Gone to the Dogs (25 page)

I heard no threat in his voice and saw none in his face. It seemed to me that he’d be content to take Mattie and go home and that he’d never tell the story
to anyone, even his wife. Once in a while, maybe, when he was alone with his Chinooks, he might say a few words about it to them and marvel at how strange life is.

Miner pivoted slowly to face Cliff Bourque. His hands were still primly and dutifully fixed behind his back. Clasped between them was a large hypodermic syringe. In the near darkness, I managed to tie Kimi’s leash tightly to the stair rail. At my side, Rowdy waited for the first command in this interesting new obedience event. I dug the fingers of my left hand into the thick guard hair at the back of his neck and down into the warm, wooly undercoat. My fingers found the training collar. Rowdy and I moved forward into the dim light of the hallway. I unhooked his leash, bent down a little, held my left forearm and hand parallel to his head, and pointed directly at the syringe. If Miner saw Rowdy coming? If Miner didn’t panic after all? Or, in his panic, stabbed wildly? If Rowdy grasped that needle by the sharp, deadly point?

Suddenly, I moved my hand forward and said firmly, “Rowdy, take it!”

Rowdy was primed for the ring. He shot forward and bounded into the little room. His glossy dark back shining in the light, he made directly for Miner, who spun toward him and, with a sharp reflex jerk, pulled his hands protectively toward his face. When I’d pointed to the hypodermic and Rowdy’d sighted along my arm, had he understood? I suspect that when he forged forward, he meant only to retrieve whatever object he encountered first, whatever looked anything like a dumbbell or a glove. But when Miner raised his arms? And gripped that object tightly in his fist? Then Rowdy clearly got the object
of this strange new game. He leaped and, as he did so, he must have opened his jaws, ready to grasp this peculiar dumbbell of strange design.

Ever seen the jaws of an Alaskan malamute? At the sight of Rowdy hurtling toward him, Miner must almost have felt those thick, sharp teeth digging into his face, ripping apart his hands and crushing them. I’ll never know for sure whether Miner dropped the needle first or whether Rowdy grabbed it from his hand. But no more than seconds after I’d sent Rowdy on the directed retrieve, Miner, screaming and shaking, had his arms wrapped across his face, and Rowdy held that hypodermic in his gentle mouth. He’d probably never even touched Miner.

I ran to Rowdy, reached out and took the hypodermic by the safe, blunt end, and said, “Drop it!” He did. “Good boy,” I said. “Good boy.” Never forget to praise your dog. Never.

“Don’t just stand there,” I told Bourque. “Get him. Pin his arms, for Christ’s sake. Where the hell is Steve? Jesus Christ, he’s not—”

I started for the little room where Bourque had evidently found Mattie. By then, Kimi was woo-wooing with outrage at missing the fun, and the kenneled dogs had taken up her call. When I pushed in the swinging door to the small adjacent room, I expected to find Steve comatose on the floor. He wasn’t there. Elsewhere in the clinic? Dead. In the kennels, maybe, his body in one of the cages. Just as I was heading there, I heard his voice rise above the arfing and wooing and yapping of the dogs.

I ran into the center hallway.

“Jesus Christ, Holly,” Steve said. “What the hell is going on here?”

Next to him stood my next-door neighbor, Lieutenant Kevin Dennehy.

“That’s what the cop’s supposed to say,” I told them. “That’s Kevin’s line, right? ‘Now, now, what’s all this about?’ Or is that just in the movies?”

“Holly—” Kevin started to say.

“Miner’s in there,” I said, pointing to the exam room. It felt like a second directed retrieve. “Cliff’s holding him. He could use some help.”

Kevin evidently felt that he could, too. Before long, he’d summoned a squad car and, for all I know, some other help as well. I heard some noise, but I didn’t pay much attention. I was busy piling together a lot of soft blankets and towels to make a cozy whelping area in a corner of Steve’s kitchen. When he delivers puppies at the clinic, it’s usually on the operating table, when he has to do a Caesarean because the bitch is in trouble. On that Christmas Eve, he became the first veterinarian in Cambridge, maybe the first anywhere, to provide an obstetrical patient with a comfy birthing room. The father was not present at the delivery, but I think that Mattie didn’t miss him. Cliff was the only person she wanted in attendance.

