Bride & Groom

by Conant, Susan

  Because we’d lingered at The Wordsmythe, it was seven by the time we got home, but we’d been nibbling cheese, fruit, and cake, and weren’t very hungry. We’d fed the dogs before ’ my signing, so we just gave them brief turns in the yard, first Rowdy and Kimi, then India, Lady, and Sammy the puppy, Rowdy’s son, who was now a big teenage malamute but was doomed to be known for life as “the puppy.” In my view, the beautiful, sweet, funny, and charming Sammy was actually the puppy. Succumbing to my addiction, I checked my E-mail. After that, Steve sat at the kitchen table drinking cold beer while I made a salad. Even for the author of 101 Ways to Cook Liver, it was too hot to cook.

  “Claire is really something,” Steve said. “Comical.”

  I was at the sink washing lettuce, but turned my head to look at Steve. “Is she? I didn’t get to spend any time with her.”

  “You have to feel kind of sorry for her husband. I’ve met him. Daniel. He seems like a nice enough guy.”

  “So why do you have to feel sorry for him?”

  “A lot of her joking’s at his expense. About how rigid he is. Or selfish. Or how Daniel doesn’t appreciate her. Claire is funny. But she practically says that the only reason she married Daniel was that she wanted a baby.”

  “Did she get one?”

  “Yes. He’s five or six now. Gus. She talks about him a lot. Devoted mother. People say one reason she married Daniel was that she thought he’d be a good father.”

  “Is he?”

  “I guess so. That’s why he wasn’t there today. He took Gus on one of those Duck Boat tours that leave from the Prudential. Amphibious vehicles. Claire tried to get him to forget it, but he wouldn’t. She always says, ‘You know what Daniel’s like.’ I hope you never say that about me.”

  “I say it all the time. Besides, everyone knows what you’re like, Steve. You’re wonderful. Everyone always says so. And since you’re so wonderful, why don’t you open that bottle of Reisling that’s in the refrigerator. And pour me a glass.”

  I was slicing tomatoes, chopping fresh basil, and performing other such tasks without having to guard the food from Rowdy and Kimi. The only dog loose in the kitchen was Steve’s shepherd, India, who was not a food thief. In fact, India was that rarest of creatures, a truly obedient dog. Rowdy and Kimi were obedient dogs in the sense that they’d indulged the senseless human wish to put advanced obedience titles on them; when they’d felt in the mood and simultaneously found themselves in the obedience ring, * they’d cooperated. India, in contrast, reliably obeyed Steve. In marrying him, I was marrying into his family of dogs. India would fully accept me as Steve’s wife. Astute judge of character that she was, India had rejected Anita. In her own way, India already loved me, but she worshiped Steve and was truly a one-man dog.

  Sipping the wine Steve had supplied, I said, “It would be nice if someone would give us a big wooden salad bowl as a wedding present. Rita is making me register at Blooming-dale’s. Maybe I’ll pick one out.”

  Steve was silent for a moment. “You’re not really doing that. Are you?”

  “We are. You and I are. Rita is making us do it. She’s taking me to some mall next Friday. You’re welcome to come along.”

  For once, he replied instantly. “No.”

  “Rita says that left to our own devices, we’d register with some kennel supply place. Cherrybrook. I said that we wouldn’t, because we already have all the dog stuff we need.”

  “We don’t need dishes. For us. Do we?”

  “Not really. But we do need a salad bowl, and if we take attrition into account, we could use a hundred sets of those wooden salad forks. Rowdy and Kimi eat them.”

  “Buy a salad bowl. And forks.”

  “Argue with Rita, not me. And with Gabrielle. She’s as determined as Rita.” Gabrielle was my stepmother.

  “I’m going to have a mother-in-law.” Steve sounded H as if the idea had just occurred to him, “Me. With a mother-in-law.” Anita’s mother had died long before she’d married Steve.

  “You love Gabrielle. So do I. And we can both be grateful to her for exerting some control over my father. She’s the first person who’s been able to do that since my mother died.” I was immediately sorry that I’d mentioned Buck, who was a good father in his own eccentric and sometimes infuriating way. I said, “The salad’s ready.”

