A Bite of Death

by Susan Conant

  "Kevin? Holly. I have to ask you about something."

  Kevin Dennehy is my next-door neighbor on Appleton Street, but I'd reached him at the Central Square Police Station, where he works.

  "If this is about a lost dog," he said, "I don't have time. You know why I don't have time? Because I just got a big promotion."

  "Congratulations, Kevin! I didn't know you'd applied."

  "Yeah," he said. "I just got promoted. From animal control to homicide."

  "I hate to be the one to break the news, Kevin, but that wasn't a promotion. It was a demotion. Anyway, this is partly about a person. And, uh, it's serious. Her name was Elaine Walsh."

  "Right."

  "I know it's right. She was a friend of mine. I want to know where her dog is."

  "Holly, for God's sake."

  "Is the dog all right?"

  "Yeah."

  "Good. That's great." I paused. "And where is she?"

  "You don't want to hear about it." He had a macho-protective tone in his voice.

  "Why not?"

  "You have a hard time with death. Remember? You told me all about it. When you were a kid, your parents kept making you go to the funerals of all the family dogs, and you can't handle it, right?"

  It wasn't so much the funerals as the deaths. Dogs have short life spans. We had a lot of dogs and a lot of death. Anyway, Kevin is in no position to criticize me for not being able to handle it. He doesn't have a dog because he was so broken up when Trapper, his last dog, died that he won't get another.

  "So," he added, "you don't want to know the details. It wasn't a natural death . . ."

  "I thought you said she was all right!"

  "Hell, the dog's all right."

  "Well, that's what I called about. One of the things, anyway. Where is she? Elaine's malamute, Kimi. I was helping Elaine with her, and now I want to know what you did with her. I know where Elaine is."

  "Started out with Pat Shanahan, but he tied her to a desk, and next thing you know, she's dragged it ten feet and eaten a pizza the guys brought in, and they made Pat pay for it, and he got mad at the dog."

  "What did he expect? She's a malamute. Born to pull. So where is she now? In the pound?"

  "Yeah."

  "I want her. Elaine left her to me." That was true. In spirit. Or would have been if Elaine had thought of it. "How do I bail her out?"

  He told me and then said he had to run.

  "Yeah. One last thing," I said. "How did Elaine die?"

  "Looks like an overdose."

  "Of cocaine?"

  "Was she a regular user?"

  "Not that I know of. I don't think so. Maybe I was thinking about Len Bias. Is that what she died of?"

  "Doubtful," Kevin said. "So far, it looks like sleeping pills. That's a guess. Possibly suicide."

  "But you don't believe that?"

  "What we've got here is a lady who writes books, right? Gives talks. She's a lady you can't shut up. A feminist." Elaine would have loved that definition. Or maybe not. Kevin went on. "And here she is, ready to take what you might want to call a major step, right? And you're telling me she's got nothing to say about it? No note. Not a word."

  "Yeah. If Elaine had been going to kill herself, she'd have written a book about it first. And I don't think she'd kill herself, anyway."

  "Yeah. I'm betting she didn't swallow the pills. She got fed them."

  "People are going to tell you she was depressed, though," I said.

  "Yeah."

  "You know about this?"

  "Not much."

  "She lost a patient," I said. "She was a therapist. You already know that, right? A psychologist. She knew Rita." Since Kevin lives next door, and Rita has my second-floor apartment, he knows Rita, too, of course. "Anyway, that's why Elaine had the dog, because of her patient."

  "Could you stop talking about dogs?"

  "They're relevant," I said. "She had a patient who killed herself, and she left the dog to Elaine. Elaine never even had a dog before, and she took Kimi mostly because of that. Because she felt terrible about having one of her patients commit suicide. So she took the dog partly out of guilt. I mean, this was the only thing she could do for her, she said. But, of course, Kimi is a beautiful bitch. Any sane person would want her. I'm sure the minute Elaine saw her, she knew she had to have her."

  "People," Kevin said. "No more dogs."

  "So the point is that Elaine really was upset, and people are going to tell you she was depressed, and, okay, maybe she was. That's probably one of the reasons she let the dog push her around. That's what I was helping with. She hadn't exactly made herself the alpha figure in Kimi's life."

