This Dog for Hire

Westminster. You know, it wouldn’t have been the money that would have bothered Cliff. It would have been the lying, for sure, but more than that, the loss of control of what happened with Magritte. He would have hated that. So I need a gigantic favor. Could you take Magritte for me until I get back from Boston? Gil said he’d keep him for me, but I definitely don’t want to do that, and I can’t bear to board him. He won’t be any trouble at all. He’s got wonderful manners. Unless you don’t consider licking his balls wonderful manners. Lucky mutt. I always have to find someone else to lick mine.”
    “That can be very time-consuming,” I said. “That aside, we’ll take him. Dashiell loves to have friends sleep over.” As a show dog, Magritte would be crate trained, so if I had to leave him home alone, I could still come home and find my possessions intact. And if he carried on, no one would hear him. Shelly and Norma Siegal wouldn’t be back from Florida for at least another month. “I’ll be at Westminster anyway. I’ll just take Magritte home with me after Best in Show.”
    Dennis sighed. “Clifford sold more paintings tonight than in the entire time he was alive,” he said. “Maybe he’ll even get a posthumous cult following, like Frida Kahlo. Weird how things work, isn’t it?”
    The light was green as we approached Houston Street, so Dash and I ran to make it across Houston Street. When we reached the other side, I turned and waved to Dennis.
    In a world where appearances are everything, this proud oaf had loved a beautiful man. But now Beauty was dead, and the Beast was as lonely and miserable as ever. Sounds like one of the bedtime stories Lili used to make up for me when our parents were out and had left her in charge.

14
    Let Sleeping Dogs Lie

    WHEN I GOT home, I fed Dash, checked the answering machine, and got ready for bed, but I was as wide awake as if I had just run out of a sauna and jumped into a snowdrift.
    There’s a period in every case when I feel really confused. It’s usually from right after I’m hired until I find out who did it.
    Dog training is a lot easier. At least you know who the criminal is. Okay, sometimes it’s the dog, but usually it only seems as if it’s the dog. More often than not it’s the owner, the so-called intelligent partner who thought it was cutesy-poo when little Killer growled for six months before he actually started putting his teeth into it.
    The thing is, when you’re called in to solve a dog problem, you get to meet all the players up front. You’d be surprised how clear things look when the dog is seen in the context of his pack. When a dog is an accident waiting to happen, you can see it, and when the problem is fixable, most of the time you can fix it.
    With human beings, things are never so clear. Motives are more complex, behavior is more devious, and the histories are infinitely longer and more twisted.
    Dogs live in the present. They’re not capable of planned revenge. Alas, people are.
    Had Morgan Gilmore been an accident waiting to happen? Was it only a matter of time before one of his clients found out what he was doing and confronted him? For surely, if he was doing this with Magritte, he could be doing it with any dog he was handling.
    Did Gil murder Cliff because Cliff finally confronted him about the thefts? Had Clifford threatened to expose him? In that case, Gil would have lost more than a good client. He would have lost his occupation.
    Still, the question remained, how did he know Cliff would be out on the pier so that he could try to pass off the killing as a gay bashing?
    I was pacing now, the way Clifford did that night he told Dennis he had found out something and that someone had to be exposed. It went underground then, stewed and simmered in him. He couldn’t rid himself of all the bad feeling, couldn’t confront and forgive, or even if that’s what he had decided to do, maybe Gil couldn’t take the chance that people would find out what he had done.
    The American Kennel Club library wouldn’t be open until Monday. But I didn’t have to wait to see if I could get more dirt on Gil. I had every Westminster catalog since I began studying dog training. I went into the study, pulled two recent catalogs off the shelf, opened the first, and found the list of basenjis. The catalog not only listed the name of each dog entered and the name of the handler showing him but listed the name of the sire, too. This