by Susan Conant
"Yes," I said. "So he had the strongest motive in the world. Maybe it ended there. Maybe somebody did him a favor."
"Who?"
"For one thing, somebody who had a lot of this drug, Sinequan. Somebody who didn't know she hated cottage cheese. He probably didn't know that, but where could he have got the stuff? And how would he have got it into the carton? Was there somebody else who could have? And who had some reason to, besides him? Rita, these people are living the most weird life. It's a weird way to live. But you know what's the weirdest thing? These are nice people. And you know what else? Not only are they likable, but I happen to like them. Rita, you know them. They are very nice people, and if I say anything to Kevin, they're not going to stand a chance. And absolutely everyone in Cambridge will know everything. Have you ever been to their house?"
"Yes."
"Well?"
"If you honestly think that he did these things, you can't keep it to yourself. It's not like this hypothesis you have about him. And, by the way, you aren't necessarily wrong."
"Thanks."
"Some of it does fit. I can see it. The truth is, I don't believe Kimi spoke to you, but once the possibility arises . . . anyway, the two issues are separate. Murdering people is not just one more alternative life-style. If he did this, I don't want him getting away with it. You didn't know Donna."
"I knew Elaine. And I liked her. I liked her a lot. And maybe now I don't like her quite as much I did then, but she meant what she said. And about that other stuff, I really don't think she meant to cause pain. She honestly did not believe in marriage. Literally. She would not recognize it. She did not mean to cause pain. And for all I know, maybe she didn't. I'm not at all sure that you-know-who knew about it."
"You-know-who with the Birkenstock sandals is married to an M.D.," Rita said. "Have you thought about that?"
"Not much, though she does do his billing. She told me that night I was there. Besides everything else, she was going to do their billing, she said. So if she sends his bills to his patients, she'd have known that Donna saw him, right? And she'd have Donna's address. And obviously she'd know where Elaine lived. Maybe she knew what he prescribed for Donna, even before."
"I don't see what she'd have against Donna, but that wasn't necessarily—"
"I don't either. Unless . . ."
"Unless what?"
"You're the one who said that psychiatrists pay a lot for malpractice because they get sued, and presumably they get sued because they're more apt to—"
"Holly, just because they pay a lot for their insurance, it doesn't mean they're all guilty of malpractice. Not at all. But about her? The billing? Maybe it does raise possibilities. But you're right about what Kevin would probably make of all this."
"I hope I'm wrong about Joel. If I decide I'm not, I'm going to have to tell Kevin."
"I hope you're wrong, too."
The waitress appeared. "Coffee?" she asked.
"Decaf," Rita said. "With cream?"
"Real," I said. "Caf."
The waitress left.
"I always think that decaf coffee is like safe sex," Rita said nostalgically.
16
"A women's libber and a pill pusher," Kevin said. "Both. And proud of it."
We were discussing Dr. Ben Moss as we made our way around Fresh Pond at what I considered to be a running pace. Kevin wasn't even breathing hard. Rowdy, heeling nicely at Kevin's side but on leash, anyway, could have matched or beaten Kevin's normal speed, but his pink-red tongue was still hanging out. It does when he smiles. I had to keep passing Kimi's leash from one hand to the other as she bounced around me, tearing out in front, lagging behind, and levitating in joy.
"Rita says it's a fine art," I panted. "She says that some people can't function without medication and that picking the right stuff is a fine art. But she says Moss is no expert."
"Psycho," Kevin said, and then finished the word, stretching out the syllables, "pharmacology."
"Are you on some kind of holistic health kick?" Kimi suddenly stuck her nose in some leafless shrubbery and yanked me to an abrupt halt. "Kimi, let's go!"
"No." Kevin made a dismissive gesture with one of his beefy hands. "No. But the guy is an arrogant jerk."
"Could we slow down a little?"
"Sorry."
"It's okay. He was having an affair with Elaine Walsh. Rita told me."
"Yeah," Kevin said.
"You knew?"
"Yeah."
"How? Does he admit it?"
"Christ, admit it?" He shook his head back and forth.
"He bragged about it? Is that what's bothering you?"
