The Deadly Dog Show (Roger and Suzanne South American Mystery Series Book 6)

by Jerold Last

  Robert Rosswell looked and acted like a used-car salesman. Medium sized, too quick and too firm with his insincere handshake, he made me want to check my pocket to make sure my wallet was still intact. His first words were, "Call me Rocket. I'm from Ballimer". I tuned out most of the rest of his blatantly overdone greeting. Needless to say, he was in sales. He explained to me that the AKC didn’t actually do any hands-on supervision of dog shows.

  “The two big contractors, Bradshaw and MBF, manage all of the larger shows with more than 500 dogs---venue rentals, dog enrollments, hiring judges, and keeping track of winners. There are more management companies to keep track of when you include the smaller shows. Supervision of the contractors is nominal since they’ve been doing this for over 75 years. Liaison with the two perpetual contractors is Cabot’s responsibility, which is a good job for the dimmest bulb in our corporate chandelier. He’s from an important family that over the years has made, and continues to make, big contributions to the AKC, to the museum, to our health and welfare funds, and to a lot of special fund raisers. I guess he’s earned his job.”

  Rosswell picked up a shiny, fancy silver letter holder from his desk and fidgeted with it, as he continued. “The AKC makes a lot of its money selling things to its captive audience of members. Among the items we sell is record keeping software, paid access to all sorts of records and pedigrees, and DNA analysis for their dogs. They can also qualify for various levels of competitive awards, and buy impressive framed certificates to advertise their animals. There’s also an AKC store that sells all kinds of merchandise provided by outside vendors. I’m responsible for all of those operations.”

  Rocket was yet another talker. Thus far, these interviews were easy----sit and listen, and try not to look too bored. Roswell was a self-important windbag who tried to convince me that without his sales of new awards and new tests to the members, the whole AKC organization would wither away and die from chronic money shortage. The only thing he said that really related to me or to the ostensible purpose of our meeting was to remind me to keep receipts for every expense I ever incurred on the job. “These bean counters here in the corporate office won’t reimburse you for a lousy cup of coffee or tip for a taxi driver without a signed receipt. Make sure you get a receipt for everything, I mean everything, you buy on the job!”

  My impression of Rocket was that he had the personality type who would always be trying to sell 100,000 T-shirts that he had been able to buy at a cheap price in Cambodia with another catchy logo like “My bite is worse than my bark!” but he’d never succeed.

  For my next interview, Hunter Lodge was about 5 foot 10 inches, in pretty good shape at about 165 pounds, who looked and acted a lot more competent than most of his colleagues. He probably worked out in a gym, but was also outdoors enough to acquire a suntan. Lodge was the youngest of the group, still in his 40s. He was the corporate comptroller handling all things financial for the AKC, and was responsible for supervising a lot of employees in both New York City and Durham, North Carolina. His welcome betrayed a childhood spent in Boston, where the letter “r” has officially been banned from normal speech. "Glad to see you heah in the office. Manhattan is a whole lot like Bahston, only bigga".

  He asked a lot of questions in his strong New England regional dialect about my detective agency's finances. I answered as honestly as I could when the information was easily corroborated from public records. However, when he tried to probe into my personal financial situation, I was a good deal less candid, knowing that these answers would be a lot harder for him to check out (very wealthy, thanks to Suzanne’s inheritance and our combined incomes). In the last ten minutes of the interview Lodge turned human and asked me about hobbies and what I liked to do when I wasn’t working.

  This part was easy, since I could just tell the truth. “I work out pretty regularly and spend a fair amount of time practicing martial arts, especially Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and karate. Suzanne used to work out with me, but it’s become a lot harder for her to find the time since we had the baby. We have an infant son, Robert, who takes up a lot of our time outside of work. Fortunately, he travels well. Suzanne and I have done a fair amount of traveling around South America.”

  I learned that Lodge sailed, hunted, and played in several recreational team sports, especially squash and tennis where he preferred doubles. He seemed likeable enough based on this last ten minutes of the interview, and was almost certainly the most qualified of the board members I’d met so far that morning.

