Rachel Alexander 02 - The Dog who knew too much

anyway?”
    “Rachel,” I told her. “Rachel Alexander.”
    “No, that’s not her name. Not Rachel Alexander. She had a completely different name.”
    “How did she make Howie cry,” I asked, “that bitch?”
    “Don’t take much.”
    “So what happened, she hurt his feelings?”
    “Feelings? She was going to fire him. That’s nothing to do with feelings. It’s to do with money.” She rubbed her thumb and forefinger together. “Like we’re rolling in it,” she said, indicating the room we were in with a sweep of one hand. “Like we don’t need every damn penny he can make.”
    “Did she say why? I mean, did Howie say what the reason was?” I took a peek at my watch. Howie was already twenty-two minutes late for my appointment.
    Dora Lish suddenly got up and started beating on the couch cushion. I guess she’d lost the ash of her cigarette. The cloud of dust came at me like nuclear fallout, and suddenly I was having a sneezing fit.
    Satisfied she’d found the culprit and had beat it into submission, Dora sat and relit her cigarette. It was then I heard the familiar pop and looked up to see Dashiell, a huge paw anchoring the Kleenex box on the cluttered coffee table between Dora Lish and myself, a tissue dangling from his big, wide mouth. He walked over and dropped it into my lap. I blew my nose and patted his big head.
    “Wait a minute here.” Dora started to get up and then sat back down. She pointed at Dashiell with her cigarette. “Did I see what I just saw?”
    I nodded.
    “ Naw . You’re pulling my leg, trying to fool an old lady. Bet he wouldn’t do it again,” she said, suddenly as excited as a child.
    I opened my mouth, but before I had the chance to say a word, Dora Lish , who apparently didn’t live next door to the HB Acting Studio for nothing, lifted one big nicotine-stained hand toward her face and faked a rhinoceros of a sneeze.
    Ever alert, Dashiell turned back to the coffee table and crushed one side of the tissue box with his foot so that it wouldn’t fly up, then pulled out half a tissue, which he dropped into Dora’s lap. He backed up and waited.
    Dora began to cackle.
    Dashiell went back for the other half of the tissue. But this time he didn’t bring it to Dora. This time he dropped it right on the coffee table, and pop, pop, pop, three more tissues were out of the box.
    “Enough,” I told him. “Good boy.”
    Left without praise, like most of us, he finds a way to thank himself , in this case with the heady pleasure of snapping tissues out of the box until it’s empty. After that, he’d discover how tissue boxes are constructed. And if his best efforts on behalf of the human race were further ignored, he’d make tissue-colored confetti, blue in this case. Hey, you never know when there’s going to be a parade.
    Howie was now forty-five minutes late. Dora had seen me check my watch this time.
    “He musta got held up at the grocer’s,” she said, dropping the end of her cigarette into the whiskey glass. “I’ll tell him you were here. What’d you say your name was?”
    “Rachel.”
    “Oh, yeah. I remember. Rachel. Got a cigarette on you, hon ?”
    I shook my head.
    “Mrs. Lish —”
    “Dora. Everyone calls me Dora.”
    Everyone? The place didn’t exactly look as if she entertained much, but you never know.
    “Dora,” I said, but she had turned her attention toward the television set. There was a faux pearl necklace being shown, and Dora watched the hand holding it move across the screen.
    “You never told me, Dora, why was Howie going to get fired?”
    “I’ll tell him you were by,” she said without turning to look at me. She fished a butt out of the ashtray and lit it. “I’ll tell him about the
    Kleenex, too,” she said, the smoke from her cigarette rising in a thin stream, then widening as it headed for the ceiling.
    “Just pull th ’ door closed on your way out, will ya , hon ?”
    So I did. I closed the living room door, waited a minute, Dashiell and I frozen in place, my hand still on the knob, and when there was no sound other than the drone of the TV, I looked around the narrow, dark hallway and headed hot toward Howie’s office and the front door, but the other way.
    Dora’s ashtray of a bedroom was on the left side of the narrow hallway, a small, dark, cluttered hole of a space, its one window facing an air shaft. She had her own bathroom, though. I poked through her medicine cabinet, filled with enough antibiotics,