Gaits of Heaven (8 page)

Kevin Dennehy used to work out exclusively at the
Cambridge YMCA, which is on Mass. Ave. near Central Square and thus conveniently near Cambridge Police Headquarters. In saying that Kevin worked out exclusively there, I mean, of course, that he worked out nowhere else; the Y is no one’s idea of a la-di-da establishment. Under the influence of his girlfriend, Jennifer Pasquarelli, Kevin then expanded his fitness horizons by joining the Original Mike’s Gym, which is on a little street off Concord Avenue beyond the Fresh Pond rotary, on the way to Belmont. Cambridge being Cambridge, the superficially unprepossessing Mike’s Gym is highly exclusive in the sense that its membership is limited to persons who go there strictly to achieve strength and stamina and not, to borrow Kevin’s words, to loll around gargling carrot juice and practicing heavy breathing. The phrases, I might mention, irritate Officer Jennifer Pasquarelli, who regularly imbibes freshly extracted vegetable juices and dutifully performs the breathing exercises of various Eastern disciplines as part of a comprehensive program intended to keep her in the state of physical perfection that she obviously enjoys. She is strong and voluptuous. Unfortunately, the program she follows is less comprehensive than it might be: it has utterly failed to endow her with even the slightest trace of the most rudimentary sense of humor. But as I was about to say, the exclusivity of Mike’s Gym consists only in part of excluding those whose purposes are frivolously nongymnastic. From Kevin’s viewpoint, the important and winning aspect of exclusivity at Mike’s is that it is populated only by town and gown, and not by newcomers who, in Kevin’s opinion, have no business being in Cambridge at all.

I easily envision Kevin as he stands under the shower at Mike’s Gym on Wednesday morning and vents his rage in an apparent effort to scrub the freckles off his face and wash the red out of his hair. My relationship with Kevin is, I hasten to add, such that I see him from the waist up and the mid-thigh down. Kevin’s anger, by the way, has nothing to do with the mean-looking scar on his torso. Although he has listened to Ted Green blather on about trauma, it hasn’t occurred to Kevin to apply the concept to his own experience in taking a bullet in the chest. In Kevin’s view, if you don’t want to get shot, you shouldn’t become a cop, and there’s no more to be said about it. Anyway, what accounts for his bout of matutinal fury isn’t posttraumatic stress but the interruption of his workout by an urgent phone call about the results of the postmortem on Eumie Brainard-Green, who had taken a variety of prescription medications in quantities far too great to be consistent with accidental overdose. The substances identified by the medical examiner include Prozac, Ambien, Sonata, and various benzodiazepines, together with a moderate quantity of alcohol. The amounts and the combination are consistent with suicide. Or homicide, of course. She had also consumed a large amount of vitamin and herbal supplements as well as soy milk and the juices of raw vegetables.

Kevin disapproves of everything about the death of Eumie Brainard-Green. For a start, he hates weird food. He also disapproves of hyphenation. Although I have talked to him about Lucy Stoner, he disapproves of my having kept the name Winter when I married Steve. He disapproves of Eumie’s neighborhood, too, not because Avon Hill is populated by the gown side of the town-gown split but because, like other gownish areas, so to speak, it has been invaded by the very rich, who flaunt their wealth and who, far from parading around in academic gowns and driving venerable Volvos, wear designer clothing and drive BMW and Lexus SUVs. He almost wishes that the dead woman had worn peasant garb, denim, and three hats at once, had driven some ancient and eccentric vehicle—an adult-size folding tricycle, for example—and had been getting a Ph.D. in some useless and probably unspeakable foreign language, which is to say that Lieutenant Dennehy wishes that she had been a familiar Cambridge type and not one of the new ones, to whom he objects principally because they baffle him. More than anything else, Lieutenant Dennehy disapproves of unnatural death or, indeed, unnatural anything else that occurs within the city limits and especially within walking distance of his own neighborhood and thus near his own mother. He feels particular rage at the young officer who was first on the scene and who was so intimidated by the Brainard-Green house and the Avon Hill neighborhood that instead of immediately protecting the scene, he had allowed the surviving family members to meander around as they damned well pleased. Kevin Dennehy does not believe in policing by ZIP code. He does, however, approve of Mike’s Gym. The invaders belong to overpriced tennis clubs with swimming pools. At Mike’s, town and gown sweat together.

