Rachel Alexander 04 - Lady Vanishes

Park, mostly way uptown, near the university. Nothing recently.”
    Dashiell had rolled over onto his side and fallen asleep, his head resting on one of the exposed roots of the tree. I sat there, the directory on my lap, just thinking. Then I got up, switched directories, got the residential one. When you don’t know which pieces of information are significant, you need to gather them all; as my erstwhile employer Frank Petrie used to say, you never know.
    I looked up Harry Dietrich to see where he might have been headed the last time he left Harbor View. The Upper East Side. Park Avenue. Where else would a rich man live?
    Had he been heading north, toward the subway? Had he heard the wheels of the bicycle bumping over the broken sidewalk? Had he turned around, curious?
    After a moment, I looked up Eli Kagan, because knowing more is always better than knowing less, and besides, I was too hot to climb a flight of stairs and take a shower. No Eli Kagan in Manhattan. Either not listed, or in another borough. I’d find out tomorrow.
    Sitting there, not wanting to move, I looked under W next. There was a Venus White right in the neighborhood, at the Archives, the pricey rental building that formerly housed the Federal Archives, with a gym, a supermarket, a dry cleaner, and a catering place on the ground floor. The building was bounded by Christopher, Greenwich, Barrow, and Washington Streets—an easy walk to work, nice, open views, maybe even a river view, just like at work.
    I wouldn’t have thought a nonprofit institution would pay its manager enough to live at the Archives, but she did have that lovely pin she was wearing at the gallery, and the clothes she wore didn’t look as if they came from Kmart.
    Thinking about Venus’s story, I pictured her at the gym, remembering the necklace she wore while she was working out. It must have been under her shirt at work, because I hadn’t seen it there; but at the gym, there’d be nothing to hide it under, not an ounce on her body she needed to cover up with a big shirt or loose pants, everything out there, looking terrific. Including that necklace.
    It looked like the heart Carder advertised every few weeks in the Times —the ad saying, Start something, or, Because she has your heart, something like that, the heart and chain sold separately, the whole shebang costing slightly more than my yearly nut for renting the little back cottage on Tenth Street I’ve lived in for four and a half years.
    It sure didn’t look like the kind of jewelry a woman would buy herself.
    If Venus had been so lonely, where had it come from— the married man she met on-line?
    And why was I hearing about him anyway? What did he have to do with a missing dog, a dead old guy, a bunch of witnesses who don’t speak and couldn’t tell you the time of day if they did, and this gorgeous, mysterious black woman who hires me because she thinks her life’s in danger, then won’t tell me why?

CHAPTER 6
    I Know a Lot of Stuff, He Said

    After showering, I gave Dashiell his dinner, then went back upstairs to my office and sat at my desk, now covered with the equipment my brother-in-law kept sending me so that “we could be a family again,” not understanding that a fax machine, a laptop, and a printer are not the route to this girl’s heart.
    Why was I still so angry? Lillian wasn’t. She was acting as if they were kids again, as if they had just fallen in love, as if they didn’t have two pimply, whiny, selfish teenagers, as if Ted hadn’t cheated on her with one of his models.
    I opened the laptop and turned it on, thinking about the case while it booted up, beeping and whistling to let me know how hard it was working on my behalf. Then I waited again while it dialed my internet provider, gurgling and flashing some more, making sure it had my attention.
    When the home page was there, wiggling annoyingly, promising free upgrades and all kinds of other things I didn’t want, I typed in “puli rescue” and hit the search button, waiting while the computer found what I was looking for.
    I left a message on the lost-and-found bulletin board of the closest group, hoping for some exposure, that someone checking my post might know where Lady was. Of course, there was no sense describing her, a thirty- to thirty-five-pound springy little black dog, cheerful, noisy, smart, easy to train, with dreadlocks. That wouldn’t exactly cut her out of the pack. But since she’d been a trained visiting