All Shots (3 page)

In books and movies, it’s always the dog who alerts the dog walker to the presence of a corpse in a ditch or a shallow grave or under a pile of leaves and branches. Rowdy’s only interest was in persuading me that we’d wasted enough time hanging around and that it was now my obligation to relieve his boredom. In other words, his contribution consisted of awakening me from my trancelike state of shock. When I turned from the scene of horror that lay inside, everything in the neat little yard and on the beautifully furnished deck seemed momentarily unreal, as if the handsome wooden fence, the weeping tree, the shrubs, the planters, and all the rest were nothing more than images cast by a projector. Then my eyes met Rowdy’s, and his big, powerful, loving reality dragged me back to the world of substance. Sensing my disquiet, he moved to my left side, and I put my left hand on his back and leaned on him for support. The familiar texture of his coat, the coarse guard hairs over the soft padding of the undercoat, gave me comfort and strength, and his questioning look reminded me of the need to breathe and the need to take action.

“Dear God,” I said aloud. “Rowdy, I love you with all my heart. Get me out of here.”

I stopped when we reached the sidewalk and then led
Rowdy to the front of the house, where I found the street number on a decorative tile mounted next to the door. After taking a seat on the steps, I called 911 from my cell. Having promised to stay where I was, I remained there and tried to compose myself. My thoughts were racing. Mellie’s fear of the police meant that the sirens would frighten her. For all I knew, she’d assume that I’d called the police to come and arrest her for dog-sitting without a license. But I couldn’t go to her; I had to stay where I was until the police arrived and until I’d directed them to the deck, the glass door, and what lay beyond. The woman simply had to be dead. The scene had looked anything but fresh. The frames of the shattered aquariums were large. Those big tanks must have held a lot of water, but there had been no pools on the floor; all that remained was the dampness visible in the mess of flour, sugar, cereal, and whatever other food had been thrown to the tiles. Or was there a slight chance that the woman was still alive? Could anyone have lost so much blood and survived for the time it had taken the water to run off or evaporate? The petunias in the planters and the mums and tomatoes in the pots were so thoroughly wilted that the rain we’d had earlier in the day had failed to revive them. How long had it taken the plants to dry out so completely? Days rather than hours, certainly, but I had no idea how many days. Still, days rather than weeks. Wilted though they were, the plants were still green and still recognizable as petunias, mums, and tomatoes; they hadn’t become anonymous brown stalks.

But Mellie! Should I run to her house and explain? Persuade her to follow me back here so she wouldn’t be alone when the police arrived? There’d be an ambulance, too, and other emergency vehicles.

“And how do I
explain
to her?” I asked Rowdy. “We’re two houses from Mellie’s. Mellie probably knows her. And, of course, there’s Strike, too, and Strike’s owner, whoever that is. I have to find out. For all we know, Strike ran off and headed for home.”

When the emergency vehicles approached, Rowdy’s eyes lit up, and he began to raise his head. Before he had the chance to burst forth with glorious howls, I put a finger to my lips and said, “Shhh! Not more malamutes, buddy. Just sirens. Good boy.”

A cruiser arrived first, and just behind it was an emergency medical van. Instead of wasting time searching for parking spots, the cops and the EMTs halted in the middle of the street, which was so narrow that it should probably have been one-way. I rose and rapidly explained to the older of the two cops, a massive guy with thick black hair, that I’d been looking for a lost dog when I’d happened to glance inside the door and had seen…but he should look for himself. Followed by the cops and two EMTs, Rowdy and I led the way to the backyard, where I pointed to the deck and the sliding glass doors. “In there,” I said. “I’ll be in front of the house.”

No one objected, but the second cop accompanied us. He was a young African-American guy with light skin, hazel eyes, and the lean build of a long-distance runner. When we reached the graveled cutout, he leaned against the bright blue car and pulled out a notebook and pen. “Looking for a dog,” he said. “Yours?’

