A Hell of a Dog

by Carol Lea Benjamin

  “Ready for five?” Tracy called out.

  “Oh, no,” Cathy said. “At least send Magic instead of Jeff.” And once again, we were giggling like kids.

  “No five,” Boris said.

  We all groaned.

  “Six. Boris on end.”

  And with that, Chip Pressman did something I would have thought was impossible. As if to make room for Boris, he moved closer.

  “There’s a whole park out here,” I whispered, looking not at him but up at the stars.

  “I know.”

  I could see the Big Dipper.

  “I thought we should all get as close as possible so that Jeff can make the jump without landing on Boris.” He scrunched closer still.

  “Jeff not to land on Boris,” I heard from the other side of Chip. And then I heard Tracy, and Jeff was coming our way. I closed my eyes this time, waiting. It seemed to take longer this way, nearly forever. Perhaps Tracy had backed up to give the dog a better chance of making the jump. And then I felt him and heard him land, heard the others clapping for him and shouting his name. I sat up. Boris was already standing, taking a bow. Jeff was back with Tracy, ready to go again.

  “Let’s make it seven. I’ll take the end.” It was Beryl, coming to lie down next to Boris.

  “Let’s try something else, give another of the dogs a chance.” That was Cathy, the voice of reason. She had changed to one of the Huffy T-shirts, the one with Sky doing weave poles on it.

  “How about human weave poles, then?” Beryl asked. “I’ll send the doggies through, just tell me which ones know how to do it.”

  Some of the dogs were on down-stays, others were on their own in the meadow, chasing each other or sniffing all the wonderful new odors. I whistled for Dashiell, and Sky came too. Beryl called Cecilia. Betty came on her own, curious to see what all the fuss was about. Bucky had been sitting with Tamara, who he’d said would only work for him. Sam was next to him, with Angelo on her lap, and Martyn had Alexi at his side and was stroking the big dog’s neck. Far off at the edge of the meadow, Sasha was pacing. Boris said Sasha was American dog, keeping the world safe for democracy. But the truth was, he was keeping Sasha away from the other males. The Rottie people say Rotties will never start a fight, but they’ll never back down from one either. I say, show me a dog who’ll never back down, and I’ll show you a dog who will start a fight, any chance he gets. Looking around, I wondered which of us was like that. In the middle of our work, who had taken things so irretrievably far? And why? Then Tracy grabbed my hand and pulled me into the line with the others.

  All the dogs except Sasha were lined up for Beryl to send. The rest of us held hands, standing as far apart as we could this time, leaving room for the dogs to weave in and out as they ran down the line as quickly as they could.

  Cecilia did the human weave poles like the puppy she was, jumping up for kisses on whichever people she fancied she could manipulate into responding to her cuteness, stopping to pull up some grass, barking when she got to the end, so pleased with her own performance she couldn’t keep quiet about it. Alexi and Tamara walked through, as if they were strolling down Fifth Avenue in the Easter parade. Bucky, who held my other hand, squeezed it as his dogs passed around us. Betty was precise, centering herself on each turn and not touching any of us. Dashiell was the opposite, smacking into as many legs as possible on his way. Sky streaked through the poles like a bolt of lightning, never touching any of us, and when he reached the end, turning and running back through, ending with a smart, neat sit in front of Beryl, as if to say, How was that for weave poles, amateurs?

  “That’s it,” Audrey called out, dropping the hands she was holding and breaking the line. “No one can compete with Sky. Time for something new.”

  “How about hide-and-seek?” Chip said.

  I thought he’d be shouted down, that Boris would suggest we find a wall for the dogs to scale or that we do a relay race, each of us running with our own dog. I saw that Cathy had a bag of Frisbees and that Woody had brought a couple of gloves for scent discrimination, even though we said we’d use what we found in the park. But suddenly they were all shouting like five-year-olds, hide-and-seek, hide-and-seek. And then before I knew what was happening, Chip had grabbed my hand and we were running toward the line of trees, Betty and Dashiell at our sides.

  “We’ll give you fifteen minutes,” Beryl shouted, “then we’re coming to get you.”

