Stud Rites

by Conant, Susan

  Sherri Ann broke in. Her voice trembled with sincerity. At first, I mistook it for the heartfelt candor of one who deeply and genuinely longs to win an election. ”I’ll have you know,” she informed Kariotis, ”that every person at this national is grateful to this woman for her efforts on behalf of this breed. Not one person here is going to stand by and watch you manhandle her and undermine her mission of helping these poor dogs. Practically every single one of us, myself included, has to live day in and day out with the terrible knowledge that in spite of our best efforts, our very own lines have ended up in the puppy mills! And I know! Because I myself was tricked into selling a beautiful Pawprintz puppy to one of those filthy, disgusting puppy-mill people! So if you think that we’re going to just let you grab my beautiful lamp that I personally made and donated to help those poor dogs that go back to my—”

  Kariotis valiantly interrupted Sherri Ann by saying something to Betty about probable cause. What he made of Sherri Ann’s speech, I couldn’t tell. The typical member of the general public doesn’t even know what a puppy mill is, never mind what’s wrong with puppy mills. Although the detective probably didn’t understand that Sherri Ann had just made a brave and unusual public confession, be must have sensed the violence of her feelings. By comparison with Sherri Ann and the rumbling group around her, Betty must have seemed an easy target for an appeal to cool reason.

  ”I didn’t hear him!” I complained to Harriet Lunt. ”What did he say?”

  ”Piffle!” she replied. ”He says they found dog hair in the wound or on the body or somewhere! And he thinks that because...” Switching abruptly from me to Kariotis, Harriet called out, ”Young man! You there! You don’t know much about dogs, do you? Well, don’t you try and pull this probable cause nonsense here, because with all these dogs, you’re going to find dog hair anywhere and everywhere! We eat it, we breathe it, it’s all over us, it’s all over everything we own, it’s on our clothes, it’s in our cars; if we don’t find dog hair in our scrambled eggs and in our oatmeal, we know we’ve gotten someone else’s breakfast; when we send letters, we mail dog hair with them, and when we go to the dentist, the hygienist finds it stuck between our teeth; and furthermore, whenever we cut ourselves, we wash and scrub and disinfect, and before we can slap on a bandage, there it is! If I’d actually been killed last night and you’d sliced into me, and guess what? Dog hair! In my guts, in my liver, in my arteries, everywhere! And not just little hairs, either, but whole big clumps! So if you found it in his blood and brains, young man, naturally you did! I happen to be an attorney, and what I’m telling you is, what you’ve got isn’t probable cause. All you’ve got is so what!”

  Mainly because Sherri Ann and Bear were wanted in the ring, the crowd dispersed with the dispute about the lamp still unresolved. What had happened was a phenomenon that Kariotis, I thought, should’ve seen coming: a large-scale version of a domestic disturbance in which the intervening cop becomes the target of the combatants.

  ”Leah,” I asked, ”where’s Kevin?” Not that I expected or wanted Kevin to aid his fellow officer. On the contrary, I was as eager as I’d been all along to shield Betty from inquiries about the lamp, as well as about

  Cubby’s pedigree and the stud book page, items that must have been covered with her fingerprints. Since hearing Sherri Ann’s speech, I was, if anything, more determined than ever to protect Betty. It sounded to me as if Sherri Ann had known all along about the Pawprintz dog that had ended up with Gladys Thacker. Surprised, shocked, and ashamed, Sherri Ann might have blamed Hunnewell, acted on her anger, and guaranteed his silence. But besides having apparently known all along, she’d just made a highly public admission. Sherri Ann could have reclaimed the Comet-reliquary lamp late on Thursday, at the end of the evening’s events, when Betty had left it briefly unattended in her unlocked van. At the same time, she could have raided Betty’s tote bag and grabbed the papers out of Cubby’s file. But if she’d been choosing a weapon known to be in Betty’s possession and pieces of paper bound to bear the clear prints of Betty’s fingers, why the lamp she had made and handled herself? And why pages that bore her own name? Furthermore, if she’d gone out of her way to implicate Betty, why would she then have rallied her comrades in Betty’s defense?

