Paws before dying

by Conant, Susan

  “Not to mention your own part,” Rita said later. I have told you that she’s a psychologist, haven’t I? “Consisting,” she went °n. “of your favorite transference relationship, namely, a tendency to shape your experiential reality in your mother’s image, compounded in this instance by acute, self-generated sibling rivalry. In other words, you convinced yourself that Leah was more your own mother’s daughter than you are and, furthermore, that your dogs knew it. For example, consider your perception of her supposedly special relationship with Jack Engleman, who, not incidentally, had just become a widower— in other words, more and more like your father—plus, of course, your readiness to blame her for interrupting your intimate relationship with Steve. The less transferential option open to you was to go to her and say, ‘Look, Leah, I can’t write when you’re around, so go take a walk. And when you get back, Steve’ll be here, and he’ll be staying all night.’ ”

  My own interpretation differed slightly from Rita’s. In wolf packs, it seemed to me, juveniles were too busy chasing and pouncing on each other to pester the adults, who were thus free to stalk musk-oxen, win each other’s favors, and otherwise do their canine equivalents of writing their articles and sleeping with their vets. I’d made what Rita would call my intervention on Monday morning. “Maybe you’d like to have some people over,” I’d said. “Jeff? And anybody you met at that party.” As Rita pointed out, then, it was my own soft howl that first incited the pups to gather. On Monday night, when I returned from interviewing a guy in Arlington about the dating service, the juvenile pack had established itself in my living room in front of Rita’s VCR, borrowed for the evening. On Tuesday, Leah had called all of her new packmates, each of whom had called her at least once. When we got back from dog training on Tuesday night, my answering machine had messages for Leah from Ian, Seth, Miriam, Noah, Monica, and Emma, and didn’t have one from Jeff only because he’d been at dog training with us. I quit answering the phone. Not one of the calls was for me.

  Shortly after I explained what tail spraining was, the bell rang. When I opened the front door, a happy-looking kid holding a big glass vase of long-stemmed red roses asked, “Winter?”

  Nobody sends me flowers.

  “Yes,” I said, “but, uh, there’s a mistake here. We sent roses. They were supposed to go to someone else.” In fact, I’d had them sent to the funeral home on Saturday and had assumed that Jack had thanked Leah during their tête-à-tête. “The names must’ve got mixed up. Damn, that means they never...”

  The kid read from a slip: “Leah Whitcomb, care of Winter, two fifty-six Concord.”

  Her parents? Maybe normal parents do things like that. It’s always hard for me to guess. Not that Marissa was stingy, or that Buck is, either, but, for one thing, Marissa loved flowers and hated to see them cut, and Buck never gives anyone anything except guns, dogs, fishing rods, and relevant accessories, none of which can be sent FTD.

  But the roses weren’t a mistake and weren’t from her parents. They were from Willie Johnson, the youngest lout.

  “What is this white stuff they’re in? It looks like ice.” Awe filled Leah’s voice. She was delighted.

  “Plastic, probably. Some kind of mush that retains moisture.”

  “Aren’t they wonderful?”

  “They’re very romantic,” I said. “I didn’t know...”

  “He’s called a couple of times.”

  “But how did he know...?”

  “From the list,” she said. The list of people in dog training, of course. “Remember?”

  I counted the roses. There were a dozen. I wanted to ask Leah whether she knew how much a dozen long-stemmed roses cost, but I didn’t.

  “I guess I should call and say thank you.”

  “I guess you should,” I said. Marissa always drilled me on the fine points of show ring and social etiquette. “Or you could write a note, I guess. Isn’t that what Jane Austen would’ve done?”

  Leah grinned. “I think I’ll call.”

  When she finally got off the phone, she took Kimi outside to train her, and I called Steve, who was a little irked.

  “Just leave her and come over,” he said. “What’s going to happen?”

