Rachel Alexander 03 - A Hell of a Dog

Then he got this job on Madison Avenue, selling men’s clothing. But it bored him. He said he could barely stand it. He’d wake up in the morning and not want to get out of bed. So he took a loan out, finished his degree, and went right on to graduate school. He started out working with homeless children, and he brought his dog with him to get the kids to open up and talk. Then one thing led to another, I guess.”
    “Poor man,” Audrey said. “Alan was a teacher. High school history. He went to visit his brother, someplace in the South, one of the Carolinas maybe, or Tennessee, and they went hunting. He thought the electronic collars that the hunters all were using working off-leash dogs at great distances could also solve the problems of pet owners whose dogs wouldn’t come. That’s all most people want, he used to say, is for their dogs to come off leash. They don’t care about the other stuff.” She was stroking Magic, who was sitting, as usual, on her lap.
    There was a silence.
    “To Alan,” she said.
    Boris poured a swallow or two into Chip’s cup, then Woody’s. But when he refilled his own, it runneth over, and when he lifted it to drink, some of it even runneth down his double chin.
    “Cake,” Beryl said. I looked over at her now. She seemed drunk out of her mind. I wondered if I looked that way, too. “We need sweets,” she said, attempting to get up and fetch the platter of cakes and pastries, then falling back into her chair. “Oh, my.” She straightened up and fussed with her blouse. “Someone bring on the goodies.” She spoke slowly, so as to get the words past her Ups in good order. “The old lady’s too drunk to do it herself. You know, my dears, if the queen could see me now, perhaps she would knight me.” She pronounced the k, then fell apart laughing, as if she’d just uttered the funniest thing she’d ever heard. “Oh, dear, am I making a complete ass of myself?”
    “Only partial,” Woody assured her, getting up to get the platter of sweets and offering it to Beryl first.
    “Sugar,” she said, stopping to take a bite of a small Napoleon and getting powdered sugar and pastry crumbs all over herself as she did, “now what was I saying?”
    ‘That sugar cures a hangover,” Audrey said. “But only if accompanied by chanting.”
    If we’d ever be ready for Audrey, the time was now. We lifted our empty cups. ‘To Audrey,” we all said.
    “Come on, handkerchiefs over your faces. You can use napkins,” she said, motioning to Cathy, who could reach them from where she sat. Cathy passed us each a large paper napkin, so we finally relinquished our vodka cups, putting them on the floor if we couldn’t reach a table, unfolded our napkins, and covered our faces with them. I decided to cheat, pretending to have trouble opening up my napkin. Or did I really have trouble getting the layers apart? I watched everyone, feces covered, napkins rising up and down with their respiration.
    “Just chant along with me. Ah la, ah la. At first,” Audrey said, her voice low and soothing, “ah la, good, keep it up, at first you’ll feel the grief in your chests, the loss of our young colleagues, ah la, ah la, and then the grief will rise and you will feel a lightness, an energy, as you turn your focus to the future and let go of the past, ah la, ah la.”
    The chanting became one sound, all the voices together, the syllables running together. I chanted too but without covering my face. Instead, I was watching Chip Pressman, one arm hanging off the side of his chair, his hand resting on Betty’s head, which was raised as she watched us all behaving so peculiarly, trying to figure out if her master was in danger.
    As I watched his handkerchief rising and falling over his mouth, thoughts of being alone with him nearly swept me away. But the overwhelming urge I felt had nothing to do with breaking the laws of man, God, and possibly even the Ritz Hotel. I was thinking about something far more dangerous, breaking one of the rules of private investigation, that body of wisdom my former mentor Frank Petrie had so carefully yelled into my face back when I was in his employ.
    When I’d first called Frank and gotten him to agree to an interview even though he’d said he had no openings, especially no openings for no beginners, he’d given me a time to meet with him and directions to his office.
    “The elevator only goes to twenny,” he’d told me. “Get out there and take the stairs to