This Dog for Hire

by Carol Lea Benjamin

  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.

  Had I thought Alexander sounded more game than Kaminsky?

  I looked out over the living room and beyond to the river. It had gotten dark already, and the bridge lights were on. You could see the traffic slowly snaking its way to and from Westchester County, across the Hudson. I took Dashiell out, and we walked up to the crest of the mountain. Despite the quiet and the beauty around me, all I could think about was the case.

  Maybe Clifford Cole’s death was the result of random hate. Louis thought it was. It was easy enough, wasn’t it? You just got a few friends together, took some sticks or bats and drove through the tunnel, then headed for the Village. The latest trick was to stop the car, ask directions to a gay bar, and if the stranger you had stopped gave them to you, everyone would jump out of the car and beat him to a pulp, justifying the action with the belief that no one but a lousy faggot would know how to get to the Monster or Sneakers. It’s sort of a modern-day Cinderella story, a bunch of Jersey princes going around looking for a princess, or, in this fairy tale, a queen. And when they think the shoe fits, wham.

  But what about the man in the camel coat? Could there have been a ponytail under that scarf or stuffed into that beret?

  When we got back to the house, Ted was sitting in front of the fireplace, a fire burning and the brandy out, picking up the glow of the flames. I sat next to him, and for a while neither of us felt the need to talk.

  “Stay over,” he said after a while. “You can drive in with me in the morning.”

  The brandy was burning in my stomach. I leaned against his shoulder and sighed. “I can’t,” I said, the warmth of the fire on my face.

  “You don’t have to work tonight, do you, little sister?”

  “No. But it’s too quiet here. If not for Dashiell’s snoring, I’d think I was dead.”

  He reached behind him, but I jumped up and out of the way. Then, due to my extensive professional training and a quick wit, I managed to get the brandy snifter off to the side before the couch pillow came sailing at me and hit me square in the chest.

  “You’re lucky my pit bull is such a sound sleeper,” I said.

  But Dashiell had awakened. He ambled over and was licking up the drops of brandy that had splashed out of my snifter when I got hit. Lili joined us then, and we talked for a couple of hours before they loaded me up with leftovers and drove me back to Nyack to catch the late bus home.

  18

  He Barked Twice

  I had just stepped out of the shower when the phone rang. It was someone from Bailey House, the AIDS hospice at the foot of Christopher Street, saying they had heard about me and Dashiell from a caseworker who visited the Village Nursing Home, and they had both agreed that Dashiell would be an absolute godsend for their indigent AIDS patients. Since their social worker was in that morning and had a terribly tight schedule, they wondered if I could come over with Dash, say, in an hour, for a walk-through and a discussion about my adding Bailey House to Dashiell’s schedule.

  It was nine-thirty. I had to get over to the AKC library, check the studbooks to see if I could get some idea of how big a business Morgan Gilmore was conducting with Magritte’s frozen semen, drop Dashiell off at home, hightail it over to the Garden, and see what else I could dig up about Gil from his fellow handlers. I told the person on the phone I’d be there in half an hour.

  Bailey House is on the southeast corner of Christopher and West, across the highway from the Christopher Street pier. The building that houses Bailey House used to be the River Hotel. The whole top floor, with its sweeping, spectacular river views, belonged to the expensive, chic La Grande Corniche restaurant. You can still see both signs, but now homeless men and women occupy the whole building, people dying of AIDS who have nowhere else to do it.

  I approached with the mixed feelings I always had doing this work. Why the hell was I here? How could I say no? Perhaps that’s why Zachery says I’m only a medium-boiled detective.

  Mr. Sabotini said he’d like to watch me with a few patients and see what Dashiell did, and then we could talk about the feasibility of regular visits. He was short and small with annoying little hands that fluttered constantly as he spoke, and he did that—speaking—slowly and carefully, exaggerating the enunciation of each and every syllable as if I were retarded or perhaps suffering from dementia. He was bald across the crown but had cleverly combed some long hair from the side of his head over the top and glued it down with something that made it look wet and stiff, so that of course no one could tell. And he was one of those self-important prigs who often end up working in institutions, people whose personalities are so offensive that they could never make it in any sort of private practice or in any situation where people feel they have any choice. I was ready to split when one of the patients walked into the office where we were talking and noticed Dashiell.

  “Oh, God, it’s Petey,” he said, falling onto his knees and embracing Dashiell without asking anything. Lots of people called Dash Petey, the pit bull with the line drawn around his eye that was in the Our Gang comedies.

  “Hi,” I said. He didn’t look up. His head was bent down against Dashiell’s neck, and his arms reached way around, squeezing as tight as he could.

  “He’s won-der-ful,” he said, his face so thin it was barely more than a skull, his eyes shining with the look some people get shortly before they die.

  “His name is Dash.”

  “I’m Ronald,” he said, taking his arm from around Dashiell and pointing to himself. “Will he be coming here regular?” He sat back on his heels and tightened the belt on his robe. “I like him so much.”

  “Ms. Alexander and Dashiell are here to discuss that today, Ronald,” Mr. Sabotini said.

  “Rachel,” I said. “Can we walk you back
to your room, Ronald?”

  “Sure. Really?”

  I handed him the leash and told him how to get Dashiell to heel.

  Ronald was beaming. “Can I do this? Yes, I can do this. This is the most fun I ever had here.”

  “Me, too,” I said. Mr. Sabotini was taking notes on a very little pad as we walked Ronald to the elevator, and seemed to miss the joke that Ronald and I were sharing.

  I will say this for Robert Sabotini. He hung back and let me and Dashiell do our thing. Ronald, not Sabotini, became my guide, taking me from room to room, filling me in on names and bringing me up to date on each person’s latest opportunistic illness, which Ronald referred to as an 01. He held Dash’s leash and then passed it on to those who wanted to walk the big dog, too. Anyone who could, did.

  I was surprised at how much I was enjoying myself, even though that’s a funny term to use about a place like this. But each time we entered a room, the occupants would light up, and though their evident pleasure was because of Dashiell’s presence, not mine, I still got to bask in the results. After we had visited nearly a dozen patients, Sabotini said he had seen enough and we could go downstairs and talk.

  “No, wait. She di’n’t meet John yet,” he said. “Gotta show John Petey, okay, pleeze, Mr. Sabotini, it’ll just take a minute. You go. I’ll bring her down. I know the way.”

  “Well, if Ms. Alexander has the time, Ronald,” Mr. Sabotini said.

  “It’s fine,” I said. “We’ll be down in five minutes.”

  “If you’re quite sure,” he said, smoothing down a hair that had come unstuck.

  “She is. She’s quite sure,” Ronald said.

  We watched Sabotini leaving like two little kids watching the teacher leave the room. Ronald took my hand and pulled me down the hall to a room at the end, near the window.

  “This is John’s room. I love him, John. He’s so funny. He could always cheer you up, no matter what he has.” Then he put his hand at the side of his mouth and in a dramatic aside told me, “He has KS. Kaposi’s sarcoma,” he said, enunciating carefully in a witty parody of Sabotini. “That’s cancer,” he explained. “Don’t say nothin’. It makes bumps and dark spots, you know, on your skin, and John’s real self-conscious about looking ugly.”