Stud Rites

by Conant, Susan

  Timmy’s reply to Duke’s request for reimbursement was loud and brash: ”Your room, man, your problem.” There was a pause; Duke must have spoken. Then Timmy said, ”No can do! If I had a dime, I’d have my own room. Go ahead and try, but you can’t get blood out of a stone.” If Crystal was telling the truth, only yesterday she’d paid Timmy two hundred dollars. According to Betty, he’d probably already spent it. Or he was lying.

  A hand descended on my left shoulder. Even before I saw whose it was, I flinched. Leaning across Z-Rocks, Timmy breathed into my ear. He reeked of aftershave and peppermint. ”Too bad about that back there. These things’ll happen. Nobody’s fault.”

  As an alpha, I’m strictly self-made. I envied the naturals: Duke Sylvia, Rowdy, Kimi, Casey, Betty Burley. My mother, too. She’d have acted by instinct. But once I worked out what to do—not a damned thing—I knew I’d hit on the true alpha attitude. In my world, Timmy Oliver did not exist.

  And that’s alpha: Does God swat flies?

  UNABLE TO OUTRUN his predators, the horned lizard relies on crypticity and spines: He is hard to see and even harder to swallow. For canids, he reserves a unique defense: His lids swell, and out of minute openings in his eyes squirt fine streams of noxious and repellant blood. I am a sort of horny toad in reverse. Regardless of my surroundings, I stand out as a dog person, and far from sticking in the throats of dogs, I readily slip inside their skins. Confronted with a dog, I become all eyes. Into them shoots my life’s blood. When it comes to dogs, I am utterly without protection.

  So, when Timmy Oliver raced poor Z-Rocks up against Ironman, when he pulled that dirty old show-ring trick, I considered Z-Rocks ill-used, and I felt for Ironman.

  Leah was vocal in her outrage: ”Did you see that! Why doesn’t the judge...?”

  ”This is an insult to her,” I said. ”When she catches °n, she won’t put up with it.”

  ”What does he think he’s doing?” Leah demanded.

  Timmy’s immediate purpose, as I saw it, was to provoke Ironman. The sparring of terriers, of course, has no place in the malamute ring. If Timmy wanted an altercation between dogs, however, his effort was doomed. The peaceable and baffled-looking Z-Rocks was a wildly unsuitable choice for the role of aggressor, and even if she’d been a big, challenging male, the adroitly handled and self-contained Ironman would probably have continued to mind his own business.

  I guessed what Timmy really wanted only when Mikki Muldoon intervened, as she’d been bound to do. To get Duke ordered out of the ring, Timmy had risked being booted out himself. An experienced judge, and no fool, Mrs. Muldoon called Duke, Timmy, and their dogs into the empty center of the ring, where she spoke briefly and softly while thrusting her finger first at one man, then at the other, and never at the dogs. The spectators, of course, eventually fell silent, but by the time everyone had quit talking and was straining to hear, Judge Mikki Muldoon had said whatever she’d had to say. The episode, by the way, does not appear on the commercial videotape of the national. I don’t know whether the camera was stopped or whether the interchange was filmed and subsequently edited out. The outcome is, however, apparent on the tape: Instead of exercising her power to expel Duke, Timmy, Ironman, Z-Rocks, or all four from her little rectangular kingdom, Mikki Muldoon played absolute tyrant. For all I know, she may actually have threatened to behead someone: Quick, stewards, the guillotine! What I do know for certain is that Timmy Oliver immediately became a perfect little human good citizen in the realm of Mikki Muldoon, who subsequently ran her discards once around the ring before blocking them at the gate, where she said a polite thank you to everyone she was excusing, and thus let Timmy Oliver know that Z-Rocks had been cut.

  As Leah and I watched Judge Mikki Muldoon, we began to make our own cuts from the list of murder suspects.

  ”Mikki Muldoon?” I said to Leah. ”Hunnewell was a lot sicker than we knew. He told Karl Reilly so. Freida must’ve known, and she’d’ve told the judge who’d have to step in if anything happened. Even if Hunnewell had made it through yesterday morning, he’d probably have collapsed, and Mrs. Muldoon would be just where she is now. Why murder someone when all you have to do is wait? Besides, Mrs. Muldoon made a big point of keeping herself sequestered. Thursday night? When we had dinner? She could’ve had dinner in her room, okay? But what she did was to eat all alone out in public where everyone could see that she wasn’t socializing. So it’s hardly likely that a couple of hours later, at ten-thirty or whenever, when the Parade of Veterans and Titleholders was ending, she’d’ve been wandering around back here where—” Leah interrupted me. ”Wow! Isn’t that...?”

