The Dog Who Knew Too Much (9 page)

“The last letter was written more quickly than the other four,” he said. “Forgery is almost always written slowly, deliberately.” He stood and began to pace. “Even if the forger practiced Lisa's writing, one does not dash off a note in someone else's handwriting. When copying, one takes his time.” He leaned over the table now. “Not only does the
L
look like Lisa's writing, Rachel, but the
I
in
I'm
sorry looks as if she wrote it. And the small
i
, see how straight, how precise, now look in her other letters, see, the same, the same, and here, the same.”

The rabbi fished in his jacket pocket, came up with a magnifying loupe in a green leather case, and took his chair again, sighing as he sat. He held it over the suicide note, moving it slowly over each letter in each word.

“Here's something interesting,” he said, holding the paper right up to his face again. “Look at the periods in her older letters.”

I took the loupe and slid it over the letters. Magnified, Lisa's periods were tiny dashes that turned up at the end. I picked up the xerox of the suicide note. Again, a tiny dash that with the naked eye looked like a dot. A dash that had an upward movement, that told you the direction her pen was lifted off the paper. The same, the same, the same.

“And her
s
,” he said, “in ‘sorry' and in ‘Lisa.'”

“The same, the same,” I said.

He nodded.

“I don't get it. She couldn't have killed herself. I feel it so strongly.”

“No one is saying she did, Rachel. We are just seeing that it seems she wrote, ‘I'm sorry. Lisa.'”

“Oh, God,” I said.

The rabbi nodded and began to hum.

“She wrote the note. But not necessarily for the purpose everyone assumed.”

“She wrote the note,” he repeated. “But unfortunately, the only person who could have told us the purpose is dead.”

“Maybe not,” I said. I picked up the jelly glass and downed the sherry. “Maybe one other person knows, the person who wanted us to
think
it was a suicide note. The person who killed Lisa.”

The rabbi turned sideways on his chair so that he could look toward the window. He sat like that for a while, nodding to himself, his face and hair illuminated by the afternoon sun.

“Perhaps so,” he said. “Perhaps so.”

After a while, he picked up one of the older letters.

“See how the letter is framed, Rachel, the broad margins left and right, top and bottom, as if it were a painting. She had, your Lisa, a passion for beauty, did she not?”

I pictured the roses hanging upside down over Lisa's dining room table.

“Yes, I believe she did, Rabbi.”

He sighed. “
Azoy gait es
,” he said.

“So it goes,” I agreed.

I folded the letters and put them back in my pocket, wrote a small check to the building fund, called Dashiell, and suddenly remembered the black Taurus sitting down the block from my house. A true New Yorker, I was so used to walking I hadn't remembered I had a car this month, and now, having walked all the way to the East Village, I would have to walk all the way home.

I stopped for fresh hot bialys, giving the bag to Dashiell to carry for me, and then stopped at Guss's for a fresh, crisp pickle, the kind that gets fished out of a wooden barrel. This no one had to carry for me. This I munched noisily as we headed back to the West Village.

We walked along Houston Street, past the Mercer Street dog run, which you have to be a member to use, past the thirty-six-foot-high bust of Sylvette by Picasso, set on the grounds of University Village, and past Aggie's restaurant on the corner of Houston and MacDougal, which made me realize the pickle was only a first plate.

Across MacDougal from Aggie's was a large, fenced ball field. I went to a far corner, took the bag of bialys from Dashiell, and unhooked his leash. I sat on the ground, legs folded in front of me, eating a bialy and thinking about Lisa's dog, there with her the night she'd been killed.

The Japanese consider all their breeds to be more courageous than any Western breed. It is courage in the face of adversity that the Japanese most admire, a trait, by their own admission, of national character that they also assign to their dogs, the Akita, the Sanshu, the Shika, and even the cute but bratty Shiba.

If the note that I'd carefully put back into Lisa's jacket pocket had not been a suicide note, if Lisa had not climbed up on the windowsill and tossed herself straight into eternity, what, I wondered, would the Japanese say about the fact that someone had murdered her while her Akita stood by doing nothing?