  “She’s only sixteen,” I said, “and I don’t know these kids, except Jeff, and what if this one shows up? I don’t want her alone with him. He must be at least two or three years older than she is, and you should see the way he leers at her. Maybe he’s a perfectly nice kid, but she looks older than she is, and I don’t know him, and I’m not all that crazy about what I’ve seen. And, look. Weird stuff is happening. I need to talk to you. Anyway, I need to be here.”

  “And if he asks her out?” Steve said. “You intend to tell her no?”

  “I don’t know. I should’ve got this straight to begin with.

  hen Jeff appeared, I thought I wasn’t going to have to worry about limits like that. Anyway, I don’t know what she’s doing tonight. Maybe Jeff will call, but I don’t want all the rest of them here when I’m not home. Half an hour or something, okay, but not the whole evening. And I don’t want her here alone. Look, these roses are sort of out of line. I mean, he’s seen her maybe four times. At two classes, at the match the other night, and then on Sunday, at Jack Engleman’s. And apparently he’s called her, but that’s it. And now he sends these incredibly expensive flowers. I don’t like it. It feels off.”

  “So what does she think?”

  “Oh, she’s thrilled. Anyway, come over. Maybe she’ll go out, or maybe she’ll stay in her room and read Jane Austen.”

  “And we’ll stay in yours, and I’ll read you anything you want.”

  “Look, Steve, I’m serious. I need to talk. It’s about Rose Engleman. People are saying things, and Kevin told me there’s an inquest. He let it drop, and then when I asked him about it yesterday, he said he didn’t know any more about it. And that’s probably true, because he’s Cambridge, and that’s Newton. Anyway, we need to talk, and not on the phone.”

  “It’s because I didn’t send roses, isn’t it?” he said. “If I bring them with me, will you get rid of her?”

  “Please! And if you want to bring something, stop at McDonald’s and get me a fish sandwich, a chocolate shake, garden salad with Ranch. And some fries. And get a Quarter Pounder with cheese, and a salad, and diet something for Leah, and whatever you want.”

  But he showed up with human Eukanuba, premium-quality chow, which is to say, frozen gourmet take-out stuffed sole in aluminum trays, mussel and shell salad, three-dollar-a-loaf French bread, one of those dark-chocolate cakes made with heavy cream and no flour, and a bottle of white Burgundy. Jeff called to see if Leah wanted to go to the Square—she did—and just as she finished eating a two-thousand-calorie wedge of cake with a glass of diet iced tea, I heard him at the back door. When I pulled it open, he was smirking. His hands were behind his back. He followed me into the kitchen, nodded to Steve, and gave a half-shy but elaborately sweet imitation of a magician as he presented Leah with a bunch of daisies and mums that probably came from a supermarket, but were pretty, anyway, and would undoubtedly last a lot longer than the roses, which were, fortunately, in her room.

  “Nice kid,” Steve said when they left.

  “Very,” I agreed. “You know, when he calls, he actually talks to me? And not in that sort of stiff, pseudo-adult way you get when kids suddenly turn on the manners, either. I can’t believe that with him around, she’d really be interested in the other one, roses or no roses. He’s... I don’t know. What can I say? You take one look at him, and you don’t want your sixteen-year-old cousin going out with him. He’s probably all right, but you just don’t.”

  “You want some advice?”

  “Sure.”

  “Don’t say that to her.”

  “I know better than that,” I said. “I should probably tell her that you and I are both crazy about Willie and don’t trust Jeff, right?”

  “Do we?” He reached over and cupped my chin in his hand.
“Come on.”

  “You come on,” he said gently. “Or did someone else send you roses?”

  A while later, when we were back in the kitchen finishing the cake and the Burgundy, I said, “Can we talk now?”

  “Sure,” he said.

  “Actually, first, I want to talk, and I want you to listen, okay? Because between Leah, and not getting any work done, and the heat and everything, I’m not thinking too clearly. Okay? And then I want you to tell me everything you know about pacemakers.”

  “Not a lot.”

  “Fine,” I said. “Then just listen. First of all, it’s obvious that the autopsy showed something, or maybe it failed to show something. For instance, maybe it showed that lightning didn’t hit her. I don’t know. Autopsy results aren’t public.”

