by Dead
"He did. Rowdy loved him. That's my dog, Rowdy."
"Of course. Now, he's an Alaskan malamute? Not a Siberian husky."
I smiled. "That's right."
"Just this morning, I reserved a pointer puppy. It seems like a way to start recovering, for Libby
as well as for me. We hope we'll have a mate for Sunshine, but Libby says we aren't to count on it."
"Libby knows a lot about dogs."
"Doesn't she! This puppy will be good for both of us, after what we've been through. Libby
especially needs something. She met him here, of course, and through me."
When I got home, my answering machine had a message from Libby Knowles. I returned the call.
"Holly? Look, I know this may sound coldhearted, but you understand about dogs, and you can
ask better than I can. Could you find out if I can have my shears back now?"
"Libby, tell me something. Why did you ever buy those gigantic shears in the first place? I've
never seen you with a giant dog."
"You don't know much about grooming, do you?" It wasn't a question.
"No. I don't know much about it at all."
"Well, you don't fit the shears to the dog. If you're a professional, you've got control of shears like
that, and you use them whenever you want to scissor, on any scissorable dog."
"You don't scissor pointers. Or goldens."
"I don't handle all the dogs I groom. I do Old English sheepdogs. I've done Portuguese water
spaniels. You know something else? The blades are probably dull now. And it costs thirty dollars to
sharpen them."
"Libby doesn't care where they've been," I told Kevin. "She doesn't care who put them there. It
bothers her that they might be dull. She doesn't care at all how they got that way. And what about
Mimi? I wonder if this whole thing has wised her up at all."
He was standing at my kitchen stove burning onions.
"You're hard on Mrs. Nichols," he said.
"I like her."
"You're still hard on her."
She's so trusting, Kevin. She thinks everyone is the way she is. Genuine. That's what I like about
her. She's genuine. And she does a lot of good."
"You bet she does. Look at that poor slob, Pete Quigley. You want some?"
He spooned the greasy mess onto a burned hamburger. I didn't have the guts to tell him that I hadn't been able to eat meat since I'd seen the inner room of that lab.
"No thanks," I said. "I just ate. It was nice of Mimi to offer to buy the drugstore. It was a lot
kinder than just giving Pete money outright, you know, as if he were some charity case or as if she
were paying for his parents, and the money undid everything and made it all right. And it's not as if
she had any use for it. What's she going to do with a run-down drugstore?"
"Tear it down. Leave it. It doesn't matter to her, does it?"
"Speaking of the drugstore, did you ever find out about Reggie going there? He was after
whatever record there was t of that prescription, right?"
"Right."
"But why did he wait? Once he'd decided I was onto him, and if he wanted to destroy the records,
why did he wait?"
"Your friend. The girlfriend who wants the shears back. Apparently she and Cox had a little game
going whereby whenever Mrs. Nichols takes off somewhere, and she gives the help time off, they
move in."
"Into the main part of the house?"
"Yeah. Live it up. You know. Get out the fancy glasses. Take a bath in her tub. Sleep in her bed."
"They probably didn't even change the sheets." Kevin laughed.
"Mimi Nichols doesn't know about this, does she?" I asked. "She couldn't."
"I didn't tell her."
"You can bet Libby didn't, either," I said.
"So that's where he was. On a heavy date."
"You want some blueberry pie?" I asked. "Don't worry. I didn't make it. But it's made with real
Maine blueberries. They probably came from Deblois. It's good."
"Sure. How come you can't cook?"
"If I could, you'd marry me. So would Steve. And there I'd be, a bigamist. And if I knew how to
cook, I'd get stuck doing it, and it's a waste of time."
"Unlike dogs," Kevin said.
"Bigamy reminds me of my other little crime."
"Little."
"Yeah," I said. "A year in jail isn't little. I know. Look, I know you took a big risk doing that."
He'd eaten the last of his pie and was scraping the plate with his fork.
"Are you listening?" I added. "I'd never have asked you to do it, you know. It never crossed my
mind. Even if it had, I wouldn't have asked you."
"Just do me a favor." His expression was serious. "Two favors.”
"Sure. Of course."
"One, don't say anything about it. Not a thing."
"Of course not. I know better than that."
"Two. Get rid of the damned thing."
