In Dog We Trust (Golden Retriever Mysteries) (17 page)

He knew about my trouble in California; he’d even offered to hire an attorney for me if I needed. I worried, as I was on my way to meet him at a fancy steak house in the meat packing district, that things might be awkward between us, based on how my life had fallen apart, but he greeted me outside with a big bear hug. Tor looks like he should be winning an Olympic medal in the giant slalom; he’s six-three, blond and blue-eyed, his build gone beefy in middle age.

“Hey, you have been such a stranger,” he said. “You come all the way back from California, but down there in Pennsylvania you are almost as far away.”

“I’m not the one with the high-powered career. Every time I invite you and Sherry to come down to Bucks County you have too much work to get away.”

“Soon. We will make it soon. Now, we eat.”

We ordered massive porterhouse steaks, drank imported beer, and talked non-stop for two hours. The restaurant was elegant in an understated way—wooden booths with thick cushions, fake gas lamps and a pressed-tin ceiling. It was filled with people like Tor—prosperous, well-dressed, men whose ties alone cost more than everything I had on my body.

At some point, our conversation passed over Caroline Kelly, and how I’d inherited Rochester from her. “Good for you,” Tor said. “You need a dog. Man’s best friend. Give you someone to take care of.”

“I can barely take care of myself.”

“Exactly,” Tor said. “That’s why you need a dog.”

I wasn’t sure I agreed with his logic, and I wanted to change the subject. “Hey, you know anything about identity theft?” I asked.

“What you want to know?” Tor wiped his mouth with his napkin and laid it down next to his plate. He sighed. “Good food.”

I told him about Edith Passis, that I thought someone had stolen her identity in order to cash checks made out to her.

“So someone has access to her mail,” he said. “This person either stole the checks from her mailbox or changed her address so the checks would go elsewhere.”

“Sounds right.”

“It’s classic case of identity theft,” he said, dropping his articles as he often did. “Someone uses your personal information without permission to commit fraud or other crimes. This person uses your friend’s information to cash checks in her name—steal from her.”

“It’s hard to imagine,” I said.

“Identity theft is fastest-growing crime in this country,” Tor said. “Your friend must request credit report right away. These people may have new credit cards in her name, too, and ring up big bills without her knowing.”

I shook my head. Edith was in a world of trouble.

When the check came, Tor wouldn’t even let me leave the tip. “We come to Pennsylvania, you can treat us,” he said. He pulled out his cell phone and speed-dialed a number, requesting a car to meet him at the restaurant. “I can drop you somewhere?”

I shook my head. “I have to walk off this dinner.”

He gave me another bear hug before he got into the town car, and I watched it head east for a block or so, until I lost it in the welter of traffic. I crossed over to Fifth Avenue and headed south, enjoying the crisp night, the lit shop windows, the noise and vitality of the city. Soon enough, I would have to go back to Stewart’s Crossing, work on my business plan and tell Edith Passis someone was stealing from her. But for a moment, I was a free man in a great city.

When I lived in Manhattan, I was fearless. I took the subway home from friends in Washington Heights at three a.m. I walked through dark corners of the Village, withdrew cash from ATMs on deserted streets. It was the hubris of youth.

That night, though, when I turned a corner onto a dark street near the Hudson, I felt scared. Caroline had been shot to death in just such a deserted place, though she’d had much more reason to feel safe in Stewart’s Crossing. Two guys approached me, swaying and talking loudly, and I hunched down into my jacket and quickened my step.

“Hey, buddy, spare a couple of bucks?” one of the guys said, and I didn’t hesitate; I took off at a sprint down the street, and didn’t stop until I’d reached a brightly-lit avenue.  Nobody followed me and nobody shot at me, but I was reminded that the world was a dangerous place.

