A Bite of Death

by Susan Conant

  Kimi hopped in and discovered a half-eaten blueberry muffin tucked under the front passenger seat, and when Rowdy bounded in after her, he went for the muffin. And her. Miss Alpha Wolf, of course, refused to part with her prey, and Rowdy leapt on her, dug his teeth into the back of her neck, and pinned her. With Kimi yelping in pain and Rowdy snarling and biting, I had no choice, and luckily, I was wearing heavy Thinsulate gloves (L. L. Bean, of course). I jumped into the back of the Bronco, straddled Rowdy, and grabbed his collar with my left hand. Rowdy'd pinned Kimi, and in pinning him, I found myself riding two writhing, bucking malamutes. I hung on and used my right hand to force Rowdy's jaw open. As you may know, the trick is to wrap your hand over the top of the muzzle and push in hard at the hinges of the upper and lower jaws, way back where there aren't any molars. I won't try it with any dog except my own, and I keep talking to remind the dog of who I am. As soon as Rowdy'd released his hold on Kimi, who wasn't yet my dog the way Rowdy was, she slashed out and got my parka and a glove, but no flesh. Then she spotted a bit of muffin that she'd dropped in the scuffle, and while she darted for it and tossed it down her throat, I pulled Rowdy out of the Bronco and slammed the tailgate.

  If I'd left them both home, they'd have won, and I'd have lost the leadership of our little pack. They accompanied me, each in a large, solid polypropylene dog crate, the kind you see at airports.

  "Freedom presupposes an educated populace," I explained to them.

  As I drove to one of the western suburbs to pick up the dog food, the adrenaline was still running, and I was feeling confident, mostly because of what I'd told Elaine about dogs, power, and self-confidence. Alaskan malamutes aren't the biggest dogs in the world, but when you take size into account, they're among the strongest, and Rowdy and Kimi combined outweighed me by fifty pounds. Once you've broken up a fight between those two growling hulks of flashing teeth and Arctic muscle, what mere person can intimidate you?

  A sneaky one. A coward. The kind who won't confront you directly. The kind who makes you afraid to eat and afraid to feed your dogs.

  Well, not me, I thought. If you're after Kimi or after her owner, you picked the wrong dog and the wrong owner. I can tackle two Alaskan malamutes and come out on top. You don't scare me.

  On the drive home, I planned it out.

  "First we find out about you, Kimi," I said to her. "We find out who you are, where you came from, and I'll bet it isn't far away because they don't breed malamutes like you outside New England. They've never even seen a malamute like you." As I've said, big as any malamute is by ordinary standards, mine were comparatively small. In other parts of the country, and occasionally here, too, you see M'Loot malamutes that stand more than twenty-eight inches at the withers. (That's where you measure a dog's height, at the highest part of his body, between the neck and shoulders.) In other ways, too, Kimi and Rowdy both looked like Kotzebues, the original malamutes bred in New England, where we know that bigger isn't necessarily better.

  "And," I added, "if there's nothing strange about who you are, we check out the remote possibility that in spite of your faultless behavior, you've done something to offend someone. And we find out what happened to your other owners, right, girl? Because if you lose your third in a row, you and Rowdy will both end up with a charming gentleman in Owls Head, Maine, who'll breed you both to wolves. And in the meantime, we're careful. We don't take candy from strangers."

  7

  "What you are is a fool," Faith Barlow said to me. When she smiles, her eyes twinkle and dimples appear, but she wasn't smiling. "Wasting your time in obedience. With malamutes."

  Faith had nothing against malamutes. In fact, she was rubbing Kimi's throat, and Buddy, her oldest malamute, was lying on the carpet of her living room. At the moment, Faith had eleven other malamutes and was planning a litter for the spring.

  "And furthermore, she added, "you could have reserved one. It's going to be a nice litter. Bounce and Dasher. It's a repeat breeding. Why didn't you let me know you wanted one?" She'd looked just the same for as long as I'd known her, her light brown hair streaked with gray, her face apparently fixed at forty. She'd been breeding and handling malamutes for years. Spending all that time with pushy dogs had taught her to be direct. "It wasn't the money, was it?"

