Dog Bites Man

by James Duffy

  There, in living color on the front page of The Times, was the picture of Eldon, seated at the side of the cow, who was apparently named Florence. The same picture even made The Post-News, though on an inside page. The City Hall clipping service later found out that the picture had appeared in papers across the country, and the following Monday it was on the "People" page of Time.

  The Times ran a somewhat facetious editorial but concluded that "Mayor Hoagland, with this one gesture, probably did more to humanize the face of the city to upstaters than any local politician in memory." The Post-News called it "grandstanding" and wondered how Eldon had been able to "spare a day away from his duties for this publicity junket."

  The mayor's e-mail about the picture was heavy. City dwellers loved it—"You sure showed those apple-knockers, Mr. Mayor!"—though there was also a negative response or two. "New York City milking the upstaters once again," one dissenter grumped.

  Edna had the last word. "Good grief, Eldon, do you realize you would have been the laughingstock of the country if Florence hadn't cooperated?"

  . . .

  A week after the triumph in Syracuse, the Hoaglands held a small private dinner party at the mansion for several friends. They tried to do this at least once a month, though it was not easy, given the public demands on the mayor's time. At this particular event, the guests were Senator George McTavish and his current girlfriend, Leaky and Carol Swansea and Eldon's corporation counsel, Noel Miller.

  The evening opened, as it always did, with drinks from a self-service bar in the downstairs living room, the self-service part being another of Eldon's small economies. (He had pointed out to his wife that Amber could perfectly well serve as a bartender on these occasions, but Edna had vetoed the idea; still suspicious that Amber was gathering material for a book, she didn't want her overhearing the cocktail hour conversation.)

  Swansea was the first to arrive and made himself a stiff martini. His wife, Carol, had come in especially for the mayor's dinner. Otherwise she would have been in Southampton working on her tennis. At the moment she was brown as a berry, suntanned to the point where her skin had cracked, as if she'd had a face-lift that had been pulled too tight. For all of that she was the healthiest-looking person in the room.

  "Glad to see you're still serving decent gin," Leaky told the mayor. "Schoolchildren may not be getting their hot lunches, but there's a good gin supply at Gracie Mansion."

  "I pay for it myself, thank you," Eldon said. "And what do you know about good gin, anyway? I remember the industrial-grade alcohol you used to drink at Princeton."

  "Oh God, Princeton. You're not going to sing that awful song for us, are you?" Carol asked.

  "Shut up, my dear. What do you want to drink?" Leaky asked her.

  A Kir was the answer, but there was not any cassis with which to make it.

  "Sorry, we gave the cassis money to the school lunch program," Eldon explained, so Carol settled for a simple glass of white wine. (Eldon was grateful that there was no such thing as New York City wine, since he would then have had to serve it. It tickled him that Governor Foote was stuck with a wine cellar limited to the New York State product.)

  Noel Miller and Senator McTavish and his latest friend arrived at the same time. Noel looked the part of a prominent and successful Wall Street lawyer, which he had been before taking the city job at Eldon's urging, if not insistence. Fair-haired and in his late fifties, he was even taller than the mayor. Many thought he looked down on the world both literally and figuratively, but he was really an open and democratic sort.

  Noel had been worried that the strange world of municipal law might overwhelm him, but he came to the job of the city's top lawyer from a tough mergers and acquisitions practice and, thus trained to expend boundless time and energy on his work, was able to keep ahead of the game. Being called a workaholic would have surprised him; he just did what he had to do and if that took every night and weekend, that's the way it was. Besides, there had never been a Mrs. Miller to occupy his time or attention.

  The senator's "new" find (she had been in residence in his Watergate apartment for three months) was the object of close scrutiny. She had been described in the gossip columns as a "budding actress"; up close she looked more like a buxom waitress in a not too upscale restaurant. She was introduced as "Casey," though later it turned out she spelled her name "KC." Her first question to Edna was whether she could smoke. Edna looked sympathetic and nodded her head. "Don't ask, don't tell," she told KC, producing an ashtray from inside a cupboard.

