All Shots

by Susan Conant

  But as I was saying, Rowdy’s handler, Teller, appeared, and trailing after him was the second handler he’d promised to supply. Teller was a round-faced, muscular man of medium height, heavy around the middle, but light on his feet, and he was groomed and dressed in a fashion intended to convey respect for the judges. He had short brown hair and was so closely shaved that I wondered whether he might have used a depilatory on his face. He wore gray pants with sharp creases, a tweed sport coat, a white shirt, and a red tie. Although he’d probably been showing dogs since the early morning, he looked fresh and energetic, and not a single hair, dog or human, was evident on his attire. In brief, Teller looked worth the fee I was paying him.

  “Hey, Holly,” he greeted me. “Rowdy’s looking good.”

  “This is Sammy,” I said. “Rowdy’s in his crate.”

  “Dead ringer,” Teller said. “This is Omar.”

  “Nice to meet you,” I said.

  The name was misleading. Omar had pale blond hair and fair, badly sunburned skin. His hazel eyes looked faded and weak, as if they had once belonged to a nonagenarian and had been transplanted to his sockets by mistake. The remainder of Omar’s face, including his vapid expression, suggested a maximum age of twenty.

  After fruitlessly waiting for Omar to say that it was nice to meet me, too, I said bluntly, “Are you sure you’re up for this? You’ve handled malamutes before, haven’t you?”

  Omar’s sport coat and the rest of his attire were appropriate for the ring, but his manner was, at best, unimpressive, and his build was disconcertingly frail. He looked too slight to handle a frisky Chihuahua.

  “He’s trained, isn’t he?” Omar said.

  “Yes,” I began, “but—”

  Teller cut me off. “Omar’s a pro.”

  The sound of my father’s characteristic bellow distracted me. Glancing toward him, I saw that he and Gabrielle were still talking to Lewis Van Zandt. Actually, Gabrielle and Van Zandt were silent; Buck was doing all the talking, and he was doing it loudly enough so that everyone within a mile must’ve heard every single word he was saying. I listened in horror.

  “Growing marijuana!” Buck exclaimed. “My wife! Who’d ever have thought? It was all in the Ellsworth American. We had a visit from the DEA. That’s the Drug Enforcement Administration. Pleasant young fellow. You’d never guess to look at Gabrielle, would you? Looks as—”

  “Teller,” I said hastily, “you’ll have to pick up the arm-bands. Rowdy’s in this crate.” I pointed. “I’ll see you…I’ll see you later.”

  Lewis Van Zandt had no sense of humor. What’s more, he was none too bright. To make matters worse, he was a dreadful rumormonger. And Buck was baiting him with some ludicrous tale about Gabrielle, marijuana, and the DEA? While simultaneously spreading the story himself at top volume? Buck knew exactly how gossipy shows were; and gossip being the distorting phenomenon that it is, word would be out that Buck and Gabrielle had been freebasing cocaine or dealing heroin at this very show.

  Without actually leaping over crates, I managed to reach Van Zandt, Buck, and the maligned Gabrielle in what must have been seconds. “He’s only joking,” I assured the old cheek-pincher. “You know Buck. He can never resist the temptation to—”

  To my horror, Gabrielle said, “No, no, it’s perfectly true! Not that I’ve been growing marijuana, of course, but we did have a visit from a DEA agent. It was all very exciting! He belongs to a special team. We thought he sounded very proud of it, just as if he played for the Red Sox. He told us all about drugs. It seems that this kind of marijuana patch is much more common in southern Maine than it is in our part of the state, although I have to wonder whether it isn’t just a matter of where people get caught. It could be the climate, too, I suppose. But these DEA teams aren’t all that interested in marijuana, anyway. The one they’re worried about is…Buck, what’s it called?”

  “Methamphetamine.”

  “That’s it! He was telling us that as it is, there’s not a lot of it in Maine. Holly, do you know that these terrible people mail it to Maine from Arizona and places like that? They mail it! Or they use UPS or FedEx. Just like L.L.Bean! But in reverse! So, the purpose of this team is to make them stop. And to stop them from making it. It’s quite easy to, uh, brew, I suppose you’d say. All you—”

  “There was obviously some mistake,” I said to Lewis Van Zandt. “Gabrielle is the last person who’d do anything illegal. Maybe it was someone with the same name.”

