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assistance in solving cases that baffled him. Too bad about the “all but in Newton.” The City of Newton just might be in the habit of dispatching its police chief to murder scenes, but Boston assuredly was not. Felicity’s knowledge of police hierarchies beneath the level of chief was vague. What’s more, her great and happy familiarity with British mysteries meant that she understood the titles and responsibilities of detective chief inspectors, superintendents, constables, and such far better than she understood anything about the ranks within American forces. Still, she knew a pooh-bah when she saw one, and there was, alas, none in view.
    Prominently in sight and sound were a uniformed police officer of some sort and Felicity’s trash-fussy Russian neighbor, Mr. Trotsky, who was shouting at the officer even more angrily than he’d ever shouted at Felicity about allowing her recycling bin to trespass on what was, in fact, condo association property. The object of Mr. Trotsky’s rage was the police cruiser, which had two of its wheels on his lawn. Its front doors were open, its lights were flashing, and its siren was still screaming.
    Undeterred, Mr. Trotsky was shaking a fist at the officer—I constable? sergeant?—and yelling in accented but fluent English, “You know what my lawn service costs me? You wanna take a guess?” Answering his own question rather anticlimactically, he finished, “Plenty, that’s what.”
    Mr. Trotsky looked nothing like the Trotsky of revolution and assassination. Rather, he bore what Felicity found to be an alarming resemblance to Joseph Stalin. He had the same heavy features, the same thick, dark hair combed straight back from his face, and the same oversized moustache. Felicity was certain that he cultivated the likeness as a way to intimidate people.
    The policeman was apparently unintimidated. At any rate, he didn’t move the cruiser.
    “This is private property!” Mr. Trotsky hollered. “It’s not a public street! That car is on my property, and it’s compacting the soil. The grass is never going to recover.”
    Approaching the men and butting in, Felicity said loudly, “Then it doesn’t matter whether it’s moved, does it? If it’s too late now?”
    Turning to the policeman, she smiled, pointed at the cruiser, and held her hands over her ears. Having mimed her meaning, she shrieked, “Is the noise necessary? There was a darling cat left with the man in my vestibule, and the poor thing is very frightened. The siren isn’t helping!” Backtracking, she bellowed, “I’m Felicity Pride. I’m the one who called.”
    The policeman nodded to Felicity and complied with her request by getting in the cruiser and silencing the siren. In one of her books, he’d have been astonishingly young or had an embarrassingly large nose or a marked stutter. In fact, he had to be thirty-five or forty. Worse, he was maddeningly ordinary, with no oddity of feature, speech, or manner to distinguish him from other characters.
    “We’ll want to talk to you, ma’am,” he said.
    “Of course you will,” Felicity said. “And the cat is evidence. It... he, the cat, the very beautiful and sweet cat— strikingly beautiful and very lovable, irresistible—was in my vestibule with the man. The outer door was closed. The man and the cat were obviously left at the same time by the same person.” After allowing a few seconds to pass, she added dramatically, “At my doorstep.”
    The pause failed to achieve its intended result: The policeman did not ask about the significance of Felicity’s doorstep. Furthermore, Mr. Trotsky gave him little time to mull over the implications of her remark. Instead, he demanded, “You gonna move the car now?”
    “This is a crime scene,” the officer replied with an air of authority and dignity that surprised Felicity, whose low-ranking law enforcement characters tended toward the buffoonish.
    As Mr. Trotsky was composing his face in an apparent attempt