Stud Rites

by Conant, Susan

  I strongly suspected otherwise.

  IN THE THIRTIES, dogs were big news. Other socialites just threw parties, but Geraldine Rockefeller Dodge gave fantastic dog shows at her New Jersey estate, Giralda. Mrs. M. Hartley Dodge wasn’t the only Rockefeller prominent in the dog fancy, and The New York Times faithfully reported on the Morris and Essex shows and lots of others as well. In the thirties, Admiral Byrd was news. So were sled dog racing, the Chinook Kennels, breeds newly recognized by the AKC, show results, everything.

  So on this November day, the murder of Judge James Hunnewell transported us back to the future, forward to the past: cameras, yes, but video cameras; brilliant halogen lights; and umbrella-shaped devices with undersides of shiny metallic foil, parasols devised to bounce limelight off clouds with silver linings. In the aisles around the rings, in the parking lot, in the grooming tent, the dogs preened for cameras, whroo-whrooed into microphones, and rose up to rest gentle, mammoth snowshoe paws on the shoulders of startled, flattered reporters here to cover a homicide.

  Basking in the reflected light of one of the silver-lined umbrellas, Betty Burley grabbed the opportunity to make an ardent pitch for the wonderful, friendly, healthy, young rescue malamutes who awaited loving adoptive homes. I should have done the same, but my face was still stinging from Betty’s verbal slap. Instead, I wandered around exchanging rumors, eavesdropping on conversations, watching the judging, and otherwise doing pretty much what I’d have done if James Hunnewell had still been breathing.

  The arrival of the police had put an end to the worry that they’d halt the judging and maybe even force the cancellation of the national. Hunnewell’s room was sealed off immediately, and so was the area around the shed. Scrutinizing the entire hotel and its grounds, as well as the myriad of vans, campers, and cars, not to mention the hundreds of dogs and people, was a task no homicide team wanted to tackle. It would have meant summoning zillions of technicians to collect monumental amounts of evidence, all of which would have had to be processed and analyzed, and almost all of which would undoubtedly have been utterly irrelevant to the murder. People would have protested; search warrants might have been a problem. The course the police followed, as I see it now, was a sensible one meant to protect the evidence and maintain the availability of witnesses. If they’d closed down the hotel, for instance, what would they have done with us? The hundreds of hotel guests could hardly have been forced to camp out or to rent rooms elsewhere; with the show canceled, the dog people would’ve all gone home. Could we have been locked inside? Not for long. And no one, I imagine, wanted to smell the consequences of depriving the dogs of access to the outdoors. Furthermore, antagonizing all potential witnesses would have been a poor strategy for getting people to talk.

  The air in the exhibition hall was thicker with theories than it was with dog hair. Nepotism: According to Pam Ritchie, who said she’d heard it from Freida Reilly, the police couldn’t close us down without ruining the wedding, and our national had been unintentionally saved by Crystal’s father, who had a brother high up in the attorney general’s office. Tiny DaSilva disagreed: the groom’s father, not the bride’s, and not a brother in the attorney general’s office, either, but a fraternity brother in the state police. In what I thought was an effort to present herself as the kind of fiscally minded person who’d make a splendid member of our breed club’s board, Sherri Ann Printz argued for strict economic determinism: The hotel brought money to Danville. Shut it down, and who’d ever book here again? Then there was the show-precinct debate: Had Hunnewell’s body been found on or off show grounds? Freida Reilly and a few other exceptionally devout worshipers at the shrine of AKC were apparently unable to conceive of circumstances in which the distinction didn’t matter. Freida may even have believed that if the hallowed ground of a show were desecrated by bloodshed, AKC was obliged to dispatch a high priest rep to reconsecrate the sanctuary; otherwise, like mock marriages, the awards wouldn’t count.

  I watched and listened as a mousy-looking little breeder with a resplendent name—Celeste LaFlamme—casually told a police officer about a quirk of Mikki Muldoon’s that was universally taken for granted. I hate to speak ill of any dog, but if tomorrow’s competition had been for Worst of Breed instead of Best, Celeste’s dogs would have been the only ones to make the final cut. Every malamute of Celeste’s breeding had a pinched expression, a narrow front, feeble little legs, splayed feet, and wary-looking, hooded eyes. In other words, Celeste’s dogs looked astonishingly like Celeste herself, who didn’t belong at a national any more than they did. And here Celeste was informing the police about highly esteemed Judge Mikki Muldoon’s little quirk, which was that Mrs. Muldoon always carried a handgun and that it was always loaded.

