This Dog for Hire (5 page)

“Please may I keep him, Mommy, may I, Mommy, please?”

“He's too big for you to walk,” Antonia's mother said, as sensible as my big sister, Lillian.

“He's too big for us to feed.”

“And where will he sleep? He's much too big to sleep in your bed.”

But there they are, on the last page, in Antonia's bed, and, see, they fit just fine.

Bashert
, my grandmother Sonya used to say.

I closed Dennis's book and dropped it onto the floor.

“You don't know me,” he had said when he called me.

Was that just this afternoon?

“I got your name from someone in the neighborhood, but you don't know her. You did some work for her cousin about a year ago. Ellen Engel? And now I need your help. I need it badly.”

Jack had said it, too, the first time he'd called.

“You don't know me.”

There was a silence then, as we both waited.

“I got your number from your brother-in-law. Ted.”

“Oh,” I had said, my voice catching in my throat.

I closed my eyes and thought about the last message on the tape from Clifford's answering machine.

“You don't know me,” a woman's voice had said, “but I have a beautiful basenji bitch, pointed, she just needs one more major, and I was interested in Magritte, you know, if you hire him out at stud.”

Sex, it can fucking ruin you.

6

It Looked Like an Enormous Bowling Ball

It was so cold when I got up, I could see my breath indoors. One disadvantage of living in the cottage is that I get to pay my own heat bill, and by necessity and nature I'm cheap. If Dashiell were a malamute, I could say I keep the place as cold as the inside of a refrigerator to prevent him from blowing his coat. But the truth is, if he were a malamute, he'd blow it anyway. You really
can't
fool Mother Nature.

I went downstairs and opened the front door for Dash. A moment later, he was back with the
New York Times
, which gets pitched over the locked gate in an electric blue plastic bag.

It was going to be cold and windy with a chance of snow toward evening, the homeless were causing safety and sanitation problems at Penn Station, Tiffany's was advertising a diamond bracelet for about the price of a one-bedroom apartment, and a man in Oregon had poisoned his wife, who, the
Times
reported, had survived to testify at his trial, in his defense.

I fed Dashiell, got dressed, and headed downtown to Clifford Cole's loft.

Where Dennis had warmed the cavernous space with color, Cliff's studio area was white—tin ceiling, walls, and wooden floor all done in a shiny enamel so that when I arrived, the sun was bouncing off whatever surface it hit, except of course the paintings, where the light seemed to become absorbed into the canvas. The paintings apparently had not been touched since the murder, and I made a note to find out who owned them now. Then I took some photographs of the studio.

All the paintings in the large room were Cliff's, all huge, some telling their story in three or even four canvases. There was one set of three canvases, hung so that there were only inches between where one stopped and the next began, that took up the entire north wall of the huge space. The first canvas showed a pale blue wall with a window. Out the window was a single branch with buds, a March branch, and on the pale wooden floor a yellow and black ball, the kind that squeaks when squeezed. The second canvas showed more of the same place, blue wall, no window this time, a single wooden chair with a black baseball cap with a red B on it hanging over the left-hand corner of the ladderback, a green frog under the chair, the same kind Henri had gotten for his Jimmy dog and then kept “for memories.” The third canvas showed the blue wall, the pickled whitish wooden floor, and the back end of Magritte, as if he had been caught walking out of the picture. In the lower right-hand corner of the last panel of the triptych, Clifford had printed the title of the painting in small, neat letters, all lowercase:
out, damned spot
.

There was another painting of Magritte on the south wall, this one called
rising son
. It showed another underfurnished room. Even the paint was used starkly in these portraits. The color was rich, but the brush strokes were very even, and you could see the texture of the canvas as part of the painting. At the top of the portrait, you could see the white-socked feet of the basenji, as if this time Magritte were floating up out of his own portrait.

There were two paintings standing against that wall, both done at the beach. In one, an oversize close-up of part of a wooden beach house, painted in shades of gray: you could see through the large window that it was raining
indoors
. The small printed title read
home, sweet home
. The other painting showed Magritte leaning out the window, elbows on the sill, a cigarette dangling from his tight lips, like the lonely men you see looking out of tenement windows in the city. Even Magritte was done in gray, so that the painting resembled a black-and-white photograph. It was called
he never read the surgeon general's report
.