“No. Just helping someone else.” It’s been pointed out to me that when I talk about dogs, I have a tendency to elaborate a bit. This time, I did not. Rather, I limited myself to giving my name, address, and phone number and saying that I had no idea who lived in the house. If I hadn’t been so concerned about Mellie’s reaction to the arrival of the police and, inevitably, to the news of a murder so close to home, I’d probably have mentioned Lt. Kevin Dennehy and said that he was my next-door neighbor. In fact, friendly person that I am, I’d have made some sort of contact with the young cop. Strangely enough, Rowdy took his cue from me. Instead of stacking himself in a show pose or demonstrating the full range of northern breed vocalizations or hurling himself to the ground to beg for a tummy rub, he made none of his usual bids for attention and admiration, but sat quietly and unobtrusively at my side.

In almost no time, I was free to return to Mellie’s, as I promptly did. One glance told me that she was as frightened as I’d feared. In fact, she’d taken refuge inside her house. Still clutching the fabric lead, she was peering out through a front window. Catching sight of Rowdy and me, she opened the door, and before she had a chance to speak, I said, “Someone needed an ambulance. That’s why the police are here. It has nothing to do with you. You don’t need to worry. But I didn’t have any luck finding Strike.”

Mellie shook her head back and forth. “Me neither.”

“I have some ideas about what to do next.” Instead of explicitly inviting myself in, I asked, “Is there somewhere we can talk?”

Mellie looked bewildered. From her point of view, I realized, we were already talking, weren’t we?

“We could sit here on the porch,” I said. It had two folding aluminum lawn chairs, the uncomfortable kind that find their principal use around here after snowstorms, when people who shovel out their cars are careful to designate the snow-free spaces as personal property rather than as the open-to-anyone spots on city streets that they might otherwise appear to be. Traffic cones and trash barrels are also popular choices. As a dog person, I take a keen interest in this local custom, which is clearly a human version of territorial marking, which is to say, leg lifting.

This time, Mellie got the point and invited me in. The first floor had only two rooms, a living room at the front, with a flight of stairs leading up to the second floor, and a kitchen and dining area at the back. The living room had brown carpeting, a brown couch, two brown chairs, a profusion of small pillows in bright colors, a large television set, and a great many small tables crammed with religious objects and framed photographs. On the wall hung two large reproductions of oil paintings, one of the Last Supper, the other of the Madonna and Child. The kitchen had dark brown cabinets and a floor of dark brown linoleum, but on the table in the dining area was a bright yellow tablecloth, and the refrigerator was plastered with photos of dogs held on by magnets. The little rooms were incredibly clean. The sink and appliances were white and unstained. Even the refrigerator magnets looked as if they’d been scrubbed. Francie had described Mellie as a model for independent living. I’d begun to wonder about the accuracy of the claim, but the sight of the well-kept house relieved some of my concern, as did Mellie’s pleasant, ordinary offer of coffee and her obvious competence in using her coffee machine and in setting out mugs, spoons, a sugar bowl, and a pitcher of half-and-half.

As the coffee dripped, she showed me the photos on the fridge. “My dogs,” she said with a giggle.

“Dogs you take care of?”

“Rusty, I walk him. He’s a Yorkie. Celeste. She stays with me sometimes.” Most of the dogs were small or medium size, but there were a couple of Labs and a golden retriever. The highbrow names of some of the dogs gave Mellie trouble. The Pomeranian she called Kink and Guard was clearly Kierkegaard, but I was unable to translate a few of the others. To my amazement, she pointed to a picture of one of the Labs and said, “Milton has hip dysplasia.”

Why shouldn’t Mellie have known the term? What right did I have to be surprised? But I was. When she’d finished reciting the names of all the dogs, she addressed Rowdy, who was still on leash. “And you’re a good dog, too,” she said. “Rowdy, you want a cookie?”

Instead of pinching the treat between her fingers to offer it to him, she placed it on her flat palm, and when he scoured her whole hand with his tongue, she laughed so raucously that a tense dog might have been startled. Then she clapped the same moist hand over her mouth. “Bad! Be quiet!” In a near whisper, she said, “Good dog.”

“Mellie, as long as you sound happy, he doesn’t mind if you laugh. Or even if you yell.”

“Don’t yell!” she protested in a near yell before adding softly, as if repeating an oft-repeated phrase, “Pretty voice.”

