The Wicked Flea (11 page)

What transformed the incident into a political dispute was a column in one of the Boston papers that showed no sign of any effort at professional journalism. Here’s how it began:

On a warm, peaceful November afternoon in the Safest City in America, Sylvia Metzner took a few minutes from her busy schedule to walk her beloved golden retriever, Zsa Zsa. The widowed mother of three children, Metzner was crossing the playing field of Clear Creek Park and looking forward to a chat with fellow pooch-proud Newtonians when violence reared its hideous head.

The episode occurred on a cold morning. Zsa Zsa wasn’t exactly beloved, and Sylvia hardly fit the image of a widowed mother of three. The columnist went on to write that a Newton police officer with an Italian name, Pasquarelli, had been ill advised to use totalitarian tactics on an innocent citizen with a Jewish name in a city with a substantial Jewish population as well as large number of residents who’d fled Iron Curtain countries for the land of freedom and justice. The attempt to recast the incident as an act of anti-Semitism was ridiculous. There had been nothing to identify Sylvia as Jewish. What’s more, in addition to a substantial Jewish population, Newton had a substantial Italian population and its own Little Italy, albeit a very little one. A Newton police spokesperson reported that an Internal Affairs investigation of the incident was under way. Although both Officer Pasquarelli and Sylvia Metzner were women, a feminist group hurled itself into the fray on Sylvia’s side by interpreting her arrest as a diversionary tactic that perpetuated violence against women at the park. According to the group’s leader, “If a woman were lurking in the woods and exposing her genitalia to men, she’d have been caught long ago!”

Ceci’s response to the news of Sylvia’s death was thus no surprise. “Officer Pasquarelli!” she exclaimed. “Rage syndrome! That’s what Sylvia said she had! We should have listened. This is terrible! Sylvia was such a jolly person, wasn’t she! And for all that she let her children take advantage of her, it was done out of love for them, wasn’t it! Douglas, you don’t suppose she’s still around, do you?”

The shock of finding Sylvia’s body had eroded Douglas’s patience with Ceci. “How could Sylvia still be around? I just told you! She’s dead.”

“Not Sylvia. That policewoman who shot her. No one else carries a gun here. If she hears us talking, she might—”

Douglas now looked queasy as well as pale. “Ceci, uh, Sylvia has been dead for, uh, some time. And there’s no reason to think that Jennifer Pasquarelli... I have no idea who shot Sylvia.”

“We need a phone,” I said. Although Sylvia’s house was nearby, the prospect of going back there on an errand radically §nd gruesomely different from the first felt grotesque.
Well, Eric, nice to see you again! This time, it’s not the dog I’m returning, it’s your dead mother!

“I have a car phone,” Douglas said. His manner irritated me. He was just standing there aimlessly shuffling his feet on the dirt path. His uselessness in a crisis might, I thought, be one reason he was seeing Dr. Foote.

“Go and use it!” I ordered him.

Douglas looked offended. “There’s no hurry, really,” he said. “This isn’t something that just happened. That’s what attracted Ulysses—”

“Ceci doesn’t need to hear the details.” I gave Douglas what I hoped was a meaningful stare. Ceci was owed the deference traditionally shown to elders. Besides, I didn’t want to have to hear about decomposition and its stench, either. I was a dog writer; I could guess what had attracted the attention of a scent hound. “Douglas, if Ulysses found the body, someone else could, too. Children could.
Please
run and use your car phone. Call the police.”

As if to second me, Rowdy began issuing impatient, insistent Arctic-dog noises that were halfway between abbreviated growls and prolonged whines. His opinion was clear to me. What’s more, I shared it. For once, Rowdy and I both wanted an authority figure to appear and take control.

“Douglas,” I said calmly, “where is the body?”

He pointed in the direction of the parking lot and the field. “Back that way. Down one of those little paths. To the left. Not far. In a clearing.”

“Fine. We’re going to walk with you to the beginning of the path. We’re going to wait there so no one else goes in. Then you and Ulysses are going to run to your car and call the police.”

We followed my plan. The path Douglas meant diverged from the main trail in a pretty section of pines. The path was barely that; it couldn’t have been more than six inches wide and looked more like an animal track than like a walking trail. “Hurry!” I told him. “Run!”

