A Hell of a Dog

by Carol Lea Benjamin

  “I must admit that after that, I really badgered Tina. Parents can do that, you know. We know all the buttons to push to get our children raging mad.”

  “Did she blurt out Martyn’s name at last?”

  “No, dear. But when I’d finally gotten her really angry, by naming trainers and nattering away at her, Was it he? Was it he? she said, No, Mummy, it’s not any of those. He’s foreign. So naturally I thought it was Boris.”

  “Did he have a sweetie, too?” I asked.

  “Exactly my question, Rachel. So guess what I did,” she said, taking on a conspiratorial tone, as if the two of us were in on this together.

  I got up and walked to the door, opened it, and looked out into the hall, nodding to Mercedes, who patted her uniform pocket to show me where the twenty I’d given her had been squirreled away. Then I called to Dashiell. “Keys,” I told him, pointing down the hall to where the supply cart had been parked. A moment later, Dash was back with the passkey. He sat and tossed it in the air for me to catch.

  “Brilliant,” she said, the muscles in her cheeks jumping. She looked at Dashiell and then at me, sizing us up anew.

  “But what did you do about Sasha?” I asked her.

  “Don’t be a goose, dear. Do you think I can’t handle a Rottweiler? Are you forgetting who I am?”

  “Not in the least, Mrs. Potter, but we’re discussing a protection-trained Rottweiler here, not a crooked sit.”

  “I bloody well know that.”

  “What was it you shoved through a crack in the door?” I asked, remembering the dog dead asleep on stage the following morning, “a couple of Valium in a bite of cheese? Halcyon? Then you waited a few minutes before opening the door and having yourself a good look.”

  “Yes, dear, a good look.” She was glaring now, and I knew she was planning something, too. I had trained enough dogs to recognize escape behavior, no matter if the creature was human, not canine.

  “At who?” I asked.

  “Whom,” she said. “At Boris, that’s who.” She sat back again, smiling now.

  “And?”

  “He was all alone, lying on his back, snoring. He looked like a beached whale. I thought to myself, Tina couldn’t have meant Boris.”

  She picked up her cup of cold tea and took a sip.

  “Of course, I hadn’t thought of Martyn as foreign. But after this, I knew that that’s who it was. Martyn Eliot, of all the ironies.”

  “How did you get him to go up to the roof, Beryl?”

  “What did you say, dear?” she asked, fiddling with a wisp of hair that had come loose from its combs. “Oh, yes, the roof. Of course, you’d wonder about that. Well, you’re such a terribly clever person, you tell me.”

  “As you wish. It had to be a test of character, in keeping with your theme.”

  She smiled, but her eyes were cold.

  “First, you heard me at your door. Cecilia must have been all excited, because Dashiell was with me. Next—”

  “I’ve had quite enough of this, dear. The tea is cold, and I’m afraid I’m getting bored with your company.”

  She stood, took her purse from the bureau, and stooped to scoop up her dog. Then she headed for the door.

  I watched her reach for the knob, turn it, and pull the door partway open before sending Dashiell. Crossing the room, he didn’t seem to touch the ground. When he came up on his hind legs and slammed the door shut with a satisfying thud, the room shook.

  “Sit down, Mrs. Potter. We’re not finished with our discussion.”

  Beryl reached for the doorknob again.

  “Watch her,” I said.

  Dashiell wedged himself between Beryl and the door, using his hip to back her out of his way. Then he stood facing her, as quiet and unmovable as cement.

  “Out,” she commanded, her voice booming.

  Dashiell never blinked.

  “Haven’t you trained him?” she asked me, desperation in her voice. Then without waiting for me to tell her what she had already learned for herself—that while Dashiell might sit for her, or even roll over if she asked him to, he had been proofed against taking commands from anyone but his handler when doing protection work—she made another mistake. She reached for Dashiell’s collar.

  Dashiell’s muzzle wrinkled up like an accordion, retracting his lips. There were sound effects, too, a low rumble that made everything tremble, as if we were outside and the subway were passing underneath the sidewalk.

