The Barker Street Regulars

by Susan Conant

  The second incident occurred on Thursday night after services, which is to say at the end of the evening’s dog training at the Cambridge Armory. I’d left Rowdy home and taken Kimi to the advanced class. Steve had been working his pointer, Lady, in Novice, more to build her self-confidence than to prepare her for obedience competition, I might add. Anyway, after class, out on the sidewalk in front of the armory, Kimi checked out Lady, who immediately curled up in a quivering ball of submission at Kimi’s feet. Steve’s shepherd bitch, India, is a superb obedience dog. What’s more—and the two don’t always go together—India is wonderfully obedient in everyday life. She is utterly devoted to Steve and quietly protective of him. India is one of the least neurotic animals I have ever known. Lady, in contrast, actually leaps in fear at the sight of her own shadow. Terrified, love-starved, and unbelievably sweet, she was brought to Steve for euthanasia. With more justification than she realizes, she regards him as her defense against a world that is trying to kill her. It seemed to me symptomatic of Steve’s state these days that he’d shown up with Lady and left his tough-minded protector at home.

  Without preamble, I said, “It’s harassment You could at least talk to a lawyer.”

  “These aren’t the first dissatisfied clients I’ve had. They won’t be the last. They’re entitled to take their business elsewhere. There’s no more to it than that.” He paused. “Negative attention can be reinforcing, too. I don’t need to tell you that.”

  It’s true. Take barking. Yap, yap, yap, yap, yap. The owner springs up, dashes to the dog, and yells, “Now, Fang, enough of that! No more noise! I am sick to death of listening to that racket all the time, and so is everyone else! Stop! Quiet! No more barking!” Now consider the opposite behavior, namely, not barking. When Fang is a good, quiet boy, what does the owner do? Nothing. And from a dog’s point of view, almost anything is better than nothing, and a dramatic display of attention is radically better than nothing. In fact, it’s such a big treat that Fang wants more. Yap, yap, yap, yap, yap.

  “Gloria and Scott don’t care about your response or nonresponse,” I told Steve. “They’re getting plenty of positive reinforcement elsewhere. Irene Wheeler is getting free publicity. This is not some minor behavior problem that is going to vanish if you ignore it. If a dog goes for your throat, you defend yourself. You don’t just stand there trying not to reinforce the behavior. Besides which, you are not the only person being hurt here.”

  “All I’m doing, Holly,” he said pointedly, “is minding my own business.”

  That’s how we parted for the evening.

  The third incident emerged from a series of minor episodes evidently presented for my viewing by some Higher Power who wanted to teach me a lesson in the difficulty of distinguishing between truth and make-believe. The incident itself, to the extent that it was one, was strictly internal and consisted of my concluding that I couldn’t make the distinction myself and couldn’t tell whether anyone else could, either.

  On Friday morning, Rowdy and I arrived in Althea’s room at the Gateway to find Robert and Hugh engaged in fantastic Holmesian speculations about Jonathan’s murder. In today’s episode of the Great Game, Robert and Hugh took turns playing the Great Detective.

  “Has there ever been,” Robert interrogated Althea, “a family connection with Australia?”

  Bending toward me, Hugh said in an undertone, “The possibility of a missing heir, you understand.”

  “None whatsoever,” replied Althea. “The return of long-lost kin from anywhere at all is entirely out of the question. Jonathan was Ceci’s heir and my own, and we are his, too, for that matter. He told me so himself. You see, there are no other family members.” As if in response to my unspoken speculations about who would inherit now that Jonathan was dead, Althea added, “Except ourselves, of course. I myself am now Ceci’s heir, I suppose, although the matter is strictly hypothetical. Ceci is a relatively young woman. As for me?” Here, Althea produced a mischievous smile that took sixty years off her face. Wagging a finger at Hugh and Robert, she said, “As for me, I suppose I’d better be careful if the two of you install yourselves in the next room and suspend a bellrope near my bed!”

  Delighted with myself, I said a bit too loudly, “‘The Speckled Band’!”

  Remember that one? Dr. Grimesby Roylott? His stepdaughters? The ventilator? The bellpull? And the deadly snake, the swamp adder, that is the speckled band.

