A Hell of a Dog

by Carol Lea Benjamin

  “Come on,” I said, heading back to the stairs. “We have to hurry.”

  “We do?” he asked.

  “Stop being cute. You’re with me, aren’t you?”

  “In sickness and in health. I just wish we were doing something less sick. Where are we going now?”

  “My house.”

  It must have been something in my tone, or the way I yanked on his arm. He didn’t say another word. When we hit the street, I went straight to the curb and put my arm out and, God bless New York City, a taxi pulled over to the curb to pick us up with both dogs.

  “Tenth and Bleecker, please.”

  The driver’s turban bobbed forward and back, and we were on our way.

  We rode downtown in silence, the dogs jammed between us. When the cab stopped in front of Kim’s Video, we got out and walked west, past the Sixth Precinct, jaywalking across the street to the gate that led to my cottage. There was a thin young man leaning on the gate, his nails painted a frosty blue, the blue arcing around platinum moons on each nail. It must have taken forever to do them so neatly. He moved away when Dashiell, followed by Betty, headed for where he was standing.

  I unlocked the gate, and we walked down the brick passageway into the garden. After Westminster, I’d often imagined Chip coming here. I even made up what he might say, and what I might answer back. I’d thought about it a lot after he said he’d call, but this afternoon, there wasn’t time for us to think about ourselves. Back at the hotel, someone could be in danger.

  Chip must have been thinking the same thing. He didn’t tell me how beautiful the garden was or how at home he felt in my living room. He didn’t look into my eyes until my body heated up and I ached for him to touch me. He didn’t touch me, either. Without speaking, he followed me upstairs to my office, and when I’d found the videos I was after and had put them inside the leather backpack that had been hanging on the back of the office door, he followed me back down the stairs. We whistled for the dogs, who were having a sniffathon in the garden, and headed back to the Ritz.

  “What do you expect to find in those?” he asked, this time sitting pressed against me, the dogs smudging up the windows on either side of the taxi as the city pulled by.

  “I’m not sure. Maybe the missing link we’ve been after.”

  “When and where are we going to look at those?”

  “I think we have to go to dinner. It would be pretty blatant for us to skip it. I don’t want to act strange in any way, or to call any more attention to ourselves than we already have.”

  “It’s a little late for that, Kaminsky.” He tugged on my shirt collar. Actually, his shirt collar.

  “When we get to the hotel, I’ll run upstairs and change.”

  “What about the tapes?”

  “We’ll find a friendly video store later tonight. I don’t care if you have to buy a fucking VCR to accomplish this, but one way or another, we’re going to watch these tonight. Are you with me?”

  “Of course. And that’s not a bad idea.”

  “What isn’t?”

  “Buying a VCR. I lost the one I had in the settlement.”

  The cab stopped a block from the Ritz, as instructed. Chip began to reach into his pocket for money, but I got to my wallet faster. “Allow me,” I said. “It’s on Sam anyway.”

  When I opened the door, Dashiell practically fell out, and Betty got out, too, by walking across Chip’s lap and mine. Even good training has its limitations. Sometimes a dog has a better idea than you do about how to get something done.

  “Go on ahead,” he said. “I’ll see you at dinner.”

  I took the elevator this time. Once in my room, I changed out of Chip’s shirt, hanging it all by itself in my closet. Then I stashed the backpack on the floor and actually closed the closet door. My mother would have been proud.

  I was the last to arrive at dinner. There we were, all sitting as we always had, except that there were three fewer people around the table. We apparently pattern-trained as easily as our dogs did, forming comforting habits almost immediately in new situations. My spot. My chair. My place in the world.

  “Ah, there she is,” Sam said.

  It seemed to me her chair was a little closer to Woody’s than it had been at yesterday’s dinner.

  When I’d looked at his phone records, I noticed he was calling home every day, usually before breakfast. When he’d taken my hand in the hallway, just before telling me that Martyn was dead, I’d felt the callus his wedding band had made on the ring finger of his left hand, a hard ridge just above where the ring would be, were he wearing it. There was no telltale tan line. Then again, it wasn’t summer.

