A New Leash on Death (Dog Lover's Mysteries Book 1)

by Susan Conant

  Running is supposed to build confidence. Maybe it had. I called Kevin at the Central Square station and told him I wanted some information and didn't want to tell him why. I asked him to find out when Dr. Stanton, Gerry Pitts, and Margaret's brother, Bill Lytton, had been in the Navy and where they'd been stationed. Either my postrunning confidence or Kevin's access to my nonvegetarian, nonteetotal kitchen convinced him. He promised to check.

  The issues of the Malamute Quarterly I'd borrowed from Dr. Stanton's library were still in my kitchen. Toward the back of each was a page headed "Breeders' Directory." Snowcloud was listed between Snokimo and Southsongs:

  Snowcloud (pdsbh). 508 372-6586.

  Janet Switzer,

  501 Greenwood Avenue,

  Bradford, MA 01830.

  Bradford is a semirural section of Haverhill, an industrial city on the Merrimack River, about thirty-five miles north of here. According to the key to abbreviations, pdsbh meant puppies available, grown dogs occasionally for sale, stud service to appropriate bitches, dog boarding available, and a handler, too. There weren't any other abbreviations. Snowcloud did everything.

  The same issue of the MQ had a couple of full-page ads for Janet's dogs. One of them showed a photo of "Am/Can Ch. Snowcloud Kotzebue Denali, C.D.X.," an American and Canadian champion in breed, a Companion Dog Excellent in obedience. Most of the dogs in most of the other ads in the MQ were standing posed at a show. In almost all of the ads, the dog faced left, and the handler's right hand was pulling up on the dog's collar to lift his head. The handler's left hand was busy making sure that the dog's tail was over his back and displayed to good advantage. Denali's picture was different from the others. Holding a perfect show pose without any human assistance, he stood alone in a snow-covered field. The text under the photo described him as the grand old man of Snowcloud. It claimed that he wanted to congratulate several of his children and grandchildren for some obedience titles and a grandson for a major win in breed. It was easy to see why Janet Switzer was proud of the dog. I felt proud, too. Rowdy looked just like him. Damn those papers.

  Margaret had chosen the kennel well, one that produced what are called well-balanced dogs, breed championships before their names, obedience titles after. What's more, I was willing to bet that she'd picked that particular sire or grandsire, Denali.

  Janet Switzer was home when I called. She agreed to an interview about the special challenges of training northern breeds. After she gave me directions, I told her that I had Dr. Stanton's malamute. In obedience, lots of people know lots of people, but the world of malamutes is tiny. I didn't want her to hear about Rowdy from someone else.

  I have a cousin who lives in Haverhill, which used to be Shoe City, U.S.A. Although the Merrimack, which separates Haverhill from Bradford, has been somewhat cleaned up, the city still stinks like an old boot. Unemployment, alcoholism, small-time prostitution, and drugs have replaced the shoe industry. According to my cousin, Haverhill made a trade with Lyndon Johnson in the late sixties. The city gave him young men for Vietnam. In return, the War on Poverty bombed the center of Haverhill. That trade may sound bizarre, but the story must be true because there's a long list of names on the Veterans' Memorial, and the exact center of the city shows unmistakable signs of having been razed about twenty years ago.

  I missed the Bradford exit from 495 and ended up driving through Haverhill, then over the bridge and through unblitzed Bradford, past the college, down Kingsbury Avenue onto Greenwood, and into farm country. A neatly lettered gray- and-white sign for Snowcloud hung from a post by Janet's driveway. Across the street was a cemetery. It was a good location for a kennel. If you raise dogs, the best neighbor is a dead neighbor.

  Janet's house was a diminutive blue cottage with white shutters. In the drive stood a long tan RV, a tan house trailer, and a tan Chevy wagon. Inside the Chevy was a wagon barrier to keep the dogs in the back, and on its bumper was a trailer hitch. The collection of vehicles was typical for someone who does a lot of traveling to dog shows. Also typical were the bumper stickers all over the rear ends of all three vehicles: "Caution Show Dogs, Do Not Tailgate," with a drawing of a malamute. "Malamute Power." "I'd rather be driving sled dogs." "On the eighth day God created Alaskan malamutes."

