by Susan Conant
“So this guy I saw tonight,” I said. “When I asked you if that was Rinehart, you didn’t just say no. You said something like, ‘That’s not Rinehart.’ So it sounded like … I mean, I had this feeling that what you meant was that he was someone else. Not just not Rinehart?”
Kevin stood up and stretched. “He’s a tough little nobody.”
“Rowdy didn’t think so,” I said. “When … I’d turned my car around, and … really, I didn’t do anything to him. He’d pulled his van out of the back lot at Rinehart’s, and he got out to shut the gate, and I saw him in the headlights. And so he started swearing and yelling at me to get out of there. And Rowdy growled.”
The sound of his own name would rouse Rowdy from a coma. He’d been stretched out on the floor in a deep doze, but now he stood up, shook himself, and padded over to me. Have I ever mentioned what a beautiful dog he is? As maybe you’ve noticed, he looks quite a lot like a famous malamute named Inuit’s Wooly Bully, who was called Floyd. Rowdy’s a pretty boy, too. I told him so.
“Probably a dog somewhere around,” Kevin said. He had a point. That van could have been packed with puppies. When Rowdy and Kimi are in their car, they’ll warn other dogs away. If they spot a particularly dominant-looking canine, they’ll roar, yell, and claw at the windows.
“I didn’t see one,” I said, “and if there’s a dog around, I notice. Besides, I could tell. Maybe you won’t believe it, but it’s true. Rowdy didn’t like the sound of this guy’s voice.”
Kevin’s big face crinkled up, and he said, “Oh, yeah?”
“Yes,” I said. “So what’s his name?”
“Simms,” Kevin said. “He’s Rinehart’s delivery boy. He’s the guy who brought the puppies to Diane Sweet. Walt Simms. Hey, Holly, like I told you, local dogs.”
Rowdy strolled to his water dish. He drank with loud splashes. The refrigerator hummed. Kimi yipped softly in her sleep. To hide my face from Kevin, I got up, filled the kettle, and put it on to heat.
“Oh,” I said, smiling. Smiling? You bet. Kevin would arrest Walter Simms for the murder of Diane Sweet; Simms’s dogs would somehow be confiscated; we’d get Icekist Sissy back; and we’d rescue the others, too. “Well, Kevin, if this guy was there that night, then obviously—”
“His story’s, uh … his story checks out.”
“He admits he was there?”
“Oh, yeah.”
“And?”
Kevin’s smile was wry. “I’ll tell you something.” Kevin’s eyes have a wonderful clarity. They locked on mine. “You hear the craziest things in this job. Amazing things. And every time I think I’ve heard it all, then I hear something else.”
“What did you hear this time?”
“Well, Sunday night, Monday morning, we figured what we were dealing with here was a rape and robbery.”
“You didn’t tell me that,” I said. “My God. That really is awful. Now I am sorry for her.” And I was, too. Yeah, I know. Murder didn’t elicit all that much sympathy, but rape did. I’m not trying to justify my feelings, you know. I’m just telling you what they were. “Kevin, what the hell are you smiling about? You know, I have read and heard a lot about how the police, at least male cops, don’t take this seriously, but I never, ever thought that you—”
“It wasn’t rape,” Kevin said.
I was furious. “Oh,” I said, “I suppose she had on black lace underwear, so you guys decided—Kevin, I can hardly believe this. If anybody had asked me, I would have said that more than almost any other cop, including women, you would be—”
“Hey, hey.” Kevin raised both palms to stave off a tirade. “It all checks out. They had a regular thing going, him and Diane. Whenever Simms brought an order of puppies, uh, let’s say the puppies weren’t the only thing he delivered.”
“You’re joking. How do you know that? I suppose that’s what Simms said, right?”
Kevin patted his giant hands on his even more giant thighs and made clucking noises to Rowdy, who happily went to him. “This night business hit me right from the beginning. You have to ask yourself, why would she stay there late, washing dogs? Why not wait till morning? Why not get someone else to do it? Yeah, Diane did a lot of work, but she ran the place, and she could’ve got one of these kids who work there to wash and brush the puppies. Only she didn’t. But the main thing is, all of them knew about it.”
