Rachel Alexander 02 - The Dog who knew too much

who could have told us the purpose is dead.”
    “Maybe not,” I said. I picked up the jelly glass and downed the sherry. “Maybe one other person knows, the person who wanted us to think it was a suicide note. The person who killed Lisa.”
    The rabbi turned sideways on his chair so that he could look toward the window. He sat like that for a while, nodding to himself, his face and hair illuminated by the afternoon sun.
    “Perhaps so,” he said. “Perhaps so.”
    After a while, he picked up one of the older letters.
    “See how the letter is framed, Rachel, the broad margins left and right, top and bottom, as if it were a painting. She had, your Lisa, a passion for beauty, did she not?”
    I pictured the roses hanging upside down over Lisa’s dining room table.
    “Yes, I believe she did, Rabbi.”
    He sighed. “ Azoy gait es ,” he said.
    “So it goes,” I agreed.
    I folded the letters and put them back in my pocket, wrote a small check to the building fund, called Dashiell, and suddenly remembered the black Taurus sitting down the block from my house. A true New Yorker, I was so used to walking I hadn’t remembered I had a car this month, and now, having walked all the way to the East Village, I would have to walk all the way home.
    I stopped for fresh hot bialys, giving the bag to Dashiell to carry for me, and then stopped at Guss’s for a fresh, crisp pickle, the kind that gets fished out of a wooden barrel. This no one had to carry for me. This I munched noisily as we headed back to the West Village .
    We walked along Houston Street , past the Mercer Street dog run, which you have to be a member to use, past the thirty-six-foot-high bust of Sylvette by Picasso, set on the grounds of University Village , and past Aggie’s restaurant on the comer of Houston and MacDougal, which made me realize the pickle was only a first plate.
    Across MacDougal from Aggie’s was a large, fenced ball field. I went to a far comer, took the bag of bialys from Dashiell, and unhooked his leash. I sat on the ground, legs folded in front of me, eating a bialy and thinking about Lisa’s dog, there with her the night she’d been killed.
    The Japanese consider all their breeds to be more courageous than any Western breed. It is courage in the face of adversity that the Japanese most admire, a trait, by their own admission, of national character that they also assign to their dogs, the Akita, the Sanshu , the Shika , and even the cute but bratty Shiba .
    If the note that I’d carefully put back into Lisa’s jacket pocket had not been a suicide note, if Lisa had not climbed up on the windowsill and tossed herself straight into eternity, what, I wondered, would the Japanese say about the fact that someone had murdered her while her Akita stood by doing nothing?
    The American standard for the Akita —American meaning the standard approved by the American Kennel Club, the main U.S. registry of purebred dogs—says the ideal Akita should be “alert and responsive, dignified and courageous.”
    Whatever the truth was, whatever had happened that night, Ch’an was living proof of the beauty of the breed. If truth be told, Ch’an , with her deep-set, triangular eyes, her powerful, wedge-shaped head, her thick, dark coat, was breathtaking.
    And isn’t beauty what most of us go for anyway?
    Wasn’t it what was motivating my brother-in-law’s apparent indiscretion?
    Wasn’t beauty what killed King Kong? Just try telling any one of the single apes you know that you want to fix him up with a woman with a great personality. See how far you get.
    At least the Akita standard says something about temperament. Many of the AKC standards have nothing at all written about character, as if a dog were an assembly of parts covered with fur.
    Had Lisa been fooled by the words of the Akita standard, all that overblown, flowery stuff the national clubs write about each breed— loyal, dignified, courageous? Or, since she embraced things Eastern, had she merely wanted an oriental dog?
    I opened the bag and pulled out a second bialy, giving half of it to Dashiell.
    The same, the same, Rabbi Zuckerman had said.
    But who’s to say what its purpose was?
    I’m sorry. Lisa.
    It could have been about anything.
    I thought about stopping at the Sixth Precinct on my way home, but what would I say—that I’d made the astonishing discovery that Lisa Jacobs had actually written the suicide note they already knew she wrote? Or that, despite that fact,