Stud Rites

puppy mills was so revolting that some of the people who’d caught sight of it on the monitor at the rescue booth had been unable to take in what they were seeing. Innocent and mystified, they’d peered at the screen and asked, ”What is that?” I’d found replies difficult to formulate. A chicken-wire cage crammed with the corpses of puppies, I could have said, or A broker who’s killing a dog while those two people wait to buy the meat.
    ”People need to see that,” Betty told Leah crisply. Although Betty was right, some of the other rescue people had lured me into a harmless conspiracy aimed at substituting tapes that would attract people to the rescue booth for the ones that they needed to see. Jim Kuehl was letting us borrow his tape of obedience bloopers, and we’d also lined up some films of long-ago shows. According to the plan, I was one of the people designated to eject Betty’s cassettes and slip in the appealing ones.
    Consequently, instead of minimizing my chances of success by focusing Betty on the subject of videos, I said brightly, ”Betty! Who’s that woman over there? The one at the corner table. She looks familiar.”
    So familiar that I even remembered her name—Michele Muldoon, Mikki as she was called—and had a good idea of why she’d chosen to eat alone. Her appearance, however, was so striking that I might well have chosen her in an uncalculated pick. She was a beautiful woman whose swept-back white hair was shot with fading red and whose face retained what I always assure Leah will be wrinkle-disguising freckles. I’d never met Mikki Muldoon, who came from the West. But I had frequently seen her picture in ads in the Malamute Quarterly, and had read and heard stories about her. She was a popular judge with what I’d been told was a flamboyant manner. As the judge, she appeared on the left in the show photos, usually with her feet hidden behind a large basket or pot of flowers, and maybe a pile of trophies—tote bags, tea sets, glass punch bowls, commemorative clocks—and always an announcement board with letters reading something like BEST OF WINNERS, PRAIRIE SCHOONER KENNEL CLUB. Truly, you’d assume from show photos that AKC judges share some grotesque podiatric disorder or a predilection for the kinds of ludicrous shoes that exhibitors wouldn’t want wrecking otherwise impressive pictures of big wins. Anyway, on the right, the smiling handler invariably stood behind the dog, who, being a show dog, usually looked suitably showy. ”Highly respected breeder/judge Mrs. Michele Muldoon,” as the ad copy often read, looked like every other judge in every other ad, except in one way: Instead of proffering the ribbon to the dog or the handler, she always looked ready to pin it on her own breast.
    ”That’s Mikki Muldoon,” said Betty as our food arrived. ”You know, she really should’ve had this assignment. She finished second in the poll. She deserves it. That’s what she’s doing eating all by herself. Just in case.”
    Judges, I might mention, do not fraternize with exhibitors before completing their assignments. They don’t have to imprison themselves in their hotel rooms, but they do maintain their distance.
    Leah, who must have been studying an out-of-date book, looked up from her steak. ”But that doesn’t mean she automatically gets—”
    Betty’s malamute eyes darted from Leah’s food to her face. ”Now it does. They changed the rule. Mikki finished second, so if she’s here, she gets the assignment.”
    ”Has anyone seen Hunnewell?” I asked. ”Do we even know he’s here? Maybe he isn’t, and that’s why—”
    ”Oh, he’s here,” Betty said grimly. ”Duke saw him checking in.”
    I said the same thing that everyone always said about Duke: ”What an incredible handler he is!”
    Equally unimpressed with Duke Sylvia and the salmon she’d ordered—creamed and, from the looks of it, canned, too—Betty edged toward my seafood casserole. ”Hah! Hunnewell’s not going to look twice at that dog of his. Duke told me so himself.”
    ”But I thought—” Leah began.
    Like Kimi anticipating the command to jump, Betty leaped to explain that Duke had not only been around long enough to remember James Hunnewell’s likes and dislikes, but was a genius at assessing judges’ preferences.
    As coolly as I could, I asked what Hunnewell liked. Duke Sylvia’s dog was a big gray male, Mal-O-Mine Ironman, that he co-owned with a breeder named Lillian