“How could they know? I mean, they might have wondered or something, but …”
“One of these kids, Patty, her name is, nice kid, one time, back in December, she gets home from work and a couple of hours later, she can’t find her wallet, and all her money’s in it, driver’s license, and she’s going out. So she thinks maybe she left the thing at work, it fell out of her pocketbook, so she goes back to Puppy Luv.”
“And?”
“And when she gets there—this is at the back of the store—she sees this guy Simms’s van, so she figures Diane is still there, so she knocks and whatever, and then when nobody comes to the door, she lets herself in. And back there, there’s this room where they wash the dogs, and that’s where they keep the coffee pot, take their breaks, hang their coats, that kind of thing. And that’s where this kid, Patty, keeps her pocketbook. Only she never gets that far, because when she opens the back door, she sees that the door to this dog washing room is half open.”
“Grooming area,” I said. “And?”
Sex embarrasses Kevin. His coloring is totally Irish, very fair, and when that Irish color rushes to his face, he turns scarlet. He looked at the floor and said quickly, “And there they were, going at it.”
“On the grooming table?” I asked. It seemed like the logical place.
But Kevin gazed upward, smiled, shook his head, and finally said, “They’ve got a funny kind of bathtub there, for washing dogs. Not down low, like a regular tub. Up high, sort of waist high, set in the wall.”
“They’re always like that,” I explained. “So you don’t strain your back leaning over.”
“Well, I don’t know if that’s why they were in it,” Kevin said, “but that’s where she says they were. Bubbles and all. In a dog bathtub. Like I said, this is a crazy job.”
“They probably weren’t too pleased when Patty, uh … or …?”
“According to her, they didn’t see her, never knew she was there. She just took one look and snuck out. And, uh, some of what Simms has to say confirms the whole story. And there’s, uh, material evidence to support it.”
“What kind?”
I could almost hear the grind as Kevin shifted to professional gear. “Her, uh, birth control device,” Kevin said stiffly. “Knows what she used, where she kept it, what she kept it in. He said she was wearing it. She was. And the, uh, case was where he said it was.”
“That does sound … yeah, I agree.”
“And the rest of Simms’s story checks out. He left his last place at around ten to nine, and he got to Cambridge, to Puppy Luv, around nine-thirty. The stop before was Diane’s sister’s place, this one you see the ads for, Your Local Breeder.”
“I’ve heard of it,” I said.
“And at around ten after ten, the sister, Janice, calls Diane, and Diane tells her that Simms has already left. And then Simms has this sister, Cheryl, he lives with, and Cheryl swears he got home around quarter of eleven, and that fits.”
“Does it? Where does he live?” I asked casually. I hate a sneak, but what choice did I have?
“None of your business.”
“Near Rinehart,” I guessed. “His business.” I corrected myself. “Businesses. Plural. Westbrook. Then that is where Puppy Luv gets its dogs. From Rinehart. Believe me, from now on, I stay far away from him, okay? The whole idea of Guarini scares me. I don’t want anything to do with those people. I just want to know. You’ve seen the paperwork at Puppy Luv. Just tell me. That is where the dogs come from?”
Kevin nodded, hesitated, and said with no expression in his voice or on his face, “Rinehart. Rinehart Pet Mar
t.”
“Christ.”
“Yeah, like they were cars. I wasn’t going to tell you that.”
“But you did,” I said. “Hey, Kevin, I’m really sorry I yelled at you about the, uh, rape business. I was wrong. I mean, actually, I was right to begin with. About you. What I said tonight was unfair. I am really sorry.”
“Hey, forget it.”
“Thank you,” I said. “So tell me. If this kid Patty knew about Diane and Simms, and all the other people who worked there knew about it …?”
Kevin smiled. “Yeah. Numero uno. John Sweet. The hubby. Home watching TV. No phone calls, no visitors, no nothing. First at the scene. Cannot wait to get us out of there so he can open up shop.”
“So the question really is whether Diane’s husband knew about Simms. Could Patty or someone have told him?”
“Not a chance.” Kevin shook his head. “At least in my opinion, not a chance. And he didn’t spend a lot of time there. Yeah, it’s possible he overheard someone saying something, or maybe he just got suspicious.”
