Stud Rites (20 page)

EPITHALAMIUM: a marriage song.

The gray, wet day of Crystal and Greg’s wedding dawned with the music I’d have chosen myself. One voice rose, then another and another joined the first, caught the tune, and lifted the melody to the rainy sky. How many dogs? Fifty? A hundred? But how many voices? Countless. A full choir of choristers, each singing multiple simultaneous songs, each canine voice soaring in dissonant harmony with itself and all the others. Crescendo! The climax reached, one by one— diminuendo—the voices fell almost to silence until a lone note sounded, then another and another, and the song rose again in this weirdly circumpolar Ode to Joy. For all that happened in those days in Danville, my most vivid memory is of that early-morning howling.

Unloading cardboard boxes of paper products from the back of a delivery van in the parking lot, a guy nodded in my direction and said, ”Jesus, don’t those damned things ever shut up?”

To my ear, the damned things that never shut up weren’t the dogs, but the forced-air dryers already blasting like horrid mini-hurricanes in the grooming tent where I’d just delivered Rowdy, Kimi, and Leah to Faith Barlow. Over the roar, I’d shouted to Faith about the predawn attack on Harriet Lunt, and Faith had bellowed back that she’d already heard.

After surrendering my dogs and my cousin to Faith, I left the grooming tent. I was heading across the parking lot in search of breakfast when a drenched and dripping Z-Rocks splashed through a puddle, shot to the end of Timmy Oliver’s lead, wiggled, shook hard all over, and gave me my second before-breakfast shower of the day. I didn’t mind. The old issues of the
Malamute Quarterly
that I’d brought with me to leaf through while I ate were safely stowed in my newest malamute-decorated tote bag. After breakfast, I intended to change into real clothes and spiff myself up. In the meantime, I was wearing my old yellow slicker over jeans and the new national specialty sweatshirt that already sprouted fur. My hair was damp from the light rain, and the dogs had licked off the moisturizer I’d patted on. It’s hopeless. Why I bother, I don’t know. I should just get out of bed, throw on the clothes that Rowdy and Kimi slept on, reach into my pockets and dust myself with the powdery residue of dried liver, let the dogs cover my face with saliva, and then go outside and roll around in mud. No one but me would know the difference.

So, when Z-Rocks spattered me, I said good morning to her and asked Timmy Oliver whether he’d heard about Harriet Lunt. Harriet herself had told him about the attack, he said. He’d seen her only a minute ago at the hotel entrance. The manager had been trying to talk her into having her shoulder x-rayed, but Harriet had absolutely refused.

”He’s probably terrified she’ll sue the hotel,” I commented. ”I wonder if he knows she’s a lawyer.”

Then Timmy changed the subject to Z-Rocks. Instead of waiting for me to say something flattering about her, Timmy took advantage of her plastered-down coat to deliver himself of so enthusiastic a disquisition about her good bone, broad skull, admirable angulation, and so forth that I was tempted to ask whether he intended to show her to Mikki Muldoon in her present soaked and thus anatomically revealing condition.

As Timmy went on and on, dwelling on Z-Rock’s ideal this and excellent that, I’m sorry to say I tuned him out until he triumphantly burst forth with a single word: ”Comet!”

As dense as ever, I said casually, ”Oh, Z-Rocks goes back to Comet?”

So did thousands of other malamutes: show dogs, pets, puppy-mill dogs. The presence of an illustrious ancestor in a family tree is always interesting, but that’s about it. Just because you’re the direct descendant of Helen of Troy, it doesn’t mean you’ve got a face to launch a thousand ships. But in Timmy Oliver’s eyes and, according to him, in James Hunnewell’s, Z-Rocks was what Timmy called ”a living legacy,” the female reincarnation of the fabulous Northpole’s Comet. Z-Rocks, I should say, was not utterly unlike Comet. Instead of looking like a female replica, though, a sort of sex-changed Xerox copy—hence her name, I guess— she was as good as Comet had been outstanding, as decent as he had been superlative, and she totally lacked Comet’s innocent arrogance, the all-eyes-on-me attitude that had kept my gaze fixed on a grainy black-and-white image of a long-dead dog whose radiant glory burned across decades.

