by Susan Conant
“Had she been—?”
“I know what you’re going to ask, but, no, that’s what Cliff said. She hadn’t been drinking a lot of water, and there’s no way she could’ve raided the food bags or anything like that. And the other thing was, I was afraid her stomach was swollen, and he said it looked exactly the same, but it really was hard to tell, because she was pregnant.”
“That does make it hard to tell, I think. But retching without vomiting? When it’s a big dog?”
“Yeah. That’s what the vet said. I made Cliff call the vet. Dr. Miner. He said if a dog keeps doing that, you have to assume it’s bloat, and he told Cliff to get her there right away, to the animal hospital, and he’d meet them there. And when Cliff left, he was like, ‘Oh, this is mostly to calm you down. There’s nothing that wrong with her, because if there was, she’d look a lot worse.’ And that was true. She didn’t look all that sick.”
“Maybe with bloat, they don’t always. I don’t know. Anyway, and then? You stayed here.”
“Right, because we thought, so if it isn’t bloat, maybe they’re all going to get it. Like something contagious? Or maybe they did eat something. So I stayed here.”
“And did any of the others …?”
“Not a thing. And I’m positive, because I brought them all in. I had all of them in the bedroom with me. I went back to bed, but I was still listening. And then when Cliff got back, we took a good look at all of them, and they were fine. They would be. I mean, bloat isn’t contagious.”
“And what did he say? About taking Mattie in.”
“Just that Dr. Miner was there, and he said not to worry. They’d call, and Cliff could probably go pick her up the next day.”
“One thing I’ve been wondering is, is there some reason why Cliff didn’t stay there at the clinic? I mean, why he left and came home?”
“Mostly in case the other dogs had started with the same thing. If it’d been Dr. Patterson, maybe he would’ve. Dr. Patterson practically lets you move in. He doesn’t exactly want you breathing down his neck when he’s doing surgery or anything, but he’ll let you take your dog home the same day, most of the time. And one of the things we like about him is that he doesn’t just treat your dog. He’ll explain what he’s doing, and he’ll teach you about it. The woman who’s there now—she’s the only one of them that’s left—she’ll do that, too. But with Dr. Miner, it was like, ‘I’m the doctor, and you don’t know anything, so get out of my way.’ ”
In presenting Lee Miner with my own misdiagnosis of Rowdy’s ear infection, I’d invited the conclusion that I didn’t know anything. But with Groucho? Although I’d been relieved to have Lee Miner, D.V.M., take charge, I’d felt brushed aside.
“But you called Dr. Miner?” I asked. “Not Dr. Patterson?”
“We would have, except Dr. Miner was the one the answering service got. It was his night. I guess we could’ve called Dr. Patterson or just gone and showed up at his door, but it didn’t seem right, to go and wake him up. And we didn’t like Dr. Miner a whole lot—he didn’t exactly fit in around here—but there wasn’t anything wrong with him. People laughed at him, ‘cause he was kind of a sissy, but he was a good enough vet. And some people did like him. Like, one of my clients has this cat that got into a really bad fight with something, maybe a raccoon, and got all torn up. And Dr. Miner sewed it completely back together. She thought she was going to have to have it put to sleep, and now I guess you can hardly tell. So she thought he was great, and some other people did, too.”
I nodded. It was easy to imagine Lee Miner spending hours on the cat, meticulously cleaning and suturing every wound and tear.
“Anyway,” Anneliese continued, “Cliff wasn’t exactly happy when he got back, and we were both kind of worried about the other dogs, just in case. But he did not know Mattie was dead. And he didn’t expect her to die, either.”
Her eyes filled with tears. We talked about losing dogs you love.
Eventually, I asked, “So when did you hear about Mattie?”
They’d learned the next day, when they’d also heard Miner’s story about overhearing a fight between Cliff and Patterson.
“What do you make of that?” I asked.
