The Dog Who Knew Too Much (19 page)

“You mean he's sensitive?” I asked.

“Sens-tive my ass,” Howie's mother said. “He's a damn crybaby, is what he is. Always was. Always will be. Whines ever' time I need something, s'if he had to trudge ten miles in the snow 'stead of around the corner.” She puffed on the cigarette without removing it from her mouth and stared at me. “You're not from the school, are you?”

“You mean the t'ai chi school? Yes, I am. I'm studying there, too.”

“
You
the one made him cry?” she asked, looking confused for the moment.

“No,” I said, a little too quickly. “I just started there. I'm new. But I heard—”

“That bitch!” Dora said. She took the cigarette and pointed toward me with it. “Wasn't you, you sure it wasn't you? Say, what's your name anyway?”

“Rachel,” I told her. “Rachel Alexander.”

“No, that's not her name. Not Rachel Alexander. She had a completely different name.”

“How did she make Howie cry,” I asked, “that bitch?”

“Don't take much.”

“So what happened, she hurt his feelings?”

“Feelings? She was going to
fire
him. That's nothing to do with feelings. It's to do with money.” She rubbed her thumb and forefinger together. “Like we're rolling in it,” she said, indicating the room we were in with a sweep of one hand. “Like we don't need every damn penny he can make.”

“Did she say why? I mean, did Howie say what the reason was?”

I took a peek at my watch. Howie was already twenty-two minutes late for my appointment.

Dora Lish suddenly got up and started beating on the couch cushion. I guess she'd lost the ash of her cigarette. The cloud of dust came at me like nuclear fallout, and suddenly I was having a sneezing fit.

Satisfied she'd found the culprit and had beat it into submission, Dora sat and relit her cigarette. It was then I heard the familiar pop and looked up to see Dashiell, a huge paw anchoring the Kleenex box on the cluttered coffee table between Dora Lish and myself, a tissue dangling from his big, wide mouth. He walked over and dropped it into my lap. I blew my nose and patted his big head.

“Wait a minute here.” Dora started to get up and then sat back down. She pointed at Dashiell with her cigarette. “Did I see what I just saw?”

I nodded.

“Naw. You're pulling my leg, trying to fool an old lady. Bet he wouldn't do it again,” she said, suddenly as excited as a child.

I opened my mouth, but before I had the chance to say a word, Dora Lish, who apparently didn't live next door to the HB Acting Studio for nothing, lifted one big nicotine-stained hand toward her face and faked a rhinoceros of a sneeze.

Ever alert, Dashiell turned back to the coffee table and crushed one side of the tissue box with his foot so that it wouldn't fly up, then pulled out half a tissue, which he dropped into Dora's lap. He backed up and waited.

Dora began to cackle.

Dashiell went back for the other half of the tissue. But this time he didn't bring it to Dora. This time he dropped it right on the coffee table, and pop, pop, pop, three more tissues were out of the box.

“Enough,” I told him. “Good boy.”

Left without praise, like most of us, he finds a way to thank himself, in this case with the heady pleasure of snapping tissues out of the box until it's empty. After that, he'd discover how tissue boxes are constructed. And if his best efforts on behalf of the human race were further ignored, he'd make tissue-colored confetti, blue in this case. Hey, you never know when there's going to be a parade.

Howie was now forty-five minutes late. Dora had seen me check my watch this time.

“He musta got held up at the grocer's,” she said, dropping the end of her cigarette into the whiskey glass. “I'll tell him you were here. What'd you say your name was?”

“Rachel.”

“Oh, yeah. I remember. Rachel. Got a cigarette on you, hon?”

I shook my head.

“Mrs. Lish—”

“Dora. Everyone calls me Dora.”

Everyone
? The place didn't exactly look as if she entertained much, but you never know.

“Dora,” I said, but she had turned her attention toward the television set. There was a faux pearl necklace being shown, and Dora watched the hand holding it move across the screen.

“You never told me, Dora, why was Howie going to get fired?”

