Gone to the Dogs (20 page)

“So the Chinooks are …”

“Himself. And the other members of the breed, including the ones that died? So, yes, when she says they’re the buddies he lost, probably they are. Is that his word?
Buddy?”

“It’s what she said. I don’t know whether he says it.”

“Don’t you call your dogs that sometimes? Buddy?”

“Once in a while. Actually, I picked it up from a dog training book. Pearsall. That’s what the Pearsalls call the dog. ‘Have Buddy sit,’ that kind of thing.”

“I wonder …” she started to say. “Anyway, the other parallel I’m hearing is
training
. Didn’t it seem strange to you? Here’s a man who’s more or less a fugitive from justice? He’s presumably got some vaguely paranoid suspicions? He’s doing something he calls ‘tracking’?”

“Yeah. She said that’s what he calls it.”

Rita nodded. “And all of a sudden, in the middle of this, he takes up
dog training?
Didn’t you find that peculiar? Well, no, you wouldn’t, but—”

“Oh, I understand that,” I said. “They saw an obedience-trained Chinook, and obviously, he saw that it was a way to promote the breed, right? Get the breed recognized. Oh, yeah. Get what the Vietnam vets didn’t.”

“Exactly. But what you’ve missed is
training
. It’s no more than a hypothesis, of course, but for a man who was in Vietnam? Holly, ‘basic training’? For this character,
training
is not a neutral word.”

When you’re sick to your stomach, a loyal hunting dog will hover around pleading to retch and vomit in your stead. In contrast, the Alaskan malamute views your relationship as a partnership of equals: He throws up for himself, and he expects you to do the same. A malamute may even take advantage of your prostration to steal, demolish, and comfortably digest the rest of whatever made you sick. If he decides that you’re too weak to ban dogs from the bed, he’ll vault in next to you. Once he’s there, though, he’ll train deep, gentle eyes on you, thrust his big paw into your hand, shove his wet black nose at you, and scour your smelly face with his wet red tongue.

You are what you pat. When I was a solicitous golden retriever, I’d have gone trailing after Steve the second he left. As it was, I didn’t look for him until I’d finished his drink.

“He hates being fussed over,” I told Rita, “and if he’s throwing up, he’s going to want privacy.”

“I can’t believe you’re saying this,” she accused me. “What if he’s passed out?”

“From one drink? Or two? He hasn’t passed out. He probably ate some bad curry. He’ll be back in a minute.”

“He could have the flu,” she said.

“He doesn’t get the flu. He doesn’t even get colds.”

“This is ridiculous,” she said. “To maintain this Superman image of him that you like to cultivate, you’re leaving him all alone out there?”

“Okay,” I said, “but I’m warning you. All he’ll do is growl.”

“That’s his problem. Let’s go.” She’d apparently forgotten about or entirely given up on the Chinese crested owner.

When she’d paid our bill and retrieved her coat, we went out and scanned the area around the entrance and checked the maze of narrow, dark alleys and footpaths that weave around behind Harvest. The temperature had dropped at least thirty degrees since Steve and I had sat in Brattle Square watching the morris dancers, and the air had turned damp. Mark Twain got it wrong. If you don’t like New England weather, the thing to do is enjoy it while it lasts.

“He probably went home,” I said.

“And just left you here?”

“What was going to happen to me? But you’re right. It isn’t like him. The only thing is, maybe he wasn’t sick? It’s possible that if he suddenly thought of something about a patient, he could’ve just bolted for the clinic. That’s possible.”

“Well, he looked sick,” she said.

Rita had parked in the garage under the Charles Hotel, and by the time we reached her car and she got the engine going, I was shaking from the cold. Have you ever noticed that the chills and fear feel a lot alike?

“Let’s just go home,” I said. “I’ll try calling him.”

Once I penetrated the guard of his answering service, however, Steve turned out to be easy to reach. As I’d guessed, he’d gone directly to his clinic.

“I’m real sorry about that,” he said. “But Jesus Christ. Once it hit me … Anyway, you want to come over here? No, don’t. Stay there. I’ll be right over.”

What had hit him was not, of course, the flu, and he wasn’t begging for help. When I heard the bell and opened my back door, he was leaning against the frame, and his skin retained that green tinge it had had when he’d dashed out of Harvest, but he didn’t look sick.

“Christ, Holly,” he said. “It’s so goddamned obvious. It was all I could think of. I’m sorry. You got home all right?”

