The Wrong Dog Read online

  CAROL LEA BENJAMIN

  THE WRONG DOG

  A RACHEL ALEXANDER MYSTERY

  For Dexter and Flash, semper fidelis

  CONTENTS

  EPIGRAPH

  CHAPTER 1

  You Can Say That Again, She Said

  CHAPTER 2

  We Know Everything We Have To Know, She Said

  CHAPTER 3

  Would You Do It? Chip Asked

  CHAPTER 4

  I Handed Dashiell’s Leash to Mel

  CHAPTER 5

  We Sat for a While Longer

  CHAPTER 6

  I’m Chopping Swiss Chard

  CHAPTER 7

  What Brings You Here?

  CHAPTER 8

  He Waved His Hand Back and Forth

  CHAPTER 9

  I Took a Bite of My Sandwich

  CHAPTER 10

  Find It, I Told Him

  CHAPTER 11

  They Met at the Run

  CHAPTER 12

  I Went Quickly into the Garden

  CHAPTER 13

  Stop Right Where You Are, I Said

  CHAPTER 14

  Are You a Cop? She Asked

  CHAPTER 15

  I Sat There Holding the Phone

  CHAPTER 16

  I’m Doing Some Work for the Landlord

  CHAPTER 17

  We Were Her Family, She Said

  CHAPTER 18

  The Driver Began to Shake His Head

  CHAPTER 19

  One Thing Kept Coming Back

  CHAPTER 20

  I Could Hear the Patter of Little Feet

  CHAPTER 21

  Are You Staying Over, He Asked

  CHAPTER 22

  Better Safe Than Sorry

  CHAPTER 23

  Someone Had Insomnia

  CHAPTER 24

  I Bent My Head to Listen

  CHAPTER 25

  Someone Has to Get the Dog

  CHAPTER 26

  I Took a Big Breath and Let It Out

  CHAPTER 27

  I Rotated the Knob and Gave a Push

  CHAPTER 28

  I Said Her Name

  CHAPTER 29

  I Probably Shouldn’t Have Let Him Do That

  CHAPTER 30

  He Hadn’t Shaved

  CHAPTER 31

  It Was Probably His Eye Glasses Case

  CHAPTER 32

  He Pulled Down the Shade

  CHAPTER 33

  He Took a Step Toward the Gate

  CHAPTER 34

  I Climbed the Stairs

  CHAPTER 35

  He Tried to Pull Me Closer

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PRAISE

  OTHER BOOKS BY CAROL LEA BENJAMIN

  COPYRIGHT

  ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

  Epigraph

  Everyone is in the best seat.

  —JOHN CAGE

  CHAPTER 1

  You Can Say That Again, She Said

  I was doing the acrostic when the phone rang. I let the machine pick up. The dog on the tape barked three times. Someone sighed. I knew what that meant.

  “Alexander,” I said into the receiver, turning the puzzle sideways so that I could take notes in the margin.

  She said her name was Sophie Gordon and that someone who knew someone had given her my name. She waited then. I did, too. I turned the puzzle back the right way and filled in the answer to G, a four-letter word for the thread Theseus used to find his way out of the labyrinth.

  The line was still silent. She seemed to need help getting started.

  “Who’s dead?” I asked.

  “Sorry?” she said. “My dog was shoving her leash onto my lap and knocked the phone out of my hand.”

  I repeated my question.

  “Oh, no one. This isn’t that sort of case.”

  “What sort is it?”

  “I need you to find someone.”

  “A relative?”

  “It’s a rather long story, and complicated, but Bianca will drive me crazy if I don’t get her to the run. I was hoping I could tell it to you there.”

  “The one in Washington Square Park?”

  “Yes, that one.”

  I asked if fifteen minutes would be too soon. She said it wouldn’t, it would be perfect, and told me she’d be sitting on a bench on the east side of the run.

  “How will I know you?”

  “You can’t miss me,” she said.

  “Why is that?”

  “I have red hair.”

  That narrowed it down. Half the women over forty in the city had red hair. The other half were blond.

  I thought that was it, but the line was still open.

  “Sophie?”

  “I never thought I’d find myself hiring a private investigator.”

  “That’s the thing about life. You never know.”

  “You can say that again,” she said.

  She must have put the radio on before she hung up the phone because suddenly I heard someone playing the piano, a haunting melody I couldn’t place. Then the line went dead.

  I didn’t know much when I left to meet her at the park, just that her dog was probably white and that this wouldn’t be one of my usual cases. It wasn’t about someone dying. I’m sure Sophie believed that. She seemed sincere. Unfortunately, she was mistaken.

  The park was pretty empty for a Saturday. Maybe it was the unseasonably chilly weather, the wind knocking leaves off the trees and making them eddy in great circles on the paths. Or perhaps it was simply too early for the weekend crowds, couples who might have decided to have brunch before strolling in the park, fathers reading the paper before taking their kids to the playground, bums still sleeping in doorways before convening on the benches at the south end of the park, hoping to snag a beer, a cigarette, whatever they could. And it was way too early for the drug dealers and their clientele. They wouldn’t be open for business for another few hours.

