All Shots (5 page)

Kevin Dennehy’s gigantic appetite helps to account for
his horrible taste in restaurants. He loves any place that dishes out mammoth portions. If he were served a plate heaped with garbage, he’d be perfectly happy as long as there was lots and lots of garbage, especially if it contained very few green vegetables. My dogs love vegetables, but life with malamutes has accustomed me to Kevin’s general attitude. I have often thought that instead of training my dogs with liver, cheese, and beef, I could use eggshells and coffee grounds. The dogs would get sick, but before they did, they’d work as hard as they do now. Consequently, it’s easy for me to resign myself to allowing Kevin to decide where we eat. The occasion has seldom arisen since he started going out with Jennifer Pasquarelli, whom he did not, I might mention, pick up over sushi at Loaves and Fishes. Still, she is exceptionally well nourished, at once buxom and trim. When they eat out, Jennifer drags Kevin to Asian restaurants and forces him to eat vegetables with foreign names. Jennifer is a Newton, Massachusetts, police officer, and she and Kevin met on the job. Actually, she was in trouble then because of her rude behavior to a Newton taxpayer, and Kevin was free this Friday night because she was in similar trouble once again. Specifically, when summoned to investigate a typical suburban crime, namely, the theft of a Mercedes-Benz hood ornament, Jennifer told the citizen to trade in his “goddamned status symbol” for a Ford or a Chevy and quit bothering the police about trivia. So, for at least the second time, Jennifer had been packed off to a training course on developing social skills for effective community law enforcement, and Kevin was free to pig out on meat.

The restaurant he selected was one of his better choices, by which I mean that it did not have the reputation of giving its patrons food poisoning. It was a chain eatery in a big converted warehouse. The interior space was barnlike. The decor was based on rough wood and dead animals—rustic beams, deer heads, moose heads, stuffed pheasants—but the booths were cozy, the service was friendly, and the menu was extensive. The offerings did not, oddly enough, include venison, mooseburgers, or game birds, but there wasn’t an Asian dish among them, and the vegetarian items were in the pasta section and contained only what Kevin deems “normal” vegetables, that is, tomatoes and the like, and not bok choy, Chinese cabbage, or wild mushrooms. I ordered a Caesar salad and fettuccine Alfredo. Kevin went for a double portion of deep-fried mozzarella sticks to be followed by a sixteen-ounce steak with french fries. He was driving, so he had Coke instead of beer, but I had a glass of Merlot that wasn’t half bad.

One of the appeals of the restaurant, from Kevin’s viewpoint, was the fast service. The drinks had appeared immediately, and we’d barely ordered the food when the server returned with our appetizers. I took the arrival of my salad and Kevin’s mozzarella sticks as a signal that he’d finally discuss the murder with me. On the way to dinner, he’d refused to say anything about it. His excuse had been that there were things he wanted me to look at, and when he’d parked his car, he’d retrieved a briefcase from the backseat and carried it in with him.

After devouring a mozzarella stick, he shifted his briefcase from the floor to the seat of the booth, pulled out a sheaf of papers, and placed them on the table. “These are photocopies,” he said, as if to assure me that he hadn’t broken any rules about absconding with evidence. It struck me that he looked less like a gorilla than usual. The briefcase was one source of the impression. Also, he was wearing a khaki suit, a white shirt, and a flowered tie in colors that picked up the red of his hair and freckles, and the blue of his eyes. Non-ape colors: khaki, red, blue. And from the front, you couldn’t see that the suit jacket was stretched taut over his back and shoulders.

“Am I allowed to look at them?” I ate some romaine, which was covered with hard granules of cheese. “Right side up?”

“That’s why I brought them.”

“This is my phone bill. Electric bill. Bank statement. I keep meaning to tell the bank to stop sending paper statements. I do all my banking online. Where did you get these?” I should explain that when Steve and I got married, he moved in with me, I kept my original name, and I didn’t bother to inform the utility companies of our union, so many of the household bills were addressed only to me. “What happened? The trash people rejected my recycling for some reason, and…?” Cambridge trash and recycling regulations are fierce and are fiercely enforced. You can be ticketed for putting out improperly prepared recyclables. The city doesn’t yet respond to violations of the trash rules by hauling away our bins and barrels, but I fully expect it to happen. But photocopying the offending papers and turning the matter over to the police? Too much even for Cambridge. “What’s going on?”

