Bloodlines (13 page)

“Holly?” Betty finally said. “Are you thinking …?”

I hadn’t been. If I’d been thinking about anyone, it had been Gloria Loss, and she’d barely crossed my mind. Betty didn’t know Gloria Loss, though. But Betty and I both knew Lois Metzler.

“Forget it,” I said. “Lois was upset, naturally, but … Look, I don’t know the details, really, but I think it wasn’t … It just wasn’t a woman’s crime, I think. What I heard was that a
guy
broke in. It did cross my mind that it might’ve been someone who’d bought a puppy that turned out to be sick. You know? Someone had humongous vet bills and tried to get Puppy Luv to pay, something like that. But Lois? I mean, yeah, of course she was … Her reputation and everything?”

Betty, the human Kimi, overrode me. Alpha and beta. “You know what my mother always used to say? She used to say it all the time. It drove me and my sisters crazy. ‘Remember, girls, your reputation is priceless.’ ”

“Everyone’s mother used to say that.”

“Everyone’s mother was right,” Betty said.

My own mother, Marissa, was positively vituperative on the subject. She banned any behavior even remotely suggestive of such gross improprieties as double handling, altering a dog’s natural color, sneaking food into the obedience ring, and stepping on the toes of a competitor’s dog. Fortunately, she considered human love affairs a personal matter, governed by the American Kennel Club only in the sense that “all participants should be guided by the principles of good sportsmanship both in and outside the ring.” At least I think that’s what she thought. She died quite a long time ago. There was one … Well, I’m not sure what she meant. The remark was a direct quote from the AKC Obedience
Regulations, but Marissa definitely said it about people, not dogs. What Marissa said was that smoothness and naturalness should be given precedence over military precision and peremptory commands. Make of it what you want. Myself, I think it’s good advice.

As I’ve mentioned, Weston, Westford, West Brookfield, and lots of other Wests and Brooks appear in big gold letters on the Dog Lover’s Map of Massachusetts, but Westbrook doesn’t have a show site, kennel club, obedience club, or canine activity center. No one goes there for tracking tests, agility training, sled dog racing, sheep herding, lure coursing, flyball, or Newfoundland water trials. So far as I knew, there’d never been so much as a show-and-go held in Westbrook. With one exception, it wasn’t a dog town at all. The exception was a business shamelessly named Your Local Breeder. I’d seen its ads in the ‘Dogs, Cats, and Other Pets’ section of the
Globe’s
classifieds:
“Never buy a dog from a pet shop! Come to us first, Your Local Breeder!”
Puppy Luv advertised there, too:
“Adorable AKC puppies! Not from puppy mills! More than twenty breeds to choose from!”
Below each come-to-us pitch there’d be a list of breeds and prices. Although I’d tsked and sneered at the ads, I’d never visited Your Local Breeder for the same reason I’d never entered Puppy Luv until last Friday: The list of breeds had never included the Alaskan malamute.

Yes. As if it mattered. As if it did.

As I was saying, although I’d never stopped at Your Local Breeder, I’d driven through Westbrook from time
to time on my way to and from real dog towns. The prettiest sections of the town had rolling hills thick with pines and maples, and leisure farms with saltbox houses, red barns, stone walls, white corrals, and brown Morgan horses. A few of the original working farms survived as side-of-the-road vegetable stands and garden supply centers, but most of the once-agricultural acreage was now given over to Acorn and Deck houses, Royal Barry Wills capes, and brandless, nameless neocolonial split-level hybrids inhabited by commuters who willingly traded the long daily round-trip to Boston for clean air and green trees. A few areas of Westbrook looked like the ugly parts of most New England towns. My own home town, Owls Head, Maine, has its share of hovels set in mud amidst flocks of filthy, squawking geese, broken-down cars, and the rusted remains of doorless refrigerators and irreparable kitchen stoves. Westbrook did, too. And, even viewed collectively, how beautiful can a McDonald’s, a Burger King, a Pizza Hut, a Wendy’s, a Stop & Shop, three gas stations, and a used-car lot really be? How distinctive? Westbrook’s fast-fill strip looked like a thousand others.

