Stud Rites Read online

  With Rowdy and Kimi barricading the narrow space between Betty’s van and my Bronco, I grabbed an old dog blanket that I keep in the car, and slipped it under the van and over the lamp. Taking special care not to damage the lamp, I pulled it across the blacktop, lifted it up into my car, and settled it on the floor where the passenger’s feet belong. I hid the lamp under the blanket, locked the car door, and took the dogs for a quick walk, during which, I might add, they failed to find the body of James Hunnewell. Maybe they sniffed in some special way, but after all, they’re dogs; they always sniff. If they pulled on their leashes, what do you expect? They’re Alaskan malamutes. But I may have missed some subtle sign. I was preoccupied. We were not engaged in a cover-up, I decided. Betty or I might well have locked the lamp in my car for safekeeping; we just hadn’t happened to do so. Well, now we had. All I’d done, really, was to change history. A half hour later, when I’d showered and dressed for the day and was following the tortuous route to the Lagoon, where breakfast was served, it occurred to me that during the Watergate affair, the conspirators had probably expressed the same sentiment. Betty Burley, however, was no Richard Nixon.

  Despite the tropical vegetation, both organic and plastic, and the plethora of ukeleles, feathers, and paddles on the walls of the Lagoon, the only Hawaiian foods on the breakfast buffet table were several bananas that rested atop a mound of apples and the chunks of canned pineapple in the big steel bowl of otherwise fresh fruit salad. Bearing a plate heaped with scrambled eggs, sliced cantaloupe, and two pancakes, I joined Betty at a small table where she sat alone sipping coffee and nibbling on a triangle of whole wheat toast. Its mate rested on Betty’s otherwise empty and clean plate. I am what horticulturists call ”a heavy feeder,” a sort of human peony. Betty usually was, too. This morning, however, she didn’t even glance at my plate. I Wondered, of course, whether she’d found out about the insult to our rescue dogs that had caused Jeanine such grief.

  ”Is that all you’re having?” I asked. ”Are you all right?”

  Betty didn’t look sick or tired. Her dark eyes weren’t bloodshot or droopy, and her face was as animated as Kimi’s. ”I didn’t sleep very well.” Her tone suggested that her insomnia was my fault. ”I was fretting about Sherri Ann and Freida and that miserable lamp. It has occurred to me that inflicting it on us was an act of hostility.”

  Except in practical matters like moving dog-shaped lamps, I am incapable of dealing with dog politics until a few hours after breakfast. I ate and listened.

  Betty said that Sherri Ann Printz had never done a thing to support Rescue and that Victor Printz hadn’t either. Betty was incensed. ”How I detest being the object of political machinations!”

  In neutral tones, I remarked that to Sherri Ann’s credit she was fussy about who used her dogs at stud.

  ”Freida! Hah! In that instance, Sherri Ann was not being particular. She was deliberately trying to slight Freida! And nothing more!”

  To divert Betty, I told her about finding the lamp. She was indignant. ”Under?”

  ”Resting on its side. Under. Underneath.” As if there’d been some ambiguity, I said, ”Beneath the rear of your van.”

  She sat back in her chair and scowled. ”Well, what on earth was it doing there?”

  ”Betty, I assumed that you—”

  ”Oh, I got it from the booth. Of course I did. I remembered. Well, I finally did. I’d already got into bed, and when I finally remembered, I was sorely tempted to stay there, but all I could think was, ’Well, if you don’t go and get those things, everyone’s going to know what an old fool you are!’ ”

  As I’d guessed, instead of asking for help, Betty had moved her van from its spot next to my Bronco to the unloading area near the exhibition hall.

  ”It took me three trips,” she reported. ”I got my tote bag and that damned lamp first. Then I went back for the prints. Then I packed the rest in a cardboard box. And I covered the tables with bed sheets—the things for the silent auction. Now I know that that’s not perfectly secure, with us only one booth away from that great big door, but—”

  ”We can’t move all of it every night,” I assured her. ”And then I drove back, and I parked right in the same place, next to you.” She hesitated. In a low voice, she added, ”And then I was a lazy old fool after all.”

