Stud Rites

by Conant, Susan

  As Timmy Oliver marched toward Casey, the nasty little Colt in his hand abruptly silenced the screams and ”bravos.” Reaching Casey and taking the dog’s lead, Timmy told Casey’s owner-handier, ”Sorry about this, Al, but I got no choice.” You can hear Timmy on the videotape. I’ve listened again and again. And you can see him press that gun right up against Casey’s gorgeous head and dig it into that gold-mahogany coat until the trusting dog must have felt the cold of metal on his warm skin. You can’t hear what Al says to Casey, but you can tell that he says something, and you can see the color drain from Al’s face as Timmy leads Casey away.

  With no word or signal, the people outside the ring moved back to clear a broad path to the open door. Casey parted crowds all the time; he was used to it. And Mikki Muldoon was equally accustomed to exerting authority. Furious at having her judging interrupted and her Best of Breed stolen from her ring, she was on Timmy’s tail when through the wide door to the parking lot burst the four big heads of Poker Flat’s Risky Business, Poker Flat’s Hell’s Belle, Ch. Poker Flat’s Snow Flurrie, C.D., and Ch. Poker Flat’s Paper Chase, C.D. The four big bodies of this team entry of Battering Rams followed. Confronted with Casey, they came to a halt and spread themselves across Timmy’s escape route. The five big, beautiful dogs—the team and Casey —knew nothing of Colt Mustangs. Poke-Poke-Pokers though they were, the Battering Rams, show dogs all, knew that the one place they were never to stick their noses was straight into the face of another dog.

  As Timmy Oliver and Casey paused before the canine blockade, Judge Mikki Muldoon stepped swiftly to our breed club’s preview display of auction items, seized that historic sign that had hung over one of Eva

  B. Seeley’s own kennels, raised it swiftly in the air, and smashed it down on top of Timmy’s head.

  ”Not loaded!” she announced authoritatively. And after getting a grip on Casey’s lead, she took her Best of Breed back into what was unquestionably her ring.

  HOW TIMMY OLIVER’S mug shots turned out, I don’t know. They couldn’t have been flattering. By the time they were taken, I guess he’d had the splinters removed from his scalp, but his hair was probably messy. Although he’d no doubt had a Teflon-coated comb or a finishing brush in one of his pockets when he was arrested, the police must have confiscated all his possessions.

  I suspect, though, that Timmy didn’t look too much Worse than the rest of us. Even the official show photographer who took the picture of Casey’s win failed to make the occasion appear normal. On the far right, Mary Jane Holabach, Casey’s co-owner and human Mom, is as pretty and well groomed as ever, and she’s managing to smile, but the malamutes in the framed Print she displays seem to be standing on their heads: She is holding the picture upside down. Freida Reilly’s show chair badge, purple flowers, and gold dog team are askew; her closed eyes suggest that instead of presenting the malamute quilt she’s holding to Casey and the Holabachs, she’ll wrap it around herself, drop to the floor, and take a long, drugged nap. Although Mikki Muldoon hides her feet behind several pots of flowers and a collection of trophies, you can see that her slip is showing. Furthermore, her once-carrot hair is a little disheveled. Her bearing, however, is flawless, and as usual, she is fastening the ornate purple-and-gold Best of Breed rosette to her own midriff. Al’s color has not returned. He looms over Casey, as if fearful that the dog might again be taken hostage. Casey’s ears are, as always, alert. His broad winner’s smile reveals a red tongue. Every single hair is exactly where it should be. Indeed, everything in Casey’s world is just as it should be: He is used to creating a stir. This time, he thinks, he has simply outdone himself.

