Rottweiler Rescue (12 page)

Harry ignored my sarcasm. “You don’t go to many shows, do you?”

“Usually just the big shows at the Stockyard Complex in February.”

“Maybe he was at the specialty and seeing you was a shock.”

“Maybe, but I didn’t recognize him and couldn’t recognize him, and he seems to have believed that until about the time of the show.”

The scowl finally disappeared entirely from Harry’s face, and he relaxed. “I have an empty kennel run. Your dogs will be okay there. Come on up to the house and we’ll talk.”

As we walked the dogs toward the kennel run, I turned and asked as causally as I could, “Do you remember where you were the morning Jack was killed?”

Harry laughed out loud at me. “I was puttering around here like always in the middle of the week. You think I killed him because he beat me out for Best of Breed the weekend before that?”

“Did he?”

“No, as a matter of fact. We both got beat by an owner-handler.”

Was it realizing I really had a reason to be asking him questions that made him cooperative all of a sudden, I wondered, or was it hearing from my own mouth that I couldn’t identify the killer?

Harry opened the gate, and I led Sophie and Robo inside. Sophie was obviously unhappy over being treated like an ordinary dog. Robo just as obviously didn’t care.

As I walked with Harry back to his house, I tried to decide if he was a possibility as the killer. In a blue work shirt and jeans, his barrel chest was noticeable and didn’t fit into my memory of the killer, but would I have noticed such a detail under the loose-fitting black clothes the killer wore? Harry was also slightly too short, I thought, but he had on worn leather shoes with an ordinary sole today. Would running shoes with thick, cushioned soles give him enough extra height?

As we entered the yard, its two guardians came over to check me out. They were beautiful dogs. I was no expert, but they looked as nice as anything I’d seen in the show ring at the specialty show. The male was an older boy with flecks of white on his face and a gray chin, but the female looked in her prime. “Are these your own dogs?” I asked.

“They’re family pets,” he said in a dismissive tone, then introduced me to his wife, Lannie, and daughters, Terry and René.

After a few quiet words to his wife, Harry led me around the house to a backyard even prettier than the front. Shade alternated with sun. Lush grass was laced with paths of brick pavers, and the gardens were bright with the yellows and oranges of late-blooming marigolds and mums. Harry and I sat at a glass-topped wrought iron table in the shade of ash trees that had not yet begun to give up their summer green for fall gold. He got right to the point.

“I probably can’t tell you the kind of thing you want to know about Jack. He and I bumped into each other at almost every dog show, but I can’t remember ever talking to him about anything but dogs. We were competitors, not friends.”

“I heard he could be a...,” I hesitated trying to chose my words carefully, “keen competitor.”

“Sure he could. So can I. It’s that kind of business. You win enough and your customers are happy and stay with you. You lose enough, and you have no customers and you’re out of business.”

“So you don’t think he carried it too far, tricked people in order to get an edge on them?” I asked.

“I heard things, but I never saw it. For all I know people tell stories like that about me. Jack was good with a dog, and he was good to his dogs, a good all around handler. Dogs liked him. We helped each other out a little now and then, not a lot, but he’d lend me a piece of equipment, or take a dog in the ring if I was short handed and he didn’t have a dog for the class, that kind of thing.”

Either Harry was dissembling or there was a side to Jack Sheffield no one but Harry and Susan had ever noticed. Before I could shape my next question, the screen door at the back of the house opened.

Harry’s wife pushed through, carrying a tray with a pitcher of lemonade and three glasses on it. She had buttoned a loose-fitting white blouse over the halter top she’d worn for gardening and run a comb through her long blonde hair.

We made small talk about the gardens and the weather while Lannie set out the glasses and poured. She had the slightest of accents, Scandinavian maybe, more a matter of word patterns than pronunciation. Lannie pulled out a chair and sat at the table with us, and I brought the subject back to Jack.

“Your husband is the first person I’ve talked to other than Susan McKinnough who has anything nice to say about Jack Sheffield,” I told Lannie.

“And who else have you talked to?” she asked.

“Well, I suppose you have a point there,” I admitted. “So far I’ve talked to Carl Warmstead, and they were breaking up, and then to Dorrie Stander.” I saw the blank looks on both their faces and added. “Dorrie owns Bear Creek Kennels. You know about the lawsuit, don’t you?”