  As I was preparing to leave, Lodge warned me in an offhand manner not to trust Carswell too much. According to Lodge, Carswell had a habit of always blaming the people around him for business problems that weren’t being solved or mistakes he’d made himself. “Hmm,” I thought to myself, as I made a mental note that there was an obvious rift in the AKC leadership.

  Hunter Lodge was the only one of the interview group who was, more or less, from my generation. He seemed to be trying to nonverbally communicate to me that he could be a potential colleague, or at least a potential ally, within the group. He shook my hand warmly as he sent me to my final interview.

  Finally, Stanley Morgan was the corporate counsel, a fancy label for the head attorney at the corporation. Morgan was a handsome 6 footer in his mid-50s, who was professionally groomed and dressed well. He appeared to have captured every nuance of the image of a successful attorney climbing the corporate ladder. Since I had been, once upon a time, a patent attorney, he was fascinated by my underused law degree and expressed mild disbelief that I might prefer the relatively underpaid life of the P.I. to the wealth that could be amassed practicing patent law. He spent the better part of five minutes advising me about the many available opportunities with firms specializing in intellectual property law in New York City.

  “I’ve got friends at all of the big firms going back to my time in law school, which I attended here in New Yawk. They’re always looking for new associates and they pay a ton of money if they want you in the firm. You should think about it.”

  The rest of the time we talked about my investigative plan, was I to be awarded this AKC contract. I described the overall proposal I had discussed with Carswell but gave as little detail as possible. He was a good listener and asked the right questions so time passed quickly. Surprisingly, Morgan was able to pull off my interrogation quite smoothly, without pissing me off in the process. This led me to believe that he was probably very good at his job, especially if it involved any litigation work. His speech pattern was well educated, with a trace of a New Yawk dialect underneath the long and well-parsed words. Of all of the people I’d met thus far from the AKC Board of Directors, other than Carswell, he seemed by far the most capable. He was also the one I’d assume was the most independent, therefore the most likely to stand up to the boss in public, not just rubber stamp any and all of Carswell’s decisions.

  I made another mental note that if there were any undertones of different factions among the AKC leadership, Morgan was the prime candidate to be the opposition leader. My guess was that if any organized opposition to Carswell’s decisions ever arose, it would come from Morgan, with perhaps Lodge as an ally.

  Eventually I completed my running of the gauntlet and it was time for lunch, served in the Executive Dining Room on the 31st floor of the building. We sat around a huge table, while multiple courses of soup, fish, salad (after the main course in the French tradition), and desert, were all served with wine by elegantly dressed wait staff. Discussion revolved around the problems with the west coast conformation show circuit and how to resolve them. I sat and listened, especially to a strong recommendation by Nathan Forrest that I be hired to solve these problems. Talk about casting one's bread upon the waters. For a change, I seemed to have become the recipient of something better than soggy bread crusts.

  After lunch I was excused to take a break, but only a short break. I was expected to meet once again with Harold Carswell, in his office, in 15 minutes. At exactly the appointed
time, I knocked on his open door and was invited in.

  Carswell rose to greet me and shook my hand. He pointed to a couple of comfortable looking upholstered chairs off to the side by a coffee table with two fresh cups of coffee in front of the chairs. “Roger, you’re now officially employed by the AKC to solve their problems with regard to the West Coast dog show circuit. Why don’t we sit down together and discuss your plans in a little more detail? After today you’ll be entirely on your own, at least on a day-to-day basis. We’ll expect periodic reports from you to the New York office through Sherry Wyne. Will this fit into your usual operating style, Mr. Bowman?”