“Apparently.” I stretched out my arms to make an exaggerated appraisal of my hands and lowered my head to gaze at the rest of me and verify that I was all there. “Yes. All of me seems to be here.”

But it was no time to get cute. After a token smile, Steve wrapped his arms around me, buried his face in my hair, and groaned. His breath made a warm spot on my scalp. He hadn’t even put anything on over his T-shirt. It smelled faintly of dogs and bleach.

“Christ,” he said. “It’s like something my grandfather used to say. He used to say, ‘They left the door open, and the wrong dogs came home.’ When I was a kid, I could never understand what it was supposed to mean.”

“What
is
it supposed to mean?”

“Right now it’s supposed to mean that my grandfather’s grandson is the major fuck-up who left the door open, that’s what it’s supposed to mean.”

I’d seen him in this mood only a few times before, once when he’d made some trivial, inconsequential misdiagnosis, once when he’d blamed himself for failing to save a dog that had been crushed by a car. The dog’s owners had always let it run loose, and, as Ian Dunbar says, dogs that live on the street die on the street, but Steve hadn’t even wanted to hear about that. “You lost an animal?” I asked, looking up at him.

“Jesus, no.” He let go of me, stormed around the kitchen, raised his arm, made a fist, and looked ready to slam it into one of my heavily mortgaged walls or doors.

“Don’t you dare!” I said. “If you want to break something, including the hand you use for surgery, fine, but go outside and do it, and don’t put a goddamned scratch on anything that belongs to me.”

Whenever Rowdy and Kimi decided to chase each other around indoors, I told them the same thing, minus the reference to surgery, of course. Alaskan malamutes are remarkably intelligent and dexterous, but they have their limits. Steve recognized the words and the tone of voice. “I’m not one of your dogs,” he snapped, but he lowered his fist.

“Go out and kick someone else’s trash cans,” I suggested.

“God damn it, don’t condescend to me,” he yelled.

I yelled back. “What the hell is this about?”

His voice was suddenly soft and rumbly, but still enraged. “Goddamned son of a bitch! He put her in
my
goddamned freezer! He killed her, and then he put her in
my
freezer, and he counted on it. He figured I’d be too dumb to figure out what was going on,
and he was dead right.” Then he caught the gruesome pun and said, “Oh, shit.”

“Jesus,” I said. “Steve, look. Could you start talking to
me?
I don’t know what’s going on, you know. Except …”

I didn’t really want any coffee, but I needed something normal to do. I filled a kettle with water, put it on to heat, and nervously got out filters and French roast. “Sit down,” I added.

“You do talk to me like one of the dogs,” he said, turning toward me.

“It’s a compliment. You should know that.” I fished in my pocket, pulled out a hunk of freeze-dried liver, held it up pertly, and said, “Speak, boy!” Then I sobered up. “Christ, Steve, is that really true? That can’t be true.”

“Good,” he said flatly, still pacing around. “That’s real comforting.”

“Hey, all right. But if this awful thing really happened, and if I have to hear about it, I need you to quit stalking around. Just sit at the table, we’ll have some coffee, and I’m going to let the dogs in. Okay? And don’t growl at me. I didn’t stash any bodies in your freezer.”

“Holly, do me a favor and don’t kid around about it.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Rita says that compulsive joking is a defensive—”

“Never mind. I don’t want to hear about it. Just don’t do it.”

“Sure. I’m sorry. I guess it’s just hard to believe, but if it’s true …” In the freezer, for God’s sake? The impulse to get cute was nearly irresistible. In the freezer? Well, it sounded like a joke to me, albeit a
sick joke, which is to say, no joke at all. My skin was crawling.

Steve made coffee while I let in Rowdy and Kimi. Then I tied them at opposite ends of the kitchen and gave each one a big Iams dog biscuit. Rowdy’s disappeared so fast that he must practically have swallowed it whole. The second Kimi saw that he’d finished every crumb, she ostentatiously dropped hers on the floor, picked it up, dropped it again, and then lay down and began licking it very slowly. Her eyes never left Rowdy. Eventually, she began to nibble on the biscuit. He stared at it. She grasped the biscuit between her paws and very deliberately chewed. I was, of course, tempted to give him a second biscuit, but she’d probably worked it out: If I gave him one, I’d give her one, too. If there were a canine version of chess, all of the grand masters would be malamute bitches. And, yes, I’d rather tell you about my dogs than talk about what really happened to Jackie Miner.

