The Barker Street Regulars

by Susan Conant

  “Not everyone,” Althea said censoriously, “swallows poppycock. What on earth has this woman done to convince you? And don’t tell me she hasn’t! I always used to tell my students, ‘I have eyes in the back of my head.’ Now, they’re virtually the only ones I have left, but their vision remains as unclouded as ever. I have no difficulty in seeing through this paranormal malarkey and no difficulty in seeing that a web of it has been spun over your eyes.”

  Reluctantly, I said, “She told me things she couldn’t possibly have known except … Althea, she told me things that I would have sworn on Rowdy’s head that she couldn’t possibly have known.”

  “Indeed,” said Althea.

  I described my infatuation with the beautiful gray cat. “Irene Wheeler described that cat perfectly.” I gulped. Yes, purr-fectly. Sorry. Rita informs me that punning is a symptom of anxiety. “I’ve thought of every possible way she could have found out about that cat. I don’t really believe in mind reading, but … Althea, every other possibility is totally farfetched, practically impossible. And when you eliminate the impossible …”

  “Half the residents of this facility,” Althea cut in, “were identically infatuated with that foolish cat.” Sweeping an arm toward her roommate’s empty bed and toward the television, she added, “Helen used to ooh and ahh whenever that commercial was on. She even managed to remember the cat from one moment to the next. Gray thing. With big yellow eyes.”

  “Yes.”

  “That commercial ran incessantly. Every animal lover who has turned on a television during the past year is smitten with that cat. This so-called psychic took a guess. You were an animal lover. Therefore, you, too, were enthralled with that cat. What was true of you was true of millions of people, especially people like you. Did you happen to mention a cat to her before she produced this bit of mind reading?”

  “Yes,” I admitted.

  “Well, there. So much for that bit of mumbo jumbo.”

  After a silent consultation with Robert, Hugh picked up the interrogation. “We are wondering,” he said, “what prompted you to bring up the subject of cats. It has been our observation …”

  “That I am obsessed with dogs,” I finished. “You aren’t the first to notice. I asked Irene Wheeler about a cat because I rescued one.” Here, I gave a succinct account of saving Tracker. I described the man who had tried to drown her and the episode of the bottles of hair color. Robert and Hugh were bug-eyed. “So I showed Irene Wheeler a picture of the cat,” I continued, “a close-up shot, in profile. The damaged ear didn’t show, and neither did the double paws. And without being told, she knew that the cat was a female, and she knew about the ear and the paws and a lot else. I was bowled over. It seemed like a genuine miracle.”

  “But it was not,” Althea said sympathetically. “She knew the cat.”

  I felt really, really stupid. “She conned me. She knew the man, she knew the cat, she saw the picture. Presto! Clairvoyance.”

  “Almost from the beginning,” Robert interjected, “we have viewed the existence of a confederate as a logical necessity.”

  “Acting alone,” Hugh explained, “the woman could not have staged the appearance of the spectral dog.”

  I’d had the same idea myself. But my candidates for the role of accomplice had been Gloria and Scott.

  “The seances,” Robert said, “took place in Ceci’s house, yet the dog appeared outdoors.”

  “The evidence was plentiful,” Hugh added. “Dog hair, paw prints, footprints, tire tracks.”

  “Moreover,” Robert pointed out, “this psychic, this medium, knew that Lord Saint Simon was black. The portrait hangs over Ceci’s fireplace. Therefore, the someone else, namely, the confederate, made the initial error of miscasting a white dog in the role of Simon.”

  “But with a big white dog on hand,” I said, “the two of them made the best of the initial mistake. When Simon first came back, he was a spectral dog—a white dog. Gradually, as he materialized, he was going to get darker and darker.”

  Althea nodded. “Yes, ‘The Copper Beeches.’ But the need was not to cut the hair. Rather, it was to change the color.”

  From the hallway came the sound of food carts. A heavy odor drifted in. Lunch at the Gateway always smelled like overcooked broccoli.

