The Dog Who Knew Too Much

by Carol Lea Benjamin

  But it’s so obvious, I’d said, two days into my second case.

  He’d looked down at his paperwork and smiled. Ring a few doorbells, he told me. Ask a few questions. Stick your hands in people’s pockets. Snoop some more, kid. Then come back and tell me who did it.

  Who did it? he’d said, shaking his head. Who did it is only the tip of the iceberg. You gotta know why. You gotta know how. You gotta have proof, Rachel, he’d said, because there’s too many lawyers and not enough people out there willing to serve time for killing them. You get my meaning?

  I had. So I angled myself away from the front desk and slipped the wallet out of her pocket and onto my lap. And in it, behind a picture of Pola, I found two very surprising things.

  I slid the wallet back into Janet’s pocket, wrote her a note saying I’d see her on Monday, and rolled my sore shoulders a few times before heading home. Dashiell did need a walk. And I needed sleep. There was no way to fight the exhaustion any longer, and all I could think of all the way home was how safe and wonderful it would feel to get home, take off my clothes, floss, and crawl into bed with my dog.

  As my eyes were closing, I thought I could smell those yellow roses, dying under the bushes, returning to the earth from whence they came, but it was probably just a trick of what my mother used to call my overactive imagination.

  You ought to be a writer, she’d said once. Like your cousin Richie.

  Yeah, right.

  I closed my eyes and pictured the photos Ceil had shown me of Richie in drag. But then I was thinking of other pictures, the ones in Janet’s wallet.

  The first one behind the plastic window was Pola. She was lying on that handwoven carpet, a rawhide bone between her big white paws. She wasn’t looking at the camera, the way Dashiell would have. She was looking off toward the windows, the sun filling her dark eyes with light.

  Behind the picture of Pola, there was a photo of Lisa Jacobs, her curly hair loose about her face, her cheeks flushed, as if she’d just been running, or working out. She too was not looking at the camera. It looked as though she didn’t know her picture was being taken. She was laughing, looking beautiful and full of life.

  And behind the snapshot of Lisa, there was another familiar face. This picture wasn’t a drugstore print. It had been cut from a magazine or glossy newsletter, the kind a gym might send to prospective members to entice them to join up.

  His dark hair was wet and spiky. He was smiling. Thinking about him now, I could almost smell the faint odor of chlorine that used to linger in his hair and on his skin.

  I buried my face in Dashiell’s neck and, for the longest time, tried in vain to sleep.

  29

  Feeling As If My Heart Were Breaking

  Even the sunlight slipping between the slats of the shutters didn’t wake me until two in the afternoon. Feeling drugged instead of rested, I got dressed in whatever of Lisa’s I found thrown on the rocking chair and headed over to the waterfront.

  I passed the Christopher Street pier where there were dogs playing hey, it’s spring, let’s chase the bitch and maybe we’ll get lucky and where some of the most gorgeous guys in the world were catching rays on the narrow strip of pier beyond the fencing, some of them naked, all of them gay, and headed south to the deserted Morton Street pier, where I could be alone and think.

  The Morton Street pier was in such disrepair that it had been fenced off to keep people from using it. But this was New York, so there was a place where the chain link had been cut. I held it open for Dashiell, stepping through the opening and walking down toward the end of the pier. Standing there, watching the Hudson flow south toward the Atlantic Ocean, I thought about Paul Wilcox and played with the silver bracelet he’d sent to Lisa after they’d broken up.

  Be My Love.

  Or had he?

  Wasn’t the lovesick stalker someone else? And whoever it had been, sending presents and posies and watching her window, wasn’t he now watching me? After all, the last bouquet had been left not at Lisa’s but in the gate on Tenth Street, where no one was supposed to know I lived. And wasn’t Paul killed after I’d been seeing him?

  I turned north and breathed in the fishy air that wafted over the Hudson and across the old pier, then began the form. Dashiell, who had been scrutinizing the weeds that grew between the broken paving stones that covered the pier, came close and sat.

