two vintage holly winter stories

by Susan Conant

  "Re: JOHN RICHARD FARRELL, also known as Morris W. Rinehart, John Visco, John Morris. TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN: The FBI is conducting an investigation to locate John Richard Farrell, who is wanted for Unlawful Interstate Flight to Avoid Prosecution for the crimes of Murder, Conspiracy, and Narcotics Trafficking."

  If you're a real dog person, you simply won't believe what came next: "Investigation has determined that Farrell is an avid breeder and owner of Alaskan malamute dogs and may still be involved in that hobby."

  Hobby! I ask you, what is a hobby? Stamp collecting, model airplanes, gourmet cooking, macramé, basket weaving, right? Dogs, my friends, are a passion, an obsession, a compulsion, a mania, or the living, breathing, tail-wagging embodiment of purpose and meaning in this otherwise random universe, but they are certainly not some furry alternative to decoupage. Hobby, indeed. For this we pay taxes?

  Worse, the G-men had foolishly sent photos of Farrell, not his dogs. Whereas most people lack distinguishing facial markings like a stunning white blaze on the forehead or a lovely black bar down the nose, each Alaskan malamute is a highly distinct individual. My bitch, Kimi, has a full mask. Rowdy, my male, has an open face, but he's utterly unmistakable, too, not just one more guy like Farrell, who looked like a thousand other men. Nonetheless, I studied the mug shots and the FBI's description: a 50-year-old white male, 5 feet 10 inches, 170 pounds, brown hair and eyes, no scars. A murderer, conspirator, drug trafficker, and, as the notice went on to say, a known user of his own merchandise isn't the kind of person I'd trust with companion guppies, never mind with dogs. If Farrell showed his face in dogdom, I was prepared to spot it instantly.

  But when you consider where I encountered Farrell, it's still a miracle that I recognized him. The Essex County show was perfectly probable, but just outside the Novice A ring? Obedience is the last place you'd expect to find a malamute person, and if you count both Farrell and the handler who'd just left the ring, there were five of us.

  Pam Ritchie, Tiny DaSilva, and I were sweltering in the mid-July sun that always turns Essex County into a steam bath endurance competition. Tiny, who'd bred the bitch that had just made her obedience debut, was telling lies, and Pam, whose young male had gone Best of Breed early that morning, was agreeing with her.

  Tiny had short, blunt-cut white hair obviously lathered in Sho Sno and touched up with a cake of grooming chalk. Although she was small boned and wiry, she had those big malamutes you see in the Midwest—handsome, bearlike dogs with a lot of Storm Kloud in them. "Malamutes are just not that hard to train," Tiny was saying with the authority of someone who'd never so much as entered the Pre-Novice ring at a club-members-only show-and-go.

  Pam's obedience qualifications were identical to Tiny's, but she shook her mane of chestnut curls up and down. "People just aren't willing to put in the time," she agreed. Pam's hefty build suggested an origin in the same Storm Kloud lines as Tiny's dogs, but she bred our agile New England Kotzebues. She eyed the bitch who'd just left the ring and commented, "Big, isn't she?"

  "Seventy-five pounds is not big," Tiny snapped. "Read the standard."

  When one breeder starts ordering another to read the standard, any sensible dog person vanishes. In lieu of actually disappearing, I feigned ardent interest in the performance of a Rottie in the Open B ring. That's when I noticed an ordinary-looking brown-haired man standing about 20 feet to our left. Because I've stewarded in Open and Utility, I'm pretty good at estimating height, but only up to about 32 inches at the withers, of course. Was he 5 foot 10? Well, he was taller than 5 foot 6, shorter than 6 foot 2, looked about 50, and had no visible scars. The details didn't matter, though. He looked exactly like the mug shots. I must have caught my breath aloud. Pam turned to me.

  "Did you see that flier?" I whispered.

  Breed people like to imagine that they understand obedience, but here's evidence that Pam didn't: So far as I know, flier is not dog-training slang for some elevating crime like hightailing it out of the ring or lifting a leg on the judge's shoe. To straighten out the confusion, I said, "You see that man in the blue shirt? Brown hair? Standing sort of in front of those two young guys with the shepherd?"