He finally did. When he’d taken off, I turned my attention to Ceci, who had been uncharacteristically silent. Her lips looked blue. “Ceci, are you okay?”

“I’m cold,” she said. The temperature had, in fact, dropped, and the pines blocked the sun. The chilling element, however, must have been the news of Sylvia’s murder.

“Zip up your parka,” I advised. “Do you want to put your hood up? I can give you my jacket, too.”

“You are a dear girl,” she said. “Offering me the shirt off your back!”

“The police’ll be here in no time, and then I’ll get you home.”

‘They won’t send the same policewoman, will they? Officer Pasquarelli? What am I saying? Of course not. She’s been suspended. I hate that expression! It sounds as if she’s been hanged.” Healthy color suddenly returned to Ceci’s face. “You don’t think Douglas could be dramatizing things, do you?” Her glance eagerly traced the narrow track that meandered under the pines and disappeared in a dense thicket. “Sylvia might just have fallen, you know. Or fainted. Douglas doesn’t strike me as a terribly imaginative type, but you never know, do you? I think we’d better go see whether Sylvia needs help.”

“Ceci, I don’t...”

By the time I realized that she wasn’t just free-associating, she’d dragged the imperturbable Quest to his feet and was hauling him swiftly down the track. Too late, I realized that my promise to get her home soon hadn’t conveyed the comfort I’d intended; rather, she’d viewed it as a threat to remove her from the action. Rowdy, who never wants to be left out either, was trying to pull me after Quest and Ceci.

“Ceci!” I called out. “I don’t think this is a good idea!” I have to confess that as I was hollering to Ceci, I was also mulling over what she’d said about Douglas. He didn’t strike me as the imaginative type, either, certainly not as the type who imagines dead bodies where there are none. On the other hand, as Ceci didn’t know, Douglas was consulting a psychiatrist, my own Dr. Foote, about something. He seemed far too bland, too ordinary, to possess so vivid and unusual a symptom as the tendency to hallucinate corpses. Still, as Ceci said, you never know, do you?

Ceci had moved beyond the pretty pines to thick woods, which consisted of tall, bare trees, barren saplings, and weedy shrubs. I ran, with Rowdy dashing ahead. Mainly because Quest was slowing Ceci’s progress, we quickly caught up. She and the Newfie had, however, come to a stop at the edge of a small clearing that was little more than a widening of the track. In its center stood a waist-high boulder, the kind that the last glacier deposited in great numbers as it retreated from New England. Steeling myself for the macabre sight of Sylvia’s body, I came to a halt next to Ceci, maybe five or six yards from the boulder. With its flat top, it looked like a small version of one of those expensive granite food-prep islands you see in trendy kitchens. Shards of blue-and-white crockery were scattered on the boulder and on the ground next to it, as if a butterfingered cook had smashed a stack of plates. Heightening the sense of domesticity was the apparent presence of the klutz who’d dropped the china. Indeed, she seemed to have fainted at the sight of what she’d done. She lay on the ground on the far side of the boulder, her head visible to its right, her feet to its left. Even from a distance, the stench was strong and nauseating.

“There are a terrible number of skunks in Newton,” Ceci remarked. “You wouldn’t expect it, but there are. I’m afraid one of them...” She began to step forward.

“Don’t!” I ordered. “Ceci, if she really has been killed, we need to stay away. The worst thing we can do is get our footprints and everything all over the place.”

To my amazement, instead of barging ahead or launching into a monologue about the broken china, Ceci held still and asked softly and pensively, “Holly, how did Douglas know it’s Sylvia?”

“Is there something that makes you think it isn’t?”

“No, no, it’s Sylvia. That’s her coat, Lord and Taylor, but she got it at Filene’s Basement, and the shoes are Joan and David, from Frugal Fannie’s, the scarf, too, she was wearing that outfit, and I said, how pretty, but Holly, she’s face down.”

“Yes?”

With a hint of panic in her voice, Ceci said, “You can’t see her face!”

Calmly, I said, “No, you can’t.”
Thank heaven!