“I'll tell him you were by,” she said without turning to look at me. She fished a butt out of the ashtray and lit it. “I'll tell him about the Kleenex, too,” she said, the smoke from her cigarette rising in a thin stream, then widening as it headed for the ceiling.

“Just pull th' door closed on your way out, will ya, hon?”

So I did. I closed the living room door, waited a minute, Dashiell and I frozen in place, my hand still on the knob, and when there was no sound other than the drone of the TV, I looked around the narrow, dark hallway and headed not toward Howie's office and the front door, but the other way.

Dora's ashtray of a bedroom was on the left side of the narrow hallway, a small, dark, cluttered hole of a space, its one window facing an air shaft. She had her own bathroom, though. I poked through her medicine cabinet, filled with enough antibiotics, Tylenol with codeine, Valium, Ex-Lax, and Tums for her tummy to start her own pharmacy. I even found her favorite medicine, hidden behind the six-pack of toilet paper under the sink for those times when Howie was too slow getting back from the store. Before leaving Dora's suite, I stopped at her bureau to look at the photo hanging over it, a round-faced boy, already overweight at seven or eight, standing next to a little girl, her dress so starched the skirt stood out, a ribbon in her curly hair, her face as round as Howie's. A sister? So where was she when Mama needed so much care?

Next door to Dora's room was a second bathroom, and across the hall from that was Howie's bedroom, the door so warped it didn't even close all the way. I pushed it open slowly and turned on the light.

Howie slept on what looked like a cot, or a youth bed. It was as neatly made as if Howie were in the army, the single pillow fluffed, the striped blanket pulled tight and tucked in with hospital corners. Howie's slippers were lined up next to the bed on a little mat. I walked in, waited for Dashiell, and closed the door behind us as well as I was able.

There was an old upright bureau on one wall and a small desk on the other. I sat at the desk, turned on the lamp, and opened the top drawer, looking at the neatly lined up pens and pencils, the checkbook, the little packet of rubber bands, the small dish of paper clips, and the box with stamps in it, all carefully torn from their sheets and stacked in neat compartments, everything just so.

The drawers to the left held Howie's business files, every payment and expense neatly recorded. And envelopes of receipts, all marked and ready for tax time. Behind the receipts were letters. I pulled the file and looked through the lot of them, all from patients and doctors relating to the conditions Howie was supposed to treat. And behind that a folder with photographs in it, only three of them, Howie kneeling with a bunch of other boys, perhaps a team shot but without the identifying paraphernalia, Howie's grim little high school graduation picture, and one really good photo, a black-and-white enlargement of Howie doing t'ai chi. It reminded me of the photo of Lisa in Avi's office, the way the subject was off center, the way the light hit the hands, caught in a graceful pose as the subject moved slowly through the form. Howie looked through the Tiger's Eyes, loose circles made by his powerful hands, which in the photo looked as chiseled as the David's.

I checked my watch. It would be nearly halfway into the next appointment, if there were one. Still no Howie. But for how long, I couldn't say.

I became aware of my breathing then, shallow and quick, my head clear, my ears alert to any sound from elsewhere in the apartment. I shut off the desk light and was ready to go when I got one last idea. I knelt and looked under Howie's neat bed, then slid out the magazines I'd had the feeling would be there, carefully sliding them back when I had seen enough silicone and whips to last me a lifetime.

I stopped in Howie's office on my way out. His appointment book was lying open on the cabinet near the head of the massage table. I checked my watch. It was four twenty-eight. Someone was due in just two minutes, on the half hour. Just then, the bell rang. I signaled Dashiell, and we made it out the door before the second ring, a longer one, had summoned Dora.

There was a tense-looking young man waiting to be buzzed in. Walking past him, I thought about her, about Howie's mother. She had looked as if she'd fall asleep, mesmerized by the TV. I wondered what would happen to the cigarette, but whatever would, it had happened countless times before, and Dora the lush was still here to tell any stranger who'd listen what a fucked-up loser the son who cared for her in her old age was.

