The Barker Street Regulars (3 page)

I got Rowdy to his feet and excused myself.

As we left, Robert began to read. “
Holmes laid his hand upon my arm,
” he began.

Hugh interrupted in a cheerful effort to continue from memory. “
If my companion would undertake it, there is no man
—”

“No!” Robert bellowed. “No, no, no!
My friend, my friend, my friend!”

“My apologies,” said Hugh.

Althea’s eyes were closed. She wore a gentle smile of contentment. The exchange between Hugh and Robert, I realized, must be as familiar to her as the Canon itself.

Mollified, Robert resumed where he had left off. “
If my friend would undertake it, there is no man who is better worth having at your side when you are in a tight place. No one can say so more confidently than I.
”

Robert must simply have picked up where he’d left off. Even so, it now seems to me that the passage from
The Hound of the Baskervilles
was a fitting portion of scripture for my introduction to Robert and Hugh. Among Sherlockians, the relationship between Holmes and Watson is known as “The Friendship.”

Y
OU LIVE IN CAMBRIDGE,”
Robert informed me, “but you did not grow up here and did not go to Harvard. You have ties to Maine. You are a dog writer. You own two Alaskan malamutes. They are your only pets. When you acquired Rowdy, he was no longer a puppy.”

Robert was not, I might mention, reading my palm, which was wrapped around a coffee mug. It was the Wednesday after I’d first met Hugh and Robert. In the morning I’d finished my column for
Dog’s Life,
and in the afternoon I’d gone to Harvard Square to celebrate in a typically Cantabrigian fashion, meaning that I had gone out to splurge on books. In other places, high living is French wine, marc de Bourgogne, cocaine. Here, it’s hardcovers. When I ran into Robert and Hugh, I was buying paperbacks. Cambridge low life. Anyway, Althea’s friends had invited me for coffee, and we were now sitting in a booth in one of those real-world coffee shops where you don’t have to specify the country the beans were grown in and how long they were roasted. “You are a linguist,” I told Robert. “Your real
name is Henry Higgins. When you’ve finished with me, I’ll be able to hold my own in the senior common rooms, and no one will ever guess that I used to peddle flowers on the streets of Portland.”

Hugh smiled. “Robert makes a study of vowels.”

Robert nodded.

“Are you actually a linguist?” I asked.

“Robert retired from Widener a number of years ago,” Hugh replied, without saying whether Robert had been one of Harvard’s head librarians or had just checked books in and out. “The deduction of occupation is one of his pastimes.”

Althea later told me that Robert had been a fairly senior librarian who’d overseen a number of special collections. Hugh, she insisted, had pursued an occupation so technical that she’d never understood what it was. The friendship between the men had begun as a family connection: Their wives had been sisters. Robert’s had died young and childless. Hugh, widowed ten years ago, had three children who worked in the Silicon Valley and took no interest in Sherlock Holmes, to whom Robert had originally introduced his brother-in-law.

“You met Rowdy,” I told them, “and Althea has heard about my other malamute, Kimi. As a matter of fact, I don’t have any other animals, but I could. Plenty of people have cats and dogs, even cats and malamutes.”

“As I deduced,” Robert responded, “you did not raise Rowdy yourself. He is a malamute. Therefore, despite his gentleness with people—”

Hugh interrupted. “Including, of course, Althea.”

“He is a predator,” Robert resumed. “Had he been brought up with cats—”

“And just how did you deduce that I did not raise Rowdy myself?”

With a smug little smile, Robert said, “Canine nomenclature merits a small monograph. The name ‘Rowdy’ is of an era that predates yours, my dear. Like ‘Rex,’ it bespeaks the twenties and thirties.”

“Rowdy,” I said, “is a traditional malamute name. Rowdy of Nome was the first registered Alaskan malamute.” I refused to give Robert the satisfaction of admitting, first, that Rowdy of Nome had, indeed, been born in about 1928 and registered in 1935 and, second, that my Rowdy had been given his call name by a man of Robert and Hugh’s generation. “You’re right about the cats,” I admitted. “Rowdy wasn’t raised with them. Neither was my other dog, Kimi. It would be difficult for me to get a cat, but it could be done. And, okay, if I had a cat, you’d see cat hair on me, maybe, but for all you know, I could have a tank of fish. An iguana. A ferret! They’ve just become legal in Massachusetts and—”

“Possibly,” conceded Robert with a smile. “As practiced by those such as ourselves, the science is not exact. Watson, for example, was notably unsuccessful in applying the Methods.” Really, you could hear the capital letter.

