This Dog for Hire

finger, sliding it along the oak shelf until I could pull it to the edge where I was able to grasp it.
    The envelope was blank, but there was a letter inside it.
    “Honey,” I read, still standing on the top of the step stool, one hand on the cabinet, bracing me. “For so many years I pushed aside my desire to sleep with a man, not just the desire for sex, but to lie in a man’s embrace, to feel his strong arms around me, his warmth and sweetness mine hour after hour. I never had that until I met you. And much as I want that, want to be with you, sometimes I can’t.
    “I’m driven by demons now. There’s something I have to do, now, to get out, and I want you to understand that your love is my saving grace, my life, and to be patient with me while I work this out.”
    It was typed and not signed. Had Cliff written it to Louis? Or to someone else? “Honey” could be anyone. And why had it been hidden, not mailed, given, faxed?
    After making tea, I decided I should do my best to really make myself feel at home, despite the empty spaces where art had once hung. If I got comfortable, I might get more into Cliff’s head and be able to sort out some of the incredible things I had found out the day before. I decided that music would be the first priority. Having noticed a tape deck and drawers of tapes in Clifford’s study, I put on the light and began to look at Clifford’s taste in music. But before I had the chance to consider Diana Ross over Barbra Streisand, I saw just the tape; I wanted to hear. It caught my eye because it was loose, sitting on top of the other tapes. Miles Davis, Workin’. I turned on the tuner and the tape deck, put the tape in, pressed the play button, and went to sit in the chair to drink my tea and listen while I thought about what to do next. Cliff had apparently made the tape himself, probably from a CD. There were other tapes he had made, carefully listing each cut in order on the paper in the box so that he would know what was coming and when. This tape, though, had no box. But Clifford was as obsessive-compulsive as you can get; even his copper-bottomed pots were polished. Why was this tape loose?
    I went back to the drawer where the tapes were arranged not only alphabetically but by style of music, and looked for the jazz tapes, my finger running over the boxes—Chet Baker, Clifford Brown, Ray Charles, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Bag’s Groove, Birth of the Cool, and there it was, Workin. I pulled out the box to read the titles of the cuts, but it wasn’t empty. There was a tape in it.
    I guess that’s why he hadn’t put the tape away. I thought, sitting back in Clifford’s chair, at his desk, holding the box in my hand, turning it over to read the cuts. And while I listened to “It Never Entered My Mind,” I began to think that the Clifford Cole I knew and loved was much too compulsive to leave a tape out where it could get dusty or to put a tape back in the wrong box.
    For a moment I pictured the precise little lowercase letters with which he painstakingly titled Ms paintings.
    I looked at the box in my hand, at the neat priming of each cut; underneath the last one he had taken the time to put down the name of each artist along with the instrument he played.
    Was this a man who would leave a tape lying around loose?
    I interrupted Workin ’, popped in the unmarked tape, and pressed play.
    “I have Magritte.”
    It was a woman’s voice.
    But it wasn’t really a woman’s voice. You don’t work for Bruce Petrie for very long without being able to recognize the sound of a voice-changing telephone. I even had one someplace, probably with my good crystal, in the basement. Bruce had given it to me, “For Hanukkah.” And when I’d said, “Bruce, you shouldn’t have,” he’d looked puzzled. “Why not?” he said. “It’s your Christmas, isn’t it?”
    “I have Magritte,” “she” said, enunciating carefully so that not a syllable would be lost. “If you want him back alive, don’t tell anyone about this message. Come to the Christopher Street pier at four o’clock tomorrow morning. Come alone—alone, you hear, or the mutt dies. And bring a thousand bucks, you got that? A thousand, in small bills. Yeah.”
    The money was an afterthought. The money was clearly not the point of this. Which is why it wasn’t taken.
    I rewound the tape and listened three more times to the message that signaled the beginning of the end of Clifford Cole’s life. Afterward,