Port Mortuary (6 page)

Certainly the EMTs, the police, didn’t leave a helpless greyhound in Norton’s Woods yesterday, lost and alone in the New England weather. Benton told me it was eleven degrees this morning in Cambridge, and before the night is out, it will snow. Maybe the dog is at the fire department’s headquarters, well fed and attended to around the clock. Maybe Investigator Law took it home or some other police person did. It’s also possible no one realized the dog belonged to the man who died. Dear God, that would be awful.

“What happened to the greyhound?” I have to ask.

“Got no idea,” Marino says, to my dismay. “Nobody knew until this morning when Lucy and me saw what you’re looking at. The EMTs don’t remember seeing a greyhound running loose, not that they were looking, but the gate leading into Norton’s Woods was open when they got there. As you probably know, the gate’s never locked and is wide open a lot of the time.”

“He can’t survive in freezing conditions. How could people not notice the poor thing unleashed and running loose? Because I can’t imagine he wasn’t running around in the park for at least a few minutes before he ran out of the open gate. Common sense would tell you that when his master collapsed, the dog didn’t suddenly flee from the woods and onto the street.”

“A lot of people take their dogs off the leashes and let them run loose in the parks like Norton’s Woods,” Lucy says. “I know I do with Jet Ranger.”

Jet Ranger is her ancient bulldog, and he doesn’t exactly run.

“So maybe nobody noticed because it didn’t look out of the ordinary,” she adds.

“Plus, I think everybody was a little preoccupied with some guy dropping dead,” Marino states the obvious.

I look out at military housing on a poorly lit road, at aircraft that are bright and big like planets in the overcast dark. I can’t make sense of what I’m being told. I’m surprised the greyhound didn’t stay close to his master. Maybe the dog panicked or there’s some other reason no one noticed him.

“The dog’s bound to show up,” Marino goes on. “No way people in an area like that are going to ignore a greyhound wandering around by itself. My guess is one of the neighbors or a student has it. Unless it’s possible the guy was whacked and the killer took the dog.”

“Why?” I puzzle.

“Like you’ve been saying, we need to keep an open mind,” he answers. “How do we know that whoever did it wasn’t watching nearby? And then at an opportune moment, took off with the dog, acting like it belonged to him?”

“But why?”

“It could be evidence that would lead to the killer for some reason,” he suggests. “Maybe lead to an identification. A game. A thrill. A souvenir. Who the hell knows? But you’ll notice from the video clips at one point the leash was taken off him, and guess what? It hasn’t showed up. It didn’t come in with the headphones or the body.”

The dog’s name is Sock. On the iPad’s display, the man is walking and clucking his tongue, telling Sock it’s time to go. “Let’s go, Sock,” he coaxes in a pleasant baritone voice. “Come on, you lazy doggie, it’s time for a walk and a shit.” I detect a slight accent, possibly British or Australian. It could be South African, which would be weird, a weird coincidence, and I need to get South Africa off my mind.
Focus on what’s before you,
I tell myself as Sock jumps off the couch, and I notice he has no collar. Sock— a male, I assume, based on the name—is thin, and his ribs show slightly, which is typical for greyhounds, and he is mature, possibly old, and one of his ears is ragged as if once torn. A rescue retired from the racetrack, I feel sure, and I wonder if he has a microchip. If so and if we can find him, we can trace where he’s from and possibly who adopted him.

A pair of hands enters the frame as the man bends over to loop a red slip lead around Sock’s long, tapered neck, and I notice a silver metal watch with a tachymeter on the bezel and catch the flash of yellow gold, a signet ring, possibly a college ring. If the ring came in with the body, it might be helpful, because it might be engraved. The hands are delicate, with tapered fingers and light-brown skin, and I get a glimpse of a dark-green jacket and baggy black cargo pants and the toe of a scuffed brown hiking boot.

The camera fixes on the wall over the couch, on wormy chestnut paneling and the bottom of a metal picture frame, and then a poster or a print rises into view as the man stands up, and I get a close look at the reproduction of a drawing that is familiar. I recognize da Vinci’s sixteenth-century sketch of a winged flapping device, a flying machine, and I think back a number of years— when was it exactly? The summer before 9/11. I took Lucy to an exhibition at London’s Courtauld Gallery, “Leonardo the Inventor,” and we spent many entranced hours listening to lectures by some of the most eminent scientists in the world while studying da Vinci’s conceptual drawings of water, land, and war machines: his aerial screw, scuba gear, and parachute, his giant crossbow, self-propelled cart, and robotic knight.