The hollows beneath her cheekbones seemed to deepen. She looked directly into my eyes. “That it wasn’t Cliff. It was some other guy. That’s all. Because Dr. Miner never saw Cliff, you know. He just heard them—the man who was arguing with Dr. Patterson—when he was leaving. After Cliff left and came home, I guess, Dr. Patterson showed up, which is like him. You know their house is right there? The animal hospital is right on the road, and their house, his and Geri’s, is back down a dirt road, so there’s just a field between his house and the animal hospital. And he does have a tendency to sort of butt in.”
“With Dr. Miner’s patients?”
She smiled affectionately. “With everybody’s, the woman, too, and the vet who was there before Dr. Miner. But he doesn’t mean it like that. They’re a lot younger than him. You can’t blame him if he wants to make sure they’re doing everything right.”
“Oh.” I envisioned Oscar Patterson charging in to play God, D.V.M., while Steve Delaney was working on an animal or explaining something to an owner. The picture that came to mind was of Steve stooping down to Patterson’s level, scooping him up, and tossing him out the door.
“Which is one of the things I don’t understand,” Anneliese said. In spite of the masses of hair, her face seemed almost bony now, thin and tired. “When Dr. Patterson came and took over and told Dr. Miner to go home, he must’ve thought Mattie was okay or at least starting to get better. Otherwise, wouldn’t he’ve told Dr. Miner to stay?”
“Hold on a second. What does Dr. Miner say? Does he say it was bloat?”
“Yeah, now he does, because that’s what she died of, I guess, but he didn’t know then. I mean, he didn’t know yet, because Dr. Patterson came right over, right after Cliff left. He must’ve seen the lights on in the animal hospital, and then he came right over. And he told Dr. Miner to leave. And then when Dr. Miner was going out, that’s when he heard yelling, which is what he thought was Cliff having a fight with Dr. Patterson. But it wasn’t.”
“So Lee Miner thought that Cliff had turned around and come right back?”
“Yeah. And, you see, everybody believes that—that it was Cliff he heard. Look, you asked me, right? Why didn’t he stay with her? And the cops asked the same thing, when they came here the next day, and they’ve asked me again, and you can tell they don’t believe me. And I can sort of understand it, because if you know Cliff and how he feels about the dogs, it’d make sense that after he left Mattie, he’d change his mind and go back.”
“How sure are you that he didn’t?”
“He didn’t have time! I was here! He did not have time. And I explained about the other dogs, that it was mostly Cliff who thought she didn’t have bloat, so it was mostly him who was worried that the other dogs might be sick. But you can tell they don’t believe me, which is partly because of how it ended up. I mean, if the other dogs had got sick, too, and we’d had to take them all to the vet or get Dr. Patterson to come here, then there’d be some proof that, you know, Cliff really did feel like he had to come home. And with Mattie dead, it looks like he had a good reason to go back there. Only he didn’t know, not then. Dr. Miner told him Mattie’d be okay and not to worry.”
“Anneliese, what about cars? If Cliff went back, his car would have to have been there. Did Dr. Miner say that he saw Cliff’s car?”
“No, but he wouldn’t have, even if it was there. You haven’t been there? Well, like I said, the animal hospital is right on the road, but the entrance and the parking lot we use are on the opposite side, next to the field. But where the people who work there park is on the road. There’s like a little staff parking lot between the road and the building, and there’s a back door there, for deliveries and stuff. So when Dr. Miner went out to his car, he used that door, and the only car he could
’ve seen was his own.”
I drew a mental map of the scene and studied it: the road, the staff parking lot, the animal hospital, then the clients’ parking lot. I darkened the map; the events had taken place in the middle of the night. Even if Miner had glimpsed the clients’ parking lot as he drove away, he’d probably have seen nothing more than the outline of an unidentifiable car, anyone’s car. Anneliese’s account made sense.
“So what do you think happened?” I asked.
“Somebody else showed up, and when Dr. Miner heard them yelling, he just assumed it was Cliff. And, you know Dr. Miner?”
“A little.”
“Well, can you see him going to help Dr. Patterson?” She gave a quirky little smile. “If there was a fight? What he’d do was run away.” She jerked her chin down once as if to say, So there! That’s what happened.
“Even with Mattie there? If Dr. Patterson was fighting with whoever it was, he couldn’t have been paying much attention to Mattie.”
