The Barker Street Regulars (13 page)

“Jonathan sensed Simon’s presence, you see,” Ceci explained, “and felt suitably ashamed of himself for saying those cruel things to Irene. I have never been so humiliated in all my life! As I told Jonathan when I shared my joy about Simon, all transactions are exchanges of
energy,
you see, and Irene’s time, as well as her gifts, of course, are
her
energy, and she is perfectly entitled to receive energy in exchange. It’s only fair.”

I said, “But Jonathan didn’t see it that way.”

“I should never,
ever
have told him about Simon,” Ceci agreed. “It was just that when Jonathan happened to call—he was really very good about staying in touch—I simply couldn’t keep the news to myself. Simon had just made his first material appearance, just the evening before, and I was so absolutely thrilled! And,
of course, I couldn’t tell Althea, of all people. Althea does not understand at all.”

“When was this?” I asked.

“Well, Simon first came back on Monday. So, it was Tuesday that Jonathan called.”

Three days later, on Friday morning, Althea had been excited about her grandnephew’s impending visit. The sequence made sense. On Monday, Irene stages Simon’s appearance. On Tuesday, Ceci can’t help telling Jonathan all about the wonderful psychic whose daily consultations have culminated in the material return of a dead dog. By Wednesday, Jonathan has made plans to come to Boston. He calls the sensible great-aunt, Althea. He arrives on Saturday and meets Irene. At his insistence? According to Ceci, he is unpardonably rude to Irene; in other words, he charges her with conning his elderly great-aunt. Soon thereafter, he dies a violent death. And my hypothesis about a drug deal? I tried and failed to work in the cocaine. White powder, the paper had said. Instead of doing the coke indoors, Jonathan goes outside? Where the wind might be blowing? All I could think of was the sneeze scene in
Annie Hall

“Jonathan had an officious streak,” Ceci told me. “In retrospect, I can see that it was most unwise of me to say a word to him. Not, of course, that my affairs were any of his business.”

As Ceci talked, Robert and Hugh arranged numerous little evidence bags in a long, narrow box meant for index cards. As they worked, they exchanged cryptic Sherlockian references. I was proud to catch an allusion to “The Dancing Men.” In the story, mysterious little stick figures, the dancing men, had been drawn, among other places, on a sundial. And what clues
had
Hugh and Robert found? Blobs of ectoplasm? Wasn’t that
what spirits came back as? Gelatinous matter, chilled and slippery, like flavorless Jell-O. Had psychic zealots had the guts to taste this glop? Not that I expected them to substitute it in a recipe for molded lime salad. I mean, to a spiritualist, ectoplasm is human remains, of a sort, and consuming it might accordingly be considered a form of cannibalism. But if intrepid psychic researchers had gone ahead and sampled this stuff, strictly for the sake of science, “flavorless” probably wasn’t how they described it. Rather, they probably gave the report you always hear about everything from frog legs to rabbit to human flesh: It tastes like chicken, only not quite.

“Ceci,” Robert demanded, “what is this hole doing here?”

“I was concerned,” she replied with dignity, “that Simon was repelled to find himself out here all cold and by himself. He lived in the house, of course. You remember, don’t you? He was my constant companion. He had the free run of the yard whenever he wanted to go out—the fence goes all the way around—and at the time I thought, well, he belongs, really, out here in the fresh air. That’s why I bought the sundial, you see. I simply couldn’t tolerate the prospect of a gravestone. It’s so depressing, so
un-Simon,
if you see what I mean, so …” Ceci continued to discourse on Simon’s warm, sanguine disposition and the unsuitability of cold ground. She then moved to the topic of Boatswain, who, as Hugh and Robert probably did not realize, was a Newfoundland dog and the subject of a poem written by his bereaved owner, Lord Byron, for inscription on the dog’s tomb.

“‘Are deposited the remains,’” Ceci quoted, “‘of one who possessed Beauty without Vanity.’”

“‘Strength without Indolence,’” I continued, “‘Courage without Ferocity, And all the virtues of Man, without his vices.’”

“You
do
understand,” Ceci said.

“So you buried Simon’s ashes here.” That’s in Byron’s poem: ashes. “And then?”

“Then last week, we had that warm spell, you remember, which was deceptive. How was I to know? So I got out a shovel and started to remedy my error, but just below the surface, the ground was frozen, and the task was considerably more arduous than I ever expected. So”—she pointed to the hole—“that’s as far as I got.”

“Simon’s remains are in an urn?” I asked.

“Of course! I wouldn’t just—”

“Ceci,” Robert interrupted, “what did you do with the shovel?”

