Stud Rites (31 page)

By ten-thirty Timmy was back at the exhibition hall. Sherri Ann remembers seeing him. The Parade of Veterans and Titleholders was still going on. Sherri Ann Printz is sure that Timmy was there when she showed some people the lamp and explained what it was and how she’d made it. Sherri Ann
is
running for the board of our national breed club, by the way. For office: president.

Anyway, at about the same time that Sherri Ann was politicking with the lamp, Betty Burley remembered that she’d left the lamp and the other valuable auction items, as well as her tote bag, at the booth, and she went out and drove her van to the unloading area just outside the hall. On Betty’s first trip from the booth to the van, she had her tote bag over her shoulder, and she carried the lamp in her arms. It must have been while she was returning for the framed wolf prints and the other stuff that Timmy slipped into her van, grabbed the lamp, and raided her tote bag. The theft of the lamp, I am sure, was a last-minute inspiration. His camper overflowed with the detritus of travel—maps, fast-food wrappers, old coffee cups—but the amount of loose change was extraordinary, and there were all those socks, too. The Comet lamp, I think, was a substitute for the coin-packed sock he’d intended to use as his blunt instrument. In contrast to a cosh, the lamp was a meaningful weapon: a sacred relic of Northpole’s Comet. And Timmy must have known that if he could get the lamp back in Betty Burley’s possession, she’d do her best to see that it got auctioned off to raise money for her rescue dogs. Then, after the auction, the murder weapon would vanish forever into the living room or den of the highest bidder.

Exactly where Timmy waited to intercept Hunnewell is unclear. Running out of cigarettes, Hunnewell would certainly venture from his room. Timmy must have hung around watching for him, perhaps in a linen closet or in the stairwell. In any case, he must have approached Hunnewell and told him that he had cigarettes in his camper. Hunnewell was so out of touch with the times that he hadn’t even known how to open a pop-top can. I guess that whoever did his shopping for him bought nothing but bottles. Anyway, I don’t think he’d have been surprised to hear that Timmy smoked. If Hunnewell ever entered the camper, he didn’t leave any prints that the police found. Probably Timmy told him to wait outside. Then he returned not with cigarettes, but with imminent death.

Although I don’t know exactly where Timmy murdered Hunnewell, I know that very early on Friday morning, Freida found the corpse under a camper. Timmy’s must have been in the line of campers when Leah and I played at choosing one for ourselves. Freida continues to insist that the body was either on show grounds or close enough to show grounds to threaten the cancellation of the national, and she is as furious as ever at Timmy Oliver for depositing it there and leaving her stuck with the obligation to move it to the little shed where Finn Adams subsequently came across it. According to someone who told someone who told me, Freida swears that Mikki Muldoon had no idea how sick Hunnewell really was. Consequently, according to rumor, Freida just took it for granted that Mikki Muldoon had murdered him to get the judging assignment. Freida apparently also confides to people that she’d eventually have shared her suspicion with the police. Further, she assures everyone that she’d have waited until Mikki had completed the judging. Freida is running for the board, too. For president.

But back to that Saturday afternoon. By the time Detective Kariotis showed up, the crime-scene experts were more than ready to get rid of the dogs, who, as it turned out, were destroying evidence. Toss anything into a dog crate occupied by a puppy, and what can you expect? Actually, Timmy Oliver expected the destruction to be greater than it really was. As we found out afterward, in addition to shredded newspaper and miscellaneous filth, the puppies’ crates contained bits of the paper towel that Timmy had used to clean off the base of the bloodied lamp, as well as numerous scraps from the files that Timmy had stolen from Betty’s tote bag. I suspect that Cubby’s pedigree and the page from the stud book were touches that Timmy added well after he’d murdered Hunnewell. Betty’s tote bag is always so crammed with paper that she still isn’t sure what he stole, but the information on several other dogs is also missing, and I think that he looked through all of it, selected those particular pages, and planted them on Hunnewell’s body. He really was furious at Betty for refusing to tell the hotel that his camper belonged to her.