  Beryl withdrew her hand.

  “Sit down, Mrs. Potter. You aren’t going anywhere. Even if Dashiell weren’t here, I am. You don’t have the advantage of surprise this time.”

  She backed up to the bed and sat, Dashiell watching her every move.

  “It had to do with Cecilia,” I said. “Because that would be the one request he couldn’t turn down, and you knew it.”

  Even sitting on the bed, her back was as straight as a ramrod.

  “I woke up at four again. It was Cecilia. She was at the door, and I heard the tags on her collar tinkling. She was just standing there, begging me to open up, her little tail wagging back and forth. Then she came back to bed. But a moment later, she was at the door again. That time I did get up, because I heard the key in the lock next door to me. It was our Martyn, home from your poker game.”

  “You locked Cecilia in the bathroom,” I continued, having recently felt the scratches on the inside of the door to make sure my theory was correct. “And then you went to knock on his door.”

  “He looked so tired, so out of sorts. It was a demanding lifestyle he kept, trying to make so many women happy. It would wear a man down, I’d think. It wouldn’t leave much for the woman waiting at home.”

  “No, it wouldn’t.”

  “I was quite hysterical, you know. I grabbed at his shirt and began to pull him out into the hall. ‘It’s Cecilia,’ I told him; ‘she awakened me crying, had to go and do her business, poor thing, but Samantha had warned us about the dangers of New York City,’ I told him, doing my best frail and frightened old lady in a bathrobe for him. ‘I’m afraid I’ve done a naughty thing,’ I said. ‘I took her up on the roof. I thought she could take care of things there, and we’d be safe.’

  “He was frowning, almost too tired to follow the little story I was telling him. ‘Well, somehow,’ I said, rushing on with it, ‘she’d gotten herself into some sort of pipe and was too frightened to come to me. Oh, could you help, Martyn?’ I asked him.

  “‘Perhaps we should call the desk,’ he said. I could see he was annoyed. He was dying to get to sleep. ‘There’s no time,’ I told him, ‘it’s a matter of life and death.’ Well, that was certainly true,” Beryl said. “I begged him to fetch his umbrella, I said perhaps we could use the handle to hook her collar and pull her out. We headed for the stairs. I assured him that the elevator man would be fast asleep in the basement, and there wasn’t a moment to waste with Cecilia’s life in the balance, now was there?”

  “So he passed his character test?”

  “So he did, my dear. So he did. However, in general, I thought his character to be the lowest. Wouldn’t you agree?”

  “And once you were up there?”

  “I tossed the umbrella down and looked over the ledge. Good Lord, I said, see what she’s gone and done. He came running, the dear man, so concerned.”

  Again, there was that faraway look in Beryl’s eyes.

  “He was a wee thing, wasn’t he? Couldn’t have weighed much more than nine stone, nowhere near as heavy as Charles.”

  “Charles?”

  “Carl’s bullmastiff, dear. Remember?”

  “Your Carl was a veterinarian, too, wasn’t he?”

  “He was indeed.”

  “An American?”

  “Yes, dear.”

  “And you loved him with all your being?”

  “You have no idea.”

  She lifted Cecilia and held her against her bosom, squeezing the little terrier so tightly that she began to squirm.
/>   “I used to kill him off every day,” she said. “In my imagination, of course.”

  “After he left you?”

  “No, dear, before. I loved him so desperately, I used to think, what if anything ever happened to him? I wouldn’t be able to go on. So every day, I’d kill him off and then imagine how I’d cope, how I’d care for Christina and make a life for us. It assuaged my anxiety. But at the time, I had no idea—”

  She looked at me for the first time in what seemed like ages, and I could see the years of pain in her eyes now, all exposed.

  “It was his heart,” I whispered.

  “Yes, dear, his heart.”

  “He fell in love with someone else.”

  “Yes, dear, that’s what he did.”

  “And abandoned you and his child.”

  Beryl nodded. “At first no one knew his whereabouts. And in my shock and grief, all I could think about was that someone would take Tina from me.”

  “You wanted to keep her.”

  “Wanted to keep her? She was all I had left. She was my life. So as soon as we could, we moved to England, not to London, where I’d lived when I met Carl, but the Cotswolds, where I hoped none of his family would be able to find me.”

  “And did you ever find out what happened to Carl, where he went and with whom, and what became of him?”

  “Oh, yes, dear. Actually, I did. He’d disappeared with a wealthy client. That was clear from the first.”

  “He left a note?”

  Beryl smiled the saddest smile I’d ever seen. “A note? Why, no, he didn’t think to do that, Rachel. No, there was no note. But she went missing too. That part wasn’t hard to figure out.”

  “And what became of them?”

  “I don’t know about her,” she said, “but shortly after they came back from France, poor Martyn—”

  “You mean Carl.”

  “Yes, shortly after they came back from France, poor Carl had a terrible accident.”

  “Fatal?”

  “As it happens, it was. A lucky thing, too. With him gone, I was able to sell his practice. That gave me the money I needed to raise my daughter and get on with my life.”

  The longer it cooks, my grandmother Sonya used to say, the thicker the stew. No matter if you were a dog or a person, you only got to be more like yourself as time passed.

  I looked out the window. People were on their way to work. Traffic had picked up, too.

  “I’ll get ready now,” Beryl said.

  I reached into my pocket and shut off the tape recorder. Then I walked over to the phone and called downstairs. Beryl waited until I hung up. She whispered something in her little dog’s ear; then, back straight, head held high, she handed her to me and began to pack her things.

  Turn the page to continue reading from the Rachel Alexander and Dash Mysteries

  1

  I Know What You Mean

  I shouldn’t have been awake, but it was one of those nights. I was in the garden, with Dashiell, watching the blue-black sky, waiting for dawn and the false feeling of safety that comes with the light. When my cell phone rang, I sent Dash for it, wiped it off on the leg of my jeans, and flipped it open.

  “I got to get to sleep,” someone said.

  The wind blew. I shivered. The dry yellow leaves that had clustered against the back wall of the garden lifted and eddied.

  “I know what you mean,” I told her without bothering to ask who she was or who had died this time.

  “What I was wondering,” she said, a heavy smoker, a rich, raspy Lauren Bacall voice, “is if you’re going to the run with Dashiell tomorrow.”

  He was over at the back wall, poking his big head into the pile of leaves, trying to figure out what had made them move.

  “Who wants to know?” I asked.

  “Never mind that for now. This is about work. For you.”

  I waited for more. She waited for me to comment.

  “This here’s Rachel, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well.” Pleased with herself.

  I had a nearly overwhelming urge to talk, to tell her that maybe I was awake because the wind had made the windows rattle, that the noise had gotten me up. Or maybe not—maybe something else, the holiday blues arriving earlier than usual this year, before Thanksgiving this time, ask if she ever got them, and if she did, what she did about it. I could have gone with it, told her the story of my life. Four in the morning, you’ll talk, period. You’ll order a pizza to talk to the deliveryman. You’ll say anything to anyone who’ll listen.

  Instead I said, “Two-thirty.”

  “No good.”

  “Then when?”

  “Before work. Eight o’clock.”

  “That’s less than four hours from now,” I said, more to myself than to her, thinking I wouldn’t get any sleep at all, a hell of a way to start a case.

  “Not that eight. The other one.”

  “Eight P.M.? But you said—”

  “Right. I’m a health care professional. Night shift.”

  “Okay. Eight P.M. it is, but then not at the dog run. Too many aggressive dogs late in the day. Name another spot.”

  “You the fussy one. You name one.”

  “Farther west okay?”

  “Whatever.”

  “Abingdon Square Park, Twelfth and Hudson.” I figured it wasn’t all that far from St. Vincent’s Hospital. If that’s where she worked. If not, then the hell with it. Let her take the subway.

  “You got it.”

  “How will I know you? I mean, just in case someone else decides to take a load off at eight o’clock, enjoy the scenery.”

