Rachel Alexander 02 - The Dog who knew too much

clothes, running clothes, cross-trainers, running shoes, and sweats, nothing much in the way of taffeta dresses, no sexy lace teddies in the dresser drawers.
    There was lots of food in the small kitchen, mostly gross-tasting stuff that was supposed to be good for you—millet, apricot butter, and tofu mayonnaise. There was a juicer on the counter, the same kind that Paul was using at the Club the first time I’d met him. Instead of finding parts of dead animals wrapped in aluminum foil in the freezer, I found a twenty-five-pound bag of organic carrots in the fridge, just waiting for the juicer to turn them into sludge.
    I refilled Pola’s water dish and gave her a couple of biscuits for being such a decent hostess, checked my watch, and quickly locked up and headed back to the gym to get Janet’s keys back into her pocket before she noticed they were gone.
    “Oops. She’s still busy,” Skip sang out as I passed the desk. “Someone came in for a makeup session. You got to squeeze those in,” he said, rolling his eyes. “House rules. She said if you would stay, she would treat you to dinner, you know, for making you wait so long. Or you could work out meanwhile, if you want.”
    “I don’t know.”
    “She said to tell you your abs needed work. And there wouldn’t be no charge,” he added in a stage whisper, even though no one else was within earshot.
    “I’ll leave her a note,” I said. “I have to go home and walk my dog.”
    “Tell me about it,” he said, rolling his eyes. “She’s so busy, busy, busy, but sometimes she’s got to sneak out and do the same thing. You gotta go, you gotta go, am I right?”
    I nodded.
    “Too bad you can’t stay. She’ll be very disappointed,” he said. “But even if you did, another person might show up with an aerobic emergency, who knows, right? She’s very in demand,” he whispered. “She’s the favorite. It’s a lot of pressure on her.”
    Not as much pressure as not being the favorite, I thought. I went back to Janet’s desk to return her keys and write her a little note, but when I slipped my hand into her pocket, I felt something else, her wallet I’d been so anxious to get my hands on her keys, it hadn’t occurred to me the first time around that a wallet can be rich with things other than money.
    Don’t stop digging until you know for sure, Frank used to say when I’d come running to tell him I knew who did it before I’d checked out everything.
    But it’s so obvious, I’d said, two days into my second case.
    He’d looked down at his paperwork and smiled. Ring a few doorbells, he told me. Ask a few questions. Stick your hands in people’s pockets. Snoop some more, kid. Then come back and tell me who did it
    Who did it? he’d said, shaking his head. Who did it is only the tip of the iceberg. You gotta know why. You gotta know how. You gotta have proof, Rachel, he’d said, because there’s too many lawyers and not enough people out there willing to serve time for killing them. You get my meaning?
    I had. So I angled myself away from the front desk and slipped the wallet out of her pocket and onto my lap. And in it, behind a picture of Pola , I found two very surprising things.
    I slid the wallet back into Janet’s pocket, wrote her a note saying I’d see her on Monday, and rolled my sore shoulders a few times before heading home. Dashiell did need a walk. And I needed sleep. There was no way to fight the exhaustion any longer, and all I could think of all the way home was how safe and wonderful it would feel to get home, take off my clothes, floss, and crawl into bed with my dog.
    As my eyes were closing, I thought I could smell those yellow roses, dying under the bushes, returning to the earth from whence they came, but it was probably just a trick of what my mother used to call my overactive imagination.
    You ought to be a writer, she’d said once. Like your cousin Richie.
    Yeah, right
    I closed my eyes and pictured the photos Ceil had shown me of Richie in drag. But then I was thinking of other pictures, the ones in Janet’s wallet.
    The first one behind the plastic window was Pola . She was lying on that handwoven carpet, a rawhide bone between her big white paws. She wasn’t looking at the camera, the way Dashiell would have. She was looking off toward the windows, the sun filling her dark eyes with light.
    Behind the picture of Pola , there was a photo of Lisa Jacobs, her curly hair loose about her face, her cheeks flushed,