The Barker Street Regulars (26 page)

O
N A DESERTED DEAD-END
road on a dark, foggy night, men lurk in the shrubbery only yards from the scene of a recent murder. They are ready to spring at me. Rowdy approaches them. He approaches in the hope of a tummy rub. He threatens wet kisses. My deduction? “Silver Blaze.”

Only one of the two men sprang out: Robert. He was far from glad to see me. In fact, his stage-whispered greeting was, believe it or not, “Go home! This is no place for the weaker sex.”

Truly. But when I’m dealing with a person of Robert’s age, I always strive to take generational differences in attitude into account. Most of the time, there aren’t any. Now there were. “I’m sorry,” I answered at normal volume. “Kimi would have liked to come along, but I’m afraid we’ll just have to make do with a male.” Without pausing, I added, “Your message arrived ahead of schedule. If I deciphered it correctly, you
did
ask for help.”

“You,”
Robert whispered in disgust.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You have alarmed Althea. You should never have done that.”

“I haven’t seen Althea since this morning. I don’t know how I’m supposed to have alarmed her. Wait! Yes, I do. You thought I’d have to take the message to her, didn’t you? You didn’t think I’d be able to figure it out for myself. Well, if I’d had to take it to her, then she really would’ve been alarmed, wouldn’t she? You should’ve—”

From the bushes came a wordless injunction to be quiet. I heard the sound of a car engine. The beam of distant headlights glowed through the fog. Before I could decide whether to vanish into the shrubbery or resume my disguise as a dog walker, the lights faded as the car turned onto Upper Norwood. Popping out of the unpruned hedge by Ceci’s gate, Hugh took Robert and me to task so severely that Rowdy plunked his bottom on the ground and listened, too. Although Althea had largely disabused me of my newfound flirtation with the belief in thought transmission, I realized that Rowdy was watching me. It was too dark to see him. But I could feel his gaze. I reached down to rest a hand on his head.

According to Hugh, Robert and I were making a mockery of a serious situation. He was, of course, right.

“How serious is it?” I asked. “Do you have some reason to believe that something is going to happen tonight? Now?”

“I warned you of this!” Robert told Hugh. “The cipher message was
your
idea, I remind you, and—”

Ignoring Robert, Hugh informed me that after leaving the Gateway, the men had discussed the entire matter and decided to interrogate Ceci. In a phone conversation, they’d learned that she was eagerly expecting a reunion with Simon this very evening. Indeed,
she’d been so thrilled by the prospect that they’d obtained only a little information from her about the events preceding Jonathan’s murder. It had been Jonathan, not Ceci, who had called Irene Wheeler to insist that she meet with him. On the phone, and later in person, Jonathan had demanded that Irene return every cent Ceci had ever paid her. According to Ceci, Jonathan had said terrible things to her and to Irene as well, but the men had been unable to discover exactly what the terrible things were.

“When Robert challenged her on the point,” Hugh whispered indignantly, “she had the audacity to hang up on us.”

“Ceci is afraid of ending up at the Gateway,” I ventured, “or in another nursing home.” It seemed to me, too, although I didn’t say it, that Irene and her confederate, the man with the bulbous forehead, might, after all, be guilty only of conning Ceci. Irene’s psychic powers might not be genuine, but her powers of persuasion were real. And the man who’d tried to drown poor Tracker had certainly conspired with Irene to create the credible illusion of Simon’s return. Moreover, Ceci depended exclusively on Irene for her sense of contact with Simon and for the wondrous prospect of earthly reunion with him. Simon, Ceci had told me, was “coming home.” She’d meant the words literally: coming home to his house and his yard on Norwood Hill. To Ceci, Simon was as real as Rowdy was to me right now. But I could rest my hand on Rowdy’s head. In the darkness, I could feel his gaze. Jonathan, I thought, had threatened to deprive his great-aunt Ceci of precisely the kind of contact I had at this moment with my own living dog. But I needed no help to reach Rowdy. Ceci needed Irene. And to see and touch Simon she needed to be at home on Norwood Hill, not at the Gateway, not
anywhere else on earth. If Jonathan had threatened to drive Irene away? If he’d questioned Ceci’s mental competence and threatened to move her from Simon’s home? If so, he had, in effect, threatened to kill her dog. And Irene and her confederate had unwittingly set Ceci up to commit murder.

