Stud Rites

here, I came close to reaching over and opening the door and giving him a hard shove.” Taking a bite of lettuce, he nearly choked. When he stopped coughing, he said hastily, ”Not really, but—”
    Duke and Timmy started ribbing Karl about waiting until later.
    Laughing, Karl said, ”With the way that guy smoked, I don’t know why anyone bothered. Geez, between Boston and here, he must’ve gone through two packs of cigarettes. Every time I opened the window, he’d complain he was cold...”
    Pam dipped her head. ”Poor circulation.”
    ”And,” Karl went on, ”I’d have to shut the window again. And the thing was, he couldn’t’ve been on a plane for a long time, because he didn’t know they wouldn’t let him smoke, and from what he said, he took it like it was something personal, and so when I picked him up, he was in a wicked foul mood, and he’d had a few drinks, on top of the nicotine fit.”
    ”The police asked me about that,” I said. ”About how much he smoked, did he offer me a cigarette, which he did, a lot of stuff like that. I can’t figure out what it had to do with anything.”
    ”Well, that I can tell you,” Tiny said triumphantly. ”He ran out of cigarettes.”
    Karl snorted. ”Geez, no wonder.”
    ”And,” said Tiny, ”that’s what he was doing out of his room. He called room service, and he called the desk, and he was not very nice about it!”
    ”And how would you know?” Pam demanded. ”The chambermaid told me,” Tiny replied smugly. ”The woman at the desk told her supervisor who told another chambermaid who told—”
    ”Gossip!” Pam decreed.
    ”No, it is not gossip,” Tiny said. ”They noticed because he wanted a whole carton of the things, and all the hotel has is a machine over in the bar somewhere, and when Hunnewell heard that, he expected them to send someone out to a store for him! Can you imagine? Eleven o’clock at night or whenever it was, and he expected—”
    ”I don’t know who James Hunnewell thought he was,” Pam interrupted, ”but after the encounter that Holly and I had with him, I can believe anything! The arrogance! Karl, I’m surprised he didn’t try to get your mother to play errand girl for him! Poor Freida, getting stuck with him for a judge! Judge! Hah! That man didn’t strike me as being safe out alone. What he’d have done in the ring, I shudder to contemplate. I don’t know what he was like years ago, but if he was in his right mind then, he wasn’t last night. You should have heard the terrible things he said about Mrs. Seeley!” Pam bowed her head. Her lips moved in what I took to be a silent prayer addressed to the matriarch of our breed.
    ”You have to admit that Short was opinionated” opined Duke.
    He might as well have reached over and jabbed his dinner knife into Pam’s ribs. Flying half out of her seat she shrieked, ”OPINIONATED! Opinionated? Short Seeley was not opinionated! Short was right!” Without Eva B. Seeley, Pam declared, there wouldn’t be an Alaskan malamute at all, and if, on occasion, Mrs. Seeley had seen fit to speak authoritatively, well, she was, after all, the authority, wasn’t she? Or did Duke imagine otherwise?
    As affable as ever, Duke tried to pacify Pam. What he’d meant, he said cheerfully, was that Mrs. Seeley had been a woman who never shied away from speaking her mind.
    ”As she had every right to,” Pam declared with satisfaction. ”Every right.” Seizing her fork, she attacked her salad with great ferocity, as if it, too, had somehow desecrated the memory of Eva Seeley.
    In a gentlemanly effort to change the subject, Finn Adams remarked that considering what had happened, the hotel was coping pretty well. And we’d certainly lucked out with the weather!
    The weather! I ask you!
    As Timmy Oliver informed us that it was supposed to pour all day tomorrow, the hotel staff began to remove the salad plates and to dole out our dinners.
    ”This your first national?” Duke asked Leah.
    She said that it was, and that, yes, she was handling my bitch tomorrow, and that, yes, she did intend to relax and have a good time.
    ”Fun’s what it’s all about,” Duke told her.
    With the tape of Comet’s old show appearance in mind, I glanced at Timmy Oliver. He nodded in agreement and repeated Duke’s words: ”Fun’s what it’s all about.”
    It occurred to me that if Duke and Timmy happened to be in the ring together tomorrow, Duke could play the same old Texas handling