The turn for Coakley’s was a right at the first set of lights after the third gas station. His house was picturesquely situated a quarter of a mile off the main drag, just beyond what had started out as the town dump and had evolved into a sanitary landfill. A thin row of sickly hemlocks and a ragged, tilting snow fence failed to screen the landfill from the road. Coakley’s house was a seedy-looking cedar-shingled cape progressing toward hoveldom, which is to say that it did have lots of frozen, rutted mud, a dented old maroon Chevy sedan with no tires, and a harvest gold refrigerator-freezer with no doors, but it lacked the geese. The only dog run, if you can call it that, was a small chicken wire enclosure that fenced in a pile of rough plywood and the carcass of a dead chicken. The plywood was apparently the raw material for a doghouse that no one had ever gotten
around to building or the remains of one that had tumbled down. The chicken? Killed by Missy?

At the shabby front door, Bill Coakley greeted me in the same jovial tones I’d heard on the phone: “Hope you come about a dog, ‘cause I ain’t got a lot else since the wife kicked me out.”

Although the room into which he led me was almost devoid of furniture, the racket of dogs and the stench of God-knows-what would’ve been enough to fill the Astrodome. How many dogs? It was hard to count. Poms, Yorkies, toy poodles, Shih Tzus, mini dachshunds, and mini Schnauzers were packed into cages, boxes, and orange crates stacked precariously on top of one another. A makeshift cardboard pen occupied a far corner of the room.

The superabundance of little dogs certainly contributed to the odor, but its principal source may well have been Bill Coakley. One of the amazing things about Coakley was that he wasn’t very old. He couldn’t have been more than thirty. I mean, you’d think it would take longer than that for anyone to accumulate so much dirt. His yellow teeth were thickly encrusted with plaque or oatmeal, maybe both. His hair looked as if he’d coated it with cooking oil before standing out in a sandstorm. The layer of dirt left its base color an open question to which Coakley himself, not having bathed for years, might not even know the answer. I mean, how does someone like that apply for a driver’s license or a fishing license or any other ID?
(Color of hair, sir?
the clerk asks.
Geez, ma’am
, he replies,
your guess is as good as mine.)
Anyway, eye color was obvious—red—and it probably goes without saying that his hands and nails were … well, let’s let it go. Suffice it to say that if Bill Coakley had been found dead, the coroner wouldn’t have needed to open him up and examine his stomach contents to discover what he’d eaten lately. Dried egg coated his mouth. A long strand of spaghetti clung like a stray hair to one shoulder of his army-surplus khaki shirt.

“Mr. Coakley,” I said firmly over the din of the dogs, “I’m Holly Winter. I called about the malamute. Betty Burley did
not
pick her up, and neither did Enid Sievers, the owner. Now I want to know—”

Coakley didn’t wait for me to finish. “Found
that
little lady a good home,” he said. Then he moved purposefully toward the pen in the far corner of the room. The light was dim. A brown haze hung in the air. Maybe once, a long time ago, this had been a living room. A battered couch remained. Like everything else in the house, including the walls, the floor, the ceiling, the air, Coakley, his clothing, the dogs, and a large, ugly cat asleep on top of a stack of crates, the couch was dirt tan. “Woman sees my usual ad in the paper, calls, stops in about a dog. One of my pups.” His tone was indefinably inventive. “And she says, ‘Ain’t that a pretty husky you got out there,’ and I says, ‘Sure is.’ ”

“Meaning the malamute,” I said. “Missy.”

Coakley bent over to retrieve a large plastic bowl from the cardboard pen. Inside the enclosure swarmed about two dozen tiny puppies, Yorkies, Poms, and what I think were Pom-a-poos. “Got my chores to do here,” he said. “Breeding dogs ain’t easy. It’s a lot of work.”

Shall I spare you the food dish? Let’s make a deal. I’ll skip Coakley’s ears, but you have to hear about the dish, which was a big avocado green spill-proof plastic bowl thickly lined with a hardened brown substance that I hope—but won’t promise—was old dog food. Solidified dribbles clung to the outer sides. Coakley handled the thing with no evident revulsion or even reluctance and—this is the really disgusting part—plunged it unhesitatingly into an open bag of dog food unprepossessingly labeled Generic. The clunk and rattle of the kibble against the dish touched off a renewed frenzy of little-dog yapping and yelping. Four or five dirt brown food moths rose lazily from the bag of dog food and hovered in the dusty air. Their larvae probably had a higher protein content than the food did.

The clamor eventually subsided enough for me to
speak.
“Where
is the dog now?” I demanded. “That dog belongs—”

I never heard Bill Coakley sound anything but cheerful. He did now. “Don’t have to do nothing but turn around, and there’s some woman’s hollering at me.” Happy sounding as ever, he launched into the details. “Lady from the IRS.
They’re
after me. The wife, she’s still after me, and that old battle-ax from the Humane. You ever get in tax trouble, let me tell you, there’s one thing you gotta—”

When he lowered the dish into the puppy pen, the noise of the dogs cut him off. The little ones in the pen scrambled and fought for their foul dinner. There were so many of them that it was hard to distinguish one from the other. I wondered why anyone would buy a dog from a place like this. Kind, ignorant people must look around and think, “My God, I’ve got to get this puppy out of here.” Or did people imagine that filth promised a bargain? But the puppies were cute, of course. Damn, they were adorable. You wanted to scoop one up, take it home, clean it up, and give it the first decent meal of its life.
You
did? No, I did. Yes, even me. They were almost irresistible.

“I’m in a hurry,” I said. “I’m here for that dog, and I want her—”

“I’m telling you, ain’t I? The lady come and took a look at her, and I says that the lady that owns her can’t keep her no more and if you want her, she’s yours, and the lady says, sure. I didn’t even get nothing out of it. I done it for the dog.” He looked me directly in the eyes.

Bill Coakley, canine benefactor?

“Okay,” I said. “So just give me her name and—”

The ugly cat, a blatantly unneutered tom, chose that moment to plummet from its perch on the crates, traipse across the floor, and head straight for me. Its sudden dive precipitated a renewed outburst of yipping, to which Coakley and the cat seemed equally deaf.

“Handsome bugger, ain’t he?” Coakley remarked genially.

I tried to feel sorry for the cat. As you probably know, cats require a higher protein diet than dogs do. That’s why dogs love cat food, of course, and why a cat fed on dog food is malnourished. My hunch was that the handsome bugger ate the same food-moth chow the puppies did. Its large belly hung from a swayback. Its ribs showed. The yellow-tinged farinaceous glop that dripped from its eyes looked a whole lot like the stuff on Bill Coakley’s teeth. The poor thing’s ears were ragged, and its head was scarred. Also, it undoubtedly had fleas. Cats are supposed to be standoffish, right? Sure, but there’s something about communicable diseases that makes them super friendly. This one sauntered up and rubbed against my legs. I bent down and stroked its bony spine.

“Handsome bugger,” Coakley repeated proudly.

It may have been the cat’s name. I didn’t ask. Instead, I again demanded the name of the woman who’d taken Missy. I don’t know why I bothered. I was far from sure that she existed.

Coakley picked up the cat, gave me a plaque-ridden grin, shrugged, and said, with what felt like a hint of stubborn defiance, “Got it around here somewhere.”

That’s when I’d had it. “That dog is the property of Alaskan Malamute Rescue,” I announced. Did I sound ridiculous? Maybe. Maybe not. I’m used to ordering around creatures a whole lot tougher than dirty Bill Coakley. “I want her back, and I want her back fast. You get that dog back, or I’ll have the MSPCA and every other animal welfare organization in Massachusetts in here so fast you won’t know what hit you. Do you understand what I’m telling you? You get that malamute back here, or I close you down.” Then I stomped out.

I meant to do it anyway, or I meant to try my damnedest. I knew how to start. I knew the people to call. But first, of course, I had to have Missy back. Do you understand? I just
had
to.