The Dog Who Knew Too Much (24 page)

Unless, perhaps, there were some emergency, some reason to get to the window as fast as she could, without a thought to anything else, even a custom she had abided by faithfully for all the years she'd worked at Bank Street T'ai Chi.

“Lisa never would have walked across the studio with her street shoes on,” I said to Marty.

“Rachel,” he said, as patient as if I were more than a little bit slow, “when someone decides to end it all, they don't care about shit like that. You wanna tell me she was religiously neat, too, she never would have littered Bank Street? You're grasping at straws here. None of the rules count at this stage of the game,” he said, pointing to the picture of Lisa dead on the sidewalk beneath where she'd taught and studied.

But I thought the rules you lived by
did
count up until the end. People folded their clothes neatly before a suicide. Or carefully buttoned up their uniforms and made sure their shoes were shined before eating their guns. What was the point of living your life with certain standards if you were just going to abandon them all at the last minute? And anyway, whether Marty believed it or not, I was still sure Lisa's death hadn't been a suicide, any more than Paul's had happened during a random mugging.

I took one last look and closed the folder, turning my attention to the big windows that looked out over Tenth Street. Had I walked over to them and looked out, I would have seen the wrought-iron gate that led to my garden, just across the street and a few doors west of the precinct.

“Is that it?”

I nodded. “I thought—”

“Suppose someone killed her,” he said, his voice low, his back turned to the detectives so that neither of them would hear what he was about to say.

“Okay,” I told him. On second thought, I might not have been able to see my gate, had I walked over to the windows. The precinct had moved here from Charles Street in the late sixties, and it appeared that no one had had the time to get the windows washed since then. They were practically opaque.

“Might you then suppose the ex-boyfriend, Wilcox, was killed by the same individual, not by a mugger?”

“I might,” I said, turning back toward Marty.

“And is there any particular individual you have in mind? Is there someone you suppose it might be, or haven't you gotten that far yet?” Sounding just like my brother-in-law, the
mamzer
.

“Look,” I said, but Marty held up a hand to stop me.

“In order to make an arrest,” he said, “we need more than suppositions. We need—”

“Yeah,” I told him. “I get it. Evidence. Not hunches. Something concrete, airtight. A bloody glove. Particularly helpful if it actually fits the suspect. Bloody footprints leading away from the scene, preferably right to the suspect's house. Or a signed confession. Something of that sort.”

“We don't need a signed confession. It could be videotaped. That would be acceptable, too.”

Okay, I thought, so we were both having a bad day. It happens. “I'll get back to you,” I said.

“You do that,” he told me.

How much pressure was the precinct under, I wondered, with an unsolved murder in the area? Like Marty really wanted to up it to two, go tell the detectives they'd made a little mistake about Lisa Jacobs's death, tell the press, inform her parents. That sure sounded like a half an hour alone with a box of Twinkies and a quart of chocolate milk.

“Look, I know you're busy. Thanks a million for showing me the photos.”

“No problem, kid,” he said. “Sorry I jumped all over you.”

I shrugged my shoulders to tell him it was no big deal, water off a Labrador retriever's back. He picked up the folder and turned to go.

I almost stopped him, but decided against it. He was right. I didn't have evidence. I only had a hunch. And the terrible feeling that time was running out.

31

He Couldn't Get In, Could He?

I got to Stewie's apartment much later than I'd hoped I would, wondering as I knocked and waited exactly how early he left work. The welfare system was corrupt on both sides: people who should have been taxpaying, productive citizens getting checks, sometimes in more than one location, and employees signing out to the field and going to the Bronx Zoo, teaching t'ai chi, or merely going home.

Someone was playing with me now, letting me know he knew where I really lived, sending me flowers, calling up to see if I was home. I had to move fast, I thought, slipping the first of three keys into the first of the three locks on Stewie Fleck's apartment door, because whoever had killed Lisa and Paul was clearly playing for keeps, and it wouldn't take a genius to guess who might be next on his list.

