This Dog for Hire (30 page)

“Lisa never married,” her mother said.

“No, marriage wasn't what Lisa wanted,” David said.

“Her studies were everything to her.” Marsha gathered the crumbs from her silk skirt onto one hand and carefully brushed them off in one corner of the tray.

“The mother has a college degree, too. Did your aunt mention that?”

“
Da
vid.” Marsha flapped a hand in his direction.

“Six years she studied, three at night, three full time, at Brooklyn College, competing with all those young hotshots. She got wonderful grades, wonderful.”

I smiled at Marsha, and she patted my damp leg.

“She taught school, too. A very intelligent woman. That's who Lisa took after. Her mother. A bachelor's degree. Just like the hot-shots.”

“Is that how you met, at college?”

“Fourteen years,” he said. He took a last puff on the cigarette and put it out. “That's how long we waited for Lisa.”

“David, we shouldn't—”

“Rachel needs to know these things, isn't that so, Rachel? She came here to get the facts, so that she could help us. We never thought there would be a baby, not for us. Fourteen years it took.”

We sipped tea for a moment in silence. Finally David opened the album. But I had already seen Lisa. Across from us, on the baby grand piano in a standing silver frame, was a photo of a pretty young girl smiling.

“She was an extraordinary child,” Marsha told me as David turned the pages, “not average.”

I looked at Lisa in her carriage, Lisa in the bath, Lisa sleeping.

“She did everything early, before the books said,” Marsha told me, looking at me for approval.

“Everything early,” I repeated.

“This was the summer she went to camp,” I heard David say, “but we missed her. Marsha kept saying, ‘David, we have the beach right here, we have the Atlantic Ocean at our beck and call, why does Lisa have to be in the Adirondacks with all those mosquitoes and no ocean?' So, what else, we went up on visitors' day and brought her home. At the end of July. Slow season. I could take her to the beach every day. No problem. She was some swimmer, that child. Like a fish.”

“She was a varsity swimmer,” Marsha said, “at Abraham Lincoln High School.” She got up and brought over the medals and one of the trophies that sat on the shelves across from the couch.

“She was the valedictorian,” David said. “She made a speech on graduation day. Smart. Like her mother. There was nothing that girl couldn't do, if she set her mind to it.”

“When did Lisa get interested in t'ai chi?” I asked.

“While she was in college,” Marsha said. “Just before she broke her engagement, the end of her sophomore year.”

I could feel David tense. Marsha looked into her lap.

“You liked the boy?” I asked.

“He was going to be a dentist,” she said, “like his father.”

“Water under the bridge,” David said.

Had Ceil told them
I
had been married to a dentist, that I too had let a professional man go?

“In her third year,” Marsha said, “that was when—”

“China, China, she wanted only to go to China. To study. She was nineteen. What did she know? Imagine, running to China, a nineteen-year-old kid, alone, on the other side of the world.”

“So, did she go? Did she study in China?”

“Go? Did she go?” David bellowed.

For a moment he looked as if he were on fire, red smoke swirling about him as his aura turned the color of his rage.

“You tell me if you'd let a kid like that go off on her own to a foreign country. What did she know, to do a dangerous thing like that, by herself? She stayed here. It was for her own good. Everything we did was for her, everything.”

“She studied here,” Marsha said. “At Barnard. Eastern philosophy and Chinese language.”

“She spoke Chinese, what else, beautiful, just as good as if she had lived there, you should have heard her.”

“After her postgraduate studies, five years at Columbia on a fellowship, that's when she met Avram, the director of the school where Lisa worked. She studied with him since then.” Marsha picked up a napkin and held it to her mouth for a moment. “Avram adored her, you know. He said Lisa was his best student.”

“Then she was here, living here with you?”

“Oh, no. She was at the Printing House,” Marsha said. “On Hudson Street. Not far from you. She wanted to be near the school. To walk.”

“She wanted the Village, the Village, so, what else, I bought her a condo,” David said.

