by Susan Conant
I controlled the urge to show her the puppy mill tape. It’s strong stuff; it gives me nightmares. I was still angry at her as well as sorry for her, but not that angry.
“Anyway, we have business to take care of,” I said abruptly. “You owe me thirty-five dollars.”
“I don’t have any money.” Her eyes were wide and childish. “Besides, I didn’t touch the trail mix. Your dog did.”
I just could not help laughing. “I thought he wasn’t mine to own! If I don’t own him, I’m not responsible for his debts, am I? Anyway, I am, and I paid, and the only reason I had to pay the thirty-five dollars was that you let him loose.”
We got into what may seem like a petty quarrel. Although Gloria had dropped out of school, she didn’t work, and when she’d said that she had no money, she’d been describing her chronic state, not temporary empty pockets. Her mother, Gloria told me, provided room, board, and nothing else. If the Massachusetts economy had merely been in a recession, as the newspapers kept claiming, I’d have tried to talk Gloria into finding a job. But even if there had been jobs out there, what did Gloria know how to do? If I wanted to be paid, I’d have to employ her myself. I own this house, or I will eventually, and I do most of the maintenance and repair. I can paint, spackle, cure dripping faucets, replace broken glass, and repair garbage disposals. I do my own housework, and I shovel my own walks and driveway.
“Do you have a heart condition?” I asked.
“No,” she said.
“Good. The next time it snows, be here at seven A.M., and you can start working off the money. I work at home, but my tenants don’t, and people start going by here early. I want the sidewalks clear. Or maybe I’ll think of something else you can do. In the meantime, I need to ask you a personal question.” Please understand that I could not stop myself. I couldn’t look at the poor kid another minute and keep quiet. “Gloria, have you ever been to a dermatologist?”
Involuntarily, I’m sure, she dropped her head and hunched her shoulders in an obvious effort to cover her face. Worse, she blushed furiously, and the addition of yet more red did nothing for her complexion.
“Have you?” I persisted.
She managed to shake her head.
“You need to see someone,” I said. D.V.M.’s are, of course, more in my line than are M.D.’s, most of whom I don’t trust, but when I’d first come to Cambridge, I’d caught a persistent and disgusting case of ringworm from one of my cats, and a good dermatologist had cured me. I liked her a lot. Framed pictures of her family rested proudly on her desk: four English cockers, very handsome dogs. “I know someone good,” I said. “I’ll make the appointment for you.”
“I don’t have any money,” Gloria said.
“Then we’ll both pray for snow. In the meantime, don’t worry about it. And don’t go to any more dog shows, either.”
Gloria smiled. Amazingly, she had beautiful, perfectly even white teeth, a smile out of a toothpaste commercial. Life is a parts match, right? It’s a parts match. Everybody wins.
10
The frigid temperatures of Sunday night glazed Cambridge in a layer of ice as hard and slick as the coating on a candy apple. When I let Rowdy and Kimi into the yard for their first brief outing of the day, they slid, lost their footing, and had to dig in their nails and scramble to make it back up the stairs. Footing bad enough to take the ground out from under a malamute usually means a productive work day for me and a long snooze for the dogs. They stretch out on the kitchen floor, and I sit at the table drinking cup after cup of sweet tea and covering page after page of yellow legal pad with my illegible scrawl. In case you haven’t guessed, the whole point of being a writer is that you get to stay home with your dogs. And, of course, the article about Sally Brand wasn’t finished. There was a lot more to say than I’d covered so far. For instance, I’d assumed that Larry Wilson’s brace of pec-flex-tail-wag poodles must be Sally’s masterpiece, but when I’d mentioned Larry, Sally had informed me that hula girl tattoos like his had been out since World War Two. The poodles had been a technical challenge, she conceded, but, all in all, they lacked artistry. Please don’t pass that along to Larry. Or the poodles, either, of course.
