Authors: Cecelia Tishy
I take the envelope, open it, unfold the single sheet, and read, “…wrong man… bad evidence…if you are a moral detective you
must care and act…do something.” At the bottom, in huge letters: “HELP ME.”
A short letter, it’s a disclaimer and a plea. It contains no real information, not one fact. I hold it at the edges between
fingers and thumbs, reading and rereading top to bottom until I can recite those words verbatim, “…wrong man…moral detective…do
something.”
Devaney waits patiently. I’m still reading. Then there’s a shimmer, an optic flash. The moment hastens but stands still. Yes,
I stare at lines of ballpoint ink, but through the paper I see a scene develop. The letter in my hand has turned as transparent
as cellophane, and on the other side something swirls. Like a storm. Coils of red heat. The paper takes me there. It’s an
oven, an inferno.
I now pretend to read. I am posing with the letter, merely posing. Devaney thinks I pause to grasp the words on the page,
but he is mistaken. My left side is hot. Below the rib cage is a burning. It’s painful. The hot coils sear and flash. It takes
everything I’ve got not to cry out, to stand as if normal. The fiery storm scene engulfs me.
“Reggie, are you okay?”
“Okay,” I say, voice from an echo chamber. “Hot—”
He takes the letter from my hands. I lean against the cool door frame. The coils begin to fade as he folds the letter, tucks
it back in the envelope. No flames crackle in his mind.
“Reggie, you okay? Are you sick?”
I shake my head. “Just a feeling in my side, like something hot. Terribly hot.” Then I feel embarrassed. Suppose he thinks
it’s a hot flash?
Devaney leans close, looks hard at me. “I have something to tell you. The house, Reggie, the crack house where Henry Faiser
lived—”
“Yes?”
“The day we arrested him, it went up in flames. The chop shop and all three houses on the block burned to the ground. Two
bodies were found—homeless squatters. We never solved it.”
“Oh.”
“You felt that, Reggie. The heat. The letter did it. It means you can help, Reggie. Just like your aunt. I’ll get to work
on this and call you.”
Relief on his face. Relief in my soul. Bingo! Psychic is open for business. Hoo-ray. Saved. Deputized.
Yet my rib…my rib is still hot. Moments pass as Frank Devaney welcomes me to the team. As I sign on gladly as his silent partner.
Even after Devaney leaves, the rib is still hot. When my whole self is willing and able and eager, why this blaze? Listen
to the body, say the experts. Suppose I do? Suppose it warns me, as I plunge ahead, not to walk through fire?
I’
m ready to take a midday walk to Eldridge Street for a crime scene survey—just as soon as my dog comes home. The radio’s
on as I wash a few dishes, the violins and cellos full-throttle fortissimo. I turn it off, since Beethoven is the last thing
I need at a stressful moment. The fact is, I’m jittery and my rib is pulsing. From the front window, I scan the scene on Barlow
Square, where the trees are leafing out nicely in bright spring green. On the brick sidewalk, a dry cleaner makes a delivery
and an older man in an argyle sweater fills his pipe. A woman carries a cardboard carton in from her car—a new toaster oven.
It’s a calm city scene for suburban me, the twenty-five-year denizen of enclosed malls and culs-de-sac. Sometimes distraction
is the best sedative.
Seated in Jo’s study, I open my laptop and start “Ticked Off,” a hybrid etiquette and pet peeve column now running in seventeen
suburban weeklies, three new ones signed on since last month. The weekly column was launched during my last corporate-wife
posting in Oakton, Illinois—i.e., Chicagoland— where we had our biggest house. Where I had my smallest life, upscale as it
was.
“Ticked Off” was the hobby that has gained a life of its own. The sight of my name in print, the check payable to me—what
a thrill! Who knew that one little op-ed piece on cell phone bad behavior would turn into a bona fide column? Who knew, for
that matter, that “Ticked Off” would become a flotation device when my marriage crashed—or, to be precise, when I was ejected
from what Martin “Icehouse” Baynes decided was the passenger seat? Never mind that my own idea was long-term partnership,
my spousal role the family copilot.
Marty, it seems, saw it differently. For him, I was to learn, a wife meant twenty-five years of cargo to be jettisoned when
Ms. Trophy appeared. My era was done, finis, when Marty got Celina, one year older than our daughter, Molly, who is now twenty-three.
In any case, “Ticked Off” is now modest steady income to be counted on. Serendipity, never knock it.