The next day, I was waiting for Chris McCutcheon at a Starbucks on Broadway in the West 90s when he pulled up on a Colnago CF4 Ferrari carbon-frame bicycle, which I recognized by the signature yellow and black stallion logo on the top tube. I’m no biker; I only knew about the Colnago because Rick Stemper had been raving about it to me. It was one of the best bikes in the world, if not the best, and Rick had said they went for over $8,000.

Chris was wearing black compression shorts and a tight black T-shirt. No helmet; that would have messed up his perfectly uncombed blonde hair. I admit it; he reminded me of all those guys in high school who were faster, stronger or more coordinated than I was, and I disliked him on sight.

I was sitting at a table on the street, shivering in my lightweight windbreaker, as he dismounted and locked his bike to a parking meter. “I don’t have much time,” he said, coming over to shake my hand, as he was pulling off his black bike gloves. “I’m meeting a friend in half an hour for a ride over to Brooklyn and back.”

I didn’t know where to start—how to get into such a complicated subject in a matter of minutes—but Chris McCutcheon saved me the trouble when he returned to the table after a minute with a bottle of water. My grande raspberry mocha seemed wasteful and decadent in the face of his asceticism—at least to me. “You wanted to talk about Caroline?” he asked, as he sat down across from me.

I tried to remember if I’d ever noticed him when that black SUV had been parked in Caroline’s driveway, but I drew a blank. “I found her body,” I finally said, and the words spilled out. “It’s just really freaked me out, you know? And I realized that I hardly knew her, but we didn’t have any friends in common, we were just neighbors, you know? And there was nobody I could talk to about her, to, I don’t know, get to know her a little better.”

If only to stop my blathering, Chris McCutcheon jumped in. “We lived on the same base in Korea when we were teenagers,” he said. “I was, I think thirteen or fourteen, and she was a year younger.”

He unscrewed the top of the water bottle and took a long drink. “She used to tag along behind me. There wasn’t much for kids to do on the base, but they’d have movies now and then, and once in a while they’d have some kind of dumb social event—a Korean food tasting, for example.” He made a face. “So, I don’t know, we just hung out. There weren’t a lot of other kids our age.”

“What was she like then?” I asked, just to keep him talking.

“A lot skinnier,” he said. “Smart. She was always reading. She had this lousy little dog, too, used to follow her everywhere. When it ran away she was bummed.”

I could see the beginnings of the Caroline I had known—smart, bookish, loved dogs. “When did you two meet up again?” I asked.

He used the bottom of his t-shirt to wipe a bead of sweat from his forehead. “About five, six years ago,” he said. “She was living in the city then, and we ran into each other on the Upper West Side. She was with this other chick we knew in Korea—Karina.”

“I’m having brunch with her tomorrow.”

“She’ll give you all the details, I’m sure.” He frowned. “Caroline and I went out a couple of times, but then we just ended up friends.” He drank some more water. “Military brats—we don’t attach to people real well. Sometimes the only ones we get to know are other people like us.”

“You came to visit her in Stewart’s Crossing, didn’t you?”

He nodded. “Tried to get her to go biking with me. There’s some great trails there, down along the river, by the canal. She wasn’t interested. Truth is, we didn’t have that much in common, besides Korea.”

He looked at his watch. “I gotta go,” he said. He reached over to shake my hand. “Listen, don’t let yourself get too freaked out. People come and go in life.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Thanks for meeting me.”

“Sure.” He unlocked the bike and hopped back on, and in a moment he was lost in traffic.

After I left Chris McCutcheon, I was didn’t have anything else to do until my brunch the next day with Karina Warr. I started walking down Broadway, figuring I’d meander back to the hotel.

I’d almost forgotten how many beautiful women there were in New York, too. Living in Stewart’s Crossing, most of the women I saw were either harried young mothers, or blue hairs like Edith and Irene. But in the city! I’ve always been a sucker for a professional woman. A tailored suit, a silk blouse, and stiletto heels draw me in right away. Manhattan was full of women like that, blondes and brunettes and raven-haired beauties shouldering their expensive handbags, talking on their cell phones, clutching their designer coffee cups.

