This Dog for Hire

this was clearly the same voice that left the warm and funny messages for Clifford that I had heard last night. That was as I had guessed. The rest was not.
    Louis Lane was speaking softly about the rise of bate crimes, the resurgence of Nazism in the new/old unified Germany, the racial cleansing in Bosnia, and the rise in gay bashing here at home. Then he began to talk about Clifford, his painting as a kind of journal writing on canvas, the curiosity that drove him into his own psyche to troll for powerful material, his feeling that if he touched upon the things he felt deeply about, his paintings would touch others in some powerful way even though each person’s history was unique and even though Clifford’s own story was not fully expressed, just alluded to mysteriously. That, he said, the mysterious quality of Clifford’s work, was what he, Louis, loved best.
    “It was his way of expressing not only his own alienation and the alienation all gay men feel, but a far larger issue, the alienation of the nineties, the understanding that we never really know each other, and the question of whether or not many of us care for each other.”
    Of course, this made me wonder how well Louis Lane knew Clifford Cole, or why he thought this was a nineties concept. From the beginning of time, no one has ever known anyone. I mean, did Adam know Eve? I mean, really know her, beyond the biblical sense?
    “He was very emotional,” he continued, “yet in the translation to canvas, a kind of artistic flatness took over. I think without that, he couldn’t have gone where he needed to go. The pain would have
    been too great. And in that, he was a strong for what is going on in the post-Bush era, the disappointment people feel resonating with the pain of childhood, as if Bush the father betrayed us just as our own fathers did.”
    In action, how like an angel! To coin a phrase.
    The reporter nodded and kept writing. Behind him, there was a triptych I hadn’t seen at the loft. In fact, looking around, I hadn’t seen much of what was on display. I guess these were the paintings from the closet. Looking at the one behind Louis, this one really was from the closet; it was a middle-aged man in drag, but in each of the three pictures he had his back to the viewer. What was weird is that it looked like early TV, like Milton Berle in drag. It was even pained without color, in black and white and shades of gray. This was neither genderfuck, where there is a devil-may-care mix of male and female, say a guy with a beard smoking a cigar and wearing a strapless gown, his chest hair poking up from the bodice of the dress, nor was it cross-dressing, where the aim is to pass for the opposite sex. This was broad burlesque, but somehow creepy.
    The dress was a cheap housedress. You should see what guys wear when they do drag. You should have the money they spend. But this was a somewhat heavy guy in a woman’s cheap cotton housedress and a five-and-dime wig, ever so slightly askew, with a cigar in “her” hand. The cigar was the only thing to change in three paintings. That is, in the third canvas, the ash was dropping onto the carpet. Unlike all the other paintings I had seen, this one had no title on the last canvas. In fact, when Louis moved little, I saw that the card on the wall read “untitled oil on canvas.” It was dated this year. Perhaps it was the last series he had painted. Perhaps he never finished it.
    I waited for the interview to end and introduced myself.
    “Louis? Rachel Alexander. I understand Dennis told you he hired me to investigate Cliff’s murder?” I put out my hand. “Can we talk for a moment? Perhaps we can duck out into the stairwell. It’ll be more private there. And cooler.”
    He nodded, and Dashiell and I followed him out the side door of the gallery and into the hall in the stairwell. Unfortunately, others had gone out there to escape from the crowd and the heat, but we brushed by them and went up a flight, where we could be alone.
    “You don’t have a drink. May I fetch you one?” he asked in that lovely voice I had heard on the tape. “I guess I shouldn’t say fetch. That must be his job,” he said, indicating Dash with his wineglass. It seemed he had had a few before this glass. He stood a little too close, occupying some of the space I needed to have between me and any other being other than a baby, a lover, or a dog, but I didn’t want to back up because I thought it would put him