And James Hunnewell’s opinion? What would he really have thought of Z-Rocks? Obviously, Hunnewell had known Comet’s lines better than I did. Maybe Hunnewell could have seen something in Z-Rocks that was eluding me. Whatever
it
was, I thought that Judge Mikki Muldoon would miss it, too. About Z-Rocks’s chances under Mrs. Muldoon, Timmy Oliver agreed: When I wished him luck, he smiled and looked sad and said thanks, but Z-Rocks just wasn’t Mikki’s type. He and Z-Rocks headed for the grooming tent. I wanted breakfast.

The glass-fronted announcement board in the hotel lobby informed me that Greg and Crystal’s three o’clock service was sandwiched between a wedding breakfast—scheduled for the Lagoon at twelve-fifteen— and what the notice board called a ”Gala Hawaiian Wedding Reception.” Since the Lagoon was being set up for the wedding breakfast, the only restaurant open for ordinary breakfast was the grill. I filled a plate at the buffet and, on impulse, helped myself to a loaner copy of a Boston paper. Then I sat by myself in an uncrowded area, where I ate and read. Because of the multitude of reporters who’d questioned everyone at the show yesterday, I expected to find a long article about James Hunnewell’s murder in a prominent place in the paper. Instead, it appeared as a small item on the last page of the business section. When Boston papers say
Boston,
Boston is what they mean. I read:

DEATH OF DOG JUDGE

DEEMED MURDER

DANVILLE. Police were summoned early yesterday morning to the grounds of the Danville Milestone Hotel and Conference Facility when a guest of the hotel discovered the body of James Winston Hunnewell, 79, of Kiawab Island, South Carolina. The deceased was to head the panel of judges scheduled to pick the top dog from among the hundreds of beautiful blue-eyed pet huskies gathered here for a multinational dog show. Dog show president Freida J. Reilly, of Portland, Maine, dismissed the suggestion that one of the show dogs was responsible for the death. State and local authorities are pursuing their investigations.

The item was harder to swallow than the lump of half-chewed pecan roll lodged in my throat. It was impossible to say what offended me most—the nasty, senseless piece of anti-dog libel, the ignorant bit about the blue-eyed pet huskies, or the amazing vision of a revolution that had turned conformation judging into a sort of jury system. Opinion is what breed judging is all about, and if there’s one topic that gives rise to violent differences of opinion, it’s the relative merits of show dogs. The AKC is less likely to spread the judge’s authority among a bunch of committee members than the Vatican is to delegate infallibility to a board of Popes. James Hunnewell at the head of a panel of judges? Now that would truly have been a setup for murder.

And speaking of murder, the item, of course, offered less information about James Hunnewell’s than I already possessed. Despite the numerous inaccuracies in the piece, I was, however, inclined to believe that Hunnewell had, in fact, been seventy-nine and that he’d lived in Kiawah Island, South Carolina. At any rate, Freida did live in Portland.

About Kiawah Island I knew a little because my friend Rita had spent a week there when her parents had rented a big condo that they’d shared with their children and grandchildren. Rita, being a psychologist, had come back talking mostly about family dynamics, but, then, you could rocket Rita into outer space, and she’d splash down analyzing the structural patterns of astronaut interaction and dropping only an incidental word or two about planets, stars, or black holes, unless, of course, the objects in the cosmos embodied symbolic psychic meaning, as I guess might be the case with black holes. Kiawah Island, I gathered from her, was sort of like Hilton Head, a fancy resort and retirement community with restaurants, beaches, swimming pools, and— here come the black holes—real-live alligators lazing around on golf courses and, on occasion, emerging from gator holes to gulp down small dogs. So, as a retirement spot for a dog person, Kiawah Island was a place with one big advantage—dogs were allowed, at least small dogs—and the corresponding disadvantage that they were vulnerable to being eaten by alligators. But, of course, I didn’t know whether James Hunnewell had had—or even wanted—any kind of dog at all. He’d been out of malamutes for years. He could have switched breeds. For all I knew, the presence of dog-eating predators was what had attracted him to Kiawah to begin with.

