by Dead
before I saw his booth.
“All dogs are descended from wolves,” he was explaining forcefully.
Even from a distance — and I kept my distance — the exhibit looked good: Large posters of white arctic wolves, a video display of some kind, and, of course, Clyde, wandering around at the end of a
lead behind Buck, like a long, tall, rangy version of Rowdy, with big ears and wary eyes.
Sissy stood in front of the exhibit, bony arms akimbo, shrieking at Buck, almost spitting. “You’ve
got no business bringing that thing in here. For your information, I want you to know that there are
valuable show dogs here today.”
I stayed long enough to see Buck draw in a gigantic breath, throw his shoulders back in that
Teddy Roosevelt bull moose way he has, and start to bellow. Then I walked away. I’d wanted him
distracted while I was in the ring, but not like that. I should have gone up to Sissy, loyally
introduced Buck as my father, explained that Sissy had two beautiful pointers and that Buck used
to have goldens, and got them talking to each other. Instead, I walked away.
It was a mistake to get Rowdy out of his crate when I was feeling so lousy. I did, anyway. Then I
heeled to him to the Novice B ring, where we waited our turn while I sweated. People who know will
tell you that if you’re nervous or upset in the ring, you smell like a stranger to your dog and he won’t
obey you. Those people are right. When our turn in the ring finally cam, Rowdy’s heeling on leash
was bad. Just bad, not disqualifying. I don’t think I made any handler errors. But I could feel myself
sweating, and I could sense that stranger phenomenon. To Rowdy, I wasn’t Holly anymore. I was
some other person who smelled of guilt, shame, and disloyalty. After the figure eight, the last part
of heeling on leash, I stacked Rowdy up for the stand-for-examination exercise, unsnapped the
leash, and handed it to Linda McNally,, who smiled at me and tilted her head a little to the side.
Rowdy did fine. Next came heeling off leash.
“Are you ready?” Mr. Salisbury asked.
“Ready,” I said.
That’s a ritual. I was, of course, lying.
“Forward,” he said.
“Rowdy, heel,” I squeaked.
Rowdy was more or less with me, less rather than more, but if the dog stays within six feet of the handler, the judge is supposed to award a qualifying score for the exercise. The recall did us in. with
Rowdy sitting at one end of the ring, I walked to the opposite end, turned, and, on Mr. Salisbury’s
signal, called, ”Rowdy, come!”
Rowdy didn’t. instead, he shook himself all over, threw me a grin, and started to tear around the
ring in circles. The crowd loved it. First, he just got laughter, then applause. The judge and the
stewards loved it. I tried to catch Rowdy, and if he’d been on leash, I’d probably have succeeded. As
it was, he got a running start, sailed out of the ring, steamrollered his way through a bunch of
people, and leapt into the next ring, where Dorothy Barton was judging pointers. Pointer dogs.
Max. I was in that ring only seconds after rowdy. Bless Dorothy Barton. She swept in, caught
Rowdy’s collar, and brought him to a swift half. If Max had gone for? If someone had tried to break
it up and been bitten? If he’d accidentally bitten a judge? I don’t want to think about it.
Pretending that Rowdy was someone else’s dog — and that my own was a golden retriever — I
took him by the collar and led him back to the Novice B ring. I didn’t say a word to him. Mr.
Salisbury, who is really a lovely person and a good judge, asked me whether I wanted to complete
the remaining exercises, the group sit and down. I didn’t. a mean judge would have insisted.
With Rowdy back on leash, I led him to his crate and shut hi in. the Siberian was in hers, and
Faith was nowhere in sight. I sat on the floor and felt rotten. I felt guilty about my disloyalty to
Buck and even more awful about Rowdy’s misbehavior. I could almost hear my mother’s voice
asking me what she always asked when a dog I’d trained acted up: “And just who taught him to do
that? Just who trained him?”
But you want to know what obedience people are like? Ten or twelve people came up and told me
worse stories about their own dogs. I heard about dogs retrieving dumbbells from other rings,
leaping out of the ring to steal food from the spectators, relieving themselves in the ring, and trying
to bite judges — sometimes successfully. Not one person tried to make me feel bad. As I began to
calm down, I remembered what a good time Rowdy had had flying around in circles and playing the
clown for everyone. These things happen. It’s only a dog show.
But Sissy must have know how near a miss we’d had with Rowdy and Max. I’d been cowardly
enough for one day. With Rowdy still locked in his crate, I wandered down through the grooming
area to offer Sissy the apology she deserved. Rowdy hadn’t started the first fight. Even if he’d run up
to Max in the ring, he wouldn’t necessarily have started another one. But he might have, or Max
might have, and Rowdy certainly had disrupted the judging. For that, I owed Sissy an apology.
Before I saw her, I heard Max. He was howling in a way pointers usually don’t, pitifully,
frantically. He was in a big Vari-Kennel on the floor, and he was scratching at the metal mesh door,
trying to get out. That’s not normal. A show dog’s crate is his home away from home, his den, his
haven in the chaos of the show.
“What’s wrong, boy?” I asked him as I walked toward the crate. “No Best of Breed today?”
