Stud Rites (28 page)

”So, Z-Rocks.”

”She didn’t make the cut,” I said. ”Weren’t you looking?”

”What I want to know is, did Hunnewell really like Z-Rocks as much as Timmy Oliver says?”

”How would I know? Duke says... I’m not sure whether Duke said that he didn’t or that he wouldn’t have.”

”And Duke would know.”

”As well as anyone. He knew Hunnewell way back, and he’ll tell you that you can’t second-guess judges, but, yeah, of course, Duke is as good at knowing what judges like and don’t like as anyone is. It’s his business. So, uh, yes, I’d say Duke was probably right. Besides, Z-Rocks is linebred on Comet, and she’s perfectly decent, but she’s just not outstanding.”

”So Timmy is lying.”

”Let’s say Timmy has a highly developed capacity for self-deception. Leah, if you don’t mind, I want to go check on Rowdy. Do you have a room key? And if you see Kevin, tell him I want to talk to him, okay? Oh, and do me a favor, will you? If the opportunity arises, why don’t you
not
introduce Kevin to Finn Adams.”

”Oh, they’ve already met,” Leah said blithely. ”Kevin knows who he is. Kevin says you’ve told him all about Finn. Kevin recognized his name right away.”

MY IMAGE of the Last Judgment owes more to the American Kennel Club than it does to Michelangelo. For one thing, although the Blessed and Damned huddle together, everyone is decently dressed, and the Judge, in particular, knows better than to turn up in a diaphanous loincloth that poses the insurmountable problem of finding a place to fasten the official badge where it won’t look like a joke-shop fig leaf and inflict genital scarification if it comes unpinned.

And it’s not just the Last Judgment. The Creation of Adam: Ever notice that sad little gap between God’s hand and Adam’s? Well, once you’ve torn your eyes away from the worrisome evidence that Adam suffers from the same demasculinization that afflicts those Florida alligators, you’ll notice that although God and Adam are trying hard, God more than the languid Adam, I might add, divine and human don’t quite touch. Feminist revisionist canine-cosmological Creation: The energetic Eve, her secondary sexual characteristics indicative of hormone levels in the high-normal range, eagerly reaches forth with not just one but two outstretched hands, as does the Great Breeder. In this version, the hands don’t touch directly, either, but instead of an empty space? Pre-Creation Adam lazed around waving a finger in the air. Eve put down a deposit. He got a gap. She got a puppy. And at the Final Judgment? When the last trump sounds, Eve will not walk alone.

Nor, I hope, will I. But on the afternoon of the Eve of the Feast of Saint Hubert, after checking on the solidity of my links to the Infinite, I made a solitary sprint back to the exhibition hall and got there just as Mikki Muldoon was saying thanks, but no thanks, to a group of disappointed handlers whose dogs would doubtless make the Great Final Cut, but hadn’t made this one.

Even celestial judgment is assumed to require paperwork, and in the earthly canine version thereof, the judge not only has to make entries in the official book, but, being human and fallible, has to keep taking and consulting notes, and, after temporarily excusing some dogs and then calling them back, is required to check handlers’ armbands to make sure that those same dogs have, in fact, reentered the ring. Shuffling through the papers on her table, Judge Mikki Muldoon prepared for the culmination of her assignment. Lined up ready to go before her one last time were the dogs who’d made the final cut, among them some I recognized: Daphne, who’d both beaten and been beaten by Rowdy; a local dog called Burlimute’s Malfeasance, sound and typey; a veteran whose name reliably aroused Pam Ritchie’s fury, the unpronounceable Koonihc, ”Chinook” spelled backward; Ironman, looking indefatigable; and pitted against Ironman, the blazing sable Casey, the dog of gold. Sherri Ann’s Bear was not among the elect. Her Winners Bitch, however, could still get Best of Winners.

