The Dogfather

Infatuated with Alaskan Malamutes. In other words, Emma had been singled out as excellent against heavy national competition. Furthermore, after finishing, she’d won an Award of Merit at the National, too.
    Rowdy, too, had finished his championship and had acquired an impressive list of titles after his name for achievements in... well, if I start on Rowdy, I’ll never get back to Joey Cortiniglia. Emma’s owner, Cindy Neely, and I had exchanged and pored over pedigrees and health information. Emma and Rowdy were free of hip dysplasia, eye disease, hypothyroidism, and other afflictions. As to safe sex, neither was infected with brucellosis. Temperament? Each was as sweet as the other. My own Kimi, I might mention, had a streak of single-minded intensity that in my opinion made her an iffy candidate for breeding. The trait suited me perfectly. I adored Kimi for it. I drew on her strength. But she was just too much dog for most people, even for most malamute people. So, I didn’t want to breed her.
    As to Joey’s murder, what forethought had gone into that? Any? Grab a gun. Pull the trigger. Well, a bit more. Joey’s killer had also been armed with bones for my dogs. Big deal.
    One final point of comparison. Cindy Neely and I had signed a stud contract that spelled out the terms of the breeding. Had Joey’s killer also had a contract? My contract had given me a choice of a stud fee for Rowdy’s services or a puppy in lieu of cash. I’d wanted a puppy. But Rowdy, Kimi, Tracker, and I live on the first floor of my three-story house. The bank and I own the place, and without the rents from the two apartments, the bank would soon own the whole thing. The yard is fenced, but it’s small; near Harvard Square, I’m lucky to have a yard at all. It would be impossible for me to toss a third malamute into my existing pack because Rowdy wouldn’t accept another male, and Kimi wouldn’t tolerate another female. I had no room for an outdoor kennel. Still, having to settle for a stud fee almost broke my heart.
    But I was rescued by sex and death, or at least by sex-gone-by and the death of... well, maybe I’d better explain. Early that past autumn, the man in my life and the vet in Rowdy’s and Kimi’s lives, Steve Delaney, had done the unthinkable by getting married. Not to me, I should add. Steve had asked me first. Second. Third.... I’d refused. Why? In retrospect, I think that the true answer is that it never occurred to me that he’d marry someone else. It certainly never occurred to me that Steve, the most honest, ethical person in the world, would marry a crook. Specifically, an embezzler. But that’s a whole other story. He was now getting divorced. And that’s yet another story. What’s relevant to this one, besides Steve’s upright character and touchiness about violations of the law, is that totally out of the blue—actually, totally out of the wolf gray and white—when he and I hadn’t spoken for months, he called to say that he was interested in a malamute puppy and had heard that Rowdy had been bred. Even if Steve had been a stranger, I’d have thought it was an excellent idea to replace his horrible about-to-be ex-wife with a wonderful dog. As it was, Steve was anything but a stranger, and he wasn’t proposing to replace the dreadful Anita with any old fantastic dog of any old splendid breed, either, but with a puppy of my breed sired by my dog. So, sex: Rowdy and Emma’s, death: the demise of Steve’s marriage.
    Careful breeder that she was, Cindy interviewed Steve at great length to make sure he was good enough to own one of Emma’s puppies, and let me just mention as a little aside that if Steve had been half as thorough about screening a wife as Cindy was about screening a puppy buyer... well, let me not add that after all, but jump to Logan Airport, where Steve and I arrived at eight o’clock in the evening on the day after Joey Cortiniglia’s murder. We were at Logan to meet the plane carrying Rowdy’s son, Emma’s son, Cindy’s puppy, Steve’s puppy, and therefore almost my puppy. The plane wasn’t due until 9:14. We were early because a certain impatient person was exuberantly excited at the prospect of getting her hands on Rowdy’s, Emma’s, Cindy’s, and Steve’s puppy. Since we were going to pick him up at the passenger baggage claim, we weren’t stuck waiting way out in the cargo area, which lacked the amenity of passionate interest to anyone genetically