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

by Susan Conant

  Just as I shot back the new dead bolt on the door, the phone rang. The call was from Steve's answering service, an emergency message about an Afghan hound hit by a car. While Steve talked to the owners, I listened to the warm rumble of his voice. If your dog is ever hit by a car, that's the voice you'll want to hear, but better not to let it happen. Cars are only one threat to a loose dog. The word dognapping sounds silly, but dognapping is no joke, and the guy who steals your dog isn't necessarily looking for a pet. Research laboratories pay for dogs, and some laboratories don't ask many questions. Some don't ask any. What happens to Rover in the lab? No one wants to think about that.

  Steve didn't deliver any diatribes to the owners of the Afghan hound. As long as the owners aren't abusing the dog or telling Steve to put a healthy dog to sleep because they're too lazy to train him, Steve is usually understanding about pet owners' occasional lapses. He arranged to meet the Afghan and the owners at the clinic and rushed off. If he weren't my lover, he'd still be my vet.

  And if he were my lover but not a vet, or if he were a less conscientious vet than he is, I'd have stayed home that night, but dead bolts or no dead bolts, dog or no dog, the house felt empty and cold. It was cold. I'd turned the thermostat down to fifty-five when we left for dog training, and the old radiators are slow to heat up. I should have put on a flannel nightie and climbed under my comforter, but the comforter reminded me of that clump of dog hair, and the dog hair reminded me of Margaret and, especially, of Roger Singer. If Steve had stayed, we'd have talked about them, and I wouldn't have wondered where they were. With Steve and India in the house, I wouldn't have listened to the wind batting the leafless trees on Appleton Street or thought about the spite building on the corner of Concord and Appleton, my corner. It used to be a sandal maker's shop, but Cambridge is a city where you wear boots, not sandals, for six months of the year. The narrow building had stood vacant since the sandal maker closed shop. Was it locked tightly? It was unheated, I was almost sure, but it would offer shelter from the wind, shelter to wait for my lights to go out, or shelter for Hal while he drank up or worked up the courage to give the armory another try. I could almost see someone huddled in the spite building or crouched under the landing at my back door or flattened on the sand of the playground to wait for Hal. I've made some connections, I thought, but it isn't too late to shut me up before I find some hard evidence.

  Hard evidence. The dog hair? That was more like soft evidence. If I could convince Kevin to search, he might find out exactly where it had come from, but what real evidence did I have? An old memory, a tattoo, an appointment book, ground-up diskettes, a veterinary prescription for Valium, the prickle of my skin. I knew too little to convince Kevin, and I knew both too much and too little to go to sleep.

  My L.L. Bean Maine warden's parka is navy blue because I like navy blue, even though it shows dog hair. I didn't buy it because navy's an effective camouflage on a dark night, but right now I was glad it was. From one of the drawers under my bed, I pulled out a full set of pink silk long johns. I removed my jeans and sweater, stepped into the long johns, and put my everyday camouflage back on: the jeans and my black sweater, navy wool socks, dark-brown boots, and my navy parka and gloves. I didn't wear the sled-dog hat, but a black watchman's cap, and I stuffed my hair into it. I could have been almost anyone.

  There was no disguising Rowdy, but I couldn't leave him home alone. That he might have bitten Roger once meant nothing. If I'd tossed Rowdy into a tub too many times, he'd have bitten me, too, but he wouldn't have held a grudge against me any more than he held a grudge against Roger. If I'd put a training collar high on his neck and jerked and jerked and never praised, the way Margaret must have done, he'd just have decided I was a jerk myself. The next time I patted him, he'd have been all smiles and bounce, just as he was at the sight of my parka and gloves and his leash in my hands.

  I switched on the outside flood that illuminates the driveway at the back of my house, held the key to the Bronco ready in my hand, eased open the back door, and surveyed the scene. Three or four kids, students, I guessed, were walking up my side of Appleton Street toward Concord Avenue, and I timed my dash to the Bronco so that they passed the end of my driveway as I unlocked the door, hurried Rowdy in, jumped into the driver's seat, and relocked the door. It took me a minute to convince Rowdy that the rules hadn't changed. I'd let him in through the front of the Bronco, not the tailgate, but he still had to ride in the rear. The Bronco felt like a cryogenics vault. I let the engine warm up for a minute, then headed for Avon Hill. The lights were on in the yellow farmhouse. I slowed up in front, then drove off. Through the golden curtains of the den, the inimitable Margaret was visible, striding across the room.