On Wednesday morning, Caprice slept until eleven
o’clock. Steve and Leah had left for work at six-thirty, and by the time Caprice staggered downstairs, I’d vacuumed up dog hair, unloaded the dishwasher, and written a four-page article, complete with sidebar, about pet-stain removal. Healthy people Caprice’s age have an extraordinary capacity for sleep and can easily seem drugged when they finally rouse themselves. Caprice’s mother had just died. Still, the young woman looked so abnormally out of it that I had to wonder whether she shared the family fondness for prescription medication. But what did I know? Damned little. And most of that damned little was, of course, about dogs. For as long as I could remember, veterinarians had been prescribing sedatives for agitated dogs. The old-time favorite was acepromazine, but these days, up-to-date vets prescribed some of the same drugs used for distressed human beings. According to Steve, all medications carried the risk of adverse reactions. He favored plain old over-the-counter Benadryl, an antihistamine that includes drowsiness among its side effects, but he occasionally prescribed tranquilizers, sedatives, and the same SSRIs, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, that Rita’s patients used for depression. In fact, antidepressants were what had brought Rita and Quinn Youngman together. The circumstances were exceedingly unromantic. One of Rita’s patients had a manic episode in response to Prozac prescribed by the psychopharmacologist to whom Rita was sending those in need of medication. Rita blamed the guy for starting the woman on too high a dose, and she was furious at what she saw as his lack of sympathy for her patient, who, among other things, talked nonstop for thirty-six hours, racked up gigantic credit card bills, and ended up in a hospital emergency room. So, Rita found someone else to do her meds, as the expression goes, and that someone else was Quinn Youngman. Anyway, I knew a little about psychoactive drugs from Steve and Rita, but all I knew, really, was enough to wonder about Caprice’s grogginess.

It also concerned me that instead of eating what I’d have considered a nutritious breakfast, Caprice had nothing but black coffee and half an English muffin spread with peanut butter and jelly. When Caprice entered the kitchen, Rowdy and Kimi were there. Both leaped to their feet and, ever alert to alterations in pack membership, signaled their willingness to include her by pealing loud, friendly
woo-woo-woo
s. When she took a seat at the table, they stationed themselves on either side of her. The contrast between the young woman and dogs was heartbreaking. Caprice was still in a nightgown and robe, her eyes were puffy, her face blotched, her hair uncombed. Rowdy and Kimi had gleaming coats, and their eyes were clear and focused. Rowdy, I thought, shared my desire to rouse Caprice from her stupor: he knew better than to poke her with his big white paw, but when he settled for offering it to her, I could sense the impulse he was restraining. His slightest movements, the upward motion of his foreleg, the turning of his big head, revealed massive muscle, and the gentle warmth of his dark eyes plainly said that he was eager to share his strength, but Caprice merely took his paw as if it were a disembodied object and then quickly released it. To Kimi, whom she knew, Caprice simply said hello, but Kimi continued to train her intelligent eyes on the young woman as if waiting for a request that Caprice was unable to issue.

When I’d told Caprice to help herself to food, I let Rowdy and Kimi out in the yard and brought Sammy into the kitchen. Sammy had a hearty appetite, but he wasn’t the horrendous food thief that Rowdy and Kimi were. Sammy, I should mention, was a vessel spilling over with joy. He curved his body around Caprice’s legs and treated her to what really was a smile. He, too, got almost no response. In prescribing for his patients, Quinn Youngman probably had the same sort of experience I was having: when he’d had three drugs fail, he, too, probably tried a fourth. I replaced Sammy with India. Perhaps what Caprice needed was exactly the sense of safety, protection, and order so notably missing at home. India, ever dignified, approached Caprice, studied her, and stood calmly about a yard away. Caprice ignored her.