  By comparison with a dog show, a session of the United States Congress is devoid of politics. In her precampaign campaigning for the breed club board, Sherri Ann might have been making a move that eluded me. Especially if she thought that Betty were supporting Freida, she might yet turn on Betty. Sherri Ann’s loyalty to Betty was open to question. Mine was not. I needed to find out immediately everything Kevin knew about probable cause, warrants, and the seizure of evidence. Did the police have the right to demand Betty’s fingerprints? ”Leah,” I repeated, ”where is Kevin?”

  ”He got badgered into buying a lot of raffle tickets,” she reported, ”and he won something.”

  ”And?”

  ”And it’s supposed to be a secret.”

  ”What’s so secret about—”

  ”It’s a present. For you. He wants to save it as a

  Christmas present for you. So he’s stashing it in Steve’s van. He’ll be back. Hey, Holly, I wanted to ask you. Comet?”

  ”You read the centerfold. You looked at it last night.”

  ”So a lot of people owned him.”

  ”That happens with show dogs. You know that. A lot of top show dogs have a lot of owners all at once. Casey has four; Daphne has three. But, yeah, a lot of people owned Comet, and not at the same time.”

  ”Remind me who.”

  ”Well, J. J. Hadley. Hadley was his breeder. And then after Hadley died, his widow, Velma Hadley. Velma Hadley sold him to Elsa Van Dine. Then, uh, when Elsa Van Dine got engaged and was moving to England, she sold Comet to Timmy Oliver. Timmy got the money to buy Comet from James Hunnewell, and he and Timmy co-owned the dog. Except that Timmy was a co-owner in name only, I gather. It wasn’t a normal co-ownership. Hunnewell didn’t trust Timmy—”

  ”Surprise, surprise!” Leah was lighthearted. Even so, as I watched her face, I could see the thought cross her mind that my own prejudice against co-ownership could be overcome by just such a special arrangement.

  ”Yeah, who does trust Timmy? So Hunnewell had Harriet Lunt draw up some sort of elaborate contract that gave Hunnewell total control over everything. Hunnewell paid the whole purchase price and all the expenses, and Timmy paid nothing, so I guess it was fair. Duke told me that Timmy couldn’t so much as say boo to Comet without Hunnewell’s permission. And then, uh, I have the impression that it was just shortly before Comet died, Duke Sylvia managed to buy Timmy out. So then Duke co-owned him with Hunnewell. Duke had handled Comet all along, for everyone. Legalities aside, Comet was really always Duke’s dog. I know it sounds like a lot of people, but it’s not all that unusual, and—”

  ”So, Z-Rocks.”

  ”She didn’t make the cut,” I said. ”Weren’t you looking?”

  ”What I want to know is, did Hunnewell really like Z-Rocks as much as Timmy Oliver says?”

  ”How would I know? Duke says... I’m not sure whether Duke said that he didn’t or that he wouldn’t have.”

  ”And Duke would know.”

  ”As well as anyone. He knew Hunnewell way back, and he’ll tell you that you can’t second-guess judges, but, yeah, of course, Duke is as good at knowing what judges like and don’t like as anyone is. It’s his business. So, uh, yes, I’d say Duke was probably right. Besides, Z-Rocks is linebred on Comet, and she’s perfectly decent, but she’s just not outstanding.”

  ”So Timmy is lying.”

  ”Let’s say Timmy has a highly developed capacity for self-deception. Leah, if you don’t mind, I want to go check on Rowdy. Do you have a room key? And if you see Kevin, tell him I want to talk to him, okay? Oh, and do me a favor, will you? If the opportunity arises, why don’t you not introduce Kevin to Finn Adams.”

  ”Oh, they’ve already met,” Leah said blithe
ly. ”Kevin knows who he is. Kevin says you’ve told him all about Finn. Kevin recognized his name right away.”

  MY IMAGE of the Last Judgment owes more to the American Kennel Club than it does to Michelangelo. For one thing, although the Blessed and Damned huddle together, everyone is decently dressed, and the Judge, in particular, knows better than to turn up in a diaphanous loincloth that poses the insurmountable problem of finding a place to fasten the official badge where it won’t look like a joke-shop fig leaf and inflict genital scarification if it comes unpinned.

