Stud Rites

by Conant, Susan

  Brooding over my own foolishness, I failed to notice the approach of Detective Peter Kariotis until he spoke my name, and when he did, my first thought was that, yes, now and then I certainly did imagine a universe in which powerful authority figures hovered around waiting to deliver timely little respect-your-elders lectures to know-it-all Harvard freshmen, but that, no, right now I did not require police intervention. My second thought was that the one Detective Kariotis had come for was not Leah, who had presumably told the police everything she knew and who had known nothing whatsoever about the small mystery of the malamute lamp.

  In a way, my second thought was correct, except that the lamp wasn’t what Detective Kariotis wanted to ask about. He’d seen it, of course, just as in the past few hours he’d seen zillions of other malamute objects— large, small, light, heavy, sharp, and blunt. If I didn’t mention it, I told myself, he wouldn’t, either. And he didn’t. Consequently, I wasn’t nervous. Also, I should reveal that I’m perfectly used to being interrogated by the police. Kevin Dennehy is always asking me how I’m doing, and whether it’s hot or cold enough for me. I always answer truthfully: ”Fine” or ”Sure is!” So I pretended that Kariotis was a Greek-American version of Kevin. The tactic worked. Detective Kariotis looked almost as Greek as Kevin looks Irish, and the effort required to achieve the radical ethnic transformation left me no energy to think about lamps. Kevin has red hair and pale freckled skin, and he’s a tall, beefy guy. Kari-0tis was dark and wiry, but his accent eased my task. It wasn’t Kevin’s heavy Cambridge-Boston, but the vowel sounds were pretty close, and Kariotis treated the right r’s as silent letters.

  We talked in a room off the corridor that ran between the exhibition hall and the Lagoon. This function room, as I guess it would be called in hotelese, had three or four chairs, a little table, no windows, and zillion-watt fluorescent lighting. Maybe the hotel was courting the mortuary trade. The obvious function of the room was to make people look as if they’d died of anemia.

  When Kariotis and I had seated ourselves on opposite sides of the table, he began his interrogation with a question that sounded like a line from an old movie. ”Miss Winter,” he said blandly, ”do you smoke?”

  For a second, I thought he must’ve been studying a hopelessly out-of-date text on interview procedures and was trying to put me at ease by offering me a cigarette. I blinked. ”No.”

  ”When you encountered Mr. Hunnewell last night, did he ask you whether you smoked? Or whether you had any cigarettes?”

  ”No. He didn’t have reason to. He was smoking constantly. He was chain-smoking. He had a pack of cigarettes with him. And a lighter. An old-fashioned gold lighter, the kind you put lighter fluid in, with a sort of flip top.” I snapped my fingers. ”I just realized something. I didn’t know who he was then, but now that I think of it, he probably won the lighter at a show, a dog show. Years ago, ashtrays, lighters, cigarette boxes, all that stuff used to be given as trophies. It seems ridiculous now, but people’s dogs used to win them all the time.”

  ”This, uh, pack of cigarettes he had. Did you notice how full it was? Or if it was, uh, almost empty?”

  ”Uh, I don’t know. I don’t... I’m sorry. I just don’t know.”

  ”Did Mr. Hunnewell say anything at all about buying cigarettes? Or, like, uh, when you were helping him with the soft-drink machine and the ice machine, did it seem like he might’ve been looking around for a cigarette machine?”

  ”I don’t think so. Not that I noticed. And he didn’t say anything about cigarettes or smoking or anything, except that he did offer me a cigarette. Mainly, he just... I mean, he was smoking, and then he kind of stubbed out the cigarette and threw it in the trash barrel, and he lit another one. I remember because I was worried that the cigarette wasn’t out, that it would start a fire. And... this probably sounds kind of silly, but... he didn’t just smoke: He really smoked. There was so much smoke that I half expected the smoke alarm to go off. It sort of worried me that it didn’t. And just in case his cigarette was still smoldering and the alarm was broken or something—really, so I wouldn’t stay awake worrying about it—I went back, after he was gone, and poured water in the trash barrel.”

  ”The last time you saw Mr. Hunnewell was when he was leaving with Mrs. Reilly?”

  I tried to read Kariotis’s expression. He didn’t have one. ”Yes,” I said.

  ”And then you entered your room.”

  ”Yes. And later, I went back out and poured a lot of water in the trash barrel. And I got ice, and I got something to drink. That’s what I was doing there to begin with, only I ended up helping him instead. So I went back.”

