Stud Rites

Betty had learned that in Jeanine’s presence someone had called our rescue dogs ”trash.” Furthermore, Betty knew that I’d kept the episode from her.
    Before I could confess, however, Betty raged: ”You had absolutely no business removing Cubby’s pedigree or that page of the stud book or anything else!”
    Cubby, I remind you, was Jeanine’s dog. As I’ve said, Jeanine’s reason for adopting a big dog wasn’t something she’d have wanted boomed over a sound system. But Betty was talking about the second piece of information I’d suppressed. Cubby, who’d been bought at a pet shop, had been turned in to Rescue with AKC Papers. As I mentioned earlier, in running his pedigree, I’d found that way back there in Cubby’s unfortunate family tree of puppy-mill dogs was an ancestor bred by Sherri Ann Printz, a dog that bore her kennel name. The dog had been registered as Pawprintz Attic Emprer and owned by Gladys H. Thacker, who, as I’ve mentioned, farmed puppies in the state of Missouri. According to the stud book, she’d had malamutes for decades. After I’d taken Cubby in and placed him with Jeanine, I’d sent a full report to Betty, who’d threatened to include Cubby’s pedigree in our showcase album. Until now, I’d assumed she’d been joking. I seldom raise my voice, even at people. ”You did not! Damn it! I never meant—”
    Betty interrupted. I fell silent. In the hierarchy of Rescue, she outranked me. ”If people don’t see it, they just go on thinking that those poor dogs being bred to death in the puppy mills have nothing whatsoever to do with their dogs. May I point out that you were the one who proposed that we take out an ad in the Quarterly and start publishing these pedigrees? And if memory serves me, Cubby was exactly the dog you had in mind.”
    A regular feature of the Malamute Quarterly is what’s known as the centerfold: a celebration of a famous malamute, including an article written by the dog’s breeder or owner, photographs, of course, and a pedigree. What I’d proposed, strictly in jest, was a corresponding centerfold of rescue, with Cubby as a sort of Playdog Rescue Bunny, mainly because, as his pedigree revealed, his Pawprintz ancestor had been sired by the legendary Northpole’s Comet.
    I was ripping. ”Betty, you knew then and you know perfectly well now: It was strictly a joke. When I sent you that pedigree and the page of the stud book with that dog’s registration, it was understood that the information was totally confidential. I did not intend to humiliate anyone, and you had no business putting that stuff out here where everyone could see it!”
    ”As a matter of fact,” Betty responded tartly, ”that material was not in the album. It was in my private tote bag, which you had no business with, Holly Winter. For your information, I intended to give Cubby’s pedigree to Jeanine, and I also had several others that I intended to give to other people. But in the rush, I forgot.”
    ”Betty, I did not remove those pages! I never even looked in your bag.”
    Isabelle intervened. In a near whisper, she interjected, ”If the two of you don’t cool it, you’re going to find yourselves starring on tonight’s evening news.”
    The TV reporters and camera crews had arrived in the exhibition hall in plenty of time to capture the arrival of the police; and since the media people happened to be there anyway, they performed the incidental task of informing us of the murder of James Hunnewell. It was a Channel 5 interviewer who told me that Hunnewell had been bludgeoned to death. Her name was Alex Travis. I’d seen her on TV. She looked almost the same in person—no fatter, no thinner, very young, with sleek black hair and perfect skin, her lipstick and blush a little redder than on TV so her color wouldn’t wash out on camera. According to Alex Travis, James Hunnewell had been murdered last night. His bed hadn’t been slept in. His body had been cold. Alex Travis was the one who used the phrase ”blunt instrument” and who told me that whatever it was, it hadn’t been found.
    I strongly suspected otherwise.
     

 
     
    IN THE THIRTIES, dogs were big news. Other socialites just threw parties, but Geraldine Rockefeller Dodge gave fantastic dog shows at her New Jersey estate, Giralda. Mrs. M. Hartley Dodge wasn’t the only Rockefeller prominent in the dog fancy, and The New York Times faithfully reported on the Morris and Essex shows and lots of others