24

There Ought to Be a Law

Leaving Howie's, I felt that crick in my neck he had warned me about the first time we'd met. I had thought about going over to the Club to see Paul. I could say I'd lost Lisa's work keys, ask if I could borrow his set, see what he said, watch his eyes while he said it.

Then I thought about the envelope. What had he thought when he'd reached into his pocket and found it missing, when he'd realized I knew that it had been he who'd been so anxious to get married, not Lisa? All she had wanted was to go to China, no matter what it cost her. So I thought maybe I shouldn't go and see him. I thought perhaps he needed some time.

But then I found myself thinking about the way his skin smelled, about the long, smooth muscles of his back, about the warmth and softness of his hands, about the way he'd said my name, over and over again, like a mantra. Then I
knew
I better not go see him, because the sixth law of investigation work is, Don't get caught with your pants down, and I didn't want to break it again. I cared much too much for this man, considering all I didn't yet know, and I didn't want to break my heart either.

I could hear the phone ringing when I was still in the garden, but by the time I got the door unlocked, it had stopped. It was probably just someone asking me if I wanted to switch back to AT&T. They call at all hours. There ought to be a law.

I went upstairs to run a bath, and while the tub was filling with water too hot to dunk anything in other than a lobster on its way to becoming bisque, I checked my answering machine and found that an unusual number of calls had come in since I'd left home that morning. Eleven. But when I rewound the tape, I discovered they were all hang-ups. As if someone were trying to find out whether or not I was home.

I was tempted to dig my revolver out from the shoe box on the top shelf of my closet where it had been for over a year, but I told myself that that was too paranoid, even for me.

I turned off the phone and turned down the volume on the answering machine. Soaking in the steamy hot water, without the agitating noise of the telephone, I quickly fell fast asleep and stayed that way for over an hour, until the water had cooled off enough to wake me.

It was nearly eight o'clock when I got out of the tub, turned the phone back on, and, still feeling exhausted, plodded downstairs to feed Dashiell. When the phone rang again, I grabbed it on the first ring. This time the person on the other end didn't hang up.

“Rachel?”

“Marty?”

I looked out the small kitchen window into the garden, a tangle of dark shadows at this hour. “What's up?” I asked.

“I need to see you, kid. Can you come over for a minute?”

“Now?”

“It won't take long.” Sounding like a cop.

“Sure,” I said, looking at the kitchen clock. Eight twenty now. What was Marty even doing there at this hour? He worked days. “Is anything wrong? You okay? Are the dogs okay?”

“I'll wait for you at the front desk,” was all he said. And then I heard the click. He had hung up.

Had he made all those other calls? Had he been waiting, for some reason, for me to get home and pick up?

I pulled on one of Lisa's black sweaters and some leggings, stepped into a pair of clogs, combed back my wet hair, and poured some dry dog food for Dashiell. In less than five minutes I was out the door.

Marty was standing near the front desk, and when he saw me, he took my arm and led me to a desk in back where there was no one else within earshot.

“There's been a murder, Rachel. In the neighborhood. Close by.” I felt my heart start to race. Who was I, for the Sixth Precinct to suddenly be filling me in on their most up-to-date bad news? “The victim was found on Bank Street, in that outdoor area at Westbeth.” He paused, as if the location of the body would be so pregnant with significance I'd burst out with the name of the killer.

“And?” I said.

He was watching my face. I watched his, not blinking, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

“Across from the school,” he added, “where your clients' daughter used to work.”

“Yes. But what's—”

“He had your name on a card in his shirt pocket, Rachel.”

“You mean my card? Maybe it was someone who needed help, you know, a work contact.”

“It wasn't
your
card, Rachel. It was actually
his
card. He'd written your name on the back of it. And there was something else written there, too.”

“Something else? What else?”

“Something in Chinese.”

Suddenly I got a strange rush to my head, as if I were breathing pure oxygen, and the air tasted metallic, the way it does when you take antibiotics.

“
Xiao yue
?” I asked.

But he didn't reply. Instead he took my arm and backed me into a molded plastic chair next to the empty desk. He pulled the desk chair around so that he could sit in front of me, so close our knees were touching.