Ruffly Speaking (14 page)

“I’m sorry. I’d speak to her about it, except that I keep complaining about Willie’s barking and I hate to do anything to make things worse. Rita’s not doing very well these days. It’s the hearing aids—she hates them. That’s why the radio’s so loud in the morning. She doesn’t like to put her aids in until she’s been awake for a while.”

“I don’t know why she’s making such a big thing of

it. Stephanie wears hearing aids and it doesn’t bother her. Rita’s being a big baby.”

No
one asked your opinion,
I longed to say. The task of explaining Rita’s distress to a seventeen-year-old was beyond me, especially because I didn’t fully understand it myself. Instead of trying, I changed the subject by asking what Ivan had been up to in the past few days. After observing his assault on Alice Savery’s door, I’d taken increased interest in what Leah called “The Amazing Adventures of Ivan the Terrible,” and Leah was always happy to relate new episodes. As I’d heard earlier in the week, although Alice Savery hadn’t appeared during the raid, she’d evidently been at home and had certainly seen enough to read the lettering on Ivan’s shirt. On Tuesday, she’d presented herself at the Avon Hill Summer Program and insisted on seeing the director. She hadn’t complained directly about the boys, but had stated that she wanted to make a gift to the program, a gift that turned out to be a stack of photocopies of a page from a walking guide to Cambridge architecture, the page that contained a capsule description of her fence with notes on its historical significance. The director was, of course, mystified by the visit until Matthew Benson made the connection.

Ivan’s latest prank at the program, the one Leah told me about in the car, involved Matthew himself. As I’ve mentioned, Matthew was teaching a course—or maybe a seminar, workshop, or module—about urban flora and fauna, and one of the fauna had, indeed, turned out to be the cockroach, which, as Matthew had explained to me, was a zoologically fascinating insect of ancient and noble lineage. The topic put Matthew in an unusually talkative mood, and he became outright animated as he went on about it. I wasn’t very responsive, but Steve, who was there, too, caught Matthew’s contagious enthusiasm, and the two had a long, technical discussion about evolution and adaptation that almost sent me rushing to call the exterminator.

Steve commented afterward on what a bright kid Matthew was. I had to agree, but couldn’t resist adding that as companion animals, Border collies were a few million evolutionary steps ahead of roaches, and how would Steve like it if his clients started showing up with little portable kennels crawling with vermin for him to spay and neuter? Steve said that he, like every other veterinarian, would be happy to find a new area into which he could expand his practice, and he claimed to welcome the challenge of mastering microsurgical techniques. Furthermore, Steve said, neutering roaches couldn’t be any worse than de-scenting skunks.

But back to Matthew. The Avon Hill Summer Program followed a hands-on, learn-by-doing approach. Consequently, instead of just reading about roaches and listening to Matthew lecture about them, his students watched them in the flesh, if
flesh
is the right word for what insects have. In the shell. In the shell surrounding some revolting mess of squishy, roachy slime. Whatever. The point is that Matthew’s roaches lived in some sort of dry aquarium in the AHSP science lab, or they did until Ivan liberated them.

“And then Matthew and the director asked Ivan why he did it,” Leah said, “which turned out to be a mistake, because Ivan can explain anything, anyway, and his mother—she’s a single parent—is a professor of socioecology at B.U., and—” B.U. Boston University.

“Of
what?”
I asked.

“People and the environment.Rain forests. Trash recycling. Lots of things. Ivan can tell you all about it. She’s a really good parent that way, and she reads Shakespeare with him, things like that. Otherwise, she’s pretty oblivious, but she tries. Where was I? Oh, so they asked Ivan why he did it, and he had this great explanation about how they’d been studying the cockroach’s beautiful adaptation to varied natural environments—they don’t have to keep evolving, basically, because they’re perfectly adapted now—but how were you supposed to observe it when the roaches were trapped in a glass box?”

“The director bought that?”

“Not really. Matthew made Ivan sit down and work out how fast roaches reproduce so Ivan would understand the quote significance of his act unquote, and the director kept wringing her hands and wondering about whether to spray now or wait and see what happened. It was Matthew’s fault, really.”

“What was Matthew supposed to do? Put a training collar on Ivan and bind him to his left side until—”

“Bernie Brown is not meant to be taken literally,” pronounced Leah. “The roaches should’ve been locked up.”

“Listen,” I said, “could we get something straight? First of all, Bernie Brown would take one look at Ivan and find that kid a good home and get himself a better prospect. Second, the no-force method isn’t about how to correct behavior problems. It’s about how to score two hundred instead of a measly one ninety-nine, okay?”

Two hundred?Perfection. Let’s start from the Beginning, 1933, when Mrs. Whitehouse Walker returned from England and, instead of issuing the usual complaints about the lousy British food and the warm beer, said, “Let there be light.”

And there was light.

There were, however, neither apples nor serpents, no original sin at all, and, really, it’s a religion of endless forgiveness, too. Every time you enter the ring, you start out with all two hundred points. Your only task is to stay perfect. I should warn you, though, that strait is the gate that leads in and out of the obedience ring. And narrow the way. What did you think canine cosmology was? Some quack religion?

15

 Here’s proof that I am less dog-obsessed than is commonly supposed. Kevin Dennehy had been my friend and next-door neighbor for quite a few years before I noticed his almost unbelievably precise conformation to the American Kennel Club standard for the Mastiff. Amazingly enough, I never made the connection at all until I was researching an article on the breed. Then, all of a sudden, the words hit me. “Forechest should be deep and well defined.” Kevin’s forechest.
“Shoulder and
Arm
—Slightly sloping, heavy and muscular.” To say the least. “Legs straight, strong and set wide apart, heavy-boned.” Kevin’s own-But here’s the clincher:
“General Character and Symmetry
—Large, massive, symmetrical, and well-knit frame. A combination of grandeur and good nature, courage and docility.” Kevin’s hair is even an acceptable color, for God’s sake! Well, the standard says “apricot,” not the word Kevin would choose, but his hair is a light enough red so that no sensible judge would disqualify him, and, all in all, Kevin Dennehy really is the ultimate Mastiff.

