This Dog for Hire

I put “It Never Entered My Mind” back on, hoping that I was finally on the right track and it wouldn’t turn out to be my theme song.
    Cliff had hidden the tape in the Miles Davis box. Did he think he’d need it again, later? He had hidden the letter, too. And one of the bills I had found, a fifty, in one of his jackets, had been tucked into the bottom of that long, skinny inside pocket that I always figured was for carrying glasses.
    He hadn’t told Dennis the identity of the person he had found out about. Hadn’t told Louis about the kidnapping. It’s only a dog, Louis would have said. Why take chances?
    He was secretive, even before the events that led up to his death. I reached for the phone and called Information, to see if his phone number was listed. That’s when I got the next big surprise of the day.
    It seemed everyone involved with this case was full of secrets, and many of them were telling lies.
    I took off my boots and padded out to the front room to make sure the chain lock was on. Paranoia was in the air, and I didn’t want any surprises today, not from the ever lovely Veronica Cahill and certainly not from the person with the big feet who was my neighbor in the ladies’ room at Madison Square Garden.
    I wondered if he had the key, too.
    If he was the murderer, apparently he did. After all, Dennis didn’t say the loft had been broken into as an explanation for Magritte’s disappearance had he?
    I went back to the little red room with its orderly collection of tapes, CDs, and videos and, opening each door and drawer, found the slide projector, a huge collection of slides, all marked as to content, three fat photo albums, and an ample collection of X-rated commercial videotapes, including two of my all-time favorites, Scared Stiff and Honorable Discharge.
    There was another large collection of tapes, the homemade kind if you were to judge by the labels, all, oddly, with the same label, “The Cliff and Bert Show.” I wondered if these were pornographic as well. I wondered who the hell Bert was.
    Fortunately, I didn’t even have to close the curtains to make the room dark enough. Since the den was an internal room, it was always dark.
    Having determined to dig in and be comfortable, and since what’s a movie without good snacks, I refilled my cup, took the box of Mallomars, and got Magritte settled on my lap. As I pointed the remote at the set and pressed play, I even answered my own question—who the hell Bert was.
    Clifford Cole was on the screen, his round face tense, his smallish, close-set, brown eyes alert, as if he were waiting, his brown hair too long, my Mother would have said, ringlets falling on his brow and curling around his collar, giving him an almost cherubic appearance.
    “I watched the tape,” he said, his voice nearly inaudible.
    “And so what would you like to say?”
    Bertram Kleinman’s face wasn’t on the video, only the sound of his voice, as seductive as bait.
    “Well, when I was here last time and I talked about these feelings that keep cropping up, that come back from time to time—”
    Clifford stopped speaking, and one hand went to his mouth, the fingers tracing his full lips from one side to the other, as if there might he traces of a meal he wished to wipe away.
    “Well, when I viewed the tape,“ he said, drawing himself up, beating back what was coming, “that's just not true. It’s not that they crop up from time to time. They’re always there. Like weather.”
    “What does that feel like?”
    “Like it’s always raining. What I mean to say is, oh, it’s so difficult to express, it’s like the sun could be out, but it would be raining inside, inside me. I don’t know why, but I’m carrying something around that makes me feel terrible. I know I’m not a terrible person, but I feel I am, do you know what I mean?”
    “Yes, of course, Clifford. Can you tell me, when did this feeling begin?”
    “Oh, it’s been around as long ago as I can remember. ”
    There was silence then, Klein man saying nothing, Clifford looking down into his lap, as I had done so often, having arrived at Ida’s office feeling blocked or sullen, not knowing what I was suppos -til to be saying or feeling, removed, as it were, for the moment, from my own self.
    As I watched and waited, just as Bert Kleinman must have, suddenly the painful issue of the inability to create a human being from the clues of his life was no longer a problem. Here was the man whose