One of the guys was Asian. I’d seen him come in right after me, with a little sesame Shiba Inu. One of the guys was black. He had been here when I arrived and I didn’t know which dog was his. There was an old guy with his coat buttoned wrong, wearing a knit hat. He kept running over to his dog, a small, white mixed breed and telling her she was doing something wrong, like the nervous parents at the playground on the opposite side of the park. The fourth guy seemed a little overdressed for the run. He might have been a lawyer or a stockbroker, taking his dog for exercise before going in to the office. His hair was gray at the temples, neatly combed, and he’d had a shave before coming. Not so for the guy with the hat, gray stubble all over his face. He probably hadn’t brushed his teeth either. And lucky me, I was about to find out.
He shook his head when I showed him the picture.
“Never seen him.”
“You’re sure?”
“What are you, deaf, lady? I said I never seen him. Not here. Not there,” pointing toward the small brick buildings to the south of the run that housed the bathrooms, “not anywhere.”
“You’re here every day?”
“Twice a day,” he said. Then he was off. “Phoebe, Phoebe, none of that now. You’re making a scene.”
There was a pregnant woman reading on the next bench.
“Are you a cop?” she asked when I showed her the picture.
I shook my head.
“Then what’s it your business if I know him or not?”
You’ve got to love this city.
“Look,” I said, “I’m a friend of his ex-girlfriend, who just died and—”
“Like I need to buy into this stress?”
The two older women talking to each other on the next bench both peered at the picture and shook their heads. They went back to their conversation while I was still there, the picture of Herbie extended toward them.
The Asian guy took his Shiba and left before I got to him. The black guy was hooking up his dog when I showed him the photo. He shrugged, then opened the gate to go, couldn’t care less who the dude in the picture was or why I was so anxious to find him.
A boy of about ten, without a dog, came in as the black guy went out. One of the women got up and asked him what he wanted. For safety’s sake, kids weren’t supposed to be in the run without their parents. I saw her hand land on his shoulder as she steered him back toward the double gates.
“That’s good,” she said when he hung over the fence to watch from the outside. “Much safer there.”
I walked over to the well-groomed man, looking down to see all the dust that now covered his polished shoes.
“I’m trying to find this guy,” I said, showing him the picture, “and I was told he comes here with his dog.”
He took the picture and studied it, even pulled a pair of reading glasses out of his inside jacket pocket so that he could get a better look. Then he smiled, shook his head, and handed back the photo.
At the next bench, I was forced to interrupt a young, pretty blond whose head was tilted back so that she could get some sun. New Yorkers, always trying to do at least two things at a time. I held the picture out, but her cell phone rang. She took the picture from me and slipped the phone out of her pocket.
“Do you know this man, by any chance?” I asked.
She answered the phone and almost immediately started laughing. “No, no, I’m not doing anything,” she said. “Saturday? Sure. That sounds great. Me, too.”
Then she covered the mouthpiece with the hand holding Herbie’s picture. “Excuse me. This is important.”
She turned her back to me and continued her conversation. I had to walk around her to get the photo back. She’d never looked at it, and I had no reason to think she ever would.
That was as close as I got. I went back to sit with Blanche, making sure that Dashiell and Bianca weren’t getting into any trouble. Blanche was whining in her sleep and I picked up my jacket and bent to whisper in her ear. When I looked back up, the blond was gone. So was the saluki that had been playing near the water bowl.
But something was off. No one else had left. Four new people had come in. One more was coming in the gate while I was looking around. I counted the people again. Then I counted the dogs. That was odd. Not counting myself and the three dogs I’d brought with me, there were fourteen people in the run. And only thirteen dogs.
On the weekend, couples sometimes came together with their dog. They’d sit together on a bench and watch their offspring socialize. But during the week, that almost never happens. It’s more common to have more dogs than owners. There was always someone here, like myself, who had come with more than one dog. In the afternoon, it was even more out of balance. Then the walkers would come, each with four, five, or even six dogs in tow.
I tried to figure out which dog was with which human, but it wasn’t possible. The dogs were doing what they came here for, running, digging, and wrestling, not going back to check in with their owners.
On the way to the drugstore, I remembered two other times the number of people and the number of dogs hadn’t added up properly. In the first instance, like today, there seemed to be an extra person. Not that that’s against the law or anything. There was this weird guy who came every day for a week or two and sat watching the dogs. Sometimes he’d ask about one or the other, saying he wanted to get a dog and was coming to the run to help figure out which kind would be right for him. Once he brought biscuits and none of us would let him feed our dogs. We thought he was a creep and didn’t know what he was really up to. In some places, love is in the air. In New York, it’s paranoia.
The second time the count was off was one of those cold days where there were so few people brave enough to go to the run that you could count the shivering souls in a glance. There were six of us there, wrapped up so that we were barely recognizable. And there were eight dogs. This didn’t have to mean trouble. Lots and lots of New Yorkers have more than one dog. But after I was there for a while, Dashiell running around and me sitting still and freezing, a young woman came up to me and pointed to a little mutt. She’s been here all morning, she said. I don’t think there’s an owner here.
