Dead and Doggone

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by Dead


  "What the fellow's got up there is no ordinary collection of fishing gear. Don't you know an old

  Payne rod when you see one?"

  "I know the name," I said. "Does he have one?"

  "A museum display," Buck said. "You didn't see the books?"

  "Of course I saw books. This is Cambridge. He's an assistant professor."

  "Call your insurance company tomorrow. I don't want you responsible."

  "Sure," I said. "So what did you think of Windy?"

  If you ask Buck a question about an Irish setter, you can expect an answer within seconds, but he

  paused.

  "Pretty," he said. "What's happened to the vet?" he added.

  Although I'm not religious in the conventional sense, I do believe that everything is part of an interconnected system. For example, if Sissy had set up in another grooming area at the

  Masconomet show, the show wouldn't have been canceled, I wouldn't have been exhausted that

  night, and Clyde would probably have been calm enough to stay in the guest room with Buck. My

  exhaustion is no excuse. Buck doesn't trust Cambridge, but he knows almost nothing about what is

  and isn't dangerous or stupid in a city. When Clyde got edgy inside my house and my father wanted

  to let him spend the night in his van, I should have said it wasn't safe, but all I said was that it

  wasn't a good idea. In the morning, Clyde was gone.

  "Of course I left the windows open," Buck hollered at me. "Did you want him to suffocate?"

  We were standing on the sidewalk by his white Chevy van. A bumper sticker on the rear said:

  "Keep Maine Green. Shoot a Developer."

  "You did lock it?" I asked.

  "Yes, I locked it." Buck hadn't even washed his face yet.

  His hair stood up wildly around his big head. "But you left that side window open?" It's a

  customized van with a couple of square windows, and the screen of one was torn away. "He was

  nervous," I added. "It looks to me as if he clawed it open and got out."

  My father didn't buy that explanation at all, but was convinced that Clyde had been stolen. I was

  sorry Rita was away. It seemed to me his worry about Clyde was making him paranoid. At the very

  least, he took Clyde's disappearance personally and insisted that it had something to do with Sissy

  Quigley.

  "Did I tell you what she called him?" His face was red. "Bloodthirsty."

  "Yesterday, you thought that was funny," I said. "Anyway, she said the same thing about Rowdy.

  And besides, she's dead."

  "And," he said, ignoring me, "she lived a block or two from here. Didn't you tell me that

  yourself?"

  "She's dead," I said again.

  "That husband isn't."

  "He doesn't even know you. Does he?"

  "Oh, he was there, too."

  As I learned later, according to every version of the confrontation except Buck's, the husband,

  Austin Quigley, had tried his hapless best to make his wife and Buck calm down and had finally

  succeeded in extricating Sissy.

  "This is one hell of a fix I'm in," he said, "with Millie due." Next to Clyde, Millie was Buck's current favorite. She'd been bred to Clyde sixty-one days earlier. The gestation period for wolves

  and dogs is about sixty-three days, which is why Buck had intended to return to Maine the morning

  after the show.

  "Maybe you can get Regina to stay." Regina Barnes is Buck's wolf-sitter.

  "Leaves for her sister's at four today."

  "AI?"

  "Busy."

  "Someone else?"

  He'd already checked. Owls Head, Maine, is not large enough to offer an ample supply of people eager to house- and pet-sit for Buck, and even fewer willing to act as midwife to a wolf dog bitch

  about to deliver her first litter, not that Buck would have trusted anyone except himself.

  "You can't leave Millie alone," I said. "Look, I'll find Clyde. I promise."

  "God's balls," Buck said.

  It was a feeble way to say thanks.

  -9-

  Losing any dog is bad, but losing a wolf dog is worse. Lots of dog lovers will take in a wandering

  dog, check his tags, and call the owner, but how many people will take in what looks like a wild

  animal and is probably so scared that he acts like one, too? In the country, you have to pray that no

  one shoots him. No matter where you are, you have to hope either that he comes home or that

  someone mistakes him for a funny-looking German shepherd.