  Obviously briefed, KC said she understood that Edna was a dermatologist.

  "That's right."

  "Then you could clear up Ricky Martin's acne scars," KC said.

  "Perhaps," Edna replied noncommittally, not knowing who Ricky Martin was.

  (As they had conferred about the evening's guest list, Edna and Eldon had laughed about their senior senator's way with the ladies. There was always one in residence, but they changed as often as two or three times a year. The Hoaglands reflected on "how times have changed."

  "Remember Adlai Stevenson in nineteen fifty-two?" Edna asked her husband. "He had to apologize because he went to church one Sunday wearing a blazer, not a suit!"

  "Yes, and the divorce business really hurt him. And can you imagine the uproar if he'd been living with someone?"

  "George would have been in hot water all the time back then. Probably driven out of office," Edna added. "Assuming he ever got there in the first place.")

  The senator, a bourbon in hand, congratulated Eldon on his "brilliant" performance upstate. "You did in one day what I've been trying to do for twenty years—get the yokels to trust me. I'm up there six or seven days a month; thought about getting one of those SUVs, with a gun rack on the back, and driving around in that, but it's too out of character for me. So I just walk around in my shirtsleeves, shake hands with everybody, take the maple syrup and cheddar cheese they give me and hope for the best. Thank God it's worked for me, but I got worried every time I ran."

  The guests moved on to the dining room for Julio's paella. Edna realized that most of the guests present had had the dish before, but it seemed to be the one concoction he could not destroy, so here it was again.

  Over the dinner table, conversation about the cow milking continued. The senator, sitting next to Edna, shouted down to Eldon at the other end that he'd heard the governor was furious. " 'He's invading my territory,' she's been telling people."

  "Me invading her territory!" Eldon snorted. "Have you heard what she's done to me?" He recounted to his incredulous guests Randy Randy's demand for access to the Governor's Rooms.

  "You know, it's terrible, but I understand the Democrats up in Albany have started the rumor that Randy Randy's really a man," Senator McTavish said.

  "That's funny!" KC commented. It was to be her last remark of the evening.

  The mayor called a halt. "Look, I know I'm among friends, but I'm not going to comment on what George said. I'd be likely to say something so outrageous that you'd all be tempted to repeat it. I have enough problems with Randilynn already. So please, let's move on to something pleasant."

  Edna came to the rescue, asking McTavish who would run for his seat two years hence.

  "Well, you know the usual suspects, Edna. The comptroller, Congressman Canale or Rosie Malloy, Westchester's gift to the Legislature."

  "Out in Southampton they're talking about a local lawyer named David Bowen," Carol Swansea said.

  "Oh, yeah, forgot him," McTavish added. "He's been a hard worker for the party out there. Don't know much about him as a lawyer, though. Do you, Noel?"

  "Never dealt with him. He has a one-man office in Riverhead as I understand it. Probably handles dog-bite cases."

  Edna for an instant looked as if she had been struck, then recovered when she realized that the Incident was not involved. Eldon had much the same reaction.

  "Speaking of dog bites," Leaky Swansea said, after downing the last of the sec
ond martini he had quickly made for himself in the living room. "I'm getting damn sick of those crazy cold calls you get every night—selling you stocks, magazine subscriptions and every other goddam thing."

  "And I'm afraid even soliciting campaign contributions sometimes, for me or Eldon," McTavish added.

  "Yes, I suppose that's right. But most of these calls are just plain asinine. Why, the other night some damn fool called from that gossip sheet, The Surveyor. I told him I had a subscription already, but he tried to keep me on the line with some cock-and-bull story about a dog murder. Couldn't make any sense of it at all. But these people will try anything!"

  "We have it in the country," Carol added. "Chimney sweeps. They call all summer long."

  Neither Edna nor Eldon really heard what was said about chimney sweeps. Or any of the rest of the talk around the table as the evening wound down. Their thoughts were elsewhere as they somehow got through the rest of the dinner on automatic pilot.

