Stud Rites

everything. Harriet Lunt drew up the agreement. Duke knew that. He’s the one who told me. He also said that when Comet was alive, when Timmy and Hunnewell co-owned him, Timmy had a bitch he wanted to breed, and he wanted to use Comet, but Hunnewell absolutely refused. Timmy didn’t even have stud rights on his own dog. And out in the grooming tent, Duke said that Comet’s semen had been frozen. And never used. I just didn’t finish putting it all together: that if Hunnewell controlled everything else about Comet, including using him at stud when he was alive, he’d hardly have let Timmy own half those straws of sperm.”
    ”Usually,” Betty said, ”if you co-own a dog and you have his semen frozen, then half the straws are in one person’s name, and the other half are in the other Person’s. Isn’t that how it works?”
    ”Unless you make some other arrangement. Hunnewell didn’t trust Timmy. Who does? If Hunnewell hired Harriet Lunt to cut Timmy out when he bought Comet, he probably got her to make sure that the contract about the frozen semen was the way he wanted it, too.”
    Betty sighed. ”So that’s why Timmy’s been making a fuss about Z-Rocks. He knew as well as I did that that bitch didn’t have a chance against this kind of competition. He was just setting the stage for what would happen after she produced a litter out of Comet. I can just hear him: ’See? Didn’t I tell you James loved her? Didn’t I tell you she was just his type?’ ”
    ”So everyone would believe that Hunnewell had let him use Comet,” I said. ”Comet’s sperm. I wonder if Timmy ever even asked Hunnewell. Or if he just assumed that Hunnewell would refuse.”
    ”And went ahead and killed him. And forged his signature. And left that damned lamp under my van!” As we later found out, Timmy did forge Hunnewell’s signature. In his camper, the police found transfer-of-ownership forms for Comet’s sperm, papers signed with James Hunnewell’s name, but not in James Hunnewell’s own hand.
    When we reached Timmy’s camper, Detective Kari-otis wasn’t there. Crime-scene tape was strung all over, and two police officers guarding the camper didn’t want to let us in, so we hung around waiting. The camper, of course, was crammed with real evidence. For example, the open carton of cigarettes I’d noticed that morning, the carton that Timmy must have lifted from Hunnewell’s hotel room. Timmy didn’t smoke, but Hunnewell sure did, and a heavy smoker like that doesn’t arrive at an unfamiliar destination without the means to satisfy his addiction. As I now piece things together, Timmy must have gone to Hunnewell’s room at about ten o’clock on Thursday night. At nine-fifteen or nine-thirty, when I was helping Hunnewell with the ice machine, he offered me a cigarette, and he didn’t ask anything about the location of a cigarette machine. Furthermore, Freida Reilly says that after Hunnewell’s spat with Pam, at quarter of ten or so, when Freida took him back to his room, he didn’t ask her, either. So Timmy must have shown up there at around ten o’clock and left, probably soon thereafter, with Hunnewell’s entire cigarette stash. Exactly how he filched it, I don’t know, but I understand why he didn’t want to commit the murder inside the hotel. There, a guest passing by in the hall could have heard a shout, or he might easily have been observed leaving the rooms with traces of the deed visible in the expression of his face, if not actually on his hands and his clothes.
    By ten-thirty Timmy was back at the exhibition hall. Sherri Ann remembers seeing him. The Parade of Veterans and Titleholders was still going on. Sherri Ann Printz is sure that Timmy was there when she showed some people the lamp and explained what it was and how she’d made it. Sherri Ann is running for the board of our national breed club, by the way. For office: president.
    Anyway, at about the same time that Sherri Ann was politicking with the lamp, Betty Burley remembered that she’d left the lamp and the other valuable auction items, as well as her tote bag, at the booth, and she went out and drove her van to the unloading area just outside the hall. On Betty’s first trip from the booth to the van, she had her tote bag over her shoulder, and she carried the lamp in her arms. It must have been while she was returning for the framed wolf prints and the other stuff that Timmy slipped into her van, grabbed the lamp, and raided her