Kiawah, though, did tell me something solid: James Hunnewell had had money. The business about Rita and the astronauts is true. It’s also true that Rita had refrained from tantalizing me with descriptions of a vacation that I couldn’t begin to afford. Wondering who’d inherit James Hunnewell’s estate, I turned to the death notices, but found nothing under Hunnewell. I didn’t need a newspaper, though, to realize that wealthy men leave wills. I put down the paper, ate my breakfast, and toyed with a new idea about why Gladys H. Thacker was coming all the way to Massachusetts to see that her brother got a Christian burial. The new idea was that Gladys H. Thacker was already
here.

A puppy-mill operator like Gladys Thacker was probably selling puppies for thirty-five, fifty, or a hundred dollars each to a broker who’d get two or three hundred dollars or more apiece for those same pups, and with a quick turnaround. Pet shops would then resell those same pups for between five hundred and a thousand dollars. As I understood it, a lot of the Gladys

H. Thackers are small-time operators, farmers and farmers’ wives, whose puppy income is strictly supplemental: egg money derived from dogs instead of chickens. A puppy broker could well be a millionaire. Gladys Thacker had probably just traded her roosters and hens for Alaskan malamutes, and moved the dogs into the same old henhouses.

Was Gladys H. Thacker already here? After all, she’d had a motive to arrive before her brother’s death —if, that is, she’d wanted to get here in time to cause it.

And the attack on Harriet Lunt? Harriet Lunt was of James Hunnewell’s generation. Harriet was a lawyer. Was she
his
lawyer? If Gladys Thacker had had a motive to murder her brother, maybe Harriet Lunt knew what it was.

I remembered what Harriet Lunt had said last night:
Poor Elsa. And then Janies. And now me.
James Hunnewell, yes. Here at the show site. And Harriet Lunt, of course. But Elsa Van Dine? She had been fatally mugged and robbed of her diamond ring on a street in Providence.
Poor Elsa,
everyone kept lamenting.
Poor Elsa, the victim of
random
violence.

ELSA VAN DINE’S unexpected marriage to the elderly and long-widowed Marquis of Denver was considered a mesalliance. The marquis, you see, did not have malamutes. What he had, in addition to a title, a country seat, and a modest fortune, was life-threatening asthma. The marquis’s most virulent attacks had all been triggered by inadvertent contact with dogs. During the rapid kennel dispersion that preceded the moderately young and very beautiful Elsa Van Dine’s immigration to Great Britain, the bride-to-be made a big deal of expressing public concern for her fiancé's ailing lungs. In private, however, she confided her reluctance to subject her dogs to the ordeal of a six-month quarantine. Ah, the transparent foolishness of exchanging a pack of gorgeous show dogs with numerous impressive handles to their names for a man who possessed but one! Thus Elsa Van Dine became the Marchioness of Denver. And Ch. Northpole’s Comet was sold. Elsa Van Dine, I think, made a very bad bargain. The marquis was one peer among many; Comet was without peer.

The story of Elsa and the marquis I learned from Duke Sylvia while I was hanging around the exhibition hall watching Mikki Muldoon judge what are called Bred-by-Exhibitor bitches, more or less what it sounds like—and nervously awaiting Leah and Kimi’s time in the ring. When I’d last checked, Kimi had been standing on the grooming table wagging her tail and looking really lovely, and Leah had finally changed into the dress that I’d sprung on her at the last minute, together with the threat that if she refused to wear it, I’d withhold permission for her to handle Kimi, who is not co-owned, but officially belongs only to me. The flower-patterned dress fit perfectly, just as it had when Leah had made fun of it in the store. It had big pockets for stashing bait. Furthermore, judges prefer the
Little House on the Prairie
look to Leah’s usual layers of black on black over black, a style that owes more to Bram Stoker than it does to Laura Ingalls Wilder, and if you had to pick one or the other to handle your bitch, just which one would
you
go for? Reconciled to the dress, Leah had seemed as happy and confident as Kimi.