Animal Appetite

by Susan Conant

  After a while, though, Claudia, in what may have been a peculiar effort to include me in the conversation, returned to the topic of her first husband’s murder. By then, she’d learned that I train dogs. “We were supposed to believe that Jack committed suicide,” she announced. “We were meant to. And at first we did. But Shaun made one major error!”

  “Shaun McGrath,” Professor Foley murmured. “Jack’s partner. Died before he went to trial. Never even arrested.”

  “His murderer!” Claudia corrected fiercely, as if Professor Foley had declared Shaun McGrath innocent. “Jack had a dog, you see,” she continued in the tone appropriate to proclaiming that the dead man had doted on a pet tarantula. “And the dog went everywhere with him. Everywhere! But when Jack was alone in his office, the dog was always running around loose. It was only when Jack had someone else there that he tied it up.”

  I nodded.

  “To keep it from bothering people.”

  I nodded again.

  “And that’s how we eventually realized that Jack hadn’t committed suicide.”

  “Yes?” I asked.

  “He’d been murdered!” Claudia again proclaimed. “We knew! Shaun tried to disguise it as suicide, but we knew! We knew someone else had been there! Because when we found Jack’s body, the dog was still tied to his desk.”

  “Oh,” I said. Then, without censoring what must have sounded like an odd query, I asked the question that’s a reflex with me: “What breed of dog was it?”

  Claudia blinked.

  I clarified: “What kind of dog?”

  “A golden retriever,” she answered, raising her hand and pointing a finger in a manner that reminded me of the statue of Hannah Duston. “It was a golden retriever.”

  My parents raised golden retrievers. I, Holly Winter, grew up with the breed. Jack Winter Andrews. A golden. Claudia’s Hannah-like gesture felt like the finger of fate. The finger pointed directly at me.

  Claudia brandished an empty fork. “Everyone knew. There was no mystery about it. As soon as we saw that it was murder, we knew immediately that it had to be Shaun McGrath.”

  “It’s common knowledge,” said Oscar Fisch.

  “Written up,” Professor Foley commented. “Chapter in a book.”

  Claudia almost leaped on him. “A dreadful book! Written by the prototype of the pompous ass!”

  “All I meant, my dear Claudia, was that Shaun McGrath had been identified in print.” Professor Foley paused. “Not that it matters at all.”

  “Certainly not,” said Oscar Fisch. “The man was undoubtedly guilty. In any case, one can’t libel the dead.”

  CHAPTER 3

  The canine press abounds with stories ofi dogs that detect drugs or arson, rouse trauma victims from comas, or entice children from autistic states. Dog’s Life alone must have published two dozen articles about family pets that awakened households when the smoke alarms failed, valiant canines who dragged sleeping infants from flame-licked cribs. In revealing Jack Andrews’s apparent suicide as murder, however, his golden retriever had served humankind in what struck me as a fresh and publishable way. I should be able to whip off a little piece about the heroic golden in no time at all. Hannah Duston represented a radical career change; dog writing was my real métier. Until people writing started to pay off, I couldn’t afford to quit my day job, not yet.

  On Sunday, the day after Marsha’s bat mitzvah, I checked the phone book for Claudia and found her listed (“Andrews-Howe, Claudia & Oscar Fisch”) on Francis Avenue in Cambridge. Our Fair City, as it’s known, has two fancy neighborhoods. The famous one, the area surrounding Brattle Street, is only a few blocks from my house, but on the patrician side of Huron Avenue. Francis Avenue and the other streets that begin at Kirkland and run back toward the American Academy of Arts and Sciences are a sort of quiet version of Off Brattle. The houses are just as discreetly immense, the vegetation just as lush, the residents just as reliably university-affiliated, and the walk to Harvard just as short as from high-traffic Brattle Street. Furthermore, there’s no disguising the monied exclusivity of Brattle Street; but from Francis Avenue, it’s only a couple of blocks to a decidedly working-class section of Somerville, so if you’re both very rich and very egalitarian, you can take comfort in your proximity to those who work with their hands.

  When I reached Claudia and asked how she’d feel about my writing up the story of Jack and his revelatory dog, I made the mistake of saying “heroic,” and she churlishly pointed out that the dog hadn’t actually done anything at all, really. Rather, in remaining tied to the desk, the dog had been nothing more than a piece of passive evidence. My readers would not object, I assured her. Did I have her permission to write the story? I did. We made an appointment for eleven o’clock the next morning at her office. She promised to bring a photograph of Jack and, if she could find one, a picture of his dog, too.

