Gaits of Heaven

particular, she and Lady would have taken a long walk. As it was, as soon as Caprice finished breakfast, she called her human therapist, Dr. Missy Zinn, and arranged an emergency appointment for that same afternoon. When she went upstairs to shower and get dressed, Lady tagged along. Caprice could only have been flattered.
    While Caprice was upstairs, Ted Green called to cancel our dog-training and canine-grief-counseling appointment. “Ai-ai-ai,” he said, “the cops are making life hell for me. They’re all over the house. Here I am, traumatized by the loss of my wife, and these schmucks are retraumatizing me.“
    “Ted, what I really think is that it’s important for everyone to know exactly what happened.”
    “I know what happened. Eumie’s trauma history clouded her judgment. She mixed up her meds. Wyeth and Caprice and I need a peaceful, loving environment to process our loss. So does Dolfo. And these dummkopfs won’t listen. What they need is a program to sensitize them to trauma. That would be a fitting memorial to Eumie. But I’m not ready yet.”
    I bristled. What Caprice didn’t need, of course, was the environment created by Wyeth and Ted. Furthermore, even before Kevin Dennehy had sustained the indubitable trauma of being shot in the chest, he’d had an intuitive, if burly, kindness that no sensitization program would have been able to instill. And I damned well didn’t like having him or his colleagues referred to as schmucks and dummkopfs. Fortunately, Ted ended the conversation quickly. He had to rush off to see Dr. Tortorello and, after that, Vee Foote.
    When Caprice came downstairs, she looked awake. Her eyes had lost most of their puffiness, and her hair was a halo of pretty curls. She wore a long black linen skirt and top that had picked up only a few stray dog hairs. I offered to drive her to therapy, but she explained that Missy’s office was actually a block away on Concord Avenue.
    The location wasn’t the coincidence it might seem. My stretch of Concord Avenue had an alarming number of buildings that appeared from the outside to be ordinary single-family and multi-family houses but were, in reality, psychotherapy office buildings. The discrepancy between appearance and reality struck me as underhanded and deceptive. I mean, if you were naively to start out at the corner of Concord Avenue and Huron and innocently walk a few blocks toward Appleton, you’d pass by house after house— hah!—that tried to pass itself off as the wholesome Cantabrigian abode of graduate students, Harvard faculty, families with children, and so forth, but was actually teeming with psychiatrists, psychologists, clinical social workers, and other practitioners who, instead of devoting themselves to writing dissertations, preparing lectures, and pursuing domesticity, were delving into the dark and impulse-ridden depths of the human psyche. Fact: those few blocks of Concord Avenue, from Huron to Appleton, contained fifty-four psychotherapy offices. Fifty-four! I didn’t count them. Rita did—before she rented her new office, which was, I hesitate to say, in the very heart of those shrink-infested waters. So, the presence of Caprice’s therapist, Missy Zinn, there in my own neighborhood was no coincidence. I have, by the way, a religious theory (goD spelled backward) about why psychotherapists have been drawn to the area near my house. It is my belief that the powerful, healing presence of my very own woofy, furry incarnations of the healing spirit, my beloved Creatures Great, acted like magnets in attracting human beings who charge money to apply the mental balm that dogs freely and joyously give away all the time.
    Anyway, once Caprice had left to see one of the fifty-four surrogate dogs, I tried to reach Kevin Dennehy. If, as Ted had told me, the police were conducting a full investigation of Eumie’s death, Caprice was bound to be questioned again, and I wanted Kevin himself to do the interrogation. Having managed only to leave messages for him, I went next door to see Kevin’s mother, who had more influence with him than I did. Kevin was fond of describing his mother as a religious fanatic, by which he meant that she had left Roman Catholicism for Seventh-Day Adventism and consequently wouldn’t allow meat or alcohol in her house. In reality, I’m the religious fanatic, but the tenets of Canine Cosmology permit me to give refrigerator space to other people’s meat and beer, and the