This Dog for Hire

off.
    “I’m fine, Louis, thank you. I wanted to offer my sympathy on your loss. I understand Cliff’s family hasn’t included you or any of Clifford’s New York friends in their plans. I’m so sorry about that, but it’s not an uncommon reaction, is it?”
    He seemed taken aback at the abruptness and the personal nature of my question. This is definitely a problem I have. I am only semiskilled beating about the bush.
    “No. Unfortunately, it’s more commonly the rule than the exception.”
    “Are they here? His mother? His brother?”
    “I expect not. We’ve never met, but I did get y call from Peter yesterday saying the memorial service was this evening. In Virginia. I’d left a message for him on Monday, to tell him about the opening. So I don’t expect them here. More importantly. we won’t be there. I assume that was the point. He was very polite, of course. He said he’d come by the gallery one evening next week, after he returns from Frederick. Anyway, it’s all water under the bridge now, isn’t it? The time to be supportive to Clifford is gone.
    “So that family can and will handle things any way they like. I’ve talked to Dennis, and we’re going to have our own service in New York after the show closes, for Clifford’s real family.”
    “What a good idea. So what’s your take on tins, Louis? Do you agree with the police assessment of what happened to Clifford?”
    “It makes no sense to me at all. Oh, please understand, I am perfectly able to believe a gay man would be mindlessly killed by a stranger for no reason other than that he appeared to be homosexual. But I cannot fathom what Cliff was doing or; the pier at that hour. Or, to tell the truth, at any hour.
    Have you ever noticed that people who interject that expression, “to tell the truth,” are often lying“
    “What I was wondering about, mainly,” I said, “was the same thing. The night of the murder…”
    He stiffened slightly at the sound of the word.
    “Where were you when Cliff left for the pier at three or four in the morning? Asleep? I mean, did he talk to you, say where he was going? Or why?”
    “I told all this to the police,” he said. “We weren’t together that night. He stayed at his studio. He usually came to my place in the evening, and I’d cook for him or we’d go out, he’d almost always spend the night and then go back to the studio early in the morning, most of the time before I woke up. There’s living space there—he was living there before we met. But we—I should say, I —never stayed there. I have a sensitivity to paint. And I’m allergic to dogs.”
    “Oh, I’m sorry, is he a problem?” I asked, looking down at Dashiell.
    “Not unless I sleep with him,” Louis said. He sighed, looked away, and then took a small sip of wine.
    He was tall and slender, young, about twenty-eight, I guessed, with lovely olive skin, thick, dark hair, an angular face, almost but not quite too delicate, like a swarthy Montgomery Clift. His eyes were dark and intense. He was the kind of person that gave you chills when he looked at you. No wonder poor, pale, cloddy Dennis was jealous. I wish I looked half as pretty as Louis Lane.
    “Was it unusual for Clifford to stay at the studio?” I asked after a moment of silence. “Had you had some sort of argument?”
    “No, he was painting, he said, and he wanted to stay with it. He sometimes did that for several nights in a row, just went with it. But this time . . .”
    “Yes?”
    “He sounded tense that night, Rachel, not high ” When he said my name, it felt the way it does when a lover whispers your name during sex. He was good, this Louis Lane, a sort of work of art himself.
    “When the painting was going so well that he couldn’t stop working,” Louis continued, “he'd be on a high, he’d sound wonderful, excited, energetic. But Tuesday night, he sounded, I don’t know, funny, like there was something he wasn’t telling me.”
    “And you didn’t ask?”
    “We tended to give each other a lot of room in that area, Rachel. I knew he’d tell me when he was ready. He always had.”
    I wondered what Leonard Polski had invented, besides his name. I wondered if he had murdered his lover.
    Never assume, meaning never assume anyone is innocent until you’re absolutely sure who’s guilty. You could get killed that way.
    “So you have no guess as to what happened, as to why he ended up on the pier?”
    “Not a clue.”
    “Well, thanks,