Dead and Doggone

by Dead

  "This isn't about us," I said when I heard his voice. "It's about dogs. It's an emergency. Get every dog crate you own, load them in your van, and get over here. Fast. The door will be open. And bring

  a padlock." I gave him directions and hung up.

  While I waited for Steve, I sat on the floor in front of Reggie's cage with the revolver aimed at

  him.

  "Let me get this straight," I said. "Ed Nichols had you fill that prescription for the bee sting kit.

  You did. You ran all his errands. You ran that one. You went to Quigley Drugs. It wasn't his usual

  drugstore. I'll bet that was Huron, but they might've remembered the prescription there. So you

  went to Quigley's, where the Nicholses would never have gone. Sissy waited on you, and she

  thought you were the one with the allergy. Right? Answer me fast, you bastard. Right?"

  "Right." Reggie looked ridiculous and more than a little uncomfortable jammed in that cage, but

  no more than the dogs did in theirs.

  "But you didn't know just how interested she was. You figured she'd never see you again, and if

  even if she did, she wouldn't remember. But she did. First of all, she was a hypochondriac, and she

  was allergic to bees, or thought she was, and she practically wanted to start a support group for

  people who were. Second, she always remembered what people filled prescriptions for because she

  liked to know people's secrets. Like Libby's. You know about that? You are not answering fast

  enough."

  "Fits," he said.

  "Seizures. That's the nice word for it. You could use an etiquette lesson. For example, when you

  answer me, you say, 'Yes, Miss Winter.' You can start now."

  "Yes, Miss Winter."

  "Very good. I get what happened at the show. You thought Sissy was going to say something

  about the prescription in front of Mimi. Then or later. And Mimi would have understood right away

  what it meant. Ed Nichols's old bee sting kit was at home? And Mimi found it there. She thought he

  hadn't taken it with him at all?"

  He nodded his head.

  "Now, tell me about Austin. That's still a little bit of a mystery to me. You got this crazy idea that I

  was playing detective when all I was doing was trying to find a lost dog. You thought I was going to

  ask Austin something? What could I have asked him? Wait a minute. Let's back up. When you took

  that prescription to him instead of Huron, you had it planned, didn't you? I mean, why else would

  you go there? The people at Huron would've known the Nicholses. Quigley wouldn't. So you

  must've had it planned before you went on that fishing trip. Or maybe you just went prepared."

  "It was an accident," he said. "Don't give me that. You planned it all before you left Cambridge."

  "No, listen. I'm carrying everything, and then we run into this buddy of mine, and he's half

  crocked, and he don't know nothing, and he don't keep his mouth shut. He starts in on the dogs."

  "The pointers? They were with you? No. The dog scam. It went back that far? Before Shane was

  here? When Ed Nichols was still alive. And your buddy knew what you'd been up to in Cambridge.

  And he knew about Maine, too. Ed Nichols didn't know about that, did he? I bet I can guess. You

  used to break into camps, didn't you? When the people were away? What else?"

  "Jacking deer. Everybody does it. It's no big deal."

  "But Ed Nichols thought it was. And he trusted you. And then you ran into this guy who was so drunk he blurted out everything. And he did it in front of Ed Nichols, who must've been delighted

  to find out he'd hired a thief and that you were running a stolen-dog operation in his backyard."

  Reggie stuck to the story, then and afterward, that he'd never planned to kill Ed Nichols. He also

  claimed, then and afterward, that he'd never stolen anything from the house or from Ed before Ed

  died, and he tried to deny that he'd stolen anything afterward, either. I didn't believe him, then or

  later. I've always suspected that Reggie's drunken friend said something Reggie never told me or

  anyone else, and that whatever it was confirmed something Ed Nichols had already begun to

  suspect. Or maybe it was what Ed Nichols saw. Maybe Reggie lifted a fly rod or a reel and sold it to

  the guy they ran into. Maybe the guy was carrying it, and Ed recognized it. I never found out for

  sure.

