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

by Susan Conant

  Most people don't bother to bathe a dog for a fun match. In fact, even for a real obedience trial, it isn't necessary, since he's judged on behavior, not looks, but I think that it creates a sloppy impression to walk into the ring with an ungroomed dog. Also, in case the dog hasn't guessed already, it doesn't do any harm to let him know that a special occasion is coming up.

  When I bathe my dogs in Cambridge, I have to use my own bathtub, which means that if I'm not careful the next time I bathe and groom myself, I end up washing my hair with Hills Flea Stop and conditioning it with Ring 5 Coat Gloss.

  At Buck's, bathing should have been easy because Marissa built a dog spa in the barn. It's a little heated room with a sunken concrete tub so the dog doesn't have to climb over anything to get in. She installed a powerful spray that lets you rinse thoroughly. There's a big pile of thick towels, a blow dryer on a long cord, a grooming table, and a set of grooming equipment—brushes, combs, nail trimmers. Rowdy took one look and backed up. When I unbuckled his leather collar, slipped on the training collar and leash, and tried to lead him to the tub, he braced his front paws and growled in much the way Clyde had growled at him. I thought I knew the solution. I let go of his leash, took off my shoes and socks, rolled up my jeans, stepped into the tub, and splashed around. I told him what a lovely time I was having. I pointed out that he was missing out on the fun. The ploy failed. He went to the door and raked it with his claws.

  Hanging on a hook on the wall was a modern muzzle that Buck must have bought or been given, because they didn't make this kind when Marissa was alive. It's made of soft webbing, and it fastens with Velcro. I clamped it on Rowdy, picked up his leash, pulled him toward the tub, wrapped my arms around his hindquarters, and pushed him in. I'm stronger than I look. It occurred to me that Dr. Stanton must have stuck to dry baths.

  Fifteen minutes later, the blow dryer was running, I was brushing, and Rowdy, sprawled on a bed of towels on the floor, was nearly comatose with bliss. I was using a soft brush on his underbelly and inner thighs when I found the tattoo, smaller and much closer to the hock of his hind leg than tattoos usually are.

  A tattoo on a dog isn't, of course, a heart with "Mother" inside. It's an identification number, usually the owner's Social Security number or the dog's AKC registration number, tattooed either inside an ear or on the inner thigh. This one read WF818769, obviously not a Social Security number. I wasn't surprised to find that he'd been tattooed. Dr. Stanton was careful. My only surprise was that I hadn't noticed it before. This was the first bath I'd given Rowdy, but I'd brushed him a couple of times. Apparently, the idea of locating the tattoo near the hock and making it small had been to keep it almost invisible unless you were looking for it. It seemed to me that hiding the tattoo defeated one of its main purposes—to get back a lost dog—but the cosmetic result was perfect.

  * * *

  We left for Cambridge early Thursday afternoon, but, thanks to a minor breakdown on the turnpike that cost us a couple of hours, we arrived late for the match, with no time to go home. All of the outside floods were on at the armory, and the patrols were visible. Steve and India were walking back and forth near the entrance. India's wide-open eyes were fastened on Steve. She always looks as if she's asking whether there's some service she can render him.

  "We just got in," I said, and explained about the breakdown. I'd called Steve on Saturday to let him know where I was. "I'm sorry I copped out on the work."

  "No problem," he said, and patting Rowdy, added, "You're doing your share."

  "This dog isn't work," I said. "He's therapy."

  I meant it. I hadn't felt so happy since before Vinnie died. Because I had a dog again, life was okay. I was sorry Dr. Stanton was dead, but the truth is that if bringing him back to life had meant returning Rowdy, I might not have done it even if I'd had the choice. As I've said, I'm not rational when it comes to dogs.

  Our spring fun match is a big deal locally. We list it in The Match Show Bulletin, and people come from all over the place. The fall one is just for the club. Two rings were going when Rowdy and I walked in: Novice and Open. Pre-Novice must have been earlier, and we never have enough people to do Utility at the fall match. In the ring closer to the door, Diane and Curly were doing Open. When Curly feels like it, he heels off leash so perfectly that you'd swear there's an invisible lead running up from his little red collar to Diane's hand. That's how he was heeling when I walked in. Afterward, Diane would probably say that he'd known it was only a fun match. In the back ring, a skinny guy with a big mixed breed named Caesar was doing Novice. Caesar was lagging. A bigger crowd than I'd expected was standing around watching. I was glad to know that we weren't people who scared easily.

