by Jerold Last
until you’re dead.
"He definitely doesn't seem to like me anymore," declared Suzanne. "We really have to do something about him."
"I'll take care of it," I promised. But I got sidetracked by the next round of dog shows and allowed it to slip from my mind.
The following weekend we were entered in one of the larger and more prestigious dog shows, sponsored by the Santa Clara Valley Kennel Club in San Jose, at the southern end of San Francisco Bay. Techies know the area as Silicon Valley, the center of the universe for computer makers, computer programmers, and American technological innovation. The show’s conformation events are held inside big cavernous buildings, occurring simultaneously with obedience competitions on the grounds outside these buildings. It’s a very busy venue during the time that the competitions are being held. The Sporting Dog breeds, including us, were competing in Pavilion Hall in the middle of the grounds. Toy Breeds were in Expo Hall to our east while the obedience competition was using all of the available space between the indoor venues. There was a big crowd with a lot of local spectators. The indoor rings were noisy enough to make some of the younger and less experienced dogs noticeably nervous. The veteran animals were used to the noise and crowding. It was just another day at the office for them. Juliet did well, earning a few more points and another rosette, while we learned a bit more about dog shows.
For the first time since we had started the circuit, Bruce was invited by potential clients to handle dogs in other breeds. He was beginning to be noticed as he continued to collect wins with Juliet week after week. “What should I do when someone asks me to handle their dog, Roger?”
That took only a few seconds to think through. “Take the commission and keep the extra money you make. The more people see you as an all-breed handler, the more it will help your cover story to be credible. We want to get to know as many of the regulars at these dog shows as we can. Getting a perspective from some of the other breed people about whether they think there are problems with the judging would be helpful.”
Over the next few weekends Bruce built up his clientele and found himself busy all day with the four or five breeds he was now expected to show. He started working for over a dozen owners and became a popular participant in tailgate barbeques with several different groups of owners and handlers. He won a fair share of competitions and seemed to be well liked by everybody. I tagged along for a few of his parties, but tended to maximize my interactions with the sporting breed owners. Bruce got to know owners in the working, herding, toy, and hound groups. Everyone complained about the judging, which made sense if everyone’s dog was so good it should always be the one selected as the best of breed, which seemed to be the prevailing theme in every group. Everybody wanted to win badly enough that it seemed they would do whatever it took to beat the other dogs, as long as it was fair and within the rules. For some, however, it seemed that the only limitation on what they’d do to win was that they wouldn’t be caught if they cheated.
For a change we drove home from San Jose on State Highway 101, a high-speed older road that runs north and south along the valleys between the western coastal range and the Pacific Ocean parallel with I-5. The different scenery and occasional stretches along the ocean were a welcome variation in our routine. Bruce was snacking on some beef jerky and drinking a cup of coffee while he discussed his impressions of dog show life as seen by a professional handler.
He sipped some of his coffee before continuing. "There's a lot of excitement and all kinds of cash bonuses from some of the owners and sponsors when you win, but it's always your fault when you don't. I’ve watched owners giving thick envelopes to winning handlers on one day and cussing them out the next. Two of the owners hinted I could make a lot more money than you pay me by handling their dogs if I was available, and another one asked me flat out what it would take to make me work for her rather than you. The amateur handlers and the semi-professional owner-handlers who only show their own dogs are competitive at the class level, but the judges far too often tend to pick the dogs handled by professionals in the breed and group competitions.”
Bruce bit off a chunk of the beef jerky, chewed it carefully, and swallowed. “The professionals all know each other very well since the same handlers see each other at every show. They make a living by handling a lot of dogs, the more the better. That means they have to be able to show a lot of different breeds if they want to make a good living doing this. Most of them are supportive of one another when they need help. I’ve watched handlers competing all out with one breed and talking trash at one another, then handling the other person's dog as well as they can when the first handler has to be in two places at once. You’d be surprised how often that happens if you have a lot of dogs to handle and more than one of them wins at the class level. But the pro handlers never seem to tank it; it’s an unwritten rule that if you stand in for another handler, you do your best on his or her behalf.”
He stopped to sip some more of his coffee. “It can get pretty boring spending your weekends in a bunch of small towns, with a dozen crated dogs for company, parked in an RV in a lot attached to the local county fairgrounds a few miles from downtown. There's a lot of drinking and RV sex going on in the evenings, mostly among the handlers and including some of the owners. There's also a surprisingly large supply of excellent street drugs and coke available all over the place. Somebody's making a lot of money from the recreational drug franchise at these shows."
I asked Bruce the obvious question. "If I wanted a snort or two of coke next week, who would I have to see to buy it?"
There was another pause to sip coffee while he thought about the correct answer. "I don't know yet. It's there, it's pervasive, but nobody's approached me. I may be too new for them to trust or I still may not be a full member of the club."
