The Wrong Dog Read online

  CHAPTER 6

  I’m Chopping Swiss Chard

  I was scrubbing organic carrots, getting ready to feed them into the Cuisinart, when Chip called.

  “I got your message. What’s wrong?”

  The light was gone from the garden. Being surrounded by buildings, it gets dark early.

  “Sophie’s dead,” I told him.

  “A seizure?”

  “It looks that way. The meds were next to her. I don’t know if she took them and they didn’t work, or if the dog didn’t get them to her in time.”

  “The dog? Blanche got the medication for her?”

  “No. Blanche let her know what was coming. She usually had the medication on her, in a little pouch. But at home, she left it on her nightstand, and if she wasn’t in bed, she’d send Bianca for it. My guess is, she did it as a step toward her alerting one day, you know, to focus her on how Sophie was feeling and have her respond.”

  Holding the phone in the crook of my neck, I put the Swiss chard on the cutting board and began slicing along the bright red ribs.

  “I’m sorry, Rach.”

  “Me, too.”

  “So, you’re going to work tonight, wrap things up?”

  “It’s not that simple. First of all, even if I chose to do nothing else, there are the dogs to think about. There may not be any relatives. At least, her dog walker doesn’t know of any. Nor is he aware of any plans she made for the animals. So the very least I can do would be to find out if there are arrangements for the animals and if not, to try to place them. Blanche is here for a day or two. The dog walker has Bianca. He says his own dog is just like her, too much energy for Blanche or he would have taken both. But I don’t mind having Blanche here.”

  “And what’s that sound?”

  “She hasn’t eaten all day. Maybe she didn’t eat last night. I’m getting her dinner ready. I’m chopping Swiss chard.”

  “Swiss chard? For Blanche? Don’t tell me.”

  But I did. “Raw carrots and yellow squash, ground up small to imitate what would be in the stomach of a kill, cod-liver oil for essential fatty acids, vitamin E for a healthy coat and its antioxidant benefits, glucosamine and condroitin sulfate to help maintain and rebuild healthy joints, raw chicken, kelp—”

  “And chard.”

  “For calcium.”

  “So homes for two bullies. The young one should be pretty easy. Blanche is going to be tough, though. She’s how old?”

  “You’re way ahead of me, Chip. I can’t place the animals until I’m sure that’s necessary. Anyway, I said taking care of the animals was the very least I could do. Doing the least is not my intention.”

  I put the sliced chard in a pile and began to cut in the other direction.

  “I’m going to do what Sophie asked me to do. Actually, that’s the least I can do and live with myself. Sophie was concerned that Side by Side is cloning dogs that will not work as expected for their disabled owners and I’m going to do my best to find them and tell them that. I’m going to start by listening to the tapes again, see if there’s anything I missed when I took notes. Tomorrow, after acupuncture, I’ll go over to The School for the Deaf and see if I can talk to anyone who was close to Sophie. I know there’s one person she was tight with, the receptionist. Then as soon as the police release the apartment, I’ll stay there for a day or two so that I can take care of the girls in their own home and while I’m there, I’ll check all Sophie’s papers, bills, notes—whatever I can find. I have to see if she made arrangements for the dogs or if there are any relatives who might take them.”

  “Do you need my help with anything?”

  “Maybe later, if I have to find the dogs a new home.” I measured the cod-liver oil and dumped it into the bowl. “Chip?”

  “I’m here.”

  “I wonder if it’s the food.”

  “If what is?”

  “Blanche. She’s eleven and a half and still working. I thought service dogs retired by nine at the latest.”

  “Apparently Sophie didn’t know that.”

  “And neither did Blanche.”

  She was sleeping on the couch, her face pressed into one of the pillows. It didn’t look like much to most people, trotting along beside Sophie or sleeping under her desk while her mistress taught, but she’d taken on the responsibility of trying to keep Sophie from having seizures, and no matter what it looked like, it was a big job for a dog of any age.

  “I’ll call you tomorrow,” I whispered into the phone.

  “Rachel—”

  “I love you,” I told him. “Everything will be okay.”

  But looking at the old dog on my couch, I had trouble believing it would. What would become of her now that the rug had been pulled out from under her for the second time in her life?

  I finished chopping the vegetables and mixed everything together, noticing how bright the colors were—the orange of the carrots, the deep green of the leaf and cherry-red rib of the chard, the yellow skin of the squash against its firm, pale flesh, and the paper-thin seeds, slippery to the touch and nearly as hard to pick up as a drop of water. When it was all blended together, I checked the list Mel had written out for me. I added a dollop of yogurt, the digestive enzymes, and kelp, putting the bowl down for Blanche, calling her to come and eat. I thought she might ignore me, or come and sniff at the food, then walk away. But she picked her head up from where she lay on the couch and began to slip down to the floor, front legs first, the hind legs oozing slowly afterward, rubbing against the couch as she left it. She trotted right over to her bowl and, legs wide, as if she was protecting her meal from competitors—and perhaps she was—she ate ravenously, not stopping until the bowl looked as if it had never been used.

