“Surely you are not going to give up,” Pepe said. “What do you think would have happened if I had given up when they said a Chihuahua couldn’t participate in the Iditarod?”
“You never did that, Pepe!” I said.
“Of course, I did. I have done many marvelous things. More than you can imagine. But I would never have done any of them if I had given up when things got rough.”
“I am happy for you,” I said. “But that’s not my MO.” I’m the kind of person who always gives up when things get rough. I quit art school when my husband wanted to get an MBA. Then I had to drop out of interior design school when he wanted a divorce. I didn’t even hire a lawyer, just accepted the settlement he proposed. And now I was about to give up on being a PI.
“That is why we are partners, Geri,” said Pepe. “I will stick by you. We are going to go back, and we are going to catch that dog in the act.”
“You might actually be a good influence on me,” I said. I was being sarcastic but Pepe didn’t notice that. He didn’t seem to recognize sarcasm. At least, not when it applied to him.
“We must do a stakeout next time,” Pepe said. “So Bruiser does not know we are watching.”
“OK,” I said. “A stakeout next time.” That would solve one problem, since we also didn’t want Mrs. Snelson to know we had returned. “Are you OK, Pepe? Did that old lady hurt you?”
“I endured much worse,” said Pepe, “while performing in the Mexican circus. We will get that Loser. Do not worry, Geri!”
“I believe you,” I said. Though I wasn’t sure I believed he had ever been in a circus. “Now settle down.”
“OK, OK,” he said. “I am sorry. It has been a trying day so far.” He lay down in his seat, saying, “Perhaps I need a short siesta.”
“Good idea,” I told him. “You rest while I drive.”
“Sí,” he said, curling up in the seat.
He was soon quiet and appeared comfortably asleep, except for occasional low growls, rapid movements of his eyelids, and twitching in his feet. I guessed he was dreaming about besting one of his adversaries. But which one? Sarge? Bruiser? Or Albert? Maybe all three.
Pepe woke up just as I was crossing over Lake Washington on the Evergreen Point Floating Bridge, which connects Seattle and Bellevue. It was a direction I don’t go much anymore, although I used to live on the East Side when I was married. There is a natural rivalry between Seattle, the older city, and Bellevue, its glitzier upstart. I have friends in Seattle who have never been to Bellevue.
Unfortunately, the opposite is not so true. Because there are more jobs in Seattle, the traffic across the bridge slows to a crawl during rush hours. I was hoping to slip across and get back home before it got too bad.
Pepe looked around. “Where are we going? We are not anywhere near Mrs. Tyler’s house.”
“I owe my sister some money. I thought I’d drop it off before I spend it all buying you bacon.”
“You have a sister, Geri?”
“Yes, her name is Cheryl.”
“Do you think your sister will feed us dinner?” asked Pepe with a wistful note in his voice. “It is, after all, almost dinner time.”
“It’s always dinner time in your world,” I pointed out.
“I am a dog,” he said. “We like to eat.”
“In answer to your question, no. My sister will probably not offer us dinner. And, even if she did, we wouldn’t stay. She’s probably fixing something disgusting like pot roast or steak.”
“Steak!” murmured Pepe with a dreamy tone in his voice. “It has been ages since I had a nice, juicy steak.” He glanced sideways at me. “I do not understand this human fascination for vegetables. You are omnivores, like dogs. You can eat everything. Why not eat everything?”
“I didn’t really intend to become a vegetarian,” I explained. “But after I read a book called Eating Animals, I couldn’t eat meat any more.” I looked over at him. “You know, the author mentions that in some cultures people eat dogs. And I read that some people believe Chihuahuas were originally raised to serve as food, just like guinea pigs.”
“Geri!” said Pepe. “That is not funny!”
“I didn’t mean it to be funny. I just meant to point out that different people have different attitudes about what is appropriate to eat. I would never eat a dog.”
“That is good to know,” said Pepe. When I didn’t respond, he continued, “Geri, that was sarcasm!”
