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Authors: Laurien Berenson

Tags: #Suspense

Best in Show (19 page)

BOOK: Best in Show
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“And hearing that made you call Rosalind?”
“Not right away,” said Crawford. He'd finished his sandwich and was sipping a glass of sweet tea. “At first we figured he just needed a couple of days to adjust to being back in the kennel. Besides, this was a dog who loved to show. We had him entered that weekend, and we thought that would perk him up.”
“It didn't,” I guessed.
“Right,” said Terry. “He showed like a bum. There was no way he was going to get a major with that kind of performance. So Crawford talked to Natalie about it and Natalie called Rosalind. Natalie was thinking maybe Stretch missed his puppies and wanted to go home and see them.”
“I thought you said he didn't realize they were his puppies.”
“We were just throwing out ideas,” Crawford grumbled. “Work with us here, okay?”
I sat back and shut up.
“It turned out,” Terry said, “that Stretch didn't miss the puppies. Instead he was jealous of them. He had an idea that while he was away, the puppies were going to grow up and take his place in the house. He was afraid that Natalie was going to stop caring about him.”
“Poor guy.” Even a nonbeliever like me couldn't help rooting for a happy ending.
“Exactly. So Natalie tells Rosalind to send the message back to Stretch that she loved him and missed him. She couldn't wait for him to come home. All he had to do was go that weekend and show his heart out. If he won, she'd come and pick him up right away.”
Terry was grinning. I figured I knew what was coming. “He got his major, didn't he?”
“First day.” Crawford nodded. “And he was asking for it, too. Maybe I'd been a little skeptical before, but not after that. I'm not sure how she does what she does, but Rosalind made a convert out of me.”
At this rate, I thought, she'd be making one out of me, too. Maybe I should think of scheduling a session. Not with Eve; the puppy and I were getting along famously. But maybe I could have Rosalind contact Faith back home in Connecticut. The Poodle would probably be happy to pass along all the juicy tidbits that Davey was carefully editing out of our telephone conversations.
The Standard Poodle as spy. The idea had potential.
I thought back to something Crawford had said earlier. He'd told Aunt Peg about Rosalind. Roger Carew had told him. And Roger had gotten the word from. . .
“Those dotty southerners,” I said. “Were they by any chance—?”
“The Boone sisters,” said Crawford, confirming my hunch. “Betty Jean and Edith Jean. They knew all about Rosalind. They'd used her services themselves.”
Why was I not surprised?
19
C
onsidering all the information I'd milked them for, I figured it would be greedy on my part to try and sell Crawford and Terry raffle tickets too. I left them to their work and lugged my basket back inside the arena. The lunch break had just ended in the Standard ring. The Bred-by Exhibitor Bitch class was about to begin.
Looking out across the ring, I saw Aunt Peg at the other end, settling into her corner seat. The chair next to hers was empty, and I made a beeline for it.
As I sank down beside her, Peg looked askance in my direction. “There is a limit,” she said, “to how many raffle tickets I can buy. Please tell me I'm not single-handedly supporting the entire endeavor.”
“I'm not here to sell you anything.” I shoved the basket back, out of sight, beneath my chair. “I'm here to watch. Bred-by Bitch, are you kidding? It's the best class in the whole show.”
Few of the spectators would have disagreed with me, and certainly not Aunt Peg. At regular all-breed dog shows, Bred-by has largely become just another class, an additional stepping stone on the way to those all-important points. But at specialty shows like PCA, which are always judged by Poodle experts, the Bred-by Exhibitor class is a showcase for the best the country's Poodle breeders have to offer.
Aunt Peg already had her catalog open and turned to the right page. As I glanced over to check the page number, I saw that her margins were filled with scribbled notes. The information she gathered by watching at PCA would impact breeding decisions she made throughout the year.
Quarters were close at ringside. All conversations were held
sotto voce
. As Mr. Lamb finishing checking in his entries, Peg said quietly, “I've just come from having lunch with Nancy Hanlon. The poor woman was almost distraught. You'll never guess what's happened now.”
“Edith Jean.” I almost smiled, then caught myself in time. “Right?”
“You've heard about the proposed memorial service?”
“And the ash scattering.”
Aunt Peg rolled her eyes. The gesture was more eloquent than a comment would have been.
