Stud Rites (29 page)

Betty and I exchanged shrugs.

”Cremation?” Betty asked.

Kariotis nodded. ”And the ashes sprinkled over one of these, uh, malamute shindigs.”

”Some people find the idea of cremation very repugnant.” Betty sounded sympathetic. ”It really all depends on your point of view.” She cleared her throat. ”Speaking of which, Mrs. Thacker, why don’t you step back here, behind the booth, and have a seat? Because you and I need to have a long talk about everything, including James, and the dog that you bought from Mrs. Printz, and her, uh, feelings on the subject.” With one hand resting protectively on the remains of Northpole’s Comet, Betty gestured invitingly to two folding metal chairs. When Gladys Thacker complied, Betty lifted the lamp, placed it on the floor, and seated herself in front of it. ”Now,” she said resting one elbow on a stack of handouts about the evils of puppy mills, ”the first thing to get out in the open here is that what we are experiencing, you and I, is a radical clash of cultures, if you will, and I, for one, see this situation as a golden opportunity to hear your point of view. But let’s start with your brother. You came here because you wanted to get his body, isn’t that right? To bury at home? With, uh, other members of the family?” Gladys Thacker nodded. ”With his own people.”

”Except that once you got here, you discovered that you have no authority in the matter, because... He didn’t leave you anything, did he? You must have felt very hurt, that your own brother went and...”

”It’s crazy,” Gladys said. ”Jim’s brain wasn’t right, you know. He’d go on and on about dogs. But it wasn’t him—it was his brain! It wasn’t getting oxygen. He hadn’t been right for a long time. You could tell. I’d call him, and he’d go on and on about dogs—not that I’ve got anything against dogs; I’ve got dogs myself—and at Christmas, we’d keep sending him cards, and, one year, what he did was pack up all the ones we sent and mail ’em back to us! And the one time Jim come to visit, he had a fit, because he didn’t like the looks of the dogs I had, and I told him, yeah, they’re not your show dogs, but they’re real good producers. And I shovel out once a week, and they get enough to eat, and all that. It’s not like I run one of them puppy mills, you know. I’m licensed and everything. But he wouldn’t listen.”

”Yes, I can see that there was a, uh, a problem in communication,” Betty said tactfully. ”And part of the problem is that your brother really felt that, uh, people like everyone here were like family. That his friends in dogs had
become
his family.”

”That’s why I come here today!” Gladys Thacker cried. ”I figured, well, Jim treated them like family, and so maybe they’ll understand that his brain wasn’t right, and they’ll help me get him home! And then I get here, and I get sent back and forth, and then I wait and wait for that one over there”—Gladys pointed to Mikki Muldoon—”so’s I can talk to her and ask her to help me get these people to let me bring him home!” She ended on a wail.

”Well, I for one,” said Betty, ”have no objection to your taking his body back to Missouri, and I will be glad to say so to anyone you like, for all the good it’ll do. After all, James is beyond caring, and if it’s so important to you, I don’t see what the big objection is.”

”The objection,” Kariotis contributed, ”is that the deceased explicitly—”

”Died,” Betty finished tartly. ”And isn’t it illegal to go around distributing ashes here and there? It’s not exactly sanitary, is it? Maybe there’s a loophole for you there, Mrs. Thacker. We’ll ask around. But while we’re on the subject of disease”—Betty seized a puppy-mill handout—”I want to discuss with you one of the concerns that many of us have about, uh, commercial kennels. You see, in
our
experience, all too many of the dogs that...”

I had heard enough. Confronting Gladys Thacker, a genuine, if timid, representative of the archenemy, Betty was a woman without violence. She was, as always, determined to make her own views clear, but I trusted her to fulfill the promise to hear everything that Gladys Thacker had to say in reply. I was as convinced as ever—and as sure as I thought Betty was, too—that the Comet lamp had been the blunt instrument used to murder James Hunnewell. I was equally convinced that Betty hadn’t been the one to use it.

