Animal Appetite

by Susan Conant

  Life with malamutes has sharpened my sensitivity to power plays. When I encountered Dr. Randall Carey, I intended to emerge one up. Consequently, I dressed for success in a uniquely Cantabrigian manner: I wore my same old jeans, wool shirt, and heavy boots. At the highest levels of academe—Harvard, where else?—the So-and-So Professors of Such-and-Such are always getting mistaken for maintenance workers. Dr. Randall Carey would take one look and decide I was brilliant and eminent—unless he wrote me off as an unemployed lumberjack with the bad manners to go around inviting herself places she most definitely wasn’t welcome.

  Rowdy and Kimi were already dressed for success. Under the streetlights, their wolf gray coats gleamed. On the block between Appleton and Walden, a neighbor greeted them by name. As we waited for the traffic light at Walden, two little boys admired the dogs, who dropped to the sidewalk and rolled on their backs so the kids could scratch their furry white tummies. On the first block of Walden, we paused while I chatted with a fellow dog walker, and Rowdy and Kimi exchanged full-body sniffs with her greyhound, Gregory, a retired racing dog adopted off the track. Rowdy sometimes gets tough with other males, but never with Gregory. As Kimi checked out the gentle dog, her face wore an expression of motherly accusation: “Just where have you been? And what have you been up to?” Not much, she decided. Nothing to get alarmed about. Where Walden crosses Garden Street, Kimi snatched a discarded paper cup from the leaf mush in the gutter and paraded along showing off her trophy. Rowdy pretended to ignore her. From behind a chain-link fence, one of Rowdy’s neighborhood enemies, a black cocker, yapped out a challenge. Kimi dropped the cup. Rowdy’s hackles rose. “Leave it!” I told him. “That dog is none of your business.” I felt guilty. As a convert to positive methods, I should have found a way to reward him for behavior I wanted.

  Although Walden Street is perfectly pleasant, it isn’t grand. Even so, Randall Carey’s resonant Harvardian tones led me to scan the street numbers in expectation of a comparatively august residence, perhaps a majestic Victorian divided into renovated condos. To my surprise, I found the number on a three-story house with weathered brown shingles. The bare yellow bulb of a bug light illuminated a sagging porch crammed with paper grocery bags and recycling bins in which newspapers, glass, milk bottles, metal cans, and other discarded items had been carefully sorted. The thick black paint on the three mailboxes was chipped to reveal a hideous aqua. The one marked DR. RANDALL CAREY was empty. His name appeared again on a hand-printed card under one of three door bells: DR. RANDALL CAREY. I rang the bell. “Sit,” I told the dogs. Correctly sizing up the porch as something other than an AKC obedience ring, they obeyed.

  A door with alligatored paint opened inward. The temptation to address Carey as “Mr.” almost got the best of me. Alternatively, I could’ve asked him to remove my appendix. But I behaved myself. “Hi!” I said. “I’m Holly Winter. Dr. Carey?”

  In person and a decade after the publication of Mass. Mayhem, Randall Carey looked just as nondescript and academic as he had when the photo was taken. He hadn’t aged much. In his hand he held what may have been the same pipe. His brown hair was longer than in the picture and cut in an English-schoolboy style reminiscent of the early Beatles. His eyes were a washed-out hazel. He wore khakis, a cream-colored turtleneck, and a tweed sports jacket with leather elbow patches. The main difference between the image on the dust jacket and the man who opened the door was that this guy looked uncomfortable. Also, he seemed vaguely familiar. In response to my greeting, he raised the pipe to his thin lips and puffed. You can always tell who’s gone to Harvard and who’s gone to Dale Carnegie.

  “I called,” I reminded him. “I have a few questions about Jack Andrews.”

  “Come in,” he finally said.

  I hesitated. “You don’t have a dog, do you?” I asked. “Or a cat?”

  “God, no,” he replied.

  “You don’t mind if . . . ?” Rowdy and Kimi’s tails were thumping the old boards. Their eyes were bright. They love making new friends.

  “I’d prefer that they stay on the porch.”

  “Then maybe we’d better talk out here,” I said. “It’ll just take a second. Really, Dr. Carey, I just wanted to know where you heard that, on the insurance policy, Shaun McGrath had forged Jack Andrews’s signature.”

  “Randall.” He said his own name in a peculiar way, stretching out the syllables, almost as if he were making fun of himself. “Huh. The wife, I think. Claudia. Maybe someone else. Sorry, it was more than ten years ago. The details aren’t fresh in my mind.” Either the impeccable behavior of my dogs or the cold wind softened him. “You’d better come in, Ms. Winter.”

  “The dogs will behave themselves. They’re trained.” Smiling, I added, “And I’m the alpha leader around here.” To the dogs, I said, “Okay! This way.”

  A common recommendation in the vast literature on how to establish yourself as your dog’s alpha leader is that you, alpha, must always precede your dog. In particular, when you enter or leave a building, you go through the door first; the duly impressed Rover humbly follows. If he’s as big as Rowdy and Kimi, he’s humbled all right! The poor guy’s tail is always getting mashed when the door shuts. Consequently, the dogs followed Randall Carey into his first-floor apartment, and I trailed after them.