“Oh!” I said and gave a little, forced laugh.
“If I had been so particular when I was making my way across the great Sonoran Desert, I would have starved,” Pepe said. “I subsisted on cactus and cockroaches.”
“Ugh,” I said. Then asked, “Why were you making your way across the great Sonoran Desert?”
“After my work exposing the head of a certain drug cartel, it became too dangerous for me to stay in Mexico. There was a bounty on my head. So I paid a coyote to smuggle me into this great country of the United States of America,” said Pepe.
Since it was Pepe telling the story, I really didn’t know if he meant a real coyote or a person. I thought it best not to inquire.
“But you must promise me you will tell no one. I do not wish to be deported.”
“Don’t worry, Pepe,” I said. “As far as I know, we don’t deport dogs. Just humans.” That was meant to be sarcastic, but, as usual, sarcasm rolled right off him.
“Bueno,” he said.
“Wow!” said Pepe, as I pulled into the driveway of my sister’s house.
My sister and her husband live in a new development in the Issaquah Highlands. The streets have names like Stonybrook and Fairmeadow, although there is not a meadow or a brook in sight. All of the houses are brand-new, multistoried with gables and porches, painted in discreet shades of brown and green, and stacked up next to each other like so much firewood.
“That is quite a house!” said Pepe.
“Really?” I was a bit miffed. I didn’t think Pepe had very good taste if he was impressed by this monstrous McMansion. But then again I’d been in a million of these while working as a stager, and I knew how hard it was to give them any personality. I preferred the charm of my 1920s-era apartment.
“Wait in the car for me,” I said. “I’ll just be a minute.”
“Oh, Geri,” Pepe said, “please just let me out. I have to pee.”
“OK, but not on my sister’s lawn!” But it was too late. He jumped out the open door, ran across the tiny lawn, and lifted his leg on the rhododendron closest to the front door. At least they were acid-loving plants.
Naturally, at that moment, my sister opened the door to see who had driven into her driveway. She has one of those alarms that sounds a beep inside the house when anyone crosses her property line.
“Good afternoon, Geri’s sister,” said Pepe, running up to her, his little tail wagging. “Are you going to feed us? Please say yes.”
“Shoo!” said my sister, flapping her hands at him. She had an apron tied around her waist. We had obviously interrupted her in the middle of preparing dinner. “Get out of here! Or I’ll call Animal Control.”
“Wait a minute, Cheryl,” I said. “That’s my dog!”
Cheryl frowned at me. “Since when do you have a dog?”
“I adopted him two days ago,” I said. It was hard to believe I had only known Pepe for two days.
“Well, he can’t come in. It’s unsanitary,” she said.
“Yum! I smell roast beef!” said Pepe, running into the house.
“Now where has he gone?” asked Cheryl, hurrying after him. “You know, we can’t have a dog in the house.”
I hurried after her. She was peering around the living room, which was crammed with the most hideous modern furniture, things she bought at a store named Furniture for Less. It was dim because she always keeps the blinds drawn (“for privacy”). You need privacy when your neighbors’ windows are only one foot from yours.
“Where did he go?” asked Chery
l.
“Probably the kitchen,” I said.
“Oh!” she said and hurried off in that direction. The kitchen was equally hideous (in my humble opinion). She had chosen a sunflower theme and everywhere you looked there were sunflowers—on the curtains, on the tiles, on the towels, even the plates. Pepe was standing in front of the oven, looking at it eagerly.
“Can I have some, please?” he asked.
I snatched him up. “I guess he’s hungry,” I said.
“Leave it to you to get a new mouth to feed when you can’t even feed yourself,” my sister said. “I suppose you’re here to borrow more money.”
“Not at all,” I said. “I’m here to pay you back.” I tucked Pepe under my arm while I pulled some bills out my purse. I counted out three one-hundred-dollar bills. Cheryl’s jaw dropped.
“Where did you get this?” she asked.
“I have a new job,” I said.
“What is it?”
