Susan Conant - Gaits of Heaven

A DOG LOVERS MYSTERY

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

GAITS OF HEAVEN

A Berkley Prime Crime Book / published by arrangement with the author

Copyright 2006 by Susan Conant.
Cover illustration by Louisa St. Pierre.
Cover design by Lesley Worrell.

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ISBN: 1-4295-8784-9

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Berkley Prime Crime Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.
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In loving memory of my own Rowdy,
Frostfield Perfect Crime, CD, CGC, ThD, WPD
(November 29, 1993November 29, 2004),
my perfect girl.

I am grateful to Phyllis Hamilton for allowing me to write about her majestic Monty, Alaskan malamute Ch. Benchmark Captain Montague, ROM, a legend in the breed.

For answering my questions, I am grateful to James Dalsimer, M.D., and Michael Glenn, M.D. Special thanks to Carter Umbarger, Ph.D., for discussing hypothetical cases with me. Any errors are mine alone. Roseann Mandell, please accept my thanks for your help with the manuscript. Profuse thanks, too, to Jean Berman, Lynn Madar, Pat Sullivan, Margherita Walker, Anya Wittenborg, Suzanne Wymelenberg, and Corinne Zipps.

For companionship and inspiration, my thanks to Jazzlands Got That Swing, my beloved Django.

The first step in recovery is to admit that you are powerlessyour life has become unmanageable. Second, you need to believe in a power greater than yourself that can restore you to sanity. When I first met Ted and Eumie Green, they were indeed powerless. Their dog, Dolfo, hadnt exactly become unmanageable; he had never been otherwise. As to restoration to sanity, I, Holly Winter, intended to become the Higher Power: I wanted to rid poor Dolfo and his owners of their multitudinous defects and shortcomings, thus inducing in all three a spiritual awakening that would free the dog from his seemingly incurable addiction to canine bad citizenship and simultaneously cause Ted and Eumie forever after to practice the principles of responsible ownership.

Having mentioned sanity, I feel compelled to defend myself against the potential psychiatric insinuation that I was suffering from delusions of omnipotence. I intended to become a Higher Power only with respect to Canis familiaris : I never imagined that I had created the world or had the power to change it except in one limited sphere, which was, is, and ever shall be the behavior of dogs. Even so, such chutzpah! The word was a favorite of Ted Greens. In his devotion to Yiddish expressions, he pronounced the ch with a deep gurgling in his throat. Shikse that I am, I settle for a WASPs h . Still, no matter what your ethnic origin, youd readily admit that when it comes to dogs, I have a lot of nerve. Chutzpah : nerve, gall, moxie, as opposed to the ancient Greek hubris , pronounced Hugh Briss, as if it were a normal first name followed by the term for a Jewish circumcision ritual. Anyway, chutzpah can be bad or good, whereas in ancient Greece, hubris referred to considering yourself on a par with the gods, an act of arrogance that invariably led to divine retribution. In this story, fairly or unfairly, the person who suffered the ultimate fatal fate was not she who set herself up as Gods gift to horrible-acting dogs. Rather, it was Eumie Brainard-Green.

To begin: I first met Ted, Eumie, and Dolfo at 6:15 on the evening of Thursday, May 26, in front of the Cambridge Armory, where the Cambridge Dog Training Club holds its classes. The armory is a low, unprepossessing brick building on Concord Avenue near the Fresh Pond rotary and the LaundroMutt self-service dog wash. The clubs classes take place in the big hall that occupies most of the armorys interior, a space big enough for the club to run three classes simultaneously and blessedly free of those damned supporting columns that handlers are always smashing into when theyre zeroing in on their dogs rather than on the risk of bruises and concussions. From my viewpoint, another advantage of the armory is its proximity to my house, which is the barn-red one at 256 Concord Avenue, on the corner of Appleton Street. My husband and I, together with two of our five dogs, were making our way along the sidewalk by the little fenced playground that abuts the armory grounds, and both dogs, Rowdy and Sammy, father and son, the two most breathtakingly beautiful male Alaskan malamutes ever to set big white snowshoe paw on the lucky planet EarthSorry. I seem to have drifted Arcticward.