Paws before dying (9 page)

“And,” I went on, “the companies that sell these things are big business. You should see the brochures. I’ve got some at home. I’ll show you one I really hate. It makes me so furious: There’s a malamute on the cover. A malamute!”

“God!” Leah said.

Demi, at the very least. She was learning fast.

‘You won’t believe the ads and the brochures! I mean, they’re totally professional, obviously done by some Madison Avenue outfit. I just hate them.”

They never, ever use the words
electric
or
shock.
They sell remote trainers,” not shock collars. They really are remote. Some of the expensive new ones have a range of up to a mile. You can be a mile away from the dog, and when you press that button on the transmitter, he still gets a shock, and it can last for ten seconds, which is a long time for pain. That’s another word they don’t use. And when you up the voltage, you’re “changing the level of stimulation.” I’d like to stimulate whoever invented those damned things.

Chapter 9

LEAH was sitting opposite me at the kitchen table in the chair that’s supposed to be empty when I’m working. She looked up from
Sense and Sensibility.
“What are you writing about?”

“Tail spraining.” Wanna make something of it, kid?

She blinked.

“I know it wasn’t a favorite subject of Jane Austen’s,” I said, “but she probably didn’t have a mortgage and two dogs.”

“She probably just didn’t know about it,” Leah said politely. “What do you have against Jane Austen?”

“Nothing. I like her.” Of course, she wasn’t Jack London, but not everyone hears the call of the wild.

It was Wednesday morning, and although the column wasn’t due for a week, I was behind on my self-imposed beat-the-deadline schedule. Since Leah’s arrival, I hadn’t touched any of the articles I was working on, either, including a promising one about a computerized dating service for single dog-owners and an evaluation I’d promised to do of an apartment dwellers’ device called the Doodoo Voodoo Box. Part of the problem was that Rita, my friend and tenant, had refused to fill out the dating service questionnaire, and Groucho, her dachshund, had started digging in the box instead of fouling it. Leah was another part of the problem.

“Not to mention your own part,” Rita said later. I have told you that she’s a psychologist, haven’t I? “Consisting,” she went °n. “of your favorite transference relationship, namely, a tendency to shape your experiential reality in your mother’s image, compounded in this instance by acute, self-generated sibling rivalry. In other words, you convinced yourself that Leah was more your own mother’s daughter than you are and, furthermore, that your dogs knew it. For example, consider your perception of her supposedly special relationship with Jack Engleman, who, not incidentally, had just become a widower— in other words, more and more like your father—plus, of course, your readiness to blame her for interrupting your intimate relationship with Steve. The less transferential option open to you was to go to her and say, ‘Look, Leah, I can’t write when you’re around, so go take a walk. And when you get back, Steve’ll be here, and he’ll be staying all night.’ ”

My own interpretation differed slightly from Rita’s. In wolf packs, it seemed to me, juveniles were too busy chasing and pouncing on each other to pester the adults, who were thus free to stalk musk-oxen, win each other’s favors, and otherwise do their canine equivalents of writing their articles and sleeping with their vets. I’d made what Rita would call my intervention on Monday morning. “Maybe you’d like to have some people over,” I’d said. “Jeff? And anybody you met at that party.” As Rita pointed out, then, it was my own soft howl that first incited the pups to gather. On Monday night, when I returned from interviewing a guy in Arlington about the dating service, the juvenile pack had established itself in my living room in front of Rita’s VCR, borrowed for the evening. On Tuesday, Leah had called all of her new packmates, each of whom had called her at least once. When we got back from dog training on Tuesday night, my answering machine had messages for Leah from Ian, Seth, Miriam, Noah, Monica, and Emma, and didn’t have one from Jeff only because he’d been at dog training with us. I quit answering the phone. Not one of the calls was for me.

Shortly after I explained what tail spraining was, the bell rang. When I opened the front door, a happy-looking kid holding a big glass vase of long-stemmed red roses asked, “Winter?”

