Best in Show

by Laurien Berenson

  I thought that I hadn’t mentioned anything of the sort. Not only that, but finding people at PCA who were willing to put their names on that particular piece of paper might be about as easy as teaching a Pekingese to point. “A petition might be premature. After all, you haven’t even spoken to Nancy yet.”

  Edith Jean didn’t look deterred. “We can’t afford to wait too long to get the ball rolling. After all, we’ve only got a day and a half to pull the whole shebang together.”

  I knew the woman was grieving. I knew that everyone handled grief in his or her own way. But so help me, I had to speak up. “You know, it might help your cause if when you talk to the board, you try not to refer to the memorial service as a shebang. . . or a double whammy.”

  Edith Jean regarded me calmly. She crossed her arms over her chest. “I’m a good ole southern gal, sweet pea. Down in Georgia, we know how to speak our minds. We call things like we see them.”

  We did that in the north, too. And right about now I was ready to call this whole idea a catastrophe.

  Edith Jean was silent for a moment before speaking again. I was afraid that maybe I’d hurt her feelings, but it turned out that she only wanted to change the subject. “I don’t mind telling you, your police up here don’t seem worth squat.”

  They weren’t my police, I wasn’t even from Maryland.. On the other hand, my home was even farther north of the Mason-Dixon Line, which was probably worse in Edith Jean’s mind. “They still don’t have any idea who killed Betty Jean?”

  “Not a one, far as I can tell. Mostly they just seem to be running themselves around in circles. I guess they’ve got more important things to do than worry about the death of one poor old lady from somewhere else.”

  “I’m sure they’re trying their best.” I hadn’t a clue if that was true or not. After my initial interview with the detective, my involvement with the police had been limited to periodic updates from Aunt Peg. “I could try to talk to someone if you like.”

  “No, don’t do that,” Edith Jean said quickly. “I don’t want to trouble anyone on my account. Besides, what’s done is done. There’s not much point in looking back. I’m just going to carry on the best I know how.”

  Carrying on was beginning to sound like a good idea to me, too. I picked up the basket and headed out. Miniatures had finished for the day in ring one. Toys were about to start. In the Standard Poodle ring, the Novice Bitch class was ending. It would be followed by a lunch break.

  Day by day, raffle tickets were becoming harder and harder to sell. For one thing, due to our diligent efforts, most exhibitors and spectators had already had an opportunity to purchase them. For another, everyone had now had several days to browse the concession stands in the hallway outside the upper tier of seats. Spare cash, hoarded all year to bring to the specialty show, was going fast.

  I sold some tickets in the grooming area, and a few more to the dealers manning the concessions. Then I headed out the upper doors to the parking lot where the professional handlers had parked their big rigs. Many had opted not to unload inside and were prepping dogs beside their motor homes.

  As I’d hoped, I found Terry and Crawford at home. Crawford was using the lunch break in the Standard ring to grab a bite to eat. He was seated in a director’s chair in the shade; jacket off, tie loosened, munching on a tuna fish sandwich. Terry, who’d set up a boom box and tuned it to a local rap channel, was standing at a grooming table nearby, working on a Toy Poodle.

  Terry flashed me a big smile; Crawford was more reserved. “Checking out here for mice?” he asked. One silver brow lifted archly.

  “Mice?” Terry squeaked. He took a hasty look around. “I should hope not.”

  “Melanie thought she saw one the other night at the hotel.” His eyes never leaving me, Crawford stood up, reached over and turned off the radio. The sudden silence came as a relief. “Or maybe she was mistaken.”

  “Actually it wasn’t a mouse.” I plopped the raffle basket down on an empty grooming table and helped myself to a seat. “What I saw was a rat.”

  “Ahhh.” Terry nodded knowingly. “Plenty of those around.”

  “Harry Gandolf,” I said.

  Crawford considered that. “Harry made you scream?”

  “You screamed?” Terry turned to stare. “I would like to have heard that.”

  “I can demonstrate.”

  “No need,” said Crawford. “Once was plenty. What did Harry do?”