  Steve was setting the table with the precision of the surgeon he was. He aligned the knives and forks exactly where he wanted them. His vet techs and assistants always remarked on what a neat surgeon he was; similarly, he never left dirty dishes for me to clean up, but rinsed them and stowed them in the dishwasher.

  When we sat down, he said, “Beautiful. Shrimp. Avocados. Cheese. Maybe if you’d written a cookbook for people, you’d’ve turned into a great cook for dogs.”

  “I am a great cook for dogs.” Then, to avoid returning to the subject of my father, I said, "You know that woman who died? The one Ceci kept going on about? Nina Kerkel. Did you have the feeling that Mac’d had something going with her? Because while Mac was talking about her, Judith kept whispering remarks in my ear. That when Nina was a receptionist, she was all too receptive. That kind of thing. And what Ceci implied was, as Ceci’d say, that Nina was no better than she should’ve been. Meanwhile, Mac looked pretty nostalgic. And he had nothing but good things to say about Nina.”

  Steve shrugged. “Maybe. But Judith was in an awfully good mood.”

  “She was? Not while Mac was talking about Nina. Then, she wasn’t exactly in a good mood. Or a bad mood. In a strange mood, maybe. Or a vindictive mood.”

  “When we were all eating, after you were done signing, Judith was smiling a lot. I noticed because when we first got to the store, she looked real serious. And then later, she was all lighthearted. She was hitting the wine. I wondered if that was why.”

  “Maybe Mac had an affair with Nina, and Judith was glad that Nina was dead.”

  “Hey, I meant to tell you. This guy Mac.”

  “Yes?”

  “He has this habit of putting his hands on people.”

  “I know. Mac reaches out to people. He likes to make contact.”

  “Keep your eye on Rowdy when he does that.”

  “Steve, Rowdy doesn’t bite! How could you say such a thing about Rowdy?”

  “I didn’t. What I meant is that Rowdy doesn’t like it. “Who is it who doesn’t like it? Rowdy? Or you?”

  He took a second helping of salad, heavy on the shrimp. “Rowdy.”

  “People’ve told me this before,” I conceded. “And I’vi noticed, too. Rowdy doesn’t like strangers to touch, me, Especially men. That’s true. Not that Mac is a stranger. Rowdy has been to his house with me. But Rowdy won’t do anything. I don’t need to keep my eye on him. And in case you wondered, I have no interest in Mac, and he’s never been anything but friendly with me. He’s never come on to me. Never. Nothing even remotely like that. Besides, Mac may be young for his age, but he’s old enough to be my father.” j “There are women who like that,” Steve said.

  “I’m not one of them,” I said.

  CHAPTER 4

  Five days after the launch party at The Wordsmythe, on the evening of Thursday, August 22, a woman was bludgeoned to death in the underground parking garage of a fancy Cambridge hotel. Steve and I learned of the murder early on Friday morning. I’d just spooned scrambled eggs onto our plates, and in compliance with Cambridge law, we were listening to National Public Radio. As proof that I’m neither lying nor exaggerating about Cambridge lunacy, I’ll present the relevant city ordinance in its entirety:

  Section 9.08.021

  Consumption of certain breakfast foods in private places

  No person shall consume any breakfast foods as defined in Chapter 138, Section 1045 of the General Laws while on, in or upon any private place between the hours of 5:00 AM and 10:00 AM without simultaneously listening to National Public Radio as defined in Chapter 1046 of the General Laws. Whoever violates this section may be arrested wit
hout a warrant by an officer authorized to serve criminal process. All breakfast foods being used in violation of the section shall be seized and safely held until final adjudication of the charge against the person or persons arrested or summoned into court, at which time they shall be returned to the person or persons entitled to lawful possession. Anyone found guilty of the violation of this chapter shall be punished by a fine of not over one thousand dollars and immediate deportation and permanent exile from the City of Cambridge.