The American standard for the Akita—
American
meaning the standard approved by the American Kennel Club, the main U.S. registry of purebred dogs—says the ideal Akita should be “alert and responsive, dignified and courageous.”

Whatever the truth was, whatever had happened that night, Ch'an was living proof of the beauty of the breed. If truth be told, Ch'an, with her deep-set, triangular eyes, her powerful, wedge-shaped head, her thick, dark coat, was breathtaking.

And isn't beauty what most of us go for anyway?

Wasn't it what was motivating my brother-in-law's apparent indiscretion?

Wasn't beauty what killed King Kong? Just try telling any one of the single apes you know that you want to fix him up with a woman with a great personality.
See
how far you get.

At least the Akita standard says
something
about temperament. Many of the AKC standards have nothing at all written about character, as if a dog were an assembly of parts covered with fur.

Had Lisa been fooled by the words of the Akita standard, all that overblown, flowery stuff the national clubs write about each breed—loyal, dignified, courageous? Or, since she embraced things Eastern, had she merely wanted an oriental dog?

I opened the bag and pulled out a second bialy, giving half of it to Dashiell.

The same, the same, Rabbi Zuckerman had said.

But who's to say what its purpose was?

I'm sorry. Lisa
.

It could have been about anything.

I thought about stopping at the Sixth Precinct on my way home, but what would I say—that I'd made the astonishing discovery that Lisa Jacobs had actually written the suicide note they already knew she wrote? Or that, despite that fact, I had a strong
feeling
that she'd been murdered?

You mean an
intuition
? Marty might ask.

Or would he say, “Handwriting analysis? Pretty flaky, Rachel, even for you. What's next, a Ouija board?”

Just thinking about it, I could almost hear them snickering.

No way. If their motto was Cover your ass, well, so was mine. I didn't need to be thought a fool by my local branch of New York's finest.

What, after all, did I have so far? Cops say the criminal always leaves something of himself at the scene, and that he always takes something away from the scene when he leaves. Could the note, written for another reason, be what was left? That could mean the killer had planned Lisa's death. So what might he have taken away? A hair? A thread? The scent of her perfume? But so what? Whatever he took, whatever he left, a fingerprint, some dandruff, even his damn wallet, couldn't he have been leaving things and taking things away from the scene for years? After all, he had the keys. Didn't he?

Or she?

It was way too soon to talk to the cops. All I had was Lisa's note. And the nagging idea that its purpose had been universally misconstrued.

12

Are You Seeing Anyone?

In the evening I walked Dash to where the car was parked and drove to Rockland County to visit my sister. Maybe there I'd discover something telling, like if my sister's husband had suddenly started wearing turtlenecks to cover up the hickeys on his lousy, philandering neck.

I made a mental note. Check bald spot for signs of hair transplants in progress. Check bathroom for Grecian Formula for Men. Get Lillian talking.

The gate was open, and I parked just outside the two-car garage. What a different life from mine my sister had—two children, an expensive suburban house, a fully stocked and equipped kitchen, a washer and a dryer, even a freezer. And now, or so it appeared, a cheating husband.

I walked down the long, skinny deck. The door was ajar. I called Lili's name and walked in. She was in the kitchen making soup, her sleeves rolled up, the chopping board deep in carrots, celery, parsley, and parsnips, a cut-up chicken in a bowl to her right.

“Oh, I didn't hear you,” she said, her face without makeup, her hair uncombed and sticking out around her face as if she'd stuck her finger in a socket. She was wearing one of Ted's old shirts and what we used to call fat pants, baggy, wide-legged jeans. Maybe those were Zachery's. She had a dishcloth tucked into her waist with assorted stains in various colors on it, and she wore fuzzy slippers, black-and-white ones, in the shape of pandas. If not for the size of her feet, eleven, I would have thought the slippers were Daisy's.

I thought about Lisa's mother, perfect in her gray silk dress and simple pumps. My sister used to dress like that, fussing with her hair, wearing makeup and pretty clothes even when she was staying home. Then I thought about the blond and wondered what difference dressing up would make anyway.

