Stud Rites (10 page)

”All done, big boy?” I bent over. When I lifted Rowdy’s empty dish, he kept licking it. As I held it for him, my eyes drifted and then froze. On the macadam just under the rear of Betty’s van lay, of all things, Comet’s reliquary, the Alaskan malamute lamp—pink granite base, brass rod, shedding dog, Iditarod shade and all—Sherri Ann Printz’s donation to Rescue’s auction. After the showcase, I realized, Betty and I had both neglected to gather up the valuable items reserved for Saturday night’s live auction. At some point, Betty must have remembered our lapse and returned to the booth to remove the Inuit carving, the jewelry, the antique wolf prints, and Sherri Ann’s lamp. The framed prints were bulky, heavy, and fragile. The lamp, of course, sat on granite. It would’ve required a six-armed Amazon to carry the entire load at once. Betty was in her seventies. At a guess, she weighed barely a hundred pounds. Instead of making repeated journeys through the exhibition hall, the corridors, the lobby, and the maze of hallways and staircases that led to her room, and instead of asking for help, she must have made a single trip with her van, returned it to its original spot next to my Bronco, and carried some or all of the items the short distance to her room.

What I didn’t understand was why the damned lamp was
underneath
Betty’s van. Her aging memory? It was usually better than mine. Forty years her junior, I’d entirely forgotten the valuables until now. No, Betty loathed that lamp, and she resented Sherri Ann’s use of Rescue in her bid for a seat on the board of our national breed club, a campaign that was heavily focused on beating Freida Reilly. In all arenas, political ambition baffles me. If the United States were populated exclusively by people like me, the race for the White House would be a sprint in the opposite direction, and presidential debates would be fights about who’d have to get stuck with the job this time. But glory isn’t wasted on everyone. In vying for the honor of election to the board, Sherri Ann and Freida both wanted the support of the pro-Rescue faction of the club, and Betty took violent exception to what she saw as Sherri Ann’s hypocritical effort to seduce our vote with her lamp.

With Rowdy and Kimi barricading the narrow space between Betty’s van and my Bronco, I grabbed an old dog blanket that I keep in the car, and slipped it under the van and over the lamp. Taking special care not to damage the lamp, I pulled it across the blacktop, lifted it up into my car, and settled it on the floor where the passenger’s feet belong. I hid the lamp under the blanket, locked the car door, and took the dogs for a quick walk, during which, I might add, they failed to find the body of James Hunnewell. Maybe they sniffed in some special way, but after all, they’re dogs; they always sniff. If they pulled on their leashes, what do you expect? They’re Alaskan malamutes. But I may have missed some subtle sign. I was preoccupied. We were not engaged in a cover-up, I decided. Betty or I might well have locked the lamp in my car for safekeeping; we just hadn’t happened to do so. Well, now we had. All I’d done, really, was to change history. A half hour later, when I’d showered and dressed for the day and was following the tortuous route to the Lagoon, where breakfast was served, it occurred to me that during the Watergate affair, the conspirators had probably expressed the same sentiment. Betty Burley, however, was no Richard Nixon.

Despite the tropical vegetation, both organic and plastic, and the plethora of ukeleles, feathers, and paddles on the walls of the Lagoon, the only Hawaiian foods on the breakfast buffet table were several bananas that rested atop a mound of apples and the chunks of canned pineapple in the big steel bowl of otherwise fresh fruit salad. Bearing a plate heaped with scrambled eggs, sliced cantaloupe, and two pancakes, I joined Betty at a small table where she sat alone sipping coffee and nibbling on a triangle of whole wheat toast. Its mate rested on Betty’s otherwise empty and clean plate. I am what horticulturists call ”a heavy feeder,” a sort of human peony. Betty usually was, too. This morning, however, she didn’t even glance at my plate. I Wondered, of course, whether she’d found out about the insult to our rescue dogs that had caused Jeanine such grief.

”Is that all you’re having?” I asked. ”Are you all right?”

