Stud Rites

them shoots my life’s blood. When it comes to dogs, I am utterly without protection.
    So, when Timmy Oliver raced poor Z-Rocks up against Ironman, when he pulled that dirty old show-ring trick, I considered Z-Rocks ill-used, and I felt for Ironman.
    Leah was vocal in her outrage: ”Did you see that! Why doesn’t the judge...?”
    ”This is an insult to her,” I said. ”When she catches °n, she won’t put up with it.”
    ”What does he think he’s doing?” Leah demanded.
    Timmy’s immediate purpose, as I saw it, was to provoke Ironman. The sparring of terriers, of course, has no place in the malamute ring. If Timmy wanted an altercation between dogs, however, his effort was doomed. The peaceable and baffled-looking Z-Rocks was a wildly unsuitable choice for the role of aggressor, and even if she’d been a big, challenging male, the adroitly handled and self-contained Ironman would probably have continued to mind his own business.
    I guessed what Timmy really wanted only when Mikki Muldoon intervened, as she’d been bound to do. To get Duke ordered out of the ring, Timmy had risked being booted out himself. An experienced judge, and no fool, Mrs. Muldoon called Duke, Timmy, and their dogs into the empty center of the ring, where she spoke briefly and softly while thrusting her finger first at one man, then at the other, and never at the dogs. The spectators, of course, eventually fell silent, but by the time everyone had quit talking and was straining to hear, Judge Mikki Muldoon had said whatever she’d had to say. The episode, by the way, does not appear on the commercial videotape of the national. I don’t know whether the camera was stopped or whether the interchange was filmed and subsequently edited out. The outcome is, however, apparent on the tape: Instead of exercising her power to expel Duke, Timmy, Ironman, Z-Rocks, or all four from her little rectangular kingdom, Mikki Muldoon played absolute tyrant. For all I know, she may actually have threatened to behead someone: Quick, stewards, the guillotine! What I do know for certain is that Timmy Oliver immediately became a perfect little human good citizen in the realm of Mikki Muldoon, who subsequently ran her discards once around the ring before blocking them at the gate, where she said a polite thank you to everyone she was excusing, and thus let Timmy Oliver know that Z-Rocks had been cut.
    As Leah and I watched Judge Mikki Muldoon, we began to make our own cuts from the list of murder suspects.
    ”Mikki Muldoon?” I said to Leah. ”Hunnewell was a lot sicker than we knew. He told Karl Reilly so. Freida must’ve known, and she’d’ve told the judge who’d have to step in if anything happened. Even if Hunnewell had made it through yesterday morning, he’d probably have collapsed, and Mrs. Muldoon would be just where she is now. Why murder someone when all you have to do is wait? Besides, Mrs. Muldoon made a big point of keeping herself sequestered. Thursday night? When we had dinner? She could’ve had dinner in her room, okay? But what she did was to eat all alone out in public where everyone could see that she wasn’t socializing. So it’s hardly likely that a couple of hours later, at ten-thirty or whenever, when the Parade of Veterans and Titleholders was ending, she’d’ve been wandering around back here where—” Leah interrupted me. ”Wow! Isn’t that...?”
    ”Yeah, that’s Casey,” I said with approval.
    Now that I saw my pick in the ring, I realized that what I’d mistaken for his performance had been a mere rehearsal. Clowning around for the passersby, Casey’d just been warming up his allure and stretching his magnetism, and in gazing at the eyes of his admirers, he’d been making a final check on the reflected glory of his own perfection. Now, muscles rippling and surging, he was the ultimate gorgeous show-off show dog... and I suddenly knew that Betty Burley had been right.
    ”Betty told me so,” I said to Leah. ”I just didn’t listen.”
    ”About...?”
    ”Betty said it about... I can’t remember. Maybe about Sherri Ann and Bear. No, about Daphne. Any-way, it doesn’t matter, because what Betty said applies to everyone. We were talking about Best of Breed, and what Betty said was that because of Casey, nobody bet-ter count on anything. I remember how she said it, bemuse she never sounds that way. ’Because Casey’s here!’ she said. And I didn’t really get it, because I’d just seen photos of