A Bite of Death

by Susan Conant

  Kelly was wearing a hand-knit Irish sweater like one I'd admired in the L. L. Bean catalog, but decided not to order because it was too expensive. Instead, I got an encyclopedia of rare breeds, two obedience books, a text on canine genetics, a grooming guide, and a gallon of dog shampoo from a mail-order discount pet-supply house, and I had some money left over, too. Until I saw Kelly in the sweater, I didn't regret the decision.

  "Hi, there," I said. "How'd you do?"

  It was a safe question. Joel and Kelly had that relaxed, smug look of people whose dogs have done well. By the way, if—God forbid—you've never been to a dog show, you may imagine that I had to shout to make myself heard over the yapping of thousands of dogs. Actually, every dog show generates a tremendous amount of yapping, but it's nearly all human. The loudspeakers kept blaring out announcements, the people kept prattling, and most of the dogs were silent.

  "Tuck went BOS," Kelly said. That stands for Best of Opposite Sex. If Best of Breed goes to a dog, Best of Opposite goes to a bitch, and vice versa.

  "Congratulations. That's great," I said to both of them, then added, to Joel, "You handle her yourself, don't you?"

  He nodded. He was dressed for the breed ring—a good wool suit in a Ridgeback shade of tan, an off-white shirt, and a brown tie—but unlike most dog people, he usually dressed that way, except, of course, that his clothes didn't always color-coordinate with the dogs. His blond hair looked newly trimmed, and I'd never seen him when he wasn't closely shaved. Nowhere in the American Kennel Club regulations does it stipulate that handlers have to dress up, but they all do, at least in breed. In obedience, those of us who respect the sport always dress presentably, but certain other people not raised by my mother look like slobs.

  "Good for you. I hate to see it go all professional," I said. "Even though I do it myself. I show Rowdy in obedience myself, but I have a handler for breed. But we aren't entered today. We're just here for the experience. We snuck in."

  Both of my dogs had been harmlessly comparing the new scent of Science Diet to the familiar one of Eukanuba, but Kimi was starting to paw at a twenty-pound bag, and I didn't want to fund a taste test.

  "Rowdy, heel," I said. He came smoothly to my left side and sat squarely. "Kimi, leave it." I took a couple of steps and hauled her as gently as I could away from the bag of dog food. You're allowed to warm your dog up before you enter the obedience ring, but otherwise, training is strictly forbidden on show grounds.

  "You going to do an obedience brace?" Joel asked. "Or breed? They look marvelous, don't they?"

  I loved the man, of course.

  "Thanks," I said. "I don't know about Kimi yet. I haven't had her long. I'm just starting to work with her."

  "She's a sweetie," said Kelly, who was chucking Kimi under the chin, massaging the thick fur around her neck, and making soft noises to her. Kelly's shiny, curly dark hair echoed Kimi's glossy dark wolf gray, and Kelly's white sweater picked up Kimi's white trim.

  Joel reached into his pocket and gestured to me with his closed fist. "All right?"

  Carrying food into the obedience ring is prohibited, but, in breed, all handlers use food to bait the dogs. If you're a newcomer to dog shows and you've been wondering why the dogs all look so alert in the breed ring, that's the answer to your question: liver.

  "Sure," I said. No. I'm pretty sure you murdered two women, and I don't trust you with my dogs. Obviously, I did trust him. With dogs.

  He smacked his lips, held his closed fist near Kimi's nose to attract her attention, and then lifted his fist up and held his other arm out. She took the bait, rising on her powerful hindquarters and resting her forepaws on Joel's outstretched arm. Her muscles rippled, and her eyes gleamed. Even if you've spent your entire life around beautiful dogs, there are moments when you see dogs as if for the first time. She looked spectacular. Joel opened his fist and fed her the liver.

  "See what fun shows are?" I said to her.

  Rowdy was still sitting at heel and, as he'd been taught, not leaning on me, but I could still feel him quiver. I looked down. A stream of drool was pathetically cascading from his mouth.

  "Did we forget you?" I asked him.

