This Dog for Hire

as Magritte would be five hundred at the lowest, and up to maybe one thousand if Gil had a real sucker interested. I didn’t know if I’d find anything that might possibly mean Gil was sending checks to Cliff, but whether or not he was became the loose thread of the moment .
    I decided it would he too rude, even for me, to leave in the middle of the speeches. So I waited until the bitter end before air-kissing my table companions and then running off to beat them to the coat check. I have my standards. They may be low. but they’re there.

16
    Nowhere in Sight

    I TOOK A cab to the cottage, changed clothes, draped Dashiell’s leash around my neck, and headed for Greene Street. Twenty minutes later I was sitting at Cliff’s desk, the small green shaded desk light making a warm, bright circle on the open file folder with Clifford’s bank records.
    One large deposit was credited to Cliff’s account every month, probably from some trust fund. It was done automatically—there were no deposit slips for those amounts. In fact, there were no deposit slips, period. Unless Gil was paying Cliff cash, unlikely with a deductible expense, he was indeed pocketing Magritte’s stud fees.
    I returned the file folder to its place in the lower left-hand drawer and opened the other drawers again to see if something would register that didn’t the first time around. The more you learn on a case, the more you can understand the possible importance of what you see, the significance of something ordinary that normally »night not catch your eye.
    I was looking at the odds and ends in the middle drawer, the place where people keep pens, paper clips, rubber bands, and loose change. First I found a receipt for slides from B & H Photo. I put it in my pocket. There can be nothing more heart-wrenching than looking at the last photographs someone look, it’s like getting mail from someone after they’ve died. But I thought Dennis or Louis would want them anyway.
    Next I spotted a penlight and remembered that I had wanted to look at the paintings in the storage closet, but the light hadn’t been working. I wondered if there’d be anything left to look at, or if, like the rest of the loft, the closet too would be depressingly denuded of Clifford's art.
    I flicked on the penlight, shut off the lamp, and walked across the hall. The closet door opened with a slight creak, releasing the musty smell of a place too jammed with stuff to have been cleaned. There was also a faint odor like that of raw wood in lumberyards, probably from the unfinished floor. I walked in, the penlight making the tiniest imaginable circle of light in the nearly empty closet.
    Dashiell followed me into the closet and started sniffing the floor as I sent the small circle of light slowly around the walls, looking to see if any painting had been left by accident or design. After revealing nothing but the bare closet on three of the four sides, the light hit three stretchers that were leaning on the wall to my right. I walked farther into the closet to take a better look.
    Each of the three was as empty as a gaping, toothless mouth. It was my impression that stretchers were made and canvas stretched onto them only when the artist was ready to use them. Materials were expensive, and if someone other than Cliff were making the frames and stretching the canvas, then it was likely one would be made at a time. When I looked closer, I saw that these weren’t new stretchers at all. They were dirty, splattered with drops of paint, and there were staples and threads on the back of each, as if canvas had been in place, used, and then removed.
    I was leaning them back against the closet wall when I heard a key in the front-door lock.
    I hadn’t ever put on the light in the front room, and when I left the study, I had turned off the lamp, good training from my grandmother, who had lived through the Depression. So except for the small light from the penlight, the loft was dark.
    For the briefest moment, I thought of Dennis, coming to check the answering machine.
    I heard the door open, there was a silence, then the door closed.
    If someone had entered the loft, they were wearing sneakers. Or they were barefooted. I tried to stop breathing so that I could hear them, but the loft was silent. I slid my finger off the button of the flashlight. Then I remembered Dashiell. I could no longer see him in the pitch-black closet, and my own breathing seemed so loud now that I couldn’t hear