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

by Susan Conant

  I stretched out on the back seat of the cruiser with Rowdy next to me on the floor. I rubbed his nose and dug my fingers into the thick coat around his head and neck. It was still snowing. As dogs go, malamutes are almost odorless, but even a malamute eventually perfumes an overheated car, especially if he's damp. Not everyone likes the aroma of a wet dog in a hot car, but I do. It helps me think. When I closed my eyes and held my head absolutely still, the pain wasn't bad. I made pictures on my closed eyelids and told myself a story. Here's how it went.

  The story started years ago with the feud between those two scrappers, Frank Stanton and Margaret Robichaud. Year after year, they vied with each other for scores and ribbons and trophies and for position: chairman of this, head of that. Overall, Margaret won the competition in the ring, but she lacked Stanton's financial power, and she was a woman. He made big donations, established his informal library, and contributed fancy trophies. He was the aristocratic patron of the sport. By comparison, she was hired help. Stanton was, however, older than Margaret. As he aged and as his vision faded, she grew into the aspiring young wolf who sees the alpha male's power begin to wane. I could see them as they'd been at dog training only a few years ago, goading and taunting each other until Margaret, dominant bitch that she was, took up his challenge.

  She'd gone to Janet Switzer, and she'd used her clout in the show world to buy the best pup Janet had, her great challenge to Stanton. As I saw it, that's when things started to go bad for her. She got what she paid for, King, the perfect malamute, intelligent, independent, and strong-minded, no one's toady. It was easy to imagine him as a pup, snapping at his lead, playing his tricks, refusing Margaret the submissive cooperation that, to her, meant obedience. I knew him, and I knew her. By the time he was nine months old, they must have been locked in such a battle of wills that his disappearance—nothing personal, just malamute wandering—was a shameful relief to her. In the meantime, when the club fired her, she also lost a major battle in her war with Stanton. By the time she talked to Ray and Bud, maybe she was eager to believe that King was dead.

  Nameless and on the loose, her dog followed the end-of-summer traffic south from Maine to New Hampshire until, just over the Massachusetts border, he got lucky. The man whose chickens he killed, instead of shooting him as a wolf, caught him and, mistaking his breed, turned him over to the Siberian Rescue League. The Siberian people would have known that Bobbi would take him in. She did, and once she had him, his route to Stanton's was paved. Even if Dr. Stanton hadn't gone to her place for a meeting, she'd eventually have given him a call. She knew his dog had died and that he'd want another. She also knew that since he'd stopped going to shows, he might be willing to adopt a dog without papers. Stanton, I was sure, had taken one look at that gorgeous dog and seen the ultimate symbol of his victory over Margaret. From the moment the man with the chickens mistook a malamute for a Siberian, I realized, it was inevitable that Margaret's King would become Stanton's Rowdy, that he'd live on Appleton Street, a few blocks from Avon Hill.

  Another part of the story also went back a long way. Roger, I thought, must have always considered himself his rich uncle's only relative. He was wrong, of course, as Dr. Stanton's lawyer knew and as Ron Coughlin was told. Really, we—the Cambridge Dog Training Club, the patrons of his library, dogs in general, his beloved Rowdy—were his natural heirs, but Roger, I guessed, hadn't known that. To Ron, who’d heard about the will but hadn't seen it, the legacy seemed almost too good to be true and too uncertain to count on. Roger, to guarantee his inheritance, wasted every Sunday on long, dreary dinners with his uncle, and just to make sure he was the good boy his uncle wanted him to be, he even got a dog, Lion, and made a pretense of training her. Although he didn't really train the dog, he grew fond of her in his own way. Like Rita, he didn't want to change the dog. He liked her the way she was. Consequently, when she started scratching and losing her coat, he took her to Dr. Draper, who eventually prescribed large doses of Valium, large not only because the dog was a Newfoundland but also because Dr. Draper, approaching retirement, was less cautious about tranquilizers than a young vet would have been and habitually wrote generous prescriptions anyway. Maybe the Valium worked, or maybe something else did. When Lion recovered, plenty of Valium was left.