  “Roger Carew was scissoring his puppy, Bubba, and Harry was about to knock into him. He’d been trying all week to get that puppy out of his way. Roger didn’t see Harry coming. It was the only way I could think to warn him in time.”

  “It must have worked,” said Terry. “Bubba looked fine yesterday. Until Roger tripped over him, that is. So Harry ended up getting what he needed anyway.”

  “Needed?” My ears perked. “You mean wanted, don’t you?”

  “Kind of both the same in this case. Last month, Harry made a deal to sell Vic to a breeder in Japan for mucho yen. The Japanese breeder had been burned before, however. He’d bought dogs from overseas that turned out not to be the quality he’d been promised.

  “Apparently Harry’d done some bragging about Vic. He told the Japanese breeder that he was good enough to win at PCA. ‘Fine,’ said the breeder. ‘Prove it. I’ll pay you after the puppy wins.’ So you might say that Harry was feeling the heat. No Winners, no sale.”

  I nodded slowly. “That explains why he offered Edith Jean money not to show Bubba.”

  “What he offered her was probably only a fraction of what he expected to get for Vic,” said Terry. “Toy Poodles are a hot commodity in Japan, and with the strength of the yen against the dollar, there’s plenty of shopping going on. The same breeder had approached us earlier in the year; that’s how we knew he ended up with Harry. And the money he had to spend—”

  Crawford cleared his throat loudly. He leveled his assistant a look.

  “Thousands,” Terry whispered out of the side of his mouth. “Enough to make even someone like me think twice.”

  “We didn’t have what he was looking for,” said Crawford. “Period.”

  “Too bad,” I said. “And a lucky break for Harry.”

  “As long as he could make it happen,” said Terry.

  Indeed.

  I turned and looked at Crawford. “Aunt Peg told me you were the one who recommended Rosalind Romanescue to her for the seminar.”

  “Yeah. So?”

  “So I was surprised by that. I can’t imagine you talking to an animal psychic.”

  The older man’s mocking look was back. “Why is that?”

  “Well. . . because I’ve always thought of you as being more practical than that. I can’t imagine you’re the kind of person who’d be taken in by sleight of hand and hocus pocus.”

  “Is that what you think Rosalind does, magic tricks?”

  “Quite possibly.”

  “You might consider letting her do a reading for you. There’s a good chance you’d change your mind.”

  I looked at him in surprise. “Has she done one for you?”

  “Several, actually. Though as it happens, we’d never met before this week. Rosalind usually does her communicating over the phone. That way she can get in touch with clients all over the country.”

  I tried, without success, to picture how that might work. “Like you hold the receiver up to the dog’s ear?”

  “No.” Terry giggled. He was no help.

  “She communicates with the animals telepathically,” said Crawford. “The phone is so she can talk to the humans. You pick a time and call her. She taps into your dog’s thoughts and you talk to him through her.”

  “And you’ve actually done this?”

  “I just said that, didn’t I? Pay attention, Melanie, and try not to look so shocked.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  That earned me a glare. Crawford doesn’t do sarcasm.

  “The first time was on
a circuit over the winter. One of the dogs I’d brought with me to show was behaving very oddly. Up until then, he’d been the easiest Standard Poodle in the world. Suddenly he wasn’t eating, he wouldn’t walk on a leash. He didn’t even want to come out of his crate. And if you reached in to get him, he’d snap and pull away. You can see why I was worried.”

  I certainly could. Fortunately, that was most un-Poodle-like behavior. “Did you have a vet look at him?”

  “Not right away. After all, we were hundreds of miles from home. Besides, the dog wasn’t running a temperature, and he didn’t have any obvious symptoms. We couldn’t figure out what was the matter.

  “Roger and I got to talking about him one day. By then, I’d stopped showing him. I couldn’t even slip the leash over his head without a fight. Roger said he had these clients, a pair of dotty sisters from the south, who’d had some luck consulting a psychic. By that time, I was desperate enough to try anything. He got the number for me and I gave Rosalind a call.”

  “And?” I asked.

