This Dog for Hire

just haven’t found that out yet,” Zack said.
    “You may be right,” I said. He was the older of the two, fifteen, and used to look like a cherub. Now his feet looked five sizes too big, and he had zits.
    “Lots of people, in my day, changed their names for business reasons,” Ted said.
    “Yeah. Yeah. You mean they got rid of Jewish-sounding names so they could blend in.”
    “Did you ever think of doing that, Dad?” Daisy asked Ted.
    “In my business? Hardly !”
    “Did the people on your ease change their names so that no one would know they were Jewish, Aunt Rachel?” Daisy asked.
    “I don’t know.”
    Lili got up to clear the table. My family are all graduates of the Evelyn Wood speed-eating course.
    Had Dennis and Louis wanted to appear to be more mainstream? Or less like pushovers? Except for the Israelis, Jews were often characterized as wimps.
    Had I thought Alexander sounded more game than Kaminsky?
    I looked out over the living room and beyond to the river. It had gotten dark already, and the bridge lights were on. You could see the traffic slowly snaking its way to and from Westchester County, across the Hudson. I took Dashiell out, and we walked up to the crest of the mountain. Despite the quiet and the beauty around me, all I could think about was the case.
    Maybe Clifford Cole’s death was the result of random hate. Louis thought it was. It was easy enough, wasn’t it? You just got a few friends together, took some sticks or bats and drove through the tunnel, then headed for the Village. The latest trick was to stop the car, ask directions to a gay bar, and if the stranger you had stopped gave them to you, everyone would jump out of the car and beat him to a pulp, justifying the action with the belief that no one but a lousy faggot would know bow to get to the Monster or Sneakers. It’s sort of a modern-day Cinderella story, a bunch of Jersey princes going around looking for a princess, or, in this fairy tale, a queen. And when they think the shoe fits, wham.
    But what about the man in the camel coat? Could there have been a ponytail under that scarf or stuffed into that beret?
    When we got back to the house, Ted was sitting in front of the fireplace, a fire burning and the brandy out, picking up the glow of the flames. I sat next to him, and for a while neither of us felt the need to talk.
    “Stay over,” he said after a while. “You can drive in with me in the morning.”
    The brandy was burning in my stomach. I leaned against his shoulder and sighed. “I can’t,” I said, the warmth of the fire on my face.
    “You don’t have to work tonight, do you, little sister?”
    “No. But it’s too quiet here. If not for Dashiell s snoring, I’d think I was dead.”
    He reached behind him, but I jumped up and out of the way. Then, due to my extensive professional training and a quick wit, I managed to get the brandy snifter off to the side before the couch pillow came sailing at me and hit me square in the chest.
    “You’re lucky my pit bull is such a sound sleeper.” I said.
    But Dashiell had awakened. He ambled over and was licking up the drops of brandy that had splashed out of ray snifter when I got hit. Lili joined us then, and we talked for a couple of hours before they loaded me up with leftovers and drove me back to Nyack to catch the late bus home.

18
    He Barked Twice

    I HAD JUST stepped out of the shower when the phone rang. It was someone from Bailey House, the AIDS hospice at the foot of Christopher Street, saying they had heard about me and Dashiell from a caseworker who visited the Village Nursing Home, and they had both agreed that Dashiell would be an absolute godsend for their indigent AIDS patients. Since their social worker was in that morning and had a terribly tight schedule, they wondered if I could come over with Dash, say, in an hour, for a walk-through and a discussion about my adding Bailey House to Dashiell’s schedule.
    It was nine-thirty. I had to get over to the AKC library, check the studbooks to see if I could get some idea of how big a business Morgan Gilmore was conducting with Magritte’s frozen semen, drop Dashiell off at home, hightail it over to the Garden and see what else I could dig up about Gil from his fellow handlers. I told the person on the phone I’d be there in half an hour.
    Bailey House is on the southeast corner of Christopher and West, across the highway from the Christopher Street pier. The building that houses Bailey