The Wicked Flea

expression. She wore a very feminine version of the classic navy pinstriped suit. Tucked under her arm was a slim leather briefcase. My Bronco, I should mention, is distinctive, especially in fancy neighborhoods. Sylvia’s neighborhood wasn’t quite so dazzling as Ceci’s. Still, Sylvia’s street had a lot of brick pseudo-Tudors like hers, manicured lawns, and other features more compatible with new Volvo station wagons, shiny Mercedes sedans, and trendy sport-utility vehicles than with my rattletrap, which was readily identifiable not only by its dents, but by the bumper sticker I got for subscribing to The Bark , a fundamentalist religious publication (‘The Modem Dog Culture Magazine”) out of Berkeley, California, the West Coast Cambridge. Great reading! Check it out! ( www.thebark.com ) Anyway, as you’ve probably guessed, the bumper sticker reads DOG IS MY CO-PILOT, and it’s identical to the one that used to be on Steve Delaney’s van until that doGawful woman removed it. Okay, men! Let that be a warning to you! Today, she just tears off your bumper sticker. But tomorrow?
    Where was I? Oh, yes, the beautiful woman with the briefcase must have recognized my distinctive car, but made no acknowledgment. Rather, she strode gracefully up the front walk of the late Sylvia Metzner’s house.
    “Real estate agents do that, you know,” Ceci remarked censoriously. “It’s disgraceful.”
    I didn’t feel up to conversation. Still, I said, “What?”
    “They ask owners if they’re interested in selling. I get letters from them, and every once in a while, one of them turns up at my door and asks if I want to sell my house, and I don’t like it one bit. This one must have heard about Sylvia. I think that must be it. At least she looks like a real estate agent, doesn’t she?”
    “She’s a lawyer,” I said. “And what she wants to look like is a movie star.”
    “You know her?”
    “Her name is Anita Fairley. Fairley-Delaney. She’s a lawyer, or maybe a disbarred lawyer, and she’s Steve Delaney’s wife.”
    “Your Steve Delaney?”
    “Yes. But not anymore.” I paused. “She’s beautiful, isn’t she?”
    Ignoring the question, Ceci asked another one. “What on earth is she doing here?”
     

Chapter 21
     
    “Damn Sylvia! She’s an even worse problem dead than she was alive!” Noah’s thick fuzzy brown fleece jacket enhanced his natural resemblance to a teddy bear, but he sounded like an enraged grizzly. “Why the hell did she have to go and get herself murdered!”
    Even the mild swearing surprised me, coming as did from someone who’d named his dogs for the apostles. Ceci, a devout Episcopalian, seemed unoffended by the names and the curses; she liked Noah. At the moment, I was feeling especially fond of him myself. Five minutes after leaving the Metzners’ house, we’d arrived at Clear Creek Park, where Ceci had undoubtedly wanted to hang around the playing field. Noah, however, had persuaded her that she and I should accompany him on an actual walk. By unspoken agreement, we’d avoided the trail that ran near the murder scene. Soon after we’d started down another one, a damp path that followed a polluted-looking stream—the Clear Creek?—through murky woods, Douglas and Ulysses had joined us.
    “Sylvia didn’t set out to get herself murdered,” Douglas pointed out.
    Once again, I reminded myself that he wasn’t bad looking. On the contrary, he had the mannequin looks of the models you see in ads for men’s suits. Among other things, his hair was exactly the conrect length. Steve Delaney’s, I might mention irrelevantly, was usually too long or too short, because instead of getting it professionally cut every month or so, he prevailed on one of his vet techs to run clippers over his head a few times a year. Or that’s what he’d done before. By now, Anita had probably bullied him into patronizing some trendy Newbury Street salon. At least she’d dug her talons into only one of my two males. If she’d been put in charge of Rowdy’s grooming, she’d have subjected him to an English Saddle clip meant for a show poodle, half shaved to the skin with puffs here and there and a pompom bouncing around on the end of his poor malamute tail. But back to Douglas, whose most endearing quality was the possession of a charming dog. At the moment, the ungainly, mottled Ulysses was sniffing his way along the edge of the filthy water. For all I knew, the hound was hoping to