A Bite of Death Page 4

  "If somebody knew she got cottage cheese. . . ."

  "Yeah," I said. "So either it was somebody who'd been in her house and seen it there, in the refrigerator, and asked her about it or something. Or he just knew that you get that kind from Pleasant Valley and no place else. Or somebody looked in the milk box after the milkman had been there and before Elaine took it inside. You know, Kevin, that could have been a long time. Those boxes are insulated. You can leave milk and things in them for hours, all day. Suppose the milkman came in the morning. If Elaine was at work all day, the cottage cheese probably sat there until she came home. So you need to talk to the milkman."

  "No kidding."

  "He's a nice guy," I said. "At least, if it's the same one I have. It probably is. It must be the same route. He's a very nice guy. He's going to be awfully upset. So is the dairy, if this ends up in the papers. And anybody could've found out where she lived. She was listed in the phone book. I know because I looked her number up the other day."

  "Anybody," he said. "Anybody who wanted her dead. But the thing is, this patient of hers. I tracked that down."

  "And?"

  "She did die of an overdose. Funny how these things happen. Her name was Donna Zalewski. She took an overdose of Sinequan."

  "Just like Elaine."

  "Just like Elaine."

  5

  "There's one hitch," Rita said. "It so happens that Elaine hated cottage cheese."

  "How do you know?" I asked.

  We were in Rita's living room, which is directly above mine and the same shape, also with a fireplace. In most other respects, though, the two rooms look like the before and after pictures in the interior-decorating magazines. My living room is the before. A cheap glass globe covers the original overhead bulb. There is one couch. Rita has color-coordinated furniture from stores like Bloomingdale's. Come to think of it, although Rita and I don't look alike, she's the after of herself, and I'm permanently before.

  "I knew her," Rita said. "Remember? We were in that supervision group together." She was wearing her one pair of jeans and a white vicuna sweater. To sit around the apartment, she'd put on a pair of big handcrafted gold earrings and a matching chain.

  "Did you spend a lot of time discussing dairy products?" I asked.

  "We had occasion to refer to the milkman."

  "That must have been fascinating."

  "It was," Rita said. "Elaine had a dream about him. He represented male nurturance. Milk?"

  Rita says things like that sometimes, but she's very good to her dog, a white-muzzled, untrained dachshund named Groucho, who was sitting in her lap.

  "You must be kidding."

  "I'm serious. We did a lot with dreams in the group."

  "So she had a premonition?"

  "Of course not. It's just peculiar. She was one of those people with an aversion to yogurt, things like that. Sour cream, cottage cheese."

  "So why'd she have a milkman?"

  "For milk, presumably," Rita said. "On the surface of things at least. But, obviously, the milkman had symbolic significance for her."

  "Actually, she did drink milk. At least in tea, she did. I know because I like milk in my tea, and when she put the milk out, Kimi drank it. And I'm sure I remember Elaine using it in her tea. Would somebody like that cook with it? With cottage cheese?"

  "Why not? She wasn't phobic about it. And if you make a casserole or a dip or something, you don't really taste it, do you? And the texture is different."

  "Yeah, but even so, she ate something she didn't like," I said. "That's what's really strange. What a weird thing for someone to put the stuff in. I mean, if you wanted to kill her, wouldn't that be the last thing you'd put it in?"

  "You'd want something she always ate," Rita said.

  "Suppose you're going to murder Mrs. Dennehy," I said. "What would you put something in? Pecans. Herbal tea. Right? You'd sprinkle arsenic or whatever on something she eats all the time."

  "But only if you knew," Rita said. "If this guy was after her because she was a feminist, how would he know? Maybe he just watched her house, noticed the milkman, and decided to lace whatever was in the milk box."

  "So why did he use the same thing her patient used? Sinequan."

  "Maybe there's a connection," Rita said. I didn't pay too much attention. Therapists are always saying that everything is connected to everything else. "Maybe it was meant to look as if she were repeating the suicide. Her patient takes a fatal overdose of Sinequan. Elaine loses the patient. She identifies with her. To keep the patient alive, defend against her guilt, she becomes her lost patient. But it doesn't really work. Or it works too well. And she does just what the patient did."