  “The dog had an infected tooth, one of the molars way in the back. The root was about to abscess. From the front everything looked fine, but the poor guy was really in pain. No wonder he didn’t want us touching anything in the area.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “I know Poodles are smart, but are you saying that a dog told you his tooth was going to abscess?”

  “Not in those exact words,” said Crawford. “He let Rosalind know that his head hurt. And he let her know where. We added some deductive reasoning and a visit to a canine dentist. But her assessment of the situation was what got us started in the right direction.”

  Hmm, I thought.

  “Tell her about Stretch,” said Terry.

  “Who’s Stretch?” I asked.

  “Another client’s dog that Rosalind talked to.”

  “You tell her.” Crawford settled back in his chair. “I’m eating.”

  Besides, there were few things Terry enjoyed more than a good story.

  “Okay, so we were showing this Standard named Stretch. A nice boy, easily finishable, though he came by his name honestly.” Terry held up his hands, wide apart, indicating a more than optimal length of back.

  “Let’s move it along, shall we?” Crawford was a firm believer in the dog show credo that you never advertise your dog’s faults.

  “Good old Stretch was just about finished. He only needed his last major when we hit a month where there weren’t going to be any good judges for him. Rather than have him sit around the kennel all that time, we sent him home for a break.”

  “That was brave of you,” I said. Most Poodle handlers won’t trust their clients with dogs that are in show coats.

  “No, it was all right. We knew Natalie could do hair. A couple of weeks went by and we entered Stretch in some shows. But when Natalie sent him back, he was all mopey and depressed.”

  That wasn’t entirely unusual. For some dogs, depending on their home situation, it was very difficult to make the transition between owner and handler.

  “So Crawford called Natalie and asked how Stretch had been when he was home. You know, did anything unusual happen since we’d seen him last? Natalie said everything was fine. The only thing that was different was that she’d whelped a litter of puppies while Stretch was there. As it happened, they were his puppies, though she couldn’t imagine how he would know that. For some reason he was fascinated by the litter and was always trying to get into the puppy room to see them.”

  “And hearing that made you call Rosalind?”

  “Not right away,” said Crawford. He’d finished his sandwich and was sipping a glass of sweet tea. “At first we figured he just needed a couple of days to adjust to being back in the kennel. Besides, this was a dog who loved to show. We had him entered that weekend, and we thought that would perk him up.”

  “It didn’t,” I guessed.

  “Right,” said Terry. “He showed like a bum. There was no way he was going to get a major with that kind of performance. So Crawford talked to Natalie about it and Natalie called Rosalind. Natalie was thinking maybe Stretch missed his puppies and wanted to go home and see them.”

  “I thought you said he didn’t realize they were his puppies.”

  “We were just throwing out ideas,” Crawford grumbled. “Work with us here, okay?”

  I sat back and shut up.

  “It turned out,” Terry said, “that Stretch didn’t miss the puppies. Instead he was jealous of them. He had an idea that while he was away, the puppies were going to grow up and take his place in the house. He was afraid that Natalie was going to stop caring about him.”

  “Poor guy.” Even a nonbeliever like me couldn’t help rooting for a happy ending.

  “Exactly. So Natalie tells Rosalind to send the message back to Stretch that she loved him and missed him. She couldn’t wait for him to come home. All he had to do was go that weekend and show his heart out. If he won, she’d come and pick him up right away.”

  Terry was grinning. I figured I knew what was coming. “He got his major, didn’t he?”

  “First day.” Crawford nodded. “And he was asking for it, too. Maybe I’d been a little skeptical before, but not after that. I’m not sure how she does what she does, but Rosalind made a convert out of me.”

  At this rate, I thought, she’d be making one out of me, too. Maybe I should think of scheduling a session. Not with Eve; the puppy and I were getting along famously. But maybe I could have Rosalind contact Faith back home in Connecticut. The Poodle would probably be happy to pass along all the juicy tidbits that Davey was carefully editing out of our telephone conversations.

  The Standard Poodle as spy. The idea had potential.