  No one answered the doorbell, so I walked to the side of the house and peered over the gate of a wooden fence. Inside was a professional setup consisting of a couple of sheds, several rows of chain-link runs separated by gravel paths, and a stretch of rough lawn. Inside the runs were wooden platforms, upended tires, and doghouses, and above part of each run was a sheet of corrugated green plastic to give shade in the summer. From the top of a flat-roofed wooden doghouse in the run closest to me, Denali stared at me and led fifteen or twenty other malamutes in a chorus of their woo-wooing substitute for barking. He'd aged a little since the picture in the Quarterly was taken, and he could have used an hour's brushing, but he had a thicker coat than Rowdy's, the kind of coat that malamutes develop only if they live outdoors in the cold, and an alpha-wolf air of dominance.

  "Hello?" I called out. "It's Holly Winter."

  "That will do, thank you," a clear voice said authoritatively to the dogs. "Denny, that's enough. They like to pretend they're guard dogs. Holly Winter? You're Buck's daughter," she informed me.

  Janet was older than I'd expected from hearing her high voice on the phone. Her short, curly brown hair was streaked with gray, and her face was weather-lined. She was hefty for someone who lived in a dainty cottage and in those miniature houses on wheels, and she wore rugged clothes, thick green corduroy pants, hiking boots, and a tan parka with tooth-shredded pockets. One of the ways she met the special challenges of training malamutes, I suspected, was to keep those pockets filled with bits of dried liver to reward the dogs. On the left shoulder of the parka was an embroidered patch with a picture of a dog and the words Alaskan Malamute. I fumbled with the handle on the gate, but she strode over and let me in.

  "Your father tried to buy one of my dogs once," she said. "I didn't make the connection until after you hung up. That's one thing you get when you breed mals, you know, guys who want to use them for hybrids. I won't sell to them. And then you get the macho types who want a tough-looking dog to scare the neighbors. And I won't sell to them, either. If you want to know the truth, about one person in ten thousand deserves an Alaskan malamute, and my job's to spot the one person."

  I've read that every now and then, an alpha female heads a wolf pack. Here was one. I was glad that I hadn't come to convince Janet to let me have one of her dogs. Janet was a little more outspoken than a lot of breeders, but her attitude wasn't unusual. Instead of trying to sell you a dog, a good breeder will evaluate you to see if you're good enough.

  "This is Denali, isn't it? I saw his picture in the Malamute Quarterly," I said as I walked over to the big dog's pen. "It seems to me that one person in a million deserves a dog like him."

  A prize show dog is a prize show-off. Denali hurled himself from the roof of the doghouse to the cement of his pen, shook himself, loped over to the chain link, rose on his hind legs, and licked my face through the mesh. In what I think was an alpha-wolf test of a newcomer, Janet opened Denali's gate and let him out. According to the AKC standard, the Alaskan malamute is "playful on invitation, but generally impressive by his dignity after maturity." Never say that the AKC lacks a sense of humor. Denali ran up to me, sniffed my hands, legs, and feet, then flopped onto the ground to present me with his thickly furred tummy. I knelt down, rubbed, and told Denali how gorgeous he was.

  I must have passed Janet's test. She introduced me to all the dogs. There were eighteen, ranging from Sassy, a nine-month-old bitch, to Leo, a twelve-year-old veteran of a research lab. He was a sweet old boy whose only sign of the years before his rescue was occasional drooling.

  We visited the dogs, let them take turns running loose, and talked about training for at least an hour. Janet was no Margaret Robichaud. I'd been right about the liver.

  "
What you have to understand," Janet said, "is that malamutes are very intelligent. A lot of jerking on the collar just doesn't impress them. In fact, it’s apt to make them decide you're stupid. You talk to them a lot, work out your relationship. You let them know you're the head of the pack, and, believe me, a lot of jerking on a collar won't convince an Alaskan malamute of anything except that you're a jerk yourself."

  "You don't use training collars?"

  "Oh, I use them. I've tried training halters, too, but they're all just signals," she said. "To a malamute, they're not punishment. They're not correction. They're just a reminder. So's food. A malamute understands that it's all a game, and reward's part of the game. Really, you don't obedience-train an Alaskan malamute. They don't really obey. They're not supposed to. They think with you. You want a dog that obeys you when you tell him to pull the sled onto thin ice? No, you want a dog who'll override you if you make a dumb decision. In so-called obedience, they do what you want because they like you and they want to please you, but it isn't obedience. It's cooperation. But you've got a malamute. You know all that, I hope."

