Gaits of Heaven (10 page)

Kevin likes exactly the kinds of heavy, creamy desserts I’d tossed out. When I offered raspberry sorbet and fresh strawberries, he looked disappointed but accepted anyway. As I was scooping the sorbet and hulling the berries, a phrase he’d spoken kept ringing in my head:
still left alive
. Maybe what triggered the ringing was the sight of the bird feeders outside the window over the sink.

When I was again seated at the table, I said, “This probably has nothing to do with anything, but, speaking of substances, there’s one really odd thing at Ted and Eumie’s.”

“Yeah,” said Kevin. “Ted.”

“Kevin, you were in the backyard. When you talked to Caprice. I don’t know whether you noticed, but there are a lot of bird feeders there.” I ate some sorbet and continued. “And no squirrels. And the feeders aren’t damaged. Squirrels will wreck feeders. They chew wood, and they ruin plastic perches. Those feeders are not damaged. And they don’t even have squirrel baffles.”

Rita cast a professional eye at me. “Are you suggesting…?”

“I’m not suggesting anything. It’s just that when I told Steve that there weren’t any squirrels there, he said it was impossible. And then he said something about…he said that it was impossible unless someone had killed them. But I’m not sure he was serious.”

“Steve,” said Rita, “isn’t given to jokes about cruelty to animals.”

“Of course not,” I said. “He just meant that it was impossible. But it isn’t. There are no squirrels there. No gray squirrels, no black squirrels, no squirrel damage. Period. No squirrels at all.”

“Got it,” said Kevin.

“Got what?” Rita demanded.

“The point Holly’s making is that the place is some kind of Love Canal. It’s polluted with shrinks and drugs and dog urine. You gotta wonder why anyone’s left alive.”

When Steve got home that night, he was unhappy to
find that I’d thrown out all the ice cream, and the next morning, he was even more unhappy to discover that I’d also tossed out all the bread and English muffins.

“Why stop there?” he asked. “Why didn’t you get rid of all the butter? The jam?”

“Because there’s nothing to put them on,” I said.

“All of sudden we’re becoming vegans?”

“We are not becoming vegans. It isn’t what we are becoming. It’s what we’re not becoming. And that’s enablers. If we have fattening food in the house, that’s enabling Caprice to eat food she shouldn’t eat.”

“What about the rest of us? Are we supposed to starve?”

“Fasting is au courant these days,” I said. “You subsist for days at a time on water, lemon juice, maple syrup, and hot peppers. Or maybe it’s chili powder. It’s supposed to cleanse your system.”

“Are the dogs being subjected to this regimen, too? They—”

“Of course not. All I did was remove temptation, and dog food isn’t exactly tempting. Except to dogs, of course. Look, Steve, it’s temporary. And it won’t hurt us. If we took in a stray dog, we’d do everything possible to meet the dog’s needs. This is exactly the same principle.”

Leah’s response was identical to Steve’s. They made do with scrambled eggs and fruit. When they’d left for work, I reluctantly awakened Caprice. As I’d told her the night before, Kevin was going to arrive at nine o’clock to talk with her. That’s how I’d phrased it. The whole idea was that she wouldn’t be
interrogated
. When I’d broken the news that her mother’s death was being treated as a homicide, she hadn’t quite come out and said, “I told you so.” But she’d come close.

Today, instead of staggering into the kitchen in her nightclothes, she first took a shower and got dressed, and when she came downstairs, her eyes were clear and focused. Without asking, I served her the same breakfast that Leah and Steve had had. As usual, she drank her coffee black. When Kevin rapped at the back door, she was still at the kitchen table.

“Hi, Lieutenant Dennehy,” she said. “I’m glad it’s you.”

“You make it sound like I’m gonna take out your appendix,” Kevin said.

Caprice looked astonished. After a second, she laughed.