Betty’s initial hypothesis that Sherri Ann and Victor Printz had murdered Hunnewell was not, I think, part of Timmy’s scheme. Betty now confesses that mistrustful of Sherri Ann’s sudden generosity to Alaskan Malamute Rescue, she decided that Sherri Ann had donated the lamp for her own use as a murder weapon. Betty, of course, knew that Sherri Ann was furious that one of her Pawprintz puppies had ended up in Gladys Thacker’s puppy mill. Sherri Ann now claims that she, Sherri Ann, has only herself to blame for shipping a pup to someone she didn’t know. Betty still says that Sherri Ann has always held James Hunnewell responsible for referring his sister to her to begin with; and that if

Sherri Ann was murderously angry, she had every right to be. Victor, Betty maintains, was the one who left the material about Cubby, which Betty viewed as equivalent to a soldier’s playing card. Until Betty advanced the idea, I hadn’t even known that soldiers left playing cards on bodies.

Anyway, when the police finally let us have Timmy’s dogs, the crime-scene experts inadvertently turned over to us the single most damning piece of evidence against Timmy Oliver. And I was the one who found it!
Found,
however, is not quite the right word... I picked it up in a plastic bag. Not an evidence bag, either. Not an
official
one, anyway. So here’s how I brilliantly, resourcefully, and single-handedly obtained absolute, undeniable proof of Timmy Oliver’s guilt: I walked a puppy. I cleaned up after him. Truly, that’s all there was to it. Well, a little more. Instead of letting Betty and me go into the camper to get Timmy’s dogs, the police protected what they supposed to be the crucial evidence by bringing the dogs out one at a time. By then, Steve and Kevin had arrived. Steve’s van held the two crates he uses for his own dogs. The plan was that he’d take Timmy’s two adult dogs, Z-Rocks and the silver male, back to Cambridge, where he’d board them at his clinic. That part went fine: A couple of crime-scene guys led out the dogs and turned them over to Steve and Kevin. Then a woman brought out both his sturdy puppies. Betty took the lead of the female Timmy had tried to sell to Crystal. I took the male’s. And we started toward Betty’s van. A dog show was no place for puppies this age, Betty had insisted. Neither was a veterinary clinic. Consequently, she was going to drive the two puppies home and leave them with her sister, who was taking care of Betty’s own dogs. As we crossed the asphalt, both sizable puppies kept biting their leashes and bouncing around. My puppy, however —the male—started to sniff and circle, and as he settled into a squat, I reached into my pocket and extracted one of the plastic bags that I, Ms. Responsible Dog Owner, am never without. And when the pup had finished, I, Ms. Responsible Dog Owner, reached down to clean up after him. What I found, in the middle of the expected, was a tiny plastic packet carefully sealed with tape. For obvious reasons, I did not unwrap the little package with my bare hands, but immediately turned my evidence bag over to the police. This indelicate vignette has a moral:
Always, always clean up after your dog!
For in doing so, you, too, may one day find a diamond ring. You, however, may get to keep
yours.
I had no right to the one I found. My diamond ring had belonged to Elsa Van Dine.

At the banquet that night, everyone kept asking me about the diamond ring. At first, I avoided the topic. My mother would not have considered the episode a suitable subject for the dinner table. After drinking more than I probably should have, however, I revealed the whole story. My mother, after all, had belonged in a federal penitentiary. Who was she to make me feel guilty about a trivial impropriety? Although Betty, I am certain, was as astounded at the discovery as I was, she maintained that she wasn’t in the least surprised. ”Timmy always did go whining to Elsa about everything,” she reported. ”I have no doubt that he tried to buy that semen and that when James refused, he went sniveling to Elsa.”

After dessert, I carried my coffee cup and bravely took the vacant seat next to Harriet Lunt. Keeping my voice low, I related the full history of Jeanine and Cubby, including the ugly words spoken in the darkness of the parking lot. And Jeanine’s tears. Harriet did not produce the confession I’d hoped to provoke. Her only reaction was to Cubby’s ancestry.
”Comet!”
she cried. ”Good God! Duke Sylvia or no Duke Sylvia, that was obviously a
trash dog.”

At the post-banquet auction, Rescue’s special items brought in a satisfying amount of money, mainly because Freida and Sherri Ann got into a vicious bidding war over the print of the wolf disemboweling the elk.

Both responded to the symbolism, I suppose. Each, I’m sure, saw herself in the victorious wolf, her rival in the vanquished elk. Although I made a few bids, the only item I’d coveted, the sign from the Chinook Kennels, had been reduced to fragments of old board that were now in police custody. Pam Ritchie will never forgive Mikki Muldoon for smashing that relic. A tiff broke out. Mikki Muldoon swore that she’d grabbed the first weapon that came to hand. According to Pam, Mikki deliberately destroyed a significant piece of the breed’s history while delivering a posthumous insult to Eva B. Seeley. Then Freida charged Pam with trying to spoil the occasion by picking a public quarrel with the judge. Betty and Sherri Ann, in contrast, moved to a distant, deserted table at the back of the banquet room and commiserated about what both considered the theft of the Comet lamp. As to the mix-ups of the entrees, the cake, and the flowers, Sherri Ann managed to convince Betty of her innocence. I, however, continue to believe that Sherri Ann was guilty. She will not, of course, get my vote.

