Stud Rites (18 page)

I cringed. ”Pam,” I said, ”I swear he’s from R.T.I. If there are any cops here, Finn isn’t one of them. And if they want to know anything, they don’t have to sneak anyone in. There’s nothing to stop them from just asking.”

As if to prove me right, Karl Reilly shook his head glumly. ”The cop I talked to really put me through it.”

As one waitress removed the remains of his fruit cup and another replaced it with a salad plate, he added, ”I’m the one who picked Mr. Hunnewell up at the airport. Favor to my mother. Turned out to be more than I bargained for, and the cops had to hear all about it.” The salad in front of me was composed of a bed of shredded iceberg lettuce topped with one leaf of arugula. Karl must’ve decided that the dark green leaf on his had gotten there by mistake. Or maybe a bug or a strand of hair clung to it. He delicately removed the leaf with his fingers and speared a fork into the lettuce. ”Geez, at first I didn’t... The fact is that my mother’d warned me that Mr. Hunnewell was... that he wasn’t necessarily Mr. Nice Guy all the time, but whoo! If I’d’ve known, I’d’ve told her to let him take a cab.”

Lowering her chin to peer censoriously over imaginary eyeglasses, Pam pointed out, ”It was much more courteous to have someone meet him personally, you know, Karl. And it’s an awfully long ride for a taxi.”

”You’re telling me,” Karl said. ”Halfway here, I came close to reaching over and opening the door and giving him a hard shove.” Taking a bite of lettuce, he nearly choked. When he stopped coughing, he said hastily, ”Not really, but—”

Duke and Timmy started ribbing Karl about waiting until later.

Laughing, Karl said, ”With the way that guy smoked, I don’t know why anyone bothered. Geez, between Boston and here, he must’ve gone through two packs of cigarettes. Every time I opened the window, he’d complain he was cold...”

Pam dipped her head. ”Poor circulation.”

”And,” Karl went on, ”I’d have to shut the window again. And the thing was, he couldn’t’ve been on a plane for a long time, because he didn’t know they wouldn’t let him smoke, and from what he said, he took it like it was something personal, and so when I picked him up, he was in a wicked foul mood, and he’d had a few drinks, on top of the nicotine fit.”

”The police asked me about that,” I said. ”About how much he smoked, did he offer me a cigarette, which he did, a lot of stuff like that. I can’t figure out what it had to do with anything.”

”Well,
that
I can tell you,” Tiny said triumphantly. ”He ran out of cigarettes.”

Karl snorted. ”Geez, no wonder.”

”And,” said Tiny, ”that’s what he was doing out of his room. He called room service, and he called the desk, and he was not very nice about it!”

”And how would you know?” Pam demanded. ”The chambermaid told me,” Tiny replied smugly. ”The woman at the desk told her supervisor who told another chambermaid who told—”

”Gossip!” Pam decreed.

”No, it is not gossip,” Tiny said. ”They noticed because he wanted a whole carton of the things, and all the hotel has is a machine over in the bar somewhere, and when Hunnewell heard that, he expected them to send someone out to a store for him! Can you imagine? Eleven o’clock at night or whenever it was, and he expected—”

”I don’t know who James Hunnewell thought he was,” Pam interrupted, ”but after the encounter that Holly and I had with him, I can believe anything! The arrogance! Karl, I’m surprised he didn’t try to get your mother to play errand girl for him! Poor Freida, getting stuck with him for a judge! Judge! Hah! That man didn’t strike me as being safe out alone. What he’d have done in the ring, I shudder to contemplate. I don’t know what he was like years ago, but if he was in his right mind then, he wasn’t last night. You should have heard the terrible things he said about Mrs. Seeley!” Pam bowed her head. Her lips moved in what I took to be a silent prayer addressed to the matriarch of our breed.

”You have to admit that Short
was
opinionated” opined Duke.

He might as well have reached over and jabbed his dinner knife into Pam’s ribs. Flying half out of her seat she shrieked, ”OPINIONATED! Opinionated? Short Seeley was not opinionated! Short was
right!”
Without Eva B. Seeley, Pam declared, there wouldn’t be an Alaskan malamute at all, and if, on occasion, Mrs. Seeley had seen fit to speak
authoritatively,
well, she was, after all,
the
authority, wasn’t she? Or did Duke imagine otherwise?