  And it’s not just the Last Judgment. The Creation of Adam: Ever notice that sad little gap between God’s hand and Adam’s? Well, once you’ve torn your eyes away from the worrisome evidence that Adam suffers from the same demasculinization that afflicts those Florida alligators, you’ll notice that although God and Adam are trying hard, God more than the languid Adam, I might add, divine and human don’t quite touch. Feminist revisionist canine-cosmological Creation: The energetic Eve, her secondary sexual characteristics indicative of hormone levels in the high-normal range, eagerly reaches forth with not just one but two outstretched hands, as does the Great Breeder. In this version, the hands don’t touch directly, either, but instead of an empty space? Pre-Creation Adam lazed around waving a finger in the air. Eve put down a deposit. He got a gap. She got a puppy. And at the Final Judgment? When the last trump sounds, Eve will not walk alone.

  Nor, I hope, will I. But on the afternoon of the Eve of the Feast of Saint Hubert, after checking on the solidity of my links to the Infinite, I made a solitary sprint back to the exhibition hall and got there just as Mikki Muldoon was saying thanks, but no thanks, to a group of disappointed handlers whose dogs would doubtless make the Great Final Cut, but hadn’t made this one.

  Even celestial judgment is assumed to require paperwork, and in the earthly canine version thereof, the judge not only has to make entries in the official book, but, being human and fallible, has to keep taking and consulting notes, and, after temporarily excusing some dogs and then calling them back, is required to check handlers’ armbands to make sure that those same dogs have, in fact, reentered the ring. Shuffling through the papers on her table, Judge Mikki Muldoon prepared for the culmination of her assignment. Lined up ready to go before her one last time were the dogs who’d made the final cut, among them some I recognized: Daphne, who’d both beaten and been beaten by Rowdy; a local dog called Burlimute’s Malfeasance, sound and typey; a veteran whose name reliably aroused Pam Ritchie’s fury, the unpronounceable Koonihc, ”Chinook” spelled backward; Ironman, looking indefatigable; and pitted against Ironman, the blazing sable Casey, the dog of gold. Sherri Ann’s Bear was not among the elect. Her Winners Bitch, however, could still get Best of Winners.

  Near the gate, repeatedly pulling back the black jersey sleeve that covered her left wrist, was the L.L. Bean woman, as I thought of her, who had vanished for a while and now, like the dogs temporarily excused, had returned for the final judging of Best of Breed. Again, she checked her watch and then moved forward, almost as if she intended to speak to Mrs. Muldoon, who turned her head briefly in the woman’s direction and, in apparent response to the woman’s gaze, swiftly gathered her papers together, tapped them on the judge’s table, consulted her own wristwatch, and gave a definitive, confident smile. A dog-show pro, I had no difficulty in reading the interchange. The Bean woman? In seeing her as a plainclothes cop, I hadn’t been entirely wrong. Stationed by the ring, one eye on the judge, the other on the clock? She was, it seemed to me, a guard of sorts, and an official one, sent not by the police, but by the agency that rules the show ring. Monitoring the ring procedure, timing the speed of judging, the woman was—who else? at last!—a representative of the American Kennel Club, here to judge the judge. As she approached the gate, I noticed the inevitable layer of dog hair that now clung to the black jersey.

  ”Hey, you!” the L.L. Bean woman called to Mikki Muldoon. ”You, there! Can I have word with you?” Wrong again. ”Who is that?” I demanded of Lisa Tainter, who was squashed up next to me.

  Lisa pulled back the fur hood of her authentic parka to reveal thin hair sweat-matted against her scalp. ”She’s, uh, Mr. Hunnewell’s sister. It seems like she, uh, has some kind of thing about... It’s weird. It’s like she doesn’t understand he’s dead or something. Like she thinks his body is still him. She keeps talking about bringing him home and not wanting him to go home all alone. It’s creepy, if you ask me.”

  What impelled me to speak the woman’s name aloud was, I think, simple astonishment at the discrepancy between my image of Gladys Thacker as a sort of generic puppy-mill operator and the reality of a woman I’d mistaken, even momentarily, for an AKC rep. ”Gladys Thacker!”