  They were in their midtwenties, blond, short-haired, clean-cut young men dressed more for conformation than for obedience in stiffly pressed and sharply creased khaki pants and heavily starched, wrinkle-free white summer shirts. Their dog, though, was definitely not dressed for breed. He was a decently proportioned tan GSD, but he was no show dog, wasn't on a show lead, and hadn't been groomed for the ring. An obedience dog? Maybe. But neither of the men wore an armband.

  Anyway, Pam followed my gaze across the intense, heat-blurred green of the field and said casually, "Yeah." Then she really focused on him, perked up, and said, "Hey, I know him. I sold him a puppy, maybe four years ago." After that, of course, she started to tell me everything about the sire, the dam, the breeding, the puppy's Iittermates, their wins, the repeat breeding, and so on.

  Before she had a chance to zip over to Farrell, recite the same litany, and ask about the pup, I interrupted. The melodrama was unavoidable. "Pam, he's wanted by the FBI!"

  As Pam was asking whether I'd been out in the sun too long, Tiny came to the defense of my sanity. Someone had shown her the FBI notice, she said. "He does kind of look like him," she added.

  "Of course he does," I said. "He looks exactly like the pictures. And, besides, we know this guy has malamutes, because Pam sold him a puppy."

  Tiny's little eyes blazed at Pam. "You sold him a puppy?"

  Pam nodded. "Yeah." Her big features remained immobile. "He seemed all right."

  "I hate to say this," Tiny told her, "but do you really think that 'all right' is good enough? I mean, obviously, it isn't. You know, you trust people too much. You really have to screen better than that." She raised a bony hand as if she intended to shake a scolding finger at Pam but caught herself and ended up holding out a clenched fist.

  "Well, what did you want me to do?" Pam said. "I met him and talked to him, and he seemed all right. And he already had a malamute, so he knew about the breed. As a matter of fact, his dog was out of that bitch you sold to the Levinsons, and the dog was dysplastic, which, in case you want to know, happens to be why he came to me when he wanted a puppy."

  "Well," Tiny said emphatically, "the dysplasia must've come from whoever the Levinsons bred her to, because it did not come from my lines." She paused and added pointedly, "All my dogs are OFA," by which she meant, of course, that her dogs were rated clear of hip dysplasia by the Orthopedic Foundation for Animals.

  Before Pam could ask OFA what—Excellent? Good? Fair? Dysplatic?—I cleared my throat and, trying to keep my eyes off Farrell, said, "He's a drug dealer and a murderer! Pam, would you turn so he can't see you? You know, he might recognize you, and, for all we know, he knows about the FBI flier. Don't let him see you staring at him."

  "Well, what's he done with my bitch?" Pam said. "That was a beautiful puppy. When he got in trouble, he should've brought her back." She paused, folded her arms, and eyed Tiny. "I won't sell any puppy without a return agreement."

  "Well, neither will I!" Tiny said. "And if you'd followed up, you'd know where your bitch is."

  May I interject something? I don't want to give a false impression of malamute breeders, who are not, in general, scrappy, aggressive types. They aren't even terribly competitive, at least by comparison with, say, terrier people. But they're strong-minded and independent. Also, they never back down. Sound familiar?

  "Look," I said, "I'm worried about his dogs, too, but among other things, we don't even know that he still has them."

  "Of course he does," Tiny said. "Just look at him. He's been to Cherrybrook, and he's been picking up samples."

  She was right. A guy at a dog show who's holding a big white Cherrybrook bag and two smaller ones from lams and Science Diet probably owns at least one dog.

  “We have to do something," I said. "The FBI notice said not to do anything to
endanger anyone, so he's probably armed, but we have to let someone know he's here."

  You do show your dogs, don't you? Good. Well, then, I don't need to explain why I was glad that Pam and Tiny were not obedience people, who are the champion nit-picking legal hair-splitters of the dog fancy. Three obedience types in our situation would have argued about whether Farrell was standing within the jurisdiction of the Novice A judge. Since Farrell was outside the ring, was he thereby outside the judge's province? But judges are empowered to remove spectators who are causing a disturbance, aren't they? So doesn't a fugitive from the FBI constitute a potential impediment to the performance of dogs and handlers? I mean, the Best in Show judge would've been making her cuts before we'd settled the question.

