The Dog Who Knew Too Much (20 page)

“Paul Wilcox is dead, Marty?”

He nodded.

I looked back toward the desk, at the uniforms milling around, at the line of civilians, there at any hour of the day or night to report the kind of minor irritations that build up in a city like New York, things that drive people to the brink of insanity, or over it. I reminded myself where I was and what was at stake here.

“How? What happened?” I asked him, as if we were talking about some stranger and not a man I'd gone to bed with, my voice sounding as if it were coming from far away, or from the other side of a closed door.

Marty took my hands.

“A couple of the detectives want to talk to you. I came back in so that I could do this.” He squeezed my hands. “So like I said, he was carrying a card with your name on it, Rachel. Looks like you were pretty important to him.”

I felt my face flush, but the rest of me was as cold as a corpse. I had come out without a coat, and my hair was still wet, I thought as I felt myself shiver, my fingers like icicles in Marty's hands.

“Rachel?” he said. He stood, slipped off his jacket, and put it around my shoulders.

“How, Marty? Help me out here, will you?”

“ME says broken neck, unofficially, of course, pending autopsy. They're working on him now.”

“When did it happen?”

“Mid to late afternoon. Best guess? Weather conditions weren't unusual, so by the deceased's temperature, he figures four to five, give or take.”

I winced, thinking of the medical examiner slipping the thermometer next to Paul's eyeball. Keep your mind
here
, I told myself.

“Who's on?” I asked him. “Who do you want me to talk to?”

“Talk to me,” he said.

“He was Lisa Jacobs's sweetheart,” I told him, “until a few months before her death, her suicide. I met with him in connection with the case, to try to find out what I needed to know about Lisa, for her parents.”

Marty nodded.

“So that I could help them to understand what had happened, I mean, why what had happened had happened, so that I could give that information to her parents.”

“And?”

“He wasn't very forthcoming when I first went to see him. He just seemed angry. Turned some of that on me.”

“So you tried another approach? Something less threatening, more friendly.”

“Swimming,” I said, feeling my throat closing.

“Swimming?”

“He was a swim coach. I went over to the gym where he worked, the Club on Varick Street, and went swimming.”

“And?”

“And then he was more forthcoming. He opened up,” I said, swallowing hard, “about their relationship. I guess that's why—”

“He had your name in his pocket, over his heart?”

I nodded. “How did it happen, Marty?”

“Looks like a mugging. The sort where you not only take the individual's credit cards and cash, you also inflict as much damage as possible, given the constraints of time and place. Sometimes the mugger gets scared off in time, and the victim lives. No such luck this time.”

“Was there anything else on him, Marty, besides the card?”

“Handkerchief, key ring, driver's license, small change, nothing much.”

“Show me.”

“His belongings? What for?”

“Please, Marty. This has to do with my case. It's really important.”

“I don't—”

“You don't think
I
—”

“Rachel—”

“So show me.”

A moment later I was looking through a plastic bag at Paul Wilcox's handkerchief, driver's license, two quarters, a dime and two pennies, and a key ring with eight keys on it, three of them Lisa's, three of them for Bank Street T'ai Chi, one for downstairs, two for upstairs, though nobody ever locked the bottom lock.

“That's it?” I asked.

“Just what you see,” he said.

“Rachel, you know anything about this man's life, any enemies he might have had?”

“No,” I said. “No friends either. We only spoke about Lisa, about his feelings for Lisa.”

“If you think of anything—”

“Right,” I said. “Can I go now?”

“Rachel—”

“What? You don't want me to leave town?”

“I want you out of this.”

I nodded.

“Unless you
think
of something he said, anything he said that might—”

“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “I'll call you first thing. I'll beep you. Whatever.”

“Or Matthew. He and Dave are in charge of this. They might want to talk to you, but I'll talk to them for now.”

“Thanks, Marty.”

“Sure thing, kid.”

I started to go, but Marty took my arm and stopped me.