  ”And what time was that?”

  ”I have no idea.”

  ”Yes, you do,” my interrogator said impassively. ”Midnight?”

  ”No. Nine-thirty, I think. Before ten. Well, it must’ve been well before ten, because that’s... I think that’s about when I went to sleep.”

  ”And this last time, when you were in the corridor, did you see anyone?”

  ”Not that I remember. No, I don’t think so.”

  ”Did you see or hear anyone or anything during the night? Or in the morning?”

  ”At, uh, somewhere around six, six-thirty, someone in one of the campers started a generator. That’s what woke me up. It woke everyone up, I think. But that’s normal. It happens all the time at shows. Other than that, nothing.” I did not say that I, like a lot of other people, had assumed that the offending generator was Tim Oliver’s.

  ”You had a dog in your room?”

  ”Two. And my cousin.” I suppressed an irrational impulse to explain that Leah was human.

  ”At any point, did your dogs bark?”

  ”Someone must’ve told you this by now,” I said, ”but they’re malamutes, and most malamutes don’t exactly bark. And they’re not watch dogs. A few malamutes will rumble or growl if a stranger comes to the door, but a lot of them won’t do a thing, except maybe stand there wagging their tails. That’s what mine do. They like strangers—strange people, anyway. If they’d heard other dogs, they might’ve made some noise. But malamutes don’t go around warning you about anything, because the typical malamute attitude is that no matter what it is, he can handle it. So why get worked up?”

  ”While we’re on the subject of dogs...,”Kariotis attempted. He pulled out two pieces of paper and asked me to explain what they were. One bore my name: Cubby’s pedigree, the one I’d run myself. The other was a page of the stud book register, the page I’d included with the pedigree when I’d sent it to Betty Burley. He asked me to explain exactly what they were.

  In my effort to divert him from anything related to the lamp—anything being, of course, Betty Burley—I made a total fool of myself by setting a personal best (maybe a world record) for dog talk. Detective Kariotis showed almost no reaction. When I said the words ”stud book,” however, even those death-light fluorescents couldn’t wash out the red that abruptly coursed into the man’s cheeks. Flashing him an innocent smile, I said, ”Relax! It’s dogs. It’s not for eligible bachelors.” The second time he looked interested was when I explained that the stud book listing of Pawprintz Attic Emprer meant that the dog had been bred by S. A. and V. Printz and owned by G. H. Thacker. The pedigree I’d run showed Gladys Thacker’s full name at the bottom of the page and the notation ”MO A,” my shorthand for a USDA Class A dealer, a puppy farmer rather than a broker, in the puppy-mill capital of the United States, Missouri. (Shorthand, indeed! Have I lost you? The USDA, United States Department of Agriculture, licenses operators of wholesale commercial kennels. The Class A dealers, the puppy farmers, breed puppies that they sell to the Class B dealers, the brokers, who resell the puppies to pet shops. And Missouri? According to the USDA’s reports, the Show-Me State had 1,084 licensed dealers. Kansas, by comparison, came in a distant second with a mere 448. Why such small numbers? Two reasons. First, at least half of the puppy farmers don’t have licenses. Second, lots of the brokers a
re big time. What does big time mean? There’s one broker who’s reported to ship 24,000 puppies a year. That’s twenty-four thousand. And that’s big time.)

  Fingering the pedigree, I said, ”I guess that all this has something to do with Mr. Hunnewell’s murder.” I meant Cubby’s ancestry, the Printzes, and Gladys Thacker, of course, not the business about smoking. One thing I knew for sure was that James Hunnewell hadn’t lived to die of lung cancer.

  Detective Kariotis’s face remained blank. ”The originals of these were found with the body. You got any idea about why?”

  I answered truthfully: ”No.”

  Kariotis stared at a spot over my left shoulder. ”Gladys Thacker,” he said. ”She usually comes to these, uh, shows?”

  A puppy-mill operator at a national specialty dog show? Like a prostitute at a nuns’ convention. Except that good sisters would presumably refrain from casting stones.

  ”Not that I know of,” I replied. ”But this is the first malamute national I’ve been to myself.”

  ”Most of you people here know each other, is that right?”

  ”Not all. But a lot of people do. And one of the things about a national is that it’s a chance to meet people—people you’ve just heard of, people you’ve talked to on the phone and haven’t met in person before.”

