Stud Rites

anti-dog cousin of Juan Valdez who meticulously selects the most shriveled little beans from the most sickly, runty bushes, mixes his harvest with fistfuls of manure, and ships it to the U.S., where it’s tested for staleness, and then sold exclusively for brewing and consumption at dog shows.
    After handing me a cup and sipping from her own, Betty also passed along a bit of something that’s as universal at dog shows as bad coffee: gossip. In this case, though, the news was anything but the usual light hearsay. ”Elsa Van Dine was murdered last night!” I had the impression that the late Elsa Van Dine had once been a Personage in malamutes. ”In Providence!” Betty added. She made the city sound as shocking as the crime itself.
    The combination of murder and Providence reminded me of something ugly I’d heard from my next-door neighbor, Kevin Dennehy, who’s a Cambridge police lieutenant. Looking up from a newspaper article about murder-for-hire, my cousin Leah had asked Kevin how much you had to pay to get someone killed. ”It all depends,” Kevin had replied matter-of-factly. ”In Providence, you can get a bat job for sixty dollars.” In reply to Leah’s baffled look, Kevin had expanded: ”Baseball bat.”
    ”The poor thing,” Betty went on, ”flew in to New York and rented a car, and on her way here, she stopped off with relatives in Providence. And last night, when she went out to her car for something, she was robbed and murdered! Right there on the street! Her wedding ring and her diamond engagement ring were Pulled right off her finger. Poor thing! She died of massive head injuries.”
    Before I could ask exactly who Elsa Van Dine was —had been—Betty aimed a finger at the lamp. ”Don’t tell me! Sherri Ann Printz. And she made it herself.”
    I first met Betty Burley when we’d been seated next to each other at a dog club banquet. Even before we exchanged introductions, a flash of recognition informed me that I was encountering a rare case of duplicate reincarnation: Staring into Betty’s weirdly familiar almond-shaped brown eyes, I saw the soul of an Alaskan malamute, and not just any malamute, but my own Kimi. The physical resemblance, however, ended with those duplicate eyes; Kimi is young, big, well-muscled, and dark, with the facial markings that make up a full mask: a black cap, a bar down her muzzle, and goggles around her eyes. A tiny, frail-looking woman in her midseventies, Betty Burley never even wore a hat, never mind a cap or a mask, and she used glasses only for reading. Nonetheless, whenever Betty entered my kitchen, I felt compelled to check the counters for food she might steal. In Betty’s presence, I’d find myself fishing through my pockets for liver treats, and I’d discover on the tip of my tongue such unspeakable commands as ”Off!”
    ”Leave it!” and an emphatic ”Watch me!”
    ”Dear God,” sighed Betty, eyes on the lamp, ”since when did Sherri Ann start supporting Rescue?” She spoke loudly enough to be easily overheard by the people looking over the collection of silent-auction items arranged on our table. Saturday night’s live auction would bring in big money. The objects in our comparatively humble silent auction included a pair of metal dog bowls, a set of malamute refrigerator magnets, a copper aspic mold in the shape of a fish, two pounds of Vienna roast coffee beans, a case of beer that it was probably illegal for us to auction in Massachusetts, and —my favorite—a framed mirror with malamutes painted all over the glass, designed, I guess, to let you see yourself as your own dogs.
    ”She was going to give the lamp to Freida,” I said quietly, ”but she changed her mind. I assume it was that ’Putting the SPECIAL Back...’ ”
    Betty eyed the lamp. ”What it was—is—is trouble-making.”
    ”That’s Comet’s fur,” I said defensively.
    ”She hasn’t glued it on right,” Betty pointed out. ”It’s falling off.”
    In fact, stray clumps of fur were loose, as if the stress of finding himself stacked on pink granite and transformed into a light fixture had induced the poor dog to blow coat.
    ”Did Sherri Ann ever own Comet?” I asked.
    ”No. Comet had three or four different owners. Actually, poor Elsa Van Dine was one of them. But Sherri Ann certainly wasn’t. Some of her dogs do go back to Comet, though.” With an un-Kimi-like expression of resignation, Betty said, ”Well, if that really is Comet’s fur, I