  "No. Kimi was the one I wanted," I said. "I don't know what you're bitching about. She's one of yours, after all. It isn't as if I'd gone off and got a puppy from somewhere else."

  The couch and chairs in Faith's living room aren't shaped like dogs and aren't fur covered, and the lamps are not brass malamutes packing light bulbs and lampshades on their backs. Faith is capable of occasional restraint. Over the fireplace, however, hangs an oil painting of her foundation bitch, Beebee. There are more than enough miniature ceramic malamutes lined up on the mantelpiece to form two or three teams. One wall is filled with shelves that hold silver-plated trophies, pewter plates, and glass statuary interspersed with china sled dogs. The wall space that isn't covered with photographs of malamutes displays framed pedigrees and awards. On a side table sit three dinner-size plates with hand-painted portraits of three of Faith's dogs. It's amazing that Faith has that couch and those chairs. You'd expect to be offered a seat on a dog sled.

  "And as for obedience," I continued, "Rowdy has his C.D., and we're training for Open. We're going to enter the matches in the early spring and do the trials in the summer."

  Have I mentioned Rowdy's C.D.? A Companion Dog title is nothing special for a golden retriever or one of the other breeds you see all the time in obedience, just a grammar school diploma, but for a malamute, especially Rowdy, it's pretty good. Open is what you enter when you're going for the next title, C.D.X., Companion Dog Excellent. In the United States, about one malamute a year gets a C.D.X., which is one reason Faith thought I was wasting my time. But I wanted Rowdy to be that one.

  "Good luck," Faith said. "And I'm not trying to drum up business, you know. I don't need it. I could sell more puppies than I could breed just this year. If I bred all three bitches, I could sell all the puppies. To show homes, too."

  A show home is every breeder's ideal, owners who'll show the puppy in breed, not just keep him as a pet, but a good, conscientious breeder also cares about finding responsible, loving owners who'll give the dog a happy life.

  "So how did you end up selling Kimi to Donna Zalewski?" I asked. "Did she promise to show her?"

  "No. Look, I felt sorry for her. She needed a dog. She was crazy about dogs, and she told me this whole long story about a malamute some neighbors had when she was a kid. And I knew she had the resources." What Faith meant is that there are people who'll pay five hundred or a thousand dollars for a dog when they don't have the spare cash to feed the dog or pay one vet bill. The same people make big down payments on Corvettes and Jaguars when they can't afford to refill the gas tanks. "You can't always tell what people are like. I try to screen people, but sometimes I'm wrong."

  "Did you have a return agreement?"

  Faith looked insulted. "Of course. You know I won't sell a puppy without one." A return agreement means that the breeder will take the dog back. If the dog develops hip dysplasia or bites someone, the buyer returns him. Try that with a pet shop. "I don't know why she left Kimi to that woman."

  "Elaine was her therapist," I said.

  "Even so! It's not as if Donna hadn't stayed in touch with me. I'd talked to her maybe two months before. She knew I'd have taken Kimi back if I'd known she was that desperate."

  "It didn't have to do with you, Faith. Apparently, it had something to do with her relationship with her therapist. Like leaving part of herself to Elaine? Something like that."

  "That's bull." Faith said. "This woman had never even had a dog before."

  "You got it."

  "And nobody even called me." Perhaps in response to Faith's hurt tone, Kimi sprang halfway into her lap and licked her face, but Faith, used to tricks like that, shoved Kimi off.

  "These aren't people who would have
thought to call you," I said. "Elaine Walsh had the registration papers, and she'd done the transfer of ownership, but that was only because Donna's lawyer found Kimi's papers and told Elaine what to do. He has poodles himself. He shows. Otherwise, Elaine wouldn't have thought of the papers. She wouldn't have known they existed."

  Kimi's American Kennel Club registration papers were how I'd traced her to Faith Barlow. I'd had to show Kevin Dennehy a couple of AKC registration forms and beg him to see if there was something similar in Elaine's house. There had been, and he'd brought me a photocopy. The breeder's name was on the papers, of course. And Kimi's official name, too. It was worse than my own. Sno-Kist Qimissung. My bitch. I'd have to live with it.

  "So how do you plan on getting ownership transferred to you?" Faith asked.

