A Hell of a Dog Read online

  I crouched next to Dashiell at the end of the tree line and watched Alan work, sending his dog out and calling him back. The first two times, the big dog was quick to obey. The third time he caught a scent in the air—a squirrel, a bird, something his genetic programming made more interesting than breathing—and he made the mistake of obeying his nature instead of his master.

  I didn’t need to watch Alan to know when he was making a correction. I saw it in the dog, too thin for his size, and once he’d stopped, I could see, too, that he was trembling.

  I heard Alan call out.

  “Beau, come.”

  The dog stood facing him, head dipped low, one front leg bent and held off the ground, as if he were pointing a bird. His docked tail pointed to the ground instead of the sky. I saw him blink twice and pass his tongue over his upper lip. Then he ran toward his master, who, holding the remote zapper, welcomed him with almost as much warmth as a rattlesnake would display.

  I signaled to Dashiell to follow me, and instead of crossing the sunny meadow, we continued partway around it, staying hidden among the trees, emerging a few minutes later near a lake where Dashiell could swim.

  Other people apparently had the same idea; there in the water was a large, lovely male Golden, on his way back to shore with a tennis ball in his mouth. On the shore were four humans and three more dogs—a greyhound, a Norfolk terrier, and what the ASPCA calls a Bronx coyote, a medium-size, prick-eared, pointy-faced brown dog, what third-generation mixed-breed dogs look like, in New York City and all over the world.

  The greyhound, a lovely old bitch with a graying muzzle, possibly one of the many rescued retired racers that are becoming popular as pets, ran in huge circles, followed by the mixed-breed dog and the little Norfolk, who did the best he could on those short legs, barking gleefully as he ran. The Golden came out of the water, shook, and dropped the tennis ball at his mistress’s feet. The dark-haired young woman reached into an open fanny pack, worn pouch to the front over her ample stomach rather than over her ample derriere as the name would suggest, and pulled out a treat, which she gave the dog. Then she picked up the wet ball and pitched it right back into the lake, the dog heading for the water before the ball landed with a splash. I wondered if she had ever considered not giving her water retriever a treat for doing what comes naturally.

  I picked up a stick and tossed it into the lake. Dashiell marked the fall and waited. I moved my hand in the direction of the lake, and he was off, airborne over the last stretch of wet grass, his belly flop sending water high into the sky.

  Dashiell and the Golden emerged together, each with his own prize. The Golden dropped the ball and waited for a treat. Dashiell put the stick in my hand and danced his way back to the edge of the water, waiting for a toss, please God.

  Like any dog that’s given half a chance to be himself, it was work that thrilled the pants off Dashiell. But the pear-shaped woman with the fanny pack didn’t seem to know that. She tossed the ball for her dog and came to stand near me.

  “Do you want some treats for him?” she asked.

  “Thanks,” I said, not wanting to be deemed one of those rude New Yorkers I hear so much about, “he’s fine.”

  “It’s no problem, really. I have plenty, and Jeff doesn’t mind sharing,” she said as if we were in the playground talking about our three-year-olds instead of out in the park discussing our dogs. She pried open the fanny pack and showed me enough dried liver to give all of the NYPD’s explosive-detection canines diarrhea for a month.

  “He’s happy to get the chance to—”

  She pulled a card out of her pocket.

  “I’m only trying to help.”

  Tiny beads of sweat were forming on her upper lip, and I noticed she could have used a shave, too.

  I wiped my wet, dirty hand off on my leggings and took her card. It read, “The Positive Pooch. Tracy Nevins, canine behaviorist.”

  In my neighborhood, positive means you’ve gotten unfortunate results on your HIV test. In dog training, it means the trainer is a foodie, a practitioner of what my friend Mike Chapman refers to in his dog column as “dog training lite.” Basically, the dog is viewed as a gaping maw into which you keep dropping treats. It’s the method used to produce a dancing chicken, ergo an important skill to have on the odd chance you’ll meet a dog with that spectacularly low an IQ.

