Stud Rites (15 page)

Fingering the pedigree, I said, ”I guess that all this has something to do with Mr. Hunnewell’s murder.” I meant Cubby’s ancestry, the Printzes, and Gladys Thacker, of course, not the business about smoking. One thing I knew for sure was that James Hunnewell hadn’t lived to die of lung cancer.

Detective Kariotis’s face remained blank. ”The originals of these were found with the body. You got any idea about why?”

I answered truthfully: ”No.”

Kariotis stared at a spot over my left shoulder. ”Gladys Thacker,” he said. ”She usually comes to these, uh, shows?”

A puppy-mill operator at a national specialty dog show? Like a prostitute at a nuns’ convention. Except that good sisters would presumably refrain from casting stones.

”Not that I know of,” I replied. ”But this is the first malamute national I’ve been to myself.”

”Most of you people here know each other, is that right?”

”Not all. But a lot of people do. And one of the things about a national is that it’s a chance to meet people—people you’ve just heard of, people you’ve talked to on the phone and haven’t met in person before.”

”One thing I’ve observed today,” Kariotis remarked impassively, ”is that you people talk a lot.”

”Really!” I exclaimed. ”Do you think so?”

He finally cracked a hint of a smile. ”You ever hear any talk,” he said, ”of any hard feelings here?” He started tapping the pedigree.

I looked at his finger. ”Where?” I asked.

”Here,” he said, tapping Gladys Thacker’s name. ”Between Mr. Hunnewell and his sister here. Between him and Gladys Thacker.”

My jaw must have dropped.

”The lady’ll be here tomorrow,” Kariotis continued. ”Says she wants to take her brother home with her to Missouri for a Christian burial.”

BEFORE MY INTERVIEW with Detective Kariotis, I’d instructed Leah to return Rowdy to our room and to turn herself over to Faith Barlow, who was handling a number of dogs today (besides Rowdy tomorrow) and could probably use help. After the interview, I considered seeking Faith out to beg her to minister to me instead. From the moment I’d spotted that cursed lamp under Betty’s van, I’d botched everything. Now I was furious at Betty, disappointed in Finn, ashamed of myself, and enraged at my dead mother’s high-handedness. Leah had sized up Finn in a second. At about her age, why hadn’t I? Tomorrow, Steve Delaney, my lover and my vet, would be here. I’d told him all about the fascinating Finn who’d abandoned me. If they met? I consoled myself with the thought that I hadn’t spoken to Steve today and thus hadn’t had the opportunity to foul things up between us. Tomorrow, reformed, I’d speak the simple truth. Better, I’d quote Shakespeare. ”I feel like Titania,” I’d say, ” ’Methought I was enamor’d of an ass.’ ” For all I knew, though, Steve and Finn would sit in Finn’s posh booth happily conferring about impaired motility and artificial vaginas. Today, I would do what I always advised newcomers to do at any dog show: I’d keep my eyes and ears open and my mouth locked shut. I would contemplate the ultimate reality: I would look at dogs.

And, catalog in hand, I did. Right on schedule, Mikki Muldoon had completed her judging of the boys —the males—and started on the girls. Tomorrow morning, she’d begin her day with what was rather ingloriously described as ”Remainder of Bitches.” Flipping through the catalog, I noticed that Freida and her committee had been quite successful in filling it with paid advertising and pages of boosters and tributes. In Pam Ritchie’s ad, a circa 1935 photo of Eva B. Seeley had been cropped and merged with a contemporary picture to present the image of an admiring Mrs. Seeley beaming approval at one of Pam’s bitches. The listings on the pages headed ”Tributes” offered brief, inexpensive homage to assorted collections of people and dogs. Freida Reilly thanked ”Karl Reilly, Ch. Tuffluv’s A Plus,” as if her son and her stud were one and the same. Rowdy, Kimi, Leah, and I paid tribute to Faith Barlow and Janet Switzer, whom I’d scrupulously listed in alphabetical order. Janet’s full-page ad, bordered in black and headed ”In Memoriam,” showed Janet’s great dog, Denali, Rowdy’s sire. I wished that judges were allowed to look at catalogs. The photo of Denali would surely have primed Mikki Muldoon for the sight of his son.

When I raised my eyes from the catalog, Mrs. Muldoon was pointing one finger—number one, first place in the twelve- to eighteen-month puppy bitch class—to a lovely female of Pam Ritchie’s and a junior handler I recognized as Pam’s nephew. Sherri Ann took second with a black-and-white puppy called Pawprintz Amber Waves. Putting the kid first was, I guess, picking the sentimental favorite, but the crowd was pleased, and Sherri Ann hadn’t come to a national specialty with her ambitions fixed on a puppy bitch. The dog she gave a damn about was Bear, and the prize she craved above all others was the purple-and-gold rosette for Best of Breed.

I wondered whether James Hunnewell would have put Sherri Ann’s bitch first today and whether he’d have liked Bear as much as Sherri Ann evidently believed. Years earlier, when Sherri Ann had sold that Pawprintz dog to Gladys H. Thacker, had Sherri Ann known that the woman was Hunnewell’s sister? If so, the family connection must have felt like a high recommendation. The brother, James Hunnewell, held a respected position in the dog fancy. It certainly hadn’t occurred to Sherri Ann that his sister operated in the ninth circle of hell: the puppy mills.

Over and over, television, newspaper, and magazine exposes had documented horrendous filth and disease on puppy farms. I’ll give one example. At a recently raided operation in the Midwest, the puppy miller maintained what she called her ”death barn.” That was where she dumped the bodies of dead dogs and puppies. It was also where she took any dog in desperate need of veterinary care. The sick dogs that entered the death barn didn’t get veterinary care, of course. They got neither food nor water nor euthanasia. They just stayed locked in the barn until they died. Want to hear more? Gee, why not?

