Free Stud Rites by Susan Conant Page A

therein meant exclusively for human emergencies.
    ”I’m not handling,” I said. ”He didn’t get all that good a look at you, and he didn’t really look at the dogs. The only one it really affects is Pam.”
    Leah replied by asking for some of my cognac. ”Only if you don’t mix it with anything,” I said. Anyone who wants to be young again has forgotten the concoctions that youth pours down the throats of its victims.
    ”Ice?” she requested.
    ”Oh, all right.” He probably had seen her. And her hair is very distinctive. ”Freida says he drank on the plane,” I said for the second time. ”He hates flying.”
    ”You told me,” Leah said. ”Why was he so pissed at Eva Seeley?”
    Pissed. Her language! For this she goes to Harvard. ”At a guess,” I answered, ”sometime or other, Mrs. Seeley told him his dogs weren’t malamutes. I gather that she did that—if malamutes weren’t from her lines, then she thought they weren’t malamutes, and she didn’t mind saying so. Naturally, people weren’t thrilled.”
    ”I’ll bet she would’ve loved Rowdy and Kimi!” Leah said.
    ”Mrs. Seeley isn’t judging,” I reminded Leah. ”James Hunnewell is. She’s dead. And he’s still half alive.”
    Oh, yes. James. James Hunnewell.
     

 
     
    BUT I WAS WRONG. James Hunnewell’s body was found early the next morning. Hunnewell had been smashed on the head with what, in a triumph of honesty over literary aspiration, I shall describe as a blunt instrument. I am, however, relieved to report that despite the proximity of hundreds of keennosed dogs, the corpse was discovered by—of all things—a human being, in fact, by an ex-lover of mine named Finn Adams, whom I’ll introduce only by falling back on the truism that we all make mistakes.
    But Judge James Hunnewell was dead! Murdered! Isn’t death, especially violent death, exactly what cliches are for? He lost his life, as if it were a folding umbrella he’d absentmindedly left on the seat of a cab, or a glove he’d accidentally dropped, or a forgotten jacket borrowed by a friend who, suddenly remembering, might yet bring it back. His time ran out? Death as meter maid! The indignity! As if a cemetery were a grassy parking lot with rows of stones depicting fluttering tickets and stylized Denver boots. ”SCOFF-LAW!” shouts each epitaph, which also lists the ticket number, the issue date, and the time of the violation, but not, of course, the amount due, the ultimate price having obviously been paid in full. He expired? It could be worse: Ignoring appeal procedures, he was towed away. Grotesque? That’s the point: that James Hunnewell’s time did not just run out.
    I shall postpone for the moment the matter of the blunt instrument and the mistakes we all make by noting that at six-thirty on Friday morning, some fool in one of the campers at the edge of the back lot decided not to let sleeping dogs lie and, indeed, to awaken everyone but the proverbial dead, in this case James Hunnewell. Leah rolled over, swore, and pulled the hotel’s plush blanket over her head. When I’d fallen asleep at ten or so the previous night, she’d just started watching Back to the Future. At a guess, she’d been up until midnight, maybe later. Neither of our dogs was in the ring until Saturday; Leah was free to keep on sleeping for the next twenty-four hours. To prevent the dogs from leaping on her bed and licking her awake, she’d crated them, but at six thirty-five that Friday morning, Kimi’s metal crate was clanking, and Rowdy was breathing in a meaningful way.
    So, ten minutes later I was standing bleary-eyed and messy-haired on the blacktop between my Bronco and Betty Burley’s van while the dogs gulped down their carefully measured portions of the defrosted Fresh Frozen Bil Jac I’d been keeping on ice in a cooler in the car. Great stuff. For what it costs me to feed these dogs, I could live on lobster. Since neither of the dogs exhibits the self-sacrificing