The Wicked Flea (17 page)

Noah, Douglas, and I exchanged glances. In unison, we shrugged our shoulders.

With no prompting, Ceci went on to clarify her point. In hushed tones, she said, “I could not help noticing, among other things, that he was not fully zipped!”

Taking pity on Noah and Douglas, I explained. “Ceci made a cake for Sylvia’s children. We just delivered it. They really weren’t prepared for visitors.” At the risk of shocking Ceci, I added, “Eric’s fly was open.”

“That
Eric,” Ceci sputtered, “could charitably be described as a slob. Pia was asleep on the living room couch, of all places, and Oona was... well, times change, but in my day, girls made an effort of some sort, even my sister Althea, not that Althea was an unattractive girl, but she’s very tall and broad shouldered, and have you ever noticed her feet? It was dreadfully hard to find anything in size eleven except clodhoppers, we used to call them, not to mention gloves. And it’s sadly clear that poor Sylvia was nothing more than a housemaid to the whole lazy pack of them because they’re living like little piggies without her, and not the slightest indication of grief. But mark my words! That Eric is the one to keep your eye on.” Evidently listening in on her own prattle, she blushed. “What am I saying! Or the one to keep your eye off, if he can’t manage to do up his buttons and zippers, and I can’t help wondering whether it was entirely accidental, if you understand me, or whether he had succumbed to a sick compulsion.” Perhaps I should remark on the unmistakably titillated quality of Ceci’s interest in the exhibitionist. Lingering beneath every sentence she spoke about him was an unvoiced and breathless question, namely,
Is he going to expose himself to ME?
Had she been his victim, she’d have hated the reality. But she adored the fantasy.

Douglas responded to what struck me as Ceci’s ludicrous implication that the exhibitionist was Sylvia’s son. “Eric as the exhibitionist. That’s a new thought.”

Noah promptly dismissed it. “Pia was the last victim. He wouldn’t go around exposing himself to his own sister.”

Woman of the world, Ceci chimed back in. “You never know, do you? After all, it’s a sick individual we’re talking about. What if Sylvia caught him at it? There that Eric is, lurking in the woods up to you know what, and along comes his mother, and he shoots her!”

Douglas cleared his throat. “He’s carrying a gun in case his mother strolls along and catches him, because if she does, he intends to kill her. That’s a bit farfetched.”

“Sylvia threatened him,” Ceci hypothesized. “She threatened to turn him over to the police. And for all we know, Douglas, he carried a gun all the time. Maybe he still does!”

“Hey, this is Newton,” Noah said. “A Newton mother who catches her son exposing himself packs him off to a psychiatrist. She doesn’t call the police.” The word
psychiatrist
made me jump. I covered my embarrassment by looking in every direction except Douglas’s. The stream was narrow and almost stagnant, its water brown with a greenish cast. Ulysses’ feet were coated in filth. Noah’s four dogs ran in a congenial little pack ahead of us. Their short coats would be easier to clean than Rowdy’s thick double coat. Although Quest was on leash and hadn’t left the path, his legs and feet were dirty, and Ceci would have a hard time removing the mud from his underbelly before she allowed him in the house. If you’ll forgive an interjection, let me comment that free association is a weird phenomenon.
Psychiatrist
leads to
Douglas
leads to
dirt.
No wonder I was having my head examined. And Douglas? What was his excuse?

“Still,” I said, “I suppose it’s possible that the exhibitionist is the one who killed Sylvia. She could have recognized him, whoever he is. For all we know, he’s some fine, upstanding citizen with a lot to lose if Sylvia—”

“Exposed him!” Noah exclaimed.

I laughed obligingly. “Suppose he’s a doctor, or he’s in some other profession where that kind of scandal would do him in. Anyone would be humiliated, I guess, but not everyone’s livelihood would be threatened. Maybe that’s why he wears a ski mask. Exhibitionists don’t necessarily do that kind of thing, do they?”

“The one they caught in the library didn’t,” Ceci said. “That one used to lurk on the third floor, and everyone knew what he looked like because there were those what-do-you-call-them drawings of him on posters all over the library, and then finally someone spotted him and had him arrested, but you have to wonder whether he didn’t get some sick sort of enjoyment from seeing his face plastered all over the library, because after all, when you think about it, it’s what these men want, isn’t it? To be looked at?”

