Gaits of Heaven

were going to Vee Foote for couples therapy.”
    “Her,” he said.
    “Her. Rita says that most of what Vee Foote does these days is diagnose everyone with depression and prescribe antidepressants. With therapy, of course. Many hours of expensive therapy. Maybe she’s redoing her bathrooms. It was her kitchen when I saw her. Anyway, seeing Vee Foote isn’t even what’s so weird, which is that they, Ted and Eumie, were seeing her for couples therapy, and now Ted says that he has to see her! And there is no doubt in my mind that she’ll continue to see him for couples therapy for as long as he’s willing to pay for it. When half of the couple is dead!“
    “Holly, be fair.”
    “I always am.”
    He smiled. “Look, maybe the two of them, Ted and Eumie, were in the middle of something with her, and Ted needs to finish talking about it.” It was one of the most psychological statements I’d ever heard him make.
    “Okay. Fair enough. For one or two sessions. And then? We’ll wait and see. But I’m telling you, Steve, it would be exactly like Vee Foote to build up a specialized practice in couples therapy that consists exclusively of treating widows and widowers. Couples bereavement therapy, let’s call it. Now, don’t you find that peculiar?”
    “What’s that old saying? All the world’s crazy except me and thee.” He paused and kissed me. “And sometimes I wonder about thee.”
     

CHAPTER 12
     
    Kevin Dennehy used to work out exclusively at the Cambridge YMCA, which is on Mass. Ave. near Central Square and thus conveniently near Cambridge Police Headquarters. In saying that Kevin worked out exclusively there, I mean, of course, that he worked out nowhere else; the Y is no one’s idea of a la-di-da establishment. Under the influence of his girlfriend, Jennifer Pasquarelli, Kevin then expanded his fitness horizons by joining the Original Mike’s Gym, which is on a little street off Concord Avenue beyond the Fresh Pond rotary, on the way to Belmont. Cambridge being Cambridge, the superficially unprepossessing Mike’s Gym is highly exclusive in the sense that its membership is limited to persons who go there strictly to achieve strength and stamina and not, to borrow Kevin’s words, to loll around gargling carrot juice and practicing heavy breathing. The phrases, I might mention, irritate Officer Jennifer Pasquarelli, who regularly imbibes freshly extracted vegetable juices and dutifully performs the breathing exercises of various Eastern disciplines as part of a comprehensive program intended to keep her in the state of physical perfection that she obviously enjoys. She is strong and voluptuous. Unfortunately, the program she follows is less comprehensive than it might be: it has utterly failed to endow her with even the slightest trace of the most rudimentary sense of humor. But as I was about to say, the exclusivity of Mike’s Gym consists only in part of excluding those whose purposes are frivolously nongymnastic. From Kevin’s viewpoint, the important and winning aspect of exclusivity at Mike’s is that it is populated only by town and gown, and not by newcomers who, in Kevin’s opinion, have no business being in Cambridge at all.
    I easily envision Kevin as he stands under the shower at Mike’s Gym on Wednesday morning and vents his rage in an apparent effort to scrub the freckles off his face and wash the red out of his hair. My relationship with Kevin is, I hasten to add, such that I see him from the waist up and the mid-thigh down. Kevin’s anger, by the way, has nothing to do with the mean-looking scar on his torso. Although he has listened to Ted Green blather on about trauma, it hasn’t occurred to Kevin to apply the concept to his own experience in taking a bullet in the chest. In Kevin’s view, if you don’t want to get shot, you shouldn’t become a cop, and there’s no more to be said about it. Anyway, what accounts for his bout of matutinal fury isn’t posttraumatic stress but the interruption of his workout by an urgent phone call about the results of the postmortem on Eumie Brainard-Green, who had taken a variety of prescription medications in quantities far too great to be consistent with accidental overdose. The substances identified by the medical examiner include Prozac, Ambien, Sonata, and various benzodiazepines, together with a moderate quantity of alcohol. The amounts and the combination are consistent with suicide. Or homicide, of course. She had also