  Perhaps Mikki Muldoon didn’t understand just how strict a handgun law we have here in Massachusetts. The handsome young police officer certainly did, but obviously formed the same opinion of Celeste that everyone held of her dogs—namely, that she was unsound. Glancing at Judge Muldoon, then back at Celeste, the policeman wore the expression you see on the faces of kind, sane people listening to first-person accounts of UFO abductions.

  And, of course, Hunnewell hadn’t been shot.

  The manner of James Hunnewell’s demise, in fact, suggested a copycat crime. Rumor even had it that Hunnewell’s murder had been inspired by the slaying of poor Elsa Van Dine, who’d been bludgeoned on a street in Providence. The precise nature of the blunt instrument was another favored topic of intense speculation. Examined from a murderous point of view, the exhibition hall was packed with bludgeons. The vendors selling sledding equipment were asked to account for all their snow hooks. In viewing the wooden walking sticks, iron weather vanes, and handcrafted wall plaques for sale and on display, the police got a crash course titled Five Thousand and One Ways to Depict Malamutes. In the absence of any one likely weapon, the authorities seized none. Excitement spread when one of the trophies went missing, a big malamute-shaped pewter doorstop on a heavy base, but it was soon returned by its donor, Pam Ritchie, who was offering it in Mrs. Seeley’s memory and who had briefly removed it from the trophy table and taken it outdoors so someone could admire its craftsmanship in good light. I remain convinced that under impossible circumstances the police were as diligent as possible. Elaine Barrasso, the president of our national breed club, told someone who told someone who told me that Greg and Crystal’s wedding presents, which were on display at a sort of nuptial trophy table in a special room of the hotel, also received a thorough going-over.

  And so did we. I gave my name, room number, permanent address, and license-plate number to a state police detective named Peter Kariotis. I told him that, yes, I’d seen James Hunnewell last night. I’d helped him use the Coke machine and get ice. Like the reporters, Detective Kariotis couldn’t seem to grasp that, no, the dog show didn’t exactly have ”a winner,” but that, yes, in a way it did: Best of Breed. Leah and I both donated our fingerprints. One of the two ice buckets found in Hunnewell’s room was from our bathroom. Leah might have touched it. My prints must have been all over it and also on the can of Coke I’d helped Hunnewell to buy. Freida Reilly and her son, Karl, gave their prints, too. Freida had been in Hunnewell’s room. Karl had carried Hunnewell’s luggage when he’d picked him up at the airport.

  To a remarkable extent, however, the atmosphere was disconcertingly normal, at least normal for a posthomicide dog show. In the grooming tent, the powerful dryers roared and blasted away at dogs who weathered the storms of this strange new Arctic. As gregarious and curious as our dogs, we always socialize and speculate; and like show people everywhere, we invariably help the show chair out by making sure that she fulfills her principal responsibility, which is to take the blame for everything. ’7 am fully aware of just how hard it is to manage the millions of little details that go into making a show a success,” Sherri Ann Printz commented to me. ”After all, I did it myself just last year. And last year’s national went off without a hitch. Not that any of this
is Freida’s fault! Or that I’m tooting my own horn. Let’s just say that I stand on my record.”

  Not everyone blamed Freida Reilly. On the contrary, instead of blaming Freida, at least one person gave her credit. As I sat watching the judging with Janet Switzer, Rowdy’s breeder and the alpha figure in my life, Janet told me, ”The truth is, the old expletive deleted probably wouldn’t have held up for two days, anyway. He might’ve dropped dead in the ring all on his own. Hunnewell was in no shape to judge. He should’ve resigned; he should’ve removed his name from the eligible list years ago.” After an uncharacteristic pause, she added grimly, ”Instead of leaving poor Freida to do it for him.”