I began to wander around the loft, just to get a feel for the space and to see where things were. I wanted Dashiell to take a look at things, too, the way dogs do, with their noses. So as I walked and he sniffed, every once in a while, I told him, “Smell it, good boy!” to let him know he wasn't just being nosy, he was working. I never know what Dash will come up with, but I always know that it will be very different from what I can “see.” I put the kettle up, took out a big white mug, and found a box of Earl Grey tea bags. It was a cook's kitchen—good equipment, lots of expensive, shiny copper-bottomed pots hanging above. There was no microwave, but there was a Cuisinart and a professional-size mixer.

Dash and I continued wandering while the kettle heated. Cliff's bedroom, facing west, was high enough to get good light even though it faced the back of a building on Wooster Street. There was enough space for the light to filter down, enough to give the room a lovely cast, but not enough to blind you when you were trying to sleep. The bed, unmade, was a double, and the sheets and quilt were white, as were the walls, the floor, the rug, and the long, low painted dresser.

There was a four-panel painting hanging over the bed, titled
up
. In the first three panels there was a man asleep in a bed, in the very bed beneath the portrait, down to the last detail. Those three pictures were identical but for one detail, a slight change in the position of the head on the pillow, a dark head of hair poking out from the white quilt, the face not visible. In the last panel, the bed was rumpled and empty. Somehow I was sure the mysterious man was Louis Lane, that in this way, he did indeed sleep over.

Above the dresser there was a smaller painting with a dark, brooding, and sexually suggestive look, a Diane Arbus-y portrait of two young boys, one on each side of the canvas. The empty space between the boys gave the portrait a palpable tension. Both boys looked ahead, at the viewer, as if unaware of each other. They were nude. The boy on the left was a cherubic-looking six- or seven-year-old, with large, apprehensive hazel eyes. The boy on the right, the older of the two, a ten- or eleven-year-old, had a lewd expression on his face. In the usual spot, it said
les and mor
.

Cliff's work was more intellectual than emotional, more Magritte than Matisse. Even the disturbing pieces had a coldness to them; they were either fascinating or clever but kept the viewer at a distance rather than embracing him, rather than bringing him into the painting or into the heart of the artist. Whatever emotion was visible was well controlled, as if the hurt could be displayed visually but without the accompanying feeling. I wondered how the work reflected the man, but it's not possible to put together a person from the pieces of his life. You can't even come close.

At the side of the bed there was another Magritte, the Clifford kind, the chestnut-and-white dog flying over the rooftops of what appeared to be Paris, a basenji angel with creamy, feathered wings. I wondered if Louis had seen
good boy
, and if he had indeed been jealous of his demanding, adored rival.

I opened the drawers of the nightstands and pawed through the dead man's personal stuff—condoms, K-Y jelly, handcuffs, nothing unusual.

I opened the closet and looked at the clothes, good-quality pants and jackets and lots of them, not the kind of clothes I'd expect to find in a poor artist's closet. Jack, who dressed like a peacock when he wasn't filling cavities (no pun intended, the man is a dentist), had introduced me to designer clothes, and now I could tell without even checking the labels. Cliff was apparently slight; his butterscotch-colored suede jacket fit me perfectly.

When I heard the kettle, I put Cliff's jacket away and went back to the kitchen, adding up in my head the cost of what I had seen in the closet, then opening the cabinets and toting up how much Clifford had spent to outfit his kitchen. Poor artist indeed. Perhaps the man had a patron.

Louis Lane?

I took my tea over to a desk that sat in a little in-between area, open, of course, because it had no window. It was a cozy nook with a desk, a rich, red oriental rug, red walls, and a red velvet chair, someplace to read, listen to music, watch videos, pay the bills.

There were two drawings and a painting in the den that were not Cliff's—a lovely pencil sketch of Magritte, signed “Jan Bella,” a pen-and-ink nude, male, signed “D. K.” (the D. K. who was helping me pay my bills?), and a smallish watercolor head study of a sweetly handsome young man with a halo of curly hair, signed “john.”

