Stud Rites

Christmas, we’d keep sending him cards, and, one year, what he did was pack up all the ones we sent and mail ’em back to us! And the one time Jim come to visit, he had a fit, because he didn’t like the looks of the dogs I had, and I told him, yeah, they’re not your show dogs, but they’re real good producers. And I shovel out once a week, and they get enough to eat, and all that. It’s not like I run one of them puppy mills, you know. I’m licensed and everything. But he wouldn’t listen.”
    ”Yes, I can see that there was a, uh, a problem in communication,” Betty said tactfully. ”And part of the problem is that your brother really felt that, uh, people like everyone here were like family. That his friends in dogs had become his family.”
    ”That’s why I come here today!” Gladys Thacker cried. ”I figured, well, Jim treated them like family, and so maybe they’ll understand that his brain wasn’t right, and they’ll help me get him home! And then I get here, and I get sent back and forth, and then I wait and wait for that one over there”—Gladys pointed to Mikki Muldoon—”so’s I can talk to her and ask her to help me get these people to let me bring him home!” She ended on a wail.
    ”Well, I for one,” said Betty, ”have no objection to your taking his body back to Missouri, and I will be glad to say so to anyone you like, for all the good it’ll do. After all, James is beyond caring, and if it’s so important to you, I don’t see what the big objection is.”
    ”The objection,” Kariotis contributed, ”is that the deceased explicitly—”
    ”Died,” Betty finished tartly. ”And isn’t it illegal to go around distributing ashes here and there? It’s not exactly sanitary, is it? Maybe there’s a loophole for you there, Mrs. Thacker. We’ll ask around. But while we’re on the subject of disease”—Betty seized a puppy-mill handout—”I want to discuss with you one of the concerns that many of us have about, uh, commercial kennels. You see, in our experience, all too many of the dogs that...”
    I had heard enough. Confronting Gladys Thacker, a genuine, if timid, representative of the archenemy, Betty was a woman without violence. She was, as always, determined to make her own views clear, but I trusted her to fulfill the promise to hear everything that Gladys Thacker had to say in reply. I was as convinced as ever—and as sure as I thought Betty was, too—that the Comet lamp had been the blunt instrument used to murder James Hunnewell. I was equally convinced that Betty hadn’t been the one to use it.
     

 
     
    JUDGE MIKKI MULDOON was going over a group twice the size of any she’d previously had in her ring, twenty dogs, perhaps more. The video shows me looming in back of Pam Ritchie, who’d stolen my seat, as I peer solemnly into the ring. Visible behind my shoulder is the aged-child face of Tim Oliver. Even more than usual, his half-baked countenance suggests a squishy interior of warm, damp feeling. In the camera’s eye, Pam Ritchie bears a weird resemblance to a barefaced Alaskan malamute inexplicably sporting chestnut curls. Although I have forgotten Pam’s words and cannot hear them on the video, I am sure that as she bobs her head and jabbers to Tiny, she emphasizes, as always, the incomparable excellence of the old Kotzebue dogs. In the ring, Duke takes Ironman out and back. Duke is a master of timing and gait. With another handler, the dog could be ponderous. With Duke, he is athletic. Ironman remains serious competition. My own group is smaller than Mikki Muldoon’s. Pam Ritchie joins my discards. To the best of my knowledge, she has no connection with Harriet Lunt and hadn’t even known Elsa Van Dine. Besides, far from killing off opposition, Pam cultivates it. James Hunnewell’s blatant insult to Mrs. Seeley’s memory, instead of driving a desperate Pam to murderous reprisal, merely secured her all the more as Mrs. Seeley’s ardent defender. No, Pam hadn’t murdered James Hunnewell.
    My other discards: Mikki Muldoon, who’d have judged anyway; Freida and Crystal’s father, Harold, who’d never have chanced the cancellation of their respective, if parallel, events; Sherri Ann Printz, who wouldn’t have bashed in Hunnewell’s skull to conceal a secret she’d just broadcast herself. I’d cut Betty Burley, too. One of the mean-spirited people Jeanine and Arlette had overheard on the night of the showcase was, I believed, the