  Or so it seems in the photo. I wasn’t there when it was taken. I left even before Judge Muldoon picked Daphne for Best of Opposite—Best of Opposite Sex to Best of Breed. (Since Best of Breed was a male—Casey —Best of Opposite was a female—Daphne.) The female of Sherri Ann’s who’d gone Winners Bitch defeated the Winners Dog for Best of Winners. (Still not fluent? Winners Bitch: the winner of the championship points in the competition among the bitches who weren’t yet champions. Winners Dog: same thing, but for males. Best of Winners: She’s defeated the other girls who were vying for points. He’s defeated the other boys. Both have won championship points. Now we have the battle of the sexes: Winners Bitch versus Winners Dog’ The victor? Best of Winners. Okay, so what about Casey and Daphne? Best of Breed and Best of Opposite? Why didn’t they win the points? Because they weren’t competing for points, that’s why; they were already champions and thus entered only in the Best of Breed competition. Ah, but could the Winners Dog or Winners Bitch also have gone Best of Breed? Yes, thereby automatically becoming Best of Winners. Confusing? Consider tennis. Fifteen, thirty, forty, game? And ”love”? What on earth does ”love” have to do with tennis? Love is no racket! On the contrary, love is a warm you-know-what.) Anyway, I wish I’d been there. I hated to miss the judging of the Stud Dog, Brood Bitch, Brace, and Team classes, too, but Betty needed help with Timmy Oliver’s dogs. Seconds after Timmy was arrested for the murder of James Hunnewell, Betty, of course, started to worry about his dogs. Timmy, she declared, belonged in a jail cell. But what had the innocent Z-Rocks and the silver male and, especially, the two puppies done to deserve incarceration? Her concern was well founded. Detective Kariotis did, in fact, try to claim the dogs as evidence. But Betty held out, and before long, she and Kariotis worked out a trade. Betty would have had to surrender the lamp, anyway; in bartering the murder weapon for the dogs, she got a good deal.

  As we started across the parking lot toward Timmy’s camper, I said, ”You know, Betty, I feel so stupid. Duke told me so much that I can’t help thinking that he knew all along. I mean, he’s the one who told me about Timmy Oliver and James Hunnewell’s co-ownership agreement: that Timmy co-owned Comet in name only and that Hunnewell controlled absolutely everything. Harriet Lunt drew up the agreement. Duke knew that. He’s the one who told me. He also said that when Comet was alive, when Timmy and Hunnewell co-owned him, Timmy had a bitch he wanted to breed, and he wanted to use Comet, but Hunnewell absolutely refused. Timmy didn’t even have stud rights on his own dog. And out in the grooming tent, Duke said that Comet’s semen had been frozen. And never used. I just didn’t finish putting it all together: that if Hunnewell controlled everything else about Comet, including using him at stud when he was alive, he’d hardly have let Timmy own half those straws of sperm.”

  ”Usually,” Betty said, ”if you co-own a dog and you have his semen frozen, then half the straws are in one person’s name, and the other half are in the other Person’s. Isn’t that how it works?”

  ”Unless you make some other arrangement. Hunnewell didn’t trust Timmy. Who does? If Hunnewell hired Harriet Lunt to cut Timmy out when he bought Comet, he probably got her to make sure that the contract about the frozen semen was the way he wanted it, too.”

  Betty sighed. ”So that’s why Timmy’s been making a fuss about Z-Rocks. He knew as well as I did that that bitch didn’t have a chance against this kind of competition. He was just setting the stage for what would happen after she produced a litter out of Comet. I can just hear him: ’See? Didn’t I tell you James loved her? Didn’t I tell you she was just his type?’ ”

  ”So everyone would believe that Hunnewell had let him use Comet,” I said. ”Comet’s sperm. I wonder if Timmy ever even asked Hunnewell. Or if he just assumed that Hunnewell would refuse.”

  ”And went ahead and killed him. And forged his signature. And left that damned lamp under my van!” As we later found out, Timmy did forge Hunnewell’s signature. In his camper, the police found transfer-of-ownership forms for Comet’s sperm, papers signed with James Hunnewell’s name, but not in James Hunnewell’s own hand.