People did that sometimes, dumped a dog they no longer wanted at the run, figuring one of the dog lovers there would simply take her home. We walked around together and sure enough, no one there owned the little girl. Or knew who did. And just as we were discussing which of us would take her home and see if we could find her a permanent place to stay, a young man opened the double gates, went up to her, and hooked on the leash he pulled out of his pocket.
The woman I’d been talking to flew at him, asking him how dare he leave his dog unattended for all these hours. Hey, he said, I had something to do. With that, he turned to leave, the little dog trotting along behind him.
I stopped at the drugstore on the corner of Tenth and Bleecker, asking all three dogs to sit in the corner near the pharmacist’s counter. Then I asked him what “teratogenic” meant, the word that came up as a possible side effect of every single medication listed at the epilepsy site. The dictionary at Sophie’s had said it meant “monster-making.” The pharmacist said what that meant was that it could affect the fetus, if someone was taking one of these medications when pregnant. So unless Sophie could have survived nine months of seizures without medication, she hadn’t had the choice about whether or not she would be a parent.
I asked him how anticonvulsive drugs worked, what happened when you took them, what they might interact with badly, and if they ever worked for a while and then suddenly stopped being effective.
Walking home, I wondered what difference any of that made now. Sophie was dead. It no longer mattered whether or not she’d pined for the child she couldn’t have, or if she’d be alive if Bianca had gotten there a minute sooner, or if the pup had gotten there in time but the meds hadn’t worked. I unlocked the gate and watched Dashiell run on ahead through the dark tunnel and into the sunlight of the garden, the bullies
close behind him, thinking that even if it hadn’t been a seizure that had killed her, but salmonella, so what. The only thing that counted now was finding a home for her dogs. And toward that end, I still had a lot of checking to do.
CHAPTER 15
I Sat There Holding the Phone
I could hear the house phone when I came out of the tunnel that led into my garden. I ran for the door and got it just as the machine was picking up.
“Don’t go away. I’m here.”
I waited for the machine to click off. Whoever was on the other end waited, too. “Rach?”
“Marty. Hey.”
“Listen, I passed on the info you gave me about the iguana.”
“Yeah?”
“Burke said he didn’t know what he’d do without you.”
“Oh, great. Now what? Iguana jokes? Look, Marty, I said it was a slim chance. I knew that. But I think it’s better to have all the information—”
“You did the right thing, Rachel.”
“Only?”
“Only it wasn’t salmonella.”
“You got the ME’s report?”
“We did.”
“And?”
“It wasn’t a seizure either.”
“What?”
“It was something she ingested.”
“I don’t get it. Like what?”
I wondered if it had been something she ate at dinner, if she’d gotten a really bad case of food poisoning.
“It was the pill she took, the capsule.”
No more jokes. His voice serious now.
“You mean the dog brought her the wrong medication?”
“What the hell does the dog have to do with this?”
“She taught the dog to get her medication on command. The older one, Blanche, alerted her when a seizure was coming. Sometimes twenty minutes before, sometimes two minutes before. When she was out of the house, she carried the medication on her, in a little belt pouch or a fanny pack. So it was always available. But at home, shit, she could be in the bathtub or asleep when the dog gave her the word. So she taught the little one, Bianca, to get her the meds and bring them to her.”
“The clone?”
I sighed audibly. “Yeah—the clone. So what are you saying, she should have taught her to read the prescription bottle more carefully?”
“Good thought, but it wouldn’t have helped. It was the right container.”
“I don’t get it.”
“What she ingested—Ms. Gordon—the particular pill she took, it wasn’t her medication.”
“What was it?” I asked, pressing the phone closer.
“Vacor.”
“Which is?”
“Rat poison.”
“Jesus.”
“Where are you now?”
“Home. Why?”
“Because if you were at her place, I’d tell you to get the hell out. Now.”
I waited.
“The medication found next to her, the stuff the dog was lying on, the clone.” I could hear him lighting a cigarette, inhaling, blowing the smoke out before he continued. “It was the right stuff, her regular prescription. Burke called her doctor and checked it out.”
“You’re saying Bianca brought her the anticonvulsant?”
“To the best of her knowledge. At least it was the right container. And probably, in the right place, on her nightstand more than likely. Did she mention what she taught the dog to do, Rach, if it was by location? That would have made the most sense.”
“I don’t know how she did it, Marty. It was a friend of hers who told me about this, a woman who worked with her.”
“Name?”
“Ruth Stewart. She’s the receptionist.”
I heard him talking to someone else. Then there was a pause, Marty writing down the name I’d given him.
“That would have been the easiest way,” I said, “to teach her to retrieve the medicine from the nightstand by back-chaining, you know, start the dog where you want her to end up, where the vial with the pills was kept, and work backward, a few feet at a time until she’d get it and take it to wherever Sophie was, anywhere in the house or garden.”