Nobody sends me flowers.

“Yes,” I said, “but, uh, there’s a mistake here. We
sent
roses. They were supposed to go to someone else.” In fact, I’d had them sent to the funeral home on Saturday and had assumed that Jack had thanked Leah during their tête-à-tête. “The names must’ve got mixed up. Damn, that means they never...”

The kid read from a slip: “Leah Whitcomb, care of Winter, two fifty-six Concord.”

Her parents? Maybe normal parents do things like that. It’s always hard for me to guess. Not that Marissa was stingy, or that Buck is, either, but, for one thing, Marissa loved flowers and hated to see them cut, and Buck never gives anyone anything except guns, dogs, fishing rods, and relevant accessories, none of which can be sent FTD.

But the roses weren’t a mistake and weren’t from her parents. They were from Willie Johnson, the youngest lout.

“What is this white stuff they’re in? It looks like ice.” Awe filled Leah’s voice. She was delighted.

“Plastic, probably. Some kind of mush that retains moisture.”

“Aren’t they wonderful?”

“They’re very romantic,” I said. “I didn’t know...”

“He’s called a couple of times.”

“But how did he know...?”

“From the list,” she said. The list of people in dog training, of course. “Remember?”

I counted the roses. There were a dozen. I wanted to ask Leah whether she knew how much a dozen long-stemmed roses cost, but I didn’t.

“I guess I should call and say thank you.”

“I guess you should,” I said. Marissa always drilled me on the fine points of show ring and social etiquette. “Or you could write a note, I guess. Isn’t that what Jane Austen would’ve done?”

Leah grinned. “I think I’ll call.”

When she finally got off the phone, she took Kimi outside to train her, and I called Steve, who was a little irked.

“Just leave her and come over,” he said. “What’s going to happen?”

“She’s only sixteen,” I said, “and I don’t know these kids, except Jeff, and what if this one shows up? I don’t want her alone with him. He must be at least two or three years older than she is, and you should see the way he leers at her. Maybe he’s a perfectly nice kid, but she looks older than she is, and I don’t know him, and I’m not all that crazy about what I’ve seen. And, look. Weird stuff is happening. I need to talk to you. Anyway, I need to be here.”

“And if he asks her out?” Steve said. “You intend to tell her no?”

“I don’t know. I should’ve got this straight to begin with.

hen Jeff appeared, I thought I wasn’t going to have to worry about limits like that. Anyway, I don’t know what she’s doing tonight. Maybe Jeff will call, but I don’t want all the rest of them here when I’m not home. Half an hour or something, okay, but not the whole evening. And I don’t want her here alone. Look, these roses are sort of out of line. I mean, he’s seen her maybe four times. At two classes, at the match the other night, and then on Sunday, at Jack Engleman’s. And apparently he’s called her, but that’s it. And now he sends these incredibly expensive flowers. I don’t like it. It feels off.”

“So what does she think?”

“Oh, she’s thrilled. Anyway, come over. Maybe she’ll go out, or maybe she’ll stay in her room and read Jane Austen.”

“And we’ll stay in yours, and I’ll read you anything you want.”

“Look, Steve, I’m serious. I need to talk. It’s about Rose Engleman. People are saying things, and Kevin told me there’s an inquest. He let it drop, and then when I asked him about it yesterday, he said he didn’t know any more about it. And that’s probably true, because he’s Cambridge, and that’s Newton. Anyway, we need to talk, and not on the phone.”

“It’s because I didn’t send roses, isn’t it?” he said. “If I bring them with me, will you get rid of her?”

“Please! And if you want to bring something, stop at McDonald’s and get me a fish sandwich, a chocolate shake, garden salad with Ranch. And some fries. And get a Quarter Pounder with cheese, and a salad, and diet something for Leah, and whatever you want.”

