Lady Vanishes Read online

  “It was like a miracle,” she said.

  Meeting someone on-line, I thought, what does that even mean? On-line, it could seem like one thing, be something else entirely.

  “After a while, we’re not in the chat room anymore, it’s just the two of us, staying up late writing long, long letters every single night, no exceptions, letting it all hang out, hopes and dreams and fears, nothing we couldn’t say.

  “All of a sudden, everything’s different. Someone’s listening to me, and me to him, listening to my problems, saying I’m kind, and funny, taking my advice, giving me some too. And, you know something, Rachel, I’m not so lonely anymore. I got [email protected] to talk to.”

  “No names?”

  “No real names. Just made-up names we use on-line. That’s how it worked in the chat group, and we stuck to it. I never asked for more. Neither did he. We both had so much more than we’d had before. Why rush? Why be greedy when you already feel rich?”

  “Weren’t you concerned?” I asked. “Meeting on the net, you wouldn’t know anything for sure. You wouldn’t know who he really was.”

  “Who he was? Of course I knew that. I knew he was kind, intelligent, sad, but funny too. I knew he was warm. I knew he cared about me and that I cared about him. What else did I have to know?”

  Lots, I thought. But I didn’t say so.

  “I know what you’re saying, Rachel—that he could be a kid, fooling around, or a con artist, about to lay a big story on me and ask for money, or an old lady in a wheelchair, passing the time away on her computer; that nothing I knew was real, that I could get myself one big hurt doing this. But in a short time, I knew that there was nothing I could find out about this man that would change what I felt for him. Not one thing.

  “And shortly after I knew I felt that way, that’s when he told me he was married.”

  Fortune, a Jewish proverb says, is a wheel that turns with great speed.

  But Venus didn’t look upset. She unscrewed the top of her water bottle and took a long drink. Then she hit the cool-down button on her treadmill.

  “I have a meeting.” Very businesslike now.

  She stopped the belt and shut off the power.

  “I have to get back. I’ll see you tomorrow, at two-thirty, then again here at five-thirty, and I’ll go on with this.”

  “Venus—” I said.

  But before I got the chance to ask anything else, she was off the treadmill and on her way to the ladies’ locker room, leaving me alone, the belt of my treadmill moving rapidly along, me getting nowhere, fast.

  CHAPTER 5

  I Left My Number, Just in Case

  I didn’t go directly home from Serge’s. First I crossed back over the highway, walked uptown to the Gansevoort Street dog run, a private, locked run for members only, and looked through the chain link fence at the dogs playing ball to see if there were any pulis there. If I wanted to hide a purebred dog, I’d hide it in plain sight, especially a breed like the puli—cords hanging over their faces, most of them black, except to their owners, they all look pretty much alike.

  But there were no pulis there, only the more popular breeds—two Goldens, a chocolate lab, even more popular now that President Clinton had one, a Dalmatian, two mixed breeds, and a border collie, crouching, her eye on the ball she was waiting for her owner to throw, as intense as if she were herding sheep.

  I waited for the toss.

  “Get it, Mavis,” the woman said, the dog halfway there before the words were out.

  We crossed the highway at Gansevoort Street, heading for Beasty Feast on Hudson. If someone were bringing a puli in, or having food delivered for one, they would know it. That is, if Lady were still in the Village and if her new owner spared no expense, feeding her premium dog food in lieu of a supermarket brand.

  The woman who ran the store began to shake her head.

  “No one came in with a puli in the last few weeks.”

  The delivery man shook his head, too.

  “No deliveries for pulis.” He scratched the tip of his nose with one finger. “There’s a new Tibetan terrier on Jane Street. Cute as a button. And Jack Russells, you’re looking for a Jack Russell, I can give you twenty addresses.”

  I left my card, just in case.

  I tried their other stores, too—the one on Washington Street near Charles and the one all the way over on Bleecker, near Sixth Avenue.

  If I was going to meet Venus at the gym every day, I needed new shoes. The ones I was wearing let me feel every crack in the sidewalk. I walked around the corner to Sixth Avenue and dropped an obscene amount of money on a pair of cross trainers that made me feel as if I were walking on marshmallows.