  All I could hear was my breathing as we ran in the dark, through the trees and to a narrow dirt path on the other side.

  “This way,” he said, pulling on my hand, holding it so tightly I couldn’t get it free. He was running in an arc, heading east first, then north, then west. At one point, he stopped so that we could leash the dogs, and I realized we were at the stone wall that lined the park.

  “Here, let me give you a leg up,” he said, bending and linking his hands so that I could step on them. Ignoring his offer, I turned my back to the wall, hoisted myself so that I was sitting on it, and then swiveled around and jumped off, calling Dashiell to jump the wall and follow me.

  “Where are we going? They’ll never find us if we leave the park.”

  “Exactly,” he said, grinning.

  I stopped walking. Dashiell stopped, too.

  “I’m going back.”

  “Don’t,” he said. “I never had the chance—”

  At first he just stared at me. He didn’t look like a five-year-old any longer. He looked significantly older. Maybe deep into adolescence.

  He started coming closer, too close, if you ask me. When I saw his lips heading for mine, I ducked, leaving him with a mouthful of hair.

  “Rachel,” he said. “I never—”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know. You never knew it could be like this. Well, the truth is, it can’t. It can’t be like anything between us.”

  “You don’t understand,” he said.

  “But I do. I understand perfectly. Everyone is feeling frisky this week, and you feel left out. If I play my cards right, we could be part of it all, you know, the adultery that no one takes very seriously, that doesn’t spoil anyone’s home life. Because as you might well imagine”—I may have been shouting by then, but hey, this was New York, who the hell would even notice?—“I’ve been lying awake at night wishing I could have a meaningless roll in the hay with some other lady’s husband and then order up some traif from room service because there’s nothing quite like pork rinds after sex. It’s a well-known fact.”

  I took a deep breath and continued. “I would appreciate it immensely if we could refrain from any sort of personal conversations for the rest of this week while we’re stuck in each other’s presence. We’re here to work, and I find this sort of—”

  “I hear you, Rachel. It was foolish of me to think—” Suddenly we could hear the dogs barking, coming our way. “This way.” He reached for my hand again, then thought better of it and gave me the hand signal for come. “Hurry.”

  We headed across the street and back to the hotel, going straight to the tea room, where we began gobbling dessert, trying to make it look as if we’d been there for ages, just waiting for them to show up.

  My mouth was full of cheesecake when the glass doors opened and the others burst in. I lifted my teacup and took a sip. “What kept you all?” I said, as casual as a polyester pants suit.

  “Guess you’re not trying for tracking degrees with any of those mutts,” Chip added.

  Bucky could hardly catch his breath. “Good one, pally,” he said to Chip. “You really had us going this time.” He threw himself into the chair next to mine. I heard it groan.

  Martyn sat across from Bucky, still holding Alexi’s leash. Tracy was at the dessert table, and Beryl was pouring tea. Everyone looked happy, flushed with color, not nearly as tired as we all should have been.

  “How did you ever get involved in this insanity?” Chip asked Sam.

  “Don’t get me started,” she said, waving away the question. “Who’s up for
the morning?” Audrey asked.

  “Good lord, it is morning,” Martyn said. “It’s me. I’d better be off to bed.”

  I looked around for Cathy and didn’t see her.

  “Have a cup first.” Beryl handed him tea, but before he got the chance to take a sip, Boris walked in with a better idea, three bottles of vodka. He held the door with his ample backside, and Cathy came in behind him with a huge bowl of water for the dogs.

  Boris filled eleven cups with vodka and handed one to each of us. “To American camaraderie,” he said, and we all cheered and emptied our cups, holding them out immediately for refills. Martyn waved away a second and handed Alexi’s leash to Bucky. Beryl got in the next toast before he got out the door.

  “To England.”

  So of course Martyn walked back in and refilled his cup.

  “To the queen,” he said.

  And then Boris was opening the second bottle. This time Martyn made it out the door before the toast.

  “To better days ahead,” Bucky said, holding up his cup. “And to Rick,” he added softly.