“Hey, I meant to tell you, Rach. You were right on the money about Elwood's thyroid.” He made a fist and pointed to the floor with his thumb. “Way down. He and Gluck are taking the same pills now. We keep telling Gluck he better watch it, he'll be out of a job, we're going to put Elwood on the phone. The doc says it'll take a few months for his weight to go down, but his energy is way up. You gotta see him. He's like a new dog,” he said. “I'll call you as soon as he gets back.”

The bomb dogs worked one week, then had two weeks off, what a lot of their fellow officers considered an enviable work schedule.

“You okay?”

I nodded.

“Good. That's good. You take care now. And call me if you think of anything.”

It was nearly ten when I got back home, and I couldn't remember having just walked across from the precinct. There were two more messages. Both hang-ups. Of course the calls hadn't been from Marty. He would have left a message.

I sat in the living room for a while, thinking about Paul. There wouldn't have been a wallet. When he'd paid for the Chinese food, his cash had been loose in his pocket. He wouldn't go out without money. No one would. So the mugger had taken whatever cash he'd had on him.

I made a pot of tea, heating the pot with boiling water the way he had. But when it was ready and I'd carried my cup back to the couch, I just let it sit there, untouched.

He'd had the keys to the studio. Had he used them that night? No, of course not. He wouldn't have been so surprised to learn about the note if he had.

The phone rang, and I picked it up, but oddly, whoever was on the other end had nothing to say. That's when it occurred to me that I couldn't remember if I'd locked the garden gate. I grabbed my keys, put Lisa's jacket back on, and walked outside, Dashiell following. We headed toward the dark tunnel that led to the gate. I was going to try it, to make sure it was locked. I was going to shake it, to see if it held, then finally go to sleep. But what I saw stuck in a curlicue of the wrought-iron gate stopped me dead in my tracks.

There, wrapped in floral paper with a layer of waxy green tissue paper underneath, were yellow rosebuds, twelve of them, each perfect. Their perfume filled the night air.

After making sure the gate was locked, I looked at the bouquet very carefully, even turning it upside down and shaking it. But no matter how hard I looked, I couldn't find a card.

25

We Don't Need the Money, He'd Said

The phone rang again. I could hear it as I carried the flowers back toward the cottage and laid them on the steps.

Someone had been sending roses for a while now. Someone had waited across the street from Lisa's, watching her windows. And someone knew that I didn't live at Lisa's house, that I lived here. That when the time came, this is where I was to be found.

But it hadn't been Paul. Then who was it? And what was he after now? Or who?

Leaving the roses on the steps, Dashiell in the garden, and the door open, I went upstairs, took the little stool from my office, and carried it into the bedroom closet. Then I climbed up on it and pulled down the Joan & David shoe box, a relic of my eight-month marriage to Dr. Fashion, a box much too heavy to have shoes in it, and put it on the bed.

Under some circumstances, my shrink Ida used to say, paranoia is not such an inappropriate response.

I went down to the basement where I had the formal dining room table I never used and all the cartons of stuff I'd never opened from when I split with Jack and moved here, saltcellars and linen napkins, a dozen sterling silver iced-tea spoons, stemware, Rosenthal china, wedding presents from people who apparently thought Jack had married Martha Stewart. I squeezed my way past a mountain of boxes to the sideboard against the far wall, which held only bullets for my gun and the boxes of gadgets Bruce Petrie used to give me, so full of formal dinner parties was my life. With a box of thirty-eights in hand, I began to pick my way back to the stairs. But then I stopped.

Why was this stuff still here, still part of my life? More to the point, how had I fooled myself into thinking I could be happy spending my days hanging up the clothes someone else tossed over the dresser the night before and finding new things to do with cilantro?

I had moved into Jack's Victorian house in Croton, overlooking the Hudson River, a sort of mirror image of Lili and Ted's modern house on the other side of the river. Lili, cradling her morning coffee, could watch the sun rise over Westchester, pink turning to gold, all brightness and hope. I could watch the sun set over Rockland County, brilliant orange and flaming red, the colors of dying leaves in fall.

Having closed my dog school in the city, I'd figured, no problem, I'd train in Westchester, closer to home. But when I told Jack my plans, he became as still as marble and just as cold.

