Evil Breeding

home, I’d turn the whole problem over to Kevin Dennehy.
    The time was now an almost incredible six-thirty. The traffic on Main Street had eased. With luck, I’d be back in Cambridge in half an hour. No time at all. Except with a full bladder. I parked in a spot near the side door of the fast-food place, went in, and used the ladies’ room. Emerging from it, I saw the Mercedes man, who was seated alone at a table for two with his back toward me. Not that it mattered. Why would he remember someone who’d sat at a table next to his at the Gardner Café, someone he might have seen briefly at Mount Auburn, someone he’d never met? Besides, he wasn’t looking around. Rather, he was concentrating on the tray in front of him. At the moment, he was raising a double burger to his mouth. If anyone had ever told him to keep his elbows in when he ate, he hadn’t listened. The sight of bad table manners and the man’s messy tray shouldn’t have stimulated my appetite, especially after all the shortcake I’d eaten at Ceci and Althea’s, but I instantly craved food, the greasier the better. Impulsively, I joined the shortest of four lines, waited, and ordered a fish sandwich for myself and, I confess, a cheeseburger for Rowdy.
    Back in the car, I fed him his unearned treat, which he downed in one gulp. I ate with a bit more decorum, but I’m sure I didn’t linger; the cuisine and surroundings weren’t conducive to elegant tarrying. Besides, it was past Kimi’s dinnertime. I wanted to get home. Either I took longer than I remember, or the Mercedes man bolted his food at a speed to rival Rowdy’s: Driving out of the lot, I saw that the Mercedes was gone. So what? I wasn’t following it anymore. At least not knowingly.
    Retracing my route, I made it back to Cambridge in less than half the time it had taken me to reach Waltham during the rush hour. I want to emphasize that I was not trying to follow the Mercedes. For all I knew, it had gone in a completely different direction. It wasn’t the Mercedes I saw, anyway, but its driver, and the only reason I spotted him was that he jaywalked across Mount Auburn Street directly in front of my car. He didn’t notice me. What attracted my attention was, in fact, his weird look of alert and purposeful obliviousness. His gait was more a trot than a walk, and his head was tilted upward at an awkward angle. As he crossed in front of my car, I couldn’t actually see his nostrils, but I’d have bet anything that they were twitching. Everything about his gait, his posture, his facial expression was intimately familiar to me. I know all too well the unmistakable air of a dog who’s up to something.
     

Chapter Twenty-six
     
    IF HE’D BEEN CROSSING from the cemetery side of Mount Auburn Street to the Star Market side, I’d probably have decided that the worst he was up to was shoplifting. In my dogs, that up-to-trouble air often heralds a spree of food-stealing. But he was making his strangely abstracted yet resolute way across the street to the sidewalk that runs by the cemetery fence. Mount Auburn Cemetery is, I might mention, the largest fully fenced yard in Cambridge. It’s much larger than Harvard Yard, which is walled rather than fenced, and the walls are, in any case, rendered almost completely useless by the wide-open gates. Imagine! An institution of so-called higher learning where dogs can’t pursue advanced obedience skills because it’s unsafe to work them off-leash! And with Harvard’s endowment! Disgraceful! There’s no excuse.
    MountAuburn does have an excuse: disrespect for the dead. Eager though I am for a clean, attractive, spacious, and fully fenced area right near my house where I can train and exercise the dogs off-leash, I have to admit that it would be a little unseemly to allow even such splendid and civilized animals as Kimi and Rowdy to lift their legs on B. F. Skinner or Mary Baker Eddy. Skinner’s presence, though, sustains my hope. Skinner? Harvard psychology professor. Renowned behaviorist. Pigeons, not dogs, but learning is learning, or so Skinner maintained. Best publicist that operant conditioning ever had. Anyway, there lies Skinner, cold and mute, when, damn it, if I could just warm him for a minute or two of animated chitchat, he’d come up with a clever solution to the vexing problem of how to train dogs not to pee on tombstones. The other part I’ve solved myself: The owners carry plastic cleanup bags. The plan as a whole is