  When my hands formed the Tiger’s Eyes, once again I felt the presence of something I needed to remember but couldn’t grasp. Twice I backed up and started again, but still, nothing.

  Still tired, and feeling as if my heart were breaking, I climbed back through the space in the fence, held it for Dashiell, and together we headed home.

  30

  And Then It Came to Me

  Sunday night Dashiell and I slept for twelve hours, waking up with barely enough time to get to the noon class at Bank Street T’ai Chi, a class I couldn’t afford to miss because I had plans other than practicing the form.

  Class had already started. Stewie’s jacket was tossed over the back of one of the couches. You know, I thought to myself, throw your jacket around like that instead of hanging it up and your damn wallet could fall out of your pocket.

  Or worse, your keys.

  So I picked up Lisa’s black practice shoes and sat on the couch next to Stewie’s jacket to change my shoes, sliding my hand into the pocket, hooking his key ring on one finger, and slipping the keys into my pocket before I got up. Then I went to join the class in progress.

  Moving slowly, as if in water, rooted to the ground, as if I were the great oak that stretched its arms heavenward from its place in the center of my garden, thinking now of nothing but what I was doing at the moment, I stepped into Single Whip and, following Stewie’s lead and direction, continued along with the rest of the students.

  Janet was there. After Stewie spoke, she took over, asking us all to stop so that she and Stewie could come around and make corrections. We froze, waiting, our legs burning, and after each of us had been checked, we continued with the form. We moved backward, doing Repulse the Monkey. We walked sideways, doing Cloud Hands. We opened our hips to do Fair Lady Weaves at the Shuttle. We stepped forward, folding our wrists before our chests, our hands closing into loose fists, the Tiger’s Eyes.

  Suddenly I was not seeing the polished studio floor beneath the circles formed by my hands, I was seeing Dashiell, days earlier, lying at the base of the oak tree, giving his full attention to the ground beneath his paws. I froze in place, my mind spinning, struggling again for whatever was just beneath my consciousness, looking through the Tiger’s Eyes at the ground beneath me, giving it my full attention, as Dashiell had.

  And then it came to me.

  And when it did, it seemed so obvious, I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of it before.

  After class Janet invited me to come to sword class at seven. I told her yes, I’d come. I thanked her, nodded to Stewie, changed shoes, signaled to Dashiell, and, feeling Stewie’s keys in my jacket pocket, headed out the door.

  I went first to the Sixth, asking for Marty at the desk.

  “What’s up, kid? You think of something?”

  “Sort of. Marty, can I see the photos of Lisa Jacobs?”

  Marty raised his eyebrows. “At the scene?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  He looked at me for a moment without saying anything, then told me to follow him. We passed the maps in back, near the arrest processing room. One had the locations of robberies, each marked with a pushpin. These fanned out all over the Village. The second map was for narcotics arrests. All those pushpins, sixty or seventy of them, were jammed into one small space, Washington Square Park.

  I followed Marty up the stairs to the detectives’ squad room, where he sat me down at one of the empty desks. Two detectives were working at desks over near the windows, and Marty went over to talk to one of them. I saw him hook his thumb in my direction twice, and when the detective he was talking to leaned back so
that he could look past Marty and see me, I decided to skip being a wiseass and just looked away instead. When Marty came back, he had a folder in his hand.

  “Is this going to jog your memory, so you’ll have something to share with us?” he asked, just a tinge of sarcasm in his voice.

  “It might,” I said. “I had a thought this morning.”

  “Congratulations,” he said.

  The other detective—mid-thirties, thin, red hair, freckles—was doing the looking now.

  “Well, more of a question than a thought,” I said, deciding to ignore both Howdy Doody and Marty’s tone. “I need to see the photos of Lisa. Okay?”

  “Since you’re in the middle of this now, and you’re doing this to help out, as any good citizen would, why not?”

  He laid the file on the desk and opened it. I leaned over the desk, took a good look, and winced. At first glance, except for the odd position of her legs and the fact that she was lying on the sidewalk and not in bed, Lisa Jacobs might have been asleep.