“Which is what happened, you see. That’s mostly why she died. So, in a way, you could say that it was Dr. Miner’s fault, for leaving her. But Cliff …”
“Is that why he’s in Cambridge?”
“He thinks Dr. Miner knows. If you listen to Cliff, Dr. Miner wouldn’t run out and leave her like that. We both think he wouldn’t’ve run in and helped Dr. Patterson, but Cliff says he’s lying. Dr. Miner knows what happened. And Cliff does have sort of a point. Dr. Miner was the one who saw her body.”
“So you never—?”
“No, which is part of Cliff’s problem right now. When Dr. Miner got to the animal hospital the next morning, she was dead. And, of course, he thought Dr. Patterson was home asleep. Anyway, he didn’t really know us, so he had her body sent away to be cremated, which I guess is sort of the normal thing they do. Dr. Patterson would’ve known that Cliff would want to bury Mattie here. But how was Dr. Miner supposed to know? And besides, it’s sort of against the law. Probably Dr. Miner would’ve thought he was committing a crime or something. He’s kind of like that. Anyway, meanwhile, the cops keep asking questions about Dr. Patterson, what happened, where he was, all that kind of thing. And, you know, I thought Cliff would go totally wild, about Mattie, but he didn’t. He just got so quiet. So when the cops finally figured out that Dr. Patterson actually was gone, which took a while, and when they started leaning on Cliff, he just took Bear and left.”
“So Cliff followed Miner to Cambridge?”
“That’s not what he calls it,” she said. “He calls it tracking.”
16
According to the American Kennel Club, every obedience judge “must carry a mental picture of the theoretically perfect performance in each exercise and score each dog and handler against this visualized standard.” Mental picture. An abstraction? Never. There is nothing abstract about a golden retriever, and make no mistake: The real standard is a golden. In developing that mental picture of the perfect golden, every judge also ends up with a photographic negative, the visual representation of monstrously rotten performance, this, too, embodied in the image of a particular breed. Again, make no mistake: The Alaskan malamute sets the real standard of ultimate disobedience.
All this is to say that it probably didn’t matter which dog I presented to Dickie Brenner: An experienced obedience judge—something Brenner certainly wasn’t—swiftly looks beyond the breed to the individual dog, but everyone else is ready to see any malamute as a monster. I’d chosen Kimi and taken her with me to the Bourques’ mainly because I predicted that Brenner would have a few dozen barking dogs, and, as I’ve said, in that situation, I trusted Kimi to act worse than Rowdy would.
To guarantee naturalness in my own handling, I pulled in briefly at a shabby shopping mall located about five miles south of the Bourques’ and maybe ten miles north of Brenner’s. In the pet supply section of a sprawling, depressing discount department store, I found what I needed: A bad collar and a worse leash. The right collar for a malamute is rolled leather. The one I picked was flat and wide, the kind that ruins a thick double coat. It was studded with silly, undignified blue and orange costume jewels. A good training lead is strong and soft. Whether it’s made of cotton webbing, nylon, or leather—the old-timers swear by leather—it folds easily and feels comfortable when you loop it neatly or just crumple it up in your hand. I tested one short, thick leash made of hard, scratchy braided plastic, but settled on the kind of chain leash that I’d always assumed to be good for one thing, namely, scraping the skin off your palms. Inadequately attached to the chain was a flimsy hard-leather handle designed to cut into your flesh and then fall off.
In the parking lot, I changed Kimi’s attire, replacing her good collar with the piece of junk and hiding it, together with my good leash, under the front seat of the Bronco. I opened the thermos of water I’d brought for Kimi, filled her water bowl, and, as she drank, delivered a rousing preshow pep talk. Then we set off.
We reached Brenner’s about twenty minutes later. He had quite a spread. A white sign with green lettering hung in front of a great big white farmhouse with neat, freshly painted green shutters. A gravel drive wound around the house to a long, low cinder-block structure reminiscent of a prefab barn but with row after row of chain-link dog runs along the sides. There were at least sixty runs, perhaps more. I didn’t count. The setup reminded me so much of a modern, professional dairy operation that I half expected to see someone attaching a milking machine to one of the dogs. Even with that detail missing, the effect remained professional. Despite the pervasive, damp, dirty gray of New England in December, when the lifeless brown earth reflects the mucky slate sky, the paint looked dead white; the gravel, newly raked.