  "But that's not what happened."

  "No. But maybe that's the picture somebody tried to create."

  "It's awfully psychological," I said. "The police probably wouldn't buy it."

  "So who was this patient? What do you know about her?"

  "Practically nothing. Except that she owned Kimi, of course. Elaine said she was very troubled, or something like that. Her name was Donna Zalewski. Kevin told me that. Elaine didn't."

  Rita's face lost its expression. "No," she said. "Elaine wouldn't have told you that. It would have been a breach of ethics."

  The temperature outside was back down to normal, about ten degrees, and I was listening for the milkman and still trying to write about the woman who died and came to life as her own dog. Rowdy and Kimi heard the milkman before I did. Their relationship was improving slightly (Kimi occasionally remembered that she was inhabiting territory that Rowdy had claimed first and that he outweighed her by fifteen pounds), but they were still highly competitive, and one of their favorite competitions was a race to see who could get to the door first. Kimi weighed about seventy-five pounds, and Rowdy was up to ninety. My father, who raises wolf dog hybrids, had always wanted Rowdy to look even more like a wolf than he did already. Buck kept telling me to keep Rowdy down to eighty-five, but Faith Barlow, who was handling him in breed, had insisted that I was starving him. Buck and Faith both kept delivering lectures on dog food, too. Buck maintained that Eukanuba was the wrong food for a malamute who wasn't worked in harness every day, and Faith insisted that it was the perfect food. Peace never reigns in dogdom.

  Anyway, at the sound of heavy steps and the clatter of milk bottles, a hundred and sixty-five pounds of Alaskan malamute muscled its way to the back door, where Rowdy, who'd finally got his C.D.—his first obedience title, Companion Dog—sat the way I'd taught him, and Kimi raised her big right front paw and gouged another line of claw marks through the terra-cotta paint and into the wood. Rowdy's big white face bore a look of condescending superiority, civilization sneering at barbarity. He tilted his big head down toward her and raised it up to me.

  "Good boy, Rowdy," I said. "Kimi, no. Cut that out."

  I shut them both in the kitchen and opened the back door.

  Jim, the milkman, was a nice guy who had told me he lived in Dorchester with a wife, four kids, and a mixed-breed dog that was supposed to be half Labrador retriever.

  "Don't bother," I said to him as he started to put my order in the milk box. "I'll take it in."

  "Sure thing," he said. "Cold enough for you?"

  "Cold enough for my dogs," I said. "I've got a new one. Another malamute."

  "Good for you."

  "She used to belong to one of your customers, I heard. You do Upland Road?"

  "You bet."

  "Elaine Walsh."

  His face clouded over. "The lady who died."

  "Yeah. You know about . . ."

  "You still want this cottage cheese?"

  "Yes."

  "It ain't in the papers," he said. "But I guess you heard already."

  "You worried about people canceling?"

  He just sighed.

  "I hope that doesn't happen," I said. "If it does, I don't think it'll last long."

  We talked a little about how worried he was about losing busine
ss. Then, since it was a little chilly to be out in jeans and a sweatshirt, I got to the point. "Tell me something. Did Elaine Walsh always get cottage cheese? Was it part of her regular order?"

  "Yeah. Like I told them," Jim said, meaning the police, I assumed, "just lately. Before, milk, eggs, butter. Then she changed the regular order, added the cottage cheese. Plain. A pound. Twice a week."

  It took me two trips to take my own order in, first the milk, then the eggs and the cottage cheese. I put the carton of cottage cheese on the counter and began transferring the eggs to the plastic container in the refrigerator door, but before I finished, I had to stop and grab Kimi. She'd been bouncing around and wagging her tail, but now she rose up, rested both front paws on the counter, and started sniffing the cottage cheese carton.

  All canine behavior is communication, of course. The dog may not intend to tell you anything, but if you observe carefully, you see that everything a dog does tells you something. Kimi's behavior was easy to read. She recognized that carton. Dinnertime, she was saying. My dinner. My food. This is mine. Elaine hadn't liked cottage cheese. She hadn't bought it until recently; in other words, until she'd acquired a dog. Kimi was telling me that Elaine bought that cottage cheese for her. Just as in my story, Elaine had come back to life as her own dog.

