A New Leash on Death (Dog Lover's Mysteries Book 1)

by Susan Conant

  "You know what this reminds me of?" Barbara said. "It's weird. It's like a bad dream about a dog show."

  She was right. If you're entering one dog in one obedience event, you spend a maximum of maybe fifteen minutes in the ring. Maybe you also exercise the dog once or twice, run through a couple of things with him, and get yourself a cup of coffee. The rest of the time, you hang around. But, of course, that night, there was nothing to watch while we hung around, and when people had to take their dogs out, a cop went along. As Barbara said, it was a nightmare dog show, with no rings set up, no dogs retrieving—or failing to retrieve—dumbbells, and officials striding around who weren't judges and stewards, but cops, including Kevin Dennehy.

  "Hey, Holly, how ya doing?" he asked.

  If Kevin Dennehy and I both go to Hell and meet in one of its dogless circles, he'll ask how I'm doing. My house is on the corner of Appleton Street and Concord Avenue, not too far from the armory, and his is the first on Appleton Street. Kevin, who's a little older than I am, lives with his mother. She overfeeds him, and he looks as if he isn't fit enough to write out a parking ticket, but he works out at the Y, runs around Fresh Pond every day, and always finishes the Boston Marathon. He has reddish hair and blue eyes. He's possibly the most Irish-looking person in the world. Long before I knew him, he had a dog. The dog died, an event of which Kevin always says, "I could never go through that again." When he says it, he moves his big head back and forth as if I'm holding a puppy out and he's refusing it. I'd always thought of Kevin as a nice guy who needed a dog.

  "I'm not doing too well, Kevin," I said.

  "Yeah," he said. "Look, you think you could tell me about it?"

  "Yeah," I said. "I guess. But I don't know anything."

  We moved to the end of the bleachers, near where Rowdy had been tied, and sat down. Rowdy lay down, sniffed the floor, and then kept trying to stick his big nose under the bleachers. Although I've never seen a mouse in the armory, people have told me that there are some and that they live under the bleachers. Maybe Rowdy had found one.

  "So what happened?" Kevin asked.

  I told him the story, what there was to it.

  "This leash," Kevin said when I'd finished. "Wasn't it kind of thin for a husky?"

  "Malamute," I said automatically. "People were just talking about it. It was a little thinner than most people would use, but what you use just depends on what you like. The dog doesn't know. Leather's a little more expensive. Dr. Stanton probably paid, oh, I don't know, twelve dollars for that one. Maybe fifteen. He had a lot of money, and dogs were his whole life, so maybe he paid more."

  "Did he have any enemies?" Kevin asked.

  I had an uncomfortable new take on Kevin. A lot of the time, he was eating too much and running around Fresh Pond and raking leaves from under his barberry hedge, and the rest of the time he was asking whether dead people had had enemies.

  "Yes," I said. "But it's a long story. He was an abrasive sort of character. He had a lot of friends, and he had some enemies, but none of them were here tonight."

  "What about this guy, uh, Harold Pace?"

  "Who?"

  "Pace," said Kevin, stroking Rowdy, who had abandoned the mouse game when he discovered that Kevin would pat him. "The guy you saw out there. Big fellow. Blond hair. Collects cans and bottles. You saw him out there."

  "Hal," I said. "He's harmless. He ran off. I don't even think Dr. Stanton knew him."

  "Look," said Kevin, "I've got to talk to you more. You going to be home tomorrow?"

  "Are you telling me not to leave town without informing the police?"

  "Right," Kevin said with a grin more subdued than his usual one.

  It was not the first time I’d suspected Kevin of having a slight crush on me. His mother does not have a crush on me. Alcohol is forbidden in her house, and until I bought the house next door to hers, Kevin used to have to sit on the back steps when he wanted a beer, even in midwinter. Kevin is not a heavy drinker. He just likes an occasional Bud when he's been mowing the lawn or shoveling the driveway, and now, if it's cold or rainy, he sometimes sits in my kitchen and sips. Mrs. Dennehy does not approve. Neither does Steve.

  "Look, Kevin," I said, "I really don't want to joke around about it. Do you know what happened? Do you have any idea who did this?"

