Paws before dying (15 page)

“No one will care! And it’s outdoors.”

I gave in. “Okay. The agreement is that you’re responsible for her. But don’t blame me if the judge gives you a lecture about it, and he might.”

“He probably won’t even notice. I’m taking her to the Square, okay?”

“Fine. Good idea.” One of the reasons I love Cambridge is that when you’re training a dog, you want to work him in places that look, sound, and smell as much as possible like a dog show in Harvard Square, the human Westminster.

“And do you think I could use the car tonight? There’s a party at Seth’s.”

Kevin Dennehy appeared on the sidewalk, overheard, and demanded: “Do his parents know about it?”

“Hi, Kevin,” Leah answered, ignoring the question.

“Do they?”

“Kevin, relax,” I said. “It’s Newton. Would you let me worry: about his parents?”

“I would if you would,” he said.

“Yes, his parents know about it,” Leah said. “They’ll be; there. See you later.”

She and Kimi trotted away, and Kevin rushed off to meet some guys at the Y for a few hours of what Rita—but definitely not Kevin—calls male bonding. Leah and Kimi returned at five and left for Newton at seven, just as Steve and I took off for dinner with some friends of his in Watertown who have three rescue greyhounds. We tried to leave at eleven because Steve had to get back to check on a recuperating komondor, but it was hard to get away. When we did, Steve was worried about his patient. Because Appleton is a one-way street—you can’t turn onto it from Concord Ave.—he dropped me on Concord opposite the front of my house instead of detouring around to reach my driveway and my back door, the one I always use.

I usually say that my house is on the comer of Appleton and Concord, but what’s right on the comer, occupying a rectangular section of what would otherwise be part of my yard, is a long, very narrow, rather whimsical one-story structure known as a spite building and presumably built out of spite, revenge for some long-forgotten grievance. It’s hard to imagine why else anyone would have built it. For a while, it was a sandalmaker’s shop, but it doesn’t look any more like a store than it looks like a house. In fact, especially because it has stood empty since the sandal shop closed, I didn’t think of it as a building at all, but as walls that helped to enclose my property, an extension of my fence on which my dogs liked to lift their legs, thus prompting unliberated passersby to mistake Kimi for a male.

I crossed Concord and covered the narrow stretch of sidewalk that runs between the cars parked on Appleton and the spite building. Beyond the building, the sidewalk widens, and my own fence begins, but it didn’t look like mine anymore. The fence is taller than I am, and so, I think, was the swastika spray-painted on it. The thing was about six feet by six feet, or maybe its obscenity and my rage made it feel bigger than it was. It jumped out at me, loomed over me, and swore wordlessly, but there were words there, too, sprayed on my fence,
my
fence: “Gas them all,” I read, and “Jew lovers.” I wanted to scream, cry, and belt someone—I actually did slam a foot hard against the fence—but I also felt a peculiar, irrational impulse to hide the thing: to rush to the cellar, grab a wide brush and a can of white paint, and blot it out before anyone else saw it. It was an urge to whitewash someone else’s filth, filth directed at me, an impulse to cleanse myself.

A car passed by on Appleton, its lights illuminating the fence. I wondered who was in the car, whether anyone had seen the swastika, whether it had hit home. I couldn’t paint it out until the police saw it, but I could call them, and I could screen it with something, throw something over it. Even so, Leah would have to know. I couldn’t protect her from it, and when I wanted to wipe it out and be alone with my unquestioning dogs, she’d need to talk about it.

I could see from the driveway that the kitchen lights were on, and when I first walked in and caught sight of Leah, I thought that she’d not only discovered the thing but had felt so befouled by it that she’d taken a bath and washed her hair. Water was dripping from her curls onto the kitchen table, where she sat, and onto the adoring dogs whose chins she was rubbing.

“Damn, Leah. I hoped—”

But she interrupted me. “I am going to kill whoever did this! It is not funny. Practical jokes are not funny. They’re just stupid.”

I dumped my purse on the counter and sat down. “It doesn’t seem like a practical joke to me,” I said. “It feels a lot worse than that. It’s not just some prank. You saw it when you drove up?”

