This Dog for Hire

the first place we came to. I showed the waiter Dash’s bright yellow Registered Service Dog tag- He didn’t say anything about Magritte, so neither did I, and we were taken to a corner table.
    “Two kir royales, please,” Dennis said. “And keep them coming.”
    He turned to me, reached out, and covered one of my hands, covering his face with his other hand. “Give me a minute,” he said. I decided to skip the several sarcastic things that popped into my head, and wait.
    “Look. First of all, I’m sorry.”
    “You ought to be,” I said angrily. “I don’t make it a practice to lend my dog or my gun to strangers.”
    “You have a gun?”
    “Do Hasidim have sheets with holes in them?” Dennis rolled his eyes.
    “Okay. I accept your apology.”
    “Except that’s not what I was apologizing for. It was—the other thing. But I fucked up before you told me, uh, not to fuck up. Okay? I didn’t think. I didn’t know Louis Leaky would tell Veronica.” He held up his hand. “Yes, yes, I know about it. And then for her to tell the press. God! At least she got it screwed up.”
    The kir royales arrived. The bubbles looked pretty rising through the raspberry-colored creme-de-cassis-spiked champagne. I lifted my glass, clinked Dennis’s, which was sitting on the table, and took a sip.
    “I spoke to Louis. He spoke to Veronica. We’ve, uh, locked the barn. I’m sorry.” He picked up his glass and chugged half of it down. “Are you hungry?”
    “Starved! Let’s forgive each other and eat. not until we have a few of these.” I could feel the drink going to my head and warming my body at once and all lovely. The fact is, as long as my name and picture didn’t appear in the paper., rest was workable. I told Dennis. He leaned over and hugged me and finished his drink. The waiter brought two more. I hurried to catch up.
    “Okay,” I said, “there’ll be a few articles about Cliff, they’ll say thank God his lost dog was found, the prices of the paintings will go up, and”—I gave his glass another clink; this time it was in hi s hand—“Morgan Gilmore has been stealing sperm!”
    “What?”
    “Morgan Gilmore has been banking Magritte, for who knows how long. Evidently he refused to take no for an answer. So Magritte has sired pups, my guess is a lot of pups, and it looks as if Gil has been pocketing the stud fees.”
    “Good grief. Gil?”
    “On Monday I’ll go over to the American Kennel Club library and check the studbooks for the last few years and see if I can get an approximate count of Magritte’s get. This could be big bucks, all stolen from Clifford.”
    “Rachel,” Dennis said. He took a long drink of his kir. “How could I have forgotten! Well, I know how. I mean, it was ages ago, he never explained it, and, well, nothing happened. You know how it is, your own problems are at the fore, and you, well, you get caught up, oh God, I should have remembered. I should have told you.”
    “What? What are you babbling about?”
    The waiter put two more drinks on the table. I felt something brush my leg, and suddenly a basenji was on my lap-“About three months ago, Cliff came over looking really upset. It was in the evening, sevenish. I was having dinner. I asked him to join me, but he declined. He wouldn’t even sit down. He was packingg. I hate it when people do that, don’t you?”
    “Dennis—”
    “Right. He had left Magritte with me and gone out late in the afternoon, said he’d be gone a few hours, then come back for Magritte. I don’t know where he was. He never said. He just said that he had found out something about someone and it had to be exposed, at any cost. I asked him what he had found out and who he was talking about, and he just said, ‘Wait and see, old buddy. Wait and see.’
    “Well , I was worried about him when it happened, but he never brought it up again. I was having this huge problem with my publisher, so I forgot about it. I wonder if he was talking about Gil, if he had discovered what Gil was doing. He was really upset, and God, he loved that little dog to pieces. He would have been wild, absolutely wild, if he had known what Gil had done. And Rachel, he was wild that night.”
    “But he never mentioned it again? He never said another word about finding out about something that had to be exposed?”
    “Not a word.”
    “Does that strike you as unusual, I mean, to be so upset and then nothing?”
    “Actually, no. I do it all the time, don’t