A Hell of a Dog (16 page)

I took a deep breath and continued. “I would appreciate it immensely if we could refrain from any sort of personal conversations for the rest of this week while we're stuck in each other's presence. We're here to work, and I find this sort of—”

“I hear you, Rachel. It was foolish of me to think—” Suddenly we could hear the dogs barking, coming our way. “This way.” He reached for my hand again, then thought better of it and gave me the hand signal for come. “Hurry.”

We headed across the street and back to the hotel, going straight to the tea room, where we began gobbling dessert, trying to make it look as if we'd been there for ages, just waiting for them to show up.

My mouth was full of cheesecake when the glass doors opened and the others burst in. I lifted my teacup and took a sip. “What kept you all?” I said, as casual as a polyester pants suit.

“Guess you're not trying for tracking degrees with any of those mutts,” Chip added.

Bucky could hardly catch his breath. “Good one, pally,” he said to Chip. “You really had us going this time.” He threw himself into the chair next to mine. I heard it groan.

Martyn sat across from Bucky, still holding Alexi's leash. Tracy was at the dessert table, and Beryl was pouring tea. Everyone looked happy, flushed with color, not nearly as tired as we all should have been.

“How did you ever get involved in this insanity?” Chip asked Sam.

“Don't get me started,” she said, waving away the question. “Who's up for the morning?” Audrey asked.

“Good lord, it
is
morning,” Martyn said. “It's me. I'd better be off to bed.”

I looked around for Cathy and didn't see her.

“Have a cup first.” Beryl handed him tea, but before he got the chance to take a sip, Boris walked in with a better idea, three bottles of vodka. He held the door with his ample backside, and Cathy came in behind him with a huge bowl of water for the dogs.

Boris filled eleven cups with vodka and handed one to each of us. “To American camaraderie,” he said, and we all cheered and emptied our cups, holding them out immediately for refills. Martyn waved away a second and handed Alexi's leash to Bucky. Beryl got in the next toast before he got out the door.

“To England.”

So of course Martyn walked back in and refilled his cup.

“To the queen,” he said.

And then Boris was opening the second bottle. This time Martyn made it out the door before the toast.

“To better days ahead,” Bucky said, holding up his cup. “And to Rick,” he added softly.

“To Rick,” we all repeated.

“He was in men's clothing,” Bucky said.

“Who was?” Chip asked.

“Rick. Before his degree. He'd dropped out of college and bummed around out west for a year or so. Then he got this job on Madison Avenue, selling men's clothing. But it bored him. He said he could barely stand it. He'd wake up in the morning and not want to get out of bed. So he took a loan out, finished his degree, and went right on to graduate school. He started out working with homeless children, and he brought his dog with him to get the kids to open up and talk. Then one thing led to another, I guess.”

“Poor man,” Audrey said. “Alan was a teacher. High school history. He went to visit his brother, someplace in the South, one of the Carolinas maybe, or Tennessee, and they went hunting. He thought the electronic collars that the hunters all were using working off-leash dogs at great distances could also solve the problems of pet owners whose dogs wouldn't come. That's all most people want, he used to say, is for their dogs to come off leash. They don't care about the other stuff.” She was stroking Magic, who was sitting, as usual, on her lap.

There was a silence.

“To Alan,” she said.

Boris poured a swallow or two into Chip's cup, then Woody's. But when he refilled his own, it runneth over, and when he lifted it to drink, some of it even runneth down his double chin.

“Cake,” Beryl said. I looked over at her now. She seemed drunk out of her mind. I wondered if I looked that way, too. “We need sweets,” she said, attempting to get up and fetch the platter of cakes and pastries, then falling back into her chair. “Oh, my.” She straightened up and fussed with her blouse. “Someone bring on the goodies.” She spoke slowly, so as to get the words past her lips in good order. “The old lady's too drunk to do it herself. You know, my dears, if the queen could see me now, perhaps she would knight me.” She pronounced the
k
, then fell apart laughing, as if she'd just uttered the funniest thing she'd ever heard. “Oh, dear, am I making a complete ass of myself?”