“One of these days, Rowdy’s going to figure it out,” Steve said. “It takes some of us a while.”

I unleashed the dogs. After each had checked to make sure that the other hadn’t overlooked any crumbs—dream on, guys, you’re both malamutes—Kimi sat primly in front of me in the hope that I’d feed her some of the Christmas cookies from a plate I’d put on the table, and Steve started tossing a greasy potholder for Rowdy to retrieve.

“Use two if you want,” I said. “Or three. He can do a directed retrieve. Then when you’re done training my dog, you can tell me what’s going on, unless you want me to set up the high jump and get out his dumbbell.”

“Dumbbell, right,” he said.

“When did you get so hypersensitive?”

“Do you want to hear about it?”

“Yes,” I said. “No, not really.” I closed my eyes and held my breath, as if vision- and oxygen-deprivation would blot out all sensation. Finally, I said, “Look, Steve, first of all, what was it? At Harvest?”

“That was just what triggered it. You remember what happened? What we said?” He’d returned to his normal way of talking, slow and patient. “You were asking if anyone’d seen Jackie, Lorraine or anyone, and so I said something like, no, but it wasn’t because they weren’t looking. Right?”

“And?”

“And then it was like I was hearing my own voice. Here’s where we need to back up.”

“Good,” I said. Asking him to hurry up and spill a story is a waste of time.

“You remember you asked me to see about getting a tag put on Groucho’s body. Rita’d changed her mind. She wanted the ashes back after all.”

I nodded, but as Steve uttered the words, they’d seemed to catch in my own throat:
body, ashes
.

Steve went on: “So I said, sure, no problem, I’d do it.”

“And you did, right?”

“Wrong,” he said. “It got done, but not by me. That’s the point. This was Wednesday, right? I’d just got back, things had piled up, and then an emergency came in, so I mentioned it to Lorraine, not to let me forget, because her brother was due there, and I didn’t want to get busy and then find out he’d already come and gone. So late in the afternoon, damned if I didn’t remember, and Lorraine hadn’t reminded me. So I got after her, but she said it was all taken care of. She knew it was important to Rita, and I was tied up,
so she decided she’d do it herself. She didn’t mind that much, but she was sort of … They’ll talk about that kind of thing. They have to, or they can’t manage it. So she was telling Pete, and Miner stepped in. And when he heard what was going on, he said, no, he’d do it. And he did.”

“He was being a nice guy?”

“I should’ve got it then.
Nobody’s
that nice a guy. Especially him. And he’s always so damned slow that the waiting room’s full, he’s way behind schedule, so for sure he didn’t have a lot of free time. And doing favors for Lorraine isn’t his idea of what he’s supposed to do, anyway. I should’ve known something was way off. Lorraine should’ve, too.”

“Probably she was just glad she didn’t have to do it herself.”

“She wasn’t the only one.” He stroked Rowdy’s throat. “Hell, if he’d offered while I was on my way to do it, I’d’ve said, sure, thanks. So that’s what did it. At Harvest. No one’d seen Jackie. And then I hear myself talking, and what I hear is, they haven’t been looking. Jesus, was I slow. Why would he’ve volunteered?”

“Yeah. It’s not an upbeat job.”

“And Rita isn’t a friend of his. Anyway, Lee doesn’t do favors. So it fell in place. He did it so none of us would look in the bags.”

“But what about Lorraine’s brother? After he, uh, takes the bags away …?”

“Rumor has it that sometimes they do check, but he knows we’re not going to try and pull anything.”

“What could you possibly pull?”

“Two bodies in one bag. Charge two owners for their animals and then put both animals in one bag. Pay him for one. Keep the difference.”

“Steve, is that what you think Lee did? He killed her? And then, Jesus, he must’ve had to bend … God. And then he put her body in with …?” A horrible song began to run through my mind, a nasty children’s ditty I’d managed to forget for a couple of decades. Remember? “The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out.…” I could feel them, invisible beneath my skin. I hope I never again say that my skin is crawling unless I really mean it. I reached across the table for Steve’s hands and held them tightly. “Steve, did he put her with Groucho?”

He shook his head. “The fee depends on the size of the animal, roughly. Not the exact weight, but small, medium, large. So if it was supposed to be a small dog, it wouldn’t match up. And if there was already, say, a large dog, the bag’d weigh so much that someone would notice.” He paused. “Jesus, when it hit me, I honest to God did feel sick. But that’s what I had to check, how he pulled it off.”