“I left it right here.”

“Did the police take it?” Hugh asked.

“No, no, it was gone. I’ve wondered if it might not have been stolen by those young people who found Jonathan. But never mind that! I was about to show Simon’s paw prints to Holly.” Making her way to the gate, Ceci explained, “They’re perfectly preserved, you see, because Simon was here every day last week during the warm spell, when it was so damp, and then, of course, it suddenly turned cold, so you can still see them where the mud froze.”

With more seriousness of purpose than I’d have expected, Hugh and Robert followed Ceci and me through the gate, which led to the dead end of a dark street. Reaching the dead end, the joggers who’d discovered the body must have reversed direction, taken a breather, and succumbed to the temptation to peer through Ceci’s
iron gate into the private precincts of the wealthy. I wondered whether the sight of the corpse had permanently cured the joggers of their snoopiness or whether, on the contrary, they would forever after feel compelled to sneak glances into hidden gardens on the chance of again uncovering one of the unexpected secrets of the rich.

“Lower Norwood Road,” Robert informed me.

Here, a few gaslights were spaced at wide intervals. The one near the rear of Ceci’s yard was out. Her property, as I hope I’m making clear, ran all the way from Upper Norwood Road, where her house was, to Lower Norwood, as did the lot next to hers. On the side of Lower Norwood opposite her back gate loomed a dark mass.

“Vacant house,” Hugh remarked.

Robert was quick to correct him. “
Empty
house!
Empty
.” That’s the title of one of the adventures: “The Empty House.”

With undiminished pleasure, Hugh said, “He is everywhere,” meaning, as Holmesians mean, Sherlock Holmes.

The house next to the empty one was a brick Tudor with bright windows, a light over the front door, and carriage lamps set on pillars on either side of the front walk. “The Franklins must be home from Florida,” Ceci remarked. Then she trained her flashlight on her own side of the street, where a wide strip of rough grass and dirt took the place of a sidewalk. “Right over here, near these bushes. There! You see? All along here! The best ones are just to the right of the gate.”

Shining my own flashlight on the area, I saw what were unmistakably the paw prints of a very large dog. How large? Rowdy weighs close to ninety pounds. He’s
a heavy-boned boy with big snowshoe paws. But these prints were longer, wider, and deeper than any I’d ever seen in the mud of my own backyard. For an unnerving moment, I wondered whether everything I understood about death was wrong. Had Simon really come back? Then I realized that Lower Norwood Road must be on the route of some local dog walker who owned …? A Newfoundland? A living one, that is, or a mastiff, a Great Dane, or maybe one of those so-called giant malamutes that get sold through ads in the dog magazines for staggering sums of … well, energy exchange. Caveat emptor. Just my humble opinion, of course, backed by a lifetime in dogs and by the official standard for the Alaskan malamute. Have I digressed? Not really.

Anyway, if I couldn’t identify the breed that had left the prints, Ceci couldn’t be sure that they belonged to a particular Newfoundland who’d been dead for two years. But she
felt
certain, and the feeling satisfied her, as did Robert and Hugh’s close examination of her evidence. On his knees, Hugh was going over the prints with his Sherlock Holmes magnifying glass. Ceci was triumphant. “There! You see? Now, am I letting my imagination run away with me? Am I seeing things? I know my Simon when I see him. Holly, wouldn’t you know your Rowdy or your Kimi anywhere?”

“Yes, I would,” I said truthfully.

“Well, you see? And I know my Simon. I’ve seen him just as clearly as I see his paw prints.”

“Ceci,” Robert demanded, “what color was Simon?”

I replied for her. “Black. His portrait is over the fireplace.”

“Embedded here,” said Hugh, “and observable in small quantities in the lower portion of the yard are
hairs that, pending further research, we have tentatively identified as coming from a dog.”

Ceci clapped her mittens together in delight.

“The hairs,” Hugh continued, “are not black. On the contrary, without exception, these hairs are uniformly
white
.”

W
ITH HUGH AND ROBERT’S
permission, I finally got Kimi and her tracking gear from the car. Kimi “got dressed,” as Ceci phrased it, in the house. I should mention that Kimi’s dark facial markings make her look intimidating. In particular, the goggles around her eyes create a permanent Lone Ranger mask. Ceci wasn’t put off. To a Newf person, a seventy-five-pound malamute was practically an oversize Pomeranian. “Isn’t she just the sweetest little girl?” Ceci cooed. “Isn’t she a darling? Isn’t she a love?”