The great Renaissance genius believed that art is science and science is art, and the solutions to all problems can be found in nature if one is meticulous and observant, if one faithfully seeks truth. I have tried to teach my niece these lessons most of her life. I have repeatedly told her we are instructed by what is around us if we are humble and quiet and have courage. The man I am watching on the small device I hold in my hands has the answers I need.
Talk to me. Tell me. Who are you, and what happened?

He is walking toward the door that is deadbolted with the slide lock pulled across, and the perspective abruptly shifts, the camera angle changes, and I wonder if he has adjusted the position of the headphones. Maybe he didn’t have them completely over his ears and now he’s about to turn on music as he heads out. He walks past something mechanical and crude-looking, like a grotesque sculpture made of metal scrap. I pause on the image but can’t get a good look at whatever it is, and I decide that when I have the luxury of time I’ll replay the clips as often as I want and study every detail carefully, or if need be, get Lucy to forensically enhance the images. But right now I must accompany the man and his dog to the wooded estate not even a block from Benton’s and my house. I must witness what happened. In several minutes he will die.
Show me and I’ll figure it out. I’ll learn the truth. Let me take care of you.

The man and the dog go down four flights of stairs in a poorly lit stairwell, and footsteps sound light and quick against uncarpeted wood, and the two of them emerge on a loud, busy street. The sun is low, and patches of snow are crusty on top with black dirt, reminding me of crushed Oreo cookies, and whenever the man glances down, I see wet pavers and asphalt, and the sand and salt from snow removal. Cars and people move jerkily and lurch as he turns his head, scanning as he walks, and music plays in the background, Annie Lennox on satellite radio, and I hear only what is audible outside the headphones, what is being picked up by the mike inside the top of the headband. The man must have the volume turned up high, and that’s not good, because he might not hear someone come up behind him. If he’s worried about his security, so worried that he double-locks his apartment door and carries a gun, why isn’t he worried about not hearing what is going on around him?

But people are foolish these days. Even reasonably cautious people multitask ridiculously. They text-message and check e-mail while driving or operating other dangerous machinery or while crossing a busy street. They talk on their cell phones while riding bicycles and while Rollerblading, and even while flying. How often do I tell Lucy not to answer the helicopter phone; doesn’t matter that it’s Bluetooth-enabled and hands-free. I see what the man sees and recognize where he’s walking, on Concord Avenue, moving at a good clip with Sock, past redbrick apartment buildings and the Harvard Police Department, and the dark-red awning of the Sheraton Commander Hotel across the street from the Cambridge Common. He lives very near the Common, in an older apartment building that has at least four floors.

I wonder why he doesn’t take Sock into the Common. It’s a popular park for dogs, but he and his greyhound continue past statues and cannons, lampposts, bare oak trees, benches, and cars parked at meters lining the street. A yellow Lab chases a fat squirrel, and Annie Lennox sings “
No more I-love-yous… I used to have demons in my room at night…
“
I am the man’s eyes and ears at the time the headphones are recording, and I have no reason to suspect he knows about the hidden camera and mike or that any such thing is on his mind at all.

I don’t get the sense he has a dark plan or is spying as he walks his dog. Except that he has a Glock semiautomatic pistol and eighteen rounds of nine-millimeter ammunition under his green jacket. Why? Is he on his way to shoot someone, or is the gun for self-protection, and if so, what did he fear? Maybe it was a habit of his, a normal routine to walk around armed. There are people like that, too. People who don’t think twice about it. Why did he grind the serial number off the Glock, or did someone else do it? It enters my mind that the hidden recording devices built into his headphones might be an experiment of his or a research project. Certainly Cambridge and its surrounds are the mecca of technical innovations, which is one of the reasons the DoD, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Harvard, and MIT agreed to establish the CFC on the north bank of the Charles River in a biotech building on Memorial Drive. Maybe the man was a graduate student. Maybe he was a computer scientist or an engineer. I watch what is on the iPad’s display, abrupt, shaky images of Mather Court apartments, a playground, Garden Street, and the tilted, worn headstones of the Old Burying Ground.

