Stud Rites

if
    Sherri Ann was murderously angry, she had every right to be. Victor, Betty maintains, was the one who left the material about Cubby, which Betty viewed as equivalent to a soldier’s playing card. Until Betty advanced the idea, I hadn’t even known that soldiers left playing cards on bodies.
    Anyway, when the police finally let us have Timmy’s dogs, the crime-scene experts inadvertently turned over to us the single most damning piece of evidence against Timmy Oliver. And I was the one who found it! Found, however, is not quite the right word... I picked it up in a plastic bag. Not an evidence bag, either. Not an official one, anyway. So here’s how I brilliantly, resourcefully, and single-handedly obtained absolute, undeniable proof of Timmy Oliver’s guilt: I walked a puppy. I cleaned up after him. Truly, that’s all there was to it. Well, a little more. Instead of letting Betty and me go into the camper to get Timmy’s dogs, the police protected what they supposed to be the crucial evidence by bringing the dogs out one at a time. By then, Steve and Kevin had arrived. Steve’s van held the two crates he uses for his own dogs. The plan was that he’d take Timmy’s two adult dogs, Z-Rocks and the silver male, back to Cambridge, where he’d board them at his clinic. That part went fine: A couple of crime-scene guys led out the dogs and turned them over to Steve and Kevin. Then a woman brought out both his sturdy puppies. Betty took the lead of the female Timmy had tried to sell to Crystal. I took the male’s. And we started toward Betty’s van. A dog show was no place for puppies this age, Betty had insisted. Neither was a veterinary clinic. Consequently, she was going to drive the two puppies home and leave them with her sister, who was taking care of Betty’s own dogs. As we crossed the asphalt, both sizable puppies kept biting their leashes and bouncing around. My puppy, however —the male—started to sniff and circle, and as he settled into a squat, I reached into my pocket and extracted one of the plastic bags that I, Ms. Responsible Dog Owner, am never without. And when the pup had finished, I, Ms. Responsible Dog Owner, reached down to clean up after him. What I found, in the middle of the expected, was a tiny plastic packet carefully sealed with tape. For obvious reasons, I did not unwrap the little package with my bare hands, but immediately turned my evidence bag over to the police. This indelicate vignette has a moral: Always, always clean up after your dog! For in doing so, you, too, may one day find a diamond ring. You, however, may get to keep yours. I had no right to the one I found. My diamond ring had belonged to Elsa Van Dine.
    At the banquet that night, everyone kept asking me about the diamond ring. At first, I avoided the topic. My mother would not have considered the episode a suitable subject for the dinner table. After drinking more than I probably should have, however, I revealed the whole story. My mother, after all, had belonged in a federal penitentiary. Who was she to make me feel guilty about a trivial impropriety? Although Betty, I am certain, was as astounded at the discovery as I was, she maintained that she wasn’t in the least surprised. ”Timmy always did go whining to Elsa about everything,” she reported. ”I have no doubt that he tried to buy that semen and that when James refused, he went sniveling to Elsa.”
    After dessert, I carried my coffee cup and bravely took the vacant seat next to Harriet Lunt. Keeping my voice low, I related the full history of Jeanine and Cubby, including the ugly words spoken in the darkness of the parking lot. And Jeanine’s tears. Harriet did not produce the confession I’d hoped to provoke. Her only reaction was to Cubby’s ancestry. ”Comet!” she cried. ”Good God! Duke Sylvia or no Duke Sylvia, that was obviously a trash dog.”
    At the post-banquet auction, Rescue’s special items brought in a satisfying amount of money, mainly because Freida and Sherri Ann got into a vicious bidding war over the print of the wolf disemboweling the elk.
    Both responded to the symbolism, I suppose. Each, I’m sure, saw herself in the victorious wolf, her rival in the vanquished elk. Although I made a few bids, the only item I’d coveted, the sign from the Chinook Kennels, had been reduced to fragments of old board that were now in police custody. Pam Ritchie will never forgive Mikki Muldoon for smashing that relic. A tiff broke