Stud Rites

trick, and Timmy Oliver would probably fall for it all over again. Duke wouldn’t try it, though. Over the years, he’d gained in subtlety. Besides, he respected Mikki Muldoon.
    Digging a fork into my scrod, I saw that I’d gotten swordfish instead. As I was about to say so, Pam Ritchie wondered aloud why she had prime rib. All of us, we found, had been mysteriously upgraded.
    ”Freida must’ve taken in more money than she expected,” Tiny suggested. ”She’d hardly have bothered to ask if we wanted better than we paid for.”
    Pam, of course, disagreed. ”If there’d been a surplus, she’d hardly have—”
    ”There wasn’t,” Karl announced. ”The hotel’s made a mistake. I’d better let my mother know.”
    When he’d excused himself and left in search of Freida, Leah said boldly that if we’d been served good stuff by accident, we’d better start eating before someone came and took it away. Duke, I noticed, was already digging into his prime rib. I took a quick survey of the plates. Tiny, Pam, Karl, Timmy, and Leah also had beef. As I’d suspected, Duke’s was by far the biggest, thickest piece. Leah didn’t notice or didn’t care. After chewing and swallowing, she said, ”This is the first real meat I’ve had in over a month!”
    ”Leah’s in college,” I explained. ”She eats cafeteria food.”
    Finn asked her where she went.
    ”Harvard,” she said.
    Silence fell.
    Finn said that two of his uncles had gone there. No one else said anything.
    Then Duke had the sense to ask Leah what she was going to do after college. When she announced her intention of becoming a veterinarian, everyone started talking again. Timmy Oliver and Finn Adams got involved in an intimate one-to-one discussion of recent advances in sperm preservation—canine, I presume; and Tim made a general pitch for the wonders of Pro-Vita No-Blo Sho-Kote. Having sipped her way through several glasses of wine, Pam confided to everyone within hearing distance of a shotgun blast that, well, strictly between ourselves, we had to admit in all honesty that whoever had murdered our judge had at least had the courtesy not to do it on show grounds.
    ”What a perfectly awful thing to say!” Tiny looked horrified. ”And I’m not even sure it’s true. That field is part of the hotel. As far as I know, that means it’s show grounds.”
    ”No,” Pam insisted, ”show grounds means to the end of the parking lot, and obviously, since it would’ve been just as easy to clunk him over the head on show grounds as it was off —”
    ”Who says it’s the end of the parking lot?” Tiny challenged. ”It must be you, Pam, because it’s not AKC.”
    ”It certainly is! That field is definitely not on show grounds. Among other things, the obedience people were training there on Wednesday, and they can’t train on show grounds.”
    ”Yes,” I confirmed, ”but I think it was okay to work a dog there unobtrusively on Wednesday, the day before the trial. As far as I know, there’s no strict written definition of show precincts. How could there be? Show sites are all so different. But you’d really have to ask an AKC rep.”
    Speaking, for once, with one voice, Pam and Tiny said in unison: ”There’s no rep here!”
    In response to the outburst, a waiter who’d been helping to arrange an elaborate dessert buffet on a long rectangular table behind ours scurried over to ask whether something was wrong.
    Dismissing him rather abruptly, Pam complained that she didn’t understand the absence of an AKC rep. ”It seems to me that it would’ve been to Freida’s advantage to see that there was one.”
    As I’ve mentioned, the principal responsibility of a show chair is to take the blame for everything. In accepting the job, Freida had made sure that everyone would know who she was. She’d also gambled on satisfaction with how she’d performed. ”There doesn’t have to be a rep,” I told Pam, ”and it certainly wasn’t Freida’s decision. As far as I know, reps determine their own schedules.”
    ”Well,” insisted Tiny, ”at a minimum, Freida might’ve arranged for better security.”
    Leah joined in. ”Isn’t security the hotel’s responsibility? Especially out in the parking lot?”
    None of us really knew. ”When clubs give shows,” I said, ”they have to take out big umbrella policies that cover anything that happens, so it can’t be just the responsibility of the site. Clubs can get sued; it does