  "Alpha. It's Greek to me!" Kevin sounded gleeful. Then he repeated himself in case I'd been too slow to catch on the first time.

  I hissed. I'm not a total misfit in Cambridge, and that's what you're supposed to do here when someone makes a pun. "Anyway," I said, "Kimi was top dog. Alpha is what it's called in wolf packs. Elaine was a definite beta—underdog—with Kimi. So maybe one thing that happened was that with this patient, Elaine was top dog. I mean, she was the therapist. She'd have to be, wouldn't she? So maybe with Kimi, she was afraid of that power. Look what happened last time."

  Rita would have loved that, but Kevin wasn't interested. He was interested in the patient.

  "So who was this patient?" he asked.

  "I don't know. Some woman. Elaine said she was young."

  "And how did she die?"

  "Suicide. An overdose, Elaine said. That's all I know. I remember, because I thought about cocaine, because of, you know, how the Celtics are doing. Anyway, it wasn't an accident. She left a note for Elaine. She asked Elaine to take her dog."

  "No more dog talk."

  "Let me tell you something," I said. "You think I don't care about Elaine, right? That's the implication. Well, I do. I'm telling you about the dog because the dog is relevant. I feel terrible about Elaine. You know, in a way, you could say she was my patient, because she needed help with Kimi, and not psychotherapy, either. And I was helping. I did care about her. We were getting to be friends."

  "She didn't tell you the name of the patient?"

  "No. I suppose she thought it was confidential. Therapists don't tell you who their patients are. It's some kind of ethical violation. I don't know who she was."

  "Me neither," Kevin said. "But I will."

  Bailing Kimi out was easy. I didn't need Kevin to intercede on our behalf. Malamutes don't ruff-ruff and bow-wow like other dogs. They talk. That's what it's called. "Woo-woo," they say. "Ah woo. Woooooo?" Kimi had been doing more than talking. She'd been shouting, swearing, and trying to start cage fights with the dogs in the other pens. She was very dominant, and as soon as she'd found herself in a pack of strange dogs, she'd simply tried to establish her position. I started to explain her behavior, but no one wanted to hear about it. Everyone at the pound was as glad to get rid of her as I was to get her.

  4

  Kevin Dennehy's mother sees faces as a series of animated maps inscribing themselves on the human countenance. Kevin, she always says, has the map of Ireland written on his face. Rita has Italy. I have Scotland.

  "Hey, Holly, how ya doing?"

  Kevin was standing at my back door. In one beefy arm, he held a brown paper grocery bag. Although he doesn't like to hear his living situation phrased this way, he lives with his mother in her vegetarian, teetotal house—Mrs. Dennehy has abandoned the Catholic Church for Seventh-Day Adventism—and, whether he admits it or not, it's definitely her house. Before I bought the house next door to hers, or should I say, before my father helped me with the down payment (when I couldn't find a decent apartment that allowed pets), Kevin lived mostly on pecan loaf and herbal tea except when he went out for pepperoni pizza, McDonald's quarter-pounders, and Kentucky Fried Chicken. If Kevin wanted a Bud, he'd have to sneak one on the back steps, and if Mrs. Dennehy caught him, he'd have to sit on the curb or pace up and down the sidewalk to drink it. He
didn't like the image of a cop drinking in public, but the solution he found—slipping the beer can into a paper bag—didn't exactly raise the tone of the neighborhood, and people complained.

  In spite of the block-long town-house complex that Harvard has just erected across the street on Concord Avenue, the corner of Appleton and Concord isn't the toniest place in Cambridge. The upwardly mobile triple-deckers can't help giving away their working-class origins. Some, like Mrs. Dennehy's, remain aggressively proletarian and proud of it, too, with plebeian lime-green vinyl and mock-brick siding, pitted aluminum storm doors, and scraggly barberry hedges mocking the pretensions of the newly genteel pale-painted facades, railroad-tie fir bark, and spreading dwarf junipers of their neighbors.

  So it isn't the toniest neighborhood—it'll never be Brattle Street—but getting Kevin and his bagged beer cans off the sidewalk and into my kitchen helped almost as much as the town houses. Kevin keeps his Bud in my refrigerator, and I let him cook meat, not that what he does deserves to be called cooking. My own cooking consists mainly of scrambling eggs, slapping sandwiches together, spooning out cottage cheese, baking dog biscuits and liver treats, dishing up dog food, and refilling water bowls, but at least I don't burn everything the way Kevin does.