  “To Rick,” we all repeated.

  “He was in men’s clothing,” Bucky said.

  “Who was?” Chip asked.

  “Rick. Before his degree. He’d dropped out of college and bummed around out west for a year or so. Then he got this job on Madison Avenue, selling men’s clothing. But it bored him. He said he could barely stand it. He’d wake up in the morning and not want to get out of bed. So he took a loan out, finished his degree, and went right on to graduate school. He started out working with homeless children, and he brought his dog with him to get the kids to open up and talk. Then one thing led to another, I guess.”

  “Poor man,” Audrey said. “Alan was a teacher. High school history. He went to visit his brother, someplace in the South, one of the Carolinas maybe, or Tennessee, and they went hunting. He thought the electronic collars that the hunters all were using working off-leash dogs at great distances could also solve the problems of pet owners whose dogs wouldn’t come. That’s all most people want, he used to say, is for their dogs to come off leash. They don’t care about the other stuff.” She was stroking Magic, who was sitting, as usual, on her lap.

  There was a silence.

  “To Alan,” she said.

  Boris poured a swallow or two into Chip’s cup, then Woody’s. But when he refilled his own, it runneth over, and when he lifted it to drink, some of it even runneth down his double chin.

  “Cake,” Beryl said. I looked over at her now. She seemed drunk out of her mind. I wondered if I looked that way, too. “We need sweets,” she said, attempting to get up and fetch the platter of cakes and pastries, then falling back into her chair. “Oh, my.” She straightened up and fussed with her blouse. “Someone bring on the goodies.” She spoke slowly, so as to get the words past her lips in good order. “The old lady’s too drunk to do it herself. You know, my dears, if the queen could see me now, perhaps she would knight me.” She pronounced the k, then fell apart laughing, as if she’d just uttered the funniest thing she’d ever heard. “Oh, dear, am I making a complete ass of myself?”

  “Only partial,” Woody assured her, getting up to get the platter of sweets and offering it to Beryl first.

  “Sugar,” she said, stopping to take a bite of a small Napoleon and getting powdered sugar and pastry crumbs all over herself as she did, “now what was I saying?”

  “That sugar cures a hangover,” Audrey said. “But only if accompanied by chanting.”

  If we’d ever be ready for Audrey, the time was now. We lifted our empty cups. “To Audrey,” we all said.

  “Come on, handkerchiefs over your faces. You can use napkins,” she said, motioning to Cathy, who could reach them from where she sat Cathy passed us each a large paper napkin, so we finally relinquished our vodka cups, putting them on the floor if we couldn’t reach a table, unfolded our napkins, and covered our faces with them. I decided to cheat, pretending to have trouble opening up my napkin. Or did I really have trouble getting the layers apart? I watched everyone, faces covered, napkins rising up and down with their respiration.

  “Just chant along with me. Ah la, ah la. At first,” Audrey said, her voice low and soothing, “ah la, good, keep it up, at first you’ll feel the grief in your chests, the loss of our young colleagues, ah la, ah la, and then the grief will rise and you will feel a lightness, an energy, as you turn your focus to the future and let go of the past, ah la, ah la.”

  The chanting became one sound, all the voices together, the syllables running together. I chanted too but without covering my face. Instead, I was watching Chip Pressman, one arm hanging off the side of his chair, his hand resting on Betty’s head, which was raised as she watched us all behaving so peculiarly, trying to figure out if her master was in danger.

  As I watched his handkerchief rising and falling over his mouth, thoughts of being alone with him nearly swept me away. But the overwhelming urge I felt had nothing to do with breaking the laws of man, God, and possibly even the Ritz Hotel. I was thinking about something far more dangerous, breaking one of the rules of private investigation, that body of wisdom my former mentor Frank Petrie had so carefully yelled into my face back when I was in his employ.

  When I’d first called Frank and gotten him to agree to an interview even though he’d said he had no openings, especially no openings for no beginners, he’d given me a time to meet with him and directions to his office.