“On exhibition,” I agreed.

“Like pictures,” said Ceci. “ ‘Pictures at an Exhibition,’ but I don’t suppose that what’s his name, Mussorgsky, was—”

Douglas smiled at her. “You never know.”

“Yeah, but it’s a whole different category,” Noah said. “It’s sick, but it’s not violent. It’s not in the same class as murder.”

“That day when Pia ran into this guy?” I reminded everyone. “When she came running out of the woods? She looked like a crime victim to me. She was very frightened. The violence was emotional, or psychological maybe, but it was still violence. And this is a crime against women, meaning that it tends not to be taken seriously.”

As if to prove my contention, Douglas said jocularly, “We’ll have to start a campaign, persuade the guy, hey, he’s being politically incorrect.”

My hackles rose. “You see! It’s a crime against women, so it gets joked about and dismissed. Pia didn’t exactly have a hilarious experience. There was nothing funny about how she felt. It’s possible that this guy exposed himself to Sylvia, too, and that he’s the one who shot her. I don’t tend to think of exhibitionists as physically violent types, either, but what do we really know about them? And we don’t know anything about this particular man. He could be an exhibitionist and a murderer, too. The two things aren’t mutually exclusive.”

Rowdy had turned his attention to my face. His beautiful almond-shaped eyes glowed with approval. He approves of Kimi even more than he does of me. Anatomy has made her the feminist extremist in our family: she is blessed with malamute jaws, whereas I make do with a sharp tongue. Douglas looked abashed. Well, to be accurate, he looked like a men’s suit ad model trying to look abashed.

From behind us, the sound of pounding feet and strained breathing presaged the appearance of Wilson and Llio. Llio was trotting along happily, maybe because it was the first time in her life that she’d ever been taken for a run. Wilson was sucking in air. He’d changed into gray sweatpants and a faded maroon sweatshirt. To fortify himself for exercise, he’d apparently eaten a doughnut; his sweatshirt was dusted with powdered sugar. As he approached us, he said, “Getting in a little conditioning before the show tomorrow!”

The sensible time to begin conditioning a dog for a show is about six months before the dog is going to enter the ring. Llio, however, was muscular and fit from walking or playing; no judge was going to fault her for flabbiness. I suspected that Wilson had suddenly taken up jogging in response to his own preshow nerves. In any case, he slowed down and joined our little group. “Sorry about the fiasco back there,” he told Ceci.

“No apologies are necessary,” she said graciously.

“Without Sylvia, we’re in chaos,” he explained. “But that’s all too obvious. We don’t know what to do. We’re barbarians. Here I am showing Llio tomorrow when Sylvia—but what else am I going to do?”

Stay home,
I thought. In my own show-fanatic family, the opposite would’ve been true. We’d expect a family member to go right ahead and get into the ring and win even if the entire rest of family had just perished in a catastrophe. But that’s because we’re exceptionally religious. If an Orthodox Jew dies, the family doesn’t stay home from temple; on the contrary, everyone attends services. My family’s just like that: Orthodox. But Wilson was a new convert, and the other members of the family weren’t show types at all. Still, I had the feeling that none of them would give a damn whether Wilson went to a dog show or to hell. They probably wouldn’t even notice he was gone.

“Sylvia wouldn’t have cared,” Wilson added.

“The police have any news?” Noah asked. “Have they got any idea what happened?”

“They’re asking questions,” Wilson replied, “not answering them. The one thing that hasn’t been in the papers is what Sylvia was doing in the park, which was scattering Ian’s ashes. That was her husband. Not that she shouldn’t have been doing it. It’s morbid to keep human remains in a vase in the house. You can call it an urn, but you could’ve put a bunch of flowers in this one, and no one would’ve known the difference.”

I confessed. “Sylvia got the idea from me. Not the idea of the urn, but about scattering the ashes. Or a story I told her must’ve made her think about it. My stepmother inveigled me into helping her scatter her first husband’s ashes in Harvard Yard. Only we got caught by the University Police. I remember that after I told the story, Sylvia said something about her husband’s ashes.”