I sat at the desk and began to open drawers, and what I found told me that there were some pretty important things that Dennis Keaton did not know about his friend.

The first file I found was the one for Clifford's Fidelity Corporate Bond Fund. His current investment was in the neighborhood of $200,000, give or take a few thou.

The next file was an IRA, with Dreyfus. That was only valued at $22,611.16, but hell, the man had only been thirty-two.

His checkbook—Chemical Bank Select Checking, which, according to the brochure of bank costs in the file, required a minimum balance of $25,000, entitling Cliff to free checking, free telephone transfers, the privilege of larger ATM withdrawals, and a shorter line when he had to show up at the bank in person—had a balance of $44,682.13 in savings and only $132.11 in checking after a cash withdrawal of $1,000 made January 18, the day before he died. Clifford had neatly recorded the withdrawal both in his checkbook and on the bottom of the previous bank statement. But I hadn't needed to see that to know he was an obsessive-compulsive personality type. I had seen his pots.

I had also found money in many of his pockets, along with small sandwich bags for picking up after Magritte. As with every other New York City dog owner, every pocket, including the ones in his tux jacket, had plastic bags in it, because even if you've been out to a black-tie event, you still have to walk your dog and scoop when you get home.

Magritte's papers were in the desk, too, neatly filed like everything else. He was four and a half. His health was protected by the Murray Hill Animal Hospital on East Thirtieth Street. He had, I noticed, been vaccinated against Lyme disease, which probably meant he was taken out of the city regularly, perhaps to outdoor dog shows, and his rabies shot was up to date. He was indeed a champion of record, American, Canadian Ch. Ceci N'Est Pas un Chien. Clever, Clifford, mighty clever, I thought, and then, when the next certificate was in my hand, I was filled with admiration. It seems Magritte had a C.D., a Companion Dog degree, which meant he had satisfactorily performed all the basic commands off lead at three different AKC obedience trials and under three different judges, no small feat for a basenji.

There were photos in the file, too. In all three, Magritte was stacked, meaning he was standing in show pose, and a handler, a tall man with a ponytail, presumably Morgan Gilmore, was holding the show lead taut and beaming. The judge was in the photos, too, holding the blue ribbon and whatever bowl or platter Magritte had won at each of the three shows.

I found Cliff's gallery contract, signed by Veronica Cahill. Most interesting, there was even a copy of his will in the file drawer, with a note saying the original copy was filed with George Rich, his lawyer.

The most recent check register showed regular monthly payments to a Dr. Bertram Kleinman. I checked the medicine cabinet. There was no AZT, DDI, Bactrim, or even Flagyl. It didn't appear Cliff had active AIDS. There was no Prednisone or allergy medication.

Was Dr. Kleinman a chiropractor or a shrink?

From the amount of the checks, and the little drawings on them, two men emoting in kind, my guess was that Clifford Cole was in some sort of interactive therapy.

A gay man in therapy—what a surprise.

After another thirty or forty minutes of poking around, I took Cliff's will, the gallery contract, his address book, and Dashiell and headed for the closest copy shop, returning everything to where we found it before heading back for another look at the Christopher Street pier. But when we left the loft, I decided to walk over to the gallery first, just to take a look around and see what I might find out.

The Veronica Cahill Gallery was on the fifth floor of a wide ten-story brick building on West Broadway between Prince and Spring. To get to the gallery, you take one of those elevators that open on either side, depending upon which side you push the button, which depends upon which of the two galleries on each floor you are going to. The elevator opened right into the gallery spaces, which, like most of the West Broadway spaces, were large and bright.

The current installation at Cahill was called Dots, and the most enigmatic dot for me was the single sculpture placed in the middle of the gallery's white floor. It looked like an enormous bowling ball, but without the holes. It was titled
Black Dot
. The price on the title card was $25,000, and amazingly, there was a red dot on the card, signifying that this lucky dot had found a home. The paintings were also fairly large, although there were a few small ones toward the back of the gallery. They consisted of various canvases painted either white with one or more black circles or, for variety, black with one or several white circles. Prices were all in the ten- to twelve-thousand range. Several of those were sold as well. To each his own.