This Dog for Hire

by Carol Lea Benjamin

  I put the yellow box into my pocket and headed downtown with the dogs. After I tossed the loft again, I’d sit down and look at the slides and have myself a good cry.

  Walking downtown, Dashiell plodded along at his usual workmanlike pace, stopping only when I told him to wait at street crossings where the light was red. Magritte kept pace, darting to the side occasionally to try to catch a bit of paper that was swirling about in the wind. But as soon as we crossed Houston Street, Magritte’s demeanor changed. He began looking up at me and whining, as if he couldn’t contain himself. When we got to Greene Street, he pulled straight for home, and once inside, where I unhooked both leads, he dashed on ahead, passing his new home and going straight for his old one.

  I knocked. After all, there seemed to be more people with keys than without them, and I didn’t want to cause anyone undue fright. Then I unlocked the door, Magritte impatiently jumping up and down at my side. He was the first one inside when I opened the door.

  Dashiell headed straight for the kitchen, looking for water. Magritte walked to the center of the front room and sat. Head cocked, as if listening for a sign that his beloved master was home, a sound, a scent, anything to hang his hopes on, he stayed in place without moving, as I did, watching him. Suddenly, his muzzle tilted up, his mouth made a small circle, and he let out the most heart-wrenching sound, a keening howl, not long and smooth like a wolf howl, but a piercing awoo, awoo, awoo, a pause, then again, awoo, awoo, awoo, the second time joined from the back of the loft by Dashiell’s guttural howl, honoring his friend’s misery the way a second hunting dog honors a point.

  For a while Magritte stayed close enough to trip me when I tried to walk, following me to the kitchen, where I filled the water bowl and put the kettle up for tea. He stayed close by while I poked around in the cabinets for snacks, even trying to join me on the step stool when I was checking out the shelves I couldn’t reach. When he found he couldn’t reach me, he whined and paced. I let him be. Dogs have as much right to the integrity of their feelings as people do.

  After pulling down some unopened rice crackers and—God is merciful and all knowing—an unopened box of Mallomars, I felt an envelope on the top shelf, the one I could barely reach, even with the stool. I managed to pull it forward with one finger, sliding it along the oak shelf until I could pull it to the edge where I was able to grasp it.

  The envelope was blank, but there was a letter inside it.

  “Honey,” I read, still standing on the top of the step stool, one hand on the cabinet, bracing me. “For so many years I pushed aside my desire to sleep with a man, not just the desire for sex, but to lie in a man’s embrace, to feel his strong arms around me, his warmth and sweetness mine hour after hour. I never had that until I met you. And much as I want that, want to be with you, sometimes I can’t.

  “I’m driven by demons now. There’s something I have to do, now, to get out, and I want you to understand that your love is my saving grace, my life, and to be patient with me while I work this out.”

  It was typed and not signed. Had Cliff written it to Louis? Or to someone else? “Honey” could be anyone. And why had it been hidden, not mailed, given, faxed?

  After making tea, I decided I should do my best to really make myself feel at home, despite the empty spaces where art had once hung. If I got comfortable, I might get more into Cliff’s head and be able to sort out some of the incredible things I had found out the day before. I decided that music would be the first priority. Having noticed a tape deck and drawers of tapes in Clifford’s study, I put on the light and began to look at Clifford’s taste in music. But before I had the chance to consider Diana Ross over Barbra Streisand, I saw just the tape I wanted to hear. It caught my eye because it was loose, sitting on top of the other tapes. Miles Davis. Workin’. I turned on the tuner and the tape deck, put the tape in, pressed the play button, and went to sit in the chair to drink my tea and listen while I thought about what to do next. Cliff had apparently made the tape himself, probably from a CD. There were other tapes he had made, carefully listing each cut in order on the paper in the box so that he would know what was coming and when. This tape, though, had no box. But Clifford was as obsessive-compulsive as you can get; even his copper-bottomed pots were polished. Why was this tape loose?

