Paws before dying

anybody, you do it to me.’ Or maybe, ‘If you persecute anyone, you persecute everyone.’ Anyway, we can’t get rid of the swastika yet, but we can do more or less what he did.”
    We locked the dogs in my bedroom, spread a plastic drop cloth on the kitchen floor, and painted a defiant banner on a king-size sheet: a blue Star of David on a white background. It took us only a few minutes. When we carried it outside, Kevin and the other cops, who were still there, thought we were crazy. They wouldn’t let us hang it over the graffiti—the blue paint was still wet—but I stood on a stepladder and nailed it to the top of the fence, my fence, so it hung next to the swastika. Leah probably thought I was crazy, too, but I felt wonderful. I am a Jew, the banner announced. I am Danish royalty.
     

Chapter 16

     
    “AND tomorrow,” I told Kevin, “I am adding ecumenical detail. A cross, unbroken. Pictures of Vishnu and Shiva. Anything else I can think of. Is there a symbol of Seventh-Day Adventism?”
    Leah had gone to bed, the uniformed guys had departed, and Kevin and I were sitting on the back steps. He was sipping Budweiser. I was drinking milk.
    “Hey, Kevin, what were you doing up, anyway? Did we wake you?”
    “Nah, I was glued to the tube.” He happens to suffer from insomnia, but whenever Rita calls it that, he gets furious. Last winter, when he went through a bad bout, she sat him down and delivered a serious lecture about stress management. In her version, she tried to get him to take a Zen meditation course. He reports that she tried to sell him to the Eastern brain-snatchers.
    “So you were home?” I said. “Presumably, you were home when it happened.”
    “Yeah. Like I said. Now ask me again.”
    “Hey, there’s no reason why you should’ve... I mean, you’re not some patrolman assigned to this beat.” That’s one source of his insomnia. He grew up here, and he feels responsible for the entire neighborhood. “Anyway, there’s some stuff you should know about this. And other stuff. And I have a match tomorrow, and I don’t want to be wiped out, so I’m going to say it all fast, and I want you just to listen and not yell. First of all, you remember what happened in Newton, the graffiti, at the park, right? Well, in Leah’s dog-training class there, there’s a kid…"
    I started to tell him about Willie, Dale, Edna, and the boom box, but before I even finished the part about returning the present, he interrupted me to say that the Newton police had already made the connection between the graffiti in the park and Willie’s presence at the class, and hadn’t he told me not to go there again?
    “But Willie didn’t necessarily do it,” I said. “Either the other time or this thing. The whole family is, well, Rita would say that it’s a dysfunctional family, I guess. And how come you I know about them? Are you on some community liaison panel or something?”
    “One,” he said, “Saporski’s mother still lives in Newton.” As I may have mentioned, John Saporski is one of Kevin’s best friends in the department. They used to play handball together at the Y, and they still go running sometimes. “And when this crap gets plastered all over a wall there, she expects him to do something about it. Two, M. D. Johnson and Sons is Cambridge.”
    “What?”
    “It’s in Cambridge.”
    “What is it?”
    “Like the trucks say: disposable containers to the beverage industry.”
    “Which means?”
    “Plastic cups,” he said. “They’re distributors. They distribute beverage containers.”
    “So you know about them from here? From Cambridge? How come? Do they distribute something else, too?”
    He shook his head. “Nah. The problem was with the kids. Three of them, right? The old man, and three kids, and they all work for him. And when the oldest kid’s maybe sixteen—old enough to drive—he starts hanging around the place after work, weekends. The place is down in East Cambridge, and it’s a warehouse, and it’s got offices, but it’s got neighbors, too, and they start making complaints, and it turns out that when the place is closed, these kids are hanging around, drinking and shit.”
    “And they’re underage.”
    “And then the neighbors get smart, and instead of calling us, they call the old man, and then instead of a bunch of kids, we get calls about domestic altercations.”
    “Between Mitchell Senior and the son? The oldest son?”
    “By that time, it’s two of