  ”Yeah, that’s Casey,” I said with approval.

  Now that I saw my pick in the ring, I realized that what I’d mistaken for his performance had been a mere rehearsal. Clowning around for the passersby, Casey’d just been warming up his allure and stretching his magnetism, and in gazing at the eyes of his admirers, he’d been making a final check on the reflected glory of his own perfection. Now, muscles rippling and surging, he was the ultimate gorgeous show-off show dog... and I suddenly knew that Betty Burley had been right.

  ”Betty told me so,” I said to Leah. ”I just didn’t listen.”

  ”About...?”

  ”Betty said it about... I can’t remember. Maybe about Sherri Ann and Bear. No, about Daphne. Any-way, it doesn’t matter, because what Betty said applies to everyone. We were talking about Best of Breed, and what Betty said was that because of Casey, nobody bet-ter count on anything. I remember how she said it, bemuse she never sounds that way. ’Because Casey’s here!’ she said. And I didn’t really get it, because I’d just seen photos of him. Leah, the point is that Casey is such serious competition that—”

  ”Under Hunnewell?” Leah asked.

  ”That’s the point. You could go around mass-murdering judges, and it still wouldn’t guarantee anything, because as long as Casey’s here, Casey’s going to do his damnedest to win, and he’s going to stand a good chance of succeeding, because he is a hell of a dog and a hell of a showman. Furthermore, Sherri Ann Printz and Timmy Oliver and Duke all knew that, because they’ve all seen Casey before, so they knew exactly what they were up against, okay? So, Best of Breed had nothing to do with the murder: With Casey in the ring, you could murder half the judges on the AKC eligible list, and Casey could still win.”

  ”So why does Timmy Oliver keep harping on...?”

  ”Well, he’s obviously right that Z-Rocks wasn’t going to go anywhere under Mrs. Muldoon—she got cut—but whether Hunnewell... I don’t know. Best of Opposite? An Award of Merit? I suppose it’s remotely possible, but she’s just not this caliber!” I pointed to the dogs in the ring. Bitches, too, of course. ”Just look! Look at what’s in the ring! She’s—”

  Almost against my will, my upraised hand and pointing finger, however, drifted from my original target toward a remarkably accurate, yet smaller-than-lifesize and entirely floral representation that the florid-faced Harold Jenkinson, Crystal’s father, was positioning in the dead center of the trophy table by the gate as solemnly and wordlessly as though it were a spectacular bonus surprise Best of Breed trophy offered as a tribute by the admiring wedding party. And if the man’s hands trembled? If his complexion turned from red to white to scarlet? Why, what could be more natural in the father of the bride, the patriarch who had presumably just given away a gift more precious than an elaborate dog of flowers? And in another holy rite, too? The marriage of a daughter? A life event of sufficient moment in itself to act as a sort of emotional surgery on the vocal cords, thus transforming Harold Jenkinson into the grotesque and pitiful human mockery of a poor debarked dog. His mouth convulsively and silently opening and closing, Harold Jenkinson settled the elaborately florist-bred rose-red, white-trimmed malamute on the trophy table. Driven, no doubt, by the stress of a life transition and obviously frustrated in his futile effort to speak his mind to Freida Reilly, he laid hands upon the rope of flowers twined around the gate to the
ring and, with a swift yank, loosed the long garland, sent the wooden trellis crashing to the floor. Then, like an angry bride fleeing a ruined altar, he dragged away the train of flowers, his own white veil.

  Ignoring the departing Harold, Freida Reilly, arms akimbo, scanned the crowd, spotted her objective, and stormed toward Sherri Ann Printz. Jolting to a halt, Freida turned so violently red that I feared for her physical and mental health. ”What have I ever done to you to deserve this persecution?” she shrieked. ”In the past year, I have spent thousands of hours slaving over every last detail of this show, and what do I get in return? A systematic campaign organized by you to ruin my show! You got those entrees switched last night! And you stage-managed this business with the flowers! And you, Sherri Ann—”

  ”Holly,” Leah whispered, ”do you think that Sherri Ann really...?”

  ”Yes,” I whispered back. ”I think she really did. And I think that Victor helped her, too.”

  ”Mother,” Karl interjected calmly. ”Mother?” At his side was a young woman I recognized as the doctor who had volunteered to examine Harriet Lunt last night. Together, Karl and the doctor somehow convinced Freida to back off. They led her, red-faced and still sputtering, quietly away.

