“That Eric!” Ceci spoke of Eric Metzner as if Eric were his middle name. “All three of Sylvia’s children were a perfect disgrace. But that Eric!”

  “Were? When was this?”

  Ceci said nothing for all of five seconds. “Thursday,” she admitted. “Now, Holly, I told you it wasn’t right to abandon Sylvia, didn’t I? And I was certainly not the only concerned citizen there.”

  With an inaudible groan, I said, “You obeyed Pythagoras.”

  “Holly, are you all right? No, you’re not! It’s shock. On top of your concussion. Holly, dear, Pythagoras has nothing to do with anything. What I was saying was that after Sylvia was so brutally dragged off by the police, you were just as eager as I was to show your support for her, but you had already taken hours out of your workday and were simply too nice to tell me that you didn’t have time. So after you dropped me off, I naturally hurried down there to headquarters, and I assure you that except for the appalling behavior of Sylvia’s children, it was a deeply moving experience. Quite a few people from the park were there, and they were as horrified as we were at what we’d witnessed. And if I haven’t happened to mention that I showed my support for Sylvia, it’s only because I didn’t want you to feel in the least tiny bit guilty for being unable to help. I have never doubted for a moment that you are just as strongly committed as I am to human rights.”

  “Of course I’m committed to human rights.”

  Ceci seized on a one-second pause. “Also, I have to confess, in all honesty, Holly, truthfully, that when I got back home and told Althea, she came very close to accusing me of being a busybody, which is patent nonsense, but without intending to hurt my feelings, Althea did leave me a teeny bit sensitive on the subject, and so I thought matters over and decided that sometimes the best thing to say is nothing at all. Holly, are you all right? Shock has dangerous effects on some people, you know. I think you should pull the car over.”

  “I’m fine. So what happened at headquarters?”

  “That Eric! Well, you saw for yourself! He has pierced ears, and he wears earrings, two in one ear, and his hair stands on end as if he’d moussed it and then been frightened by a bear.” Eric, Ceci informed me, was the youngest of Sylvia’s three children. Together with the middle child, Oona, as well as Pia and Wilson, Eric lived with Sylvia. Furthermore, since graduating from college a few years earlier, Eric had worked full time at the unpaid job of deciding what he wanted to do with his life. “Sponging off poor Sylvia,” Ceci said. “And that Oona isn’t a lot better, but at least Sylvia had the sense to complain about Oona, who is quite a pretty girl, ruining her skin by exposing it to the sun, such a shame, but as I was saying, all that she, Oona, does morning, noon, and night is cadge rides on boats. What kind of life is that?”

  Although Pia and Wilson, in contrast to Eric and Oona, held paying jobs, Ceci disapproved of them, too, primarily because they had participated in what sounded like a nasty family fight at police headquarters. The argument, according to Ceci, had initially centered on the subject of finding a lawyer for Sylvia. Wilson, Pia, or both had apparently contended that despite Sylvia’s parting instruction at the park, there was no need to call a lawyer, since Sylvia would already have summoned one herself. Oona had wanted to call a lawyer she knew, but the others had disagreed with her choice of attorney because his only qualification had been the ownership of a yacht that Oona admired. All the family members had agreed that when Ian Metzner, Sylvia’s husband, died, Sylvia’s lawyer had been a woman. No one, however, could remember her name. The unfriendly exchange of views turned into an outright squabble when Eric asked to use Wilson’s cell phone. Wilson refused. Eric persisted. Wilson remained firm.

  “And then,” Ceci said, “that Eric called Wilson some names too horrid for me to repeat, and Wilson up and told that Eric that he was a ne’er-do-well bloodsucker who ought to be ashamed of himself for taking advantage of his mother’s misfortune by using it as a pitiful and transparent excuse for his own insatiable greed. ‘Insatiable greed!’ Those were his very words.” Ceci said gleefully. “Those were Wilson’s exact words, Holly, right there in the middle of the police station, and it was deplorable, although I must admit that there is some substance to Wilson’s accusation, except that it applies equally well to the whole pack of them, parasites all, shamelessly living off Sylvia. And quarrelsome parasites to boot! I can just see that Eric as a little boy, and Wilson, too, the pair of them, silly, selfish children fighting over their toy trucks instead of this foolish cell phone, neither one of them wanting to share his toys. Poor, poor Sylvia!”

  Since Sylvia was Eric’s mother, it seemed to me that it was Sylvia’s fault if Eric grabbed other people’s toys. But Ceci’s love of dogs extended to underdogs. Now that Sylvia had been murdered, she’d become, in Ceci’s view, the ultimate underdog.

  Chapter 15

  Subj: Re: Genetic Clearances

  From: HollyWinter@amrone.org

  To: Jazzland@pnwmals.org

  -------------------------

  Hi Cindy,

  A million thanks for the photos! Emma is just beautiful. I have to tell you that I am crazy about her rear angulation.

  Best,

  Holly

  Chapter 16

  Kevin Dennehy, my next-door neighbor, showed up at my door at six o’clock on that same Tuesday evening and invited me out to eat. He lives with his mother, a strict vegetarian, so he leaves home in search of flesh. Not mine. Since Kevin had started seeing his girlfriend, Jennie, a few months earlier, he hadn’t even been seeking my company. I hadn’t even met Jennie.

