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

by Susan Conant

  "I can't imagine that Hal did," I said. "But, you know, he's a strange-looking guy. Have you ever seen him?"

  "Not that I know of."

  "If you gave him a bath and shaved him and put him in a Brooks Brothers suit, he'd look as if he were in town for a meeting of the Harvard Board of Overseers or something. He has a purebred look. God, I feel awful. I wish I hadn't said he was there. Speaking of which, I need to ask you about something. You know Margaret Robichaud?"

  "By reputation only," Steve said.

  "Well, last night, Kevin . . . You remember Kevin the cop?"

  "Marathon Man."

  I ignored him. "It turns out he's a lieutenant. He showed up and asked some questions, and you may not believe it, but he actually asked if Dr. Stanton had any enemies. It was pretty corny. Anyway, I didn't say anything about the whole mess with Margaret."

  "What did you say?"

  "Oh, I don't know. That he was abrasive, which is true. Something vague like that. Anyway, Kevin's going to be here today, and, especially with this Hal thing, I think maybe I should just shut up. I mean, I thought she was a god-awful head trainer, and I was glad when she left, but . . ."

  "She wasn't there last night, was she?"

  "God, no. The club is the last place she'd be."

  "Look, why not just tell the truth? You don't have any secret information about her, and the whole thing is public knowledge. If you don't tell him about it, someone else will."

  After Steve left to do his Friday morning clinic, I started on my column, an evaluation of electronic flea collars. Vinnie used to sleep at my feet under the kitchen table while I wrote, but Rowdy had apparently decided that the bedroom was his den, and he curled up and slept all morning in the spot where the window seat is going to be. On his afternoon walk, he was less of a monster than I'd expected. An untrained malamute will treat you like a dogsled, but he only dragged me down the street a couple of times, when he saw other dogs. A malamute might not protect you, and he certainly won't protect your house, but if a strange dog ever tries to mug or rob you, you'll be in good paws. By the time we got back from our walk, three people had told me what a nice husky I had. The first time I said he wasn't my dog. The second time I said he was a malamute. The third time I just said "Thanks."

  4

  The phone was ringing when we got inside, Ray Metcalf asking whether I could meet with him and Lynne and some of the others that night. To my shame, I'd forgotten the matter that was foremost on Ray's mind, not Dr. Stanton's murder but the fun match we'd scheduled for next week. To undo my guilt, I offered to have the meeting at my house, and Ray accepted. As soon as I hung up, I heard Kevin at the door.

  "How ya doing, Holly? You're keeping the pooch, huh?"

  At the sound of his voice, someone dropped belly-up onto the linoleum, eyes closed in expectant bliss. Not I.

  "This is a temporary foster home," I said. "Come in. I've decided to tell you everything."

  "Everything. My job's all done, huh?" He stooped over, scratched Rowdy's furry chest, rubbed him under the chin, and said it again in his talking-to-dogs voice. Twice. "My job's all done, huh? My job's all done, huh?"

  "No," I said. "I just decided that since you have arrested Hal, who has no motive, you ought to hear about someone who does, at least sort of. That way you can arrest two innocent people instead of only one."

  I want to confess at this point that there were two reasons why I thought Hal was innocent. First, he was acting perfectly normal, for him. Second, he reminded me a bit of Buck, except that Buck bathes occasionally and owns a suit he bought at Brooks Brothers about twenty years ago.

  I gave Kevin one of the Budweisers he keeps in my refrigerator and told him about the great head-trainer feud.

  "The thing started maybe four years ago? Four. Henry McDevitt had been head trainer since forever, and he decided to quit. Retire. He was turning sixty-five. He worked at Polaroid, and he was retiring there and moving to the Cape, Brewster, and he didn't want to do the commute to Cambridge every week, so he resigned. Nobody was happy about it, including me. He was the main reason I joined this club to begin with. I sort of knew him. He's a friend of my father's. Mostly, though, he's just a fantastic trainer."

  "So?" Kevin was nursing his beer at the kitchen table, his mind on Budweiser, his right hand around one of Rowdy's paws.