Kevin informs me that modern guidelines for interrogation emphasize the importance of making the witness comfortable. In Kevin’s view, the authorities in the field have now acknowledged what he knew all along, namely, as he phrases it, that nervous people clam up. So, confident that I was contributing to the relaxed atmosphere advocated by law enforcement experts, I dug out the Dunkin’ Donuts coffee that Kevin likes, made him a cup, and served it with milk and sugar. The cream and the half-and-half had gone down the drain. As I was fixing coffee, Caprice asked Kevin whether he wanted to tape the interview.

“I got a whatchamacallit, audiographic memory.” The smile on his big freckled face made it hard to tell whether he was or wasn’t lying. “But thanks for asking. Holly, you out of cream?”

“Yes,” I said flatly. Then, having refilled my own cup, I took a seat at the table.

“You out of dogs, too?”

“Me? Never.”

“Where are they? Or maybe Caprice is kind of fed up with them.”

Caprice protested. “No! I like them.”

“Leah and Steve took India and Sammy with them,” I said. “Rowdy and Kimi are in the yard. Lady is around somewhere.”

“On my bed, I think,” Caprice reported. “She was the last time I saw her.”

Our dogs are not allowed on beds unless they are explicitly invited. Unfortunately, they are astute about guessing who will or will not enforce the rule.

“Hey, good going,” said Kevin. “It’s not everybody she trusts like that.”

Nonsense. How much trust does it take to sleep on someone’s bed? Besides, what Lady mistrusted was life itself and not particular individuals. Exception: Anita. Lady was frightened of Anita—for good reason.

“Trauma history there,” Kevin remarked. “You think so?”

It was a matter that Steve and I had discussed at length. Although environment had undoubtedly played a role in Lady’s fearfulness, both of us thought that it had a strong genetic component as well.

“Have you been reading Ted’s book?” Caprice asked.

“No. Just listening to him.”

“Have you talked to Johanna yet?”

“That’d be Johanna Green. The ex-wife.”

“Ted divorced Johanna to marry my mother. Johanna was insulted. She still is. She hated my mother. She believes everything Baby Boy Wyeth tells her.”

“Your stepbrother.”

“My mother’s husband’s son. That doesn’t make him
my
anything.” Her face was expressionless. “We’re not done with Johanna yet. One thing you might notice about her is that she kept Ted’s name. Johanna Green.”

“Some women do.”

“Johanna is a feminist linguist. Supposedly. And she took her husband’s name to begin with and then kept it after the divorce?”

“Your father.”

It was as if Caprice became a new person. Her eyes brightened, and her face shone. “He didn’t change his name. Before or after.”

Kevin smiled. “How’d he react to the divorce?”

Caprice bought time by taking a sip of what must have been cold coffee. “Pragmatically,” she finally said. “You see, Eumie was in therapy with Ted. While she and my father were still married, she went into therapy with Ted. And if you listen to them, they fell madly in love.”

“And if you don’t listen to them?”

“Ted slept with his patient. What else? Horrors! He violated the
taboo
.” Her emphasis was heavy and cynical. “But they both tried to cover it up, of course. They pretended that she’d just been in supervision with him, but everyone knew that was bullshit. That’s basically why we had to leave.”

“And your father?”

“Are you planning a new career?”

“Hey, not me. It’s mothers they ask about, anyway.”

“Corny therapist joke. Definition of a Freudian slip. That’s when you mean to say one thing and instead you say
a mother
. So, my father. Monty took it pretty well. He’s mellow. He takes most things pretty well.” With no prompting, she added, “He lives in Manhattan, but he travels a lot. He’s a consultant. Otherwise, I’d’ve stayed with him.”

“He was here this past weekend.”

“Yes. At the Charles Hotel. That’s where he always stays. I had brunch with him on Monday. At the Charles. At Henrietta’s Table.”

“Did he and your mother see each other? This past weekend?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Did he pick you up? Drop you off?”

“No. I took a cab there and a cab home.”

“How about Ted and your mother? On Monday.”

“They both saw a few patients.”

“On Memorial Day?”

