The Wicked Flea (26 page)

I’m equally sure that he never noticed Douglas at all. Still holding the big rock in both hands, Douglas, the lovely person, the exhibitionist, took long, smooth steps that placed him directly behind Wilson. Raising his arms high above Wilson, he paused for a second and then slammed the rock down on Wilson’s skull. As Wilson collapsed, Douglas glanced at me and said, with no emotion in his voice, “He shot Sylvia. If I’ve killed him, he had it coming.”

Turning back to the dogs, Douglas lunged at Zsa Zsa, who had finally loosened her hold on Llio’s ear. Or what was left of it. And Douglas did precisely what I’d warned him not to do: He reached out, grabbed Zsa Zsa’s collar, and dragged her away from the corgi. As I’d predicted, Zsa Zsa nailed him; she veered abruptly around and sank her teeth into his free arm. He didn’t seem to notice the bite.

Did he notice the blood? It flowed from his forearm, from the corgi’s mauled ears, and from Anita Fairley’s veins. Llio shook her head. Her blood flew everywhere. It showered Anita’s body and mingled with Anita’s human blood.

Chapter 36

The bullet had entered Anita’s chest. She bled heavily. She survived. Rowdy had his brucellosis test done at Boston’s famous Angell Memorial Animal Hospital, not at Steve’s clinic. I heard that Steve and Anita were getting a divorce. I didn’t write, call, or E-mail Steve. I knew he wasn’t entirely alone. Steve had his dogs and his work.

I had my dogs, too, of course. And my work. Not that there’s a sharp distinction between the two. Dining the month that followed the horror, as I thought of it, I did some final liver-recipe testing, put the finishing touches on my cookbook, and trained Rowdy and Kimi with homemade treats. Kimi picked up one championship point at the Boston shows in December, and Rowdy took two B.O.B.’s—Best of Breed wins—and on both days, he went on to place in the group—Working Group—one second place, one third place, not bad except that Rowdy is drop-dead gorgeous and... the expression is unfortunate.

Speaking of show dogs, Wilson wrote to me from prison to thank me for rushing Llio to Angell on that nightmare day. Llio’s show career had ended, as Wilson knew it would the moment he saw Zsa Zsa rip into the corgi’s uninjured ear. The surgeons at Angell did a wonderful job of restoring Llio to close-to-normal, but the show ring is about perfection, and from a judge’s viewpoint, Llio is now imperfect. She does, however, seem perfectly happy, and that’s what matters most, isn’t it? I expected to get stuck with the whopping bill from Angell, but to my surprise, Pia not only paid it but took Llio home and now devotes herself to pampering her jailed husband’s dog.

When, at Wilson’s request, I made a visit to check on Llio, Pia talked on and on about Llio, and also had a few things to say about Wilson, all of them nasty. According to Pia, her husband should be charged with attempted homicide for shooting Anita. Pia hadn’t even been there. I had. “A would-be double murderer,” Pia insisted. “That’s what he is.” Without waiting for the results of ballistics tests, Wilson had confessed to using the same gun on Sylvia that he’d used on Anita. He was claiming, truthfully I might add, that he hadn’t aimed at Anita and that in Sylvia’s case, he was guilty only of manslaughter. Eric intends to testify against Wilson, Pia told me, and anyway, she added, it was apparent to everyone that her rotten husband was—and I quote—“a sneaky, mooching liar.”

According to his wife, Wilson ferreted around in Sylvia’s desk and discovered that she intended to sell the house, move to a small condo, and leave her children and son-in-law to fend for themselves. But if Sylvia died? Wilson and Pia, as well as Oona and Eric,-could continue to occupy the house or could sell it. Furthermore, the children would inherit the rest of Sylvia’s estate.

Interestingly enough, Pia did not allude to Wilson’s dog-show extravagances, which she perhaps does not view as such. Maybe she imagines that Wilson paid fifty dollars for Llio’s palatial wooden crate. Maybe Wilson lied to her about its cost. Pia not only accused Wilson of being a liar, but cited what she considered to be irrefutable evidence. “Do you know what Wilson has the gall to say about Douglas?” she demanded. “Well, according to Wilson, Douglas is the exhibitionist. Is that the most outrageous thing you’ve ever heard? I mean, Douglas of all people! Let me tell you, Holly, Douglas is really a lovely person. As a matter of fact, we’ve started spending a little time together. Walking dogs. And we’re having dinner on Saturday. I keep telling Douglas that he should sue Wilson for defamation. But naturally Douglas would never do that. He’s much too nice. The exhibitionist, for Christ’s sake, is Wilson. The creep! I should know, shouldn’t I? To think that I ever shared the same bed with that pervert.”