Kevin was on his second plate of mozzarella sticks. He swallowed, wiped his hands, and again reached into the briefcase.

“Kevin, if you intend to show me one of those horrible death photos, I don’t want to see it. I saw that poor woman once. That was more than enough.” I ate a little salad and added, “But, okay, I didn’t see her face. Apparently she’s not the other Holly Winter. Someone told me she was unidentified. If you really need to know whether I recognize her, I can do it.”

What the photograph showed wasn’t a woman at all. I studied it closely. It was an eight-by-ten print with sharp focus and excellent detail.

“Tell me about him,” Kevin said.

“Her. Female. I’m all but positive. She’s a malamute. You knew that.”

“I figured.”

“She’s a breeder dog. Show lines.”
A breeder dog
: a dog from a reputable kennel rather than from a backyard breeder, a pet shop, or one of those ghastly Web sites that are nothing more than cyber pet shops. “Where did you get this?”

“All this stuff,” Kevin said. “All of it was in Dr. Ho’s house.”

“My utility bills? And a picture of a blue malamute? That’s what she is. Blue. The color is rare. It’s the rarest malamute color. It’s distinctive and unusual. I know she doesn’t look sky blue, but that’s what this color is called.”

“Gray.”

“This shade of gray is called blue. Like Russian blue cats, okay? It’s called blue. Take a look at the pigment on her nose. In my dogs, it’s black. Hers is slate gray. Or blueberry, except that it’s more gray than blueberries really are. And her eyes are light. It’s a little hard to see in the picture, but they’re not the dark brown you’re used to seeing. She’s a blue malamute. I’ve never seen her before. And I’d remember. I’ve seen pictures of blue malamutes, but I’ve actually seen only a few of them. The first one I ever saw belonged to a really nice man named Jim Hamilton. Jim died a few years ago. His wife, Phyllis, is a top breeder, and she has blue in her lines. Anyway, Jim had a dog called Steely Dan, and at shows, people always wanted to see the blue malamute, and Jim was always good about going out of his way to—”

The server removed Kevin’s empty plate, left my half-eaten salad, and presented us with our main courses. I belatedly realized that my fettuccine Alfredo would contain the same flavorless cheese granules that were in the salad, as proved to be the case, but melting had improved the cheese, and the pasta was less mushy than I expected. Kevin’s steak looked big enough to feed six people. It was served on a platter and accompanied by a bushel or two of french fries.

“You want some?” he asked.

“Far be it from me to take food away from a growing boy. Anyway, this is a blue malamute, but I don’t think that Phyllis Hamilton bred her. She doesn’t quite have the look of Phyllis’s dogs. Phyllis’s dogs have small ears, not that these are all that big, and Phyllis’s dogs have plenty of facial markings, more than this. Do you know anything about her?”

“Nope.”

“And my utility bills? My bank statement? These are recent. I’m not sure when I threw this stuff out. Just before Labor Day? Kevin, I don’t like that.”

“That was what made ’em think she was you.”

“Who is she? You must know by now. What’s all the secrecy about?”

“We don’t know much yet, but, yeah, she’s unidentified. There was a purse there, but it’d been emptied. No cash, no ID in it, junk dumped out. Lipsticks, empty wallet. The neighbors say that this Dr. Ho had a house sitter lined up, and the guy backed out at the last minute. He didn’t want to leave it empty because of the plants and the fish.”

“Fish,” I said. “I can never quite get that. They’re pretty. But why keep pets that don’t love you back? Anyway, speaking of fish, I heard that Dr. Ho picks up women at Loaves and Fishes. The neighbors think that’s what happened.”

Kevin shrugged. “No luck reaching him.”

“He’s in Africa. That’s what I heard. What else was in the house? What else that belonged to the woman, I mean.”

“Stuff in the name of Holly Winter.” Kevin is not normally laconic. He was working away at the steak and trying not to talk with his mouth full.

“Kevin, you just showed me that. What else?”

“The other one, too.”

I helped myself to a french fry. “The other Holly Winter? There were things of hers there, too?”

Kevin nodded.

“Bills and stuff from her trash? Kevin, look, this whole situation is weird for me. Could you please give the steak a rest and talk to me?”

