The Wicked Flea (13 page)

Kevin again announced that he was starving and stunned the waiter by bursting into Gilbert and Sullivan. “ ‘A policeman’s lot is not a happy one,’ ” he caroled. “Jennie sings. Did I tell you that? Voice like an angel.” Abruptly addressing the waiter, he said, “General what’s his name chicken, beef with cashews, sweet and sour shrimp, pork fried rice, for starters. No pancakes in any of that, is there?”

“You want mu shu?” the waiter asked.

“No,” I said. “That’s what he doesn’t want. I do.” The term
waiter
is politically incorrect. We’re supposed to say
server,
but I hate the word. Given the choice, I’d rather wait than serve. And servers are presumably servile, whereas waiters are...? Anyway, when the restaurant employee had departed, I said, “So your lot isn’t happy? Mine isn’t—”

“Not mine. Jennie’s. She got attacked.”

“How horrible!”

“By a
dog
walker.” Kevin’s tone suggested that I was somehow responsible. “She wasn’t on duty. Just out for a run. I tell you she runs?” Hefty appearance to the contrary, Kevin is a dedicated long-distance runner. “She’s in great shape.”

Bully for her
, I thought and also refrained from saying,
so am I.

Kevin expanded. “She does Tai Chi. Tae Kwon Do.” He gave a sly smile. “Sashimi. One of those things. Jennie’s big on Asian. Eats nothing but vegetables. No calories in this stuff. Hey, you hear about the German Chinese restaurants?”

“Yes, Kevin. And so has everyone else.”

An hour later, you’re hungry for power.

“Snappish tonight, aren’t we?” he said.

“I’ve had a horrible day. I really want to—”

The waiter interrupted me to cover the table with dishes of beef, chicken, shrimp, pork, and vegetables, all awash in brown glue. Then Kevin elaborated on Jennie’s encounter with the dog walker. “She goes out for her run, and the park’s full of loose dogs, and she goes by one, and the dog snarls at her.” The waiter returned with my mu shu pancakes and a small platter of what looked like thousand-year-old cabbage. Kevin loaded his plate with big helpings, picked up his fork, and dug in. He does not believe in chopsticks. Between bites, he went on. “So Jennie asks the woman—dog’s with a woman, older woman—to leash the dog, and like you always say, the woman gets her hackles up and tells Jennie it’s her dog, and mind her own business.”

‘That must’ve gone over big,” I said, struggling to encase the cabbage neatly in a pancake while hoping I was wrong. “So, what did Jennie do?”

“Identified herself.” Kevin meant as a police officer. In his view, a cop has no other identity. “Told the woman to leash the dog. Woman refused. Jennie asked to see the dog’s rabies tag. And, uh, something to clean up after the dog with.” He looked embarrassed, and not because he was discussing an unmentionable subject over dinner. Is there a cop on earth who takes pride in enforcing the pooper-scooper law? “They’re big on that in Newton. Fine for not having a plastic bag with you.”

“Newton? I thought Jennie was a Cambridge cop.” Even so, I’d made the connection. I’d also realized that Kevin couldn’t have heard about Sylvia’s murder. The body had, after all, been found not that many hours ago.

“Newton,” Kevin said. “So what happened next was that the woman starts screaming, goes nuts, and shoves Jennie and knocks her to the ground.”

“What about Tae Kwon Do?” I poured myself some tea. Only then did I notice that Kevin hadn’t ordered beer. If he was enduring that sacrifice to decrease his girth, the relationship with Jennie was serious.

Ignoring my remark, Kevin said, “Assault on a police officer. Jennie told her she was under arrest, and she still didn’t get it. Resisted. Had hysterics. When they took her in, she finally got the message. Kicked up a stink. This was all in the Sunday papers. Jennie’s been suspended. There’s a lot of political garbage going on. The woman’s threatening to sue Jennie. Everyone knows the woman’s lying”—Kevin meant everyone in blue— “but they’ve still got to investigate, and that’s hard on Jennie.”

Instead of breaking the bad news, I said, “Kevin, I have to confess. I was there. At Cold Creek Park, when it happened. And I read about it in the papers. I just didn’t connect Jennifer Pasquarelli with your Jennie. I thought you met Jennie here. In Cambridge.”