  The first thing I noticed once we got inside was that, even apart from the tobacco smoke, the place smelled peculiar. I never did identify the source of the odor. There was no cat, so it couldn’t have been a litter box, and if there’d been a cage of gerbils or guinea pigs, Rowdy and Kimi would certainly have noticed. The dogs and I entered what had been built, I thought, as a living room, but was now a study crammed with a minimum of ten trillion books. The desk was a door that rested on trestles. On it sat a Brand X computer, a decent-looking printer, and a neat stack of manuscript. The bookshelves were brick and board. A wide archway opened to what had once been a dining room. The built-in china cabinet held books, and on the industrial metal shelves that lined the walls were books, books, and yet more books. The wooden trim around the windows and doors was chipped off-white. The walls might have been any color at all: fuchsia, geranium, aquamarine. I don’t know. I saw nothing but books. In Cambridge, normal apartment decor consists of an overwhelming display of the printed word: everything from ancient volumes to textbooks to how-to manuals to paperback thrillers to whodunits with lurid covers in languages so foreign you can’t guess what they are. The only unusual feature of what Randall Carey probably referred to as “my library” was a predominance of hardcovers and a corresponding scarcity of paperbacks.

  “I know where I’ve seen you!” I burst out. “The Bryn Mawr Book Sale.”

  “Bryn Mawr.”

  “The Bryn Mawr Book Sale,” I repeated.

  “Bryn Mawr,” he said again.

  I finally caught on: Randall Carey was correcting my pronunciation. My consonants were okay, I think; it must have been the vowels that irritated him. I didn’t try again. If I want language lessons, I’ll pay Berlitz.

  “I thought you looked familiar,” he admitted. Now that we were indoors (need I say that the light was adequate for reading?), he scanned me as if I were a work of fiction he’d decided not to buy. His eyes lingered on my heavy boots.

  “Down,” I told the dogs. “Stay!” To Randall Carey I said, “I really shouldn’t have barged in on you. Especially with big dogs.”

  “Huskies,” he said.

  Ten trillion books on the shelves and . . . !!

  “Alaskan malamutes.”

  Standing corrected—he hadn’t taken a seat and hadn’t offered me one—he remarked that the dogs seemed well-behaved.

  “Thank you. They’ll just stay there. And they’re perfectly friendly.”

  Seating himself on an old leather swivel chair, he gestured toward what I thought of as an analyst’s couch, a heavily padded, leather-covered chaise longue raised at one end. A potted palm dangled its fronds above the head of the couch. The source of the odor
may have been the pieces of furniture rather than musty books. I remembered reading, somewhere about an American tourist who’d brought home a hassock from some exotic place and discovered that it was filled with camel dung. Or possibly Dr. Randall Carey fed the plant with fish emulsion.

  “Your chapter on Jack Andrews was very helpful,” I lied. “I haven’t had a chance to read the rest of the book yet.”

  Between the swivel chair and the analyst’s couch sat a steamer trunk that served as a coffee table. Prominently displayed on it was a new and highly publicized translation of Dante’s Inferno. I understand that the Inferno is literature, okay? I’m not a total philistine. But strictly between us, I never have trusted Dante. I mean, it’s your choice, of course, but if the guy ever invited me home to see his etchings, I’d dream up some excuse to bolt. Dante: the blind date from hell. Cambridge disagrees. When the translation first appeared, it immediately sold out at every bookstore in the Square and popped up on coffee tables all over the city. In normal places, a coffee table book is a gorgeous edition of Audubon’s The Birds of America or maybe a photographic study of Monet’s garden, Cape Cod, or the south of France: things you’d like to see, places you’d like to go. In Cambridge, it’s Dante’s Inferno. You work it out.

  “Sherry?” he offered. With an author, flattery will get you anywhere.

  I don’t know which kind of sherry I hate more, dry or sweet. “I’d love some,” I said enthusiastically.

  He rose, crossed the room, and passed through the book-filled dining room to what I assumed was the book-crammed kitchen. I noticed that he had the build of a little boy: short, with a round head, and plump in the middle. When he moved, he rocked a little from side to side. In his absence, I tiptoed to his desk and snuck a glance at what proved to be the title page of the manuscript. It read:

  DENT-U-STICK INDUSTRIES:

  AN AMERICAN CORPORATION

  BY

  RANDALL CAREY, PH.D.

  I now knew how Randall Carey earned his living: He wrote corporate histories on contract. His present subject was a famous manufacturer of dental adhesive. I returned to the couch. If he found out the true subject of my usual literary endeavors, he’d probably smirk, too.

  Returning with a bottle of dry sherry and two actual, if not very fancy, sherry glasses, Randall poured a drink for me and one for himself. Raising his glass, he said, with a note of self-mockery, “Santé!” He downed the sherry in his glass.

  “Santé!” I took a sip. Yick.

  “In memory of Jack Andrews,” Randall Carey said.

  “Yes. You knew him?”

  “Met him once. Very briefly.”

