Rachel Alexander 09 - Without a Word

keeps a camera between himself and the rest of the world.”
    “Including his daughter?” I asked. But I already knew the answer. I’d seen the space between them the very first day, space I thought Sally used to fill or might fill again if I could find her. But maybe that wasn’t so. One way or another, Leon seemed to keep those he loved at bay. Perhaps that was why he’d wanted Roy. Dogs often filled the gaps between people, space they couldn’t bridge on their own. Perhaps Roy was supposed to be the mortar that held them all together.
    “Leon’s not a toucher,” Ted said.
    “And Sally? Was she?”
    He shook his head. “Didn’t like it.”
    “No hugs good-bye?”
    He shook his head again. “Tough on the kid,” he said. “Tough on me, too.”
    “I’ve always thought that we’re more like animals than we like to admit.”
    “That people need physical contact, too?”
    I nodded.
    He took a sip of coffee.
    “None of this tells us where Sally is,” I said, “if she’s alive or dead.”
    “Nor if Madison killed her doctor?”
    “You think?”
    Ted rubbed his chin, his hand covering his mouth, then shook his head. “I’ve been wondering about the first question for five years, the second one since I heard. I can’t help you rule it out, Rachel. I wish I could.”
    “You have helped me. You are helping me. You’re the first person I spoke to who gave me any kind of sense of Sally. But—”
    He waved his hand in the air, as if to erase what I was about to say.
    “I had a client once. She was engaged and living with her boyfriend, but he was reluctant to commit to a wedding date. She’d pick one, he’d agree, then he’d change his mind, suggest a later date. One day she says, ‘Harvey, I’m not getting enough love here. I’m getting a dog.’ ”
    “You’re thinking Roy? But he was Leon’s dog, Rachel. Leon was the one who wanted Roy.”
    “I know.”
    Ted nodded. “He took him everywhere, starting from when he was this big.” He held his free hand a foot or so above the floor. “In the beginning, he carried him in his jacket when he went out to shoot. The last month or so, Roy would just follow him, sit and wait while he took pictures, get up and walk when Leon did. He was doing this series about the amount of filming done in New York, movies and TV. I had a small part in Law and Order at the time. I was the nosy, chatty next-door neighbor who told the detectives about the person who’d been killed, what a slut she was. I know what you’re thinking,” holding up one hand.
    “I wasn’t thinking anything.”
    “Right.Typecasting. Well, so what. It’s a living, meager, but a living.”
    “You were telling me about Leon and Roy and the shoot he was doing.”
    “The dog couldn’t have been five months old and Leon’s on the periphery of the set, kneeling down, climbing up on things, taking all these shots, and the pup, he was like a professional. He kept his yap shut. He watched Leon work, never took his eyes off him. Leon might have told him to stay sometimes because sometimes he trailed after him, but sometimes he waited. If Leon wanted someone to pay attention to him, Roy was his man, so to speak.”
    “But Sally took him. Didn’t that strike you as weird?“
    “Weird? You’ve met Leon and Madison and Emil/Emily and you think it was weird that Sally took Roy for a walk?“
    “What do you think? An excuse to get out of the house?” He shrugged.
    “And then,” I lifted one hand, “poof.”
    “One way or another,” he said. “I hear him sometimes when I’m up late.”
    “Leon?”
    He nodded. “He paces.”
    I nodded. “I’d pace, too.”
    “He needs to know what happened.”
    “One way or another,” I said. “Thanks for the tea and sympathy. Mind if I come back again?”
    I expected him to smile. Instead, his eyes teared up. For a moment, he couldn’t look at me.
    “I should have known,” he said.
    “Known what?”
    “That Sally was going to take off.”
    “How could you have?”
    “Something she said the week she disappeared.” He put one hand over his eyes. His shoulders shuddered once. “I’ve never told this to anyone,” he said, looking at me now. “She’d taken Madison to see Dr. Bechman that afternoon, and after dinner, she came down. She looked awful, pale and out of it in a way. She sat there, where you are now, and she leaned back, her head on the cushions so that she wasn’t looking at me, and in this dreamy voice she said that