The Dogfather

Guarini and I had sat in my kitchen discussing dogs and memory, I’d made the arrogant claim that we human beings enjoyed, or perhaps suffered from, a mental liberation from the constraints of space and time. Had I been right? If so, the sight of that very Cantabrigian woman here in the Loaves and Fishes parking lot proved that I was, indeed, half canine. The memory that had lingered on the tip of my brain was the memory of the woman who owned Kimi’s dust mop with teeth. Like so many other residents of my neighborhood, the woman rode her bicycle, quoted Robert Frost and e. e. cummings, shopped at Loaves and Fishes, and otherwise blended so unobtrusively into Cambridge that she might as well not have been here at all.
    Once a word moves from the tip of the tongue to the lips, it spits itself out in no time. That’s how long it took Enzio Guarini’s hidden army to emerge from fifteen or twenty apparently empty cars parked near the woman on the bicycle. Like wasps descending on a picnic, the men flew at the woman and swarmed over her. At a guess, twenty seconds had elapsed since the first gunshot. Carla was shrieking for Enzio, who now stepped out of his limo. To my surprise, he had Frey with him, and to my astonishment, he was not flanked by his bodyguards. Following Favuzza’s route, Guarini moved quickly to the scene of the dust mop woman’s capture. Carla started after him. So did I. If Guarini felt safe without the bodyguards, why should I hang back?
    By the time I reached Guarini, the wasplike swarm of men had disappeared back into the cars and driven away. The woman lay on her stomach at Guarini’s feet. Her ankles were bound with what I had no trouble in identifying as a leather dog leash. Behind her back, her arms were bound with a thin leather belt.
    “Carla, my dear, be a nice girl and go get Anthony,” Guarini said. When she’d tottered off on her high heels, he gave me one of those charming smiles of his. “Sit,” he told Frey. The pup obeyed. “Good boy,” Guarini told him. The praise was warm and genuine. Without a word to me, Guarini bent down, grabbed the prone, bound woman’s head, and with a swift upward movement, removed her short, straight, ever-so-Cantabrigian gray hair. The now-hairless woman twisted and squirmed. Holding Frey’s leash in one hand and the wig in the other, Guarini just stood there smiling at me.
    I started to say that I didn’t understand. But all of a sudden, I did understand. The small flashlight I’d taken with me when I’d set out to rescue Sammy was still in my pocket. By its light, I saw the face of Guarini’s captive. Everyone in Greater Boston knew that infamous face. Anyone else would’ve recognized it as easily as I did. We’d seen it in our newspapers and on our television screens. I’d seen it on the FBI website. I’d printed its image for Kevin Dennehy.
    Enzio Guarini had captured Blackie Lanigan.
     

CHAPTER 31
     
    When the police arrived, as they soon did, Enzio Guarini explained everything. The police had no choice about accepting his story. After all, he had proof. Blackie Lanigan was indubitably lying there in the parking lot with Guarini’s belt around his wrists and Guarini’s leather leash around his ankles. There was no question about whether Guarini and his girlfriend, Carla Cortiniglia, had, in fact, come to the area for an innocent session of dog training. He had the dogs and the dog trainer right there to support his statement. Carla bubbled about my success with Anthony. Guarini went so far as to demonstrate Frey’s obedience for the cops, to whom he also offered a cogent explanation of clicker training. Frey behaved extremely well. I felt proud that he’d become the model puppy. With regard to Al Favuzza’s body, now minus the hat and walking stick, it was obvious that Blackie Lanigan had made an attempt on Guarini’s life and shot the wrong man by mistake. “I’m lucky to be alive,” Guarini told the cops. He pointed to the weapon, which was right there on the asphalt. It really was the murder weapon, of course, and Blackie Lanigan really had fired it.
    It still infuriates me to realize that I’d seen that quintessentially Cantabrigian woman lots of times. Her dog had attacked Kimi. I’d commented on her taste in novels. In retrospect, I see the books as a give-away I missed. The typical Cambridge type has already read Stephen McCauley, Elinor Lipman, and Mameve Medwed. She could’ve been rereading, of course, but