Near the gate, repeatedly pulling back the black jersey sleeve that covered her left wrist, was the L.L. Bean woman, as I thought of her, who had vanished for a while and now, like the dogs temporarily excused, had returned for the final judging of Best of Breed. Again, she checked her watch and then moved forward, almost as if she intended to speak to Mrs. Muldoon, who turned her head briefly in the woman’s direction and, in apparent response to the woman’s gaze, swiftly gathered her papers together, tapped them on the judge’s table, consulted her own wristwatch, and gave a definitive, confident smile. A dog-show pro, I had no difficulty in reading the interchange. The Bean woman? In seeing her as a plainclothes cop, I hadn’t been entirely wrong. Stationed by the ring, one eye on the judge, the other on the clock? She was, it seemed to me, a guard of sorts, and an official one, sent not by the police, but by the agency that rules the show ring. Monitoring the ring procedure, timing the speed of judging, the woman was—who else? at last!—a representative of the American Kennel Club, here to judge the judge. As she approached the gate, I noticed the inevitable layer of dog hair that now clung to the black jersey.

”Hey, you!” the L.L. Bean woman called to Mikki Muldoon. ”You, there! Can I have word with you?” Wrong again. ”Who
is
that?” I demanded of Lisa Tainter, who was squashed up next to me.

Lisa pulled back the fur hood of her authentic parka to reveal thin hair sweat-matted against her scalp. ”She’s, uh, Mr. Hunnewell’s sister. It seems like she, uh, has some kind of thing about... It’s weird. It’s like she doesn’t understand he’s dead or something. Like she thinks his body is still him. She keeps talking about bringing him home and not wanting him to go home all alone. It’s creepy, if you ask me.”

What impelled me to speak the woman’s name aloud was, I think, simple astonishment at the discrepancy between my image of Gladys Thacker as a sort of generic puppy-mill operator and the reality of a woman I’d mistaken, even momentarily, for an AKC rep. ”Gladys Thacker!”

In my surprise, I must have spoken more loudly than I’d intended. Sherri Ann Printz, who stood nearby misting her bitch’s coat, jerked her head toward me just as the L.L. Bean woman veered around and asked, ”You talking to me?”

Up close, Gladys Thacker’s hair revealed itself as a myriad of flattened curls, each crossed by the mark of a bobby pin. Her foundation makeup was a few shades lighter than her skin. Her eye shadow was green. She smelled musty, like old powder.

Ignoring Sherri Ann, I cleared my throat and held out my hand. ”My name is Holly Winter. You’re, uh, Mr. Hunnewell’s sister?”

”If her name is Gladys Thacker, you bet your life she is!” Her face cold with anger, Sherri Ann turned to the other woman. ”Is that who you are?” When Gladys Thacker gave a baffled nod, Sherri Ann continued venomously, ”Lady, do you have any idea how much grief you have caused me? A million times, I have cursed myself for shipping that lovely puppy to you, all on your brother’s say-so! What a fool I was! I should never, ever have sold a dog to someone I’d only talked to on the phone, never, ever! And you sounded so sweet and all innocent, and all you wanted was a pet! And I call you, I do my follow-up, and, yeah, yeah, he’s just fine, and then,
then,
a couple of years later, I discover...! I get a call from someone who says there’s a malamute at a pet shop, and she’s managed to get a look at the papers, and guess what? The sire is Pawprintz! He’s
my
puppy that I sent to you! You scum of the earth! How
dare
you show your lying face—”

”You’re one to talk!” Gladys retorted. ”Yow breed dogs yourself! You sell dogs! You sold one to me! I’m a breeder same as yourself, and I don’t see where you get off treating me like dirt. I got as much right to be here as you! More! I’m here because of my brother! I’m not just here to make a stupid fuss about a bunch of dogs!” I decided to intervene. ”Sherri Ann, uh, wait, okay? This is really not the time to get into it. You’re due in the ring.”

One of the last people to feel any sympathy for a puppy-mill operator, I nonetheless pitied Gladys Thacker, whose eyes had filled with tears and whose powdered face showed not a trace of comprehension. I searched her features for any sign of resemblance to the late James Hunnewell and found only one: thin, lined lips. Gladys Thacker, however, was much younger than her brother had been. Perhaps his illness rather than genetics had made him look like a bloated horny toad.

