Distemper

by Beth Saulnier

  That night I was trying a new recipe for diavolo sauce, which, as the name implies, is hot as hell. I’m physically incapable of cooking for less than twenty people, so I’d quadrupled the recipe. This meant four full heads of garlic and eight teaspoons of dried pepper flakes. I tested the pasta to make sure it was done and had Mad pull the strainer out and shake off the excess water, since my left wrist was still out of commission. He mixed it up with the sauce, put it on the counter with a stack of bowls and silverware, and grabbed the six loaves of garlic bread out of the oven with his bare hands, as oven mitts are for wimps.

  “Thanks for helping.”

  “Emma says chicks think cooking is sexy.”

  “I see.” I went over to the far side of the living room and yelled that the food was ready. This kitchen is way smaller than my last one, and I learned the hard way that once the hordes start coming in, there’s no getting out until they’re done. Everybody made for the food so fast the house practically tilted. Along with all three of my female housemates, there was Melissa, a Monitor photographer who likes to shoot things from weird tilty angles, which makes them art; the Dixie-born business writer, Marshall, and his wife, Charlotte, who is presently out-to-here pregnant; the two guys who make up O’Shaunessey’s entire sports staff; Wendell, the photo editor, who spends most of his time at the local Buddhist temple but occasionally eats with us if we promise to cook vegan; Maggie, who just got promoted to anchor for the local TV news but would give a major organ for a slave job at CNN; a couple of radio reporters; and various interns, spouses, and significant others.

  Okay, it was a mob scene. But it was my mob scene.

  Everybody eventually settled throughout the living room, and those who got stuck on the floor had to eat with one hand and fend off dogs with the other. Shortly thereafter most of them were begging for Kleenex and gulping down their wine. I was wondering if maybe I’d put just an eensy bit too much pepper in when the doorbell rang and Marci got up to get it. The dogs glanced back and forth between the door and the food and decided to stick with a sure thing.

  “Hey, where’s Junior?” I asked. “Anybody seen him? Don’t tell me he’s bailed already.”

  “Man, he better not,” O’Shaunessey said. “He lasts six more days, I’m up three hundred bucks.”

  “Right, but if he lasts two weeks, I’m up three hundred bucks,” said Melissa, who’s way less sweet than she looks. “And since I started the pool, it seems only fair.”

  “Flag on the play,” O’Shaunessey said, and threw his napkin at her. “The fix is in. Clearly.”

  “Nah,” Mad said. “He’s still back at the joint. Bill’s got him working on some goddamn timeline, history of homicides in Walden County or some crap. Probably never run it. He’s just trying to torture the kid. Says it’s for his own good.”

  Melissa snorted. “Right. Twelve hours down in the morgue. That’s bound to teach him something. If the rats don’t get him, the asbestos will.”

  “Who was that at the door?” I asked Marci when she got back.

  She shrugged. “Some old man. He had the wrong house. I think he may have been looking for whoever lived here before us.”

  “You mean the biker fraternity?”

  “Well, no, probably the people before them. He said he hadn’t been back in a while. I offered to let him use the phone but he said he didn’t want to disturb us.”

  “So screw ‘em,” O’Shaunessey said cheerfully. “Who’s for seconds?”

  All our Thursday night dinners have one thing in common: you know they’re over when we run out of booze. It’s a good thing Friday is recycling day, or we’d spend the rest of the week tripping over empties. That night, the party broke up around eleven, which is on the early side. Mad usually sticks around until I evict him, but that night he and Emma repaired to his lair at ten, presumably to act out his Princess Di fantasies.

  The guests always do the cleaning—I’m hospitable, but I’m not crazy—and I was putting away dry dishes when the doorbell rang again. I opened the door, and there under the porch light was just about the last person I would have expected.

  “First rule of home security,” said Detective Brian Cody. “Keep the front door locked.” Two of the dogs started barking and lunging at him and I told them to heel. This did no good whatsoever, so I grabbed their collars (my left wrist didn’t thank me for it) and yelled at him to come in. He was wearing jeans, ratty sneakers, and a black leather jacket over a navy Red Sox sweatshirt. It looked a lot better on him than the suits had. Then I noticed he had the Monitor folded under his arm. Uh-oh.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I promised you a security check.”

  “I thought you were sending someone.”

  “I wanted to talk to your friend Marci, get some basic information just to be safe, so I decided to come over myself.”

  “At eleven?”

  “Is it too late?”

  “Nope. I’m a night owl.”

  “Good guard dogs you’ve got there. Yours?”

  I shook my head. “That lump on the couch is mine. Her name is Shakespeare. She’s part German shepherd, part beagle. She’d play fetch with a rapist. The big black poodle is Tipsy. He belongs to my roommate Emma. The shepherd is C.A.’s. He’s a purebred, real champion stock. Her mom’s family’s really into the dog-show thing. Name’s Nanki-Poo.”

  “That’s humiliating.”

  “I know. C.A. hates it. She got him from her grandmother when the dog was already three, so there was no changing it. Believe me, she tried. I guess her grandma’s all freaky for Gilbert and Sullivan.”

  “So she named it after the fellow from The Mikado?”

  “How’d you know that?”

  “My mom’s all freaky for Gilbert and Sullivan.”

  “Oh.” We stared at each other for a while. I could see the outline of his gun under his sweatshirt and hoped there was nothing particularly incriminating in the living room; good thing I wasn’t wearing Adam’s HEMP IS HEAVEN T-shirt. “Are you going to come in, or would you rather just loiter here in the doorway?”

  “Loitering is underrated.”

  “Want a beer? Or are you, I don’t know, on duty or something?”

  “Thanks for the offer, but I might as well get this over with and let you get back to whatever you’re doing. Can you go get Marci? It will only take a couple minutes.”

  “It’ll take less than that. She’s not here.”

  Insert more uncomfortable silence. “I guess I should have called first. But I was on my way home from the station and I saw your lights on, so I figured I’d stop.”

  “Decent of you.”

  “No trouble. I can come back some other time.” He turned and started down the front steps.

  “You sure you don’t want a beer? We’ve got Guinness.” That stopped him.

  “I probably shouldn’t.”

  “Why not? What is it, sleeping with the enemy or something?”

  He turned around, and his cheeks were tinged the same shade of pink I’d seen in the hospital room when he took me for a tenth-grader. I wondered again how a guy this easily embarrassed had managed to get through basic training. “Ex…” He cleared his throat. “Excuse me?”

  “ ‘Sleeping with the enemy,’ you know, it’s an expression. It was a joke. A really bad one.”

  “Oh. Right.”

  “So do you want a Guinness or don’t you?”

  He cocked an eyebrow. “No strings attached?”

  “Huh?”

  “Just a beer and nothing else?”

  “What, are you afraid I’m gonna jump your bones? Those Boston chicks must be pretty hot.”

  “Come on, I didn’t mean…”

  “Oh, I get it. You’re afraid I’m going to pump you. I mean for info.”

  “Crossed my mind.”

  “Oh, Christ, Cody. I was just trying to be nice, say thanks for you coming by to protect our virtue.”

  “No digging about the case?
”

  “Not unless you want to unburden yourself.”

  “You got Guinness stout?”

  “How the hell do I know?”

  I got him a bottle out of the fridge from Emma’s private stock, and we sat on stools at the kitchen counter. “Where is everybody? I thought you lived with a whole houseful.”

  “Steve is out counting the little birdies, which is where he is most nights. Emma is disporting herself with my friend Mad, and the other two just took off for the vet library. That’s everybody.”

  “It’s good there are so many of you. Safer.”

  “I guess. What about you, Detective? Do you live alone?”

  “Yeah. And since you’re serving me the good stuff you could call me Brian.”

  “Wait, I thought you lived with your mother.”

  His bottle stopped an inch from his lips. “Now that’s a crock. Where did you hear that?”

  “Apparently from someone who didn’t know what he was talking about.”

  “For the record, I live near my mother. I do not live with my mother.”

  “It’s an important distinction.”

  “I’ll say.”

  “You know, it totally freaks me out you thought I was in high school.”

  “It was the cuts and bruises. They made you look vulnerable. The pigtails didn’t help.”

  “I have got to stop dressing like Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”

  “Who?”

  “Never mind. So I hear your wife left you.”

  “Are you always this shy?”

  “Always.”

  “Where’d you hear about my wife?”

  “Sources. Hopefully, more reliable than the other one.”

  “Well, that much is one hundred percent true.”

  “What happened? She didn’t like being a cop’s wife?”

  “No, she loved being a cop’s wife. Loved it so much, she traded up. Dumped me for my lieutenant.”

  “Isn’t that—I don’t know—unethical? On his part? Can’t he get in trouble?”

  “He might, but only if I made a stink. Which I didn’t.”

  “You just did the honorable thing and retreated to a nothing police department in the middle of nowhere.”

  “I don’t hate it here. I already told you, my mom lives in Gabriel.”

  “You didn’t grow up here, did you? You sure don’t sound like it.”

  “Me? No way. I grew up in Southie. That’s South Boston.”

  “I know what Southie is. I grew up in Western Mass. The Berkshires.”

  “Another world out there.”

  “We all root for the Yankees and plot secession.”

  “And we’d just as soon have you fall off into New York.”

  “No kidding. How did your mom end up here?”

  “After my dad died, she married a guy who got a job running the grounds department at Benson. He died last year, so she was by herself. But she had her friends here, and her church, and she didn’t want to move. So here I am.”

  “Doomed to be bored off your ass.”

  “Hardly. Not now, anyway.” He picked up the paper from where he’d dropped it on the counter. I’d assumed it was that day’s, but it turned out to be from Tuesday. My story had run above the fold under the headline POLICE IDENTIFY SECOND VICTIM. I’d filed it ten minutes before deadline Monday night, then fallen asleep on the couch in the managing editor’s office. Cody unfolded the paper and shook his head. “How the hell did you pull this off?”

  “What do you mean? How did I get you to talk?”

  “You did not ‘get’ me to talk. I did the only logical thing under the circumstances. Pissing off the local daily is very shortsighted. It feels good at the time, but when you need a favor two weeks later, it comes back to bite you on the ass. I meant, how did you get these pictures? And how did you get all these people to talk to you—her roommate, her boyfriend, her parents, for God’s sake?”

  “That’s not my story. The cop reporter wrote it.”

  “Do you think for a minute I believe that frightened adolescent wrote this?”

  “Okay, you got me. We co-wrote it. And if you really want to know, the photo on the jump page came from her high school yearbook. That’s a no-brainer. We just sent the photo intern to the local library. The one that ran on page one—that posed sort of glamour shot—we got that one from her boyfriend. He kept it in his wallet.”

  “But why do people let you invade their privacy like that? That’s what I can’t understand. If I was that poor girl’s boyfriend, I would never talk to you people in a million years.”

  “Most people think they’d feel that way. But when push comes to shove, they’d rather talk about something than just sit on it.”

  “I don’t buy it.”

  “Then maybe you’re the one person out of a hundred that can handle silence. Most of us can’t. It makes my job a lot easier. I bet it does the same thing for yours.”

  “Food for thought.”

  “Fact is, most people need to talk about themselves. Makes them feel like they’re worth something.”

  “Only if they’ve got something to prove.”

  “And you don’t?”

  “I’m not real big on spilling my guts.”

  “So why’d you tell me about your wife and all?”

  “Damn good question.” He thought about it for a minute. “I guess… because you asked so straight. Frontal assault.”

  “The best kind.”

  “But there’s a big difference between talking over a beer and spilling personal stuff to the newspaper. It’s not like my lousy marriage is going to end up in print.”

  “You hope.” He shot me a startled look. “Relax, Cody. I’m just joking. And for the record, though it’s absolutely, positively, and completely none of my business, it sounds to me like that wife of yours was a flake and a half.”

  “You’re not wrong.” He drank down the rest of his beer. “All right, let’s take a look around this place.” He got up and went straight for the front door. “What you have here is a lock so cheap any two-bit break-in artist could pick it. Which doesn’t much matter, because anyone with a brick could break the glass, reach in, and turn the latch. What you want is a Medeco lock, the kind you can deadbolt from the inside with a key. They cost a mint, but when you move out you can take it with you. And you don’t want to leave the key hanging in the lock, or you’ve defeated the purpose. Got it?” I wrote it down. He surveyed the house, and, in the end, calculated eight separate points of entry that any idiot with a stepladder and an urge to maim could use to get at us. Put security bars on the first-floor windows, he said, and plant prickly bushes underneath them. Close and lock the ones on the second floor, since it wouldn’t take much to climb the trellis to the garage roof and get in that way. Have the landlord fix the broken light fixtures outside the back door. Install motion-sensitive floodlights. Et cetera, et cetera.

  “Sounds like living in a prison.”

  “It’s living in the real world.”

  “How about you just catch this guy?”

  “We’re working on it.”

  “He’s crazy, isn’t he?”

  “I don’t believe in crazy. I believe in evil. How else do you describe someone who kills women, and leaves them lying in the woods like some sort of…”

  I thought of what I’d found on Saturday. “… sacrifice?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Do you have any leads at all?”

  “A few. And you know I can’t say anything.”

  “What if I promise to be a good little girl and keep my mouth shut?”

  “You wouldn’t know how.”

  “Look, I’m not asking you as a reporter. I’m asking you as the poor schmuck who found Patricia Marx in the goddamn woods.” I stared him right in his baby greens, and for a minute I thought he was going to open up. Fat chance.

  “I’d better get going before I say something I’ll regret later. You’re damn good at what you do. Too
good for my taste.”

  He moved toward the front door, fast enough to upset the unfortunately named Tipsy and Nanki-Poo. They lunged for him, and I grabbed them by their collars again to give him enough time to get out. After informing the dogs that they were both very bad indeed, I followed him outside and shut the door behind me. “Sorry about that,” I said, and reached out to shake his hand.

  “I don’t mind. Like I said, they’re good guard dogs.” He went to shake, but all of a sudden he grabbed my wrist and held it up to the light. For a minute I thought he was going to try some gentlemanly hand-kissing thing, but he was just trying to get a good look at my palm. He stared at it, and rubbed at the marks that were already fading.

  “What’s the deal?”

  “Which dog were you holding with your right hand?”

  “Jesus, I don’t know.” I thought about it. “It was Nanki-Poo. The German shepherd.”

  “Go get me his collar.”

  “Why?”

  “Just do me a favor and take it off him.”

  I went back in the house, took the collar off the dog, and snapped off the license tags. “Here. Now what’s going on?”

  “I’m sorry. I can’t tell you. But I’ve got to take this with me. I’ll give it back.” He started down the driveway.

  “Wait. Hold on. What am I supposed to tell C.A.?” I looked down at my hand. The marks were just faintly visible. “Oh, my God.” I ran after him. “It’s the marks on the girl’s neck. The diamond-shaped marks. She was strangled with a goddamn dog collar. Wasn’t she?”

  “I can’t talk about this.”

  “Come on.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said, and he was gone. I locked the door behind him and C.A.’s dog looked up at me, naked and wondering where his next biscuit was coming from.

  6

  “A DOG COLLAR? A MOTHERFUCKING DOG COLLAR?”

  “Ssh. Mad, for Chrissake, can you keep your voice down?”

  “Who’s gonna hear in this place?”

  “Are you kidding me? Everybody. You know better.”