The Barker Street Regulars (7 page)

“The thing about making a fool of myself with dogs,” I told Kevin Dennehy a half hour later, “is that I get results. Now here I am stuck with this cat under the bed, and I can’t get the damn thing to come out.”

Kevin was seated at my kitchen table sipping Bud out of the can. Indeed, it occurs to me that I can introduce Kevin, and Cambridge, too, as Caesar introduced Gaul. Thus all Cambridge is divided into three parts, of which one drinks mineral water, the second imported wine, and the third what in Kevin’s language is called Bud, in mine beer. In this context, as one writes in Cambridge, let me add that the connection between Kevin and the Romans isn’t just random. Rather—surprise, surprise—the association has to do with dogs and specifically with the mastiff, a breed found by the Romans in England and subsequently taken home to such cozy spots as the Coliseum, and the breed with which Kevin has an obvious anatomical and temperamental
affinity. True! Giant breed, weight of adult male up to about two hundred pounds, massive head, short coat, natural protectiveness, unmatched loyalty … Except that Kevin has red hair and freckles and that if you set him down in the middle of Dublin, no one else there would look Irish at all. There is, however, an additional point of similarity: The mastiff has a kind nature.

“It’s a darling little cat, too,” I said. “Practically a kitten. And desperately in need of a good home. Once Steve checks it out and gives it its shots, it’ll be a ready-made perfect pet.”

Yes, I tried to con a cop. In the Holmes stories, Lestrade, Gregson, and other members of the force are usually slow-witted foils for the Great Detective. They have to be, really. If Conan Doyle had made them superbright, Holmes would have been stuck home fiddling and doing drugs.

“No,” said Kevin.

“Well, you could at least find this bastard who tried to murder the poor thing,” I replied. I’d already given him a detailed description of the man. “I’d definitely recognize him. I’ll be happy to testify against him. And I have the pillowcase and the big rock that was in it and the twine that was used to tie it up.” I rose from my seat and retrieved the items from the kitchen closet. To avoid contaminating the evidence, I’d stored the stone, the pillowcase, and the twine in a brown paper grocery bag. Now I rather dramatically lowered the bundle to the kitchen table and revealed its contents. “You see? It’s a really smooth stone. You’ll get a beautiful set of prints from it.”

Kevin eyed my carefully preserved evidence with less enthusiasm than I might have wished.

“And,” I added, pointing at the stone, “for all we
know, this is some rare kind of rock that an expert could identify instantly.”

“It’s granite,” Kevin said.

“Well, to you maybe it looks like ordinary granite, but granite isn’t all the same, is it? You must have geologists you could ask. And for all I know, there’s someone in the state crime lab who specializes in being able to take one look at a lump of rock and know exactly where it came from. The pillowcase and the twine are admittedly pretty ordinary-looking, but think about trace evidence! Put this stone and the pillowcase and the twine under a microscope, and you’ll probably find fibers and maybe even little flakes of skin or whatever that you can test for DNA. I mean, if we get lucky, maybe he slept with his head on the pillowcase. Maybe he had a cut on his hand and bled on the twine!”

Instead of rushing to use my phone to summon a team of crime-scene technicians, Kevin reminded me that he’d warned me about that stretch of the river.

“I was just driving by. I didn’t intend to stop. But obviously it’s a good thing I did. So what are you going to do about it?”

Kevin shrugged. “It’s M.D.C.” As the signs on Greenough Boulevard announce, the agency in charge is the Metropolitan District Commission. The M.D.C, for reasons I don’t understand, maintains and polices a lot of parks, skating rinks, pools, and other recreation areas in Greater Boston.

“You know people at the M.D.C,” I said. “And the crime took place in Watertown. I’m sure you know people there, too.” I didn’t mean just any old people, of course. “And I know I should’ve noticed the license plate.”

“Make and model of—”

“Kevin, it was a perfectly ordinary van. Panel truck.
With no windows. The kind plumbers drive. Electricians. Or like a delivery van, but with no sign on it, no lettering or anything. Just a plain van. I’m not Sherlock Holmes. I didn’t see anything distinctive about it.”

“Hey, hey,” said Kevin. “‘Quick, Watson, the needle.’ I got no use for that.”