  "Of course not," Kelly said, reaching into her pocket and then offering him his share of the treat. "This is a beautiful dog. Aren't you? And are you a good boy? You sure are." She reached back into her pocket.

  "That's probably enough," I said. "They don't do too well around food yet. I have to feed them separately."

  Rowdy understood the tone of my voice—and maybe, just maybe, my words—and looked up at me in the hope that I'd change my mind, but Kimi was still sniffing around. She checked out Kelly's hands, licked them, and conducted a careful survey of the floor beneath Rowdy's mouth in case he'd dropped any liver. He hadn't. She raised her pretty head and discovered a fascinating new scent. We'd been at the show for a couple of hours, and, as Rita had said, dogs always know. Kimi's nostrils twitched, and her face took on that bright, transported expression that always reminds me of the picture in the children's book that shows Ferdinand the bull smelling the flowers. No. Red Flower, I thought. It was a book Elaine Walsh had tried to get me to read. An entire book about menstruation. Is that incredible? I told Elaine that as soon as I'd gone through all of the three or four thousand dog books written in English, everything ever published about the Celtics, and then every book that had a plot, I'd give it a try.

  I obviously hadn't mastered the dog books I'd already read, because I wasn't quick enough. Kimi pressed her nose against my crotch. Elaine would probably have lectured me on the foolishness of my embarrassment. But Elaine was dead.

  "Shoo," I said quietly, pulling at her leash, and Kelly tried to rescue me.

  "Kimi!" Kelly knew how to animate her voice. At the sound of her own name, Kimi turned to Kelly, but something distracted her. A different scent.

  No. Not quite. She pointed her head back toward me, sniffed, then just as if speaking aloud in the high, clear tones of a precocious child, darted toward Joel and pressed her nose against his crotch. "Oh! You, too!" she announced. I gave a sharper pull on her leash than the American Kennel Club would have liked to see on the grounds of a show.

  "Well, congratulations on Tuck." My voice sounded false. "We'd better be going. Nice to see you."

  Well, what was I supposed to say? Was I supposed to say what was on my mind? How could I? If Kimi had spoken English, she couldn't have told me more clearly and explicitly that Joel, too, was having his period. You don't believe me? A human being has about five million olfactory cells. A dog has two hundred million, and those canine cells are more sensitive than ours. Furthermore, dogs process information about odor better than we do because the part of a dog's brain that deals with scent is better developed than ours. All in all, a dog's nose is about a million times better than a person's. On top of that—in spite of what Rita is always saying about wishes—when my dogs communicate their observations to me, I understand what I'm being told. You still don't trust me? Don't. It doesn't matter. Once Kimi said it, everything else about Joel fell into place: His prettiness. His build. His clothes—suits, ties, topcoats, male shoes, nothing a woman would wear, nothing unisex. In fact, he had to dress like a man because that's what he wasn't.

  Rita says that this anomalous observation precipitated a brief and benign state of dissociation. "So he's having his period," I remember saying to myself. "I'm having mine, too." The next thing I remember is stopping at a concession booth where I bought a bright red coupler to connect the dogs' collars so I could walk them on one leash and—someday—show them as an obedience brace. It was a sensible enough, if optimistic, purchase. I also bought a bottle of Burnished Bronze dog shampoo, presumably for use on my nonbronze dogs, a large container of Ever Clean cat litter, a book on dog tricks that I already had at home, and a T-shirt that read: "Love Is a Great Dane." I have never owned a Great Dane. At another stand, I bought a pound of raisin and nut trail mix, exactly the kind I hate most. Finally, I bought
a hideous plate with a hand-painted picture of a Labrador retriever holding a dead bird in his mouth. Did I intend all of these things for someone else? Don't ask me.

  Eventually, of course, the dogs brought me to my senses. Returning people to normal is a canine specialty. Rowdy started woo-wooing, and Kimi joined in. When Alaskan malamutes woo-woo like that, it's obvious that they are not merely venting their feelings. No, they are insistently addressing you, and you'd better listen. I did.

