Stud Rites (27 page)

”Reasoning by analogy,” I said. ”Harvard should’ve warned you about that instead of teaching you to say ’pissed’ all the time. Leah, the police could have declared this entire hotel a crime scene! They didn’t. But they could have. No wedding, no national. Freida? Crystal’s father? You’ve just picked the last two people on earth who’d ever have risked murder.”

Twenty-seven

”MYSELF,” declared Pam Ritchie of Ch. Pawprintz Honor Guard, ”I would say that he needs more neck and that he’s oversized to the point of clumsiness, but far be it from me to stand between you and your own opinion, Tiny, and if you think he’s nice, then nice he is.” She paused. ”In your opinion.” She paused again. ”Others, of course, may beg to differ. Mrs. Seeley, for instance, felt very strongly that...”

The better to tune in to today’s episode of the Pam and Tiny spat, I’d turned my head away from the ring and was studying the object of dissent, Bear. The dog waited in the aisle behind my seat at the side of his breeder-owner-handler, Sherri Ann Printz. Mindful, no doubt, that Pam and Tiny wouldn’t vote for her anyway, Sherri Ann boomed at her husband: ”Victor! Victor, give me your opinion on something!” With her free hand, Sherri Ann directed Victor’s attention and everyone else’s to a gray dog who just happened to be of Pam Ritchie’s breeding. ”Now, Victor, if this wasn’t a
malamute
national, wouldn’t you swear to God that
that
was a
Siberian
?” Aiming her saccharine gaze straight at Pam, Sherri Ann drove the insult home: ”And a fine-boned Siberian, at that!”

How Pam countered I cannot report. I was lost in thoughts of collaboration, collusion, and loyalty. Pam and Tiny: When James Hunnewell desecrated Short Seeley’s sacred memory by spitting a stream of obscenities, Pam had zealously defended the matriarch of the breed: ”If Short were alive today, you wouldn’t dare say any of that!” Mrs. Seeley was dead, of course, but keeping her revered memory alive was a mission that Pam certainly pursued with religious fervor. Could Mrs. Lunt, too, have disparaged the matriarch of the breed in Pam’s presence? And if zealotry had driven Pam to exact revenge on the defilers of her idol, Tiny would, as always, have been right at Pam’s side. Sherri Ann and Victor Printz: Victor named her dogs. He mumbled to them. At ringside, he was Sherri Ann’s ardent booster. When two Pawprintz dogs were due in the ring at the same time, he handled for her. He was her husband, her kennel help, her aide-de-camp. As I’d told Leah, I strongly suspected that Freida’s accusations concerning Sherri Ann were correct and that Victor had served as his wife’s co-conspirator. If Sherri Ann had committed murder, Victor, I knew, would have made himself as ruthlessly useful as ever.

Leah touched my arm. ”Hey, that reminds me,” my cousin said, pointing to the R.T.I. booth, where Steve Delaney was engaged in conversation with Finn Adams. ”I forgot to tell you. Did you know that Steve and, uh, Finn already knew each other?”

”They don’t. I mean, I’ve told Steve—”

”They met,” Leah gleefully reported, ”at a conference in Minneapolis. It was about—”

”A.I.” Artificial insemination. ”No, Leah, you’re wrong. Because if they had, Steve would—”

”If they’d made the connection, which they didn’t but—”

”But
you...!”

”I did
not!
The un-romance of your romantic past is strictly your own—”

”Affair,” I snapped. ”And is not something I’m thrilled to have dragged into the present. Shit! It’s not that Finn is... He’s a decent person, and what happened was actually my mother’s fault, not his, but I just—

”He’s a jerk,” Leah said.

”Distance did lend enchantment,” I conceded. ”Well, if they haven’t made the connection, they probably won’t. Steve has a lousy memory for human names, and Finn doesn’t know who Steve is, in relation to me, and even if he did...”

”Even if he did,” Leah finished ruthlessly, ”they’re both more interested in dog sperm than they are in you.”