Kevin has pale, almost translucent skin that freckles heavily in the summer, but since it was midwinter, his face turned an almost uniform red. The sky and its reflection in the pond were that bright winter gray that brings out the depth and highlights in his red hair. When he flushed, his whole head blazed.
"Was this some sort of locker room conversation?" I tried to catch my breath. "You thought he was being indecent?"
"First him. Now you."
"He told you that you were being prudish or something?"
"He tells me women are equal. Then he proceeds to tell me how. Graphically."
"You know, you really are a prude." I slowed down. "What did he say? That she was, uh, imaginative? Is that euphemistic enough? That she was unconventional?"
"Not in those words." He moved a little ahead of me.
"Well, that is offensive," I said. "She wouldn't have liked that. Or I don't think so. I don't think she thought kiss-and-tell was an essential part of liberation. Slow down, would you? And there is something indecent about it. I can see why you were offended. So why did he do it? Couldn't he see that he was making a bad impression? What was the point?"
"Oh, I got the point." Kevin was a couple of steps ahead of me. He turned his head so I could hear him clearly and added, "The point was, 'Why would a guy murder such a great lay?'"
"Kevin, Elaine would have overdosed you both if she'd heard that. Slow the hell down, would you? I'm not training for the marathon." Kevin was. He always is. "But what about the drug? The Sinequan?"
"Nothing there. Yes, he handed it out to Miss Zalewski. No, he didn't think she was a suicide risk. He has been forced to ask himself why he selected the drug. He has gone so far as to go to some other shrink to quote, work on the issue, unquote. With the assistance of the other shrink he has quote, recovered a memory, unquote."
"Of what?"
"It seems that a long time ago, the pharmaceutical company that pushes this stuff was trying to get doctors to prescribe it. So they didn't just advertise. They offered inducements."
"Like what?"
"They gave away records of classical music."
"You must be kidding."
"Fact. And Moss quote, recovered a memory, unquote of getting into the habit of prescribing Sinequan because he liked the free records. When he writes out a prescription for it, he hears violins playing in his head. And he likes the violins."
"So did he want a whole orchestra so badly that he gave Elaine some, too?"
"No. Not to Miss Walsh."
"Not 'Miss,'" I said. "Look, what is this macho need to set a pace that's just a little too fast for me? If you want to race, find someone your own size and give me Rowdy. I can handle them both."
"Sorry."
"I'm not a runner, you know. I only do this because the dogs need the exercise. So, did he prescribe it for anyone who knew Elaine? What did he say about that?"
"Squat," Kevin said.
"That it was none of your business? They have to do that. They can't go around talking about their clients. Patients. Whatever you call them. It really is confidential."
"No kidding. Do you need to stop?"
"No. You're in a great mood about this, aren't you?"
"The neighbors didn't notice a thing," Kevin said. "No suspicious characters had been hanging around Upland Road. No nuts had been threatening h
er. The only nut case we've got is a lady who thinks that all the dogs in Cambridge are conspiring against her, and since she got my name, she calls twenty times a day to tell me there's another one in her garden and will I send someone to arrest it."
"That woman on Lakeview," I said. "This is fine. You see? It's not that slow. The one with the strange garden, with the rocks that look like tombstones. Wait a minute, would you?"
Kimi lifted her leg on a section of the fence that runs between the path and the pond. Fresh Pond is a reservoir. No swimming. All bodies of fresh water in Massachusetts are reservoirs. Sometimes I get homesick for Maine. When Kimi finished, Rowdy covered her scent with his.
"Green, her name is," Kevin said, moving into a jog. "Rowdy, heel."
"Yes. How appropriate."
"Ms. Zalewski," he said pointedly, "lived on the same block. The woman is a total nut case from the word go."
"Don't let Rowdy forge like that," I said. "Is there some way this woman could've got hold of the Sinequan? I mean, if she really is that disturbed, maybe she had it prescribed for her. You know, I've gotten relaxed about Kimi. I mean, I went through that scare, worrying that someone was trying to poison her. Then, nothing's happened. There hasn't been a thing. So I've been pretty relaxed about it." In truth, of course, I'd quit worrying because I knew that Joel Baker wouldn't harm a dog, but I wasn't about to say that to Kevin. I wasn't about to mention Joel's name to him. "Could this woman have got hold of Sinequan? Did you check that out?"