  But Sam was a big girl. If Woody was married, she knew that. If she decided to be his perk for this symposium, she knew what that meant, too.

  “We all took a lovely walk in the park, but we didn’t know where you were,” she went on. “Some of the students came too. Bucky did an impromptu talk about promotion for their fledgling businesses. Woody told a group how to condition their dogs for agility competition. And Beryl took a small group birding.”

  “I was working on my notes,” I told her. “For Saturday.”

  Sam nodded. The waiters began serving. I sipped my wine and looked around at the group, no longer seeing them only as professional colleagues. Now as I looked at each one, I wondered which of them had killed the three of us who were no longer here. And why?

  Sure, I could tell Chip stories, some of them even plausible sounding. It was one of the men, killing off the competition. It was one of the men, green with envy over the lovemaking that others were enjoying. It was one of the women, unlucky at love, lucky in murder. But I couldn’t buy any of them. Somehow, when you looked more closely, things didn’t add up.

  It’s said that people kill over nothing. But it’s never really over nothing. Certainly not to the killer. Quite the contrary—the slight, the promise not kept, the display of disrespect, these could blacken the sky. They could leave nothing but hopelessness in their wake. And a desperate need to get even.

  If an offense could be undetectable to everyone but the killer, how would we see it? How would we find the corner to peel away the top layer and see what lay underneath?

  “It’s not so,” I heard Tracy say, wondering what came before that I’d missed.

  “But Cathy never had a problem,” Bucky said, smiling at Tracy’s crushed-looking face.

  “Of course she didn’t,” Tracy said, a lot too loud, “look at her.”

  So of course we all did.

  “Women who look like that never have trouble. In anything.”

  I turned to look at Cathy, who had a look of panic in her eyes now, having just lost the philanderer she thought she loved.

  “That’s not fair,” Audrey said. “You have no idea how hard Cathy works. You’re assuming that success fell in her lap because she’s beautiful. Well, let me tell you. Life is never that simple. And right now, she’s feeling—”

  “Stop it,” Cathy shouted. “Stop it right now. First of all, you’re talking about me as if I weren’t here. And second, I haven’t asked for a reading, and I don’t want one. Don’t you people have any sensitivity at all?”

  That shut us up. For a moment, but not long enough, there was only the sound of forks on salad plates. But this was not a dinner of mimes. This was not a group who could leave bad enough alone.

  “You think being woman is difficult, Boris comes here from Russia with no money, no family, only incredible skill as dog trainer to start new life—”

  “I don’t believe this.” Woody pushed his salad dish to the side. “How about we go our separate ways this evening? How about I go out and eat Chinese food—Bucky, what’ll it be? Thai? French? Or maybe just good old Burger King. I’m sure there’s one around Columbus Circle. This is bizarre, sitting here every night and having these petty fights. Where the hell does it get us?”

  He pushed back his chair, picked up Rhonda’s leash, and headed for the door, and
suddenly I felt the kind of panic I used to feel when things were going badly with Jack. We’d have words, and he’d head for the door, and I’d become terrified I’d never see him again, even though a moment earlier that’s exactly what I was wishing for.

  “Wait,” I said. “Chinese. Wow. I have a real yen for Peking duck, don’t you?” I asked Chip, who was sitting, as usual, to my left.

  “I do,” he said. “That crisp skin, the spicy sauce, the cold, fresh taste of the cucumbers. Count me in.” And now he was up, too.

  “I know just how you feel. But it’s the soup I love, the wontons, shrimp, pork, chicken, veggies, and that aromatic broth. I can’t resist.” Sam was standing, too.

  Before anyone else had the chance to stand and testify, we were all laughing. And all sitting around the table again. The waiters cleared the salads and brought steaming pots of mussels and thick white bread to dip into the sauce, and as quickly as the storm came, it had blown over.

