The Barker Street Regulars

furry pet that says meow. He’s still a genius. Writes the check. Mails it. Gets a letter back. Congratulations! He’s won. His prize is he gets moved up to the expert level. Entry fee: twenty dollars. Forty dollars. One down: five letters, four-legged animal that says neigh.”
    “Through the mail? That must be a federal offense. If it isn’t, it ought to be.”
    “You want it straight? In ninety-nine percent of these cases, you can’t prove a thing, and if you can, you can’t catch the perp, and even if you do, ninety-nine percent of the time, he gets off, and if he goes to jail, he’s out next week. Most of the time, no one hears a thing, because when these guys are good, hey, everybody’s happy, at least for a while. You used to be a lonely old nobody, or a lonely not-so-old nobody, and now all of a sudden, you’re a winner, you’re a financial wizard, you got the satisfaction of feeding starving kids in Boola-Boola Land, or you got romance back? Complaining is the last thing that’s going to cross your mind.” Kevin’s voice dropped. “For a while. And if you catch on, you’re going to knock yourself out making sure your relatives don’t find out, because if they do, you’re going to end up somebody’s ward, and where you’re going to end up is in a nursing home.”
    “Ceci is aware of that possibility,” I said, “except that she doesn’t see herself as a victim. What she’s afraid of is misunderstanding. That’s what she thinks about Jonathan, the grandnephew, the one who was murdered. What I think is that Jonathan got the full picture.”
    “Maybe Auntie did him in.”
    “ Ceci? I really don’t...”
    Although Kevin had no connection with the official investigation of Jonathan’s murder, I couldn’t bring myself to say anything incriminating about Ceci. I couldn’t help thinking, though, that the murder weapon had presumably been the shovel she’d admitted to having left in her yard. I remembered how effortlessly she’d lifted and carried the heavy tea tray. Most of all, I thought of how dependent Ceci was on Irene Wheeler and how pitifully eager for a reunion with her beloved Simon. As to risk, it seemed to me that half the people who lived at the Gateway might’ve risked jail to stay out of the nursing home.
    “When it comes to murder,” said Kevin, “one thing you can forget is this pet psychic who’s conning the old lady. These vultures who prey on the elderly are dirt, they’re filth, you can’t touch them, most of the time you don’t even know they’re there, but if things start to go wrong, the world’s full of sitting ducks, and all’s they do is move on to a new one. These bastards are the scum of the earth, but there’s one thing they’re not, and that’s violent.”
     

Chapter Seventeen
     
    M Y CONVERSATION WITH KEVIN took place on Wednesday. Over the next few days, one little incident after another echoed his disheartening message that no one would nail Irene Wheeler.
    The first incident consisted of my checking out and reading a tattered old library copy of a book published in 1924. Its title was Memories and Adventures. It was the memoirs of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. If I’d hoped to find proof that a belief in spiritualism was any indication of lunacy, I’d have been deeply disappointed in the book. It was the warm, charming, utterly cogent autobiography of a sane person whose assumptions about the possible and the impossible differed radically from mine. The creator of Sherlock Holmes had been a man bursting with energy and interests: crime and detection, of course, politics, war, friendship, love, travel, the sea, the Arctic, and that marvelous new invention, the bicycle. Gregarious and industrious, Conan Doyle was an incredibly prolific writer who penned his works while talking with family and friends. On several occasions, he’d played Sherlock Holmes; he’d investigated real crimes. Only at the end of his memoirs did he turn to what ultimately became the grand and generous passion of his life: his determination to share with the world the joyous news that the spirits of the dead could communicate with the living. His fervor was more technological than evangelical. A few weeks earlier, I’d heard Nicholas Negroponte preach on the radio about bits and bytes. Negroponte: the Billy Graham of computers. Half of Negroponte’s claims sounded more farfetched than Conan Doyle’s. I believed Negroponte; I’d experienced the miracles myself.