  I went back to the drawer where the tapes were arranged not only alphabetically but by style of music, and looked for the jazz tapes, my finger running over the boxes—Chet Baker, Clifford Brown, Ray Charles, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Bag’s Groove, Birth of the Cool, and there it was, Workin’. I pulled out the box to read the titles of the cuts, but it wasn’t empty. There was a tape in it.

  I guess that’s why he hadn’t put the tape away, I thought, sitting back in Clifford’s chair, at his desk, holding the box in my hand, turning it over to read the cuts. And while I listened to “It Never Entered My Mind,” I began to think that the Clifford Cole I knew and loved was much too compulsive to leave a tape out where it could get dusty or to put a tape back in the wrong box.

  For a moment I pictured the precise little lowercase letters with which he painstakingly titled his paintings.

  I looked at the box in my hand, at the neat printing of each cut; underneath the last one he had taken the time to put down the name of each artist along with the instrument he played.

  Was this a man who would leave a tape lying around loose?

  I interrupted Workin’, popped in the unmarked tape, and pressed play.

  “I have Magritte.”

  It was a woman’s voice.

  But it wasn’t really a woman’s voice. You don’t work for Bruce Petrie for very long without being able to recognize the sound of a voice-changing telephone. I even had one someplace, probably with my good crystal, in the basement. Bruce had given it to me, “For Hanukkah.” And when I’d said, “Bruce, you shouldn’t have,” he’d looked puzzled. “Why not?” he’d said. “It’s your Christmas, isn’t it?”

  “I have Magritte,” “she” said, enunciating carefully so that not a syllable would be lost. “If you want him back alive, don’t tell anyone about this message. Come to the Christopher Street pier at four o’clock tomorrow morning. Come alone—alone, you hear, or the mutt dies. And bring a thousand bucks, you got that? A thousand, in small bills. Yeah.”

  The money was an afterthought. The money was clearly not the point of this. Which is why it wasn’t taken.

  I rewound the tape and listened three more times to the message that signaled the beginning of the end of Clifford Cole’s life. Afterward, I put “It Never Entered My Mind” back on, hoping that I was finally on the right track and it wouldn’t turn out to be my theme song.

  Cliff had hidden the tape in the Miles Davis box. Did he think he’d need it again later? He had hidden the letter, too. And one of the bills I had found, a fifty, in one of his jackets, had been tucked into the bottom of that long, skinny inside pocket that I always figured was for carrying glasses.

  He hadn’t told Dennis the identity of the person he had found out about. Hadn’t told Louis about the kidnapping. It’s only a dog, Louis would have said. Why take chances?

  He was secretive, even before the events that led up to his death. I reached for the phone and called Information, to see if his phone number was listed. That’s when I got the next big surprise of the day.

  It seemed everyone involved with this case was full of secrets, and many of them were telling lies.

  I took off my boots and padded out to the front room to make sure the chain lock was on. Paranoia was in the air, and I didn’t want any surprises today, not from the ever lovely Veronica Cahill, and certainly not from the person with the big feet who was my neighbor in the ladies’ room at Madison Square Garden.

  I wondered if he had the key, too.

  If he was the murderer, apparently he did. After all, Dennis didn’t say the loft had been broken into as an explanation for Magritte’s disappearance, had he?

  I went back to the little red
room with its orderly collection of tapes, CDs, and videos and, opening each door and drawer, found the slide projector, a huge collection of slides, all marked as to content, three fat photo albums, and an ample collection of X-rated commercial videotapes, including two of my all-time favorites, Scared Stiff and Honorable Discharge.

  There was another large collection of tapes, the homemade kind if you were to judge by the labels, all, oddly, with the same label, “The Cliff and Bert Show.” I wondered if these were pornographic as well. I wondered who the hell Bert was.

  Fortunately, I didn’t even have to close the curtains to make the room dark enough. Since the den was an internal room, it was always dark.

  Having determined to dig in and be comfortable, and since what’s a movie without good snacks, I refilled my cup, took the box of Mallomars, and got Magritte settled on my lap. As I pointed the remote at the set and pressed play, I even answered my own question—who the hell Bert was.