  But of course, she was not asleep. A small dark stain had seeped out on one side of her head. The way her hair fanned out, you could hardly see it.

  Her arms looked relaxed. One hand, as Avi had mentioned, was turned up toward the sky, as if to see if it were raining. The other arm lay still, palm down, across her chest, as if she were thinking of turning over.

  She’d been wearing black leggings and a plain black sweater. You could see an inch of her white socks at her ankles. And beneath that, what I came to find out—whether or not she was wearing shoes. And she was—soft, low black suede oxfords with a leather sole, the sort of shoe Lisa Jacobs never would have worn walking, or running, across the pristine floor of the t’ai chi studio.

  Unless, perhaps, there were some emergency, some reason to get to the window as fast as she could, without a thought to anything else, even a custom she had abided by faithfully for all the years she’d worked at Bank Street T’ai Chi.

  “Lisa never would have walked across the studio with her street shoes on,” I said to Marty.

  “Rachel,” he said, as patient as if I were more than a little bit slow, “when someone decides to end it all, they don’t care about shit like that. You wanna tell me she was religiously neat, too, she never would have littered Bank Street? You’re grasping at straws here. None of the rules count at this stage of the game,” he said, pointing to the picture of Lisa dead on the sidewalk beneath where she’d taught and studied.

  But I thought the rules you lived by did count up until the end. People folded their clothes neatly before a suicide. Or carefully buttoned up their uniforms and made sure their shoes were shined before eating their guns. What was the point of living your life with certain standards if you were just going to abandon them all at the last minute? And anyway, whether Marty believed it or not, I was still sure Lisa’s death hadn’t been a suicide, any more than Paul’s had happened during a random mugging.

  I took one last look and closed the folder, turning my attention to the big windows that looked out over Tenth Street. Had I walked over to them and looked out, I would have seen the wrought-iron gate that led to my garden, just across the street and a few doors west of the precinct.

  “Is that it?”

  I nodded. “I thought—”

  “Suppose someone killed her,” he said, his voice low, his back turned to the detectives so that neither of them would hear what he was about to say.

  “Okay,” I told him. On second thought, I might not have been able to see my gate, had I walked over to the windows. The precinct had moved here from Charles Street in the late sixties, and it appeared that no one had had the time to get the windows washed since then. They were practically opaque.

  “Might you then suppose the ex-boyfriend, Wilcox, was killed by the same individual, not by a mugger?”

  “I might,” I said, turning back toward Marty.

  “And is there any particular individual you have in mind? Is there someone you suppose it might be, or haven’t you gotten that far yet?” Sounding just like my brother-in-law, the mamzer.

  “Look,” I said, but Marty held up a hand to stop me.

  “In order to make an arrest,” he said, “we need more than suppositions. We need—”

  “Yeah,” I told him. “I get it. Evidence. Not hunches. Something concrete, airtight. A bloody glove. Particularly helpful if it actually fits the suspect. Bloody footprints leading away from the scene, preferably right to the suspect’s house. Or a signed confession. Something of that sort.”

  “We don’t need a signed confession. It could be videotaped. That would be acceptable, too.”

  Okay, I thought, so we were both having a bad day. It happens. “I’ll get back to you,” I said.

  “You do that,” he told me.

  How much pressure was the precinct under, I wondered, with an unsolved murder in the area? Like Marty really wanted to up it to two, go tell the detectives they’d made a little mistake about Lisa Jacobs’s death, tell the press, inform her parents. That sure sounded like a half an hour alone with a box of Twinkies and a quart of chocolate milk.

  “Look, I know you’re busy. Thanks a million for showing me the photos.”

  “No problem, kid,” he said. “Sorry I jumped all over you.”

  I shrugged my shoulders to tell him it was no big deal, water off a Labrador retriever’s back. He picked up the folder and turned to go.

  I almost stopped him, but decided against it. He was right. I didn’t have evidence. I only had a hunch. And the terrible feeling that time was running out.

  31

  He Couldn’t Get In, Could He?

