A Hell of a Dog

by Carol Lea Benjamin

  There was a terry robe the hotel supplied tossed over the closed toilet, something to put on when you got out of the tub. And Alan’s toothbrush and shaving things were out on the sink.

  The trash basket had only a couple of used tissues in it. I picked up Alan’s things and went back into the bedroom. I packed the rest of his gear, putting his bathroom supplies neatly into his dopp kit, checking the closet again to make sure I hadn’t left a pair of shoes on the floor or a shirt on the shelf. I slipped the collar and remote in last. Then I sat on the window seat and looked out at the park.

  It was after nine already. I still had to get Dashiell out for a short walk and shower and change before Beryl’s talk. I stood near the window looking around one last time, then zipped up the suitcase, released Dash from his stay, and was about to leave when I realized I hadn’t checked the wastebasket near the bed. So while Dashiell filled his nose with Beau’s smells, I walked back to the bed where Alan Cooper had spent the last night of his life and found another bunch of wadded-up tissues in the trash. Guy must have had one hell of a cold, I thought. Or maybe he was allergic. It was the season for it.

  “Maybe that’s why he was soaking in the tub, to help with chest congestion, what do you think?” I asked Dash, being one of those New Yorkers who uses my dog as an excuse to talk to myself.

  But Dashiell wasn’t listening. He’d found a third tennis ball, this one under the covers on the other side of the bed, and since I’d spoken to him, he figured maybe I wasn’t busy any longer; maybe, in fact, I’d be as interested as he was in a little game of fetch. He trotted over and tossed the ball at my feet, backed up, barked, and wagged his tail.

  One ball on the floor and two shoved under the covers didn’t mean a game. It meant Beau was hoping for a game and was being ignored.

  So instead of responding to Dashiell’s invitation, I busied myself pulling the top sheet and blankets all the way off the bed.

  Bright sunlight was streaming in through the window, lighting up every corner of the room. With the covers off, I quickly discovered why Beau had had no response to his pleas for a game of fetch. His master, it seemed, had been otherwise occupied. As far as I could tell, right up until the end, Alan Cooper, God bless him, had made wet spots the old-fashioned way.

  Now all I needed to find out was who wore skimpy leopard bikini underwear. Because whoever it was, she’d left a pair in Alan Cooper’s bed.

  9

  WOULD YOU MIND? SHE ASKED

  I took the empty place in the last row next to Woody for Beryl’s talk, then looked around to see where the other female trainers were, wondering if it had been one of them who had so generously entertained Alan on the last night of his life. I’d overheard Audrey in the bathroom saying she’d been with someone in Phoenix who was in New York now, someone with whom she was contemplating breaking the laws of God and man again.

  Could she have meant Alan? It was hard to believe. He’d been so cruel to her at dinner. Still, you never know. Her whole schtick was fixing bad relationships, wasn’t it? Perhaps she saw him as an irresistible challenge. Or maybe his nastiness had turned her on. I’d have to find out if Alan had ever shocked dogs and humane trainers in Arizona, and one way or another, if it was he who had charmed the pants off Audrey last night.

  On the other hand, many of the students had arrived last night, and their names had been gleaned from lists of people attending previous seminars, including Alan’s. For years I had heard stories about certain male trainers who crisscrossed the country teaching seminars, hopping from bed to bed instead of hotel to hotel as they moved from city to city. One of them had even bragged to me about how much money he’d saved, revealing the name of the lady who’d so kindly put him up, and making sure I knew he hadn’t slept on a foldout couch or in a guest room. A real gentleman.

  “It is character, dear people,” Beryl was saying, “that makes or breaks a relationship, character that becomes the red thread of a life, no matter if we are discussing a canine or a human, and therefore understanding character should be a prerequisite for choosing a dog and for educating a dog as well.”

  “Rotten piece of luck about Cooper,” Woody said, his voice serious.