  "I've been given some expert instruction lately." I grinned. She knew I meant Rowdy.

  "I've talked you nearly to death," Janet said. "Want some coffee?"

  I did. Her kitchen was about the size you'd expect to find in the house trailer. Four 40-pound bags of ANF dog food were lined up along one wall together with a stack of metal feeding pails. On one wall was a poster with the word Alaska and a drawing of two wolves howling. When Janet took off the parka, I wasn't too surprised to see a blue T-shirt with an orange moon and a team of dogs pulling a sled across her heavy breasts. Janet turned on the gas under a battered kettle. She set the table for coffee, producing two mugs decorated with pictures of . . . guess what.

  "I interviewed Margaret Robichaud a little while ago," I said.

  "I should never, ever have sold her that dog," Janet said. "I knew it at the time, and I don't know why I did it. Well, I do know. But it was a bad reason." She sighed with regret. "You know who she is. That woman is a real power, and she knows everyone. How do you say no to someone like that? I tell her no, she can't have one of my dogs, and she talks to everyone, and I mean everyone, and eventually, the judges start looking funny at my dogs. So I told myself it was good for the dogs, good for the breed. I'd heard all about what she thought of malamutes, her remarks about temperament, and I was pretty tired of it. You know, that was a lovely puppy, one of Denny's, and I told myself, 'Well, if this one doesn't win her over, it can't be done.' What can I say?"

  So Denali was the sire. "She never had anything bad to say about the puppy," I said. "She says she adored him. In fact, she says she didn't have the heart to get another malamute after she lost him."

  "Fecal matter, that's what that is." Janet poured boiling water into the mugs.

  "Are you sure?"

  "Did she tell you all about how well her jerks on the collar worked with him? 'Minimal low-key praise. Make him understand that he has no choice about obeying. Minimal praise, maximal correction.' Right?" She leaned forward and pointed a finger at me.

  "Yes," I said, drawing back.

  "That's fecal matter. You know how I know? I've got eighteen dogs out there right now." She waved her hand toward the back window. "I've had Alaskan malamutes for thirty years. And let me tell you, you give any one of those dogs minimal praise, and what you'll get back is nothing, believe me. It just won't work. I know these dogs. My first husband tried that. He had German shepherds. I gave him one of my dogs, and before long, that dog started to turn mean. And I have never, never had temperament problems with my dogs. I just couldn't put up with that."

  Like any other premium dry dog food, ANF provides a complete, balanced diet, but from the expression on Janet's face as she thought back on the incident, I fleetingly suspected she'd supplemented ANF by feeding her first husband to the dogs.

  "I think you would have liked the way Frank Stanton was with his malamute," I said. "Rowdy, his name is. He's a sweetheart."

  "Frank was a dear man," Janet said. "I used to see him all the time, at shows, you know, everywhere."

  "He must have loved Denali."

  "You know, the last time I saw Frank, I was showing Denny in Veterans. At Bayside."

  Veterans is what's called a nonregular obedience class. It's for dogs eight or older. They have to have obedience titles. They don't gain any points toward anything. It's a way to keep them happy when they're too old for jumping but still active enough to enjoy performing.

  "Did you ever see Rowdy?" I asked.

  "Nope. Never did. If he wanted a mal, I don't know why he didn't come to me."

  "He didn't decide to get a mal and then find Rowdy," I said. "It was the other way around. He saw Rowdy, and that's what decided him. He's a lovely dog, and I think Dr. Stanton didn't want to take on a puppy."

  "Bring him out here sometime," she said. "Where's he from?"

  "I don't know," I said. "I haven't got his papers yet."

  "You're going to show him?"

  "I hope so," I said.

  "Of course you are," Janet said.

  Just before I left, Janet asked me a strange question: "You heard anything funny about Margaret Robichaud lately?"

  "Funny?"

  "Yeah. I wondered."

  "I don't think so," I said.

  "Something happened that I thought was a little odd. A couple of months ago, it was. In Novice. One of her bitches fell asleep."