“When I drove up? How stupid do you think I am? If I’d seen it when I drove up, I’d’ve known it was there, and I wouldn’t’ve got hit by it. I didn’t notice it until it fell on me. I mean, I noticed the screen door wasn’t shut right, but how was I supposed to—”

“Hold it. Start over.”

“I drove in. I turned off the car. I got Kimi out of the back. Then I went up the stairs. The screen door was open a little, and I just thought, you know how it sticks sometimes? It doesn’t shut all the way unless you pull it or push it. All I did was open it, and this bucket of water fell on my head. Is that stupid? You know what it is? It’s juvenile.”

“That’s it?”

“Well, you know, it’s not nothing. I just got wet, but the bucket could’ve hurt somebody, you know, if it’d landed hard on somebody’s head. If it’d been you...”

“I hate to tell you,” I said, “but it’s not the only thing. I’ll tell you about it.”

“What is it?”

“I’ll show you. But, first, uh, I’ve got to call the police, unless... You don’t know if Kevin’s home?”

She shook her head. “I didn’t see him. Holly, did something really bad happen?”

“Yes,” I said.

It was after midnight. Instead of knocking on Mrs. Dennehy’s door or phoning there so late, I called the police. Maybe because I explained that I was Kevin’s next-door neighbor and asked whether he happened to be there, a cruiser and two uniformed officers arrived pretty quickly, at least for Cambridge, which is not Newton, but not Boston, either.

One of the officers looked about fifty, the other about fifteen, ‘ but I could tell that the police-academy etiquette course they’d both taken hadn’t changed over the years. I’m sure they both got A’s, too, because they never addressed either Leah or me without calling us “Ma’am,” and both displayed that mastery of facial expression that consists of showing none whatsoever.

Kevin Dennehy certainly didn’t pull any higher than a C. Although he Ma’ams dutifully enough—not to me, of course, at least not anymore—his feelings register on his face and in his voice. That night, before he caught sight of Leah and me, he wasn’t even making any effort to disguise them. He directed a muted bellow at his brethren: “What the hell is this all about?” Then he got closer and saw us and the dogs. “Sorry. Didn’t see you. What the hell is going on here?”

We were on the sidewalk, and I pointed to the fence.

“Holy Christ,” Kevin said. Then he read aloud: “Gas them all. Jew lovers.” His solid, good voice felt like a husky, gloved hand that picked up the sprayed words and deposited them in a clear plastic evidence bag.

The child officer was shining a flashlight on the swastika. The color was primary red, not the barn red of my house, but it was close enough to gall me. I’d always liked the color of my house, exactly the shade my mother always used on the barn in Owls Head, and I didn’t want anyone attaching bigoted, ugly associations to my house and Marissa’s bam. Bigotry works like a permanent adhesive that glues the ugly to the innocent. During World War II, Americans started saying “Alsatians” instead of “German shepherds,” but fools chased the dogs, tied cans to their tails, and persecuted them, anyway.

“Kevin,” I said, kicking the bottom of the swastika, “I don’t want this garbage on my fence. When can I paint it out? Can I do it now?”

“We have paint,” Leah added. “I’ll get it.”

“No,” Kevin told her. “Not yet. I’ll let you know.”

“Kevin, I am not having a goddamned swastika on my fence. I can cover it up. What if we hang some sheets over it? Nail them on or something.”

He sighed. “Sure.”

While he conferred with the guys in uniform, Leah and I took the dogs inside, where I dragged a white sheet out of a closet and, after some inspired ferreting in the cellar, brought up some odds and ends: plastic drop cloths, a hammer, a fistful of nails, two trim brashes, and an almost-full can of medium-blue paint left over from a chair I’d done a long time ago.

“Leah,” I said. “Was Willie Johnson at the party tonight? Did you see him tonight?”

She shook her head.

“I didn’t mention his name to those guys, but I have to tell Kevin. I haven’t told him about that radio. The tape player. But he has to know.”

“No!” she said. “That is not fair. You don’t know.”

