This Dog for Hire (14 page)

I decided it would be too rude, even for me, to leave in the middle of the speeches. So I waited until the bitter end before air-kissing my table companions and then running off to beat them to the coat check. I have my standards. They may be low, but they're there.

16

Nowhere in Sight

I took a cab to the cottage, changed clothes, draped Dashiell's leash around my neck, and headed for Greene Street. Twenty minutes later I was sitting at Cliff's desk, the small green shaded desk light making a warm, bright circle on the open file folder with Clifford's bank records.

One large deposit was credited to Cliff's account every month, probably from some trust fund. It was done automatically—there were no deposit slips for those amounts. In fact, there were no deposit slips, period. Unless Gil was paying Cliff cash, unlikely with a deductible expense, he was indeed pocketing Magritte's stud fees.

I returned the file folder to its place in the lower left-hand drawer and opened the other drawers again to see if something would register that didn't the first time around. The more you learn on a case, the more you can understand the possible importance of what you see, the significance of something ordinary that normally might not catch your eye.

I was looking at the odds and ends in the middle drawer, the place where people keep pens, paper clips, rubber bands, and loose change. First I found a receipt for slides from B & H Photo. I put it in my pocket. There can be nothing more heart-wrenching than looking at the last photographs someone took. It's like getting mail from someone after they've died. But I thought Dennis or Louis would want them anyway.

Next I spotted a penlight and remembered that I had wanted to look at the paintings in the storage closet, but the light hadn't been working. I wondered if there'd be anything left to look at, or if, like the rest of the loft, the closet too would be depressingly denuded of Clifford's art.

I flicked on the penlight, shut off the lamp, and walked across the hall. The closet door opened with a slight creak, releasing the musty smell of a place too jammed with stuff to have been cleaned. There was also a faint odor like that of raw wood in lumberyards, probably from the unfinished floor. I walked in, the penlight making the tiniest imaginable circle of light in the nearly empty closet.

Dashiell followed me into the closet and started sniffing the floor as I sent the small circle of light slowly around the walls, looking to see if any painting had been left by accident or design. After revealing nothing but the bare closet on three of the four sides, the light hit three stretchers that were leaning on the wall to my right. I walked farther into the closet to take a better look.

Each of the three was as empty as a gaping, toothless mouth. It was my impression that stretchers were made and canvas stretched onto them only when the artist was ready to use them. Materials were expensive, and if someone other than Cliff were making the frames and stretching the canvas, then it was likely one would be made at a time. When I looked closer, I saw that these weren't new stretchers at all. They were dirty, splattered with drops of paint, and there were staples and threads on the back of each, as if canvas had been in place, used, and then removed.

I was leaning them back against the closet wall when I heard a key in the front-door lock.

I hadn't ever put on the light in the front room, and when I left the study, I had turned off the lamp, good training from my grandmother, who had lived through the Depression. So except for the small light from the penlight, the loft was dark.

For the briefest moment, I thought of Dennis, coming to check the answering machine.

I heard the door open, there was a silence, then the door closed.

If someone had entered the loft, they were wearing sneakers. Or they were barefooted. I tried to stop breathing so that I could hear them, but the loft was silent. I slid my finger off the button of the flashlight. Then I remembered Dashiell. I could no longer see him in the pitch-black closet, and my own breathing seemed so loud now that I couldn't hear his.

Suddenly there was light coming from the front room. I looked behind me and then stepped back into the far corner of the closet. When I turned, I saw Dashiell at the closet door, standing absolutely still, his head cocked to one side. I could see his nose twitching, trolling for a scent. It would come toward him in the shape of a cone, strong and narrow where it left the person, wider and fainter the farther it traveled. I needed to get Dashiell's attention so that I could signal him to come closer to me and stay quiet, but a sick feeling in my gut told me it wasn't Dennis, and I was reluctant to speak. Instead I reached behind me to scratch my nails on the wall so that Dash would turn and look at me.

