Stud Rites

by Conant, Susan

  And James Hunnewell’s opinion? What would he really have thought of Z-Rocks? Obviously, Hunnewell had known Comet’s lines better than I did. Maybe Hunnewell could have seen something in Z-Rocks that was eluding me. Whatever it was, I thought that Judge Mikki Muldoon would miss it, too. About Z-Rocks’s chances under Mrs. Muldoon, Timmy Oliver agreed: When I wished him luck, he smiled and looked sad and said thanks, but Z-Rocks just wasn’t Mikki’s type. He and Z-Rocks headed for the grooming tent. I wanted breakfast.

  The glass-fronted announcement board in the hotel lobby informed me that Greg and Crystal’s three o’clock service was sandwiched between a wedding breakfast—scheduled for the Lagoon at twelve-fifteen— and what the notice board called a ”Gala Hawaiian Wedding Reception.” Since the Lagoon was being set up for the wedding breakfast, the only restaurant open for ordinary breakfast was the grill. I filled a plate at the buffet and, on impulse, helped myself to a loaner copy of a Boston paper. Then I sat by myself in an uncrowded area, where I ate and read. Because of the multitude of reporters who’d questioned everyone at the show yesterday, I expected to find a long article about James Hunnewell’s murder in a prominent place in the paper. Instead, it appeared as a small item on the last page of the business section. When Boston papers say Boston, Boston is what they mean. I read:

  DEATH OF DOG JUDGE

  DEEMED MURDER

  DANVILLE. Police were summoned early yesterday morning to the grounds of the Danville Milestone Hotel and Conference Facility when a guest of the hotel discovered the body of James Winston Hunnewell, 79, of Kiawab Island, South Carolina. The deceased was to head the panel of judges scheduled to pick the top dog from among the hundreds of beautiful blue-eyed pet huskies gathered here for a multinational dog show. Dog show president Freida J. Reilly, of Portland, Maine, dismissed the suggestion that one of the show dogs was responsible for the death. State and local authorities are pursuing their investigations.

  The item was harder to swallow than the lump of half-chewed pecan roll lodged in my throat. It was impossible to say what offended me most—the nasty, senseless piece of anti-dog libel, the ignorant bit about the blue-eyed pet huskies, or the amazing vision of a revolution that had turned conformation judging into a sort of jury system. Opinion is what breed judging is all about, and if there’s one topic that gives rise to violent differences of opinion, it’s the relative merits of show dogs. The AKC is less likely to spread the judge’s authority among a bunch of committee members than the Vatican is to delegate infallibility to a board of Popes. James Hunnewell at the head of a panel of judges? Now that would truly have been a setup for murder.

  And speaking of murder, the item, of course, offered less information about James Hunnewell’s than I already possessed. Despite the numerous inaccuracies in the piece, I was, however, inclined to believe that Hunnewell had, in fact, been seventy-nine and that he’d lived in Kiawah Island, South Carolina. At any rate, Freida did live in Portland.

  About Kiawah Island I knew a little because my friend Rita had spent a week there when her parents had rented a big condo that they’d shared with their children and grandchildren. Rita, being a psychologist, had come back talking mostly about family dynamics, but, then, you could rocket Rita into outer space, and she’d splash down analyzing the structural patterns of astronaut interaction and dropping only an incidental word or two about planets, stars, or black holes, unless, of course, the objects in the cosmos embodied symbolic psychic meaning, as I guess might be the case with black holes. Kiawah Island, I gathered from her, was sort of like Hilton Head, a fancy resort and retirement community with restaurants, beaches, swimming pools, and— here come the black holes—real-live alligators lazing around on golf courses and, on occasion, emerging from gator holes to gulp down small dogs. So, as a retirement spot for a dog person, Kiawah Island was a place with one big advantage—dogs were allowed, at least small dogs—and the corresponding disadvantage that they were vulnerable to being eaten by alligators. But, of course, I didn’t know whether James Hunnewell had had—or even wanted—any kind of dog at all. He’d been out of malamutes for years. He could have switched breeds. For all I knew, the presence of dog-eating predators was what had attracted him to Kiawah to begin with.

