This Dog for Hire

number.
    “Research assistance?”
    “Right. You need some information. We’re going to do the necessary research for you.”
    “I thought you were a PI.”
    “Maybe you do see too many movies,” I told him.
    I turned to go upstairs, and Dashiell bounded on ahead.
    “Rachel,” he called after me. “Ditto about calling me. Anytime is okay, day or night. I can’t sleep anyway.”

4
    We Rode Downtown in Silence

    AT FIRST, THE blinking red light of the answering machine was the only thing I could see. After a moment, when I got used to the dark, I found a light switch and was startled to discover myself dwarfed by the immensity, power, and beauty of Clifford Cole’s paintings, which were hanging and standing everywhere.
    I rolled back the tape so that I could hear Cole’s messages. There were only a few since Dennis had been here. The one from the National Dog Registry took an easy preference to the others. My heart began racing, even though the dog who had been recovered wasn’t my own. In fact, I hadn’t even seen him yet.
    Or had I? He was the subject of some of the canvases that were wherever my eye went as I called the 800 number that had been left on the machine a day or two earlier.
    I explained my relationship to Magritte and apparently said enough of the right things to be given the name and number of the man who claimed to have him. A few minutes later I had spoken with him, and Dashiell and I were on our way.
    Henri Plaisir lived in a walk-up on West Nineteenth Street, in Chelsea. After buzzing us in, he and Magritte waited in the open doorway while Dash and I climbed the three flights trying hard not to breathe in too much of the musty smell of the old tenement stairwell. Henri extended his hand to shake mine. For a moment, Magritte stood still as a statue at his side. I had the photo of him Dennis had given me in my wallet and had seen several much-larger-than-life portraits of him at Clifford’s loft, but none of this had prepared me for seeing him in the flesh.
    He was immaculately clean, almost sparkling, a little foxy-faced boy with small rounded-at-the-top triangular ears and dark, alert eyes. He was a ruddy chestnut brown with white points on his face, chest, paws, and tail, handsome, elegant, and with an uncanny presence, especially considering he weighed not much more than twenty pounds. He was clearly the kind of dog judges say “asks to win,” the kind of creature you somehow find yourself drawn to look at, no matter how many other dogs are around. It was no surprise at all that he was so successful in the show ring.
    Henri, as he had asked me to call him on the phone, swept us in with a broad gesture of his arm. Magritte came to life. He play-bowed to Dashiell, and all four of us stepped into Henri’s one small, neat room, kitchenette on one wall, pull-down bed on another, two bookshelves, a small TV set on top of one of them, a round oak table with two matching chairs, and two doors, one presumably the closet and the other the john.
    Late on January 20, Henri’s story began, the evening of the day Clifford Cole was murdered and less than a dozen hours after his body was discovered by Billy Pittsburgh, Henri had stopped at Metrometer, the taxi garage on Charles Street, just east of Washington, to have his meter checked. It was there that he first saw the little brown-and-white dog who, cold, dirty, thirsty, hungry, and frightened, had ducked into the open garage.
    Henri was from Haiti but had lived here since he was in his late thirties. He and his brother had saved for years to buy a taxi medallion, and now they shared the cab, each working a ten- or eleven-hour shift. That way they got the most use out of it and usually didn’t even have the expense of a garage, he said. He had just parked the cab half an hour before I got there, and his brother would take it out at midnight.
    He appeared to be in his mid-sixties, a little taller than me which meant he was five-seven or five-eight, about 165 pounds, with close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair, rough-textured, clean-shaven, dark coffee-colored skin, and soft brown eyes. He was wearing a weimaraner-colored cardigan with pockets, the kind I remember from when I was a kid, like the one Mr. Werner who ran the candy store wore, and beige twill pants with a crease. He had just gotten home from parking the cab when I called from Clifford’s loft.
    “I wasn’t looking for a roommate at the time. I just thought my meter was running