  As it was, mainly because we were afraid that Farrell had noticed Pam, we immediately dispatched her to look for the AKC rep. Then Tiny volunteered to find the show chairman. I consulted my catalog and swore. The chairman, James J. Pastern, a pint-size Koehler-fanatic martinet and unpopular Working Group judge, owned three breed champion giant schnauzers that reliably NQ'd in obedience because Mr. Pastern drilled them to believe that every move they made was a hanging crime. Koehler, right? The dog training expert who always puts the word kindly in quotation marks in case anyone suspects him of meaning it seriously. No one ever does, of course.

  “Mr. Pastern," I informed Tiny. “You know him, right?"

  "Him! Have you ever seen what he puts up? How he managed to get himself qualified—"

  "I know! But just find him, would you? And don't let him do anything, OK? Because if this guy Farrell has a gun and Pastern starts—"

  "Mass slaughter," Tiny said. "Hey, relax. If I can handle—"

  "Just do it!"

  My task was to keep Farrell in sight. Almost as soon as Tiny trotted off, Farrell took long strides away from the obedience rings and headed across the wide, hot field to the breed rings, where he momentarily vanished in the illegal white cloud surrounding a conscience-stricken Old English sheepdog determined to shake off what his handler should have brushed out. I trailed behind, detoured around the OES, made my way through the hairspray miasma surrounding a brace of black standard poodles, and followed Farrell toward the double row of concession booths and tents that I'd intended to visit before going home. At first I thought that his destination was the row of portable toilets located just beyond the concessions, but he entered a tent, one I'd seen at other shows, but not one I'd had on my agenda.

  You go to a lot of shows? If so, you've seen at least a few stands like the one called Bud's. I'd never been able to figure out how the place survived. First of all, while most small concessions specialized in something—T-shirts, books, stationery, posters, nutritional supplements, jewelry—Bud's didn't. Also, the other concessionaires offered show-special discount prices on rawhide chews, brand-name shampoos, training collars, leather leads, and the other necessities of existence, but Bud charged at least twice what you'd pay at any other tent for exactly the same items.

  Well, maybe Bud's did specialize after all. In fact, he practically had a monopoly. Never in my life have I seen so many inaccurate representations of purebred dogs as I saw on Bud's merchandise. His T-shirts had breed names lettered across the top and blurry depictions underneath, but there was no correspondence between the words and pictures. The Alaskan malamute could have been a Siberian, I guess, but what was supposed to be a golden retriever looked a lot like a corgi, and the purported shih tzu didn't even look like a dog. The needlepoint kits were, if anything, even worse than the T-shirts. Bud's had a second specialty, too: unsafe dog toys. There were toys of soft latex for dogs to gnaw to pieces and swallow, squishy toys with metal squeakers just waiting to pop out and slip down the throat, and plush fabric animals with small, dangerous hard-plastic eyes and noses.

  A table ran across the back of the tent, and across the table in untidy rows straggled numerous bottles and canisters of shampoo, conditioner, grooming powder and detangling spray in three or four popular brands. Behind the display loomed Bud, who wore a filthy once-off-white carpenter's apron and a dirty duck-billed cap with his name emblazoned in red letters on the brim. He was tall, emaciated, and so chinless that he made you want to look down to see where the bottom part of his face had fallen.

  I stepped just inside Bud's tent and pretended to examine a really hideous collection of little dime-store pseudo-porcelain dogs shoddily glued to slabs of quartz. For a mere $65 I could've had my very own representation of a mixed-breed sled dog permanently stacked in a puddle of rubber cement. Wow. Farrell, though, was at the counter facing Bud, and he was actually buying something, namely, a small canister of grooming powder. I backed out of Bud's and into the burning sun, and then hurried to the next booth, which turned out to display dog beds in every possible size, shape, style, and material—real and fake lambskin pallets, cedar-filled nests with washable covers in plaids and solids, egg-carton orthopedic foam mattresses, and all the rest. The two clean-cut young men with the tan shepherd were intently fingering a dainty flannel-lined wicker basket that would've been a tight squeeze for one of the big dog's forepaws.

