This Dog for Hire by Carol Lea Benjamin Page A

stomped the snow off my boots, pulled the door open, and followed Dashiell inside. Once indoors, I signalled Dashiell to sit and watch me, then gave him the hand signal for go find, a flat, open hand first touching my right eye, then sweeping out forward as far as I could reach.
    Dashiell headed for the front room. We always started downstairs and worked our way up. I followed along behind, making sure the doors were still locked, no windows had been broken, no gas was leaking, no pipes had burst. Dash made sure no one else was in the house.
    Downstairs was where a burglar would be most likely to break in, even though some preferred access from above, coming from the roof of another building. In some places in the city, you could travel an entire block by running across the roofs.
    In New York City, most accessible windows had bars on them. But Norma wouldn’t hear of it. “They’re ugly,” she’d said when I suggested that window guards would help safeguard the house. “I will not live in a jail. That’s why you’re here.” I was in no position to argue.
    I followed Dashiell, telling him he was a good boy, checking to make sure the shutters were closed in the front of the house and open to let light in in the rear, those windows that faced the cottage. The thermostat was set at sixty so that the old house wouldn’t take too bad a beating contracting and expanding as the weather changed.
    We finished at the top without finding a single thief hiding under any of the beds or in the closets, double-checked the front door, shut off the lights, and let ourselves out the back.
    Once, the first winter I was here, Dashiell had started to pare and whine, going to the living-room window that faced the main house and coming back to poke me with his muzzle and look into my eves. I had taken my gun from the shoe box in the bed-room closet, and we had gone across the snowy garden in silence, my heart pounding as I opened the, back door. Five minutes later we were face-to-face with the, intruder, a homeless woman who had broken one of the front windows to get in from the cold. She was nestled under three blankets in the spare bedroom, trying to get warm.
    This time, everything was as it should have been. By the time we got back to the cottage, stopping briefly to race around the big oak, it was time to get ready for the opening. I had planned to soak in the tub until I was as wrinkled as a shar-pei, but I couldn’t. I was too excited about the thought of possibly meeting the killer in an hour or so and she question of whether or not I’d know him—or her— when I did.
    In the Village, if your sweats are clean, you’re dressed up. SoHo is another story. Not wanting to stick out like a bulldog at a field trial, I put on my long black coatdress with matching pants, wound my hair up, and clipped it at the back of my head. Then I stood by helplessly as most of it worked its way out of the barrette. Looking as if I’d just been Marlene Dietrich’s stand-in in Morocco , I called my dog, and together we headed downtown to see if anyone smelled like a killer.

12
    He Raised His Lovely Eyebrows

    THE BIG BLACK dot was nowhere in sight, and the floor of the Cahill Gallery had been painted iridescent chartreuse. The walls, still white, were hung with Clifford Cole’s paintings, which gave me the same kind of pang I got when I thought about my father not living long enough to see his grandchildren. Then again, who ever said life was fair.
    Despite the fact that this was a posthumous show, the mood was festive. Artists turned out in great numbers, as they always do for openings—and the free food and booze—and there were an unusual number of collectors, especially for the shrinking art market of the nineties. There was press, too, so there would be, it seemed, even more articles in the papers and magazines about the young artist who died so tragically just as his tremendous talent was about to come to light.
    God, did schmaltz sell.