I heard a drawer open and close in the front room and some clicking noises, and then there was silence except for the small whoosh of Dashiell blowing air out of his nose, the way dogs do when they ride with their heads flying out of car windows, to clear the way for an interesting new scent. Then, just as my hand found the wall, I heard Dash sneeze, and I knew he had the scent he was after. Faster than you could say
Gesundheit
, he was, as they say in my neighborhood, out of the closet.

For a few seconds I heard only the sound of Dashiell's nails on the hardwood floor. He was walking slowly, as if he were going to meet an old friend.

Was I being too paranoid, even for New York? If Dashiell wasn't worried, it
must
be Dennis who came in to check the answering machine.

Of course. That's what the clicking must have been. The answering machine.

Dashiell sneezed again. This time it was the kind that could blow your house down. Someone inhaled audibly—okay, gasped—and then I heard the crash. The front door opened and, a moment later, slammed shut. I bolted out of the closet and ran like hell toward the front room.

The odor hit me first, a sickly sweet cloud of aftershave or perfume. Lately, they all seemed the same. A sort of nasal androgyny has taken over the scent business. Whatever it was, it made me sneeze, too.

I rounded the corner and saw Dashiell. He was standing in the light of the lamp near the front door, just wagging his tail. Next to him, lying broken on the floor, was Clifford Cole's answering machine. When I picked it up and popped open the cover, I saw that the spool on the left was empty. I looked around on the floor, but the message tape was nowhere in sight.

17

If the Shoe Fits

Lillian tried to get her arms around me as I debused, but couldn't make it. Both my arms were wrapped around her bulky birthday present, and Dash was pulling me in the opposite direction, doing a great imitation of an untrained dog.

“How are you?” she asked.

I sort of nodded and grunted. I had arrived more in body than in spirit.

I had gone to the huge windows in the front of Clifford's loft, struggled to open one, and then hung out, despite my fear of heights, as far as I could, just short of what would make me tip forward a trifle too far, lose my grip on the frame, and plummet screaming to the street, where my head would split open like a ripe melon dropped from the roof. I tried like hell to see who was leaving the building, but the gallery, Haber's, had these colorful flags out front with their current artist's name on them, so all I saw was a glimpse of a tall man in a camel-colored coat, black beret, and white scarf quickly turning right and disappearing.

How many people had keys to the loft anyway?

“I said, ‘Are you working?'” I heard Lillian say. She had taken Dashiell's leash, and we were heading for her Jeep Cherokee. Dashiell jumped up onto the backseat, and Lili helped me place Mr. Present next to him.

“Feels expensive.”

“I don't want to think about that part.”

“You must
really
love me,” she said, pulling out of the parking lot. She was beaming.

“I got work,” I told her. Then I gave her the bare bones of the case, skipping my visit to the loft late last evening. Hey, I was alone at a murdered man's residence in the middle of the night, and a tall man in sneakers, cheap aftershave, and a camel coat came in, broke the answering machine, and stole the message tape. What's the big deal? But my family has a low threshold of irrationality, forcing me to edit everything I tell them.

“You think this handler with the ponytail killed him?”

“Too soon to say.”

Ted came out to meet us, wearing his white chef's apron with a wooden spoon in his left hand, and gave me a long bear hug. “Rachel has a new case,” Lili told him excitedly. Then she frowned. “Is this one going to be dangerous?”

Lili filled Ted in on her version of my version of the case as we walked inside.

“Would this artist have threatened the handler over the money?” Ted asked. “How much is involved in these stud fees?”

“Could be a lot. Thousands, anyway. But I don't think it would have been the money. He would have been livid about losing a choice as significant as whether or not his dog should be bred. At least, that's how Dennis sees it.”

“And you? What do you see?” Ted asked.

“I'm still collecting data,” I told him.

“But tell me, Rachel,” he said, “how did this Gil person get Clifford out onto the pier?”