  A young white bull terrier bitch met us at the inner gate of the dog run, spiriting Dashiell away the second I unhooked his leash. I looked around for Sophie.

  She would have looked pretty ordinary, sitting there alone, diagonally across from the gate, her skin as pale as 2-percent milk, her eyes hidden behind small, round, tinted glasses. Except for the hair. This red didn’t come out of a bottle; it was the real thing. With the sun hitting it, it looked as if it were on fire. If a hundred people had been at the run, with a hundred dogs running and playing, I still would have noticed Sophie.

  “It started two years ago, right here on this very bench,” she said immediately after I introduced myself. I put out my hand to shake, but she left hers where it was, resting on her coat which, despite the chill in the air, was bunched up and lying to her right on the bench. She’d just nodded instead. I sat at her left, turning on the tape recorder that was in my jacket pocket.

  “I’d come to the run to exercise Blanche. Shortly after I got here, a young woman, early twenties I’d guess, sat down next to me and unhooked her dog’s leash to let her go and mix, only the dog, a black mutt, a little bigger than Bianca but not as big as…”

  “Dash.”

  “And not a purebred either, some terrier and God-knows-what-else, cute but sort of sad looking, too, well, she just sat there, not doing much of anything. It was almost as if she didn’t know how to play with other dogs, poor thing. After a few minutes, she’d backed up to my legs and was sitting on my shoes, just watching the other dogs, as if she thought she’d been dropped on some alien planet. That was the first strange thing that happened that afternoon, but not the last, not by a long shot.”

  She turned to look at Bianca, who was giving Dashiell a run for his money. I looked at them, too. Bianca
was young, as tall as she would get, but not yet as wide. I figured Blanche had died and now there was Bianca. But I didn’t interrupt the story to ask.

  “After taking a pack of cigarettes out of her pocket,” Sophie said, “the woman began to talk, just dog-run talk at first, same as any other conversation you’d have here, how nice it was that the Parks Department had put in the run, how important it was for city dogs to be able to socialize and run around safely off leash, how beautiful the day was. Then she noticed Blanche’s cape folded and lying on my lap. She asked me what it was and seemed really interested.

  “I told her that Blanche wore her cape most of the time, except when she was playing with other dogs. I told her it was a service dog cape, and I held it up and let it fall open so that she could see it, so that she could read the round patch I’d sewn on the left side.

  “She read it out loud—Please don’t pet me. I’m working—then asked if it was for real.

  “I told her it was. I tell everyone who asks. And they all do.

  “‘A service dog?’ she asked. She started to bite the skin next to one of her ragged nails. I remember wondering what was making her so nervous, or if that was just her type—high-strung, one of those people whose motor seems to run too fast.

  “I pointed to the other end of the run, saying that Blanche was the white bull terrier who was teasing all the male dogs and then running away to get them to chase her. I said she was a seizure-alert dog and asked if she knew what that was?

  “That’s when she told me that I was the person she’d been looking for.

  “I don’t know why, but for a minute there, I got scared. I thought something was wrong, that somehow I was going to lose Blanche.”

  “Why did you think that?”

  “I don’t know. It was just a feeling that came over me. But it passed quickly. When I asked her what she meant and she started to explain, well, what she told me was so fascinating that I forgot everything else. Even caution.

  “She said she didn’t have my name, that The School for the Deaf wouldn’t give it to her when she called, but that they said they would give me her number, and that it would be up to me if I wanted to call her back.”

  “The School for the Deaf?” Was she lip-reading?

  “I work there. I’m a teacher.”

  I nodded, wondering when she was going to tell me who’d gone missing.

  But Dash was racing back and forth with Bianca and the sky was the kind of blue I’d always thought you’d have to live in Montana to see. So what if she took her time?

  “I’d never gotten any message,” Sophie told me. “Maybe they just forgot to give it to me. Sometimes they get really busy.” She shrugged. “She told me her name was Lorna West. She even introduced her dog, Smitty. I thought it was a funny name for a girl dog, but the way she was sitting, with her legs straight out in front of her, her belly exposed, I had no trouble seeing she was a female. She’d turned her head then, right when Lorna said her name, and I remember how big and round and dark her eyes were, how she’d looked first at Lorna, then at me, with this astonished expression on her face.

  “‘Here’s why I was looking for you,’ Lorna said, scooting closer to me and lowering her voice. ‘I work for Side by Side. Did you ever hear of it?’

  “I told her I hadn’t. She smiled and said she wasn’t surprised. She said that the man behind it was very rich. But very private. She nodded for emphasis.

  “‘But what is it?’ I asked her. ‘What’s it for?’

  “And she said it was a charitable organization that supplies service dogs to disabled people who need them.

  “I wondered why she was whispering. For a minute, I thought she was going to hit me up for a contribution, but I didn’t say anything about that. Instead I asked her if it was like the Seeing Eye or Canine Companions for Independence.

  “‘Not exactly,’ she said, and she took a cigarette out of the pack and lit it. I moved away a little, to get away from the smoke. It must have bothered Smitty, too. She sneezed, then moved right with me. But Lorna didn’t seem to notice.”

  “Did she explain?”