He put down his knife and fork, wiped his mouth, and looked me in the eye. “It looks like someone got into the other one’s apartment. She was in England for the summer. Lah-di-dah. She just got back on Tuesday. And she left a key hidden where nobody’d ever guess. You got it: under the doormat. You see, the way it works is that the world’s divided in two, the smart and stupid, and the way you tell the smart ones, they’re at Harvard, and it’s a whole other world there, so—”

“She went to England for the summer and left her key under the doormat? What did she expect? Harvard. I thought she had some connection with Harvard.”

“ABD. Does that mean something to you?”

“All but dissertation. In what?”

“Statistics. She works, too. Teaches a course. Consults, whatever that means. And she knows this Dr. Ho. They’re not friends. She says they know each other from some group that hates Superman. What’s wrong with Superman?”

“It’s not just Superman, Kevin. It’s media characters in general.”

“I gotta tell you, Holly, you’re being a lot nicer about this than she is. Wants to know everything, wants to see everything, wants action. She’s wicked pissed.”

“At a woman who had the misfortune to be murdered? Well, I don’t exactly like it that the woman went through my trash, but she obviously got a lot worse than she deserved. Kevin, is all this about identity theft? Because I don’t think my identity’s been stolen. I do all my banking online. I keep a close eye on everything, and there hasn’t been anything suspicious.”

“Checked your credit lately?”

“No. But I will. Kevin, did she say anything about the guy on the motorcycle? The one I told you about. Adam. Did he show up at her house?”

“‘Preposterous notion.’ That’s a quote.”

“He said something about someone named Calvin. Had I heard from Calvin? Or maybe had Calvin said something…I don’t remember. Yes I do. He said, ‘You haven’t heard from Calvin?’ As if I should have. Or as if he expected me to have heard from Calvin, whoever he is. I was so angry at Leah for leaving this guy, Adam, in the house that I wasn’t paying all that much attention. Did I tell you about that? Leah let him in, and when she went out, she left him sitting in my kitchen. I mean, Leah reads Latin, she’s taken all these premed courses for vet school, she gets As, and she can be totally brainless. It sometimes seems to me that Harvard ought to have a required course on common sense.”

“I hope you chewed her out.”

“I did. She won’t do it again. Or she won’t do exactly the same thing again. But I worry about her.”

“Speaking of that, there’s one other thing.”

“Kevin, I know what’s coming. The cop-mentality lecture, right? The world is a dangerous place. We all have to stay on high alert all the time, or we’ll—”

“She was younger than you. Early twenties or so. Different, uh, style. Long fingernails, nail polish, lots of makeup. Capri pants. Is that what you call them? And those high-heeled sandals with no backs. She smoked. Traces of methamphetamine. Whole other world from you.”

“Good,” I said.

He dug back into his steak. I passed the time by nibbling on a few french fries. Finally, I said, “And?”

“There’s this other thing.”

“What? What other thing?”

“I’m not saying she was some kind of twin of yours or anything.”

“Her hair. Kevin, you seem to have forgotten that I saw her. Not her face, but I did notice her hair. It was about the same color as mine. Same length.”

“Same height as you, more or less. Same build.”

“Average height, ordinary build.”

“She dyed her hair.”

“This is my natural color.”

“Like I said, she dyed her hair the color of yours.”

“And the color of a million other people’s! For all we know, it’s the most popular shade of hair coloring in America. Well, it probably isn’t. It’s too reddish for most people. But if you’re suggesting that she was trying to look like me, that’s…let me quote the other Holly Winter. It’s a preposterous notion.”

“And the picture of the dog?”

“The photo you brought with you has to be a copy. Of course it is. You must have other copies. I want this one. I’ve never seen this malamute before, but I’m going to a show tomorrow, and I can hand it around. There’ll be other malamute people there. There’s one person in particular who knows everything about blue malamutes. Phyllis Hamilton. I mentioned her before. She has a dog entered. I want to show this picture to her.”

“Go ahead.”

We ate silently for a minute. Then I said, “Kevin? Not that I buy this theory of yours. Not at all. But…you said she wasn’t some kind of twin of mine. But was there…?”

“Like I said.”

“Hair, height, build. Her face?”

“Not really.”

“What about this other Holly Winter?”

“What about her?”