I opened the door and quickly followed Dashiell in, closing the door behind us and locking the middle of the three Medeco locks. Then I waited, letting my eyes acclimate to the dark before feeling around for the light switch.

Stewie's studio apartment was on the first floor in the rear of a six-story tenement building on Bedford Street, a block and a half from Chumley's, where we'd had a couple of beers while he'd told me the story of how he found t'ai chi. Stewie was apparently one of those people who straightened up but didn't clean, as in, “I'll straighten up the bathroom.” Whose husband hasn't said that? But there was no exasperated wife in Stewie Fleck's life to utter sarcastic epithets under her breath while handing him the Comet, Fantastic, Soft Scrub, and toilet brush. Everything was in order and covered with dust, to say the least.

Stewie didn't have a desk in the small room. There was a Murphy bed, and it was closed, locked up against the wall. There was a small Formica table with wrought-iron legs and one chair near the pint-size kitchen appliances in what was called a Pullman kitchen, maybe because it could fit in one of those miniature rooms you could get on a train. Stewie's breakfast coffee cup was in the sink, but the rest of the dishes were in the drainer. I'm sure if Beatrice were here she'd rewash them, but I had more urgent things to do.

It was after four, and Stewie could be home at any moment. I was hoping not to be here when he discovered his keys were missing, just in case the super had a set for emergencies such as this one.

I poked through Stewie's closet, checking out his inexpensive and tasteless wardrobe, finding nothing but small change and used tissues in his linty pockets. I looked at the vegetables in his refrigerator, feeling that sour taste in my throat as I did. Perhaps I should have left the Fantastic out, to give him a hint, but there probably wasn't any. Maybe it was made with animal products and he couldn't use it, for political or moral reasons.

I looked through a pile of magazines on the floor near Stewie's ratty couch, wondering why
he
wasn't on the dole. Surely he lived as if he were hovering at the poverty line. But the magazines were expensive ones, all photography journals, and his books were mostly photography books. The expensive Nikon I'd seen at t'ai chi school was nowhere around. Maybe, like Diane Arbus, he liked to photograph life's losers, so he took it to work with him. Maybe not. I wondered now if the wonderful photos I'd seen of Lisa had been his, or the one of Howie doing t'ai chi. No way those were drugstore prints. Anyone who did work like that had to have a darkroom, but dark as the apartment was, he wasn't using the kitchen. There were no chemicals under the sink, no stores of paper, no enlarger in the small closet. And even if Stewie could have made do in the tiny bathroom, covering the window with thick black paper and laying a board over the tub to have a surface for the chemical baths and enlarger, still, the equipment just wasn't there.

I went back to the books. Sure enough, several were about developing and printing black-and-white film. I looked around again to see if I had missed a place where Stewie could have stashed an enlarger, trays, and chemicals, but the place was small, and the storage practically nil.

I can't recall who started sneezing first, me or Dashiell, but once I started, I kept going until there were tears coming out of my eyes.

I never heard the first few pops. I was probably still sneezing. By the time I realized what was happening, there were tissues everywhere. Like an idiot, I began to pick them up before separating Dashiell from the box, but no matter, he'd destroyed it already. One side had been mashed down by his big paw to anchor the box so that he could pull the tissues out. Now he was shaking the empty box violently from side to side, having the time of his life. I'd have no choice but to take the thing with me, ditch it in a garbage can on the street, and let Stewie figure he forgot he used his last Kleenex.

That's when I heard it, the ping of something metallic and small hitting the dull parquet floor.

“Take it,” I told him, not seeing what it was, a coin perhaps. Or the rabies tag falling off his collar. I knew I had to find out what it was before leaving.

Dashiell's mouth was right on the floor for a moment, which meant he was scooping something up with his tongue, something too small to get his teeth around. Then I heard it against his teeth as he chewed on it, trying to determine if luck were on his side and he'd picked up something edible, because don't all dogs believe in their hearts that they aren't fed nearly often enough?