  In my surprise, I must have spoken more loudly than I’d intended. Sherri Ann Printz, who stood nearby misting her bitch’s coat, jerked her head toward me just as the L.L. Bean woman veered around and asked, ”You talking to me?”

  Up close, Gladys Thacker’s hair revealed itself as a myriad of flattened curls, each crossed by the mark of a bobby pin. Her foundation makeup was a few shades lighter than her skin. Her eye shadow was green. She smelled musty, like old powder.

  Ignoring Sherri Ann, I cleared my throat and held out my hand. ”My name is Holly Winter. You’re, uh, Mr. Hunnewell’s sister?”

  ”If her name is Gladys Thacker, you bet your life she is!” Her face cold with anger, Sherri Ann turned to the other woman. ”Is that who you are?” When Gladys Thacker gave a baffled nod, Sherri Ann continued venomously, ”Lady, do you have any idea how much grief you have caused me? A million times, I have cursed myself for shipping that lovely puppy to you, all on your brother’s say-so! What a fool I was! I should never, ever have sold a dog to someone I’d only talked to on the phone, never, ever! And you sounded so sweet and all innocent, and all you wanted was a pet! And I call you, I do my follow-up, and, yeah, yeah, he’s just fine, and then, then, a couple of years later, I discover...! I get a call from someone who says there’s a malamute at a pet shop, and she’s managed to get a look at the papers, and guess what? The sire is Pawprintz! He’s my puppy that I sent to you! You scum of the earth! How dare you show your lying face—”

  ”You’re one to talk!” Gladys retorted. ”Yow breed dogs yourself! You sell dogs! You sold one to me! I’m a breeder same as yourself, and I don’t see where you get off treating me like dirt. I got as much right to be here as you! More! I’m here because of my brother! I’m not just here to make a stupid fuss about a bunch of dogs!” I decided to intervene. ”Sherri Ann, uh, wait, okay? This is really not the time to get into it. You’re due in the ring.”

  One of the last people to feel any sympathy for a puppy-mill operator, I nonetheless pitied Gladys Thacker, whose eyes had filled with tears and whose powdered face showed not a trace of comprehension. I searched her features for any sign of resemblance to the late James Hunnewell and found only one: thin, lined lips. Gladys Thacker, however, was much younger than her brother had been. Perhaps his illness rather than genetics had made him look like a bloated horny toad.

  Recalled to the present, Sherri Ann stashed her spray bottle and metal comb in one of the big pockets of her dress, a sort of housecoat of gray satin and turquoise chiffon. Like Gladys Thacker, she looked close to tears. ”You just tell me one thing,” she demanded of Thacker. ”What do you think you’re doing here? Here! This is the last place on earth anyone’d expect to find the likes of you, you—”

  ”Sherri Ann—” I started to say.

  But Sherri Ann called loudly, ”Victor! Victor, do you know who this person is? This is that puppy-mill woman who conned us out of that puppy! Harriet, this person is the one I was telling you about! She breeds malamutes for pet shops!”

  ”Sherri Ann, the ring!” Harriet warned, with more success than I’d had.

  As Victor shepherded his wife down the aisle, Harriet Lunt, ignoring Gladys Thacker’s existence, demanded of me: ”Is that true?”

&n
bsp; ”More or less,” I replied. ”Mrs. Thacker is James Hunnewell’s sister. Years ago, Sherri Ann shipped her a dog that’s shown up in a whole lot of pet-shop pedigrees. But—”

  ”My brother,” Gladys Thacker cut in, ”is right now lying cold in some morgue, and I come all the way here to bring him home with me so’s he can rest with his own, and do you people care? I think it’s disgraceful, is what I think. My brother was murdered right here not two days ago, and here I am, come all this way so he don’t have to go home all alone, with total strangers, and all you people can talk about is just dogs! It’s the most disgusting thing I ever heard! It’s sick! It’s like you don’t know the difference between a dog and a human! Sick!”

  With a dignified snort that damned Gladys as an unworthy opponent, Harriet marched off.

  ”We do know the difference,” I said quietly. ”It’s just—”

  Someone tapped my shoulder. ”Holly!” Leah said insistently.

  I snapped at her. ”What?”

  ”Holly, about Comet. Who exactly owned...?”