  “Let me summarize,” Althea said. “With the aid of the confederate photographed by Hugh and Robert, Irene Wheeler duped my sister into believing that her late dog was materializing. What do we know of this man, this confederate? That he almost succeeded in drowning a cat, a cat known to Miss Wheeler, perhaps her own cat. We know that communication between Miss Wheeler and this man is somewhat disturbed, shall we say. Instead of supplying the black Newfoundland she needed, he provided a large white dog. The evidence suggests that he is a somewhat unstable, perhaps impulsive, individual. He could have done away with the cat under cover of darkness or in a secluded area. Instead, he tried to drown the creature in daylight on a stretch of the river where there was a fair chance that he would be observed. When Holly spotted him in Cambridge, did he act rationally? No, on the contrary, he panicked and thereby drew attention to himself.”

  “My companion in Cambridge,” I said as much to myself as to Althea, Hugh, and Robert, “was a Cambridge police lieutenant, Kevin Dennehy, whose picture has been in all the papers. And he’s been on TV. His appearance is distinctive. He’s a big, tall guy with red hair. And the reason he’s been in the papers and on television is that he’s one of the people investigating the Donald Lively murder. He was the Cambridge drug dealer whose speciality was—”

  Hugh couldn’t let me finish. In deep, dire tones, he proclaimed, “Cocaine!”

  “I assumed,” I said, “that the man panicked because he recognized me and was afraid of being charged with animal abuse. Hah! The one he was scared of was actually Kevin.”

  “The traces of cocaine on Jonathan’s body,” Hugh said.

  “My grandnephew,” Althea said smugly, “was not at all that sort of person.”

  “But this man is,” I pointed out. “His behavior is erratic. And the cocaine connection accounts for something else, namely, Irene Wheeler’s desperation. We’ve been … Well, I, at least, have been assuming that her motive in conning Ceci and everyone else is purely mercenary. But maybe there’s a reason for her greed. One day when I saw her, she looked terrible. I thought she had a dreadful cold. But now …”

  Althea was impatient. “Jonathan was all that stood between this scheming pair and my sister’s money. I have no doubt that they had plans that reached far beyond the payments made for daily consultations. And when this woman visited my poor, gullible sister and failed to convince Jonathan of her supposed psychic powers, her confederate listened in.”

  “The footprints in the flower beds,” Hugh informed me.

  “And,” Althea continued, “lured Jonathan outside and murdered him, leaving behind minute traces of—”

  “The solution!” Robert cried dramatically.

  “Of course,” Althea calmly pronounced. “The seven-percent solution.”

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  I CAN’T BE BLAMED for playing Sherlock Holmes. The impulse is irresistible. When Rita came home for lunch, I sprang on her the astonishing deduction that her patient’s missing dog was a male Great Pyrenees stolen while the owner was running on Greenough Boulevard. Whenever Holmes made a comparably staggering proclamation, the victim was always gratifyingly stunned: “How the deuce did he know I came from Afghanistan?”

  Rita, in contrast, just said, “I already told you that.”

  I was childishly put out. “No, you didn’t. I deduced it. Just like Sherlock Holmes.”

  “This Sherlock Holmes obsession of yours is getting to be worse than dogs,” she sighed.

  I continued. “The man who stole the dog is the same one who tried to drown Tracker.”

  “Tracker?”

  “The cat. I finally got around to naming her.”

  “Tracker,” Rita said u
ngenerously, “is a stupid name for a female cat.”

  “Positive refraining,” I said, lapsing into the psychotherapeutic jargon I’d picked up from Rita herself. “And you know what? It works. It’s totally transformed my feelings about her. And Tracker is only her call name. Her real name is Kaila’s Paw Print. Actually, it’s Champion Kaila’s Paw Print. I named her after a famous malamute. I’m teaching her to live on top of the refrigerator. That’s from Holmes, more or less. The Empty House.’ From this convenient retreat, the watchers were being watched and the trackers tracked.”

  Rita, for once, refused to listen. In fact, she interrupted me by shrieking. When she’d composed herself, she said, “I was right! The Holmes obsession is getting to be worse than dogs. So, who is this mystery man?”

  Succumbing to the Holmesian fondness for theatrics, I let silence linger before making my dramatic pronouncement. “He is Irene Wheeler’s partner in crime. He has drug connections. Greenough Boulevard is one of his haunts. Kevin is always warning me about that stretch of the river. I just never took him seriously.”

