The Wicked Flea (15 page)

Let’s step back a second. Here we have Lieutenant Kevin Dennehy of the Cambridge Police, who is involved in what is, to the best of my knowledge, the first serious romance of his adult life. The object of Kevin’s affection, Officer Jennifer Pasquarelli of the Newton Police, is not on active duty at the moment because she engaged in a physical altercation with a woman who is charging her with brutality, violation of civil rights, and so forth. Now, of course, the woman, Sylvia Metzner, has been murdered in the very same park where the dispute took place. And the best Kevin and I can find to talk about is revoltingly contaminated food? Come on! I’d thought about pursuing the subject of the murder. But how? The possibilities felt impossible.
Did your girlfriend shoot Sylvia?
No wonder I write about dogs. They’re easy. If you want to direct a dog’s attention to a target, you put a delectable tidbit of cheese or meat on it, and what you get is rapt canine attention. Simple! Beautiful! You know all those books that promise to reveal the mystical secrets of communicating with your dog? Go into a trance, merge minds, read body language, tune into ESP, or pay hundreds of dollars for the services of the joker who wrote the book? Hah! I, Holly Winter, will now, free of charge, reveal the true secrets of communicating with dogs. There are two secrets. One is meat. The other is cheese. Ah, but the secrets of communicating with people? If I knew them, I’d tell.

“Another beer, Kevin?” I asked.

He accepted. After sipping it, he suddenly blurted out, “In case you wondered, Holly, Jennie had nothing to do with shooting Sylvia Metzner.” Before I could reply, he said, “It was a small-caliber weapon.”

Not a cop’s gun. That was what Kevin meant. I nodded.

“Jennie can be hot tempered,” Kevin informed me, “but she’s a professional.” As if I might have misunderstood, he added, “Law enforcement. That’s what she does.
Law
enforcement,” he repeated.

“Kevin, I never said otherwise.”

“Handguns are all over. You might not expect it in Newton, but half the people at that park’ve got registered handguns.”

“Half? Kevin, I really doubt—”

“Including the victim’s deceased husband.”

“Kevin, I know you’re obsessed with family violence, but you can hardly suspect Sylvia’s dead husband of shooting her. Do you think he came back from the grave?”

Kevin shook his big head. “Cremated. Ian Metzner was cremated.”.

“You checked? This is ridiculous! Sylvia was
not
murdered by a ghost! Kevin, this is totally unlike you.” Kevin had a sly expression. “The guy was there. In the park.”

“Stop it!”

“Gotcha!” he exclaimed. His eyes crinkled in delight.

“Gotcha? I don’t think so! I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“His remains.Scattered near the body, human remains evidently belonging to the late Mr. Metzner. Who was cremated. Who owned a .22. And did not take it with him.”

“Where is it?”

“The kids don’t know. All innocence!” Kevin mimicked: “ ‘Did Daddy really own a gun? How terrible! How awful!
Where is it?
We don’t know! We didn’t even know he had one!’ ”

Kevin must’ve heard the story thirdhand. A Cambridge homicide lieutenant wouldn’t have been working in Newton. And even if Jennifer hadn’t been relieved of her duties, she’d have been the last person the Newton police would’ve assigned to interview Sylvia’s family. Still, Kevin is an experienced cop. I felt certain that he accurately conveyed the family’s attitude, if not their precise words.

“You ever met these people?” he asked.

I nodded. “All but the younger daughter. Oona, her name is. I’ve just heard about her. She sails. I’ve met the others, but I don’t really know them. Wilson’s the only one I’ve talked to much. He has a corgi he shows. Pembroke.”

Kevin rolled his eyes.

I laughed. “I can hear what you’re thinking. Wilson’s a dog nut, so he’s capable of anything. Actually, he’s just getting started in dogs, so from your point of view, maybe that lets him off the hook. And he and Pia, his wife—Sylvia’s daughter, the older one—are probably the two most normal people in that family. They both have regular jobs. They live—lived—with Sylvia, but for all I know, they paid rent. The other two probably couldn’t have. Oona apparently does odd jobs for friends of hers who own boats. Sailboats. Yachts, maybe I should say. She crews. That can’t pay, can it? And if she scrapes off barnacles and swabs decks, she probably gets something, but not much. The one Ceci really frowns on is Eric. He’s the youngest. He graduated from college a few years ago, and I guess he hasn’t done anything since, except hang around home. But Ceci’s prejudiced about him. She isn’t used to pierced ears on men.”

