The Barker Street Regulars (11 page)

Precisely.

“Not at all!” I countered.

“We may be a pair of old jackasses,” he said proudly. “Well, I may be one. I can’t speak for Robert. But there is nothing asinine about the methodical collection of empirical evidence. And I assure you that we see this murder for the horror that it is.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Perhaps I could persuade you to accompany Rowdy.”

I gave in, but insisted on driving to Ceci’s myself and also substituted Kimi for Rowdy. Kimi was anything but a real tracking dog—I’m not claiming otherwise—but I’d taken her to a couple of tracking workshops, where she’d shown considerable aptitude for the sport. With her tracking harness on, she might satisfy Hugh and Robert’s desire for a Toby or a Pompey by putting her nose to the ground. To Rowdy, a harness meant
pull.

After digging out Kimi’s red tracking harness and an old thirty-foot army-green tracking lead, I bundled up in my parka and then remembered that I had to check on the cat. After locking the dogs in my bedroom, I eased open the door to my study, slipped in, and quickly shut the door without giving the cat a chance to escape. As it turned out, the cat hadn’t been hanging around looking for the opportunity to bolt. Rather, it had installed itself, appropriately enough, on the mouse pad next to my new
computer. At the sight of me, it glared, hissed, and then vanished in the tangle of cables under the printer. The mouse pad was covered with cat hair and oily medicine. “Nice little kitty,” I said hypocritically. Then I produced those stupid squeaking noises that no self-respecting person makes to a dog that weighs over five pounds. Not that I don’t like cats. Not that I’m superstitious about them, even about really hideous black cats like this one. But cats are not my special mission.
Dog
spelled backward? Yes. But
cat?
Tac? I don’t see the cosmic significance.

Nonetheless, instead of following Hugh’s precise instructions for getting to Ceci’s house in Newton, I stayed on the Cambridge side of the river, took a right onto Arsenal Street, and then made an immediate left onto the strip of Greenough Boulevard where I’d saved the cat. I did not, of course, expect to come upon the tall, evil man with the bulbous forehead. I certainly didn’t expect to catch him abusing another helpless little animal. It occurred to me that in Kevin Dennehy’s mind, that stretch of road represented a sort of Great Grimpen Mire, the haunt of the hound of the Baskervilles. Remember the famous message sent to Sir Henry Baskerville at the Northumberland Hotel?
As you value your life or your reason keep away from the moor
Well, Kevin had never come out and warned me about valuing my life and my reason, but when he mentioned the area, he spoke in sinister tones, and his wholesome freckled face took on a sort of Baskervillian expression. Anyway, as I drove slowly along what actually was a dire-looking stretch of road, I wondered why Kevin had wasted his time scaring me when he could have been calling the Metropolitan District Commission or writing to the Boston newspapers to demand the installation of streetlights along the presumably dangerous stretch. As
it was, the only illumination came from the big lights in the parking lot of the shopping mall; the area by the river was utterly black. I relied on my headlights to see that only a couple of cars and one pickup were parked in the turnouts; there was no sign of the evildoer’s dark van. The pointless detour left me feeling guilty. If the cat had been a dog, wouldn’t I be doing more to find out who’d tried to drown it?

After crossing the river, I pulled over to consult the directions that Hugh had dictated. Ceci lived in a section of Newton called Norwood Hill. Following Hugh’s instructions, I cut through Brighton and, just after entering Newton, veered sharply uphill in more senses than one. Brighton was apartment buildings, triple deckers, and shops that sold lottery tickets, potato chips, and not much else. As a tangle of streets ascended Norwood Hill, the size of the houses increased with the gain in altitude, and dim gaslights replaced the bright electricity of the lower regions. At a four-way intersection of narrow streets, I came to a stop to figure out where I was, but couldn’t read the street signs in the darkness and realized that the gaslights carried a message: If you didn’t already know your way around, you didn’t belong in this neighborhood at all. After crossing the intersection, I pulled up, dug a flashlight out of the glove compartment, got out of the car, and found a small street sign that told me I was almost at Ceci’s. Another gaslit block and a couple of turns put me on Norwood Road, which, as Hugh had said, soon split into Lower and Upper Norwood. Bearing right on Upper Norwood, I passed a baronial stucco minipalace, a rambling brick Victorian, a Cape that looked little and cosy by comparison with its imposing neighbors, and, on my left, a colonial that obviously dated not to New World imperialism but to the twentieth-century colonization of the
suburbs. Beyond that colonial was a second, this one big, white, and square, with three gables and two massive chimneys. To the right of Ceci’s house was a detached garage, and in the driveway that led to it was a car I recognized from the Gateway lot, the old Volvo with the bumper sticker that read
THE GAME IS AFOOT
.