When, if ever, had Sherri Ann found out exactly how James Hunnewell’s sister made her shameful living? Could Sherri Ann have made the discovery only recently? In her position, I thought, wisely or foolishly, fairly or unfairly, I’d have blamed James Hunnewell for his sister’s sins.
He should have known,
I’d have thought.
He should have warned me. He should never have let this happen.
Was that how Sherri Ann had felt? Had she taken revenge at the first opportunity?

And Betty Burley. When Betty received Cubby’s pedigree from me, she’d unquestionably seen that Gladys Thacker was a licensed dealer, which is to say, no amateur dabbler in the commercial puppy trade, but an official operator, a farmer whose produce consisted not of maize, soybeans, eggs, or milk, but of AKC-registered dogs. Betty had been in malamutes for decades. So had Sherri Ann Printz and James Hunnewell. So, in a very different way, had Gladys H. Thacker. Betty might have known that James Hunnewell and Gladys Thacker were brother and sister. If so, it would have been exactly like Betty to confront both Sherri Ann Printz and James Hunnewell. Could Betty have approached Hunnewell last night? Betty didn’t have a dog entered. Nothing in the AKC regulations would have barred her from knocking on his door; and she’d been in the corridors before and after she’d retrieved the lamp from the booth.

My anger came back. If Betty had to be so judgmental, she should’ve become a judge! And before judging me, she should’ve heard my side! I hadn’t touched her tote bag. And I’d kept my mouth shut about the damned Comet lamp.

Betty could be as ruthless as Kimi, as high-handed as my mother, and as judgmental as God on the Day of Wrath, all at the same time. And that awful lamp meant a great deal to Betty: Cubby, a puppy-mill dog, was descended from a Pawprintz dog, a dog sired by the famed Northpole’s Comet. James Hunnewell had owned Comet. The lamp bore Comet’s fur. As a weapon in Betty’s hands, had the lamp symbolized vengeance for the descent of Comet’s glorious genes into the puppy mills, for the suffering of all dogs doomed to lead miserable lives as puppy-mill breeding stock, and for the heartless elitism of breeders and judges who cared only for
quality
dogs and denied responsibility for so-called
trash?
And those voices in the dark parking lot? The voices that jeered at ”Betty’s mongrels” and ”trash dogs”? That parking lot was not far from James Hunnewell’s room. Judges, as I’ve said, need not imprison themselves. Catching the cruel words, Jeanine had worried that Betty, too, might have overheard. Jeanine and Arlette had not recognized the voices. Betty might well have known James Hunnewell’s. Jeanine, who loved Cubby, had been wounded. It had not occurred to Jeanine to strike back.

Betty was a tiny woman, and the lamp was heavy, but Hunnewell was small, a diminished man, and Betty had the strength of a lifetime spent handling great big dogs. Like everyone else with years of experience in rescue, Betty had had to euthanize dogs that were a menace to children, dogs that had savaged people, malamutes that were a danger to everyone and a threat to the breed’s good name.
Euthanize:
destroy, put to sleep, put down, give the needle. Take to the vet. But last night in the parking lot there hadn’t been a vet handy, had there? And she could hardly have rushed James Hunnewell to the nearest animal hospital. If Betty had decided to destroy him, she’d have had to do it herself.

STACKED in a human show pose—feet frozen, head high—Sherri Ann Printz had the black-and-white Amber Waves at her gold lame side. In six months, I predicted, the puppy bitch would be chunky and unrefined. Sherri Ann, of course, had already ripened to beefy coarseness. Amber Waves, however, was behaving like a perfect, if far from little, lady. Sherri Ann, in contrast, was engaged in an ill-bred shouting match with Freida Reilly.

”Everyone knew I gave that lamp to Betty!” Sherri Ann screeched. ”And I never, ever, not once promised it to you, Freida Reilly, and you damn well know it!”

Freida’s early-morning lacquer had developed cracks. It was now four or so in the afternoon. The judging was over for the day. In the ring, the hands-on portion of the judges’ education seminar had just started. The participants consisted of six or eight demonstration dogs and the usual dog-world combination of many women and few men. It won’t always be this way, you know. Modern science, I am happy to report, is already at work on a solution to the scarcity of men in the dog fancy. In the future, we’ll collect, extend, and chill them so they can be conveniently and inexpensively shipped all over the country to be warmed up as needed, just like sperm. As it is now, our human studs are hopelessly overbooked.

The group surrounding Freida Reilly and Sherri Ann Printz at the national breed club’s booth, however, showed the underrepresentation of men that we temporarily endure. In addition to Freida, Sherri Ann, and Betty Burley, there were four or five other women. Victor Printz lingered at the edge, as did Tim Oliver. Taking yet another covetous look at the old sign from the Chinook Kennels and poking through a stack of collector’s item issues of the
Malamute Quarterly,
I wasn’t really part of the crowd.

But back to Freida. Her badge was askew. Her short, tight perm was crushed on one side. The other side puffed out. Her head looked coyly tilted at an uncomfortable angle. Hanging upside down from her lapel was a dainty corsage of white baby’s breath and bruised pink rosebuds. The pewter malamute pin was now upside down. In a voice hoarse with overtried patience, she declared, ”Sherri Ann, you know as well as I do that a good six months ago you told me all about that lamp, in detail, and when you did, you asked whether I would like it for our auction, and I said yes, we certainly would.”