Someone had obviously tried to teach Mellie to modulate her voice. A special education teacher? A speech therapist? Interestingly, although she sometimes lost control of her volume and had changed an unfamiliar name to familiar words, she’d mastered
hip dysplasia
and, even more strikingly, had used the dog trainer’s term
cookie
in place of
dog biscuit
.

When we were seated at the table drinking our coffee, I reluctantly raised the topic of Strike. “Mellie, it’s possible that she’s gone home. Where is that?”

“Here.”

“But when she isn’t here. She’s staying with you, but she belongs to someone else. Who is her owner?”

Mellie’s face shut down.

“It’s one thing if your own dog gets loose,” I said, “but when it’s someone else’s dog? It’s easy to feel really guilty about that, even though it’s not your fault.” For all I knew, Strike’s escape was Mellie’s fault, of course, but I had no intention of saying so.

Mellie’s jaw was locked.

“This probably isn’t the first time Strike has escaped from somewhere. Siberian huskies are escape artists. Some of them climb fences. They squeeze out under fences. Strike’s owner has probably been through this before. Does Strike live near here?” Feeling increasingly like an interrogator, I continued to press Mellie. How long had Strike been with Mellie? Awhile. Was her owner a man or a woman? A girl. A nice girl. Yes, Strike was wearing a collar.

“With tags?” I made the mistake of calling Rowdy to me and showing Mellie the ID attached to his rolled leather collar. “Like these?”

“Like Rowdy,” she agreed.

I had the frustrating impression that she was responding mainly to my suggestion; in reality, Strike might or might not have been wearing tags.

The only other piece of information I elicited was that Strike had arrived sometime after August 24, and I got that date by accident. Having abandoned my direct questioning about Strike, I gently asked Mellie about her own dog. Mellie produced a sheaf of snapshots that showed an adorable Boston terrier. Her name was Lily, and Mellie went on and on about her. Lily, I learned, had lived to fifteen and had gone to heaven. Father McArdle had said so. Mellie then produced a card with a picture of the Virgin Mary. In clear script, someone had written Lily’s name on it, together with the dates of her birth and death. Lily had died on August 24.

“Were Lily and Strike friends?” I asked. “Did they play together?”

Mellie looked confused. Then, having apparently decided that I’d said something silly, she declared with a hint of scorn, “Lily was in heaven.”

“So Lily went to heaven, and then, after that, Strike got here.”

Mellie’s response was loud and emphatic: “Of course!”

I gave up. Mellie and I then took a look at her backyard, which had a five-foot-high chain-link fence and a chain-link gate secured with a snap bolt. Either the missing Strike or another dog, perhaps many others, had dug holes in what remained of the grass, but some forsythia and a mock orange tree had survived. Visible at the rear of the fence was evidence of Strike’s means of escape. The earth by the fence showed the signs of recent digging. Right under the fence itself was a small depression.

“Under and out,” I said.

Mellie repeated the phrase.

“When we find Strike, I’ll fix this for you,” I promised.

Before Rowdy and I left, I wrote my name and phone number on a pad of paper next to Mellie’s phone. Whether or not she could read, the information was worth leaving. Mellie had people to help her, and one of them would presumably read my number for her if she needed to call me. We agreed that she’d let me know immediately if Strike returned. I promised to do what I could to find the missing Siberian.

Pulling out of Mellie’s driveway, I saw that the official vehicles no longer blocked the street. A small group of people had gathered on the sidewalk, but I had no desire even to pass by and drove in the other direction. Preoccupied with Mellie, I’d managed to blot out the image of the body on the tiles. It now returned to me. She had had my slim build. Her hair had been medium length, its color a pale brown with maybe a hint of red, a familiar shade, one that occurs in golden retrievers. Or so my father has always insisted. It is, in other words, the color of my own hair.