  "In the ring?"

  "On a down."

  "I haven't heard about it," I said. "It is strange."

  I felt sad when I left because I wished that I could have shown Rowdy to Janet. Denali was getting old, and she would have been thrilled to see a new Denali, young again. I also felt that I'd eliminated one person from my list. There was no doubt that Janet would have recognized Rowdy as one of her own, but she would never have threatened to take him from Dr. Stanton and would never have taken Dr. Stanton from him. If anything, Janet would have tried to prevent Margaret from getting Rowdy back. And, without a doubt, even if Janet had somehow managed to sneak into the armory during the fun match, she would never have tried to overdose any malamute.

  13

  Barbara Woodhouse wrote somewhere that a heaven without one's dogs would not be the heaven we hope for. Do you know who Barbara Woodhouse is? Who she was, I should say—she's now presumably in just that heaven she hoped for. Her TV series on dog training immortalized the word walkies and the phrase "What a good dog," all spoken in her distinctive British voice. For a lot of people in Cambridge, Massachusetts, however, heaven is a particular place that does not allow dogs: the bar of an overpriced restaurant called Harvest. Harvest is in Brattle Square, around the corner from Harvard Square, near what Cambridge people call the old D.R. building. Design Research was a store that went out of business a long time ago, but Cambridge people still say D.R. the same way they still refer to the Harvard Square Theater as the U.T., even though it hasn't been the University Theater for decades. What they call the old D.R. building actually houses a store called Crate and Barrel, and it's really the new D.R. building. About twenty years ago, the Harvard Graduate School of Education tore down the original D.R. building to put up a library, something I happen to know because when I was little, Marissa used to take me to the old D.R. to buy special Christmas ornaments and drops of amber and blue glass to hang in my bedroom windows, and every time I walk by the library, I remember those Christmas trips.

  To return to the topic of heaven, the menu at Harvest is pretentious, and the food isn't always wonderful, but the bar is shabby and stylish, and everyone goes there, including tourists who hope to see someone famous like the president of Harvard or Robert B. Parker. Steve and I were at the bar in Harvest, but we hadn't seen anyone famous. We weren't looking. After a tiff about something I'd rather keep to myself, we hadn't seen much of each other lately. But we'd made up. Neither of us can even afford to drink at Harvest, so going ther
e was a special treat. We'd both put on clothes that weren't dog-torn or cat-snagged, and we'd taken turns brushing fur off each other with one of those red velour lint removers. We looked pretty spiffy, for us.

  "You're a vet. Tell me something," I said. "Why would a dog fall asleep on a long down?"

  "Fatigue. Boredom."

  "In the ring?"

  "A mellow dog?"

  "I don't think so," I said. "Doesn't it seem weird? I've seen dogs go to sleep in class, like at the end of the nine o'clock class, but at a show? In the ring?"

  "It's possible," he said. "I'll bet it's happened."

  "It has. One of Margaret's goldens did," I said. "Let's get another drink and talk about Valium."

  We ordered refills. The drinks at Harvest are reasonably generous.

  "Valium could sure make a dog sleepy. Look what it did to you," Steve said as he ran a hand through my hair.

  "It didn't kill me," I said. "I thought I was dying, but they told me at the hospital that it's hard to kill yourself with it. One of the doctors said they get failed suicide attempts with it all the time. And the other thing she said was that the worst part isn't the overdose. It's coming off it. So what else? Medically."

  "Valium, otherwise known as diazepam, is one of the most overprescribed drugs in the U.S., maybe in the world. It's a benzodiazepine. Do you want me to spell that for you?"

  "No, smart ass," I said.

  "Okay. One point is that it has a long, long half-life. You take it at bedtime to go to sleep, and it's still in your system all the next day. Longer. Sometimes much longer. It's addictive. Contraindicated in pregnancy."

  "And indicated when?"

  "When someone has anxiety. Insomnia. Muscle spasms. Acute alcohol withdrawal. It's an anticonvulsant."

  "And for dogs? Do you prescribe it?"

  "Hardly ever. Sometimes for acute stress. Plane travel for nervous animals. Or suppose the owner's going crazy because the dog's agitated about something, I'll sedate the animal for a day or two. Like if the dog's crated near a bitch in season."