I tried to remember whether I’d told Althea that Rowdy and Kimi were my only animals. Althea’s roommate, Helen Musgrave, preferred cats to dogs. If I’d told Helen that I didn’t have a cat, Althea would have overheard. “But I’ve been
thinking
a lot about a cat,” I said, as if proving to Hugh and Robert that my mind, at least, was unreadable. “And I don’t necessarily live in Cambridge. I could live on Beacon Hill or in Allston, Brighton, Somerville, Belmont, Brookline—”

“Denim jeans,” Hugh countered. “Hiking boots. No trace of cosmetics on the face. Hair not recently trimmed. In combination with your choice of reading material? We couldn’t help noticing. Indeed, we make every effort to do so.”

“Everyone reads Cynthia Heimel,” I said defensively. “She’s the funniest woman in America.”

“Unmanicured nails,” Hugh responded. “Your Navajo ring.”

“I didn’t buy the ring. It was a present.” From Steve Delaney. Steve is my vet. My lover. He lives in Cambridge, too. Come to think of it, he’d bought the turquoise ring in the Square.

Hugh, undaunted, said, “When we lamented the demise of Elsie’s, you agreed.”

Hugh looked so pleased with himself that I didn’t bother to argue. Elsie’s was a lunch place in the Square that made world-famous roast beef sandwiches. Anyone anywhere could have agreed that the closing of Elsie’s was a loss to the Square. “You looked me up in the phone book,” I charged. “And just because I live in Cambridge, it doesn’t necessarily mean that I’m a writer,” I said mendaciously. Hah! It’s true that not everyone in Cambridge is a
published
writer. My next-door neighbor Kevin Dennehy, for instance, is a Cambridge cop, and he’s never published anything. Being not just any cop, however, but a
Cambridge
cop, Kevin is convinced that there’s a book to be written about his experiences on the force. Kevin is probably right. He just hasn’t gotten around to putting the words on paper yet. “And not everyone who owns dogs writes about them,” I pointed out. “Am I covered with ink and hair?”

With a languid Holmesian sigh, Robert pointed out that I was free in the daytime and walked around with a
steno pad tucked in the outside pocket of my shoulder bag. “You are Holly, not Dr. Winter, not Professor Winter,” he said. “Cambridge being what it is, had you a title, you would use it. Therefore, you are not an academic. You own an exceptionally well-trained dog of a notoriously difficult breed.”

“Malamutes are not difficult. They’re interesting.”

“On Rowdy’s collar,” Robert continued, “Hugh observed an extraordinary number of tags. The average dog wears, perhaps, two: a dog license and a rabies tag.”

“And an ID tag with the owner’s address,” I added, without admitting that Rowdy wore so many tags that I could hardly remember what they were: license, rabies, my name and address, his therapy dog tag, one proclaiming him a Canine Good Citizen, one from the National Dog Registry giving the location of his ID tattoo, and, oh, yes, a Saint Francis of Assisi medal I’d bought in desperation during one of the low points in our obedience career. “But I get the point.”

“The collar, Hugh reports, is of fine workmanship. Yet your car, which we noticed in the parking lot on our way into that institution, before we encountered you, is old. It stood out. Bumper stickers. Cages.”

I am the first to complain about the battered state of my ancient Bronco. I prefer to be the first. And the only. Robert’s mother, I thought, should have taught him not to make personal remarks. Hugh’s mother, too. Never mind Sherlock Holmes’s.

“Crates,” I corrected.

“Crates?” Hugh inquired.

“Dog people don’t say ‘cages.’ We say ‘crates.’ And Maine was easy. You saw the bumper sticker.
MAINE: THE WAY LIFE SHOULD BE
.”

“Elementary,” said Robert, without a trace of self-consciousness.

“Elementary,” I repeated. I might mention now, as I didn’t then, that as I’d been leaving the Gateway on Friday, I’d applied my own observational skills and deductive powers. Parked two cars away from mine had been an ancient Volvo sedan in that gray-matter color favored by intellectuals determined to pass off their vehicles as mobile human brains. Without even pulling out my Sherlock Holmes magnifying glass or taking samples of the dirt embedded in the tire treads, I’d brilliantly deduced that it belonged to Robert or Hugh. It bore a single, if rather telling, bumper sticker that read
THE GAME IS AFOOT!
Speaking of games, two can play. Or three. “You,” I said to Robert, “are intimately acquainted with libraries. Once you generated this hypothesis that I was a writer, you checked an index of periodicals. Maybe you even bought a copy of
Dog’s Life.
”

With a jarring mixture of scorn and pride, Robert contradicted me by reporting that Hugh surfed the Web.