“I know what back-chaining is, Rachel.”
“Right. But I didn’t get the opportunity to discuss this with my client so I don’t know exactly how she taught the dog…”
“Doesn’t make much difference now.”
“Anyway, if it were me, I’d check the container the dog brought me, just to make sure.”
“Like I said, it was the right container. And when the victim opened it and removed a capsule, it looked the same as it always did, just the way it should have. But someone had emptied out one of the capsules, cleaned it out, and filled it with Vacor, someone knowing that eventually she’d get alerted that she was going to have a seizure and eventually she’d take the tainted pill.”
“What do you mean, one of the capsules?”
“The rest of them, they were fine. They had the anticonvulsant in it that she took to ward off her seizures.”
“Then how do you know the Vacor was in one of the capsules?”
“The ME recovered the outer material and no traces of the medication that should have been in it. And enough Vacor not to just make her wish she was dead, but to actually get the job done.”
“But all the other pills—”
“Were as they came from the pharmacy. Whoever killed her—”
“Was willing to wait, let it happen when it happened.”
“Precisely.”
“Someone not in a rush.”
“Gives me the creeps,” he said, “someone can be that calculating.”
“That’s why you’re with the Bomb Squad.”
“No one likes a wise ass, Rachel.”
I heard someone talking in the background, saying, “I told him, fifty bucks for a haircut? That’s robbery.”
Marty asked me to hold on.
“That’s because you went to a stylist,” another voice said, “instead of a barbershop.”
And then Marty came back on the line, saying he had another call, he had to go. But he didn’t hang up. “Someone else got it,” he said.
For a moment, neither of us spoke.
“Marty, I wonder if whoever did this was counting on the fact that there’d be no autopsy because of the increased risk of death with epilepsy. Maybe he figured the cause of death would be assumed to be epilepsy related.”
“No one makes detective by assuming, Rachel. Things aren’t always what they seem to be. You know that.”
“I do. But maybe whoever used the Vacor didn’t know that. I did some research on epilepsy. There’s a higher rate of suicide among epileptics. There are more accidental deaths, especially drowning, and there’s something called ‘unexplained death syndrome.’”
“And there’s murder.”
“That, too.”
“Watch your back,” he said. “You hear?”
I sat there holding the phone, thinking about what had happened a few hours earlier, the super coming in, using his key and walking into Sophie’s apartment without knocking. Then I thought about what had happened right afterward, about the unwelcome visitor in the garden, the price you pay for outdoor space in Manhattan.
Joe, the super. He’d have rat poison in the basement. He’d have to.
But why would he want Sophie dead?
I called the dogs into the house, gave them each a biscuit, and headed back to Sophie’s to have a talk with Joe in broad daylight.
CHAPTER 16
I’m Doing Some Work for the Landlord
Underneath the bells for all the apartments in Sophie’s building, there was a small plaque that directed me to the building next door, Apartment B, for the super. I walked to that doorway, found the bell, and rang it, not knowing what I’d say if anyone answered.
Improvise, my former boss used to say when, in the beginning, I’d once asked him how to get where I had to go. You’re a college graduate, he’d added,
I shouldn’t have to be telling you how to do the job.
The intercom crackled.
“Who’s there?” The accent was Russian and so thick she sounded as if she had several golf balls in her mouth.
“I need to get into the cellar,” I said. I’m quick, you have to give me that.
“Con Ed?”
She was doing my job for me, giving me the excuse I needed to check around downstairs. But I was wearing jeans and a T-shirt. Con Ed? I didn’t think so.
“I’m doing some work for the landlord and I have to check something in the cellar.”
“I buzz you in.”
I pushed open the door, followed the long hallway back, and opened the gray door on the left that led under the stairs and said Basement on it. I felt my way down in the dark.
She was waiting for me in the open doorway, someone who lived underground like a mole in this dank place, a woman of about fifty, or who appeared to be fifty because life hadn’t been kind.
“What you need in cellar?”
“I have to check the tools. I’m doing some carpentry work for, well, over at the office, and I don’t have the right saw.”
Lame, I thought, wondering if she’d go for it.
She began to shake her head, making a sound in her throat that sounded as if something had gotten stuck there—my story, no doubt.
“No, no, no. Tools belong to Sergei. I can no let you take saw. You come back in one hour. Talk to him about saw.”
“Sergei?”
“My husband. He super for this building and next-door building. He fixing toilet upstairs. You come back in one hour. He give you saw.”
“I spoke to a man named Joe yesterday. He said he was the super here.”
“No, no, no. Sergei. No Joe.”
“What about…?”
“No Joe here,” she said, looking frightened and closing the door.
I made my way back up the dark, worn steps and headed for the dog run so that I could show Herbie’s photo to a new group of dog owners; after sixteen more people told me they’d never seen the man in the picture, I went back to my cottage to pick up Bianca, to take her uptown to the school where Sophie taught in the hope that one of Sophie’s students would have something worthwhile to tell me.
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