  “Along with the issues of size, strength, activity level, and trainability,” Beryl was saying.

  “What did I miss?” Chip said, taking the seat next to mine.

  Woody leaned across me. “I was saying to Rachel here that it was a rotten piece of luck, Alan’s accident.”

  “Not so rotten for dogs,” Chip said. He was watching the stage, Beryl at the mike, the screen down for her slide show.

  I’d been wondering exactly how long respect for the dead would stave off comments about Alan’s training method. He’d been dead only five or six hours, and apparently the moratorium had already run out.

  “So it is the work function of the dog which must be examined,” Beryl was saying, “for therein lies the blueprint for understanding the animal, the way he thinks, moves, gets on with others.”

  “Still, I found the news shocking, didn’t you?” Woody said.

  “It certainly has everyone talking,” Chip said.

  “What have you heard?” I asked, watching Beryl imitating a golden retriever waiting to be sent for a duck. And then doing exactly the same expression again, saying it was the same dog, now waiting for its owner to chuck a ball.

  “Rumor has it that Beau stood up and pulled down the shelf with the radio on it,” Chip said.

  “Poetic justice,” Woody said.

  “Most dogs, like the Golden, will happily swap some game for the function for which they were created and bred, as long as that game contains the elements that were genetically strengthened over the years in order to make the dog a more efficient and dedicated worker.”

  “That the ASPCA hired the mob to—”

  “Will someone in the back please turn down the lights?” Beryl said. A young man across the aisle jumped up, and in a moment we were sitting in the dark.

  “And the usual stuff. ‘How did Alan Cooper find the dog-training seminar? Electrifying.’ You know, that sort of thing. I mean, if they did it when the Challenger went down, why not now?”

  The first slide was on the screen, a border terrier digging for a rodent. “This very tenacity—” Beryl began. Then Chip leaned across me to speak to Woody again.

  “Where’s Sam? Did she say if they’re doing an autopsy?”

  “She’s probably still with Elizabeth. It’s too soon for any results,” I said.

  “So that if you are training a proper terrier, it should—” Beryl said as the next slide clicked into place.

  “It’s not an easy way to go,” Woody said. “Better to die in your sleep.”

  “I wonder if he had time—”

  I turned to look at Chip. Woody leaned across me.

  “I’m just saying, they said he fell. They didn’t say if he was knocked out before the radio hit the water. So I wonder if there would have been time—”

  “To try to get out after the radio fell in?” Woody said. “Trust me. That’s not an option.”

  When I was kid, my sister Lillian used to take me to horror movies, and I would put my hands over my eyes when the scary parts came on so that I wouldn’t get nightmares. But then, I couldn’t help it, I’d spread my fingers apart and look anyway.

  “Time to what?” I couldn’t resist asking.

  “To rethink his training method,” Chip said, watching Beryl on the stage, the podium light throwing weird shadows onto her face.

  Woody and I groaned.

  “I hope the students don’t find out,” he said.

  “Do you think they’ll miss him?” I asked. “He’s on the program. And some of them must have come just to see him.”

  “I can’t imagine why,” Chip said.

  “Because he promised them the magic pill,” I said, “a way they could get what they were after without actually working for it. Isn’t that why the lottery works?”

&n
bsp; Chip leaned across me to say something to Woody.

  “Shhh, Beryl’s speaking. I want to hear her.” I punched him in the arm for emphasis, the way I used to in the old days, before he spoiled our friendship by getting divorced and reconciled.

  “Do you know what Sam is going to do about his time slot?” Woody asked.

  Beryl was showing a slide of a Rottweiler herding sheep.

  “She’ll probably ask one of us to fill it,” I said. “You wouldn’t have a problem with that, would you?” I asked him.

  “Not as long as I don’t have to electronically stimulate any dogs.”

