Chow Down (A Melanie Travis Mystery)

“What kind of dog do you see her with?”
    I thought for a moment. “A Saluki.”
    “Good guess, but no.”
    “Chinese Crested?”
    Cindy giggled at that. “No way. You’d never catch Simone with a dog that was nearly hairless. Not enough to primp. No, she’s got a Pomeranian named Chloe. Sometimes Simone sticks Chloe inside her purse and brings her to work.” She glanced down at Faith. “Not on the days when we’re going to have other dogs visiting, though.”
    “What about Chris?” I asked.
    “He has a Scottie.”
    “Like MacDuff.”
    “That’s right.”
    She looked over her shoulder and pushed some papers around her desk, as if she’d suddenly remembered a task that needed attending to. I wasn’t fooled. Cindy didn’t want to talk about Chris’s pet. Which made me want to discuss him all the more.
    “So I guess he was pretty happy to see MacDuff chosen as a finalist,” I said.
    “I guess so.”
    Her tone was carefully neutral. I guessed there might be some resentment there that she was holding tightly in check. Worried about appearances, Cindy had tried hard not to practice favoritism. It must have rankled to see Chris do the opposite in making his selections.
    “How were the five finalists chosen?” I asked.
    “You know that. The procedure was outlined in the contest rules. You must have read them before you entered.”
    “Sure, but I was wondering how things worked within the committee itself. Did each of the judges look at every single entry? Did you vote on which ones you liked the best? Did all your votes count equally?”
    Queried about an easier topic, Cindy relaxed a bit. “Doug and Simone were much too busy to be involved at the beginning of the selection process. The contest was incredibly popular, there were several thousand individual entries that needed to be sorted through. That was Chris’s and my job. Between the two of us, we looked at and evaluated every one.”
    “That must have been a huge undertaking.”
    “Believe me, it was. Although some of the entries were obviously more serious than others. You wouldn’t believe how many submissions we got from little kids who thought that their pet Fluffy or Fido was the best dog in the world.”
    Little did she know, I thought.
    “Of course we had to put those aside. But even so, there was still a huge number to consider. Finally Chris and I had to split them up. Each of us did half and came up with our ten favorites. That left us with twenty semifinalists for the whole committee to consider.”
    “How many of your choices ended up as finalists?” I asked curiously.
    “Three,” she said with satisfaction. “And before you ask, yes, Faith was one of them. As soon as I saw your entry, I knew that she would be a perfect candidate.”
    “Who else did you pick?”
    I wasn’t sure Cindy would answer, but she did.
    “Ginger and Brando were mine, too. All three of my choices were dogs with great charisma. Actually I was quite certain that at least seven or eight out of the ten I presented could have won the whole thing. But when we got the entire committee together to choose the finalists, I think Doug and Simone felt kind of bad when the first three we selected came from my pile. After that they made a conscious effort to take the last two from Chris.”
    “Not an entirely fair way to do things. Maybe your semifinalists were a better group.”
    Cindy only shrugged. If she’d had a problem with the outcome, she wasn’t about to discuss it with me.
    “So your selections were all big dogs.”
    “Not intentionally, that’s just the way it worked out. I was looking for a dog that I thought would have a certain kind of presence in the print ads and on TV. In my mind, I guess that translated into using one of the bigger breeds.”
    “Clearly your director of advertising didn’t feel the same way.”
    “Not necessarily. I saw Chris’s whole group, and he had several large dogs among his final ten. A Weimeraner, I think, and maybe a Scottish Deerhound. But the two he was really pulling for were Yoda and MacDuff.”
    “And Doug and Simone agreed with him.”
    “Eventually, yes. In the beginning our choices were all over the place. And it didn’t help that there were four of us on the committee, which naturally led to some tie votes.”
    “What did you do about those?”
    “Doug dealt with them,” Cindy said with a small, humorless laugh. “Or rather, he announced that in the case of a tie, his vote carried more