Bloodlines

Dennehys’ back door. Have you ever met Kevin’s mother? If not, maybe I should warn you: Her Biblical pronouncements can be slightly startling; she favors the Old Testament and the Book of Revelation. Also, her face has a severe expression that I attribute to chronic pain; instead of cutting her steel gray hair or just letting it hang, she twists it into a knot that she bolts to the top of her skull.
    Mrs. Dennehy edged open the back door, eyed me, and opened her mouth.
    I beat her to it. “Behold,” I said, “I stand at the door, and knock.” Revelation, chapter three, verse twenty. “Is Kevin home?”
    He must have heard my voice. A couple of seconds later, he loomed behind his mother. He was pulling on a black raincoat. His eyes looked hungry for escape.
    I was bursting with enthusiasm. “I have a million things to tell you, Kevin,” I said as soon as he stepped outside.
    “You want to walk?”
    “I have some things to show you first,” I said impatiently. “I know what’s going on. Kevin, Simms is double-dealing. He’s cheating Rinehart, and I can prove it.”
    When we reached my kitchen, I ignored the dogs, who were bouncing around and playing up to Kevin. Before Kevin even had his raincoat off, I’d whipped out the envelope Gloria had given me and spread the three photocopied pages on the table. “There!” I said. I kept talking while Kevin pulled his arms out of his sleeves. “This one is a shopping list. Okay? They’re all from this place called Your Local Breeder. In Westbrook. This is how many puppies Janice Coakley wanted, the breeds, how many of each breed. She wanted twenty puppies. Like here? One mini schnauzer, one Shih Tzu, three cockers, one Doberman. Anyway, I even know why she wanted three cockers, okay? First of all, it’s a popular breed, but the line she gives her customer is that she’s a breeder, right? Your Local Breeder. And apparently she does breed some dogs, but she also buys puppies and passes them off as her own. Like these cockers.”
    “Hey, slow down,” Kevin said. He lowered himself into a chair.
    “Sure,” I said, but I was wired. I didn’t take a seat, and the words kept tumbling out of my mouth. “Then after she’d decided what she wanted, instead of making one call to place her order, she made two. First she called Walter Simms, and then, after that, she called Rinehart. And the reason she called Simms first was to see which breeds she could get cut-rate. Discount, okay? Like take the cockers. On the first page, you can see that she wanted three, but Simms must’ve said he could only supply two. So she ordered those two from Simms, here on this page. And then when she called Rinehart, she just wanted one cocker. Rinehart charges more than Simms. Like here? She’s paying Rinehart one-fifty for a cocker, and Simms only charges a hundred.”
    Kevin was thumping Rowdy on the back and rubbing the top of Kimi’s head.
    “Don’t you get it?” I demanded. “Just on these two cockers that Janice Coakley ordered from Simms instead of Rinehart, Simms is cheating Rinehart out of a hundred dollars.”
    Kevin finally glanced at the pages, Janice Coakley’s initial shopping list and the lists of the puppies she’d ordered from Simms and from Rinehart. “Yeah, same as at Puppy Luv,” he said blandly.
    I could feel my face fall. “Kevin, if you knew that...? Look, maybe you don’t get it, because you don’t see where the big profits are. A guy like Rinehart, a broker, probably only pays around forty dollars for a cocker puppy, and in theory, according to the law, he’s supposed to keep the puppy for a minimum of twenty-four hours, I think, but the USDA isn’t the world’s greatest enforcement agency. In fact, it’s probably the Worst. So, say Rinehart pays forty and sells for one-fifty, he’s made a hundred and ten, okay? And he’s had a really quick turnover. Maybe it costs him five or ten dollars to have the puppy picked up and another five or ten to have the puppy delivered, plus he pays some vet to sign some papers, but his profit is tremendous, and it’s quick, and it’s not a lot of work, either.”
    Kevin looked damp and stolid.
    I went on. “The point is that Simms is using Rinehart’s setup to cut into Rinehart’s profits. Simms isn’t trying to do in Rinehart’s business, because he can’t. A pet shop needs a reliable source of a whole lot of different breeds, and the only way to get that is through a broker. Simms is