“We know about the suit,” Harry said, “but if I heard the kennel owner’s name it didn’t stick in my mind. I never met the boyfriend either. Isn’t he allergic?

“Yes. Supposedly that’s why Jack never had a dog of his own and kept his show dogs in the Standers’ kennel instead of having a set up like this.”

I looked toward the kennels. Robo was almost invisible, lying in the shade. Sophie sat at the fence facing us, and I thought I could feel the power of her indignant stare. Stifling the pangs of guilt she was so good at provoking, I turned back to Harry and Lannie.

“And supposedly, because they were going their separate ways, Jack could finally have a house dog and was adopting a rescue, but Carl says Jack was bringing a dog in to push him out faster — faster and maybe without his full share of their assets.”

Harry took a swallow of his drink. “Divorces can be messy,” he said in a way that made me think this marriage wasn’t his first, “but Susan McKinnough was willing to adopt a dog to Jack, right?”

“Yes, she was, but do you believe Jack was adopting a rescue because he just wanted a dog?” I asked. “Your dogs are so beautiful. They look like retired show dogs. Don’t professionals like you have clients wanting you to take dogs all the time?”

Harry didn’t answer right away, and his wife jumped in. “Yes, we do, but you have too narrow an idea of what is rescuing,” she said. “See our Bear over there? Yes, he was a good show dog, a great show dog even. So this grand dog goes home to his rich owner....”

“Lannie.” Harry’s voice carried a warning, but his wife ignored him.

“Don’t you, ‘Lannie,’ me. His owner used to take out big ads and walk around the shows with everyone knowing who he was and congratulating him. Then time passes, Bear is retired, and dog shows bore Mr. Big Winner, and all of a sudden we get a call, can we keep the dog, he’s going to Europe. And you should have
seen
the dog that came back to us. Fat and dirty and smelly, his coat all rough, and his nails so long it must have hurt to walk.”

She glared at me as if I had a part in this disgrace.

Harry touched her hand, then took up the story. “Here we were trying to figure out a way not to let him have the dog back, and if we’d only known, he was trying to figure out a way not to take the dog back.”

“So what happened?” I asked, drawn in by the story.

“He came back from Europe and kept calling and saying he’d get the dog soon but never showed up. After months of that I told him the girls had gotten fond of the dog and asked him if he’d let them have Bear and we’d forget the board bills. I don’t know what we’d have done if he hadn’t agreed, but he did, and I could hear the relief in his voice. So is Bear a retired show dog, or is he a rescue?”

“I guess he’s both,” I said slowly. “But isn’t he valuable as a stud dog if he won that much?”

“Only a few dogs ever become popular enough to earn much in stud fees, and Bear never did. Of course, his owner never worked at it. I know he ignored inquiries when the dog was still winning. We don’t want to get into that end of the business either.”

“What about the bitch?” I asked.

Harry and his wife exchanged a glance. “Tell her,” she said. “She should know all rescue dogs don’t come from shelters. Jack is dead and we have the papers. They can’t do anything to him or to us. So tell her Maida’s story.”

Maida! When Lannie said the name, the bitch’s head came up, and I looked again at her pretty face with its dark, almost black, almond-shaped eyes. Her perfectly shaped ears cupped her face closely and gave it a distinctly feminine cast in spite of the breadth of skull and shortness of muzzle. Her rich mahogany markings contrasted perfectly with her coat, which shone in the sunlight like polished onyx.

“I think I know the beginning of her story,” I said softly.

“I suppose you do, especially if you talked to the kennel owners,” said Harry. “The thing is when the lawsuit was over, her owners found themselves with a dog who was useless by their standards. So they told Jack they wanted her euthanized on the q.t.”

I stared first at Harry and then at Lannie, hardly able to believe my ears. “So what stopped Jack from doing what they wanted? He did what they wanted with her tail, didn’t he? He drove off and left her to get hit by the car, didn’t he?”

“No,” said Lannie. “He sat in our kitchen and almost cried. He felt terrible about everything. He was driving around looking for her when she was hit.”

“He lied about what happened to save himself and let Standers take the blame, didn’t he?”