  “The elevator only goes to twenny,” he’d told me. “Get out there and take the stairs to your left down the hall to twenny-one. Don’t mind that the sign says Authorized Personnel Only. I’m authorizing you.”

  The sign on the office door said Petrie Brothers. When I opened it, there was no receptionist. There was only Frank, sitting behind a big desk with so many phones on it, you’d think he was a bookie.

  “You the kid who called?” He looked me over from head to toe and back again. “Sit down. Sit down.”

  I nodded, taking the plastic folding chair on my side of the desk, wondering what the hell I’d had in mind when I made the call.

  “I was hoping you’d consider me as an investigator trainee,” I said, making it up as I went along, like everything else in my life.

  “Nah,” he said. “Now that I see you’re a girl, I don’t think so.”

  “Now that you see I’m a girl?” I shouted, surprising myself as well as Frank. “You mean you didn’t know I was a woman when you spoke to me on the phone? You mean the name Rachel didn’t tip you off that I’d be a female? You mean I had to waste my time waiting for two hours and then coming up here to see you for you to figure out I was a fucking female and that you didn’t hire women to work in your farkuckt agency?” By the end, I was standing, my hands on his desk, leaning forward and looming over him. “Listen, mister, there’s no job here I couldn’t—”

  “Okay, you’re hired. When can you begin? I have a case that needs an undercover operative, at a hospital in Staten Island, night shift. Ya think you can handle it?”

  I sat down, stunned at my own behavior and at Frank’s response.

  He was grinning. “Just wanted to see if you had a little spunk, kid. You’re going to need it on this one. But let me tell you right off. You’re going to get in there, just like that, you’re going to want to blab. You’re going to want to tell just one person what you’re really doing there. Especially you broads, you know how you are, yadda, yadda, yadda with every stranger you meet. Don’t do it, I’m telling you. Because no matter what you think, you might be blabbing to exactly the wrong person, the person you’re looking to finger. You know what, use everyone else’s desire to blab. That’s how you do this.” He nodded. Then he whispered. “Mouth shut, except when asking questions. And don’t only listen with your ears. Listen with your gut.” He slapped his abs for emphasis.

  I opened my mouth, but he didn’t leave me time to say a thing.

  “No. Don’t say nothing. I know what you’re
going to say even before it comes out. You’re a college graduate. Told me so on the telephone. Graduated with honors. See, I remember every word you said. You got a pen? Of course you do. Then write this down. It’s rule number twelve, but maybe it oughta be number one.”

  I picked up a piece of paper and a pen from his desk.

  “You’re going to want to blab. Don’t do it,” he said. Then he sat back, hands behind his head, and waited while I wrote.

  “There’s another one, sounds similar. But it’s different, believe me. It’s number eight. Don’t give information. Get information. See what I mean? Similar, but different. That one has to do with blabbing too, running off at the mouth instead of listening to see what you can find out. This one has to do with blowing your cover. Which, no matter what, you never do. Lie, that’s okay. But never—”

  “Blow my cover.”

  He’d nodded. I’d nodded back. But now, with years of experience and three cups of vodka under my belt, I was starting to think that maybe it was the exception that proved the rule. I was starting to think that I needed to talk things out about what was happening during this symposium, and I had the feeling that the last person who would listen to my theory with a sympathetic ear was the one person I should be talking to, Samantha Lewis. I was thinking, in fact, that it might be time to trust an old friend with the truth.

  That’s when I knew it was time to get moving. Frank Petrie was as pigheaded as they come, but in all the years I’d been in his employ, he had never been wrong in the advice he gave me about the work.

  As Dashiell and I slipped out the door, it wasn’t the chanting of my colleagues I was listening to. All I could hear, as clearly as if Frank were standing in front of me, was the cacophonous Brooklynese I had come to know and love, repeating the same phrase over and over again, as if it were a mantra: Don’t do it.

  17

  DOES ANYONE NEED AN ASPIRIN?

  It was seven-thirty when the clock radio woke me, the Beethoven sonata sounding as loud as the rap music blaring from some people’s cars as they drive around my neighborhood on Saturday nights trying to appear cool. I had slept a little over four hours.