The Dog Who Knew Too Much (23 page)

I stood completely still. Even the sort of dog who wouldn't alert its owner when his Lincoln was being stolen might, at some given moment, feel it was her turn to save the day.

But once I'd had a moment to look at the Akita, I could see that she was just a big puppy, six or seven months old. She wagged her curled tail in slow motion, first to one side, sweeping over her back and leaning over her flank, and then, ever so slowly, to the other.

“Who's my good girl?” I said, kneeling down, arms to the side, my voice animated.

Head down, eyes squinchy, forehead wrinkled, the Akita came into my arms to be hugged. I confirmed her gender with one hand, using the other to scratch her neck. I kissed her small, triangular ears and read the tag on her collar, “Pola Bear.” Then I checked my watch and got to work.

I started with Janet's desk, going through her receipts and bills, looking for something, I didn't know what. I didn't think Janet was sending those roses, but hey, this was the Village, anything was possible. Still, I didn't find receipts from a florist. Janet's receipts were all from the Foot Locker, Paragon Sporting Goods, or the Athletic Attic. But before I left the desk, I did find something interesting. Apparently Janet, like most other trainers, spread her services around in order to make more money. What I found was a 1099 from the Club. The world was rapidly becoming a smaller place.

I walked through Janet's apartment, looking at her stuff. Stewie had said Janet lived in the gym, but her place was warm and homey, particularly for me, since it had the two things I needed to call a place home, a dog and plenty of sunlight. I looked in the closets and found exactly what I would have expected—workout clothes, running clothes, cross-trainers, running shoes, and sweats, nothing much in the way of taffeta dresses, no sexy lace teddies in the dresser drawers.

There was lots of food in the small kitchen, mostly gross-tasting stuff that was supposed to be good for you—millet, apricot butter, and tofu mayonnaise. There was a juicer on the counter, the same kind that Paul was using at the Club the first time I'd met him. Instead of finding parts of dead animals wrapped in aluminum foil in the freezer, I found a twenty-five-pound bag of organic carrots in the fridge, just waiting for the juicer to turn them into sludge.

I refilled Pola's water dish and gave her a couple of biscuits for being such a decent hostess, checked my watch, and quickly locked up and headed back to the gym to get Janet's keys back into her pocket before she noticed they were gone.

“Oops. She's still busy,” Skip sang out as I passed the desk. “Someone came in for a makeup session. You got to squeeze those in,” he said, rolling his eyes. “House rules. She said if you would stay, she would
treat
you to dinner, you know, for making you wait so long. Or you could work out meanwhile, if you want.”

“I don't know.”

“She said to tell you your abs needed work. And there wouldn't be no charge,” he added in a stage whisper, even though no one else was within earshot.

“I'll leave her a note,” I said. “I have to go home and walk my dog.”

“Tell me about it,” he said, rolling his eyes. “She's so busy, busy, busy, but sometimes she's got to sneak out and do the same thing. You gotta go, you gotta go, am I right?”

I nodded.

“Too bad you can't stay. She'll be very disappointed,” he said. “But even if you did, another person might show up with an aerobic emergency, who knows, right? She's very in demand,” he whispered. “She's the favorite. It's a lot of pressure on her.”

Not as much pressure as
not
being the favorite, I thought. I went back to Janet's desk to return her keys and write her a little note, but when I slipped my hand into her pocket, I felt something else, her wallet. I'd been so anxious to get my hands on her keys, it hadn't occurred to me the first time around that a wallet can be rich with things other than money.

Don't stop digging until you know
for sure
, Frank used to say when I'd come running to tell him I knew who did it before I'd checked out everything.

But it's so
ob
vious, 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.