Caprice shrugged. “They did that. Saw people on holidays sometimes. And Monday night, they went out to dinner. To Rialto. That’s at the Charles, too. That’s why it’s open on Mondays, because it’s in a hotel. I guess they could’ve run into Monty there. You go through the lobby to get to Rialto. You’d have to ask Monty.”

“Did Wyeth go with them?”

“No. He was at his computer. He didn’t go out. He never does, except when he goes to Johanna’s.”

“Did they meet someone at the restaurant? Another couple, maybe?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so. If they were going with other people, they didn’t mention it.”

“What time did they get home?”

“I don’t know. I was in bed.”

“Where was the dog all this time?”

“Eating mail. Chewing on books. Wrecking things. Where he wasn’t was in my room.” She paused. “I took him out to the yard before I went to bed. That was at maybe eight o’clock.”

“Was the house locked?”

“My bedroom door was. The house probably wasn’t. I told you when we talked before. Besides, half the world had keys.”

“There’s an alarm system.”

“Dolfo jumps on things. Doors. Windows. He kept setting it off, so they quit using it.”

Although Caprice was showing no signs of strain, I created a break by asking whether anyone wanted more coffee. Kevin and Caprice both accepted.

“The, uh, prescription bottles,” Kevin said, “have the names of a lot of doctors. Maybe you could give me a sort of who’s who.”

Caprice gave a quirky smile. “It’s a cast of thousands.”

“Just the M.D.s. The ones who wrote prescriptions.”

“Let’s see. My mother had an internist. I forget her name. Salzman, maybe. Dr. Salzman. And a dermatologist. A man. I don’t know his name. Her gynecologist. Dr. Cohen. Her therapist, Nixie Needleman. She’s a psychiatrist. M.D. And her psychopharm guy, Dr. Youngman. He’s Ted’s, too. Ted’s therapist is Dr. Tortorello. He’s a psychiatrist, so he probably prescribes. Ted must have a primary-care physician, but I don’t know who that is. Maybe he sees Dr. Salzman, too. And their couples therapist is Dr. Foote. Psychiatrist. I don’t know whether she wrote prescriptions for them, but she could have. Wyeth supposedly goes to a pediatrician, which he hates, but mostly he pretends to go and doesn’t actually see the doctor. His therapist is new. Dr. York. But he’s a psychologist. A few of them can prescribe, but I don’t know if this one does. My therapist is a Ph.D. She doesn’t prescribe. I don’t exactly have a primary. I just go to the University Health Services.” She went on to name three dentists and her mother’s endodontist. “She had a root canal last winter. He could’ve given her painkillers then. That’s all I can think of. Unless you count my mother’s herbalist.”

“Is that the houseplant lady?”

“Oh, her. No. She’s a houseplant tutor, to teach my mother to grow plants. Just for decoration. The herbalist prescribes medicinal herbs, not prescription drugs. My mother took a lot of supplements, too. She got most of them from Loaves and Fishes, not from a practitioner. Oh, I forgot the homeopath. But she wasn’t seeing him anymore, anyway.”

Kevin looked pale and wide-eyed. I felt sure that until he’d landed in the hospital with a bullet wound and had required a surgeon, he’d had a doctor and a dentist. And that had been it. “Did any of these, uh, practitioners talk to the others? Coordinate?”

“Probably not. Well, the psychopharm guy, Dr. Youngman, might talk to the individual therapists, I think. But otherwise…? I don’t think so.”

“So, one hand didn’t know what the other hand was doing. Hands. So, it was more like those Hindu goddesses, you know? Like what’s her name, Colleen there, the lady with ten arms.”

“Kali,” Caprice said.

“Her. And all the hands got no idea about the prescriptions the others are writing.”

“Precisely,” said Caprice. “The perfect image.”

“I got one last question, and you don’t have to answer it if you don’t want.”

“Okay. If I don’t want to answer it, I won’t.”

“Trauma. I keep hearing about your mother’s trauma history. You want to say anything about that?”