“Maybe just the way you did,” I said. “Maybe he wondered about why she was staying so late to wash the puppies when she could’ve gotten someone else to do it in the morning. Or maybe … Kevin, you found material evidence. Maybe John Sweet found something, too.” I hate to embarrass Kevin, but I asked, anyway. “Kevin, where did she keep her diaphragm?”
But Kevin didn’t even turn pink. “Like I told you before, she did all the work. Very systematic. Businesswoman type.”
I interrupted. “Well, where?”
“In a manila folder in a filing cabinet in her office,” he said. “Right where it belonged. Alphabetical order. Under D.” A look of wonder filled Kevin’s broad face. Imagine a double-size, red-haired Irish-American Jean-Paul Sartre confronting a raw sense of being. “Like I keep saying, Holly, in this job, you wait long enough, you run across everything.”
22
When Steve arrived at midnight on Tuesday, I was asleep. He let himself in. At breakfast on Wednesday morning, I thought about telling him what was going on, but decided against it. Dragging him to a pet shop had been okay, but hauling him into this mess of puppy mills and brokers? Those bastards couldn’t operate without shady veterinarians to certify the health of sick puppies they’ve never even seen. I wanted to keep Steve completely away, totally protected.
As soon as Steve left, I called Bill Coakley and offered him five hundred dollars in cash for Missy’s return. The amount—roughly four hundred and ninety dollars more than I could afford—was probably a hundred dollars less than Edgar Sievers had paid for her at Puppy Luv. Now that Missy was no longer a cute little baby, though, her market value as a pet had probably plummeted to one or two hundred dollars, assuming that someone would buy her at all.
But what was Missy worth as a brood bitch? She was eight months old, due to come in season any day now. A puppy mill operator would probably consider her a better deal now than she would have been four or five months ago because she could be bred almost immediately. He’d be spared the expense of keeping a puppy bitch alive during those useless months before her first heat. He? Or possibly she? Did Janice Coakley actually breed any of those puppies she claimed were all hers? I was relying on Gloria Loss to find out. But Janice Coakley wasn’t the only Westbrook connection. Bill Coakley, her ex-husband, was pretty close to Your Local Breeder, and Rinehart’s dual dealership was within walking distance of Bill Coakley’s. On Sunday evening, shortly before Diane Sweet’s murder, Walter Simms, who worked for Rinehart, had made a delivery to Janice Coakley at Your Local Breeder and had then driven to Puppy Luv, where he’d made his usual double delivery to Diane, Janice’s sister. Well, so what? The valentine in Diane Sweet’s window? Love is a warm puppy. Also, it was none of my business what consenting adults chose to do with one another in the privacy of their own grooming areas.
So, as I’ve suggested, the network of relationships involving Janice Coakley, Bill Coakley, Joe Rinehart, Diane Sweet, and Walter Simms wouldn’t have concerned or worried me if these people had dealt only with one another and with inanimate objects. If Rinehart had brokered nothing other than used cars? If Janice, Bill, and Diane had been foisting off automotive lemons on the ignorant public? If so, Walter Simms and Diane Sweet would’ve ended up in the back seat of an old Chevrolet—or possibly a car wash—and I wouldn’t have cared at all. But now that I’d been forced to relocate Walter Simms to my own turf? Now that all roads led to Westbrook? It seemed to me that if Bill Coakley hadn’t sold Missy to his ex-wife, he’d probably sent Missy to join her mother, Icekist Sissy.
How much had Missy been worth to Janice Coakley or Rinehart or Simms? Purebred dog fancy is my home, but I live above ground; I was a stranger in this underworld. I’d heard, read, and even written about it, of course. I knew, among other things, that in this underworld, both AKC papers and purebred dogs were sold at auction—and not necessarily attached to one another, either. In purebred hell, Missy could even end up as an AKC-registered Siberian husky and the dam of dozens of AKC-registered pet shop Siberians. Am I exaggerating? A man named Bob Baker once registered a nonexistent litter of Labrador retrievers with the AKC. Baker didn’t do it as a joke. He works for the Humane Society of the United States, and he did it to dramatize the point that AKC papers guarantee absolutely nothing. So, you see, people like Bob Baker had charted the slimy routes through this subterranean muck, but I’d done no more than study their maps. I was feeling my way around. My hands were dirty. I felt sick about the five hundred dollars I’d offered Bill Coakley, scared that the bribe was laughably inadequate, nauseated by this whole business of buying and selling dogs as commodities, angry at the AKC for accepting registration fees from puppy mills, and, most of all, disgusted with myself for having lost Missy.
