Stud Rites

one but me would know the difference.
    So, when Z-Rocks spattered me, I said good morning to her and asked Timmy Oliver whether he’d heard about Harriet Lunt. Harriet herself had told him about the attack, he said. He’d seen her only a minute ago at the hotel entrance. The manager had been trying to talk her into having her shoulder x-rayed, but Harriet had absolutely refused.
    ”He’s probably terrified she’ll sue the hotel,” I commented. ”I wonder if he knows she’s a lawyer.”
    Then Timmy changed the subject to Z-Rocks. Instead of waiting for me to say something flattering about her, Timmy took advantage of her plastered-down coat to deliver himself of so enthusiastic a disquisition about her good bone, broad skull, admirable angulation, and so forth that I was tempted to ask whether he intended to show her to Mikki Muldoon in her present soaked and thus anatomically revealing condition.
    As Timmy went on and on, dwelling on Z-Rock’s ideal this and excellent that, I’m sorry to say I tuned him out until he triumphantly burst forth with a single word: ”Comet!”
    As dense as ever, I said casually, ”Oh, Z-Rocks goes back to Comet?”
    So did thousands of other malamutes: show dogs, pets, puppy-mill dogs. The presence of an illustrious ancestor in a family tree is always interesting, but that’s about it. Just because you’re the direct descendant of Helen of Troy, it doesn’t mean you’ve got a face to launch a thousand ships. But in Timmy Oliver’s eyes and, according to him, in James Hunnewell’s, Z-Rocks was what Timmy called ”a living legacy,” the female reincarnation of the fabulous Northpole’s Comet. Z-Rocks, I should say, was not utterly unlike Comet. Instead of looking like a female replica, though, a sort of sex-changed Xerox copy—hence her name, I guess— she was as good as Comet had been outstanding, as decent as he had been superlative, and she totally lacked Comet’s innocent arrogance, the all-eyes-on-me attitude that had kept my gaze fixed on a grainy black-and-white image of a long-dead dog whose radiant glory burned across decades.
    And James Hunnewell’s opinion? What would he really have thought of Z-Rocks? Obviously, Hunnewell had known Comet’s lines better than I did. Maybe Hunnewell could have seen something in Z-Rocks that was eluding me. Whatever it was, I thought that Judge Mikki Muldoon would miss it, too. About Z-Rocks’s chances under Mrs. Muldoon, Timmy Oliver agreed: When I wished him luck, he smiled and looked sad and said thanks, but Z-Rocks just wasn’t Mikki’s type. He and Z-Rocks headed for the grooming tent. I wanted breakfast.
    The glass-fronted announcement board in the hotel lobby informed me that Greg and Crystal’s three o’clock service was sandwiched between a wedding breakfast—scheduled for the Lagoon at twelve-fifteen— and what the notice board called a ”Gala Hawaiian Wedding Reception.” Since the Lagoon was being set up for the wedding breakfast, the only restaurant open for ordinary breakfast was the grill. I filled a plate at the buffet and, on impulse, helped myself to a loaner copy of a Boston paper. Then I sat by myself in an uncrowded area, where I ate and read. Because of the multitude of reporters who’d questioned everyone at the show yesterday, I expected to find a long article about James Hunnewell’s murder in a prominent place in the paper. Instead, it appeared as a small item on the last page of the business section. When Boston papers say Boston, Boston is what they mean. I read:
     
DEATH OF DOG JUDGE
DEEMED MURDER
 
DANVILLE. Police were summoned early yesterday morning to the grounds of the Danville Milestone Hotel and Conference Facility when a guest of the hotel discovered the body of James Winston Hunnewell, 79, of Kiawab Island, South Carolina. The deceased was to head the panel of judges scheduled to pick the top dog from among the hundreds of beautiful blue-eyed pet huskies gathered here for a multinational dog show. Dog show president Freida J. Reilly, of Portland, Maine, dismissed the suggestion that one of the show dogs was responsible for the death. State and local authorities are pursuing their investigations.
     
    The item was harder to swallow than the lump of half-chewed pecan roll lodged in my throat. It was impossible to say what offended me most—the nasty, senseless piece of anti-dog libel, the ignorant bit about the blue-eyed pet huskies, or the amazing vision of a revolution