We don't need the money, he'd said, as if that were all that work was about. Then, after a long frost, he spoke again. He wanted me home when he got home, not running around at all hours of the night getting myself bitten. He wanted to sit down to a nice, home-cooked meal with me and discuss his day. That's what marriage was, wasn't it, for chrissake, he'd said. He hadn't married me, he added, to come home to an empty house.

Where, I remember wondering, was the man who'd found my occupation quirky and endearing? Get a load of this, he'd told his cretin brother Alan, she trains
dogs
for a living. And while I'd answered all his brother's inane questions, he'd looked proud. But as soon as we were married, he'd changed.

The price of my poor judgment had been a divorce. Lisa's may have cost her her life.

I put the box of bullets on the bottom step and began to open those other boxes, cartons containing carefully wrapped champagne flutes, a soup tureen, a fish poacher, grape shears, lobster forks. At three in the morning, having set aside only a hand-thrown planter I could use for herbs in the winter and a small, flowered bud vase, I resealed the cartons and stacked them neatly under the windows. Then I shut off the light, dropped the box of ammo in the kitchen, and went back out into the moonlit garden.

Alongside the house were the logs I had gathered last fall in the woods surrounding my sister's house. The smaller pile, the split logs, was nearly gone. I tossed the jacket over that pile, lifted the heavy tarp from the larger woodpile, and unwrapped the sledgehammer and wedge that lay on top of the wood.

Dashiell lay peacefully on the rich, loamy earth near the oak tree that stretched skyward from the center of the garden. It was taller than the cottage. The moonlight, filtered through its branches, made his white fur look pearly, almost iridescent.

A mugging. Yeah, right.

Mid to late afternoon, I thought, lifting a log from the woodpile. Where had Howie been? It didn't take an hour and a half to pick up a bottle of cheap Scotch for your mother, did it?

I stood the log on the tree stump near the wood pile and tapped in the wedge. Where had Stewie Fleck been between four and five? In the field, meaning anywhere he damn well wanted to be, the little creep?

What about Janet? Had she been at the gym, where Stewie said she practically lived, torturing innocents?

Come to think of it, where had Avi been? The news was full of reminders lately that no one is immune to human frailty, not judges, Nobel laureates, or even holy men.

If Paul had been killed across from the school, didn't that mean he'd been on the way to the studio, to find me?

If so, why hadn't he called to see if I were there?

But what would be the point? Surely he knew that no one ever picked up the phone. If someone doesn't have the patience to wait for us to call them back, Avi had said once when I was going to answer the phone in the middle of working, they're not going to have the patience to learn t'ai chi. Not answering the phone was a weeding-out process for him, the first in a long string of character tests.

Why Paul? I thought. But the answer to that question hit really close to home. Too close, if you ask me.

I looked back at Dashiell, still lying under the tree. Between his paws, right under his nose, he had serendipitously discovered a scent worthy of his complete attention. I could see his nostrils moving.

I turned my attention to the wood pile and began to split logs in earnest now, tapping the wedge into the next log, swinging the sledgehammer back and then high over one shoulder, bringing it down hard, hearing the satisfying clang of metal on metal and seeing the log cleave in two, opening like a flower that had suddenly decided to bloom, the outside darkened by the weather, the inside raw and vulnerable looking as a wound. I worked until I developed a rhythm, until I was drenched with sweat, until I no longer knew where the sledgehammer ended and I began, nor did I care, until there were no more logs to split. Then I sat quietly on the steps, my dog on one side of me leaning in, those perfect roses on the other, until the stars began to disappear, the color of the sky lightened, the first bird began to sing. And when it did, I sat some more.

26

Be Not Afraid

When the garden was filled with the sweet, clean light of morning, I spread the yellow roses under the bushes across from the cottage to mulch. Then, sticking my sore hands into my pockets, I felt the fortune cookie I'd never opened. I broke it in half and held the pieces for Dashiell to eat while I read the message. It was a proverb.
Be not afraid of going slowly, be afraid only of standing still
.