two vintage holly winter stories (3 page)

“Mr. Pastern," I informed Tiny. “You know him, right?"

"Him! Have you ever seen what he puts up? How he managed to get himself qualified—"

"I know! But just find him, would you? And don't let him do anything, OK? Because if this guy Farrell has a gun and Pastern starts—"

"Mass slaughter," Tiny said. "Hey, relax. If I can handle—"

"Just do it!"

My task was to keep Farrell in sight. Almost as soon as Tiny trotted off, Farrell took long strides away from the obedience rings and headed across the wide, hot field to the breed rings, where he momentarily vanished in the illegal white cloud surrounding a conscience-stricken Old English sheepdog determined to shake off what his handler should have brushed out. I trailed behind, detoured around the OES, made my way through the hairspray miasma surrounding a brace of black standard poodles, and followed Farrell toward the double row of concession booths and tents that I'd intended to visit before going home. At first I thought that his destination was the row of portable toilets located just beyond the concessions, but he entered a tent, one I'd seen at other shows, but not one I'd had on my agenda.

You go to a lot of shows? If so, you've seen at least a few stands like the one called Bud's. I'd never been able to figure out how the place survived. First of all, while most small concessions specialized in something—T-shirts, books, stationery, posters, nutritional supplements, jewelry—Bud's didn't. Also, the other concessionaires offered show-special discount prices on rawhide chews, brand-name shampoos, training collars, leather leads, and the other necessities of existence, but Bud charged at least twice what you'd pay at any other tent for exactly the same items.

Well, maybe Bud's did specialize after all. In fact, he practically had a monopoly. Never in my life have I seen so many inaccurate representations of purebred dogs as I saw on Bud's merchandise. His T-shirts had breed names lettered across the top and blurry depictions underneath, but there was no correspondence between the words and pictures. The Alaskan malamute could have been a Siberian, I guess, but what was supposed to be a golden retriever looked a lot like a corgi, and the purported shih tzu didn't even look like a dog. The needlepoint kits were, if anything, even worse than the T-shirts. Bud's had a second specialty, too: unsafe dog toys. There were toys of soft latex for dogs to gnaw to pieces and swallow, squishy toys with metal squeakers just waiting to pop out and slip down the throat, and plush fabric animals with small, dangerous hard-plastic eyes and noses.

A table ran across the back of the tent, and across the table in untidy rows straggled numerous bottles and canisters of shampoo, conditioner, grooming powder and detangling spray in three or four popular brands. Behind the display loomed Bud, who wore a filthy once-off-white carpenter's apron and a dirty duck-billed cap with his name emblazoned in red letters on the brim. He was tall, emaciated, and so chinless that he made you want to look down to see where the bottom part of his face had fallen.

I stepped just inside Bud's tent and pretended to examine a really hideous collection of little dime-store pseudo-porcelain dogs shoddily glued to slabs of quartz. For a mere $65 I could've had my very own representation of a mixed-breed sled dog permanently stacked in a puddle of rubber cement. Wow. Farrell, though, was at the counter facing Bud, and he was actually buying something, namely, a small canister of grooming powder. I backed out of Bud's and into the burning sun, and then hurried to the next booth, which turned out to display dog beds in every possible size, shape, style, and material—real and fake lambskin pallets, cedar-filled nests with washable covers in plaids and solids, egg-carton orthopedic foam mattresses, and all the rest. The two clean-cut young men with the tan shepherd were intently fingering a dainty flannel-lined wicker basket that would've been a tight squeeze for one of the big dog's forepaws.

Then Farrell emerged from Bud's tent and, without looking around at all, made straight for the row of portable toilets. I stayed with him long enough to see the line of people waiting for the toilets. I lost sight of him only because Janet Switzer waylaid me. Janet is Rowdy's breeder. To understand a breeder, it's vital to know her original purpose. Janet was developed to serve as the alpha individual to a fluctuating but always rather large number of Alaskan malamutes. She has such a dominant personality that whenever she addresses me, I have to resist the urge to drop to the ground, roll onto my back, and grovel in submission.

