The Barker Street Regulars

moment to the next. Gray thing. With big yellow eyes.”
    “Yes.”
    “That commercial ran incessantly. Every animal lover who has turned on a television during the past year is smitten with that cat. This so-called psychic took a guess. You were an animal lover. Therefore, you, too, were enthralled with that cat. What was true of you was true of millions of people, especially people like you. Did you happen to mention a cat to her before she produced this bit of mind reading?”
    “Yes,” I admitted.
    “Well, there. So much for that bit of mumbo jumbo.”
    After a silent consultation with Robert, Hugh picked up the interrogation. “We are wondering,” he said, “what prompted you to bring up the subject of cats. It has been our observation...”
    “That I am obsessed with dogs,” I finished. “You aren’t the first to notice. I asked Irene Wheeler about a cat because I rescued one.” Here, I gave a succinct account of saving Tracker. I described the man who had tried to drown her and the episode of the bottles of hair color. Robert and Hugh were bug-eyed. “So I showed Irene Wheeler a picture of the cat,” I continued, “a close-up shot, in profile. The damaged ear didn’t show, and neither did the double paws. And without being told, she knew that the cat was a female, and she knew about the ear and the paws and a lot else. I was bowled over. It seemed like a genuine miracle.”
    “But it was not,” Althea said sympathetically. “She knew the cat.”
    I felt really, really stupid. “She conned me. She knew the man, she knew the cat, she saw the picture. Presto! Clairvoyance.”
    “Almost from the beginning,” Robert interjected, “we have viewed the existence of a confederate as a logical necessity.”
    “Acting alone,” Hugh explained, “the woman could not have staged the appearance of the spectral dog.” I’d had the same idea myself. But my candidates for the role of accomplice had been Gloria and Scott.
    “The seances,” Robert said, “took place in Ceci’s house, yet the dog appeared outdoors.”
    “The evidence was plentiful,” Hugh added. “Dog hair, paw prints, footprints, tire tracks.”
    “Moreover,” Robert pointed out, “this psychic, this medium, knew that Lord Saint Simon was black. The portrait hangs over Ceci’s fireplace. Therefore, the someone else, namely, the confederate, made the initial error of miscasting a white dog in the role of Simon.”
    “But with a big white dog on hand,” I said, “the two of them made the best of the initial mistake. When Simon first came back, he was a spectral dog—a white dog. Gradually, as he materialized, he was going to get darker and darker.”
    Althea nodded. “Yes, ’The Copper Beeches.’ But the need was not to cut the hair. Rather, it was to change the color.”
    From the hallway came the sound of food carts. A heavy odor drifted in. Lunch at the Gateway always smelled like overcooked broccoli.
    “Let me summarize,” Althea said. “With the aid of the confederate photographed by Hugh and Robert, Irene Wheeler duped my sister into believing that her late dog was materializing. What do we know of this man, this confederate? That he almost succeeded in drowning a cat, a cat known to Miss Wheeler, perhaps her own cat. We know that communication between Miss Wheeler and this man is somewhat disturbed, shall we say. Instead of supplying the black Newfoundland she needed, he provided a large white dog. The evidence suggests that he is a somewhat unstable, perhaps impulsive, individual. He could have done away with the cat under cover of darkness or in a secluded area. Instead, he tried to drown the creature in daylight on a stretch of the river where there was a fair chance that he would be observed. When Holly spotted him in Cambridge, did he act rationally? No, on the contrary, he panicked and thereby drew attention to himself.”
    “My companion in Cambridge,” I said as much to myself as to Althea, Hugh, and Robert, “was a Cambridge police lieutenant, Kevin Dennehy, whose picture has been in all the papers. And he’s been on TV. His appearance is distinctive. He’s a big, tall guy with red hair. And the reason he’s been in the papers and on television is that he’s one of the people investigating the Donald Lively murder. He was the Cambridge drug dealer whose speciality was—”
    Hugh couldn’t let me finish. In deep, dire tones, he proclaimed, “Cocaine!”
    “I assumed,” I said, “that the