  "Kevin? Holly. Look, Elaine wasn't murdered, exactly." Again, I'd had to call him at the station. "She died by accident. I know you have this irrational idea that I'm obsessed with dogs, but listen. The cottage cheese was meant for Kimi. Elaine didn't order cottage cheese from the milkman until she got Kimi."

  "I know," Kevin said.

  "Elaine hated cottage cheese. And when Kimi sees the carton, she knows it's for her. It wasn't meant for Elaine at all. It was meant for Kimi. Her first owner died from an overdose of Sinequan, and her second owner died the same way. And I'm her third owner . . ."

  "Don't eat anything," Kevin said. "Don't eat anything you've already bought. Are you busy for dinner?"

  "No."

  Steve had a clinic from four until eight.

  "We'll go out. Don't eat anything until I get there."

  Tell that to an Alaskan malamute. Jim had actually handed me the cottage cheese, and I was positive it was okay. Almost. I would have been positive, of course, if he hadn't been Elaine's milkman. Jim? Impossible. I put the cottage cheese down the garbage disposal, rinsed out the carton, threw it in the trash, and carried the trash outside to the barrels where Kimi couldn't steal the carton. And dog food? In the kitchen closet sat what was left of a forty-pound bag of Eukanuba, premium dog chow with a guaranteed minimum protein content of thirty percent. In the United States, about four hundred major manufacturers and hundreds of little companies produce God knows how many thousand brands and varieties of dog food. In spite of Faith Barlow's brand loyalty, I won't swear that Eukanuba is any better than ANF or a couple of the other premium foods, but it's much better than hundreds and hundreds of other brands, and Faith trusts it, especially for a good coat. I'd paid mightily for it, and I wouldn't have thrown out twenty pounds on a whim. Who'd been in my kitchen since I'd brought Kimi home? Had anyone I didn't know been alone there? The man who'd repaired the oven. Someone else? I couldn't remember. With Rowdy and Kimi growling at each other, I sealed the open bag in a heavy-duty plastic garbage bag, carried it outside, and put it in a trash barrel with a lid that locks on. I checked the lid to make sure it was tight. Not everyone obeys the leash law, and (although I knew, really knew, that the dog food was fine) I didn't want to risk killing someone else's dog while saving my own.

  Then I put a training collar and a leash on each of the dogs and walked them to the Sage's at the corner of Concord and Huron, where I bought a small bag of Purina. On the way home, they had a near fight, snarls and scuffle but no blood, over an apple core someone had discarded on the icy sidewalk, but I managed to yank both of them away from it. I knew there was nothing wrong with it, of course. I knew that no one had put anything in it and left it for my dogs. Or for Kimi in particular. I knew that. I didn't let them have it, anyway.

  6

  "Let's get one thing straight," Kevin said. "This is all supposition on your part."

  My favorite restaurant in Cambridge used to be a now-defunct place in Kendall Square called the Daily Catch—squid, shrimp, and mussels with garlic and olive oil—but the only time Kevin went there he saw someone else eating black pasta (squid ink, I suppose), and he decided that the Daily Catch was a yuppie hangout and refused to return. He'd insisted on an upscale pizzeria, and we were paying about sixteen dollars a pizza for some okay crust with hardly any sauce.

  "I understand," I said. "I'm not stupid. There are two possibilities. One, the guy didn't know Elaine or didn't know her well. He assumed she ate what she bought. He didn't know she hated cottage cheese."

  "Good pizza," Kevin said.

  "Bland," I said. "The crust isn't too bad. Anyway, he didn't know that the cottage cheese was for Kimi, and he meant the Sinequan for Elaine, not Kimi. Second possibility, he knew Elaine, knew she hated cottage cheese, assumed she fed it all to her dog, and meant to kill Kimi. You talked to Jim, right? The milkman?"

  "Yeah. Says he didn't know about the dog."

  "He knew she had one," I said. "Anyone would. Elaine quit trying to walk Kimi because Kimi pulled so hard she'd knock Elaine over, and Elaine thought she was going for other dogs. So Elaine just took her out to the flower bed in front of the house, and once in a while, about half a block down the street. Take one look. You can see that a dog's been there."

