The Barker Street Regulars

illiterate, her husband, Ellis, had been an active member of the Red-headed League of Boston. And Ceci was, after all, Althea’s sister. Rowdy was to play Toby or Pompey to Robert and Hugh’s Holmes and Watson. For all we knew, Hugh asserted, the murderer, accompanied by his gigantic dog, had arrived and departed on foot. A mere forty-eight hours or so later, the trails of the two were surely fresh enough for another dog to follow. Furthermore, Ceci had no idea what had prompted Jonathan to leave the house. When she’d gone to bed, he’d been listening to music. She was certain that he’d made no plans to go out. That Saturday night had been brutally cold; Jonathan obviously hadn’t just gone out to enjoy the night air. And if he’d decided to use Ceci’s car, without her permission, of course, or to take a cab or even to go for a walk, he’d have left by the front door, and he’d have closed it after him. As it was, a French door at the rear of the house had been found ajar, and his body had been discovered in the backyard. Between the time Jonathan left the house and met his end, what had his movements been? Hugh and Robert were determined to put a dog on Jonathan’s trail.
    “What you’re looking for,” I told Hugh, “is a highly trained search and rescue dog. Every single thing you’ve mentioned is an extremely difficult task.” As I was about to say that Rowdy would be absolutely useless, it hit me that in taking the request seriously, I was playing into the Great Game. In the case of a real murder, the pretense struck me not as a harmless pastime, but as a morbid and ghoulish confusion of fact and fiction. If Kevin Dennehy had been silly enough to ask for Rowdy’s assistance as a tracking dog, I’d have told him to find a canine with an educated nose. But Kevin was the real thing, a police lieutenant; he’d never have made such a request. Hugh and Robert, in contrast, would probably go marching off to the crime scene with deerstalker hats on their heads, magnifying lenses in their hands, and the Sherlockian cliché on their lips: “The game is afoot!” They didn’t need a tracking dog; all they wanted was one more stage prop. What prevented me from refusing to participate in this mockery was, of all things, Hugh’s touchingly genuine faith in the methods of Sherlock Holmes. As if reading my mind over the phone line, Hugh said, “You must imagine that we’re a pair of old jackasses having fun at the expense of this unfortunate young man.”
    Precisely.
    “Not at all!” I countered.
    “We may be a pair of old jackasses,” he said proudly. “Well, I may be one. I can’t speak for Robert. But there is nothing asinine about the methodical collection of empirical evidence. And I assure you that we see this murder for the horror that it is.”
    “Yes,” I said.
    “Perhaps I could persuade you to accompany Rowdy.”
    I gave in, but insisted on driving to Ceci’s myself and also substituted Kimi for Rowdy. Kimi was anything but a real tracking dog—I’m not claiming otherwise—but I’d taken her to a couple of tracking workshops, where she’d shown considerable aptitude for the sport. With her tracking harness on, she might satisfy Hugh and Robert’s desire for a Toby or a Pompey by putting her nose to the ground. To Rowdy, a harness meant pull.
    After digging out Kimi’s red tracking harness and an old thirty-foot army-green tracking lead, I bundled up in my parka and then remembered that I had to check on the cat. After locking the dogs in my bedroom, I eased open the door to my study, slipped in, and quickly shut the door without giving the cat a chance to escape. As it turned out, the cat hadn’t been hanging around looking for the opportunity to bolt. Rather, it had installed itself, appropriately enough, on the mouse pad next to my new computer. At the sight of me, it glared, hissed, and then vanished in the tangle of cables under the printer. The mouse pad was covered with cat hair and oily medicine. “Nice little kitty,” I said hypocritically. Then I produced those stupid squeaking noises that no self-respecting person makes to a dog that weighs over five pounds. Not that I don’t like cats. Not that I’m superstitious about them, even about really hideous black cats like this one. But cats are not my special mission. Dog spelled backward? Yes. But cat ? Tac? I don’t see the cosmic significance.
    Nonetheless, instead of following Hugh’s precise instructions