  When we reached Timmy’s camper, Detective Kari-otis wasn’t there. Crime-scene tape was strung all over, and two police officers guarding the camper didn’t want to let us in, so we hung around waiting. The camper, of course, was crammed with real evidence.
For example, the open carton of cigarettes I’d noticed that morning, the carton that Timmy must have lifted from Hunnewell’s hotel room. Timmy didn’t smoke, but Hunnewell sure did, and a heavy smoker like that doesn’t arrive at an unfamiliar destination without the means to satisfy his addiction. As I now piece things together, Timmy must have gone to Hunnewell’s room at about ten o’clock on Thursday night. At nine-fifteen or nine-thirty, when I was helping Hunnewell with the ice machine, he offered me a cigarette, and he didn’t ask anything about the location of a cigarette machine. Furthermore, Freida Reilly says that after Hunnewell’s spat with Pam, at quarter of ten or so, when Freida took him back to his room, he didn’t ask her, either. So Timmy must have shown up there at around ten o’clock and left, probably soon thereafter, with Hunnewell’s entire cigarette stash. Exactly how he filched it, I don’t know, but I understand why he didn’t want to commit the murder inside the hotel. There, a guest passing by in the hall could have heard a shout, or he might easily have been observed leaving the rooms with traces of the deed visible in the expression of his face, if not actually on his hands and his clothes.

  By ten-thirty Timmy was back at the exhibition hall. Sherri Ann remembers seeing him. The Parade of Veterans and Titleholders was still going on. Sherri Ann Printz is sure that Timmy was there when she showed some people the lamp and explained what it was and how she’d made it. Sherri Ann is running for the board of our national breed club, by the way. For office: president.

  Anyway, at about the same time that Sherri Ann was politicking with the lamp, Betty Burley remembered that she’d left the lamp and the other valuable auction items, as well as her tote bag, at the booth, and she went out and drove her van to the unloading area just outside the hall. On Betty’s first trip from the booth to the van, she had her tote bag over her shoulder, and she carried the lamp in her arms. It must have been while she was returning for the framed wolf prints and the other stuff that Timmy slipped into her van, grabbed the lamp, and raided her tote bag. The theft of the lamp, I am sure, was a last-minute inspiration. His camper overflowed with the detritus of travel—maps, fast-food wrappers, old coffee cups—but the amount of loose change was extraordinary, and there were all those socks, too. The Comet lamp, I think, was a substitute for the coin-packed sock he’d intended to use as his blunt instrument. In contrast to a cosh, the lamp was a meaningful weapon: a sacred relic of Northpole’s Comet. And Timmy must have known that if he could get the lamp back in Betty Burley’s possession, she’d do her best to see that it got auctioned off to raise money for her rescue dogs. Then, after the auction, the murder weapon would vanish forever into the living room or den of the highest bidder.

  Exactly where Timmy waited to intercept Hunnewell is unclear. Running out of cigarettes, Hunnewell would certainly venture from his room. Timmy must have hung around watching for him, perhaps in a linen closet or in the stairwell. In any case, he must have approached Hunnewell and told him that he had cigarettes in his camper. Hunnewell was so out of touch with the times that he hadn’t even known how to open a pop-top can. I guess that whoever did his shopping for him bought nothing but bottles. Anyway, I don’t think he’d have been surprised to hear that Timmy smoked. If Hunnewell ever entered the camper, he didn’t leave any prints that the police found. Probably Timmy told him to wait outside. Then he returned not with cigarettes, but with imminent death.

  Although I don’t know exactly where Timmy murdered Hunnewell, I know that very early on Friday morning, Freida found the corpse under a camper. Timmy’s must have been in the line of campers when Leah and I played at choosing one for ourselves. Freida continues to insist that the body was either on show grounds or close enough to show grounds to threaten the cancellation of the national, and she is as furious as ever at Timmy Oliver for depositing it there and leaving her stuck with the obligation to move it to the little shed where Finn Adams subsequently came across it. According to someone who told someone who told me, Freida swears that Mikki Muldoon had no idea how sick Hunnewell really was. Consequently, according to rumor, Freida just took it for granted that Mikki Muldoon had murdered him to get the judging assignment. Freida apparently also confides to people that she’d eventually have shared her suspicion with the police. Further, she assures everyone that she’d have waited until Mikki had completed the judging. Freida is running for the board, too. For president.