I’m finally past the jitters and settling into writing the column—a reader-suggested topic of women who file their nails in
public—when an ungodly roar erupts outside, a sonic throbbing with firecracker accents.
My jumpiness doesn’t trigger because this time I know what’s up. I dash to the window and see the familiar chrome and cherry
fenders, the bubble helmet and leathers, the gloved fingers on handlebar controls. I watch the motorcycle ease to the curb
and back against it. This Harley is rigged with a dog seat. Sitting up in a harness thing, wrapped in a blanket, the dog has
a brown-white-black furry head, floppy ears, and the blunt muzzle and nose of a beagle.
I spring out. “Biscuit. Sweetie.” My voice is swallowed by the engine roar.
This black, white, and tan bundle of energy is my dog. Correction: half mine. Formerly my aunt’s, she was jointly bequeathed
to me and to this biker, who cuts the engine and dismounts, visor up. Standing by the chrome exhaust, I struggle with the
harness straps, a Gordian knot. I am exasperated beyond words. “How can you—”
“How can I what?” He pulls off the helmet. This is R. K. Stark, who stands like a highwayman, a Colossus of Roads, in his
biker leathers.
“This harness contraption, it’s dangerous.”
“Custom-made, a stroke of genius.”
“A dog’s hearing could be damaged by the noise. You didn’t consult me. What about our deal?”
He deftly frees the dog, who jitterbugs into my arms and licks my fingers. As I hug her and scratch her warm belly, my dogdander
allergy acts up, the same allergy that plagued me for years while raising the children with retrievers, one Lab and one golden.
I sniff but coo, “Sweetie—”
“Sweetie? Did I hear sweetie?”
Caustic as always, this man wants to turn a sweet animal companion into a Call of the Wild. Meaning that our philosophies
on dog care are as different as day and night. Stark stows the harness contraption in the saddlebag. Biscuit darts toward
a puddle in the gutter.
“Biscuit, no.” On Stark’s order, the dog halts, comes when he calls her, delights at his gruff “Good dog” and the tug at her
ears. I am practically forced to invite him inside. The two of us have issues to discuss, such as fleas, ticks, and kibble.
“Coffee on?”
To a normal person, you’d say yes and issue a polite invitation. But Stark strips manners like bark from a tree. I call it
the Stark effect.
“Coffee on?” he repeats. “Pope Catholic?”
“How fresh?”
“Since last Tuesday.”
At her kitchen water bowl, Biscuit laps furiously, doubtless dehydrated from the foolish motorcycle ride. I pour Stark a mugful
of hot coffee, slide the sugar bowl, and wait as he spoons in his usual five. His cropped hair and trim mustache are ginger,
his eyes gray as the North Atlantic. He’s over thirty. His scent is unfiltered Camels. And muscles—the man might as well live
at a gym.
Literally, he might. I can contact him only on his cell phone and suspect he’s close to homeless. Or never sleeps. For two
years, he lived rent-free in my Aunt Jo’s basement, jobless, practically a derelict. He’s supposedly working off his debt
of gratitude to Jo by “helping” me, mostly, it seems, by showing up at odd times.
One of which saved my life. Truly. Stark is brusque and about as sensitive as a boiled owl. My neighborhood grocers call him
a thug, and they may well be right. Credentials? Don’t ask. I don’t even know what his initials, R. K., stand for, and he
keeps me off-balance by showing up and vanishing like a Cheshire tomcat.
But in my two months here on Barlow Square, Stark has shown uncanny skill where my welfare is concerned. It’s as if one of
my son’s boyhood action figures has come to life to watch over me. What I know for sure is, the man’s tongue is alkali, but
his deeds are heaven-sent. Stark has been a rock. So far.
What links us is Biscuit. What divides us, among other things, is also Biscuit. I’ll never know why Aunt Jo saw fit to name
both Stark and me guardians of her dear beagle. Doubtless Stark is as mystified as I am.
“I’ll call her sweetie if I want to. Pets deserve pet names.” I blow my nose.
Stark gulps down coffee that would scald ordinary mortals. “Today in the open field,” he says, “she figured out her nose beats
her eyes.”
“Perfectly good eyesight. The vet checked.”
“Next step, rabbits. She won’t be gun-shy.”
He’s baiting me. I reach for the tissue box. “Biscuit,” I say, “is a house dog, not a gundog.”
He gulps again. “How about you, Cutter?”
“Me?”
“How’d you like to learn to hunt? Teach you how to field-dress a deer.”
“To butcher dead animals in the woods? No thanks.” He’s goading me. I give him a stony stare.