  Claudia’s office was on Appian Way, only a few blocks from Harvard Square, in Larsen Hall, a peculiar-looking mid-sixties fortress with high, blank walls of red brick and, except in a sunken courtyard, almost no windows. The architect’s message, as I read it, was that at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, one had definitively arrived and thus need look nowhere else. The design did, I suppose, minimize hard feelings about who got stuck with offices in the interior of the building. Claudia’s was an airless beige cube to which she’d added personal touches evidently selected to create the illusion that she worked in Santa Fe. Woven into the red-patterned ethnic rug was a faded yellow motif of what looked like interlocked swastikas. A Hopi pot on her desk held pens and pencils. On one wall hung a large framed poster of a desert landscape with prickly pears in bloom. There wasn’t a toy in sight. Go to any canine training center you like, any dog show, any small-animal veterinarian’s office, and take a wild guess at what the decorations depict, usually in bewildering number and variety. The objects in my own home-office are precisely what you’d expect: a gold-framed copy of Senator Vest’s Eulogy on the Dog; photographs of Rowdy, Kimi, and my late goldens; snapshots of dogs sent by people who read my column; ribbons and trophies; and, on top of a bookshelf, a wooden urn containing the ashes of my last golden retriever, Vinnie, with a leather collar fastened around it and a little brass plate that bears her name and the years of her birth and death. Nothing in Claudia’s office, however, even remotely suggested an interest in children. Not that I expected cremated remains.

  The door to her office had been open when I arrived. When I tapped lightly and entered, Claudia looked up from her computer, removed her glasses, and gestured to a hard plastic chair by her desk. “My office hours,” she said. “We may be interrupted.” She wore a one-piece khaki safari outfit, a sort of boilersuit, and a necklace strung with such heavy-looking chunks of polished rock that the giant-size bottle of ibuprofen next to her keyboard made sense. Her long gray-streaked hair was held back by the same barrette I’d noticed at the bat mitzvah. The style is popular among women handlers: The clump of hair above the barrette provides a convenient place to stash the comb needed for last-minute touch-ups on the dog. I didn’t say so to Claudia. Just as my mother taught me, I made no personal remarks. I’ll tell you, though, that the bright overhead lights were unkind to Claudia’s face. The skin under her eyes was bluish, and deep lines cut her mouth and chin off from the rest of her face, as if her lower jaw were hinged in the manner of a marionette’s.

  I sat. “Thank you for seeing me. I guess my request must have seemed a little strange.”

  She shrugged. Her left hand opened and closed as if she were kneading a fat lump of putty.

  The contrast with the driven volubility she’d shown at the bat mitzvah was so sharp that I felt ill at ease. I pulled a steno pad and pen out of my purse, settled into the chair as best I could, and smiled. “I wonder if you could tell me what happened.”

  She cleared her throat. “Jack was a publisher. He ran a small press. In Cambridge. Damned. Yankee Press. They did travel guides. New England guides
. Books on the Alcotts, Lexington and Concord, Paul Revere. Before personal computers were, uh, fashionable, before the computer revolution hit, when it was just beginning, Jack saw the potential, especially for small presses, not only for the actual publishing but for direct marketing, mail order, all that sort of thing.” Claudia looked not at me but at her keyboard. She cleared her throat. “So at that point, he got connected with this dreadful little moon-faced man, Shaun McGrath, who was billed as some kind of computer whiz.” She transferred her gaze to me. “But what Shaun McGrath was, was a mindless technocrat! A complete philistine. He’d gone to some little business college, and . . . Jack himself was an acquisitions editor, really. His grasp of the business side of things wasn’t what it could have been. So he ended up taking in this sleazy little person! And somehow or other, McGrath talked Jack into signing a life insurance policy with himself as the beneficiary!”

  I nodded. “So that’s how you suspected—”

  “We did not suspect! We knew! Once we learned about the insurance policy, we put it together with the dog and the desk, and it was perfectly obvious. The police knew, too. Everyone did. It couldn’t have been anyone else. Everyone loved Jack. And it had to be someone who worked there.” I raised my eyebrows.

  “They’d had rats in the building.”

  When I was growing up, the local dump had rats. Remarkably enough, even after it became a sanitary landfill, it still had rats. Until a few months earlier, I’d never seen one anywhere else, unless you counted a few ailing white rats in cages in Steve’s waiting room. My own neighborhood, however, was now experiencing what The Boston Globe called a “rat invasion,” a sudden and occasionally visible proliferation apparently attributable to construction on Huron Avenue, where a new water main and gas line were being installed. In Owls Head, Maine, target-shooting rats was a socially acceptable, if gruesome, local sport. As a new Cambridge pastime, however, it had all the promise of pre-Columbian proto-soccer played with a human head. We’d been warned not to poison the rats, either. Cambridge being Cambridge, we were probably supposed to conduct an ethological study of rodent behavior in a natural urban environment.

  “Rats,” I echoed.

  Claudia nodded. “Jack foolishly decided to deal with the problem himself. He got hold of this horrible, very powerful poison. Everyone knew it was there—everyone at the press. And Shaun McGrath laced Jack’s coffee with it. He planted a couple of letters that purported to be suicide notes. But when we found the dog tied to the desk, well, that was the first hint we had. Once we saw that, we realized that Jack couldn’t possibly have been there alone.”