Not everyone loves dogs or even likes them. Take Dr. Vee Foote: phobic. But Caprice was not such a person. She did respond to one of our dogs, my fifth drug, the smallest of the dogs, our delicate, trembling little pointer, Lady. Anxiety is not a typical characteristic of the breed. The pointer belongs to the American Kennel Club’s Sporting Group and, as the name suggests, was originally bred to indicate the presence and location of game by pointing. In the field, pointers also retrieve and otherwise perform as all-purpose hunting dogs. Because they should be able to run tirelessly through fields and woods from daybreak to sunset, they are supposed to be strong and athletic. A top-notch pointer from field lines may vibrate with energy in the manner of a Mercedes engine, but in both bench and field lines—show dogs and hunting dogs—it is undesirable to have a pointer, or any other breed, for that matter, quiver with apprehension in response to life itself. Viewed objectively, Lady was anything but a model of the breed. Exception: in pointers, any color is acceptable. Lady was what’s unappetizingly called “liver and white ticked,” that is, white with brown marks, including “ticks” or spots. As to her other physical features, love demands silence. Fortunately, Steve and I viewed her subjectively, and from our angle, she was a sweetheart. Do dogs feel gratitude? Lady had been left at Steve’s clinic for euthanasia. She always acted as if she knew he had saved her life.

So, there was Caprice, weighing perhaps two hundred pounds, bleary-eyed and sluggish, newly bereft of her mother, and there was Lady, thin despite good nutrition, shaking like Jell-O, each needy, each hurt. Holding an English muffin in her right hand, Caprice allowed the left to dangle, and Lady took advantage of the unattended hand by placing her head under it and moving slowly forward so that the hand’s owner, Caprice, involuntarily stroked the dog from crown to tail. To my astonishment, Caprice, observing this maneuver, burst into bubbly laughter.

“We call Lady ‘the self-patting dog,’” I said.

“She is so sweet!”

“She is the perfect pet. She really is.”

So, I got the medication right on the fifth try. Still, if I’d been offering one dog after the other as a sort of woofy projective test, a canine Rorschach, I’d have preferred a strong response to one of the big, strong, self-confident dogs. But any positive response was far better than none. There was hope for Caprice after all.

If I’d been designing a behavioral intervention for Caprice, she’d have spent the rest of the day with Lady. In particular, she and Lady would have taken a long walk. As it was, as soon as Caprice finished breakfast, she called her human therapist, Dr. Missy Zinn, and arranged an emergency appointment for that same afternoon. When she went upstairs to shower and get dressed, Lady tagged along. Caprice could only have been flattered.

While Caprice was upstairs, Ted Green called to cancel our dog-training and canine-grief-counseling appointment. “Ai-ai-ai,” he said, “the cops are making life hell for me. They’re all over the house. Here I am, traumatized by the loss of my wife, and these schmucks are retraumatizing me.”

“Ted, what I really think is that it’s important for everyone to know exactly what happened.”

“I know what happened. Eumie’s trauma history clouded her judgment. She mixed up her meds. Wyeth and Caprice and I need a peaceful, loving environment to process our loss. So does Dolfo. And these dummkopfs won’t listen. What they need is a program to sensitize them to trauma. That would be a fitting memorial to Eumie. But I’m not ready yet.”

I bristled. What Caprice didn’t need, of course, was the environment created by Wyeth and Ted. Furthermore, even before Kevin Dennehy had sustained the indubitable trauma of being shot in the chest, he’d had an intuitive, if burly, kindness that no sensitization program would have been able to instill. And I damned well didn’t like having him or his colleagues referred to as schmucks and dummkopfs. Fortunately, Ted ended the conversation quickly. He had to rush off to see Dr. Tortorello and, after that, Vee Foote.

When Caprice came downstairs, she looked awake. Her eyes had lost most of their puffiness, and her hair was a halo of pretty curls. She wore a long black linen skirt and top that had picked up only a few stray dog hairs. I offered to drive her to therapy, but she explained that Missy’s office was actually a block away on Concord Avenue.

