Paws before dying (8 page)

And murdered? Determined and murdered.

“You remember the time she filed that 51 A?” the other woman said. “Jack, you remember that.”

He nodded absently.

“While I was with her,” Jim O’Brian said. “Four years ago. This boy’s parents were, you know, above reproach. As a matter of fact, they were copresidents of the PTA.”

One of the other teachers opened her eyes wide and glared at him.

“Forget that,” he said. “Let’s say they were Mr. and Mrs. Newton. Anyway, it was the old story, bad bruises and worse explanations. And Rose spoke to them, suggested counseling-But it kept going on, and she went and filed a 51 A.” He saw our blank faces. “Suspicion of abuse.”

“They mustn’t have been any too pleased about that,” said Charlotte Zager.

“Rose was not afraid of anger,” Jack told her.

If she had been, I suppose, she’d never have married Jack-Or maybe whatever his family felt wasn’t anger, but something else, maybe something quite different.

“Especially not if it had to do with children,” someone said. “Or dogs. That was Rose. Children and dogs.”

Jack’s eyes filled with tears, and he put an arm around Leah. “I’m doing everything we planned,” she told him softly. “Kimi’s going to get her C.D. this summer, just the way Rose said.” My mother always used that same tone of voice to predict the canine future, as if it were preordained. Rose had led Leah not merely to want that C.D. but to expect it.

“Is that that malamute?” Heather asked. She laughed. No one else did.

“Yes,” I said with an edge in my voice.

“Well, good luck. You’ll need it.”
Dog's Life
is always publishing articles about the importance of breeding for temperament. Heather’s parents evidently hadn’t subscribed.

After that, people talked in twosomes. Jim O’Brian wanted to hear about my malamutes and said he’d always wanted one. When I said I might be able to find him a nice rescue dog, he looked interested. We eventually said our good-byes. As I stood up, Charlotte Zager, who’d been showing people in and out as if it were her house, thanked me for the chicken salad and started to accompany me to the door, where Jack joined us. Charlotte stayed at the door, though, while he walked us to the car, which I’d parked on the street in front of the house next door. The louts we’d encountered last time were nowhere in sight. Leah was a few steps ahead of us when Charlotte called out: “Watch for the cab, Jack.”

“My father’s coming,” he explained. “From Florida. He’s
^e
¡ghty-five. He has never entered my house before.” He paused. “Someone would’ve picked him up at the airport, but he insisted on the cab. God forbid that he should show a sign of weakness. First he takes a ride from us, then Charlotte decides he’s helpless, next thing he ends up in a nursing home.” Jack shrugged. If he takes a cab, he’s not helpless.”

“He doesn’t sound very helpless.” I had to speak up because the louts’ yard a German shepherd—the older, darker one, he poor guy we’d seen slapped around—was growling and barking protectively at the end of a long rope. Want a dog with a really rotten temperament? In between whacking him, leave tied up. It works every time. Anyway, the louts’ front door opened and the youngest brother, Willie, the trainer of the other shepherd, appeared and hollered, “Kaiser, shut up! Dale, come get your dog.” Then, catching sight of Leah, he ran his fingers through the hair on top of his head and ambled to the Bronco. I could see him talking to Leah.

“After all these years,” Jack said, nodding toward the neighboring house, a nondescript yellow ark. “And they haven’t so much as said a word. And this one, Willie, a student of Rose’s. Not a word.”

“Maybe they will.” I frowned and shook my head sympathetically, doubting it.

When we reached the car, though, Willie stepped forward, held his hand out to Jack, and muttered almost apologetically, “Mr. Engleman, I’m sorry about Mrs. Engleman. I’m real sorry.”

Chapter 8

“SOME of those people
would,
you know. They really would. They’d do anything. They just don’t care.” The speaker was Tamara Ryan, who has West Highland white terriers—Westies to their friends. She was talking about top obedience people, the real competitors. “Some of them actually would kill to win. I wouldn’t put it past them at all.”

