Black Ribbon

mother died; navy socks with red toes and red stripes; a matching sweater, navy with a red sled dog team racing across my breasts; hiking boots tightly laced. It must have been midnight. The legendary loyalty of dogs extends beyond us to our daily routines. True to bedtime, Rowdy slept curled in his crate, its door open. As aware of Phyllis Abbott’s presence on the other side of the cabin as if she’d been a corpse laid out there, I took a seat at the desk and pawed through the materials still strewn on its surface: a pen, legal pads, notes, magazines, lists of AKC transgressions, copies of rules, regulations, and guidelines, the Holy Writ applying to registration, dog shows, obedience trials, and AKC judges, the Word, the Commandments, all of it spread out where Judge Phyllis Abbott had seen it when she’d stopped in to say that Leah had called.
    I ran my eyes over the written rules in search of one that Phyllis Abbott might have violated: attempting to obtain judging assignments, looking at a catalog before the judging was complete, smoking in the ring, dressing in clothes that offended the dictates of good tastes. Phyllis Abbott? I tried to picture her in a low-cut satin top, a brass-studded leather miniskirt, and fishnet stockings, one high-heeled foot fetch-ingly propped on a baby gate, a catalog in her hand, and a cigarette dangling from her mouth as she brazenly solicited assignments. I found it impossible to imagine her as anything but a model of judicial propriety and responsibility. Like every other obedience judge in the country, she probably got letters of complaint from OTCH people about such momentous matters as half-point deductions for sits that looked perfectly straight from one angle and ever so slightly crooked from another. I felt certain that she handled such routine griping with her usual courtesy and authority. Phyllis knew the regulations, followed the procedures, and met the requirements; and she did so with admirable fairness and impartiality. Neither on nor off show grounds would she ever have abused a dog, uttered obscenities, or done anything else I could think °f to merit even a mild reprimand from the AKC. Phyllis’s self-appointed priest, I examined her conscience and found it clean of sin—except, of course, that she’d murdered Eva Spit-teler and then tried to drown me.
    Neither crime, I realized, was specifically forbidden by any of the rules, regulations, or guidelines. In that respect, murder and attempted murder were not alone. A dignified body, the American Kennel Club refused to compromise itself, its judges, and the fancy as a whole by acknowledging the existence of the unspeakable. The need for judicial sobriety, for example, went without saying. A few judges—very few—occasionally broke the unwritten rule. The two or three I’d been warned to avoid were conformation judges. Somewhere, sometime, an obedience judge must at least have sipped a little wine before entering the ring. But Phyllis Abbott? Don Abbott was a heavy drinker. Phyllis wasn’t. She didn’t abstain, either. Nothing about her suggested a woman on the wagon. Secret drinking would have worked, especially tipsiness in the ring: It would certainly have been a violation of an unwritten rule. Eva could somehow have found out. Don Abbott had his eye on the presidency of the AKC. His hope didn’t necessarily coincide with reality, of course. How many hopes do? He had the business background. And despite his obvious lack of interest in particular representatives of canisfamiliaris, Don was undoubtedly in dogs. He’d even written a book on getting started in the fancy. But married to a judge who entered the ring with alcohol on her breath? Damn! It would’ve done just fine. The American Kennel Club is possibly the single stuffiest, stodgiest, most conservative organization in the country. Especially on the grounds of an AKC show, its president’s wife would have to be like Caesar’s, above reproach.
    What the hell could Phyllis have done?
    Frustrated, I leafed through the guidelines for conformation judges and wished that Phyllis Abbott had become one. The guidelines were so tough! So specific, so clear, so rigid! And so rigidly enforced, too! Damn Phyllis! And damn the AKC for allowing obedience judges so much leeway, for leaving so much to their discretion and good taste. Without that freedom, as I well knew, the sport of obedience would lose its judges, almost all of whom worked for expenses, not