“So you’re not clairvoyant after all,” I teased.

“A.C.D. to the contrary,” Hugh replied.

A.C.D.? To the contrary?
I suppressed the urge to lapse into baffling jargon of my own.
J.H., CD., O.FA.!
I wanted to reply. Unfortunately, I could think of no way to turn the conversation to Junior Hunter and Companion Dog titles or to squeeze in a cryptic reference to the Orthopedic Foundation for Animals. My annoyance must have shown on my face. Its source was, as I’ve just said, natural resentment at being addressed in a language I couldn’t follow, as opposed to justifiable indignation at finding myself the target of unwelcome snooping. Robert, however, cleared his throat and said, “We keep a close eye on Althea.”

Hugh expanded. “We prefer to know who her friends are.”

Was Althea so tremendously wealthy that gestures of apparent friendship toward her required scrutiny? Had the men suspected me of being an innovative con artist who’d hit on the scheme of identifying potential marks by cruising nursing homes with a canine confederate disguised as a therapy dog? I must have looked puzzled. In apparent response, Robert said, “Althea is a woman of extraordinary wit.”

“And quickness,” Hugh chimed in.

“Resolution,” added Robert.

“In brief,” said Hugh, “she eclipses the whole of her sex.”

Robert glared at him. “
Eclipses and predominates.
”

I finally caught on. The adventure was “A Scandal in Bohemia.” The reference was to Irene Adler,
the
woman in the Great Detective’s life. Not yet knowing about the late sister-wives, I said gently, “Althea is
the
woman.”

Robert, of course, corrected me. But not about the wives. “Is
always the
woman,” he said.

A
LTHEA BATTLEFIELD’S SISTER, CECI,
was ten inches shorter than Althea and her junior by ten years. It took me a minute to realize, though, that the principal difference between the sisters was that Ceci had a streak of foolishness. What briefly fooled me was that Ceci made a fool of herself over Rowdy, who is always glad to make a fool of himself over anyone. I must add, however, that fool that I am over Rowdy, I took a liking to Ceci that endured even after it slowly dawned on me that she’d pulled a fast one and that Althea knew she’d done so.

It was the Sunday after Hugh, Robert, and I had had coffee in the Square. On Friday, Rowdy and I had paid our regular visit to the Gateway. Helen had been having her hair done, Robert and Hugh hadn’t been there, and Althea had had a fine time instructing me about engineers’ thumbs, devils’ feet, Sussex vampires, and miscellaneous other bits of Sherlockian trivia. In an oblique and tactful way, I’d tried to satisfy my curiosity about whether Hugh or Robert had ever been
the
man in her life, as she was
the
woman in theirs, and if so, which one,
Hugh or Robert, but I got nowhere, mainly because such bothersome impediments as discretion and good taste held me back from suggesting that the late Mr. Battlefield, whoever he’d been, had been other than
the
man. All I learned about Mr. Battlefield was that Althea had married him just after she’d graduated from Radcliffe and that he’d soon died of meningitis. Althea had then begun her career as an English teacher at the Avon Hill School, where she’d continued to teach even after boys had been admitted and from which she’d retired twenty-five years ago. Robert and Hugh, she told me, were fellow members of the Red-headed League of Boston, not to be confused with any of the other Red-headed Leagues in other cities or any of the three other Sherlockian organizations in Greater Boston, and certainly not to be confused with the Baker Street Irregulars. The B.S.I., I learned, was the elite, by-invitation-only society to which Althea and Robert belonged and Hugh did not. She herself was a recent inductee—the B.S.I. had been closed to women until 1991—but Hugh had been eligible for eons, and was sensitive about his exclusion.

“Politics!” Althea exclaimed.

“It’s the same way in dogs,” I told her.

“It’s the same way everywhere,” Althea said. “And what does a title mean, after all?”

“Nothing,” said I, stroking the head of my Ch., C.D.X., C.G.C., T.T., soon-to-be Rx.D. companion. That’s breed champion, Companion Dog Excellent, Canine Good Citizen, Temperament Tested, soon-to-be Therapy Dog, who’d also have titles from Canada, Bermuda, and elsewhere if I could afford to travel. “But what do, uh, titles …?”