  ”Betty—”

  ”I carried the box up to my room. And I didn’t go back. But that van was locked, and the windows were up. Every door was locked! I checked every one.” Involuntarily, it seemed, Betty had grabbed a fork and was now pounding her armed fist on the table. ”This is Freida’s doing!” she whispered venomously. ”I can feel it in my bones! That woman cannot bear to watch Sherri Ann get the edge on her, and she’s delighted to make us look bad, too.” Midthump, she dropped the fork, grabbed her purse and her tote bag, rose, and said, ”Damn! The wolf prints! The frames alone are worth... I’ll be right back!” Coming to a halt, she interrupted herself. ”In the meantime,” she whispered in my ear, ”this is best left—”

  ”Not a word,” I vowed. ”Do you want me to go with you?”

  ”No! The less fuss, the better.”

  Before Betty had taken a step, though, Freida Reilly came stomping up to the table to demand whether either of us had seen James Hunnewell. As befits a show chair, Freida wore a well-tailored CEO-style gray wool suit with a medium-length knife-pleated skirt. Her silky-looking white blouse had a built-in scarf that wrapped itself around her neck before slithering into her bosom. Her makeup was careful, if a bit heavy; her red nails matched her mouth; and her overall look was so perfectly lacquered that I wondered whether, having devoted great effort to her appearance, she’d closed her eyes and preserved her perfection by misting herself right down to her spiked heels and pointy toes with an entire can of ultra-hold hair spray. Her show chair badge was pinned to one lapel, a big pewter malamute to the other. Two of the big fellow’s just-like-Daddy pups bit so deeply into Freida’s earlobes that I hoped she was up on her tetanus shots.

  Betty checked her watch. With not a hint of the accusation she’d just voiced about Freida’s role in the lamp’s odd appearance under her van, she asked, ”What time is it?” Answering her own question, she said, ”Seven-thirty. Judging’s at nine, isn’t it? Hunnewell’s probably still asleep.”

  Freida sourly replied that she’d rung James Hunnewell’s room twice, banged on his door three times, and failed to get what she described, and I quote, as ”any sign of life.”

  ”Well, Freida, delegate someone to go and roust him out!” advised Betty, who had moved the auction items all by herself. ”Maybe he’s not in his room. Maybe he’s wandering around somewhere.”

  Freida bristled. The pewter pups on her earlobes trembled. ”Naturally, I have people looking, but after all these years, there aren’t all that many of us who know what he looks like.”

  A gigantic horny toad, I longed to say. Instead, I picked up my check, excused myself, paid, and dashed to the nearby ladies’ room, where investigation confirmed that Mother Nature had once again adjusted my menstrual cycle to make my period coincide with a big dog show. I will swear that She consults the AKC Events Calendar. I could practically hear her: Hm, Alaskan Malamute National Specialty, October thirtieth, so let’s see, obedience on the thirty-first, we’ll hit her with PMS for that, and on Friday morning...

  As I sat in the cubicle digging around in the little cosmetics bag in my purse, the metal door of the next stall slammed shut, and a lock slid in place. Someone got violently sick. The toilet flushed. Dogs, fine. I stroke their heaving ribs and whisper sweet moral lessons about eating steel-wool pads and paying the consequences. But people are hard to help. Morning sickness? Crystal, I thought.

  Again, I was wrong. A few minutes later, while I was washing my hands at one of the dozen sinks, out of the cubicle emerged a green-faced Mikki Muldoon, who had finished second in the judging poll, second to James Hunnewell. Ignoring me—I was a stranger to her, anyway—Mrs. Muldoon made he
r way to one of the basins, turned on both faucets, and, without using soap, rubbed her hands together as if trying to warm her fingers. As I combed my hair and daubed on lip gloss, she produced a makeup kit from her pocketbook. Just as Crystal had done, she brushed her teeth. Then she began to restore color to her face.

  Five minutes later, when I was crossing the lobby and heading toward Betty’s van, Duke Sylvia told me that James Hunnewell was dead. My thought was of Mikki Muldoon, who was a decade beyond Crystal’s kind of morning sickness. Nerves? After all, with Hunnewell permanently out of the picture, she was now about to judge a national specialty.

  Had she known? And if so, how?

  AS DUKE SYLVIA told me about the demise of James Hunnewell, he could have been remarking about how many autumn leaves had fallen overnight. ”Fellow from R.T.I. found him,” Duke informed me. Arms folded across his chest, Duke leaned comfortably against a wall of the hotel lobby.

  Infected by Duke’s placidity, I said, ”Oh, I was looking for the R.T.I. guy yesterday. I wanted to ask him about...” I stopped myself. If we’d been attending a service at an open grave, Duke wouldn’t have considered a discussion of Rowdy’s sperm in the least out of line. I cleared my throat. ”He was looking for him?”