I hadn’t even turned off the ignition when the front door opened. Robert, tall and dignified, came down the walk bearing a big battery-powered lantern. I noticed that he, like my father, had an exceptionally large head. Looped around his neck was the wide strap of a camera that clunked against his chest. To my relief, he wore neither an Inverness cape nor a deerstalker hat.

At his request, I left Kimi crated in the car and followed him into the house, which was all high ceilings, brocade chairs, shiny mahogany tables, oriental rugs, and dark wood floors. Ceci, dressed in layers of pinkish-beige jersey, was fluttering around offering tea and sherry.

Hugh looked up from an assortment of paraphernalia that he was removing from a cardboard box and arranging on the floor of the spacious front hall. Robert, as usual, wore a suit. Hugh had on a plaid flannel shirt with pens and pencils stuck in the breast pocket. Exchanging glances with Robert, he looked like a carpenter consulting an employer about which door he wanted rehung. Hugh rose to his feet, assured himself that I’d brought a dog, and immediately put on a padded canvas jacket. Robert donned a heavy black wool coat that made him look like an undertaker. Then the three of us followed Ceci into a living room the size of a banquet hall. At its far end, the room became a sort of miniconservatory: a series of French doors overlooking the backyard formed a large bay or alcove. A forerunner to today’s sun spaces, the area had a floor of burgundy
tiles, tubs of potted palms, and the kind of natural-colored rattan furniture that obviously hadn’t been bought at some discount department store’s spring sale on wicker. The two chairs and an ottoman had cushions covered in a deep green and rose floral prints: fat peonies about to turn blowsy. The low table was topped with glass. Robert and Hugh trailed after Ceci as she made her way to the alcove and began to question her about Jonathan’s movements. Where had he been when she had gone to bed? Had she no premonition of evil? What had she observed the next morning?

Turning a rheostat that lowered the lights in the bay, Ceci said, “I feel that Jonathan left this way.”

“You
feel
?” Robert inquired. “And what grounds do you have for—”

“Ceci, dear,” Hugh interrupted, “which of these doors did you, in fact, find unlocked?”

Pointing to a French door in the center of the alcove, Ceci said, “Ajar. Ever so slightly open. It was really very naughty of Jonathan to have done that.” She talked on. I didn’t follow what she said. Indeed, so transfixed was I that I didn’t even follow her to the alcove. I stared at an immense oil painting that hung over the baronial fireplace in the living room. The painting was a beautifully executed life-size portrait. Its subject posed right in front of this same fireplace. During his lifetime, when he’d actually sat on the hearth directly beneath his portrait, he must have given people the uncanny impression that they’d been struck by double vision on a giant scale. Maybe the artist had intended precisely that effect. In any case, as rendered in oil, the subject was a handsome, noble fellow. The portrait was illuminated from above by a small light mounted on an elaborate gilded frame. The bottom of the frame bore a brass plate that read
LORD SAINT SIMON
.

An end table near the fireplace held a collection of crystal knickknacks and china shepherdesses arrayed around a small photograph in a correspondingly small silver frame. The frame wasn’t cheap-looking—nothing in Ceci’s house was—and it was tasteful, but it was only about two inches wide and four inches high. Like the massive gold frame over the fireplace, it displayed a portrait. This one showed a bald-headed man with wire-rimmed glasses. The man wore a morose expression. I assumed that he was Ceci’s late husband, Ellis Love. If so, he had a right to look slighted.

H
UGH AND ROBERT HAD
brought what I suppose should be called a scene-of-crime kit: Robert’s camera, two powerful lanterns, tweezers, small paper envelopes, paper and plastic bags, labels, indelible markers, little glass jars and test tubes, measuring tape, a yardstick, plaster of Paris or perhaps of somewhere else, a fingerprint kit evidently purchased at a toy store, a laptop computer that sat like a mechanical bird in a homemade-looking nest of insulation, and exactly the kind of oversize magnifying glass depicted in caricatures of Sherlock Holmes. With misogyny worthy of Holmes, they forbade Ceci to go anywhere near the equipment arrayed on the floor of the immense central hallway of her house. I, they decided, might make myself useful by lugging gear, but would probably drop it.

