The Wicked Flea (16 page)

Ceci was talking nonstop about everything and nothing. “How nice that you have taken time off from work, Wilson, and Pia, too, prostrate with grief, how could she possibly have gone in and tried to concentrate? Neither of you would have gotten a thing done, and have the police been able to cast any light?” When no one responded, she barreled on. “Have you set a date for the memorial service?”

“Sylvia hated funerals,” Oona said.

The whole scene was so depressing that I felt immobilized. No wonder Pia had fallen asleep. My own eyes were heavy. The cake plate might as well have been glued to my hands. I felt like a character in a surrealist drama, an absurd woman inexplicably trapped in a dark, smelly room, doomed forever to clutch a lemon cake that no one wants.

Wilson startled me out of my daze by addressing me in my native language. “You entered tomorrow?”

I shook myself. “No. But I’m going.”

Like everyone else who shows regularly, I keep my own little heavily annotated book in which I rate judges. Sam Usher, who was judging malamutes at tomorrow’s Micmac Kennel Club show, had earned his prominent place in my Absolutely Never Enter Under This Jerk class on the shameful—for him—occasion when he’d dumped both Rowdy and Kimi in favor of the most cow-hocked, swaybacked, snipey-muzzled, light-eyed, and otherwise pitifully unsound, incorrect, and just plain plug-ugly collection of supposed malamutes I’d ever seen in the ring. Not that I’m a poor sport! Ask anyone! I’m well known for my excellent sportsmanship. It’s just that I don’t believe in wasting my money asking for the opinion of an ignoramus who isn’t qualified to judge stuffed animals.

But as I’ve remarked, I’m a good sport. Instead of explaining about Sam Usher, I politely asked Wilson about Llio, who, he replied, was entered. I said I’d look forward to seeing both of them. Since Wilson and I were now on chummy terms, I went on to point out the obvious, namely, that the cake I was holding was a gift from Ceci. What would he like me to do with it? In yet another display of what a good sport I am, I want to take full responsibility for what happened next. I have spent my entire life with dogs. By profession, I am a dog writer. I own, train, and show my dogs, who are, I should add, the most determined and voracious food thieves I have ever even heard of. And I knew that the Metzner household included two dogs. So, when Wilson belatedly thanked Ceci for the cake, moved a couple of pizza cartons to the floor, and told me to put the cake on the coffee table, I should have ignored him. Instead, I complied.

Where had Zsa Zsa been? I have no idea. Maybe she’d been sleeping. If so, the sound of the cake plate making contact with the table perhaps awakened her. In any case, a few seconds after I finally got rid of the cake, a golden-furred blob zoomed out of nowhere, crashed into Ceci, knocked her to the floor, made a dive at the cake, sent plate and cake flying off the table, hurled herself at her booty, and began gobbling it up. “Bad dog!” Wilson yelled. “Bad, bad dog!”

Ceci had pulled herself to a sitting position. I lowered myself to her level. “Are you hurt?” I asked. “Is anything broken?” Within a few seconds, it became clear that she was more angry than injured. Luckily, she’d cushioned her fall by lurching against one of the couches. As I helped Ceci to her feet, Pia, jolted awake, began swearing about how no one ever gave her any consideration, and Eric made the mistake of trying to get the plate and the remains of the cake away from Zsa Zsa, whose response to his effort was a snarl.

I’d be curious to know how quickly I got us out of there. I have a clear memory of gripping Ceci’s arm and almost dragging her to the door as I simultaneously and unnecessarily told anyone who might be listening— no one was—that we were going. It may have been as little as fifty seconds from the moment Ceci hit the floor to the moment she and I stood on the front walk catching our breath and recovering our sanity. The tidiness of the weed-free front lawn, the neatness of the heavily mulched rhododendron beds, the solidity of the big brick house on this infinitely suburban street were in such contrast to the chaos within that I felt momentarily disoriented.

"That,”
said Ceci, “was a mistake. Holly, those people are barbarians.” To my relief, far from showing any ill effects, she had apparently been revitalized by her tumble to the floor. Her face was pink with excitement, and her eyes sparkled.

“You’re sure you’re okay?”