  So how could I believe that for the reasons I’d imagined, any one of these people who were now laughing and telling each other hilarious stories had killed, not once, but three times?

  27

  YOU DON’T KNOW THE HALF OF IT, I TOLD HIM

  Had we spent another hour telling war stories and drinking wine, we would have gotten to Broadway Electronics after they’d closed. As it was, there wouldn’t be time to watch all four tapes. I’d have to scan them. And since I wasn’t sure where the tiny part I thought I remembered was, I’d have to do it not only quickly but carefully.

  I walked around the store looking at TVs and cordless phones while Chip began schmoozing up the clerk, pretending he wanted to buy a large-screen TV, one of the ones that sold for close to a thousand dollars. He was right, I thought, listening to him from an aisle away. His gender did corrupt easily. Perhaps, in the name of science, there’d be time to test that theory further later on in the evening. But first, there was something urgent I had to do.

  I walked over and interrupted the big sale.

  “I was thinking of getting a new VCR, right?” The thin, pimply clerk with the prominent Adam’s apple and unfortunate teeth looked annoyed. “I can try one or two of them out, right?”

  “No prob.” He stepped back behind the counter and came up with Ace Ventura, Pet Detective. Everyone’s a wit.

  “Way in the back,” he told me, turning his attention back to Chip. He probably worked on commission.

  I took the tape and went to the back of the store, laid the tape on top of one of the TVs, put the first of the four tapes I had in my backpack into one of the VCRs, and hit play on the remote.

  The music came on first. Next, as an announcer spoke, there were dogs doing a long sit—a Great Dane, a chocolate lab, a boxer, two corgis, and what we call an English cocker, though where this tape was shot, it was just called a cocker spaniel.

  And then there she was, her hair flaming red, or rather flaming orange, the color of the setting sun, her face twenty years younger, the jaw better defined, the cheeks higher, her skin without wrinkles, even though she’d been close to fifty when she’d done the TV series. Clearly she was at the top of her form, strong, confident, full of energy. Hands on her hips, she was directing her students.

  I hit fast-forward, remembering that the part I was looking for was at the end of one of the sessions, not in the middle of it.

  As I watched the screen, the training class looked like an old silent film, everyone moving much too fast and no one saying a word, even when their mouths were moving. My eyes began to burn, but I couldn’t take my eyes off the screen; if I blinked, I might miss what I had come here to see.

  The end of a session was coming up, and I hit play again.

  “And so, my dears,” she said, in that same strong voice, “when you practice this week, remember to praise with enthusiasm. Here now, give me that darling corgi, no, no, the little girl. Watch me, students,” she said, leading the corgi to the heel position, signaling her to sit, and then bending down and hugging the little girl against her leg. “There’s a clever girl,” Beryl cooed, her voice warm and animated. The little dog gazed up at her, totally enthralled.

  “See,” she said, standing again, “nothing to it.”

  God, she was good. But this wasn’t the spot.

  I fast-forwarded, watching the jerky movements. Beryl was teaching the stay, demonstrating with the Dane and then watching her students try with their dogs, moving away so quickly that some of the dogs got confused and followed their owners instead of staying put.

  I scanned the first tape and checked my watch. Time was running out. Chip might not be able to keep the clerk busy much longer, and at the rate this was going, I might not have time to find what I was after before the store closed. I put the second tape in and popped the third tape into the machine next to it, pressing play twice and looking back and forth between the two sets as Beryl sped through her training classes. I must have looked as if I were watching a tennis game played by midgets.

  Then, on the third tape, the scene I was looking for began, something I had only vaguely remembered as I’d stood outside 303 back at the Ritz.

  I rewound the tape so that I would hear the whole thing.

  “So, dear people, now you have the down. But remember how to practice this, please. Those of you who had a little growling problem, teach the command at home first, where there are no other dogs about. The down puts your dog in a submissive posture, and for some of the males, this is quite embarrassing in class, in front of the other gents. It hurts your doggy’s pride. But once he learns the down at home, and you give him that nice tummy rub I showed you, he’ll do it very nicely in class and anywhere else you might need it. Any questions?”