I called him over, whispering in case someone were in the hall. It was a quarter to five now, time to get out of here.

I heard someone outside and froze in place. Dashiell was approaching me, and the sound of his nails click-clacking on the wooden floor seemed as loud as hailstones on the roof of a car. I signaled him to lie down by raising my arm over my head, then crept up to him and cupped my hand under his jaw.

“Out,” I whispered, hearing the footsteps in the hall stop just outside Stewie Fleck's door.

But he couldn't get in, could he?

Unless the super had his keys.

Or he had an extra set over the jamb or under his ratty welcome mat.

Could he see light coming from under the door?

Crouched next to Dashiell, whose breathing seemed as loud as a respirator, I looked down into my hand at the saliva-covered key Dashiell had dropped there. It must have fallen out of the tissue box as he was annihilating it.

When the doorknob turned and rattled, my heart jumped, and while I was nowhere near as paranoid as Stewie, having only one lock on my cottage door, I was grateful I'd been paranoid enough to lock Stewie's door behind me.

He rattled the knob again, which was about as effective as kicking the flat tire you found on your car. I heard his footsteps as he walked away, then the click of the front door closing.

I opened my hand again and looked at the key that Stewie had hidden in his own home. What did he think, that just because he lived in New York City someone would break in and paw through all his worldly possessions?

I stuffed the torn tissue box and all the tissues into a dog pickup bag, waited an extra minute, heart still pounding, shut off the light, and let Dashiell into the hall, slipping out after him and locking all three locks, the key Dashiell had found in my other sweating hand. Then I looked for the stairs, because his darkroom would be in the basement, wouldn't it?

We didn't meet anyone downstairs. The building probably only had a part-time super. I tried to keep my eyes up; this was water bug territory if ever I'd seen it, and while I'd face a snarling dog or walk into a lion's den, so to speak, bugs were a horse of another color.

There were eight doors in the basement, all but one locked. I dumped the remains of Stewie's tissue box in the compactor room and went back to try the key Dashiell had found in each of the other locks, hoping one was a utility closet, with water, that Stewie used as a darkroom. At the fifth door the key moved and the tumbler turned over. I felt my heart start to pound again.

I found a light switch on the left, and as soon as the light went on, I inhaled hard enough to pull the whole room down into my lungs. There on the wall, over the sink and shelf full of trays for chemicals, and hanging on a wire, pinned up to dry, looking eerie in the glow of the red safety light, were photos of
me
.

Dashiell and I squeezed into the small room and, not knowing how Stewie would react to having lost his keys, or how soon after the locksmith let him in he'd notice his tissue box was missing, I locked this door behind me too.

Dashiell sat, and I began to look at the photos, one hand leaning on the counter for support.

I had been captured doing t'ai chi on the Morton Street pier, then holding the fence open for Dashiell as we were leaving.

There was a shot of me walking on Hudson Street, Dashiell heeling at my side. And several shots of me entering and leaving Lisa's building, even one of me looking out the window, at night. It seemed Stewie had more than just a Nikon with a telephoto lens.

There were close-ups, too. And shots at the dog run, most of me practicing the form, but some of me sitting on the bench and watching the dogs play. And one of me holding someone's cute Jack Russell puppy on my lap. There were even shots of Dashiell, but those were off on the little piece of wall to the right, opposite the side where Stewie kept his enlarger.

Then I noticed something else. The pictures of me all over the wall seemed to be tacked over other photos. In several places, I could see the edges of other pictures sticking out.

I leaned forward and pulled out some pushpins, carefully taking down a photo of me frozen in the middle of Cloud Hands, my arms moving from one side to the other in front of my chest, eyes on the horizon, knees bent, in Lisa's black leggings and sweater, her heart necklace dangling from around my neck. Under it, there was a similar photo. At first glance, it looked identical. But it wasn't.

There was a pull chain hanging down in the center of the tiny room. I gave it a tug and turned off the safety light. Then I leaned over the counter and looked at the picture again. Not me. It was Lisa.