  Arlene was at the desk. Her hair looked oily. She needs to lose thirty or forty pounds. She could have used Rowdy's rehab program. But her looks don't bother her.

  "I thought you weren't going to make it," she said. "You're next, and you're the last dog. Vince signed you up. Doesn't he look gorgeous?"

  She meant Rowdy, not Vince.

  "He's really a sweetheart," I said. "Novice?"

  She nodded. "Let them know you're here."

  I put my stuff—my purse, an extra leash, Rowdy's regular leather collar, the thermos, the bowl—on one of the bleachers at the far end of the hall and tossed my jacket on top. In the Novice ring, Caesar was finishing the recall, his last individual exercise. He came in crooked. I put on my armband, and the steward, a guy from beginners' who has a basset, spotted me.

  I said a few words to Rowdy before I led him into the ring. "It's okay if you forget. Just do your best," I whispered.

  The judge, a brown-haired, fortyish woman in a peach polyester suit, was one I hadn't met before.

  "Are you ready?" she asked. She wasn't curious. It's a required question.

  "Ready," I said.

  On leash, he forged a little, I thought, except on the outside turn of the figure eight, where I had the feeling he was lagging. (Since good handling means looking at the judge and looking where you're going, you don't always see what your dog's doing.) Off leash, his sits seemed a little slow. His stand for examination was perfect, but it's a pretty easy exercise. Recall isn't, but he was close to perfect anyway, and when he finished, he bounced to a sit and smiled up at me. I released him and gave him a hug. Praise is allowed in the ring between exercises.

  After a break of only a couple of minutes, we were called back for the group exercises, the long sit and long down. He'd done them so well all week that I should have been suspicious. Since this was Novice, not Open, we stayed in the ring when we left the dogs. On the long sit, Rowdy squirmed, which would lose us points. On the long down, I thought for sure he was going to try to crawl over to Lion, who was next to him, but he caught my eye and held still.

  We all left the ring to wait. There were a couple of handlers and dogs still waiting for Open, and then there'd be the group exercises for Open. After that, the judges would finish adding up the scores and would check their arithmetic. Finally, everyone who'd qualified would be called back for the ribbons and trophies. I didn't know what our score would be, but I was sure we'd qualified.

  I'd missed dinner in order to get to the match, and I was hungry and thirsty. Rowdy probably was, too. There was a bottle of water in the car, but I'd discovered in Maine that Rowdy was one of those dogs who'd eat or drink anything—salad, grapes, bananas, peanuts, popcorn, tomato juice, orange juice—so I dug under my jacket, pulled out the thermos and bowl, and poured both of us some orange juice, which was what I'd filled it with at Buck's. The orange juice tasted kind of funny to me, but I was so thirsty that I drank it anyway. After the drive to Owls Head, I'd left the thermos sitting in the Bronco all week, so I figured that it must have got moldy and that I hadn't washed it well enough before I put in the orange juice that morning. Or maybe I'd used the wrong pitcher and got some of Buck's Tang or Gatorade by mistake, or, just possibly, some orange-flavored nutritional supplement for lactating bitches, bu
t it didn't worry me. Buck believes you shouldn't feed a dog anything you wouldn't eat or drink yourself, and vice versa. Rowdy didn't seem to notice the taste, but my deity looks after her own. If that judge had taken another few seconds to tally up the scores, I'd have refilled Rowdy's bowl.

  As it was, we were called to the ring before I had a chance. The Pre-Novice trophy went to a golden handled by Rick Lawson. No one was surprised. As I'd predicted, Curly won Open. We won Novice. Steve and India were second, only because she'd messed up the recall by wandering around before she got to Steve. The sleepiness hit me while people were crowding around patting Rowdy and telling me how happy Dr. Stanton would have been. That was true. I remember nearly starting to cry, then yawning, then thinking what a long drive I'd had. The next thing I recall was some disconnected memories of what turned out to be the Mt. Auburn Hospital.

  The hospital room was too sunny the next morning. The light kept hurting my eyes while Steve was telling me that Rowdy and I had been overdosed with Valium. Sometime later in the morning, someone told me that Steve rushed Rowdy to his clinic as soon as he had told Ray to take me to Mt. Auburn. Steve has his priorities straight.