As affable as ever, Duke tried to pacify Pam. What he’d meant, he said cheerfully, was that Mrs. Seeley had been a woman who never shied away from speaking her mind.

”As she had every right to,” Pam declared with satisfaction. ”Every right.” Seizing her fork, she attacked her salad with great ferocity, as if it, too, had somehow desecrated the memory of Eva Seeley.

In a gentlemanly effort to change the subject, Finn Adams remarked that considering what had happened, the hotel was coping pretty well. And we’d certainly lucked out with the weather!

The weather!
I ask you!

As Timmy Oliver informed us that it was supposed to pour all day tomorrow, the hotel staff began to remove the salad plates and to dole out our dinners.

”This your first national?” Duke asked Leah.

She said that it was, and that, yes, she was handling my bitch tomorrow, and that, yes, she did intend to relax and have a good time.

”Fun’s what it’s all about,” Duke told her.

With the tape of Comet’s old show appearance in mind, I glanced at Timmy Oliver. He nodded in agreement and repeated Duke’s words: ”Fun’s what it’s all about.”

It occurred to me that if Duke and Timmy happened to be in the ring together tomorrow, Duke could play the same old Texas handling trick, and Timmy Oliver would probably fall for it all over again. Duke wouldn’t try it, though. Over the years, he’d gained in subtlety. Besides, he respected Mikki Muldoon.

Digging a fork into my scrod, I saw that I’d gotten swordfish instead. As I was about to say so, Pam Ritchie wondered aloud why she had prime rib. All of us, we found, had been mysteriously upgraded.

”Freida must’ve taken in more money than she expected,” Tiny suggested. ”She’d hardly have bothered to ask if we wanted better than we paid for.”

Pam, of course, disagreed. ”If there’d been a surplus, she’d hardly have—”

”There wasn’t,” Karl announced. ”The hotel’s made a mistake. I’d better let my mother know.”

When he’d excused himself and left in search of Freida, Leah said boldly that if we’d been served good stuff by accident, we’d better start eating before someone came and took it away. Duke, I noticed, was already digging into his prime rib. I took a quick survey of the plates. Tiny, Pam, Karl, Timmy, and Leah also had beef. As I’d suspected, Duke’s was by far the biggest, thickest piece. Leah didn’t notice or didn’t care. After chewing and swallowing, she said, ”This is the first real meat I’ve had in over a month!”

”Leah’s in college,” I explained. ”She eats cafeteria food.”

Finn asked her where she went.

”Harvard,” she said.

Silence fell.

Finn said that two of his uncles had gone there. No one else said anything.

Then Duke had the sense to ask Leah what she was going to do after college. When she announced her intention of becoming a veterinarian, everyone started talking again. Timmy Oliver and Finn Adams got involved in an intimate one-to-one discussion of recent advances in sperm preservation—canine, I presume; and Tim made a general pitch for the wonders of Pro-Vita No-Blo Sho-Kote. Having sipped her way through several glasses of wine, Pam confided to everyone within hearing distance of a shotgun blast that, well, strictly between ourselves, we had to admit in all honesty that whoever had murdered our judge had at least had the courtesy not to do it on show grounds.

”What a perfectly awful thing to say!” Tiny looked horrified. ”And I’m not even sure it’s true. That field is part of the hotel. As far as I know, that means it’s show grounds.”

”No,” Pam insisted, ”show grounds means to the end of the parking lot, and obviously, since it would’ve been just as easy to clunk him over the head
on
show grounds as it was
off
—”

”Who says it’s the end of the parking lot?” Tiny challenged. ”It must be you, Pam, because it’s not AKC.”

”It certainly is! That field is definitely not on show grounds. Among other things, the obedience people were training there on Wednesday, and they
can’t
train on show grounds.”

”Yes,” I confirmed, ”but I think it was okay to work a dog there unobtrusively on Wednesday, the day before the trial. As far as I know, there’s no strict written definition of
show precincts.
How could there be? Show sites are all so different. But you’d really have to ask an AKC rep.”