  "How am I doing, Kevin? I am holding up." My voice probably sounded a little hoarse, not from shouting at Rowdy and Kimi, of course, but from speaking sweet reason to both of them. "It takes three days, you know," I added. "Anyone who knows anything about dogs will tell you that. Introduce a second dog into an only-dog house, and it takes a minimum of three days. I'm sorry about the noise last night. Did it wake you up?"

  "My mother woke me up." He dumped the bag on the counter and pulled out a package of hamburger. Rowdy ran to the counter, pricked up his ears, raised his big head, sniffed hopefully, and tried to look cute. "She had this bad dream," Kevin added. "A nightmare. About a beast with seven heads. All of the heads were yelping like dogs."

  "What a coincidence. I had the same nightmare. An apocalyptic vision visited the neighborhood." Then I noticed that his face was, for once, showing fatigue. "Look, seriously, I'm sorry. This won't go on forever."

  Rowdy had been sleeping in my room off and on since the first night I brought him home. The floor under the bay window, where the window seat is going to go when I have the money, belonged to him. I couldn't ask him to give it up or push over. But what really did it was the old rope chew toy of Rowdy's that Kimi discovered under the bedroom radiator at three a.m. and refused to relinquish.

  "So where is she?" Kevin asked.

  "In the yard. Digging, probably." For January in Cambridge, it was a warm day, in the forties, and Rowdy and I had both felt desperate for some relief. The previous summer, I'd finally persuaded Rowdy to abandon work on the scale model of the battlefield at Verdun on which he'd been laboring, but Kimi was probably excavating all the trenches and foxholes I'd filled in. At least she wasn't bothering the neighbors. She was quiet, and the yard is fenced.

  "Sinequan," Kevin said.

  "What?"

  "Sinequan. Not a trace of cocaine anywhere. Sinequan. Also called doxepin." The skillet was smoking. Kevin dropped in two hamburger patties that sizzled, spattered, and emitted bursts of greasy steam.

  "What is it?" I asked. "Sleeping pills?"

  "Sometimes. They say it's for people who are depressed and nervous at the same time. Antidepressant and tranquilizer. Sleepiness is a side effect, and sometimes people take it for that."

  "Well, I guess you could say Elaine was depressed and nervous, sort of. I mean, she was depressed and upset about her patient. But I don't know. She didn't strike me as someone who'd take pills for it. Like Rita, you know?"

  "Yeah." He turned the hamburgers burned-side up.

  "With Rita, everything's an issue she's supposed to work on, confront. Right? If she gets a headache, she practically won't take aspirin because she thinks the headache means something. And if she takes aspirin, she thinks she's just running away from whatever the psychological issue is, and she feels guilty. I mean, if everybody gets the flu, and Rita does, too, she still thinks it isn't just the flu. It's her body sending her a message about her mother. Or if she admits it's the flu, she has to analyze why she got it. I would've thought Elaine was like that, too. Did she have a prescription for this stuff? Was there a bottle there?"

  "Nope."

  "That doesn't necessarily mean much, especially if she was using it to sleep. People hand stuff around."

  That's Cambridge. You say you haven't been sleeping too well, and ten people offer you their Xanax or Ativan before they even hear that what you've got is a noisy dog, not insomnia. And when you tell them, they say to take some yourself and give the rest to the dog.

  "Do people tell you to mix the stuff with cottage cheese first?"

  I looked at him.

  "Cottage cheese." He turned the hamburgers again. "That's how she took it. They're both in her, Sinequan and cottage cheese, mixed with a lot of other stuff, and the carton shows traces. Like I been saying, she got fed it. Now we know in what. In cottage cheese."

  "God. It's lucky Kimi didn't get any."

  "The carton hadn't been licked clean." Kevin deposited the two blackened lumps on the bottoms of two cold hamburger rolls, put them on separate plates, topped each lump with a big spoonful of mayonnaise and a dollop of ketchup, balanced the tops of the rolls on the lumps, and pushed down hard. He slid one plate onto the kitchen table in front of me and sat down with the other in front of him.