  ”One thing I’ve observed today,” Kariotis remarked impassively, ”is that you people talk a lot.”

  ”Really!” I exclaimed. ”Do you think so?”

  He finally cracked a hint of a smile. ”You ever hear any talk,” he said, ”of any hard feelings here?” He started tapping the pedigree.

  I looked at his finger. ”Where?” I asked.

  ”Here,” he said, tapping Gladys Thacker’s name. ”Between Mr. Hunnewell and his sister here. Between him and Gladys Thacker.”

  My jaw must have dropped.

  ”The lady’ll be here tomorrow,” Kariotis continued. ”Says she wants to take her brother home with her to Missouri for a Christian burial.”

  BEFORE MY INTERVIEW with Detective Kariotis, I’d instructed Leah to return Rowdy to our room and to turn herself over to Faith Barlow, who was handling a number of dogs today (besides Rowdy tomorrow) and could probably use help. After the interview, I considered seeking Faith out to beg her to minister to me instead. From the moment I’d spotted that cursed lamp under Betty’s van, I’d botched everything. Now I was furious at Betty, disappointed in Finn, ashamed of myself, and enraged at my dead mother’s high-handedness. Leah had sized up Finn in a second. At about her age, why hadn’t I? Tomorrow, Steve Delaney, my lover and my vet, would be here. I’d told him all about the fascinating Finn who’d abandoned me. If they met? I consoled myself with the thought that I hadn’t spoken to Steve today and thus hadn’t had the opportunity to foul things up between us. Tomorrow, reformed, I’d speak the simple truth. Better, I’d quote Shakespeare. ”I feel like Titania,” I’d say, ” ’Methought I was enamor’d of an ass.’ ” For all I knew, though, Steve and Finn would sit in Finn’s posh booth happily conferring about impaired motility and artificial vaginas. Today, I would do what I always advised newcomers to do at any dog show: I’d keep my eyes and ears open and my mouth locked shut. I would contemplate the ultimate reality: I would look at dogs.

  And, catalog in hand, I did. Right on schedule, Mikki Muldoon had completed her judging of the boys —the males—and started on the girls. Tomorrow morning, she’d begin her day with what was rather ingloriously described as ”Remainder of Bitches.” Flipping through the catalog, I noticed that Freida and her committee had been quite successful in filling it with paid advertising and pages of boosters and tributes. In Pam Ritchie’s ad, a circa 1935 photo of Eva B. Seeley had been cropped and merged with a contemporary picture to present the image of an admiring Mrs. Seeley beaming approval at one of Pam’s bitches. The listings on the pages headed ”Tributes” offered brief, inexpensive homage to assorted collections of people and dogs. Freida Reilly thanked ”Karl Reilly, Ch. Tuffluv’s A Plus,” as if her son and her stud were one and the same. Rowdy, Kimi, Leah, and I paid tribute to Faith Barlow and Janet Switzer, whom I’d scrupulously listed in alphabetical order. Janet’s full-page ad, bordered in black and headed ”In Memoriam,” showed Janet’s great dog, Denali, Rowdy’s sire. I wished that judges were allowed to look at catalogs. The photo of Denali would surely have primed Mikki Muldoon for the sight of his son.

  When I raised my eyes from the catalog, Mrs. Muldoon was pointing one finger—number one, first place in the twelve- to eighteen-month puppy bitch class—to a lovely female of Pam Ritchie’s and a junior handler I recognized as Pam’s nephew. Sherri Ann took second with a black-and-white puppy called Pawprintz Amber Waves. Putting the kid first was, I guess, picking the sentimental favorite, but the crowd was pleased, and Sherri Ann hadn’t come to a national specialty with her ambitions fixed on a puppy bitch. The dog she gave a damn about was Bear, and the prize she craved above all others was the purple-and-gold rosette for Best of Breed.

  I wondered whether James Hunnewell would have put Sherri Ann’s bitch first today and whether he’d have liked Bear as much as Sherri Ann evidently believed. Years earlier, when Sherri Ann had sold that Pawprintz dog to Gladys H. Thacker, had Sherri Ann known that the woman was Hunnewell’s sister? If so, the family connection must have felt like a high recommendation. The brother, James Hunnewell, held a respected position in the dog fancy. It certainly hadn’t occurred to Sherri Ann that his sister operated in the ninth circle of hell: the puppy mills.