  I envied Rowdy's self-confidence, based though it was on a failure to appreciate that anything was

  wrong. From his viewpoint, we were out for nothing more than a long, long walk, and my whistles

  and calls were cries of encouragement to him.

  "I'm not talking to you, buddy," I told him a couple of times. He didn't believe me.

  By the time we got home, Buck's van was gone, but on the kitchen table, he'd left a package

  clumsily wrapped in the green paper with red bows the Owls Head store carries at Christmastime.

  My mother was a meticulously polite person, and once in a while, Buck makes a halfhearted

  effort to maintain the family standards she set. She must have informed him that it's correct for a

  houseguest to express his gratitude with a small present. The package was fairly large, and so was

  the burgundy carrying case inside, but the revolver itself was small, my father's idea of the perfect

  little hostess gift.

  Ladysmith, it was called, a .38 special with a heavy three-inch barrel, but, still, a real lady's

  weapon — a Smith & Wesson Model 60 Ladysmith, top of the line, with a wood-grained stock and

  frosted finish on the barrel. Great. With a little effort, I'd be able to find frosted lipstick and nail polish to match. In Massachusetts, the possession of a handgun with no permit carries a mandatory

  one-year jail sentence. I'd be able to sit in my cell color-coordinating my makeup and manicure

  with my confiscated revolver. The last time Buck gave me a handgun, I reminded him of that law,

  but, as usual, he claimed that the U.S. Supreme Court was going to over-turn it any day. I also said

  that with a malamute that looks like Arnold Schwartzenegger disguised as a wolf, I didn't need a

  gun, but Buck had never heard of Arnold and insisted that a Schwartzenegger was a rare German

  hunting dog.

  I don't like guns, and, as I've said, I don't need a handgun. Even so, as Kevin sometimes reminds

  me, I'm a country girl at heart. I lifted the little Ladysmith out of its fitted case and held it. I even

  loaded it. Naturally, ammunition was part of the present. In his own way, Buck is thoughtful. When

  I was a kid, he always remembered batteries for the battery- operated toys, too. Then I unloaded it,

  tucked it back in the case, and put the whole thing on the high shelf in my bedroom closet, out of

  the reach of children.

  The Boston Globe, like every other newspaper, is usually short of news on Monday. Maybe that's

  why a dog made the front page, an event that normally happens only when Susan Butcher wins the

  Iditarod sled dog race, and it happens then only because it's impossible to photograph her without

  having a dog or two shove its way into the frame, since she owns more than a hundred. Sissy would

  have hated the photo that went with the story about her. It showed some people I didn't know

  leading their Afghan hound — not a pointer — out of the back door of Bayside. The people looked

  disappointed. Sissy would have hated the story itself, too, and not just because it was news of her

  death. It announced to the world that she was fifty-fiv
e years old, first of all, and it never once

  mentioned pointers, just dogs, as if Max and Lady might equally well have been Cavalier King

  Charles spaniels or Manchester terriers instead of pointers, as if their breed didn't matter. It had

  mattered to Sissy. If I die a violent death, I hope the Globe gets things straight: Alaskan Malamute

  Grieves Owner" or, with luck, "Companion Dog Malamute Suffers Loss."

  -10-

  Cambridge Animal Control. The SPCA. The Animal Rescue League. And the others. I tried them

  all. Monday. Tuesday. Lost-dog ads in all the papers, the Globe, the Herald, the Tab, the Cambridge

  Chronicle. In the Back Bay lives a woman who takes in stray dogs and places them with families. It's

  rumored that if she doesn't find enough strays, she creates them, so to speak. If you ever adopt a

  dog from her, check its tags. No one else may have bothered to call the owners. I called her, and a

  lot of other people and places, too. The lost-dog signs I posted allover Cambridge had a photo of

  Clyde that didn't Xerox too badly. The signs said he looked wolflike and acted shy.

