Rachel Alexander 02 - The Dog who knew too much

feeling as if someone else were speaking through my mouth. It was probably the echo from all the tile.
    “What about this evening?” he said.
    “I’m busy.”
    “Me, too. I have to take my grandmother shopping. But I could meet you afterward, at ten, say.”
    Apparently Paul Born in the USA Wilcox was no banana, the Asian equivalent of an Oreo.
    “Should I come up or wait for you downstairs?” he asked.
    “Downstairs?”
    “Bank and West, isn’t it? Two buildings in from the comer, south side of the—”
    “Oh, that downstairs.”
    “That is where you’ll be, isn’t it?”
    I nodded.
    “I’m coming prepared to talk. Et tu , Dog Paddle?”
    I could feel his breath on my face.
    “I’ll be prepared to listen,” I said.
    “That’s a start,” he said.
    He put his hands on the edge of the pool and hoisted himself up and out of the water. I put my hands on the edge, too, but before I could propel myself out of the pool, Paul Wilcox did it for me. He had taken my wrists, and then there I was, standing too close to him, rivulets of chlorinated water running down my thighs and onto the wet tile beneath my bare feet.
    “God,” he said, his voice suddenly husky, “your hair does the same thing Lisa’s did when it got wet.”
    His was jet black and thick. It stood straight up when it was wet, in spiky little clumps.
    “Another family thing?” he asked, his voice soaked with sadness.
    I pulled my hands away and brushed the hair off my face.
    “Nah, it’s a Jew thing. We all have curly hair and big noses.” Big Nose was what the Chinese called Caucasians.
    He smiled and ran his finger down my nose. “Your nose isn’t so big. It’s just about perfect,” he said.
    “Yeah, yeah,” I said. Next thing he’d be telling me I was a hard-boiled egg, white on the outside, yellow on the inside, a Caucasian with an Oriental soul. Like my cousin.
    I’d forgotten how dark his eyes were.
    He turned and headed for the men’s locker room.
    For a moment in the pool, he’d seemed so angry, I’d been afraid he was going to push me under. But that couldn’t have been my real fear. Hell, my sister did that all the time when we were kids. The real threat was becoming sucked in. The real fear was that something about this man was making me lose my objectivity, even my judgment.
    “Wait,” I shouted at his back.
    “You bellowed?” He came back to where I was standing.
    “About tonight,” I said. Avi had said he’d have a surprise for me. I thought he might be ready to talk. “I can’t meet you tonight. How about—”
    “How about now? I’m ready for lunch.”
    “Lunch?” I said, as if I were a parrot.
    He simply waited.
    “Okay, lunch. That sounds fine.”
    I had to talk to the man. He was an important source. Lunch was better than the deep end of the pool. For one thing, I’d be dressed. Suddenly, lunch sounded safe, it sounded perfect. What the hell could happen at lunch? I asked myself, feeling smug now, as if it had been my idea all along.
    “It’ll take me ten minutes to get dressed. Can you wait that long? You seem to be a pretty impulsive person.” He picked up a corkscrew strand of my wet hair, shook his head, then let it go and headed for the locker rooms.
    “I’ll meet you at the front door,” I said to his back, watching his adorable little tochis as he walked away. “In seven minutes. Don’t keep me waiting.”
    I’m not one for fussing. I was showered, dressed, and in front of the gym in six minutes.
    “We can go right across the street,” Paul said a moment later, not breaking stride as he joined me on the steps and swept me along onto Varick Street .
    The mystique of perfect timing pervades the literature of dog training. Correct a dog precisely at the moment of his indiscretion, and he’ll learn to mend his ways. Make your correction a minute later, and he won’t. Had we come out of the Club a minute sooner, or a minute later, I never would have seen him.
    I was supposed to look across the street, see the ordinary-looking luncheonette that, according to the Zagat survey, had the best fried chicken north of the Mason-Dixon line, and agree to have lunch there. That’s all. But trouble never asks permission. Like that proverbial bad penny, it just keeps turning up.
    There, across the street, standing right in front of Edna Jean’s, was a middle-aged man I knew, a man who shouldn’t have been there. It was Saturday, wasn’t it? He should have been home, having lunch