  15

  I broke the news to Rita the next day. She was, if anything, even less eager to believe it than I'd been. In fact, she didn't believe me. "Dogs sniff," she said. "They sniff everyone."

  "I do speak dog, you know," I said. "It happens to be my native language. I'm perfectly fluent. If you knew I'd grown up in Budapest and I told you what somebody said in Hungarian, would you tell me I'd misunderstood?"

  We were eating lunch at Pentimento, which is on Huron Avenue, only a few blocks from my house, and will be terrific once the management stops groveling to the so-called health inspectors. Health! If the government is really serious about keeping restaurants free from a species that spreads disease, the inspectors ought to issue warnings and then close down any eatery that allows Homo sapiens on the premises. Do dogs carry influenza, TB, and strep? No. You can't even catch a cold from a dog. Steve agrees with me, of course, but he's too concerned about his practice to take action. He worries that human clients might not trust a radical veterinarian.

  In the meantime, in spite of the dogless environment, Pentimento manages to serve a grand dessert—Denver chocolate pudding—a combination chocolate cake and pudding, and you can order it topped with about eight ounces of whipped cream.

  Is it necessary to advertise Denver chocolate pudding to explain how Rita reacted to the news that Joel Baker was a woman? Perhaps you have the impression that I am digressing. Maybe you share Rita's conviction that a person who feels anxious about something blathers on about anything else instead. Maybe you are right. But the pudding is really good, anyway.

  "You're probably going to have seconds, aren't you?" Rita said. When she recently discovered that her one pair of jeans wouldn't zip, she started on a high-protein liquid diet, but declared today a solid-food holiday. I don't know why she cared. She's tiny, and she hardly ever wears jeans, anyway. Most of the time, she has on the kind of outfit she was wearing that day, an olive-green silk suit with an off-white sweater and chunky gold jewelry. I was wearing jeans and a wool sweater that were on the verge of demotion to kennel clothes.

  "No. I won't be hungry for at least another hour," I said meanly. Rita insists that dogs have given me some kind of parasite that spares me high-protein liquid. "The problem is that you'd like to see a dividing line between therapists and clients, and what I'm telling you is that the line isn't there. It's so strange that you just won't see it."

  "Who was it who recently said that this dog obsession of yours represented a healthy adaptation? She ought to lose her license. Can I have a bite of that?"

  "Finish it. Or I'll treat you to one."

  "No. Please." She pushed the bowl back toward me, but dipped her spoon into the goo and worked her way through it while we talked.

  "For one thing, he's very short. For a man."

  "That means nothing," Rita said, and, lowering her voice, added, "Don't use names."

  "I'm not. And by itself, it does mean nothing. Spud Webb is shorter than I am."

  "Who's Spud Webb?"

  "Never mind."

  "Oh, no," she said. "A famous dog."

  "No. Dogs are not my only interest."

  "A basketball player."

  "How did you guess? Anyway, it's unusual for a man to be that short, and not just for basketball players. Then look at his face. His features are small, too. And his body? The narrow shoulders?"

  "Normal variation."

  "His voice."

  "Haven't you got over that yet?"

  "But the main thing is the beard."

  "He is very fair-skinned. He has very light blond hair. His ancestors were probably Swedish or something. Nobody with that coloring has a five o'clock shadow. Besides, I'm sure I would've noticed if he had none. If he had a perfectly smooth face."

  "Well, I've noticed," I said. "What I've noticed is that he always looks as if he's just finished shaving, and you know what? I'm sure he does shave. Lots of women have a little hair on their faces. If it bothers them, they go and have it waxed, right? How come? So they don't end up looking and feeling as if they have whiskers. That's why they don't shave it. Because they'd look like bearded ladies. You'd be able to feel the stubble. And see it. And that is what we're both seeing on him, what everybody's seeing. That's how it's done. I've thought this all out. Would you just consider the possibility?"

  "I've known him for years. I've known them both for years. Among other things, they're two of the most conventional people I know. Their marriage is so traditional that, in Cambridge at least, they practically stand out."