Despite the ice outside and the literary temptations of tea, dogs, and words in my cozy cream-and-terra-cotta kitchen, it wasn’t a writing day. I was due on Enid Sievers’s raspberry doorstep at ten-thirty, when I’d promised to pick up Missy and drive her to Betty Burley’s. Before collecting Missy, I intended to stop at Puppy Luv, where I meant to follow Betty’s advice: to stay calm, to introduce myself, and to persuade Diane Sweet to let me leave some material with the malamute puppy’s papers: my own name, address, and phone number; information about training; and the national breed club’s booklet about the Alaskan malamute. The booklet about the Alaskan malamute would present a problem because the section entitled “On Choosing a Puppy” explained, among other things, that pet shops buy puppies wholesale from people who don’t know and usually don’t care whether the pups are free of hip dysplasia, chondrodysplasia, and other genetic faults. Chondrodysplasia causes skeletal distortion throughout the body, grotesque deformities of the joints and limbs. A male and female may be carriers who show no signs of the disease themselves but whose puppies sure do. Puppy mills don’t screen for it, and neither do backyard breeders. And then there’s progressive retinal atrophy. Seizures. Day blindness. Anyway, I suspected that Puppy Luv wouldn’t be eager to pass along a booklet containing that truthful but damning paragraph about pet shops, and, with considerable reluctance, I’d glued a blank sheet of paper over that page of the booklet and laboriously printed in some information about the Cambridge Dog Training Club. The result looked patched up, but I was hoping that Diane Sweet would simply thumb through the booklet and accept it.
Actually, I was hoping that Monday happened to be Diane Sweet’s day off and that someone else would be in charge at Puppy Luv. If you’re afraid to make a fool of yourself, you have no business owning a dog, but it’s one thing to make a fool of yourself with someone who loves you no matter what and quite another thing to confront someone like Diane Sweet and admit that you’ve been a total jerk. And I had been. On Friday, instead of maturely striding in, presenting myself as who I am, and making a reasonable request, I’d acted childish. Too many baby greens lately. So instead of costuming myself as someone else, today I dressed in honest, self-revealing L.L. Bean—flannel-lined jeans, flannel shirt, heavy parka, Ragg socks and mittens, boots with good traction—and set out in my cold Bronco.
At my first glimpse of the seedy strip mall, my heart raced and fell. I’d expected the parking lot to look as icy and empty as the center of the Boston Garden before a Bruins game. In fact, the glare was so bright that I wouldn’t have been surprised to see a Zamboni machine chugging away, but the area directly in front of Puppy Luv was packed with cars. God damn, I thought, Valentine’s Day. In the yearly cycle of the American pet shop, summer is a time of hibernation. Pet shops do most of their business between Labor Day and Easter. Christmas, the period of greatest activity, was past. Easter was distant. Despite the cheerful display of hearts and clichés I’d seen in Puppy Luv, I hadn’t expected this pre-Valentine’s burst of business.
Four of the cars, however, turned out to be police cruisers. A few others were official vehicles, too. Some apparently belonged to the innocently curious or genuinely worried, the rest to the truly ghoulish. Yellow crime-scene tape cordoned off Puppy Luv. Stomping his hefty way out of the pet shop was my friend and neighbor Kevin Dennehy, who’s a Cambridge cop. I pulled the Bronco into a space near the hardware store a few doors down from Puppy Luv, killed the engine, got out, and watched Kevin, who did something unprecedented.
In case you’ve never met Kevin, I should tell you that he’s a big, burly guy, shorter than Steve, but about twice as wide. How someone who works out at the Y and who runs, too, can sustain that ever-enlarging gut, I don’t know, but Kevin manages. By the time he’s thirty-five, Kevin is going to have a
real beer belly, even though he isn’t allowed to keep beer in the refrigerator at home or drink it in the house. He can’t keep or consume meat there, either, because his mother is a Seventh Day Adventist, a vegetarian as well as a teetotaler. Consequently, Kevin owns a corner of my refrigerator. That’s how I happen to be an expert on his consumption of flesh and Bud. Rita, my second-floor tenant and resident shrink, says that in granting Kevin access to my kitchen but not my bed, I am fostering his prolonged dependence on his mother by encouraging him to transfer a libidinal cathexis from one Oedipally unavailable object to a symbolic substitute. That’s a direct quote. Honest to God, that’s how Rita talks. Also, Rita places particular emphasis on the refrigerator, but I’m too embarrassed to tell you what she says about it.
