This Dog for Hire

murdered.“’
    “Have they done the autopsy yet?”
    “Hey, we’re talking New York here. There’s a major backup in autopsy. But get this, the technician starts checking everything, you know, really looking at the body carefully and checking all the clothes, the pockets, whatever, and finally he opens the pouch. Well, as you might imagine, it stinks to high heaven.”
    “Of course, that’s what liver’s supposed to do,” I cut in. “That’s why it works so well as bait.”
    “But this liver smelled like bitter almond. This is where the smell was coming from.”
    “So how come Gil didn’t smell it?”
    “Maybe because he was working, you know, concentrating really hard on what he was doing with Magritte. Anyway, he was a smoker. Cigars. Dulls your sense of smell.”
    “And taste,” I added. “Not only that, once he popped it in his mouth, by the time he might have realized anything, it might have been too late. Cyanide is fast. You don’t get an awful lot of time to react.”
    “Rachel, doesn’t that mean Gil put the poisoned liver in his mouth while he was in the ring? Right in front of us!”
    “Yes. And not only that, it means not all the liver was tainted.”
    “How do you know?”
    “Because I’m pretty sure he spit a piece to trip up the tri. So he would have died then if it was all laced with cyanide. And so would the tri if he’d spit it out before he went down.”
    “But the toxicology lab said all the liver in the pouch was poisoned.”
    “It was. But the liver in his pocket wasn’t. That's how this was done, Dennis. Someone swapped the liver in the bait pouch for the doctored liver.”
    “How? When?”
    “While Magritte was being groomed.”
    “You’re kidding!”
    “I’m not. Look, the pouch was where Gill kept his supply of liver, but he took some and put it into his jacket pocket so that he wouldn’t have to wear the pouch until he was in the ring. He left the pouch with his stuff, in back of Magritte’s crate, it was there, unattended, when we all trooped off to the grooming area. In fact, Doc left before we did. He also beat it away from the ring when Gil went down.”
    “Who’s Doc?”
    “This hideous little man Gil was talking to when he came back to get Magritte ready for the ring.”
    “Do you think he switched the liver?”
    “All I’m saying is he could have. Dennis, I could have. Gill left all his things there when he went for coffee. But he had some liver in his jacket pocket, untainted liver, because he gave some to Magritte when he cut his nails. So, that means—”
    “Magritte. Oh, God, you mean he could have—”
    “No, Dennis, it went into his own mouth first, for a while, too. He kept swishing it around in his saliva to get it all juicy, and he teased Magritte to distract him from the indignity of getting his nails cut. That means the liver in his pocket was okay. That explains why the tri is okay, and why Gil wasn’t poisoned in the group run.”
    “So you’re saying that when he took liver earlier from his pouch, it was okay. And when he used liver later, from the pouch, it wasn’t.”
    “Right. In fact, a moment after I saw him fish around in his pocket and then go into the bait pouch, I saw him make this awful face. I figured, shit, who wouldn’t make a face, putting liver in his mouth. But, you know something, hit didn’t make a face in the grooming area, and he practically ate the fucking liver while he was grooming Magritte.” “But when he got a piece with cyanide, he did notice it was bitter.”
    “Apparently.”
    “My mother used to make me eat liver when I was a kid, you know, for the iron, and I still remember that some of it was sort of sweet and some of it was really bitter.”
    “So Gil could have thought he had just gotten a normally bitter piece. It’s not like he had time to taste-test the whole pouch. He was in the ring, working. And anyway, he didn’t have time for another reason.”
    “The cyanide. It’s too fast.”
    “Exactly.”
    “Do you think the killer planned it so that it would happen in the ring, right in front of everyone?”
    “I don’t know. But if he did, it would mean that, whether or not he was there, he’d hear the results of his handiwork on the news that night. There’s no way something this dramatic would go unreported.”
    “Damn clever of him.”
    “Or her. What else did Marjorie tell you?”
    “That the technician sent the pouch to the lab for testing. Once there’s