Distemper

by Beth Saulnier

  I got a flash of a girl lying dead in the woods, naked, angry red marks across her neck. The memory was worse now that I knew her name. “It was the most horrible thing I ever saw.” Until I saw C.A. with her guts cut open, I added to myself, and decided to spare her.

  “Alex,” she said, leaning over in the chair and staring down at her pink high-tops, “can you tell me what’s going on?”

  “I wish I could, but I just don’t know.”

  “All these girls are dying, and the police don’t even seem to have a clue.”

  “They thought they had something to go on, but it turned out to be the wrong guy. Now I think they’re just trying to… regroup, I guess.”

  “How?”

  “I’m not sure. I heard they might have another lead, though. That’s kind of why we wanted to talk to you.”

  “About what?”

  “Well, this might sound kind of random, but do you think there’s any way Patsy might have had a dog?”

  “Jeeze, you’re like the third person who’s asked me that”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “First the cops asked about it, and I told them about how Patsy wanted a dog, how she’d even gotten permission from our landlady. She was just starting to save up for the pet deposit. Two hundred bucks.”

  “And somebody else asked about it too?”

  “Some reporter from the New York Times came in yesterday asking all these questions.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “Nothing. He was a total jerk. Like, when he first walked in and I asked if I could help him, he said he wouldn’t shop at a mall if his life depended on it.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Nope. And you should have seen how he was dressed, like some college professor. Ugh.”

  She had to be talking about Gordon, but it hardly sounded like him. I mean, Gordon hates malls with a passion, but I couldn’t believe he’d blow an interview like that. Maybe the desperation was making him sloppy. Odd.

  “Kim, do you know what kind of dog Patsy wanted to get?”

  “One of those Dobermans. She promised me it wouldn’t be mean or anything, though. I’m not real great with dogs, but I thought a puppy would be okay—maybe that way I could get to know it before it got all big and scary.”

  “Why did she want a Doberman? For protection?”

  “No, I don’t think she really cared what kind she got, she just wanted a dog. The Doberman was supposed to be a surprise for her boyfriend. He’s crazy for them.”

  “I don’t get it. If it was for him, why was she okaying it with your landlady?”

  “Oh. It’s ‘cause he lives in the dorms at S.U., and there’s no pets. They were talking about maybe moving in together next year, though.”

  “Where was she going to find it? A shelter?”

  “Oh, no, I think she was going to buy it from a breeder somewhere.”

  “Do you know which one?”

  “What difference does it make?”

  “Probably none. I was just wondering.”

  “Well, I don’t know. I wasn’t real interested. Patsy asked me if I wanted to go help her pick out a puppy sometime but I didn’t think I could tell them apart.”

  You poor ignorant twit. I was on the verge of informing her that people who don’t like dogs have no right to take up oxygen when Mad finally emerged from the dressing room.

  “What do you think, Bernier? Do these make me look like I have an ass?”

  “Mad, you know damn well you have the flattest butt known to man. You could cook pancakes on it.”

  Kim watched as he peered at himself in the three-way mirror at the end of the hall. “Wow, you’re right,” she said. “I’ve never seen those pants hang that way before. It looks kinda weird.”

  “It’s his only physical flaw. Drives him insane.”

  “I’ll tell him to try the ones with the pleats.”

  She consulted with Mad over the dressing-room door, and a minute later he came out wearing a new pair that, remarkably enough, made it seem like he had something happening in the posterior region.

  “They look pretty good, huh?” he said as he surveyed his backside from various angles.

  “And guys think we’re vain,” I said to Kim. “Go figure.”

  “What color is this?” Mad called from down the hall.

  “Honey mustard,” she said.

  “What else do they come in?”

  “Chocolate, olive, and, um… stone.”

  “Does this place take credit cards?”

  Kim stared at Mad like he’d just emerged from his flying saucer. “Uh, of course. All the majors.”

  “Tasty,” he said. “I’ll take one in every color.”