  "Well, I'm pretty sure you didn't," he said. "Go home. Get out of here. I've got work to do."

  A few other people had already been dismissed. The hall was less crowded now, although there remained some trios of cop, handler, and dog in conference. Roger, in one such trio, was leaning against the wall near the open door to the shelter, with Lion, his big Newfoundland bitch, sprawled on the floor at Roger's feet like a gigantic thousand-dollar F.A.O. Schwarz black teddy bear. Ron and Vixen weren't far away, maybe waiting their turn.

  Vince and Ray came up to me. Rowdy was tugging and bouncing at the end of the leash and making a persistent throaty growl that was, I hoped, nothing more than his way of pleading with me to take him outdoors. The last time he was out must have been two or three hours ago.

  "Holly," Vince said in unusually quiet tones, "I want to talk to you."

  "Sure," I said, "but Rowdy's got to go out."

  "This won't take a minute," Vince said. "Did they tell you you could leave?"

  "Yeah," I said.

  "Then why don't you just get your stuff and take Rowdy and go home real quietly. Ray says Roger's got some crazy plan to take Rowdy with him."

  "That's not possible." I meant it. I'd have bet anything that whatever provisions Dr. Stanton had made for Rowdy didn't include Roger. It wasn't that Dr. Stanton disliked Roger or anything. I think he just thought that Roger was a big dope. Besides, it hadn't occurred to me that Rowdy would go home with anyone other than me.

  "It's not practical," I added. "He can't manage two dogs."

  "He can't manage one," Vince said acidly. Vince never, ever said things like that. We were all feeling the strain.

  "Just take Rowdy and go," Ray said. "I'll get him tomorrow, or someone will. We'll work it out."

  3

  If I'm alone, it takes me about ten minutes to walk up Concord Avenue from the armory to my house, which is barn red with three apartments and a fenced yard. I live in the ground-floor apartment, and the rent from the other two apartments pays the mortgage. My friend Rita, the therapist, is on the second floor, and on the third was an assistant professor of English at Harvard who got turned down for tenure because the department found out she drank Cambridge tap water instead of Perrier, didn't listen to National Public Radio, and was once overheard to say "I feel" instead of "One assumes," or at least that was her story.

  Of course, what you earn writing about dogs won't pay for a house in Cambridge, even a house in a modest neighborhood at the wrong end of Appleton Street. The Brattle Street end of Appleton Street is posh. It's even more posh than Brattle Street because Brattle Street, for all its mansions, carries plenty of traffic to and from Harvard Square, while Appleton Street is, by Cambridge standards, quiet. Until that night, Dr. Stanton lived on Appleton Street, and not at the humble end. The only reason I could afford a house in Cambridge at all was that Buck had helped me. Even though he thinks I ought to move back to Maine, he was so outraged when I couldn't find an apartment where I could keep a dog that he offered to make a down payment to establish a zone of canine liberation. Naturally, I allow pets in my apartments. Buck feels that the investment in the house is an ethically correct one.

  The walk home from the armory took at least twenty minutes that night, maybe more, because Rowdy left his scent on every tree, fire hydrant, lamppost, and hedge on the route. At the corner of Fayerweather, a couple of guys in running gear passed us doing six-minute miles, and Rowdy tried to drag me into dog-team formation after them. At the corner of Walden Street, he spotted an Irish setter taking itself for a walk. His hackles went up, he hit the sidewalk in a flat, ready-to-spring crouch, then he hurled himself forward so hard and fast that I had
to bend my knees and brace myself like a martial-arts pro to keep my balance and hang on to his leash. I suppose I should have felt anxious about walking at night along a street where a murderer might be running loose, but Rowdy distracted me. Besides, with him along, I looked protected even though I probably wasn't. Malamutes are the original "Hello, burglar" dogs. They love almost everyone, but at night they look even more like wolves than they do in the daytime.

  Whether thanks to Rowdy or not, I arrived home safely. My kitchen is pure, unrenovated 1940s but painted cream with terra-cotta trim to compensate. If you don't look closely, you hardly notice that the cabinets are metal and that what's underfoot is linoleum instead of tile. Rowdy needed water, and I filled a big aluminum saucepan for him. Somehow, I wasn't ready to let him use Vinnie's bowl. He gulped down a quart or so and then started an olfactory survey of the apartment. His hackles went up again, probably at what remained of Vinnie's scent. He checked out the corners and baseboards of the kitchen with special care, then rose on his hind feet, plunked his front paws on the kitchen table, and stuck his big nose into the sugar bowl I'd left out. I yelled No at him, but he'd already licked it clean.