Anyway, as one who knows more than Kevin himself does about how much he drinks, I’ll swear that his consumption is what Rita calls “socioculturally normative.” Furthermore, the hamburger and bologna in Kevin’s corner of my refrigerator were fresh. All this is to explain that when Kevin stomped out of Puppy Luv, staggered to the edge of the concrete walk, bent over the fragile barrier of crime-scene tape, and vomited, it probably wasn’t because he had a hangover or a case of food poisoning.
Nor does he have a weak stomach. Nor, in general, does he dislike dogs. On the contrary, he’s fond of them. Even so, when I went tearing across the ice, skidded up to him, and solicitously placed a mittened hand on his beefy shoulder, he dragged himself fully upright, trained his bloodshot blue eyes on me, and said with a note of unmistakable accusation, “Oh, Christ. Dogs.” Kevin has the fair Irish skin that goes with his red hair, but he runs outdoors even in winter, so he usually looks pale but healthy, not sickly white with green undertones.
“Do you have any more to bring up?” I asked. I’m used to ministering to nausea victims, of course. Rowdy and Kimi will eat anything.
The dogs like company when they’re retching. I always wrap my arms around their poor heaving ribs, murmur words of consolation, and save the recriminations for later. (“Garbage in, garbage out, you big dope. What did you think was going to happen?”) But Kevin was an ingrate. Although my practiced eye told me that he did, in fact, have more to bring up, he choked it down, glared at me, and said bluntly, “Go home.”
“Okay,” I said. “But just tell me … Kevin, are the puppies all right?”
“Jesus Christ!” He dug his hands into the pockets of his unzipped parka. “Holly, a woman’s dead. A young woman. A pretty woman. And what you want to know is … What you want to know is …? Christ, am I hearing this right?”
“Look, Kevin, I’m sorry, but I do want to know. I’m sorry about the woman, but I need to know. Are the puppies all right?”
Kevin Dennehy huffed himself up, locked his jaw, and said between clenched teeth, “Sure, Holly. Everything’s just hunky-dory in there. Your little darlings are all rounded up and tucked in their beddie-byes. After a nice meal, of course. Tore open every bag of dog food in the place, ran riot, peed, puked, crapped, and … Holly, you ever thought about what a medical examiner has to do? What the guy has to do, all day, every day? You ever thought about that?”
“Not in great detail,” I said.
“Yeah, well, keep it that way,” Kevin advised. “You’ll sleep better. But you don’t need to know a lot to reach the conclusion that it takes a whole lot of bad smell to do that to a medical examiner.” Kevin’s eyes darted to the ground. He shuffled his feet as if he wanted to kick something over the wet mess visibly steaming on the icy pavement. “The poor bastard was sicker than me.”
“Kevin, nausea is nothing to be ashamed of,” I said.
“Would you not keep looking at it?” He raised his eyes upward toward the cold sky.
“Diane Sweet?” I asked.
Kevin stared at me.
“Because of the malamute.” I answered his unspoken question. “That’s why I’m here. I was in here the other day because somebody told me there was a malamute puppy. I heard there was a malamute for sale here. And there was. So today I was going to—”
“Well, you’re not,” Kevin grumbled.
“Kevin, what happened? The person is, uh …”
“Yeah. Diane Sweet. She owned the place, her and her husband. A hard-working lady. Last night she’s working here all alone. It’s late. Guy forces his way in.”
I looked at the plate glass and at the door, both festooned with valentines.
“Through the back,” Kevin said. “She’s working late, guy busts his way in, she puts up a fight. Cash drawer’s empty.”
“How did she …?”
“Best guess is first he tries to shut her up, and then that doesn’t work, or maybe she struggles a lot, and he doesn’t like it. So he grabs her by the throat. Or maybe it works the other way around. He grabs her by the throat, she puts up a fight, maybe she—Anyway, then he ends up wrapping the plastic around her head, and like they say on the dry cleaner’s bags …”
“And the puppies were—The puppies were all turned loose? Why would …?”
“Screw up the evidence,” Kevin said. “Jesus.” He blew out hard. A small white cloud rose from his mouth. “The worst mess, Jesus. I don’t know how those guys are ever going to—”
“Were they loose there all night? What time—?”