  I got to Stewie’s apartment much later than I’d hoped I would, wondering as I knocked and waited exactly how early he left work. The welfare system was corrupt on both sides: people who should have been taxpaying, productive citizens getting checks, sometimes in more than one location, and employees signing out to the field and going to the Bronx Zoo, teaching t’ai chi, or merely going home.

  Someone was playing with me now, letting me know he knew where I really lived, sending me flowers, calling up to see if I was home. I had to move fast, I thought, slipping the first of three keys into the first of the three locks on Stewie Fleck’s apartment door, because whoever had killed Lisa and Paul was clearly playing for keeps, and it wouldn’t take a genius to guess who might be next on his list.

  I opened the door and quickly followed Dashiell in, closing the door behind us and locking the middle of the three Medeco locks. Then I waited, letting my eyes acclimate to the dark before feeling around for the light switch.

  Stewie’s studio apartment was on the first floor in the rear of a six-story tenement building on Bedford Street, a block and a half from Chumley’s, where we’d had a couple of beers while he’d told me the story of how he found t’ai chi. Stewie was apparently one of those people who straightened up but didn’t clean, as in, “I’ll straighten up the bathroom.” Whose husband hasn’t said that? But there was no exasperated wife in Stewie Fleck’s life to utter sarcastic epithets under her breath while handing him the Comet, Fantastic, Soft Scrub, and toilet brush. Everything was in order and covered with dust, to say the least.

  Stewie didn’t have a desk in the small room. There was a Murphy bed, and it was closed, locked up against the wall. There was a small Formica table with wrought-iron legs and one chair near the pint-size kitchen appliances in what was called a Pullman kitchen, maybe because it could fit in one of those miniature rooms you could get on a train. Stewie’s breakfast coffee cup was in the sink, but the rest of the dishes were in the drainer. I’m sure if Beatrice were here she’d rewash them, but I had more urgent things to do.

  It was after four, and Stewie could be home at any moment. I was hoping not to be here when he discovered his keys were missing, just in case the super had a set for emergencies such as this one.

  I poked through Stewie’s closet, checking out his inexpensive and tasteless wardrobe, finding no
thing but small change and used tissues in his linty pockets. I looked at the vegetables in his refrigerator, feeling that sour taste in my throat as I did. Perhaps I should have left the Fantastic out, to give him a hint, but there probably wasn’t any. Maybe it was made with animal products and he couldn’t use it, for political or moral reasons.

  I looked through a pile of magazines on the floor near Stewie’s ratty couch, wondering why he wasn’t on the dole. Surely he lived as if he were hovering at the poverty line. But the magazines were expensive ones, all photography journals, and his books were mostly photography books. The expensive Nikon I’d seen at t’ai chi school was nowhere around. Maybe, like Diane Arbus, he liked to photograph life’s losers, so he took it to work with him. Maybe not. I wondered now if the wonderful photos I’d seen of Lisa had been his, or the one of Howie doing t’ai chi. No way those were drugstore prints. Anyone who did work like that had to have a darkroom, but dark as the apartment was, he wasn’t using the kitchen. There were no chemicals under the sink, no stores of paper, no enlarger in the small closet. And even if Stewie could have made do in the tiny bathroom, covering the window with thick black paper and laying a board over the tub to have a surface for the chemical baths and enlarger, still, the equipment just wasn’t there.

  I went back to the books. Sure enough, several were about developing and printing black-and-white film. I looked around again to see if I had missed a place where Stewie could have stashed an enlarger, trays, and chemicals, but the place was small, and the storage practically nil.

  I can’t recall who started sneezing first, me or Dashiell, but once I started, I kept going until there were tears coming out of my eyes.

  I never heard the first few pops. I was probably still sneezing. By the time I realized what was happening, there were tissues everywhere. Like an idiot, I began to pick them up before separating Dashiell from the box, but no matter, he’d destroyed it already. One side had been mashed down by his big paw to anchor the box so that he could pull the tissues out. Now he was shaking the empty box violently from side to side, having the time of his life. I’d have no choice but to take the thing with me, ditch it in a garbage can on the street, and let Stewie figure he forgot he used his last Kleenex.