  But back to that Saturday afternoon. By the time Detective Kariotis showed up, the crime-scene experts were more than ready to get rid of the dogs, who, as it turned out, were destroying evidence. Toss anything into a dog crate occupied by a puppy, and what can you expect? Actually, Timmy Oliver expected the destruction to be greater than it really was. As we found out afterward, in addition to shredded newspaper and miscellaneous filth, the puppies’ crates contained bits of the paper towel that Timmy had used to clean off the base of the bloodied lamp, as well as numerous scraps from the files that Timmy had stolen from Betty’s tote bag. I suspect that Cubby’s pedigree and the page from the stud book were touches that Timmy added well after he’d murdered Hunnewell. Betty’s tote bag is always so crammed with paper that she still isn’t sure what he stole, but the information on several other dogs is also missing, and I think that he looked through all of it, selected those particular pages, and planted them on Hunnewell’s body. He really was furious at Betty for refusing to tell the hotel that his camper belonged to her.

  Betty’s initial hypothesis that Sherri Ann and Victor Printz had murdered Hunnewell was not, I think, part of Timmy’s scheme. Betty now confesses that mistrustful of Sherri Ann’s sudden generosity to Alaskan Malamute Rescue, she decided that Sherri Ann had donated the lamp for her own use as a murder weapon. Betty, of course, knew that Sherri Ann was furious that one of her Pawprintz puppies had ended up in Gladys Thacker’s puppy mill. Sherri Ann now claims that she, Sherri Ann, has only herself to blame for shipping a pup to someone she didn’t know. Betty still says that Sherri Ann has always held James Hunnewell responsible for referring his sister to her to begin with; and that if

  Sherri Ann was murderously angry, she had every right to be. Victor, Betty maintains, was the one who left the material about Cubby, which Betty viewed as equivalent to a soldier’s playing card. Until Betty advanced the idea, I hadn’t even known that soldiers left playing cards on bodies.

  Anyway, when the police finally let us have Timmy’s dogs, the crime-scene experts inadvertently turned over to us the single most damning piece of evidence against Timmy Oliver. And I was the one who found it! Found, however, is not quite the right word... I picked it up in a plastic bag. Not an evidence bag, either. Not an official one, anyway. So here’s how I brilliantly, resourcefully, and single-handedly obtained absolute, undeniable proof of Timmy Oliver’s guilt: I walked a puppy. I cleaned up after him. Truly, that’s all there was to it. Well, a little more. Instead of letting Betty and me go into the camper to get Timmy’s dogs, the police protected what they supposed to be the crucial evidence by bringing the dogs out one at a time. By then, Steve and Kevin had arrived. Steve’s van held the two crates he uses for his own dogs. The plan was that he’d take Timmy’s two adult dogs, Z-Rocks and the silver male, back to Cambridge, where he’d board them at his clinic. That part went fine: A couple of crime-scene guys led out the dogs and turned them over to Steve and Kevin. Then a woman brought out both his sturdy puppies. Betty took the lead of the female Timmy had tried to sell to Crystal. I took the male’s. And we started toward Betty’s van. A dog show was no place for puppies this age, Betty had insisted. Neither was a veterinary clinic. Consequently, she was going to drive the two puppies home and leave them with her sister, who was taking care of Betty’s own dogs. As we crossed the asphalt, both sizable puppies kept biting their leashes and bouncing around. My puppy, however —the male—started to sniff and circle, and as he settled into a squat, I reached into my pocket and extracted one of the plastic bags that I, Ms. Responsible Dog Owner, am never without. And when the pup had finished,
I, Ms. Responsible Dog Owner, reached down to clean up after him. What I found, in the middle of the expected, was a tiny plastic packet carefully sealed with tape. For obvious reasons, I did not unwrap the little package with my bare hands, but immediately turned my evidence bag over to the police. This indelicate vignette has a moral: Always, always clean up after your dog! For in doing so, you, too, may one day find a diamond ring. You, however, may get to keep yours. I had no right to the one I found. My diamond ring had belonged to Elsa Van Dine.

  At the banquet that night, everyone kept asking me about the diamond ring. At first, I avoided the topic. My mother would not have considered the episode a suitable subject for the dinner table. After drinking more than I probably should have, however, I revealed the whole story. My mother, after all, had belonged in a federal penitentiary. Who was she to make me feel guilty about a trivial impropriety? Although Betty, I am certain, was as astounded at the discovery as I was, she maintained that she wasn’t in the least surprised. ”Timmy always did go whining to Elsa about everything,” she reported. ”I have no doubt that he tried to buy that semen and that when James refused, he went sniveling to Elsa.”