The Barker Street Regulars

he’d barely been home for two days. He’d stop in to eat, catch a nap, and take a shower. Then he’d be off again. I emphasized to Mrs. Dennehy that I absolutely had to talk to Kevin the next time he showed up, no matter when it was. As I didn’t tell Mrs. Dennehy, I just couldn’t face trying to explain matters to the Newton police or to any of the other authorities involved in the whole business. I imagined the reception I’d get if I phoned the police or the D.A.’s office and outlined the story to some stranger: Hugh and Robert’s application of Holmes’s methods, the use of a stolen Great Pyrenees to impersonate a dead Newfoundland, my conviction that a man vicious enough to attempt the murder of a pitiful cat would stop at nothing. Kevin and his cop buddies alternately joked and complained about nuts who wasted police time by propounding loopy conspiracy theories. Especially if I failed to censor what I am informed is a slight tendency to punctuate narratives with the occasional extraneous detail or two about dogs, I’d be mistaken for a paranoid lunatic. Kevin Dennehy knew the full extent of my madness, but understood that it was strictly limited to matters canine.
    And to a lesser extent, feline. Tracker’s physical condition, I might mention, was improving. As part of my plan to integrate her into my household, I took advantage of the two big dog crates I’d set up in the guest room. The crates occupied most of the floor space, but anyone who’d visit me—my father, for example— Would view the crates and their occupants as a welcoming touch of hospitality designed to make the visitor feel right at home. So I crated the dogs, closed the guest-room door, and closed off my bedroom, too, before opening the door to my office and tempting Tracker off the mouse pad and out of the room. My personality held no charms for her, but she was now wild about canned tuna. I succeeded in luring her into the kitchen. Sensing somehow—ESP? my dog instincts?—that she was ready, I gave her a boost to the top of the refrigerator and promptly ladled out more tuna. Before the kitchen was redone, Kimi had been able to leap up and snatch food from the top of my old refrigerator, but the old one was small, and most of it was recessed under a cabinet. Tracker, I thought, should be safe from predation on top of the new, deep refrigerator, at least if she stayed away from the front.
    Have I digressed? God help me! First it was dogs, then Holmes, now cats. Stop me before I love more! The point is that after returning from the Gateway, chatting with Rita, and trying to reach Kevin Dennehy, I puttered around implementing the program I’d designed for my breed champion Alaskan malamute cat, Tracker, before returning her to my study, releasing Rowdy and Kimi, and settling down to earning our daily kibble by writing the beginning of an article about the dogs of Sherlock Holmes.
    As I was about to finish the first sentence, the ring of the doorbell interrupted me. On my back steps I found a young neighborhood friend of mine, a ten-year-old boy who loves dogs and misses his own. The separation is temporary. The kid’s parents are on a one-year stint as visiting scholars at Harvard. Meanwhile, the family dogs live in air-conditioned splendor with the boy’s uncle back in the United Arab Emirates. The kid arrived in Cambridge speaking fluent American English, but his classmates apparently made fun of his name, whatever it is, so he insists on being called Billy. Although he speaks four or five languages and has traveled all over the world, he is wonderfully unassuming about his accomplishments and background, and is friendly to the point of brashness and refreshingly unspoiled. Indeed, he’s the only child on the block who can be hired to perform such traditionally all-American-kid tasks as shoveling sidewalks, taking out trash, and walking dogs. Every few weeks, Billy showed up at my door in the hope that I’d finally relent by letting him add Rowdy and Kimi to his canine clientele. As I did not tell Billy, he was way too small to manage one malamute, never mind two. Instead, I explained, as he already knew, that I walked the dogs myself. Rowdy, Kimi, and I ran into him all the time. Anyway, when I saw him on my back steps, I assumed that he was there either to repeat the request for employment or to stop in for a visit. As he promptly announced, however, he was running an errand.
    Handing me a sealed envelope, he gave me