Although Tamara and I were stretched out on the grass of Eliot Park with our backs resting against a tree, the expansive suburban evening air felt and smelled like the polluted miasma of a hermetically sealed kitchen in which someone was running the self-clean cycle of a heavily soiled oven. Sprawled on his back in the hope that a nonexistent breeze might fan his belly, Rowdy maintained a sour, stolid expression. It was too hot for him to bother chasing the Westies and too hot for them to bother provoking him. Rowdy and I had already had our individual turn with Tony, and it was so hot, we’d skipped the Jumps. My skin felt greasy, and sweat was dribbling down my neck.

“And,” Tamara went on, “the Donovans swear up and down that lightning did not strike.”

. “The people with the English cocker?” I asked. “Davy, fight?” I remembered because I’d noticed on the list Nonantum ad mailed after last week’s class that these people had given he dog their own last name. If I name a dog Holly’s Fuzzy Wuzzy or Winter’s Arctic Storm or whatever, fine. That’s normal. But an English cocker named David Donovan? When it comes to dogs, some people get carried away.

She nodded.

“How do they know?”

“They live right over there,” said Tamara, pointing toward the park entrance. “The yellow Victorian with the coral trim. And they were home, too. Ask her. There she is. Lisa?”

Lisa Donovan turned out to be a tan, athletic-looking young woman in white shorts and a green Izod shirt. She had a round, smiling face and straight blond Dutch-boy hair.

“I was just saying you were home Friday night,” Tamara told her, “and you didn’t hear lightning strike, you or Bill.”

Lisa’s face turned serious. She sat cross-legged on the ground next to Rowdy and ran a hand over his head. “Shedding,” she remarked.

“Just beginning,” I said.

“Yeah, we were home. We had guests. And you know what’s odd? The house has lightning rods. If it’d hit near here, wouldn’t it’ve hit them? I asked the police, but they’re a lot of help. When we got broken into, they said they knew who did it, and did they catch him? No. So I ask a simple question like, ‘If we’ve got lightning rods, isn’t it going to strike us first?’ and they clam up.”

“Maybe they didn’t know, either,” I said out of loyalty to Kevin, who complains that people don’t want to tell the police anything and then expect them to know everything.

“Oh, they knew,” she said suspiciously. “They just weren’t saying.”

I tried to get her off the police and back to the lightning. “If it hit here, wouldn’t you hear it? Or notice
something!“

“Naturally, we heard thunder. Who didn’t?” She was scratching Rowdy’s flanks and gathering bits of his white under-coat into a little ball. “And before the rain started, we sat out back, and there was a lot of that whatever you call it, sheet lightning? Heat lightning? That overall kind, where there’s a big, even flash. And, sure, we heard some crashing and cracking, but not practically next door. And wouldn’t we have felt it? I call that very peculiar.”

I was about to call it pretty peculiar myself when she switched the subject. Holding up Rowdy’s fur and rubbing it between her fingers, she asked, “You save this?”

“No.”

“One of my neighbors would love it, is why I asked. She’s a weaver. She’s into natural fibers. You want me to ask her about it?”

“I guess so.” The prospect of wearing Rowdy or Kimi felt repulsive. Then I had another thought. “Actually, does she make things?”

“Sure.”

“My father would love that. A scarf or something. Would you ask her about it?”

“Yeah. Or maybe you know her. She has a border collie.”

“Is her name Cohen?”

But that would have been too much of a coincidence. “Marcia Brawley. I’ll ask her. I’ll let you know.”

Then Tony Doucette, dapper in spite of the heat in a 1930s pre-air-conditioning seersucker suit, summoned us for the group exercises. Instructors like Tony are practically as eager to see their students make it into the ribbons and put titles on their dogs as the students are themselves. They want you to show, and even when you don’t do anything more than qualify, they congratulate you in front of everyone, and they keep goading you and everyone else to get out there.

“Any brags tonight?” he asked when we’d lined up and sat our dogs. “No one? Come on!”

“Guilford,” called out Heather. “High in trial. One ninety-seven plus.”

“What’d they give you?”

“Pewter tray.” She sounded disappointed.

