The Wicked Flea

even met Jennie.
    “Hey, Holly, how ya doing?” he greeted me, as usual. He didn’t wait for my answer, which would, of course, have been that I’d had a ghastly day. Immediately, he asked Rowdy and Kimi the same question. They’re crazy about Kevin, mainly because he feeds them whatever he happens to be eating, and since he is a great big man with a gigantic appetite, he eats all the time and doles out a stream of treats.
    Kevin lowered the upper half of his mammoth body to dog level and made stupid growling noises that the dogs love. In response, they scoured his face with their big red tongues. Although Kevin is part Italian, he is the most Irish-looking person I’ve ever seen. In Greater Boston, that’s saying something. He has red hair, fair skin, freckles, and blue eyes, and in a gruff way, he has that famous Irish charm, too. As I watched him fool around with the dogs, it occurred to me that Kevin was one cop who, unlike the voluptuous terrier who’d arrested Sylvia, would never need to announce himself as such. Studying him, I tried and failed to identify any specific attribute that proclaimed his profession. He’s a lieutenant in homicide, so he doesn’t wear a uniform; at the moment, he wasn’t even dressed in blue, but in khaki pants and a tan crewneck sweater. Funny-looking shoes and big flat feet were supposed to be hallmarks. Like the rest of Kevin, his feet were big, but they didn’t look flat, and his white athletic shoes were obviously designed for fitness running rather than for chasing down criminals. Still, if a menacing stranger had suddenly broken into my kitchen and Kevin had pulled out a badge and said, “Police,” the intruder would’ve been entirely justified in replying, “Yes, I know.”
    I tried, of course, to tell Kevin about Sylvia’s murder. One price I pay for having beautiful, friendly dogs is, however, that people ignore me in favor of Rowdy and Kimi. Kevin was now on the tile floor of the kitchen flirting with the forbidden game of wrestling with malamutes. He is also prohibited from giving them beer. I know that he violates that ban when I’m not looking because I smell brew on the dogs’ breath. Instead of breaking the wrestling taboo behind my back, he waits for the dogs to roll onto their backs for tummy rubs, and then under the guise of vigorously scratching their chests and bellies, he tussles in a fashion just short of wrestling. “Hey there, tough guy,” he rumbled at Rowdy, “who you been beating up lately?”
    “As a matter of fact,” I said, “he was in a dog fight not all that long ago, and would you please stop giving them both the wrong message? Kevin, I have told you a million times that the message to give to them is that you do not like—”
    Kevin mimicked me. “Anything that even begins to remind them of aggression toward blah, blah, blah. Who won?”
    “Rowdy did. Well, I broke up the fight, but he did.” I again tried to divert Kevin’s attention from the dogs. “Kevin, I need to—”
    “Then that’s all right. You won, did you big fellow? They scrape the other guy off the sidewalk?”
    “The other guy was a girl. Rowdy didn’t hurt her. But—”
    Gently grabbing both sides of Rowdy’s substantial head, Kevin delivered a little congratulatory shake and said, “Sexist! Should’ve beat the pants off her like Kimi would’ve done.”
    Before I could break in, Kevin announced that he was starving, explained that we’d better take separate cars because he was going somewhere after dinner, and gave me directions to the restaurant he’d selected. Kevin’s restaurant preferences are based largely, no pun intended, on quantity. He doesn’t care whether the food is overcooked or the meat is tough if the portions are mountainous. He still hadn’t stopped talking about a Spanish restaurant he’d mistakenly patronized because he hadn’t understood that tapas didn’t just mean appetizers; it meant small servings. Tonight, instead of going to the kind of Italian restaurant where everything swims in the same red sauce, we went to the kind of Chinese restaurant where everything swims in soy sauce made thick, slimy, and shiny with cornstarch. Cambridge has scores of excellent Chinese restaurants. This storefront place near Inman Square in Cambridge wasn’t one of them. The outsides of the windows were so heavily coated with dirt and the insides with grease that the artificial plants shoving their plastic leaves to the plate glass