“The
Gateway
,” Robert said with scorn. “The Gateway! Death and roaches!”

“I’ve never seen roaches there.” I didn’t mention that I’d heard about them, looked for them, and found none.

“According to our research,” Hugh countered, “there are five superior facilities in the area.”

“There are probably hundreds of inferior ones,” I loyally replied. Then I did a mental double take. Research? Had Hugh and Robert been visiting nursing homes? I hadn’t done comparative shopping. When Rowdy and I had begun to volunteer, my expectations of nursing homes had been so low that almost any half-decent facility would have been better than I’d feared. For all I knew, the Gateway had roaches I hadn’t seen. I remembered the unresponsive attendant, Ralph, the one we’d met by the elevators, the one I wouldn’t have hired as kennel help. The roaches might be imaginary. Ralph was real. Rowdy and I arrived at the Gateway at ten-thirty one morning a week. What went on when I wasn’t there? And it was true that the Gateway offered Althea no intellectual companionship. Almost no one else showed any interest in books, and Althea had never shown the slightest interest in any of the social activities that drew Helen Musgrave. Helen was pleasant and cheerful, but wouldn’t Althea happily trade her roommate for the luxury of privacy and the space for more than a handful of personal possessions? Maybe Althea would be better off at one of the five superior facilities.
But the Gateway simply had to be a better-than-average facility. There was nothing cheap-looking about it. It occurred to me that I had no real proof that Jonathan’s visit here had anything to do with Irene Wheeler, spectral dogs, con jobs, or the great-aunt at whose house he had been murdered. Maybe the purpose of his visit had concerned his other great-aunt, Althea. According to Ceci, Jonathan had Althea’s power of attorney. It had been Jonathan who’d written monthly checks to the Gateway. It might not meet Hugh and Robert’s standards as a suitable place for Althea—would any institution?—but those checks must have been for large sums. Any nursing home was expensive. Could Jonathan have come here not to protect Ceci from a con job, but to
move
Althea from the Gateway to some cut-rate place?

Another possibility occurred to me. On the Saturday when Jonathan had arrived here, he had talked on the phone to Irene Wheeler, and she had come here to meet him. What else had he done? Had the psychic been the only one he’d talked to? Althea had known of his impending arrival. She must have told Hugh and Robert. Had they presented Jonathan with information about the five superior facilities? Hugh, I felt certain, had carefully entered tons of data on local nursing homes in a file on his laptop. With research data available, Hugh and Robert could have presented Jonathan with the demand that Althea be moved to a facility of their choice. Or perhaps they’d insisted that she at least have a private room. If Jonathan had refused? Ceci had told me that she was positively not going to take over Althea’s finances; with Jonathan dead, someone else would have to assume the responsibility. Hugh and Robert had known Ceci for decades. They’d surely have been able to predict that response. They were the obvious people to take over from Jonathan. Perhaps one of them already
had Althea’s power of attorney. Perhaps plans were now under way to move her. But did Althea have the funds to pay for a palatial nursing home? The sister who did was Ceci. Could this entire Holmesian investigation of Jonathan’s murder be an elaborate smokescreen? With Jonathan dead, Althea was Ceci’s heir. Oh, yes! Althea would inherit not only Ceci’s money, but her house on Norwood Hill. The money would be more than sufficient to pay for round-the-clock care. And unlike any institution, this grand and beautiful house would be a suitable residence for
the
woman.

Irene Wheeler was supposed to visit Ceci this evening. Were Hugh and Robert really here to set a trap for Jonathan’s murderer? Or to frame the psychic and her confederate for the murder they themselves intended to commit? Hugh, I reminded myself, had sent one man to the hospital. And another to the morgue?

I
F HUGH AND ROBERT
had murdered Jonathan, they were here tonight to reenact their Baskervillian drama. This time, however, Ceci would play the victim. Rowdy, I imagined, would find himself miscast as the demonic hound. Did I, too, have a role? Or was I caught not in a Holmesian play, but in a psychic con game? Irene Wheeler had already duped me. I didn’t blame myself. Gaining misplaced trust was how she made her living. Violence was not her game. It was, of course, her confederate’s. He’d tried to drown a sickly, aging cat. He’d fled at the sight of Kevin Dennehy, a cop whose face had appeared in the papers and on television in connection with the murder of Donald Lively. If the man with the bulbous forehead had murdered Jonathan, he’d made an unexpected move in Irene’s game. Then there was Ceci’s metaphor, the one she’d borrowed from Conan Doyle: the joyous image of the gates that were not shut, the great news that the dead were not lost to us, but eager to communicate, ready to speak, to listen, and even to return to those who loved them.