  Rowdy and I walked so much that I started wearing hiking boots for our expeditions, and I

  whistled so much that my mouth looked as if I'd been on some kind of fad lemon diet. Even though

  I always left the answering machine on when we went out, I worried about missing any calls about

  Clyde, but as soon as we got home, I'd worry about not doing anything active to find him. Most of

  the messages were from Buck, even though I phoned him a couple of times a day. On Sunday night,

  he had sounded worried. On Monday, he had sounded angry. By Tuesday, Millie still wasn't in

  labor, and he was frantic about Clyde, wildly suspicious of Austin Quigley, and insistent that I get in touch with Matt Gerson.

  By Tuesday morning, there'd been four messages from Lieutenant De Franco asking Buck and me

  to return his calls — I had more important things to do — and two messages from Steve asking me

  to call him, too. I didn't.

  The only in I had anywhere was whatever influence I have with Kevin Dennehy, but I probably

  didn't need it. He'd met Clyde, and he likes dogs, anyway. He had one once, Trapper, but he's

  refused to get another since Trapper died. He loves dogs too much to have one, or so he says. So

  don't have one, I always tell him. Have lots and lots.

  "I don't like to ask favors," I said when I reached him at the Central Square station on Tuesday

  morning, "but I need help."

  "Has your father left town?"

  "He had to. He didn't have any choice." I explained.

  "Mickey's just going to love this story," he said when I told him about Millie and said that not

  even De Franco could expect her to whelp her first litter alone.

  "I told him everything I know," I said. "And Buck didn't have anything to do with it. Come on,

  Kevin. You know that. He was there, but so were a few thousand other people. Where was her

  husband?"

  "With the kid. In the men's room."

  "That's a great alibi," I said. "From a nice impartial witness, their son. And furthermore, the

  bathrooms are right near where it happened, you know."

  We talked a little more about Sissy's murder, in which Kevin had a special interest, not just

  because of De Franco or my father or me but because, to my surprise, Kevin had actually gone in

  and out of Quigley Drugs without having the sign fall on his head. In other words, he'd been a

  customer. Since Quigley Drugs was only a couple of blocks from Appleton and Concord-Kevin's is

  the first house on Appleton — I wouldn't have been surprised except that I'd always assumed that

  Quigley's didn't have any customers.

  "It's all right," he said. "It's a regular kind of a place." Huron Drug, on Huron A venue, is about the same distance away as Quigley's. I always go to Huron because it has a post office as well as a

  pharmacy, and dog writers have to make as many trips to the post office as other writers do. I'd

  never thought of Huron Drug as exclusive, but I suppose that in Kevin's eyes, catering to Brattle

  Street by carrying imported soaps, loofahs, pumice stones, and English back brushes made it, in

  contrast to Quigley's, irregular.

  Before Kevin hung up, I asked him to put in a word for me with the guys in Animal Control. "You

  can get them to keep a special eye out for Clyde, right? They can do that. And tell them he's

  harmless."

  "Right," said Kevin. "I'll tell them to watch out for a harmless wolf."

  Kevin is mostly bark. I thought he'd help, or at least try. I think he has a slight crush on me. Even

  so, I didn't ask him to speak to his cousin, not about me, not about my father. It was a subject I

  preferred to let drop.

  My ads and signs offered a reward. The calls started that morning.

  "How big was the dog?" I asked a woman in Somerville who thought she might have seen Clyde.

  "Why, a little smaller than Billy," she said.

  "What kind of a dog is Billy?" I asked.

  She laughed. "Billy's not a dog! He's my son."

  Billy was four, too small to be bigger than Clyde.

  That afternoon while I was whistling and calling up Appleton toward the river, Rowdy and I ran

  into Mimi Nichols. For once, she was alone and wearing clothing made of an identifiable material,

  heavy cotton jersey, or at least I think so. I was, of course, walking, but she was really walking. For

  exercise. In costume. Does Neiman-Marcus sell sweat suits? If so, they're probably called "fitness

  wear" or something, but the pale gray outfit she had on must have come from there, if not from

  Bonwit's. And, of course, her shoes were made for aerobic walking, too, not just for putting one foot

  in front of the other. It's understood in Cambridge that one mile in a suit and shoes like Mimi's is

  equivalent to ten miles in an old windbreaker, jeans, and hiking boots.

