Rottweiler Rescue (10 page)

In no time at all, a man wearing a blue jacket with the kennel logo on it came through a swinging door, letting the faint sound of barking from somewhere deep in the building slip through with him. His friendly smile was bright in his round, coffee-colored face, and he obviously knew who he was looking for.

“Hey, Mrs. Aitkin. Hey, Dumpling,” he said, scooping up the little dog and talking to her nose to nose. “Are you ready for a vacation with your pals?”

The woman got to her feet and gave him a bulging tote bag. “Her toys and her mat and her vitamins are there, and so are all the usual instructions, just in case you have someone new on staff,” she said.

“No problem. We’re all old hands,” said this paragon of customer relations. “She’s going to have another great time here with us, and we’ll have her bathed and groomed and looking her beautiful best to go home next week.”

The kennel man carried the little dog back through the swinging door, holding her on his shoulder and talking softly to her as he went. The woman stared after Dumpling for a moment before leaving too.

The next time the door swung open, the thin, intense-looking woman who came through it headed straight for me. Dorrie Stander had on the same blue jacket as her kennel help. From the look of her, she also did the same work they did and just as much of it. Her black hair was pulled straight back in a ponytail and her makeup was minimal, with only traces left of the morning’s lipstick. The hand she extended for shaking had short, unvarnished nails and calloused palms.

“Come on back to my office,” she said immediately after introducing herself and putting us on a first-name basis.

She led the way through the swinging door into a hallway, then to the first office on the right, which was more businesslike than homey, with the same flooring and painted walls as the reception area and a beige metal desk and cabinets.

Only some distinctive pencil sketches on the wall behind the desk gave the room any personality. If the soft-eyed spaniels frolicking in the sketches were Dorrie’s own dogs, her choice of livelihood involved her heart, not just her pocketbook.

Once I had eased my sore body onto the hard wooden seat of her visitor’s chair, Dorrie leaned back in the desk chair as if to convince me how relaxed she was. The nervous way her fingers played with a pencil she had taken from the desktop betrayed her.

“I didn’t kill Jack Sheffield. I probably had more reason than most, but since I didn’t kill him a year ago when he screwed us to save his own sorry butt, I wouldn’t have bothered now when the whole thing is history. The police talked to us right after Jack was killed, and they must have been satisfied. They went away and didn’t come back.”

“Us?”

“Me and my husband. We run this place together.”

“Were you here that morning?”

“Yeah, we both were. The cops talked to us and to some of the staff and they seemed satisfied with that. Like I said, they didn’t come back.”

“I know you didn’t kill him,” I said, even as I wondered about her husband. “It was definitely a man I saw leaving his house that morning, but if I don’t figure out who it was before he finds me again....”

“You said he attacked you.”

“He only missed doing to me what he did to Jack by a bit,” I said. “That’s why I’m wearing this blouse when it’s the weather is still like summer.”

Dorrie threw the pencil back on the desktop and leaned forward, staring intently. “I see some of the cut, by your ear. You need a bodyguard, not help from me.”

“I can’t afford that, and I can’t afford to just pack up and leave town, so I need to figure out who it is and let the cops take it from there.”

“The cops ought to protect you. They ought to find him.”

“Maybe so, but they haven’t found him, and they can’t protect me.”

“I’ll tell you anything about Jack you want to know. Probably there are lots of people who felt like me. I wouldn’t throw him a rope if he was drowning, but to actually kill him... nobody I know would kill him like that.”

“You said what he did to you might make someone want to kill him. Tell me about that. I never really knew him when he was alive, and I need to find out about him now,” I said.

“Yeah, well, Jack boarded his dogs here for years. I mean that. He didn’t get his customers to board here.
He
boarded their dogs here, and he paid me, and then he billed them more than he paid as part of his whole bill to them for training and showing. I guess you could say I got what I deserved in the end. I knew what he was doing, knew he was sharp enough to cut himself, but he paid on time and his dogs were steady income, so I figured it didn’t matter, but of course it did matter, and it caught up with me in the end.” She paused then and picked up the pencil again, obviously angry at herself as much as Jack.

