The Barker Street Regulars (20 page)

Today, Wednesday, Irene Wheeler wore a navy linen suit, a silk blouse, and leather pumps. I hadn’t taken off my anorak, which was cobalt blue, brighter than navy. I reminded myself that according to the L.L. Bean catalog, thye anorak’s polyester fleece was twice as warm as natural fibers. It was the second such anorak I’d owned. The first had been a present from Steve. After I’d worn it for a few years, the hood had started to come loose, and a tailor had informed me that the anorak couldn’t be repaired. The tailor was new to this country and still learning English. What he actually said was that the garment had defected. On reflection, I decided that the tailor was right: In going to pieces, the anorak had committed treason against a great American institution. Consequently, I bundled it up and shipped it to Free-port, Maine, where, after what I assume were grueling hours under harsh lights, it evidently confessed its guilt, because L.L. Bean replaced it with the new and presumably loyal anorak I now wore. I hadn’t asked for a replacement; I’d just wanted to snitch. But L.L. Bean is the real thing. Satisfaction guaranteed. Anyway, I’d worn the brand-new anorak in the hope of presenting myself to Irene Wheeler as the sort of prosperous person who can pay to raise the dead as easily as she can fill her closet with polyester fleece. Rita, I might mention, insists that in choosing to wear the anorak, I elected to garb myself in a personal symbol of reincarnation. As to the remainder of Rita’s interpretation, well, it’s true that Vinnie was the last gift my mother
gave me before she died, the pick puppy from the last litter she bred, and I did, admittedly, grow up in Maine, but L.L. Bean as a
mother figure?
Therapists! Let me also point out that since polyester fleece is warm, soft, and cuddly, it has to feel like a baby blanket against your skin. What else could it feel like? It has no choice in the matter. I said that to Rita. She said, “Neither do you.”

But back to Irene Wheeler. “A model of perfection,” she said. “We do keep coming back to ideal images. The gray cat?”

I decided to keep quiet about the mystical transformation Tracker had undergone the second I’d named her after a breed champion malamute. “Vinnie was real,” I said. “Besides, she was my dog.” It didn’t require a psychic to see our bond in the picture I’d offered Irene Wheeler. It was a color snapshot I’d had blown up. Vinnie and I are standing on the pier in Port Clyde, Maine, on a hazy summer day. The diffused light that radiates downward and bounces back from the ocean creates the illusion that her coat and my hair are exactly the same color. I am kneeling with my arm around her. We are smiling at each other. We are both young. Vinnie is obviously going to live forever.

“She was beautiful,” Irene said tritely.

I stopped short of saying that I would pay anything to see Vinnie again. I settled for saying that I’d give anything. As I spoke the words, as I’d certainly done before, I suddenly felt as if I’d been blasted with loud noise. Sometimes when Rowdy shrieked in the bathtub or when Kimi roared in my ear as I bent down to put her food dish on the floor, my head would rock as if I’d been whacked hard on the skull. Whenever it happened, I wondered whether I might actually have sustained a
mild concussion. Irene Wheeler’s office, however, was quiet. What rocked my head were my own words.

“Your great dog is still available to you,” said Irene Wheeler. “Is she not?”

I hesitated. “In a sense, she is.” My head was still reeling. The office seemed like an echo chamber that distorted my own voice.
In a sense,
I heard myself say. The phrase ricocheted:
Innocence.

“In a sense,” Irene Wheeler repeated.

“Not in material form,” I said carefully.

Irene eyed me with what looked like suspicion. “Perhaps your Vinnie is as close as she is ready or able to be.”

“Vinnie was always ready for
anything
,” I snapped.

“Her life was full? It was complete?”

“Absolutely,” I said truthfully. I couldn’t control my tears. “I gave her everything I had. She gave everything back a millionfold.”

“Everything,” said Irene Wheeler. “She gave you everything. She was more than willing to try anything you asked.”

“Yes,” I agreed.

“A cycle is complete. She gave you everything. She continues to sustain you. And you want
more?
”

I said nothing.

“The dogs you have now?” Irene Wheeler asked.

“Rowdy and Kimi.”

“Would you trade them?”

“Not for anything.”

“Not for Vinnie? Their lives for hers?”

My head rocked again. “Of course not.” The prospect felt sick and grotesque: a bargain with the devil.

“You ask too much of everyone,” Irene Wheeler said. “Of your dogs, past and present, of me, of yourself, and of the cycles that govern the universe. The full
completion of a cycle is rare and beautiful. Just as you said, it is perfection itself.” She let silence hang. “Do you have any questions to ask of Vinnie? Is there anything you need to know? Any unfinished business?”