  23

  WE HAULED OUR PURCHASES OVER TO THE MALL COFFEE shop, the kind of place where they sell beans scented like raspberries and caramel side by side with a dizzying variety of mugs depicting Impressionist paintings. We snagged a white metallic table outside the entrance, and I left Mad there while I went in to find some coffee he wouldn’t throw back in my face. I settled on something Sumatran, which the clerk swore was the strongest they had, plus a copy of the Syracuse newspaper and a hazelnut biscotti big enough to choke a pig.

  When I got back, Mad was perusing his loot with a beatific expression. “Do you realize that I won’t have to buy another pair of pants again for…” He did some calculations in his head. “For the rest of my life?”

  “Yeah, as long as you’re still a thirty-four waist.” He shot me a dirty look. “What am I thinking? You’ll be buried in them.”

  “What you got there?”

  “Hazelnut cookie. Twice-baked and crunchy-licious.”

  “Junk food.”

  “Hazelnuts have protein.”

  “Right,” he said, and broke off half. Then, with no attempt at concealment, he produced his flask and topped off his coffee.

  “What the hell is that?”

  “Whiskey. Want some?”

  “No, I’m good.”

  “What do you want with the Syracuse rag, anyway?”

  “Classifieds.”

  “What for?”

  “A hunch.”

  I found the section and looked for the heading PETS (FOR SALE). What I found was nauseating to a mutt-lover like myself: a long column of ads for purebred dogs, with prices ranging from two hundred dollars to over a thousand. There were five ads hawking AKC registered Doberman pinschers, and I circled them.

  “Four hundred dollars for a dog?” Mad said when I handed him the page. “Is that nuts or what?”

  “It’s canine eugenics. Don’t get me started. Some people live for it, though.”

  “Why do we care?”

  “Patricia Marx wanted to buy a Doberman.”

  “But I thought she never got it.”

  “That’s what everybody says. I just want to do a little checking.”

  “Why?”

  “On the off chance we may come up with a decent story for tomorrow.”

  “About what? ‘Third girl had a dog too’? Isn’t that kind of lame?”

  “Think about it, Mad. It might be the key to everything. I mean, two women nabbed while they’re walking their dogs could be a coincidence. Three is, well… it’s a pathology. And it’s a hell of a better story than ‘Cops still stumped,’ which is our other option.”

  “Don’t you think Band tried this already?”

  “Maybe. He seems a little whacked, though, kind of scrambling around. He might not’ve thought of it.”

  “Okay, but you have to promise that if we do scoop the little bastard, I’m the one who gets to rub his nose in it.”

  “The pleasure’s all yours.”

  We moved over to a circular bank of pay phones and divided up the list. I’d called two of the breeders with no luck when I heard Mad give a war whoop from his side of the kiosk. He emerged a minute later, holding up a napkin covered in his scrawl.

  “Jackpot,” he said.

  “Wh
at’d you find out?”

  “I just talked to a guy in Cortland. He said he and his wife sold Patricia Marx a male Doberman puppy on…” He looked at his notes. “The date works out to less than a week before she died.”

  I stared at him. “That was way too easy.”

  “Easy? Are you kidding me? Alex, we just got our first break on this story in three months.”

  “Good point. So let’s go talk to them.”

  “They’re on their way out. Said we could drop by at three. So since it only takes half an hour to get there, that gives us”—he checked his watch—“two hours to kill.”

  “We should probably call Bill and tell him what we’re up to. What do you want to do after that?”

  “I was wondering,” he said, “do you think they sell shirts here too?”

  We got back to Gabriel around five, after an hour-long stop at a Cortland farmhouse with a row of chain-link kennels out back and a big wooden Doberman out front. There, we’d learned that in the waning days of her life, Patricia Marx had bought a twelve-week-old puppy she’d named Cocoa. The dog had been the runt of his litter, too small and with too many brown markings to ever be shown, and the breeders had despaired over unloading him. They’d offered him for the bargain price of a hundred dollars, and Patricia had jumped at it—particularly when they said they’d keep him until she could square things with her landlady.