  "I'm getting to it. So there was a lot of trouble finding somebody to replace him, naturally, and we ended up with Margaret Robichaud, and don't ask me why. Believe me, it wasn't my decision. The point is, it wasn't Dr. Stanton's idea. They went way back, and, I mean, they could not stand each other, even then. Anyway, Henry was on her side, and I'm sure that didn't hurt. People thought he should have some say in picking his successor. So Dr. Stanton lost round one."

  "And he decided to murder her. Wrong way around, Holly."

  "Listen. I'm getting to it. Look, Henry was a great trainer. He still is. And Dr. Stanton really was a sort of pillar of the dog world."

  Kevin smirked.

  "He was," I said. "Don't laugh. But they were both, I don't know, maybe a little less competitive than they used to be. They softened up a bit. But Margaret wasn't beyond it at all. She was like Miss Two Hundred. Miss Perfect." Two hundred is a perfect score in obedience. She was showing all the time, and she actually did have a couple of 200s, which is, how can I explain it? It's a little like Nadia scoring 10.

  "Like Bill Rogers in the old days," Kevin suggested.

  "Sort of, but everyone likes him. When he was winning the marathon every year, everyone adored him, and now that he doesn't win anymore, everyone still loves him."

  "He's a hell of a nice guy."

  "Right. That's just what Margaret isn't. She wins, nobody likes her. She loses, nobody likes her. But she doesn't lose a lot, and when the club hired her, she'd been winning big. In obedience. But she'd also been showing in breed, and she'd been doing pretty well there, too. She has goldens."

  "Breed?"

  "Conformation—to see how the dog matches up to the standard for the breed. His build, coat, color, whatever."

  "Like a beauty contest." He kept running an oversize index finger down Rowdy's throat

  "So to speak. So when she applied for the job, people hoped that some of the success would rub off, and in a way it did. I mean, the club got a lot more competitive. Henry was really a good trainer, but compared to Margaret, he's super easygoing, and he was perfect for the people who just want a couple of classes to train the family pet. He's such a nice guy. He's never met a dog he doesn't like. Margaret was just the opposite—she was not interested in the average guy, and she was really not into mixed breeds."

  "Mutts?"

  "Yeah. And one thing that made it really stupid is that you can get an all-American C.D. with a mixed breed."

  "Certificate of deposit?"

  "A Companion Dog title. But the main thing is that any dog training club isn't just to teach you to show. It might sound silly, but you're supposed to help make the average dog a good canine citizen. And Margaret used to say all the time, 'We are not here to teach tricks to pets.' " She always said "pet" as if it were an obscenity. She was wrong. If "pet" means a good friend, every dog I've ever owned has been a pet. Furthermore, although she bad-mouthed all dogs except goldens, she was an outspoken proponent of the view that all dogs can be trained if you use the right methods, which were, in her view, her methods and her methods only.

  "So," I added, "before long, she offended a lot of people. And she didn't really have anything new to say. Jerk on the training collar until the dog does what you want. That was pretty much it. And meanwhile, a lot of us were reading this book by the monks of New Skete."

  "Is there any beer left?"

  "Yes. You think I'm making this up? I'm not making it up. They live in New York State. Anyway, their idea is that dogs are all descended from wolves, and from the dog's point of view, you're part of his pack. He's part of yours. And one of the things you're doing with a dog is le
tting him know who's the alpha wolf in the pack. Who's top dog. Because dogs are like wolves. In a way, they are wolves. They need to know where they fit, where they belong. And all Margaret was telling us was to jerk harder."

  "Does this have something to do with Frank Stanton?"

  "Yes. Because he really grabbed onto the book, the whole monks of New Skete thing, and he used all of it against Margaret. It was new ammunition. And anybody who knew anything about wolves or dogs could see what was going on with them, which was a classic leadership struggle to see who was top dog, one alpha against the other. Sometimes they were practically growling at each other. You're the one who asked if he had any enemies."

  "He teased her."

  "No. He did more than that. He taunted her. He goaded her. Like about the goldens. Goldens really are easy to train, so he'd say, oh, that he'd heard about a nice litter of Akita pups, or he'd tell her about some Irish terrier. He had an Irish terrier himself then. The books always say breeds like that are a challenge. Akitas. Terriers. All the northern breeds: Alaskan malamute, Samoyed, Siberian husky. So the only way for her to shut him up was to get one of the difficult breeds, and she finally took the bait. That was January. It was her second year with the club. She got an Alaskan malamute."