In Harvard Square, his attention fixes on the Crimson Corner newsstand, and he seems to think of walking in that direction, perhaps to buy a paper from the overstocked selection that Benton and I love. This is our neighborhood, where we prowl for coffee and ethnic food, and papers and books, ending up with take-out and armloads of wonderful things to read that we pile on the bed on weekends and holidays when I’m home.
The New York Times
and
Los Angeles Times,
the
Chicago Tribune,
and
The Wall Street Journal,
and if one doesn’t mind news a day or two old, there are fat papers from London, Berlin, and Paris. Sometimes we find
La Nazione
and
L’espresso,
and I read to us about Florence and Rome, and we look at ads for villas to rent and fantasize about living like the locals, about exploring ruins and museums, the Italian countryside and the Amalfi Coast.

The man pauses on the crowded sidewalk and seems to change his mind about something. He and Sock trot across the street, on Massachusetts Avenue now, and I know where they are headed, or I think I do. A left on Quincy Street, and they are walking more briskly, and the man has a plastic bag in his hand, as if Sock isn’t going to hold out much longer. Past the modern Lamont Library and the Georgian Revival brick Harvard Faculty Club and Fogg Museum, and the Gothic stone Church of the New Jerusalem, and they turn right on Kirkland Avenue. It is the three of us. I am with them, cutting over to Irving, turning left on it, minutes from Norton’s Woods, minutes from Benton’s and my house, listening to Five for Fighting on the satellite radio… “
even heroes have the right to bleed…
“

I feel a growing sense of urgency with each step as we move closer to the man dying and the dog being lost in the bitter cold, and I desperately don’t want it. I’m walking with them as if leading them into it because I know what’s ahead and they don’t, and I want to stop them and turn them back. Then the house is on our left, three-story, white with black shutters and a slate roof, Federal style, built in 1824 by a transcendentalist who knew Emerson, Thoreau, and the Norton of
Norton’s Anthology
and Norton’s Woods. Inside the house, Benton’s and my house, are original woodwork and molding, and plaster ceilings with exposed beams, and over the landings of the main staircase are magnificent French stained-glass windows with wildlife scenes that light up like jewels in the sun. A Porsche 911 is in the narrow brick driveway, exhaust fogging out of the chrome tailpipes.

Benton is backing up his sports car, the taillights glowing like fiery eyes as he brakes for a man and his dog walking past, and the man has his headphones turned toward Benton, maybe admiring the Porsche, a black all-wheel-drive Turbo Cabriolet that he keeps as shiny as patent leather. I wonder if he will remember the young man in the bulky green coat and his black-and-white greyhound or if they really registered at the time, but I know Benton. He’ll become obsessed, maybe as obsessed with the man and his dog as I am, and I search my memory for what Benton did yesterday. Late afternoon he dropped by his office at McLean because he’d forgotten to bring home the case file of the patient he was to evaluate today. A few degrees of separation, a young man and his old dog, who are about to be parted forever, and my husband alone in his car heading to the hospital to pick up something he forgot. I’m watching it all unfold as if I’m God, and if this is what it’s like to be God, how awful that must be. I know what’s going to happen and can’t do a thing to stop it.

I
realize the van has stopped and Marino and Lucy are getting out. We are parked in front of the John B. Wallace Civil Air Terminal, and I stay put. I continue to watch what is playing on the iPad as Lucy and Marino begin unloading my belongings.

Cold air rushes in through the open tailgate while I puzzle over the man’s decision to walk Sock in Norton’s Woods, in what’s called Mid-Cambridge, almost in Somerville. Why here? Why not closer to where he lived? Was he meeting someone? A black iron gate fills the display, and it is partially opened and his hand opens it wide, and I realize he has put on thick black gloves, what look like motorcycle gloves. Are his hands cold, or is there another reason? Maybe he does have a sinister plan. Maybe he intends to use the gun. I imagine pulling back the slide of a nine-millimeter pistol and pressing the trigger while wearing bulky gloves, and it seems illogical.