This Dog for Hire

his left hand, and gave me a long bear hug. “Rachel has a new case,” Lili told him excitedly. Then she frowned. “Is this one going to be dangerous?”
    Lili filled Ted in on her version of my version of the case as we walked inside.
    “Would this artist have threatened the handler over the money?” Ted asked. “How much is involved in these stud fees?”
    “Could be a lot. Thousands, anyway. But I don’t think it would have been the money. He would have been livid about losing a choice as significant as whether or not his dog should be bred. At least, that’s how Dennis sees it.”
    “And you? What do you see?” Ted asked.
    “I’m still collecting data,” I told him.
    “But tell me, Rachel,” he said, “how did this Gil person get Clifford out onto the pier?”
    “Don’t get technical,” I told him. It was a Beatrice favorite when she was caught in an inconsistency.
    “So this we don’t know yet,” Ted said. He was bending over, reaching into the oven, so I could see his bald spot.
    “Roast chicken! I don’t know about you, but Fir, starving.”
    “So,” Lillian said, “she’s starving. What else is new?”
    Had the intruder followed me? I wondered. But he had a key. What was he after on the message tape? Was it a message he himself had left and didn’t want anyone else to hear?
    “So, are you seeing anyone?” Ted asked. He was taking baked potatoes out of the oven one by one with a long-handled fork.
    “No one special,” I said.
    “Well, we’ve met this young man, a single man, very nice. He sells woolens, imported fabric from Scotland, it’s his own company, and—”
    I wondered if he wore those plaid skirts.
    “—we thought you and he could come to dinner sometime. You might like him.”
    “I don't know, Ted—”
    Half the guys in my neighborhood wore skirts. Why would I have to come here for that?
    “We hate to see you—” His voice trailed off, leaving the obvious unsaid. My family is subtle. You’ve got to give them that.
    “What about all those good-looking policemen at the Sixth?” Lili chimed in. “Aren’t any of them single?”
    “Probably.”
    “So? A man in uniform? With good medical benefits?”
    I sighed. “Cops leave the toilet set up.”
    “Rachel, don’t you get tired of—”
    “I’m not alone,” I said, skipping the part where she told me I would be forever and ever if I didn’t learn to compromise. “I have Dashiell.”
    “Mea culpa,” Ted said. “I’m sorry I mentioned it.” Lili called the kids and opened a bottle of white wine.
    We gathered around the big round table in the open kitchen, which was a huge balcony overlooking the living room below, the spectacular view of the Hudson River ahead. For a while the only sounds were of platters being picked up and put down on the bare, round oak table and Lillian asking her children why they weren’t taking vegetables onto their plates. As if it were the first time this was happening.
    Don’t talk about yourself, she’d told me more than once. Give the man a chance.
    When would I get the message and stop coming to dinner on the lost continent, where time stopped in 1952? I was surprised my sister wasn’t wearing a circle skirt with a poodle on it.
    I tuned them all out and began to think about my case. Sometimes I’d get a message I wanted to save for one reason or another. I’d flip the tape, or if I really wanted to save it, I’d take the tape out of the answering machine and put it away, putting a new tape in the machine. But what could be on Clifford’s tape now ? Didn’t everyone know he was dead? After all, it had been in the New York fucking Times.
    “Ma!” It was Daisy.
    “Stop teasing your sister,” Lili said without even looking. She had probably said it a million times “And don’t fill up on bread,” she added.
    “My God, Lili, they’ve turned into us!”
    “Zachery, use a fork. What do you mean?” she asked me, looking at me with her large hazel eyes.
    I just shrugged. People not only dislike it when you make suggestions about their kids and dogs, they don’t like it when you criticize the behavior of said offspring, unless that’s what you’re getting paid to do. At least that’s what my shrink used to say as she criticized my behavior without the least inhibition.
    “I’ve got this case now,” I began to tell Daisy, who was seated across from me, “where half the people have changed their names.”
    “Maybe the other half have, too, but you