  So, as I was saying, to avoid getting booted out of the highbrow community that we insanely chose to inhabit, we were listening to Morning Edition on WBUR and thus heard about the murder of Dr. Laura Skipcliff, who’d been killed the previous evening in the garage beneath The Charles Hotel. In fact, it was the mention of the hotel that caught our attention and created a moment of awkwardness between us. There was nothing wrong with The Charles. On the contrary, although it lacked the exclusivity of the Harvard Faculty Club, it was nonetheless the most luxurious and expensive lodging place in Harvard Square. The cause of our discomfort was that Steve had met the evil Anita, now his ex-wife, in the bar of Rialto, a sumptuous restaurant located in the hotel. Despite that horrid association, which was certainly not Rialto’s fault, Steve and I had eaten there several times this summer and had enjoyed the wonderful food and the romantic ambiance. What’s more, on each occasion, I’d savored the pleasure of revenging myself on Anita by refusing to let her ruin Rialto for me. Good restaurants, I might add, were Steve’s only extravagance. When he’d first bought his practice from old Dr. Draper, he’d been paying off the loan he’d taken out for the purchase as well as his veterinary school loans, but his finances were now in great shape. His clinic was thriving. His staff included three other vets, and he’d wisely poured money into high-tech equipment. Even so, he was earning far more than he spent. He still drove an old van. Furthermore, because he’d had the sense to hire a sharp divorce lawyer, Anita the Fiend had gotten almost no money from him. Anyway, although she hadn’t managed to spoil Rialto for Steve or me, the mention of The Charles Hotel caused a moment of discomfort.

  “What was she doing in the garage?” I asked. “How did she get murdered there? It’s—”

  Steve hushed me. “Could we hear the rest of it?”

  There wasn’t much more. Public Radio isn’t usually big on crime. What we heard was that Dr. Laura Skipcliff, an anesthesiologist from New York, had come to Boston for a meeting and had been staying at The Charles.

  “The paper won’t be here for another half hour,” I said. “It’ll have the details. But this’ll be Kevin’s case. Or he’ll be the main person from the Cambridge police. The D.A.’s office and the state police’ll probably take over.”

  “Good luck to them shoving Kevin out of the way in Cambridge,” Steve said.

  Lieutenant Kevin Dennehy still lived with his mother in the house where he grew up, the one on the Appleton Street side of mine. The crimson tidal wave of Harvard’s expansion having rolled our way, Mrs. Dennehy could have sold the house for an incredible amount of money and moved elsewhere, but Cambridge was her city. Like his mother, Kevin belonged here. Furthermore, in Kevin’s view, Cambridge temained moderately safe only because of his personal and professional presence. Consequently, he didn’t dare to leave. Or so he claimed. What was undoubtedly true, as Steve had just suggested, was that Kevin had a deep loyalty Cambridge, an unrivaled knowledge of his hometown, and the secret conviction that he was smarter than the D.A.’s office and the state police combined.

  “One thing you can bet on,” I said, “is that Kevin knows at least half the people who work at The Charles, including the people who work in the garage. Either he went to school with them, or they have relatives who are cops, or they work out at the Y with him, or he just knows them. More coffee?”

  “To go.” Steve had a morning of surgery ahead of him. Instead of sitting around drinking a second cup, he left carrying a red insulated Purina mug. It occurred to me that the two of us combined probably owned at least a hundred canine-embellished cups, mugs, and glasses, some of which had been won by our dogs at shows, trials, and matches. Others had come as promotional gifts from dog-food companies that wanted to endear themselves with pet professionals. If you also counted the trophies won by my late mother’s golden retrievers and bequeathed to me, we had enough drinking vessels, bowls, candleholders, plates, and knickknacks to stock a gift shop. And Rita was nonetheless making us, of all couples in the world, register for wedding] presents! Hah! In fact, Rita had returned home from visiting relatives who had a beach house in Rye, New York, and was dragging me to Bloomingdale’s this very evening. Well, damned if I was going to pick out coffee mugs.

  As I fed Rowdy and Kimi, checked my E-mail, made then bed, tidied up, and contemplated the trip to the mall, an! unhappy image came to me. Rita and I had gone to the same mall before. Its stores were too pricey for me, but Rita had hauled me along to advise her about selecting a present for my cousin Leah. What I now saw in my mind’s eye wasn’t the shop-lined interior with its glittering escalators and lush tropical vegetation, but the adjoining three-story concrete parking garage. In contrast to the one at The Charles Hotel, the mall’s garage was above ground. Still, it was undeniably a parking garage and almost certainly darker and emptier than the bright, popular, well-patrolled garage beneath the hotel. If only the stupid mall allowed dogs, we could park anywhere we pleased. As it was, we’d have to avoid the garage and use the parking lot instead.