  Hugh and Robert greeted my interjection with glances of withering scorn. Resuming the interrogation, Robert asked whether Jonathan had been in a position to reveal the shameful secrets of some highly placed personage. I struggled to sense how light the banter really was. Althea, I was certain, understood the game as just that; in pretending that the Canon was the true record of the exploits of Sherlock Holmes, she reveled in what she knew was fantasy. Of Hugh and Robert I felt less certain. At some level, they could tell fact from fiction. It seemed possible, though, that just as I could imagine Holmes and Watson as real people, so Hugh and Robert could conceive of them as historical beings. Why not? Didn’t the entire world believe in Sherlock Holmes?

  “Jonathan did not move in the circles of the illustrious,” said Althea.

  Narrowing his eyes, Hugh demanded in low tones, “Freemasonry?”

  As Althea was shaking her head, I felt like asking what Conan Doyle had had against Freemasons. In his work, they were always portrayed in a hideously sinister fashion that I’d never been able to comprehend. A reference to Conan Doyle as a writer of personally biased fiction would, however, have seemed like a spoilsport’s effort to ruin the game. Furthermore, although Hugh and Robert were successfully distracting Althea from what might otherwise have been gloomy thoughts of the demise of her family and the restrictions of her life at the Gateway, the strained atmosphere of forced gaiety and the scorn that had greeted my own contribution made me reluctant to say anything more. Responding to my discomfort or perhaps to the oddity of the whole situation, Rowdy grew increasingly restless. Instead of playing up to Althea, Hugh, or Robert, he focused exclusively on me. For the first time since our initial visits to the Gateway, he whined noisily in what I heard as a plea to go home. I didn’t linger, but excused myself by claiming that he needed to go out, as in a sense he did.

  Once we left Althea’s room, Rowdy stopped his noise and seemed in no hurry at all. As we waited by the elevators, an attendant, Ralph Ryan, according to his name tag, appeared from around the corner with an ancient, emaciated man in a wheelchair. Rowdy gave the frail-looking man his usual happy tail wag. “Do you like dogs?” I asked brightly. To Rowdy, I whispered, “Wait.”

  The man said nothing. It occurred to me that he may not have heard me. When I’d found myself in similar situations on previous visits to the Gateway, I’d tried to read the person’s facial expression and body language. Now, I found nothing to read. The attendant, Ralph, was almost as unresponsive as his charge. I hated to seem like the kind of person who acts as if people in wheelchairs can’t speak for themselves (“Does he like dogs?”). Some people at the Gateway, however, really were unable to speak for themselves. Most of the employees would tactfully let me know when someone couldn’t see or couldn’t hear and whether the person did or didn’t welcome the attention of a therapy dog. Ralph yawned and checked his watch. Rowdy and I might have been invisible and inaudible. When one of the two elevators arrived, I let Ralph and the man have it to themselves. In the absence of information about the old man’s wishes, it seemed best not to trap him in a small enclosed space with a big dog.

  As Rowdy and I waited, a woman wearing a bright red dress and baby blue bedroom slippers joined us. She said how beautiful Rowdy was, but declined my invitation to pat him. He was too big for her, she said; she’d always had toy poodles. When the elevator finally came, she followed us in with no hesitation. The second the doors closed, she began to complain about the Gateway. The elevators took forever, she said. The food wasn’t what it used to be, and neither were the activ
ities. There was a shortage of staff because everyone was underpaid. Furthermore, these days, the Gateway wasn’t in the least fussy about who got hired. “They’ll take anyone who’ll work for almost nothing,” she said. “And with what it costs to be here? Scandalous!” She went on to say that when she’d moved to the Gateway, it had been just like a hotel. Now, no one did anything for you. “And it used to be spotless!” she exclaimed indignantly. “How that’s changed! Yesterday, a cockroach crawled right across my windowsill, and I couldn’t get a soul to do a thing about it.” As the doors opened to the lobby, she lowered her voice and confided, “They pretended they didn’t believe me. They do that here, you know. It’s one of their favorite tricks.”