  In the meantime, the dog was hospitalized, and her stay at the hospital coincided with Dr. Stanton's trip to Chicago to receive his award. Since Roger was going to house-sit anyway, as he always did, and since Lion was in the hospital, he dog-sat as well. Dope that he was, he let Rowdy run loose. Rowdy found his skunk, and Roger's efforts to deodorize Rowdy showed him something his uncle's vision was too weak to reveal: the tattoo. He traced the number to Margaret, and he was bright enough to see that there was no longer any need to wait for his inheritance. He extorted regular sums from his uncle, who assumed, as Roger intended, that his tormentor was his old enemy, Margaret Robichaud.

  That was as far as I got. The minion startled me when he opened the door of the cruiser.

  "Miss Winter, they're ready for you," he said.

  A resident swabbed me off in a more sanitary but less healing fashion than Rowdy had already done, made me turn my head, ordered X rays, told me I was lucky I could still breathe, prophesied that I'd feel worse in the morning, and finally sent me home with some wonderful painkillers.

  I did feel worse in the morning. I took more painkillers. Even though it was Saturday, Mrs. Dennehy brought me some vegetarian imitation of chicken soup. Rita tried to take Rowdy for a walk, but after he dragged her down the block in pursuit of the cocker spaniel that he loathed, she gave up and hauled him home. I slept all afternoon. Without my knowledge or permission, Rita called Steve's clinic, got the number of his hotel in Philadelphia, and told him what had happened. She also phoned Buck for me and passed me the news that he'd finally reached Jim Chevigny, who'd made a couple of calls and confirmed my hunch that Buck hadn't been the first person to check on that AKC registration number.

  Kevin dropped in, deposited a pot of purple chrysanthemums on my nightstand, blushed, drank a Bud, and told me some things about Dr. Stanton's finances that I hadn't known before. He also told me that Roger, Lion, and Roger's personal computer were gone.

  "I told you he was the one who'd go for diskettes," I said. Mostly, however, I acted more gracious to Kevin than I usually do. Kevin's only problem is that he still misses his old dog.

  By the time Steve arrived, I was up and dressed, and my voice was starting to strengthen. According to Rita, that's proof of the hysterical nature of my muteness, since my neck and throat were even more swollen than they’d been the night before. In lieu of flowers, Steve brought a bouquet of Old Mother Hubbard dog biscuits. How special is this guy? How many men know that the way to a woman's heart is through her dog's stomach?

  After I told Steve the same story I'd told myself in the back of the cruiser, we finished it together.

  "Roger made two big mistakes about Stanton," I croaked. "He overestimated how much Stanton could or would pay, and he underestimated the guy's guts. He must have figured that Stanton had a bigger income than he did or that he could tap the principal, which he couldn't, at least not without raising a lot of questions." Ever since I talked to Millie, I'd wondered whether Stanton was hurting for money, but I hadn't known the rest until Kevin told me. Kevin, of course, had interviewed Stanton's lawyer.

  "And the old guy did have a lot of guts," Steve said. "He paid up, but the whole thing had a big impact. Everyone says he was looking sick. You remember? You told me. You said that the night he died, you noticed he was looking better than usual, the way he used to look. He'd decided to act."

  "Right. And when he thought he was paying Margaret, it must have nearly killed him."

  "Maybe Roger thought it would," Steve said.

  "Until he saw the appointment book. You know what he saw there. The appointment with the lawyer. The appointment with Margaret. Roger never thought Stanton would go to Margaret, and, of course, if he had, th
at would have blown everything. Stanton might not have believed her at first, but eventually, he'd have had to, and he certainly wouldn't have paid any more."

  "And once the thing was out in the open," Steve said, "Stanton would've traced it all to Roger sooner or later, and even if Stanton hadn't decided to prosecute, there goes the inheritance or what Singer thinks is his inheritance."

  "And he's got to act fast, before his uncle sees Margaret."

  Steve agreed. "Or the lawyer. So he ties Lion to the tree, waits for Stanton, grabs the leash he knows will be there, does him in, and hustles back for the dog."

  "Which Hal has been patting."

  "Which Hal has been patting," Steve said. "And he sees Hal there."

  "Maybe. Or maybe he only figures that out later. You want to get the straight story out of Hal?"

  He didn't bother answering that. "And he figures with the uncle dead, he gets the dog."