  Then Farrell emerged from Bud's tent and, without looking around at all, made straight for the row of portable toilets. I stayed with him long enough to see the line of people waiting for the toilets. I lost sight of him only because Janet Switzer waylaid me. Janet is Rowdy's breeder. To understand a breeder, it's vital to know her original purpose. Janet was developed to serve as the alpha individual to a fluctuating but always rather large number of Alaskan malamutes. She has such a dominant personality that whenever she addresses me, I have to resist the urge to drop to the ground, roll onto my back, and grovel in submission.

  "Well, where is he?" Janet meant Rowdy, who'd been entered in Open obedience. "Chicken out, did you?"

  I explained that Rowdy had a deep pad cut. It was healing fine, I assured her, but he wasn't ready to jump. When Janet had finally finished cross-questioning me, I excused myself.

  I'd spent only a few minutes with Janet, not nearly long enough for Farrell to have reached the front of the line, but he was nowhere to be seen. Had he headed for the privacy of the woods around the site? Or had he left the show altogether? In either case, he would have taken the blacktop road that snaked around the open field, past the parking lot reserved for exhibitors and show officials, and toward the distant area relegated to mere spectators. I hate the heat almost as much as my dogs do, but I jogged along that road, past the field, the rings, the tents, then between row after row of vans, RVs, trucks, and station wagons, beyond the tired handlers resting in their Winnebago shade and beyond the hot, victorious dogs cooling off for the Best of Breed competition.

  Under a tall Norway maple at the far end of the distant parking area, a group of people stood around a copper-colored Isuzu Trooper. I slowed to a brisk walk. Tiny and Pam were both there, and with them were the AKC rep and the show chairman, Mr. Pastern, the judge who daily hanged his own dogs. The clean-cut young men were there, too, and so was the tan shepherd. All of them were alive, as were two Alaskan malamutes I'd never seen before. Inside the Trooper, his nostrils heavily dusted with white powder, lay John Richard Farrell, also known as Morris W. Rinehart, John Visco, and John Morris.

  There was no mystery about who killed him, really, at least not for long. Have you guessed? Who killed John Richard Farrell? Who immediately identified the murderer? And how?

  Solution: Murder Well-groomed

  Show people are fanatics about the accurate representation of breeds and about the safety of toys. Could the sale of shoddy dog merchandise have kept Bud in business? Never. And would Farrell, who had already visited the Cherrybrook tent, have bought overpriced grooming powder from Bud? Of course not. The organization that employed both Bud and Farrell (remember? conspiracy and narcotics trafficking?) took advantage of the cover offered by dog shows. As a concessionaire, Bud could travel from show to show on a predictable schedule to distribute his white powder to a fe
w select customers. When Farrell became a threat to their organization, which was not eager to have him chat with the FBI, Bud followed orders to supply a deadly substitute for grooming powder. The layer of cocaine at the top of the canister was pure—uncut and thus fatal. I guess you could say that John Richard Farrell really died by his own nose.

  The FBI is obviously and regrettably not run by real dog people—hobby, indeed—but it didn't take a dog person to realize that Farrell might turn up at a show. The clean-cut young men, though, turned out to be handlers after all. Their shepherd had no difficulty identifying Bud as the source of the cocaine and thus as Farrell's murderer. I tried to corroborate the shepherd's testimony by explaining that I'd seen Bud sell the canister to Farrell, but the FBI agents didn't seem to put much faith in the statement of a human (and thus fallible) witness. Quite correctly, they trusted only their dog.

  Like other breeders, Pam should screen her buyers, but don't you think that culling her human mistakes would have been a bit extreme? And the AKC rep was outraged to discover that criminal activities had been taking place on the grounds of shows, but the only murder weapon he ever contemplated using was the permanent suspension of privileges. Mr. Pastern, the Koehler disciple? One of Koehler's principal justifications for rough dog training methods was that any problem creature has a moral right to rehabilitation. Mr. Pastern might have strung Farrell up, but he wouldn’t have killed him.

  By the way, the mal from Tiny’s lines was OFA Excellent; the supposed hip dysplasia originated in the vicious imagination of a jealous gossip who lied to Pam. Also, in case you wondered, real show people never suspected what Bud was actually selling because, of course, the heaviest drugs in common use in purebred dogdom are Nemex-2 and Panacur, and the only time we snort is when fools of judges put up the wrong dogs, which is to say, not ours.