I was pondering the ultimate consolation when, in the aisle behind us, new and acrimonious voices rose above Pam’s and Sherri Ann’s in what sounded like the escalation of their skirmish into a major battle in the sometimes uncivil civil war about malamute bloodlines that has raged for at least four decades. I want to report that in rising from my seat, I firmly intended to ally myself with neither militant faction, but to remain in the neutral role of a sort of United Malamutes observer.

As it turned out, however, Detective Kariotis had unintentionally changed the course of the battle by rallying the warriors on both sides in defense of one of their own, Betty Burley, against a common foe, namely, himself. The floor space near the gate, the trophy table, the breed club booth, and the rescue booth was so thick with handlers, dogs, and spectators that I had to keep tiptoeing around paws and begging everyone’s pardon to get near the center of the escalating fray. Sherri Ann Printz, backed by Victor Printz, Harriet Lunt, and an assemblage of other previously anti-Rescue and anti-Betty forces, was valiantly contesting Detective Kariotis’s attempt to seize the Comet lamp as a piece of evidence in the murder of James Hunnewell—indeed, as the murder weapon itself. Victor Printz, in a voice rusty with disuse, was demanding to see a search warrant. He was also threatening to file charges against Kariotis for harassing Betty Burley, who was calmly explaining what Alaskan Malamute Rescue was and how she would spend the money that the high bidder would pay for the lamp. With her neck stretched high and her small arms folded stalwartly across her chest, she insisted, ”So, you see, since this beautiful and unique lamp is a very valuable collector’s item, donated not to me personally, but to this organization and to the dogs that Mrs. Printz intends it to help, I am simply not entitled to—”

Sherri Ann broke in. Her voice trembled with sincerity. At first, I mistook it for the heartfelt candor of one who deeply and genuinely longs to win an election. ”I’ll have you know,” she informed Kariotis, ”that every person at this national is grateful to this woman for her efforts on behalf of this breed. Not one person here is going to stand by and watch you manhandle her and undermine her mission of helping these poor dogs. Practically every single one of us, myself included, has to live day in and day out with the terrible knowledge that in spite of our best efforts, our very own lines have ended up in the puppy mills! And I know! Because I myself was tricked into selling a beautiful Pawprintz puppy to one of those filthy, disgusting puppy-mill people! So if you think that we’re going to just let
you
grab my beautiful lamp that I personally made and donated to help those poor dogs that go back to
my
—”

Kariotis valiantly interrupted Sherri Ann by saying something to Betty about probable cause. What he made of Sherri Ann’s speech, I couldn’t tell. The typical member of the general public doesn’t even know what a puppy mill is, never mind what’s wrong with puppy mills. Although the detective probably didn’t understand that Sherri Ann had just made a brave and unusual public confession, be must have sensed the violence of her feelings. By comparison with Sherri Ann and the rumbling group around her, Betty must have seemed an easy target for an appeal to cool reason.

”I didn’t hear him!” I complained to Harriet Lunt. ”What did he say?”

”Piffle!” she replied. ”He says they found dog hair in the wound or on the body or somewhere! And he thinks that because...” Switching abruptly from me to Kariotis, Harriet called out, ”Young man! You there! You don’t know much about dogs, do you? Well, don’t you try and pull this probable cause nonsense here, because with all these dogs, you’re going to find dog hair anywhere and everywhere! We eat it, we breathe it, it’s all over us, it’s all over everything we own, it’s on our clothes, it’s in our cars; if we don’t find dog hair in our scrambled eggs and in our oatmeal, we know we’ve gotten someone else’s breakfast; when we send letters, we mail dog hair with them, and when we go to the dentist, the hygienist finds it stuck between our teeth; and furthermore, whenever we cut ourselves, we wash and scrub and disinfect, and before we can slap on a bandage, there it is! If I’d actually been
killed
last night and you’d sliced into
me,
and guess what? Dog hair! In my guts, in my liver, in my arteries, everywhere! And not just little hairs, either, but whole big clumps! So if you found it in his blood and brains, young man, naturally you did! I happen to be an attorney, and what I’m telling you is, what you’ve got
isn’t
probable cause. All you’ve got is
so what!”