“So how did
Douglas
know? Holly, I recognize her hair and her coat and her shoes and her scarf, but there’s nothing special about her hair, it could be anyone’s, and men don’t notice clothes, do they? So how did Douglas know?”

“Maybe he moved her. To see who it was.”

“He touched her?”

Sirens sounded in the distance and approached with what felt like impossible speed.

“The Newton police are—” Ceci started to say. With unintended disrespect for the dead, Rowdy drowned her out by taking up the call of emergency vehicles. Planting himself in a solid sit, he raised his handsome head and emitted prolonged, responsive howls. The dog has a great voice, tremendous tone, extraordinary range, basso profundo to high falsetto, and in most circumstances, his singing hits me as a magical incantation so powerful that I expect to see the aurora borealis light up the Massachusetts sky. If he’d actually been howling a dirge for Sylvia, I’d have let him go on. In fact, he’d barely known Sylvia. He wasn’t mourning her; he was just howling in reply to the malamute-like sirens. Wrapping my hands around his muzzle, I said, “Not now! Rowdy, quiet!” And then, “Good boy!” Heralded by the sound of voices and footsteps, uniformed police officers and EMTs arrived in astonishingly large numbers. The initial influx consisted of six police officers and four EMTs. In a lot of big cities, you’d be lucky to get that much help for a bank heist where the robbers had shot ten people dead and were threatening to kill ten more. Now, far from bothering my political conscience, the unfair privilege of wealthy suburbs made me sigh aloud in relief. I’d pressured Douglas to run and call the police, and I’d prevented Ceci from contaminating the scene with footprints, paw prints, Quest’s hair, and who knew what else. Otherwise, I’d done nothing. Still, it felt wonderful to be free of the responsibility I hadn’t assumed. Two of the officers were the handsome men who’d removed Sylvia from the park once before. The other four, three men and a woman, were also incredibly attractive. The unnatural good looks of all six cops created a sense of playacting. For a moment, the shattered pottery seemed to be a prop arranged by a stagehand, and the lifeless body looked ready to rise, brush the dirt off her coat, and take a coffee break.

Douglas, who’d led the way for the police and the EMTs, was flushed with what I suspected was pride in his starring, although hardly heroic, role. Ulysses was still with him. Of the three dogs, Quest, Ulysses, and Rowdy, mine was the only one who displayed an active interest in the sudden arrival of ten keyed-up strangers who talked softly to one another and loudly into cell phones, trampled the ground I’d kept Ceci from contaminating, and shooed us back up the narrow track and away from the clearing. Quest, as usual, sank to the ground and took a nap, and Ulysses sniffed dead leaves, bushes, earth, and Douglas’s shoes. Rowdy, in contrast, joined me in studying the EMTs, all four of whom hovered around the body, and the cops, who unintentionally irked me by continuing to look more like movie stars than like the agents of law enforcement. Rowdy, I felt certain, was intent on discovering whether any of these newcomers happened to be carrying food that might somehow be induced to make its way from human pocket to malamute mouth. Being a mere human being, I watched just to see what would happen.

As I understood matters, the first cop who arrived was supposed to have the honor of officially deciding whether a crime had occurred. Since the six cops had reached the clearing almost simultaneously, I frivolously wondered whether they might quarrel among themselves about who had gotten there first. Somewhat to my disappointment, not a single spat broke out. Four cops now stood at the edge of the clearing. Another had run back up the track, presumably to lead reinforcements to the scene. The sixth, a tall, unbelievably gorgeous guy, stood near us. Since the cause of the stench was clearly not a skunk, the EMTs quickly finished what must have been a mandatory procedure to assure themselves that the victim was beyond help. As they stepped back, yet more people showed up, a few in uniform, most in mufti. No one asked us any questions, presumably because Douglas had talked to the police while he’d led them here.

“Holly,” Ceci demanded, obviously aiming her voice at our guard, “aren’t they supposed to be questioning us? After all, we found Sylvia! That’s supposed to make us the prime suspects, isn’t it?”

We hadn’t found Sylvia; Douglas had. Still, after Ceci’s remark about suspicion falling on the person who finds a body, I didn’t want to make myself obnoxious by announcing that she and I had been late arrivals. Instead, I said, “It was Ulysses who found her, really.”