  I decided to go with apparently frank answers, but to tell him what I knew he wanted to hear. "I'm used to working on my own. In fact, the biggest reason I quit the Los Angeles police force was because I'm not very patient with rigid policies and protocols, and prefer not to spend most of my time writing redundant reports. To move forward, in broad terms, my plans are to start going to dog shows in the role of a nouveau riche sponsor for Sherry's bitch Juliet, as we discussed earlier. I suspect we’ll have to play it by ear after that. As far as the other owners are concerned, having leased Juliet from Sherry we'll be entering their world at the owner level, with a dog they already know and respect. According to Sherry, that should be our ticket to instant acceptance, either as real dog owners or as a naive sugar-daddy and sugar-mommy who just might be convinced to sponsor their dogs too. Suzanne and I will start by trying to get a feeling for what's going on from the owner-sponsor perspective. We'll try to get close to as many of the owners as possible to talk about what's going on. I suspect they'll have strong opinions about any judging irregularities that they might have seen or heard about. With Sherry's help and sponsorship I imagine we'll be accepted into their group and trusted to hear plenty of gossip pretty much immediately.

  I picked up my coffee cup, which was made of fine China, and took a sip. "At the same time, Bruce will be in front of everybody at each show as Juliet's handler, and he’ll try to build a similar relationship with the handlers that we're trying to do with the owners. He's a pretty good people person, and is excited to be working with dogs again. I’m sure he’ll do very well playing that part.”

  I took another sip of the coffee, which was very good. "There’ll be informal updates to Sherry, and she can report back to you. We plan to meet at the beginning and end of each show, when she can be seen as tutoring Bruce and me on the nuances of handling Juliet in the ring. As far as I'm concerned, that's all of the reporting you'll get from me until and unless we find out anything you need to know that I wouldn’t want to share with Sherry. My office will send you monthly bills for hours and expenses. Is that satisfactory?"

  Carswell stood up and shook hands. "That sounds perfect to me, except for one thing. You should probably plan on your involvement in this case stretching out for the entire season, which can be as long as 11 months, starting in January. I'm going to have to justify a large expense for your salaries and expenses to my Board of Directors, so quarterly reports from you would make my life a lot easier. You should plan accordingly."

  "That sounds good to me," I replied insincerely. He'd get reports from me when I had something to report.

  Carswell handed me his business card. "My personal cell phone number is on the back of the card. Please call me anytime, day or night, if you find out something I should know or you need anything that Sherry can't provide. In the meantime, think about all we’ve discussed for the rest of the afternoon. I don’t expect any miracles, but the AKC will want to see steady progress from you. Spend as much as you have to so you’ll have something substantial to tell me in each of those quarterly reports, even if it’s just how many shows you’ve attended and how many people you’ve interviewed. If you think of anything else or have any more questions, we’ll discuss it at dinner tonight at 7."

  Chapter6.New York City nightlife

  It was 3 P.M. I walked back to the hotel to relax and wait for Suzanne before we headed over to dinner with the AKC managers. Suzanne hadn't gotten back to our room yet, giving me plenty of time for a shower and shave. After that, I relaxed on the bed watching bad daytime TV for about half an hour before she opened the door, saw me lying there, and leaned over the bed to give me a kiss. It was very nice. Suzanne was completely back into shape after her pregnancy a year ago. At 5'8", with a lean athletic body and long blond hair, she was worthy of a long look or two.

  After a long, lingering, sweet kiss Suzanne disengaged long enough to ask, "You're back to the hotel a lot earlier than you expected. How did your job interview go?"

  I reached up to stroke her hair. "Smoothly. They offered me the job formally over lunch, and I accepted it. Basically, we have a free pass to every dog show on the west coast circuit and the loan of a top show bitch to take to those shows for a year, all paid for by the AKC. I got a huge retainer fee in the five figures to get started. As an additional incentive, I'll be paid all of my usual hourly fees and expenses for every dog show we attend, plus whatever additional time we spend on this case, and a huge bonus if we solve their problems while we're having fun showing Juliet. Bruce and Vincent will also get hourly fees and expenses for any of their time I can bill for, so over the next year the agency will make a ton of money from the AKC.

  I gently played with a few of Suzanne’s curls that dangled over my face. "What about your day, Suzanne? How did the visit to Rockefeller University go?"