Since it was Saturday, there were plenty of casually-dressed women as well. Mary’s favorite weekend look was jeans, a t-shirt and sneakers, and I saw that style was still in fashion on upper Broadway. She liked to pull her blonde hair into a ponytail, then pull it through the back of a ball cap. She’d appropriated my favorite, a soft, faded denim one with the logo of a Fortune 500 company whose meeting I had covered for the magazine where I worked.

We spent our Saturdays running errands. Mary loved to cook, and she was always dragging me down to Chinatown for exotic spices, to Little Italy for handmade sausage, to the Greenmarket in Union Square for fresh produce. I was her beast of burden, tagging along behind her carrying the bags while she picked through bunches of Swiss chard or examined the freshness of salmon fillets. We’d laugh and talk, share apple fritters from a stand in the Greenmarket, and just enjoy each others’ company.

Broadway seemed to be conspiring to remind me of Mary and our life together. I passed the store where we’d bought our mattress, the office building where she’d been working when we met, a favorite Italian restaurant. I saw young couples holding hands, as we’d done long ago, before the move to California, the miscarriages and the ugly divorce.

At Columbus Circle I looked into the park and my heart skipped a beat when I saw a woman about Mary’s size, a blonde ponytail pulled through a denim ball cap. She walked into the park and I couldn’t help it. I followed her.

I knew it wasn’t Mary. She’d cut her hair short after we moved to Silicon Valley, and the ball cap was in one of the boxes of stuff she had shipped to Stewart’s Crossing while I was in prison. But the past was drawing me back.

The night of our first anniversary, we went to one of the free concerts in the park. Mary had taken the afternoon off, packing a picnic basket at Balducci’s, including a chilled bottle of champagne with plastic flutes. I met her right there at Columbus Circle, kissed her in front of the statue of old Chris, and then we walked into the Sheep Meadow, where we staked out a piece of lawn.

“I’ll spread the cloth, while you open the champagne,” Mary said. While I wrestled with the wire and cork, laid out a colorful Indian throw she’d had since college, anchoring the corners with books and take-out containers.

We fed each other grapes and slathered Brie on Swedish flatbread. “I can’t believe we’ve been married a whole year,” she said.

“I can.”

She turned on her side to look at me. There was a little bit of Brie on her lip and I picked it off with a napkin. “What’s that supposed to mean?” she asked.

“It means we’ve packed a lot into the last year, and I remember it all.”

“Speaking of packing,” she said. She reached over and picked a clover from the grass, then discarded it when she realized it had only three lobes instead of four.

“Packing for a vacation?” I asked. We’d gone to France for our honeymoon, spending a week in Paris and then another traveling to the chateaux of the Loire Valley, but we hadn’t been away since then.

I was munching on a croissant filled with chicken salad when she said, “Maybe a different kind of trip.” She sat up.

I looked up at her. “What kind?”

“I’ve been offered a promotion,” she said. “Manager of public relations and publicity for the west coast region.”

She reached over to brush a stray hair from my forehead. “The job is based in Palo Alto. Silicon Valley.” The high-tech industry had just begun to boom, and we’d talked a bit before about the possibility of relocating to California. But it had never been more than idle speculation.

“When did this happen?”

“Yesterday. I didn’t want to tell you until I had a chance to think about it.”

I finished my croissant and picked up the champagne bottle. Both our glasses were empty, and I filled them both.

I’d accepted a long time before that Mary was more ambitious than I was, and that happiness in our life together lay in going along with what she wanted. It wasn’t much of a sacrifice. I loved her, and I wanted her to be happy. I thought I would do just about anything to make that happen.

It turns out I did a lot more than agree to move to California to try and make Mary happy. I remember the concert, which finished with “The William Tell Overture,” complete with cannons and fireworks. How it felt to lie there under the stars with Mary, my arm around her shoulders, her head nestled into me, the music and the light show celebrating the commitment we had made to each other the year before, the new commitment we were making.