  I was half expecting Steve to call or show up. I hadn't seen him since he’d sent me to phone for the ambulance and the police, but someone had said that he was at the front of the armory, probably in the entrance hall. I figured that he'd know a lot more than I did about what had happened, and it was unlike him not to tell me about it. He has a harder time than you might think when he loses a patient. I thought he'd probably be upset about Dr. Stanton and want to talk about it, but I was hungry and tired, and I wasn't going to wait up for him. I feel a lot for him, but one doesn't want to assume. While I sat at the kitchen table eating a tuna fish sandwich, Rowdy planted himself near me and watched politely. The No had done its work. He was so good that I left a few crusts and put the plate on the floor. One of the many sad things about losing Vinnie was the absence of someone to lick plates and bowls and pans. Every time I had to rinse the egg off a plate, or scrub baked-on cheese off a casserole dish, or lick a bowl myself, I missed her, not that she had much appetite at the end. There's nothing unsanitary about letting a dog prewash the dishes. If you don't mind having your friends eat from your dishes, you shouldn't worry when a dog does.

  My bedroom could be pretty, and someday it's going to be. It's painted white and has white shades. The bow window would look great with a window seat, and there's room for a rocking chair and a large dresser. In the meantime, the room is rather sparsely furnished. There's a king-size platform bed with an oak headboard. The comforter, which serves as a bedspread, has little white dots on a navy background. There are drawers under the bed. Vinnie's Orvis dog nest used to be there, too, but I washed the cover and stored her bed in the basement when she died. I am habitually tidy, perhaps because when I was a child, anything I left lying around would end up either chewed or buried.

  I decided that Rowdy would be happiest staying in my room. Before I got into bed, I turned off the overhead light and put on my bedside light. The bed has a little built-in nightstand on each side. It's a good bed. I thought it was better to buy one good thing than lots of cheap ones. Rowdy wandered over to me, the tags on his collar jingling. This was no night to be awakened by dog tags. I unbuckled his collar and put it on the nightstand.

  I can't explain it, but I think that the moment I undid his collar, he realized that something was wrong. He put both front paws on the bed and stared at me. One thing I like about malamutes is that they're not all supposed to look identical. Rowdy has what's called an open face. His face is all white, with no black around the eyes or on the muzzle, except that his nose is black, the way it's supposed to be. He looked so intelligent that I felt as though I owed him some explanation of what he was doing there. You may think it's stupid, but I gave him one. I also told him about Vinnie.

  "She was a real winner," I said. "My mother gave her to me. Now I've lost them both. You have to understand that I'm not looking for a replacement."

  He flattened his ears against his head, opened his almond eyes extra wide, and put one great paw in my hand. After I finished talking to him, I turned off the light and slept until seven in the morning, when the phone rang. It was Steve, inviting himself to breakfast. Ordinarily, I'd have told him to go to McDonald's so I could go back to sleep, but I wanted to talk to him before I saw Kevin Dennehy. I wasn't sure what I wanted to tell Kevin about Margaret Robichaud, and Steve could give me some impartial advice. The club fired her more than a year before Steve arrived.

  According to the AKC standard, the Alaskan malamute is not a one-man dog, and it was a good thing for Rowdy that he conformed to the standard. He didn't seem to miss Dr. Stanton. I let him into the yard for a minute, and when he came back inside, he followed me to the bathroom door. Vinnie, who loved water, used to stay in the bathroom and keep me company while I showered—she always hoped I'd invite her in—but even when I'd turned the water off and was drying my hair, Rowdy still stood in the hall with a suspicious look on his face.

  Steve and India arrived at quarter of eight. I'd told Steve about Rowdy on the phone, and we'd decided that it was okay for him to bring India. Rowdy and India knew one another, and even if they hadn't, a male and female will seldom fight. Two males are another story. And for a deadly slash-and-tear that's all business and no mere ritual bravado, you need two bitches who don't like each other. That may sound like an unfeminist remark, but it's true.

