Bride & Groom (5 page)

As I fed Rowdy and Kimi, checked my E-mail, made then bed, tidied up, and contemplated the trip to the mall, an! unhappy image came to me. Rita and I had gone to the same mall before. Its stores were too pricey for me, but Rita had hauled me along to advise her about selecting a present for my cousin Leah. What I now saw in my mind’s eye wasn’t the shop-lined interior with its glittering escalators and lush tropical vegetation, but the adjoining three-story concrete parking garage. In contrast to the one at The Charles Hotel, the mall’s garage was above ground. Still, it was undeniably a parking garage and almost certainly darker and emptier than the bright, popular, well-patrolled garage beneath the hotel. If only the stupid mall allowed dogs, we could park anywhere we pleased. As it was, we’d have to avoid the garage and use the parking lot instead.

By the time I was ready for my second cup of coffee, the paper had arrived. The murder of Dr. Laura Skipcliff was reported in a section called New England News Briefe and consisted of only a couple of paragraphs. According to the paper, Dr. Laura Skipcliff, fifty-seven, a nationally renowned anesthesiologist from New York City, had been staying at The Charles Hotel while she attended a medical conference at which she’d been scheduled to speak. She had apparently driven her rental car into the hotel’s garage at 10:42 P.M. The body had been found by another hotel guest at midnight. Authorities were questioning hotel employees and conference participants, including Dr. Skipcliff’s ex-husband, Dr. Dominic DiTomasso. There followed the usual statement that the police were investigating all possible leads, as if they’d consider doing otherwise. Knowing Kevin Dennehy as I did, I felt certain that one of the leads he’d vigorously pursue would be the presence in Boston of the victim’s ex-husband. Kevin’s experience in law enforcement had taught him to see marriage principally as an institution designed to create motives and opportunities for violence. It seemed to me that the first frustration Kevin would encounter in investigating the murder of Laura Skipcliff would be the aggravating fact of her divorce: Kevin would be irked that Dr. Dominic DiTomasso was Dr. Laura Skipcliff s
ex
-husband.

CHAPTER 5

The dossier on Laura Skipcliff, M.D., like the other four dossiers that eventually came into my possession, consisted of a neatly labeled letter-size manila folder that contained pages I printed from the World Wide Web. Laura Skipcliff’s name had appeared on many web sites; hers was a thick folder.

The first page of her dossier showed the results of a search using InfoSpace, a popular “people finder,” as such sites are called, a superduper internet phone and address directory. According to InfoSpace, “Skipcliff, Laura” lived on East Eighty-third Street in New York, NY 10021. Her phone number began with the familiar Manhattan area code: 212. Beneath the directory listing, InfoSpace offered the options of getting a map of the area, finding nearby businesses, and  adding Laura Skipcliff to an address book. Three lines followed:

Find out more about Laura Skipcliff.

Find Laura Skipcliff on Classmates.com!

Send flowers to Laura Skipcliff.

The next page was similar to the first, but came from another people finder, Any Who. Its listing was for “Skipcliff, Laura, MD,” and specified the street number. The line below the directory information offered the opportunity to get a map and directions to her address, and asked,
Did you go to school with Laura MD Skipcliff?

The next three pages showed pictures of Laura Skipcliff, photos printed in black and white. The first, which had come from her hospital's web site, was a small close-up of her face, together with a paragraph about her. Her skin was deeply lined, and she had prominent pouches under her eyes. I wondered whether cosmetic efforts had backfired; perhaps makeup had sunk into the creases of her skin, thus highlighting the signs of age. Her hair suggested a woman who’d cared about her appearance. It was dark and cut in an attractive, youthful style, shoulder length and smoothly straight. The second photo was an enlargement of the first. The quality of the original graphics file must have been poor. The blowup blurred Laura Skipcliffs features and grotesquely exaggerated her haggardness. On the following page, however, printed from the web site of a modern dance company, was a group shot of three donors attending a fund-raising dinner. Laura Skipcliff was on the right. She’d dressed up for the occasion. She wore a short-sleeved dress in what I guessed was black. Her hair was a bit bouncier than in the previous picture, and she wore earrings, bracelets, and an ornate necklace. It was now easy to see that she’d once been pretty.