“I did. At a ten-K road race.”

“I assumed it was at work. Look, there’s something you don’t know.” I started by telling Kevin all about Ceci and Quest and then outlined what I knew about Sylvia’s arrest. With remarkable tact, I avoided pointing out the differences between the account he’d given me and what I’d seen, heard, and read. For instance, according to Kevin’s report, which was presumably Jennie’s, the officer had identified herself as such
before
she’d landed on the ground. In contrast, I’d seen her pull out her badge and identify herself as a cop
after
the shoving incident. She could have done it twice, of course. Maybe she had.

Kevin ate silently.

“The background,” I said, “was that there really has been crime committed at the park. An exhibitionist. And there was the sense that the police weren’t doing anything about him. And then this altercation about the
leash law. ”

“It’s not about the leash law.”

“It started that way,” I insisted, feeling only a little guilty. Technically, I hadn’t seen the beginning of the episode. “Admittedly, it escalated.” That part, I had witnessed.

“And whose fault was that?” Kevin demanded. “Don’t yell at me! It wasn’t mine!”

“I’m not yelling!” he yelled.

“Kevin, listen to me. Something else happened. The woman Jennie arrested, Sylvia Metzner...” I paused. “The liar,” Kevin said.

“Kevin, this is very serious. Rowdy and I were with Ceci today at Clear Creek Park. We were on one of the trails with a guy and his dog. The dog disappeared. The owner went after the dog. The two of them found Sylvia Metzner’s body. She’d been shot. There was no weapon there. The wounds were not self-inflicted. The Newton police told me that.”

Kevin put down his fork, wiped his mouth with his napkin, and tossed some cash on the table. Kevin and I were old friends: He didn’t have to explain his departure, and neither of us had to say outright that his Jennie was the prime suspect. Still, as if establishing Jennie’s innocence, Kevin said in parting, “That Metzner woman was a damned liar.”

I said nothing. Sylvia Metzner was not lying about being dead.

Chapter 17

Before I tell you what happened next, I need to fill you in on a session I had with Dr. Foote in which I somehow drifted into talking at incredible length about a trivial, meaningless incident that wasn’t worth two expensive seconds of a fifty-minute meeting. Instead of making maximal use of my therapy so-called hour, I wasted Dr. Foote’s time and mine, as well as my insurance company’s money, by telling her about a little episode that had occurred recently at a fast-food restaurant. Therapy is for big stuff. Conflict, torment, agony, panic. And mothers! Mothers! So what did I light on? Hamburger.

Anyway, what happened was that Kimi and I... “Have I mentioned Kimi?” I asked Dr. Foote. “My malamute bitch? Have I? Well, I’m pretty sure I have.”

Little mental mementos of my head injury still lingered; my mind was apparently afraid that I might forget amnesia. Hah! Amnesia, let me tell you, was a bitch, and not a bitch of the Kimi variety. The tight-laced spell checker on my word processor purses its prissy lips when I write
bitch.
Instead of having the guts to come right out and order me to quit talking dirty, it expresses its prudish disdain by suggesting a ludicrous euphemism, namely,
arrogant woman.
In dog circles,
bitch
is clean. In feminist circles,
arrogant woman
is dirty. Ain’t life strange.

Where was I? Oh, yes, as I told Dr. Foote, my malamute arrogant woman and I were on our way home from a freestyle obedience workshop when we stopped at S & I’s Burgerhaven, a hamburger joint in one of Boston’s western suburbs. Freestyle, as I explained to Dr. Foote, is dancing with dogs. It’s fun. To return to the incident, the lawn next to the parking lot had picnic tables, and since it was a warm day, a few lone people and one big family were sitting at the tables enjoying the late afternoon sun. Arrogant women don’t use ladies’ rooms. Consequently, I was walking Kimi toward the designated pet exercise area when our route took us close to the table occupied by the family, whose large order of paper-wrapped burgers, french fries, and cold drinks was still piled on a tray. Worse, instead of sensibly occupying the center of the table, the tray rested at one end and not just any old end, either, but the end within easy leaping distance of Kimi, who took one whiff and squeezed her own trigger, as it were, thus shooting a large and wolflike gray bullet at the target, which she hit dead center. Bull’s-eye! Not to brag or anything, but Kimi’s aim is incredible, and is she fast! Rowdy is a perfectly decent food thief, but Kimi is extraordinary. When this sport makes it to the Olympics, the U.S. Food Filching Team is going to consist mainly of Alaskan malamutes and Labrador retrievers, and even against that class of competition, Kimi will be a shoo-in for the gold. When she shows off like this around malamute people, I try to be modest, but it’s difficult because they exclaim at her prowess and speed, as did the family at the picnic table, but not in quite the same tone of gasp. In brief, they were irate.