“What’s your take on him?” Kevin asked.

“Pierced ears don’t bother me. Ceci, I guess, could be responding to a difference in style or a generational difference or something like that. But I met him myself. This was actually
after
his mother was killed, except that no one knew that. Well, someone did. But I didn’t. Anyway, Sylvia’s dog, Zsa Zsa, was running around in the park, and I got a leash on her and took her home. The one who answered the door was Eric. This was in the middle of the afternoon, and he looked as if he’d just gotten out of bed. Ceci makes him sound kind of punk, but he isn’t, really.”

“Known drug user,” Kevin interjected. “Keep talking.”

I shrugged. “He’s more preppie than punk. Dissipated preppie. Mainly, he’s a spoiled brat. Here I was, a stranger returning the family dog, and what he did was complain about how there was no food in the house. He wanted me to tell his mother if I saw her. As if he couldn’t go to the store himself! Or cook. Or go out and look for his mother. But the point about Sylvia’s family, Kevin, isn’t any one person. It’s everyone. I mean, Sylvia was killed on Sunday, and her body wasn’t found until Tuesday afternoon, and so far as I know, no one in that family was worried about her. All three of her children and her son-in-law live with her, four adults, at least in terms of age, and not one of them even notices she’s missing? Unless you count Eric and the food, I guess. You have to wonder how long it would’ve taken these people to start wondering where she was. A week? More?”

“They didn’t all gang up and do it,” Kevin said. “This’s Newton. It’s not Agatha Christie.”

“That’s not exactly her formula, is it? Except in the one on the train where all those people stab someone. But the formula is the least likely suspect, isn’t it? It is in the movies, anyway, like that stabbing one. The least likely suspect is everyone. Anyway, the murderer is the one who couldn’t have done it or the last one you’d suspect. Some twist on that.”

“The police got a lot to learn,” Kevin pronounced with mock solemnity. ‘Take me for example.” He tapped the side of his presumably thick head with one of his big fingers. “Geez, Holly, the correctional institutions of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts are packed with innocent guys I been locking up ’cause I’m so dumb. You see, I get taken in by
appearances."

I waited.

“Typical scenario,” Kevin continued. “Junkie slithers into a convenience store and grabs the cash, scares the daylights out of two little old ladies and a mother with a babe in arms, and the clerk ends up with bullet holes where his brains used to be. And who takes the rap? Hey, next time it happens, I’m gonna know better. Instead of arresting the poor innocent junkie who just
looks
guilty because he happens to be holding the weapon, I’m gonna chase after the
real
perp, who’s lo and behold, the last one the dumb cops’d ever suspect. The old ladies? Not them. They could’ve done it. The mother? No. She could’ve. And there are lots of rotten mothers around. Obvious suspects.” He paused before his triumphal finish. “Yes, the baby! From now on, all the jails are going be filled with puking little babies, last people you’d ever suspect, right? See, Holly? The little suckers aren’t called babes in
arms
for nothing.”

Chapter 20

“Ceci,” I said when she called the next morning, “what makes you think that the Metzners are sitting shivah? There was nothing in the paper about visiting the family. There wasn’t even anything about a funeral. And it was her husband who was Jewish, wasn’t it? Not Sylvia.”

“In Newton,” Ceci insisted, “everyone is more or less Jewish.”

Or Catholic,
I wanted to add.
Or Protestant. Not to mention Russian Orthodox, new age Buddhist, agnostic, atheist, and a lot of other things.
Instead, I kept quiet.

Ceci defended her claim. “Everyone in Newton eats bagels.”

“Everyone in America eats bagels!”

“Taking food to the bereaved is not a strictly Jewish custom,” Ceci lectured. “It’s a lovely gesture for anyone to make to any family, and when you took Zsa Zsa home, Eric told you that there was no food in the house, didn’t he? Holly, I can simply
feel
that this is the right thing to do,” by which she meant that she was itching to hear the latest news of Sylvia’s murder and was determined to use any excuse to barge in.

If Ceci had been under the age of seventy-five, or if she hadn’t taken care of me and my dogs after my head injury, I’d probably have informed her that if she wanted to turn up uninvited on someone’s doorstep, she could do it by herself. If she’d pestered less vociferously, I’d have held out. As it was, I succeeded only in extracting a promise from Ceci that she’d call the Metzners before we stopped in and that we’d stay only long enough for her to leave her food offering.

