Stud Rites

to asking Timmy whether the secret ingredient he kept mentioning actually was snake oil. Leah had inched her chair back from the table and was gazing silently at Mikki Muldoon. I kept waiting for Timmy to try to enlist Betty, and possibly me, in a Pro-Vita No-Blo Sho-Kote pyramid scheme, but what he finally got around to oozing was the request that Betty tell the hotel that his camper was hers so he could leave it in the parking lot all night. As we’d been repeatedly informed, motor homes were allowed in the parking lot only if they belonged to people registered at the hotel. They were absolutely not to be used for sleeping. A few People, I thought, broke the rule. That morning, I’d noticed four or five of the big, long campers parked unobtrusively at the far end of the lot, but so far as I knew, the management hadn’t staged any midnight raids.
    ”Oh, for heaven’s sake, Timmy,” Betty told him, ”go to the campground! It’s only ten minutes from here. If they catch you sleeping out there and your camper’s listed on my room card, they’ll come banging on my door in the middle of the night expecting me to let you in!”
    Tim Oliver wasted another few minutes wheedling and whining, but Betty held firm. His scheme having failed, he departed. Between bites of the scallops I’d rejected, Betty predicted that Timmy would find someone else to lie for him. I listened in silence. Although I had no reason to believe that Tim was one of the people whose words had caused Jeanine such pain, he struck me as exactly the kind of person who’d go around talking about ”Betty’s mongrels” and ”trash dogs.” If Betty had heard the phrases, however, she obviously had not identified either voice as Timmy’s. On the contrary, it seemed that Betty was his defender. Although I kept my opinion of him to myself, Betty tried to change it. ”You didn’t know Timmy when he was a kid,” she said. ”He needed a lot of help, and everyone watched out for him and gave him a hand. Elsa Van Dine, among others. Elsa really took him under her wing.” With the universal affection of the dog fancy for junior handlers, Betty added sadly, ”When Elsa took to someone, she could really be very generous, and Timmy wasn’t so full of himself then. He wasn’t a bad kid at all.”
    When the waiter offered coffee, Betty refused, but Leah and I accepted, and all three of us ordered the same dessert: chocolate mousse. Leah and I commiserated about Rowdy’s and Kimi’s rotten performances in obedience that morning. We comforted ourselves: Of the seventeen dogs in the trial, only four had qualified. If we’d washed out? Well, so had the bitch I’d considered Rowdy’s serious competition, Vanderval’s Tundra Eagle, C.D.X., whose score I will tactfully not report lest anyone ask, ”Oh, and what was Rowdy’s?”
    Betty stood up. ”I am beat,” she announced. She looked it. Furthermore, she hadn’t finished her own chocolate mousse, never mind anyone else’s. Like Kimi stealing a hunk of raw beef, however, she snatched the check, refused to give it back, and even said what Kimi virtually says, namely, ”This is my treat!”
    Leaving the grill, we followed a maze of corridors and stairwells, both up and down, and eventually dropped Betty outside her room and continued to our own, which was at the exact opposite end of the hotel from the exhibition hall and the outdoor grooming tent, but conveniently near the stairs to an exit to the back parking lot. Our room was much larger than I’d expected, with a couch, armchairs, side tables, a large-screen TV, a desk, two king-size beds, and lots of floor space left for Rowdy’s and Kimi’s crates. The Hawaiian theme so overwhelmingly prevalent in the public areas was mercifully absent. The room was clean, beige, and bland, with nontropical bedspreads and framed prints of distinctly non-Polynesian chickadees and cardinals. The windows overlooked the rear parking lot and a stretch of New England field with woods at its far end. Furthermore, until Leah cluttered up the bathroom with enough cosmetics to do the makeup for the entire cast of all three Star Wars movies, it was a model for what I’d love to have at home: big sink, long counter, unstained tub, white tile, and new grout.
    Except for their forays in the obedience ring and a couple of bathroom trips, Rowdy and Kimi, who are used to vigorous daily exercise, had had the kind of crated day that animal-rights extremists imagine as