The Barker Street Regulars

you listen? No, you didn’t even bother looking at them.”
    He was looking at them now. They were sitting between us on the kitchen table.
    “Mea culpa.” Thumping his beefy chest, he looked like a Catholic gorilla.
    At the risk of sounding like Irene Wheeler singing a combined commercial for Coca-Cola and the phone company, let me say that the cosmos is, after all, a harmonious system in which people, animals, and objects really do communicate with one another all the time. But I have leaped ahead of myself. Robert’s application of the Master’s favorite weapon to the revolver in Artie Moore’s hand ended what I am tempted to call “The Norwood Hill Melodrama.” As you may have noticed, however, Robert’s intervention did not resolve the question of who had murdered Jonathan Hubbell. As I had been quick to point out, the name Artie Moore, although reminiscent of Moriarty, offered no proof of the man’s guilt. In the Canon, the nomen omen was a literary device. In the real world of the dog fancy, of course, the phenomenon carried a divine message. But just as there were Mrs. Breedloves and Mr. Bassets who didn’t even like dogs, never mind show them, so there must be upstanding, law-abiding Artie Moores who bore no resemblance to the evil Professor Moriarty. Holmes, I felt certain, would have agreed with me. The Newton police did. And when the police asked who owned the revolver, Hugh and Robert, in an outrageous betrayal of the loyal Watson, fingered Artie Moore, who truthfully said that he had never seen the weapon before.
    It was Ceci who called the police. What impelled her was the discovery that Irene Wheeler had taken advantage of the brouhaha at the gate to slip away. Soon after the police cruiser arrived, I wished that I, too, had had the sense to flee. Or maybe what I wished for was the power to dematerialize at will. The surreal scene took place in Ceci’s living room. Having recovered her volubility, Ceci issued nonstop complaints about being the victim of fraud. The con artist who’d duped her, she reported in urgent tones, was at this very moment attempting to reach California, which Ceci apparently viewed as a small country with border crossings staffed by customs officials whose duty it was to keep normal people out. Her argument had admirable internal logic.
    She was convinced that a fraudulent animal psychic was just the sort of person who’d be welcome. Meanwhile, Hugh and Robert attempted to follow Holmes’s example by repeatedly assuring the two bewildered patrolmen that popular applause was abhorrent to them and that orthodox officialdom would be given full public credit for apprehending Jonathan Hubbell’s murderer. Indeed, the Holmesians claimed no personal credit. Rather, they attributed their success to the diligent applicant of the Master’s methods.
    “ The great thing,” Hugh informed one of the uniformed officers, “ is to be able to reason backwards. ”
    Robert was scornful. “The grand thing is to be able to reason backward.”
    Slumped in a corner of one of Ceci’s mile-long couches, Artie Moore confined himself mainly to rubbing his knobby forehead and keeping his mouth shut. He’d been walking his dog, he mumbled. He didn’t know anything about anything else. Hugh and Robert promptly produced the snapshots of him and his van taken outside Irene Wheeler’s. I added to the clarity of the account by reporting that Moore had abused and tried to drown my cat and should be arrested for cruelty to animals. He should have been informed of his rights by now, I advised. I also contributed a note of normality by demanding to know the whereabouts of the piebald dog, which, I said, was stolen property and belonged to a patient of a psychotherapist friend of mine. I didn’t know the owner’s name, but I was sure that she was frantic about her dog. Consequently, her therapist should be called immediately. As an aside, I mentioned that Artie Moore was wanted by the police in connection with the highly publicized murder of Donald Lively. Would the officers please call Lieutenant Kevin Dennehy of the Cambridge police?
    Summoning help struck them as a good idea. Before long, a couple of detectives and more uniformed men arrived, as did an emergency medical vehicle with E.M.T.s who examined Hugh for injuries and led Artie Moore away, under police supervision, to have his bruised and swollen right hand treated.
    It was during Hugh’s absence that Robert made what I took to