Rachel Alexander 04 - Lady Vanishes

someone left the door open?”
    “At Harbor View? No way. The door is always locked. That’s rule number one. The kids can’t go out without an escort. Not only would they get scared, confused, and lost, even right out in front of the building, but we’re right on West Street. The West Side Highway is steps away from our front door. Even with the construction, there are still six lanes of moving traffic.”
    “And no one saw anything?”
    “You got it. No one saw anything. No one knows anything. It’s not like there’s anyone around to see anything. We don’t have neighbors anymore. The place to the north of us burned to the ground. Last winter. You heard about it?”
    I nodded.
    “We’re lucky we didn’t go up along with it. The other side, there’s a bar. But it closed one night and never opened again the next.” She shrugged. “Maybe tax problems, too much cash going into the pocket, not enough going to Uncle Sam.“
    „That happens,” I said.
    “So we’re alone on the block. And our residents, they’re with us because most of the essentials of reality don’t factor into their lives. You don’t ask these people who, what, where, why, and when. Information? Forget about it. We don’t have one iota of information in the whole damn building. What we do have is frantic human beings, people who need everything to stay exactly the same, and now things are different and it’s no damn good.”
    “You looked around the neighborhood, of course?”
    “We looked. We called the shelters. We put up signs.“
    “Any response to those?” I asked, remembering seeing one, wincing at the thought of yet another lost pet.
    “Yeah, two calls. One lady had a brown dog she’d found two months earlier. The other was from a man I wouldn’t mind strangling. Hard voice. Sounded like a lawyer. He offered us his own dog, in case Lady didn’t turn up. Said he didn’t want her anymore, she was way more work than he expected. That’s it so far, so we still don’t have a clue as to what happened to our Lady Day.
    “Finally, in desperation, I called the Village Nursing Home, hoping they could recommend one of their volunteers who might come in with a dog until we found Lady. Or replaced her. That’s where I got your name and number.“
    „So all this secrecy has to do with asking me to come with Dashiell and—”
    “No. That’s just how I got your name. And in that conversation, Muriel, at Village Nursing, mentioned that you didn’t keep a regular schedule. She said it didn’t matter there, no one knew the time of day anyway. She asked if it mattered to us, if we needed someone who could commit to the same time every day. She said you and Dashiell were especially gifted with her residents, but that you kept weird hours, that sometimes you’d visit after breakfast, sometimes at bedtime, sometimes not for weeks at a time, that you did what you could, and would that work for us? Then she told me why, that you were a private investigator.”
    Venus turned to face me now, her eyebrows raised, as if she wasn’t sure it were true and I was supposed to tell her it was or it wasn’t.
    “And that’s what you need, a private investigator? To find out who mowed down—”
    “Harry Dietrich,” she said. “Yes, that’s what I need.”
    I waited for more.
    “I’m not buying that it was a random accident, Rachel. I just don’t believe it. Maybe I don’t want to believe it, I don’t know.”
    ‘Terrible things happen for no discernible reason. Look at the population you take care of at Harbor View.”
    “I know,” she said. “Still.”
    “And are you hiring me on behalf of Harbor View?” I asked.
    “No,” she said. “That’s why we’re talking here, not there. I’m hiring you on behalf of myself.”
    Once again, I waited for more. It seemed to me that there was no end of more I hadn’t been told. I didn’t need a tarot deck or a crystal ball. It’s just how human beings are, always keeping the most difficult stuff for last. Or not telling it at all.
    “What I want you to do is this. I want you to come in with Dashiell and work with the kids, but you’ll be working undercover. I want you to find out who killed Harry. And I need you to do it as fast as possible.”
    What had the cops found out? I wondered. But I figured I’d get that answer straight from the horse’s mouth.
    “Do you know what kind of bike rider hit him, Venus?” She shook her head.
    “I know I’m not giving you much