  ”Who?”

  ”The guy from R.T.I. He was trying to find Mr. Hunnewell?”

  Duke shook his head. ”Just happened on him. Right out in back here, in back of the hotel. At the end of the parking lot, there’s a baseball field, recreation area, and there’s a little storage shed.”

  ”What on earth was James Hunnewell doing out there?”

  Duke shrugged. And when I asked what should have been my first question—what Hunnewell had died of—Duke said he didn’t know. He made the obvious guess. ”His lungs must’ve finally quit. Freida’s shaken up.” Duke made Freida Reilly’s distress sound as distant and foreign as a volcanic eruption on some South Sea island he’d never visited and never would. ”Once Freida calms down, she’ll be relieved. James would’ve botched the judging. He’d’ve done an awful job.”

  Over the next hour, in the lobby, the parking lot, the corridors, the grooming tent, and the exhibition area, everyone seemed to agree: We were better off without James Hunnewell passing judgment on our dogs. But relief turned to astonishment when the word spread that instead of passing peacefully to the ultimate Judgment, Judge James Hunnewell had been bludgeoned to death. Busy at the rescue booth, I, however, must have been one of the last to hear the word ”murder.”

  When Betty Burley arrived at the booth bearing the heavy lamp, I knew only what Duke had told me. ”The parking lot is crawling with police,” Betty complained. She sounded like a fastidious homemaker describing a dishwasher invaded by ants. She thrust the lamp at me. ”Here, take this thing, will you? My arms are aching. I had to carry it all the way here. When I saw which way the wind was blowing, instead of moving it to my van, I marched right into the hotel and straight to my room, and then I went back and got the wolf prints.”

  ”Which way is the wind blowing?” I asked.

  ”Well, now they’ve got the whole area cordoned off—that whole end of the parking lot—so if I hadn’t hustled out there and whisked everything away, for all I know, they wouldn’t have let me move it at all! And hideous as this thing is, it’s arousing a lot of interest.” As she spoke, one of our rescue people, a guy named Gary Galvin, arrived with the prints. The heavy antique frames were handsome, but the subjects made me uncomfortable, mainly, I think, because I saw them as rather silly allegories. In one, a lonely looking wolf was howling at a faceless moon: Rescue Lifts a Lone Voice in an Uncaring Wilderness. The other was a grisly depiction of a wolf attempting to disembowel an elk that was kicking and fighting back: Compassion Battles Politics, the Outcome Undecided. Or maybe Freida Reilly and Sherri Ann Printz Do Battle for a Seat on the Board. A woman named Isabelle, who trailed after Gary, was carrying the cardboard box that contained the Inuit sculpture, the jewelry, and the other small valuables. The first to arrive at the rescue booth, I’d gently unshrouded the silent-auction items, made sure they were matched with the correct bid sheets, and otherwise readied the display to present what Betty Burley was always calling ”a positive image of rescue.” I’d felt so much like a Barbara Pym character, an excellent woman making herself useful at a church jumble sale, that I’d half expected someone to come up and offer me the first in a series of endless cups of tea. Now, as Betty rearranged the table I’d tidied up, Gary slipped me two videotapes. ”One’s last night’s showcase,” he said. ”Betty can’t object to that. And the other’s the obedience bloopers.”

  ”Betty will have a fit,” I whispered. ”Gary, Betty says the whole back of the parking lot is cordoned off and... Do you have any idea what’s going on? Someone told me that Hunnewell was dead, but...” Even if no one had informed me of Hunnewell’s demise, the presence of a substitute judge in one of the two baby-gated rings would have alerted me that something was wrong. In one ring, all was as it should have been: Today’s sweepstakes judging—another innocent gambling game—was already under way. In the second ring, the one that should have belonged to Judge James Hunnewell, the competition for championship points— the show—was due to start. In preparation, Judge Mikki Muldoon was dutifully pacing up and down:

  The condition of the ring is the judge’s responsibility. Maybe the Pope, too, is obligated to check the Vatican’s streets for potholes. Within the ring, the judge’s authority is as absolute as his. Authority dies with death. The judge is dead, I thought. Long live the judge.