In between his occasional checks on Mattie, Steve kept apologizing to me and to himself for having left the clinic. He kept reminding me—and himself—that he’d had his beeper with him and that when he’d left, he intended to be gone only long enough to find out why I wasn’t answering my phone. When he’d found that the dogs and I weren’t home, he knocked on Kevin Dennehy’s door, and Kevin’s mother had sent him out to drag Kevin away from some lodge of the Ancient Order of Hibernians, where Kevin had been helping Santa Claus, his
cousin Mickey, to distribute the presents at a Christmas Eve party.

“Look, Steve,” I said. “Lots of animal hospitals around here never have anyone on the premises at night, ever. And you didn’t know where Miner was, and then you couldn’t find me.… Anyway, this just shows that you were right to begin with. Or that Lorraine was. You do need a second veterinarian, or you at least need someone to live here.”

“Jesus Christ,” he said.

The first puppy, a male, arrived just after midnight, and seven more little Chinooks were born in the early hours of Christmas. Cliff let me name Mattie’s firstborn. He probably expected me to pick something Christmasy, but I didn’t. As I’ve said, these names are a bitch. I called him Living Proof.

Cliff Bourque spent Christmas in Steve’s apartment with Mattie, Bear, and the puppies. Steve offered him a key, but he said that if he needed to go out and get back in, he’d use the same credit card that had popped the lock the night before, when he’d wanted to wait there for Lee Miner. On the day after Christmas, the Vietnam buddy Cliff had been staying with drove him and his dogs home to New Hampshire. Anneliese had told me that Cliff had lost a lot of buddies in Vietnam. She never said that he’d lost them all. She’d trusted me a lot, of course, but not quite enough to tell me that one of the guys from his outfit lived in Cambridge; and not quite enough to confide that she and Cliff had talked by phone every few days since he’d left.

That’s how Cliff Bourque decided that it was safe to come out in the open and confront Miner: He heard from Annaliese the rumor about Jackie and Patterson. Before Jackie’s disappearance, it had been in Miner’s interest to have Bourque suspected of having murdered Patterson. Afterward, though, as Bourque realized, it was to Miner’s advantage to have Patterson presumed alive. The rumor that Miner’s two victims had run off together explained
both disappearances, but Miner couldn’t accuse Bourque of doing away with Patterson and also claim that Jackie and Patterson had run off together.

Whenever Steve and I discuss why Lee Miner killed Jackie, Steve attaches great importance to the little red car, which turns out to have been a BMW. If Rita’s there, she adds that those crystal lamps Jackie had in the living room were real Waterford. I don’t show lamps, either. Steve and Rita agree, though, that the main reason Lee murdered Jackie was that the second she heard him say that a detail didn’t matter, she knew for sure that he was lying.

But the question that interests me isn’t why he murdered Jackie, but why he let the dogs live. Why didn’t he kill Mattie and toss her body in the woods instead of driving her to Charity’s? Of course, he knew that Charity wouldn’t recognize him. Patterson was Charity’s vet, but Patterson made house calls. Miner had heard about her—that’s why he’d taken Mattie there—but neither of them had ever seen the other before the late night or early morning when he’d shown up with Mattie. Also, he must’ve felt confident that no one would identify Mattie as a Chinook.

But why take the risk? Why let her live at all? And why let Willie live? He did—and does—you know. He spent Christmas Eve safely, if tediously, kenneled at Steve’s clinic. But why did Miner spare him? If Jackie and Willie had both vanished, nothing about Miner’s story would have been suspect. Marriages break up all the time, and husbands don’t necessarily know where their departing wives have gone. The bond between Jackie and Willie, though? That was a true union, till death us do part.

Steve’s explanation is simple. He says that Miner
didn’t become a small-animal veterinarian to kill a healthy pregnant bitch of a rare breed and certainly not to kill his own dog. Steve says that when an owner insists, it’s one thing, but that when Miner had to choose, he chose life. Rita says that Miner’s vocational choice represented a counterphobic defense, by which she means that his fear of big dogs was the reason he became a veterinarian in the first place. Big dogs had some great unconscious symbolic significance for him, and as a veterinarian, he repeatedly murdered and rescued the object of his fear. Rita adds that his superego allowed him to act on his impulses only within the confines of his profession. As a veterinarian, he could put dogs to sleep, but as a person, he couldn’t kill them.