Oona Metzner, I might mention, bought a boat and sailed away, but Pia and Eric are still living at home in Sylvia’s house. Someone told someone who told Ceci who told me that Sylvia’s children are quite well off. Sylvia’s life insurance policy was a big one, and the children sold S & I’s for a ton of money, despite the fuss about contamination. The Trasks settled the case out of court. The settlement was generous, or so George Trask said. I ran into the whole family a few days ago outside my dentist’s office in Newton. The Trask girls, Di and Fergie, had appointments with a children’s dentist in the adjoining office. Charlie’s hip surgery is scheduled for next month. I still can’t decide whether I was right to keep my inside knowledge of the Trasks’ wily-fox scheme to myself. On the one hand, the scam was none of my business. On the other hand, Charlie
is
a dog, and dogs
are
my business. Morally speaking, where does that leave me? On the side of the dog. Where else?

That reminds me. Zsa Zsa. All along, it had seemed to me that there was something terribly wrong with her. Her bad hips must have caused her terrible pain, she probably had an aggressive temperament to begin with, and Sylvia was an irresponsible owner. All true. But there was more. On the day of horrors, the cops had no sooner shown up, taken Wilson into custody, and set about taping off the area and taking down names, when Zsa Zsa collapsed and had a seizure that went on and on. I had the comfort of knowing that although she looked as if she were suffering, she was deeply unconscious. Even so, I threw hysterics until the police agreed to call a vet. But Zsa Zsa died. Although she’d instigated the dog fight, I felt sick at the idea that Rowdy had inflicted a mortal wound. To my relief, the police ordered a necropsy—a veterinary autopsy—just in case Zsa Zsa’s death had some connection with Sylvia’s. It didn’t. And according to the vet who performed the necropsy, the stress of the dog fights may have triggered the seizure activity, but Rowdy hadn’t killed Zsa Zsa. The main finding of the necropsy was a brain tumor. I felt stupid. I’d known all along that there was something aberrant about Zsa Zsa. I should’ve guessed what it was. All the members of Ceci’s dog group felt the same way I did. In the peculiar fashion of people devoted to dogs, we mourned a dog we hadn’t even liked.

The dog group is in partial hibernation for the winter, but Ceci has stayed in close touch with Noah, who is planning to regularize and upgrade his position as mayor of the dog group by running for mayor of Newton. Ceci is working hard on his one-issue campaign: Noah promises that if elected, he will lead Newton into a new era of fully fenced off-leash dog parks throughout the city. If I lived in Newton, he’d have my vote. On the subject of Newton’s public servants, let me report that Officer Jennifer Pasquarelli has been reinstated after successfully completing a social skills training program. Kevin informs me that Jennie graduated at the top of her class. I notice, however, that Kevin has still not introduced Jennie to his mother.

Douglas has also entered a social-skills program of sorts. It’s a self-help group for sexual addicts. He dropped out of treatment with Dr. Foote. So did I. Dr. Foote knew that Douglas was frightening women by exposing himself in the park, she knew that he had witnessed Sylvia’s murder, and she did nothing to protect the women or to bring Sylvia’s murderer to justice. Furthermore, she was of no help to Douglas or to me.

But those aren’t the reasons I quit seeing her. No, I dropped out because of an incident that occurred only a few days after Anita’s near-slaying. The incident should have amounted to nothing. In the shrink-infested quarters of Cambridge and Newton, therapists and their patients run into one another all the time at restaurants, theaters, health clubs, parties, and everywhere else. Big deal. As it happened, I ran into Dr. Foote in Harvard Square. She was crossing the street from the Harvard Coop to the kiosk, and we were crossing in the opposite direction. By “we” I mean, as always, Rowdy and Kimi. Being the sort of friendly human being who does not need to be sent off for social skills training, I smiled, nodded, and said hello to Dr. Foote just as if she were a normal human being instead of a psychiatrist. The dogs, who are even more socially skilled than I am, were as quick as ever to pick up on my gregarious attitude and to add their own conviviality, which took the form of bouncing up and down in an unmistakably merry and entirely nonthreatening manner while issuing throaty peals of
woo-woo-woo.
And instead of returning our greetings and going on to admire the dogs, just what did Dr. Foote do? I’ll tell you. She screamed and ran. Since I couldn’t imagine what had upset her, I tried to go to her aid. The dogs, I’m proud to report, were just as solicitous as I was. In brief, Rowdy, Kimi, and I sprinted through the crowd by the Coop and had no difficulty catching up with Dr. Foote before she reached Brattle Square. When we did, she keeled over. Abruptly. I’d never before seen anyone black out so rapidly. One second, she was on her feet, and the next, she lay on the brick pavement. She immediately drew a crowd that included my sympathetic dogs, who did their best to revive her by licking her alarmingly pale face. Someone who announced herself as a doctor gently nudged the dogs aside, kneeled, and hovered over the ailing Dr. Foote. As I watched, Dr. Foote whispered something to the doctor, who rose and spoke to me.