For the third weekend out of four, we had a dog show to go to. It would be almost a month before Juliet's next scheduled outing, a break we were all looking forward to. This show was sponsored by the Silver Bay Kennel Club of San Diego and held in Del Mar near the racetrack on the Pacific Ocean, just north of La Jolla. It was the second, and last, smaller dog show we entered. There would not be enough dogs or bitches to make it a major in the class entries for German Shorthaired Pointers, GSPs or Shorthairs as I was now calling them. But Sherry had explained to me, if your show dog was good enough to win Best of Breed and thereby compete with the other Sporting Dog Best of Breeds, there were more points possible to earn for placing high in the Group competition. This show was less than a two-hour drive from our house so I could commute both days. Bruce opted to stay overnight so he could explore San Diego with Juliet and a couple of friends he had made among the handlers. Because it was so close to home, Suzanne was planning to join us with Robert for one of the two days. She was becoming sophisticated enough to check the ring times for GSPs on her computer. For this weekend, it was later in the morning on Saturday, which meant she could sleep in before we had to start driving south.
The setting was beautiful---blue sky, the deep blue Pacific Ocean just to the west, and the best of California’s coast as we drove south accompanied by moderate weekend traffic through Orange and San Diego Counties on I-405 and I-5. The GSP competition on Saturday left something to be desired. Best of winners went to a 10-month old puppy whose greatest distinction we could figure out was that he was owned by the local Club president. The same puppy went on to win best of Breed, which was outrageous when he was compared with Juliet. We could speculate that the judge, a Mexican National specially imported to judge this weekend’s shows, had been wined and dined by the club and was returning the favor. Perhaps the wine was exactly the right vintage. This was our first experience of an egregiously unfair decision by a judge. It went into the notebook for my report to the AKC, but everyone knew this kind of reciprocal backscratching happened on occasion between invited judges who made a good bit of money from these dog show gigs and the local club leadership who decided which judges got the invitations.
It certainly wasn’t part of some major conspiracy to fix multiple major dog shows like we were looking for, but probably explained today’s small entry in GSPs.
To Suzanne’s credit, there weren’t any catty remarks about the puppy, and to Bruce’s credit, he just said, “There are good days and not so good days. Juliet did her best and showed well. That’s all we can ask of her.”
“I’ve got an idea,” I said to Suzanne. “Let’s get out of here and skip the Group competition. The winner might be a three-legged Chihuahua with the right connections and that would piss me off a whole lot more. Somebody told me about a place in Carlsbad that raises flowers all year round and has beautiful displays open to the public.”
So we visited The Flower Fields at Carlsbad Ranch, where 50 acres of brilliant colors from multiple species of flowers, including Ranunculus and Freesia, bloom on a large hillside overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Robert was entranced by the explosion of color and pointed at one group of flowers after another. It turned out to be a nice day after all. It also turned out to be an interesting day in yet another unexpected way.
As we walked around with Robert we did a bit of people watching to complement our flower appreciation. Most of the visitors were locals, mainly retirees from San Diego and the local communities near Del Mar. But there was also a smattering of tourists like us, and even a few faces we recognized from the dog show. We were walking past a huge hill covered with red and yellow flowers in full bloom when Suzanne grabbed my arm and yanked me next to her.
In a quiet voice, so as not to be overheard, she said, “Look over there, by the trash cans at the top of the hill! Do you see the tall woman in the blue sweater and the tall Mexican gentleman dressed like a pimp?”
It was a succinct and excellent description. The tall man was looking totally out of place for Southern California in a three-piece suit and tie with polished shoes. I recognized the judge who had just dumped Juliet in favor of a 10-month old puppy in the earlier competition that day. Suzanne very quietly informed me, “The woman in the sweater is the President of the local dog club sponsoring the show, who owns the puppy that beat Juliet. That’s an odd couple to be out looking at flowers this afternoon, wouldn’t you say? But this place is well off the beaten track and the odds of anyone from the dog show world recognizing them here together must have been pretty high against. ”
I pushed Robert’s stroller back and forth to keep him happy and looked at Suzanne. “Do you know if there are any AKC rules about showing dogs if you’re the sponsor of the show? There probably ought to be.”
As usual, Suzanne surprised me with her depth of trivia knowledge. “Yes, I do know the answer to that. I looked it up on the Internet for some reason when we first got into this whole dog show scene. There isn’t any particular AKC rule about this, and it’s pretty common for the smaller clubs and the smaller shows to encourage turnout of the local dogs to get as many entries as possible into the competition. Several of the clubs, especially the larger ones, prohibit their members from showing their dogs at any specific show they are sponsoring, but it’s OK to show the next day if another club is the sponsor. Hey, look at what they’re doing now!”
The woman was handing the judge a thick envelope of about the right size and thickness to contain a substantial sum of money. It disappeared quickly into an inside breast pocket of the judge’s suit.
I couldn’t keep from smiling. “You know what? I think we just became real dog show owners. We’re not only complaining about the judging but we’re accusing the judge of taking a bribe and being a crook. Welcome to the answer to what’s feeling wrong about the judging at this particular dog show.”