He took his checkbook out of his breast pocket. I began to protest, but his hand went up to stop me.

“It's just that—”

“The police have looked into our Lisa's death,” Marsha said as David wrote, “but they're busy with many other things, there's so much crime in the city, so much.”

David looked up. “What we need,” he said, “it's not really police business, Rachel. They're finished now. But we're not. We're the parents. We have to know what happened, what went on. We need”—he practically bellowed—“to find out why our daughter took her own life.”

“
David
,” his wife said, trying to calm him.

“Mr. Jacobs, I—”

“David. Forget this Mr. Jacobs. You could be Lisa's friend, you're so young. You could be my own daughter.”

“And call me Marsha, Rachel. We know your aunt so long, we feel we know you, too.”

“David. Marsha. To find out something so intimate about a person, it might take a long time. Often the victim's best friend, or her parents, had no idea she was depressed.”

“Spend the time, Rachel. We can afford it,” David said. “Now tell me your fee, please.”

I did. And asked for a thousand in advance.

“Money I have,” he said. I heard the sound of a check being torn from a checkbook. “A daughter I don't have, but money I have.” He handed me the check. Without looking, I folded it in half and put it into my shirt pocket.

“Even if I do spend the time,” I said, “I might not find the answers you're looking for.”

“I can't think of anything more important to spend money on than at least
trying
to understand what happened to Lisa. Can you, David?”

But David Jacobs didn't answer his wife's question. He had turned his back to us, and I could see his shoulders trembling. With one hand he removed his bifocals. The other carried an ironed white handkerchief toward his eyes.

“I'll do my best,” I heard myself promise. I called Dashiell and heard the jingle of the tags on his collar as he got up.

“We already know that,” Marsha said, squeezing my hand.

“I'll have to speak to people—”

“Of course,” Marsha said.

“I'll need Lisa's address book, her appointment calendar, and access to her apartment, if possible.”

She slid her arm in mine, the way my mother always used to, to walk me out. There was a briefcase on the small table near the door. Marsha lifted it by the handle and gave it to me.

“There are some letters she wrote to us in here, so that you will be able to see for yourself the kind of person she was, how bright, how thoughtful. Her keys are in the zippered pocket. You know the Printing House?”

I nodded.

“Anything else you need, you just ask us.”

Despite my willingness to travel as I always did, by foot or subway, David insisted I'd need a car for the duration of the investigation and had already paid a month's rent in advance on the Taurus.

Once out of their house and inside the car, I opened the briefcase and looked inside. There in the pocket, as promised, were Lisa's keys. Her apartment, Marsha had said, was undisturbed. As I was leaving, she'd urged me to go there, where there might be clues, something, anything, that might help me discover what I had to do in order to help her understand what had gone wrong in the perfect life of her perfect child.

Yeah, yeah.

I wondered what Lisa had
really
been like.

I started the car. Then I slipped the check out of my pocket to take a look. It was for three thousand dollars. I had been redefining hand-to-mouth for a month or so. Now if I found myself headed for the poorhouse, I'd be able to go by limo. Driving home, I thought about hiring a cleaning lady. And a gardener.

3

Don't Mention It, He Said

In the morning, after leaving a message for Avram Ashkenasi asking to see him about Lisa, I headed across the street to the Sixth Precinct to see if my friend Marty Shapiro was around. The officer at the desk said Marty was exercising Elwood and Watson, two of the bomb dogs he worked with. That meant he'd be in the wide alley that ran along the side of the precinct, between Tenth Street and Charles, where the cops parked official vehicles. I found him there, tossing a tennis ball.

“Look at El, Rach,” he said as soon as he saw me. “No waistline, and a belly like he swallowed a cantaloupe.”

“Too early in the season for melons. More likely it was a box of doughnuts. Maybe you ought to take him to Overeaters Anonymous, on Christopher Street.”

Dashiell's nose was welded to Watson's ass.

“I'm taking
him
to Sniff Enders,” I said, hooking a thumb toward Dash. He and Watson danced in circles, play-bowed, and began taking turns trying to hump each other.

