The Barker Street Regulars

Wheeler said. “Of your dogs, past and present, of me, of yourself, and of the cycles that govern the universe. The full completion of a cycle is rare and beautiful. Just as you said, it is perfection itself.” She let silence hang. “Do you have any questions to ask of Vinnie? Is there anything you need to know? Any unfinished business?”
    “None,” I said. I saw Vinnie enter this world. I was the first human being to hold her. I was the last. I’d been holding her ever since. Now I finally let her go.
    On the sidewalk outside Irene Wheeler’s building, I paused and stood in an oddly peaceful daze. What awakened me was a brief flash of light from a third-floor window of the three-decker house across the street. Moving nothing but my eyes, I caught sight of a pair of binoculars in the window. Then an invisible hand drew a curtain closed. The neighborhood snoop? Or a confederate of Irene Wheeler’s? But why observe clients as they left? Peering at me as I descended the steps of the psychic’s house, a confederate could have learned less than Irene Wheeler had seen and heard for herself. And with a thousand confederates, how could she have known about the beautiful gray TV cat? About Tracker’s ear? About her double paws?
    Today’s experiment had been a failure in the sense that Irene Wheeler has sized me up as a client entirely different from the wealthy, lonely, gullible Ceci. Anorak or no anorak, I was broke. And I’d have been hard to fool. Irene Wheeler chose her victims carefully. She had rejected me. Yet she’d demonstrated a power as uncanny as her inexplicable knowledge of my ideal cat and my real Tracker. She had challenged my sorrow. I felt healed by evil.
     

Chapter Twenty-three
     
    T HAT SAME WEDNESDAY KEVIN Dennehy and I had dinner at a restaurant on upper Mass. Ave. The place is a favorite of his. There’s surf-and-turf on the menu, and “cheese” refers exclusively to a tremendous pool of warm goo so absolutely identical in color to the orange plastic that covers the comfortably padded seats of the restaurant’s booths that I am always tempted to sneak a bite of the upholstery to find out whether it is, in fact, the solid form of the glop on the nachos. The more Kevin and I go there, the more difficult it becomes for me to decide what to order. There’s a lot of cheese on the menu. Also, I rule out anything else I’ve had before. Tonight, in desperation, I’d splurged on broiled swordfish. It had arrived liberally sprinkled with an orange-colored powder that I labored to think of as paprika. As usual, Kevin had the surf-and-turf. Even with the aid of a serrated knife, Kevin had to work at the lobster tail and the steak, but far from complaining, he raved about the food the way he always does. Kevin enjoys a triumph over a tough opponent, and opponents don’t come much tougher than that surf-and-turf.
    Pushing the swordfish around in an effort to create the illusion that I was consuming my dinner, I said, “Kevin, the murder of Jonathan Hubbell? You’re going to think I’m joking, but I’m perfectly serious. There really is a lot about it that ties in with Sherlock Holmes.”
    Chewing a piece of meat, Kevin was unable to do more than grunt.
    “Especially,” I continued, “with The Hound of the Baskervilles. You’ve read it, right? You probably read it in high school.”
    The gristle prevented Kevin from answering. He shook his head.
    “You’ve seen the movie?”
    He nodded.
    “The old movie,” I guessed. “With Basil Rathbone. And Nigel Bruce.”
    Irene Wheeler’s office was only three or four blocks away, on a side street off Mass. Ave. It occurred to me that maybe having once eaten at this same restaurant with a companion who, like Kevin, had ordered surf-and-turf, she’d decided to set up shop nearby in the hope of capitalizing on the need for telepathic communication.
    “Well,” I said in response to Kevin’s mute nod, “I just reread it, and there really are a lot of parallels. Listen, okay? The victim is Sir Charles Baskerville. Every night before he goes to bed, he takes a walk down a yew alley, meaning not our kind of alley, obviously, but a sort of pathway between two hedges. And on the path, there’s a gate. Okay? And Jonathan Hubbell? In the evening, after dinner, he leaves his great-aunt’s house and goes down a pathway that ends at guess what? Evergreen hedges. And a gate. Now admittedly, Sir Charles Baskerville’s body was found on the far side