  "Jesus. And pretty soon, an accident happens. No more dog, no more tattoo, no more evidence. A dog gets hit by a car, dies, and who checks its thigh for a tattoo? And even if someone does, so what? Speaking of which, that explains why Rowdy's shots were in Stanton's records even though he hadn't been to Dr. Draper. You know what I think happened? Time comes for his shots, and Roger doesn't want Dr. Draper looking closely."

  "And," Steve said, "Stanton didn't drive anymore, so Roger volunteered, and he drove Rowdy around and brought him home."

  "But he gambles that Rowdy stays healthy. If not, Stanton and Dr. Draper could have got together. Stanton would have said Rowdy'd had his shots, and Dr. Draper would have told him that Rowdy hadn't been in."

  As Steve pointed out, it wasn't really a big gamble. Dr. Draper might have thought he'd forgotten to make a note in Rowdy's record, or Stanton could have thought that Dr. Draper's memory was slipping.

  "So he sees me at the match, and he sees that Rowdy's all fluffy after his bath."

  "That's part of it," Steve said. "He knows you're Buck Winter's daughter. You call the AKC, or Daddy does, and you don't just trace the number, you maybe also find out that other people have been asking about it, and you find out that one of the people wasn't Stanton."

  "Plus he must have known I'd go after the papers. Everyone knows I show my dogs, so if I didn't know something already, I'd find out before too long. That's why he had the Valium with him. And after that, I was in the hospital, and he couldn't get to me. He must have been stunned when nothing happened. I mean, he must have expected me to figure out that Rowdy was Margaret's, and he must have expected me to tell everyone. If he'd been smart, he would have realized that he had me right where he'd had Stanton."

  Steve disagreed. "He would've known you couldn't pay all that much, but he did expect you to make the connection with the tattoo and tell Kevin about it. In fact, when you didn't, that's when he sent the letter. It was too late to stop you from figuring out whose dog you had, and the police didn't suspect him of killing his uncle, mostly because he didn't inherit anything."

  "A nasty shock."

  "Obviously. So Margaret Robichaud was all set up to take the blame for his uncle's murder, and he tried to speed things up and strengthen the case against her."

  "I get it," I said. "Once Ron told that story about the skunk, Roger got really scared. The letter was one thing. I mean, that was sort of a sensible way to deflect everyone's suspicions to Margaret. But ransacking my place and leaving the dog hair? That just wasn't Margaret. It was a stupid thing to do."

  Rita later told me that we were wrong. Leaving the dog hair, she said, wasn't just stupid. Overdetermined was her word for it. That clump of dog hair was like the coat of Margaret's dogs, but, as I'd sensed, it was also like my own hair. On the surface, Roger was trying to incriminate Margaret. According to Rita, he was also unconsciously doing what I'd suspected and what had scared me: marking my bed with a symbol of violence against me. "You'd rejected him," she said. "It was revenge, symbolic rape."

  "I wonder," I said to Steve, "whether he could have seen us with Hal, or whether it was when Hal ran away after class."

  "He was probably panicky by then anyway," Steve said. "He'd expected to get Margaret, and it didn't work. Everything was still open. He was so panicked, he had to do something. Shutting Hal up was the obvious immediate thing to do."

  "Only I wandered in."

  "You have to admit," he said, "it would have been a fitting end for you. If Rowdy hadn't turned protective."

  "I've been thinking it over," I said. "I'm not all that sure he was protecting me. It's just possible that he thought Roger wanted to give him another bath."

  20

  "Hiram Walker apricot brandy," Kevin announced. "It's what we used to buy for the girls when I was a kid."

  It was early on Monday evening. We'd picked up dinner from the Colonel Sanders on the corner of Walden Street and Mass. Ave., and we both had our elbows on my kitchen table. Kevin likes their mashed potatoes and gravy. He believes in carbohydrate loading. My voice had returned to normal, and my neck didn't hurt quite so much anymore.

  "No relation to Johnnie," I said. "Laced with?"

  "Undiluted, unadulterated," said Kevin. "Pure Hiram Walker."