I encouraged her to continue. “So what happened?”

“He let a dog out, a really valuable bitch his best client had imported from Germany. The idea was to show her here, advertise a lot, and then breed her to another import and get big bucks for the puppies. He said a lot of Americans think the German dogs are better, but they don’t import them as much any more because they have tails. I guess you know about that.”

I nodded. “I don’t show or breed, but I’m on a couple of Rottweiler email lists, so I know docking tails has been illegal in Europe for a while now. Even so, the pro-German people make a pretty good case for the quality of their dogs. They have a breed warden system over there, and dogs have to meet standards to be bred. In this country as long as both parents have papers it doesn’t matter if they’re cross-eyed cripples, AKC will register the puppies.”

“Yeah, well, I learned more about that kind of crap than I ever wanted to know,” she said.

“The bitch they imported must have had a tail,” I said. “Was she so good they thought she could win at AKC shows with it? I guess a few dogs do.”

“They amputated the tail,” she said.

Shocked, I sat back in my chair too quickly and winced at the pain. Dorrie and I just looked at each other for a moment. Finally I found my voice. “Jack didn’t try to talk them out of it?” I asked.

“I guess not. It was Jack who picked her up from the airport, and he took her straight to the vet. He brought her here then and expected us to deal with it. Long trip in the belly of a plane, strange place, trained in a different language, hurting like hell. The son of a bitch! I should have kicked him out then. If only I’d kicked him out then.”

Like all docked breeds, Rottweiler puppies have their tails cut when they are mere days old and the tail is a soft bit of cartilage. Amputation on an adult dog with a thick tail is quite another thing.

In spite of deep division and disagreement in the breed over the European versus American rules on docking, breed associations are trying hard to write rules that will keep people from doing exactly what Jack’s client had done, obviously with limited success.

“But you didn’t kick him out,” I said quietly.

“No. That poor damn dog. Maybe I deserved what I got. Jack sure deserved what he got, even if it took a while to catch up with him. After Maida — that was her name, Maida — was healed up enough, he started working with her. He’d come after hours to work with his dogs. That was part of our deal, that he wasn’t underfoot too much during business hours.

“So he came one night and she got loose and got out on the road and was hit by a car, and Jack said he’d never been here and our kennel help must have been careless. The client sued us, and Jack testified against us. That’s how I know all about tails and imports, I heard all about it in court.”

“They won,” I said.

“They won, and they won big bucks. No puppy mill bitch ever produced the way they claimed Maida would have. Every puppy was going to be a certain Westminster winner, and they had people there saying how they’d have paid the earth for a puppy.”

“Why are you so sure it was Jack who let her loose? Couldn’t it have been one of your people here late that took her out?”

“No! For starters my people
work
here. They don’t sneak back after hours to mess with a dog by themselves. Anyway, one of the neighbors across the street saw Jack that night. Saw him try to catch the dog, and when he couldn’t, saw him give up and drive away. He just drove away, the bastard! The neighbor called Animal Control, but by the time they got here, she’d been hit. Animal Control got her to a vet.”

“She didn’t die?”

“Not then, but she had to have three or four surgeries. It cost thousands, and she had to be spayed. Supposedly she was going to get all kinds of therapy for years. I heard later that she died in the end. A blood clot or something.

I was silent for a moment, sickened at the unnecessary suffering and death of a dog I’d never known. Finally I got myself back to the subject. “If a neighbor saw what Jack did, why didn’t you win in court?”

“The neighbor didn’t get a license number or anything. He just said he saw a guy trying to catch her and the guy could have been Jack and the car could have been Jack’s car. Some other client said he was at her house that night. It didn’t matter how many locks we had or how many gates. There was Jack sitting there looking all preppy and his clients in their Gucci and Armani. It was easier to believe some low-wage kennel help did something stupid, and if not, what the hell, we were insured, right?”

I thought of how the kennel worker had eased Dumpling’s owner’s mind and crooned to the little dog as he carried her away with her bag of goodies from home, and suddenly was almost as angry as Dorrie. Still, I felt compelled to ask, “You
were
insured, weren’t you?”