Is that true? Or did he intend to kill Mattie that Christmas Eve? When he left for Charity’s, maybe so, but my hunch is that all the way back to Cambridge, he kept trying to make himself do it and kept putting it off. I think that’s one reason he drove so erratically. I’ve come to believe that he’d have let her live. I’m not sure why, but I think it’s true that Lee Miner found it easier to kill people than to kill dogs. I can understand that. While we’re on the topic, I should tell you that
Dog’s Life
rejected my article about Brenner. He’s still getting away with murder. The only piece of news I have about Brenner is so freakish that I hesitate to pass it along. I’m doing so only on the condition that you don’t ask me to explain it. I can’t, except to tell you that Oscar Patterson left his entire estate to the baby that’s due in June and to the baby’s mother, Geri Driscoll, now Geri Driscoll Brenner. Oh, yeah. Brenner’s collar and leash? The ones Kimi wore when we dashed out of there? Purloined
goods? Not really. Souvenirs, I guess. Remember, I paid cash.

But I’ve leaped ahead of myself. A week after Christmas, UPS brought the urn containing Groucho’s ashes. I intercepted the delivery woman and carried the parcel up to Rita myself. When she found out what I held in my hands and how it had arrived, she said, “UPS? Jesus.” Then she started to cry. I put the unopened parcel on her kitchen table, and we sat there looking at it.

“Rita,” I said, “there’s this theory I read about. It’s about souls.”

“Please!”

“I mean it. The theory is that dogs have only a finite number of souls, okay? So they have to share them. I’m not making this up. Anyway, when a dog dies, a new dog gets his soul. So you see? It means that when you lose a dog, you’ve got a chance of getting him back again. That’s how the theory originated. Daniel Pinkwater’s malamute died, and then his wife found another malamute that was obviously the same dog.”

She stopped crying. “Daniel Pinkwater?” She sounded incredulous. “From National Public Radio?”

“People with malamutes can be on public radio,” I said. “And Daniel Pinkwater happens to be a dog writer, and it’s his theory. Actually, it isn’t a theory. All he did was observe it. So the point is that it’s sort of like the old Woody Allen joke? Where he says that he was thrown out of NYU for cheating on a metaphysics exam. He looked into the soul of the boy sitting next to him.”

She started crying even harder.

I tried to console her. “Rita, don’t you get it?
Metaphysics is about what underlies appearances, not just physical realities, but—”

“Holly, for God’s sake, this is
Cambridge
. Pick up a cab in the Square, and there’s a good chance that the driver knows what metaphysics is. It was probably his dissertation topic. So—”

“So I didn’t know until I looked it up,” I said. “Anyway, the point is that it’s how you get your next dog. You cheat. You keep looking into the souls of the dogs sitting next to you. And one day, you’ll find Groucho.”

Then I started crying, too. I’ve sat next to a million dogs since Vinnie died, and I haven’t found her yet. Probably the AKC has done a deal with God: Utility Dogs get to keep their souls for eternity. That’s why Alaskan malamutes are such deliberately lousy obedience dogs. It’s a guarantee of perpetual return to earth. They don’t want to stay in heaven. They like it here.

So do Scottish terriers, thus the nickname. Diehard. In late January, the day after Steve, Rita, and I snuck Rowdy, Kimi, and the urn into the Mount Auburn Cemetery and scattered Groucho’s ashes over the pond, Rita kept an appointment she’d made to consult Steve about a new dog. When she returned home, Rowdy announced her arrival by rushing to the kitchen door and growling ferociously. Kimi joined him. Over the din there arose snarls, yaps, and the rasp of canine nails raking the outside of my door, then the pitter-patter of Rita’s high-heeled boots and little dog feet ascending the stairs.

I flew out of my apartment, reached her landing, and pounded on her door.

“Rita!” I yelled. “Open the door!”

When she did, Willie stuck out his head and
barked loudly. Then he fell silent and fixed his gleaming black eyes on my ankles.

“Isn’t he beautiful?” Rita said. “I never intended to get another dog so soon, but it was just like—”

“Rita, that dog has serious behavior problems.”

“And I’m fully licensed,” she said triumphantly.

“Among other things, he bites.”

“Steve says that it’s an assertive breed, and, of course, he’s been through a lot. It isn’t aggression, you know.”

Willie snarled at me.

“Yes,” I said.

Rita smiled proudly. “It’s called real terrier character.”

A few days after Easter, the Bourques called me with some great news. The Chinook dog, once nearly extinct, had just been added to the list of 146—now 147—breeds and varieties recognized by the United Kennel Club, the largest working-dog registry and the second-largest all-breed registry in the United States. I said congratulations. I meant it.