The Barker Street Regulars

Catching sight of Kevin, he must have felt like a retreating soldier who turns to see whether he’s shaken a lone pursuer and discovers a rapidly approaching tank. Or maybe he felt like a snowball in the direct path of a plow. Panic must have impaired his judgment. On the sidewalk ahead of him, eight or ten people had congregated to wait for tables at a tiny, brightly illuminated storefront bistro. Instead of sensibly detouring, the thin man tried to cut straight through the little crowd and ended up tripping on a woman and knocking her to the concrete. The group that immediately gathered around the fallen woman blocked the sidewalk and brought Kevin to a momentary halt. Just beyond the human blockade, the man paused, gasping, to regain his balance. As I started to catch up with Kevin, I heard him holler, “Police!”
    Instead of bringing the chase to an end, Kevin’s bellow of authority acted like a bullet that missed its mark. With sudden energy, the man veered around and launched the only weapons he had. Raising his right arm, he swung one plastic shopping bag backward and sent it flying over the fallen woman and a companion who knelt next to her. Kevin caught the bag before it hit his face, but as he did so, the man flung the second bag at him, turned, and raced away.
    Kevin and I again took up the chase. This time, we didn’t stand a chance. Working our way around the crowd, we had to squeeze between a parked car and a bicycle chained to a meter. By the time we did, our quarry was whipping around the comer of a distant side street. When I reached it, Kevin was dimly visible far ahead of me, and the man was nowhere in sight. Sucking in air, wrapping my arms around my aching ribs, I finally gave up. Along both sides of the street were typical Cambridge three-deckers, with here and there a brick apartment building or a big single-family house. Our prey could have vanished into any of the yards or down any of the driveways. He could have been hiding between or even under any of dozens of parked cars.
    I waited for Kevin, who’d been ahead of me and might have seen where the man had gone. After ten minutes, Kevin still hadn’t shown up, and I began to retrace my steps to the sidewalk in front of the tiny bistro. When the cat murderer had flung the white plastic bags, I’d noticed that he was wearing gloves. Even so, fingerprints might be all over the contents of the shopping bags. It now seemed to me that I should have left pursuit to Kevin and made myself useful, as even Hugh and Robert would have done, by protecting the evidence. And, indeed, I returned to the spot to find that well-meaning members of the group waiting for tables at the bistro had gathered the spilled contents of the two white bags. The crowd was animated. The woman who’d been knocked to the sidewalk hadn’t been seriously hurt, someone told me. In fact, having waited for a table, she was now inside seated at one. Had I eaten here? someone asked. The food was wonderful, well worth the wait. Of course, you didn’t always get entertainment like tonight’s.
    “Entertainment?” I asked.
    Everyone laughed.
    The cause of merriment, I learned, was the contents of the white plastic bags. On close inspection, the bags turned out to be imprinted with the interlocking red circles that were the logo of a chain of discount drugstores. Now repacked with the man’s purchases, the bags were propped up against the front of the bistro. When I was first told what they contained, I didn’t believe it. I’d assumed that the man had been toting the usual variety of odds and ends that people buy when they run ordinary errands: milk, coffee, toothpaste, a can of tomato sauce, microwave dinners. Those who’d picked up after the man, however, wondered aloud whether he was the sort of kleptomaniac who makes the newspapers by succumbing to a bizarre compulsion to shoplift large numbers of items that could serve only to meet some deranged and evidently symbolic need—the pitiful man caught filching a hundred pairs of ladies’ underpants, the wealthy woman who wears her diamonds and pearls while stealing cheap costume jewelry from cut-rate establishments where she’d never stoop to shop.
    But the white plastic bags did not contain lingerie or costume jewelry. And the man hadn’t stolen anything. In one of the bags was his receipt for the bags’ contents—two dozen packages of women’s hair coloring. All in the same shade: jet-black.
     

Chapter