“Edith Jean is afraid her request will be turned down—”
“Oh, she'll be turned down all right. There's little doubt of that.”
“She wanted me to circulate a petition while I was selling tickets. She's hoping to drum up some popular support.”
“Tell me you didn't!” Aunt Peg looked ready to snatch the raffle basket and paw through it, if necessary, to root out the offending paper.
“No, I convinced her to wait and talk to Nancy and the board first.”
“I'm on the board,” Aunt Peg said firmly. “And I can tell you right now, we're not going to approve anything of that nature. Not that we're not sympathetic mind you, but PCA is hardly a suitable instrument for someone's expression of grief. It's a dog show, for Pete's sake. It's supposed to be about the Poodles.”
So presumably if a famous and well-regarded Poodle had died Monday night, holding a memorial service would have been okay?
Aunt Peg wouldn't have appreciated the question. I went on to other matters. “I found out why Harry Gandolf was so determined to go Winners Dog in Toys.”
My aunt never took her eyes off the action in the ring. She did, however, incline her head in my direction to indicate that she was listening.
“He'd made a deal to sell that puppy to Japan, provided it won. A very lucrative deal apparently.”
“Rather a risky move on his part, wouldn't you think? Tying the sale to a win here?”
“I gather the Japanese buyer had been burned before. Harry didn't have any choice in the matter.”
“Even so, there are an astounding number of variables that have to combine just right on the day to produce a win of that magnitude.”
The Standard Poodles bitches were gaiting around the ring for the first time. A flashy black bitch, handled by Dale Atherton, caught my eye. I hadn't realized he was a breeder as well as a handler, but he had to be to qualify for entry in this class. He and his Poodle made a stunning pair.
“I'm sure Harry realized that,” I said. “In fact, he spent the first two days he was here attempting to cut down on those variables by identifying his chief opposition and trying to remove the dog from competition.”
“Trying to do so?” Peg's brow lifted. “Or succeeding at it?”
“Well, he did win,” I said, wondering what she was getting at. “But as you mentioned, there were other, perhaps unexpected, variables that came into play. The fact that Bubba was tired from spending much of the afternoon basking in everyone's admiration. That whistle during the Winners class that distracted Roger—”
Aunt Peg shot me a telling look before glancing down to scribble something in her catalog. Being nosy, I looked over and deciphered her script. Beside the name of the Poodle currently being examined in the ring, she'd written
flat feet
.
“I know what you're thinking,” I said. “You think Harry engineered that distraction. The whistle came from high in the stands. Nobody would have been sitting up there to watch, it's too far away. Harry must have had a hand in it. But he was down on the floor at the time, and there's no way I can see of figuring out who helped him—”
“Melanie,” Aunt Peg interrupted my rambling. Her tone was stern. “It doesn't matter who whistled.”
“What do you mean?”
“You're asking the wrong question.”
It wouldn't be the first time. “What's the right question?”
“Who whistled isn't important. What matters is, why did Roger look?”
“What?” The concept was so simple that for a moment it left me baffled.
“Why did Roger look?” Peg repeated. The judge was now examining a skittish brown bitch. My aunt noted the word
brown
in her margin as if that single word conveyed a wealth of meaning. Then, for the first time since the class began, she turned her attention to me.
“So someone made a noise, so what? It happens. Roger's a professional. Presumably he knows how to handle distractions. Upon reflection, that's what struck me as odd about the whole incident. Not that someone whistled at the puppy, but that Roger allowed it to affect his performance. Now, you may be right, perhaps Harry did set something up. Maybe he thought a loud noise like that would upset Bubba, though I can't think why it would necessarily. Or maybe Harry had nothing to do with it and he simply got lucky.”
That was an awful lot of maybes. And having observed Harry Gandolf in action over the last few days, I'd come to the conclusion that he was the kind of person who preferred to make his own luck. Still, Aunt Peg had a point. One that bore thinking about.
When I didn't answer right away, Peg went back to watching the class. Dale was moving his black bitch. She sighed softly and wrote the word
lovely
beside its name.
“You want to be in there with them, don't you?” I asked.
“Of course I do,” Peg said sharply. “This is the first time in years I haven't shown at PCA. Having the luxury to watch is all well and good, but it's not enough. I feel incomplete just sitting here, as though I'm only doing half what I'm supposed to do.”
It wasn't that Aunt Peg didn't have anything to show. When I'd bred Faith, she'd chosen a puppy from the litter to keep for herself, a male sibling of Eve's whom she and Davey had named Zeke. Aunt Peg had started showing him in the spring when I'd brought Eve out. The puppy dog was big and handsome; already he had both his majors and needed only a few singles to finish.
PCA would have been the perfect place to show Zeke off, except for one small glitch. The Standard Poodle judge, Tommy Lamb, and Aunt Peg were old friends. Decades earlier when Peg and her husband, Max, had started out in Poodles, Tommy had served as one of their first mentors. Over the years, the relationship had developed into a strong and abiding friendship.
Under the circumstances, showing to Tommy would have been a lose/lose proposition. If Aunt Peg did well, she risked the chance of people crying favoritism. If she did poorly, Tommy would be left in the unenviable position of needing to explain why he hadn't liked a dog whose bloodlines he'd once had a hand in creating.
Either way, Aunt Peg was better off on the sidelines. That didn't make the unaccustomed inactivity any easier for her to take, however.
“You'll miss next year, too,” I said in an effort to make her feel better.
Aunt Peg thought for a moment, then smiled. The expression blossomed over her face like a flower opening to the sun. “No, I won't. Next year, I won't miss a thing. I'll have the best seat in the house.”
The selection process for the following year's judges had been completed not long after Aunt Peg had received her judge's license. In a stunning tribute to the lifetime of hard work she'd devoted to the Poodle breed, Peg had been chosen on the first ballot. The following year, she would hold the position that Tommy Lamb held now. Aunt Peg would be judging Standard Poodles at PCA.
“Why do you think I'm watching so closely?” she asked. “I don't want to miss a move Tommy makes. I'll be lucky to do half the job he does.”
I'd seen Aunt Peg judge. She would do a superb job; and luck wouldn't have anything to do with it. “One more thing,” I said.
“Have you ever noticed that with you it's always ‘one more thing'?”
“I must take after you,” I said dryly.
For once, Aunt Peg didn't have a retort handy. I pressed my advantage. “Rosalind Romanescue.”
“Now what?” Exasperation sharpened her tone. She frowned at a blue bitch in the ring who was backing off from the judge.
No tail,
she scribbled and left it at that.
“I talked to Crawford about her. He's a believer. Not only that, but he has the stories to back it up.”
“I told you she was the real thing.”
“No,” I felt obliged to point out. “You told me she was all you could get on short notice.”
“I found her talk delightful. I'm thinking of having her communicate with my bunch.”
I was well acquainted with the six rambunctious Standard Poodles that ran Aunt Peg's house. Trying to hold a coherent conversation with that group would require an air traffic controller, not an animal communicator.
“Crawford got her name from Roger Carew,” I said. “Roger got it from the Boone sisters.”
“Really?” The last bitch in the class was being examined. Aunt Peg tore her gaze away. “Rosalind knew Betty Jean? I guess that explains her reaction.”
“When?”
“At the seminar, remember? Right off the bat someone called out a question about what had happened the night before. When she didn't answer, I pulled her aside and explained about Betty Jean. For a moment, I thought she wouldn't be able to continue. Then she pulled herself back together and went on as if nothing had happened.”
“You didn't think that was odd?”
“Why should I have? At the time, I had no idea she was acquainted with the Boones. If I had, I probably would have handled things differently. Maybe taken a small recess to allow Rosalind to regain her composure.”
“Except that she apparently didn't need one. As you said, after a moment's hesitation she simply carried on as if nothing were wrong.”
Aunt Peg and I both pondered that as Tommy made his cut. To nobody's surprise, Dale's bitch was pulled out on top. The audience agreed with the selection. Applause followed the black Poodle to the head of the new line.
“Maybe she and Betty Jean were merely acquaintances—” Aunt Peg began.
“Maybe she already knew Betty Jean was dead,” I said at the same time.
We both stopped speaking and looked at one another.
“You might go ask,” Aunt Peg proposed.
As if this murder was my problem. As if I hadn't already told Sam that this time I was nothing more than an interested bystander. As if we both didn't know that given my past proclivities, it was somehow inevitable I would do exactly that.
“Right,” I said.
BOOK: Best in Show
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