I felt a senseless urge to prove myself worthy of a key role in the charade. “Toby,” I announced, “was spaniel and lurcher.
Lurcher,
as you probably know, refers to a sighthound cross, usually greyhound. The term connotes—”

“Poachers,” Robert said.

“Gypsies,” I finished.

Hugh was tinkering with the laptop computer. Robert pointed menacingly at it and apologized for Hugh’s insistence on wasting time.

“The neatest and most orderly brain,”
quoted Hugh, peering up, “
with the greatest capacity for storing information
—”

Robert interrupted. “Not
neatest!
Not
information! Tidiest! Facts! The tidiest and most orderly brain with the greatest capacity for storing facts of any man.”
He added emphatically,
“Man!
Not
machine.”

Pressing the power button on the laptop, Hugh cryptically replied, “Jupiter nonetheless arises.”

Robert was livid. “
Ascends! Jupiter nonetheless
ascends!”

“Pay no attention to them,” Ceci advised me. “I never do. Ellis was just the same. I put up with it from him for a great many years, and—”

“Fifty-nine,” Hugh said. “You and Ellis were married for fifty-nine years, Ceci. We attended your Golden Wedding anniversary.”

In an odd voice, Ceci said, “Jonathan was there.” She sounded puzzled, as if some unreliable person were trying to convince her of her grandnephew’s presence on the occasion. “I had entirely forgotten, well, almost entirely, until the subject came up in our”—her voice dropped to a whisper—“recent communications.” Brushing a hand lightly across my sleeve, she murmured, “And you? Have you sought Irene’s assistance?”

Before I could answer, Robert broke in to warn me not to get Kimi, or Toby, as he called her, until the first stage of the investigation was complete. Ascending like Jupiter, I suppose, Hugh announced that it was about to begin. It started where Jonathan had evidently left the
house: at the large plant-filled alcove at the far end of the living room. As Robert quickly sketched the area on a sheet of paper fastened to a clipboard, Hugh drew it on his laptop. I just looked at it. The alcove, I observed, was formed by sets of French doors. Those on each end were windows, really, and angled to create the bay. The doors gave onto a brick terrace. Ceci flipped a switch that turned on large lights that must have been mounted high on the back of the house. Peering out, I saw a vast yard that sloped downward and disappeared into darkness.

Leaving Ceci indoors, I zipped my parka, pulled on gloves, and followed Hugh and Robert onto the terrace, which was elevated about two feet above ground level. It was about ten feet wide. A flight of brick steps led from the terrace to the rear of the property. On the sides, the terrace stopped abruptly where the alcove ended. Systematically casting back and forth on the empty terrace, Robert reminded me of an advanced obedience dog working his scent articles. The examination of the terrace seemed like a waste of time. Not so much as a stray leaf was visible, and any outdoor furniture Ceci kept there, a wrought-iron table and chairs, perhaps, had been stowed elsewhere for the winter.

Undiscouraged, the Sherlockians next turned their attention to the garden beds that ran along the foundation of the house. I should explain that if you faced the back of the house, to the left ran a brick walkway that eventually passed between the house and the garage, and led to a white wood fence with a sturdy gate. The flower bed to the right of the terrace ran parallel to the back of the house, turned the corner, and ended at another length of the same high white fence. Robert and Hugh hovered over the path to the garage and the flower bed next to it. I observed nothing except a thick layer of fir
bark, the leafless branches of small azaleas, the emerging shoots of daffodils, and the foliage and blooms of dozens of crocuses and snowdrops, their blossoms tightly closed, as if the February night had forced the harbingers of spring to fashion makeshift parkas out of pastel petals. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary. That mulch is ubiquitous in the suburbs, where expensive lawn services convince homeowners that bare earth, dirty as it is, should never be seen unclothed.

On the other side of the house, however, the corresponding bed of fir bark, dormant azaleas, daffodil shoots, and early bulbs drew enthusiastic exclamations from Hugh and Robert: “Features of interest!” In my skeptical eagerness to see whether the men had found a genuine clue, I had to be shooed away so I wouldn’t trample the flowers, if not the evidence. As it turned out, mashed blossoms and squished daffodil shoots
were
the evidence. Along most of its length, this mulched bed looked identical to the one on the garage side of the house. Near the angled French door that formed this end of the alcove, however, broken foliage lay flat on the fir bark. I found myself in agreement with Robert and Hugh: The appearance of the ground honestly did suggest that someone had stood there to peer through the glass.