  “Well, I’m working on a little article about his murder, and a couple of things have come up that bother me. One is this whole business of the dog being tied up.”

  “Dog’s,” he said absently.

  “What?”

  “Possessive with the gerund. ‘Dog’s.’ Preferably, ‘the dog’s having been tied up.’”

  “Well, yes,” I conceded. “Anyway, it just doesn’t jibe. Brat—Bronwyn, Jack’s daughter—told me that on the night Jack was murdered, after his body was found, the dog went home with Shaun McGrath. And then the way Shaun McGrath died. What happened was that he ran his car into a tree to avoid hitting a loose dog. I mean, if he liked Jack’s dog, Chip, well enough to take him home, and if he sacrificed his life to save a dog he didn’t even know, why did Chip have to be tied up when Shaun was in the office?”

  “Holly—may I?”

  “Of course.”

  “I’m sorry not to be more helpful, but the book came out ten years ago. My publisher made a lot of promises and then never did a damned thing to promote it. The ludicrous title, by the by, was not my idea. And then they let it go out of print before it went on sale.”

  Randall was, I saw, attempting a joke. I attempted a chortle. I sympathized about the difficulties of being a writer.

  “The book must have sold okay, though,” I told him. “At least, a lot of local libraries bought it. Strangely enough, though, it’s missing from all of them.”

  At his insistence, I gave him the details. He seemed genuinely mystified. Although I hated to tackle those vowels again, I admitted that I’d finally located the book at the Bryn Mawr Book Sale. Giving up on finding the opportunity to pour my sherry into the potted palm, I heroically drained my glass and started to thank Randall for letting me barge in. “Oh, I had one other question,” I said. “Did you know that Shaun McGrath played chess?”

  “Barely remember a thing about him,” Randall confessed. “So, is this what you do? You devote yourself to true crime?”

  Should it seem that I make fun of my fellow residents of Our Fair City, hear this! In ridiculing Cambridge, I am surely mocking myself. In the ever so Cantabrigian atmosphere of Dr. Randall Carey’s stinky library, I let slip a word or two about my interest in Hannah Duston. Randall Carey knew exactly who she was. He was impressed. Releasing Rowdy and Kimi, praising them, feeding them bits of liver, I said not a word to Carey about Dog’s Life magazine.

  Cambridge gets to everyone.

  CHAPTER 13

  “Claudia’s child is in pain,” confiided Oscar Fisch.

  Karma: In the long run, fair is fair. Sometimes in the short run. No sooner had I returned from Randall Carey’s than Claudia Andrews-Howe’s second husband, Oscar Fisch, phoned to insist on paying me a visit. I tried to put him off. I said I was busy. In fact, Rowdy and Kimi hadn’t eaten. Neither had I. I’d missed lunch. For once, I felt like cooking myself a real meal. Besides, I’d been skipping my prayers: Hannah Duston’s abductors had said theirs three times a day, yet here it was, Tuesday, and I hadn’t trained my dogs since Saturday morning. Nonetheless, in our little skirmish, Oscar Fisch won. I later learned that his specialty at the Harvard Business School was the art of negotiation.

  I, the loser, hung up and bustled around microwaving some frozen eggplant parmigiana for myself, tying the dogs at opposite ends of the kitchen, doling out their combination of dry kibble and fresh Bil Jac, and waiting the two or three nanoseconds it took them to eat. Tonight, as soon as I freed Rowdy, he headed for Kimi’s dish, and as soon as I untied her, she dashed to his. While the dogs scoured each other’s empty bowls, I changed out of my boots and into running shoes, replaced the wool jacket with a respectable-looking fleece pullover, and ran a brush through my hair. Then I tidied up the kitchen and the living room, and ate my eggplant.

  Just as I finished washing my plate, the bell rang, and the dogs went flying to the front door and stood by it grinning in happy expectation and silently wagging their plumy white tails. So inexpressibly useless are they as guard dogs or watch dogs that I always forget how they look to a stranger who doesn’t know dogs. How do they look? Big, dark, and scary. When I opened the door to admit Oscar Fisch, instead of striding after me, he flattened himself against the nearest wall. So taken were Rowdy and Kimi with this fascinating behavior that they sniffed Oscar’s feet, nuzzled his hands, and otherwise tried to determine what was wrong with him. The fear of big dogs was beyond their ken.

  I took pity on Oscar, whose tan had vanished. His face was now a deeper green than the patina on the bronze Hannah Duston. Ordinarily, I’d have put the dogs in the yard, but our neighborhood rat invasion was making me slightly paranoid. For one thing, my dogs are very affectionate. I didn’t like the idea of a post-rat lick on the face. Besides, for all I knew, rats carried horrible diseases that could infect dogs. I reminded myself to ask Steve. My great fear, though, was that one of the dogs would eat a rat that had ingested poison. A dog who has eaten the kind of rodent poison you buy at the supermarket can be treated with vitamin K, but the treatment has to start promptly, and, of course, you have to know that the dog swallowed the poison and precisely what it was. Alone in the yard, my dogs might silently murder a dozen rats larded with who knows what toxic materials.