  Sophie nodded and then looked toward the part of the run where Bianca and Dashiell were rolling around, both grinning and in dead earnest, the way bull and terrier dogs love to play.

  “She told me she’d called The School for the Deaf because Side by Side was looking for service dogs with gifts, you know, an inborn ability to do something.”

  “As opposed to dogs that are trained to help with a disability,” I said.

  “Exactly. She said she thought she’d find dogs like that there, dogs who knew to inform their deaf owners when someone was knocking at the door, the phone was ringing, or the alarm clock was going off. She told them Side by Side was doing a survey, some public-service thing, tracking how the owners had discovered their dogs’ abilities. And whoever she spoke with told her that only a few of the kids used dogs, but that hearing-alert dogs are trained at special schools and that not every dog, but a great number of dogs, particularly lively ones, could be trained to do the work. It was a matter of education, not a matter of talent, as it were.

  “So she said she thanked the woman and was about to hang up when the woman told her that one of the teachers, meaning me, had a seizure-alert dog, that seizure response could be taught to a variety of dogs but that no one had yet figured out a way to teach seizure alert. Once someone began to seizure, you could get the dog to stay with them until it was over, no problem. But as far as alerting prior to the onset of a seizure, either a dog knew when one was coming and warned his owner or he didn’t.

  “She said she’d gotten all excited and said that that was just what they needed for their survey and could she talk to me, and that the woman she’d spoken to said no, that I was teaching, but that she would give me Lorna’s name and number and I could call if I wanted to. It would be up to me. But then Lorna said, ‘That was a lie.’”

  “What was?” I asked her.

  “That’s exactly what I asked. ‘About the survey,’ she said. ‘The real thing we’re doing, it’s top secret and we don’t want it to get around.’

  “That’s when I got that funny feeling again. But what she told me then, well. You see, Blanche was nine at the time, and she had some arthritis in her elbows. ‘Crepitus,’ the vet called it. What it meant was that on rainy days, and when it was cold, she limped pretty badly.”

  Sophie stopped and pulled a wad of tissues out of her coat pocket and blew her nose. She wore her long red hair loose, the bangs so long they covered her eyebrows, touching the frames of those small, round glasses. She looked across the run at Bianca and began shaking her head.

  “Is she…?”

  “Blanche? Oh, no. She’s right here.”

  That’s when I realized that Sophie’s coat wasn’t bunched up. It had been spread out under and over her old dog, to keep her warm.

  “She’s eleven and a half,” Sophie said, dropping her voice to a whisper as she peeled back a corner of the coat and showed me a glimpse of her sleeping bull terrier before carefully covering her face again. “All this running around is much too much for her, but Bianca can’t get through the day without serious exercise. On workdays, it’s worse, because Blanche is with me at school, so I have a dog walker who brings Bianca here for an hour or two of roughhousing. Without that, she’d keep annoying Blanche when we got home, trying to get her to play. Well, she still does, but not as much.”

  Dash and Bianca were standing up now, face-to-face, paws on each other’s shoulders, all but breathing fire at each other. When their front feet hit the dirt, Bianca took off, Dash in hot pursuit, his tongue lolling out to the side. I thought I might have to hose him down before the afternoon was over.

  “So what did Lorna tell you next?”

  “Well, it got pretty amazing. She said that the founder of Side by Side was after a dog like Blanche. She turned slightly away then so that she wouldn’t blow smoke right in my face. Smitty sneezed a
gain, I remember, and I was thinking about how bad it would be for a seizure-alert dog to be around cigarette smoke. No one’s one hundred percent positive, but it’s thought they work on scent, you know, from chemical changes in the brain, that that’s how they can tell trouble’s coming.”

  I nodded.

  “Then Lorna asked me how old Blanche was. The longer we talked, the more businesslike and less nervous she became.

  “Nine, I told her, almost nine and a half. Then I’d looked at Blanche and she was limping over to the water bucket. All that running, getting the boys to chase her, her favorite game, but she was getting too old for it, even two years ago.

  “Lorna said, ‘Nine. Getting on, for a bull terrier.’

  “I turned back to her then and watched as she dropped the cigarette and didn’t bother to grind it out even though we were at the dog run. Her face was hard, almost mask-like. For a moment, I wanted to leave, not even say good-bye, just get up and go. But when she looked back at me, her expression had changed. Her face was full of concern. It threw me. And I stayed.

  “She went on. She said that what they’d like to do is make sure I always have a Blanche when I need one. She leaned toward me, talking softly, reaching out and touching my arm. She said her employer, who is a very charitable man, would like other people with epilepsy to have a dog as skilled as Blanche. ‘You’d like that, too,’ she said, ‘wouldn’t you?’

  “I didn’t say anything right away. I just looked at her, those gnawed nails and her nicotine-stained fingers, her scowly little face, trying to look all warm and concerned now; the way she seemed hunched into her coat, as if it was too light for the weather; and the dog, how Lorna never paid attention to her, never touched her and how Smitty sat there all that time, just watching and not playing. Maybe they’re just two of a kind, I’d thought, feeling, whatever it was she wanted, I didn’t want any part of it.