“The breed already has a bad name.”
“And I can see why. If this dog was a movie actor, Keller, he’d be Jack Elam.”
“I always liked Jack Elam.”
“You didn’t let me finish. He’d be like Jack Elam, but nasty.”
“What does he do, Dot? Eat children?”
She shook her head. “If he ever bit a kid,” she said, “or even snarled good and hard at one, that’d be the end of him. The law’s set up to protect people from dogs. What with due process and everything, he might rip the throats out of a few tykes before the law caught up with him, but once it did he’d be out of the game and on his way to Doggie Heaven.”
“Would he go to heaven? I mean, if he killed a kid—”
“All dogs go to heaven, Keller, even the bad ones. Where was I?”
“He doesn’t bite children.”
“Never has. Loves people, wants to make nice to everyone. If he sees another dog, however, or a cat or a ferret or a hamster, it’s another story. He kills it.”
“Oh.”
“He lives with his owner in the middle of Manhattan,” she said, “and she takes him to Central Park and lets him off his leash, and whenever he gets the chance he kills something. You’re going to ask why somebody doesn’t do something.”
“Well, why don’t they?”
“Because about all you can do, it turns out, is sue the owner, and about all you can collect is the replacement value of your pet, and you’ve got to go through the legal system to get that much. You can’t have the dog put down for killing other dogs, and you can’t press criminal charges against the owner. Meanwhile, you’ve still got the dog out there, a menace to other dogs.”
“That doesn’t make sense.”
“Hardly anything does, Keller. Anyway, a couple of women lost their pets and they don’t want to take it anymore. One had a twelve-year-old Yorkie and the other had a frisky Weimaraner pup, and neither one had a chance against Fluffy, and—”
“Fluffy?”
“I know.”
“This killer pit bull is named Fluffy?”
“That’s his call name. He’s registered as Percy Bysshe Shelley, Keller, whom you’ll recall as the author of ‘Ozymandias.’ I suppose they could call him Percy, or Bysshe, or even Shelley, but instead they went for Fluffy.”
And Fluffy went for the Yorkie and the Weimaraner, with tragic results. As Dot explained it, this did seem like a time when one had to go outside the law to get results. But did they have to turn to a high-priced hit man? Couldn’t they just do it themselves?
“You’d think so,” Dot said. “But this is New York, Keller, and these are a couple of respectable middle-class women. They don’t own guns. They could probably get their hands on a bread knife, but I can’t see them trying to stab Fluffy, and evidently neither can they.”
“Even so,” he said, “how did they find their way to us?”
“Somebody knew somebody who knew somebody.”
“Who knew us?”
“Not exactly. Someone’s ex-husband’s brother-in-law is in the garment trade, and he knows a fellow in Chicago who can get things taken care of. And this fellow in Chicago picked up the phone, and next thing you know my phone was ringing.”
“And he said, ‘Have you got anybody who’d like to kill a dog?’”
“I’m not sure he knows it’s a dog. He gave me a number to call, and I drove twenty miles and picked up a pay phone and called it.”
“And somebody answered?”
“The woman who’s going to meet you at the airport.”
“A woman’s going to meet me? At an airport?”
“She had somebody call Chicago,” Dot said, “so I told her I was calling from Chicago, and she thinks you’re flying in from Chicago. So she’ll go to JFK to meet a flight from Chicago, and you’ll show up, looking like you just walked off a plane, and she’ll never guess that you’re local.”
“I don’t have a Chicago accent.”
“You don’t have any kind of an accent, Keller. You could be a radio announcer.”
“I could?”
“Well, it’s probably a little late in life for a career change, but you could have. Look, here’s the thing. Unless Fluffy gets his teeth in you, your risk here is minimal. If they catch you for killing a dog, about the worst that can happen to you is a fine. But they won’t catch you, because they won’t look for you, because catching a dog killer doesn’t get top priority at the NYPD. But what we don’t want is for the client to suspect that you’re local.”
“Because it could blow my cover sooner or later.”
“I suppose it could,” she said, “but that’s the least of it. The last thing we want is people thinking a top New York hit man will kill dogs for chump change.”
“The person I spoke to said there was no need for us to meet. She told me all I had to do was supply the name and address of the dog’s owner, and you could take it from there. But that just didn’t seem right to me. Suppose you got the wrong dog by mistake? I’d never forgive myself.”
That seemed extreme to Keller. There had been a time in St. Louis when he’d gotten the wrong man, through no fault of his own, and it hadn’t taken him terribly long to forgive himself. On the other hand, forgiving himself came easy to him. His, he’d come to realize, was a forgiving nature.
“Is the coffee all right, Mr. Niebauer? It feels strange calling you Mr. Niebauer, but I don’t know your first name. Though come to think of it I probably don’t know your last name either, because I don’t suppose it’s Niebauer, is it?”
“The coffee’s fine,” he said. “And no, my name’s not Niebauer. It’s not Paul, either, but you could call me that.”
“Paul,” she said. “I always liked that name.”
Her name was Evelyn, and he’d never had strong feelings about it one way or another, but he’d have preferred not to know it, just as he’d have preferred not to be sitting in the kitchen of her West End Avenue apartment, and not to know that her husband was an attorney named George Augenblick, that they had no children, and that their eight-month-old Weimaraner had answered to the name of Rilke.
“I suppose we could have called him Rainer,” she said, “but we called him Rilke.” He must have looked blank, because she explained that they’d named him for Rainer Maria Rilke. “He had the nature of a German Romantic poet,” she added, “and of course the breed is German in origin. From Weimar, as in Weimar Republic. You must think I’m silly, saying a young dog had the nature of a poet.”
“Not at all.”
“George thinks I’m silly. He humors me, which is good, I suppose, except he’s careful to make it clear to me and everyone else that that’s what he’s doing. Humoring me. And I in turn pretend I don’t know about his girlfriends.”
“Uh,” Keller said.
They’d come to her apartment because they had to talk somewhere. They’d shared long silences in the cab, interrupted briefly by observations about the weather, and her kitchen seemed a better bet than a coffee shop, or any other public place. Still, Keller wasn’t crazy about the idea. If you were dealing with pros, a certain amount of client contact was just barely acceptable. With amateurs, you really wanted to keep your distance.
“If he knew about you,” Evelyn said, “he’d have a fit. It’s just a dog, he said. Let it go, he said. You want another dog, I’ll buy you another dog. Maybe I am being silly, I don’t know, but George, George just doesn’t get the point.”
She’d taken her glasses off while she was talking, and now she turned her eyes on him. They were a deep blue, and luminous.
“More coffee, Paul? No? Then maybe we should go look for that woman and her dog. If we can’t find her, at least I can show you where they live.”