“No kidding?” Marty said, the tennis ball poised over his head, then flying down the alley, a very overweight Elwood slowly running after it. “Why don't you just change his name to Bruce?”

“Very amusing, Shapiro.”

Elwood, the fat yellow Lab, dropped the ball at my feet. I kicked it toward Charles Street.

“Marty, you know anything about the Lisa Jacobs suicide? Her parents have asked me to look into it.”

“Look into what?” he asked, surprised.

“Oh, they want to find out what made her depressed enough to go out the window.”

“Yeah, right. Good luck on that, kid.”

“Why do you say that? I know it'll be difficult, but—”

“Look, Rachel, they're
par
ents. They wanna know it wasn't their fault, you know what I'm saying. Do them a big favor. Spend a few days in the park, catch a few rays, give 'em a call and tell 'em what they need to hear. It's a horrible thing to lose your kid. They don't need guilt on top of it.”

“One thing was odd, Marty. They talked to me for ages, but they didn't say much about the incident.”

“Not unusual. They don't want to think about it.”

“So what was the deal? I heard she did it from the school.”

“Maybe her place was too low for a guaranteed success. Maybe she hated her boss, you know, a passive-aggressive last act. Who knows?”

“Are they sure it was suicide?”

“Okay, you want the scene, right?”

I nodded.

He began ticking off the facts on his fingers as he spoke.

“She went out sometime after midnight. No sign of a struggle. The door was locked—”

“Chain on?”

“No chain. Anyone with a key could have locked up on the way out.”

“Bingo,” I said.

“You New Yorkers, always in such a rush, jumping to conclusions before you got all the facts.” He tossed the ball for El, then looked around the alley to make sure we were still alone. “Okay,” he continued, “you got a negative scene. No overturned furniture. No burning cigar. No smashed mirrors. No handprint on her back. You following this?”

I nodded.

“No one bent over and let his wallet drop out of his pocket onto the floor for us to find. In fact, there was no nothing.”

I nodded again to show I was paying attention.

“You got your locked door, true, without the chain on. You got no one across the street seeing nothing. We checked it out. Maybe that was because the lights were off in the studio. Maybe it was because of the courtyard and all the trees blocking the view. Who knows? Then you got this poor woman coming home from St. Vincent's Hospital, a private duty nurse. She finds the body on the sidewalk. You got the dog upstairs in the studio—”

“Dog? What dog?”

“The victim's. A big Akita. No one's going to bother her with
that
thing around.”

“Any big dog would offer a certain amount of visual protection, but—”

“And you got the note.”

“Oh,” I said, “no one mentioned a note. What did it say?”

“‘I'm sorry. Lisa.'”

All at once the dog was beside the point. True, the Japanese claimed the Akita Inu would protect its master with its very life. But as it turned out, it was only herself Lisa had needed protection from, and hometown hype aside, no dog could do that, not even the national treasure of Japan.

“‘I'm sorry. Lisa'? That's it?”

“What do you want, a memoir? She was depressed, right? She wanted out, so she's out. Young,” he said. “And pretty, too. The parents must be real broken up.”

“Her father's not eating. Her mother's not sleeping. Their worst nightmare came true.”

“So, you're going to put them out of their misery, so to speak. You're going to tell them what good parents they were, right?”

“Right,” I said, only half listening. “Where's the dog now?”

“
Now
you sound like the girl I know and love.”

“The dog, Marty. Who's got the dog?”

“The guy who owns the school, Ashkenasi, he took her that night. He came to let the detectives in, and when everything was done, he took her home. I don't know where she is now. But if I know you, you'll find out. So good, now you have your work cut out for you.”

“Did you secure the scene?”

“No need to put Ashkenasi out of business, Rachel. It was a suicide.”

He tossed the ball toward Charles Street and it bounced under one of the police cars. Watson and Dash went to wrestle the ball out from under the car while Elwood stood by, so dopey looking he might have been drugged.