  The salesman, a skinny old guy, his mustache wiggling as he slowly enunciated each word, cradled one of my pathetic-looking old sneakers in one hand.

  “There are only so many miles in a pair of shoes,” he said, turning my shoe over, shaking his head. “Do you want me to toss these?”

  “No. I’ll give them one last walk,” I told him. “For closure.”

  On the way home I stopped at Beverly Hill’s Laundro-mutt to see if anyone had a puli bathed recently. No one had.

  At Pet’s Kitchen, Dashiell put his paws up on the counter, and Sammy inserted a doggie bagel into his mouth. We both listened as Dashiell crunched, a viscerally pleasing sound, as basic as it gets.

  I asked my question. Sammy shook his head. No new customer with a puli. But he promised to call, just in case.

  When we got home, Dashiell hit the water bowl in the garden big time, then crashed at the base of the oak tree, too tired to make it into the house. I went inside, dropped the shoe box on the table, and snagged the cordless phone and the directory, calling the rest of the grooming shops, same question: Someone new come in with a puli to be bathed?

  “Saw the sign,” one guy said. “Didn’t see the dog.”

  “Too bad.”

  “Good luck, lady,” he said. “Tough thing, losing a dog like that, never knowing what happened to her.”

  I left my number, just in case.

  I sat on the steps, the phone in my hand, thinking about the bunchers—people who steal pet dogs to sell them to laboratories to be experimented on—but I thought they mostly worked the ’burbs, taking dogs off porches and out of yards, dogs left outside when the owner wasn’t home, trusting dogs, lonely dogs, easy as pie to steal.

  Lady wouldn’t have been out alone.

  And the door at Harbor View closed and locked automatically. You couldn’t leave it open if you tried, not unless you put something in front of it to hold it open. Surely someone would have noticed, had that been the case.

  I looked up the animal shelters and called those, too. Sometimes even when you report a dog lost, the report gets lost, falls through the cracks, and when the dog comes in, no one puts two and two together, gets it back where it belongs. But no, no pulis had come in. And when I asked if there’d been an unusual number of thefts reported, I was told no, there weren’t, not this summer.

  “Thefts in the city usually take place in Central Park, or Riverside,” a man with a gravelly voice told me. “Owners have the dogs off leash and get involved in a conversation, they turn around, seems like a minute later, the dog is gone. Last time we got a lot of those calls,” he said, “was last fall, Riverside Park, mostly way uptown, near the university. Nothing recently.”

  Dashiell had rolled over onto his side and fallen asleep, his head resting on one of the exposed roots of the tree. I sat there, the directory on my lap, just thinking. Then I got up, switched directories, got the residential one. When you don’t know which pieces of information are significant, you need to gather them all; as my erstwhile employer Frank Petrie used to say, you never know.

  I looked up Harry Dietrich to see where he might have been headed the last time he left Harbor View. The Upper East Side. Park Avenue. Where else would a rich man live?

  Had he been heading north, toward the subway? Had he heard the
wheels of the bicycle bumping over the broken sidewalk? Had he turned around, curious?

  After a moment, I looked up Eli Kagan, because knowing more is always better than knowing less, and besides, I was too hot to climb a flight of stairs and take a shower. No Eli Kagan in Manhattan. Either not listed, or in another borough. I’d find out tomorrow.

  Sitting there, not wanting to move, I looked under W next. There was a Venus White right in the neighborhood, at the Archives, the pricey rental building that formerly housed the Federal Archives, with a gym, a supermarket, a dry cleaner, and a catering place on the ground floor. The building was bounded by Christopher, Greenwich, Barrow, and Washington Streets—an easy walk to work, nice, open views, maybe even a river view, just like at work.

  I wouldn’t have thought a nonprofit institution would pay its manager enough to live at the Archives, but she did have that lovely pin she was wearing at the gallery, and the clothes she wore didn’t look as if they came from Kmart.