The family consisted of five people: a bedraggled mother, an oleaginous father, two neglected-looking little girls, and a vigorous old man with keen blue eyes. Individually and collectively, they exuded a heartrending air of poverty. With the exception of the old man, they looked as if they might have started out bright and vivid, but had repeatedly been run through the wash until their fabric was faded and threadbare. The mother’s hair was in brush rollers, and her face was pitifully thin. Her husband was all grease, inside and out, big gut, sausage-shaped arms and fingers, lank hair, and oily skin. The little girls were maybe four and five. They still had baby teeth, the front ones brown with decay. Their identical outfits, dresses and coats, must once have been party wear. The cloth had originally been shiny, I thought, and, at a guess, baby blue. The old man was attired entirely in gray, but his expression was alert, and although the entire family was in an uproar, he seemed to be the only one with enough extra blood in his veins to redden his face. Especially since my switch from golden retrievers to malamutes, my dogs had stolen food from me and from a lot of other people on dozens of occasions. Never before, however, had one of my dogs stolen food from people who really needed it.

I was mortified. “I’m so terribly sorry,” I said. “It was all my fault. I’ll replace everything. This is horrible. She should never have done such a thing. Just tell me what you had, and I’ll go order it.” Unappeased, the father continued bellowing. “Damn it! Damn it all! Damn it, damn it, damn it!” Meanwhile, the old man was swearing, and the malnourished girls were wailing. Tears and mucus ran down their pinched faces. Glaring at me, then exchanging glances with the men, the mother exclaimed, “Everything always goes wrong!”

“I’ll fix it,” I insisted, referring to this incident, of course, not to everything. “Just tell me what to order. Please! Double portions. With dessert. Anything!” So far, no one had responded to my offer. The restaurant’s menu was limited to hamburgers, cheeseburgers, fried clams, french fries, and the like, so the original order couldn’t have been complicated. In an effort to pry the information out of someone, I addressed the children. “I’m really sorry that my dog ate your food. Maybe she scared you, too.”

The girls just stared at me.

“Did my dog scare you?”

Still no response.

“Well if she did, I’m sorry, and she is, too. Her name is Kimi, and she didn’t mean to scare you. Now, let’s get you some more food. What did you have? Or what would you like?” These kids just had to speak English! The adults did! “French fries?” I prompted. “Hamburgers? Ice cream?”

As the smaller girl seemed about to speak, the father cut in. “They don’t take presents from strangers.” As if I were luring them into a car with the promise of candy!

“Of course,” I told him. “But, look, please let me make this right. I’ll get whatever you want, or I can just pay whatever the food cost.”

To my surprise, the woman intervened. Addressing the younger man, she said, ‘Tim, let her. It was a stupid idea to begin with. So just let her. The kids are hungry.”

“I can feed my kids, Brianna!” he hollered. “Give me credit for that.”

“That’s not what I meant!” she protested. “And you know it! This is all your fault! You and your bright ideas!”

The older man spoke. ‘Tim, shut up. It wasn’t what she meant.” To me, he said, “Look, it was an accident. Forget it. We’ve got a dog, too. Dogs’ll be dogs.”

I smiled at him. “Yes, they will. Thank you.” I renewed the offer to make good, and the family finally accepted. To my relief, I didn’t have to hang around ordering food. The older man told me the amount of the bill, and I persuaded him to take a few extra dollars for dessert. The second I handed over the money, I bolted. Kimi never even got to the pet exercise area. Not that she deserved punishment. I’d been inattentive. She’d been a dog. And it wasn’t her fault that the family was poor.