JUDGE MIKKI MULDOON was going over a group twice the size of any she’d previously had in her ring, twenty dogs, perhaps more. The video shows me looming in back of Pam Ritchie, who’d stolen my seat, as I peer solemnly into the ring. Visible behind my shoulder is the aged-child face of Tim Oliver. Even more than usual, his half-baked countenance suggests a squishy interior of warm, damp feeling. In the camera’s eye, Pam Ritchie bears a weird resemblance to a barefaced Alaskan malamute inexplicably sporting chestnut curls. Although I have forgotten Pam’s words and cannot hear them on the video, I am sure that as she bobs her head and jabbers to Tiny, she emphasizes, as always, the incomparable excellence of the old Kotzebue dogs. In the ring, Duke takes Ironman out and back. Duke is a master of timing and gait. With another handler, the dog could be ponderous. With Duke, he is athletic. Ironman remains serious competition. My own group is smaller than Mikki Muldoon’s. Pam Ritchie joins my discards. To the best of my knowledge, she has no connection with Harriet Lunt and hadn’t even known Elsa Van Dine. Besides, far from killing off opposition, Pam cultivates it. James Hunnewell’s blatant insult to Mrs. Seeley’s memory, instead of driving a desperate Pam to murderous reprisal, merely secured her all the more as Mrs. Seeley’s ardent defender. No, Pam hadn’t murdered James Hunnewell.

My other discards: Mikki Muldoon, who’d have judged anyway; Freida and Crystal’s father, Harold, who’d never have chanced the cancellation of their respective, if parallel, events; Sherri Ann Printz, who wouldn’t have bashed in Hunnewell’s skull to conceal a secret she’d just broadcast herself. I’d cut Betty Burley, too. One of the mean-spirited people Jeanine and Arlette had overheard on the night of the showcase was, I believed, the deep-voiced Harriet Lunt, who favored that horrid phrase: ”trash dogs.” If, as Jeanine feared, Betty had also heard the cruel words, and if the other speaker had been James Hunnewell, both he and Harriet Lunt would even now be pinned in a corner somewhere while Betty told the pair of them everything that was on her mind. Besides, I had a hunch that the people whose words had wounded Jeanine hadn’t been Harriet Lunt and James Hunnewell, but Mrs. Lunt and Victor Printz. With some reluctance, I also discarded the obviously guileless Gladys Thacker. She’d sat with that Comet-hair lamp right there on the floor at her feet and had shown no reaction to it at all.

Who made my final cut potential murderers? Duke Sylvia. Timmy Oliver. On Thursday, when I’d first encountered the wedding party in the hotel lobby, both Timmy and Duke had just arrived. The night before, either might well have been in Providence murdering Elsa Van Dine. Any of the others could, of course, have made the three-hour round-trip between Danville and Providence on Wednesday night. But Timmy or Duke Wight naturally have been passing through. Both men had known Elsa Van Dine. Duke had handled Comet for Elsa. She had sold Comet to Timmy. Either man could have stayed in touch with her and could have known exactly where she was staying in Providence. She had taken Timmy under her wing; she had a soft spot for him. Duke knew that the marquis had died and Elsa was now a dowager. When Elsa Van Dine had sold Comet, she’d offered the dog to Timmy Oliver. Why not to Duke? Had there been something about Duke she didn’t like? James Hunnewell had liked him, I thought, or at least liked his handling. And Hunnewell had trusted Duke to co-own Comet. On the other hand, Harriet Lunt had drawn up a special co-ownership contract for Hunnewell because he hadn’t trusted Timmy. Was it the only one she’d drawn up? Had Hunnewell
really
trusted Duke Sylvia?

Having lost my ringside seat to Pam Ritchie, I pressed up against the back of her chair, with Steve to my left, and beyond him, Finn Adams. The latter had abandoned his booth to pursue the kind of promising client he must have been trained to plague, a veterinarian interested in reproductive high tech who, as Finn was not saying outright, could fill his own coffers by funneling dog sperm into the freezers of R.T.I. Mashed against a chair back between Steve and Finn, Leah, in what I took to be a merciful effort to interrupt Finn’s copious flow, kept bursting in with queries about the legal ownership of frozen sperm. Personal property, Finn kept telling her, an asset like any other, an asset separate from what Finn kept calling the ”donor dog.”

In the ring, Al Holabach took Casey out and back.

”That’s my pick,” I told Steve. ”Beautifully presented, too. Damn! Kevin is missing everything!”

