Bride & Groom

highbrow community that we insanely chose to inhabit, we were listening to Morning Edition on WBUR and thus heard about the murder of Dr. Laura Skipcliff, who’d been killed the previous evening in the garage beneath The Charles Hotel. In fact, it was the mention of the hotel that caught our attention and created a moment of awkwardness between us. There was nothing wrong with The Charles. On the contrary, although it lacked the exclusivity of the Harvard Faculty Club, it was nonetheless the most luxurious and expensive lodging place in Harvard Square. The cause of our discomfort was that Steve had met the evil Anita, now his ex-wife, in the bar of Rialto, a sumptuous restaurant located in the hotel. Despite that horrid association, which was certainly not Rialto’s fault, Steve and I had eaten there several times this summer and had enjoyed the wonderful food and the romantic ambiance. What’s more, on each occasion, I’d savored the pleasure of revenging myself on Anita by refusing to let her ruin Rialto for me. Good restaurants, I might add, were Steve’s only extravagance. When he’d first bought his practice from old Dr. Draper, he’d been paying off the loan he’d taken out for the purchase as well as his veterinary school loans, but his finances were now in great shape. His clinic was thriving. His staff included three other vets, and he’d wisely poured money into high-tech equipment. Even so, he was earning far more than he spent. He still drove an old van. Furthermore, because he’d had the sense to hire a sharp divorce lawyer, Anita the Fiend had gotten almost no money from him. Anyway, although she hadn’t managed to spoil Rialto for Steve or me, the mention of The Charles Hotel caused a moment of discomfort.
    “What was she doing in the garage?” I asked. “How did she get murdered there? It’s—”
    Steve hushed me. “Could we hear the rest of it?”
    There wasn’t much more. Public Radio isn’t usually big on crime. What we heard was that Dr. Laura Skipcliff, an anesthesiologist from New York, had come to Boston for a meeting and had been staying at The Charles.
    “The paper won’t be here for another half hour,” I said. “It’ll have the details. But this’ll be Kevin’s case. Or he’ll be the main person from the Cambridge police. The D.A.’s office and the state police’ll probably take over.”
    “Good luck to them shoving Kevin out of the way in Cambridge,” Steve said.
    Lieutenant Kevin Dennehy still lived with his mother in the house where he grew up, the one on the Appleton Street side of mine. The crimson tidal wave of Harvard’s expansion having rolled our way, Mrs. Dennehy could have sold the house for an incredible amount of money and moved elsewhere, but Cambridge was her city. Like his mother, Kevin belonged here. Furthermore, in Kevin’s view, Cambridge temained moderately safe only because of his personal and professional presence. Consequently, he didn’t dare to leave. Or so he claimed. What was undoubtedly true, as Steve had just suggested, was that Kevin had a deep loyalty Cambridge, an unrivaled knowledge of his hometown, and the secret conviction that he was smarter than the D.A.’s office and the state police combined.
     “One thing you can bet on,” I said, “is that Kevin knows at least half the people who work at The Charles, including the people who work in the garage. Either he went to school with them, or they have relatives who are cops, or they work out at the Y with him, or he just knows them. More coffee?”
    “To go.” Steve had a morning of surgery ahead of him. Instead of sitting around drinking a second cup, he left carrying a red insulated Purina mug. It occurred to me that the two of us combined probably owned at least a hundred canine-embellished cups, mugs, and glasses, some of which had been won by our dogs at shows, trials, and matches. Others had come as promotional gifts from dog-food companies that wanted to endear themselves with pet professionals. If you also counted the trophies won by my late mother’s golden retrievers and bequeathed to me, we had enough drinking vessels, bowls, candleholders, plates, and knickknacks to stock a gift shop. And Rita was nonetheless making us, of all couples in the world, register for wedding] presents! Hah! In fact, Rita had returned home from visiting relatives who had a beach house in Rye, New York, and was dragging me to Bloomingdale’s this very evening. Well, damned if I