“Sure. Insured with a big deductible. And the company dropped us like a hot potato as soon as the jury found against us. We had a hell of a time finding other insurance, and we’re still paying through the nose for a crummy policy.”

We discussed her dealings with Jack for a while longer, but other than what she had already told me, which certainly confirmed and intensified the impression of Jack Sheffield I’d gotten from Carl Warmstead, Dorrie didn’t reveal anything significant.

“Come on,” Dorrie said. “I’ll show you our kennel setup, and you tell me if one of our people left a gate open and let the dog out by accident.”

Curious, I followed her through the building, past several rooms with workmanlike setups for grooming, all of which had dogs standing on grooming tables being worked on. Big and small, wet, dry and fluffy. The grooming business was flourishing. The sight made me grateful I’d stumbled into a breed that was if not quite as much of a dog grooming dream as a Boxer or Doberman, darn close.

At first the kennels themselves seemed ordinary. We walked down an inside corridor with dogs in chainlink kennels on one side. Like most kennel setups, the runs went through the wall to the outside, and there was a sliding door in the wall which could be lowered to keep each dog in or out as necessary for cleaning.

Dorrie took me through a door to the outside and I saw the layout of the kennel area as a whole and was impressed. We were in an open courtyard with long lines of kennel runs on three sides. The center of the courtyard was lawn edged with a wooden fence that kept the three small dogs playing there with a young kennel worker from seeing or getting near the kenneled dogs around them.

“Oh, that’s great!” I exclaimed. “Do they all get some play time out here every day?”

“No,” Dorrie said. “Some owners want it and some don’t. To be safe, most dogs have to go out alone, but those three live together. It costs extra because it’s labor intensive.”

Maybe so, but how nice for those dogs who got the extra. Somehow I had faith that Dumpling was going to be out romping on the grass every day during her stay.

“The thing is,” Dorrie said, “if one of us took a dog out, this is where we’d take it. And if we left a kennel gate open inside, the dog would still be inside, raising hell up and down the line of kennels, but inside. If we left the gate to a kennel run open on this end, same thing, but the dog would be out here. To let a dog loose on the road, you have to take it out of its kennel and then take it through doors to get out of the building. You’d pretty much have to do it on purpose.”

“Can you go directly out that way?” I asked, pointing to a door in the wall that was the fourth side of the courtyard.

“Yes, the fire department made us put that in for an emergency exit. You can’t get in here that way without a key, but you can get out. We’ve got a fence and another gate out there so there can’t be any accidents.” She walked over and opened the door so I could see the fence and gate.

Looking over the setup I didn’t see any way a dog could escape to the road accidentally.

“Did Jack train his dogs here?” I asked.

“Sometimes, but it starts the kenneled dogs barking, particularly after hours when nothing else is going on. He’d go out to the parking lot in front most of the time.”

“Is there lighting out there at night?”

“You bet,” Dorrie said. “We always leave it pretty well lit, and there are extra lights Jack could turn on.”

“What about the gates to the road?”

“They’re to keep people out when nobody’s here, not to keep anything in. Anybody who came in would open them and leave them open.”

“Keys?”

“He had keys, he had to, but so did some of my senior staff. And me. And my husband.”

“So they didn’t really point a finger at anyone specific, just said it had to be someone from the kennel?”

“She was kenneled here, it was our responsibility, we should have kept it from happening.”

No wonder Dorrie was bitter.

Behind me I heard an angry male voice, “What the hell are you doing? I told you not to talk to anyone about that bastard or that damn lawsuit!”

I turned to see a large, dark-haired man with a hard face set in angry lines striding toward us. Dorrie acted as if she hadn’t heard him.

“That’s my husband, Lee,” she said.

Better Dorrie than me. He ignored me completely and cursed her, Jack Sheffield, Maida, and Maida’s owner, Myron Feltzer. Dorrie might be bitter about what Jack had done to her, but her husband was still violently angry. The girl who had been playing with the little dogs quietly gathered them up and disappeared into the far kennel corridor.