  Clifford Cole was on the screen, his round face tense, his smallish, close-set, brown eyes alert, as if he were waiting, his brown hair too long, my mother would have said, ringlets falling on his brow and curling around his collar, giving him an almost cherubic appearance.

  “I watched the tape,” he said, his voice nearly inaudible.

  “And so what would you like to say?”

  Bertram Kleinman’s face wasn’t on the video, only the sound of his voice, as seductive as bait.

  “Well, when I was here last time and I talked about these feelings that keep cropping up, that come back from time to time—”

  Clifford stopped speaking, and one hand went to his mouth, the fingers tracing his full lips from one side to the other, as if there might be traces of a meal he wished to wipe away.

  “Well, when I viewed the tape,” he said, drawing himself up, beating back what was coming, “that’s just not true. It’s not that they crop up from time to time. They’re always there. Like weather.”

  “What does that feel like?”

  “Like it’s always raining. What I mean to say is, oh, it’s so difficult to express, it’s like the sun could be out, but it would be raining inside, inside me. I don’t know why, but I’m carrying something around that makes me feel terrible. I know I’m not a terrible person, but I feel I am, do you know what I mean?”

  “Yes, of course, Clifford. Can you tell me, when did this feeling begin?”

  “Oh, it’s been around as long ago as I can remember.”

  There was silence then, Kleinman saying nothing, Clifford looking down into his lap, as I had done so often, having arrived at Ida’s office feeling blocked or sullen, not knowing what I was supposed to be saying or feeling, removed, as it were, for the moment, from my own self.

  As I watched and waited, just as Bert Kleinman must have, suddenly the painful issue of the inability to create a human being from the clues of his life was no longer a problem. Here was the man whose murder I had been hired to solve, alive through the miracle of modern technology.

  The technique had been around for ten years or so, predicated on the idea that watching the tape would let the patient see and understand things he had missed during the session, that seeing yourself respond, and not respond, would continue the process of education at home, between sessions.

  Why not? Everything was on tape nowadays. People being born now would, in years to come, be watching themselves sally forth into life. What would they think, hearing those first cries at leaving the paradise of the womb for the harsh lights of the delivery room? What would they think, seeing themselves pop naked and greasy into the hands of a stranger?

  I had pulled a tape from the middle, not paying too much attention to the dates. Waiting as patiently as Dr. Kleinman for Clifford to troll within and come up with something else to say—God, how I hated those blank moments early on in my therapy—I picked up the box and looked at the dates, four of them, four sessions on each tape.

  Waiting, I began to think about Clifford’s work, about the painting of Magritte at the window, the rain coming down indoors, inside Cliff. Those others, the gray paintings.

  Now suddenly my mind was moving fast. I looked at the box in my hand, at the dates, then rewound the tape and looked for another, and another, all around the time that Dennis had said Clifford came to see him and he was wild, pacing, he had found out something about someone, wasn’t that what Dennis had told me? And that it had to be exposed, at any cost.

  Exposed.

  I had to look at the film, too, the slides, it was dark enough in the den, but first I had to find the tape, I was sure there’d be one, where Clifford found out whatever it was he’d found out, trolling within, I was sure now that that’s where the discovery had been made.

  Three hours and twelve minutes later, the Mallomars long gone, the dogs asleep on Clifford’s big white bed, I finally found what I had been looking for.

  31

  Man, I Couldn’t Stop

  He was wearing a navy blue turtleneck, the golden-brown curls like a halo around his face, his eyes no longer pinched and small but as round, open, and vulnerable as a child’s.

  It had been coming for months, for ages, hour after hour, talking about low self-esteem, about his lack of confidence, about feeling ugly, this beautiful child of a man, sweet-faced, sad, trying to make the bad feelings go away, trying to find out why, why some people could feel comfortable, even happy, but he couldn’t.

  “What would you like to say?” Bert asked as Clifford attached the microphone, pinching up a piece of his sweater and clipping it in place. “You look so sad today.”