But the Holmesian drama was a game, wasn’t it? The
Great Game: the pretense that fiction was history. And Irene’s con game was her drama. The people of the drama: Irene as the grifter, Gloria and Scott as her shills, and Ceci as the perfect chump. And the content of the game, the theme of the play, was the illusion of reality, or perhaps the reality of illusion. To Conan Doyle, who was, after all, in a position to know, Holmes and Watson were creatures of the imagination; to Hugh and Robert, the Great Detective, the Friendship, and the Sacred Writings were overarching realities. Conan Doyle’s true mission was not to create a Canon more real than reality, but to awaken the world to the reality that was the substance of Irene Wheeler’s con game, the same illusion that was now Ceci’s reality, the splendid news that death itself was an illusion and that its gates swung open in both directions. Until Jonathan tried to lock that gate.

The actual gate to Ceci’s yard, the iron gate, was shut but unlocked. When it came to spectral dogs, mundane security precautions evidently did not apply. For all I knew, maybe the gate had never had a lock. And if it had been Ceci who’d murdered Jonathan, she obviously had no need to protect herself against the murderer’s return. As to Simon’s access, Ceci must credit him with the power to undo latches or maybe to pass through material barriers. When I pushed the gate inward, it squeaked on its hinges. Why had Jonathan left the house? Because he had heard something outside: the squeal of this gate.

Robert made genteel noises of objection and asked what I thought I was doing.

Hedging my bets,
I wanted to say.
Heading away from violence: the two of you. The man with the bulbous forehead.
Even if Ceci had killed Jonathan, she was morally innocent of murder. Besides, she was no physical
threat to me. Furthermore, she knew I was the last person in this world or any other to stand between a loving owner and a beloved dog. Far from trying to hurt me, she might tell me what she’d done. She’d already have spoken about the deed to Irene Wheeler. Ceci would have wanted to communicate with Jonathan. She’d have required Irene’s help. And in any case, Ceci would have assumed that the psychic would know without having to be told. If so, Ceci needed another kind of help. Violence was not the psychic’s style. But blackmail was.

When I closed the gate behind me, its hinges gave another horror-movie squeak. The noise reminded me to remove Rowdy’s rolled-leather collar with its collection of jingling tags. I pulled him close to my left side, held still, and found my bearings. The fog was still thick. I had to rely on my memory. The sundial, Simon’s grave, and the scene of Jonathan’s murder must be to my left and four or five yards uphill. Directly ahead of me, I remembered, a long bluestone walk led to a flight of steps that gave access to the terrace at the rear of Ceci’s house. Like the edge of a stage, the patio was dark. Center stage glowed hazily. Then a breeze stirred, and the fog briefly cleared. The French doors that formed the big alcove were transparent curtains. Flanked by tall fronds of potted palms, two chairs had been drawn close to the edge of the stage, almost as if their occupants were acting in the sort of so-called experimental play that forces actors and audience to reverse roles. So-called: If the result of an experiment has been replicated zillions of times, the experiment isn’t exactly experimental anymore, is it? I mean, if theatergoers wanted to be actors, they’d audition, wouldn’t they? They wouldn’t buy tickets. And that, of course, is the zillion-times-replicated result. Tonight, for example, the entire
audience consisted of a woman and a dog who’d sneaked in without paying and occupied standing room near the rear exit of an otherwise empty theater.

On another night, another gate-crasher had made it all the way to the edge of the stage. Crushing flowers and foliage beneath his feet, the man with the bulbous forehead had stood in the wings, where he had eavesdropped on the action. But which side of the footlights had he really stood on? Was he a sort of stagehand or animal assistant who awaited Irene Wheeler’s cue to send the dog onstage? Or perhaps he was a vigilant and mistrustful director who wanted assurance that Irene was speaking her lines correctly. What was she saying now? What was Ceci saying?