  “Her husband will know.”

  “Why?”

  “Because they’ll have told him. In a case like that, the family’s informed.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Pretty sure. You could ask him.”

  How?” I said. “What am I going to say? ‘Gee, Jack, people are saying that Rose was murdered, and I wondered if I could see your copy of the autopsy report because I’m low on bedtime reading and...’?”

  “Are people saying that?”

  “In a way. Some of what I heard was just kind of frivolous. You know how people talk about the top handlers. First of all, everybody resents them, mostly just because they win, but also because some of them have a bad attitude. They’re arrogant. And some judges do let them bend the rules. Mostly, though, people who basically want to have fun resent it when the whole thing gets turned into a high-pressure contest.”

  Steve has a shepherd bitch who has her C.D.X.—Companion Dog Excellent—and with good scores, too. He knew what I meant. “It’s real boring when that happens.”

  “So you know how people say that some of those people really would do anything? I’ve said it myself. So people are saying that, and maybe this time, it isn’t just... It’s possible that this time, someone did. Nobody who doesn’t show dogs would believe that anyone would do something like that, but if you do, then you know, honest to God, it is possible.”

  “There’ve been a couple of cases where dogs were poisoned: at shows.”

  “But those were all in breed, weren’t they? Because in breed, if you killed the handler, the owner would just hire someone | else. Or if you killed the owner, someone else would go on showing the dog. It wouldn’t do you any good to kill a person. But in obedience, your real competition isn’t the person or the dog.

  It’s the team. But I just can’t see obedience people doing it. In breed, the dogs are more like objects—but obedience? So maybe a rare person, a really competitive handler, will do something awful, like step on your dog’s toes.”

  “Jesus!”

  “But I really think that most obedience people would rather kill a person than a dog. And besides, it isn’t the dogs anyone resents. It’s the handlers.”

  “Is there some particular handler you have in mind?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Heather Ross. You know who she is.”

  “Silver hair? With the silver standard poodle.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Rose Engleman was that much of a threat to her?”

  “Well, probably from her point of view. For one thing, Rose also had poodles, and they’d been sort of archrivals for years. Poodle people are always so competitive. They have such high standards, because poodles can be such incredible obedience dogs. Malamute people aren’t like that, not in obedience.”

  He laughed.

  “Well, okay. In obedience, we practically never even see each other, especially around here. The only malamutes you ever see in obedience around here are mine, but the point is, I wouldn’t, and other malamute people wouldn’t, either, because they obviously aren’t the world’s greatest obedience dogs.”

  “Misery loves company,” he said.

  “It’s sort of true. When I see that someone’s put a U.D. on a mal—yes, it actually has been done—I feel grateful that somebody proved it’s possible, and I know how much agony went into it. But there are millions of poodles in obedience, and they aren’t as easy to train as people say. You have to work hard, and then even when your dog is really good, you’ve got lots of competition. With a poodle, anything below one ninety or one ninety-five is a disgrace, or that’s what they think, which is why they’re the people you see painting the backs of their shoes to match the dog.”

  “What?”

  “It’s an old trick. If you think the dog’s going to sit a little crooked, and you’ve got a black dog, you make sure the backs of your shoes are black, so the judge won’t notice if the sit’s a little off. I don’t do that, but with Rowdy, I always wear a dark skirt, and I never wear anything with a line down the front, a row of buttons or anything the judge could use to line up on and see if he sits just slightly crooked. That’s fair enough. It’s not like taping a hunk of raw liver to your left thigh.”

  “Jesus!”

  “You laugh! People do it. Anyway, how did we end up talking about dogs? Here’s what I know about Heather. First of all, since she’d known Rose for years, she probably knew she had a pacemaker. I didn’t see Rose all that often, but Heather did, since they both belong to Nonantum. Rose was showing the signs of some kind of heart trouble and then was in the hospital and then got better, so Heather must’ve known. Second, obviously, she benefits. She’s already started planning a memorial trophy that she can win. It’s disgusting. And the other thing is that according to the people who live across the street from the park, lightning didn’t strike there. They were home. And they say it didn’t hit. So what did? It’s raining. Rose is probably standing in a puddle of water. She has a pacemaker. She reaches out and touches the gate, and it’s metal. And something happens.”