“Who was the judge?”

“Martori,” she said.

Samuel Martori, I would like to comment, once gave Vinnie, the best obedience dog I’ll ever own, a humiliating 187 for a spectacular performance in Open for which she deserved a minimum of 199 plus. I had not shown under the bastard since.

Tamara and one of the Westies were next to us. “I will not show under him,” she said quietly. “I was so glad to see him Set that reprimand.”

“So was I,” I agreed.

In case you didn’t know, the Secretary’s Pages of
Pure-Bred Dogs/The American Kennel Gazette
make the most gossipy reading in dogdom, because that’s where the AKC publishes notices of suspensions, reprimands, registration cancellations, and fines. Some of the notices are about boring, trivial stuff like clubs that were late sending in reports, but others are about unspecified—but obviously underhanded—“conduct in connection with” shows and trials. Every once in a while, there’s a juicy line or two about what the culprit did. The notice about Martori stated that he’d accepted hospitality from an exhibitor before and after a trial he’d judged. What the
Gazette
didn’t say, but what I’d heard from about a dozen people, was that he’d given the exhibitor a score in the 190s even though the dog ticked the high jump and didn’t look as if it even had any idea how to sit straight. A history of ethical violations won’t necessarily stop people from showing under a judge, though. What stopped other people from showing under Martori was the same thing that stopped me: unfair scoring, and not unfairly high, either.

Tamara leaned toward me and said, “You know, Rose was the one who turned him in.”

“No!” I said.

I almost missed Tony’s commands to sit and leave the dogs.

In Open, the handlers have to go out of sight of the dogs for the sits and downs, and while we waited on the sidewalk just outside the park wall for Tony to call us back—-or for someone to come and tell us that our dogs were up—Tamara and some other people kept insisting that Rose had been the person principally responsible for the reprimand.

“What did Rose do?” I asked.

“Complained in writing,” Lisa said. “Her dog had a limp, so she wasn’t competing, but she was there, and she saw how the dog did. And then she heard what the score was, and she ran into him while he was leaving with these people, and she hit the roof and complained in writing.”

“Everyone at Nonantum knew about it,” Tamara told me. “You just didn’t know because you weren’t training here.”

“I knew about the reprimand,” I said. “I just didn’t know about Rose. If I had, I would’ve thanked her.” I was about to ask Heather why she showed under Martori, but someone appeared and told me that Rowdy was shifting around and said Tony wanted to know if I wanted to do anything about it. I did.

To make sure that Rowdy didn’t pull the same trick or a worse one on the long down, I walked away with the other handlers, but instead of following them out of the park, I stepped behind a tree where I could keep an eye on him. He rested his head morosely on his paws and didn’t budge. He knew where I was.

Heather’s daughter, Abbey, was sitting in a folding chair near the tree. She’d been observing the entire thing.

“There’s a quick cure for that,” she said.

I looked interested. Rowdy was restless because he was hot and wanted to go home, but if Abbey knew a trick, I wanted to hear what it was. One thing dog training teaches you is that you never know it all.

“Electronics,” she said. “Give him a good zap, and that’s one problem you won’t have anymore.”

“Yeah, I’ve heard.” I tried to sound neutral. How other people train their dogs is none of my business, and there’s nothing I can do about it, anyway.

On the way home, though, I lost it, and Leah got the full diatribe.

“You mean they give electric shocks to their dogs?” Leah was properly horrified. “Isn’t that illegal or anything?”

“No, but it ought to be,” I said. “That’s what I think.” Okay, so once in a while, there’s some desperate problem, and nothing else works. Suppose you’ve got a lot of dogs, and one of them keeps attacking one of the others, and you’ve tried everything else. You do obedience with both of the dogs. You keep them separate. You do everything right. And it happens again. And you
know,
you just
know,
that what’s coming next is that the dog that’s getting attacked is going to get torn up or killed one of these days, and probably you’ve already been bitten separating them because you didn’t want to see the victim get hurt again. Okay, maybe then.
Maybe.
But for another couple of Points in the ring? Come on.