  “I kept thinking about what you said, when I brought in the album, about how happy I had looked as a baby and as a young boy, and then the change, you saw the change, that later I never looked at the camera, only down, and that I looked so sad, almost frightened, you said. I kept thinking about that.”

  He wiped his palm over his lips.

  He sighed.

  “So I looked at the pictures at home, not the tape this time, the photographs,” and his round, brown eyes began to shine with tears, his cheeks flushed, his nose and chin became pink, “and I kept seeing what you saw, I can see it now, I can’t understand that I didn’t always see it, and I kept asking myself why, and the more I did that, the worse I felt.”

  Clifford sat still for a moment, nothing moving except the tears running over his wet lashes and down his cheeks, falling onto his hands and lap.

  “One day I’d paint for twelve hours, the next I’d stay in bed, keep my dog with me under the covers, not answer the phone, not go to Louie’s house. I felt I didn’t deserve to see him.”

  Clifford turned away, his lips pursed, brow knit, eyes closed. And waited. We all waited.

  “That’s how I feel,” he said, his voice hoarse with emotion, “that there’s something wrong with me, that I deserve to feel like shit.”

  Tears fell.

  “But I don’t know why,” he shouted. “I don’t know why.”

  “What are you feeling now?”

  “Nothing.” Sullen.

  “You look angry now.”

  “I’m not.”

  Silence.

  “That’s not true. I am. Do you know what I did?”

  “No, what?”

  “I was taking out the pictures, so I could look at them better, first when I was happy, like you said, then later, when I was … not, like you said, when I was not happy anymore, when I was looking down.”

  Looking down now. Looking like a child. Pauses thick with emotion.

  “I didn’t mean to do it,” he said, looking so young, so scared.

  “What did you do?”

  “I tore them.”

  “Which ones did you tear?”

  “Mine. Me. But then Peter got torn, too. By accident. I tried to separate him out, so I wouldn’t tear him, too. But he got torn. In half.”

  Now Clifford Cole was sobbing.

  “I didn’t mean to hurt him,” he said. “I didn’t.
”

  And a hand appeared on-screen, offering a box of tissues.

  Clifford wiped his eyes and blew his nose, and I watched as the sad face of a little boy was transformed and, like the sudden recognition of knowledge I’d never tire of seeing in the eyes of the dogs I used to train, Clifford Cole got the knowledge he’d been looking for, the full brunt of it, all at once, recorded on tape for posterity.

  “I did,” he said. “I did mean to hurt him. It was Peter. Peter was why I hate myself.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Because he hurt me,” Clifford shouted. “He fucked me. He abused me. I pushed it all away, but now it’s back, now I remember what he did, that’s why I began to rip him up!”

  Triumph in his eyes, his eyes so old, so sad now.

  “Tell me about it.”

  “All week it was coming back to me, weird, horrible feelings, and I’d be thinking about Peter or mad he hadn’t called me, something stupid like that, only that wasn’t it, wasn’t the real thing, and I’d just feel like I was too ugly to go outside, I even hired this kid, Michael Neary, who walks dogs in the neighborhood to walk Magritte, and I stayed in bed, and then it came to me, like in pieces and I couldn’t grasp hold of it, only see parts of it, but I knew it had to do with Peter, I don’t know how to explain it, but I just did, and now all of a sudden I remember it all, what he did to me, when it was, everything.

  “It started when I was seven and he was twelve, when my parents would go out and they’d leave Peter in charge of me, and he said he had things to teach me, because I’d be a man one day, and there were things I’d have to do, things I had to know, things he knew because he was older than me, and I had no idea what he was talking about, but I knew he was going to help me because he was my brother and I loved him. I trusted him. My parents, they always made this big thing about brothers, how you’re loyal to each other, how it’s forever, being a brother, that when they’d be gone, we’d have each other.”

  “And what did Peter want to teach you?”

  “About girls. He said I had to know what to do about girls. That he’d show me. So he took me into our parents’ room and he dressed me in my mother’s clothes and he showed me.”