  “And? You don’t sound like you’re done.”

  “And, look. Heather isn’t the only one who gained, and with the pacemaker, Rose was vulnerable, more vulnerable than most people. That’s what’s bothering me most, I think. A lot of things can screw up a pacemaker, and a lot of people had something against her. Like Jack’s family. She wasn’t Jewish, and when he married her, they sat shiva. And then at the house, his sister was there, and his father was arriving, and it felt like a sort of family reunion. And there are other people, people who had some kind of case against her. One is that son of a bitch Martori, the judge. You know who he is? She got him reprimanded. And there were these other people she accused of child abuse. Anyhow, the fact is, there were a lot of people who weren’t happy to have her alive.”

  Chapter 10

  I woke up the next morning with Heather, Abbey, and double handling on my mind. Obedience competition, it seemed to me, is a game that combines a giant version of bridge with an elaborate form of solitaire. You have a partner, so do lots of other players, and one of your aims is to do better than they do, but your main contest is the one you play with yourself. Double handling is as dirty as cheating at cards and as pointless as cheating at solitaire, which is not to say that it’s easy, especially if it’s as smooth as Heather and Abbey’s.

  Rowdy was sleeping on the floor under the rattly old Hot-point portable air conditioner, but before I opened my eyes, I heard him stir, and a couple of seconds later, I could feel him staring at me. You may be able to convince your spouse, your lover, or even your children that you’re still asleep when you’re not, but you can’t fool a dog.

  “Good morning, buddy,” I said.

  He wagged his entire rear end and made that funny face mala-mutes put on when they’d like to bark like normal dogs, but don’t remember how. Then he woo-wooed at me, and I gave up and got up. When I’d let him out and in, measured out exactly one cupful of ANF30, put it in his bowl, and watched him devour half of it before the bowl hit the floor, I stood there in the kitchen and thought about malamutes and Jews, about my own family and Leah’s, and about Jack Engleman’s—in other words,
about insiders and outsiders. Before that odd early morning moment, I’d assumed that no one with four WASP grandparents could grasp Jack’s family’s response to Rose and their marriage, but it came to me that the relationship between Leah’s parents and my own was in some ways as if they had sat shiva for each other. From my parents’ viewpoint, the problem with Arthur—and Cassie, ever since she married him— wasn’t anything he’d done, anything personal. The real issue was that we were dog people, but Arthur belonged to another clan. All of the personal gripes stemmed from that radical objection: He wasn’t one of us. Well, so what?

  This is where malamutes and Jews come in, and don’t be offended. I’m serious. To my way of thinking, you see, the Alaskan malamute is, honest to God, God’s chosen dog, and no matter how much I love and admire dogs of any and all other breeds, I don’t want my malamutes jeopardizing the identity of their clan, because if enough of them do, there won’t be any clan anymore. How come? Because malamutes are so much better than other dogs? As bird dogs, guard dogs, or lapdogs, they’re useless, and if you try to get a mal to herd sheep, he’ll herd them directly into his stomach. A golden retriever, sheltie, German shepherd, poodle, border collie, or the average specimen of fifty or sixty other breeds, not to mention the average all-American mixed breed dog, is a better obedience prospect than the average malamute. Siberian huskies are faster racing dogs, bloodhounds track better than malamutes do, and if I ever lost my sight, even I wouldn’t trust a mal as a guide dog. Superior? No. Just different. Wonderful. Special. Chosen. And don’t think I’m confusing dogs with people, either. I don’t know whether Jews are different from other people, but that’s not the point. What I understood was the feeling people have about belonging to a clan and the importance people can attach to preserving it. I wouldn’t have bred Rowdy to Vinnie, my best golden ever, and there wouldn’t have been anything personal about it. Is it fair to have the same attitude toward people? I didn’t know, but I was beginning to understand the feeling.