  Rita’s patient’s dog had been stolen just before the spectral Simon, the giant white dog, made his first appearance. Later that week, Irene told the owner that the dog was fine. After Jonathan’s murder, however, Irene, in uncharacteristic fashion, gave the owner unwelcome news: All of a sudden, Irene channeled the information that the dog was dead. In other words, once the situation took a deadly turn, Irene wanted the owner to quit searching for the dog. She wanted it even more than she wanted to keep a client.

  Unlike Holmes’s creator, who investigated a couple of real-life murders, I tried to limit my imitation of the Master. It was one thing to make astonishing deductions, even if they didn’t produce the intended effect, it was quite another to meddle with a double murderer. Jonathan Hubbell had been murdered in Newton, but Donald Lively, the dealer, had been killed on Kevin’s turf, in Cambridge, right near the courthouse. In the early afternoon, I tried to reach Kevin. I left a phone message at the station. Then I ran next door. His mother said that he’d barely been home for two days. He’d stop in to eat, catch a nap, and take a shower. Then he’d be off again. I emphasized to Mrs. Dennehy that I absolutely had to talk to Kevin the next time he showed up, no matter when it was. As I didn’t tell Mrs. Dennehy, I just couldn’t face trying to explain matters to the Newton police or to any of the other authorities involved in the whole business. I imagined the reception I’d get if I phoned the police or the D.A.’s office and outlined the story to some stranger: Hugh and Robert’s application of Holmes’s methods, the use of a stolen Great Pyrenees to impersonate a dead Newfoundland, my conviction that a man vicious enough to attempt the murder of a pitiful cat would stop at nothing. Kevin and his cop buddies alternately joked and complained about nuts who wasted police time by propounding loopy conspiracy theories. Especially if I failed to censor what I am informed is a slight tendency to punctuate narratives with the occasional extraneous detail or two about dogs, I’d be mistaken for a paranoid lunatic. Kevin Dennehy knew the full extent of my madness, but understood that it was strictly limited to matters canine.

  And to a lesser extent, feline. Tracker’s physical condition, I might mention, was improving. As part of my plan to integrate her into my household, I took advantage of the two big dog crates I’d set up in the guest room. The crates occupied most of the floor space, but anyone who’d visit me—my father, for example—would view the crates and their occupants as a welcoming touch of hospitality designed to make the visitor feel right at home. So I crated the dogs, closed the guest-room door, and closed off my bedroom, too, before opening the door to my office and tempting Tracker off the mouse pad and out of the room. My personality held no charms for her, but she was now wild about canned tuna. I succeeded in luring her into the kitchen. Sensing somehow—ESP? my dog instincts?—that she was ready, I gave her a boost to the top of the refrigerator and promptly ladled out more tuna. Before the kitchen was redone, Kimi had been able to leap up and snatch food from the top of my old refrigerator, but the old one was small, and most of it was recessed under a cabinet. Tracker, I thought, should be safe from predation on top of the new, deep refrigerator, at least if she stayed away from the front.

  Have I digressed? God help me! First it was dogs, then Holmes, now cats. Stop me before I love more! The point is that after returning from the Gateway, chatting with Rita, and trying to reach Kevin Dennehy, I puttered around implementing the program I’d designed for my breed champion Alaskan malamute cat, Tracker, before returning her to my study, releasing Rowdy and Kimi, and settling down to earning our daily kibble by writing the beginning of an article about the dogs of Sherlock Holmes.

  As I was about to finish the first sentence, the ring of the doorbell interrupted me. On my back steps I found a young neighborhood friend of mine, a ten-year-old boy who loves dogs and misses his own. The separation is temporary. The kid’s parents are on a one-year stint as visiting scholars at Harvard. Meanwhile, the family dogs live in air-conditioned splendor with the boy’s uncle back in the United Arab Emirates. The kid arrived in Cambridge speaking fluent American English, but his classmates apparently made fun of his name, whatever it is, so he insists on being called Billy. Although he speaks four or five languages and has traveled all over the world, he is wonderfully unassuming about his accomplishments and background, and is friendly to the point of brashness and refreshingly unspoiled. Indeed, he’s the only child on the block who can be hired to perform such traditionally all-American-kid tasks as shoveling sidewalks, taking out trash, and walking dogs. Every few weeks, Billy showed up at my door in the hope that I’d finally relent by letting him add Rowdy and Kimi to his canine clientele. As I did not tell Billy, he was way too small to manage one malamute, never mind two. Instead, I explained, as he already knew, that I walked the dogs myself. Rowdy, Kimi, and I ran into him all the time. Anyway, when I saw him on my back steps, I assumed that he was there either to repeat the request for employment or to stop in for a visit. As he promptly announced, however, he was running an errand.