"Kevin, that's foolish. Why should I? I mean, I do have a permit for it."
-30-
A couple of weeks later, the letter carrier left me a big brown Jiffy mailing envelope with no
return address. Inside were photocopies of protocols from a place called Massachusetts Primate
Institute, which was and still is located in one of the almost-rural suburbs beyond Route 128. I read
the protocols. They were obscene. Dogs aren’t even primates, for God’s sake. They’re carnivores. Or
they used to be. The researchers at the Massachusetts Primate Institute had apparently expanded
the order of primates to include any animal that objects to surgery without anesthesia. People are
already primates, of course. Watch out. You might be next.
I remembered something Matt Gerson had said to me when it was all over. “Who do you think
these people are, Holly?” he’d said. “These researchers. You think they look like monsters? They go
around with dog blood dripping off their hands? You think they talk about it? Some of them do.
They say they do research. Some of them don’t. the only dogs they talk about are the ones they keep
at home, the family dogs. But they all look just like everyone else.
Two nights after the bi envelope was delivered, the phone rang.
“Don’t hang up.” The voice sounded older than I remembered, more a man’s than a boy’s now.
“I didn’t intend to.”
“I read about what you did. Don’t hang up.”
“Am I hanging up?”
“I have a job at Mass. Primate. Temporary. Are you listening?”
“Yes.”
"This job ends tonight. Sometime around eleven. Have you got a van?"
"A Bronco. A big one."
"Gas it up. Leave your dogs home."
"I only have one."
"I'll have the crates. All you're going to do is drive. You won’t be inside." He gave me directions.
"Holly?"
"I'm here."
"Don't let me down."
I started to say that I don't condone violence. Then I thought about it. "I'm on your side," I said.
"I always have been."
One Sunday in early June, Steve and I took the dogs — Rowdy, India, Lady — for a walk in the
woods in a park in Newton that's only twenty minutes from Cambridge. It isn't exactly the woods,
but it reminds me of real woods when I start to get homesick.
"You're not that different from Mimi Nichols," Steve said. "There are some realities you just don't see. Or won't."
"How can you say that? You saw that lab. You saw what I saw. If that isn't reality, what is?"
"That it was legal," he said. "That it is legal."
"T
hat's not my reality. That's not my law. It isn't yours, either."
"How many laws do you think there are?"
"If either of us made the law," I said, "that son of a bitch would be locked up and never get out.
You know that."
"That's what I mean," he said. "The reality is that we don't control it. We just do what we can.
That's all."
"It isn't much," I said. Lately, what I'd been able to do had begun to include a few activities he
didn't know about. It seems inevitable that he'll eventually begin to suspect, but he hasn't yet. And I
won't drag him in. I promised not to do that again.
"He didn't do anything illegal," Steve said. "Look, I know. I hate it, too. They aren't even going to get him for buying stolen property, dogs or anything else."
"He has a good lawyer. All he had to do was claim he didn't know. I wish Reggie Cox had had the
sense to steal one of the Matisses. Shane couldn't have claimed he didn't know what it was."
"They'll get Reggie Cox, though," Steve said. "Isn't that some consolation?"
"Sort of. Yes, of course. But you know what? They probably won't even bother prosecuting him
for stealing the dogs. And you know what punishment Shane gets for buying them and torturing
them? He gets evicted from his apartment."
"He could've fought that. It wasn't a legal eviction."
"Oh, yes, it was." I was adamant.
"It was not. You know that. And he got denied tenure."
"Big deal. He'll go somewhere else now."
"Sure he will," Steve said. "He's a bastard. But he's not a criminal, not in the eyes of the law."
He was in my book.
EPILOGUE
ON Monday, June 26, 1989, the Cambridge City Council passed the ordinance that made
Cambridge, Massachusetts, the first city in the United States to regulate animal research. Steve was
in the council chambers when the ordinance was passed. So was Mimi Nichols, he told me. So were
a lot of other animal rights advocates. Everyone applauded and cheered. It's a wishy-washy
ordinance, but it's better than nothing. That's what other cities have: nothing. I'd like to have been
there when the city council passed that ordinance, but I had to be elsewhere that evening. I'd
passed my own ordinance. There was someplace I had to be. There was something I had to do.
ÿ
Document Outline
DEAD AND DOGGONE SUSAN CONANT