“Yes, he did,” said Lannie solemnly, “and he felt very guilty, and maybe we were wrong too, because we did not tell anyone what Jack admitted to us. The lawsuit was over then and we decided not to do anything. Jack had no insurance and the kennel did, and Myron Feltzer is a powerful man. Jack was afraid of what Mr. Feltzer would do to him if he admitted what happened, not just money but ruining his reputation, making sure he never got more clients.”

“And what about the whole thing with her tail?” I asked. “Did he claim he was too afraid of Feltzer to say no to that?”

Harry shook his head at me. “Dianne, you may be horrified by docking an adult dog, and I may think it stinks and hope I’d have the guts to refuse to cooperate with a client over it, but the fact is it happens more often than anyone admits. And it’s going to keep happening as long as dogs with tails aren’t competitive in AKC. Jack probably wouldn’t have imported a tailed dog himself and docked her, but he didn’t see it the same way you do either.”

From my email lists, I knew that there were AKC judges who refused to even judge a Rottweiler with a tail. Susan, the only dog show competitor I knew well, would never consider docking an adult dog. Of course, she had never imported a dog from Europe, but even tailed rescues were harder to place than docked dogs. Susan took them in and just worked harder to place them.

Lannie picked up Maida’s story again. “Jack told Mr. Feltzer he had to have a signed paper permitting him to dispose of the dog. Jack typed the paper himself and gave it to him to sign. That’s the word on it, ‘dispose.’ So there he was. He had the dog and the paper, but he could not take her home because of his friend, and he could not take her to the new kennel where he was keeping his dogs because Mr. Feltzer might find out about her, so he took her to a different kennel. He thought about calling your friend Susan, but he was afraid that Mr. Feltzer might find out he had not ‘disposed’ of the dog in the way he was supposed to if he did that too. He didn’t think a signed piece of paper would protect him.”

“So,” said Harry, picking up the story, “he was in a bind. Maida was still pretty crippled and a kennel with a cement floor wasn’t the place for her, and he knew it, but he didn’t know what to do. Then one day he overheard my discreet wife here telling Bear’s story to someone at a show.”

“People need to know these things,” said Lannie. “If more people knew when they do bad things, that everyone would hear about it....”

“If they knew that, then they’d sneak at it better, and we wouldn’t have Bear or Maida,” said Harry cynically. “Anyway, this time it worked out because after that Jack drove down here, with Maida, of course. He knew it would be a lot harder to say no with her right there.”

“And he gave us the paper Mr. Feltzer signed and he gave us a paper from him to us, making her our dog,” said Lannie.

“All of which would be spit in the wind if Myron Feltzer really came after her,” said Harry. “But it’s been quite a while. Feltzer wouldn’t want her back. He wouldn’t want anyone to know what he did — what he meant to do. But I hear he and his wife tell people she died of post-operative complications, so if she’s dead, our live dog can’t be her. She’s microchipped now, and the chip is registered in our name. It’s not something we worry about too much.”

“She doesn’t look at all crippled,” I said.

“She doesn’t, does she?” Harry said, grinning at me. “We got one of those big round stock tanks and a heater for it, filled it to the brim, and Lannie and the girls spent hours helping her swim in the thing. She swims like a fish now, and she hasn’t limped or shown stiffness for months. Terry wants to get a PAL number for her and try her in obedience.”

“Do it,” I urged, “but maybe you ought to get that PAL number with a name other than Maida.”

I asked a few more questions but the Jamesons insisted they had told me all they knew about Jack Sheffield. We said our goodbyes, and Lannie went back to her garden and her daughters, but Harry walked me back to the kennel to get my dogs.

He laughed at the cool reception an unforgiving Sophie gave me. “The strong-willed ones like that are the best kind,” he said. “She’s a pretty girl, do you know her background?”

“She was turned over to rescue by people who claimed they didn’t know that puppies chew,” I said. “They had her papers, but it’s average backyard breeding — Susan says there are some well known dogs when you get a couple generations back but that’s all. You don’t have to stroke me, I know her heart is a champion’s but her body isn’t quite there.”

In my eyes Sophie was simply beautiful. However, I’d seen enough of Susan’s show dogs to know that while Sophie didn’t have rescue ears, her ears were a tad too long and so was her muzzle. She toed out in front in what dog people call an “east-west” front and probably had several other faults show people could name that I didn’t know or care about.