  “No, they had the right person,” Gabrielle insisted. “And it was my land.”

  “A wood lot in Washington County,” Buck said.

  “In the Unorganized Territories,” Gabrielle added. “Isn’t that a wonderful expression? It makes Maine sound like the wild frontier!”

  To Van Zandt, I said, “It means that the state of Maine collects the real estate taxes for areas without organized townships. What must’ve happened was that Gabrielle owned some land that someone else used to—”

  “I’m far from sure that I like this image of myself as a Goody Two-shoes,” Gabrielle said.

  As I was struggling to find a way to impress precisely that image of her on Lewis Van Zandt without simultaneously offending Gabrielle, my father said, “We’re going to miss the judging if we don’t get going.”

  Damn it all! He was right. If I’d missed the judging entirely, it would’ve been his fault. Van Zandt didn’t accompany us to the ring, either because he didn’t want to be seen with a family of notorious drug dealers or because he could hardly wait to spread the word of our notoriety. I was relieved to be rid of him and also happy to have a few moments to remind Buck of the dog-show maxim that says, keep your eyes and ears open and your mouth shut.

  Unchastened, Buck said, “Well, the old fool didn’t pinch your cheek today, did he?”

  As we made our way to the ring where malamutes were about to be judged, Buck expanded on one of his favorite themes, namely, the obligation of every one of us to experience and express overwhelming joy and gratitude in response to the multifarious beauties of nature that surrounded us. The beauties of nature he had in mind were the golden retrievers, Alaskan malamutes, Akitas, West Highland white terriers, German shepherd dogs, Belgian sheepdogs, and so forth and so on that did, in fact, surround us and were, in fact, wonderfully diverse and extraordinarily beautiful and thus cause for joy and gratitude.

  “‘The world is so full of a number of things, I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings,’” Buck proclaimed.

  We had missed only the beginning of the malamute judging. As we approached the ring, my father consulted the show catalog and said, “She’s going to do Open now. Small entry. Pitiful. I don’t know why you bothered.”

  “Because you told me to.” Almost whispering, I said, “You told me that a friend of a friend of yours said that Mrs. Woofenden was going to draw a very small entry and asked you as a big favor to see if you could help. I bothered because you leaned on me and because I am a good sport and a nice person. As you perfectly well know, all Sammy needs is one major, and this isn’t a major. He’s here because you wanted him entered.” Let’s settle for saying that all Sammy needed to finish his championship was one more big win, a “major,” and that today’s entry was too small to count. In normal tones, I added, “And Rowdy? Buck, is this your first show? I’m interested in the Group.”

  Summary: breeds are judged first. The Best of Breed winners, one for each breed, then compete in the judging of the Groups to which they belong. If Rowdy went BOB, Best of Breed, as I hoped he’d do, he’d then compete in the Working Group, which is to say, the judging of the BOB winners from the breeds that belonged to the Working Group: the Akita, the Siberian husky, the Rottweiler, the Newfoundland, and so on. Apples and oranges? Not really. Anyway, Rowdy had a good chance of going BOB, and I wanted a placement in the group. Placement: first through fourth place, preferably guess which one, but it’s an honor to place in the group at all. Incidentally, my hope for a group placement was
why I’d entered two dogs who might compete against each other for Best of Breed and why Teller would handle Rowdy in Best of Breed: if Rowdy went BOB, thus getting his ticket to the group, I thought he’d place there, whereas Sammy, gorgeous though he was, just didn’t have the maturity to be serious competition in the group.

  Anyway, when I’d finished telling Buck what he already knew, I spotted my dogs and my handlers, and I went flying to the ring, where Mrs. Woofenden was about to judge Open Dogs, that is, Sammy’s class, which consisted of males that had not completed their championships. Into that ring, my expensive professional handler, Teller, was leading my special, my champion, my consistent group placer, namely Rowdy. Mindful of the AKC’s prohibition against creating any sort of disturbance at a show, I came to a halt next to Teller and Rowdy and said in the softest voice I could manage, “Teller, stop! You have the wrong dog!”

  CHAPTER 12

  I am happy to report that the mix-up had no serious consequences. Indeed, if I hadn’t appeared in time to prevent Teller from showing Rowdy in place of Sammy, the result wouldn’t have been disastrous; everyone, including Mrs. Woofenden, would’ve understood that Teller had made an innocent mistake, albeit a stupid and careless one. Rowdy and Sammy, father and son, did look a lot alike, especially to people who didn’t know them. Still, it’s almost certain that one of the other exhibitors or spectators would’ve spotted the error; Rowdy was so well known that someone would’ve recognized him and spoken up. Teller had no excuse; even if he’d never seen Rowdy before, he should’ve known which dog was which. Sammy lacked Rowdy’s physical maturity; he hadn’t quite finished filling out. Furthermore, Rowdy’s superb natural showmanship and his experience in the ring meant that he shifted into show-off mode well outside the baby gates, whereas Sammy’s demeanor was puppyish. As to the actual show results, Sammy went Winners Dog, Phyllis’s Heart went Winners Bitch and Best of Winners, and Rowdy took the breed and got a Group II, so I couldn’t complain, especially because the Newf that won the Group was really something. Gabrielle’s bichon, Molly, won her breed but went nowhere in the Group. Gabrielle, however, wasn’t yet a hardcore show type, which is to say that she honestly did not mind losing. Give her a few more years with my father, and that attitude would change.

  When Buck, Gabrielle, the three dogs, and I finally reached Cambridge, I got my guests settled in their room, and we sat at the kitchen table and ate beef stew. My father was in a good mood and on good behavior. Why not? He’d embarrassed me at a show, and he’d been more or less right about Teller. Also, since I’d managed to keep Buck ignorant of the murder and the Holly Winter mix-up, he had no excuse to turn protective. Following Phyllis’s suggestion, I got him talking about blue malamutes. Buck knew that I was active in Alaskan Malamute Rescue of New England and in the national group, the Alaskan Malamute Assistance League, and he knew that Phyllis Hamilton also did malamute rescue. Consequently, he made the natural mistake of assuming that the blue malamute in the photo was a rescue dog. I didn’t correct him. Unfortunately, he had nothing useful to say. He knew the names of a few old-time malamute kennels, including Sena Lak, Blue Ice, and Sugarbear, that had produced blue, and he recommended an article I’d already read, a piece written by the late Jane Wilson-Adickes.

  Although I’d warned Kevin about Buck’s visit and implored him to say nothing to my father about the murder, I was still worried throughout the meal that Kevin might pop in and mention the dead woman and the possible identity theft, but the fear was needless. Over dessert, Gabrielle talked with delighted animation about the DEA’s discovery that someone had been growing marijuana on her land. In itself, the incident amounted to nothing. The property was a forty-acre lot in a numbered township that didn’t even have a name. The neighbors, if you can call them that, were big paper companies rather than people, and some unknown person had taken advantage of the isolation of Gabrielle’s land to grow marijuana in what was evidently a small clearing. Gabrielle and her late husband had bought the lot twenty years earlier. She paid taxes on it but had never so much as seen it. When I extracted details about the drug agent’s visit, I realized that it had been pro forma; the agent had informed Gabrielle about the situation, and that had been that. I am proud to report that instead of taking Buck to task for having started a rumor that would be broadcast throughout the dog fancy, I kept my eyes and ears open and my mouth shut.

  Buck, Gabrielle, and Molly left early on Sunday morning. It was a wet, dreary day, and I found myself missing Steve as well as wishing that Leah were still living with us and that Rita were home or returning at any minute. For once, there wasn’t a single dog-related event nearby that I wanted to attend. There were friends I could’ve called but no one I wanted to see, and the prospect of going alone to a concert or a bookstore made me feel like Eleanor Rigby. Work? On a Sunday? I’m my own employer and a good one: I give myself weekends off. I do household chores, of course, as I did that morning. I changed the sheets in the bedroom, vacuumed, and performed the routine task required to keep Sammy’s beloved Pink Piggy working. The toy that Steve and I called Pink Piggy was a Dr. Noy’s toy, a purple pig, a plush toy that had a great feature: the squeaker was replaceable. For reasons that baffled me, Sammy had never torn Pink Piggy to shreds, but he killed the squeakers all the time. I always kept a supply of fresh ones on hand. It took almost no time to rip open the Velcro on Pink Piggy’s back, remove the pouch inside, pull out the dead squeaker, slip in the new one, insert the pouch, and close the toy up. Then I had to repeat the process because, in the manner of Betty Burley and Kimi, Pink Piggy manifested itself in three simultaneous incarnations that were indistinguishable from one another and thus all went by the same name.

  When I’d finished restoring Pink Piggy’s voice, I spent some time training Rowdy and then Sammy. After that, I checked my e-mail, printed out a fresh copy of the photo of the blue malamute, ran off more copies of the lost-dog flyer, and then, on inspiration, searched through the Alaskan Malamute Registry Pedigree Program, a database with information about more than 79,000 malamutes from all over the world. The database includes all the malamutes in the American Kennel Club Stud Book Register, in studbooks from other countries, and in other published sources. The simplest use of the program is to generate the family trees beloved by fanciers of purebred dogs, but it can also be used to search for malamutes that meet particular criteria, for example, dogs with the sire or dam you enter; dogs with a specified kennel name, breeder, or owner; dogs with a given birth date; and so forth. A little poking around in the database, however, soon demonstrated what the program’s creator, Dan Anderson, had once told me, namely, that searching by color had more than a few hitches. Among other things, malamutes come in a bewildering variety of colors; knowledgeable people use a great variety of terms for the myriad of colors; and worse yet, official systems, which radically oversimplify coat color, have changed over the years. For instance, malamute fanciers may disagree about whether a particular all-white dog’s shading is biscuit, cream, or off-white; and once-popular terms like wolf gray and wolf sable have fallen out of use because neither the American Kennel Club nor malamute fanciers are eager to encourage the general public to confuse purebred Alaskan malamutes with wolves or wolf dogs. Well, I’ll skip to the result, which was that my search yielded only a handful of malamutes coded as blue. Next, I searched for dogs with the word blue in their registered names. That search identified 563 dogs, including some that clearly were—or had been—the real thing and not simply dogs named for blues songs. For instance, the color code “ChclBlWh” obviously meant the charcoal black shade of blue, and some of the dogs bore the names of kennels known to produce—or to have produced—blue, including Phyllis’s Benchmark, as well as Sena Lak, War-lock, Blue Ice, Sugarbear, Snosquall, Ice Age, Crevasse, and Blueline.

  Whoops! Maybe I need to explain the names of registered purebred dogs. Take Sammy. His registered name is Jazzland’s As Time Goes By. Jazzland is the kennel name of his breeder, Cindy Neely. In daily
life, of course, Steve and I make fools of ourselves over dogs all the time, but not to the extent of calling our dog by saying, “Come, Jazzland’s As Time Goes By!” Really, there are limits. So, Sammy’s call name is Sammy.

  At the end of about an hour with the database, when I started to search for dogs with potentially bluish names like Cornflower, Denim, Ultramarine, Sapphire, and Wedgwood, I could feel my thoughts turning various shades of Alice, baby, electric, robin’s egg, or possibly neon blue, so I quit for the day and ran to the little store on Concord Avenue for milk. Rain was still falling, and the sky was a deep slate, gunmetal, steel, or…

  Anyway, as I was coming out of the shop, I ran into Mellie, who was swathed in a gigantic red plastic poncho that made her look like a Mylar balloon. When we’d exchanged greetings, I asked what she was doing here. As I suspected, she’d been to Mass at Saint Peter’s. Neither of us had any news about Strike. I was carrying some lost-dog flyers that I’d intended to put around my neighborhood, but I gave them to Mellie instead. I said that I’d been sending e-mail. Did Mellie understand what I meant? Mellie said she’d been lighting candles and praying to the Virgin. Did I truly understand what she meant? In any case, so far, neither of us had a reply.