  "Oh, sorry. Then I must be wrong."

  "It has happened before," Rita said. "There are some famous cases. Like, who was it who died just a while ago? Some musician, somebody fairly famous who lived as a man, but then turned out to be a woman. It was in all the papers. And, in fact, there's a new book about the whole phenomenon. I read a review somewhere. And you know what? I didn't buy the book. How come? Because I didn't want to read about it. You know what else? I don't want to hear about it. And you know why that is? Because it's too damned bizarre."

  "Rita, bizarre is your business."

  "You got it. Do you have any idea how often I have to listen to things that nobody wants to hear? That is my business. Horrible, horrible things happen to people, and people need to be able to tell someone about them. And half of me is that someone. And the other half of me is just like everyone else. There are times when I want to say, 'Look. I can't handle this. It's too much. Stop telling me about it because I don't want to hear it.' Okay? You're not even my patient. I don't want to hear it."

  "The point is," I said, "think of the bind he was in."

  "He?"

  "He."

  Rita nodded. "Okay. He."

  "Anyway, can you imagine? Suppose you-know-who goes to this board the way her letter said, and he gets called up. Well, he's got the perfect defense. I mean, for most men, there's nothing they can do. It's just one person's word against another's, and these days, everybody is biased in favor of the woman. Only in this case, he can absolutely prove that she's lying."

  "But he pays a price." She sounded skeptical.

  "That's the bind. You want to split another one of these Denver chocolate puddings?"

  Rita groaned. "No. This whole thing is making me sick to my stomach."

  "So either way, he loses everything, right? Either he's abused a client, or he's living this bizarre life, which isn't bizarre now, of course, not in the eyes of other people, because no one knows about it. But once it gets in the papers, he's either a criminal or a freak, in the public eye. And it's not just him. Can you imagine him letting that happen to her? One day, there she is, the greatest cook in the world, looking after the dogs, wanting a baby. For all I know, they'll end up adopting. And the next day, it's all over the front page of the Globe and the Herald."

  "Not to mention the National Enquirer."

  "I want him not to have done it," I said. "Before, I guess I had a . . . sort of a trace of doubt about him. That, you know, it was possible. That maybe he did do what she said. That she'd been crying wolf, and now it really happened. Or, this time, she made it happen. She seduced him. And first he tried to shut her up." I dropped my voice even though the restaurant was clearing out. "But Elaine kept on, anyway, on principle. She believed it was suicide, but that probably just made her more determined than ever to get him for it, because she must have thought the suicide was his fault. But now? God, he must have hated Elaine. You can hardly blame him. I can't imagine anything more unfair."

  "Hav
e you told Kevin about this, uh, new hypothesis?"

  "I haven't seen him. Actually, I've been avoiding him. And if you think it's freakish and you think it's so bizarre that you're denying it . . ."

  If there's one thing that enrages a therapist, it's being accused of denying something.

  Rita interrupted. "I am not denying anything. Refusing to believe something totally improbable isn't denial. It's good reality-testing."

  "You didn't see Kimi."

  "Kimi. Who spoke to you."

  "In her own language."

  Rita studied the ceiling.

  "You see?" I said. "If this is the response I get from you, how do you suppose Kevin would react? He probably wouldn't believe me, but if he did? Nonjudgmental openness to the extremes of human variation isn't exactly what you can expect from him."

  "He's a Cambridge cop. And he grew up here. He's hardly lived a sheltered life. If something exists, it probably exists in Cambridge, and he's probably seen it. That's why he won't believe you, because even for Cambridge, this is too far beyond the pale. But you did show him those letters."

  "Actually, I didn't. And I don't know if he's looked on the hard drive. Or maybe she had copies somewhere else, hard copy or something. Something the police would've found."

  "So why haven't you . . . ?"

  "The motive is so big," I said. "Especially now. Can you imagine Kevin's reaction, even before? And now? I'm right, you know, and he just might believe me. And once he did? Nobody would look for anything else. Nobody would even consider the possibility that he was innocent."

  "Do you?"