This Dog for Hire

and failure is precisely what they’re after, at any cost.
    Whatever the truth would turn out to be, it would emerge as it always did, in frustratingly small pieces, progressing so slowly I’d want to scream, or give up, or get a job selling jelly beans in the five-and-dime. Instead, I’d keep picking away at things until the scab came loose and all the ugliness underneath finally showed itself.
    My mother always told me not to pick at scabs because, if you did, you’d get a scar. I never listened then, and I never listen to the voice of reason now. I just have to find out what’s under things, the secrets, the motives, the little twists and turns the human mind can take that; make something repugnant seem plausible. And when I’m finished poking around where I don’t belong, when the answer is finally visible, the crime solved, I think about Beatrice and what she told me, that the wound will never heal properly, that the scar will be permanent, and that chances are I’ll be even unhappier when I get where I’m going than I was before I began.

3
    I’ll Draw you a Picture

    THE CHRISTOPHER STREET pier sticks out stiff and straight into the Hudson River like an accusing finger pointing at New Jersey, the state with the worst drivers and the highest cancer rate in the country. I unhooked Dash’s leash and let him run while Dennis walked me to the place on the pier where Clifford Cole met his killer and his maker on a cold winter night two weeks earlier.
    “It must have been here. The officer I spoke to mentioned that,” he said. I followed his gloved finger to the spray-painted sign on the concrete barricade, a comical face with a sad expression, the mouth a wide M, the sparse, spiky hair like an off-center crown of thorns, and next to it, “Punk’s Not Dead.”
    I looked around the pier. Where was the dog? I wondered. Was he alive, or as dead as his master?
    If I looked over the barricade and into the river, would I see him floating there, bloated beyond recognition? I decided not to, not with Dennis there.
    Dashiell was marking the pier. He was never one to ignore masculine responsibility. When I turned around to look at Dennis, I saw that he was looking up to avoid crying. I wondered how many times he had been told that big boys don’t cry, that part of his masculine responsibility was to avoid showing any vulnerability, as if he weren't part of the human race, such as it is. I took the Minox out of my pocket and snapped a couple of quick shots of the pier.
    “Let’s get out of here,” I said. “I’ve seen enough for now.”
    Just before we turned off the pier, I noticed another spray-painted sign.
    Beware of Muggers. Don’t Be Caught Alone.
    “What a place to die,” Dennis said.
    I didn’t respond. I had seen too many worse places, places far from the fresh, fishy smell of the river and the sweeping, open views north and south, places that stunk of urine, feces, vomit, blood, places so dehumanizing and frightening they could have wiped out every decent vision the victim had ever seen, and perhaps the worst place of all to die a violent death, one’s own bed, the place for the sort of sleep you wake up from.
    I hooked on Dashiell’s leash and we headed for SoHo.
    One-sixty-three Greene Street was an AIR—Artist in Residence—loft, which meant that only qualified artists could live and work there and that the tax abatement would make the cost a little cheaper, but nothing in SoHo was what you could call cheap. A lovely five-story cast-iron building with Corinthian columns, it was painted white, unlike its drab neighbors. There was an art gallery, Haber’s, on the street level and four floor-through artists’ residences above. A fabric designer named KiKi Marr who Dennis said had been away since before Christmas was on two, Dennis had three, Clifford Cole’s loft was on four, and a choreographer named Amy Aronson was on five.
    We walked up to Dennis’s loft, a deep, wide space, open in the front, facing east, where there would be wonderful morning light, and divided in the back for living.
    Dennis’s living room was separated from his studio area by a long, low bookshelf painted teal green and some hanging plants so that it would still get the light streaming in from the enormous windows facing the street. By now it was close to four, and the afternoon light was all but faded in the bedroom and kitchen areas.
    Dennis turned on some lamps and went to put up the kettle for tea. We had