  “He always took his dog to work?”

  “Always.”

  “This was a golden retriever.”

  “Yes.”

  I wished she’d expand. I had the sense that without the audience she’d played to at Marsha’s bat mitzvah, she’d lost interest in dramatizing the murder.

  I prompted, “A male?”

  Claudia nodded.

  “And what was the dog’s name?”

  She looked startled. When she ran a finger slowly back and forth over her lips, I saw that her nails were chewed to the quick. “Skip,” she finally said.

  “And what happened to him?” It goes without saying, I hope, that I meant the dog.

  “Oh, everyone knew he was guilty, but before the police could arrest him, he ran his car into a tree. He was killed instantly.”

  Reluctantly shifting my mental gears back to Shaun McGrath, I asked, “Suicide?”

  “No, there were dozens of witnesses. It was on Memorial Drive, actually, only a few blocks from here. He was driving a convertible. He was speeding, and he wasn’t wearing a seat belt. He swerved to avoid something and ran head on into one of those trees by the river.”

  “And when did this happen?”

  “Eighteen years ago. Almost to the day.”

  “Do you remember the exact date when . . . ?”

  “Jack died on November fourth. It was a Monday. Monday evening. He didn’t come home, and I ended up going over there. And that’s when we found him. Monday, November fourth.”

  A tap sounded on the door. Claudia sighed. “Office hours. Come in!”

  A young woman’s head appeared.

  “Another two minutes, Cynthia!” Claudia told her. “I’ll be right with you.” Fishing around in a canvas tote bag crammed with books and file folders, Claudia produced a manila envelope. Thrusting it at me, she said, “The pictures I promised you. Is that everything?”

  “Just one last thing. Skip?”

  Claudia looked puzzled.

  “The dog,” I reminded her. “I wondered whatever became of the dog.”

  “Oh,” Claudia said blithely, “I found him a good home.” After thanking her for her help and accepting her assurance that I could call if I had any questions, I departed. I took the elevator to the first floor. Among the various notices taped to its walls was one that advertised a career panel for Ed School women about balancing career and family. One of the four speakers would be Associate Professor Claudia Andrews-Howe. I’d never even asked whether she and Jack had had children. She hadn’t mentioned any.

  When I got outside, the wind tunnel around Larsen Hall was roaring, and a cold rain had started to fall. Instead of going home on foot, I walked to Garden Street and caught the bus, which was almost empty. Seated alone, I removed my gloves and opened the big manila envelope Claudia had given me. I was eager to see Skip. And Jack Winter Andrews, too, of course. The top photo in the pile was what I took to be a college graduation picture. It showed a handsome, affably smiling young man whose character was not written on his face. He bore no resemblance, I might mention, to me or to any of my paternal relatives. So far as I know, there’s not a single cleft chin in our lines, or if there is, it gets obscured by the Yankee lantern jaw that Jack Andrews had lacked. Also, mainly because of the thick eyebrows that predominate on my father’s side of the family, he and his kin appear far more ferocious than affable.

  Next, a blurry Polaroid showed an older version of the same pleasant-looking man with his arm around a woman I recognized as Claudia. Then, in a family picture taken by an amateur, Jack, Claudia, and two children posed against a background of rhododendrons. The boy was ten, perhaps, the girl four or five years his junior. Jack’s hands rested on the little girl’s shoulders. Her head was tilted backward, Jack’s downward: Father and daughter exchanged grins? Jack and the little girl were on the left, Claudia in the middle, and the boy on the right, next to Claudia, but his shoulders were angled away from her and he wore a grimace. He looked ready to flee the family group.

  The photograph on the bottom of the pile made me catch my breath. It was larger than the others, in sharp focus, and shot from close up. A man’s body lay awkwardly sprawled facedown on a wood floor. The legs were twisted. The right arm was extended, its fingers bent. Beyond the hand, a coffee mug lay in a puddle of liquid.

  Claudia Andrews-Howe had given me a crime-scene shot of Jack Andrews’s dead body.

  CHAPTER 4

  Ever heard ofi McLean Hospital? Well, ifi you happen to be a famous Cambridge poet, a rock star, a billionaire novelist, or a Harvard professor, and if you also happen to have cracked up, it’s probably where you went to get patched together. McLean is in the Boston suburb of Belmont, conveniently close to Cambridge, and in the days before managed health care, the hospital looked like a cross between an exclusive country club and a ritzy college: golf course, riding stables, the whole bit. Rita, who did her internship at McLean, went out there recently for a conference about a patient. She returned sighing about such sad signs of decline as peeling paint on the woodwork and weeds in the gravel paths. Hard physical work, I reminded her, was excellent therapy. If the stables and putting greens were no more, the patients need not languish in idle madness, but could be put to work scraping paint and pulling crabgrass, thus building sound minds in sound bodies.