  7

  By Saturday morning I was healthy enough and ripping mad. Some bastard had overdosed my dog before he was even officially my dog. At eleven I checked out of Mt. Auburn and walked the four or five blocks home. I walked a little shakily, but I walked. The Bronco (Steve had saved it from towing) was parked in the driveway behind my house, my suitcase still in the back.

  Steve used his lunch break to drop off Rowdy, who seemed to have shed a few pounds, and as soon as Steve left, Kevin knocked on the back door. He was carrying a paper grocery bag and wanted to make himself a hamburger. For reasons unknown to me, Mrs. Dennehy had left the Roman Catholic Church to become a Seventh-Day Adventist. Kevin isn't allowed to keep, cook, or eat meat in her house.

  Kevin can't cook, but he knows better than to ask me to do it, so we talked over the sound and smoke of ground beef burning in a cast-iron frying pan.

  "What are your thoughts on Ronald Coughlin?" he asked, poking ineffectually at the pan.

  "My thoughts are that he has one of the best-trained dogs I've ever seen," I said. "If he hadn't been patrolling on Thursday night, he might have won Open. And he's a terrific plumber."

  "We're interested in his visit to the can," Kevin said.

  "I thought you were interested in Hal Pace."

  "Still don't know what the deal is with him, but he's out of the last one."

  "How did that happen?"

  "No access. You carried that thermos into the armory, dumped your stuff on the bleachers, and left it. Pace wasn't in the building. As a matter of fact, he was soaking up the air at Leverett House. There was some kind of a problem."

  Harvard kids live in houses, not dormitories. That makes it easier to pretend that this is Cambridge, England, instead of the gauche New World. Outside Leverett House are some big vents where the university expels excess heat, and on cold nights, homeless people gather around to get warm. Since their presence doesn't add any Old World charm, the university keeps trying to screen off the vents and drive the people away. I knew what the problem was because I'd read the Globe while I was in the hospital. Some of the kids had organized a demonstration to protect the rights of the homeless to Harvard's stale heat. Hal must have been seen there.

  "Coughlin," Kevin said. He'd scraped the meat onto two cold hamburger rolls, one generously intended for me, and he'd added ketchup, which was dripping down his blond-furred wrists.

  "Ever the loyal Republican," I said.

  "What?"

  "According to Reagan, it's a vegetable. Ketchup."

  "Damn straight," Kevin said. 'Talk about Coughlin."

  "Ron Coughlin is the treasurer of the club. He's a nice guy."

  "Access to funds," Kevin said.

  "There are no funds. We charge a few dollars a lesson. From that, we pay rent to the armory, and we pay Vince and Roz about a tenth of what they're worth. We pay insurance. We did two matches and one show last year, and we couldn't have done those without help."

  "From Stanton."

  "He donated trophies, and I think he gave something, too. Did you think that Ron was absconding with the club treasury? Have you called a plumber lately? The club could run for a year on what he charges to install a bathroom sink. Besides, treasurer is the worst job there is. It's all paperwork, and the fact that there's never enough money doesn't help."

  "Right," Kevin said, and, pointing to the second hamburger sitting in its pool of congealed grease, added, "You don't want this? Still under the weather?"

  "Not quite myself yet," I lied. "But thanks. You have it."

  "You see, Holly," he said, "in my opinion, some of these people are fanatical. Not you, but some of these people. And this Coughlin strikes me as one of them. Now, here he is, adding up this nickel-and-dime stuff. All his buddies are hoping Stanton will come through again. And all the time, Coughlin knows something the rest of you don't know: that once the old boy's offed it, it's all yours."

  "I don't know what you're talking about," I said.

  "The housekeeper gets a little something. The nephew does, too. A couple of other dog outfits get a little something. You people get the rest," Kevin said. "One dog. One house. With contents. Plus the rest. Six or eight hundred thousand dollars, they aren't sure yet."

  "You're joking." I wondered whether the rest of the club knew yet. And, uncharitably, I wondered whether Roger Singer knew.

  "When I heard it, I almost fell off the chair," he said. "Left it to a bunch of dogs. If you're a fanatic, that's a motive. I haven't got it worked out yet, but you know that's got to be one piece of it."