I was slumped in a chair at my kitchen table mulling over these sad matters when Kimi suddenly trotted in from the bedroom, spotted a Nylabone on the floor, clamped it between her teeth, raised her head, and began a private game of releasing and catching the toy. She’d open her big jaws until the Nylabone just barely began to drop from her mouth, then she’d seize it, loosen her grip, and once again snap the toy between her teeth. The click of her teeth on the artificial bone, the slight ripple of her neck and shoulder muscles, the glamourous glint of her thick coat—Kimi and her playful joy were unimaginably lovely. She does not foresee her future or any other beyond her next meal. She is a Zen master, intensely here and now. She restores my soul.
Thus renewed, I called Jane M. Appleyard, who … Well, this isn’t a diversion. You know what a battle-ax is? Yes, of course, a powerful weapon of war. Bear in mind, by the way, that I’m not the one who decided to call Jane M. Appleyard a weapon of war. The term was Bill Coakley’s, and when he bitched about “the battle-ax from the Humane,” I immediately knew that he meant Mrs. Appleyard, a breeder of golden retrievers and a vigorous force in the Eleanor J. Colley Humane Society, which is located two towns away from Westbrook. Mrs. Appleyard runs the society because such was the wish of its eponymous benefactor, a dear friend of Mrs. Appleyard’s. Mrs. Colley, whom I knew slightly, was a strong-minded Radcliffe graduate who got ticked because her alma mater wasn’t lobbying Harvard to grant tenure to women and who left most of her money to dogs on the grounds that Labrador retrievers had done more to advance the cause of women than Radcliffe ever would. I’ve shown under her son, Wilfred Colley, who judges in Open and Utility. He’s a good judge, tough but fair. Just like his mother, I guess.
But back to Mrs. Appleyard, who is what purebred dogdom calls “a very typey animal.” She’s the quintessence of who she is—Bryn Mawr ’37, golden retrievers, white linen, man-tailored khaki, practical shoes, and, of late, an ebony cane—and all of her parts fit together perfectly. Five feet seven is tall for a woman of her generation, and Jane Appleyard has not permitted age to reduce her by so much as an inch. Her large frame supports a head shaped almost exactly like a football but covered on top with silver hair hacke
d short by a hand that must wield a pair of grooming shears, a hand that is most certainly her own.
When she answers the phone, you can practically see her in her rich, full, low-pitched, but rather booming voice. She never bothers to say hello, but firmly and cheerfully announces, “Mrs. Harold Appleyard,” as if she could possibly be anyone else. Today, as usual, a dog barked in the background. “Daisy, that will do!” Mrs. Appleyard commanded, then said, evidently to me, “Well, is someone there? I don’t have all day. Speak up!”
“Mrs. Appleyard, this is Holly Winter,” I said.
“Holly Winter! I was thinking about your mother just the other day. You know, dear, everyone remembers her.”
I said that I did, too. Then I got right to the point. “I wondered if you could help with something. This has to do with, uh, rescue. I’m trying to find a man named Walter Simms. I wondered if you’d ever heard of him?”
Mrs. Appleyard cleared her throat. “I have indeed,” she said. “I’ve even been out there, but the two of them won’t let me back on the property, and the fact is, it’s an extremely frustrating situation. We find this all the time. We know who these people are, we have a very good idea of what’s going on, and there’s not a thing we can do!”
“Could you tell me … it’s his sister he lives with?”
“Cheryl. Walter is perfectly compos mentis, you know, but poor Cheryl simply isn’t all there. It’s a terrible story. The house … Well, you can literally smell it from the road. The mother died five or six years ago, and that’s when things went from bad to worse.”