“Only partial,” Woody assured her, getting up to get the platter of sweets and offering it to Beryl first.

“Sugar,” she said, stopping to take a bite of a small Napoleon and getting powdered sugar and pastry crumbs all over herself as she did, “now what was I saying?”

“That sugar cures a hangover,” Audrey said. “But only if accompanied by chanting.”

If we'd ever be ready for Audrey, the time was now. We lifted our empty cups. “To Audrey,” we all said.

“Come on, handkerchiefs over your faces. You can use napkins,” she said, motioning to Cathy, who could reach them from where she sat Cathy passed us each a large paper napkin, so we finally relinquished our vodka cups, putting them on the floor if we couldn't reach a table, unfolded our napkins, and covered our faces with them. I decided to cheat, pretending to have trouble opening up my napkin. Or did I really have trouble getting the layers apart? I watched everyone, faces covered, napkins rising up and down with their respiration.

“Just chant along with me. Ah la, ah la. At first,” Audrey said, her voice low and soothing, “ah la, good, keep it up, at first you'll feel the grief in your chests, the loss of our young colleagues, ah la, ah la, and then the grief will rise and you will feel a lightness, an energy, as you turn your focus to the future and let go of the past, ah la, ah la.”

The chanting became one sound, all the voices together, the syllables running together. I chanted too but without covering my face. Instead, I was watching Chip Pressman, one arm hanging off the side of his chair, his hand resting on Betty's head, which was raised as she watched us all behaving so peculiarly, trying to figure out if her master was in danger.

As I watched his handkerchief rising and falling over his mouth, thoughts of being alone with him nearly swept me away. But the overwhelming urge I felt had nothing to do with breaking the laws of man, God, and possibly even the Ritz Hotel. I was thinking about something far more dangerous, breaking one of the rules of private investigation, that body of wisdom my former mentor Frank Petrie had so carefully yelled into my face back when I was in his employ.

When I'd first called Frank and gotten him to agree to an interview even though he'd said he had no openings, especially no openings for no beginners, he'd given me a time to meet with him and directions to his office.

“The elevator only goes to twenny,” he'd told me. “Get out there and take the stairs to your left down the hall to twenny-one. Don't mind that the sign says Authorized Personnel Only. I'm authorizing you.”

The sign on the office door said Petrie Brothers. When I opened it, there was no receptionist. There was only Frank, sitting behind a big desk with so many phones on it, you'd think he was a bookie.

“You the kid who called?” He looked me over from head to toe and back again. “Sit down. Sit down.”

I nodded, taking the plastic folding chair on my side of the desk, wondering what the hell I'd had in mind when I made the call.

“I was hoping you'd consider me as an investigator trainee,” I said, making it up as I went along, like everything else in my life.

“Nah,” he said. “Now that I see you're a girl, I don't think so.”

“Now that you see I'm a girl?” I shouted, surprising myself as well as Frank. “You mean you didn't know I was a
woman
when you spoke to me on the phone? You mean the name Rachel didn't tip you off that I'd be a female? You mean I had to waste my time waiting for two hours and then coming up here to see you for you to figure out I was a fucking female and that you didn't hire women to work in your
farkuckt
agency?” By the end, I was standing, my hands on his desk, leaning forward and looming over him. “Listen, mister, there's no job here I couldn't—”

“Okay, you're hired. When can you begin? I have a case that needs an undercover operative, at a hospital in Staten Island, night shift. Ya think you can handle it?”

I sat down, stunned at my own behavior and at Frank's response.

He was grinning. “Just wanted to see if you had a little spunk, kid. You're going to need it on this one. But let me tell you right off. You're going to get in there, just like that, you're going to want to blab. You're going to want to tell just one person what you're
really
doing there. Especially you broads, you know how you are, yadda, yadda, yadda with every stranger you meet. Don't do it, I'm telling you. Because no matter what you think, you might be blabbing to exactly the wrong person, the person you're looking to finger. You know what, use everyone else's desire to blab. That's how you do this.” He nodded. Then he whispered. “Mouth shut, except when asking questions. And don't only listen with your ears. Listen with your gut.” He slapped his abs for emphasis.

