A Hell of a Dog (33 page)

“I can't recall, but I know it wasn't Kevin. You said Kevin, din't you?”

“Right. Think, Chi Chi.” Whatever she was smoking was not helping the conversation one little bit.

“It was like a Polish name, far as I can remember. Kevin's Irish, right?”

“Try a little harder, Chi Chi. Try to remember.”

“I'll get back to you.”

“Chi Chi, if you want me to do this for you—”

“Hey, baby, you goin' out?”

“How much for the both of us?”

“Both of youse? What are you, crazy? What'd you think, just because I'm a prostitute, you could do anything you dream up, like I have no say in the matter, like I'm too stupid to know what's a good idea, what isn't? Get lost, two at a time.” Way too loud, one word eating the next.

I heard the car peel out.

“Wanda'll do 'em. Wanda, she don't care. She used to work with this girl Susan, but she's dead already. They called her black-eyed Susan, she got beat up so much. Mostly—”

“Chi Chi, I'm still here. Talk to me.”

“I
am
talking to you. I'm saying Grace,” she said. “He asked Grace to do them, she'd take off her size-thirteen-and-a-half shoe and give him two at a time on his stupid, bald head. Grace, she don't take shit from no one. Ebony, she a whole 'nother story. Ebony got a screw loose. Everybody says so. Had her face done, you know, like Rosalinda did, but Ebony, she didn't do her upper lip. Said it hurt too much. It was too sensitive. Can you imagine! She spend all that money, she still look like shit. What's a little pain matter? In this business, appearance is everything.”

I heard another car. Business was brisk.

“Look, can we do this later? I gotta earn a living.”

I thought she hung up, because for a while I didn't hear anything. Something black and low to the ground moved across the street. I yanked Dashiell's leash, and we headed for the corner.

Then she was back. “Don't be like that, baby. Yeah? Up yours, too.”

“Chi Chi?”

I heard a horn honk. “I'll call you in the morning,” she whispered. “Hey, baby. I'm goin' make you feel
real
good, ya hear?” And then the line went quiet. Two cars passed Little West Twelfth Street. I could see Chi Chi's near-white hair as the second one went by.

The rat aside, I had a lousy feeling about Keller's, about Chi Chi's convenient memory loss, about life in general from where I stood. I checked my watch. It was nearly midnight. Keller's wouldn't be open until just before dawn, and when it was, no way was someone going to talk to me about the death of their manager. I needed to get in there when they were closed, check their paperwork, see what I could find out. I shivered at the thought. There were more rats than people in New York City, a denser population here in the meat market than, say, the Upper East Side. But that was just an educated guess.

I wondered if there were rats in the cellar at Keller's, the answer a no-brainer. I wondered if any of them came upstairs, especially when the place was quiet, the way it was now, the way it would be when I was in there, reading what was in their files, quiet as a little mouse.

I wondered if they moved around much in broad daylight. But what if they didn't? I couldn't either. Like the rest of the denizens of this street, I'd have to do my work under cover of darkness.

I walked back to Keller's again, staying on the opposite side of the street, passing by and going all the way to the end of the block, to West Street, where the wind picked up my scarf and almost carried it away. About a third of the markets on Little West Twelfth Street looked as if they'd closed not just for the night but for good. More and more of the markets were moving to Hunts Point in the Bronx, another neighborhood of wholesale food suppliers and drugged-out hookers. I'd have to come back in daylight to make sure, but some of the buildings looked deserted; a few were even starting to go to seed.

The building to the right of Keller's, my right, that is, had a sign that said they sold rabbit, grouse, pheasant, and other game. The one on the other side, the one closer to West Street, to the river and that punishing wind, to where Angel Rodriguez's body had been found, looked deserted; no vehicles outside, a heavy padlock on the door, one of the windows upstairs broken and not even repaired with cardboard and tape. All three structures as similar as they could be, aside from their signs.

I walked back to the corner again, now looking to see how I could implement my next good plan, hoping I could do it without freezing to death. At least the hookers got to get into warm cars. They didn't just stay out in the street the way Dash and I were doing.

Alert for movement, even paper swept up and sent tumbling by a gust of wind, I checked out both sides of the street for a place that would let me see without being seen, then thought of a place where I could get warm until the time was right to settle into my hiding place.

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Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank

Polly DeMille and Richard Siegel

Detectives Daniell O'Connell, Frank Fitzgerald, and James Abreu of the Sixth Precinct, Greenwich Village

Larry Berg, Dennis Owens, Beth Adelman, Sidney Shulman, Steve Martin Cohen, Warren Davis, Gina Spadafori, and Stuart Turner, DVM

Michael Seidman and the rest of the team at Walker, especially George Gibson, Linda Johns, Krystyna Skalski, and Chris Carey, with special thanks to everyone who played ball with Flash one afternoon last fall

Gail Hochman

And Dexter and Flash, constant companions

About the Author

Carol Lea Benjamin is the author of the Rachel Alexander and Dash mystery novels, which feature a Greenwich Village–based private investigator and her pit bull sidekick.
This Dog for Hire
, the first book in the series, won the Shamus Award for Best First PI Novel. Benjamin has also been a teacher, worked as a private investigator, trained dogs, and written dog-training manuals such as
Mother Knows Best
:
The Natural Way to Train Your Dog
. She lives in New York City with her husband and two dogs.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1998 by Carol Lea Benjamin

Cover design by Neil Alexander Heacox

ISBN: 978-1-5040-0672-9

This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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New York, NY 10014

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