Animal Appetite

definitely wasn’t welcome.
    Rowdy and Kimi were already dressed for success. Under the streetlights, their wolf gray coats gleamed. On the block between Appleton and Walden, a neighbor greeted them by name. As we waited for the traffic light at Walden, two little boys admired the dogs, who dropped to the sidewalk and rolled on their backs so the kids could scratch their furry white tummies. On the first block of Walden, we paused while I chatted with a fellow dog walker, and Rowdy and Kimi exchanged full-body sniffs with her greyhound, Gregory, a retired racing dog adopted off the track. Rowdy sometimes gets tough with other males, but never with Gregory. As Kimi checked out the gentle dog, her face wore an expression of motherly accusation: “Just where have you been? And what have you been up to?” Not much, she decided. Nothing to get alarmed about. Where Walden crosses Garden Street, Kimi snatched a discarded paper cup from the leaf mush in the gutter and paraded along showing off her trophy. Rowdy pretended to ignore her. From behind a chain-link fence, one of Rowdy’s neighborhood enemies, a black cocker, yapped out a challenge. Kimi dropped the cup. Rowdy’s hackles rose. “Leave it!” I told him. “That dog is none of your business.” I felt guilty. As a convert to positive methods, I should have found a way to reward him for behavior I wanted.
    Although Walden Street is perfectly pleasant, it isn’t grand. Even so, Randall Carey’s resonant Harvardian tones led me to scan the street numbers in expectation of a comparatively august residence, perhaps a majestic Victorian divided into renovated condos. To my surprise, I found the number on a three-story house with weathered brown shingles. The bare yellow bulb of a bug light illuminated a sagging porch crammed with paper grocery bags and recycling bins in which newspapers, glass, milk bottles, metal cans, and other discarded items had been carefully sorted. The thick black paint on the three mailboxes was chipped to reveal a hideous aqua. The one marked DR. RANDALL CAREY was empty. His name appeared again on a hand-printed card under one of three door bells: DR. RANDALL CAREY. I rang the bell. “Sit,” I told the dogs. Correctly sizing up the porch as something other than an AKC obedience ring, they obeyed.
    A door with alligatored paint opened inward. The temptation to address Carey as “Mr.” almost got the best of me. Alternatively, I could’ve asked him to remove my appendix. But I behaved myself. “Hi!” I said. “I’m Holly Winter. Dr. Carey?”
    In person and a decade after the publication of Mass. Mayhem, Randall Carey looked just as nondescript and academic as he had when the photo was taken. He hadn’t aged much. In his hand he held what may have been the same pipe. His brown hair was longer than in the picture and cut in an English-schoolboy style reminiscent of the early Beatles. His eyes were a washed-out hazel. He wore khakis, a cream-colored turtleneck, and a tweed sports jacket with leather elbow patches. The main difference between the image on the dust jacket and the man who opened the door was that this guy looked uncomfortable. Also, he seemed vaguely familiar. In response to my greeting, he raised the pipe to his thin lips and puffed. You can always tell who’s gone to Harvard and who’s gone to Dale Carnegie.
    “I called,” I reminded him. “I have a few questions about Jack Andrews.”
    “Come in,” he finally said.
    I hesitated. “You don’t have a dog, do you?” I asked. “Or a cat?”
    “God, no,” he replied.
    “You don’t mind if...?” Rowdy and Kimi’s tails were thumping the old boards. Their eyes were bright. They love making new friends.
    “I’d prefer that they stay on the porch.”
    “Then maybe we’d better talk out here,” I said. “It’ll just take a second. Really, Dr. Carey, I just wanted to know where you heard that, on the insurance policy, Shaun McGrath had forged Jack Andrews’s signature.”
    “Randall.” He said his own name in a peculiar way, stretching out the syllables, almost as if he were making fun of himself. “Huh. The wife, I think. Claudia. Maybe someone else. Sorry, it was more than ten years ago. The details aren’t fresh in my mind.” Either the impeccable behavior of my dogs or the cold wind softened him. “You’d better come in, Ms. Winter.”
    “The dogs will behave themselves. They’re trained.” Smiling, I added, “And I’m the alpha leader