Stud Rites

way he was jabbing at Leah’s pocket, was actually more Battering Ram than Poker.
    ”Leah,” Betty said sternly, ”get that dog out from behind this table before one of you smashes something! All we need is for one of those wolf prints to get knocked over, and there’ll be broken glass all over the place. And if he swipes that lamp with his tail and does it some damage, I’ll never hear the end of it!”
    Almost before Betty had finished issuing the warning, the big, gentle dog rose up to give Leah a giant teddy-bear hug and, paws resting on her shoulders, fulfilled Betty’s prediction by wagging his tail, tipping over what I was convinced was the murder weapon, and sending it crashing to the floor.
    Leah was suitably ashamed of herself. ”I’m sorry! I really am sorry. The bulb didn’t break. Is the lamp...?”
    Retrieving the fallen relic, Betty rose like a diminutive Statue of Liberty struggling to hold forth a disproportionately large and radically redesigned torch. Our kind of help, she announced in a crabby voice, was exactly what she didn’t need. ”Out of here!” ordered Betty. ”Every one of you!”
    Catching the scent of food, Joe transferred his attention to me and had to be lured away midpoke. I thrust the steak sandwiches at Leah and said, ”Here. One for you, one for Kimi, Go!” Then I bent over the lamp, which Betty had finally lowered to the table, and asked whether there’d been any damage.
    ”No,” she grumbled. ”More’s the pity. The more I look at the thing, the more I hate the sight of it.”
    ”Betty? I hate to tell you, but he’s lost a big patch of fur. Down here by the base of his tail, he’s shed to bare, uh, skin.”
    ”Oh, that’s nothing. That happened while he was on his little adventure. I meant to touch him up last night. We’ll have to do it before the auction. They’ll have glue back there somewhere at the registration desk.” Replying to my raised eyebrows, she added, ”Fur is fur. Rowdy’s will do just fine.”
    ”Speaking of—”
    ”Before you dash off, Holly, I want to remind you to keep your eyes open for this Thacker woman. I am certainly looking forward to having a word or two—”
    ”We don’t know what she looks like!” I protested. Betty brushed off my objection. ”Oh, you’ll know her right away. The tone here isn’t always what we might wish,” she pronounced, glaring at the lamp.
    ”Witness that ridiculous episode last night! But no one here is outright slovenly .”
    To get embroiled in a discussion of whether puppy-mill operators were necesarily slovenly seemed a perilous exercise. So I nodded compliantly and, reminding Betty that I’d brought her sandwich, took off for the grooming tent. Despite the schedule, the judging, I should note, was not about to start any second. Back from her lunch break, Mikki Muldoon was at the judge’s table, where she was conferring with her stewards while securing the shoulder strap of her purse to the judge’s chair, but a couple of show-committee members had just begun to embellish the arborlike gate to the ring with a long, thick garland woven from what must have been thousands of delicate pink and white flowers. The late Elsa Van Dine had sent Freida a special donation for flowers, I recalled Betty saying. The donation must have been very generous indeed.
    There were, of course, no flowers in the grooming tent. It was a communal backstage dressing room forced to accommodate a big cast of stars and dressers. Portable tables and commodious malamute-size crates stacked on top of each other partitioned the space into a maze of open rooms, and everywhere were crate dollies, tack boxes, canvas bags of gear, heavy-duty extension cords, and those forced-air dryers that look like old-fashioned canister vacuum cleaners and sound like peaks in hell on the verge of volcanic eruption. The roar of the motors was so loud that I could all but see, taste, and smell the sound, but as handlers led their dogs out, the noise level diminished greatly, and what remained was the miasma of no-rinse shampoo, grooming spray, and clean, damp dog, the fervent odor of my own religion.
    Faith Barlow was set up in a particularly jam-packed spot near a canvas wall about halfway down the tent. The table on which Rowdy stood was so close to the one that supported Z-Rocks that in going over Rowdy with smooth, soothing strokes of her finishing brush, Faith came close to grooming Timmy Oliver as well. I’d known Faith for