The Dogfather

don’t you ever again try to influence an AKC judge!”
    After hanging up, I gathered the supplies I thought I’d need to clean up the area where the Bronco had been parked. As I did so, I wondered, as I’d done before, whether Guarini’s men had carried out his orders in trying to influence Harry Howland or whether they’d acted on their own. Many years earlier, Guarini had finished two elkhounds. He hadn’t handled the dogs himself, but he’d owned them, and he understood the rules of the dog show game. The clumsiness—the plain stupidity—of the effort to sway the judge pointed toward Guarini’s underlings; one thing no one ever called Guarini was stupid. At a guess, Guarini had told his thugs to help me out at the show, and they’d interpreted the order in a way Guarini hadn’t intended. Had Guarini ordered his henchmen to “help” me with my car, too? I liked the possibility, mainly because it let me read the explosion as a message of thanks rather than as a threat of worse to come.
    “But we don’t know, do we?” I said to the dogs. “All we know is that I’ve got a mess to clean up.”
    The firefighters had sprayed my car with chemicals. I intended to hose down the street and sidewalk and to sweep up any auto glass that might remain. To my amazement, there was nothing to clean up. As I stood gaping at the tidy, clean, and wet space on Appleton where my car had been, Mrs. Dennehy backed out of her driveway, lowered her window, and called out, “My Kevin sent them.” Before I had the chance to tell Kevin’s mother to thank him, she drove off. When Mrs. Dennehy speaks of they and them in reference to Kevin, she means city employees, whom she views as her son’s employees. I’ve never had any reason to think that Mrs. Dennehy overestimates Kevin’s power in this city. Anyway, as I was standing there with a dopey, appreciative smile on my face, along came the ever-so-Cantabrigian owner of Kimi’s attacking dust mop. Today, the dog wasn’t with her, and she was riding a bicycle. I’d seen her on it a few times before. It was an old black three-speed women’s bike with a basket in front that at the moment held three hardcover books in plastic jackets. The Observatory Hill branch of the Cambridge Public Library was right around the corner on Concord Avenue, directly across from the front door of my house. The books weren’t the volumes of poetry I’d have expected, but they weren’t a surprise either: novels by Mameve Medwed, Stephen McCauley, and Elinor Lipman, all of whom are, I think, literary descendants of Jane Austen by way of Barbara Pym, and somehow deeply Cambridge even though Lipman neither lives in Cambridge nor sets her novels here.
    Pointing to the books, I smiled and said, “I loved every one of those.”
    To my disappointment, the woman just nodded and kept on pedaling instead of stopping to play the great Cambridge game of exchanging book recommendations and information about which authors were signing when at nearby bookstores. Even so, the little encounter, combined with the unexpected absence of broken glass and chemical foam, left me happy with everything about Cambridge, everything being town and gown. In this instance, Gown, in the person of the dust mop woman, hadn’t supplied me with the title of a book or the name of an author I just had to read, but Town, in the person of Kevin Dennehy, had more than compensated for Gown’s lapse by sparing me a nasty clean-up. And if I wanted recommendations for novels, I could stop any stranger on the street. In the vicinity of Harvard Square, Read any good books lately? is recognized as the urgent question it is and always receives the thoughtful, enthusiastic answer it deserves.
    I did not, however, go back inside to cozy up with a good book. Rather, I phoned Steve’s clinic to cancel Sammy’s visit, and accepted condolences on the loss of my car from the vet tech who took the message. After hearing that I needed groceries, she offered me the use of Steve’s van. I said no thanks. Next, I called Leah. My emotions were bouncing back and forth between relief and fear. Fear was now on the rise. In spite of the professional skill that had gone into blowing up the Bronco, Leah might have been maimed or killed. Even before last night, my Mob connections had crept disquietingly close to my cousin. At the show, the creepy, vampirish Favuzza had ogled Leah. The memory made me queasy.
    I caught Leah as she was about to leave