This Dog for Hire

awful slow, awful slow. But there he was, and the man, he say to me, what am I going to do with this little boy when I close? I don’t want to put him out in the weather with his short fur and all this traffic. And I say to him, I only have another hour or two to drive. What harm can it do if he sit in the front with me? I bend down just so.” He knelt to show me. “And he just come right up to me. He make this funny sound. Not a bark. He never bark once in all the time I got him. Like a trill in his throat, he make. And I just lose my heart to him right there on the spot. Can I offer you a cup of tea, Rachel?” he asked.
    I nodded.
    “I didn’t see the tattoo right off,” Henri said as I sat at the little table. “And there was no collar, so no tag. But I figured that if I was so taken with this little boy, someone else must be heartbroken. I never thought anyone had throw him away, but that he got lost somehow. So I begin to take him with me every day. I never got such good tips,” he said, shaking his head. “No, sir.
    “I put some signs up, near the garage in the West Village. But no one call me. On the third day I have him, I was not going to drive the cab, so I decided to give Jimmy here a bath. I been calling him Jimmy, and he likes the name very much, don’t you, Jimmy?”
    Magritte looked up when Henri addressed him. Then he went back to bringing all his toys to
    Dashiell. There were quite a number of them, considering how short a time the dog had lived here.
    “So, that's when I found the tattoo, and I wonder why someone would tattoo numbers on the inside right thigh of a dog, so from then on, whoever I pick up in the taxi, I ask them. I figure someone will know, and then I will know.
    “The day I called it in, Rachel, my fare says to me I should pull over, and he looks at the tattoo and he says, ‘Nine digits, it’s a social security number. You have to call the National Dog Registry in Woodstock. They’ll have the name and address of the owner.’ So I am so happy to get my question answered and to learn something new. And I am so sad that I will lose my friend Jimmy here. He’s been good company for me.
    “He even know the number, this man, 1-800-NDR-DOGS. His German shepherd, he say, is tattooed also. So I call it. And so here you are.”
    He sipped his tea, I ate most of the cookies he had placed on the table, and then we sat in silence for a while, watching Magritte wrestle with Dash.
    “You wouldn’t think that big one would be so gentle,” Henri said. “Not even a growl when little Jimmy jumps all over him.”
    I nodded, my mouth too full of Pepperidge Farm Chessmen for me to speak. One of the reasons people are so afraid of pit bulls is that they usually don’t growl, even when they have ample reason to do so. If there’s anything scarier than a dog making a racket, it’s a silent one, especially if he’s not making a fuss because it’s clear he knows he doesn’t have to in order to get the respect he’s after.
    “Listen, Henri,” I said when there was nothing left to eat, “I’d like to offer you a reward. My client is going to be so thrilled. I just can’t tell you what this will mean to him.”
    I reached into my coat pocket for my wallet. There was a fifty tucked away behind the picture of Dash, for emergencies.
    “I don’t want your money, Rachel.” He shook his head back and forth and reached his hand out to pat my other hand. “It’s been a privilege to have little Jimmy here with me.”
    “It’s not my money, Henri. As I told you, I’m not Magritte’s owner. That young man was killed, and I work for the new owner. And he, my client, would be happy for me to give you something.” Of course, I hadn’t told Dennis what I had discovered yet. I wanted to have the dog before I got his hopes up, to see for myself that he was okay. And even though the call had come through NDR, I wasn’t about to send him out to retrieve the dog when its disappearance might have been connected to a murder. Somehow, when I heard Henri’s voice on the phone— I pay a lot of attention to the sound of people’s voices—I lost most, but not all, of my caution.
    “No, no, I couldn’t take it,” Henri said. “It would give Jimmy here the wrong message.” At the sound of his name, Magritte, aka Jimmy Plaisir, jumped as sprightly as any cat and landed on Henri’s lap. Henri began to scratch the dog’s chest very gently, stroking him again and again, and I noticed how