Brute Strength Read online

  Recent Titles in the Holly Winter Dog Lover

  Mystery Series by Susan Conant

  CREATURE DISCOMFORTS

  THE WICKED FLEA

  THE DOGFATHER

  BRIDE AND GROOM

  GAITS OF HEAVEN

  ALL SHOTS

  BRUTE STRENGTH*

  *available from Severn House

  BRUTE STRENGTH

  A Dog Lover’s Mystery

  Susan Conant

  This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author's and publisher's rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  This First world edition published 2011

  in Great Britain and in the USA by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

  9–15 High Street, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM1 1DF.

  Copyright © 2011 by Susan Conant.

  All rights reserved.

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Conant, Susan, 1946-

  Brute strength.

  1. Winter, Holly (Fictitious character)–Fiction. 2. Dog trainers–United States–Fiction. 3. Detective and mystery stories.

  I. Title

  813.6-dc22

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-077-7 (ePub)

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-8067-3 (cased)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-84751-351-9 (trade paper)

  Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.

  This ebook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

  Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland.

  To Jessica, Bill, and Nicholas in loving memory of Samantha (1993–2008), who was half Labrador retriever, half heaven knows what, and total perfection.

  Acknowledgments

  Many thanks to Rob Rabouin, Steve Rabouin, and Kenneth Clifton for technical advice. I am also grateful to Jean Berman, Roseann Mandell, Lillian Sober-Ain, Geoff Stern, Anya Wittenborg, and Corinne Zipps, and my editor, Anna Telfer.

  ONE

  One rainy Saturday morning in April, I was grooming dogs and making enemies when a fight broke out in the little hallway outside my kitchen door. If the combatants had been dogs, I’d have transformed myself into whatever larger-than-life figure the conflict demanded. Shazam! Billy Batson becomes Captain Marvel! Or in my case, Holly Winter, dog trainer and dog writer, turns into . . . Gandhi! He’s a useful alter ego, but strictly for resolving minor canine quibbles and tiffs. I haven’t had to become General Patton in ages. When I do, I’m ferocious: Listen, you dogs of war! This is Old Blood and Guts telling you to cut it out before the entire Third Army moves in and takes no prisoners! But that’s a lie. First of all, the closest I’ve ever come to serving in the military is attending dog-training classes at the Cambridge Armory. Second, I do take prisoners: miscreants get locked in their crates until I’ve metamorphosed back into Ms Sangfroid. The surest way to lose a dog’s respect is to blow your cool.

  So, over the years, I’ve learned to replace brute strength with a sneaky non-violence that owes more to Machiavelli than to the Mahatma. I am, however, a dog trainer. I don’t do people. Hence my hesitation.

  ‘ . . . not to be where I don’t belong, Rita, and I don’t—’

  The voice belonged to Quinn Youngman, the man in the life of my friend and tenant Rita, who cut him off. ‘Don’t you Dylan me, Quinn! The only Bob Dylan you heard until you’d finished medical school was some easy-listening Muzak version ofBlowin’ in the Wind, if that, so don’t play Dr Hip with me, because I know better. If Willie bit you – and it’s a mega if – it was because you stepped on his paw.’

  So, the fight was a dog fight after all. Rita’s Scottish terrier, Willie, was a handsome, spunky, stylish fellow with flashing eyes and, on occasion, flashing teeth. The worst of Quinn’s claim was thus its credibility. I’d cured Willie of flying at my ankles, but he hadn’t necessarily generalized from my ankles to other people’s. Never before, though, had Willie ever even nipped. Had he wanted to? Oh, yes. But he had superb self-control. Bite inhibition. He was a dog who understood never to put his teeth on flesh. Or so I’d believed, anyway. But as any dog expert will tell you, if the circumstances are perfectly wrong, any dog will bite. Lassie. Benji. Rin Tin Tin.

  ‘With one of your big, heavy, affected, and totally unnecessary hiking boots! Here we are, a fifteen-minute walk from Harvard Square, which is the only place you’re ever likely to hike to, and for that, you couldn’t just wear ordinary shoes?’