  Tracy had a 914 area code, which meant she lived out of the city. She was probably in town for the symposium, but I didn’t ask. Dashiell was back, and I had my work cut out for me.

  I pocketed the card and walked closer to the lake so that I could give Dashiell more of a swim when I tossed the stick. Later, when I turned around, I saw that we were alone.

  Being a firm believer that a tired dog is a good dog, and wanting to make sure that Dashiell would be appreciative of the long down he’d have to do during dinner, I kept tossing the stick until his tongue hung down to about mid-chest level. Then, as wet as he was, because what’s the point of shaking if it’s not going to soak your mistress, I called to him and we headed back toward the hotel.

  Coming around the lake, we heard the strangest sound. Dashiell looked at me, and I nodded, meaning he could follow it, and so we left the path and once again walked into the copse of trees that snaked around the lake.

  There, side by side on a flat rock, we discovered the source of the sound, a small woman with a black pug, each with a huge white handkerchief covering her head. The pug stood as immobile as a lawn ornament, while the woman, sitting with her head tilted toward the sky, her nose poking up in the middle of the handkerchief, chanted.

  Dashiell and I froze in place, just watching. I had been unable to extract the names of the speakers from Sam. Walking through the park, I was finding out what the program was on my own; a shock collar trainer, a foodie, and the self-described “dog psychic,” Audrey Little Feather, here with her faithful companion, Magic. Not wanting to interrupt their meditation, and preferring my meditation in motion, I headed back the way I’d come.

  Audrey Little Feather, née Audrey Louise Rosenberg, had emerged on the scene when I was still in business as a trainer. She made house calls to dog and cat owners with pet problems and spoke for their pets, explaining what was wrong and how the pet thought it should be remedied. I couldn’t wait to hear her talk. But I didn’t want to hear Audrey chanting now and spoil the freshness of her performance during the symposium. Nor did I want to leave the park, the air so fragrant with flowers, the trees thick with leaves, and the birds singing so loud they all but blocked out the distant sound of traffic.

  There was no rush. I still had plenty of time to toss Dashiell in the tub, take a shower, and poke around the hotel before the dinner at eight. And I was sure, through my own brand of psychic revelation, that Dashiell was as reluctant to go back indoors as I was.

  We parked ourselves on one of the slatted wooden benches that lined the footpath, a good place from which to watch the passing parade. Across from us, his glasses pushed up onto his forehead, his newspaper almost touching his nose, an old man in baggy plaid pants sat reading the Times. A few benches down was a young priest. He sat all by himself, smoking a cigarette, his legs crossed, one foot nervously moving up and down. But then Dashiell’s tail was moving. I could hear it slapping against the bench. I turned in the direction he was staring and saw a large, tweedy older woman heading our way with a small border terrier bitch trotting along at her side. It was the bitch, of course, who’d caught Dashiell’s fancy, and he immediately left my side to get acquainted.

  Some people would be terrified to see a wet pit bull speeding their way. Not this lady. Despite the fact that Dashiell could have inhaled her little dog through one nostril, she was all smiles.

  I knew that smile, didn’t I?

  “Oh, isn’t he a handsome chap,” she said.

  As soon as I heard that voice, I knew who she was. Of course, in the tapes I had, made from her British TV series on dog training, the most popular show on the air at
the time, she was twenty years younger. She’d had no jowls, no Crosshatch of wrinkles on her upper lip, and her hair had been flaming red. But even if my eyes had been closed, there was no way I could have missed that voice, as strong as ever, her speech dotted with her own quirky inflections. How cagey of Sam not to mention this coup—unless, like me, she’d been a last-minute addition.

  “Mrs. Potter?”

  “Oh, forgive my rudeness. Have we met?”

  “No, but I’m a dog trainer, so of course I know who you are.”

  “How nice. But you must call me Beryl,” she said, turning her attention back to Dashiell. “He’s a lovely boy, isn’t he, dear? How old is he, about three or four?”

  “He’s three,” I said. “And your girl?”