The last time I’d seen Kevin, he’d been lugging a malamute-size cedar-filled dog bed that he’d confessed was one of quite a few items he’d won by buying an evidently extraordinary number of raffle tickets. Now, finding him near one of the raffle tables, I said, ”You know, you don’t really have to buy all that many tickets. It’s nice of you, but...”

Awkwardly fingering a set of kitchen utensils bearing hand-painted images of—what else?—Alaskan malamutes, Kevin said, ”Hey, heart of gold.” With a shucks-ma’am smile, he beat his chest with a wooden spatula.

I insisted that it would be a shame for him to miss the final moments of Best of Breed, but as he followed me, I made the mistake of using the word ”climax.” Kevin’s face promptly turned an orangutan orange-red that clashed with his hair. For a second, I entertained the thought that in his profound ignorance of dog shows, Kevin might imagine that I was exhorting him to witness some sort of ritual mating of the Best of Breed and Best of Opposite Sex in an orgasmic grand finale that I could hardly wait to applaud myself. Although I dismissed the possibility—Kevin really did know better—it occurred to me that from Rowdy’s point of view, such conventional trophies as punch bowls, trays, commemorative plates, tea sets, and engraved platters were of no interest whatsoever, whereas a bitch in season would be a prize
really
worth taking home.

The action in the ring did not, of course, consist of ritual mating. Rather, the dogs—an elite group of polished show dogs, not a slinker among them—were arrayed, one in front, one in back, in a zigzagged double row across the narrow end of the ring, near Leah, Steve, and Finn. Facing the dogs, studying Ironman, narrowing her eyes to peer at Casey, taking long, slow strides, tilting her head as if to get a fresh look at Daphne, Mikki Muldoon wore the grave expression universally seen on the faces of judges who, as the entire gallery realizes, have finished picking their winners, but aren’t quite ready to bring the drama to its conclusion by ending the delicious tension of uncertainty. What makes the ploy work is that there’s nothing sham about the absolute power of a judge: At the last second, Mikki Muldoon really could change her mind.

As we worked our way toward Steve and Leah, Kevin caught sight of Finn Adams. Respectful of the hush that had fallen, he poked one of the wooden kitchen implements toward Finn and Steve and whispered salaciously in my ear, ”The two of them caught on yet?”

”There’s nothing to catch on to,” I whispered indignantly, ”and, no, they haven’t, and please do not—”

With as much dignity as can be summoned by a gorilla-built cop in mufti carrying a set of malamute-embellished spatulas, spoons, and pancake-turners, Kevin gave his head a perish-the-thought shake that drove from my consciousness the lesson that most women learn by the age of eighteen, if not earlier, and that I’d certainly gleaned from my experience with Finn Adams: Never, ever under any circumstances trust a man who, by word or deed, says, ”Trust me!”

As it turned out, however, in Kevin Dennehy’s ears, the most alarming words in the male vocabulary were not ”Trust me!” The particular expression that drove Kevin wild is, in fact, still uncertain. It could have been any one of a number of those being innocently pitched sotto voce by Finn Adams to Steve Delaney when Kevin, considerately positioning himself where he wouldn’t block someone’s view, found a place between two other tall men and thus accidentally overheard my ex-lover utter to my present lover such phrases as ”always ready” and ”last forever,” and refer in passing to proven studs and ripe bitches... meaning dogs, of course, and not me.

Alas, as Kevin—in his role of defender of fair maidens—drove the handle of a wooden spoon into Finn’s solar plexus, Leah compounded my humiliation. Nimbly stepping between Pam and Tiny, bending far into the ring, Leah called out to Duke Sylvia, demanding to know who had owned Comet when his sperm had been collected for freezing. Fortunately, since my father is possibly the most embarrassing person I have ever met, I grew up being disgraced at dog shows. Leah’s inappropriate behavior, which could have been taken as a deliberate attempt to distract Ironman, didn’t faze the big steely dog at all. Maybe Ironman’s sire was as mortifying as mine. Duke, however, jerked his own head around. Despite his obvious and justified anger, he wisely shut Leah up by loudly answering her question: ”James Hunnewell,” he said. ”And Timmy Oliver.”