Betty didn’t look sick or tired. Her dark eyes weren’t bloodshot or droopy, and her face was as animated as Kimi’s. ”I didn’t sleep very well.” Her tone suggested that her insomnia was my fault. ”I was fretting about Sherri Ann and Freida and that miserable lamp. It has occurred to me that
inflicting
it on us was an act of hostility.”

Except in practical matters like moving dog-shaped lamps, I am incapable of dealing with dog politics until a few hours after breakfast. I ate and listened.

Betty said that Sherri Ann Printz had never done a thing to support Rescue and that Victor Printz hadn’t either. Betty was incensed. ”How I
detest
being the object of political machinations!”

In neutral tones, I remarked that to Sherri Ann’s credit she was fussy about who used her dogs at stud.

”Freida! Hah! In that instance, Sherri Ann was
not
being particular. She was deliberately trying to slight Freida! And nothing more!”

To divert Betty, I told her about finding the lamp. She was indignant.
”Under?”

”Resting on its side. Under. Underneath.” As if there’d been some ambiguity, I said, ”Beneath the rear of your van.”

She sat back in her chair and scowled. ”Well, what on earth was it doing
there?”

”Betty, I assumed that you—”

”Oh, I got it from the booth. Of course I did. I remembered. Well, I finally did. I’d already got into bed, and when I finally remembered, I was sorely tempted to stay there, but all I could think was, ’Well, if you don’t go and get those things, everyone’s going to know what an old fool you are!’ ”

As I’d guessed, instead of asking for help, Betty had moved her van from its spot next to my Bronco to the unloading area near the exhibition hall.

”It took me three trips,” she reported. ”I got my tote bag and that damned lamp first. Then I went back for the prints. Then I packed the rest in a cardboard box. And I covered the tables with bed sheets—the things for the silent auction. Now I know that that’s not perfectly secure, with us only one booth away from that great big door, but—”

”We can’t move all of it every night,” I assured her. ”And then I drove back, and I parked right in the same place, next to you.” She hesitated. In a low voice, she added, ”And then I was a lazy old fool after all.”

”Betty—”

”I carried the box up to my room. And I didn’t go back. But that van was locked, and the windows were up. Every door was locked! I checked every one.” Involuntarily, it seemed, Betty had grabbed a fork and was now pounding her armed fist on the table. ”This is Freida’s doing!” she whispered venomously. ”I can feel it in my bones! That woman cannot bear to watch Sherri Ann get the edge on her, and she’s delighted to make us look bad, too.” Midthump, she dropped the fork, grabbed her purse and her tote bag, rose, and said, ”Damn! The wolf prints! The frames alone are worth... I’ll be right back!” Coming to a halt, she interrupted herself. ”In the meantime,” she whispered in my ear, ”this is best left—”

”Not a word,” I vowed. ”Do you want me to go with you?”

”No! The less fuss, the better.”

Before Betty had taken a step, though, Freida Reilly came stomping up to the table to demand whether either of us had seen James Hunnewell. As befits a show chair, Freida wore a well-tailored CEO-style gray wool suit with a medium-length knife-pleated skirt. Her silky-looking white blouse had a built-in scarf that wrapped itself around her neck before slithering into her bosom. Her makeup was careful, if a bit heavy; her red nails matched her mouth; and her overall look was so perfectly lacquered that I wondered whether, having devoted great effort to her appearance, she’d closed her eyes and preserved her perfection by misting herself right down to her spiked heels and pointy toes with an entire can of ultra-hold hair spray. Her show chair badge was pinned to one lapel, a big pewter malamute to the other. Two of the big fellow’s just-like-Daddy pups bit so deeply into Freida’s earlobes that I hoped she was up on her tetanus shots.

Betty checked her watch. With not a hint of the accusation she’d just voiced about Freida’s role in the lamp’s odd appearance under her van, she asked, ”What time is it?” Answering her own question, she said, ”Seven-thirty. Judging’s at nine, isn’t it? Hunnewell’s probably still asleep.”