I deliberately parked as close as possible to one of the rows of runs, thus offering Kimi the stimulating sight and sound of an entirely black male German shepherd dog in ardent defense of his territory. At a guess, he stood thirty inches high, four to six inches above the standard. German shepherd dogs, GSDs, are supposed to be longer than they are tall—the ideal ratio of length to height is ten to eight and a half—and this one’s proportions weren’t bad. Oh, and in case that all-one-color rings a bell, it’s white shepherds that can’t be shown in breed. All black is fine. Attempting to bite the judge, though, is definitely disqualifying. I was glad that I didn’t have to examine this big guy, but Kimi was growling, scraping, and clawing for the chance.
While I was debating whether the hapless Holly Whitcomb should leave her dog in the car to shred the interior (would Dog’s Life pay for the repairs?) or whether a bona fide know-nothing would enter by malamute power, a man who turned out to be Brenner appeared through one of the doors to the building.
His command to the shepherd was loud enough to warrant a substantial penalty in the ring: “Sultan, down!”
The big dog hit the ground, quit barking, and stared at the man.
“Place!” the man shouted.
The dog slunk through a low door into the building. Obedience? Tyranny. Steve’s shepherd bitch, India, obeyed as quickly, but, when she did, her eyes radiated loyalty and self-confidence, not fear.
Nonetheless, I forced my face into an expression that said, “Wow! Just look at that!” I flashed a nervous smile of helpless admiration and edged my way out of the car as if expecting Kimi to leap ahead of me. Just before I shut the door, I softly cleared my throat, and Kimi, who’d been uncooperatively quiet since Sultan’s disappearance, responded on cue with the throaty roar that usually translated as her polite request for what dogdom euphemistically calls “exercise.” “Growl on Command” is an easy trick, no harder than “Speak.”
“You must be Mr. Brenner,” I simpered. “That was really amazing, the way that dog did exactly what you said.”
“That’s what we do here.” He shrugged—Aw, shucks, ma’am, it ain’t nothing—but his strange build spoiled the effect. As I’ve mentioned, proportion is important in the GSD, and it was one of Brenner’s most striking characteristics, too. In his case,
though, the significant ratio was width to depth. As befit the pastoral setting, he was built like the door of a low barn: short, broad, and almost flat, as if he’d started out round and bulky but had been sat on by a genetically engineered mammoth cow and been permanently squished. Also, he was either naturally hairless, a gigantic Chinese crested, or else U.S. Marine bald. He had opaque pale-blue eyes.
After verifying that I was, indeed, Holly Whitcomb, he offered me his pudgy right hand, and I took it briefly. Then, without even asking to look at Kimi, who remained in the Bronco, he led me indoors to a small office paneled in knotty pine and plastered with framed photographs of German shepherds interspersed with important-looking certificates purportedly awarded by institutions of canine this-and-that. I’d never heard of any of them, which is not to say that they didn’t exist. Some, I suspected, were diploma factories offering mail-order dog training. About a third of the floor space in the office was occupied by a long, wide fake-walnut desk. Quite unnecessarily, it seemed to me, a sheet of glass protected the top of the desk. What harm can come to wood-grained plastic? And even if it does? A throne-shaped pseudoleather black chair with a high back and broad arms sat behind the desk, and on the wall above hung a set of those shelves that kids make in junior-high shop classes. The wood was cheap pine, but at least it was real, and someone had made a laudable effort to cover it up by layering on at least ten thick coats of high-gloss polyurethane. On the shelves, like brand-new gilded tenpins arranged on the lanes of a virgin bowling alley, stood a display of ornate trophies. I was curious to know where they’d come from. Although I never got a close look, my bet is that Brenner acquired them all at the same place, and not an obedience trial, either, but a trophy shop.