  . . .

  The next morning, at breakfast with Gullighy, their friend did not even get a chance to specify how he wanted his eggs done before the first couple brought up the Incident.

  "I knew it, I knew it. Operation Blockhead is going to collapse. That has to have been a reporter who called Leaky."

  "Yep. You're probably right," Gullighy said. "But what's he going to find out? Nothing from your friend Swansea, and I'll bet nothing from anybody else."

  "I hope not. I hope not," the mayor kept saying, almost as a mantra.

  "We're doing all we can, Eldon. Just have to play it cool. We'll stonewall if it comes to that. Meanwhile, our little P.P. project seems to be right on course. Betsy Twinsett's got the guest list almost ready. We're going to have a festival the likes of which St. Francis himself couldn't have put on."

  . . .

  Betsy had solicited the names of guests from each of the Coalition for Animal Welfare organizations and had duly collated them into a master invitation list. As a formality, she presented a preliminary, annotated version, giving everyone's affiliation, to the mayor in his office the next afternoon. Four hundred people in all, with a flexible policy about allowing invitees to bring a guest. A whiskey distributor who had recently branched out into wines was providing the spirits for free. And Eatable Edibles, a new catering outfit owned by a confirmed cat lover, was donating the food. The only expense would be the wages of the wait staff, which Betsy assured the mayor would not make a very substantial dent in the mayoral entertainment budget.

  "Four hundred people, God almighty," Eldon had said, groaning. "Are there really that many animal nuts around?"

  "It's the best we could do, Mr. Mayor," Betsy informed him. "We had to invite all the board members from the seventeen CAW organizations, and we had to do some incentivizing by letting them add more names. We want to be welcoming, don't we?"

  "Bosh. Let me look at that list." He picked it up impatiently and scanned down it, until he came to Randilynn Foote's name.

  "What's this, Betsy? The governor's being invited? Christ, she'll take over a bedroom in my house while she's at it. The answer's no. Take her off."

  Twinsett protested, saying that the Humane Society was adamant about inviting her. It seems she had appeared in one of their adopt-a-pet ads, holding a small Labrador puppy to which she had allegedly given a home.

  "Poor creature," Eldon said. "It would be better off living out its life at the pound. But you're going to have to tell the Humane Society no. Explain to them that this is a city, not a state, event. This whole festival is horrendous enough without having that woman jumping in to take credit. Okay?"

  "You're the boss, Mr. Mayor," she said dejectedly.

  Eldon got to the fourth page before he spotted Sue Nation Brandberg's name. He was trapped. What reason could he give for not inviting her? (Unlike some of his predecessors, who vetoed invitations to Gracie for those who had dared to give as much as $50 to an opponent, he had a sense that, within reason, he had to act on occasions like this as the mayor of all the city and not just as the titular head of the Democratic Party.)

  He hesitated, took off his black-rimmed glasses and looked out the window. But he simply could not cook up an excuse for crossing off Sue's name. He handed the list back with a sigh. Maybe she'll be back visiting the reservation or in Italy or something, he thought, though he didn't really believe it.

  . . .

  Governor Foote was in residence in her new City Hall quarters that afternoon. At the very moment she was being excised on the floor below, she sat thumbing the latest issue of Time, with Eldon's milk picture staring back at her from the "People" page.

  "That crazy egghead bastard wants my job," she muttered to Pedro Raifeartaigh. "Milking an effing cow, for God's sake. Well, all I can say is he'll have a fight on his hands if he fools around upstate again. I'm going to get him. I don't know how yet, but I'm really going to get him."

  FOURTEEN

  Ethan Meyner had been so pleased with Justin Boyd's debut year at The Surveyor that he had presented him with a new maroon Bentley sedan (complete with driver) on the first anniversary of his editorship. The mix of scandal and innuendo that Justin had concocted, coupled in some instances with some genuinely solid and tough reporting, had pleased Meyner, even though the weekly was still losing money at an astounding rate.