The location wasn’t the coincidence it might seem. My stretch of Concord Avenue had an alarming number of buildings that appeared from the outside to be ordinary single-family and multi-family houses but were, in reality, psychotherapy office buildings. The discrepancy between appearance and reality struck me as underhanded and deceptive. I mean, if you were naively to start out at the corner of Concord Avenue and Huron and innocently walk a few blocks toward Appleton, you’d pass by house after house—hah!—that tried to pass itself off as the wholesome Cantabrigian abode of graduate students, Harvard faculty, families with children, and so forth, but was actually teeming with psychiatrists, psychologists, clinical social workers, and other practitioners who, instead of devoting themselves to writing dissertations, preparing lectures, and pursuing domesticity, were delving into the dark and impulse-ridden depths of the human psyche. Fact: those few blocks of Concord Avenue, from Huron to Appleton, contained fifty-four psychotherapy offices. Fifty-four! I didn’t count them. Rita did—before she rented her new office, which was, I hesitate to say, in the very heart of those shrink-infested waters. So, the presence of Caprice’s therapist, Missy Zinn, there in my own neighborhood was no coincidence. I have, by the way, a religious theory (
goD
spelled backward) about why psychotherapists have been drawn to the area near my house. It is my belief that the powerful, healing presence of my very own woofy, furry incarnations of the healing spirit, my beloved Creatures Great, acted like magnets in attracting human beings who charge money to apply the mental balm that dogs freely and joyously give away all the time.

Anyway, once Caprice had left to see one of the fifty-four surrogate dogs, I tried to reach Kevin Dennehy. If, as Ted had told me, the police were conducting a full investigation of Eumie’s death, Caprice was bound to be questioned again, and I wanted Kevin himself to do the interrogation. Having managed only to leave messages for him, I went next door to see Kevin’s mother, who had more influence with him than I did. Kevin was fond of describing his mother as a religious fanatic, by which he meant that she had left Roman Catholicism for Seventh-Day Adventism and consequently wouldn’t allow meat or alcohol in her house. In reality, I’m the religious fanatic, but the tenets of Canine Cosmology permit me to give refrigerator space to other people’s meat and beer, and the provision of storage space was the original basis of my friendship with Kevin. It was also the origin of Mrs. Dennehy’s prejudice against me, a bias that she abandoned when Kevin started dating Jennifer and I married Steve. In brief, Mrs. Dennehy, who dislikes Jennifer more than she used to dislike me, adores Steve, whose deep kindness she senses and respects and whom she views as a buffer between her son and my refrigerator. Kevin still keeps hamburger and Bud here, but he hesitates to drop in as often as he used to, and, in any case, his mother would rather have him eat meat and drink beer than breathe in the vicinity of Jennifer Pasquarelli.

Although Mrs. Dennehy had softened toward me, her appearance remained as severe as ever. In particular, her hair was pulled so tightly into a knot on her head that she must have had a permanent headache. When she opened the back door, I could see that she was busy. A vacuum cleaner sat on the linoleum, and by the sink were a bucket and mop.

“I’m sorry to interrupt you,” I said, “but I need a favor.”

Mrs. Dennehy tried to supply me with a cup of herbal tea, which I managed to weasel out of accepting. Still, at her insistence, I took a seat at her kitchen table and outlined my concerns about Caprice. “This was her mother who died,” I said, “and I want Kevin to be the one who talks to her. He questioned her yesterday, just after the mother’s body was found, but someone is going to want to talk to her again, and it really should be Kevin. Not that someone else would be brutal. But this young woman is very vulnerable.”

“‘Suffer the little ones,’” said Mrs. Dennehy.

My face must have reddened. “Actually, that’s part of the problem. Caprice is horribly overweight. I’m sure it’s a response to the problems in her family.” My manipulation was worthy of a malamute: Seventh-Day Adventism places a high value on health and on family life.

“The poor girl,” Mrs. Dennehy said. “I’ll have a little word with Kevin. Love thy neighbor. He’s a good boy. He understands that.”

“I’ve left messages for him,” I said.

“He’s being driven crazy! By these psychiatrists.” She stretched out the word and put a heavy accent on the first syllable:
PSY-chi-uh-trists
.

“I’ve met them. They are a little…trying.”

Two minutes after I returned home, the United States Postal Service thrilled and then disappointed the dogs, who were convinced that every package we received contained toys and treats and was thus theirs and not ours at all. The delivery wasn’t a package. It was an overnight Express envelope, inside which was a second envelope, much smaller than the first, thick and cream-colored, with my name written on it in blue ink. Inside was a note in the same ink on matching paper. I recognized the handwriting and hence took offense at the most conventional of greetings, namely,
Dear Holly. Dear!
How dare that fiend call me
dear
? I read on.
I am very sorry for any harm I have caused, and I am willing to make amends even though I cannot think of a way to do it
.

Well, then, why mention it?

The note was, of course, signed
Anita Fairley
.