  "The guy's not all that swift."

  "How swift would he need to be? She's a big bitch. The evidence isn't exactly subtle. You could be really slow and still figure a cat hadn't left all that. And could we talk about something else? This isn't exactly dinner-table conversation."

  "So maybe he knew she had a dog," Kevin said. "Maybe he figured it was a neighbor's. Says he didn't know the cottage cheese was for a dog, didn't know Elaine Walsh. He'd see her now and then. She'd pay him or ask for something extra. That's all. She wasn't friendly, he says."

  "She had a dream about him," I said. "Rita told me. Anyhow, the point is that if the Sinequan was meant for Elaine, the murderer was someone who didn't know her, or didn't know her very well. And if it was meant for Kimi, the murderer was somebody who did know Elaine, somebody who knew her well enough to know she didn't like cottage cheese, that she bought it for her dog. This is stingy pizza. It's practically all crust."

  "You've eaten your half," Kevin said.

  "So what was in her stomach?"

  "Sinequan. Cottage cheese. Noodles. Tomato sauce. Meat of some kind, sausages. Red wine."

  "Lasagna," I said. "I get it. She used it instead of ricotta."

  "I'd never have guessed," Kevin said. "Unless she happened to leave the cookbook out in one of those clear plastic stands."

  "Oh. And I suppose she did?"

  "Yes."

  "Was it lasagna?"

  "No. Some mixture with noodles."

  "That makes more sense. People who live alone don't usually make something like lasagna. A pan of it feeds ten people. If you make it for yourself, you have to eat it for weeks. Do you want that last slice?"

  "You need it more than I do," he said. "Besides, the anchovies were your idea."

  "So which is it? Which one was he after? Elaine or Kimi?"

  "It's more complicated than that. Because of this Donna Zalewski. Elaine Walsh's patient. But it seems like she had a prescription."

  "Not from Elaine she didn't. Elaine was a psychologist, like Rita. She wasn't an M.D. She couldn't prescribe."

  "From a guy Elaine Walsh sent her to. Some psychiatrist. Benjamin Moss, his name is."

  "Never heard of him," I said. "I wonder if Rita knows him. Hey, you know what? Rita has this theory. She thinks maybe somebody set this up to look as if Elaine had sort of mimicked her patient's suicide. Anyway, she doesn't think that's what Elaine did. Just that somebody tried to make it look li
ke that. Does that make any sense?"

  Kevin shrugged and made a face.

  "But," I added, "she just swallowed the pills, didn't she? The patient. I mean . . ."

  "So it seemed at the time," Kevin said.

  "Were you there? You were involved in it?"

  "Me personally?"

  "Yes."

  "No."

  "Okay, so you don't want to say it, right? You didn't see everything for yourself, and you don't want to take somebody's word for what there was to see. So there's a lot you don't know. Anyhow, am I being crazy? Maybe the Sinequan was meant for Elaine, but not because she was Elaine. Because she owned Kimi. That's possible, isn't it?"

  "Possible."

  "So somebody could've been after whoever owns Kimi. Okay. But why?"

  "It's not the only possibility. It's just one."

  "Yeah. Only this time, I happen to be the one. Or the guy screwed up both times. Both times he was after Kimi, and he got her owners instead."

  "Unlikely. Donna Zalewski left a note."

  "Okay."

  "But just to be on the safe side," Kevin said, "don't eat any dog food for a while." He was beaming. Then his big face turned serious, and he rested one of his hefty fists on the table. "Look, I don't know what the hell is going on. That's the truth. Until I do, watch what you eat. Watch what you feed those dogs."

  "I always watch what I feed my dogs. What kind of person do you think I am?"

  * * *

  If you want a really ferocious dog fight, you need two of the same sex, especially two bitches, but nevertheless, Kimi and Rowdy got into a championship bout the next morning, and it was all my fault. Having thrown out all their food, I needed to drive to a pet-supply place—needless to say, Eukanuba isn't supermarket dog chow—and decided to take them along (good idea) loose in the back of my Bronco (bad idea). My first mistake was not having cleaned the Bronco since my last trip to Maine. My second was putting Kimi in first. My third was putting Rowdy in at all.