  Thinking about Venus’s story, I pictured her at the gym, remembering the necklace she wore while she was working out. It must have been under her shirt at work, because I hadn’t seen it there; but at the gym, there’d be nothing to hide it under, not an ounce on her body she needed to cover up with a big shirt or loose pants, everything out there, looking terrific. Including that necklace.

  It looked like the heart Carder advertised every few weeks in the Times—the ad saying, Start something, or, Because she has your heart, something like that, the heart and chain sold separately, the whole shebang costing slightly more than my yearly nut for renting the little back cottage on Tenth Street I’ve lived in for four and a half years.

  It sure didn’t look like the kind of jewelry a woman would buy herself.

  If Venus had been so lonely, where had it come from—the married man she met on-line?

  And why was I hearing about him anyway? What did he have to do with a missing dog, a dead old guy, a bunch of witnesses who don’t speak and couldn’t tell you the time of day if they did, and this gorgeous, mysterious black woman who hires me because she thinks her life’s in danger, then won’t tell me why?

  CHAPTER 6

  I Know a Lot of Stuff, He Said

  After showering, I gave Dashiell his dinner, then went back upstairs to my office and sat at my desk, now covered with the equipment my brother-in-law kept sending me so that “we could be a family again,” not understanding that a fax machine, a laptop, and a printer are not the route to this girl’s heart.

  Why was I still so angry? Lillian wasn’t. She was acting as if they were kids again, as if they had just fallen in love, as if they didn’t have two pimply, whiny, selfish teenagers, as if Ted hadn’t cheated on her with one of his models.

  I opened the laptop and turned it on, thinking about the case while it booted up, beeping and whistling to let me know how hard it was working on my behalf. Then I waited again while it dialed my internet provider, gurgling and flashing some more, making sure it had my attention.

  When the home page was there, wiggling annoyingly, promising free upgrades and all kinds of other things I didn’t want, I typed in “puli rescue” and hit the search button, waiting while the computer found what I was looking for.

  I left a message on the lost-and-found bulletin board of the closest group, hoping for some exposure, that someone checking my post might know where Lady was. Of course, there was no sense describing her, a thirty-to thirty-five-pound springy little black dog, cheerful, noisy, smart, easy to train, with dreadlocks. That wouldn’t exactly cut her out of the pack. But since she’d been a trained visiting dog even before she’d arrived at Harbor View, she probably knew some unusual commands. Those were the things I included—that she might do back-up and walk-up, commands sometimes used to position a dog close to a wheelchair. She might do paws-up on the knees of someone who wanted to pet her, and she wouldn’t get spooked by canes, walkers, or any other institutional equipment. She hadn’t been tattooed or microchipped. But she did answer to her name. Big deal. Lady is by far the most common name for a female dog, Ginger or Muffin only a distant second.

  I also read the lists posted at the puli rescue groups, paying careful attention to the dates. But none of the found dogs could be Lady. Of the three on the lists found after Lady had gone missing, two were males, and the bitch was old, ten or eleven, hard of hearing, her teeth worn down to little nubs.

  Downstairs, in the pile of newspapers on the far side of the couch, I found the two recent articles about Harry Dietrich, the small piece that ran in the Metro section the day after he was killed and a larger one, an obit, that I hadn’t paid any attention to the first time around.

  When the phone rang, I was studying the photo that ran with the obit, Harry Dietrich’s grim, scrunched-up old face.

  “It’s even hotter here than New York, but everyone pretends it’s not irritating as hell because it’s not humid. There’s not enough water in the whole damn state to fill a thimble. I don’t know how anyone can live here.”

  “Hey.”

  “Hey, yourself,” he said.

  “How are the boys?”

  “Good. They actually like it here. Can’t be my genes doing that.”

  “Tastes differ,” I said. I’m nothing if not insightful.

  “So I find. Tell me about your case.”

  “Oh, it’s the usual,” I told him. “Someone’s dead, and I don’t know why. Remember, Saturday, we heard it on the news, the man who was killed on West Street by a bicycle? The old guy who owned Harbor View?”