  When I began to fill a bowl with kibble for Dash, I couldn’t help noticing that Blanche’s meal had smelled like food and his did not. I might as well have been giving my own dog a bowl of pricey cardboard. I dumped the kibble back into the bag and began all over again, grinding carrots for Dashiell this time.

  He looked up at me, hopeful, his tail wagging horizontally. As soon as I put the bowl down, he wolfed down every fresh, crunchy morsel. As I cleaned up, I could hear the sound of the bowl smacking hard against the kitchen wall as he made sure there was nothing edible left in it.

  I thought I’d let the dogs out into the garden, wash a couple of raw carrots for myself, go up to my office to listen to the tapes I’d made, and try to figure out what to do next. Instead, I grabbed my jacket and took Dashiell for what I assumed would be a short walk, just to clear my head, ending up, to my surprise, but probably not his, in front of Sophie’s building. I checked my watch. It was eight-thirty. Most people would be home from work and it was Monday, a dead night even in Manhattan.

  Not counting Sophie’s, there were five apartments in the building. After reading the names next to each bell, I used the key Mel had given me to get in, figuring I’d start at the top and work my way down. Dash headed for Sophie’s but I called him back and pointed up the stairs, then followed him all the way to the top.

  Bert Shore’s apartment, larger than Sophie’s because she shared the ground floor with a shop, looked like a greenhouse, a huge skylight over the back room to give him even more light than the front and rear windows afforded. I stayed pretty near the doorway so that Dashiell could stay in the hall, and told Bert part of what I was doing, that I was trying to find any information that might help me find a home for Sophie’s dogs.

  “I didn’t know her, except to say hi at the mailbox or hold the door for her when she had both dogs. How’d she do that?” he asked. “They told me no dogs, no way, not even a Chihuahua. So I got Magnolia instead. But she had two dogs. It never seemed fair to me.”

  There were two little dishes just inside the kitchen doorway. One said, Kitty. I wrote “cat” in my little notebook. Born to the job.

  “She’s hiding.” He pointed at Dashiell. “From him. Don’t tell me you’re moving in here now, with that.” />
  I shook my head. “So you never really talked?”

  “Not to speak of. Do they know who?” he whispered. “The coppers wouldn’t say. You know how they are.”

  I shook my head again, handed him my card, and asked him to call if he thought of anything at all that might help me, even if it seemed “banal” I said. “Trivial. Don’t be shy. I don’t give grades.”

  I turned to go.

  “There is one other thing I should mention, but I don’t think it’ll help.” He took a pack of cigarettes from the pocket of his loose pants, hit the bottom, and offered me the one that popped out. When I declined, he just held the pack in his hand.

  “She fed Maggie for me when I traveled. I’m a choreographer,” he added.

  “And you travel a lot?”

  “A great deal.”

  “And Sophie would come up here and feed your cat?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s pretty nice, from someone you hardly knew.”

  “It was business,” he said. “I paid her.”

  “But you never—”

  “I wasn’t here when she came. That was the point, wasn’t it? I’d call and tell her, ‘Thursday through Saturday,’ she’d say, ‘Okay,’ and I’d leave the money.”

  “She had the key?”

  “Still does,” he said.

  “I’ll look for it,” I told him.

  “It’s a Medico.”

  I nodded. He thanked me. I thanked him. On the way down to the next floor, I looked at my notepad. It said “cat.” I added, “Sophie fed it.”

  I was about to slip my card under the next door, with a note asking G. Pascal to please call me, when the door opened. There were two of them, arms wrapped around each other, Velcroed at the hip.

  “Sorry to bother you,” I said, which sounded lame, even to me.

  But they were fixated on Dashiell and didn’t seem to hear me.

  “He’s okay,” I said. “I’m here about Sophie, your downstairs neighbor, first floor?” If I was waiting for a look of recognition, I was bound to be disappointed. “I’m trying to locate friends of hers, or relatives. It’s about the dogs.”

  “Cop?” He had a tattoo of a knife dripping blood on his free arm. He may have had a lot of calls from cops. Unless it was a fashion statement.

  I shook my head. “I was hired by Sophie yesterday and now—”

  “Bummer,” he said.

  The girl’s hair was short and bleached nearly white. She watched him when he spoke.

  “I’m trying to find out—”

  “We just moved in,” he said. “We told the police that. There’s nothing we can tell you. We didn’t know her. I mean, I looked down at the garden sometimes and thought, Wow, cool. All that green, when you’re stoned, man, it’s really something. But I never even saw her out there, just some dog. Was she very old?”

  “Thirties.”

  “Overdose?” he asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  I handed him my card.

  “Research?” he said.

  “Yeah. I find answers for people who need them.”

  “Having any luck?”

  “No one likes a wise guy.” I wondered which of them was G. Pascal. But looking at them again, I doubted that either of them would have bothered to remove the former tenant’s name from next to the bell and put their own name there. “Call me if you think of anything helpful,” I said.

  “About what?” he asked.

  I shrugged.

  They stayed in the doorway until after we’d disappeared. I never heard the door close. For all I know, they stayed there all night. No one was home on four. Three wouldn’t open. He said he’d already talked to the cops and he didn’t know anything. He said he’d be damned if he’d open the door for some stranger and then he asked how I’d gotten in the building in the first place. He was still talking through the door when I headed for two. Sophie’s upstairs neighbor wasn’t home either. Maybe Monday wasn’t as dead a night as I thought it was.