  Fact: The elevators were slow. Fact: I wouldn’t have hired the unresponsive Ralph as a kennel attendant. But the pay scale? The cost of living at the Gateway? The decline in the quality of staff and services? And the cockroach? As I returned my volunteer’s badge to the bulletin board in the office and signed myself out, I inspected the area for signs of infestation. I found none. On the contrary, the linoleum floor looked freshly washed and waxed, the desks and shelves were free of dust, there was no odor at all, and nothing was crawling along the baseboards or anywhere else. And there were plenty of activities, weren’t there? There had to be. Helen Musgrave was always attending something, wasn’t she? But if Helen showed up to find that an event had been canceled or didn’t exist, what would she do? With a sinking heart, I realized that she’d immediately forget her disappointment and happily bustle off elsewhere. The recent past disappeared from Helen’s mind as swiftly and as completely as every trace of Nancy had vanished from her room within hours of her death. Passing through the lobby, stopping to let Rowdy say goodbye to the women gathered there, I realized that although a prominent section of the big notice board by the front doors was devoted to welcoming new residents, there was nothing there or elsewhere to acknowledge the departure of those whose beds the new people now occupied. On the way out, I studied the Polaroid photos of the new residents. Well, what did I want? A notice that read Bon Voyage? And underneath it, deathbed snapshots of people breathing their last?

  So that was when the third incident really occurred. Studying the snapshots of the new residents, I realized that I’d learned of one death at the Gateway, Nancy’s. In fact, people had been dying there all the time. I’d simply pretended otherwise. Althea was older than I wanted to acknowledge. The Holmes nonsense was make-believe. Fact: Jonathan Hubbell had been brutally murdered. Fact: Although we are all dying all the time, Althea was going to die sooner than most other people, sooner even than most other people at the Gateway. The complaining woman in the elevator had definitely been wrong about one thing. The Gateway had never, ever been just like a hotel. Here, almost no one had ever checked out alive.

  Chapter Eighteen

  AS I WAS CRATING ROWDY in the back of the car, Hugh and Robert suddenly appeared in the Gateway parking lot, hustled across, and abruptly demanded a sample of dog hair.

  “Hugh intends to perform a few experiments,” Robert explained. Half to Hugh and half to me, he added in the sort of voice people use when they’re quoting, “I gather we have your good wishes, Miss Winter.”

  Lacking the correct Sherlockian reply, I just said, “Indeed you do, Mr. MacPherson. And if Rowdy were shedding, you could have enough hair to spin and weave into a deerstalker hat. But he isn’t.”

  Producing a pair of manicure scissors, Hugh started to speak. I cut him off. No pun intended. “Rowdy is entered tomorrow,” I said, shifting into what is literally my mother tongue—she bred and showed golden retrievers. “In a dog show,” I explained. “I want someone chopping off a patch of his coat about the way you want someone hacking off the first paragraph of ‘A Study in Scarlet.’”

  “In eighteen seventy-eight …” Hugh began.

  Robert cut in. “In the year eighteen seventy-eight …”

  “The American Kennel Club had not yet been established,” I said, “and it wouldn’t have made any difference, but it does now. Besides, those scissors have sharp points.” Softening, I conceded that Kimi was beginning to shed. “I’ll send you some of her hair if you want.” That’s me: all generosity.

  Like the proverbial bloodhounds on the trail, Robert and Hugh, however, insisted on following me home. As I drove there, I kept checking the rearview mirror in the hope that I’d lost them. But Hugh, at the wheel, stuck to me like the infernal paint that the villainous Stapleton applied to the unfortunate hound of the Baskervilles. With Rowdy entered the next day, I had grooming to do, and having spent the morning doing housework and then visiting the Gateway, I hadn’t written so much as an indefinite a or an or the definite the, never mind the kind of article I could sell. Like every other freelance writer, I live in terror of having to get a real job. It was noon. Would Hugh and Robert hang around? Would they expect lunch?