  The outer door, the one to the corridor, swung open. Steve had never looked better, but I still

  hadn't forgiven him for Lady.

  "Don't say anything," I said to him. "Go through that door. There's a black dog on the table. I'm

  almost sure he's dead, but I want you to check."

  He was back almost immediately. "There's nothing I can do for him," Steve said. "He's gone."

  "Okay. Let's get the ones in here out. Did you bring the padlock?"

  He reached into the pocket of his battered denim jacket and pulled out the kind of combination

  padlock that's meant for bicycles.

  "Give it to me," I said.

  When I'd closed it on the latch of Reggie's cage, we started checking on the dogs and moving

  them out. It didn't take long. I got Rowdy and Clyde out first and put them both in the Bronco, with

  Rowdy in one of the crates Steve had brought and Clyde loose. Clyde hadn't made a sound. Then we

  got out as many dogs as Steve's van would hold, the golden who'd come when I called him, the

  shepherd-collie mix, the beagle, and the two brown dogs.

  "The Akita?" I asked Steve.

  "Do you want to open that cage?"

  "No."

  "You don't have something with you? A tranquilizer? There must be something here. Can't we

  shoot him up with something and carry him out? We can't just leave him."

  "Holly, think about it. He was a beautiful dog once. It's too late."

  "Damn! I'm calling Kevin," I said. "Then let's get out of here."

  We split up in the parking lot. The drive back to my house took hardly any time at all. At the

  comer of Concord and Walden, Rowdy spotted a Bernese mountain dog pulling a small woman

  across the street. He growled and yelped. Clyde made not a sound. I hadn't found any shaved areas

  on his neck or any other signs of recent surgery. I'd started to ask Steve what it meant. Did it mean

  he was okay? Or could Shane have done the surgery without leaving a visible wound or scar? As I

  turned right onto Walden, I started to cry, and by the time I'd reached my house, I was sobbing and

  shaking.

  -27-

  "The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness," Mrs. Dennehy pronounced. "Prepare ye the way

  of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God."

  With Mrs. Dennehy, in the beginning is always the Word. You eventually learn that quoting the

  Bible is sometimes nothing more than her way of saying hello. After that, the trick is to find one key

  word or phrase and ignore the others. Desert? A cold spring rain was pelting down on both of us

  and saturating Rowdy's absorbent double layers of soft undercoat and long guard hair. He'd hopped

  out of his crate in the back of the Bronco and down onto the driveway as cheerfully as if we'd been

  returning from a run around Fresh Pond. Voice that crieth? I'd stopped sobbing, and the light at the

  back of my house that illuminates the driveway wasn't bright enough to let her see my tears.

  "He probably doesn't have a voice anymore," I said impatiently. "He can't cry out. I think he's

  been debarked. His vocal cords are gone. I've got to get him in the house and take a look at him, but
<
br />   Rowdy needs to go in first."

  "And him going on and on this morning something awful, worrying the life out of Alicia. And how was she to know what he was going on about? Barking and howling to wake the dead, he was, she

  says to me, and neither of us thinking anything of it until Kevin comes home and tells me, poor

  thing, and Alicia calls and says she's afraid to be alone with a murderer running loose in the

  neighborhood. And her husband's gone out and him living next door to her all these years and

  mowing her lawn. Who would have thought it? First his mother, then his father."

  "He didn't. Someone else did. And that dog is all right now. He's with some friends of mine. But

  I've got my father's dog here, and I'm not sure he's all right. And I'd like to get out of the rain." Mrs.

  Dennehy was wearing a raincoat. I wasn't.

  "He maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good," she said, "and sendeth rain on the just

  and on the unjust."

  Perhaps it was only her parting comment on the weather, but the words stayed with me as I led

  Rowdy into the house, shut him in my bedroom, pulled the ragged poncho over my damp clothes,

  grabbed a flashlight, then went back for Clyde, who'd meanwhile crawled into the crate.

