The Barker Street Regulars

man panicked because he recognized me and was afraid of being charged with animal abuse. Hah! The one he was scared of was actually Kevin.”
    “The traces of cocaine on Jonathan’s body,” Hugh said.
    “My grandnephew,” Althea said smugly, “was not at all that sort of person.”
    “But this man is,” I pointed out. “His behavior is erratic. And the cocaine connection accounts for something else, namely, Irene Wheeler’s desperation. We’ve been... Well, I, at least, have been assuming that her motive in conning Ceci and everyone else is purely mercenary. But maybe there’s a reason for her greed. One day when I saw her, she looked terrible. I thought she had a dreadful cold. But now...”
    Althea was impatient. “Jonathan was all that stood between this scheming pair and my sister’s money. I have no doubt that they had plans that reached far beyond the payments made for daily consultations. And when this woman visited my poor, gullible sister and failed to convince Jonathan of her supposed psychic powers, her confederate listened in.”
    “The footprints in the flower beds,” Hugh informed me.
    “And,” Althea continued, “lured Jonathan outside and murdered him, leaving behind minute traces of—”
    “The solution!” Robert cried dramatically.
    “Of course,” Althea calmly pronounced. “The seven-percent solution.”
     

Chapter Twenty-seven
     
    I CAN’T BE BLAMED for playing Sherlock Holmes. The impulse is irresistible. When Rita came home for lunch, I sprang on her the astonishing deduction that her patient’s missing dog was a male Great Pyrenees stolen while the owner was running on Greenough Boulevard. Whenever Holmes made a comparably staggering proclamation, the victim was always gratifyingly stunned: “How the deuce did he know I came from Afghanistan? ”
    Rita, in contrast, just said, “I already told you that.” I was childishly put out. “No, you didn’t. I deduced it. Just like Sherlock Holmes.”
    “This Sherlock Holmes obsession of yours is getting to be worse than dogs,” she sighed.
    I continued. “The man who stole the dog is the same one who tried to drown Tracker.”
    “Tracker?”
    “The cat. I finally got around to naming her.”
    “Tracker,” Rita said ungenerously, “is a stupid name for a female cat.”
    “Positive reframing,” I said, lapsing into the psychotherapeutic jargon I’d picked up from Rita herself. “And you know what? It works. It’s totally transformed my feelings about her. And Tracker is only her call name. Her real name is Kaila’s Paw Print. Actually, it’s Champion Kaila’s Paw Print. I named her after a famous malamute. I’m teaching her to live on top of the refrigerator. That’s from Holmes, more or less. ’The Empty House.’ From this convenient retreat, the watchers were being watched and the trackers tracked.” Rita, for once, refused to listen. In fact, she interrupted me by shrieking. When she’d composed herself, she said, “I was right! The Holmes obsession is getting to be worse than dogs. So, who is this mystery man?” Succumbing to the Holmesian fondness for theatrics, I let silence linger before making my dramatic pronouncement. “He is Irene Wheeler’s partner in crime. He has drug connections. Greenough Boulevard is one of his haunts. Kevin is always warning me about that stretch of the river. I just never took him seriously.” Rita’s patient’s dog had been stolen just before the spectral Simon, the giant white dog, made his first appearance. Later that week, Irene told the owner that the dog was fine. After Jonathan’s murder, however, Irene, in uncharacteristic fashion, gave the owner unwelcome news: All of a sudden, Irene channeled the information that the dog was dead. In other words, once the situation took a deadly turn, Irene wanted the owner to quit searching for the dog. She wanted it even more than she wanted to keep a client.
    Unlike Holmes’s creator, who investigated a couple of real-life murders, I tried to limit my imitation of the Master. It was one thing to make astonishing deductions, even if they didn’t produce the intended effect, it was quite another to meddle with a double murderer. Jonathan Hubbell had been murdered in Newton, but
    Donald Lively, the dealer, had been killed on Kevin’s turf, in Cambridge, right near the courthouse. In the early afternoon, I tried to reach Kevin. I left a phone message at the station. Then I ran next door. His mother said that