by Susan Conant
“Right. It isn’t my business. It’s merely my profession. I deal with it all day long. Do you at least have any wine in the house? Crackers and cheese?”
“There’s a bottle of white burgundy in the refrigerator. And some cheddar. And I do have crackers.” Rita’s words bit into me. The wine was a present from Steve. The cheese was what I used to train the dogs.
When Steve returned, he uncorked the bottle. Rita put the cheese and some crackers on a plate. All three of us drank the wine, but only Rita nibbled on the cheese and crackers.
“So what’s going on?” Steve asked.
Feeling selfish and guilty, I outlined everything I knew about Professor Foley’s death and most of what I suspected about its tie to Jack Andrew’s murder.
“The police are treating it as a homicide?” he asked.
“Well,” I said, “they’re at least treating it as an unexplained death. They didn’t really tell me anything, though. That,” I said, glaring at Rita, “is why I need to talk to Kevin.”
With a cool little smile, she said, “He’ll be back in a week.”
“There’s enough gruesome mystery already about this whole business,” I snapped. “There’s no need for you to go around deliberately mystifying—”
“I beg your pardon! I am merely respecting a confidence.”
“Kevin is having an affair with someone! And he doesn’t want his mother to find out. Who? And how did he happen to tell you?”
Rita’s face was blank.
“With a woman of color! His mother will have a fit! Or is she Jewish? She’s not Christian, she’s older than he is, she drinks, and she eats meat! I’ve got it! He’s fallen in love with an elderly alcoholic kosher butcher! Mrs. Dennehy will—”
Rita remained impassive. “Have you ever considered writing novels? It sometimes strikes me that fiction is your strong suit.”
“If you recall, I’m a colonial historian.”
Steve refilled Rita’s wineglass. To me he said, “Let me get a few things straight. The position of the body.”
“Exactly like in that crime-scene shot of Jack Andrew’s body. Facedown. Twisted. Arm stretched out. All the rest. And, of course, the cup of coffee.”
Steve was skeptical. “There are only so many ways to fall down.”
“True,” I conceded.
“The coffee could be incidental. It might have nothing to do with—”
“It wasn’t incidental in Jack Andrews’s death. It was laced with sodium fluoroacetate. And that’s not exactly what I call—”
“Where have I just heard of that?” Rita asked. “Or maybe read about it?”
“I might have mentioned it,” I said. “It’s what killed Jack Andrews. Or what was used to kill him. It’s rat poison. Well, it’s not ordinary rat poison. It’s a banned substance now because it’s so dangerous. It’s colorless, odorless—”
Rita raised her wineglass. “Got it! It’s in the book I’m reading. Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. It’s about Savannah. It’s full of strange characters, but one of them has a bottle or whatever of sodium fluoroacetate. What he talks about is putting it in the water supply and wiping out the entire populace.”
“And does he do it?” I asked.
“Obviously not,” Rita said. “Savannah is still there.”
“I thought you were talking about a novel,” I said. “The book is nonfiction?”
“Well, the names have been changed, but the story is supposed to be true. I keep wondering how much really is, though. A lot of it is so bizarre that it’s a little hard to believe. I wondered whether this bit about the poison could possibly be true.”
Steve spoke authoritatively. “If it’s sodium fluoroacetate, almost none goes a long, long way.”
Rita drank some wine. “A bottleful could poison a city?”
Steve smiled. “Depends on the size of the bottle.”
Rita emptied her glass. “Mr. Science strikes again.”
He really had, too. My direct tactics had entirely failed to persuade Rita to divulge Kevin’s whereabouts. Steve had just kept refilling Rita’s wineglass. Before she revealed Kevin’s true whereabouts, she swore us to secrecy. “If either of you so much as whispers a word to Kevin about this—”
“Never,” Steve promised.
“Not a word,” I vowed. “Who is she?”
“She,” Rita whispered, as if Kevin might overhear, “is something I’ve been trying to talk him into for a long time.” Rita, for once, put her elbows on the table and leaned forward. “He has finally decided to do something about his chronic occupational stress.”
“Sex therapy!” I exclaimed.
Rita looked put out. “Don’t be ridiculous!”
“What makes you think he needs sex therapy?” Steve demanded of me.
“Damn it, Rita! Where is he?”
For the sake of drama, I am sure, she let a few moments of silence fall before she spoke. Her voice was low and intense. “Kevin Dennehy,” she announced, “is spending the week at a stress reduction workshop in the Berkshires. He is at this very moment at a retreat in the hills of western Massachusetts communing with Nature, and I forbid both of you to utter a single word to him about it or you’ll destroy all my hard work. This is something that’s crucial to his physical and mental well-being, and it has taken me more than a year to talk him into it.”
“She has been trying,” I informed Steve. “That’s true. I can’t believe he’s really done it. Is this the place where you go around tracking raccoon spoor?”
“It’s an ashram,” Rita replied defensively. “It combines meditation and breathing exercises with seminars about lifestyle changes. As I understand it, it does involve hikes in the woods.”