For the past week, Kevin, together with the state police and someone from the D.A.’s office, had been investigating the brutal and highly publicized murder of a Cambridge drug dealer named Donald Lively. Lively, who’d been in his early thirties, had been bludgeoned to death in the parking area behind his lavish condo in East Cambridge, only a few blocks from the courthouse. According to the papers, he’d been operating an elite cocaine operation that catered to software millionaires, wealthy foreign students, and other beautiful people with runny noses. Because of the proximity of Lively’s headquarters to those of the law, the case had received lots of media attention. Kevin and a couple of other investigators working on it had had their pictures in both Boston newspapers and had appeared on the TV news. Kevin was, however, atypically silent about the progress of the investigation. Today, he looked preoccupied and discouraged.

“That’s some Hollywood version,” I said defensively. “In the stories, Watson doesn’t approve, and eventually, Holmes gets cured. Anyway, Kevin, I want you to find this guy who tried to drown the cat.”

“You call the M.S.P.C.A.?” The Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

“Yes, but they’re obviously not going to do anything. They did ask about his van, but they had no interest in examining the evidence. And if his foot hit this stone when he kicked the pillowcase, he might be limping! That would help. Even apart from that! Kevin, I
could identify this man.” I tried to talk Kevin into letting me go to the station to look through mug shots. Anyone vile enough to commit assault and attempted murder on an animal would surely have his picture on file in connection with other crimes, too. Kevin didn’t disagree, really. He just said that he’d think about it. He left without the stone, the pillowcase, and the twine.

After Kevin’s departure, I ran to the local convenience store for cat food, litter, and a disposable cat litter tray that I filled and installed in my bedroom. This time, instead of trying to entice the cat out, I shoved a bowl of smelly canned cat food into its den, firmly closed the bedroom door, and got to work on the dogs. Kimi is easier to bathe than Rowdy. I did her first and then tackled Rowdy, who considers water a form of sulphuric acid that will burn through his skin on contact. He managed to leap out of the tub only once, but as usual, he shrieked the entire time, and when I’d finally finished rinsing him, he shook hard before I’d grabbed a towel, and the whole bathroom got sprayed with damp dog hair.

When Steve arrived, the kitchen table was shoved against a counter, and the grooming table and my new high-power blower occupied the center of the floor. Kimi, I must brag, looked fabulous. My wrists ached from brushing her. Rowdy was now on the table, the blower was roaring, and the kitchen looked like what it had become: a grooming shop. Although more tiring and messy than assuming the lotus position to chant
ohm
and envision irises, grooming is nonetheless a form of meditation in which subject and object, you and the dog, achieve a state of mystical communication and blissfully transcendent unity. When you’re done, you look like hell and feel wonderful.

Steve didn’t feel wonderful. For once, he didn’t even
look
wonderful. He wore green scrubs, which usually bring out the green in his eyes, but he was spattered with drops of blood, his eyes were a flat blue, and his face was expressionless. I turned off the dryer and needlessly asked how he was doing. Instead of answering, he just said he needed a shower.

“I haven’t cleaned the bathroom yet,” I admitted. “It’s still filled with hair. I’ll do it now.”

“Don’t bother,” he said.

“I don’t mind. And don’t open the bedroom door. There’s a cat in there. I need you to take a look at it. There’s no hurry.”

“Good.” He opened the refrigerator door, got a glass from the cupboard, and started to pour himself some milk. Before drinking it, he stuck in a finger and removed what must have been a dog hair. “You couldn’t do this somewhere else?”

“I always groom here in the winter.”

“At seven-thirty on Friday night?”

“It’s not seven-thirty. Is it? I lost track of time. The dogs haven’t even eaten yet.”

“Neither,” said Steve gloomily, “have I.”

Three hours later, the dogs were in their crates in the guest room, and Steve and I were in bed. He was asleep. I was reading Sherlock Holmes. Holmes hadn’t had a sex life, either, I was thinking. Abstinence didn’t seem to have done him any harm. I put the book down, turned off the light, passed out, and had erotic dreams. In the middle of the night, I was awakened by a soft noise or perhaps by the crack of light that showed through the half-open door. Steve wasn’t in bed. I threw on a bathrobe and padded barefoot toward the kitchen, which was now clean. In deference to Steve’s fastidiousness, I’d vacuumed everything and washed the floor. I’d also cleaned the bathroom, taken a shower, and made some
pasta and a salad. While we were eating, I’d told Steve about the cat. In return, he’d said almost nothing. Uncharacteristically, he hadn’t even wanted to peer into the cat’s hiding place to take a look at it.

