Rachel Alexander 04 - Lady Vanishes

I wanted to hide a purebred dog, I’d hide it in plain sight, especially a breed like the puli—cords hanging over their faces, most of them black, except to their owners, they all look pretty much alike.
    But there were no pulis there, only the more popular breeds—two Goldens, a chocolate lab, even more popular now that President Clinton had one, a Dalmatian, two mixed breeds, and a border collie, crouching, her eye on the ball she was waiting for her owner to throw, as intense as if she were herding sheep.
    I waited for the toss.
    “Get it, Mavis,” the woman said, the dog halfway there before the words were out.
    We crossed the highway at Gansevoort Street, heading for Beasty Feast on Hudson. If someone were bringing a puli in, or having food delivered for one, they would know it. That is, if Lady were still in the Village and if her new owner spared no expense, feeding her premium dog food in lieu of a supermarket brand.
    The woman who ran the store began to shake her head.
    “No one came in with a puli in the last few weeks.”
    The delivery man shook his head, too.
    “No deliveries for pulis.” He scratched the tip of his nose with one finger. “There’s a new Tibetan terrier on Jane Street. Cute as a button. And Jack Russells, you’re looking for a Jack Russell, I can give you twenty addresses.”
    I left my card, just in case.
    I tried their other stores, too—the one on Washington Street near Charles and the one all the way over on Bleecker, near Sixth Avenue.
    If I was going to meet Venus at the gym every day, I needed new shoes. The ones I was wearing let me feel every crack in the sidewalk. I walked around the comer to Sixth Avenue and dropped an obscene amount of money on a pair of cross trainers that made me feel as if I were walking on marshmallows.
    The salesman, a skinny old guy, his mustache wiggling as he slowly enunciated each word, cradled one of my pathetic-looking old sneakers in one hand.
    “There are only so many miles in a pair of shoes,” he said, turning my shoe over, shaking his head. “Do you want me to toss these?”
    “No. I’ll give them one last walk,” I told him. “For closure.”
    On the way home I stopped at Beverly Hill’s Laundro-mutt to see if anyone had a puli bathed recently. No one had.
    At Pet’s Kitchen, Dashiell put his paws up on the counter, and Sammy inserted a doggie bagel into his mouth. We both listened as Dashiell crunched, a viscerally pleasing sound, as basic as it gets.
    I asked my question. Sammy shook his head. No new customer with a puli. But he promised to call, just in case.
    When we got home, Dashiell hit the water bowl in the garden big time, then crashed at the base of the oak tree, too tired to make it into the house. I went inside, dropped the shoe box on the table, and snagged the cordless phone and the directory, calling the rest of the grooming shops, same question: Someone new come in with a puli to be bathed?
    “Saw the sign,” one guy said. “Didn’t see the dog.”
    “Too bad.”
    “Good luck, lady,” he said. ‘Tough thing, losing a dog like that, never knowing what happened to her.”
    I left my number, just in case.
    I sat on the steps, the phone in my hand, thinking about the bunchers—people who steal pet dogs to sell them to laboratories to be experimented on—but I thought they mostly worked the ’burbs, taking dogs off porches and out of yards, dogs left outside when the owner wasn’t home, trusting dogs, lonely dogs, easy as pie to steal.
    Lady wouldn’t have been out alone.
    And the door at Harbor View closed and locked automatically. You couldn’t leave it open if you tried, not unless you put something in front of it to hold it open. Surely someone would have noticed, had that been the case.
    I looked up the animal shelters and called those, too. Sometimes even when you report a dog lost, the report gets lost, falls through the cracks, and when the dog comes in, no one puts two and two together, gets it back where it belongs. But no, no pulis had come in. And when I asked if there’d been an unusual number of thefts reported, I was told no, there weren’t, not this summer.
    “Thefts in the city usually take place in Central Park, or Riverside,” a man with a gravelly voice told me. “Owners have the dogs off leash and get involved in a conversation, they turn around, seems like a minute later, the dog is gone. Last time we got a lot of those calls,” he said, “was last fall, Riverside