Rachel Alexander 05 - The Wrong Dog

came from somewhere in the vicinity of his stomach. I turned the key until the tumbler turned over. The dog inside barked again. I rotated the knob and gave a push.

Chapter 28
    I Said Her Name

    Head down, legs wide, tail straight out behind her, she seemed to fill the doorway, a good trick for a forty-pound dog. She was wide and white, a ski slope for a nose, tiny no-frill whale eyes set in that massive head.
    “Margaret?”
    The dog didn’t move a muscle.
    “Judy?”
    Nothing.
    That’s when I noticed the collar, one of those from R. C. Steele with the dog’s name and phone number sewn on in contrasting colors. My stomach did a quick handstand.
    I said her name. She took her eyes off Dashiell, looked up, and wagged her short thick tail.
    And that’s when I got a good look at her face, the pink strip abutting the leather of her nose, the little mustache underneath, the goofy smile and the little black teardrop at the outside corner of her right eye.
    Not Judy, I thought.
    Not Margaret.
    And not Mel Sugarman.
    C. Fucking Madison the Third. And Sugar. Clever, I thought. I couldn’t help smiling. Then I remembered. Whatever his name was, he was dead, having intentionally taken a bullet that was meant for me.
    I bent and scratched Sugar on the head. She turned back to Dashiell and bowed. Despite all the noise, she was still a puppy. I told Dash okay and he followed the clone down the length of the loft, one large room about twenty-five by eighty, sunlight pouring in from the huge back windows and down from the three skylights.
    The bed was at this end of the apartment, covered with a leopard spread and strewn with dog toys. The open kitchen was in the middle of the apartment, under one of the skylights, a round marble table ringed by leather chairs across from it. Down at the far end, where the dogs were wrestling prior to heading back my way, there was a huge leather couch, a couple of comfortable-looking modem chairs, an Oriental rug that looked as if it had been in the family for generations but, like my aunt Ceil, had kept its glow, and a grand piano.
    I let the door close and walked slowly down to the far end of the apartment thinking that no way on earth could someone live like this by walking other people’s dogs for a living, rain or shine, like the postal service. It’s not that dog walkers did so badly. But this was old money I was looking at, not cash earned by wearing out shoe leather.
    Of course, he could have been an eccentric. Hell, as far as I could tell, he had been an eccentric. Sometimes people with tons of money do whatever it is they want to anyway, as if they didn’t have all that dough, as if they had to work for a living. Dog walking? I didn’t think so. I’d see the walkers schlepping dogs around when it was over ninety, faces red, T-shirts soaked with sweat, still a dozen more walks to do. And in the rain, the dog’s tail tucked, ears back—even he didn’t want to be out in all that slop.
    I sat down on the leather couch and took the key ring out of my pocket, placing it on the cushion next to the one I sat on, looking hard at the keys, something I hadn’t thought to do before. But now that I did, I could see that most of them were identical. Actually, there were keys for three different brands of locks and all the keys for each lock were copies. Clones. Apparently Mel had walked only one dog, aside from his own.
    I wondered which dog I had seen that night on Horatio Street.
    And how and why Mel was really there. Because what he’d told me, I now knew, was just another lie in a pack of lies.
    I tried to picture Blanche that night, to remember how she’d acted. At first, she’d pulled toward Bianca, sniffing and checking her out. Bianca, or Sugar, had licked Blanche’s mouth, typical behavior of a younger dog toward an older one. But then on the way home, Blanche was upset and clingy. I remembered that I’d stopped to comfort her, never thinking I had to look for a reason beyond the obvious, that she’d been upset because her mistress had just died. But she might have been upset because she thought she saw Bianca, then it turned out the dog was a stranger, only a look-alike and not the real thing. I couldn’t know for sure, not with Mel, or C. Madison the Third, dead. But it was very possible Mel had had his own clone out, not Sophie’s.
    What I did know was that dogs were able to tell the difference between identical twins, by smell. And wasn’t that what clones were,