Next in the dossier came information that naive people are shocked to discover is readily available online. A page printed from AnyBirthday.com revealed that Laura Skipcliffs birthday was October 27. She had been fifty-seven at the time of her death. The site offered the unintentionally gruesome opportunity to receive an E-mail reminder when her next birthday approached. The USSearch site confirmed that Laura Skipcliff had lived in Manhattan and that her age had been fifty-seven. For a fee, the site would’ve gone on to look for judgments, liens, bankruptcies, and a great deal more. Indeed, the people finders and the other free sites all abounded in low-cost opportunities to find out almost anything about anyone: to search Social Security records, court records, and property records. Searchers were also exhorted to click on hyperlinks that would presumably benefit themselves:
Get a home loan, Rent a truck, Refinance now, Save on lodging, Find contractors, Enjoy hassle-free shopping,
and
Meet Mr. Right.

As it was, the results of free searches left no doubt that Dr. Skipcliff had been a wealthy woman. The web sites of four or five arts organizations listed her as a donor; she’d been especially supportive of dance. She’d served on the board of a well-known dance center in the Berkshires. InfoSpace and AnyWho had provided an address and phone number for her in that lovely region of Western Massachusetts. The town where she’d had what was presumably a summer house was one that posted its property assessments on the web. Laura Skipcliff had owned a house that sat on 2.4 acres. The assessed value of the land was high. The building was assessed at three times the value of the land.

The remainder of the dossier documented Laura Skip-cliffs professional affiliations, achievements, and publications. The hospital web site that displayed the close-up of her face also gave her E-mail address:
[email protected]
. She’d attended medical school at Cornell. The papers she’d published had titles that were both impressive and, to me, incomprehensible.

At the end of the dossier were pages about a meeting j sponsored by Harvard Medical School to be held in Boston from August 21 through August 25. According to the announcement, Laura Skipcliff was scheduled to present a paper on the morning of August 24 and to serve on a panel that afternoon. The dossier contained nothing about Laura Skipcliff’s murder.

CHAPTER 6

The central tenet of canine fundamentalism is the misleadingly simple-sounding principle that dogs are everywhere. Having embraced this delightful reality, we believers are never surprised to find that interspecies enlightenment lurks in seemingly improbable places. Had I been an agnostic, a skeptic, an outright atheist, a blasphemist, a heretic, or merely the sort of nonpracticing hypocrite who claims to worship dogs but doesn’t own one, I’d have been astonished to attain spiritual transcendence in so bourgeois and materialistic a spot as the Bloomingdale’s department store at the Chestnut Hill Mall. As it was, the epiphany felt perfectly natural. All this is to say that in entering my name and Steve’s in Bloomie’s bridal registry, I abruptly and joyously reached a mystical and highly desirable state that had previous eluded me: All of a sudden, I knew exactly what it feels like to be a dog.

Not one to keep divine revelation to myself, I embarrassed Rita in front of the Bloomingdale’s salesperson by blurting out, “Rita, I finally get this wedding stuff! Everything just fell in place. Rita, the wedding is a dog show! I’m the bride. I'm going Best in Show!”

It was Friday afternoon. I’d fought the commuter traffic to the Chestnut Hill Mall strictly out of loyalty to Rita, who was apparently convinced that if I failed to register at Bloomingdale’s, my marriage to Steve would be an unlawful sham; in Rita’s view, bigamy was vastly preferable to any marriage unblessed by Bloomie’s. To please Rita, I’d changed out of kennel clothes—old jeans and a stained T-shirt—and into a respectable pair of khakis and a white blouse. Rita wore a white linen suit. Her short, bouncy hair was streaked by the sun as well as by artifice, and she not only wore heels but knew how to walk in them. Until a few moments earlier, when the true nature of weddings had revealed itself to me, I’d shuffled reluctantly after her while muttering bitter complaints about china patterns and white gowns. Now that I grasped the project, I was thoroughly behind it.

