The Dog Who Knew Too Much by Carol Lea Benjamin

holding the paper right up to his face again. “Look at the periods in her older letters.”
    I took the loupe and slid it over the letters. Magnified, Lisa’s periods were tiny dashes that turned up at the end. I picked up the xerox of the suicide note. Again, a tiny dash that with the naked eye looked like a dot. A dash that had an upward movement, that told you the direction her pen was lifted off the paper. The same, the same, the same.
    â€œAnd her s ,” he said, “in ‘sorry’ and in ‘Lisa.’”
    â€œThe same, the same,” I said.
    He nodded.
    â€œI don’t get it. She couldn’t have killed herself. I feel it so strongly.”
    â€œNo one is saying she did, Rachel. We are just seeing that it seems she wrote, ‘I’m sorry. Lisa.’”
    â€œOh, God,” I said.
    The rabbi nodded and began to hum.
    â€œShe wrote the note. But not necessarily for the purpose everyone assumed.”
    â€œShe wrote the note,” he repeated. “But unfortunately, the only person who could have told us the purpose is dead.”
    â€œMaybe not,” I said. I picked up the jelly glass and downed the sherry. “Maybe one other person knows, the person who wanted us to think it was a suicide note. The person who killed Lisa.”
    The rabbi turned sideways on his chair so that he could look toward the window. He sat like that for a while, nodding to himself, his face and hair illuminated by the afternoon sun.
    â€œPerhaps so,” he said. “Perhaps so.”
    After a while, he picked up one of the older letters.
    â€œSee how the letter is framed, Rachel, the broad margins left and right, top and bottom, as if it were a painting. She had, your Lisa, a passion for beauty, did she not?”
    I pictured the roses hanging upside down over Lisa’s dining room table.
    â€œYes, I believe she did, Rabbi.”
    He sighed. “ Azoy gait es ,” he said.
    â€œSo it goes,” I agreed.
    I folded the letters and put them back in my pocket, wrote a small check to the building fund, called Dashiell, and suddenly remembered the black Taurus sitting down the block from my house. A true New Yorker, I was so used to walking I hadn’t remembered I had a car this month, and now, having walked all the way to the East Village, I would have to walk all the way home.
    I stopped for fresh hot bialys, giving the bag to Dashiell to carry for me, and then stopped at Guss’s for a fresh, crisp pickle, the kind that gets fished out of a wooden barrel. This no one had to carry for me. This I munched noisily as we headed back to the West Village.
    We walked along Houston Street, past the Mercer Street dog run, which you have to be a member to use, past the thirty-six-foot-high bust of Sylvette by Picasso, set on the grounds of University Village, and past Aggie’s restaurant on the corner of Houston and MacDougal, which made me realize the pickle was only a first plate.
    Across MacDougal from Aggie’s was a large, fenced ball field. I went to a far corner, took the bag of bialys from Dashiell, and unhooked his leash. I sat on the ground, legs folded in front of me, eating a bialy and thinking about Lisa’s dog, there with her the night she’d been killed.
    The Japanese consider all their breeds to be more courageous than any Western breed. It is courage in the face of adversity that the Japanese most admire, a trait, by their own admission, of national character that they also assign to their dogs, the Akita, the Sanshu, the Shika, and even the cute but bratty Shiba.
    If the note that I’d carefully put back into Lisa’s jacket pocket had not been a suicide note, if Lisa had not climbed up on the windowsill and tossed herself straight into eternity, what, I wondered, would the Japanese say about the fact that someone had murdered her while her Akita stood by doing nothing?
    The American standard for the Akita— American