The next day was another early afternoon ring time for the GSPs. One of the other handlers who lived in the area told Bruce about a local dog beach where Juliet could play with a bunch of local dogs and get some real exercise. We drove down to the Fairgrounds fairly early in the morning, at Bruce’s request, to pick him and Juliet up for the short ride south on I-5 along the Pacific Coast. Between Del Mar and La Jolla we turned off at a bridge spanning a small creek bed and parked on the edge of the road near a railroad trestle. It was a short walk to a large sandy beach, long and quite wide at low tide, which was the case now. Despite the size of the beach it was pretty crowded near the parking area. There must have been more than fifty dogs and their families running around on the sandy beach and in the shallow water of the ocean itself, chasing balls, each other, and the myriad birds flying by. The birds got into the game, teasing the dogs by flying just out of reach and detouring over the deep water if a dog got too close.
Juliet joined the scrum of dogs chasing birds and one another. She ran as fast as she could in broad sweeps of about 500 meters in either direction from where we were, occasionally checking back with us to make sure Robert was OK. This was doggy heaven---plenty of birds to chase, other dogs to play catch me if you can, seawater to wade in and taste, plus the occasional dead and decomposing sea creature on the beach or sand dunes to roll around on to really share the smells. Her favorite game was to run into the water until it was about knee deep chasing a low-flying bird, then to run parallel to the beach staying in the knee-deep water until the bird swerved back to the shore. She was totally fearless when the occasional large wave nailed her. With webbed feet and GSP instincts, she was designed to be a strong swimmer and was confident in her abilities in the water. Robert discovered sand for the first time. He and Suzanne built all sorts of castles and sculptures for Juliet to knock down on her short visits back to us. The seawater is still pretty cold around this area, especially in the spring, so the sandy beach was as close to the ocean as we allowed Robert to play.
All good things come to an end and Juliet was spending more time with us and less running around when Bruce announced it was time to get back to work. As we drove back to the Fairgrounds with two sandy and dirty little children, one human and one canine, Suzanne asked whether Juliet could be cleaned up enough to be shown in less than an hour or two.
Bruce laughed. “One of the biggest benefits of a short-haired dog is you only need a hose and a little bit of elbow grease to be all set for competition. Coat care is not a big part of the preparation for the show ring with this breed. You can hunt her in the morning and show her in the afternoon. That’s one of the reasons GSPs are so popular among owners who are looking for an all-purpose dog. It’ll take me less than 20 minutes to bathe, dry, and primp her for the show, and you’ll see that she cleans up real well. The real tricks in Shorthair coat care are the right nutrition and keeping her coat brushed out ahead of time, especially when she’s shedding.”
Sunday, a clean and sweet smelling Juliet again finished behind the puppy in the Best of Breed competition. While the judge was different, we presumed he enjoyed the same fine wine and gourmet dinner hosted by the local club, plus the fringe benefit package exchanged at some off-site tourist attraction. I learned a valuable lesson from this weekend. Nothing is certain, and bottom feeding in the small shows is not necessarily the road to easy points on the dog show circuit. Now I understood why most of the regulars chose to skip some of these smaller shows, unless they were already in the area for another event.
Chapter17.Suzanne's stalker
During our break after Fresno, San Jose, and Del Mar, we had a chance to take stock of what we’d learned during what I thought of as our intense orgy of dog shows. Juliet enjoyed the whole travel and dog show experience as long as we remembered to bring her favorite toys and bedding for her crate. She won points at several different shows, while at others she didn’t even place among the top animals. Same bitch, same handler, usually the same dogs as opponents. The only difference was the judges. But, as we settled into the routine, I became much more sensitive to small deviations from the norm. We saw more deviations than we might have expected due to pure chance or flaky judges. In two of the three shows where judge's decisions in the GSP class seemed off to me, Sherry expressed concern with the results of the judging from a bro
ader perspective of multiple breeds.
I was slowly but surely developing a theory to explain the deviations from normal that the AKC had hired me to investigate, which might also point towards the identity of the murderer who had killed Orval Krause. Officially, the police had kept the investigation open, but it was clear that they weren't going to solve "Awful's" murder in San Francisco. There weren't any clues and no witnesses had come forward over the two months since the killing at the Cow Palace.
The same lack of progress haunted us in our attempts to identify Suzanne's secret admirer. She received another delivery, this time more clandestine and considerably creepier. It was a spiny cactus left in front of our house in the middle of the night, making it completely untraceable. The card said:
Suzanne, you're the one I admire
You're the one to whom I aspire
Like the spiny plant herein enclosed
Like the portrait for which you've posed
It's important that you see
You're the only one for me.
Suzanne studied the note and the cactus plant carefully. "Is it just me, or has my secret admirer's verse taken a decided turn towards the dark side? This time I feel like he’s threatening and stalking me in a way the other gifts only hinted at."
It was my turn. I sensed, given Suzanne’s present mood, that it was important for me to convey the right words in the right way. "I'm sorry to say I have to agree with you. He's escalating. The choice of a cactus plant, with lots of needles to stab you and no beautiful flower to offset the danger, is definitely less romantic than roses and violets. I think we've run out of time to just ignore this stalker. It's time to do a little strategizing. How we can flush him out and stop his fun and games before someone who matters to me gets hurt? What can we guess about him?"