  After the dogs sniffed each other and we put them in the yard—I obey the leash law—Steve kissed me. "Good morning, pretty Holly," he said. One of the hazards of talking to dogs a lot is that you start talking to people the same way. He stroked my hair. He has the bluest eyes. "You know, your hair was one of the first things I noticed about you. I wanted to touch it."

  "Linatone. Secret of professional groomers. Restores shine and brilliance to the coat. And adds that special zing to scrambled eggs." I put a plate on the table. "So tell me about it," I said as we began to eat.

  "I'm not sure I can," Steve said. He's never sure that he can explain anything. In fact, he's used to explaining complicated veterinary matters to worried owners, and he's good at it. He talks quietly and slowly, and he has a warm voice, a good voice for dogs. And women.

  "Let me get you started," I said. "You, Lynne, Diane, Ron, and Dr. Stanton were working with Roz. You put the dogs on a long down."

  "Right. Lynne and Diane and I went to that corridor behind the desk."

  "What time was that?"

  "Jesus, I don't know. Quarter of nine? Then you got Diane—Curly got up—and she left. She came back. Then Roz called us all back. I saw you waving at me, and I told you to put the lights on."

  "Gerry did," I said.

  "Anyway, I knew he was dead the minute I saw him, but I had to do the usual. I told you to get an ambulance."

  "And the police," I said.

  "Right. It was obvious what had happened. After he took the leash off Rowdy, he put it around his neck. It was that thin leather one, maybe half an inch wide and a quarter inch thick. He and Ron left together, and Ron went to the men's room."

  "Why did he do that?" I asked.

  "The usual reason, I guess," Steve said. "It does seem kind of strange, but with Vixen, you could leave. With some other dog, you'd know Roz might call you back, but Vixen never gets up. You see Ron as a murderer?"

  "Of course not," I said. "It just seemed kind of strange, and I wondered if the police gave him a hard time about it."

  "Not that I know of," Steve said. "Next, Stanton went out and stood on the stairs. This is where I'm not sure. Either someone came up to him there, or else someone got him to open the gate and go onto the lawn. In either case, whoever it was got in back of him, reached in front, and grabbed the leash."

  "You know, if someone sneaked up on him, he wouldn't necessarily have noticed. I mean, he almost certainly wouldn't have seen anyone, and I'm not sure whether he would've heard. His eye
sight was really bad, but I'm not sure how his hearing was."

  "Not too good," Steve said, as if he were breaking the news about an aging setter. "Not bad for his age, but not acute, either. He could have been standing on the bottom step. The guy could have left the gate open and waited next to the building, on the lawn. It's dark there. And when Stanton got there, the guy could have gone through the open gate, bending down, and then stood up right behind him. It wouldn't have taken any time. I'll tell you one thing. This guy was no weakling, and he must have done it really fast. I don't think Stanton knew what happened. One second he was standing there, and the next second the leash was so tight he couldn't fight back. He wasn't young, but he was a big man, burly."

  "So who was the guy?" I asked.

  "This character, what's his name, Pace, I guess. They took him away."

  "Oh, shit," I said. "They didn't!"

  "Aren't you the one who saw him?"

  "Yeah," I said. "I saw him run away, but he always runs away. Or else he comes up and tells you his name, and then he babbles about something. Half the time you can't hear him. Or he'll babble something you can't understand, and then he'll say, 'I'm not supposed to say that.' Obviously, somebody tried to teach him not to say weird things to strangers. But, you know, he just drinks and cashes in his return stuff, and he walks. You see him all over Cambridge. I talk to him sometimes, or at least I try. He likes dogs."

  "Then he couldn't possibly have done it, right?"

  "It's not that," I said. "I just don't see him as a violent type. You know, if he'd been some ordinary guy in a business suit who happened to be there, they wouldn't have arrested him."

  "If he'd been an ordinary guy in a business suit, he wouldn't have been waiting to get into the shelter," Steve said, with some justification, I admit. "But you're right. They would have questioned him, but they probably wouldn't have picked him up. Unless he had some connection with Stanton or something."