As soon as I got home, I called Francie to tell her about
the murder and to inquire about Mellie’s safety. Our conversation was brief. “Mellie won’t open the door to strangers, if that’s what you’re worried about,” Francie assured me. “And she has good locks. Once Mellie masters a routine, she follows it. She always locks up. I’ll break the news to her about what happened. She won’t see it on the news. She watches TV, but mainly sitcoms and children’s shows, a few animal programs, and she doesn’t listen to the radio. Or read the newspaper, of course. News upsets her. Well, it upsets me, too. She can read, sort of, but she doesn’t. I mean, she can print her name, and she can read words on signs and packages, stuff like that, but that’s it. I wondered whether she might like reading children’s books, but I tried a few, and I got nowhere. I’m sure she had unhappy experiences in school. The printed word makes her feel inadequate. In any case, one of us can always stay there tonight. Sorry, but I have to run.” Her tone suggested urgency. “Our preschool is a media-free zone, and one of the toddlers keeps showing up in a Thomas the Tank Engine T-shirt.”

Cambridge. It’s worse than D.C.—one political crisis after another. Just let Thomas the Tank Engine chug his media-laden way across the city limits, and we’ll face inevitable assault by the armies of Batman, Superman, the Power Rangers, the entire cast of
Toy Story
, and that notorious antifeminist empress herself, Barbie, who’ll wear either her Joan of Arc outfit or her cute little U.S. Marines uniform, but will waste precious hours deciding between the two, thus giving us time to erect our fortifications of anatomically correct and racially unidentifiable dolls, unembellished blocks, Lincoln Logs, LEGOs, unpainted wooden trains, jars of finger paint, pads of blank paper, and other toys designed to challenge the imagination, boost IQs, and instill in our children the extreme tolerance for unrelenting boredom so vital to success in today’s academic world.

It was now quarter of five. I placed quick calls to the animal control officers of Cambridge, Arlington, Somerville, and Belmont, on all of whose voice mail I left my name, my phone number, and the message that a female Siberian husky had been lost near Rindge Avenue in Cambridge. Since Strike had been missing for only a short time, it was premature, I decided, to post flyers and to enlist the aid of the world’s greatest finder of lost dogs, the Internet. As we say here in Cambridge, think globally, act locally.

Instead of cooking, I ran down the street to Formaggio, a gourmet shop principally renowned for delicious cheeses from all over the world but also notable for fruits, vegetables, and flowers and for rotisserie chicken that has the distinction of not tasting like those freeze-dried poultry strips sold as dog treats. I arrived home to find Kevin Dennehy at my back door. For a person with red hair, blue eyes, fair skin, freckles, and a friendly manner, he is remarkably reminiscent of a silver-back male gorilla. He has the same massive build, including the muscular shoulders, and he sometimes lets his arms swing down as if he were contemplating quadrupedal locomotion, but the main point of likeness is Kevin’s peculiar ability to combine an air of authority with an attitude of curiosity. Kevin would strangle me for describing him as cute, but cute he can be.

To my amazement, Kevin skipped his usual formulaic greeting (“Hey, Holly, how ya doing?”) and said, “Christ, am I glad to see you. I thought you were dead.”

“Reports were greatly exaggerated,” I said. “Kevin, I have to feed the dogs, and then I have dog training, but if you’re hungry, I’ve got chicken that I’ll be glad to share.”

Five minutes later, Kevin was seated at my kitchen table with a can of Bud in front of him and his massive hands clamped over his ears. As I’ve said, he’s cute. The gesture was, however, practical and justified: I was feeding Rowdy, Kimi, and Sammy, which is to say, three exemplary specimens of the most stunningly beautiful, inventively brilliant, and passionately food-driven breed ever to set gorgeous snowshoe paw on the fortunate planet Earth. Rowdy and Kimi were hitched to doors at opposite ends of the kitchen, Sammy was in a wire crate, I was dribbling safflower oil onto a combination of Eagle Pack and EVO in three stainless steel bowls, and all three dogs were screaming, screeching, hollering, bellowing, and bouncing up and down as if their last meal had been weeks ago instead of a mere ten hours earlier. Ages ago, I’d read the report of a small study that compared the behavior of malamute puppies and wolf cubs. Whereas the little wolves showed a healthy interest in meals, the baby malamutes went nuts around the food dish. That’s my paraphrase, of course, but the point is that instead of saying that voracious eaters wolf down dinner, we really ought to say that they malamute it down. Anyway, to show my understanding and respect for the pack hierarchy, I fed Rowdy first, then Kimi, then Sammy. By the time Kimi’s bowl hit the floor, Rowdy was flat on his belly with his dish gripped between his front paws and his face in his dinner, and by the time I’d slipped Sammy’s food into his crate and shut its door, Rowdy’s bowl was empty. To someone accustomed to normal dogs, malamute mealtimes can be a shock, but Kevin was used to the madness, which was over in almost no time.

