Stud Rites

that had turned conformation judging into a sort of jury system. Opinion is what breed judging is all about, and if there’s one topic that gives rise to violent differences of opinion, it’s the relative merits of show dogs. The AKC is less likely to spread the judge’s authority among a bunch of committee members than the Vatican is to delegate infallibility to a board of Popes. James Hunnewell at the head of a panel of judges? Now that would truly have been a setup for murder.
    And speaking of murder, the item, of course, offered less information about James Hunnewell’s than I already possessed. Despite the numerous inaccuracies in the piece, I was, however, inclined to believe that Hunnewell had, in fact, been seventy-nine and that he’d lived in Kiawah Island, South Carolina. At any rate, Freida did live in Portland.
    About Kiawah Island I knew a little because my friend Rita had spent a week there when her parents had rented a big condo that they’d shared with their children and grandchildren. Rita, being a psychologist, had come back talking mostly about family dynamics, but, then, you could rocket Rita into outer space, and she’d splash down analyzing the structural patterns of astronaut interaction and dropping only an incidental word or two about planets, stars, or black holes, unless, of course, the objects in the cosmos embodied symbolic psychic meaning, as I guess might be the case with black holes. Kiawah Island, I gathered from her, was sort of like Hilton Head, a fancy resort and retirement community with restaurants, beaches, swimming pools, and— here come the black holes—real-live alligators lazing around on golf courses and, on occasion, emerging from gator holes to gulp down small dogs. So, as a retirement spot for a dog person, Kiawah Island was a place with one big advantage—dogs were allowed, at least small dogs—and the corresponding disadvantage that they were vulnerable to being eaten by alligators. But, of course, I didn’t know whether James Hunnewell had had—or even wanted—any kind of dog at all. He’d been out of malamutes for years. He could have switched breeds. For all I knew, the presence of dog-eating predators was what had attracted him to Kiawah to begin with.
    Kiawah, though, did tell me something solid: James Hunnewell had had money. The business about Rita and the astronauts is true. It’s also true that Rita had refrained from tantalizing me with descriptions of a vacation that I couldn’t begin to afford. Wondering who’d inherit James Hunnewell’s estate, I turned to the death notices, but found nothing under Hunnewell. I didn’t need a newspaper, though, to realize that wealthy men leave wills. I put down the paper, ate my breakfast, and toyed with a new idea about why Gladys H. Thacker was coming all the way to Massachusetts to see that her brother got a Christian burial. The new idea was that Gladys H. Thacker was already here.
    A puppy-mill operator like Gladys Thacker was probably selling puppies for thirty-five, fifty, or a hundred dollars each to a broker who’d get two or three hundred dollars or more apiece for those same pups, and with a quick turnaround. Pet shops would then resell those same pups for between five hundred and a thousand dollars. As I understood it, a lot of the Gladys
    H. Thackers are small-time operators, farmers and farmers’ wives, whose puppy income is strictly supplemental: egg money derived from dogs instead of chickens. A puppy broker could well be a millionaire. Gladys Thacker had probably just traded her roosters and hens for Alaskan malamutes, and moved the dogs into the same old henhouses.
    Was Gladys H. Thacker already here? After all, she’d had a motive to arrive before her brother’s death —if, that is, she’d wanted to get here in time to cause it.
    And the attack on Harriet Lunt? Harriet Lunt was of James Hunnewell’s generation. Harriet was a lawyer. Was she his lawyer? If Gladys Thacker had had a motive to murder her brother, maybe Harriet Lunt knew what it was.
    I remembered what Harriet Lunt had said last night: Poor Elsa. And then Janies. And now me. James Hunnewell, yes. Here at the show site. And Harriet Lunt, of course. But Elsa Van Dine? She had been fatally mugged and robbed of her diamond ring on a street in Providence. Poor Elsa, everyone kept lamenting. Poor Elsa, the victim of random violence.
     

 
     
    ELSA VAN DINE’S unexpected marriage to the elderly and long-widowed