  “Hey, Holly, how ya doing?” he greeted me, as usual. He didn’t wait for my answer, which would, of course, have been that I’d had a ghastly day. Immediately, he asked Rowdy and Kimi the same question. They’re crazy about Kevin, mainly because he feeds them whatever he happens to be eating, and since he is a great big man with a gigantic appetite, he eats all the time and doles out a stream of treats.

  Kevin lowered the upper half of his mammoth body to dog level and made stupid growling noises that the dogs love. In response, they scoured his face with their big red tongues. Although Kevin is part Italian, he is the most Irish-looking person I’ve ever seen. In Greater Boston, that’s saying something. He has red hair, fair skin, freckles, and blue eyes, and in a gruff way, he has that famous Irish charm, too. As I watched him fool around with the dogs, it occurred to me that Kevin was one cop who, unlike the voluptuous terrier who’d arrested Sylvia, would never need to announce himself as such. Studying him, I tried and failed to identify any specific attribute that proclaimed his profession. He’s a lieutenant in homicide, so he doesn’t wear a uniform; at the moment, he wasn’t even dressed in blue, but in khaki pants and a tan crewneck sweater. Funny-looking shoes and big flat feet were supposed to be hallmarks. Like the rest of Kevin, his feet were big, but they didn’t look flat, and his white athletic shoes were obviously designed for fitness running rather than for chasing down criminals. Still, if a menacing stranger had suddenly broken into my kitchen and Kevin had pulled out a badge and said, “Police,” the intruder would’ve been entirely justified in replying, “Yes, I know.”

  I tried, of course, to tell Kevin about Sylvia’s murder. One price I pay for having beautiful, friendly dogs is, however, that people ignore me in favor of Rowdy and Kimi. Kevin was now on the tile floor of the kitchen flirting with the forbidden game of wrestling with malamutes. He is also prohibited from giving them beer. I know that he violates that ban when I’m not looking because I smell brew on the dogs’ breath. Instead of breaking the wrestling taboo behind my back, he waits for the dogs to roll onto their backs for tummy rubs, and then under the guise of vigorously scratching their chests and bellies, he tussles in a fashion just short of wrestling. “Hey there, tough guy,” he rumbled at Rowdy, “who you been beating up lately?”

  “As a matter of fact,” I said, “he was in a dog fight not all that long ago, and would you please stop giving them both the wrong message? Kevin, I have told you a million times that the message to give to them is that you do not like—”

  Kevin mimicked me. “Anything that even begins to remind them of aggression toward blah, blah, blah. Who won?”

  “Rowdy did. Well, I broke up the fight, but he did.” I again tried to divert Kevin’s attention from the dogs. “Kevin, I need to—”

  “Then that’s all right. You won, did you big fellow? They scrape the other guy off the sidewalk?”

  “The other guy was a girl. Rowdy didn’t hurt her. But—”

  Gently grabbing both sides of Rowdy’s substantial head, Kevin delivered a little congratulatory shake and said, “Sexist! Should’ve beat the pants off her like Kimi would’ve done.”

  Before I could break in, Kevin announced that he was starving, explained that we’d better take separate cars because he was going somewhere after dinner, and gave me directions to the restaurant he’d selected. Kevin’s restaurant preferences are based largely, no pun intended, on quantity. He doesn’t care whether the food is overcooked or the meat is tough if the portions are mountainous. He still hadn’t stopped talking about a Spanish restaurant he’d mistakenly patronized because he hadn’t understood that tapas didn’t just mean appetizers; it meant small servings. Tonight, instead of going to the kind of Italian restaurant where everything swims in the same red sauce, we went to the kind of Chinese restaurant where everything swims in soy sauce made thick, slimy, and shiny with cornstarch. Cambridge has scores of excellent Chinese restaurants. This storefront place near Inman Square in Cambridge wasn’t one of them. The outsides of the windows were so heavily coated with dirt and the insides with grease that the artificial plants shoving their plastic leaves to the plate glass windows managed to look sickly and light deprived. I shouldn’t complain. We did get a booth. The noise level was low. The service was prompt. As you’ve probably guessed, there were only a few other customers, mostly because of rumors about poor sanitation and food poisoning. Kevin wasn’t put off by the restaurant’s bad reputation. On the contrary, with perverse pride he referred to it as the Taiwan Ptomaine.

  Squeezed into his side of the booth, Kevin expanded left and right to fill the space meant for two people. He looked healthy and hungry. I felt filled with affection for him and guilty about the needlessly long and preachy lecture I’d given him about not wrestling with my dogs. “I got carried away,” I said. “I’m sorry. It started with this article I’m doing about fatal dog attacks. The studies all focus on what’s happening when the dog actually bites someone or kills someone, and no one pays enough attention to what’s gone on with the dog before that. Dogs shouldn’t be given the message that aggression is all right. But just because you growl at Rowdy and Kimi, it doesn’t mean that they’re going to go out and inflict fatal bites.” Having apologized, I again started to raise the topic of Sylvia’s murder, but a waiter appeared at the table to take our orders.

  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.

 

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