  Before Gary could answer my query about what was going on, Betty asked me the same question I’d just asked him, but her tone was the one I use to accuse the dogs of crimes I’ve actually watched them commit. ”Holly Winter,” Betty demanded, ”what is going on here?”

  Instead of pointing to the substitute videotapes, however, she banged her tote bag and a photograph album down on the table. We had two albums. One was a big, fat maroon binder overstuffed with snapshots and stories about malamutes rescued all over the country. The other—the one Betty slammed down— was a slim beige volume devoted exclusively to the dogs who’d appeared in last night’s showcase. The separate album for the showcase dogs had been Betty’s idea, and it was Betty who’d put it together. I’d looked through the big album, but I already knew about the showcase dogs. In straightening out the booth, I’d lined the beige album up next to the fat maroon one. Otherwise, I Hadn’t touched it. I reached the obvious conclusion: Betty had learned that in Jeanine’s presence someone had called our rescue dogs ”trash.” Furthermore, Betty knew that I’d kept the episode from her.

  Before I could confess, however, Betty raged: ”You had absolutely no business removing Cubby’s pedigree or that page of the stud book or anything else!”

  Cubby, I remind you, was Jeanine’s dog. As I’ve said, Jeanine’s reason for adopting a big dog wasn’t something she’d have wanted boomed over a sound system. But Betty was talking about the second piece of information I’d suppressed. Cubby, who’d been bought at a pet shop, had been turned in to Rescue with AKC Papers. As I mentioned earlier, in running his pedigree, I’d found that way back there in Cubby’s unfortunate family tree of puppy-mill dogs was an ancestor bred by Sherri Ann Printz, a dog that bore her kennel name. The dog had been registered as Pawprintz Attic Emprer and owned by Gladys H. Thacker, who, as I’ve mentioned, farmed puppies in the state of Missouri. According to the stud book, she’d had malamutes for decades. After I’d taken Cubby in and placed him with Jeanine, I’d sent a full report to Betty, who’d threatened to include Cubby’s pedigree in our showcase album. Until now, I’d assumed she’d been joking. I seldom raise my voice, even at people. ”You did not! Damn it! I never meant—”

  Betty interrupted. I fell silent. In the hierarchy of Rescue, she outranked me. ”If people don’t see it, they just go on thinking that those poor dogs being bred to death in the puppy mills have nothing whatsoever to do with their dogs. May I point ou
t that you were the one who proposed that we take out an ad in the Quarterly and start publishing these pedigrees? And if memory serves me, Cubby was exactly the dog you had in mind.”

  A regular feature of the Malamute Quarterly is what’s known as the centerfold: a celebration of a famous malamute, including an article written by the dog’s breeder or owner, photographs, of course, and a pedigree. What I’d proposed, strictly in jest, was a corresponding centerfold of rescue, with Cubby as a sort of Playdog Rescue Bunny, mainly because, as his pedigree revealed, his Pawprintz ancestor had been sired by the legendary Northpole’s Comet.

  I was ripping. ”Betty, you knew then and you know perfectly well now: It was strictly a joke. When I sent you that pedigree and the page of the stud book with that dog’s registration, it was understood that the information was totally confidential. I did not intend to humiliate anyone, and you had no business putting that stuff out here where everyone could see it!”

  ”As a matter of fact,” Betty responded tartly, ”that material was not in the album. It was in my private tote bag, which you had no business with, Holly Winter. For your information, I intended to give Cubby’s pedigree to Jeanine, and I also had several others that I intended to give to other people. But in the rush, I forgot.”

  ”Betty, I did not remove those pages! I never even looked in your bag.”

  Isabelle intervened. In a near whisper, she interjected, ”If the two of you don’t cool it, you’re going to find yourselves starring on tonight’s evening news.”

  The TV reporters and camera crews had arrived in the exhibition hall in plenty of time to capture the arrival of the police; and since the media people happened to be there anyway, they performed the incidental task of informing us of the murder of James Hunnewell. It was a Channel 5 interviewer who told me that Hunnewell had been bludgeoned to death. Her name was Alex Travis. I’d seen her on TV. She looked almost the same in person—no fatter, no thinner, very young, with sleek black hair and perfect skin, her lipstick and blush a little redder than on TV so her color wouldn’t wash out on camera. According to Alex Travis, James Hunnewell had been murdered last night. His bed hadn’t been slept in. His body had been cold. Alex Travis was the one who used the phrase ”blunt instrument” and who told me that whatever it was, it hadn’t been found.