  ‘Suddenly you’re a fitness expert, Rita? You? She of the bound feet?’

  ‘I like high heels. So did you until five minutes ago.’

  ‘When your goddamned dog bit me.’

  That was when Rita really started hollering. ‘You stomped on Willie’s foot. And he did not break the skin. In fact, I am far from sure that he bit you at all.’

  ‘Rita, I am bleeding,’ Quinn shouted back. ‘Bleeding!’

  As Rita had mentioned, Quinn was a doctor, but he was a psychiatrist whose specialty was psychopharmacology. According to Rita, Quinn was a clinical genius when it came to prescribing anti-anxiety agents, antidepressant medications, antipsychotic drugs, and anti-so-forth-and-so-ons, presumably including pills, capsules, liquids, and miscellaneous other elixirs that helped patients to become calm, cheery, or compos mentis enough to benefit from talking to Rita, who is a clinical psychologist. Still, Quinn presumably remembered enough from medical school to recognize blood when he saw it.

  Rita, however, responded by lowering her voice and delivering a shrink’s version of a low blow. ‘Hysteria is not helping. And it’s very unbecoming.’

  ‘I am not hysterical!’ he shrieked. ‘I am never hysterical!’

  My animals are unused to raised voices. My cat, Tracker, was in my office, which is her abode. India and Lady, the two dogs who’d have reacted strongly, were with my husband, Steve, as was one of our three malamutes, Rowdy, who was having his teeth cleaned. Let me hasten to explain that Steve is not a dentist. He’s a veterinarian. Anyway, when the ruckus started, I’d been in the kitchen grooming our other two mala-mutes, Kimi and Sammy. If India, our German shepherd dog, had been there, she’d have interpreted the shouting as a threat to our household. Lady, our timid pointer, would’ve been frightened silly. Our King of the Castle, Rowdy the Unflappable, would’ve assumed that no matter what the nature of the dispute, he’d have the brawn and brains to come out on top. In fact, Kimi is even more brilliant than Rowdy. Furthermore, she is fearless. As to Sammy, even I, a dog professional, am baffled by him. Rowdy’s son, Sammy, too, is a dark gray and white intact male Alaskan malamute and a successful show dog. Furthermore, Sammy is immensely strong, ridiculously friendly, obsessed with food, and otherwise absolutely typical of his breed. There is, however, a naivety about Sammy’s open-hearted innocence that always amazes me. If Sammy encounters a snarling dog, he looks at me with wide-eyed surprise, as if he can’t believe that there’s a creature on earth who doesn’t love him. In some previous existence, perhaps he was a flower child.

  All this is to say that Kimi needed no protection from the ugly sounds of Rita and Quinn’s fight, whereas Sammy, who was on the grooming table, leaned into me and trained those trusting brown eyes on my presumably all-knowing face. ‘N
othing to worry about, Mr Handsome,’ I said. Even so, I got him off the table and into the wire crate that lives in the kitchen, and I put Kimi in a down-stay.

  Then I opened the back door. When Quinn was at his best, he wasn’t the sort of person to whom you could say, ‘Cut that out! You’re upsetting my dog!’ That’s a damning comment on his character. But my opinion of Quinn didn’t matter. Rita’s did. So, instead of blurting out the raw truth, I said, ‘I couldn’t help overhearing. Quinn, if you’ve been bitten, you should wash the wound. I have first-aid stuff.’

  I’ll concede that Quinn was not bad looking. He was tall and had the kind of distinguished air that appeals to Rita. As she’d said, he had on heavy hiking boots. They hadn’t left bloody tracks on the floor or on the stairs that run up to her third-floor apartment. Blood would’ve soaked right through the fabric of his khakis. I saw no sign of blood on him at all. The person who looked wounded was Rita: her pretty face was so bloodless that her careful make-up was identifiable as such, and her artfully streaked cap of dark hair was mussed, as if she’d been running her manicured hands through it. Although she was dressed in her New Yorker’s idea of an informal outfit – a beige linen jacket and pants, a white shell, and relatively low-heeled leather shoes – her distress made her look almost childlike, especially by comparison with Quinn, who was twenty years her senior.

