This Dog for Hire

she bellowed, “so now that you’re finished being Clyde Beatty you’re going to become Dickless Tracy?”
    Just like that, for the first time in eight months I started to feel like myself again.
    “Oh my God, Rachel, tell me you’re not serious.”
    “I can’t. I am.”
    Of course I wasn’t. Not yet, anyway. I was just having some fun for a change.
    “Rachel!” She was fairly hysterical by now. “Rachel—you wouldn’t. You wouldn’t dare!” That’s when I knew it was bashert, meant to be. I never could resist a dare from Lillian.
    I looked at Dennis’s ink and watercolor wash drawing of Eliot, realizing as I did that the black stains on his pants and shoes had probably been made by india ink. I mean, was I a born detective, or what?
    And what was Lillian carrying on about? This was only my second stab at what she calls the dirt bag professions. She needn’t worry about the other three. Selling insurance has never appealed to me. I’m more interested in who than how much. And on my worst day I’d never consider real estate or the used-car business. Sure, I follow people, eavesdrop, go through people’s garbage and read their mail, snoop, distort, deceive, and misrepresent. I even do a little B & E if it’s absolutely necessary. But, hey, I have my pride.
    I looked at Eliot again, a mountain of a dog, big, square head, thick and stolid, uncropped flying-buttress ears, large, meaty mouth, closed and serious for now. I studied every part of him, the massive chest, the strong, straight legs, the neat, large, rounded feet, so like Dashiell in every way except for coloring. Eliot was a brindle. Dashiell, except for the black patch on his right eye, is white.
    “Please may I keep him, Mommy, may I, Mommy, please?”
    “He’s too big for you to walk,” Antonia’s mother said, as sensible as my big sister, Lillian.
    “He’s too big for us to feed.”
    “And where will he sleep? He’s much too big to sleep in your bed.”
    But there they are, on the last page, in Antonia’s bed, and, see, they lit just line.
    Bashert, my grandmother Sonya used to say.
    I closed Dennis’s book and dropped it onto the floor.
    “You don’t know me,” he had said when he called me.
    Was that just this afternoon?
    “I got your name from someone in the neighborhood, but you don’t know her. You did some work for her cousin about a year ago. Ellen Engel? And now I need your help. I need it badly.”
    Jack had said it, too, the first time he’d called.
    “You don’t know me.”
    There was a silence then, as we both waited.
    “I got your number from your brother-in-law.
    Ted.”
    “Oh,” I had said, my voice catching in my throat.
    I closed my eyes and thought about the last message on the tape from Clifford’s answering machine.
    “You don’t know me,” a woman’s voice had said. “but I have a beautiful basenji bitch, pointed, she just needs one more major, and I was interested in Magritte, you know, if you hire him out at stud.” Sex, it can fucking ruin you.

6
    It Looked Like an Enormous Bowling Ball

    IT WAS SO cold when I got up, I could see my breath indoors. One disadvantage of living in the cottage is that I get to pay my own heat bill, and by necessity and nature I’m cheap. If Dashiell were a malamute, I could say I keep the place as cold as the inside of a refrigerator to prevent him from blowing his coat. But the truth is, if he were a malamute, he’d blow it anyway. You really can’t fool Mother Nature.
    I went downstairs and opened the front door for Dash. A moment later, he was back with the New York Times , which gets pitched over the locked gate in an electric blue plastic bag.
    It was going to be cold and windy with a chance of snow toward evening, the homeless were causing safety and sanitation problems at Penn Station, Tiffany’s was advertising a diamond bracelet for about the price of a one-bedroom apartment, and a man in Oregon had poisoned his wife, who, the Times reported, had survived to testify at his trial, in his defense.
    I fed Dashiell, got dressed, and headed downtown to Clifford Cole’s loft.
    Where Dennis had warmed the cavernous space with color, Cliff’s studio area was white—tin ceiling, walls, and wooden floor all done in a shiny enamel so that when i arrived, the sun was bouncing off whatever surface it hit, except of course the paintings, where the light seemed to become absorbed into the canvas. The paintings apparently had not been touched since the