  “Maybe she’ll add another panel,” I said. “Wasn’t Alan speaking about problem correction? We could do a problem panel, take questions from the students. There’s one on Saturday, for pet owners. But we could do this one for professionals, you know, talk about client problems as well as dog problems.”

  “Sure,” Woody said, “why not a panel, the three of us and some foodies. Why stop at one death?”

  “Sam will come up with something. She just needs to spend some time with Elizabeth first.”

  “I hope she dumped that damn shock collar,” Chip said.

  “I packed Alan’s stuff,” I said.

  Woody and Chip turned to look at me in the light of the next slide. It was a gazehound, and Beryl was saying something about the difference between dogs that work closely with man, genetically predisposed to taking direction, and dogs that hunt in packs, working off their instincts rather than instruction and therefore less cooperative as training subjects.

  “I gave Sam a hand, that’s all. I packed Alan’s stuff so she wouldn’t have to do it. She was nice enough to get Beau out, try to calm him down. And she’s the one dealing with Elizabeth. It was the least I could do.”

  “And?” Woody asked. “What about the collar?”

  “I packed it.”

  “Oh, Jesus,” he said.

  “What would you have done?” I said loud enough to get shushed by the mountain of a woman two rows in front of us. “Throw it out with the trash the maid was collecting in the hall? Don’t you figure there are more of them back at the kennel, should Elizabeth want to continue electrocuting her dog once she sheds her widow’s weeds? Anyway, married couples hardly ever train alike, even in professional families.”

  “Tell me about it,” Chip said, and when I turned to look at him, his brow was furrowed, and he seemed for the moment to be far away.

  “I mean, sometimes you can’t even get a husband and wife to use the same vocabulary with the dog. Anyway, Elizabeth will have other things on her mind,” I said, looking back at the screen, “at least for a while.”

  “So that in testing the intelligence of a dog not genetically attuned to working with a human handler,” Beryl was saying, “what are you actually testing? If the dog is not prone to being cooperative with humans in a work situation, in a partnership, as it were, then why would he care about the artificial tests devised by some scientist with no knowledge of breed differences?”

  That’s when I zeroed in on the back of Audrey’s head, the little black pug looking over her shoulder, her bug eyes watching everyone watch the slide show. Even if neither of them had been in Phoenix, suppose Alan had changed his mind and accepted Audrey’s generous offer of a psychic reading on Beau, perhaps noticing the blue-black shine of her hair or the wonderful roundness of her tight little derriere. So then I sat there trying to figure out if that wonderful little derriere was the size that would fit into the leopard bikinis I had stuffed into my pocket before leaving Alan’s room. From there it was a hop, skip, and a jump to wonder how that little tramp—how anyone, no matter how desperate—could go to bed with a shock collar trainer.

  I was dying to ask at least one of my companions that very question, but instead I merely slid lower into my seat and tried to concentrate on Beryl’s talk, suddenly seeing her younger, saying these same things, on the tapes I had at home.

  “That the Lab is harder and cooler than the Golden, that the—” Beryl was saying.

  “They’re not going to get this,” Chip whispered. “It’s too subtle.”

  “Maybe it will start them noticing things they never saw before. That’s really all you can hope for.”

  “Some of us won’t get it either,” I said.

  “Tell me about it,” Chip said.

  But I didn’t have to. Beryl was saying it for me.

  “And so of course any method that ignores breed character, that treats all dogs as if they were the same, is foolhardy at best. Sadly, to ignore character differences is also to miss out on—”

  “Who’s on after lunch?” Woody asked.

  “Audrey,” Chip said.

  I sank lower in my seat and concentrated on the stage as Beryl wrapped up.

  “And that in addition to breed character, we as trainers must pay attention to individual differences, how bright a particular dog is, how quickly he responds, to the limitations and determinations of body type, to humor and how each dog expresses his own version of it, to the level of dominance in each individual, to stubbornness and tenacity above and beyond what is to be expected for a certain breed and whether we are dealing with an issue of character or a training problem. So you can see, dear friends, that the underlying factor is always the character of the particular dog you are training, how to understand and best approach it for a successful dog-and-human relationship.”