  Kiawah, though, did tell me something solid: James Hunnewell had had money. The business about Rita and the astronauts is true. It’s also true that Rita had refrained from tantalizing me with descriptions of a vacation that I couldn’t begin to afford. Wondering who’d inherit James Hunnewell’s estate, I turned to the death notices, but found nothing under Hunnewell. I didn’t need a newspaper, though, to realize that wealthy men leave wills. I put down the paper, ate my breakfast, and toyed with a new idea about why Gladys H. Thacker was coming all the way to Massachusetts to see that her brother got a Christian burial. The new idea was that Gladys H. Thacker was already here.

  A puppy-mill operator like Gladys Thacker was probably selling puppies for thirty-five, fifty, or a hundred dollars each to a broker who’d get two or three hundred dollars or more apiece for those same pups, and with a quick turnaround. Pet shops would then resell those same pups for between five hundred and a thousand dollars. As I understood it, a lot of the Gladys

  H. Thackers are small-time operators, farmers and farmers’ wives, whose puppy income is strictly supplemental: egg money derived from dogs instead of chickens. A puppy broker could well be a millionaire. Gladys Thacker had probably just traded her roosters and hens for Alaskan malamutes, and moved the dogs into the same old henhouses.

  Was Gladys H. Thacker already here? After all, she’d had a motive to arrive before her brother’s death —if, that is, she’d wanted to get here in time to cause it.

  And the attack on Harriet Lunt? Harriet Lunt was of James Hunnewell’s generation. Harriet was a lawyer. Was she his lawyer? If Gladys Thacker had had a motive to murder her brother, maybe Harriet Lunt knew what it was.

  I remembered what Harriet Lunt had said last night: Poor Elsa. And then Janies. And now me. James Hunnewell, yes. Here at the show site. And Harriet Lunt, of course. But Elsa Van Dine? She had been fatally mugged and robbed of her diamond ring on a street in Providence. Poor Elsa, everyone kept lamenting. Poor Elsa, the victim of random violence.

  ELSA VAN DINE’S unexpected marriage to the elderly and long-widowed Marquis of Denver was considered a mesalliance. The marquis, you see, did not have malamutes. What he had, in addition to a title, a country seat, and a modest fortune, was life-threatening asthma. The marquis’s most virulent attacks had all been triggered by inadvertent contact with dogs. During the rapid kennel dispersion that preceded the moderately young and very beautiful Elsa Van Dine’s immigration to Great Britain, the bride-to-be made a big deal of expressing public concern for her fiancé's ailing lungs. In private, however, she confided her reluctance to subject her dogs to the ordeal of a six-month quarantine. Ah, the transparent foolishness of exchanging a pack of gorgeous show dogs with numerous impressive handles to their names for a man who possessed but one! Thus Elsa Van Dine became the Marchioness of Denver. And Ch. Northpole’s Comet was sold. Elsa Van Dine, I think, made a very bad bargain. The marquis was one peer among many; Comet was without peer.

  The story of Elsa and the marquis I learned from Duke Sylvia while I was hanging around the exhibition hall watching Mikki Muldoon judge what are called Bred-by-Exhibitor bitches, more or less what it sounds like—and nervously awaiting Leah and Kimi’s time in the ring. When I’d last checked, Kimi had been standing on the grooming table wagging her tail and looking really lovely, and Leah had finally changed into the dress that I’d sprung on her at the last minute, together with the threat that if she refused to wear it, I’d withhold permission for her to handle Kimi, who is not co-owned, but officially belongs only to me. The flower-patterned dress fit perfectly, just as it had when Leah had made fun of it in the store. It had big pockets for stashing bait. Furthermore, judges prefer the Little House on the Prairie look to Leah’s usual layers of
black on black over black, a style that owes more to Bram Stoker than it does to Laura Ingalls Wilder, and if you had to pick one or the other to handle your bitch, just which one would you go for? Reconciled to the dress, Leah had seemed as happy and confident as Kimi.

  I, of course, was racked by an acute case of vicarious stage fright.

  The enviably calm Duke Sylvia was waiting to handle a big, dark Kotzebue bitch entered in American Bred. The assignment wasn’t exactly what had brought Duke to the national, but I was willing to bet that later in the day, when he waited to show Ironman in Best of Breed, he’d seem as casual and congenial as he did now. ”There was one thing Elsa didn’t count on,” he remarked, filling me in on Elsa Van Dine. ”And that was, when the old guy passed away, she’d get stuck being a dowager.” Smiling rather fondly, he added, ”I’ll bet Elsa didn’t like that one damned bit.”