  Over and over, television, newspaper, and magazine exposes had documented horrendous filth and disease on puppy farms. I’ll give one example. At a recently raided operation in the Midwest, the puppy miller maintained what she called her ”death barn.” That was where she dumped the bodies of dead dogs and puppies. It was also where she took any dog in desperate need of veterinary care. The sick dogs that entered the death barn didn’t get veterinary care, of course. They got neither food nor water nor euthanasia. They just stayed locked in the barn until they died. Want to hear more? Gee, why not?

  When, if ever, had Sherri Ann found out exactly how James Hunnewell’s sister made her shameful living? Could Sherri Ann have made the discovery only recently? In her position, I thought, wisely or foolishly, fairly or unfairly, I’d have blamed James Hunnewell for his sister’s sins. He should have known, I’d have thought. He should have warned me. He should never have let this happen. Was that how Sherri Ann had felt? Had she taken revenge at the first opportunity?

  And Betty Burley. When Betty received Cubby’s pedigree from me, she’d unquestionably seen that Gladys Thacker was a licensed dealer, which is to say, no amateur dabbler in the commercial puppy trade, but an official operator, a farmer whose produce consisted not of maize, soybeans, eggs, or milk, but of AKC-registered dogs. Betty had been in malamutes for decades. So had Sherri Ann Printz and James Hunnewell. So, in a very different way, had Gladys H. Thacker. Betty might have known that James Hunnewell and Gladys Thacker were brother and sister. If so, it would have been exactly like Betty to confront both Sherri Ann Printz and James Hunnewell. Could Betty have approached Hunnewell last night? Betty didn’t have a dog entered. Nothing in the AKC regulations would have barred her from knocking on his door; and she’d been in the corridors before and after she’d retrieved the lamp from the booth.

  My anger came back. If Betty had to be so judgmental, she should’ve become a judge! And before judging me, she should’ve heard my side! I hadn’t touched her tote bag. And I’d kept my mouth shut about the damned Comet lamp.

  Betty could be as ruthless as Kimi, as high-handed as my mother, and as judgmental as God on the Day of Wrath, all at the same time. And that awful lamp meant a great deal to Betty: Cubby, a puppy-mill dog, was descended from a Pawprintz dog, a dog sired by the famed Northpole’s Comet. James Hunnewell had owned Comet. The lamp bore Comet’s fur. As a weapon in Betty’s hands, had the lamp symbolized vengeance for the descent of Comet’s glorious gene
s into the puppy mills, for the suffering of all dogs doomed to lead miserable lives as puppy-mill breeding stock, and for the heartless elitism of breeders and judges who cared only for quality dogs and denied responsibility for so-called trash? And those voices in the dark parking lot? The voices that jeered at ”Betty’s mongrels” and ”trash dogs”? That parking lot was not far from James Hunnewell’s room. Judges, as I’ve said, need not imprison themselves. Catching the cruel words, Jeanine had worried that Betty, too, might have overheard. Jeanine and Arlette had not recognized the voices. Betty might well have known James Hunnewell’s. Jeanine, who loved Cubby, had been wounded. It had not occurred to Jeanine to strike back.

  Betty was a tiny woman, and the lamp was heavy, but Hunnewell was small, a diminished man, and Betty had the strength of a lifetime spent handling great big dogs. Like everyone else with years of experience in rescue, Betty had had to euthanize dogs that were a menace to children, dogs that had savaged people, malamutes that were a danger to everyone and a threat to the breed’s good name. Euthanize: destroy, put to sleep, put down, give the needle. Take to the vet. But last night in the parking lot there hadn’t been a vet handy, had there? And she could hardly have rushed James Hunnewell to the nearest animal hospital. If Betty had decided to destroy him, she’d have had to do it herself.

  STACKED in a human show pose—feet frozen, head high—Sherri Ann Printz had the black-and-white Amber Waves at her gold lame side. In six months, I predicted, the puppy bitch would be chunky and unrefined. Sherri Ann, of course, had already ripened to beefy coarseness. Amber Waves, however, was behaving like a perfect, if far from little, lady. Sherri Ann, in contrast, was engaged in an ill-bred shouting match with Freida Reilly.

  ”Everyone knew I gave that lamp to Betty!” Sherri Ann screeched. ”And I never, ever, not once promised it to you, Freida Reilly, and you damn well know it!”