  My next destination was Washington Street, Roger's apartment. I had no intention of knocking on Roger's door, but I was hoping that there'd be a light on and a moving shadow visible inside or some other sign to assure me that he was within his own black-furred white walls.

  The Bronco is fairly distinctive. It's a shiny metallic blue, and it's so big that the car wash charges me a truck rate for it. I parked on Mass. Ave. in Central Square, near the Main Street fork and a couple of blocks from Washington Street. Anyone who saw the Bronco might think that Steve and I had gone to one of the clubs in Central Square, and I could always say that I was heading for one of the Indian or Chinese restaurants nearby. Even though you can wear anything anywhere in Cambridge, I wasn't exactly dressed for a jazz club. Rowdy would be harder to explain, but I couldn't face those dark streets alone. I counted on him to scare off most people, and he did. At the corner of Columbia, which leads to Washington, a pair of tough teenage punks underdressed for the weather passed us, and if I'd been alone, I'd have expected and probably been given a hard time.

  "Hey, is that a wolf?" one of them called out.

  "Yes," I said.

  "Jesus," said the other kid.

  They went on their way like little gents.

  The cold was so intense that the wind burned the skin on my face and made my nose drip. I pulled my hood up and almost ran down Columbia and around the corner of Washington toward Roger's building. The lights were on in his front window, but no shadows were visible because he hadn't pulled the curtains or lowered the blinds. Since the apartment was on the ground floor, I could stand in the freezing darkness on the sidewalk and see in the window just as if I'd been at one of the drive-in movies we used to go to when I was in high school, except, of course, that the drive-ins closed in the winter, and on raw Maine summer nights, we ran the heaters in the cars.

  Roger's movie was about to become one of the X-rated Grade-C ones the drive-ins started showing a few years before they all went out of business. A bottle of wine and two glasses stood on the coffee table, just as they had when I'd been there, and the girl was standing, too, a skinny teenager with spiked green and white hair. She was so pale that her skin matched her hair. She wore black pants, maybe leather, and her shirt was off. Maybe she hadn't been wearing a bra to begin with. Her shoulders were thrown back, and she held her hands behind her as if they were tied. Maybe they were. Roger was kneeling in front of her, and as I was about to leave—I'd seen enough, thanks—he got up and moved toward the window. I was almost sure he hadn't seen me, and there'd been nothing to hear, but maybe he'd sensed a presence outside. He pulled the curtains. The girl was maybe fifteen, probably younger, possibly much younger.

  At that point, I did hear something, the sound of voices, footsteps, and a door, the door of Roger's building as it opened to emit a man, a woman, and a dog. Rowdy hit the end of his leash so fast that he nearly pulled it from my hand. The temptation to go for another dog was something I hadn't been able to teach him to resist. I snapped myself back to a normal state of consciousness and tried to look like a person out walking a dog in eight below, not a sleazy Peeping Tom. I managed to yank Rowdy in the direction of Central Square. The couple with the dog walked in back of us. We passed under a streetlight, and a moment later, I hear
d the woman's high-pitched voice with its Harvard accent.

  "His damn fur is all over my jacket." Her tone announced her as someone entitled to pass through life unfurred. "Why's he shedding now? Aren't they supposed to get a winter coat?"

  "Could be hormones," the man said. "I'll take him in Monday."

  "Maybe it's fleas," she said. "That place is a fleabag."

  "Fine," said the man. "You find us another place that allows dogs."

  "It's your dog," she said. "Christ, it must be twenty below here."

  We reached Central Square, and I unlocked the tailgate of the Bronco. As Rowdy jumped in, I glanced at the couple, who'd caught up with us and were now quarreling their way along Mass. Ave. The dog was a golden retriever, a shedding golden retriever that lived in Roger's building. I selfishly hoped that the man was right, that the dog had a hormone imbalance and not fleas. If the woman was right, flea eggs were hatching on my comforter.

  After Roger's freezing drive-in, the wholesomeness of my house was even more comforting than the warmth. I'd left the thermostat at seventy, and I turned it down to sixty, not my usual forty-five, for the night. I put on a flannel nightgown and I kept my long johns on under it, not because I needed the extra heat but because I didn't want to see another naked or half-naked body that night, even my own.