“You know, Holly,” Rita said, “I sometimes wonder whether you should be committed.” Rita was a clinical psychologist. By
committed,
she meant “locked up,” as opposed to “wholeheartedly pledged,” as in,
I am committed to the wellbeing of my animals.

“I’m committed to getting married,” I said. “I’m committed to Steve. And now that I understand weddings, I’m committed to doing this one right. You see, it all came to me while I was registering. I had a distinct sense of déjà vu. And then it came to me that every time I’d ever entered a dog in a show, I’d done exactly what I was doing now, and I knew that I was filling out an entry blank just the way I do for Rowdy and Kimi, only this time I was doing it for myself. Anyway, I’m done grumbling about wedding plans. Registering for presents is fine! What they are, you see, is
trophies.
And what we’re doing here today is putting together the
premium list."

Rita sighed. “Just as long as you don’t register for cheap stoneware and cheesy highball glasses, that’s just grand.”

“In the old days,” I said with my newfound enthusiasm, “trophies used to be sterling silver. But it’s awfully expensive. Besides, my mother left me the sterling that her dogs won. And I have some crystal, too. You still see crystal at shows, and it’s really beautiful. Of course, the trophies I own are mainly bowls and stuff. But we don’t need anything to drink out of. Steve and I discussed that. We own a million mugs and glasses.”

“That don’t match,” said Rita, “and have dogs on them.”

“Not exclusively. The obedience ones have high jumps. And some of them have names of kennel clubs. But I do get the point. If we’re giving a show, we want to give it with style.” Although Rita was professionally alarmed by the reason for my change in attitude, she seized on my new eagerness and led me through the areas of Bloomingdale’s that displayed china, crystal, and silver. Just as some fortunate people are said to possess “an eye for dogs,” Rita evidently possessed an eye for expensive household objects. The prices horrified me. The cost of one place setting in the china pattern Rita favored was what I’d have expected to pay for an entire set of dishes.

“It’s china,” she corrected me. “Not just dishes. And when people buy wedding gifts, they don’t want to buy junk.”

“My friends can’t afford this stuff. And what if I drop it?”

“You won’t use it very often,” she said.

“Then why am I asking for it?”

“Every culture has its rites and rituals for marking important life transitions. Marriage is a major life event. In our culture, doing what we’re doing now is one of the rites of passage that mark it. Besides which, Steve’s first marriage was a disaster. He deserves to have everything right this time.”

“When you get married,” I said, “you can register for the same pattern. At these prices, we’ll be lucky to own two place settings each, so we’ll share. When we get together for dinner, we’ll pool resources, and maybe there’ll be enough plates for all four of us.”

"Who said anything about me?” Rita asked.

“No one needed to. You and Artie—”

“Well, we’re admittedly heading in that direction, I guess,” she conceded.

Rita led me through the selection of a china pattern, white with a blue rim. Steve, who’d refused to accompany us, had said that I was welcome to pick out anything that wasn’t covered with flowers.

“If you ask whether the pattern is available in dog bowls,” Rita warned, “I will kill you here and now.”

“I hadn’t thought of it until you mentioned it,” I said. We then selected a silver pattern and, over my mild protest, crystal wineglasses. A Bloomie’s salesperson then helped us to choose a variety of affordable objects, including salad forks. Well, she intended to be helpful. Some of her suggestions struck me as ridiculous. Steve wasn’t the kind of person who’d don the chefs hat and apron that were supposedly popular, and he and I both thought of pizza as something to order at a pizzeria, not as something to whip up at home using a pizza set. An object known as a “tart pan” hit me as a wildly inappropriate wedding present. Brides weren’t necessarily virginal these days, but
tart
was going a bit far. A Wüsthof cutlery set—knives stuck into a wooden storage block—seemed like a practical choice for couples who looked forward to years of marital discord and wanted to be sure to have sharp weapons handy when they moved beyond harsh words.