  "But," I said, "she could've fed some to Kimi. I always used to do that, give cottage cheese to my dogs. A lot of breeders used to recommend it. Then I guess it went out of style. Anyway, Elaine probably wouldn't have thought about supplementing Kimi's food. She didn't know anything about dogs. And, obviously, Kimi's fine. She was okay when you found her, wasn't she?"

  "Yeah. Ran up and tried to make friends, like Rowdy does." The ketchup and mayonnaise dripped from his hands and down his wrists like the seepage from an infected wound. "Don't you want that?" He pointed to the plate in front of me.

  "I just ate, Kevin, but thanks. You have it."

  "Anyhow, the dog was fine. She growled just like Rowdy does, and I got one of the guys to take her out. She'd chewed up some stuff in the living room. A pillow. Some kind of big basket."

  Navajo, Elaine had said when I'd asked where it came from. It was a big red and black basket, about three feet across, woven with a pattern of what looked like eagles. I could have helped Elaine to stop Kimi from ruining things like that. I started to imagine how we'd do it. But, of course, we wouldn't. Elaine and Kimi didn't have that great future together anymore.

  "So how did it happen?" I asked. "Somebody mixed this stuff with her cottage cheese, and she ate it and died. That's it?"

  "Yeah. After she ate it, which was at night, supper, she must have just felt tired. She went to bed. And then everything just slowed way, way down, and she stopped breathing."

  Elaine was not the kind of person who would have wanted to go gentle into that good night. It seemed doubly unfair that she hadn't had a chance to fight back.

  "The question," Kevin said, "is how and when it got into the cottage cheese. It could've been after it was in her refrigerator. Or before."

  "Did it come from the milkman? You must've seen the box by the door. Pleasant Valley. They deliver cottage cheese. I order it sometimes." It's one of those perfect foods: You can feed it to your dogs or eat it yourself. "It's good cottage cheese. It's better than the kind you buy in stores, and it's fresher, I think."

  "You got some now?"

  "Plain or chive?" Kevin has a big appetite—in spite of his bulk, he's a runner—but it still seemed odd.

  "Just the carton."

  The one I gave him was an ordinary white plastic sixteen-ounce carton showing the dairy's name and the same cow logo that's on the milk boxes. Kevin wiped his hands on a paper towel, removed the lid, and examined the container and its contents.

/>   "You've opened this already?" he asked.

  "No. Look, it's full. It hasn't been touched."

  "But you opened it."

  "No. I haven't touched it."

  "So where's the, uh, the plastic thing? The plastic strip. You know, to unseal it."

  "Those tamperproof things? The ones from the milkman don't have those. I mean, they aren't going to sit around in stores or anything. They aren't all sealed up. You just take the lid off. It's just like the old days."

  He replaced the lid on the carton, removed it again, looked hard at the cottage cheese, and replaced the lid.

  "So it's the same kind?" I asked.

  He nodded.

  "Well," I said, "you can't buy it in stores. They don't carry this kind. You can't get it anywhere except from the milkman."

  "So it would've sat out in the milk box. It would've sat there until she brought it in."

  "Yes."

  We looked at each other.

  "And," I added, "anybody could've come along, opened the milk box, opened the carton, added anything, and closed the carton again. If the cottage cheese was smoothed out, nobody could've told the difference. And Elaine's milk box is on the porch, and it's screened from the street. You know?"

  "Yeah. Actually, I do know."

  "So," I said, "it wasn't necessarily somebody who got inside her house. It could have been anybody."

  "Yeah," Kevin said. "That eliminates a lot of people."

  "Maybe it was some antifeminist, like the guy in Montreal. It could've been somebody who didn't even know her, some guy who hated her because his wife read her books and left him. Or maybe some woman took one of her assertiveness workshops, told some guy to go to hell, and he blamed Elaine. Something like that. Anybody who knew where she lived."

  "And found out she had a milkman," Kevin said.

  "It's not so unusual. The yuppies do it because it's convenient, and so do families with a lot of kids. And some people just like the idea of having a milkman. Also, the glass bottles are ecological, right? There must be at least two dairies that deliver around here."