Hah! Kind people over seventy-five are no more trustworthy than anyone else. As Ceci and I stood at the front door of the late Sylvia Metzner’s brick Tudor waiting for someone to answer the bell, I suddenly experienced a flash of ESP. Maybe I just knew Ceci. Anyway, all of a sudden, I’d have bet anything that she had not, in fact, warned the family to expect us. Before I had time to question her, the door opened. One glance at the person who stood there confirmed my suspicion. A muscular young woman with a deep tan and sun-streaked brown hair, she wore jeans and a wrinkled chambray shirt. Instead of greeting Ceci, she eyed us with clear expectation of a pesky pitch for some religious movement, charity, or political cause. Or maybe she thought we were selling something, for example, the lemon cake swathed in plastic wrap that Ceci had made me carry.

“Oona, dear,” Ceci said, “this is Holly Winter, who knew your mother. We’ve come to express our condolences. And I’ve brought you a cake. It’s terribly difficult to think about food at times like this, isn’t it? But it’s terribly important to keep up your strength!” As I was about to seize the mention of the cake as an opportunity to shove it into Oona’s hands and make a rapid departure, a male voice sounded from inside the house. “Oona, is that UPS?”

Delicately brushing Oona aside, Ceci stepped through the foyer and into the hall. “We’ve just come to express our sympathy!” she called out. Too late, I understood that she’d refused to carry the damn cake because she’d wanted to be unencumbered, the better to avail herself of exactly this kind of opportunity. “Eric, dear, I’m so terribly sorry about your poor mother!” she gushed.

After rolling her eyes, Oona glared at me and said, “You might as well come in, too.”

Toting the cake, which I now felt like tossing into Ceci’s face, I followed Oona inside. The front hall was the size of my living room. There ended the resemblance. My living room has bare floors. Also, it’s clean and neat. Underfoot here was an oriental rug that probably had one of those fancy names I never understand—
Kashan, Kerman, Sarab,
or some other foreign word meaning that a poor dog writer can’t afford more than bare floors, so why bother mastering carpet terminology in Persian? It was a red rug with a pretty pattern obscured by dog hair, crumbs, and other, less readily identifiable, debris, some of which looked as if it could have been pulverized potato chips. An empty chip bag lay at the bottom of a carpeted staircase. Cuddled up to it to keep it from getting lonely were a couple of empty wine bottles and two stemmed glasses with red dregs. Jackets, newspapers, magazines, junk mail, an umbrella, running shoes, and a set of yellow oilskins also littered the floor. Leaning against a wall were a pair of cross-country skis and bamboo poles. The stale air bore a hint of what my educated nose identified as dog urine.

“I’m sorry about your mother,” I told Oona.

“The place is bedlam. The kitchen is worse than this. It’s disgusting.” Oona sounded as if I’d offered condolences because her maid had quit. “You want some coffee? We’re down to instant. There’s no sugar. And the milk smells funny.”

“No thanks,” I said. “We can’t stay long. Ceci just wanted to drop off this cake.” Oona didn’t reach out for it or show me a place to put it. The only table in the hallway held a phone, phone books, and a stack of papers, so I just stood there like a dope, still holding the cake.

“Come on in the living room,” Oona offered, leading the way into a long room with wood trim and a high ceiling. Two big red couches on either side of a massive stone fireplace faced each other across a low table buried under pizza cartons and newspapers. Although quite a few standing lamps and table lamps were placed here and there, not one was on. The room seemed somehow filled with a dank and palpable darkness. Lying face down on one couch, apparently asleep, was a petite woman in a purple terrycloth bathrobe. Her short, dark hair identified her as Pia. Seated on the other couch were her husband, Wilson, and her brother, Eric, both of whom were dressed in rumpled khaki pants and polo shirts. Wilson looked, as usual, as if he hadn’t bathed for a week. His hair was greasy, and his skin had a shiny look, as if he’d applied cold cream to it. Eric looked more awake than he had when I’d returned Zsa Zsa, and when I entered the room, he made an apparently token effort to rise to his feet. He did not, however, offer me a seat, and seemed content to leave the elderly Ceci standing. He’d have done better to remain seated altogether, because his gesture toward courtesy revealed that his fly was open. Neither Zsa Zsa nor Llio, Wilson’s corgi, was in sight.