Stud Rites (14 page)

She’d had no right to interfere with my mail. But I could have gotten pregnant. I could have married him! I felt suddenly light: elevated, levitated, elated, joyous. What a wonderful life I’d had since I’d last seen Finn Adams! What a lucky person I was! My nights with Steve, my days with Rowdy and Kimi, my house rocking with the booming pitter-patter of malamutes crashing off the walls.

So, I wasn’t angry at Finn. Far from it. I felt a sort of senseless gratitude to him for vanishing from my life, which had been vastly better than his, I thought. Lacking the golden glow of sunny curls and family money to begin with, I’d had little to lose. I felt thankful that my eccentric father was still embarrassing me by being around instead of humiliating me by having had to flee to Brazil for financial wrongdoing. Also, my father had always been mortifying; I was used to it. I felt really sorry for Finn. The popularity of types changes mightily over time. But I shouldn’t have said so.

To cover up my blunder, I blundered on. ”So,” I said, ”I don’t believe in breeding for sentimental reasons.” A coughing fit seized me. After clearing my throat, I said, ”I mean, before I decide, I have to be sure that it makes objective sense, that at some point in the distant future, the semen would be worth using. Not that it would be
junk
—far from it—but I don’t want to do it just because I’m
bonded
with my dog—”

Rowdy examined me with large, empathic eyes. So far as I could tell, though, Finn entirely missed what Rowdy immediately grasped. Steve Delaney wouldn’t have noticed, either. So what? I pity men who love women who don’t have dogs like mine. Rowdy and Kimi are brilliant and intuitive. They offer me boundless entertainment and unconditional worship. They occupy my time and attention. They are excellent company. Steve is my lover. He doesn’t have to be my dog, too.

Anyway, whether densely or tactfully, Finn ignored my faux pas and said something that rendered me speechless.

”You’re thinking about the distant future,” he said. ”This morning, right outside here, I went for a walk, and what I came across was the body of the guy who was supposed to judge today. Think about it, Holly. Your dog could die
tomorrow.
So could I. So could you.”

IF I WEREN’T so cowardly, I’d have made a great cop. When I’d made the claim a few weeks earlier to my neighbor Kevin Dennehy, who actually is a cop, Kevin had suffered what our therapist friend Rita diagnosed as an hysterical seizure, meaning, as I understood it, that the problem was in Kevin’s head, not mine. Rita brought him out of the attack by lying: She said I was joking: I’d make a rotten cop. Kevin believed her. That’s Cambridge: always a mental health professional at hand to pour snake oil on the waters of turbulent truth.

But I would have. For example, if I’d been Detective Peter Kariotis,
I’d
have known
I
was lying or, if not exactly lying, not spilling the full truth. Observing a fishy look in my own eyes, a tightness about the mouth, and a rigidity in my Yankee jaw, Detective Holly Winter would have made a swift verbal pounce. ”Just what,” I’d have demanded, ”did you find on the blacktop under Betty Burley’s van? And what did you do with it? And why?”

But before I abandon the topic of fishiness, let me summarize what Finn had to say about finding the corpse of James Hunnewell. Summarize is precisely what Finn didn’t do. On the contrary, he went on and on about his reasons for taking a walk, his estimation of the air temperature, the excessive warmth of the windbreaker he’d been wearing, and the makes and models of the ambulances, emergency vehicles, and police cruisers that had subsequently arrived. I’d found Finn boring when he’d delivered his sales pitch about reproductive artifice, but he was even more staggeringly boring when he prattled on about unnatural death. Rita would have interpreted Finn’s obsessive dwelling on tedious detail as symptoms of anxiety; she’d probably have decided that Finn was having a post-traumatic stress reaction exacerbated by the unexpected resurgence of an object of libidinal cathexis: Instead of getting freaked out by finding a dead body, Finn got boring, and the reason he got really, really boring was that I made him nervous. Anyway, what I finally managed to extract from him about the murder of James Hunnewell was not much. Hunnewell’s head had been crushed. His skin had felt cold to the touch; although death had been obvious, Finn had checked. The body had been propped up against the wall of the shed, under a little open porch. Finn wondered whether Hunnewell was supposed to look like an old guy who’d settled there to watch a game of horseshoes or volleyball in the open field. If so, the odd angle of the neck and, of course, the battered skull spoiled the effect. Hanging around to be questioned, Finn gathered that the body had been moved a short distance, from a spot near the edge of the parking lot. Needless to say, Finn dwelled on how
many
feet.