"It never crossed my mind," he said. "You weren't around to tell me what to think."
"So you did check it out. Did she?"
"Not that we can tell." Then he repeated it. "Not that we can tell."
"Well, what do you think about her? You think it's possible? That she was after Kimi? Both times?"
"For what it's worth, in my opinion, she's a harmless nut. But if you see anyone hanging around, let me know."
"Of course. Hey, there's something I wanted to ask you. About the cottage cheese?"
"Yeah?"
"You found the carton, right?"
"Yeah."
"And you found the drug in it, right? There were traces of Sinequan in the carton?"
"Yeah."
"Okay. So it was mixed in, wasn't it? It wasn't just sprinkled on top. If it had just been on the top layer, there wouldn't have been any in the empty carton. So how did that happen? When? And also, where? In other words, did the murderer stand by Elaine's front door and stir this stuff in? Wouldn't that have been a little obvious? I mean, what if she had come home? Or if someone else had shown up?"
"Best guess? Prepared in advance," he said. "Substituted."
"So did anybody miss a carton of cottage cheese? Was there a carton stolen out of someone else's delivery? Or out of the truck?"
"Nope. Not on that route."
"Are you sure?"
"Yeah."
"So the murderer had to be one of Jim's customers. Or somebody on some other route? Anyway, somebody who gets milk delivered, not necessarily in Cambridge, but somewhere, because they don't sell that kind of cottage cheese in stores. I told you that. It's just Pleasant Valley. Was Donna Zalewski on Jim's route? Did she get milk delivered, too?"
Kevin nodded.
"And who else did? Did that woman with the garden? Mrs. Green?"
"Nope."
"Well, who did?"
"Every last damned person who knew Elaine Walsh," Kevin said. "And a lot of people who didn't."
Joel Baker? I'd seen the glass Pleasant Valley milk bottles in that nearly walk-in refrigerator. The Mosses? They must be on Kevin's list of last damned people, along with a lot of others.
The Observatory Hill branch of the Cambridge Public Library is located on Concord Avenue almost directly across from my house, in one corner of the new Harvard town-house complex. Rita had let me borrow one of Elaine Walsh's books. I checked out another. I read some more of what Elaine had written about marriage. I tried to read from Sheila Moss's point of view. And, little as I knew it, from Ben Moss's.
It was necessary, Elaine wrote, for men to become, at most, incidental to women's lives. For a woman to occupy the center of her own life, men had to move—or be shoved—to the periphery. Presence was power, Elaine thought. To gain power, women had to accept anger and destruction and to use both. More than other feminists I'd read (not many), she seemed to have little patience with women who were trying to work out compromises between the past and the future. If I'd been Sheila Moss, I thought, I'd have felt scorned. And Ben Moss? From what Kevin had said, Ben Moss had probably thought she was a hellcat.
17
"Did you know Elaine Walsh?" Sheila Moss was holding a carton of Pleasant Valley cottage cheese.
I must have jumped. "Yes. Not too well. I'd just met her."
A few unsubtle questions to Jim, the milkman, had let me time my visit to Sheila Moss to coincide with the Pleasant Valley delivery. I don't think Jim noticed anything, though. By this time, questions about his customers' consumption of cottage cheese must have sounded as novel as "Hot enough for you?" The pretext for my visit was to take some photos of the Ridgeback, Id, who was curled up in a giant wheaten knot, asleep on the linoleum. The dog and the floor could both have used soap and water. Sheila was stowing the Pleasant Valley delivery in a scratched avocado refrigerator plastered with nonrepresentational finger paintings that curled stiffly at the edges. At the bottom of the refrigerator door, someone had used multicolored magnetic alphabet letters to spell out "Josh Moss is a shit." The Mosses must have believed in letting their children express themselves.
"Well," said Sheila, "the oddest thing about Elaine's death was that Elaine really did not like cottage cheese." She was on her knees cramming nearly every kind of product Jim sold into the open refrigerator, shoving six half-gallon glass bottles of milk onto the top shelf and jamming yogurt, sour cream, and a couple of the one-pound cartons of cottage cheese on top of foil-wrapped dishes on the lower shelves. I'd already watched her stash three gallons of ice cream in the freezing compartment. "She didn't like any of this stuff," Sheila added, pointing to the cartons. "Yogurt. White food."