  There was no yellow tape across the hall leading to Sophie’s door, but we didn’t go that way. We headed straight out. The guy from the leather-goods store was closing up, pulling down the metal gate that covers the front of most small stores when they’re not open for business. I asked him if he’d ever met Sophie. He said no. His English wasn’t very good. At that point, neither was mine. I said it was the lady with the two white dogs. He nodded. Two white dogs, yes, yes, he said. So you knew her? I asked. He said, no, he didn’t know her, but he’d seen her, and that she had had a nice bag, a green sling, good-quality leather, but that she hadn’t bought it from him. He said he probably would have given her a better price. Then he shrugged and closed the four padlocks that held the gate in place.

  We walked around the far corner but we didn’t go into the park. By ten at night, the park belonged to the drug dealers and the dog run was closed anyway. We headed back on West Fourth Street where Dashiell suddenly began marking everything in sight. No wonder. West Fourth led directly to Washington Square Park. Lots of other males, hurrying to the dog run, had taken time out of their busy schedules to leave their stats. Dashiell did the same.

  When I got home, instead of letting Blanche out and getting to work on the tapes, I surprised myself again. I hadn’t really learned that much, so this time, taking Blanche along, I headed for the meatpacking district. If there was a veterinary office there where samples of Blanche’s DNA had been harvested, perhaps that was the place to begin. I kept the notebook in my pocket, hoping I could add to the copious notes I’d taken at Sophie’s building.

  CHAPTER 7

  What Brings You Here?

  Blanche and I walked slowly north, passing the little shops, the ethnic restaurants, the pocket parks filled with flowers that tourists loved to come and see. With everything lit up, and couples walking arm in arm, heading for Da Andrea or La Ripaille, we might have been in Rome or Paris.

  We turned west on Jane, the sort of street the neighborhood is best known for—Greek revival town houses, with high stoops and tall parlor-floor windows, set in two neat rows across a cobblestone street. When we got to Washington Street, we were at the cusp of the wholesale meatpacking district, now dotted with new or newly renovated luxury condos. Later in the evening, the neighborhood would also be dotted with black and Hispanic transvestite hookers with legs as long as flamingos, wide shoulders and narrow hips, and in case you still didn’t get it, voices so deep the sound would reverberate in your stomach.

  The indoor/outdoor contraptions on which carcasses of animals were hung on sharp, heavy hooks and moved into the buildings were no longer used this far south, perhaps in deference to the new residential buildings on the west side of the street. I was glad that Dashiell wasn’t with me this time because the smell of the place bothered him; he took the plight of all those dead animals personally. Passing a trash can full of bones or even those ominous empty hooks outside each wholesaler’s place of business made the hair on his back stand up and put a wary look in his eyes.

  One block north was the place where Sophie had met Lorna West for the second and next-to-last time. Walking toward the empty corner, I wondered if before hiring me Sophie had checked the phone book to see if Lorna was listed. Once in a blue moon, all it took to find someone was trying the simplest and most obvious thing. But not this time.

  When I got to the redbrick building on the northeast corner of Horatio and Washington, Blanche pulled to go in. But the building was locked up for the night. All the windows were dark, and if there was a cleaning staff that worked at night, after everyone else had gone home, they’d either not yet come or had already left. I let Blanche pull me up the steps so that I could check the names next to the bells. I went over all of them, even though Sophie had said the veterinary office was on the first floor. She hadn’t given me the name of a veterinarian. Perhaps she was never told a name.

  This building seemed an unlikely place for a veterinary practice. But I’d check agai
n when the building was open and see who was on the first floor, and if there was no Horatio Street Veterinary Practice there, see if anyone remembered it being there two years earlier.

  I felt Blanche’s tail banging against my leg. When I looked down at her, to see what was up, she began to pull hard in the opposite direction, away from the building and toward Bianca.

  “What a surprise. What brings you here?”

  “She was restless so I decided to take her for a long walk.” Mel gestured behind him with one of those long wiggly arms of his.

  “You took her for a walk along the river?”

  He nodded. “But when I started thinking, this was where it all began. So I thought I’d come and take a look.” He nodded again.

  “You wanted to take a look at this building?”

  “I never get to this part of the Village. My clients are all around Washington Square Park. So I thought I’d swing by, you know what I mean?”

  “Yeah, I do. I had the same feeling.”

  “It’s locked, huh?”

  “Looks to be.”

  “You coming back tomorrow?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Not definitely? Don’t you have to talk to the vet who cloned Bianca? Isn’t that what Sophie wanted you to do?”

  “I don’t think I’m going to find a veterinary office in this building.”

  “But didn’t Sophie say that this was the place?”

  “She did.”

  “That’s odd.”

  “The whole thing’s odd, wouldn’t you say?”

  He nodded. “But—”

  “I doubt there ever was a vet’s office here.”

  “How come?”

  “They’d never have clients go through the lobby of an office building with their animals. It doesn’t make sense.”