Leah (mercifully!) interrupted his monologue. I performed introductions. Leah would have made a great cop, too. Within seconds of the time we left the R.T.I. booth, she’d not only guessed about Finn, but was saying,
”Finn!
Holly, even the name...”

Embarrassed, I said, ”I was only a kid.” In what must have hit Leah as blatant self-contradiction, I added, ”I was only about your age.”

Leah remained unsympathetic, or I thought so. ”Burble burble” isn’t my idea of a supportive comment. What rankled, though, wasn’t the fish imitation, but the realization that my cousin’s judgment about men actually was better than mine had been at her age and that she thought less of me now than she had before.

Brooding over my own foolishness, I failed to notice the approach of Detective Peter Kariotis until he spoke my name, and when he did, my first thought was that, yes, now and then I certainly did imagine a universe in which powerful authority figures hovered around waiting to deliver timely little respect-your-elders lectures to know-it-all Harvard freshmen, but that, no, right now I did not require police intervention. My second thought was that the one Detective Kariotis had come for was not Leah, who had presumably told the police everything she knew and who had known nothing whatsoever about the small mystery of the malamute lamp.

In a way, my second thought was correct, except that the lamp wasn’t what Detective Kariotis wanted to ask about. He’d seen it, of course, just as in the past few hours he’d seen zillions of other malamute objects— large, small, light, heavy, sharp, and blunt. If I didn’t mention it, I told myself, he wouldn’t, either. And he didn’t. Consequently, I wasn’t nervous. Also, I should reveal that I’m perfectly used to being interrogated by the police. Kevin Dennehy is always asking me how I’m doing, and whether it’s hot or cold enough for me. I always answer truthfully: ”Fine” or ”Sure is!” So I pretended that Kariotis was a Greek-American version of Kevin. The tactic worked. Detective Kariotis looked almost as Greek as Kevin looks Irish, and the effort required to achieve the radical ethnic transformation left me no energy to think about lamps. Kevin has red hair and pale freckled skin, and he’s a tall, beefy guy. Kari-0tis was dark and wiry, but his accent eased my task. It wasn’t Kevin’s heavy Cambridge-Boston, but the vowel sounds were pretty close, and Kariotis treated the right r’s as silent letters.

We talked in a room off the corridor that ran between the exhibition hall and the Lagoon. This function room, as I guess it would be called in hotelese, had three or four chairs, a little table, no windows, and zillion-watt fluorescent lighting. Maybe the hotel was courting the mortuary trade. The obvious function of the room was to make people look as if they’d died of anemia.

When Kariotis and I had seated ourselves on opposite sides of the table, he began his interrogation with a question that sounded like a line from an old movie. ”Miss Winter,” he said blandly, ”do you smoke?”

For a second, I thought he must’ve been studying a hopelessly out-of-date text on interview procedures and was trying to put me at ease by offering me a cigarette. I blinked. ”No.”

”When you encountered Mr. Hunnewell last night, did he ask you whether you smoked? Or whether you had any cigarettes?”

”No. He didn’t have reason to. He was smoking constantly. He was chain-smoking. He had a pack of cigarettes with him. And a lighter. An old-fashioned gold lighter, the kind you put lighter fluid in, with a sort of flip top.” I snapped my fingers. ”I just realized something. I didn’t know who he was then, but now that I think of it, he probably won the lighter at a show, a dog show. Years ago, ashtrays, lighters, cigarette boxes, all that stuff used to be given as trophies. It seems ridiculous now, but people’s dogs used to win them all the time.”

”This, uh, pack of cigarettes he had. Did you notice how full it was? Or if it was, uh, almost empty?”

”Uh, I don’t know. I don’t... I’m sorry. I just don’t know.”

”Did Mr. Hunnewell say anything at all about buying cigarettes? Or, like, uh, when you were helping him with the soft-drink machine and the ice machine, did it seem like he might’ve been looking around for a cigarette machine?”