After the auction, Duke Sylvia and I left the banquet hall together to get a drink. We sat on tall stools at the outrigger bar. I told him that Leah was convinced that he, Duke, would have been Timmy’s next victim. Duke just laughed. Although he must have realized that Timmy was trying to cast a halo of guilt around him, he didn’t say so. It’s possible, I suppose, that Timmy really would have tried to murder Duke. If so, Timmy’d have failed. He’d never have gotten the best of Duke. I did not confront Duke with my firm belief that he’d known all along who murdered James Hunnewell. I know what it is to have a great dog die. What it must be like to have one murdered, I can’t imagine. Duke said, and still maintains, that Hunnewell refused to sell Comet’s sperm because he didn’t like the direction the breed was going in and wanted to guarantee that if the breed improved, there’d be a worthy stud available. As I didn’t tell Duke, I don’t think that Hunnewell’s objection to a particular bitch had anything to do with his refusal. It is my conviction that Hunnewell wanted that remaining viable trace of Comet, those precious straws of frozen semen, to remain intact in the freezers of R.T.I.

As to Timmy’s motive, Duke took the practical view that Timmy had just wanted a litter out of Comet, puppies sired by the long-dead legend. About winning and losing, Duke was a realist. He said that there were fashions and fads in the ring just as there were everywhere else and that, these days, there was no telling how Comet himself would do out there. I think that in killing for control of those last drops of Comet, Timmy ached to own the living remains of a great dog who’d never really belonged to anyone but Duke Sylvia. Where Timmy was raw, Duke was polished. Timmy was a badly aged child. Duke was a man. I believe that in longing to control Comet’s sperm, Timmy wanted not only the dog’s power, but Duke’s, as if anyone who owned even a few drops of Comet would thereby become Duke.

Now, months later, Comet’s future is as frozen as ever. In one respect, James Hunnewell proved himself a wise judge of men and dogs. He willed the bulk of his estate to the Dog Museum, which happens to be in his home state, Missouri. He left Comet’s sperm to Duke. If the immortal Comet ever sires a litter, I will look for his sons and daughters in the ring. As I’ve mentioned, it’s always a pleasure to watch Duke handle. And, after all, James Hunnewell would have been the first to agree that Comet was a dog to die for.

My own are dogs to live for. On the day after the official end of the national, Kimi went Winners Bitch at our independent area specialty, thus picking up her first championship points. Rowdy, of course, was temporarily out of competition. In my judge’s book, however, tbey eternally tie for Best of Breed. Oh, and speaking of braces of beauties, I must not forget to mention Greg and Crystal’s twins, Gregory, Jr., and Lindsay, whose names and little wrinkled faces appeared on the front page of the Boston papers almost exactly two months after the national, on January the first, when the twins took the breed, so to speak, by arriving in the early hours of New Year’s Day. Crystal and Greg are in the picture, too. Both are smiling.

Oh. After Duke and I left the bar, did we...? Certainly not! But I sure was tempted. And while I’m on that subject, I am thrilled to report that the recent restoration of the Sistine Chapel has revealed that Michelangelo did not, after all, shortchange Adam in the matter of...
one-fourth?
Really, we should have guessed. As it was, where did Cain and Abel come from? Never mind the rest of us. And the gap? Authorities maintain that what fills the previous emptiness between God and Adam is a primitive version of the Italian greyhound. Myself, I think that Michelangelo’s pup is hairier than that. The muzzle, as I see it, is blocky. The bone is heavy. In brief, when it grows up and starts to talk, it’s obviously going to say
ivoo-woo-woo.
That’s just my interpretation, of course. Genius that Michelangelo was, though, he may actually have created something of a cosmic and universal looking glass that reflects the soul of the beholder. The Sistine Chapel is not for sale. I own the next best thing. As high bidder at the silent auction, I bought that hand-painted malamute mirror. I paid a lot, but I got a bargain. In the gap between human and divine, I see myself as my own dogs. I sense Creation. Like God and Adam, I am newly restored.