  By the time I was ready for my second cup of coffee, the paper had arrived. The murder of Dr. Laura Skipcliff was reported in a section called New England News Briefe and consisted of only a couple of paragraphs. According to the paper, Dr. Laura Skipcliff, fifty-seven, a nationally renowned anesthesiologist from New York City, had been staying at The Charles Hotel while she attended a medical conference at which she’d been scheduled to speak. She had apparently driven her rental car into the hotel’s garage at 10:42 P.M. The body had been found by another hotel guest at midnight. Authorities were questioning hotel employees and conference participants, including Dr. Skipcliff’s ex-husband, Dr. Dominic DiTomasso. There followed the usual statement that the police were investigating all possible leads, as if they’d consider doing otherwise. Knowing Kevin Dennehy as I did, I felt certain that one of the leads he’d vigorously pursue would be the presence in Boston of the victim’s ex-husband. Kevin’s experience in law enforcement had taught him to see marriage principally as an institution designed to create motives and opportunities for violence. It seemed to me that the first frustration Kevin would encounter in investigating the murder of Laura Skipcliff would be the aggravating fact of her divorce: Kevin would be irked that Dr. Dominic DiTomasso was Dr. Laura Skipcliff s ex-husband.

  CHAPTER 5

  The dossier on Laura Skipcliff, M.D., like the other four dossiers that eventually came into my possession, consisted of a neatly labeled letter-size manila folder that contained pages I printed from the World Wide Web. Laura Skipcliff’s name had appeared on many web sites; hers was a thick folder.

  The first page of her dossier showed the results of a search using InfoSpace, a popular “people finder,” as such sites are called, a superduper internet phone and address directory. According to InfoSpace, “Skipcliff, Laura” lived on East Eighty-third Street in New York, NY 10021. Her phone number began with the familiar Manhattan area code: 212. Beneath the directory listing, InfoSpace offered the options of getting a map of the area, finding nearby businesses, and adding Laura Skipcliff to an address book. Three lines followed:

  Find out more about Laura Skipcliff.

  Find Laura Skipcliff on Classmates.com!

  Send flowers to Laura Skipcliff.

  The next page was similar to the first, but came from another people finder, Any Who. Its listing was for “Skipcliff, Laura, MD,” and specified the street number. The line below the directory information offered the opportunity to get a map and directions to her address, and
asked, Did you go to school with Laura MD Skipcliff?

  The next three pages showed pictures of Laura Skipcliff, photos printed in black and white. The first, which had come from her hospital's web site, was a small close-up of her face, together with a paragraph about her. Her skin was deeply lined, and she had prominent pouches under her eyes. I wondered whether cosmetic efforts had backfired; perhaps makeup had sunk into the creases of her skin, thus highlighting the signs of age. Her hair suggested a woman who’d cared about her appearance. It was dark and cut in an attractive, youthful style, shoulder length and smoothly straight. The second photo was an enlargement of the first. The quality of the original graphics file must have been poor. The blowup blurred Laura Skipcliffs features and grotesquely exaggerated her haggardness. On the following page, however, printed from the web site of a modern dance company, was a group shot of three donors attending a fund-raising dinner. Laura Skipcliff was on the right. She’d dressed up for the occasion. She wore a short-sleeved dress in what I guessed was black. Her hair was a bit bouncier than in the previous picture, and she wore earrings, bracelets, and an ornate necklace. It was now easy to see that she’d once been pretty.

  Next in the dossier came information that naive people are shocked to discover is readily available online. A page printed from AnyBirthday.com revealed that Laura Skipcliffs birthday was October 27. She had been fifty-seven at the time of her death. The site offered the unintentionally gruesome opportunity to receive an E-mail reminder when her next birthday approached. The USSearch site confirmed that Laura Skipcliff had lived in Manhattan and that her age had been fifty-seven. For a fee, the site would’ve gone on to look for judgments, liens, bankruptcies, and a great deal more. Indeed, the people finders and the other free sites all abounded in low-cost opportunities to find out almost anything about anyone: to search Social Security records, court records, and property records. Searchers were also exhorted to click on hyperlinks that would presumably benefit themselves: Get a home loan, Rent a truck, Refinance now, Save on lodging, Find contractors, Enjoy hassle-free shopping, and Meet Mr. Right.