Now, in the middle of the night, I peeked into the kitchen. All the lights were on: the overhead light, the one over the sink, the one in the hood above the stove. The kitchen table was padded with a layer of newspaper. In the center, Steve had neatly spread one of the clean old towels I keep for the dogs. The emergency kit he always carries in his van sat open on a chair. Smack in the center of the towel was the ugly cat. Its eyes were gooey with ointment. In front of it was a small bowl of semimoist cat food. It was eating. Steve was bent over the cat, gently palpating and stroking it. The damned thing was purring loudly.

A
T THE SHOW ON
Saturday, which was just that, a conformation show, with no obedience, my beautiful Kimi got a three-point major, and my wonderful Rowdy took the breed. If you don’t show dogs, you probably imagine that Kimi sank her teeth into a sort of low-ranked version of a four-star general and that Rowdy literally swallowed the competition. I’ll translate. Kimi earned three of the fifteen points and one of the two major wins she needed for her championship, a “major” being a win worth three or more points. And Rowdy went Best of Breed. Speaks for itself, doesn’t it? Maybe not quite. By 10:30
A.M.,
the rest of the malamute owners were free to take their dogs home. Rowdy, however, having won his breed, would need to appear in the Working Group ring, and the group judging wasn’t scheduled to start until 3
P.M.
Poor Holly! Stuck hanging around all day. Too bad for her that the judge liked her dog. Whoops! Maybe I need to explain this “group” business. It’s easy. American Kennel Club breeds are divided into seven groups: Sporting Dogs, Hounds, Working Dogs, Terriers, Toys, Non-sporting
Dogs, and Herding Dogs. After the individual breeds have been judged, the Best of Breed winners compete against the other Best of Breed winners in each of the seven groups. Working Group: one Akita versus one Alaskan malamute versus one Bernese mountain dog, and so on. Thereafter, the seven group winners compete for Best in Show.

Anyway, after Kimi’s and Rowdy’s triumphs in the first phase of the process, my cousin Leah and the dogs and I lingered near the ring to accept congratulations and socialize with other malamute people. Also, I had photos taken. Rowdy appears with his professional handler, Faith Barlow, and Kimi with Leah, who amateur-handles her very capably indeed. The judge, Mrs. Ring, is in both pictures, of course. No, I didn’t invent the name. Just as the real world of Conan Doyle aficionados is peopled with actual, live individuals with made-up sounding Holmesian names like Musgrave, so is the dog fancy populated by a staggering number of Wolfs, Foxes, Pasterns, Springers, Handlers, Cockers, Kerrys, and Bassets. I’d noticed the phenomenon years earlier; you can’t miss it. Robert and Hugh, however, had given me a term for it: the
nomen omen.
There are limits. So far as I know, the fancy doesn’t yet have any Mrs. Highjumps or Mr. Showleads. But do we ever have
dumbbells.
Gloria, for instance. Scott. As I shall now explain.

After the photos and the chitchat, Leah and I crated the dogs and left them under Faith’s vigilant eye while we ate lunch. The show site, I might mention, was a trade center about two hours from home. The cafeteria, which occupied one corner of the exhibition hall, served relatively decent food, at least by dog show standards. You didn’t have to poke a fork into Leah’s ham, green beans, and mashed potatoes to identify them as such;
my tuna casserole had clearly not been prepared with cat food. Having made the mistake of deciding to eat lunch at lunchtime, Leah and I were lucky to find places at one of the long, crowded tables. Lots of people smiled, waved, and said hello. Leah and I show quite a bit in breed and obedience, I’m a dog writer, of course, and Leah’s appearance is so striking that everyone always remembers her, if only because of her long, curly ruby-gold hair, which is in a red-headed league all its own. So we were seated opposite each other innocently eating lunch. On the way to the show, I’d told Leah about the cat, which, by the way, I’d last seen at dawn when I’d awakened to find it asleep on Steve’s pillow, purring in his ear.

“I tried to pat it,” I now told Leah. “But all it did was hiss at me.”

“It associates you with a traumatic experience.” Leah was, need I say, taking introductory psychology. Rita, who is a Ph.D. psychologist, agreed with me that the rate of Leah’s mastery of the subject was astounding. After two weeks of lectures and readings, there was absolutely nothing about psychology that Leah didn’t know. Rita also informed me that freshman obnoxiousness was an understudied trait, less because it spontaneously disappeared than because no researcher wanted to have to put up with the know-it-all subjects who displayed it.