  Boyd loved his Bentley and often, when riding in it alone in the backseat, he thought of his former colleagues in London, using the Underground and chivvying their expense accounts to cover up five-pound taxi rides. Life in the New World (at least in a Bentley) was good. So good that Justin took to doing much of his editing and phoning while in the car. It had become an extension of his office, and perhaps even of himself.

  Thus it was that the editorial conference about Scoop Rice's first crack at the Wambli story took place in the Bentley (the glass partition closed to prevent Boyd's driver from hearing the conversation).

  Scoop thought he had hyped the story as much as possible, having sweated over it for three days, almost without sleep and sustained with large doses of Snapple lemonade. It was a "The Sur veyor has learned" piece, that being the only way Scoop could figure out to handle the factual roadblocks he confronted—the inability to name his source and the "No comment" from the owner of Wambli. (The "No comment" had come in a phone call he had made to Mrs. Brandberg. This had been his only contact with her, and as a result of Boyd's coaching, she had limited herself to that terse response, eager though she was to tell Scoop the whole terrible narrative, the details of which he, of course, knew already.)

  This was Scoop's first excursion in the Bentley and he was awed by the array of communications equipment aboard—a phone (with three lines), a small TV, a notebook computer permanently affixed to the back of the front seat and even a small printer. Air Force One had nothing on this, he thought.

  While Scoop was examining the gadgets, Boyd read the story, peering through his Ben Franklin half-spectacles. Using the car's reading light was not necessary. It was a sunny morning and the glass in the Bentley's windows was clear. (This had not originally been the case; the car had come equipped with one-way windows that shielded the privacy of the occupant. Justin had decided that if he was going to have this magnificent chariot, the masses should be able to see him as he rode past. The Darth Vader windows had been replaced at great cost, the expense hidden somewhere in The Surveyor accounts, where Boyd hoped the generous Meyner would not discover it.)

  Boyd made little noises in his throat as he read, Scoop listening carefully as he tried to interpret their significance. Finished, the editor rustled the copy pages with a flourish and pronounced the product "very good."

  Scoop was relieved and rose up just a trifle—not quite puffed up with pride—from his deep, plush seat.

  "You've got some good stuff here—the monks, the dope dealer angle. Just a few things. First, you've got a little syntax problem in that dope-dealing graph. Possibly implying Sue is a dope dealer herself. Can't have that or I'll never be in
vited back." He laughed dryly at his miniscule joke.

  "Then, your man 'G.' Albanian. Not much sex appeal there. No one cares about Albania. What about Kosovo? Isn't there a Kosovo angle?"

  Scoop allowed as how Genc had said he did have relatives in Kosovo. And didn't like Serbs.

  "Excellent! Was he in the army over there by any chance?"

  "He said he was. Drafted."

  "That's it! Kosovo freedom fighter . . . flees bloodshed in his native land only to find it on the streets of New York. . . . A-number-one perfect!"

  "What else?" Scoop asked.

  "A minor detail. You quote your freedom fighter as saying the dog was urinating. You can't use that word in The Surveyor."

  Can't say "urinate" in print? What kind of prudery was this? Scoop wondered. What the hell was he supposed to say, "micturate"?

  "Scoop, you have to understand that The Surveyor is a family newspaper. We want to appeal to all ages, all members of the family, and we have to keep that in mind with everything we write. 'Urinating' is a turnoff for the twenty- and thirty-something readers. 'Pissing' is the word you want. 'Pissing,' 'shitting,' 'fucking.' It's the only language they're comfortable with. You have to sully the breakfast table if you want to keep ahead in this business, my boy."

  Scoop absorbed this new wisdom, or at least tried to.

  "One last thing. We have all this stuff about Sue's dog. Nothing about her. I think we have to work around her, get quotes from those she may have talked to. No—maybe not. Don't want to offend her, as I said. Let's go with the blind story and see if it stirs the pot. Fix it up and we'll run it."

  . . .

  The fixes were easy, and by the end of the day Scoop had turned in a revised version, which appeared the following Thursday: