Bloodlines (16 page)

“If it’s any comfort to you, puppy mills are notorious for lousy records,” I assured him. “The dam’s pedigree is accurate. Those are reputable breeders.”

I filled Kevin in on a little background. Ch. Icebound Peak Experience, C.D., was owned by a psychiatrist and his wife, but maybe that’s obvious, and if you know anything about malamutes, I don’t have to mention that Ch. Happy Daze of Kaktovik was bred by Helen Drummond, whose dogs all have names like Hurricane Drummer, Halcyon Diamond, that kind of thing. The Kaktovik dogs are pure Kotzebue, the line of mals that originated at the Chinook Kennels in the nineteen thirties, and, if you’re a historian of the breed, you’ll realize that the names of two of the Beaufort dogs, Kearsage and Belle, pay homage to two dogs killed in Antarctica on the Bird expeditions. Pandora is another thirties sled dog name, of course.

“Kaktovik Pandora of Kaltag was never shown,” I told Kevin, “but she contributed a lot to the breed.” I explained how. In detail.

Just as I was about to launch into a fascinating, if somewhat lengthy, description of Lois Metzler’s foundation bitch, Kevin interrupted me by pointing to Missy’s paternal line. “These two,” he said. “These LJS ones.”

“Yeah,” I said. “If there are any genetic problems there …”

“Six toes,” Kevin said.

“I’ve never heard of … but, yeah, that’s the idea. On the maternal side, it isn’t just that these people show their dogs … I mean, that’s part of it, but the really important thing is that these breeders know their pedigrees back to Adam and Eve, and they understand genetics, and they screen. But with these puppy mill dogs, there could be anything, hereditary blindness, you name it, which is why this bitch, Missy, shouldn’t be used in breeding. The breeder, Walter Simms, whoever he is, is
obviously some guy in Missouri or somewhere who doesn’t know OFA from CIA …”

By now I could see Walter Simms clearly. He was a big, lazy, stupid man with a beer belly that hung out over the unbelted waistband of his drooping pants. His unbuttoned shirt revealed a white-haired chest with small female breasts. He stood, feet apart, in the barnyard of a sprawling farm in the Midwest. Behind him, the huge burning sun of Iowa or Missouri was sinking below a flat horizon.

“Me, neither,” Kevin said.

“What?”

“CIA.”

I started to explain OFA and CERF and stuff—Orthopedic Foundation for Animals, Canine Eye Research Foundation—but Kevin spread the fingers of his left hand, pointed to the names of two dogs, and said, “These two.” He tapped on the pedigree.

“Yeah, you already … yes. They’re half sisters. Bred to the same stud.” I moved Kevin’s fingers to the left. “And these two, Sir Snowy the Fourth and Stupid Little Sally—God, I hate that name. Anyway … well, it’s very close.”

“Close!” he said in disgust. He lowered his voice. “What this is, is incest.”

“It’s really not the same, Kevin. These aren’t people. Dogs don’t know, and, besides, they
get
bred. They don’t commit incest.”

“Yeah, well,” Kevin answered, “maybe they don’t know, but if they did, you can bet they wouldn’t like it.” He moved his fingers back to the names of Queenie and Lady. “Especially these two.”

“Malamute bitches don’t usually get along too well with each other anyway,” I informed him.

Kevin’s fingers resumed the tapping. “Jesus,” he said. “No wonder.”

My
Boston Globe
arrives by seven
A.M
. On Tuesday morning, I read it over my second cup of coffee. The front page carried the usual Boston stories. Construction on the new central artery and the new airport tunnel would be slower than expected. (By whom? I, for one, expected it to take forever.) Mayor Ray Flynn’s arrival at a banquet had already been delayed. On route to the dinner, the mayor spotted a homeless man asleep in a gutter and stopped to pick him up and treat him to a Big Mac with a large order of fries. Ray Flynn is a man of the people. One of those people is, of course, his boyhood friend, Police Commissioner Mickey Roache. Boston, Boston.

Lest you suppose that the
Globe
practices provincial journalism, though, let me add that the front page articles were not exclusively concerned with events that had transpired within the city limits or even within the boundaries of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. A tractor-trailer had overturned all the way out on 1-95 in far-off Woburn, and in Rhode Island—practically a foreign country, right?—jailed racketeer Enzio Guarini (the
Globe’s
words, not mine) was again appealing two or three of his convictions on twenty or thirty counts of fraud, conspiracy, and like crimes. Well, okay, get picky
if you want. Sure, Guarini grew up in Boston, and Guarini’s whole family—and Family, presumably—still lived in Massachusetts, but just exactly how did you think he made the
Globe’s
front page, anyway?

Probably because Puppy Luv did business way out in the distant reaches of Cambridge, the two scanty paragraphs about Diane Sweet’s murder appeared in the Metro/Region section. According to the paper, police were “investigating several possible leads.” And ignoring the impossible ones. This is
news?
Diane Sweet’s obituary, though, reported a fact that was genuinely new, at least to me. This editorial slipup was undoubtedly attributable to the
Globe’s
odd but rather frequent practice of printing obituaries at the end of the Sports section, thus treating demise as the great final score.

What appeared wasn’t one of those laudatory accounts of Diane Sweet’s fine character and multitudinous contributions to society. Instead of a eulogy, all she got was the shortest paragraph in the cramped list of death notices. Even the usual information about funeral arrangements and memorial donations was missing. The gap seemed to confirm Kevin’s view of John Sweet as a good-for-nothing, the kind of husband who couldn’t even bury his wife without her help. He hadn’t so much as bothered to call her his “beloved” wife. In its entirety, the notice read:

Yes, indeed. Sister. Something clicked. I turned to the classifieds. In spite of Diane Sweet’s murder, Puppy Luv’s ad was running under “Dogs, Cats, and Other Pets,” and so was Your Local Breeder’s. The two ads were in boldface at the tops of adjacent columns. As I remembered, Puppy Luv’s offered
“Adorable AKC Puppies! More than twenty breeds to choose from.”
Your
Local Breeder, though, could supply
“any AKC breed on request.”
According to Puppy Luv’s copy,
“our beautiful, healthy puppies come from local breeders, not from puppy mills.”
But Janice Coakley’s ad, it now seemed to me, warned buyers about her sister:
“Never buy a dog from a pet shop! Come to us first! Your Local Breeder.”

More or less the same two ads appeared regularly in the
Globe
, and I’d glanced at them before, but I’d missed what now felt like the exchange of personal accusations, sibling rivalry rather than business competition. On the basis of the ads alone, Janice Coakley seemed to be winning. The key phrase in the Puppy Luv copy,
local breeder
, Diane Sweet’s big selling point, was almost a pitch for the competition; and Puppy Luv’s
“more than twenty breeds”
(however adorable) couldn’t beat Janice Coakley’s offer of
“any AKC breed.”
Also, of course, Janice Coakley was still alive.

I made my routine check of the classifieds to see whether anyone was selling a malamute—no one was—and then I walked Rowdy and Kimi around the block, came home, looked up Bill Coakley’s phone number, and once again scanned the dog ads. Three separate ads gave his number, one for Yorkies
(“tiny bundles of love”)
, one for Poms
(“home raised with TLC”)
, and one for Shih Tzus, poodles, and “Shis-a-poos.” Why puppy buyers will pay purebred prices for crossbred dogs is beyond me. In God’s eyes, every dog is beyond price, of course, but here on earth, these Pom-a-poos, Yorkie-tzus, and all the other accidental-breeding-poos are simply mix-a-Yorks, so do yourself a favor, huh? If you want an all-American, go to your local shelter. Save your money. And a life, too.

I put down the paper, picked up the phone, and called Bill Coakley, who sounded as hearty as he had yesterday and who once again assured me that he had found Missy a good home and that I “shouldn’t worry none” about her. I concluded that in the sixteen or so hours since I’d seen Coakley, he’d worked exactly as
hard on recovering Missy as he had on improving his English grammar. Janice, his ex-wife, had claimed that Bill had
sold
Missy. If so, it seemed to me, he probably knew where she was.

“This is a serious matter,” I said firmly. “That dog is the property of Malamute Rescue.” Yes, property. A dog who’s safe at home with you may share your life, but a lost or stolen dog damn well better be your property, or he’s apt to become someone else’s. “And,” I added, “it might interest you to know that there is a reward for her return.”

Ransom? Let’s call it motivation. Oh, and if you don’t do rescue, perhaps you imagine that the source of this proffered reward was the whopping endowment of the Alaskan Malamute Protection League—it has none—or the riches of the Alaskan Malamute Emergency Fund, that is, a bank balance that seldom exceeds a few hundred dollars. Yes, indeed, my empty pockets. By the way, while we’re on this topic, you don’t happen to know Robin Williams, do you? I’m serious. Robin Williams.
Popeye? Good Morning, Vietnam?
He used to own a malamute. Maybe he still does. Anyway, if Robin Williams happens to have been your first husband’s college roommate or something, and if you run into him, could you mention AMPL? The Alaskan Malamute Protection League. Just sort of work it into the conversation, huh? Box 170, Cedar Crest, New Mexico, 87008. Oh, and tell him that his donation won’t go to reclaim a rescue dog like Missy, lost by someone who found her inconvenient, someone who had better things to do.… In fact, if you think he can handle it, tell him the brutal truth: Rescue shouldn’t have to mean the painless dignity of a needle instead of the mass horror of a decompression chamber, but sometimes that’s what it comes down to.

So Missy’s ransom, Coakley’s motivation, was my responsibility. I’d lost Missy. I’d pay to get her back. Also, I kept remembering Kevin’s repeated insistence that Puppy Luv used local suppliers. I’d been assuming
that Missy had come from the Midwest or Pennsylvania and that the hog-faced, fat-bellied Walter Simms had represented himself as legitimate and persuaded Lois Metzler to ship him a puppy. In fact, I’d been especially ready to believe that that’s what had happened because of a story I’d recently heard from another local malamute breeder, Ginny Pawson. Seven or eight years ago, a pleasant-sounding woman in Iowa had talked Ginny into shipping her a bitch. A month later, though, Ginny spotted a malamute puppy in a pet shop and managed to get a look at the papers. The breeder shown on those papers was the same woman who’d just bought Ginny’s bitch. Ginny paid twice the purchase price to buy back that puppy, but she considered herself fortunate. I’d been assuming that Lois Metzler’s story was what Ginny’s would have been without the intervention of coincidence. Also, of course, I’d been eager to keep the horror of puppy mills as geographically remote as possible.

Local dogs, Kevin had insisted. Not from Kansas, not from the airport. Local. Puppy Luv’s ad: local breeders. By Diane Sweet’s standards, Bill Coakley was a local breeder; by mine, he was a puppy mill operator who’d eliminated the broker and the pet shop by doing direct sales. Your Local Breeder. Janice Coakley and Diane Sweet were sisters. Bill Coakley had been Diane Sweet’s brother-in-law. Eight years ago, Ginny Pawson had been talked into shipping a bitch to Iowa. Eight years ago, almost all breeders were more innocent and trusting than they are now. I didn’t know the birth date of Missy’s dam, Icekist Sissy, but I was willing to bet that Lois Metzler hadn’t sold her any eight years ago. I could find Icekist Sissy’s age by consulting the malamute studbook, but it didn’t really matter. The point was that Lois had sold Icekist Sissy recently enough to have been wary about shipping a puppy to an unknown buyer in a distant part of the country. Yes, it could have happened. But the chances were good that the buyer had been local.
The word kept running through my head:
local, local.

Almost on impulse, I called Gloria Loss, whose voice was thick with sleep. When she heard my name, the grogginess turned to guilt. “Did it snow? Jesus, I’m sorry. I didn’t—”

“No, it didn’t … Gloria, I’ve, uh, sort of been rethinking things.”

“I’m really, really—”

“I’ve got another plan,” I said. “There’s something I want you to do, instead of the shoveling. It’s more … it’s sort of more connected to your original purpose. Only this could actually do some good. All it is, is … all I want you to do is to collect some information. It’s just a matter of keeping your eyes and ears open. What I want you to do is apply for a job. If you don’t get hired, that’s it. We’ll … I’ll take it from there. But if you do, we have to agree right now that all you do is look and listen. You don’t actually
do
anything. Okay? And you don’t, uh, express your own opinions. You just give me the information, and then I worry about what to do about it. If anything.”