  "It's child prostitution," I said to Kevin the next morning. I'd caught him on his way out to work, and we were drinking coffee in my kitchen. Mrs. Dennehy doesn't believe in caffeine. "Can't you get him on that?"

  "You know," he said, "you're what they call naive. Here's what happens. He walks up to Central Square and picks up a kid who's got two choices. She stays out on the street, or she goes with him. It's cold on the street. She goes with him, and she's not cold."

  "For Christ's sake, Kevin, you are not listening to me. He had access to the dog hair, and he's not just weird, he's weird in a sexual way. You know what I think about the dog hair? On my bed? I was wrong about it. It means my hair. That's what color it was. It means me."

  "One, this city's full of weird people. Two, we pull in every guy that picks up a hooker, we got an empty city."

  "There'd be women left," I said. "And girls. Teenage girls."

  "With no way to support their habits and no place to get in out of the cold."

  "There are shelters. Look, at least find out if she's all right. I shouldn't have just gone off and left her there."

  "She's long gone."

  "You don't give a damn, do you?"

  "Look, Holly. I was busy last night. A twelve-year-old kid got shot in front of the courthouse. He's dead. You know who shot him? His mother. Maybe we've pulled her in by now. Maybe we haven't. If we have, that's what I do today. I have a nice chat with her about blowing her kid's guts all over the street."

  "I know it's bad," I said.

  "You don't know. You haven't got a clue."

  "I know who strangled Frank Stanton," I said. "And I know who overdosed Rowdy and me. And I know who broke in here. And you won't do a damn thing about it."

  "You know," he said. "That's what you've got. You just know. You saw something you didn't like. Guy picks up a hooker. She's a kid. It isn't nice. You're shocked. He's a monster. Next thing, he's a murderer. It all follows, right? That's what you've got."

  "So what have you got?"

  "You. Wandering the streets feeling sorry for guys like Pace," he said.

  "Not him again."

  "The original weirdo. With a thing about dogs. I tell you that, and I get this liberal crap."

  "Of course he's got a thing about dogs, but mostly he's just slow, I think. And scared and confused. Do you seriously think he wrote that anonymous letter you got? He probably can't write at all. And I suppose he has a thing about diskettes, too? He knew to grind mine up because he knows what they are? He knows they're worth something? You know who'd go for them? A guy who sells software, and in case you don't know, that's what Roger Singer does."

  "So do a lot of other guys. In the daytime, they push software. At night, they pick up girls."

  "The night Dr. Stanton died, Roger could have been there early. He left his dog in the playground. Hal patted the dog."

  "Right."

  "It is right. Roger's big enough, and he could've got as close to Stanton as he wanted. Roger walks up, and what does Stanton see? His nephew. That's all. And the night of the match, Roger was there, and last year, he had enough Valium to put me to sleep forever. You know how big a Newfoundland is? He had Valium for her for months. Dr. Draper wrote big prescriptions. What if she didn't need all of it? And the night of the match, if he'd taken a look at Rowdy, he'd have seen a dog that had just had a bath, and he'd know that meant that I'd seen the tattoo. And that I'd call the AKC and find out what he had found out himself—that Rowdy was Margaret's dog."

  "Did he know that?"

  "Of course he did."

  "They told you that."

  "Not yet," I said. "They will. I'm sure they told Roger what they told my father, that Stanton's dog was Margaret Robichaud's, and that was all Roger needed. He's tired of waiting for Stanton's money, and puts the pressure on, and Stanton pays up. And I know where. He left it in the tree in the playground. Every Thursday night. Hal saw him."

  "Funny. I didn't hear him say that. Did you?"

  "Not in so many words, but that's what he meant."

  "That's what he meant."

  "Steve was there. We both saw it," I said.

  "You saw a guy stand under a tree."

  "Look, once Roger saw I'd given Rowdy a bath, he knew I'd make the connection, and first, he tried to shut me up, and it didn't work. Then he tried to capitalize on it. He decided to point the finger at Margaret, so he wrote that letter, and he left that dog hair here. But I think there's more to the dog hair than that."

  "The charming Mrs. Robichaud happens to have four dogs with fur that matches your pretty hair. It was dog fur on your bed, you know. Did I tell you that? And the lab had something else to say about it. The dog had fleas."

  "Margaret's dogs don't have fleas."

  "All dogs have fleas."

  "They all pick them up. But they don't all keep them. You can bet Margaret sprays her dogs after every show, just the way I do."