“It’s no secret,” said Caprice. “Ted wrote about it in his book. He didn’t use my mother’s real name, but it’s her story. Her father was an undertaker. When her mother died, he did the embalming. Her father embalmed her mother. He embalmed his own wife. Or that’s the story Ted tells, anyway.”

On the afternoon of Thursday, June 2, the day of her
mother’s memorial service, Caprice Brainard goes to the house on Avon Hill that she prefers not to think of as home. She has chosen the time because Ted has told her that this is when he’ll be taking Wyeth out to buy something appropriate to wear to Eumie’s service. Dolfo is next door at George and Barbara’s. The only people in the house are six employees of a cleaning service that has accepted the job because it has never before been hired to clean this dog-dirtied abode. Caprice’s previous departure was hurried; she had time only to grab her notebook computer and throw a few essentials into her backpack and a suitcase. This time she fills two suitcases, which she carries downstairs and out to the street, where I help her to load them into my car. When we reach Steve’s and my house, where she is our guest, I drop her off and leave to run errands.

Alone in the house, Caprice goes to my study to take advantage of my invitation to use my desktop computer. Obeying the house rules, she is careful to shut the door so that Tracker does not escape. Startled at the entry of a stranger, Tracker leaps off the mouse pad and vanishes. Caprice seats herself at the computer in the hope that I have stored my password and that she will thus be able to read my e-mail without having to bother trying the guesses from her mental list of likely bets:
Rowdy, Kimi, Sammy, malamute, 256Concord, DogsLife,
our phone number, my license plate number, and so forth, all of which, I might add, would have been wrong. As it turns out, my password is stored, so she doesn’t have to guess at all.

The rules of Netiquette, I might mention, typically concern the form, content, and tone of the messages the sender composes. If you WRITE EVERYTHING IN CAPITAL LETTERS, the message will look as if you’re SHOUTING. In posts to e-mail lists, avoid obscenities and personal attacks. Remember that e-mail doesn’t convey tone of voice, so if you don’t want comments made in jest to be taken seriously, put in a smiley face or say that you are just kidding. Why do the rules fail to lay down as law the taboo that Caprice is now violating? Because they shouldn’t have to, that’s why. The rules of civilized conduct were written a long time ago, and it doesn’t take a Harvard education to figure out that if you’re a guest in someone’s house, you’re damned well not supposed to take advantage of her absence to read her e-mail.

Fair is, however, fair. As payback for her act of ungrateful snooping, Caprice sees before her on the screen of my computer about ten gazillion messages devoted to one single subject, the subject being, of course, dogs, dogs, and more dogs. Pack animal that I am, I subscribe to the list for members of the Cambridge Dog Training Club, to lists about Alaskan malamutes, and to lists for dog writers and dog trainers. Since all the other subscribers are pack animals, too, and are therefore given to frequent woofing and wooing and yapping, the lists are very active, and Caprice has the chance to read message after message that has nothing to do with me and can be of no interest to her. Indeed, she doesn’t even bother to read the list mail. She does, however, come upon a piece of personal e-mail that she opens and reads.

Subject: Cartoonbank.com E-card from Steve

From: [email protected]

To: [email protected]

You’ve just been sent an E-card from Steve, care of Cartoonbank.com, the Internet’s premier cartoon Web site and source for
New Yorker
cartoons.

There follows a hyperlink that takes Caprice to an E-card meant only for me. It shows a Booth cartoon from the
New Yorker
depicting a man seated at a typewriter in the midst of scruffy, disoriented-looking canines. The caption, spoken by the lady of the house is, “Write about dogs.” To the right of the cartoon is what E-card sites always call the “personalized greeting.” This one reads: “Dear Holly, I love you. From Steve.”

When Caprice finishes with my e-mail, she carefully marks the Cartoonbank message as unread. She would have been welcome to read messages from the lists to which I subscribe. But Steve’s message is personal. It is private. Or it should have been. Steve and I make a little game of sending each other
New Yorker
dog cartoon E-cards with love notes. We order the same cartoons on T-shirts when we want presents for each other. We are united by dogs and laughter and love. And our union is none of Caprice’s business.