  "I haven't worked out the details," I said, "but I'm not worried. It'll work out. The executor of Elaine's estate will be able to sign, I guess. It won't be a problem. It'll just take a while. What does her name mean, anyway?"

  "Snowdrift," Faith said. "It's Inuit. Eskimo."

  The most frequent letters in the Inuit language seem to be q, g, and l, and trying to say the words gives me a sore throat, but Inuits probably find English equally tough. Dog names like Lady and Blackie are probably so unpronounceable in Inuit that Lady and Blackie eventually end up with euphonious Inuit call names like Qllgg and Lgqqlq.

  Faith went on. "Donna found it in a book. You see? There's a good example of why I thought she was okay. The minute I met her, I knew there was something spacey about her, flaky, but you could tell she cared about dogs, and she read up on malamutes, the whole thing. Even before she picked up the puppy. That always impresses me, when a new owner reads up on the breed. And then when she came for the puppy, she had a new crate in the car, everything all set up. And naturally, I gave her a whole schedule of when she'd need shots, what to feed her, when: everything. And the same day, I remember, she called me to ask about something. Vitamin supplements."

  "Did you tell her to feed cottage cheese?"

  "Yeah. I always do. Why?"

  "I just wondered."

  "Why?"

  "Relax. She probably did everything you told her. What was she like, anyway?"

  "Pretty. Striking, really. Tall, with her hair messy, in a fashionable way, like on TV. You know? Ten years ago, it would've looked like a bad home permanent or like she hadn't combed it in a week, but now it's the style. But I didn't figure her for one of those—the ones who just want a flashy dog to be seen with. First time she was here, I let two of them loose out in the yard, and Mickey jumped all over her, got mud on her clothes, and it didn't faze her at all. She just said he reminded her of this malamute she'd grown up with."

  "I guess if she hadn't seemed okay . . ."

  "What do you want me to do? Send every prospective owner to a shrink? I do my best. Yeah, she seemed a little nervous. She'd kind of look off into the blue. But you can't refuse to sell to every person who acts a little odd."

  Faith senses something untrustworthy in the character of any person who owns fewer than six dogs and doesn't spend every weekend commuting five or six hundred miles to dog shows.

  "No, you can't," I said.

  "And she did call me once in hysterics, but, hey, it happens, right?"

  "What was it about?"

  "Nothing. The puppy vomited. I don't know why she called me and not a vet. People do it. Anyway, it was nothing. I called her back a few days later, and she'd practically forgotten she'd called me."

  "You got a funny look on your face when I mentioned Donna Zalewski," I said to Rita. "The same funny look you've got now."

  "Oh." She locked her teeth together and clamped her jaw shut.

  We were walking Rowdy and Groucho down Concord Avenue toward Fresh Pond. Rita was wearing a camel's-hair coat, and Groucho had on his red plaid doggy coat. My parka was navy blue, a color that prominently displays even a single dog hair, and the insulating material and liner were hanging out of the tear Kimi had made in the sleeve, but I didn't feel too shabby to walk with Rita and Groucho. Rowdy was with me. His God-given, Eukanuba-fed coat would have outshone ermine robes. Kimi's would have, too, but since she wasn't civilized enough to go for a stroll with two other dogs, she'd had to stay home.

  "I wouldn't want to ask you to violate your ethical standards," I said.

  She nodded.

  "In fact, I'd rather die."

  She rolled her eyes a little, shook her head, and smiled.

  "I'm half serious."

  I told her the story. A lot of people might have dismissed it. Rita dismisses nothing.

  "Look. You think Cambridge is a small world," she said. "You don't even begin to know how small. The therapy network here is incredible. Absolutely everyone's been in treatment or supervision or whatever with everyone else."

  "The dog world is the same way," I said. "Everyone knows everyone."

  "It's so inbred."

  "So are most dogs."

  "Cut it out. Look, I can tell you a little about my part, but you have to keep it totally to yourself. You say nothing to anyone. Not to Kevin. Not to anyone."

  "Fine. So she was a patient of yours?"

  "No. Not really. I saw her twice. It was for an evaluation. I didn't have time myself, and I referred her. I've thought about that a whole lot lately."

  "Because?"

  "Because apparently it wasn't a good referral."

  "What does that mean?"

  "That it didn't work out. But . . ."