  ”You handled Comet for her?” Feminist linguists have supposedly cured women of this shrinking-tongued habit of letting driveling questions drip from our lips when we ought to be spitting out bold assertions. I apparently suffer from a polemic-resistant case of the ailment. I knew damn well that Duke had handled Comet for every owner the dog had had. Only an hour or so earlier, as I’d finished my coffee, I’d studied the Malamute Quarterly centerfold about Comet in one of the old issues that I’d taken with me to breakfast.

  Duke nodded.

  For no good reason, so did I. ”And you handled him, uh... when Hadley...”

  I’d heard about the incident dozens of times, but until I’d read the centerfold piece, I hadn’t connected it with Duke or Comet or, for that matter, with Alaskan malamutes. Anyway, J. J. Hadley was Comet’s breeder, and when Comet wasn’t even two years old, Hadley entered him at the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show, with Duke handling. This was in the old days, of course, back before Westminster was champions only. Anyway, spectacular dog that he was, Comet not only finished his championship at Westminster, but took Best of Breed. And J. J. Hadley died of surprise. Literally. He had a heart attack right outside the ring. Of course, it was a thrill for anyone to finish a dog there, especially a young dog that took the breed, but it is possible to carry this dog thing too far, and it seemed to me that that was just what J. J. Hadley had done. Hadley’s widow, Velma, however, instead of sensibly realizing that breed competition is no sport for the faint of heart, laid the blame on the innocent Comet and on the equally innocent Westminster Kennel Club. Maddened by grief, Velma Hadley promptly sold Comet to Elsa Van Dine and launched her prolonged but ultimately successful campaign to prevent future ringside fatalities like her husband’s. Thus it is that the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show is now limited to champions of record, all because of that silly Velma Hadley. Just kidding. But Velma Hadley really did make a fuss.

  So Duke admitted that he’d handled Comet on the infamous occasion of J. J. Hadley’s demise and on numerous other occasions, first for Hadley, of course; then for Elsa Van Dine; then for James Hunnewell and, of all people, Timmy Oliver, who’d co-owned the dog with Hunnewell; and finally, after buying Timmy out, for himself and James Hunnewell.

  ”So how did Timmy Oliver ever get to own Comet?” I was amazed. Comet was my idea of serious quality. Timmy Oliver certainly was not.

  Duke’s big, leonine face showed the first negative emotion I’d ever seen it reveal. Exactly what the feeling was, I couldn’t identify, but, for once, Duke looked other than pleasant. ”Elsa offered. Timmy said yes.”

  I remembered that Betty had said something about Elsa’s taking Timmy under her wing. ”And Hunnewell? How did Hunnewell...?”

  ”Money,” Duke said. ”Timmy had dibs—Elsa liked him—but he was broke, so he got James to put up the money, promised him co-ownership, and as soon as Elsa signed Comet over to Timmy, Timmy kept his part of the deal. They had a whole elaborate agreement worked out. James paid the purchase price, the vet bills, uh, handler fees, everything. James had possession. Harriet Lunt drew it all up for them. And that was it. Timmy didn’t get a thing out of it. Co-owned him in name only. Couldn’t say boo to Comet without James’s written agreement.” Duke added with surprising scorn, ”God, there was one time there where Timmy had this bitch he wanted to breed to Comet, and James turned him down flat! Poor sucker! Didn’t even have stud rights on his own dog.”

  ”That’s a pretty unusual arrangement.”

  ”Yeah, well, Comet was an, uh, unusual dog. And, hey, if you were going to co-own a dog with Timmy...?”

  ”Perish the thought!” I exclaimed.

  ”Yeah, well, James was no dummy. He felt the same way.”

  ”So why didn’t James Hunnewell go to Elsa Van Dine in the first place and just buy Comet outright?”

  ”Elsa didn’t care much for James. James could be, uh, abrasive. This judging poll was probably the first popularity contest James ever won in his life.” Duke frowned.

  ”I thought he judged quite a lot.”