I then let Rowdy and Kimi out into the yard, let Sammy out of his crate, and joined Kevin at the table. “What must’ve happened,” I said, “was that someone confused the name of that poor woman with the name of the person who found the body. Me. Holly Winter. I’m sorry you thought—”

“It wasn’t that,” Kevin said. “It was the ID.”

“The
other
Holly Winter. So that’s who it is! The poor woman! Kevin, what a weird coincidence. Actually, it’s the second one today. The second mix-up. This is freakish. Some guy on a motorcycle was here looking for her. No wonder he was having trouble finding her. Now I know why.”

Kevin said, “I thought you didn’t believe in coincidence.”

“I don’t.” I paused. “Usually.”

The theory is that behind every so-called coincidence lies a series of connections, some small, some large, that, if traced back far enough, lead inevitably to the great source of meaning and purpose in this otherwise senseless universe, namely, dogs. As a theory, this one may not initially seem to be right up there with relativity, for example, or evolution by means of natural selection, but I have seen its predictive value demonstrated countless times throughout my life and thus should have known better than to append that foolish
usually.

“I knew she lived in Cambridge,” I said. “The other Holly Winter. Kevin, this is so horrible. I wandered back there, behind that house, looking for someone’s lost dog, and when I saw…it was sickening. Her body was right by the door, just on the other side of the glass door. Everything had been thrown around. Anyway, when this biker was here, I looked up her address for him, but it was off Kirkland Street. She must’ve moved. I used an old phone book. I’ve never met her, but I know a little bit about her. We had the same doctor for a while, and one time I called, and the doctor said, ‘Well, well, how’s the bladder infection?’ I didn’t have one. She did. She had something to do with Harvard—a graduate student or a lecturer or something like that. I am so sorry!”

“It isn’t her house,” Kevin said. “It looks like she was house-sitting. There’s a suitcase and some clothes in one of the bedrooms. And long lists about taking care of tropical fish. Instructions.”

“The tanks had been broken. Knocked over.”

“Some of them. There’s more all over the place.”

“Whose house is it?”

“A doctor. Young guy. Dr. Ho. He’s in Africa with some kind of medical group.”

“This is going to sound irrelevant, but do you happen to know a woman named Mellie who lives right near there? Two houses away.”

Kevin grew up in Cambridge and knows half the city. “Mellie O’Leary.” He smiled. “My mother knows her. Knew her parents.”

“Mellie is the reason I was there. She was taking care of someone’s Siberian. The dog got loose, and I was trying to help. I’m not supposed to have told you that, by the way. Mellie is terrified of the police. She does pet-sitting, dog walking, in a minor way, and she thinks she’ll get arrested for not having a license. Anyway, Mellie is the reason I was there. She was taking care of a dog that got loose. But the point is…Mellie is…I guess the word is simpleminded. The woman who called me about helping to find the dog says that Mellie locks up and that the neighbors watch out for her, but is she okay there? She lives alone, and it’s only two houses away. Was this murder, uh, personal? Or…?”

“Looks like a search for something. Probably something small. This Dr. Ho’s got a good sound system, and that wasn’t touched. New computer’s there. He’s a whatchamacallit, social justice type, believes in simple living. It wasn’t some junkie who’d’ve grabbed anything.”

I nodded. “I saw the food on the floor. Things that had been dumped. So, are you assuming that he thought the house was empty and that Holly Winter surprised him? While he was searching for something.”

Kevin shrugged. “Hey, don’t ask me. I just found out it wasn’t you.”

Over our hurried dinner of rotisserie chicken, I tried to pump Kevin for additional information, but if Kevin knew more, he wasn’t saying it.