  The greatest malamute fans will admit that they're not the easiest dogs to train, and many people will tell you that they're impossible. In other words, in terms of getting one up on Dr. Stanton, she picked a good breed. It was a gutsy thing to do, too, because her chances of ever getting really high scores with a malamute were practically nil. Also, I couldn't imagine anyone less suited to owning a malamute than she was. What she always wanted was a robot, not a dog with a will of its own. Although none of us ever saw her puppy—he was too young to bring to class—we certainly heard about him, and those of us who were reading the monks of New Skete felt a lot of sympathy for him.

  "And?" Then he said it to Rowdy. "And?"

  "The ploy worked. For a while. Then Dr. Stanton came up with a new route of attack. I guess you could say he turned sneaky. Has anyone told you this already?"

  "Just spit it out," he said.

  "Okay. He was always a guy who talked a lot. Before that, he didn't exactly gossip, but then he started. I don't think he invented anything. He just passed things along. Rumors."

  "Such as?"

  "Judging. She's an AKC obedience judge. American Kennel Club. He bad-mouthed her judging. Like he said she favored goldens, which I don't think was true. He said she took points off for right finishes."

  "Never. I am shocked."

  "Stop fooling with the dog and pay attention, Kevin. The dog is in front of you, and you want him sitting at your left side. In a right finish, he walks past your right side, around in back of you, and sits at your left side. In a left finish, he swings around and ends up sitting at your left side without having walked around you. In the godlike eyes of the AKC, the two finishes are equal. People take this seriously."

  "I take it seriously," Kevin said. "She murdered Stanton because his dog walked around him the wrong way."

  "Of course not. What I'm telling you is that he got her fired. Or, actually, he just thought he did. He sort of led the anti-Margaret faction, but there really wasn't any pro-Margaret faction. I mean, by the time she left, not one person there thought she was a good head trainer. All she did was criticize everyone. And the membership was really dropping off." Each beginners' class would start out with the usual twenty or thirty newcomers, and all but four or five would be gone by the third lesson. "So it probably wasn't a big surprise to her when she was actually fired, but it was worse than it had to be. Dr. Stanton won the battle, so you'd think he might have been gracious about it, but for one thing, his dog had just died, and, believe me, he was not in a charitable mood. And he never softened up, even after she was gone. A couple of months after she left, we heard that her malamute had died, and Dr. Stanton kept hinting that it was no accident." No one believed him. In fact, no one paid any attention. By then, we were caught up in Vince's enthusiasm. His belief in the power of praise was contagious. We'd all started to praise one another again, too, and we wanted to forget about Margaret.

  "So did she kill the dog or what?" Kevin asked.

  "I don't think so," I said. "I heard that the dog ran off. A malamute on the loose can really go places. He probably got hit by a car. I don't know. End of story. I can tell you were enthralled. So tell me about Hal."

  "Harold Pace," Kevin said. "A juicer. In and out of Met State."

  "Met State." Cambridge is a weird place. If a Harvard professor thinks he's God, that's normal, but if he announces it too often in public, he goes to McLean Hospital. Met State is where Harvard professors don't have to go.

  "And then the liberals came along and discovered deinstitutionalization." It's hard to tell which word Kevin says with more scorn, liberal or deinstitutionalization.

  "I figured he'd been hospitalized off and on," I said. "But what does he have to say? Do you seriously think he had something to do with it?"

  "We're going to hold him till he dries out, but in my opinion, he has no notion of what he did—or of anything else, either."

  "But what would make him do it? Why would he want Dr. Stanton dead?"

  "You tell me," Kevin said. "He won't."

  If I'd been smarter, I'd have got Kevin to tell me about Hal first thing, and then maybe I wouldn't have told him about Margaret—but it didn't matter, I thought. Kevin probably knew that I was about to spill something, and he'd probably decided not to tell me anything until I spilled it. I was glad I'd disappointed him. In any case, I decided, no one commits murder because she's been fired by a dog training club. Margaret's only crime was a gift for putting people off. Besides, the armory was the last place she'd have been, the scene of her big failure, and, as Steve had pointed out, someone was bound to tell the police about her anyway.