  Something about those two simple questions made me realize how little I knew about Hugh and Robert. They shared, it seemed to me, Holmes’s fondness for disguise, but instead of adopting the Master’s guises, they cloaked themselves in the identity he’d hidden beneath the persona of a drunken-looking groom or an old woman. What exactly was the quality of their devotion to Althea? Did they love her as a woman, a person? Or as the woman, the representative of Irene Adler? As to their relationship, was it a peculiar reenactment of what Holmes-lovers called “The Friendship”—the curious tie between Holmes and Watson? I thought of the tongue-in-cheek essay Althea had given me: “Watson Was a Woman.” Hugh and Robert were definitely men, brothers-in-law, men who had married sisters, yet who made no secret of having lived their lives in thrall to a third woman, Althea. They’d presumably been visiting the Gateway since Althea first moved there. Had the complainer in the elevator voiced her dissatisfaction to them? Had the Gateway’s standards really declined? Had the cost increased? Jonathan had been Althea’s heir. He’d had her power of attorney. He must have paid the Gateway’s bills. Could he have planned to move Althea to a cheaper place? Could Hugh and Robert have taken decisive action to prevent the move?

  As I pulled into my driveway, two crazy ideas arrived with me. The first was about Hugh’s demonstrated capacity for violence. As quite a young man, Althea had told me, Hugh had disrupted a Sherlockian convention by taking his fist to the jaw of an opponent in the Oxford-Cambridge debate. The ardor of youth, I’d assumed, had overcome Hugh’s judgment. But from Althea’s perspective, Ceci was, and I quote, “a young woman.” Ceci was eighty. Hugh’s episode of supposedly youthful violence might have taken place only a few years ago. Hearing about it, I’d facetiously reflected that Hugh’s mistake, in the eyes of Sherlockians, had been to use his fist instead of the Master’s favorite weapon, a loaded hunting crop. The weapon used to murder Jonathan Hubbell was only presumed to be the missing shovel that Ceci had abandoned by Simon’s grave. Could it, in fact, have been a weighted hunting crop? The second crazy idea was about the cocaine on Jonathan’s body. The Republican philatelist victim seemed as wildly improbable a source of the white powder as did his great-aunt, Ceci. Was it possible that in their Holmesian zeal, Hugh and Robert indulged in a seven-percent solution?

  As I got Rowdy out of the car, I found it difficult to suppress the thoughts that had been burbling around during the drive from the Gateway, but when Hugh pulled the Volvo in behind my Bronco and the two men got out, I was oddly alarmed by the contrast between my suspicious fantasies and the Holmesians’ appearance of normality. With his impressive height, his white hair, and his well-tailored dark topcoat, Robert was the kind of handsome and distinguished-looking man you see in Harvard Square on Commencement Day when he’s just marched with a handful of other surviving members of the Class of Long Ago. I’ve never been near an M.I.T. commencement and have no idea what’s comme il faut in the way of men’s clothing, but Hugh’s khaki pants and wool-lined tan jacket were practical-looking, and with his sturdy build, his jaunty mustache, and the outdoorsy glow on his face,
he could’ve been about to accept an important scientific award for having invented an ingenious contraption that enabled researchers to investigate the center of the earth, the bottom of the sea, and other places with low potential for development as family vacation spots. Both men made ordinary remarks about my neighborhood. Yes, I agreed, the townhouses that Harvard had built on the opposite side of Concord Avenue were a big improvement, and it certainly was convenient to have a branch of the library right across the street. Furthermore, neither Hugh nor Robert asked whether I owned the house or rented my floor, and neither stooped to making any sort of ill-bred reference to the increase in property values that has accompanied the gentrification of the area.

  As I was contemplating the happy prospect of raising my tenants’ rent, Rita came down the back steps, and I felt ashamed of myself. When I performed introductions, Robert and Hugh were gracious and charming. They said normal things like How do you do? and nothing at all about Sherlock Holmes. This phenomenon was, it seemed to me, a miracle on a par with my letting sixty social seconds elapse without mentioning dogs, not that it’s ever happened, but, hey, if Robert and Hugh, why not me?

  After explaining that she had to dash off to a meeting, Rita murmured to me, “You were right about that psychic after all. She got my poor patient’s hopes all built up, and now, all of a sudden, she announces the dog is dead. I am outraged. Will you be around tomorrow morning?”