But he showed up with human Eukanuba, premium-quality chow, which is to say, frozen gourmet take-out stuffed sole in aluminum trays, mussel and shell salad, three-dollar-a-loaf French bread, one of those dark-chocolate cakes made with heavy cream and no flour, and a bottle of white Burgundy. Jeff called to see if Leah wanted to go to the Square—she did—and just as she finished eating a two-thousand-calorie wedge of cake with a glass of diet iced tea, I heard him at the back door. When I pulled it open, he was smirking. His hands were behind his back. He followed me into the kitchen, nodded to Steve, and gave a half-shy but elaborately sweet imitation of a magician as he presented Leah with a bunch of daisies and mums that probably came from a supermarket, but were pretty, anyway, and would undoubtedly last a lot longer than the roses, which were, fortunately, in her room.

“Nice kid,” Steve said when they left.

“Very,” I agreed. “You know, when he calls, he actually talks to me? And not in that sort of stiff, pseudo-adult way you get when kids suddenly turn on the manners, either. I can’t believe that with him around, she’d really be interested in the other one, roses or no roses. He’s... I don’t know. What can I say? You take one look at him, and you don’t want your sixteen-year-old cousin going out with him. He’s probably all right, but you just don’t.”

“You want some advice?”

“Sure.”

“Don’t say that to her.”

“I know better than that,” I said. “I should probably tell her that you and I are both crazy about Willie and don’t trust Jeff, right?”

“Do we?” He reached over and cupped my chin in his hand. “Come on.”

“You come on,” he said gently. “Or did someone else send you roses?”

A while later, when we were back in the kitchen finishing the cake and the Burgundy, I said, “Can we talk now?”

“Sure,” he said.

“Actually, first, I want to talk, and I want you to listen, okay? Because between Leah, and not getting any work done, and the heat and everything, I’m not thinking too clearly. Okay? And then I want you to tell me everything you know about pacemakers.”

“Not a lot.”

“Fine,” I said. “Then just listen. First of all, it’s obvious that the autopsy showed something, or maybe it failed to show something. For instance, maybe it showed that lightning didn’t hit her. I don’t know. Autopsy results aren’t public.”

“Her husband will know.”

“Why?”

“Because they’ll have told him. In a case like that, the family’s informed.”

“Are you sure?”

“Pretty sure. You could ask him.”

How?” I said. “What am I going to say? ‘Gee, Jack, people are saying that Rose was murdered, and I wondered if I could see your copy of the autopsy report because I’m low on bedtime reading and...’?”

“Are people saying that?”

“In a way. Some of what I heard was just kind of frivolous. You know how people talk about the top handlers. First of all, everybody resents them, mostly just because they win, but also because some of them have a bad attitude. They’re arrogant. And some judges
do
let them bend the rules. Mostly, though, people who basically want to have fun resent it when the whole thing gets turned into a high-pressure contest.”

Steve has a shepherd bitch who has her C.D.X.—Companion Dog Excellent—and with good scores, too. He knew what I meant. “It’s real boring when that happens.”

“So you know how people say that some of those people really would do
anything
? I’ve said it myself. So people are saying that, and maybe this time, it isn’t just... It’s possible that this time, someone did. Nobody who doesn’t show dogs would believe that anyone would do something like that, but if you do, then you know, honest to God, it is possible.”

“There’ve been a couple of cases where dogs were poisoned: at shows.”

“But those were all in breed, weren’t they? Because in breed, if you killed the handler, the owner would just hire someone | else. Or if you killed the owner, someone else would go on showing the dog. It wouldn’t do you any good to kill a person. But in obedience, your real competition isn’t the person or the dog.

It’s the team. But I just can’t see obedience people doing it. In breed, the dogs are more like objects—but obedience? So maybe a rare person, a really competitive handler, will do something awful, like step on your dog’s toes.”

“Jesus!”

“But I really think that most obedience people would rather kill a person than a dog. And besides, it isn’t the dogs anyone resents. It’s the handlers.”