  He'd been telling me about Roger, who was arrested that morning near Barre, Vermont. Sitting in a snowdrift at the side of Route 89, he'd been cradling Lion's giant, lifeless head in his lap and crying, or that's what the troopers told Kevin. Roger was driving his own car, which hadn't been spotted because he'd exchanged license plates with some neighbors (in fact, the quarrelsome couple with the golden), who hadn't noticed the switch. When he stopped by the side of the highway to exercise Lion, so to speak, she apparently slipped her collar and ran into the path of a semi. The driver, who pulled over, radioed the troopers. A cruiser was there within a few minutes, and it didn't take the troopers long to match the crying man with the big black dog to the description that had been sent out. I felt really bad about Lion. She was a love. You can't always read a person's character from his dog's, or vice versa.

  Then Kevin told me that I'd be glad to know my old friend Hal was just fine.

  "You mean I could've let him go ahead and drink it, then? It wasn't even poisoned?"

  "Polished off half the bottle on his way to the armory," Kevin said, "and lived to tell about it, more or less."

  "So I've sacrificed half the skin on my neck for nothing?"

  "In my opinion," he said, "what Roger had in mind was a sort of premedication. If you look at Pace, he's no lightweight. It'd be a lot easier to get the chain on him if he was tanked up."

  "So the collar was meant for him?"

  "In my opinion," Kevin said.

  "Has Roger said?"

  "He's said zip shit."

  "So where had he been?"

  "At a Holiday Inn."

  I told you they're great about dogs.

  "There are a couple of things I still don't understand," I said. "First of all, what did he do with the money? He lived in a dump. He drove some little Chevy. I don't get it."

  "There's nothing to get. He had a lot of cash on him."

  "And the kid? The one I saw with him?"

  "He was a regular of hers. Mother picked her up yesterday, took her home to Chelmsford. She'll be back in a week."

  "I guess that's all you could do," I said. It was a feeble thing to say, but what could he have done? "So tell me about Margaret Robichaud. Where did the money come from all of a sudden? Did you find that out?"

  "Brother's widow died."

  "Bill Lytton?"

  "Mrs. Shirley Lytton. Worshipped the dead husband, never remarried. No kids. Her family's loaded. She died and left the bundle to his sister, who built a dog palace."

  My mail arrived at five o'clock. In Cambridge, you're lucky if it gets here at all and if it's not someone else's. There was an oversize white envelope with a return address in Greensboro, North Carolina. Inside were the premium lists and entry blanks for two shows. They were both in Massachusetts, not North Carolina
, which is just the address of the show superintendent. The one in Woburn offered a trophy for the highest-scoring Alaskan malamute in obedience. The Novice B judge for that one was Eileen Bernstein, who knows good handling when she sees it.

  I put on a fresh turtleneck, a corduroy jumper, dressy boots, my good woolen coat, and a pair of gloves that Rowdy hadn't unraveled. For a touch of bravado, I pulled on the sled-dog hat, but I left Rowdy home. I didn't plan to be gone long. Avon Hill is fancier than the corner of Appleton and Concord, but, geographically speaking, it's nearby.

  Margaret was not, of course, expecting me. When she came to the door, some of her hair was escaping from its usual swirl, her lipstick wasn't fresh, and she had a run in one of her stockings. The dogs must all have been in their palace. I didn't see or hear them the whole time I was there, but that wasn't for very long.

  "I need to talk to you," I said. She still hadn't let me in.

  "Holly," she said, "how are you? I was so distressed to hear what happened. Are you all right?"

  "It was nothing," I said. "I'm fine. May I come in?"

  She led me into the gold-carpeted study where we'd sat before.

  "I want to have a little talk about a malamute," I said. I leaned back in the chair and tried to look relaxed. "A big male with a registration number tattooed way down on his inner thigh. WF818769. Does that ring any bells?"

  I stared at her like a Border collie eyeing an errant sheep.

  "King died," she said coldly.

  "Roy and Bud Rogers took in a dog that died. That dog had blue eyes."

  "I don't know what you're talking about."

  "I'm talking about my dog," I said. "Rowdy. Frank Stanton's dog, my dog. Yukon King, the Wonder Dog. Remember him? He's such a wonder dog that he's led more than one life. I want his registration certificate, and I want him transferred to me. Now."