  REMEMBER all those Old Testament begats? Men begat men. Cush begat Nimrod; Arphaxad begat Salah, who begat Eber; Terah begat Abram, Nahor, and Haran. Haran begat Lot, whose father, in violation of Jewish custom, wanted to call him Haran, Jr., but whose mother, an overlooked pioneer in the feminist movement, sensibly held out for a name that the other kids wouldn’t make fun of. ”You, Haran,” she snorted, ”can take your patriarchal tradition and shove it! I, for one, take it with a grain of salt!” Thus was cast and forecast poor Lot’s lot.

  In the beginning, though, God held a monopoly on the begetting industry. God alone created. Adam and Eve probably wanted to; they just didn’t understand the mechanics until a venomous industria 1-espionage agent slipped the secret plans to Eve, who is justly famous as the world’s first union organizer and the founder of the happy free-enterprise system we enjoy today.

  In Genesis, people first had to figure out how begetting was done. Only after that did they get busy creating new life: Cain and Abel. If therein lies a natural order, we at the national violated it. Among us, violent death came first. Thereafter, in innocent near-ignorance of how the deed was done, we mated motive to motive. Suspicion begat suspicion. It was fruitful. It multiplied.

  Freida Reilly had a motive as obvious as Cain’s, although rather different from his. As I recall, all Cain wanted was a little r-e-s-p-e-c-t, whereas what Freida craved was success. This show was Freida’s. If Hunnewell had botched the judging, the failure would have been hers. The gain was hers: Mikki Muldoon’s judging was smooth and efficient. The gain was Mikki Muldoon’s, too. Judging a national specialty? A prestigious assignment, one she’d prepared herself to accept. So everyone suspected Freida, who, as rumor had it, suspected Mikki, but who was also said to have raised questions about the culpability of some member of the wedding party, whether out of genuine suspicion or loyalty to Mikki no one knew.

  Betty Burley, who always suspected everyone, even me, of greater dedication to winning with malamutes than to rescuing them, raised questions about Sherri Ann Printz, whose Bear was supposed to be the favorite under Judge Hunnewell, but was definitely not so supposed by Betty Burley. Now that Hunnewell was dead, Betty vehemently asserted that Hunnewell would have shamed everyone by withholding the ribbons and thus announcing that the entire entry lacked merit—Betty insisted that she’d said so last night.

  I, by the way, did not merely suspect Sherri Ann Printz of stealing Cubby’s pedigree and the stud book Page from Betty’s tote bag; how Sherri Ann had known that those papers were in Betty’s tote, I wasn’t sure, but I had no doubt whatsoever that it was Sherri Ann who’d taken them. In Sherri Ann’s position, I might have protected my reputation just as I was sure she’d done. Although I didn’t know whether Betty had even asked to use Sherri Ann’s Bear at stud, I nonetheless suspected Sherri Ann of having insulted Betty by refusing. Whether Victor Printz suspected anyone remained a mystery to everyone except the Pawprintz dogs. They were the only creatures who seemed to comprehend a syllable of Victor’s disjointed mumbling.

  Bear’s true chances under Hunnewell? In predicting the would-have-been opinions of a deceased judge, the forecasters had the benefit of never being proven wrong. Sherri Ann Printz graciously accepted the condolences of supporters who were absolutely certain that Bear was just Hunnewell’s type, a shoo-in for Best of Breed. Rotten luck, they told her. She agreed: Rotten luck. If Bear’s boosters and Sherri Ann’s supporters were correct, the expression was grossly inadequate. In dogs, rotten luck is missing the judging at a little local match because of a flat tire. It’s watching your halftrained pup scramble to his feet on what was supposed to be the down-stay exercise (lie down and stay down) because of some damned toddler with an ice cream cone. Furthermore, Best of Breed at a national specialty isn’t just an honor, one more big win; it is the honor, the ultimate win within the breed. Consequently, discovering that your top contender for Best of Breed at a national has suddenly become just one more competitor is not rotten luck. It’s a damned disaster.