  “Still a pup. Only eight months old. But such a cheerful girl, and so clever.” She looked down proudly at the little dog.

  Dashiell had lain down on his back, paws in the air, in the dead cockroach position, and the little border terrier was running in circles around him, barking all the while, stopping every now and then to tug vigorously on his ears or tail.

  “Gently, Cecilia,” Beryl said. “We don’t want to harm that nice boy now, do we, pet?” We sat on a bench and let the dogs race around behind us in the grass, enjoying their play and the lovely weather. “I used to bring my little girl here,” she said. “Oh, we’d come every day, rain or shine, for our walk in the park.”

  Her eyes seemed to tear up at the memory, which must have been as ancient as the brown leather purse she wore crosswise over her bosom. It might have been thirty-five years or more since she brought her little girl to the park. She was probably fifty when she did the TV series, and that was two decades ago.

  “Was it different then?” I asked.

  “Was what different, dear?”

  “The park. When your daughter was little. Was it safer then?”

  “Yes and no,” she said. “You know how it is, dear. We tend to romanticize the past, but even then, there was always the possibility of someone unsavory lurking behind a bush ready to pop out and do you in if you took the wrong path or strayed from where there were other people.”

  A nanny with two young charges, a boy and a girl, stopped to let the children watch the dogs play. The dogs stopped to watch a skater glide by. And two young lovers, both female, kept stopping to kiss as they headed out of the park, hand in hand.

  “I guess human nature never changes.”

  She frowned. “Unfortunately not. But still,” she said, looking down the path after the nanny, “the little ones keep us going, don’t they?”

  I looked at my watch, still reluctant to go.

  “You and Cecilia are lucky to live so near the park,” I said, thinking of how much fun Dashiell had had in the lake.

  “Oh, I don’t live here now,” she said. “When I lost my husband, the baby and I went home, to England.”

  I looked at the little terrier, then back at her doting owner, the way Dashiell looks at something and then at me in order to let me know what he’s thinking.

  “But—”

  “Oh, I see what you mean, dear,” she said. “You’re worried Cecilia will have to stay in quarantine for six months when I go home. But she’s going to be an American dog from now on. She’s a gift for my grandchild, you see.”

  “So your daughter lives here?”

  She nodded.

  “And we live in a little cottage in Chipping Camden, in the Cotswolds. Well, Cecilia did. Now she’ll have an American apartment, won’t you, pudding?”

  “Well, I expect I’ll see you at dinner,” I said, turning to go.

  “What was that, dear?”

  “You’re here to teach, aren’t you? At the symposium at the Ritz?” I said a little louder.

  “Yes, dear. You, too?”

  I nodded.

  “It was nice chatting.”

  “It was indeed. Americans are so terribly friendly. I’ve always found that to be so. Especially here, in New York.”

  Waiting for an endless stream of serious bikers to pass, the kind who wear those skintight shorts and hunch over the handlebars, I turned back to watch Beryl heading into the park, and stood there watching as she pulled a glove from her jacket pocket and dropped it behind her. Were she someone else, I would have sent Dashiell to fetch it for her. But I didn’t have to. Cecilia turned back, snagged the glove, and raced around in front of her mistress to sit and deliver. I watched Beryl bend over, take the glove, and pat her dog. I could just imagine her saying, “What a clever girl,” as she did.

  Outside the park, I saw the priest again, talking to a young man whose hair was dyed the color of corn. A harried-looking woman was headed our way, her fox terrier pulling so hard on the leash he was gagging. On the benches along the stone wall, a familiar-looking man sat eating a hot dog. He had another next to him on the bench, sitting on a napkin, and next to that, a giant-sized soda and a passel of greasy fries. He had just a fringe of dark hair slicked down with library paste and black as shoe polish circling a bald pate, huge eyebrows, a great, red cabbage of a nose, a heavy mustache, and a short, chunky body. I knew I’d seen him before, but I couldn’t place him, like when you run into your dry cleaner at the movies.

  I decided not to walk over and introduce myself in order to find out who he was and crossed the street instead; his Rottweiler was under the bench chewing on a bone so large it could only have been a human femur.

