Paws before dying

always preferred the known trail to the unknown and balked whenever I wanted us to detour instead of retrace our steps. “Go on,” I told him, anyway.
    He pranced happily across the street, avoided a puddle under the streetlamp in front of Jack’s house, and headed confidently down the driveway. Like the dutiful golden retriever I was born to be, I followed at the end of the leash. That Friday night, I thought. Rose and Caprice went to the tennis courts. No dog trainer himself, Jack stayed home. Home alone? Home at all? Had anyone asked? I hadn’t. The question had never even occurred to me.
    The blacktop ended at a two-car garage. Its doors were closed, but Rowdy had no interest in them. He circled knowingly to the side of the building, where a large plastic trash barrel had been knocked over, its cover pried off, its contents strewn around. For the second that I trusted Rowdy, I was afraid to look. Then my self-confidence returned and, with it, the chagrined realization that his only practiced tracking skill was a keen nose for—oh, God, yes—food. The flashlight, turned quickly on and off, showed the shredded remains of a white plastic trash bag and numerous bits of crumpled aluminum foil that stank of what smelled like Camembert but may only have been overripe Brie. Through thunder and rain, my noble lead dog had guided us swiftly and safely along the track of the last raccoon that had raided Jack Engleman’s garbage.
    Rowdy buried his nose in a large sheet of foil. His paws held it securely on the ground while his tongue scoured off every last globule of rancid butterfat.
    “Drop it,” I said firmly.
    He’d been trained to give his dumbbell on command, but obedience dumbbells aren’t coated with cheese. He ignored me. I knew I could pin him, force my fingers in back of his molars, and wedge his jaw open. I considered hauling him away by force. The Alaskan malamute is not a giant breed. I outweighed him by all of thirty pounds, and he was probably a mere ten or twenty times as strong as I was. He wasn’t even wearing a training collar. Between crashes of thunder, I listened to his tongue persistently lap the foil. Rain was hitting the trash barrels in loud pops, and water gushed noisily down a spout on the side of the garage.
    Leah and Kimi. Leah and Kimi. And he was feasting on cheese.
    I must have cast my eyes upward in search of heavenly inspiration, but the help I found, if you can call it help, was entirely mundane. The windows of Jack’s house, as I may have mentioned, were designed to look exotically and quaintly baronial. Except for the leaded-glass trim by the door, the windows in the front of the house were metal casements with dozens of tiny clear panes, and at the back of the house, in the remodeled kitchen where Jack and I had studied the blurred example of Rose’s incompetent photography, large sheets of plate glass alternated with French doors.
    The three illuminated windows on the second floor, though, the ones that faced the Johnsons’ yard, were like giant versions of the small leaded-glass panels in front. Although there were lights on inside, I couldn’t see into the house through the elaborate patterns of yellow, orange, green, and blue that were, I suppose, meant to suggest the stained glass in the private chapel of some small chateau. One of the windows stood slightly open, like a door propped ajar, but all I could see through the bright rectangle was a patch of wallpaper. The windows, then, were easements, like the ones on the front of the house. They opened. Rose had stood at one of these to take that blurred photograph.
    It might well have been snapped from behind a closed window, but through a pane of clear glass, not through this yellow, orange, green, and blue. The snapshot’s colors had been natural, obviously unfiltered. To take the picture, Rose had stood by one of those windows, all right. But the window had been open to give her and her camera an unimpeded view out. Her subject had had an equally good view in. Anyone in greater Boston who read The Globe or The Herald or who watched the local news or listened to the radio—in other words, almost everyone— knew about the man who went to jail because his smart, effective neighbor did something more than report abuse. That neighbor took pictures of the man beating his dog. In all the reports, that was the point of the story: The man got locked up because the neighbor had solid evidence.
    “Rowdy, drop it!” I