“This woman is having a severe panic attack,” the doctor said. “If you’ll take the dogs away, she’ll be fine.”

“What?” I said.

“She’s phobic,” the doctor said. “She’s deathly afraid of dogs. Yours are beautiful, by the way. I have a malamute myself.”

As it turned out, by what the non-dog world foolishly calls coincidence, she’d bought her dog from Kimi’s breeder and was thus a long-lost cousin of my own. Naturally, we simply had to spend the briefest possible moment or two comparing notes about pedigrees, and then I simply had to tell her about breeding Rowdy, and after that we devoted practically no time at all to figuring out exactly how her dog was related to Emma. Anyway, although we devoted only a second to two to exchanging these snippets of family history, when we looked for Dr. Foote, she’d mysteriously vanished. If she’d risen to her feet, we’d have noticed. I assume that she crawled ignominiously away. Poor woman! I hate to think of the psychotherapy hours we wasted together. If only she’d been open and honest with me about her fears, I’m sure I’d have been able to help her.

Rita was entirely and uncharacteristically unsympathetic to Dr. Foote’s plight. She apologized profusely for having referred me to Dr. Foote and explained that she’d done so only because of Dr. Foote’s supposed knowledge of neurology. If I’d told Rita the truth about Douglas, she’d probably have filed an official complaint against Dr. Foote. As it was, Rita settled for making Dr. Foote hand over every note she’d written about me. Rita presented me with the lot in a sealed envelope. Also, she made Dr. Foote promise to go into treatment herself with a therapist of Rita’s choosing. Never supposing that I’d recognize the name, Rita told me that she’d sent Dr. Foote to Dr. Harvey Bremmer, whom Rita described as a skilled clinician whose specialty was ethics. As I didn’t tell Rita, I’d known Harvey for ages. He breeds and shows Gordon setters. Very nice dogs. Sound. Typey.

But to return to the matter of Sylvia Metzner’s murder, it was Althea Battlefield, Adventuress of Sherlock Holmes, member of the Baker Street Irregulars, and Ceci’s sister, of course, who pointed out the inadequacies of my dog-attack analysis and of Pia’s explanation of her husband’s motives. Instead of enumerating my stupidities and telling me that the truth was elementary-my-dear-Holly, Althea straightened me out in the kindest possible way. She invited me to tea. As Ceci dished out cream and fresh raspberries, Althea told me that it wasn’t necessarily a mistake to view murder through dog-colored glasses. According to Althea, if I’d looked through my lenses at my own egregiously opportunistic dogs, I’d have seen that a concatenation of motives triggered the murder by constituting an opportunity that Wilson couldn’t resist.

When Sherlock Holmes summed up a case, Watson was always staggered by the Great Detective’s brilliance. From Watson’s astonished admiration, it’s clear he understood what Holmes was talking about. Forgetting my manners, I said, “What?”

“The concatenation of
other people’s
motives.” Althea’s eyes sparkled. “There being no such thing as a condogenation.”

“Yet,” I said.

Althea smiled. “Motives. The victim, Sylvia Metz-ner, had just had a dramatic public confrontation with Officer Jennifer Pasquarelli, who had every reason to be angry. The Trasks were justifiably furious at the victim because of the suffering of their beloved pet. My sister’s dog-walker companions at the park, especially our mayoral candidate, Noah, had been repeatedly harassed by the victim’s dog and, indeed, saw the victim’s failure to control her dog as a threat to their own dogs’ freedom to enjoy the park.”