Speaking, for once, with one voice, Pam and Tiny said in unison: ”There’s no rep here!”

In response to the outburst, a waiter who’d been helping to arrange an elaborate dessert buffet on a long rectangular table behind ours scurried over to ask whether something was wrong.

Dismissing him rather abruptly, Pam complained that she didn’t understand the absence of an AKC rep. ”It seems to me that it would’ve been to Freida’s advantage to see that there was one.”

As I’ve mentioned, the principal responsibility of a show chair is to take the blame for everything. In accepting the job, Freida had made sure that everyone would know who she was. She’d also gambled on satisfaction with how she’d performed. ”There doesn’t have to be a rep,” I told Pam, ”and it certainly wasn’t Freida’s decision. As far as I know, reps determine their own schedules.”

”Well,” insisted Tiny, ”at a minimum, Freida might’ve arranged for better security.”

Leah joined in. ”Isn’t security the hotel’s responsibility? Especially out in the parking lot?”

None of us really knew. ”When clubs give shows,” I said, ”they have to take out big umbrella policies that cover anything that happens, so it can’t be just the responsibility of the site. Clubs can get sued; it does hap-pen.

Leah, the A student, rose in her chair. ”Oh my God! I’ve got it! Holly, that’s why his sister is coming here! She’s coming to sue—”

”Whose sister?” Tiny’s face was avid with curiosity.

”James Hunnewell’s,” Leah said impatiently. ”The police told Holly. Supposedly, his sister was coming to make sure he got a Christian burial, but that doesn’t make sense, because she could have his body shipped back to Missouri and give him any kind of burial she wants, so—”

”I don’t see what Missouri has to do with anything,” Pam said crossly.

”Missouri,” Leah told everyone, ”is where James Hunnewell’s sister lives. Her name is Gladys Thacker, and she lives in Missouri, and she runs a puppy mill.” Before anyone could interrogate Leah about these revelations, a hullabaloo broke out a few table-lengths away from us. Craning my neck, I saw that towering above the otherwise unexceptional collection of puddings, pies, and yet more fruit salads on the dessert buffet was an immense multitiered cake heavily frosted in pale apricot and richly decorated with ornate flowers, both real and confectionery. Jabbing a finger of outrage at the bird-of-paradise blossom perched atop this tropical masterpiece of the pastry-maker’s art was a woman I recognized as Crystal’s mother. Flanking his wife on the opposite side of the cake was Crystal’s father. Completing the tableau were the hotel manager and Freida Reilly. Freida wore a floor-length black skirt and a dressy black jersey top elaborately embroidered in gold with the immense head of guess what breed of dog. She and the manager held themselves formally upright and faced the festive cake from several yards back, as if determined to proclaim themselves attendants at this ceremony, the best man and the matron of honor, perhaps, and not its central figures. Freida and the manager must have been murmuring: Crystal’s parents leaned toward them. Then, as if on cue, the father began shouting at the manager, and the mother started yelling at Freida Reilly. I wished that they’d take turns so I could hear them both, but I caught enough to understand the cause of their rage.

”... screw up the entrees,” the father bellowed, ”and stick us with your goddamn cheesy London broil for the rehearsal...”

And the mother:...,”
my
Crystal’s beautiful, beautiful Hawaiian wedding cake for her... and it’s too late now, because one of your rotten
dog
people has gone and taken a slice right out of the middle!”

At the word ”dog,” the father whirled away from the manager, took a threatening step toward his wife, and, almost punching her with his upraised fist, shouted,
”Dog! Dog! Dog!
You know, Mavis, anyone who listened in on this wedding would think that Crystal was going to marry one of the Christ damn things and present us with—”

Stamping a foot, the wife screamed: ”Harold-shut-up!”

”Jesus Christ Almighty, Mavis!” Blasphemy? To my ear, the poor man uttered a plea of genuine anguish.

But the only response Harold got came from his desperate wife, who had flushed a panicked shade of crimson. ”Now, Harold, you know as well as I do that—”