I sometimes wonder: If you talk like this to an Alaskan malamute, what do you have left to say to a parakeet? Not that Kimi isn’t sweet; she is. One of my most profound glimpses into her character, however, occurred when I watched her tackle and pin a male Great Pyrenees twice her size. As far as I could tell, she did it just on the off chance that he was wondering who was top dog. She didn’t hurt him, and he obviously understood that she didn’t mean to. In other words, Kimi is not everyone’s idea of the ideal house pet. But then the
average person’s idea of the ideal house pet is a stuffed animal. In any case, I’m not the average person: My only absolute requirement of my dogs is that when I look into their eyes, I see God. I felt that in that sense, Ceci and I were kindred spirits.

“And all dressed up in her pretty red harness?” Ceci went on. “Oh, what a little sweetie pie she is!”

Ceci’s fussing over Kimi annoyed Hugh and Robert, presumably because it impeded their effort to cast Kimi in the role of Toby or Pompey. I sympathized. Did Holmes and Watson have to put up with having Mrs. Hudson or some other female ramble on about how darling and sweet and adorable
their
tracking dogs were? But Toby and Pompey actually were tracking dogs, whereas the chance was slight that Kimi would make a half-decent pretense of scent-discriminatory night tracking on an old, heavily contaminated trail. Kimi’s expression, however, is always intelligent, and in her red harness, she looked the part. When Ceci produced the only possession of the late Jonathan’s not confiscated by the police, a Black Watch scarf he’d left in her front hall closet, I accepted it with as diligent and serious an attitude as I could muster.

“Now, Ceci, dear,” Robert said, “when you retired to bed, Jonathan was listening to ‘Bali Hai.’”

“And drinking Ellis’s cognac,” she concurred.

“What?” The word jumped from my lips.

“Cognac,” Ceci repeated.

“No. Uh, ‘Bali Hai’? From—”

“South Pacific,”
Ceci said irritably.

Let me now apologize for inflicting on you the merest mention of “Bali Hai.” It pains me to realize that the song will run through your head for the next quarter century. But, look, I had to mention “Bali Hai” because, hey, has anyone ever listened to it while snorting
cocaine? Not that I’m an expert on cocaine. What I knew about it consisted mainly of what I’d read in newspapers and learned from the old Dave Van Ronk song, which was still popular in Cambridge among would-have-beens in their forties and fifties who now regretted having wasted the sixties getting their doctorates instead of making productive use of the era by smoking dope and hanging around coffeehouses in Harvard Square. Ah, the touching effort to make up for lost hipness that never was! Also, of course, I knew what Dr. Watson and Kevin Dennehy had told me. Their perspectives were a lot more like what I read in the papers than what I heard from Dave Van Ronk, who appeared to share the opinion of Sherlock Holmes. On one point, these sources agreed: An effect never attributed to the drug was anything remotely like a mad compulsion to listen to
South Pacific;
the eerie strains of Holmes’s violin had not foreshadowed “Bali Hai.”

“And was Jonathan drinking heavily?” Robert inquired.

Ceci bristled. “I am thoroughly tired of hearing aspersions cast on Jonathan’s character! And while we are on that subject, let me say that far from being one of those
drug
people the papers are always going on about, he was … Now, I’ve gone and forgotten the word for him. I was telling Mary all about him as we were fixing the guest room for him, and she told me some word the young people use. Now it’s slipped my mind. I was telling her all about his activities on behalf of the Young Republicans and about his
stamp
collection, you see, and about what a nice young man he was. And she said that the young people have a word—”

“Nerd?” I blurted out.

“Nerd! That’s it!” Ceci was as delighted as if the lost word had turned out to be
prince.

“Didn’t he teach at Macalester?” I asked. I’d been there once. It’s in St. Paul. Steve grew up in Minneapolis, and one time when I went there with him, his mother drove me so crazy that I developed an acute attack of homesickness two days after leaving Cambridge. Steve treated my near-collapse by buying me a Stephen McCauley novel at a bookstore called The Hungry Mind, which obviously imported its air from Harvard Square. After one paragraph and a few breaths, I was cured. Anyway, The Hungry Mind is almost on the campus of Macalester, which is the most politically correct college in the United States. Posted everywhere were announcements of events promoting disarmament, abortion rights, lesbian awareness, multiculturalism, rain forest preservation. A coming-out day was scheduled to coincide with parents’ weekend. At Macalester, a Young Republican philatelist who listened to
South Pacific
would surely have been as out of place as a Chihuahua mistakenly entered at a Great Dane speciality, which is to say that Jonathan must have felt like a political hors d’oeuvre.