  Then everyone was clapping, and Beryl was waving away the applause.

  “Is there a question period?” Woody asked. “God, I hope not I’m starving.”

  I pulled the program out of my jacket pocket, nearly dislodging the leopard bikinis along with it. “Weird. Sam put it at the end of the day, both speakers together.”

  “She does that to keep it lively. Where’s the lunch?” Woody asked.

  “The Nixon Room,” I said.

  “You’re joking.”

  “Right.”

  But before I got the chance to tell him where the lunch was, the fat lady who had shushed us was at the end of the aisle, and we weren’t going anywhere without her permission.

  “You’re speakers?” she asked.

  “Guilty as charged,” Woody said. “Rachel Alexander, Chip Pressman, and I’m Woody Wright.”

  “Oh,” she said, disappointed. That’s when I noticed the point-and-shoot camera in her hand.

  “Bucky’s in the front, on the left side,” I told her, hoping once she’d left I could get out of the aisle and on with my life.

  She looked over toward the front of the room, toward the crowd around Bucky, but she didn’t stir. “But you’re all on the program,” she said. “May I?” She held up the camera, and as we were about to lean together and say “cheese,” she held it out toward me. “Would you mind?” she asked.

  I took her picture with Woody and then with Chip. I was about to hand the camera to Chip so that I could pose with her, too, but she was thanking them, and then she was off, leaning first to one side and then the other as she duck-walked down to the front to have her picture taken with the king of dog trainers.

  “Lunch is in the Carter Café,” I told Woody. “I think we’re eating in the garden. You coming, Pressman?”

  “I’m going to take Betty out for a walk,” he said. “Want to join me?” He was staring at me the way Dashiell does when he has some desperate need he’s trying to communicate. But the only need I was interested in just then was my own.

  I needed answers. I needed to know who fell panting into Alan Cooper’s arms last night. And then what? Did she steal away before dawn, unable to find her panties in the dark and too considerate to put on the light?

  Or was she still there in the morning when Alan had slipped into the hot, soapy tub? And if so, considering the circumstances, what business was that of mine?

  “Rachel?” he said.

  “I can’t. I have something really important I have to do,” I told him, because at least I was sure about the answer to m
y last question. Even if I weren’t dying of curiosity, Sam’s check had made it my business.

  10

  I STUCK MY HAND INTO MY POCKET

  I ran up the stairs to my room. I needed some time to be alone and think. At twelve-thirty I took Dashiell for a walk around the neighborhood, dropped off the film I had shot on Sunday at the closest drugstore, and returned at one to hear Audrey’s talk. A worried-looking Sam, standing outside the door, called me over.

  “Audrey refuses to speak this afternoon. She says the vibes are too negative, because of Alan’s accident.”

  “Won’t anyone else switch with her?”

  “Yes, but I’m worried about all these last-minute changes. People expect to hear what’s on the program.”

  “Who’s speaking in Audrey’s place?”

  “Rick said he would. He’s very sweet. But he’s such a boring speaker. I was hoping to slip him in later in the week.”

  “It’s after lunch, Sam, half the audience will fall asleep anyway. More than half if he’s really dull.”

  “Audrey would have kept them up. Even if you don’t buy a word she says, she’s so entertaining. And she gets everyone to participate.”

  “You mean the whole audience will be sitting there with handkerchiefs over their heads, chanting?”

  “Exactly. Try sleeping with that going on. But it’s not only that. She tells these sad, charming, funny stories about what the animals tell her is wrong with their lives. None of it is their own fault. It’s all human error. People lap it up. It gives them somewhere to put their free-floating guilt. Anyway, now Rick has the afternoon, which means he and Beryl will be together for the question period. You know how she is, she’s so overbearing, she won’t let him say a word.”