  ”He got assignments. People had a lot of respect for his opinions. It was him they didn’t like. With Elsa, it was... Elsa was a pretty woman. James used to hit on her. She hated it. She knew he wanted Comet, and the worse he wanted the dog, the more she’d have sold him to someone else. When she found out he got Comet after all, she was ripping mad at Timmy. But by then, it was too late. And she got over it. She always had a soft spot for Timmy.”

  ”That old tape we saw,” I said. ”That was when Comet belonged to Elsa Van Dine?” The judge had been James Hunnewell, who, for obvious reasons, wouldn’t have been permitted to judge a dog he coowned. ”She owned him for what? Four years?”

  Duke shrugged. ”Give or take.”

  ”So how did Timmy happen to sell to you?” The transaction was none of my business. I felt awkward. The sensation jarred. Ordinarily, Duke Sylvia had the flattering gift of making people feel as though they’d always said the right thing.

  But Duke didn’t seem to sense my discomfort. ”Things got ugly for a while there. One of Timmy’s get-rich-quick schemes fell apart, he was dead broke, and of course, no one was stupid enough to loan him a dime. Comet was the only thing he had that was supposedly worth anything, but, like I said, that was in name only—James had total control. According to this contract they had, he could veto any buyer Timmy came up with. And James wasn’t about to buy Timmy out. He’d bought Comet once. He’d paid the full purchase price, and he’d paid everything since then. He wasn’t going to pay for the same dog twice.”

  ”There might’ve been someone else who just wanted his name on the dog,” I said stupidly. ”Someone Hunnewell would’ve agreed to. People do that. They want the glory. And they contribute to the cost.”

  Duke smiled. ”Yeah, well, there was someone.”

  ”Oh, of course! And that’s how you ended up coowning Comet.”

  ”It worked out for everyone. James saved himself a bundle in handler fees. Timmy got some cash. I paid a decent price. Of course, after Timmy got back on his feet, he had second thoughts. You had to feel sorry for him. He never wanted to sell Comet, but he had no real choice.” Duke spoke with the easy self-confidence of someone who’s never been the object of anyone else’s pity.

  Loud applause tugged me to the present. The Bred-by-Exhibitor bitches were sailing around Judge Muldoon’s ring. I smiled at Duke. ”Whatever you paid, I think you got a great deal. I’d have given anything to own Comet.”

  Duke pulled out a metal comb and started to do a little last-minute work on the bitch. ”Christ,” he said, ”who wouldn’t?”

  IN SPECIES after species, from turtles to alligators to human beings, sperm counts are dropping and, with them, the size of male genitalia. According to radical environmentalists, chemical pollution is to blame for a multitude of diverse and alarming signs of feminization: hermaphroditism, retained testicles, shrunken members, unpaired gonads. It’s males who are losing their virility, you see; females are staying the same. In Florida’s Lake Apopka, for instance, the sexual organs of the female alligators have remained as ca
pacious as ever, while those of their mates have shriveled to a fourth their former size, and, yes, I know that Masters and Johnson shored up a lot of shaky male egos by declaring that size doesn’t matter, but let’s be honest: What Masters and Johnson had in mind or in hand or in wherever was trivial variation; it wasn’t one-fourth.

  When the news first reached me, I didn’t believe it either. I didn’t want to. Eventually, though, my defenses broke down, with startling consequences for Rowdy, who found himself flipped onto his back on the kitchen floor so I could take a close-up look and make sure everything was exactly as it had always been, as I’m happy to report that it appeared to be, so far, yes, but for how long? The matter suddenly took a grave and terrifying turn. The reproductive future of turtles, alligators, and human beings I could joke about. But the breed of breeds, pinnacle of dogdom, acme of woofy evolution, howling apex of canine creation, shining quintessence of the utmost in real dog, yes, the incomparable Alaskan malamute—extinct?!!

  Not if I could help it. So that’s why I thought about freezing Rowdy’s sperm—not for now, but for the future, for the good of the breed.

  ”For the good of the breed,” said Lisa Tainter, our show secretary, who was crowding up against me to watch the judging and, in addressing Freida Reilly, spoke almost in my ear. Easing away from Lisa, I glanced down and caught sight of a sheaf of R.T.I. leaflets in her hand. ”When it comes to the gene pool,” Lisa declared, ”it’s better to be safe than sorry.”