This Dog for Hire

murder, and I made a note to find out who owned them now. Then I took some photographs of the studio.
    All the paintings in the large room were Cliff’s, all huge, some telling their story in three or even four canvases. There was one set of three canvases, hung so that there were only inches between where one stopped and the next began, that took up the entire north wall of the huge space. The first canvas showed a pale blue wail with a window. Out the window was a single branch with buds, a March branch, and on the pale wooden floor a yellow and black ball, the kind that squeaks when squeezed. The second canvas showed more of the same place, blue wall, no window this time, a single wooden chair with a black baseball cay» with a red B on it hanging over the left-hand corner of the ladder-back, a green frog under the chair, the same kind Henri had gotten for his Jimmy dog and then kept “for memories.” The third canvas showed the blue wall, the pickled whitish wooden floor, and the back end of Magritte, as if he had been caught walking out of the picture. In the lower right-hand corner of the last panel of the triptych, Clifford had printed the title of the painting in small, neat letters, all lowercase: out, damned spot.
    There was another painting of Magritte on the south wall, this one called rising son. It showed another underfurnished room. Even the paint was used starkly in these portraits. The color was rich, but the brush strokes were very even, and you could see the texture of the canvas as part of the painting. At the top of the portrait, you could see the white-socked feet of the basenji, as if this time Magritte were floating up out of his own portrait.
    There were two paintings standing against that wall, both done at the beach. In one, an oversize close-up of part of a wooden beach house, painted in shades of gray: you could see through the large window that it was raining indoors. The small printed title read home, sweet home. The other painting showed Magritte leaning out the window, elbows on the sill, a cigarette dangling from his tight bps, like the lonely men you see looking out of tenement windows in the city. Even Magritte was done in gray, so that the painting resembled a black-and-white photograph. It was called he never read the surgeon general s report.
    I began to wander around the loft, just to get a feel for the space and to see where things were. I wanted Dashiell to take a look at things, too, the way dogs do, with their noses. So as I walked and he sniffed, every once in a while, I told him, “Smell it, good boy!” to let him know he wasn’t just being nosy, he was working. I never know what Dash will come up with, but I always know that it will be very different from what I can “see.” I put the kettle up, took out a big white mug, and found a box of Earl Grey tea bags. It was a cook’s kitchen—good equipment, lots of expensive, shiny copper-bottomed pots hanging above. There was no microwave, but there w as a Cuisinart and a professional-size mixer.
    Dash and I continued wandering while the kettle heated. Cliff’s bedroom, facing west, was high enough to get good light even though it faced the back of a building on Wooster Street. There was enough space for the light to filter down, enough to give the room a lovely cast, but not enough to blind you when you were trying to sleep. The bed, unmade, was a double, and the sheets and quilt were white, as were the walls, the floor, the rug, and the long, low painted dresser.
    There was a four-panel painting hanging over the bed, tilted up. In the first three panels there was a man asleep in a bed, in the very bed beueath the portrait, down to the last detail. Those three pictures were identical but for one detail, a slight change in the position of the head on the pillow, a dark head of hair poking out from the white quilt, the face not visible. In the last panel, the bed was rumpled and empty. Somehow I was sure the mysterious man was Louis Lane, that in this way, he did indeed sleep over.
    Above the dresser there was a smaller painting with a dark, brooding, and sexually suggestive look, a Diane Arbus—y portrait of two young boys, one on each side of the canvas. The empty space between the boys gave the portrait a palpable tension. Both boys looked ahead, at the viewer, as if unaware of each other. They were nude. The boy on the left was a cherubic-looking six- or seven-year-old, with large, apprehensive hazel eyes. The