  ‘I’m on my way to Mount Auburn,’ he snapped.

  The glorious red hair that runs in my family bypassed me, but I have traces of the quick temper. I said, ‘Mount Auburn Hospital, I presume. Not Mount Auburn Cemetery.’ Civility kicked in, as did loyalty to Rita, whose view of this pompous SOB was different from mine. ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘Do you want a ride to the ER?’

  ‘I have my Lexus,’ he said. Typical! Since Quinn owned only one vehicle, a simple ‘I have my car’ would’ve been unambiguous. If fate presented my husband, Steve, with a Rolls, he’d call it ‘my car’. Actually, Steve would be so embarrassed by the evidence of conspicuous consumption that he’d get rid of the Rolls before he had time to call it anything.

  Without saying goodbye to either Rita or me, Quinn left.

  ‘Do we need to check Willie out?’ I asked. ‘His paw?’

  ‘That was the first thing I did. Quinn felt slighted. But Willie is fine.’

  ‘Steve can take a look later. Come in. If you don’t mind . . .’

  ‘ . . . dog hair,’ she said.

  ‘Everyone’s shedding. I’m not exactly grooming. I’m just doing preventive housework. Kimi and Sammy. The other dogs are with Steve.’

  The kitchen was less hairy than you might expect, mainly because I’d been taking breaks to vacuum up undercoat. I shoved the grooming table out of the way, stowed the forced-air dryer and the Dyson canister vac under it, gave the dogs free run of the kitchen, and started making coffee.

  ‘I keep reminding myself that Quinn is in good therapy,’ said Rita, for whom psychotherapy is a religious vocation. From her priestly viewpoint, those fifty-minute hours are sacred rites. She believes in the power of her chosen form of prayer. For once, I refrained from saying anything about dog worship, the Sacred Animal, God’s woofing, furry proof of celestial design and thus of boundless, bounding, leaping, panting love in this otherwise bleak universe; nor did I point out the mundane and obvious, namely that Quinn’s accusation against a representative of the above mentioned Sacred Animal was a sign of bad character. And if the particular representative, Willie, had never liked Quinn? Well, Willie’s dislike had been a premonitory sign of Quinn’s deficiencies as a human being, hadn’t it? But I was married, and Rita was once again without a human partner, or so I suspected. Consequently, I kept my beliefs and opinions to myself and let Kimi and Sammy minister to Rita. Kimi, who is preternaturally sensitive, licked Rita’s hands as if they were ailing puppies, and Sammy put on a distracting show by dropping to the floor at Rita’s feet, rolling onto his back, displaying his white tummy, and foolishly waving his big paws in the air.

  As I made and served coffee, I kept hoping that Rita wouldn’t think of the possible consequences of a dog bite. Unfortunately, as I put her mug on the table in front of her, she asked, ‘What happens now? The hospital is going to ask him about the bite.’

  ‘If there was one,’ I said. A puncture wound might not have bled, but Quinn hadn’t just claimed to have been bitten; he’d said that he was bleeding.

  ‘If there was,’ Rita said, ‘I honestly don’t think that it requires medical attention. At worst, Willie nipped him. Or pinched him. I didn’t see any blood. But who knows? Quinn could still report a bite.’

  ‘If he does, all that’ll happen is that you’ll get a call from some Cambridge official, and you’ll have to show Willie’s rabies certificate. Steve can print you out Willie’s whole history of immunizations. Don’t worry about it.’

  Rita fished dog hair out of her coffee. ‘I don’t think that Quinn would sue me.’ There was doubt in her voice.

  ‘Of course not. What would he sue you for? Besides, he wouldn’t sue you. Look, his feelings were hurt. Willie was, uh, unfriendly to him.’

  Rita crowed.

  ‘Then instead of fussing over Quinn, you made sure that Willie’s paw was OK. Quinn was jealous.’ I added something that I didn’t believe. ‘He’ll get over it.’

  ‘Holly, what he’ll do is spend hours in therapy figuring out how he happened to get involved with a woman who loves her dog more than she loves him.’