  She looked around, her orange hair escaping the combs she used to try to keep it in place, just as her gray hair did now.

  “All right, then. Where’s my little darling?” she asked, her gaze leaving the viewer and going off to her left, a loving smile on her face now.

  I felt my stomach flip. This was the part I’d been waiting for.

  When the scene was over, I knew what I had to do, first thing in the morning. The music played again. As the credits rolled, the dogs romped in the background.

  I ejected the tapes, packed them up, and brought Ace Ventura back to the clerk.

  “I like the JVC one,” I told him. “I have to check with my roommate.”

  He closed his eyes and nodded wearily. Surely he’d heard that before.

  “I’ll give you a call about that later in the week,” Chip said. “I need a little time to think about it. Sure is a honey of a set, though.”

  “What did you find out?” he asked as soon as we’d left the store.

  “The explanation for something that was too much of a coincidence for me to buy.”

  He nodded.

  “Something you don’t care to elaborate on just yet?”

  I nodded.

  “Are we going back to the hotel?” he asked.

  “I have to make two quick stops first.”

  We were a few doors from the drugstore where I’d dropped off the film I’d shot on Sunday. I opened the envelope right in the store, looking through the pictures with Chip, stopping on the one of the locked roof door with the No Entry sign, and again on a shot of the maid’s cart parked outside one of the rooms, the passkey hanging on a hook to the left of the handle.

  “What next?” Chip asked.

  “Potato chips.”

  “A girl after my own heart.”

  We walked into one of the ubiquitous Korean delis that dot half the corners in Manhattan and stay open all night.

  “How about some beer to go with them?”

  “Oh, they’re not to eat.”

  He frowned. “I’m not going to touch this with a ten-foot pole,” he said, reaching for his money.

  “Allow me. I can expense them.”

  “You’re a hell of a date, Kaminsky.”

  I picked up a bag of Ridgies and put a five
on the counter with them. “You don’t know the half of it,” I told him.

  My cell phone rang, and I took it out of my pocket and flipped it open.

  “Hello?”

  “It’s me, Sam. I’ve been looking all over for you. Detective Flowers called.” I grabbed Chip’s arm and pulled him closer, holding the phone away from my ear so that he could hear. “The ME has results on Rick. He didn’t choke, Rachel. He died from anaphylactic shock, from an aspirin allergy. Flowers said she’d spoken to his wife, and she said Rick knew he was highly allergic to aspirin. It’s not uncommon for asthmatics. She said he was very careful—he only took Tylenol, brand-name stuff, none of that generic stuff, because he figured, you never know for sure that way.”

  “There was Tylenol on his nightstand,” I told her. “But I didn’t find a bee sting kit. The only other meds were those asthma inhalers he used, two besides the one he had with him.”

  “Flowers said something about a bee sting kit. They took it, she said, when they checked his room. I don’t get it. Was he worried about bees in Central Park? What does that have to do—”

  “It’s for any allergy that causes severe anaphylaxis. It’s got injectable epinephrine in it,” I said, keenly aware that one of the men who’d tried to rescue him was standing next to me, “which would have saved his life. But, of course, none of us knew about his allergy.”

  And as I said it, I realized that it wasn’t true. Anyone of us could have known, with all the times aspirin had been passed around the table to alleviate hangovers after a night of heavy drinking. Anyone could have noticed Rick turning it down and taking two Tylenol instead. In fact, he might easily have explained why he was doing that.

  And what about the person who had stood by so patiently while Rick spread out a towel to prevent soiling the hotel sheets? Couldn’t she know, too? She might have even seen the anaphylaxis emergency treatment kit. She might have asked what it was he’d been so allergic to.

  “What are the detectives going to do about this, did Flowers say?”

  “They’ll be here in the morning, early, and they want to talk to everyone. They want to rule out foul play.”