“None,” I said. I saw Vinnie enter this world. I was the first human being to hold her. I was the last. I’d been holding her ever since. Now I finally let her go.

On the sidewalk outside Irene Wheeler’s building, I paused and stood in an oddly peaceful daze. What awakened me was a brief flash of light from a third-floor window of the three-decker house across the street. Moving nothing but my eyes, I caught sight of a pair of binoculars in the window. Then an invisible hand drew a curtain closed. The neighborhood snoop? Or a confederate of Irene Wheeler’s? But why observe clients as they left? Peering at me as I descended the steps of the psychic’s house, a confederate could have learned less than Irene Wheeler had seen and heard for herself. And with a thousand confederates, how could she have known about the beautiful gray TV cat? About Tracker’s ear? About her double paws?

Today’s experiment had been a failure in the sense that Irene Wheeler has sized me up as a client entirely different from the wealthy, lonely, gullible Ceci. Anorak or no anorak, I was broke. And I’d have been hard to fool. Irene Wheeler chose her victims carefully. She had rejected me. Yet she’d demonstrated a power as uncanny as her inexplicable knowledge of my ideal cat and my real Tracker. She had challenged my sorrow. I felt healed by evil.

T
HAT SAME WEDNESDAY KEVIN
Dennehy and I had dinner at a restaurant on upper Mass. Ave. The place is a favorite of his. There’s surf-and-turf on the menu, and “cheese” refers exclusively to a tremendous pool of warm goo so absolutely identical in color to the orange plastic that covers the comfortably padded seats of the restaurant’s booths that I am always tempted to sneak a bite of the upholstery to find out whether it is, in fact, the solid form of the glop on the nachos. The more Kevin and I go there, the more difficult it becomes for me to decide what to order. There’s a lot of cheese on the menu. Also, I rule out anything else I’ve had before. Tonight, in desperation, I’d splurged on broiled swordfish. It had arrived liberally sprinkled with an orange-colored powder that I labored to think of as paprika. As usual, Kevin had the surf-and-turf. Even with the aid of a serrated knife, Kevin had to work at the lobster tail and the steak, but far from complaining, he raved about the food the way he always does. Kevin enjoys a triumph over a tough opponent,
and opponents don’t come much tougher than that surf-and-turf.

Pushing the swordfish around in an effort to create the illusion that I was consuming my dinner, I said, “Kevin, the murder of Jonathan Hubbell? You’re going to think I’m joking, but I’m perfectly serious. There really is a lot about it that ties in with Sherlock Holmes.”

Chewing a piece of meat, Kevin was unable to do more than grunt.

“Especially,” I continued, “with
The Hound of the Baskervilles.
You’ve read it, right? You probably read it in high school.”

The gristle prevented Kevin from answering. He shook his head.

“You’ve seen the movie?”

He nodded.

“The old movie,” I guessed. “With Basil Rathbone. And Nigel Bruce.”

Irene Wheeler’s office was only three or four blocks away, on a side street off Mass. Ave. It occurred to me that maybe having once eaten at this same restaurant with a companion who, like Kevin, had ordered surf-and-turf, she’d decided to set up shop nearby in the hope of capitalizing on the need for telepathic communication.

“Well,” I said in response to Kevin’s mute nod, “I just reread it, and there really are a lot of parallels. Listen, okay? The victim is Sir Charles Baskerville. Every night before he goes to bed, he takes a walk down a yew alley, meaning not our kind of alley, obviously, but a sort of pathway between two hedges. And on the path, there’s a gate. Okay? And Jonathan Hubbell? In the evening, after dinner, he leaves his great-aunt’s house and goes down a pathway that ends at guess what?
Evergreen hedges. And a gate. Now admittedly, Sir Charles Baskerville’s body was found on the far side of the gate, and Jonathan’s was found in his great-aunt’s yard, and there are zillions of other differences. Even so, in both cases, what’s found near the body?”

In his effort to swallow the lump he’d been chewing, Kevin turned so red that I was afraid it had lodged in his throat. A doctor once told me that a person who is choking can’t speak; people who say they’re choking are fine. “Kevin, are you all right? Say something!”

He didn’t.

Lucky for Kevin that I’d recently watched an excellent video on first aid! Rising swiftly from my seat, I said, “Relax! I know what I’m doing. Stand up!” I ordered. “I can’t reach you. Stand up!” As Kevin started to comply, I added, “I know everything about the Heimlich maneuver. I just watched a video about it. It was called ‘How to Save Your Dog’s Life.’ I practiced on Rowdy and Kimi.”

