This Dog for Hire

problem,” he said smugly. “I bank his sperm.”
    Bingo! I thought. Morgan Gilmore had just moved up to number one on my hit parade.

13
    We’ve Locked the Barn

    IF YOU’VE NEVER turned on a date with a detailed description of how semen is collected and banked, and you think you might like to give it a try, just say, “I was thinking of using frozen semen to breed my dog. Less hassle.” And when they ask the inevitable, just roll your eyes and say, “Don’t ask.” Human imagination always makes things more interesting than they actually are.
    With Morgan Gilmore’s card safely tucked into my purse, I pushed and shoved my way over to the bar, snagged a glass of white wine, then shoved and poked my way back to Dennis. Before I got there, to retrieve my dog and tell my client the news, I overheard a voice so condescending and full of authoritative ignorance that it could only belong to a gallery owner. Veronica Cahill was briefing the Press.
    “—a little steep for someone who’s hardly never had a show before, never been reviewed?'
    “It might seem that way, but this is all there is 0 f Clifford’s art, all there’s ever going to be.” Dramatic pause. Eyes lowered. “Forty-seven painting and five pieces of sculpture. This is it.” She waved a careless hand to indicate the sweep of the gallery.
    She was tail, about six feet one, what my grandmother Sonya would have called a long drink of water. But to an immigrant who lived where food was not plentiful, it would have been said with pity.
    Veronica Cahill was anything but pitiful looking. She was stylishly slim and elegant, not poor and underfed. Her red hair, red from a bottle but nevertheless gorgeous, was cut short, boyish on someone else, but not on Veronica. Her features were, slightly oversize—large eyes, long nose, wide mouth—giving her a dramatic look that the cropped hair, the makeup, the big jewelry, and the constant use of" her large, long-fingered hands only emphasized. She had a ring on every finger, several bracelets that made noise as she moved, piercing hazel eyes that gave each and every one of us a turn. She was some piece of work, this Veronica Cahill.
    “How did you discover Cliff?” someone asked. “Oh, I’ve known Clifford for ages. I’ve been watching his art develop and waiting for a large enough body of work so that I could do this, she said, once again gesturing around the room. She smiled for someone’s camera. She was wearing a short green silk dress to emphasize her legs, which, if she were lying down, would reach from here to Hoboken. And shoes I couldn’t sit in, let alone walk in.
    I had lost the drift of the interview for a moment, but something brought me sharply back.
    “—saw it all, that poor, dear thing. It’s lucky he didn’t get killed, too. You can see, in Clifford’s work of the last few years, how the image of Magritte, our Magritte, of course, not Rene, is used to express Clifford’s emotional turmoil.”
    Shit. Dennis had told Louis, and Louis had told Veronica. Was that before he promised to watch his mouth or after?
    “How do they know he was there? I had heard the dog was missing,” a pretty woman in skintight jeans asked.
    “Oh, it seems Clifford’s friends have chipped in and hired a detective. A retired police detective. This is off the record, of course. It’s all very hush-hush,” she said to reporters from the Times , the News, the Village Voice , People magazine, and the New Yorker, according to the press badges I could see. “You know, so many of these cases go unsolved. Well, Clifford’s friends would have none of that. At any rate, Magritte’s collar and leash turned up at the pier. Poor thing. You know, it’s most amazing, his recovery. It was because of a tattoo—”
    The note taking had taken on a furious pace when I decided the only rational thing to do was to find Dennis and murder him. As I began to work my way out of the group that had gathered around Veronica, I could hear her finishing her botched story about how the National Dog Registry works and I heard her say, “The little darling is here, if you’d like photographs.”
    Somehow I knew it was Magritte she was referring to, not me, a retired police detective.
    I decided to look at some more of the pieces, not wanting to find my face in Saturday's paper, even as part of the background. My only hope now was that my fucking name wouldn’t appear along with the rest of the information I’d rather not