  By the time Kevin left, I'd lost my energy for electronic flea collars, and Rowdy was prowling around looking hopeful, so I took him for a short walk. On Donnell Street, he spotted a black cocker spaniel moored to a clothesline trolley. The cocker yapped and lunged, and Rowdy, hackles up, let loose a harsh rumble from deep in his chest. He lunged, too, but I caught my balance in time and managed to stay upright. Otherwise, he was pretty good. When we got home, I still wasn't in the mood for flea collars, and since Rowdy was full of energy, we did a little work.

  If you've never trained a dog, you may think that Rowdy was learning to roll over or give his paw. An obedience-trained dog will learn the tricks easily, but they're not what training is about. Curly, Diane's miniature poodle, can dance on his hind legs and jump into her arms, but to get his first title, his C.D., which he'll probably do any day now, he won't do any tricks. If he tries any in the ring, as he's done before, he'll lose points. He'll heel on and off leash. Sit. Stand and stay in the same place. Come when he's called. Do a long sit for one minute and a long down for three.

  Unspectacular? Yes. And a million times harder than saying his prayers or playing dead. Vinnie was the best obedience dog I'll ever own. As I knew even before I heeled Rowdy up and down my block of Appleton Street that day, he was no Vinnie. His idea of heeling was forging ahead, which means walking out in front, taking me for a walk. And speaking of being in the lead, he more than hinted that he was the alpha wolf in our little pack. He nipped at the leash, a lot closer to my hands than I liked. Malamutes have large, sharp teeth. One of his cute tricks was to nip at the leash at exactly the same time he was doing precisely what he was supposed to be doing. That way, if I rewarded the good behavior, I also rewarded the nipping, and if I corrected one, I corrected the other.

  In between the forging ahead and the nipping and a few other alpha-wolf tactics, he also showed me that he was a dog who worked with joy. When I told him to heel—he'd been taught to finish right—he'd first bounce in the air, then leap around me, and then bounce again into his sit. You can teach a dog to quit the theatrics, but if he doesn't
have any zip to begin with, he never will.

  5

  "Poor baby," Barbara Doyle cooed as she ran her tiny manicured right hand over Rowdy's head and down his soft white throat. Barbara stands no more than five feet tall. Someone who didn't know Winter's rule would interpret her fluffy hair and frilly blouses as a sign that she owned one spoiled Pekingese, but if Barbara's three German shepherds ever decide to register her, the official name they choose will be Velvet Glove's Iron Fist.

  Eight of us had finished eating two large pizzas. We sat in my living room, which is painted white. It has a fireplace and one large couch. The fireplace works. When I visit Buck, I usually bring back a load of firewood. I'd made a fire that night. Barbara and Vince were sharing the couch with Ray and Lynne Metcalf. Roz, Ron, Arlene, and I were on the floor by the fireplace. Arlene is a heavy, nondescript person with two greyhounds that look like Ray and Lynne Metcalf. Cambridge has more greyhounds per person than any other place I've ever been. Almost all of them are retired racing dogs rescued from death. They make sweet, gentle pets. Life as a racing greyhound is really hellish, so their adoptive homes must seem like paradise.

  Curling up on a warm hearth or next to a radiator is a sign of illness in northern breeds, so Rowdy was avoiding us. He'd displayed unexpectedly good manners while we were eating. I'd offered to put him out until we finished the pizza, but we decided to give him a chance to behave, and he hadn't tried to steal a thing. When we were done with the pizza, Vince, who knows better, made an experimental toss with a piece of crust, and Rowdy leapt up and caught it. His jaws closed with the sound of a trap snapping shut.

  "I know I told you someone would get him today." Ray sounded guilty.

  "He's been fine," I said.

  "The fact is . . ." Ray started to say.

  "The fact is," Lynne continued, "that we're expecting, and we aren't going to have room."

  The Metcalfs are beyond childbearing age. The Clumber spaniels are not. It was obvious that Ray had suggested to Lynne that they offer Rowdy temporary kennel space, and she'd refused.