  "Hey, it's me," I told him. "Let's get you out of there."

  When he didn't emerge from the crate, something told me not to put my hand in. The beam of the

  flashlight showed him curled up at the back of the crate, which wasn't a metal cage but one of the

  big airline-approved polypropylene crates with a metal mesh door at the front that had swung

  partly closed.

  "Come on, Clyde. It's allover. It's all right now. I'm the one who got you out. Remember? Now

  let's go in the house so I can take a look at you. Come on. That's a good boy. You know me. Let's go."

  At the sight of my hand on the crate door, he raised his upper lip in a silent display of a set of

  strong white teeth about twice the size of Rowdy's.

  "Hey, what's the problem, big boy?"

  He raised his lip again.

  "Christ, growl at me," I said. "Please growl."

  I started to pull the door slowly toward me. Clyde's eyes were huge with fear. The only sound he

  made was the snap of his jaws. I latched the door of the crate and left him locked in the Bronco.

  "Buck? I've got Clyde," I said a few minutes later. "You were right. He was stolen."

  After I gave him a brief account of the evening and an unrealistically optimistic report about

  Clyde, I did something I should have done earlier. I'd been feeling guilty about it all evening, I

  thanked him for the Ladysmith. And for once, I didn't remind him that Massachusetts has a tough

  handgun law. Reggie Cox and David Shane were probably both reminding the Cambridge police of

  the law already. According to state law, not only does the possession of a handgun without a permit

  carry a mandatory one-year jail term, but you can't even take your dog to jail with you. My only

  previous offenses consisted of the usual slew of unpaid parking tickets and two violations of the

  pooper-scooper law, but I knew the sentence was mandatory, and I assumed that fleeing to Maine

  wouldn't do me any good. It's not exactly Argentina. What had Rowdy done to deserve the

  punishment of having me locked up? The evil and the good, the just and the unjust. David Shane

  and Reggie Cox alive. Grover dead. Ed Nichols. Austin. Foolish Sissy. And poor Lady.

  Even so, the last time I saw Steve Delaney, he was slamming the door of his van on a full load of

  rescued, crated dogs. He hadn't asked any questions. He'd shown up. He'd taken the dogs. Home, I

  assumed. And I'd never even offered to help with them. I'd never thanked him. Euthanasia wasn't

  his idea, I reminded myself. It was part of his job, a part he didn't like. But he did it, anyway. And I

  needed to know about debarking, about Clyde.

  Why would anyone voluntarily live in an apartment over a veterinary clinic where he needs

  white-noise machines to drown out the sound of dogs? It wasn't just Cambridge rent. It was love of

  dogs. The lights were out above the clinic, but the ground-floor lights were on. I banged on the

  door.

  He was wearing one of those loose green cotton tops he uses for surgery, the ones that bring out

  the color of his eyes. The rain had curled his hair without frizzing it. My mop of ringlets must have

  made me look like a cross between a golden retriever and a poodle.

  "You look terrible," he said. "Come in."

  His waiting room has the usual linoleum floor, high counter where the receptionist sits, benches for owners with neat stacks of Dog's Life and Cat Fancy, a big rack of pamphlets ("First Aid in

  Animal Emergencies," "Caring for the Aging Dog," "Housebreaking Your Puppy," "Urinary Tract Infections"), a poster depicting the life cycle of the heart- worm, and two shelves with an array of

  sprays, powders, collars, and products to kill fleas and ticks. On one wall hang four framed,

  inexpert needlepoint pictures of terriers, a Scot- tie, a Yorkshire, an Airedale, and a Sealyham, all

  executed, no pun intended, by his mother. The room always smells of wet fur and Lysol with a hint

  of not-yet-disinfected urine, and blood, eye ointment, ear drops, cats with abscessed bites, aging

  setters, and puppies not quite house-trained, a sad, intense odor of life and death that frightens

  most dogs except Rowdy, who doesn't mind a hypodermic in the rear or up his nose if I hold him

  tightly and tell him what a good boy he is.