Recalled to the present, Sherri Ann stashed her spray bottle and metal comb in one of the big pockets of her dress, a sort of housecoat of gray satin and turquoise chiffon. Like Gladys Thacker, she looked close to tears. ”You just tell me one thing,” she demanded of Thacker. ”What do you think you’re doing here? Here! This is the last place on earth anyone’d expect to find the likes of
you,
you—”

”Sherri Ann—” I started to say.

But Sherri Ann called loudly, ”Victor! Victor, do you know who this person is? This is that puppy-mill woman who conned us out of that puppy! Harriet, this person is the one I was telling you about! She breeds malamutes for
pet shops!”

”Sherri Ann, the ring!” Harriet warned, with more success than I’d had.

As Victor shepherded his wife down the aisle, Harriet Lunt, ignoring Gladys Thacker’s existence, demanded of me: ”Is that true?”

”More or less,” I replied. ”Mrs. Thacker is James Hunnewell’s sister. Years ago, Sherri Ann shipped her a dog that’s shown up in a whole lot of pet-shop pedigrees. But—”

”My brother,” Gladys Thacker cut in, ”is right now lying cold in some morgue, and I come all the way here to bring him home with me so’s he can rest with his own, and do you people care? I think it’s disgraceful, is what I think. My brother was murdered right here not two days ago, and here I am, come all this way so he don’t have to go home all alone, with total strangers, and all you people can talk about is just dogs! It’s the most disgusting thing I ever heard! It’s sick! It’s like you don’t know the difference between a dog and a human! Sick!”

With a dignified snort that damned Gladys as an unworthy opponent, Harriet marched off.

”We do know the difference,” I said quietly. ”It’s just—”

Someone tapped my shoulder. ”Holly!” Leah said insistently.

I snapped at her. ”What?”

”Holly, about Comet. Who exactly owned...?”

”Leah, not now. I’m busy. If you want to know the exact details, the expert is Harriet Lunt. She’s that grayhaired woman over there with her arm in a sling. She’s the one who was attacked last night.”

Without a word, Leah vanished.

”We’re in the way,” I told Gladys Thacker, who docilely followed me as I stepped back and thus ended up in front of the rescue booth. In the space behind the table, Betty continued to guard the lamp from Detective Kariotis. The policeman’s face was damp with exhaustion.

”Betty,” I said, ”I want you to meet Gladys Thacker. Mrs. Thacker, Betty Burley. Mrs. Thacker has just had a run-in with Sherri Ann Printz. We have been having a discussion of the difference between dogs and human beings. Mrs. Thacker is James Hunnewell’s sister. She’s come here to, uh, accompany his body.”

”To bring him home,” Gladys amended. ”When they let me,” she added, glaring at Kariotis.

”Mrs. Thacker,” he said, ”we have explained to you that, given the circumstances—”

”Given that he was here with nothing but strangers,” she replied acidly, ”and given that his own sister’s here to take him home—”

”I assure you that when the formalities have been completed, the body...” His voice trailed off. Gladys was stolid. ”Family is family.”

”And?” I asked.

”The deceased,” Kariotis reported somewhat grudgingly, ”left clear instructions regarding his wishes in the event of his death. As I have informed you, ma’am, we are obliged to go by the document found in your brother’s possession. It clearly stated that in the event of his death, his lawyer in Charleston was to be contacted. Acting on those wishes, we contacted the lawyer, who made the deceased’s wishes plain. As I explained to you, they make no reference whatsoever to you and no provision for shipping the body to Missouri or anywhere else. You have no authority whatsoever to act in the matter.”

”Your brother’s your brother,” Gladys stubbornly insisted, ”your sister’s your sister, blood’s thicker than water, you can’t change that, and I come all this way to get him, and I’m not leaving him here!”