What impeded my recognition of Kevin’s essential Mastiffness, so to speak, is that in the flesh, my next-door neighbor looks nothing whatsoever like a dog, and if he did, the probable breed would be an Irish terrier, Irish wolfhound, or Irish anything else. As it is, Kevin looks like exactly what he is: a Cambridge cop, a lieutenant, in fact. The original purpose of the Mastiff? Watchdog. I can’t imagine how I missed it for so many years.

“
Accidental death,”
I told Kevin. It was early on Sunday afternoon, one day after the show-and-go (Kimi, 185; Rowdy, don’t ask) and Kevin and I had both found excuses to hang around outside and enjoy the combination of warm sun and a cool breeze that occurs in Cambridge about once every thirty years. Kevin was massacring the barberry hedge that separates his mother’s property from my driveway. I was washing my Bronco. “Everyone has been assuming that Morris died of AIDS,” I continued, “or some AIDS-related illness, but then I heard someone call it a terrible accident. Morris died on the night of May eighth or maybe early on May ninth. I remember, because it was my grandmother’s birthday. Late Friday night or early Saturday morning. He was found on Saturday. You know anything about it?”

“What was the guy’s name?”

“Lamb. Morris Lamb. Winer and Lamb, in the Square?”

“Guy pulled a lady out of the Charles a couple of years back?”

“Yes! So—”

“He’s dead?”

“Yes. I was wondering... This woman, Stephanie Benson, the woman who’s renting his house... I just Wrote an article about her. She’s an Episcopal priest. She bas a hearing dog. Anyway, she just casually mentioned something about Morris’s
accident.
So I wondered. But maybe it was AIDS after all.”

“Deaf lady.” Kevin jabbed the shears at the hedge. “Over on Highland.”

“Yeah.” My sponge made big swirls of soap on the side of the car. “She’s renting Morris Lamb’s house. It’s that sort of glass cube, right next door to the run-down one that looks a little like the Longfellow House.”

“Crackpot House.” Kevin’s voice capitalized the words.

“What?”

“Crackpot House,” he repeated. “ ’Cause there’s a nut that lives there. Crazy lady who—”

“Stephanie Benson isn’t a nut,” I said. “Far from it. She has a hearing loss, and she’s a priest, but—”

“Lady next door.Miss Alice Savery.”

“Oh, her,” I said. “I ran into her. How do you...?”

“How?Because she calls us. Been doing it for years. Royal pain in the butt.” Kevin’s voice was oddly tolerant, almost affectionate. “Help! Police! House across the street’s being broken into, and then you get there, and there’s a furniture van and a guy delivering a sofa. First time I get called there, I’m on the force all of maybe three days, and I’m all dressed up in my new uniform, I march up with my chest all puffed up, Officer Dennehy to the rescue, at your service, ma’am, and I’m, Jesus, I’m Sir Galahad charging out of the cruiser, and my partner sees fit not to warn me, ’cause that’d spoil the fun. ‘You handle this one, kid,’ he says, and puff, puff, my chest swells up more, and my head does, too. So I go charging up to the big front door, and first thing that happens is—Jesus, that son of a bitch, pardon my French, should’ve warned me—this tiny little lady comes to the door, can’t be more than five feet tall, but that doesn’t stop her! She
still
looks down her nose at me, and she says, I never forgot it, she says, ‘Constable,’ just like that, ‘Constable,’ she says, ‘I am going to make an exception in your case, but, at this house, service personnel are expected to call at the rear.

“My God,” I said.

“And Cardello, my partner, Cardello’s standing there just waiting, because he knows what’s coming, and when I turn around, he’s got this big smirk on his face, and he’s just standing there splitting a gut.”

“What a nasty woman,” I said. “So what did she want? Why did she call you?”

“Something
dead.”
Kevin’s voice was flat but ominous. I quit scrubbing the Bronco and looked toward him. He was looming over the hedge with a wicked grin on his big freckled face.

“An animal?” I asked.

“Something
dead.”
Kevin’s voice dropped to basso profundo and lingered on the word.
“Dead,”
he repeated.

“Well, what was it? A squirrel or...?”

Kevin let me suffer and then, obviously pleased to have suckered me, said, “Not a damn thing. That’s all it ever is, nothing, but that’s not how Alice sees it.”

“You’re on a first-name basis?”

“Alice in Wonderland. Not to her face, but that’s a, uh, kind of a nickname.”

“So what was her problem?”

“Well, according to her, something—she doesn’t say what, but
something
—is...” Kevin paused to clear his throat. “It seems like, according to her, all of a sudden, there’s some kind of a bad smell in the house, and the way she’s worked it out, what it’s coming from is that something’s died.” Kevin tilted his head to the side and rapped two big fingers against it. “Nut case,” he explained. “She calls all the time. Calls about everything. Helicopters. Charcoal. Clothes dryers. Got to watch out for them. In winter, where they’re vented outside, they give off this steam, and the way she sees it, the house is on fire. Her house, neighbor’s house, anyone’s house. Men. Strange men. They break into her house all the time. Dig up her garden. Bury things in it. Pollution. Guy walks down the street smoking a cigarette, and she calls us. Dogs. Kids. She hates kids. The sun comes up, she calls us. Like I said, nut case.”