  Handing me a sealed envelope, he gave me a big grin and said shamelessly, “I’m not supposed to deliver this to you until tomorrow.”

  I grinned back. “Then why are you delivering it now?”

  “Because,” Billy replied with commendable honesty, “the man said you’d pay me for it, and I don’t want to wait until tomorrow.”

  “And how much did the man say I’d give you?”

  “He said a dollar, but then I said it would be better to leave it up to you, and he said that was all right.”

  We settled on two dollars plus another two for the rush delivery. When Billy had departed, I examined the envelope. It was plain white. My name and address were written in legible, old-fashioned script. There was no return address. Inside was a single sheet of white typing paper. Hand-printed on the sheet was what I instantly recognized as a cryptic message. It inevitably reminded me of the one Sherlock Holmes receives from Porlock at the beginning of The Valley of Fear. I didn’t bother dashing out of the house and down the street to snag Billy and get a description of the man who’d arranged the delivery. The cipher message? Delivered by a child? And an Arab child no less, albeit one rather different from the urchins, the dirty and ragged little street Arabs, who formed the ranks of the famous Baker Street Irregulars. The man had to be Robert, who took an interest in vowels. Only a trained ear could have heard the Middle East in Billy’s fluent American English.

  To refresh my memory, I got out my copy of the Canon and looked up the story. Porlock’s message to Holmes, I remind you, begins:

  534 C2 13 127 36

  The Great Detective realizes that he has received what he calls a cipher message without a cipher. In other words, he needs to discover the particular cipher—presumably a book—that will let him break the code. He eventually concludes that the cipher is something called Whitaker’s Almanac, chosen because Porlock assumed that Holmes would have no diffic
ulty in finding it. After a false start (Holmes first consults the new Almanac instead of the previous year’s), the Master decodes the message by going to page 534, column two, and reading the thirteenth word, the one hundred twenty-seventh word, and so on.

  My message also began with the number 534. Next, however, came the letters L and W, separated by a comma, and then a series of numbers.

  534 L,W 24,13 36,3 5,17 38,10 9,7 25,2 14,2,3,4 5,1,2,3 25,2 43,11,12 7,4 43,15 44,1,2,3,4 23,14,15 43,11 41,14 30,10 1,7 7,4 4,11 29,6 40,8 11,6 1,12 4,5 15,16 4,5 37,6 3,5 45,12 13,12 29,6 14,1 32,1,2 25,107,4 1,445,4 39,9 14,134,1333,144,5 25,11 35,18!

  In The Valley of Fear, Holmes reasons that C stands for column. Therefore the book he seeks is one with columns. It seemed to me that if the cipher I needed had columns, the C would appear at the start of my message. It didn’t. So I needed a work without columns. Not the Bible, for example. Instead of a C, my message had L, W—lines and words? So, the message began with the thirteenth word of the twenty-fourth line on page 534 of some book without columns. With a minimum of 534 pages, it was a long book. And as Porlock had done in sending his encoded message to Holmes, Hugh and Robert must have chosen a work that would be easy for me to find. An almanac? The men had commented that my house was right across the street from the Observatory Hill branch of the Cambridge Public Library. As I was about to sprint over there, I had a sudden inspiration.

  Of course! Hugh, Robert, or almost anyone else would correctly assume that I owned the latest edition of the American Kennel Club’s Complete Dog Book. Consulting it, I found that page 534 was devoted to the beginning of the write-up of the Tibetan spaniel. A photograph occupied about half the page. Consequently, there was no line twenty-four. Dead end. What other long book without columns would I be certain to own? The Merck Veterinary Manual! Flipping to page 534, hurriedly counting lines, I found that the twenty-fourth had only twelve words.