He stares back. “Okay, then, learn to ride. Give your driver’s license a big upgrade.”
On this particular subject, the goading is a try at persuasion. He’s brought this up before. “My license is perfectly adequate.”
“Adequate for your girlie car.”
My preowned VW Beetle is parked down the block. Its dashboard bud vase sports a silk rose. “The Lexus is a thing of my past,
Stark. You know that.”
“I’m not talking about your deluxe four-wheelers, Cutter. Your Beetle either. I thought you were hot for adventures. You disappoint
me.”
In truth, I am hot for adventure. I have pamphlets on scuba diving and white-water kayaking and hang gliding too. I have in
mind a certain man—no, not this dog partner, but a man who appreciates the outdoors and whose return from an international
trip I await. I won’t say his name here, but cards postmarked Hong Kong, then Cairo, promised he’d call by the first of May.
Today’s the fourth.
So, yes, a woman can be keen for adventure but have no pamphlets whatsoever for Harley-Davidson motorcycles.
“Boots and long sleeves, that’s the gear to start off,” Stark continues. “You already got the helmet.”
On the top shelf of the hall coat closet sits a spare motorcycle helmet, courtesy of R. K. Stark. Stolen, for all I know.
“Coupla weekends of school, you’ll get your certificate. We’ll start you out in empty parking lots.”
Enough of this. “On a totally different subject,” I say, “do you happen to know anything about old crimes in the South End
near the Mass Pike?”
“Happen to? You mean, was it me?”
“On a block on Eldridge near the turnpike?” I give him the dates, try out the names Peter Wald and Henry Faiser.
Stark shakes his head. “I was on the Vinson. The Indian Ocean is a few miles east of Boston.”
Imagine this man in his Marine Corps uniform on an aircraft carrier. “Maybe you know somebody who remembers those names, someone
here in the city. There was a crack house and a chop shop on the same block.”
His shrug is nonchalant. “Maybe I could ask around.” He eyes me over the rim of the coffee mug. “What’s this all about, Cutter?
Wait, don’t tell me. You got another psychic gig with the cops, right? Am I right?”
Not that I’m hiding it. “Maybe.”
“It’s that buddy of yours from Homicide, isn’t it?” He puts down the emptied mug. “So which one was offed? Faiser?”
“Peter Wald. The son of Jordan Wald.” Stark’s face shows nothing. “The Wald who’s running for lieutenant governor.”
Stark shrugs. “Crooked pol.”
“He’s an environmentalist. He’s green.”
“The color of money. If it’s Boston politics, it’s gotta be crooked.” Pure cynic, Stark. I should have known.
He says, “And Faiser? He’s doing hard time?”
“He is.”
“Black guy?” I nod. “So the case is officially reopened?”
“More like informally.”
“I see.” He smooths his mustache. “Sounds to me like somebody’s leaning hard on the cops.”
“What do you mean?”
“Maybe a reporter. Maybe prison reformers are breaking new evidence that’ll make the cops look racist. Maybe a DNA test is
coming up. The Homicide guys want to get there first. Especially with the election.”
“Stark, you have a suspicious nature.”
“I’m a city guy, Cutter. I never did time in a candyass suburb.”
“I happen to think ethics plays a part. I believe in conscience.” Somehow my statements sound like prissy teatime chatter
from my former life as Mrs. Martin Baynes.
He scoffs. “All the better reason to learn to ride. Take your mind away from all that junk.”
“Stark, why would I want to ride a motorcycle?”
“Because it’s the most fun a human being can have. Sex aside.” He cants one hip forward. “Admit it, you like Fatso.”
His Fat Boy model Harley, on which I have had two rides, one of which was to the emergency room at Boston City. In my moment
of dire need, Stark roared to my side, and the Fat Boy was my ambulance.
“The thing of it is, Cutter, a passenger ought to be able to take over if anything goes wrong.”
“Copilot a motorcycle?”
“In a manner of speaking.”
I pause to absorb this, a statement that presumes future rides on the Fat Boy.
And also presumes that Stark stands ready to pilot while I am the copilot. Never again will I let myself be mistaken for a
passenger. Never again. I say, “You owe me nothing, Stark. Jo— bless her—Jo wouldn’t expect it. You’re a free man.”
“That I am.” He reaches into a back pocket, produces a folded, crinkled sheet. “Application form,” he says. “Just fill it
out and send it in.”
The Motorcycle Safety Foundation. Weekly courses at a local community college campus, weather permitting. Tuition about the
same as scuba in a Y pool.