Lili held her arms out to the side as I hugged her, so as not to get raw veggies on Lisa's gorgeous clothes. Since she always complained about the way I looked, I thought she'd notice the improvement. But she didn't. She just turned back to the cutting board and resumed her chopping.

“Zachery is bowling,” she said, as if I'd asked. “Daisy is sleeping over at Stephanie's. Teddy had to go in to the city and take care of something at work this afternoon. Inventory? Was that what he said? Whatever. So it's just the two of us.” She looked up now and flashed me a Kaminsky grin.

“Are you hungry? There's cold chicken in the fridge. Make some tea for us, too.”

I filled the kettle and lit the stove, watching as the blue flames momentarily fogged the pot.

“I thought Ted would be home for dinner.” Lillian shrugged. “He's such a workaholic, that man. You know, I thought he'd get better as he got older, but he's worse.” She stopped cutting and looked at me. “Sometimes I worry that something's wrong,” she said. She turned back to the cutting board and carefully began taking the skin off a clove of garlic.

“What do you mean?” I asked, feeling as if I hadn't taken a breath since Nixon made his Checkers speech.

“Like if the business is in trouble and Ted won't say. He's so good, Rachel. He's never wanted me to worry about our finances.” She began to peel another clove.

I took two mugs off the shelf, put a tea bag in each, and began to make the sandwiches.

“Sometimes I think I should get a job.”

“No kidding.”

“The kids are always off with their friends, they don't even eat supper at home half the time. And Ted's been working late a lot, like last week the accountant was supposed to come at two thirty and he didn't show up until ten to five. Can you be
lieve
that?”

I didn't offer an opinion.

“It's always something. Maybe it would help if I earned some money, too. There'll be college to pay for soon.”

“What would you do?”

“Well, that's precisely the trouble. It's a great idea, but what am I trained for? Who's going to hire someone my age with no real work history?”

“You could always become a detective,” I told her, and then ducked out of the way as the dish towel snapped through the air.

“This is stupid. I have such a lucky life,” she said, signaling that she'd had about enough. We took the sandwiches over to the table. “Are you seeing anyone?”

She was obsessed with me getting married. Well, I had, hadn't I? And where had that gotten me? Where, I thought, did anything get anybody—love, marriage, having a child? Where had it gotten the Jacobses? And where had it gotten Lillian?—all her ambitions to be a lawyer instantly put aside when Ted had gotten a terminal case of ring fever and insisted, even before she finished law school, that they get married and she stay at home and play house.

“There must be some job you could get,” I said, deciding against telling her that my social life consisted of recently having kissed a total stranger in order to avoid being seen by her husband, who was at the time Velcroed to someone young enough to date her son. “Lots of women go back to work when their kids are older.”

“You get so detached from everything,” she said, “staying at home. Why am I complaining so much? I live in the most beautiful house in the world, on top of a mountain, with this wonderful”—Lili stopped and sipped her tea—“view.”

“Still, a job might be interesting. Look, even if things are fine with Ted's business, working is not only about money.”

“I know, but there is so much to do around here.”

She pushed her half-eaten sandwich away. I picked it up and gave it to Dashiell. “Let's go for a walk,” I said.

Lili changed to mud-stained sneakers and put on Ted's old leather jacket. I put on Lisa's quilted one. Dashiell rushed on ahead. We proceeded more slowly, following the circle from Lili's flashlight so that we wouldn't trip over roots or fallen branches. We went up the path that led into the state park that surrounded Lili's house, walking arm in arm where the trail was wide enough.

“Have you talked to Ted about it, about going to work?”

“I don't think he'd like it, Rach. You know how Teddy is. He wants his dinner on the table the minute he gets home. He wouldn't like the inconvenience of it.”

“So you haven't discussed it with him?”

“He has his own problems, Rachel. I don't know if I told you, but a few months ago he seemed so tired all the time that I got really worried. Maybe you should join a gym, I told him. They say it really helps, you know, exercise. It's even supposed to reduce stress, and you know Ted's work, well, the garment district, it's ulcer country.”