"You know what surprised me?" I said. "I guess I was surprised that she was cooking anything. Somehow, I didn't think of Elaine as somebody who'd cook. She didn't seem domestic. I guess I would've thought she'd live on Lean Cuisine."
"You're wrong," Sheila said. She wore a dashiki over an un-ironed denim skirt, and red wool socks under the Birkenstock sandals. The hair on her legs was long and dark. "She believed in self-sufficiency, independence. Really, if you ask me, she was something of an isolationist. She wrote about it somewhere. Cooking, I mean."
"A cookbook?" New Ways with Prairie Oysters? But, of course, I'm too much of a lady to have spoken the words.
Sheila laughed. "No. She wasn't that great a cook. It was something about women not taking care of themselves, not feeling worth the trouble. That women cook for men and children, and if we're alone, we don't bother, as if we're not people who need, or maybe deserve, to be fed and nurtured. If we don't have somebody else to take care of, we don't take care of ourselves. But she cooked with it? It was in something? That makes more sense, I guess. Fruit salad?"
"Some kind of casserole. Something like lasagna."
"Where did you hear that?"
"Someone told me."
"Huh. You know, she bought it for the dog. When I heard how she died, my first thought was someone had tried to kill her dog, not her."
"Really?"
"Yes. Ben and I both wondered. He and Elaine were very close friends, you know."
To cover my discomfort, I reached down and rubbed the comatose Ridgeback's velvety head. He didn't wake up.
Sheila went on. "Ben has a lot of women friends. I call them his harem." She laughed. "But Elaine was the closest of all. Actually, it was a bit of a problem for me. You want some coffee? It's caffeinated. It's one of the things I live on."
"Sure," I said.
> A Mr. Coffee machine spattered with off-white bits of dried batter and whipped cream, I guess, sat on one of the counters. Like everything else in the kitchen, it was surrounded by stacks of opened mail, magazines, newspapers, leaflets, new plastic toys, mixing bowls, paper bags, and the artwork of untalented children. Sheila filled one of the chipped pottery mugs for herself and another for me.
"Sugar?" she offered.
"Please."
I should have said no. She located an empty sugar canister and an empty sugar bowl and had to search through a couple of crammed cupboards before she found a whole-food product called Sucanat. "It's not exactly like sugar," she said apologetically as she put the box on the table and finally sat down, "but it's not too bad. It's very sweet."
Sweet? It tastes like saccharine-laced molasses, but I guess you have to suffer to be natural.
"Anyway," Sheila continued, "Elaine was so active. And she and Ben were always after me to do something with the women's movement. And to read more." She reached over to a counter and pulled out what looked like a thin tabloid newspaper. "Like this. The Women's Review of Books. Ben gave it to me for Christmas." She sounded arch.
Cambridge has a lot of men like that. Twenty years ago, I'll bet, the ones like that took their dates to an antiwar rally and a Black Panther breakfast instead of to the theater and a restaurant. Now they whisper in your ear about doing their fair share of the housework, and instead of sending long-stemmed roses, they send you a gift subscription to Off Our Backs.
Sheila continued. "And I did look at the first issue, but I haven't even had a chance to open the others. The problem is, really, that I'm not very organized."
"But you have an awful lot to do," I said. "You've got your job and the children and the dog and the house and everything."
"Some people manage," she said. "Or it seems to me that they do."
Car doors slammed, and I heard the sound of high-pitched voices outside.
"There they are," Sheila said. "Now, if the cat will just show up, you'll be all set."
The pretext for my visit was a photo of the Ridgeback with the Moss children and the family cat. Sheila had told me that the dog and the cat were such good friends that they often curled up and slept together. It had seemed to me, so far, that sleeping was Id's almost exclusive activity, but as the voices grew closer, he slowly raised his head and thumped his long tail on the floor in what was evidently, for him, a drumbeat of excitement. Then he rose slowly and padded to the door.