I opened my mouth, but he didn't leave me time to say a thing.

“No. Don't say nothing. I know what you're going to say even before it comes out. You're a college graduate. Told me so on the telephone. Graduated with honors. See, I remember every word you said. You got a pen? Of course you do. Then write this down. It's rule number twelve, but maybe it oughta be number one.”

I picked up a piece of paper and a pen from his desk.

“You're going to want to blab. Don't do it,” he said. Then he sat back, hands behind his head, and waited while I wrote.

“There's another one, sounds similar. But it's different, believe me. It's number eight. Don't
give
information.
Get
information. See what I mean? Similar, but different. That one has to do with blabbing too, running off at the mouth instead of listening to see what you can find out. This one has to do with blowing your cover. Which, no matter what, you never do. Lie, that's okay. But never—”

“Blow my cover.”

He'd nodded. I'd nodded back. But now, with years of experience and three cups of vodka under my belt, I was starting to think that maybe it was the exception that proved the rule. I was starting to think that I needed to talk things out about what was happening during this symposium, and I had the feeling that the last person who would listen to my theory with a sympathetic ear was the one person I should be talking to, Samantha Lewis. I was thinking, in fact, that it might be time to trust an old friend with the truth.

That's when I knew it was time to get moving. Frank Petrie was as pigheaded as they come, but in all the years I'd been in his employ, he had never been wrong in the advice he gave me about the work.

As Dashiell and I slipped out the door, it wasn't the chanting of my colleagues I was listening to. All I could hear, as clearly as if Frank were standing in front of me, was the cacophonous Brooklynese I had come to know and love, repeating the same phrase over and over again, as if it were a mantra: Don't do it.

17

DOES ANYONE NEED AN ASPIRIN?

It was seven-thirty when the clock radio woke me, the Beethoven sonata sounding as loud as the rap music blaring from some people's cars as they drive around my neighborhood on Saturday nights trying to appear cool. I had slept a little over four hours.

Martyn, bent over his notes at the far end of the breakfast table, his blond hair falling over his brow, looked more like an adolescent than an adult. I thought I'd sit quietly at the other end of the table so as not to disturb him, but when he heard me, he looked up and closed his notebook.

“Come and join me, Rachel.” He pushed what was left of his breakfast off to the side. “It's rather lonely down at this end. I was just writing my children. They love getting letters when I'm in the States. I don't think it's the letters per se they like; it's your quirky American stamps. It's so refreshing, the variety here. Not a queen in the lot.”

“Oh, I wouldn't bet on that,” I said, taking a hard roll from the basket on the table and giving half to Dashiell. There was an envelope next to Martyn's notebook, the address and two Bugs Bunny stamps already on it. “He came out, what, about a month ago.”

“I hadn't heard. The tabloids were too full of the latest pit bull fiasco. They have one in jail again. From the photo, I'd say he was a white boxer. The last one was a Great Dane mix, confiscated from a locked car because he wasn't wearing a muzzle. Our breed-specific laws have created some bizarre behavior, but it's in the humans, of course.”

“There was a push to do that here, too, to ban pit bulls first. Then of course the list would grow. Who knows where it would stop?”

The waiter came with a small pot of tea for me and took my order for breakfast.

“What are you covering today?”

“Temperament testing. In fact, I wonder if you'd consider letting me test Dashiell.”

“My vicious pit bull? Sure, if you're brave enough. Are you testing the other participants' dogs?”

“Yes, except for Sasha.” He sighed heavily.

“How come?”

He looked down at his letter, then back up at me. I expected that was all the answer he was going to give me.

He was small, shorter than I was and skinny as capellini. Did he feel uncomfortable around large dogs? Then why had he asked to test Dashiell?

“I think we'll probably not test Cecilia either. She's a lovely little thing, isn't she? But too young for this test. I don't think she's one year old yet, and I don't want to put this kind of pressure on a pup. How are you enjoying the talks, Rachel? Have you been attending all of them?”