  So, we’d asked them, what had become of the dog? The last time the breeders saw him was when Marx had picked him up to take him to the vet. When she didn’t bring him back, they figured she’d just taken him home to Syracuse. And when she’d died, they’d clucked at the tragedy of it all and never even thought to contact the cops.

  “Explain this to me again,” Bill was saying. “Why did the mutt have to go to the vet?” With everybody crowded into his office trying to hear—O’Shaunessey, Marshall, Wendell, Melissa, Lillian, et al—it was turning into an impromptu staff meeting.

  “The good news is he was going for a checkup,” I said. “The bad news is he was also getting cropped.”

  “Cropped?”

  “Yeah, it’s a goddamn purebred vanity thing. They lop off the poor dog’s tail a couple of days after it’s born. Then, when it’s about three months old, they box his ears so they stand up. Some people think it’s cute, some think it’s downright inhumane. It’s actually illegal in some places.”

  “Like New York?”

  “Like Australia.”

  “Okay, so where did the dog go for this ear-chopping?”

  “Well, the girl didn’t have a whole lot of money, so the breeder sent her to the cheapest place around.”

  “Which is?”

  “She took him,” Mad said, with a pause for dramatic effect, “to the Benson veterinary clinic.” It was something that finally tied Patricia Marx to Gabriel, and Mad seemed gratified by the gasp he got from the assembled masses.

  Bill scratched his head with a chopstick. “If this cropping is so controversial, how come they do it over there?”

  “It’s not so controversial,” I said. “I mean, not like cloning body parts or anything. Most people don’t give a damn. You don’t actually do the dog any serious harm. It’s just unnecessary surgery, that’s all. Besides, Benson is a teaching hospital. The cropping is pretty much an accepted thing, so I guess they have to train the vet students to do it. The ones who don’t want to can probably opt out.”

  “So did the dog have the surgery or didn’t it?”

  “We don’t know. I have a call in to a friend of mine at the clinic. Hopefully we can find out what happened.”

  “Your deadline’s in less than five hours.”

  “You don’t say.”

  “Don’t be a smart-ass. Just get me the story.”

  “Do we have enough to run with as is?”

  He grunted. “Be nice to get more. But go write up what you’ve got and let me take a look.”

  “Under whose byline?” The onlookers, who could smell an argument coming, took this as their cue to exit.

  Bill leaned back in his chair and put his feet on a pile of press releases he keeps at the perfect height for maximum comfort. “Madison’s. Whaddaya think?”

  “Isn’t this getting a bit ridiculous?”

  “Works for me,” Mad interjected.

  “Yeah, no shit,” I said. “But isn’t it a little crazy to have me running around interviewing people, and then when the sources read the story there’s somebody’s name on top they’ve never even met?”

  “Think of it,” Bill said, “as a return to the olden days of reporters and rewrite men.”

  “But I’m reporting it and writing it.”

  “You’re also in it up to your hips, Miss I-Had-to-Go-Find-a-Body.”

  “So why do you have me covering it?”

  “Because my cop reporter flew the coop and I have no choice, unless you’d like me to drag poor old Lillian in here.”

  “Well, if it’s so bad I’m covering it, shouldn’t we, you know, disclose our bias?”

  “Nah.”

  “Bill…”

  “Why do you want a byline so bad, anyway? Don’t you get enough of ‘em?”

  “Yeah, but it’s kind of demeaning to be Mad’s ghostwriter.”

  “Come on, Bernier,” Mad said. “Do you know how many chicks would kill to be working under me?”

  “Oh, spare me.”

  “What can I say, Bernier? It’s not my fault you’ve got conflicts of interest up the big wazoo. It couldn’t be any worse unless… Gee, I don’t know… Unless you were boffing the detective in charge.”