“Rita,” I said, “Kevin is a city kid. He’s afraid of trees.”
Steve agreed. “He sees a tree, he sees a mugger lurking behind it.”
“Precisely why he needs this week,” Rita said smugly. “He’ll return a new man. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going back upstairs.”
After she left, Steve said, “I’m going to Rialto. You coming or not?”
“You canceled the reservation.”
“I’m going to sit in the bar and drink. Alone.”
“Give me two minutes to change my clothes.” I hesitated. “If you want company.”
He did.
CHAPTER 19
On Saturday morning, afiter Steve had lefit fior his clinic and I’d finished such daily chores as vacuuming up dog hair and washing my own, I made a fresh pot of coffee and covered my kitchen table with every bit of material I’d gathered about Jack Andrews’s murder: Jack’s obituary, Shaun McGrath’s, the photographs Claudia had given me, the notes I’d made about my conversation with Brat Andrews, the Violet Wish portrait of Chip, Randall Carey’s book with the chapter about the murder, and the list of people I’d phoned to inquire about the mysterious Tracy—that tall girl, as everyone called her—who’d handled Jack’s show dogs. On the kind of yellow legal pad to which every real writer is addicted, I jotted notes about Gareth Andrews’s mad rambling: rats, dead and alive, their sharp teeth, the stench of death, Claudia, Oscar Fisch, the recovery movement, “Uncle” George Foley, and John Winter Andrews, who, in his son’s deranged mind, now and forever drank rat poison, yet did not die.
The surviving members of Jack’s family, I thought, had told me all they were willing or, in Gareth’s case, able to relate: Even if I ignored Oscar Fisch’s plea to stop “harassing” Claudia (and her child, too, of course), I’d probably learn nothing new. Had Claudia, in fact, stolen the library copies of Mass. Mayhem? Breaking into her house on Francis Avenue, I decided, wasn’t worth the risk. There was probably an elaborate alarm system, and I was a dog writer, not a cat burglar; I’d certainly get caught. Brat, I felt convinced, had said everything she intended to say. As to Gareth, I had no illusion that I could distinguish between his delusions and whatever more-or-less accurate memories he retained. It occurred to me, however, that if Gar
eth had been on Fayerweather Street near the time of Professor Foley’s death, whenever that was, his purple parka and aqua backpack—never mind his behavior—would’ve made him memorable. As one more odd duck paddling and quacking in Harvard Square, Gareth might be easy to overlook; near Governor Weld’s house, however, there’d be watchers on guard for just such rare birds. Oscar Fisch clearly didn’t want to talk to me. Randall Carey claimed to remember no more than he’d written in a book ten years earlier. Despite extensive efforts, I’d had no luck in tracing the untraceable tall Tracy, whose short brown hair might now be long and gray, and who might have switched from golden retrievers to black-and-tan coonhounds, Kerry blue terriers, or no dogs at all.
I again phoned the McGraths, who still hadn’t returned my call. This time, I got an answer. The voice was a woman’s.
“Shirley McGrath?” I asked.
“Yes.”
The names in the phone directory, I reminded myself, corresponded to the names given for Shaun’s parents in his obituary. Eighteen years ago, Shaun’s parents had lived in Arlington. This Shirley McGrath lived there, too. She must be Shaun’s mother. If not, I was about to make a real fool of myself. “My name is Holly Winter. I’m a writer. I’m doing a story about the murder of Jack Andrews.” I heard a sharp intake of breath. I went on. “I believe that Shaun was innocent.”
I listened to about ten seconds of silence. Then the woman said, “We never discuss Shaun.” She tried to be polite: She said good-bye before she hung up.
“Damn!” I told the dogs. “And damn Kevin Dennehy and his stupid ashram!” I still found it hard to believe that Kevin had, as he’d have phrased it, fallen into the clutches of the Eastern brain snatchers. Kevin’s idea of meditation, for heaven’s sake, was to contemplate the depths of a can of Budweiser. Not that his work was exactly relaxing. I mean, you can see how the prospect of getting shot would fray someone’s nerves after a while. But if Kevin needed to reconnect himself to Nature, why had he listened to Rita instead of me? I could just picture beefy Kevin out in the Berkshires eating brown rice and kelp with a bunch of turban-wearing omchanters or trailing through the icy forest after some beatifically smiling back-to-the-woods fanatic in quest of inner peace in the hoofprints and dung of a white-tailed deer. Not that I object to Nature. Well, admittedly, I hate brown rice, I’d just as soon eat clamshells as seaweed, and you won’t catch me swathing my head in bedsheets, but there’s nothing wrong with inner peace. And as for animals both wild and domestic—rats excepted—my unbridled looniness speaks for itself, doesn’t it? The mere sight of Rowdy and Kimi brings a beatific smile to my face, and, more to the point, to Kevin Dennehy’s. So why did he have to go and listen to Rita? Why, oh why, didn’t he just get a dog?
Turning to a fresh sheet of yellow legal pad, I went through the chapter in Randall Carey’s book in search of the names of people I might have overlooked. I came up with only two: Ursula Pappas, Jack’s secretary, who’d been in Greece when he’d been murdered, and Estelle Grant, described as a typist who had overheard a quarrel between Shaun McGrath and Jack Andrews. Secretary. Typist. Eighteen years had passed since Jack’s murder. Now, Ms. Pappas would be called an administrative assistant. By now, she could be the CEO of a publishing house in Athens. In the years since Jack’s murder, Ms. Grant had probably forgotten how to shift the carriage of a typewriter. Her name could be changed or, Cambridge being Cambridge, hyphenated. She could be anywhere. Both women could be as elusive as “that tall girl.”
I never found out where Ursula Pappas ended up. According to the ever-useful phone book, however, Estelle Grant lived in Cambridgeport. Yes, she informed me, she was the same Estelle Grant who’d worked at Damned Yankee Press. She’d been temping there when Shaun McGrath poisoned Jack Andrews. She’d been filling in for someone who’d been on vacation in Greece. Temp work, Estelle volunteered, was still her day job. Now, she was polishing the novel she’d been drafting eighteen years ago. As a matter of fact, she’d incorporated Jack’s murder in the plot. I told her that I, too, was a writer. She offered to let me read her book.
Like every other professional writer, I don’t have time to read my own unpublished manuscripts, never mind other people’s. Furthermore, other people’s unpublished fiction is usually even worse than mine. The characters are often flat. Worse, most of them are human. And when they’re canine? If you love dogs, even under the best of published circumstances, you hardly dare to turn a page because, in book after book, your favorite characters are always getting disemboweled, drowned, or run over, often by the end of the third chapter, and there you are broken-hearted with a few hundred pages still to go with nothing but people, people, people. Anyway, in Estelle Grant’s case I made an exception. I’d love to read her manuscript, I said. I didn’t ask whether there were any dogs in her book. If so, I could always skip to the end to make sure they were still alive.
I invited Estelle to have lunch with me in the Square, but she pulled what I now see as a fast one on me. She claimed to be busy, but offered to let me pick up the manuscript. Cambridge has at least as many unpublished writers as it does psychotherapists, perhaps more. There’s a connection there: The would-be writers who aren’t published because they can’t get the words out go into treatment for writer’s block, and the prolifically unpublished get driven mad in a whole variety of different ways. Some find themselves stuck in the neurotic dilemma of being so terrified of rejection that they won’t let anyone read their work. Others overcome the fear, only to discover that, contrary to what their therapists promised, it was all too realistic after all. They get rejections from agents that consist of nothing but their own query letters with “No!” scrawled in the margin. Self-esteem plummets. Prozac time! Back to the shrink!
Meanwhile, the poor shrink has succumbed to an occupational hazard almost as dire as getting shot: Sooner or later, the therapist, too, decides to write a book, and, being a Cambridge therapist, starts off not by sitting at a desk or keyboard but by consulting another Cambridge therapist about fears of self-revelation and inadequacy, and ends up hiring a writing tutor, who turns out to be another therapist’s patient, in other words, an unpublished writer frantic to earn a living.
Expert that I am on this subject, I quickly diagnosed Estelle Grant as having reached the stage of conniving desperation that writers attain when they discover that even their own mothers can’t be persuaded to read their books. Until I plowed through Estelle Grant’s manuscript, she wouldn’t tell me a damned thing about Damned Yankee Press. I could hear the deal in Estelle’s voice. I agreed to fetch the book.
She lived on a narrow, car-lined street of rickety asbestos-shingled three-family houses a few blocks from the river. Even before the year’s first snowstorm, two of her neighbors had staked their claims to on-street parking. One spot was marked by three official-looking orange traffic cones selected, I thought, to create the impression that a parking-spot thief would be placed under immediate citizen’s arrest. The other was occupied by two battered and bent aluminum folding lawn chairs that effectively suggested a history of having been smashed over the heads of unwise drivers who’d failed to respect the significance of the resident snow-shoveler’s territorial claim. No fool, I double-parked, dashed up the tumbledown stairs to Estelle’s shaky little front porch, and rang a bell labeled with four names, one of which was hers. The door was opened immediately by a woman wearing black tights and what I assumed was a formerly tunic-length blue-patterned wool sweater that had been misguidedly washed in hot water and consequently made its wearer look as if she’d absentmindedly forgotten to put on a skirt. Even if Estelle hadn’t introduced herself, I’d have known who she was: She answered the door with a thick manuscript in hand. Purring on Estelle’s shoulder was a tricolor kitten that chewed on her long, thin, wavy brown hair while kneading the shrunken sweater with its paws. The kitten was adorable. Estelle was scrawny and had the kind of pale, sickly-looking skin that I associate with people who work in health food stores and subsist on
mung beans, strips of dried seaweed, and other foreign objects that would make a dog throw up.