  As always, though, she acted lovely and remembered my name.

  "This is Rowdy," I said, even though I knew she'd forget his name as soon as we parted ways.

  "A husky? Why, he's beautiful!" she exclaimed.

  As Libby had said, she didn't know anything about dogs. First of all, a Siberian husky is called a

  Siberian, not a husky, and, second, as you already know, Rowdy wasn't one.

  "Thank you," I said, anyway, and after I explained about malamutes, I told her about Clyde, who

  might wander her way. In terms of property values, her neighborhood, just off Brattle Street, is two

  million dollars up from mine, but geographically, it's two or three blocks.

  "That's terrible," she said. She sounded as if she meant it. "What can I do?" she added, half to herself, and I realized that she was used to being asked for help, preferably in three figures or more.

  "Reggie," she said. "He's wonderful about things like this. He can do anything. I don't think he has any strays now, but sometimes he finds lost dogs. He finds families for them."

  Rowdy and I followed Mimi down her driveway to the back of the house, where an addition had

  expanded a mere twenty or so rooms to at least thirty, not counting the four long concrete-paved

  dog runs or the big exercise pen with its own cedar-shingled doghouse. I've mentioned Cambridge

  real estate? If Mimi ever found herself short of funds, I thought, she could move out the pointers

  and get six or eight hundred a month each for their apartments.

  Sunshine and another male stood barking in their runs. The second one was called Regis, I

  learned later, and he'd been Ed Nichols'
s hunting dog. In the big exercise pen, a third pointer, a

  runty-looking bitch, ran up to the gate, trembled allover, and urinated. Rowdy was lunging at the

  end of his lead, giving the males a suitably top-dog greeting while not missing the chance to take

  advantage of the poor bitch's pathetic submission by frightening her almost to death.

  "We have this trouble with Zip in the house," Mimi said apologetically. I could hardly hear her

  over the din. "Libby, says she can't help it. She's working on it. We don't show her."

  Libby had been tactful. Maybe, just maybe, with endless patience Libby might be able to cure the

  submissive urination — that's what it's called — but not poor Zip's cow hocks, undershot bite, or

  pigeon breast.

  Mimi must have read my face. "I bought her myself," she added, "from a pet shop. She has

  papers." Having papers means nothing, of course. Take one look at Zip. "Regis was my husband's

  hunting dog, and after Ed died, I started to keep him in the house, for company. And then one day,

  just on impulse, I thought he ought to have a companion, and I ran out and got Zip. It's not the kind

  of thing I usually do."

  "How did you find Libby?" I asked, mostly to curb my impulse to deliver a lecture on the evils of

  pet shops, and I mean evils. I won't buy so much as a collar or leash from a pet shop that sells

  puppies. "Rowdy, cut it out. Hush."

  "My father found her," Mimi said. "She was at Westminster, and somebody there recommended

  her." Westminster is to dog shows what the Kentucky Derby is to horse races. "I knew I needed help

  with Zip, and she is much, much better, and Reggie's wonderful with her, too. Libby's around

  somewhere. Libby?"

  Libby, followed by Reggie, appeared from a door at the back of the house. Although they both had

  their shirts tucked in and their jeans zipped, I had the impression that our voices and the dogs'

  barking had roused them from bed and the simultaneous impression that Mimi didn't realize it.

  I'd only heard Reggie speak a couple of times before, but I'd suspected real Down East Maine,

  Hancock County or Washington County, north of Ellsworth and Bar Harbor, north of where the

  tourists all stop, and I turned out to be right.

  "You're from Maine," I said after we all greeted each other.

  "Born in Pembroke," he said. That's Washington County. "One godforsaken hole. You never heard of it."

 

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