Bloodlines

Gloria had been unnaturally eager to switch her loyalty to me. Had I lost it already? Had I ever had it? I felt frightened about trusting Gloria and guilty about using her, but, as I’ve said, I’ll do anything for dogs.
    I cleared my throat and asked under my breath, “Where’s this guy who works here?”
    “Out back,” Gloria told me. “It’s okay. And I’ve got a lot to tell you.”
    “When is Janice Coakley due back?”
    “I don’t know. Half an hour maybe. She’s getting her hair done, too.”
    I leaned an elbow on the counter. “Okay, but if she shows up, just start telling me about Siberian huskies or something, okay?”
    “I don’t know anything about them,” said Gloria, suddenly childish.
    “You know as much about them as you know about the Finnish spitz,” I said, “and you winged that all right.” Gloria smiled. I felt a pang of guilt. I still hadn’t called the dermatologist to make an appointment for her. “Walter Simms delivers puppies here,” I went on. “I know that now.”
    “Yeah,” Gloria said. “A lot of them come from him. We’re supposed to tell the customers that Mrs. Coakley breeds them all, but she doesn’t, really.”
    “She breeds some of them?”
    Gloria pushed her braids back. “Yeah, she’s got— That’s her house, out there, in back of the parking lot. That’s where she lives. And somewhere behind there, maybe in the barn, I know she has some dogs. You can hear them. I haven’t been back there.”
    “That’s okay,” I said. “But Simms brings most of them?”
    “Some,” Gloria said. “He’s supposed to bring some tonight. She put in an order. That’s what she does. She calls up and orders them, what breeds she wants. I heard her. It’s weird. It’s like someone calling up a store and ordering groceries, only it’s dogs. It’s really weird.”
    “I believe you.” I tried to keep the disappointment from my voice. I’d already known that that’s how pet shops order puppies, and I’d known that Simms delivered to Your Local Breeder. In hoping that Gloria would learn anything useful, I’d been kidding myself.
    “Only,” Gloria continued, “at least this morning she made two different calls. Her office door was open, and I was supposed to clean the kennels, so I did the ones close to the door.”
    “Maybe she deals with more than one broker.”
    “Except they’re all coming at the same time.” Gloria’s eyes were serious.
    “That does seem kind of strange,” I admitted. “So,” said Gloria, pulling herself up straight and holding her shoulders back, “as soon as Mrs. Coakley left, I went and looked.”
    “You looked...?”
    “It sounded fishy, and that’s what I thought you wanted, anything fishy. So as soon as Mrs. Coakley left, I went into her office.” Gloria glanced toward the back of the shop. “Back there. And the file was right on her desk, because, I mean, she’d just been making these calls, and she was going out. And it was like what she said on the phone. Like, uh, two lists. Only the other sort of strange thing was that the prices were different.”
    “They would be,” I said. “Pet shops pay different prices for different breeds. They sell them for different prices, right? The puppies here don’t all cost the same, do they?”
    “No, but for the same breed, they do. Like that Finnish spitz was seven hundred dollars, and some of the others are a whole lot cheaper. Like cocker spaniels are three twenty-five. But, like, all the cocker spaniels are three twenty-five, only she pays a hundred for them to one guy, and a hundred and fifty at the other place.”
    “I don’t understand,” I said. “So why not just get them all from the place that only charges a hundred?”
    “Because those people didn’t have enough,” Gloria said. “That’s what it sounded like. We sell a whole lot of cocker spaniels, I guess, and she wanted, like, a litter of puppies, and she was supposed to get them Sunday, only she didn’t. So the first call she made, she tried to get, like, three of them, only she ended up ordering two, and the next call, she only ordered one.”
    “So she got as many of the cheaper ones as she could,” I said.
    “Yeah,” Gloria said. “Yeah, I mean, if you look at the lists and stuff, you can tell that’s what she did. It’s like, well, my mother’ll do this when she shops for clothes. She’ll go to T.J. Maxx, Hit or Miss, those places first, and then there’ll be stuff she can’t