  “Are you kidding? You don’t got a dog to exercise, some other pressing reason to be out, you staying inside, watching HBO, you’re not sitting out in no unheated park. It’s November, woman. Where you been, hibernating?”

  “Still.”

  “Girl, you too much with your questions. Take something, okay? Help yourself relax. It’s not gonna be your problem. I’ll know you. Okay?”

  “And how will you do that?”

  She sighed. There was some whispering then, but her hand must have been over the mouthpiece, because I couldn’t make out the words.

  “Honey, you was described, in detail. No stone was left with moss on it. You wanna skip the park, walk around the Village with your dog, keep moving to keep warm, it don’t make no difference to me, I’ll find you, jus’ make up your mind. What I can’t do is keep standing here yammering about it. My feet’s killing me.”

  “Okay. Abingdon Square it is. And what did you say the job was?” Wondering what kind of a person calls at this hour of the night, wondering what she had in mind for me to do.

  “You see what I mean about you? I din’t say. But it’s undercover investigation. What’d you think I was goin’ to say, nucular physics? We’ll tell you all about it tomorrow.”

  “We?”

  But there was nothing more. The line was dead.

  2

  I’m LaDonna

  I slept for three and a half hours, from just after light to nearly eleven A.M. Then I shopped for organic meat and vegetables for Dashiell and me, did the laundry at the main house while checking to make sure no one had broken in and that all systems were operational, the job that gives me a rent I can afford. I raked the last of the fallen leaves, trimmed back the herbs for winter, and vacuumed the cottage from top to bottom. At a quarter to eight, Dash and I headed over to Abingdon Square, the small triangular park where Hudson Street and Eighth Avenue play kissy-face for just a moment.

  I sat to the right of the Twelfth Street gate so that I could see both entrances, turned up my collar, opened the Times, holding it high, the way you do when you read in the subway, except there the paper gets folded like a road map in large accordion pleats so that you don’t take up the room of three people. Here, alone on a park bench, I spread the paper out and slumped down behind it. Very B movie. Not to mention pointless. I was not only the only person th
ere with a pit bull, I was the only person there. Besides that, it was way too dark to read.

  I didn’t have long to wait. She was on time. Rather, they were on time. I knew they were my clients the moment they showed. It wasn’t the white uniforms either, because, truth be told, they didn’t look much like nurses.

  The one holding the dog, a wirehaired mini dachshund the color of bread crust sticking halfway out of her short, red leather jacket, had big hair, loose, frizzy, and a shade of blond that was closer to white than yellow. Her skin was pale, too, coffee with much too much milk in it. She wore a short, tight, shiny black skirt, lacy stockings, and pointy-toed stiletto heels. Her compatriots, one on each side, weren’t wearing white either. The biggest one, head and shoulders above the other two, was wearing a halter top and matching miniskirt in a floral pattern, a faux fur jacket over it, her bronze hair piled high on her head, loose curls falling forward against her shiny ebony skin. In the light from a streetlamp, I could see she had glitter along her prominent cheekbones. A nice touch. I thought I might try that sometime. The smallest of the three, her skin the color of walnuts, eyes as small and dark as currants, wore spandex, a kind of cat suit, except the pants ended mid-thigh, as if she were about to do a cross-country bicycle race. But had that been her plan, the shoes were all wrong. They were little strappy things with the highest heels I’d ever seen, heels as sharp as needles that made a metallic peck-a-dee-peck sound as she approached, like a hungry chicken with a stainless-steel beak. Me, I couldn’t sit in those shoes, let alone work as a health care professional in them.

  They spotted me and tottered over. I dropped the paper onto the bench, stood, and smiled. Or maybe I gaped. Who knows?

  The big one stuck out her enormous hand. I felt sure she was going to say her name was Alice, because Lord knows, I was in Wonderland. But I was wrong.

  “I’m LaDonna.” She was tall, dark, and gorgeous, six-one, maybe even six-two in stocking feet. Only she wasn’t—she wore thigh-high pink boots and matching lipstick. We shook hands, her grip, like her broad shoulders and narrow hips, at odds with the message her outfit was trying so desperately to convey.