"Well, where is he?" Janet meant Rowdy, who'd been entered in Open obedience. "Chicken out, did you?"

I explained that Rowdy had a deep pad cut. It was healing fine, I assured her, but he wasn't ready to jump. When Janet had finally finished cross-questioning me, I excused myself.

I'd spent only a few minutes with Janet, not nearly long enough for Farrell to have reached the front of the line, but he was nowhere to be seen. Had he headed for the privacy of the woods around the site? Or had he left the show altogether? In either case, he would have taken the blacktop road that snaked around the open field, past the parking lot reserved for exhibitors and show officials, and toward the distant area relegated to mere spectators. I hate the heat almost as much as my dogs do, but I jogged along that road, past the field, the rings, the tents, then between row after row of vans, RVs, trucks, and station wagons, beyond the tired handlers resting in their Winnebago shade and beyond the hot, victorious dogs cooling off for the Best of Breed competition.

Under a tall Norway maple at the far end of the distant parking area, a group of people stood around a copper-colored Isuzu Trooper. I slowed to a brisk walk. Tiny and Pam were both there, and with them were the AKC rep and the show chairman, Mr. Pastern, the judge who daily hanged his own dogs. The clean-cut young men were there, too, and so was the tan shepherd. All of them were alive, as were two Alaskan malamutes I'd never seen before. Inside the Trooper, his nostrils heavily dusted with white powder, lay John Richard Farrell, also known as Morris W. Rinehart, John Visco, and John Morris.

There was no mystery about who killed him, really, at least not for long. Have you guessed? Who killed John Richard Farrell? Who immediately identified the murderer? And how?

Solution: Murder Well-groomed

Show people are fanatics about the accurate representation of breeds and about the safety of toys. Could the sale of shoddy dog merchandise have kept Bud in business? Never. And would Farrell, who had already visited the Cherrybrook tent, have bought overpriced grooming powder from Bud? Of course not. The organization that employed both Bud and Farrell (remember? conspiracy and narcotics trafficking?) took advantage of the cover offered by dog shows. As a concessionaire, Bud could travel from show to show on a predictable schedule to distribute his white powder to a few select customers. When Farrell became a threat to their organization, which was not eager to have him chat with the FBI, Bud followed orders to supply a deadly substitute for grooming powder. The layer of cocaine at the top of the canister was pure—uncut and thus fatal. I guess you could say that John Richard Farrell really died by his own nose.

The FBI is obviously and regrettably not run by real dog people—hobby, indeed—but it didn't take a dog person to realize that Farrell might turn up at a show. The clean-cut young men, though, turned out to be handlers after all. Their shepherd had no difficulty identifying Bud as the source of the cocaine and thus as Farrell's murderer. I tried to corroborate the shepherd's testimony by explaining that I'd seen Bud sell the canister to Farrell, but the FBI agents didn't seem to put much faith in the statement of a human (and thus fallible) witness. Quite correctly, they trusted only their dog.

Like other breeders, Pam should screen her buyers, but don't you think that culling her human mistakes would have been a bit extreme? And the AKC rep was outraged to discover that criminal activities had been taking place on the grounds of shows, but the only murder weapon he ever contemplated using was the permanent suspension of privileges. Mr. Pastern, the Koehler disciple? One of Koehler's principal justifications for rough dog training methods was that any problem creature has a moral right to rehabilitation. Mr. Pastern might have strung Farrell up, but he wouldn’t have killed him.

By the way, the mal from Tiny’s lines was OFA Excellent; the supposed hip dysplasia originated in the vicious imagination of a jealous gossip who lied to Pam. Also, in case you wondered, real show people never suspected what Bud was actually selling because, of course, the heaviest drugs in common use in purebred dogdom are Nemex-2 and Panacur, and the only time we snort is when fools of judges put up the wrong dogs, which is to say, not ours.