  As soon as Kevin left, I called Ron Coughlin, not, of course, to ask whether he'd strangled Dr. Stanton or overdosed Rowdy and me, but to ask where Rowdy's papers were. As Kevin had said, Ron had more or less known about the will.

  "You know, he told me, Holly," he said. "But, you know, things change. He could've altered the will anytime. And I never saw the thing. I just heard plans. And I didn't want to see anybody let down."

  "Roger must be more than a little let down," I said. "Or did he know?"

  "He must've. Frank wasn't the kind of guy who'd lead him on like that."

  Ron's line was that we'd all misjudged Roger. We all knew that since Dr. Stanton's sight had started to go, Roger had been doing most of his driving for him. We also knew that Roger had been doing a lot of other things for his uncle, keeping him company, sitting through long Sunday dinners. Is there a nice way to say this? We questioned Roger's apparent altruism. We felt that his motives might not be entirely disinterested. In particular, we doubted the sincerity of his interest in obedience training, mainly because we could all see that the only time he trained Lion was in class on Thursday nights. In short, we assumed he was sucking up to his rich uncle.

  Ron didn't have Rowdy's papers and suggested I do what I would have done next anyway, namely, look in Dr. Stanton's library. Dr. Stanton's house is only a few blocks from mine, and for the posh end of Appleton Street, it's a small house. It's very Cambridge, what the Harvard types call Cantabrigian, a little English cottage. Rowdy needed to go out anyway, and I thought Millie might like to see him, so I leashed him and walked up the street. Millie had been with Dr. Stanton for a long time, and in the last year, he'd alternated between complaining about her and worrying about her. The complaint was that she fussed over him too much, and he claimed to be worried about her health, although it's my impression that tiny women like Millie live to a hundred. I'd sometimes wondered whether she didn't resent the extra work of having people come to use the library, but I asked Dr. Stanton about it once, and he said that it was part of her job and that someone else did all of the housework for her anyway.

  When I rang the bell, I wondered what would happen to her now, how small the legacy was, whether she had somewhere to go. I assumed, however, that she would still be in the house
, and I was right. She answered the door and, as usual, shuffled rapidly in reverse to let me in. Her back was even more bent than usual, from osteoporosis, I suppose, and she barely needed to lean over to give Rowdy the kiss that was apparently their routine greeting. He must have nearly outweighed her, and watching the two of them, I was reminded of those corny posters of a St. Bernard or a Great Dane with a fluffy, beribboned white kitten. After he lapped her face, she extended a hand to him, waved it up and down, and solemnly shook the paw he dutifully raised. I hadn't known he knew the trick.

  "He's a good boy," she said to me. "He's very gentle."

  "He is a good boy," I said. "I'll take good care of him."

  She started to cry, and we spent a long time talking about Dr. Stanton. We had tea and graham crackers in the kitchen—lime green, redone in the fifties—and she told me all about how worried she'd been about Dr. Stanton, how worried he'd been, how he'd been so much better in the last week.

  "And me thinking his ship must have come in," she said.

  "He couldn't have been worried about money," I said.

  Evidently, he had been, or that was Millie's story.

  "Everything's so dear these days," she said, and I could imagine what had happened. One of them must have gone down the street to Formaggio, bought a round loaf of sourdough, and been charged two twenty-five. When whichever one it was came back, the two of them had had a long chat about how bread used to cost five cents a loaf, and Millie had taken the episode seriously. I wondered how much Dr. Stanton had paid her.

  After I'd sat with her for a while, I asked to use the library, and she let me in. The first time I ever saw it, I thought that it must have been the reason Dr. Stanton bought the house, but when I learned that he'd had the library wing built, I could see that it was an addition to the cottage. What I liked best, besides the books, was the wood—wood bookshelves on all four walls, a warm wood ceiling, the oak floor, the maple desk. And, of course, the books and films and videotapes were a scholar's paradise: obedience books by Pearsall and Leedham, Strickland, Koehler, everyone; Peary's journals of sled-dog expeditions; This Is the . . ., Meet the . . ., and The Complete . . . everything from affenpinscher to Yorkshire terrier; plus stud books, back issues of the breed quarterlies, veterinary journals, Dog's Life, The American Kennel Gazette. Furthermore, in a city that probably has more libraries per capita than any other place in the world, this was the one library in Cambridge where you could take your dog. Rowdy was, of course, perfectly at home. He denned up behind a big leather chair and fell asleep.