  She tousled my hair affectionately. "Scientifically quite well. Socially fine. And I found the perfect rug for our living room. Or at least one that looks just like it! Move over to make some room and I'll tell you all about it."

  I scooted over on the bed while Suzanne kicked off her shoes and lay down next to me. She reached over to hold hands and fondle a few of my more sensitive spots while she talked. "The technology for DNA sequencing is improving so fast, it's hard to keep up with the field. The current commercially available machines are orders of magnitude faster and cheaper to use than the one I share in my lab group at UCLA. The ones I saw today are prototypes for the next generation of sequencers---better, faster, and cheaper. The slow step now is data handling. You produce so much data so quickly, the sequencers finish in hours what used to take a lot of humans working as fast as they could several weeks, or even months, to digest and analyze. The new machines have computers and software attached to analyze the data in a variety of ways, and to break through the data logjam, they use new Artificial Intelligence programs to interpret the data in real time. The next step will be on-line journals so the machines can publish the papers as soon as they crunch the data so all of this glut of information can be shared throughout the scientific community."

  Suzanne spoke enthusiastically. She had obviously enjoyed her day. "I was able to set up a new collaboration with Joel Feinberg to get my DNA analyzed by deep sequencing. That way, we can compare a whole bunch of DNA from the same plants with each other, as well as comparing single plants from different species. It'll be nice to look at specific gene polymorphisms in the same plants and correlate the mutations we find with the yield and potency of the drug we’ve isolated from the individual plants. He's got a big lab with several post-docs who'll actually supervise the sequencing work. It'll get done much, much faster than my analyses get done now, and it will free up one of my graduate students for a new project we've been talking about her doing. It turns out that Joel manages his DNA sequencing as a core facility on a big Center grant and gets points with the NIH for showing collaborative use by other major research institutions. He's pretty happy that I chose his facility for this collaboration. While I still have to pay for the assays, it's a highly subsidized price that's actually a lot less than it's been costing me for slower and less complete sequence analyses on our own instrument back at UCLA. And I won't have to visit the post-docs here; everything will be done collaboratively through Joel. That's another plus for me."

  She paused a bit before changing the subject. "One of tho
se post-docs was pretty weird."

  I looked more directly at her. "Weird how, Suzanne?"

  She turned just a bit so she could look directly at my face. "Nothing that he actually said or did. It was more how he looked at me and how he made me feel when he looked at me. Like he was undressing me mentally and measuring me for something. He didn't say anything wrong, or try to touch me; he just gave me a creepy feeling when I was around him. He had a Russian or Polish name, something like Leninsky, but I don't remember it exactly. Anyway," she said with a shrug of her shoulders and a toss of her hair, "I won't be seeing him again so it's not worth worrying about.”

  It seemed to be a good time to change the subject. "I've never been to the upper east side of Manhattan where you visited today, Suzanne. What's Rockefeller University like?"

  Suzanne shifted effortlessly into her teacher role. "As you know, Rockefeller University is uptown between 63rd and 68th streets east of York Avenue along the East River and is mainly for graduate student and postdoctoral fellow training in research. They gave me the grand tour of the university itself, which is very small and very elite. Less than 200 students go there, all graduate students working on Ph.D. or combined M.D.-Ph.D. degrees, plus about 360 postdoctoral trainees. It sits on a small campus, even by New York City standards of size, right across the street from a couple of big university hospitals. They have a huge auditorium for concerts and recitals, as well as meetings, called the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Hall. The lobby area of the auditorium had a huge Oriental, I assume Persian, rug on the floor. It's spectacular and it's gorgeous. That's what I'd like to have for our living room at home. Someone told me that you could buy hand made rugs nowadays in China, India, and Pakistan big enough to work for our house. Some look like that rug, but would only cost a fraction of what that gorgeous antique rug probably costs. Did you have any plans on how you wanted to spend that juicy retainer fee you're getting for this case?” she asked with a mischievous grin.