  ‘Rita, you wouldn’t let a patient get away with that. You did say that Quinn’s in good therapy.’

  ‘He is,’ she said. ‘Or I hope so.’

  TWO

  After Rita left, I returned to the morning’s tasks. In the short time since I’d stopped brushing and blowing out undercoat, Kimi and Sammy had managed to release yet more of the woolly stuff. It’s not fair to blame the dogs, is it? I mean, they don’t shed deliberately. They have no more control over their shedding than I do. No, the fault lies with dog hair itself, which has a perverse mind of its own. For the moment, I’d had enough of its evil ways. Once the rain stopped and the yard dried out, I’d take the dogs and the grooming equipment outside, where the neighborhood birds would do the clean-up for me. I folded the grooming table, put away the dryer, emptied the Dyson’s canister, vacuumed, emptied the canister again, vacuumed yet again, and eventually returned to the task of making enemies, by which I mean turning down the applications of people who had applied to adopt dogs from our local Alaskan malamute rescue group.

  I exaggerate. Screening applications can be fun. I outright love making the perfect match between a homeless dog and a wonderful applicant, and I don’t mind helping people to decide that my challenging breed would be a poor match. It’s no fun to disappoint people, but I’m just never going to find the right rescue malamute for the family with three Chihuahuas, five cats, two parrots, eight hamsters, six pygmy goats, thirty-five chickens, and a flock of exotic geese, especially if the resident species all get along beautifully, and the proposed dog is expected to do the same. Introduce an Alaskan malamute into the peaceable kingdom, and what you get is warfare. When I turn down an application like that one, I always think of the dogs awaiting homes and feel guilty. From the malamute viewpoint, it’s a delectable home. It’s hors d’oeuvres, a poultry course, a meat course . . . and here am I depriving a big, hungry dog of a week-long feast!

  But the applicants I absolutely hate dealing with are the people who are going to give me a hard time, and our other volunteers feel the same way. Almost all of our applications are submitted online. There’s a special section of our website where volunteers claim applications from a database. We then reply by email or by phone. The alpha figure of our organization, Betty Burley, has decreed that every applicant gets a polite response – no one disagrees – and that applications are to be claimed in the order in which they were submitted, first come, first served. In reality, troublesome-looking applications sometimes sit unclaimed for weeks. I handle them only when it�
��s obvious that no one else is going to or when I feel like a bad human being who needs to make recompense. Good Catholics go to confession and say Hail Marys. My act of contrition consists of telling people that they won’t be allowed to adopt malamutes.

  ‘Mrs Di Bartolomeo,’ I said, having verified her identity, ‘this is Holly Winter from Malamute Rescue. Thank you for your application.’

  ‘Well, it’s really my husband who wants one,’ she said.

  Question on the application: Do all members of your household know that you plan to adopt a malamute? At least Mr Di Bartolomeo had told his wife. Men don’t always. More commonly, teenage boys don’t tell their parents.

  ‘The application is in both names,’ I said. ‘Are you familiar with malamutes? Did you read the material on our website?’ The website is packed with warnings about food stealing, predatory behavior, shedding, and the notorious malamute wild streak.

  ‘Oh, Don did,’ she said. ‘He’s been after me for a dog for years, ever since his last one got killed by a car. I finally gave in.’

  The husband had written that his last dog had died of cancer at the age of fifteen. If I’d checked the mandatory vet reference, I’d have uncovered the truth, but when I suspect that I’ll have to reject an applicant, I don’t bother to check the vet reference.

  Lying to us is grounds for rejection. Besides, it offends me. In a token act of revenge, I asked, ‘Mrs Di Bartolomeo, who does the vacuuming in your house?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘And you’ve been told about the shedding.’

  ‘Oh, that’s why I gave in.’

  ‘Pardon me?’

  ‘Don says that they don’t shed. A medium-sized dog that doesn’t shed. That’s what I told him he could get.’

  I broke the news. Our conversation ended.

  I made two more calls and left voice messages. Then I reached a man named Irving Jensen, who lived in Lynn, an industrial city on the coast about ten miles north of Boston that’s best known as the subject of the following piece of folkloric doggerel: