by Susan Conant
“And all dressed up in her pretty red harness?” Ceci went on. “Oh, what a little sweetie pie she is!”
Ceci’s fussing over Kimi annoyed Hugh and Robert, presumably because it impeded their effort to cast Kimi in the role of Toby or Pompey. I sympathized. Did Holmes and Watson have to put up with having Mrs. Hudson or some other female ramble on about how darling and sweet and adorable their tracking dogs were? But Toby and Pompey actually were tracking dogs, whereas the chance was slight that Kimi would make a half-decent pretense of scent-discriminatory night tracking on an old, heavily contaminated trail. Kimi’s expression, however, is always intelligent, and in her red harness, she looked the part. When Ceci produced the only possession of the late Jonathan’s not confiscated by the police, a Black Watch scarf he’d left in her front hall closet, I accepted it with as diligent and serious an attitude as I could muster.
“Now, Ceci, dear,” Robert said, “when you retired to bed, Jonathan was listening to ‘Bali Hai.’”
“And drinking Ellis’s cognac,” she concurred.
“What?” The word jumped from my lips.
“Cognac,” Ceci repeated.
“No. Uh, ‘Bali Hai’? From—”
“South Pacific,” Ceci said irritably.
Let me now apologize for inflicting on you the merest mention of “Bali Hai.” It pains me to realize that the song will run through your head for the next quarter century. But, look, I had to mention “Bali Hai” because, hey, has anyone ever listened to it while snorting cocaine? Not that I’m an expert on cocaine. What I knew about it consisted mainly of what I’d read in newspapers and learned from the old Dave Van Ronk song, which was still popular in Cambridge among would-have-beens in their forties and fifties who now regretted having wasted the sixties getting their doctorates instead of making productive use of the era by smoking dope and hanging around coffeehouses in Harvard Square. Ah, the touching effort to make up for lost hipness that never was! Also, of course, I knew what Dr. Watson and Kevin Dennehy had told me. Their perspectives were a lot more like what I read in the papers than what I heard from Dave Van Ronk, who appeared to share the opinion of Sherlock Holmes. On one point, these sources agreed: An effect never attributed to the drug was anything remotely like a mad compulsion to listen to South Pacific; the eerie strains of Holmes’s violin had not foreshadowed “Bali Hai.”
“And was Jonathan drinking heavily?” Robert inquired.
Ceci bristled. “I am thoroughly tired of hearing aspersions cast on Jonathan’s character! And while we are on that subject, let me say that far from being one of those drug people the papers are always going on about, he was … Now, I’ve gone and forgotten the word for him. I was telling Mary all about him as we were fixing the guest room for him, and she told me some word the young people use. Now it’s slipped my mind. I was telling her all about his activities on behalf of the Young Republicans and about his stamp collection, you see, and about what a nice young man he was. And she said that the young people have a word—”
“Nerd?” I blurted out.
“Nerd! That’s it!” Ceci was as delighted as if the lost word had turned out to be prince.
“Didn’t he teach at Macalester?” I asked. I’d been there once. It’s in St. Paul. Steve grew up in Minneapolis, and one time when I went there with him, his mother drove me so crazy that I developed an acute attack of homesickness two days after leaving Cambridge. Steve treated my near-collapse by buying me a Stephen McCauley novel at a bookstore called The Hungry Mind, which obviously imported its air from Harvard Square. After one paragraph and a few breaths, I was cured. Anyway, The Hungry Mind is almost on the campus of Macalester, which is the most politically correct college in the United States. Posted everywhere were announcements of events promoting disarmament, abortion rights, lesbian awareness, multiculturalism, rain forest preservation. A coming-out day was scheduled to coincide with parents’ weekend. At Macalester, a Young Republican philatelist who listened to South Pacific would surely have been as out of place as a Chihuahua mistakenly entered at a Great Dane speciality, which is to say that Jonathan must have felt like a political hors d’oeuvre.
Hugh and Robert had Ceci show me where Jonathan had been seated when she’d last seen him alive.
“Well,” said Ceci, pointing to the miniconservatory where we’d sat, “contrary to my wishes, he was here, and when I pointed out that it is rather drafty, he just said that it was thirty below zero in St. Paul. And he refused to move.”
I asked, “Why was it contrary to your wishes?”
“Because Jonathan had done damage enough already, thank you very much. He was perfectly horrid to Irene, who, I must say, was very gracious in the face of his insults. And then after she left, when we were having dinner, prime rib, if I’d known, it’d’ve been meat loaf, he was extremely condescending and high-handed, and instead of sharing my happiness and accepting the evidence … Do you realize that Jonathan absolutely refused to look at Simon’s paw prints? And he exuded hostile forces that were driving Simon away, which was why here by the French doors was positively the last place I wanted him. But here he planted himself. And he refused to budge.”
The chair she identified as the one where Jonathan had sat was the one I’d used. Since Saturday evening, when Jonathan had been there, Ceci and others might also have sat there, and the apparently thorough Mary had probably vacuumed its cushions as well. To please Hugh and Robert, I nonetheless directed Kimi to the chair, made a display of presenting her with Jonathan’s Black Watch scarf, and issued what I hoped was a credibly professional-sounding order to track.
Kimi emerged as the Meryl Streep, if not the Toby or Pompey, of malamutes. She was far more convincing than Rowdy’d have been. If offered the scarf, Rowdy’d have taken it in his teeth and administered a death shake. Kimi, however, having been given the opportunity to take the scent, preceded me through the French door that Hugh held open. Once outdoors, she chose the route that Hugh, Robert, Ceci, and I had taken, probably the one followed by Jonathan and subsequently by the detectives, crime scene technicians, and other official investigators of the murder. Somewhat to my disappointment, Kimi did not keep her nose to the ground. Still, the combination of her characteristic self-confidence and the long, taut tracking lead fastened to her harness created the happy impression of a dog who knew what she was doing. It’s remotely possible that she did. Technically, a tracking dog follows footsteps step by step, and a trailing dog works near the track, but an air-scenting dog goes after scent wherever it’s available, on or above ground, and doesn’t fit the Hollywood image of a bloodhound at work. The sense of olfaction, of course, is thousands, millions, or even billions of times more acute in dogs than in human beings. According to those who believe in the occult, all objects, inanimate as well as animate, retain information about everything they’ve ever been exposed to. Walls not only have ears, but can speak to those gifted with the power to hear, especially, if you ask me, if those gifted with the power to hear are paid lots of money and convey interesting messages about the exalted or fascinating personages their clients were in past lives. The only thing no one was in a past life is boring. You have to wonder whatever happens to dull souls.
Anyway, to the nose of the dog, all objects really do communicate history. Or at least relatively recent history. There was no question that Kimi was perceiving my scent, the trails of Hugh, Robert, Ceci, the authorities, and Jonathan, too, as well as the myriad scents of everything from dormant insects underground to the aromas of the dinners recently cooked and consumed by Ceci’s neighbors on Norwood Hill. I had no faith that Kimi was discriminating between Jonathan’s scent and each of a zillion others.
“Air scenting,” I remarked … well, airily.
Ceci’s property, as I’ve explained, sloped down from Upper Norwood Road, where her house was, to an evergreen hedge and the gate in the fence that opened to Lower Norwood Road. Jonathan’s body had been found near the bottom of the yard, by the sundial that mar
ked the burial place of Simon’s ashes. It seemed to me that if Kimi actually was looking for Jonathan or anything that bore his scent, she should veer off the bluestone path and make for the area near the sundial where his corpse had lain. According to one theory of how dogs track, what the animal follows isn’t the odor of the breathing, sweating person, but the scent of the microscopic flakes of skin that fall off all of us all the time and subsequently get eaten by bacteria and decompose. It seemed to me that if we, the living, went around repulsively scattering this dandruff that reeked in our paths in a manner we’d all prefer to ignore, well, what about corpses? I mean, most bodily functions don’t rev up and switch into high gear after death. Shedding, I thought, should be an exception. As in “shuffled off this mortal coil”?
I was pondering the inspiration for the image—did Shakespeare have a dog? a pet snake? dandruff?—when Kimi abruptly turned off the path and headed for the sundial. As she neared it, her demeanor changed. She slowed her pace, lowered her head, and put her nose to the frozen grass. Instead of casting about in some body-shaped area near the sundial, however, she worked her way to within an inch of its base. Ears alert, nostrils twitching, she concentrated intently on the ground. Then with an air of fascinated deliberation, she patiently sniffed her way up the stone pedestal to a height of about a foot and a half. There, her nose lingered briefly before beginning its delicious descent. A year or two earlier, I’d watched a TV show about the ritual banquet of a society in France called La Confrérie des Chevaliers du Tastevin. What struck me was the familiar expression of rapture on the faces of the chevaliers as they savored the bouquets of their wines. With an almost snobbish sense of pride, I realized that when it came to ecstasy in olfaction, the Chevaliers du Tastevin had nothing on Rowdy and Kimi. In case you’ve never walked a dog, I should perhaps say explicitly that the bouquet Kimi relished was not that of wine.
I translated for Hugh and Robert. “There’s been a dog here.” To prevent Kimi from overmarking, as it’s called, I took hold of her collar and gently moved her away from the sundial. In the beam of my flashlight, the granite pedestal showed not the slightest stain. “A big dog,” I went on. “Tall enough to leave a mark as high as Kimi sniffed. Probably but not necessarily a male. Probably high-ranking in the social world of dogs.”
“Recently?” Robert asked.
“It’s hard to say. How long scent lasts depends on humidity, temperature, and some other factors.” I imagined myself the author of a work comparable to Holmes’s monograph on however many distinct varieties of tobacco it was. A contribution to the scientific literature on dog urine, however, felt rather undignified and not really comparable at all, even though my subject had the obvious merit of not causing lung cancer.
“Let’s say,” I ventured, “that the dog was here within the past week. Probably more recently. Kimi is pretty interested in it, so it’s probably fresh.”
“Consistent with the white hairs,” Robert remarked. Hugh nodded.
“The yard is fully fenced.” I pointed toward the gate. “Is the fence this high all around?”
The men agreed that it was.
“Six feet or so,” I said. “An escape artist dog might jump it or climb it to get out, but it’s unlikely that a loose dog would’ve gone to the trouble of scaling the fence to get in, not without some strong motivation.” I refrained from citing the obvious example of a bitch in season. “One of the gates could’ve been left open,” I continued. “For Simon? But Newton enforces the leash law, so the chances are slim that there would’ve been a stray dog around here. What I really think is that someone deliberately brought in a big dog. I think it was part of an effort to convince Ceci that Simon is returning in material form.”
At Hugh and Robert’s suggestion, I led Kimi through the gate to Lower Norwood Road. Still holding her tracking lead, I released my grip on her collar and let her explore. The pruned evergreens inside the fence formed a tidy hedge. Here, masses of shrubs were tall and wild. Kimi snuffled around without paying special attention to anything. To satisfy Hugh and Robert as well as to sate my own curiosity, I directed Kimi’s attention to the gigantic paw prints preserved in the frozen mud and ordered her to track. Kimi, of course, could virtually see the big dog who’d left those prints. But did she understand what I wanted? For the thousandth time, I resolved to get serious about the sport of tracking.
Kimi dutifully put her nose down. She kept it down as she took a few steps, hesitated, took another step or two, and came to a puzzled halt near the blacktop. Numerous tire tracks were visible on the wide verge of dirt and weedy grass that stretched from the asphalt to the ragged hedge. The road was narrow. Anyone driving here for any reason could have run a tire off the paved surface. Hugh and Robert, however, were thrilled. Toby, they decided, had successfully followed the big white dog to the spot where he had entered a parked car and been spirited away.
No pun intended.
Chapter Fifteen
ACCORDING TO ECCLESIASTES, a living dog is better than a dead lion. As I said goodbye to Ceci, I couldn’t help wishing that Ecclesiastes had gone on to assert that a living cat is better than a dead dog. Lacking a biblical pronouncement on the topic, I failed to convince Ceci that a darling little kitty would make the perfect addition to her household.
The next morning, while running errands, I tried to foist off the cat on the employees and customers at the dry cleaner’s, the local used-book shop, the hardware store, and—drat!—the proprietor of the fish market, who obviously would have offered a delectable home. In the afternoon, the cat had to endure my presence in my study for the three hours it took me to keyboard and revise a book review for Dog’s Life that I’d drafted by hand. Before I dared to step into my office, I had to put the dogs in the yard in case they squeezed past me and nailed the cat. When I entered, the cat was curled up on my mouse pad. At the sight of me, it hissed. I’d discovered by now that the easiest way to get it to move was to offer affection. As soon as I reached out to pat it, it dove off the desk and disappeared. I’d cleaned the litter box that morning. The odor lingered like the grin of the Cheshire cat.
After proofing and printing the rave review—The Domestic Dog: Its Origins, Behavior, and Interaction with People edited by James Serpell—I dashed to the post office counter at Huron Drug, where I mentioned the cat to six people who weren’t interested. At the Fresh Pond Market, I pounced on a promising-looking adopter, a psychotherapist friend of Rita’s whose shopping cart held a bag of cat litter. Sounding offended, she said she was buying the litter to absorb oil that had leaked around her burner. In self-congratulatory tones that reminded me of my own when I talk about my dogs, she said, “Besides, I’m allergic to cats.”
The part about the oil may have been true, but the smug bit about the allergy struck me as a pitifully inadequate effort at a local form of status seeking. In normal places, when someone asks how you are, you’re supposed to say fine, right? What’s mandatory among Cambridge psychotherapists is a volley of complaints about physical illness, mental distress, or both, preferably accompanied by tips about traditional and alternative remedies that others might try should they, too, luck into the same maladies. Lower back pain is now passé, as are Achilles tendinitis, chiropractors, and acupuncture. Depression is still worth your social while, but the prestigious new class of afflictions now sweeping the Cambridge psychotherapeutic valetudinarian community consists of allergies. Out with pain! Out with sorrow! In with sneezes, blotches, watery eyes, gastrointestinal symptoms, or, best of all, diffuse sensations of discomfort accompanied by heart palpitations, difficulty in breathing, and a radical drop in blood pressure, a syndrome preferably triggered by pervasive and unavoidable allergens like air and water, for example, that cause no reaction in ordinary people, but reserve their provocation for the ultrasensitive and ultraspecial. A Cambridge psychotherapist with nothing better to brag about than an undistinguished allergy to something as unimaginative as cats was probably suffering from such low self-esteem th
at she’d soon regress to lower back pain. The cat, I decided, deserved a better home than this woman could provide.
“They’re worse than dog people,” I was saying to Rita a half hour later as we sat in my kitchen. “At least we have ribbons to show for our wins.”
“She’s a perfectly nice person,” Rita replied in defense of her colleague. “It’s just that her practice is down. She’s been hit hard by managed care.” That’s Rita’s allergy: health maintenance organizations, the demise of private practice. “It’s too bad she didn’t want the cat.”
“If she’s going to be out of work, it isn’t too bad at all. Besides, her oil burner leaks. Her house could catch fire. And I don’t want the cat exposed to environmental toxins. You want some coffee? Tea? Are you done for today? You want a drink?”
“Yes. My six o’clock canceled. Speaking of my clients, you remember the one whose dog is lost?”
With my head inside the refrigerator, I said, “Still lost? I’m really sorry. Maybe I can think of something … But let me get you your drink. We have Nut Brown Ale, Sam Adams, and Kevin’s Budweiser, and there’s white wine here, but it’s been opened. Scotch? Gin? Absolut?” Absolut vodka is what therapists here started to drink at about the same time the allergy fad began. It’s possible that they’re all, in fact, allergic to Absolut. Its main appeal, if you ask me, is that it permits Cambridge therapists to play mugwump: It looks as clear and pure as mineral water while packing ten times the wallop of imported wine.