  "Like I said, Holly, you're naive. And you're a pretty woman. It's a dangerous combination. I don't want you out at night. I know you. You're a country kid. This city is filled with guys like Pace."

  "I'm not stupid."

  "So you wander around alone at night, and then you tell me you're not stupid, right?"

  "Right."

  "Do yourself a favor. Stay home. Lock your doors. You think Pace is a nice guy. You feel sorry for him. You used to have it in for Robichaud. Now you feel sorry for her, right? And now you've got it in for the nephew. You don't know much, but you know what you like, huh?"

  "Get going. You're late for work," I said.

  'Take care of yourself. I'm serious."

  "Don't worry about me. Worry about Hal Pace. He's no murderer. If I'm not the next victim, he is, and he doesn't have any dead-bolt locks because he hasn't got a door. He's out on the street now, and you can bet Roger Singer will be, too. He saw Hal run away just the way I did."

  18

  The woman who answered the AKC's phone had never heard of Buck Winter or Dog's Life. She was from a temp agency. She probably thought chow was nothing more than an army word for food. Mr. Chevigny wasn't in, she said. He had the flu. It had knocked out most of the regular staff at the New York office. Could she take a message? Better yet, could I write a letter? Requests to the AKC were best addressed in writing.

  Mine weren't, but when I called Buck, Regina Barnes answered. Although I half expected her to tell me that requests to my father were best addressed in writing, too, she sounded less cranky than usual and promised to have him call me when he got back from Eastport. Eastport is on the Maine coast not far south of the Canadian border. It's had a badly needed economic revival in the last few years thanks
to the Japanese craving for sea urchin eggs. Having exhausted the sea urchin supply in their own waters, the Japanese have turned to Washington County, Maine, the sunrise country, the easternmost part of the United States, real Down East. The inhabitants won't even eat mussels—they only recently started eating clams—but they don't mind evening the balance of trade. I knew what he was doing in Eastport. He's on a council that's supposed to promote friendly relations be­tween Maine and Japan, and I was willing to bet that he was talking to some Tokyo business executive about Akitas and Japanese spaniels and cross-questioning him about why the Japanese are importing so many Alaskan malamutes. In a tiny country with a limited supply of meat for people, let alone dogs, a malamute must be the canine equivalent of a gas-guzzling stretch limo, but some malamute breeders are having yellow-peril hysterics about what the Japanese are doing with our dogs. Maybe the ghosts of the ancient Mahlemut people are having hysterics about what we're doing with their dogs. If they ever catch us blow-drying them, they may materialize and demand them back.

  Bonnie DeSouza, my editor at Dog's Life, is used to inexplicable underlining that turns out to be dog hairs, and apparent shifts from print to braille where someone overdue for a forepaw nail trimming has checked my copy, but the printouts of my articles about Bobbi and Margaret, retrieved from the floor after the break-in, looked as if they had been used for paper-training. The two articles were on a backup diskette, so I reprinted them both, and I read up on dog halters for the next column. There was a good article on halters in one of the issues of the Malamute Quarterly that I still hadn't returned to Dr. Stanton's library. Dog halters are a new fad. You use them in place of training collars. I filled out order forms and wrote out checks for four different halters.

  I also ordered a harness for Rowdy, size 4XL, red, from a little company in Vergennes, Vermont, called Konari Outfitters. In the loft of Buck's barn was an extra sled he once accepted in exchange for a pup. Buck hardly ever used the sled he already had, so I don't know why he took a second one, especially because he doesn't really like mushing. The winter activity he likes is a hair-raising sport called skijoring. Harness the dog, wrap a special belt around your waist, run a line from the dog's harness to your belt, put on your cross-country skis, and off you go. Don't try it unless you're a great skier (Buck isn't) with a well-trained sled dog (Clyde isn't). Buck has no sense of balance. Luckily, Clyde doesn't like to pull, so they haven't yet had a serious accident. Clyde is, of course, a wolf dog, not a sled dog, but his wolf blood isn't what holds him back. Most people think that all Siberians, Samoyeds, and malamutes know how to pull and that other dogs don't and can't learn, but it isn't true. Dogs from incredibly unlikely breeds can be trained to pull—there's a guy who's done the Iditarod (Anchorage to Nome, about a thousand miles) with a team of poodles—and northern breeds aren't born knowing what gee and haw mean. Even so, if you're offered a dogsled and the choice of either a poodle or a malamute to haul it, take the malamute.