Freida sourly replied that she’d rung James Hunnewell’s room twice, banged on his door three times, and failed to get what she described, and I quote, as ”any sign of life.”

”Well, Freida, delegate someone to go and roust him out!” advised Betty, who had moved the auction items all by herself. ”Maybe he’s not in his room. Maybe he’s wandering around somewhere.”

Freida bristled. The pewter pups on her earlobes trembled. ”Naturally, I have people looking, but after all these years, there aren’t all that many of us who know what he looks like.”

A gigantic horny toad,
I longed to say. Instead, I picked up my check, excused myself, paid, and dashed to the nearby ladies’ room, where investigation confirmed that Mother Nature had once again adjusted my menstrual cycle to make my period coincide with a big dog show. I will swear that She consults the
AKC Events Calendar.
I could practically hear her:
Hm, Alaskan Malamute National Specialty, October thirtieth, so let’s see, obedience on the thirty-first, we’ll hit her with PMS for that, and on Friday morning...

As I sat in the cubicle digging around in the little cosmetics bag in my purse, the metal door of the next stall slammed shut, and a lock slid in place. Someone got violently sick. The toilet flushed. Dogs, fine. I stroke their heaving ribs and whisper sweet moral lessons about eating steel-wool pads and paying the consequences. But people are hard to help. Morning sickness? Crystal, I thought.

Again, I was wrong. A few minutes later, while I was washing my hands at one of the dozen sinks, out of the cubicle emerged a green-faced Mikki Muldoon, who had finished second in the judging poll, second to James Hunnewell. Ignoring me—I was a stranger to her, anyway—Mrs. Muldoon made her way to one of the basins, turned on both faucets, and, without using soap, rubbed her hands together as if trying to warm her fingers. As I combed my hair and daubed on lip gloss, she produced a makeup kit from her pocketbook. Just as Crystal had done, she brushed her teeth. Then she began to restore color to her face.

Five minutes later, when I was crossing the lobby and heading toward Betty’s van, Duke Sylvia told me that James Hunnewell was dead. My thought was of Mikki Muldoon, who was a decade beyond Crystal’s kind of morning sickness. Nerves? After all, with Hunnewell permanently out of the picture, she was now about to judge a national specialty.

Had she known? And if so, how?

AS DUKE SYLVIA told me about the demise of James Hunnewell, he could have been remarking about how many autumn leaves had fallen overnight. ”Fellow from R.T.I. found him,” Duke informed me. Arms folded across his chest, Duke leaned comfortably against a wall of the hotel lobby.

Infected by Duke’s placidity, I said, ”Oh, I was looking for the R.T.I. guy yesterday. I wanted to ask him about...” I stopped myself. If we’d been attending a service at an open grave, Duke wouldn’t have considered a discussion of Rowdy’s sperm in the least out of line. I cleared my throat. ”He was looking for him?”

”Who?”

”The guy from R.T.I. He was trying to find Mr. Hunnewell?”

Duke shook his head. ”Just happened on him. Right out in back here, in back of the hotel. At the end of the parking lot, there’s a baseball field, recreation area, and there’s a little storage shed.”

”What on earth was James Hunnewell doing out there?”

Duke shrugged. And when I asked what should have been my first question—what Hunnewell had died of—Duke said he didn’t know. He made the obvious guess. ”His lungs must’ve finally quit. Freida’s shaken up.” Duke made Freida Reilly’s distress sound as distant and foreign as a volcanic eruption on some South Sea island he’d never visited and never would. ”Once Freida calms down, she’ll be relieved. James would’ve botched the judging. He’d’ve done an awful job.”

Over the next hour, in the lobby, the parking lot, the corridors, the grooming tent, and the exhibition area, everyone seemed to agree: We were better off without James Hunnewell passing judgment on our dogs. But relief turned to astonishment when the word spread that instead of passing peacefully to the ultimate Judgment, Judge James Hunnewell had been bludgeoned to death. Busy at the rescue booth, I, however, must have been one of the last to hear the word ”murder.”