The Wicked Flea

windows managed to look sickly and light deprived. I shouldn’t complain. We did get a booth. The noise level was low. The service was prompt. As you’ve probably guessed, there were only a few other customers, mostly because of rumors about poor sanitation and food poisoning. Kevin wasn’t put off by the restaurant’s bad reputation. On the contrary, with perverse pride he referred to it as the Taiwan Ptomaine.
    Squeezed into his side of the booth, Kevin expanded left and right to fill the space meant for two people. He looked healthy and hungry. I felt filled with affection for him and guilty about the needlessly long and preachy lecture I’d given him about not wrestling with my dogs. “I got carried away,” I said. “I’m sorry. It started with this article I’m doing about fatal dog attacks. The studies all focus on what’s happening when the dog actually bites someone or kills someone, and no one pays enough attention to what’s gone on with the dog before that. Dogs shouldn’t be given the message that aggression is all right. But just because you growl at Rowdy and Kimi, it doesn’t mean that they’re going to go out and inflict fatal bites.” Having apologized, I again started to raise the topic of Sylvia’s murder, but a waiter appeared at the table to take our orders.
    Kevin again announced that he was starving and stunned the waiter by bursting into Gilbert and Sullivan. “ ‘A policeman’s lot is not a happy one,’ ” he caroled. “Jennie sings. Did I tell you that? Voice like an angel.” Abruptly addressing the waiter, he said, “General what’s his name chicken, beef with cashews, sweet and sour shrimp, pork fried rice, for starters. No pancakes in any of that, is there?”
    “You want mu shu?” the waiter asked.
    “No,” I said. “That’s what he doesn’t want. I do.” The term waiter is politically incorrect. We’re supposed to say server, but I hate the word. Given the choice, I’d rather wait than serve. And servers are presumably servile, whereas waiters are...? Anyway, when the restaurant employee had departed, I said, “So your lot isn’t happy? Mine isn’t—”
    “Not mine. Jennie’s. She got attacked.”
    “How horrible!”
    “By a dog walker.” Kevin’s tone suggested that I was somehow responsible. “She wasn’t on duty. Just out for a run. I tell you she runs?” Hefty appearance to the contrary, Kevin is a dedicated long-distance runner. “She’s in great shape.”
    Bully for her , I thought and also refrained from saying, so am I.
    Kevin expanded. “She does Tai Chi. Tae Kwon Do.” He gave a sly smile. “Sashimi. One of those things. Jennie’s big on Asian. Eats nothing but vegetables. No calories in this stuff. Hey, you hear about the German Chinese restaurants?”
    “Yes, Kevin. And so has everyone else.”
    An hour later, you’re hungry for power.
    “Snappish tonight, aren’t we?” he said.
    “I’ve had a horrible day. I really want to—”
    The waiter interrupted me to cover the table with dishes of beef, chicken, shrimp, pork, and vegetables, all awash in brown glue. Then Kevin elaborated on Jennie’s encounter with the dog walker. “She goes out for her run, and the park’s full of loose dogs, and she goes by one, and the dog snarls at her.” The waiter returned with my mu shu pancakes and a small platter of what looked like thousand-year-old cabbage. Kevin loaded his plate with big helpings, picked up his fork, and dug in. He does not believe in chopsticks. Between bites, he went on. “So Jennie asks the woman—dog’s with a woman, older woman—to leash the dog, and like you always say, the woman gets her hackles up and tells Jennie it’s her dog, and mind her own business.”
    ‘That must’ve gone over big,” I said, struggling to encase the cabbage neatly in a pancake while hoping I was wrong. “So, what did Jennie do?”
    “Identified herself.” Kevin meant as a police officer. In his view, a cop has no other identity. “Told the woman to leash the dog. Woman refused. Jennie asked to see the dog’s rabies tag. And, uh, something to clean up after the dog with.” He looked embarrassed, and not because he was discussing an unmentionable subject over dinner. Is there a cop on earth who takes pride in enforcing the pooper-scooper law? “They’re big on that in Newton. Fine for not having a plastic bag with you.”
    “Newton? I thought Jennie was a Cambridge cop.” Even so, I’d made the connection.