  "Do you remember what I asked you after that episode with your cousin Janice?" he said.

  "I'll never do this again. I couldn't think of anyone else to call. And I thought maybe I was wrong.

  I thought maybe that big black dog might still be alive."

  "For God's sake, Holly. How could he have been?"

  "I know. It's just. . . I think I know whose dog he was. He belonged to a couple of kids, a family. I

  met the woman. Her name's Linda. I think I won't tell her. What's the point? Let her imagine him

  on a farm somewhere. She knows better, really, but she doesn't know, either. I didn't. Before."

  He put an arm around my shoulders, but I didn't feel com- forted. He took his arm away.

  "You're in very big trouble, you know," he said.

  "So were you. With me. I know, though. I understand. She didn't feel anything. She went to sleep.

  That's all she felt."

  "Who?"

  "Lady. The pointer bitch."

  "I was talking about the gun," he said.

  "Yeah. I've been thinking about it, but there's nothing I can do. It's a little late to go and apply for

  a permit. I practically forgot the thing was there. In my closet. I was going to take it to Maine the

  next time I went home. I didn't exactly want to toss it in the trash. And then, there it was. And what

  would I have done without it? I'd be dead. All the time I was trying to find Clyde, Reggie Cox

  misinterpreted everything I did, you know, everything I said. He actually thought I was

  investigating him or something."

  "He thought you were playing Nancy Drew?"

  "And I never even read Nancy Drew," I said. "I read Jack London and Albert Payson Terhune. So

  show me the dogs, and we'll figure out what to do with them. That's what I came for."

  "Is that all?"

  "More or less."

  "Mostly less."

  "Yeah. Look, I understand. I don't hold it against you. It's just me. I can't. . . And I'll never call

  you again for anything like tonight. I mean, why would I? I'll
probably never see the inside of a lab

  again. I know how much trouble it could mean for you. I'm sorry."

  "It's okay," he said. "I'm sorry about the black dog. And the Akita."

  "But not about Lady," I said. "No." He smiled. I hated him for that. "Let's take a look at the dogs."

  I followed him through the door to the back area that's filled with cabinets of veterinary supplies

  and medicine, then through another door. The dogs were a little more crowded than I'd have liked

  to see them, but less than they had been a few hours earlier, and, although as silent as before, they

  were safe. The two brown dogs were sharing a single cage. In his cage, the beagle hadn't given up trying to bay and yelp. The golden was wagging his tail. All of the cages were full. One occupant had

  been evicted to make room for the newcomers. She ran up to me when we walked in. She wasn't the

  pointer Max was, of course. She lacked his self-confidence, and although she wasn't a runty little

  pet shop specimen like Zip, she was small and quivery and as love hungry as when I'd met her in

  Sissy Quigley's backyard.

  "I can't always do this," Steve said. "You have to get that. I can't. I can't even keep her upstairs with India yet. I'm working on it. But you have to know. There are limits. I can't save them all."

  -28-

  "I'd have to anesthetize him," Steve said. "I'd have to open his mouth wide. You need to see the

  larynx. He won't let me look. Most dogs won't."

  We were standing in my driveway with the tailgate of the Bronco open. In the early morning

  light, we got a better view inside Clyde's crate than I'd had the night before, but he looked just as

  terror-stricken as he had then.

  "There's no scar at all? It doesn't show?"

  "It's usually done through the mouth. There's another way, but it involves major surgery. You

  make an incision under the neck, and you approach the larynx that way. I've only read about it.

  They wouldn't do that in a research lab. They'd go through the mouth."

  "So what do we do?"

  "Keep an eye on him. The main thing is to watch for complications."

  "Like what?"

  "Well, what happens when a dog barks is that the vocal folds vibrate, and what you do is go in

  and cut out that tissue, So one risk is that when scar tissue forms, it can begin to close the glottis.

  And the vocal folds protect the trachea, so once they're gone, the dog can aspirate into the trachea. I