Mainly because Sherri Ann and Bear were wanted in the ring, the crowd dispersed with the dispute about the lamp still unresolved. What had happened was a phenomenon that Kariotis, I thought, should’ve seen coming: a large-scale version of a domestic disturbance in which the intervening cop becomes the target of the combatants.

”Leah,” I asked, ”where’s Kevin?” Not that I expected or wanted Kevin to aid his fellow officer. On the contrary, I was as eager as I’d been all along to shield Betty from inquiries about the lamp, as well as about

Cubby’s pedigree and the stud book page, items that must have been covered with her fingerprints. Since hearing Sherri Ann’s speech, I was, if anything, more determined than ever to protect Betty. It sounded to me as if Sherri Ann had known all along about the Pawprintz dog that had ended up with Gladys Thacker. Surprised, shocked, and ashamed, Sherri Ann might have blamed Hunnewell, acted on her anger, and guaranteed his silence. But besides having apparently known all along, she’d just made a highly public admission. Sherri Ann could have reclaimed the Comet-reliquary lamp late on Thursday, at the end of the evening’s events, when Betty had left it briefly unattended in her unlocked van. At the same time, she could have raided Betty’s tote bag and grabbed the papers out of Cubby’s file. But if she’d been choosing a weapon known to be in Betty’s possession and pieces of paper bound to bear the clear prints of Betty’s fingers, why the lamp she had made and handled herself? And why pages that bore her own name? Furthermore, if she’d gone out of her way to implicate Betty, why would she then have rallied her comrades in Betty’s defense?

By comparison with a dog show, a session of the United States Congress is devoid of politics. In her precampaign campaigning for the breed club board, Sherri Ann might have been making a move that eluded me. Especially if she thought that Betty were supporting Freida, she might yet turn on Betty. Sherri Ann’s loyalty to Betty was open to question. Mine was not. I needed to find out immediately everything Kevin knew about probable cause, warrants, and the seizure of evidence. Did the police have the right to demand Betty’s fingerprints? ”Leah,” I repeated, ”where is Kevin?”

”He got badgered into buying a lot of raffle tickets,” she reported, ”and he won something.”

”And?”

”And it’s supposed to be a secret.”

”What’s so secret about—”

”It’s a present. For you. He wants to save it as a

Christmas present for you. So he’s stashing it in Steve’s van. He’ll be back. Hey, Holly, I wanted to ask you. Comet?”

”You read the centerfold. You looked at it last night.”

”So a lot of people owned him.”

”That happens with show dogs. You know that. A lot of top show dogs have a lot of owners all at once. Casey has four; Daphne has three. But, yeah, a lot of people owned Comet, and not at the same time.”

”Remind me who.”

”Well, J. J. Hadley. Hadley was his breeder. And then after Hadley died, his widow, Velma Hadley. Velma Hadley sold him to Elsa Van Dine. Then, uh, when Elsa Van Dine got engaged and was moving to England, she sold Comet to Timmy Oliver. Timmy got the money to buy Comet from James Hunnewell, and he and Timmy co-owned the dog. Except that Timmy was a co-owner in name only, I gather. It wasn’t a normal co-ownership. Hunnewell didn’t trust Timmy—”

”Surprise, surprise!” Leah was lighthearted. Even so, as I watched her face, I could see the thought cross her mind that my own prejudice against co-ownership could be overcome by just such a special arrangement.

”Yeah, who does trust Timmy? So Hunnewell had Harriet Lunt draw up some sort of elaborate contract that gave Hunnewell total control over everything. Hunnewell paid the whole purchase price and all the expenses, and Timmy paid nothing, so I guess it was fair. Duke told me that Timmy couldn’t so much as say
boo
to Comet without Hunnewell’s permission. And then, uh, I have the impression that it was just shortly before Comet died, Duke Sylvia managed to buy Timmy out. So then Duke co-owned him with Hunnewell. Duke had handled Comet all along, for everyone. Legalities aside, Comet was really always Duke’s dog. I know it sounds like a lot of people, but it’s not all that unusual, and—”