“Couple of hours. When she didn’t come home, the husband started calling, and then he came over. I’ve been here all night.”
“Look, Kevin,” I said. “I’m sorry, but the fact is, overeating like that is no joke, and some of those puppies weren’t in great shape to begin with. You really ought to get a vet to come and take a look at them. Steve would do it. For an emergency like this, I know he would. Maybe he can—”
Kevin’s face was tired and angry. “Can he raise the dead, Holly? That’s all we need in there right now. We need a guy that can raise the dead. And then, after that, when that poor woman’s back on her feet breathing again, I’ll worry about the dogs.”
“Kevin, if something happens to one of those puppies because you didn’t—”
“Like I said, Holly, go home. I don’t want to see you back here. Go home.”
“Kevin, I’m sorry she’s dead, but that woman must have had a lot of people who hated her. You think this is a dirty business now? Well, it was always a dirty business. There are probably five hundred people in Cambridge who bought sick dogs from Diane Sweet, maybe more. And every one of them must’ve found out what her so-called health guarantee really meant, which was not a damn thing. She didn’t care where her puppies came from, and she didn’t care where they went, and she didn’t care what happened to them, because nobody who runs a pet shop gives a damn. They care about one thing, and that’s profit. Diane Sweet had enemies. She deserved them. So I’m sorry she’s dead, but I’m not sorry she’s out of business, and there are going to be a whole lot of people who agree with me.”
“I got work to do,” Kevin said coldly. “Go home. It’s not just dogs that make me sick. It’s you. Get out of here. You make me sick.”
11
When I stood on Enid Sievers’s doorstep, my cheeks were still as raspberry as the paint on her house. Maybe nobody had chosen that color after all. Maybe a good friend had looked the house in the eye and said, “You make me sick.” Did I deserve Kevin’s disgust? Maybe. While I waited for Enid Sievers to answer the bell, the medical examiner who’d been sickened by the stench in Puppy Luv was probably cutting into the body of its proprietor. I wondered whether Diane Sweet’s tongue still remained that peculiar shade of loud pink. My stomach turned over.
Enid Sievers opened the door. She wore lavender. Her eyes focused on a spot above my head. “Oh,” she said vaguely to the spot, “I was going to call you.”
As on my last visit, she invited me in, ushered me to the love seat, took a place opposite me, demurely crossed her ankles, and offered me candy. This time it was Russell Stover chocolates with cream centers. I declined.
“Mrs. Sievers,” I said. “I’m in sort
of a hurry?” Why did I make it sound like a question? It wasn’t. It wasn’t even the truth. “If I could just get Missy …?”
“Missy isn’t here,” she said, exactly as if she’d already told me so and was irked at me for having forgotten. Then her face took on a weirdly coquettish little smile. “On Friday, my friend called. The gentleman I see.” Friend and gentleman. She uttered the words with smug passion. I had the sense of someone revealing an unexpected and wondrous secret.
“Yes?”
She delicately cleared her throat. “When I go away, you see, the boy who walks Missy will usually come in and feed her.” As if to allay my presumed concern for the security of her home, she added, “He’s perfectly trustworthy. I give him a key. He’s perfectly reliable.”
“So …?”
“He’d gone skiing! He’d already left. He’d gone on a bus with a group from church.” As if his destination mattered, as if it were evidence of betrayal, she added, “To Stowe! That’s in Vermont!” Her voice was mildly outraged. The heretofore trustworthy and reliable boy had done the inexplicable. “So my friend phoned Mr. Coakley.” She sounded as if she expected me to recognize the name. I didn’t. “And that’s where she is.” She folded her hands in her lap.
“And where is …?”
Enid Sievers drew herself bolt upright and said sharply, “This is all very painful for me, you know.”
I dipped my chin in a nod of fake sympathy. You know what happens to hypocrites? According to Kevin Dennehy’s mother, the earth opens and swallows them up. I listened for an ominous rumble. There was none.
Enid Sievers went on. “And once she was there, it seemed easier to leave her. If I’d brought her back here, I’d’ve just had to give her up again, wouldn’t I? After all, I have myself to consider, too.” She raised a thin hand to her lavender bosom. “This is very painful for me.”