”I don’t think so. Not that I noticed. And he didn’t say anything about cigarettes or smoking or anything, except that he did offer me a cigarette. Mainly, he just... I mean, he was smoking, and then he kind of stubbed out the cigarette and threw it in the trash barrel, and he lit another one. I remember because I was worried that the cigarette wasn’t out, that it would start a fire. And... this probably sounds kind of silly, but... he didn’t just smoke: He
really
smoked. There was so much smoke that I half expected the smoke alarm to go off. It sort of worried me that it didn’t. And just in case his cigarette was still smoldering and the alarm was broken or something—really, so I wouldn’t stay awake worrying about it—I went back, after he was gone, and poured water in the trash barrel.”

”The last time you saw Mr. Hunnewell was when he was leaving with Mrs. Reilly?”

I tried to read Kariotis’s expression. He didn’t have one. ”Yes,” I said.

”And then you entered your room.”

”Yes. And later, I went back out and poured a lot of water in the trash barrel. And I got ice, and I got something to drink. That’s what I was doing there to begin with, only I ended up helping him instead. So I went back.”

”And what time was that?”

”I have no idea.”

”Yes, you do,” my interrogator said impassively. ”Midnight?”

”No. Nine-thirty, I think. Before ten. Well, it must’ve been well before ten, because that’s... I think that’s about when I went to sleep.”

”And this last time, when you were in the corridor, did you see anyone?”

”Not that I remember. No, I don’t think so.”

”Did you see or hear anyone or anything during the night? Or in the morning?”

”At, uh, somewhere around six, six-thirty, someone in one of the campers started a generator. That’s what woke me up. It woke everyone up, I think. But that’s normal. It happens all the time at shows. Other than that, nothing.” I did not say that I, like a lot of other people, had assumed that the offending generator was Tim Oliver’s.

”You had a dog in your room?”

”Two. And my cousin.” I suppressed an irrational impulse to explain that Leah was human.

”At any point, did your dogs bark?”

”Someone must’ve told you this by now,” I said, ”but they’re malamutes, and most malamutes don’t exactly bark. And they’re not watch dogs. A few malamutes will rumble or growl if a stranger comes to the door, but a lot of them won’t do a thing, except maybe stand there wagging their tails. That’s what mine do. They
like
strangers—strange people, anyway. If they’d heard other dogs, they might’ve made some noise. But malamutes don’t go around warning you about anything, because the typical malamute attitude is that no matter what it is, he can handle it. So why get worked up?”

”While we’re on the subject of dogs...,”Kariotis attempted. He pulled out two pieces of paper and asked me to explain what they were. One bore my name: Cubby’s pedigree, the one I’d run myself. The other was a page of the stud book register, the page I’d included with the pedigree when I’d sent it to Betty Burley. He asked me to explain exactly what they were.

In my effort to divert him from anything related to the lamp—anything being, of course, Betty Burley—I made a total fool of myself by setting a personal best (maybe a world record) for dog talk. Detective Kariotis showed almost no reaction. When I said the words ”stud book,” however, even those death-light fluorescents couldn’t wash out the red that abruptly coursed into the man’s cheeks. Flashing him an innocent smile, I said, ”Relax! It’s dogs. It’s not for eligible bachelors.” The second time he looked interested was when I explained that the stud book listing of Pawprintz Attic Emprer meant that the dog had been bred by S. A. and V. Printz and owned by G. H. Thacker. The pedigree I’d run showed Gladys Thacker’s full name at the bottom of the page and the notation ”MO A,” my shorthand for a USDA Class A dealer, a puppy farmer rather than a broker, in the puppy-mill capital of the United States, Missouri. (Shorthand, indeed! Have I lost you? The USDA, United States Department of Agriculture, licenses operators of wholesale commercial kennels. The Class A dealers, the puppy farmers, breed puppies that they sell to the Class B dealers, the brokers, who resell the puppies to pet shops. And Missouri? According to the USDA’s reports, the Show-Me State had 1,084 licensed dealers. Kansas, by comparison, came in a distant second with a mere 448. Why such small numbers? Two reasons. First, at least half of the puppy farmers don’t have licenses. Second, lots of the brokers are big time. What does big time mean? There’s one broker who’s reported to ship 24,000 puppies a year. That’s twenty-four
thousand.
And that’s big time.)