  Sherri Ann, a caricature of generosity, exclaimed, ”Poor Freida! Groundless suspicion of your old friends is a sure sign of mental illness, you know,” she told us. ”Watch and see. Cracking up under the strain.” Shaking her head as if Freida were right in front of her injecting heroin: ”Drugs! Poor Freida’ll have to be all doped up.”

  Meanwhile, everyone nearby had pitched in to sweep up the scattered blossoms. As a couple of show-committee members raised the fallen bower, Leah commented, ”Freida and that father of the bride are both pissed enough to—”

  ”Do not say pissed! This is a dog show, not a kennel. Besides, you go to Harvard.”

  ”Everyone at school says everything. And,” my cousin added in the clear, ringing tones of the expensively educated, ”no one there goes around yelling about frozen semen and artificial vaginas.”

  ”Leah!”

  Finally lowering her voice, she said, ”There’s this sign you see all over the place in the Alps, warning you about not getting stuck up there, and anyway, what it says is, ’Distance distorts perspective,’ and—”

  ”I thought distance lent enchantment to the view.”

  ”They don’t have to warn you about that part,” Leah said. ”Anyway, it’s true, about distance and perspective, except that proximity does the same thing. And also, it works the other way: Perspective distorts distance.” She paused. ”And proximity.” Taking a big breath, she continued, ”So, subjectively speaking, the proximal-distal dimension is a function of perspective, and perspective—”

  I’d had enough. ”And the conclusion,” I said, ”is that since how close or how far away you are determines how something looks to you, and since your angle on it determines how near or far away it looks, there’s never any way to know where you really are.”

  ”Oh, yes there is!” Leah crowed. ”And that’s the problem! Take the bride’s father: The failure to avail himself of the perspectives of others is responsible for his transparent difficulty in obtaining a complex, multidimensional perspective on this wedding, which he is seeing from close up and strictly from his own, inevitably distorted, point of view.”

  ”And how is he supposed to view it? It’s his daughter’s wedding, and it must be costing—”

  ”Well, all that does is lock him more and more inextricably—”

  ”Leah, could I ask you something? Exactly what in God’s name does any of this have to do with anything else?”

  With a triumphant smile she exclaimed, ”There! You see? You just showed it. Distance and perspective.”

  ”I could strangle you,” I hissed.

  ”Except,” Leah impatiently continued, ”that James Hunnewell was not strangled. He was bludgeoned. With a blunt instrument.” After waiting for me to follow, she explained. ”By someone stranded on the impasse of proximity and perspective who, instead of escaping via the route of multifaceted viewpoints—”

  ”Who what?”

  ”Meaning that killing Mr. Hunnewell represents the murderer’s maladaptive effort to rescue himself or herself from an impasse or maybe an incipient avalanche that was only apparent, but that seemed real because relative proximity distorts perspective, and perspective—”

  ”Meaning,” I interrupted darkly, ”that murder seemed like a good idea at the time.”

  ”Meaning,” said Leah, ”that the two people marooned on self-created Alps were the bride’s father and Freida Reilly, who are obviously the two people who Would’ve lost perspective. So either the bride’s father was desperate not to have the wedding buried in an avalanche of malamutes, or else Freida was desperate not to have her show shoved off a cliff by—”

  ”Reasoning by analogy,” I said. ”Harvard should’ve warned you about that instead of teaching you to say ’pissed’ all the time. Leah, the police could have declared this entire hotel a crime scene! They didn’t. But they could have. No wedding, no national. Freida? Crystal’s father? You’ve just picked the last two people on earth who’d ever have risked murder.”

  Twenty-seven

  ”MYSELF,” declared Pam Ritchie of Ch. Pawprintz Honor Guard, ”I would say that he needs more neck and that he’s oversized to the point of clumsiness, but far be it from me to stand between you and your own opinion, Tiny, and if you think he’s nice, then nice he is.” She paused. ”In your opinion.” She paused again. ”Others, of course, may beg to differ. Mrs. Seeley, for instance, felt very strongly that...”