“Leah, I have no intention of protecting whoever did this, and who else would? This was not some random thing. It was meant for us. Anyway, I’m not asking you. I’m telling you that I am telling Kevin the whole story. Look, in the meantime, I have an idea. Have you ever heard about something that happened when the Germans occupied Denmark?”

She shook her head. I could see that she was angry, but I went on.

“Well, they ordered all the Jews to wear armbands with Stars of David, and... Maybe I don’t have the details right, but this is the idea. They gave the order, and the King of Denmark did a beautiful thing. He wore a Star of David, a Jewish star. He put on the armband, and then he went riding, or he went for a walk in a public park, or some other place like that, so everyone would see him.”

“Like, ‘Screw you,’ ” she said appreciatively.

“Yes,” I said a little uncertainly. “Well, what I think he meant was, ‘If you do this to anybody, you do it to me.’ Or maybe, ‘If you persecute anyone, you persecute everyone.’ Anyway, we can’t get rid of the swastika yet, but we can do more or less what he did.”

We locked the dogs in my bedroom, spread a plastic drop cloth on the kitchen floor, and painted a defiant banner on a king-size sheet: a blue Star of David on a white background. It took us only a few minutes. When we carried it outside, Kevin and the other cops, who were still there, thought we were crazy. They wouldn’t let us hang it over the graffiti—the blue paint was still wet—but I stood on a stepladder and nailed it to the top of the fence,
my
fence, so it hung next to the swastika. Leah probably thought I was crazy, too, but I felt wonderful. I am a Jew, the banner announced. I am Danish royalty.

Chapter 16

“AND tomorrow,” I told Kevin, “I am adding ecumenical detail. A cross, unbroken. Pictures of Vishnu and Shiva. Anything else I can think of. Is there a symbol of Seventh-Day Adventism?”

Leah had gone to bed, the uniformed guys had departed, and Kevin and I were sitting on the back steps. He was sipping Budweiser. I was drinking milk.

“Hey, Kevin, what were you doing up, anyway? Did we wake you?”

“Nah, I was glued to the tube.” He happens to suffer from insomnia, but whenever Rita calls it that, he gets furious. Last winter, when he went through a bad bout, she sat him down and delivered a serious lecture about stress management. In her version, she tried to get him to take a Zen meditation course. He reports that she tried to sell him to the Eastern brain-snatchers.

“So you were home?” I said. “Presumably, you were home when it happened.”

“Yeah. Like I said. Now ask me again.”

“Hey, there’s no reason why you should’ve... I mean, you’re not some patrolman assigned to this beat.” That’s one source of his insomnia. He grew up here, and he feels responsible for the entire neighborhood. “Anyway, there’s some stuff you should know about this. And other stuff. And I have a match tomorrow, and I don’t want to be wiped out, so I’m going to say it all fast, and I want you just to listen and not yell. First of all, you remember what happened in Newton, the graffiti, at the park, right? Well, in Leah’s dog-training class there, there’s a kid…"

I started to tell him about Willie, Dale, Edna, and the boom box, but before I even finished the part about returning the present, he interrupted me to say that the Newton police had already made the connection between the graffiti in the park and Willie’s presence at the class, and hadn’t he told me not to go there again?

“But Willie didn’t necessarily do it,” I said. “Either the other time or this thing. The whole family is, well, Rita would say that it’s a dysfunctional family, I guess. And how come you I know about them? Are you on some community liaison panel or something?”

“One,” he said, “Saporski’s mother still lives in Newton.” As I may have mentioned, John Saporski is one of Kevin’s best friends in the department. They used to play handball together at the Y, and they still go running sometimes. “And when this crap gets plastered all over a wall there, she expects him to do something about it. Two, M. D. Johnson and Sons is Cambridge.”

“What?”

“It’s in Cambridge.”

“What is it?”

“Like the trucks say: disposable containers to the beverage industry.”

“Which means?”

“Plastic cups,” he said. “They’re distributors. They distribute beverage containers.”

“So you know about them from here? From Cambridge? How come? Do they distribute something else, too?”