I almost stepped on her.
The red clown wig was lose, starting to slip off, and scanty red fuzz of another shade was curling
out underneath it. Her grotesquely made-up face finally had the best reason of all to look as if it
belonged on a corpse. I must have lost my mind for a couple of seconds. For a brief instant, I
thought Sissy had had an accident. Then I came to. There was no way she could have done it
herself. She could not have taken that pair of big grooming shears and plunged them through the
silly turquoise party dress into her bony chest. She couldn’t have fallen on them and rolled over.
She couldn’t have done it, not by accident, not on purpose. Someone had made Faith Barlow’s wish
come true. Someone had shut Sissy up for good.
-6-
“My best grooming shears!” Libby said indignantly. “Those happen to be Geib shears. Katana,
they’re called. You probably recognized them.” I must have looked blank, but she went on. “You
know what they cost me? Two hundred and ninety dollars. Mail-order discount. New England
Serum.”
“I’ve been using UPCO lately,” I said. “United Pharmaceutical. There’s no fifty-dollar minimum,
and they carry most of the same stuff.”
“No these,” Libby said.
“Two hundred and ninety dollars is a lot of money,” I said.
“Oh, but they’re worth it.”
What kinds of human beings are these, you might ask, chatting about the cost of grooming
equipment within hours of a murder? These are dog people. In shock.
One question popped into my mind — if a murder occurs at an American Kennel Club show, do
the rules still apply? If so, Libby and I were breaking one of Masconomet’s — namely, no chairs in the grooming areas. I’d unfolded mine, L.L. Bean, white, with a convenient carry strap, at
the far
end of the grooming area near the vacated obedience rings, and Libby had appropriated the judge’s
wooden chair from the Novice A ring. Maybe Libby’s more of a professional than I am, or maybe
looking like a Rottweiler decreases the need to have a dog with you all the time. In any case, she’d
left Mimi’s pointers in their crates, but Rowdy was with me, making up to Libby, nuzzling her
hands, swishing his white tail, and giving her one of those big-brown-eyes looks meant to convince
her that he thought she was someone special. Since he thought everyone was special, it was
probably true. According to the American Kennel Club breed standard, the Alaskan malamute is
not a one-man dog. According to my standards, this Alaskan malamute was an indiscriminate
anyone-and-everyone dog, hopelessly flattering, maddeningly sincere.
“This is really a very sweet dog,” said his latest victim. “Too bad he NQ’d.”
“It wouldn’t’ have counted, anyway,” Is aid. “Would it?”
“Of course it would.”
“How could it? I’m sure they’ll just scratch everything. What else can they do?”
“Oh, no. Sunshine took BOB.” Best of Breed. “They can’t.”
When the judging of all the breeds is over, the winner for each breed enters the best in groups
competition for his group — sporting dogs, working dogs, terriers, or whatever. For Libby and
Sunshine, the show was just beginning.
“I haven’t heard anything official,” I said, “but I’ll bet this is one show that won’t go on.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“Libby, really, I mean, the woman is dead. She was murdered. You can’t just go on holding a dog
show around her body.”
“Maybe you’re right,” she said. “The dogs are mostly too upset, anyway.”
“I’ve never heard a pointer wail like that before. You know what I thought? I thought,
bloodcurdling. There was that blood, and that unearthly wailing, and you know the way a really
high soprano voice can shatter glass? I had this awful image in my head of blood curdling.” My
hands were starting to shake. I grabbed Rowdy’s collar and pulled him away from Libby.
“It’s just an expression. Blood doesn’t curdle.”
“I guess not,” I said. “It doesn’t curdle. It clots.”
“Hey, pull yourself together. Getting morbid isn’t going to do good. It was just your bad luck that
you found her. It doesn’t have anything to do with you.”
“It had something to do with someone. I feel terrible — I used to laugh at her. Not to her face.”
“Of course you did,” Libby said. “So did everyone else. She was ridiculous.”
“She was pathetic. The baby dresses. The makeup.”
“Nobody made her do that. Did you actually know her?”
“I used to see her at dog training. But I just really met her the other day. Rowdy got into a fight
with one of her dogs.”
“Max?”
“Yeah. But it worked out all right. Neither of them got hurt. Then I saw her today.” I dropped my
voice. “Faith told me that Sissy stole things.”
“Everyone knows that.”
“I didn’t.”
“That’s because you don’t show in breed anymore.”
“I never did very much.”
“If you had, you wouldn’t feel so sorry for her,” Libby said. “Being a thief wasn’t the worst thing
about her.”
“So she was boring. And silly. I mean, it’s so sad, Libby. For one thing, there was that pathetic
need to look young. And for another, I practically didn’t know her, and she started telling me all
about all these ailments, all he allergies.”
“That was bull,” Libby said. “She was a class A hypochondriac.”
“I guess.”
“All she wanted was attention. And that wasn’t the worst thing, anyway. There was lots more. She
said terrible things about people, and most of it was outright lies. Boy, was she ever jealous of
Mimi. And she was jealous of me, too. And another thing is, did you ever hear her with that poor
kid of hers, Pete? She dragged him to every show to haul her stuff in and out, and she treated him
like garbage. I’m telling you, she was a nasty person. Look, there are vicious dogs, right? There are.
We all know it. And there are vicious people.”
“Libby,” a deep voice said, “Mimi wants you.” Reggie, his name was, the brawn.
“Thanks,” she said. “I’ll be right there.”
“someone’s always right there, huh?” I said.
“It’s not really like that. She’s all right. She doesn’t know anything, but I like her. Are you okay?”
“Sure,” I said.
Okay means, of course, that my dog is with me and he’s fine. Rita has a book called I’m OK,
You’re OK. That’s how I am, except the other way around. The dog’s okay, I’m okay. According to
Rita, the hand that rocks the cradle really does rule the world. Buck and Marissa had a wooden
cradle for me when I was a baby, but I don’t remember it, and you can’t rock a whelping box, which
is what I do remember, lots of whelping boxes filled with golden retriever puppies. When puppies
are not okay, they whine and squeal so piercingly that no on eels in hearing distance is okay, either.
Okay is quiet puppies, soft fur, the sweet scent of dog, and a correct canine-human ratio, eight or
ten to one. With my quiet, furry Rowdy at my side, and two thousand dogs nearby, I’d have been
perfectly okay. Except for remembering Max.
Lieutenant Mickey De Franco had a bizarre resemblance to Santa Claus, the same curly white
hair, the same round, red-checked face, the twinkling eyes, and an abdominal bowl full of jelly that
would have earned him higher marks at the North Pole than a police physical.
“You’re from Cambridge . . . Concord Avenue.” He read from his notes. “Ho.”
I swear, if I’d spirit-gummed on the white whiskers and popped him into the red suit, he’d have
asked me what I wanted for Christmas. What he did ask was whether I knew his cousin, Kevin
Dennehy.
“Kevin’s my next-door neighbor,” I said. Kevin’s a cop, too, but in Cambridge, not Boston. “My
kitchen’s his local bar and grill.”
Kevin lives with his mother. Ever since Mrs. Dennehy abandoned the Catholic church for
Seventh-Day Adventism, she won’t allow alcohol, meat, or caffeine in her house. The Dennehy
house is definitely hers, not Kevin’s. A corner of my refrigerator is definitely Kevin’s, not mine.
“So you’re the dog nut,” De Franco said.
“So to speak.”
“Ho-ho.” As Kevin told me later, his cousin was not born ho-hoing but acquired the habit while
playing Santa for the Ancient Order of Hibernians every Christmas. Kevin says that no one else in
the family even notices it now that they’ve made De Franco quit laying his finger aside of his nose,
but maybe Kevin made that up.
Rowdy was pulling on his leash and whining at the sight and smell of an array of American
cheese slices, bologna, and olive loaf on a long table at the far end of the room. We were at one of
the white-shrouded round tables, with the napkins and silverware shoved out of the way. The police
had requisitioned the meeting rooms where dog show officials were supposed to be eating their free
lunches. De Franco had drawn the stewards’ lunch room. Judges get roast beef or lobster rolls, not
cold cuts.
&n
bsp; He picked up a fork and started tapping it on the edge of the table.
“They call your father the wolf man, I heard,” he said. Tap. Tap.
As any properly socialized resident of Cambridge would have realized instantly, the man was
obviously in therapy for the Santa bit. Every time he felt the impulse to ho-ho, he was supposed to
tap-tap instead.
“He raises wolf dog hybrids,” I said matter-of-factly. “And he does educational programs about
wolves. He used to have golden retrievers,” I added. There’s no more ordinary, normal, respectable
breed of dog than the golden retriever, except possibly the English setter.
“And you’ve got one?” He pointed the fork at Rowdy. “That’s one of the wolves?”
“No,” I said. “This is an Alaskan malamute.”
It was a natural mistake. The hybridizers’ ideal is a friendly, loving, trainable animal that looks
like a wolf. In other words, if you want my opinion, wolf dog hybridizing is a silly and unsuccessful
effort to reinvent the wheel, the center of dogdom’s circle, that great canine mandala, the new hub
of my life, the breed that makes other dogs look subacanine, the Alaskan malamute. Pardon the
digression.
“My father has a hybrid with him,” I said. “He’d be glad to introduce you.”
“He already has. Ho.”
“Oh.”
“Says he lives alone in Maine with nineteen of them. Nineteen wolf dogs. Correct?”
“If he says so. That sounds about right.” Buck also had a bitch due in a couple of days, but it
seemed better not to mention it. “He’s sort of an expert on wolves and dogs,” I said. “Especially
wolves. He give talks about it. He was at the Museum of Science a while ago.” It’s almost as sane
and respectable as a golden retriever.
“He invited me to visit,” De Franco said. “Said I might like one. He said I might like a wolf.” Tap.
Tap.
Oh, Buck, if you had to offer him a wild animal, couldn’t you have had the sense to make it a
reindeer?”
“Really? He doesn’t usually do that,” I said. “They aren’t exactly the ideal family pet.” My father
never, of course, admits that, just that the breeding program isn’t too advanced yet, but he never
places the pups in families with kids, either.
