This Dog for Hire

see. Well, I do feel that family and friends need the closure of a service. Don’t you agree, my dear?”
    “Yes, I do.”
    “Don’t you think Clifford’s friends would come to Virginia for a small service, once the weather gets a little kinder?”
    “I’m sure they would.”
    “I’m so pleased to hear that, Elaine. I would like to meet my son’s friends.”
    “I understand. I was wondering where I could send a donation in Clifford’s name. Does the family have a preference?”
    “Well, now, of course Clifford hadn’t voiced such a preference. He was so very young.” There was silence for a moment. “I’m sure any charity you would be just fine.”
    “Okay. Thank you.”
    “Thank you , my dear. Thank you for your affection for my son.”
    Ma son, she’d said. Delicate as a tank. I wondered if degaying the loft had more to do with Cliff’s problems than his mother’s.
    More to the point, Peter had lied to Dennis about the service and had come to the opening to make bloody sure he hadn’t missed anything when he removed the offensive canvases from the loft. He had taken les and mor and tossed the empty stretcher in the back of the closet. Perhaps he’d taken another painting out, an older one, and hung it on the empty nail. He’d taken the significant panel of big shit-eating sissy. And he’d taken a portrait of himself, a portrait where his mouth was twisted and cruel, his eyes cold, his cheeks even more red and doughy than they looked under the unflattering lights of Madison Square Garden. That last one I’d seen when I watched the rest of the slides I had retrieved from B & H. It was called helen , the name gay men use for an old queen. It turns out it wasn’t only his sons that Peter had gone back to rescue. It was himself.
    My guess was that the only record of these paintings would be the slides that Clifford meticulously took and filed of all his work. I was so grateful he had done that. The slides of the missing paintings Were enough by themselves to make me suspect Peter.
    And my day on the telephone had all but eliminated everyone else.
    I’d found out from Louis that like so many other SoHo galleries, the Cahill Gallery had come dose to folding when the art-buying frenzy of the eighties had ended so abruptly, but because Veronica has the scruples of a scorpion —his words—she’d managed, mostly with manufactured hype, to keep afloat. Now they were just making as much as they could out of what Louis had inherited.
    “Can you blame us, Rachel?” he’d asked me.
    Marjorie Gilmore had clued me in on Doc. He was Herbert Hanover, Ph.D., founder and owner of Hanover Cryogenics. Frozen semen. He not only stood to lose a lot with Gil gone, he and Gil were both at the Illinois State Veterinary Conference when Clifford was killed. So Gil was already dead when I found out he had a perfect alibi.
    I had ruled out Michael Neary, the dog walker. He was only seventeen. And Addie and Poppy; had they tried to off Gil or Magritte with tainted liver, they would have jeopardized Orion. Anyway, they’re dog people. They might have gone after Gil, but never Magritte.
    In my back-to-basics mode of yesterday, I had even called information to see if Clifford’s number was listed.
    “I don’t have a listing for a Clifford,” the operator had said, “but under new listings, there - a Peter Cole.”
    That was interesting.
    I called and heard his raspy voice on his answering machine, one of those no-name, covert messages you know: “You have reached .555-2486. Please leave a message after the tone and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.”
    As if there were a person alive on the planet who didn’t know to wait for the tone by now.
    Next I called poor, shapeless Linda Cole, in Woodcliff Lake. Of course she didn’t tell me he’d moved out. Why should she have? Who was I that she should tell me her sad story?
    Whether or not he actually was abusing his boys would be her problem. And theirs, of course.
    My problem was that I needed proof.
    He had been so clever.
    He had asked Dennis for a key, when in fact he co-owned the loft with his brother. I had discovered this by dropping in at the real estate office around the corner and checking the Real Estate Directory of Manhattan, volume two, which listed the owners of the loft as Cole, C., and Cole, P.D. Banks prefer steady income to lump sums of money, which, as anyone knows, can disappear. In fact, they are sometimes “placed” in the