Rachel Alexander 03 - A Hell of a Dog

Disturb sign on the door. There was a small white envelope there too, with my name on it. I saved it for last.
    The larger package was the sweatshirt. It had a picture of a pit bull on it with the words “putting on the dog” beneath it. The smaller package, a little box wrapped in silver foil with a lavender bow, was a vial of My Sin perfume. Yeah, yeah. I really needed that.
    I pulled my wet hair back with a scarf, put on a black T-shirt and jeans, hooked Dashiell’s leash through one of the belt loops, and slipped a loose black jacket on so that I’d have pockets for my beeper-sized Minox camera, a mini tape recorder, my wallet, and my room key. Then, before waking Dash so that we could snoop around before dinner, I opened the envelope.

R,
You’re off the hook for tomorrow’s talk.
S

    Had I not gone to the park, I would have guessed that Tina Darling had showed after all. But I had. So I knew that all Sam’s worrying had been for nothing. She’d lost an ingenue and gained a star.



HE HAD A NECK LIKE A BULLMASTIFF’S

    T he Truman Salon was blue with wine velvet drapes, swagged back to reveal Central Park at night—pretty as it looked, a place no sane New Yorker would venture unaccompanied after dark. The room was lit by an immense chandelier hanging over the grand oval table. The scene looked like a coed dinner at the New Skete Monastery; each dinner guest, with two exceptions, had a dog on a down-stay behind his or her chair. Martyn Eliot had no dog with him because of British quarantine laws. And Audrey Little Feather’s pug was on her lap, her head covered by Audrey’s napkin as if she were still meditating.
    There were four empty seats. I meant to avoid the one next to Chip and sit across from him, but he caught my eye, and Dashiell caught Betty’s, and that was that.
    I smiled around the table, the waiter came and poured me a glass of white wine, and then the double doors opened and the vast space they exposed, room enough for a team of Clydesdales and a beer wagon, seemed filled by Sam Lewis, her arm linked around the tweed-clad arm of England’s most famous dog trainer, the natty Cecilia at her side.
    “I have the best surprise,” Sam announced as she breezed into the salon. I heard the quiet, expensive whoosh of the tufted, leather-covered doors closing and watched the fascinating contrast before my eyes—Sam’s pantherlike walk, Beryl’s no-nonsense stride, and Cecilia’s speedy Mr. Machine gait, her dark eyes scanning the room, looking for the most likely canine candidate to get into trouble.
    Sam gestured around the table with a graceful red-tipped hand. “Rick Shelbert, Audrey Little Feather, Martyn Eliot, Tracy Nevins, Woody Wright, Rachel Kaminsky Alexander”—she stopped and grinned at me, proud of her own detective work—“Chip Pressman, Boris Dashevski, Alan Cooper, Cathy Powers”—then she turned and beamed at her surprise—“Beryl Potter.”
    There was a round of applause, and one at a time, everyone stood.
    “Please, dear people,” Beryl said without smiling. “Let’s none of us make any sort of fuss now. ” With that, she took a chair at the near end of the oval table, then looked around for Cecilia, who was behind me, tugging on Dashiell’s tail.
    Sam walked to the far end of the table and pulled out her chair but remained standing. “Perhaps Audrey can address this issue when she delivers her talk on psychic communication,” she said. “We seem to have lost one of our participants—two if Bucky doesn’t show, but I’ve never known Bucky to be on time for anything. I believe that’s why his mother named him Baron, to get even with him for refusing to be born until she was two weeks past the due date.”
    She stood there doing a Jack Benny face, eyes big and innocent, one hand on her cheek.
    “You didn’t know his legal name was Baron? Well, now you do. That’s what happens when you’re late, people, you get talked about. But we won’t discuss his last name if he gets here before dessert I think that’s more than fair, don’t you?”
    There was nervous laughter, and one of the dogs on the other side of the table began to bark. I saw Tracy take some dried liver out of her fanny pouch and lean down to give it to her Golden.
    “Well, more to the point, I’ve been after Beryl to come and teach here, for how long?”
    “How old are you, Sam dear?”
    Laughter.
    ‘Well, nearly that long,” Sam said, leaning forward and lifting her wineglass