  Mad—the jerk—made it sound like a big joke. Luckily, that’s exactly how Bill took it. “There’s a laugh,” he said with a lusty snort. “Alex and that big macho man. I’d pay money to see that one.” The ha-has went on for a while. I wanted to kick Mad right where he lives. “Okay, Alex, I hear you,” Bill said when he finally caught his breath. “Give daddy something really juicy, and he’ll give you a lollipop and a nice big byline.”

  “For real?”

  “Yeah, what the hell? I can only get fired once.”

  “You mean,” I said with deliberate malice, “like a cute picture of Marx and her puppy? The kind of crap that breaks your heart so bad you just have to buy the paper?”

  His eyes turned flinty. “You don’t.”

  I pulled a photo out of an envelope and handed it to him. “The breeder lady has a whole wall of these, like baby pictures at a doctor’s office. Adopter and new pooch.”

  He dropped the picture on his desk and stared at it. “This is totally beneath our dignity.”

  “Like it was beneath our dignity that time those five little kids died in a house fire, and you ran all their pictures under a hundred-point headline that said ‘VICTIMS OF A DEADLY DAWN’?”

  “I won an AP award for that.” “Yeah, it’s on the wall behind you.”

  “I don’t know,” he said, still gazing at the picture. “Dead kids are one thing, but this…”

  “Takes cheesy to a whole new level?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “And you’re not going to run it under a hammer head that says ‘COCOA, WHERE ARE YOU?’”

  He took the words out for a spin. They seemed to give him a deliciously guilty sort of pleasure. “Marilyn would kill me.”

  “Yeah,” Mad said, “or maybe she’ll give you a raise.”

  “Hard to predict,” Bill said. “Be nice if I had a story to run it with.”

  Having gotten the hint, we repaired to my computer to start banging out the piece. “ ‘Cocoa, where are you?’ ” Mad mimicked. “Alex, you bad girl. You bucking for a job at the New York Post?”

  “Scary how fast he went for it, huh?”

  “There’s a tabloid writer lurking inside us all.”

  I typed for a while, then turned to him. “Listen, Mad, I was thinking. Should we be telling the cops about this?”

  “They’ll find out in tomorrow’s paper.”


  “Yeah, but should we tell them now?”

  “Why?”

  “Why not?”

  “Is this because you’re banging the detective in charge? Bill sure thought that was a hoot.”

  “I could have killed you, you prick.”

  “Relax. Now you know you’re beyond suspicion. Apparently, the idea of you banging some cop is too nuts even for…”

  “Will you cease?”

  “What was your question again?”

  “Should we let the cops in on this?”

  “Jesus, Alex, Cody isn’t doing your job for you. Why should you do his for him?”

  “Because his involves catching a killer.”

  “Oh. Right. Well, tell him whatever you want. I won’t rat on you.”

  “Marilyn might approve, actually. Doesn’t cost us anything, and it might earn her some points in the name of official cooperation.”

  “Whatever.”

  “Where is she, anyway?”

  “Ass-kicking class. She’ll be back.”

  It’s long been Marilyn’s custom to stop by the newsroom between breaking bricks with her head and having a late dinner with her husband. Sure enough, by the time we’d finished a draft of the story—with both our names on top, might I add—Marilyn was back, wearing her martial-arts pajamas and holding an ice pack on her chin. When I went into her office the first thing she said was that the other guy was in much worse shape than she was. The second thing was that, yes, I should call the cops. “Make sure they know we’re not just calling to give them a chance to comment,” she said as I was leaving. “Let the bastards know we’re doing them a favor.”

  I called Cody. He wasn’t there, but the sergeant at the desk said he’d be back any minute, so I walked over to the station and intercepted him just as he was getting out of one of your garden-variety unmarked cop cars.

  “You left before I woke up this morning.”

  “I bet you say that to all the cops.”

  “True.”

  “Sorry about taking off like that. Zeke wanted to go running, and I didn’t want to wake you.”

  “How did it go?”

  “Great. We did seven easy. Whatever you did to my back last night, it worked.”

  “How about what I did to your front?”

  He shot a look at the front door of the cop shop. Nobody was in hearing distance. “Um… I’d say that worked too.”