The Barker Street Regulars

route of some local dog walker who owned...? A Newfoundland? A living one, that is, or a mastiff, a Great Dane, or maybe one of those so-called giant malamutes that get sold through ads in the dog magazines for staggering sums of... well, energy exchange. Caveat emptor. Just my humble opinion, of course, backed by a lifetime in dogs and by the official standard for the Alaskan malamute. Have I digressed? Not really.
    Anyway, if I couldn’t identify the breed that had left the prints, Ceci couldn’t be sure that they belonged to a particular Newfoundland who’d been dead for two years. But she felt certain, and the feeling satisfied her, as did Robert and Hugh’s close examination of her evidence. On his knees, Hugh was going over the prints with his Sherlock Holmes magnifying glass. Ceci was triumphant. “There! You see? Now, am I letting my imagination run away with me? Am I seeing things? I know my Simon when I see him. Holly, wouldn’t you know your Rowdy or your Kimi anywhere?”
    “Yes, I would,” I said truthfully.
    “Well, you see? And I know my Simon. I’ve seen him just as clearly as I see his paw prints.”
    “Ceci,” Robert demanded, “what color was Simon?”
    I replied for her. “Black. His portrait is over the fireplace.”
    “Embedded here,” said Hugh, “and observable in small quantities in the lower portion of the yard are hairs that, pending further research, we have tentatively identified as coming from a dog.”
    Ceci clapped her mittens together in delight.
    “The hairs,” Hugh continued, “are not black. On the contrary, without exception, these hairs are uniformly white."
     

Chapter Fourteen
     
    W ITH HUGH AND ROBERT’S permission, I finally got Kimi and her tracking gear from the car. Kimi “got dressed,” as Ceci phrased it, in the house. I should mention that Kimi’s dark facial markings make her look intimidating. In particular, the goggles around her eyes create a permanent Lone Ranger mask. Ceci wasn’t put off. To a Newf person, a seventy-five-pound malamute was practically an oversize Pomeranian. “Isn’t she just the sweetest little girl?” Ceci cooed. “Isn’t she a darling? Isn’t she a love?”
    I sometimes wonder: If you talk like this to an Alaskan malamute, what do you have left to say to a parakeet? Not that Kimi isn’t sweet; she is. One of my most profound glimpses into her character, however, occurred when I watched her tackle and pin a male Great Pyrenees twice her size. As far as I could tell, she did it just on the off chance that he was wondering who was top dog. She didn’t hurt him, and he obviously understood that she didn’t mean to. In other words, Kimi is not everyone’s idea of the ideal house pet. But then the average person’s idea of the ideal house pet is a stuffed animal. In any case, I’m not the average person: My only absolute requirement of my dogs is that when I look into their eyes, I see God. I felt that in that sense, Ceci and I were kindred spirits.
    “And all dressed up in her pretty red harness?” Ceci went on. “Oh, what a little sweetie pie she is!”
    Ceci’s fussing over Kimi annoyed Hugh and Robert, presumably because it impeded their effort to cast Kimi in the role of Toby or Pompey. I sympathized. Did Holmes and Watson have to put up with having Mrs. Hudson or some other female ramble on about how darling and sweet and adorable their tracking dogs were? But Toby and Pompey actually were tracking dogs, whereas the chance was slight that Kimi would make a half-decent pretense of scent-discriminatory night tracking on an old, heavily contaminated trail. Kimi’s expression, however, is always intelligent, and in her red harness, she looked the part. When Ceci produced the only possession of the late Jonathan’s not confiscated by the police, a Black Watch scarf he’d left in her front hall closet, I accepted it with as diligent and serious an attitude as I could muster.
    “Now, Ceci, dear,” Robert said, “when you retired to bed, Jonathan was listening to ’Bali Hai.’ ”
    “And drinking Ellis’s cognac,” she concurred. “What?” The word jumped from my lips. “Cognac,” Ceci repeated.
    “No. Uh, ’Bali Hai’? From—”
    “South Pacific,” Ceci said irritably.
    Let me now apologize for inflicting on you the merest mention of “Bali Hai.” It pains me to realize that the song will run through your head for the next quarter century. But, look, I had to mention “Bali Hai”