“Don't get technical,” I told him. It was a Beatrice favorite when she was caught in an inconsistency.

“So this we don't know yet,” Ted said. He was bending over, reaching into the oven, so I could see his bald spot.

“Roast chicken! I don't know about you, but I'm starving.”

“So,” Lillian said, “she's starving. What else is new?”

Had the intruder followed me? I wondered. But he had a key. What was he after on the message tape? Was it a message he himself had left and didn't want anyone else to hear?

“So, are you seeing anyone?” Ted asked. He was taking baked potatoes out of the oven one by one with a long-handled fork.

“No one special,” I said.

“Well, we've met this young man, a single man, very nice. He sells woolens, imported fabric from Scotland, it's his own company, and—”

I wondered if he wore those plaid skirts.

“—we thought you and he could come to dinner sometime. You might like him.”

“I don't know, Ted—”

Half the guys in my neighborhood wore skirts. Why would I have to come here for that?

“We hate to see you—” His voice trailed off, leaving the obvious unsaid. My family
is
subtle. You've got to give them that.

“What about all those good-looking policemen at the Sixth?” Lili chimed in. “Aren't any of them single?”

“Probably.”

“So? A man in uniform? With good medical benefits?”

I sighed. “Cops leave the toilet seat up.”

“Rachel, don't you get tired of—”

“I'm not alone,” I said, skipping the part where she told me I would be forever and ever if I didn't learn to compromise. “I have Dashiell.”

“Mea culpa,” Ted said. “I'm sorry I mentioned it.”

Lili called the kids and opened a bottle of white wine.

We gathered around the big round table in the open kitchen, which was a huge balcony overlooking the living room below, the spectacular view of the Hudson River ahead. For a while the only sounds were of platters being picked up and put down on the bare, round oak table and Lillian asking her children why they weren't taking vegetables onto their plates. As if it were the first time this was happening.

Don't talk about yourself, she'd told me more than once. Give the man a chance.

When would I get the message and stop coming to dinner on the lost continent, where time stopped in 1952? I was surprised my sister wasn't wearing a circle skirt with a poodle on it.

I tuned them all out and began to think about my case. Sometimes I'd get a message I wanted to save for one reason or another. I'd flip the tape, or if I
really
wanted to save it, I'd take the tape out of the answering machine and put it away, putting a new tape in the machine. But what could be on Clifford's tape
now
? Didn't everyone know he was dead? After all, it had been in the
New York
fucking
Times
.

“Ma!” It was Daisy.

“Stop teasing your sister,” Lili said without even looking. She had probably said it a million times. “And don't fill up on bread,” she added.

“My God, Lili, they've turned into us!”

“Zachery, use a fork. What do you mean?” she asked me, looking at me with her large hazel eyes.

I just shrugged. People not only dislike it when you make suggestions about their kids and dogs, they don't like it when you criticize the behavior of said offspring, unless that's what you're getting paid to do. At least that's what my shrink used to say as she criticized my behavior without the least inhibition.

“I've got this case now,” I began to tell Daisy, who was seated across from me, “where half the people have changed their names.”

“Maybe the other half have, too, but you just haven't found that out yet,” Zach said.

“You may be right,” I said. He was the older of the two, fifteen, and used to look like a cherub. Now his feet looked five sizes too big, and he had zits.

“Lots of people, in my day, changed their names for business reasons,” Ted said.

“Yeah. Yeah. You mean they got rid of Jewish-sounding names so they could blend in.”

“Did you ever think of doing that, Dad?” Daisy asked Ted.

“In
my
business? Hardly!”

“Did the people on your case change their names so that no one would know they were Jewish, Aunt Rachel?” Daisy asked.

“I don't know.”

Lili got up to clear the table. My family are all graduates of the Evelyn Wood speed-eating course.

Had Dennis and Louis wanted to appear to be more mainstream? Or less like pushovers? Except for the Israelis, Jews were often characterized as wimps.