  The better to tune in to today’s episode of the Pam and Tiny spat, I’d turned my head away from the ring and was studying the object of dissent, Bear. The dog waited in the aisle behind my seat at the side of his breeder-owner-handler, Sherri Ann Printz. Mindful, no doubt, that Pam and Tiny wouldn’t vote for her anyway, Sherri Ann boomed at her husband: ”Victor! Victor, give me your opinion on something!” With her free hand, Sherri Ann directed Victor’s attention and everyone else’s to a gray dog who just happened to be of Pam Ritchie’s breeding. ”Now, Victor, if this wasn’t a malamute national, wouldn’t you swear to God that that was a Siberian?” Aiming her saccharine gaze straight at Pam, Sherri Ann drove the insult home: ”And a fine-boned Siberian, at that!”

  How Pam countered I cannot report. I was lost in thoughts of collaboration, collusion, and loyalty. Pam and Tiny: When James Hunnewell desecrated Short Seeley’s sacred memory by spitting a stream of obscenities, Pam had zealously defended the matriarch of the breed: ”If Short were alive today, you wouldn’t dare say any of that!” Mrs. Seeley was dead, of course, but keeping her revered memory alive was a mission that Pam certainly pursued with religious fervor. Could Mrs. Lunt, too, have disparaged the matriarch of the breed in Pam’s presence? And if zealotry had driven Pam to exact revenge on the defilers of her idol, Tiny would, as always, have been right at Pam’s side. Sherri Ann and Victor Printz: Victor named her dogs. He mumbled to them. At ringside, he was Sherri Ann’s ardent booster. When two Pawprintz dogs were due in the ring at the same time, he handled for her. He was her husband, her kennel help, her aide-de-camp. As I’d told Leah, I strongly suspected that Freida’s accusations concerning Sherri Ann were correct and that Victor had served as his wife’s co-conspirator. If Sherri Ann had committed murder, Victor, I knew, would have made himself as ruthlessly useful as ever.

  Leah touched my arm. ”Hey, that reminds me,” my cousin said, pointing to the R.T.I. booth, where Steve Delaney was engaged in conversation with Finn Adams. ”I forgot to tell you. Did you know that Steve and, uh, Finn already knew each other?”

  ”They don’t. I mean, I’ve told Steve—”

  ”They met,” Leah gleefully reported, ”at a conference in Minneapolis. It was about—”

  ”A.I.” Artificial insemination. ”No, Leah, you’re wrong. Because if they had, Steve would—”


  ”If they’d made the connection, which they didn’t but—”

  ”But you...!”

  ”I did not! The un-romance of your romantic past is strictly your own—”

  ”Affair,” I snapped. ”And is not something I’m thrilled to have dragged into the present. Shit! It’s not that Finn is... He’s a decent person, and what happened was actually my mother’s fault, not his, but I just—

  ”He’s a jerk,” Leah said.

  ”Distance did lend enchantment,” I conceded. ”Well, if they haven’t made the connection, they probably won’t. Steve has a lousy memory for human names, and Finn doesn’t know who Steve is, in relation to me, and even if he did...”

  ”Even if he did,” Leah finished ruthlessly, ”they’re both more interested in dog sperm than they are in you.”

  I was pondering the ultimate consolation when, in the aisle behind us, new and acrimonious voices rose above Pam’s and Sherri Ann’s in what sounded like the escalation of their skirmish into a major battle in the sometimes uncivil civil war about malamute bloodlines that has raged for at least four decades. I want to report that in rising from my seat, I firmly intended to ally myself with neither militant faction, but to remain in the neutral role of a sort of United Malamutes observer.

  As it turned out, however, Detective Kariotis had unintentionally changed the course of the battle by rallying the warriors on both sides in defense of one of their own, Betty Burley, against a common foe, namely, himself. The floor space near the gate, the trophy table, the breed club booth, and the rescue booth was so thick with handlers, dogs, and spectators that I had to keep tiptoeing around paws and begging everyone’s pardon to get near the center of the escalating fray. Sherri Ann Printz, backed by Victor Printz, Harriet Lunt, and an assemblage of other previously anti-Rescue and anti-Betty forces, was valiantly contesting Detective Kariotis’s attempt to seize the Comet lamp as a piece of evidence in the murder of James Hunnewell—indeed, as the murder weapon itself. Victor Printz, in a voice rusty with disuse, was demanding to see a search warrant. He was also threatening to file charges against Kariotis for harassing Betty Burley, who was calmly explaining what Alaskan Malamute Rescue was and how she would spend the money that the high bidder would pay for the lamp. With her neck stretched high and her small arms folded stalwartly across her chest, she insisted, ”So, you see, since this beautiful and unique lamp is a very valuable collector’s item, donated not to me personally, but to this organization and to the dogs that Mrs. Printz intends it to help, I am simply not entitled to—”