“It’s totally legitimate,” I said
“So why aren’t you telling me what it is?”
“OK,” I said. “I’m working as a private investigator.”
“Oh, Geri!” said my sister. “When will you get a real job?”
This was my sister’s constant complaint. I never did anything right as far as she was concerned.
“It is a real job,” I said. “I earned this money on my first day of work. And I just stopped by to give it to you. I should go now.”
“Fine,” said Cheryl, “but I hope you remember that I’m expecting you for dinner on Sunday.”
“What?”
“It’s Easter. Have you forgotten that as well?” Her tone was sharp. Cheryl still went to Mass every Sunday. She knew I had stopped going years before.
“Oh, yes. It’s on my calendar,” I said. It was. I just never checked my calendar any more since there was rarely any reason to do so.
“You could have brought the money then,” she said. “It would have been more efficient.”
“Yes, I should have,” I agreed. It was always easier to agree with Cheryl than to argue with her. “Where are the kids?” I asked.
My sister had studied to be a dental hygienist but ended up never working in the field because she married a dental student she met while doing her training at the University of Washington’s dental clinic. She got pregnant almost immediately (or perhaps slightly before the engagement—the timing was a little suspicious) and had been a stay-at-home mom ever since.
“Oh, the nanny took them to the park.” Cheryl always has a college girl as a nanny; she rotates through them at the rate of one every few months. I wasn’t sure who was harder on the nannies: Cheryl, who used them to do laundry as well as cleaning, shopping, and child care, or the kids, who could be holy terrors.
“Well, I’ll see you on Sunday,” I said, heading towards the door with Pepe in my arms. “Do you want me to bring anything?”
“Um, Geri, I have something I should tell you,” Cheryl said, as I opened the front door.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“I invited Jeff as well.”
“You did what?” Jeff was my ex-husband. He was also Cheryl’s husband’s best friend. I had met him at their wedding. He was the best man and I was the maid of honor. It seemed like a match made in heaven.
“I invited Jeff,” she repeated. She had the grace to look embarrassed. “And Amber.” Amber was his fiancée.
“Great!” I said. “Just great.”
“I told him you were coming and asked him if he had a problem with that and he said no,” she said. “So I don’t see why you should have a problem with it.”
“Because he dumped me!” I said. “For his secretary. After I put him through business school. By working as a secretary. At a waste disposal plant!”
“That was two years ago, Geri,” my sister said. “You’ve got to get over it. Move on. In fact, why don’t you bring a date to the dinner?”
She knew I wasn’t dating anybody. It was another way for her to nag me about my lack of romantic prospects.
“Sure, I’ll do that!” I said and slammed the door in her face.
Chapter 13
My phone started ringing as I got on the highway headed west towards Seattle, but I ignored it. I had enough on my hands what with Pepe who was chattering away about what we should have for dinner and my angry thoughts about my sister’s announcement. How dare she invite Jeff to Easter dinner without asking me?
I tried to think of the bright side, which is what my counselor would suggest. And that was the only bright side I could imagine: I would have plenty to talk about at my next appointment. Which triggered a new problem. What was I going to tell her about Pepe? If I told her my Chihuahua talked, she’d probably suggest voluntary commitment.
Suddenly Pepe went silent. I glanced over at Pepe and saw he was on his hind legs staring out the window.
“What is it, Pepe?” I asked.
“Geri,” he said, turning towards me, his little dark eyes shining, “this place is muy bonita. Now I see why you live here!”
I looked out the window and saw what he was seeing. We were in the middle of the bridge, which appears to float on the waters of Lake Washington. On one side of the highway, the water was choppy, the top of the waves flecked with foam. On the sheltered side, the lake’s surface was a shimmering pool of silver. Meanwhile the setting sun was breaking through the heavy gray clouds in the west, piercing the landscape with shafts of golden light. Ahead of us were the dark hills and twinkling lights of Seattle.
I sighed. Now I knew why I had adopted this dog. He was going to make my life better.
“It is muy bonita, Pepe,” I said. “And so are you.”
“Suave,” he said.
“Suave?”
“Sí, I am muy suave.”
We cruised by the Tyler residence on our way home but there were still police cars in the drive and crime-scene tape on the porch, so we didn’t stop. Instead, I headed over to my best friend’s shop, only a few blocks from where I live. I needed a hug and some sympathy. Plus I was overdue on my promise to introduce Brad to my dog.
Brad was one of the people who encouraged me to adopt a pet (my counselor was the other). He thought adopting a dog would encourage me to get out more. Plus I think he was hoping to be a surrogate dog owner. He imagined a dog frisking around the shop while we worked.
Brad and I met in the interior design program at Bellevue Community College. We were the oddballs in our class. Most of the career opportunities were in the field of office design or as sales reps for furniture companies, and so that’s what our teachers emphasized. But both Brad and I wanted to design living spaces, and we both had very distinctive tastes, as evidenced by the décor of Brad’s shop.
He rents a little storefront at the edge of Eastlake, by the approach to the University Bridge, one of our many drawbridges in Seattle, and just under the high I-5 Freeway Bridge. Cars thunder by practically overhead (the freeway is double-decker here, thanks to the Express Lanes). The store is in an old one-story wooden building, the shape of a shoebox, and just as wide as the front window and door.
In the front of his shop, Brad displays his wares—black lacquered Chinese chairs; a dark-green on pale-green striped Victorian sofa, dotted with needle-worked pillows; a larger-than-life parrot sculpture; a brass hookah; a tall blue and white Chinese vase.
The front of the shop is small and shallow, but the back room is a dim cavern. It functions as both a work room and a storage room, lit by flickering fluorescent lights. Rolls of upholstery fabric lean against the walls. Scattered here and there are chairs, sofas, and end tables in various stages of restoration. Most of them are mine—I have a weakness for rescuing the scarred chests of drawers and ratty chairs that people leave out on the sidewalk. Brad generously allows me to store them while I work on them. He also lends me a lot of the furniture and accessories I need when staging homes for sale. Not that I had done any of that lately.
Brad and I both love fantasy in design. But whereas I tend towards Americana from the thirties through the fifties, Brad prefers the British style of the nineteenth century. Brad and his partner live in an old Victorian mansion on Queen Anne Hill. It’s full of antiques—feather fans, gold-tasseled red velvet curtains, gilded chairs covered in toile, porcelain figurines of birds. Brad’s partner, Jay, has a thing for birds. He owns a bad-tempered Quaker gray parrot that always tries to bite me when I get near it. That’s why Brad can’t have a dog.
Brad’s personal style is similarly rococo. Today he was wearing a red velvet smoking jacket over a pair of loose-fitting black canvas pants.
“Geri!” he said, when I came walking in the front door. I had stuffed Pepe back in my purse. I wanted to surprise him. “Darling, I’ve been trying to call you for days! What’s going on? Are you avoiding me?”
“Of course not, sweetie,” I said, giving him a quick kiss on the cheek, our usual greeting. “I’ve just been busy. I’ve got great news!”
Brad put down the pillow he was holding. “You got a dog!”
“Better than that!” I said.
I could hear Pepe inside my purse. “Nothing could be better than that.”
“You didn’t get a dog?”
“How could that be good news?” Pepe asked.
“I did get the dog,” I said. “Here is he!” I opened the flap of my purse.
Pepe stuck his head out and looked around. I think he was a little confused by the sight of the stuffed bobcat mounted on a tree branch that protruded from the wall. Brad loves taxidermy animals. He has a whole collection of them including a group of dancing hamsters. He keeps them in the back because they freak out most people. Like this one was freaking out Pepe.
Pepe growled. For a dog so small and a sound so tiny, it still managed to make the hairs curl up on the back of my neck.
“Oh, it’s so cute! It sounds so ferocious!” said Brad, lifting Pepe out of my bag and looking him over. “He is so precious! What have you named him?”
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