  If Sherri Ann really believed that Bear would have won under Hunnewell, she must have suspected Duke Sylvia, whose name Betty Burley also let drop. ”I know you think a lot of him, Holly,” Betty told me, ”but you haven’t been around as long as I have, and there’s plenty about Duke Sylvia that you just don’t know.” What I did know was that Mal-O-Mine Ironman, the big male that Duke co-owned, was supposed to be a strong contender under Mikki Muldoon. While I’m on the subject of Duke Sylvia, let me pass along my impression that in a sense Duke alone held himself above suspicion. Duke had such quiet confidence in his own handling and in Ironman, I thought, that it wouldn’t have fazed him to discover that the change had been from James Hunnewell to Mikki Muldoon to the Great

  Last Judge. As to who had murdered James Hunnewell, Duke Sylvia rose above suspicion by becoming the one person at the national who really didn’t seem to care at all.

  Sherri Ann Printz publicly lamented the loss of Bear’s now-certain victory. With considerably less modesty than Sherri Ann displayed, Timmy Oliver, too, grieved for the honor that Hunnewell would most certainly have bestowed upon Z-Rocks. It seemed to me, though, that Sherri Ann rejoiced in the stolen glory a little more than she lamented its loss; and that she considered the man, James Hunnewell, no loss at all. Timmy Oliver’s face, however, bore the rawness of recent sorrow.

  I have digressed. What begat my ”begat”s was not suspicion, but Timmy Oliver’s sad, anxious look. Had I ever seen him in daylight before? At an outdoor show, perhaps, where almost certainly, my attention had been fixed exclusively on the dogs. Today, just outside the exhibition hall, my gaze wandered. I blamed the weather, which was startlingly clear and bright, as if God had finally gotten around to washing our windows. What I saw in Timmy was a life history of incompleteness: coitus interruptus, premature birth, and delivery by a hurried obstetrician who’d rushed off elsewhere leaving the umbilical cord half-tied. Today, only the collar and sleeves of Tim’s shirt had been pressed. His hair was longer on one side than on the other, as if he’d bolted out of the barbershop midway through his last haircut or been abandoned in favor of an important customer. His razor had missed a thin patch on his left cheek, and he’d certainly fled the breakfast table before wiping his mouth.

  ”I don’t know whose generator it was,” he told Freida Reilly, ”but it wasn’t mine, and I’m fed up with this crap of everyone saying it was. The damned thing woke me up, too, and I’m pissed about it, just like everybody else.”

  Freida, accompanied by a brace of broad-shouldered men, had cornered Tim in an angle of the building just outside the big, wide door. Our show chair pointed the red nail of her right index finger straight at his belt. I almost expected her to make a loud bang-bang. She didn’t. What she said was, ”You’re pissed? Pissed? First of all, Timmy Oliver, let me tell you that I do not appreciate having that kind of gutter language directed at me. And second, if someone else has been accusing you of anything, that’s not my problem, because all I did was ask you one simple question, which was whether it was your generator, and if it wasn’t, all you had to do was to say no. But did you just say no? You did not! What you did was, you got yourself all in a huff, and you know what that makes me wonder? I see somebody puff up like that and start sputtering all about how it was all somebody else’s fault, and I
have to ask myself in all honesty if Fm not dealing with someone who’s got something to hide.” Her arms folded against her chest, she glared at him. Her pewter malamute jewelry almost seemed to mirror the expression.

  ”Honest to God, Freida, it woke me up, too.”

  Undaunted, Freida demanded to know where Tim had spent last night, but before he had time to respond, she accused him of staying in his camper.

  ”Jesus, Freida, I tried to get a room, but they’re all booked up, and I couldn’t find anyone to room with. Ask anyone! I must’ve asked a dozen people. Ask Duke! But, hey, you know, I wasn’t the only one, and I didn’t have a choice, and, you know, it’s not like I—”

  ”Enough! I have heard all I want to hear,” Freida sliced in. ”Just a word to the wise, Tim. One more violation, and you are no longer welcome at this show. And you know what I am talking about, because I warned you once before. I am referring to the poor filthy bitch I saw you with this morning, and what I am doing is, I am dashing any hopes you may have of getting her into a bathtub in this hotel and giving her the good scrubbing she needs before she’s fit to be taken out into the light of day, never mind into the ring! Don’t do it! And one more word to the wise, Timmy, and this is a very quiet word, and it is based on extensive conversations that I have had with certain members of the wedding party that is struggling just like me to make things work in spite of everything, and that one word is puppies, and the one thing I have to say to you on that subject is, not on show grounds!” With that admonition, Freida and her deputies wheeled around and marched into the hall.