She gave her dainty hands a shake, as if to brush off my worry. “Zsa Zsa isn’t even half the size I’m used to.” Stepping briskly forward, she commented, “Won’t it be perfectly lovely to see our dogs! Quest and Rowdy are such a contrast to people like
that.
Ugh! And to dogs like that one, too. Although I must admit, I can’t help thinking that pain is contributing to that horrible behavior, and money is no excuse, there’s obviously plenty, and if you ask me, Sylvia would’ve done well to push those children of hers out of the nest and take the money she’d’ve saved and get Zsa Zsa to a good veterinary surgeon for a full hip replacement, except that she’s probably too fat, isn’t she?”

By then, we’d reached my car, where Ceci was diverted from the topic of Zsa Zsa’s appropriateness as a candidate for hip surgery. Having tapped on the rear window and waved to Quest, she got into the passenger seat and chatted to Rowdy about how nice it would be to get to the park and away from those horrid people. Meanwhile, I got into the driver’s seat, shut the door, and had just started the engine when a small, flashy silver sports car pulled up right in front of my Bronco. Out of it stepped a tall, thin, extraordinarily beautiful woman with long blond hair and a sour expression. She wore a very feminine version of the classic navy pinstriped suit. Tucked under her arm was a slim leather briefcase. My Bronco, I should mention, is distinctive, especially in fancy neighborhoods. Sylvia’s neighborhood wasn’t quite so dazzling as Ceci’s. Still, Sylvia’s street had a lot of brick pseudo-Tudors like hers, manicured lawns, and other features more compatible with new Volvo station wagons, shiny Mercedes sedans, and trendy sport-utility vehicles than with my rattletrap, which was readily identifiable not only by its dents, but by the bumper sticker I got for subscribing to
The Bark
, a fundamentalist religious publication (‘The Modem Dog Culture Magazine”) out of Berkeley, California, the West Coast Cambridge. Great reading! Check it out! (
www.thebark.com
) Anyway, as you’ve probably guessed, the bumper sticker reads DOG IS MY CO-PILOT, and it’s identical to the one that used to be on Steve Delaney’s van until that doGawful woman removed it. Okay, men! Let that be a warning to you! Today, she just tears off your bumper sticker. But tomorrow?

Where was I? Oh, yes, the beautiful woman with the briefcase must have recognized my distinctive car, but made no acknowledgment. Rather, she strode gracefully up the front walk of the late Sylvia Metzner’s house.

“Real estate agents do that, you know,” Ceci remarked censoriously. “It’s disgraceful.”

I didn’t feel up to conversation. Still, I said, “What?”

“They ask owners if they’re interested in selling. I get letters from them, and every once in a while, one of them turns up at my door and asks if I want to sell my house, and I don’t like it one bit. This one must have heard about Sylvia. I think that must be it. At least she looks like a real estate agent, doesn’t she?”

“She’s a lawyer,” I said. “And what she wants to look like is a movie star.”

“You know her?”

“Her name is Anita Fairley. Fairley-Delaney. She’s a lawyer, or maybe a disbarred lawyer, and she’s Steve Delaney’s wife.”

“Your
Steve Delaney?”

“Yes. But not anymore.” I paused. “She’s beautiful, isn’t she?”

Ignoring the question, Ceci asked another one. “What on earth is she doing
here?”

Chapter 21

“Damn Sylvia! She’s an even worse problem dead than she was alive!” Noah’s thick fuzzy brown fleece jacket enhanced his natural resemblance to a teddy bear, but he sounded like an enraged grizzly. “Why the hell did she have to go and get herself murdered!”

Even the mild swearing surprised me, coming as did from someone who’d named his dogs for the apostles. Ceci, a devout Episcopalian, seemed unoffended by the names and the curses; she liked Noah. At the moment, I was feeling especially fond of him myself. Five minutes after leaving the Metzners’ house, we’d arrived at Clear Creek Park, where Ceci had undoubtedly wanted to hang around the playing field. Noah, however, had persuaded her that she and I should accompany him on an actual walk. By unspoken agreement, we’d avoided the trail that ran near the murder scene. Soon after we’d started down another one, a damp path that followed a polluted-looking stream—the Clear Creek?—through murky woods, Douglas and Ulysses had joined us.

“Sylvia didn’t set out to get herself murdered,” Douglas pointed out.