“Ian was a bird-watcher,” Wilson said. “Used to wander around here with binoculars. That’s why she picked the park. Or that’s what we think, although it’s not my idea of a dignified resting place. And what happened was just awful, not that it was Sylvia’s fault, but she must’ve been holding the urn when she was shot. It fell and hit a rock, and the urn, this vase thing, broke. The police did tell us that. That’s all we know. Douglas, you found her. You probably know more than we do.”

“Not really,” Douglas answered. “All I did was go looking for Ulysses. But you’re right about the, uh, urn. There was a lot of broken pottery. I wondered what it was doing there. I didn’t know what it was. It could’ve been anything. Dishes. Cups. So it was the urn, huh?”

Wilson nodded.

Douglas said, “Pia told me something about that. Before all this. She said Eric’d found an unconventional use for it.”

Considering Eric’s police record and his drug-wasted look, the use wasn’t hard to imagine. His father’s ashes? His own stash. Maybe. If so, had his mother known? Not unless she’d been in the habit of sifting through the late Ian’s dust. A scenario occurred to me: Sylvia takes the urn and goes to the park to scatter the ashes. Eric discovers what his mother is doing. He follows her. Confronts her? And stops her. Dead.

Sudden violence interrupted my speculation. One moment, the nasty little trail ahead of us was empty. Noah’s four dogs were rambling in the nearby woods, Ulysses was a bit behind us on the trail of a fascinating scent, Quest was moseying along on leash at Ceci’s side, and Rowdy was peacefully ambling at mine. Then all of a sudden, from around a bend in the trail, with no warning whatever, a snarling Yorkshire terrier in full attack mode came charging toward us at ninety miles an hour. What did the little dog weigh? Four pounds? Five? Nonetheless, growling his tiny head off, the Yorkie was hellbent on attack. His chosen victim? Rowdy! The peewee’s entire body was smaller than a malamute forepaw. Still, with insane ferocity, he’d set himself on a direct course for Rowdy, who is a good dog, the best of dogs, and no bully. Even so, to Rowdy, a dog is a dog. Attacked, he retaliates. The Yorkie’s surprise assault caught me completely off guard. Before I even thought of pulling the aerosol alarm from my pocket, the Yorkie was within a yard of Rowdy, ready to hurl himself, kamikaze fashion, into the big boy’s jaws. If the Yorkie hit his target? With one shake of Rowdy’s massive head, he’d break the toy dog’s neck.

My rage was almost uncontrollable. What kind of stupid owner allowed this mindless, defenseless animal to run around challenging Alaskan malamutes? The owner should be in jail!

“Stop!” I screamed at the little dog. “No! Bad dog! Go home!” Desperate, I told Rowdy, “Watch me! Eyes on me! Leave it! Good boy! That’s my boy, Rowdy! Keep watching!”

With three men there, Douglas, Noah, and Wilson, dogs owners all, all under the age of forty, who rescued us? For all her silliness, Ceci was a paragon of common sense when it came to dogs. Among other things, she’d been teaching Quest basic obedience from the moment he’d entered her house. “Down!” she told the Newfie, who was, I’m sure, happy to sink to the ground. “Stay!” Swiftly removing Quest’s leash, she took brisk steps that positioned her behind the Yorkie, and with tremendous presence of mind, she neatly looped the leash around the toy’s neck and hauled him firmly away. I thought I’d faint with relief.

The Yorkie’s owner appeared. She was worse than I’d imagined. Sweetiekins, she informed us, hadn’t been on leash because he never, ever left her side. She couldn’t begin to imagine what he’d been thinking! As to her Yorkie’s attempt at suicide by malamute? It had been no such thing. Sweetiekins, she was sure, had just wanted to play.

I got myself and my dog and Ceci and Quest the hell out of that park as fast as possible. After I dropped off Ceci and Quest, I found the old Dylan tune about how one should never be where one does not belong running through my head. Damned pet people! If that Yorkie had ended up dead, who’d have taken the blame? My Rowdy! Damn the murky woods, the polluted stream, the exhibitionist, Zsa Zsa, Sylvia Metz-ner’s dissipated family, and Sylvia’s murder! One
should
never be where one does not belong. I’d taken my dog and was going home. And tomorrow? Tomorrow, I was taking Dylan’s advice. I was going to a show! A dog show. The ultimate place where I
did
belong.