  I thought back to something Crawford had said earlier. He’d told Aunt Peg about Rosalind. Roger Carew had told him. And Roger had gotten the word from. . .

  “Those dotty southerners,” I said. “Were they by any chance—?”

  “The Boone sisters,” said Crawford, confirming my hunch. “Betty Jean and Edith Jean. They knew all about Rosalind. They’d used her services themselves.”

  Why was I not surprised?

  19

  Considering all the information I’d milked them for, I figured it would be greedy on my part to try and sell Crawford and Terry raffle tickets too. I left them to their work and lugged my basket back inside the arena. The lunch break had just ended in the Standard ring. The Bred-by Exhibitor Bitch class was about to begin.

  Looking out across the ring, I saw Aunt Peg at the other end, settling into her corner seat. The chair next to hers was empty, and I made a beeline for it.

  As I sank down beside her, Peg looked askance in my direction. “There is a limit,” she said, “to how many raffle tickets I can buy. Please tell me I’m not single-handedly supporting the entire endeavor.”

  “I’m not here to sell you anything.” I shoved the basket back, out of sight, beneath my chair. “I’m here to watch. Bred-by Bitch, are you kidding? It’s the best class in the whole show.”

  Few of the spectators would have disagreed with me, and certainly not Aunt Peg. At regular all-breed dog shows, Bred-by has largely become just another class, an additional stepping stone on the way to those all-important points. But at specialty shows like PCA, which are always judged by Poodle experts, the Bred-by Exhibitor class is a showcase for the best the country’s Poodle breeders have to offer.

  Aunt Peg already had her catalog open and turned to the right page. As I glanced over to check the page number, I saw that her margins were filled with scribbled notes. The information she gathered by watching at PCA would impact breeding decisions she made throughout the year.

  Quarters were close at ringside. All conversations were held sotto voce. As Mr. Lamb finishing checking in his entries, Peg said quietly, “I’ve just come from having lunch with Nancy Hanlon. The poor woman was almost distraught. You’ll never guess what’s happened now.”

  “Edith Jean.” I almost s
miled, then caught myself in time. “Right?”

  “You’ve heard about the proposed memorial service?”

  “And the ash scattering.”

  Aunt Peg rolled her eyes. The gesture was more eloquent than a comment would have been.

  “Edith Jean is afraid her request will be turned down—”

  “Oh, she’ll be turned down all right. There’s little doubt of that.”

  “She wanted me to circulate a petition while I was selling tickets. She’s hoping to drum up some popular support.”

  “Tell me you didn’t!” Aunt Peg looked ready to snatch the raffle basket and paw through it, if necessary, to root out the offending paper.

  “No, I convinced her to wait and talk to Nancy and the board first.”

  “I’m on the board,” Aunt Peg said firmly. “And I can tell you right now, we’re not going to approve anything of that nature. Not that we’re not sympathetic mind you, but PCA is hardly a suitable instrument for someone’s expression of grief. It’s a dog show, for Pete’s sake. It’s supposed to be about the Poodles.”

  So presumably if a famous and well-regarded Poodle had died Monday night, holding a memorial service would have been okay?

  Aunt Peg wouldn’t have appreciated the question. I went on to other matters. “I found out why Harry Gandolf was so determined to go Winners Dog in Toys.”

  My aunt never took her eyes off the action in the ring. She did, however, incline her head in my direction to indicate that she was listening.

  “He’d made a deal to sell that puppy to Japan, provided it won. A very lucrative deal apparently.”

  “Rather a risky move on his part, wouldn’t you think? Tying the sale to a win here?”

  “I gather the Japanese buyer had been burned before. Harry didn’t have any choice in the matter.”

  “Even so, there are an astounding number of variables that have to combine just right on the day to produce a win of that magnitude.”

  The Standard Poodles bitches were gaiting around the ring for the first time. A flashy black bitch, handled by Dale Atherton, caught my eye. I hadn’t realized he was a breeder as well as a handler, but he had to be to qualify for entry in this class. He and his Poodle made a stunning pair.