  "You sent her to Elaine Walsh?"

  "No. I sent her to a guy named Joel Baker. You know I'm not in the habit of making careless referrals, and I gave that one a whole lot of thought. She needed someone really good. Yeah, who doesn't? But she wouldn't have been easy, and she needed someone very experienced, and someone who'd stay with her when it got rough, because it was going to. And I worked on the referral. I talked it over with Joel. One thing that's bothering me is that when it didn't work out, she didn't come back to me. I told her that if she and Joel thought it wasn't working out, to come back. But she didn't."

  "So what was wrong with him?"'

  "Nothing. It doesn't mean there was anything wrong with him. Maybe they just didn't connect. Or maybe it was a mistake to send her to a man. But I didn't do that thoughtlessly. Besides, Joel is a very unusual man. Of all the male therapists in this city, he probably has the best rep with women for being sensitive to women's issues. I've always thought he was a first-rate therapist."

  "So if they just didn't connect, what makes you think it was a bad referral? That wasn't your fault."

  "I know. When you make a referral, you aren't making any promise that this is going to be the perfect match. And since she didn't come back to me, that doesn't say a whole lot for the alliance I formed with her, either. I know all that. But . . . Look, this is totally confidential."

  "Of course."

  "I heard something. Just a rumor. Nothing, really. But it gave me second thoughts. That's all. I won't repeat it, so don't ask me."

  I didn't. "Joel Baker. Is he a psychiatrist? An M.D.?"

  "Ph.D. psychologist. Actually, you probably know him. They have those big dogs. Hatchbacks."

  "Try again."

  "Whatever you call them. Razorbacks."

  "Ridgebacks. Rhodesian Ridgebacks. He's a kind of slim guy, forty or so? With blond hair. Curly. And a kind of prep school voice."

  "What's that supposed to mean?" she asked. "That he didn't go to your high school? Come on, Groucho. Let's move along."

  We turned around and headed back up Concord toward home. Rita wears Joan and David boots with heels, and if she walks more than half a mile, her feet hurt, I think, but she always says that Groucho's had it and needs to go home. It wasn't a great day for a walk, anyhow. The temperature was up to forty or so, but the sky was a low, solid gray cloud, and it looked like rain.

  "That he didn't go to anyone's high school, or that's what he sounds like. You know what I mean."
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  "Educated."

  "No, not really. Because Cambridge is filled with educated guys who don't talk like that."

  "Affected."

  "Sort of. Maybe as if it started out as an affectation, but then after a long time it got to be real. I didn't know what it was when I first got here. This is going to sound prejudiced, but it isn't. When I first got here, I honestly thought that all the men who talked like that were gay. Then I found out they weren't. Don't give me that look. Men don't talk like that in Maine. Even gay men don't. Nobody does. I'd never heard it before. Anyhow, Joel and Kelly, right? They live in Cambridge. I didn't know their last name."

  "If you've remembered their names and forgotten the names of the dogs, it's a first."

  "Nip and Tuck. Sorry to disappoint you. Those are really gorgeous dogs. They show them in breed, you know. They're in great condition. She walks them all the time. I see her around. I guess she doesn't work."

  "Holly! Jesus. You are a veritable cauldron of reactionary soup today."

  "Outside the home."

  "There are women in Cambridge who'd murder you for that. And how do you know? That's probably what she thinks when she sees you."

  "Everyone thinks that writers don't work. Anyway, speaking of which, I have a column due that I haven't started. Maybe I'll do something on Ridgebacks."

  "No."

  "Ridgebacks are a perfectly normal thing to write about if you write for Dog's Life. I don't think I've mentioned them lately, and if I don't, I'll get a million letters from the Ridgeback people complaining that the breed has been slighted."

  "Sure."

  "And I won't actually write anything about the people."

  "Do you ever?"

  "Sometimes I try, but Bonnie edits it out."

  Rita yanked Groucho away from the discarded remains of a submarine sandwich embedded in a pile of dirty, melting ice. Rowdy went for it, too.

  "No!" I told him loudly. "Leave it!"

  "What's with you?" Rita said. "You don't usually shriek at him like that. It's probably starting to rot, but there's nothing else wrong with it. Do you honestly think that it's poisoned?"