Once again, I reminded myself that he wasn’t bad looking. On the contrary, he had the mannequin looks of the models you see in ads for men’s suits. Among other things, his hair was exactly the conrect length. Steve Delaney’s, I might mention irrelevantly, was usually too long or too short, because instead of getting it professionally cut every month or so, he prevailed on one of his vet techs to run clippers over his head a few times a year. Or that’s what he’d done before. By now, Anita had probably bullied him into patronizing some trendy Newbury Street salon. At least she’d dug her talons into only one of my two males. If she’d been put in charge of Rowdy’s grooming, she’d have subjected him to an English Saddle clip meant for a show poodle, half shaved to the skin with puffs here and there and a pompom bouncing around on the end of his poor malamute tail. But back to Douglas, whose most endearing quality was the possession of a charming dog. At the moment, the ungainly, mottled Ulysses was sniffing his way along the edge of the filthy water. For all I knew, the hound was hoping to discover another corpse. I liked the improbability of the big, awkward, nose-driven dog and tried to see Douglas as a whimsical, imaginative man who’d gone to a shelter and fallen for the funny-looking hound. When animal shelters fill up, the big, hairy dogs like Ulysses (and Rowdy, too) are the first to die. Douglas had probably saved the hound’s life.

“Not that Sylvia went out and decided to get murdered,” Noah conceded. “But you have to admit that Sylvia did cause trouble. Her and that damned Zsa Zsa. And the police! Honest to God! First, there was the exhibitionist. That’s crime! A sick crime. Repeated. Cops ignored it. What’d they do instead? Who’d they go after? Us! Dogs. All of us.
Our
dogs.For what? For the crime of having fun! And then Pasquarelli waltzes in, and she’s a whole new problem, her and her fascist tactics. And who gets blamed? Dogs! So, now the new problem’s murder, and who would you think was to blame? Dogs! Us again.”

On the contrary, Ceci had shown me a letter that had just appeared in the
Newton Pulse
:

More Dogs!

“Faithful and True Even to Death.” The noble phrase from Senator Vest’s famous Eulogy on the Dog sums up the compelling reasons why our City and our Parks need to shape up regarding Man’s Best Friend by making our City and our Parks welcoming places for dogs and owners. The horrible Murder in one of our Parks and preceding terrorization of women by a PERVERT in that same Park happened only because there were not MORE dogs around. Dogs and dog walkers try and keep our Parks safe for everyone! Let’s stop harassing the good guys!

–ALVIN WILLETTE

NEWTON UPPER FALLS

“Who’s blaming dogs for the murder?” I asked. “I haven’t heard anyone do that. Rowdy, leave it! Stop! That is disgusting!”

To my horror, he was scarfing down poisonous-looking mud. While I’m eating marked-down Brand X noodles, Rowdy and Kimi are dining on premium dog chow. Lately, the dogs had been feasting on homemade treats. So what delicacy did the big boy take it into his head to gobble up? Mud. I ask you!

Returning to the previous topic, I said, “If anything, dogs are the heroes. Or one dog.” I smiled at Douglas. “Ulysses found her body. Well, you did, too, Douglas, but I’m sure you won’t mind giving Ulysses all the credit.”

“He’s welcome to it,” Douglas replied, “unless it means that suspicion automatically falls on him. Isn’t that what’s supposed to happen? The one who finds the body is the obvious suspect?”

“Not with Officer Pasquarelli around,” I said, “although I can’t imagine that the police are going to focus on one of their own.”

Unconvinced, Noah said, “If someone comes along with an assault rifle and shoots everyone in the park, you know what the police are going to do? Hey, they’re going to keep doing the same thing they’ve been doing—get tough about the leash law and really enforce the pooper-scooper law. Newton’s the Garden City, you know, meaning that crime doesn’t happen here.”

Here,
at that moment, bore no resemblance to a garden. Leafless branches of trashy-looking trees overhung the trail. The sludge oozing its way between the muddy banks of the stream gave off a vaguely petrochemical reek.

“It does seem as though no one’s done much about the exhibitionist,” I said.

“Maybe now that attention is turning in the direction it’s turning,” Ceci said incomprehensibly, “there’ll finally be some long overdue progress, assuming that the police have the sense to put two and two together, and realize that it’s a dirty sort of person who’s driven to do dirty, dirty things!”