Animal Appetite

her jaws, Rowdy zoomed into the room, and still in possession of: the lobster, Kimi zipped back under the bed. By the time I’d locked Rowdy in the guest room, once again enticed Kimi out of her hidey-hole, and successfully traded a half stick of butter for the lobster, my Thanksgiving dinner was cold, and Steve had finished eating. We exchanged words about obedience training, malamutes, I and food. Then the inevitable happened. The phone rang. One of Steve’s clients was on his way to the clinic m with a beagle who’d been allowed to eat two turkey legs, splintery bones and all, and was suffering from what might turn out to be a perforated intestine. I hadn’t seen Steve since.
    So Kevin had enjoyed the salad I’d made from the? fourth lobster and was now drinking Bud out of the can. I’d drafted my Dog’s Life column on Wednesday. Today, in an effort to finish it and get it in the mail, as I’d done an hour earlier, I’d consumed so much coffee that my system was suffering from what may have been genuine caffeine poisoning. Now I was drinking milk. Although Kevin had finished eating, Rowdy and Kimi, who had studied his habits, were still stationed eagerly at his elbows. The dogs are wolf gray and white, with almond-shaped brown eyes and beautiful stand-off coats. Kimi has the dark facial markings that constitute what’s called a “full mask.” Rowdy has an “open face,” meaning that it’s white and very definitely not meaning that it in any way resembles a Scandinavian sandwich. Kevin’s hair is red. His eyes are blue. His face, like Rowdy’s, is white, but covered with freckles, and his tongue wasn’t hanging out of his mouth. Rowdy is a bit over the twenty-five I inches at the withers and eighty-five pounds that the American Kennel Club standard calls for—let me just report flatly that he’s gorgeous—and Kimi is almost precisely twenty-three inches and seventy-five pounds. Kevin, in contrast, is far beefier than what’s probably called for in the official standard of the Cambridge Police Department. For as long as I’d known him, he’d dealt with the stress of being a cop by near-daily longdistance running, but instead of becoming gazellelike, he increasingly reminded me of some impossible cross between a gorilla and a mastiff.
    “Kevin, do not even think about giving them beer,” I warned. “And do not tell me that you haven’t been doing it, because the other day when Steve opened a can of beer, they both came flying, and Rowdy opened his mouth and practically begged to guzzle.”
    “Hey, hey,” Kevin said to Rowdy, “didn’t the three of us swear it was going to be our little secret?”
    “Steve did not give them any,” I said emphatically. “He knows better. So do you.” Gesturing to the photocopied notes, I asked, “Any idea what kind of paper these were written on?”
    “Yeah. The one about the faults, ‘Love, Jack,’ was on plain white paper. Torn across the top. The other was on business letterhead. Same paper the company used. Also with the top torn off. Typed on the machine in his office. That one’d been folded, to go in an envelope. The other one hadn’t. The writing’s his. No question.”
    Neither one had been crumpled up?”
    'Nope. He didn’t do that. Just threw things in the trash. Didn’t ball them up first.”
    He didn’t have a secretary?”
    Yeah, but he typed his letters himself.”
    So anyone at the press could’ve kept going through his wastebasket for a letter that could pass as a suicide note.”
    “And the guy wrote a lot of letters, most of them telling people he wasn’t going to publish their books.”
    “Most publishers just use a form letter. He must have been a nice guy if he bothered to write personal rejections. These aren’t rejection letters, though. I guess the first one could be about a book he hoped would be a bestseller that didn’t make it and that he wasn’t going to promote anymore. But I don’t think so. Damned Yankee Press doesn’t exactly do bestsellers. Maybe he really did think about suicide. Hey, Kevin, Shaun McGrath was brought in to computerize the business. How come Jack was still using a typewriter?”
    “Computers cost big bucks in those days. Or maybe he liked to type. I wasn’t there.”
    “So tell me about this poison.” I repeated the words Kevin had said earlier. “Sodium fluoroacetate.”
    “Colorless, odorless, tasteless.”
    “I’ve never heard of it.”
    “Banned for years. Licensed