Stud Rites

prattled on about unnatural death. Rita would have interpreted Finn’s obsessive dwelling on tedious detail as symptoms of anxiety; she’d probably have decided that Finn was having a post-traumatic stress reaction exacerbated by the unexpected resurgence of an object of libidinal cathexis: Instead of getting freaked out by finding a dead body, Finn got boring, and the reason he got really, really boring was that I made him nervous. Anyway, what I finally managed to extract from him about the murder of James Hunnewell was not much. Hunnewell’s head had been crushed. His skin had felt cold to the touch; although death had been obvious, Finn had checked. The body had been propped up against the wall of the shed, under a little open porch. Finn wondered whether Hunnewell was supposed to look like an old guy who’d settled there to watch a game of horseshoes or volleyball in the open field. If so, the odd angle of the neck and, of course, the battered skull spoiled the effect. Hanging around to be questioned, Finn gathered that the body had been moved a short distance, from a spot near the edge of the parking lot. Needless to say, Finn dwelled on how many feet.
    Leah (mercifully!) interrupted his monologue. I performed introductions. Leah would have made a great cop, too. Within seconds of the time we left the R.T.I. booth, she’d not only guessed about Finn, but was saying, ”Finn! Holly, even the name...”
    Embarrassed, I said, ”I was only a kid.” In what must have hit Leah as blatant self-contradiction, I added, ”I was only about your age.”
    Leah remained unsympathetic, or I thought so. ”Burble burble” isn’t my idea of a supportive comment. What rankled, though, wasn’t the fish imitation, but the realization that my cousin’s judgment about men actually was better than mine had been at her age and that she thought less of me now than she had before.
    Brooding over my own foolishness, I failed to notice the approach of Detective Peter Kariotis until he spoke my name, and when he did, my first thought was that, yes, now and then I certainly did imagine a universe in which powerful authority figures hovered around waiting to deliver timely little respect-your-elders lectures to know-it-all Harvard freshmen, but that, no, right now I did not require police intervention. My second thought was that the one Detective Kariotis had come for was not Leah, who had presumably told the police everything she knew and who had known nothing whatsoever about the small mystery of the malamute lamp.
    In a way, my second thought was correct, except that the lamp wasn’t what Detective Kariotis wanted to ask about. He’d seen it, of course, just as in the past few hours he’d seen zillions of other malamute objects— large, small, light, heavy, sharp, and blunt. If I didn’t mention it, I told myself, he wouldn’t, either. And he didn’t. Consequently, I wasn’t nervous. Also, I should reveal that I’m perfectly used to being interrogated by the police. Kevin Dennehy is always asking me how I’m doing, and whether it’s hot or cold enough for me. I always answer truthfully: ”Fine” or ”Sure is!” So I pretended that Kariotis was a Greek-American version of Kevin. The tactic worked. Detective Kariotis looked almost as Greek as Kevin looks Irish, and the effort required to achieve the radical ethnic transformation left me no energy to think about lamps. Kevin has red hair and pale freckled skin, and he’s a tall, beefy guy. Kari-0tis was dark and wiry, but his accent eased my task. It wasn’t Kevin’s heavy Cambridge-Boston, but the vowel sounds were pretty close, and Kariotis treated the right r’s as silent letters.
    We talked in a room off the corridor that ran between the exhibition hall and the Lagoon. This function room, as I guess it would be called in hotelese, had three or four chairs, a little table, no windows, and zillion-watt fluorescent lighting. Maybe the hotel was courting the mortuary trade. The obvious function of the room was to make people look as if they’d died of anemia.
    When Kariotis and I had seated ourselves on opposite sides of the table, he began his interrogation with a question that sounded like a line from an old movie. ”Miss Winter,” he said blandly, ”do you smoke?”
    For a second, I thought he must’ve been studying a hopelessly out-of-date text on interview procedures and was trying to put me at ease by offering me a cigarette. I blinked.