  Back in my room, drying Dashiell after his bath, I realized that the man on the park bench had not been my greengrocer or druggist. In fact, I’d never actually met him. I’d only seen his face on the jackets of his books. As with Beryl, whom I’d recognized because of her distinctive voice, I had a much younger version in mind, in this case, one in which the gentleman in question had considerably less girth and tons more hair. He was Boris Dashevski, the old-fashioned yank ’em, spank ’em trainer whose books, no matter how “positive” training got, remained perennial best-sellers. It seemed that whatever dog owners did or professed to do when they were in public, they were still closet correctors at home.

  When I got out of the shower, Dashiell was in the middle of the bed, fast asleep. Two wrapped packages had been left on the bureau next to a cellophane-covered basket of fruit, cheese, crackers, chocolates, and wine, all evidently delivered while I was out in the park, despite the Do Not Disturb sign on the door. There was a small white envelope there too, with my name on it. I saved it for last.

  The larger package was the sweatshirt. It had a picture of a pit bull on it with the words “putting on the dog” beneath it. The smaller package, a little box wrapped in silver foil with a lavender bow, was a vial of My Sin perfume. Yeah, yeah. I really needed that.

  I pulled my wet hair back with a scarf, put on a black T-shirt and jeans, hooked Dashiell’s leash through one of the belt loops, and slipped a loose black jacket on so that I’d have pockets for my beeper-sized Minox camera, a mini tape recorder, my wallet, and my room key. Then, before waking Dash so that we could snoop around before dinner, I opened the envelope.

  R,

  You’re off the hook for tomorrow’s talk.

  S

  Had I not gone to the park, I would have guessed that Tina Darling had showed after all. But I had. So I knew that all Sam’s worrying had been for nothing. She’d lost an ingenue and gained a star.

  5

  HE HAD A NECK LIKE A BULLMASTIFF’S

  The Truman Salon was blue with wine velvet drapes, swagged back to reveal Central Park at night—pretty as it looked, a place no sane New Yorker would venture unaccompanied after dark. The room was lit by an immense chandelier hanging over the grand oval table. The scene looked like a coed dinner at the New Skete Monastery; each dinner guest, with two exceptions, had a dog on a down-stay behind his or her chair. Martyn Eliot had no dog with him because of British quarantine laws. And Audrey Little Feather’s pug was on her lap, her head covered by Audrey’s napkin as if she were still meditating.
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br />   There were four empty seats. I meant to avoid the one next to Chip and sit across from him, but he caught my eye, and Dashiell caught Betty’s, and that was that.

  I smiled around the table, the waiter came and poured me a glass of white wine, and then the double doors opened and the vast space they exposed, room enough for a team of Clydesdales and a beer wagon, seemed filled by Sam Lewis, her arm linked around the tweed-clad arm of England’s most famous dog trainer, the natty Cecilia at her side.

  “I have the best surprise,” Sam announced as she breezed into the salon. I heard the quiet, expensive whoosh of the tufted, leather-covered doors closing and watched the fascinating contrast before my eyes—Sam’s pantherlike walk, Beryl’s no-nonsense stride, and Cecilia’s speedy Mr. Machine gait, her dark eyes scanning the room, looking for the most likely canine candidate to get into trouble.

  Sam gestured around the table with a graceful red-tipped hand. “Rick Shelbert, Audrey Little Feather, Martyn Eliot, Tracy Nevins, Woody Wright, Rachel Kaminsky Alexander”—she stopped and grinned at me, proud of her own detective work—“Chip Pressman, Boris Dashevski, Alan Cooper, Cathy Powers”—then she turned and beamed at her surprise—“Beryl Potter.”

  There was a round of applause, and one at a time, everyone stood.

  “Please, dear people,” Beryl said without smiling. “Let’s none of us make any sort of fuss now.” With that, she took a chair at the near end of the oval table, then looked around for Cecilia, who was behind me, tugging on Dashiell’s tail.