I didn’t have to touch Kevin. My words alone performed a sort of verbal Heimlich. As soon as they left my mouth, the lump of gristle flew from Kevin’s and landed in the middle of my swordfish. Kevin gasped for air. By now, a crowd of waiters and concerned fellow patrons had gathered. Embarrassment turned Kevin’s face a deeper shade of crimson than choking had done. Shooing everyone away, he glared at me.

Once again seated across from him, I said quietly, “Now, Kevin, anyone can choke. There’s nothing to be ashamed of. And it’s the restaurant’s fault, really.”

Between clenched teeth, he demanded, “‘How to Save Your Dog’s Life’?”

“I was trying to reassure you that I knew what I was doing.”

“With you around, who needs the Heimlich maneuver?” he growled.

“You might have, for one,” I replied with dignity. “Anyway, as I was saying, in both cases, what was found near the body?” Since Kevin seemed inexplicably disinclined to answer, I continued. “The footprints of a gigantic hound. Or a giant dog, anyway. But there’s more!”

A waitress appeared. “Done?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said. I felt almost grateful to Kevin for ejecting the lump into the dinner I’d otherwise have had to make a show of finishing.

Nothing ruins Kevin’s appetite. As the waitress removed his plate, he ordered strawberry shortcake and asked whether I wanted dessert. I asked for chocolate ice cream. How could even the worst restaurant ruin that? By repeatedly thawing and freezing it until it’s a mass of ice crystals. Or that’s my guess, anyway. I picked at the ice cream. Kevin devoured what looked like strawberry jam topped with shaving cream.

“So we have the yew hedge, the gate, the evening stroll, paw prints near the body,” I persisted. “The paw prints of a giant dog. And, Kevin,
and,
it so happens that the entire neighborhood where Jonathan was murdered, where his great-aunt Ceci lives, in a fancy section of Newton, has gaslights. Gaslights! Sherlock Holmes, right?”

“Invitation to crime,” pronounced the voice of Law Enforcement.

“Well, they don’t provide much light,” I admitted. “But they’re very charming. And the traces of cocaine on the body? Holmes again.” Echoing Althea, Hugh, and Robert, I said, “
He
is everywhere.”

“What’s God got to do with it?” Kevin asked sourly.

“Not God. Sherlock Holmes.”

“Cocaine.” Kevin’s voice was ripe with disgust. “I keep telling you, I got no use for—”

“And I keep telling you! Neither did Dr. Watson. Anyway, there’s more. Over and over in the stories, there’s this theme of the victimization of the innocent.
The Sign of Four,
‘The Speckled Band,’ ‘The Engineer’s Thumb.’ In probably half the stories, maybe all of them somehow or other, there’s some innocent person who’s being taken advantage of by the forces of evil. Here, it’s Ceci who really is being victimized by Irene Wheeler, okay? Even if nobody but me seems to give a damn about it. Except Jonathan Hubbell. And Jonathan was murdered, maybe because just like Sherlock Holmes, he was trying to protect his great-aunt. Maybe. And the particular con game is also very Holmesian. Halfway through the stories, what happens to Holmes? He plunges to his death at the Reichenbach Fall. Supposedly. Except, of course, that Holmes was
resurrected.
Really, Conan Doyle made the mistake of killing him off, but the public just wouldn’t tolerate losing him, so Conan Doyle had to bring him back. And resurrection is Irene Wheeler’s con game: bringing Ceci’s dog back from the grave.”

“You want to know what I think?” Kevin asked.

“Yes.”

“You’re letting your imagination run away with you. Look, Holly, you work hard enough at it, you can always make something out of nothing. Take this case we got now. Donald Lively. Drug dealer. Dealt in what? Among other things, cocaine. Sherlock Holmes! The guy victimized the innocent. Not all that innocent, but you can look at it that way.”

“Was there a yew hedge? A gigantic dog? Were there—”

“The point is, Holly, what you see depends on what lens you look through.”

“Lens! There, you see? Lens. Magnifying glass. Sherlock Holmes.”

Kevin was unimpressed. “If you want to treat this case like it was a Sherlock Holmes story, you look hard enough, and you’re going to find something. I don’t know what, ’cause I haven’t looked, but in his closet, you’re going to find a funny-looking hat with flaps over the ears, or you’re going to find that the guy who lived next door was named Watson or—”