  “He’s the dead guy?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So it’s a rich dead guy?”

  “Very rich. I was just reading his obit. It says Harbor View cost him a million six a year to run and that he gave over a million a year to research and other charities.”

  “Where the hell did all that money come from, and why aren’t we doing that?”

  “It didn’t say. But you always think it’s something fabulous, like the guy’s great-great-grandfather found the cure for pneumonia, then it turns out he did something you’d never think of, like he invented Tupperware.”

  “No, that was Earl Tupper.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I know a lot of stuff,” he said.

  “I wish I did. The woman who hired me, the manager of Harbor View, thinks Harry’s death wasn’t an accident and that her life is in danger. But she hasn’t explained why. Isn’t that weird?”

  “No more weird than your average dog-training client—hires you to train the family dog, then accidentally on purpose leaves out the most important detail of the dog’s history.”

  “That he’s a biter.”

  “Exactly.”

  “But that’s about money, Chip. They’re afraid you’ll charge more to work with a dog that could put you out of business for a good long time. Or that you won’t come at all—especially now, with all the so-called dog trainers who only handle puppies or refer if the dog shows any signs of aggression.”

  “Maybe this is about money too. Or about you not taking the case if you heard the whole story up front.”

  I held the phone to my ear, but I didn’t say anything.

  “Rach?”

  “Maybe both,” I said. “Get this—I have to meet her every day at her gym. She only talks to me on the treadmills, the two of us working up a sweat side by side. I’m going to be one skinny detective by the time you get home.”

  “I love you just the way I saw you last,” he whispered into the phone. “Working up a sweat, side by side.”

  For a moment, neither of us spoke.

  “I have to go. I’m taking the kids out to dinner, some fish place they like on the Santa Monica pier. It should be fun. And Betty will get the chance to dip her toes in the Pacific.”

  “How’d she do on the plane?”

  “She lay down at my feet and slept right through takeoff, got up when the food was served, wisely decided it was unworthy of her att
ention, and didn’t get up again until we’d landed. Piece of cake.”

  “And did they get it this time, that she’s a therapy dog flying to a gig, or did they bust your chops?”

  “It wasn’t as bad as last time. Only two passengers asked if she was a Seeing Eye dog. I was reading both times.”

  I laughed.

  “What did you tell them?”

  “After last time, trying to explain. It’s too…” He sighed. “I told them yes, she was.”

  “You didn’t.”

  “I did. This one guy, he looks at her, he looks at me, he looks at the book, he says, ‘So you’re the trainer, and you’re transporting her?’ I told him, ‘Right.’ It made it easier all around. Look, Rach, it’s the only reason people know that a big dog can be in the cabin. They just want a little reassurance that they understand the world, that it’s not chaotic, as they fear, but orderly and safe.”

  “Good luck on that,” I said. “So when’s your gig?”

  “It starts Monday. I’m doing five sessions. If they need a few more, there’ll be time to add a few before I leave.”

  “What’s the deal?”

  “Training staff at a residential treatment center for disabled adolescents. They want to get a live-in.”

  Like Lady, I thought. “There was a resident dog at Harbor View, Chip. She went missing a couple of weeks before Dietrich got killed.”

  “And they weren’t able to find her?”

  “No, I’m working on that, too. But she’s still missing.”

  “I miss you,” he whispered. “I want to come home.”

  I held onto the phone for a while after he’d hung up, then looked back at Harry’s picture, his weedy eyebrows, potato nose, Dumbo ears, big, fat lips—mean lips, I thought. A prune of a face, not a looker, this Harry Dietrich.

  I started reading the obituary again.

  “Harry Knowlton Dietrich, 74, died yesterday of head injuries incurred when he was hit by a bicycle on West Street as he was leaving Harbor View, the small, private residential treatment center he cofounded with Eli Kagan, the psychiatrist who had treated Dietrich’s younger sister, Betsy. Ms. Dietrich suffered from autism and died in 1957 at the age of twenty-two, two years before Harbor View first opened its doors.