The Dog Who Knew Too Much by Carol Lea Benjamin Read Free Book Online Page B

turned and looked at the windows. Then I looked into Avram’s face.
    â€œWhich one?” I asked.
    â€œThe second from the left,” he said. He turned and walked back to his office, leaving me alone.
    I walked over, unlatched the window, and pushed it out, letting the cold, damp night air hit me in the face.
    The street looked very far away, and just looking down made my knees turn to water.
    The door had been locked, I thought, but the chain hadn’t been latched.
    I felt a wave of nausea as I pictured Lisa looking down, just as I was doing, then climbing onto the sill and falling into nothing.
    I thought about the second curious thing in Lisa’s calendar. All those appointments. All those plans. The days after her death were filled with things to do.
    No handprint on her back, Marty had said.
    Most jumpers were men, I thought, looking down. Female suicides usually used carbon monoxide or some other form of poison, not something that would disfigure them, like a gunshot wound. Or defenestration. Vanity at play, right up to the very end.
    I thought about all Lisa’s pretty things, about those roses, dozens of bouquets, hanging upside down from her ceiling.
    I thought about her pretty face.
    I thought, No way did Lisa Jacobs jump out of this window.
    There was a reason none of this made sense. Lisa Jacobs hadn’t killed herself. Someone had done it for her.
    I leaned out and looked down.
    Then, quickly, I straightened up and stepped back, bumping into Avram. He leaned past me, pulled the window shut, and latched it.
    In those black cotton shoes, he had been so silent I hadn’t heard him approach me.
    I began to shiver. I had stood in front of an open window in a dark room in the middle of the night with a stranger behind me, a man strong enough to lift me and toss me out the window as if I were a sack of trash he was tossing into a Dumpster.
    His hands were trembling.
    So were mine.
    When he moved, I felt myself jump.
    He reached into the pocket of his soft cotton pants.
    â€œWill you lock up after you change your shoes? I must go now.”
    â€œOf course.”
    He handed me a set of keys.
    â€œTomorrow, five o’clock?”
    I nodded.
    â€œGood,” he said. “I’ll have a surprise for you.”
    My heart was pounding so hard I thought I might have a surprise for him too, another of his protégées dead in the middle of the night, this one right in the studio, of a fear-induced heart attack.
    But he never noticed anything.
    He grabbed his jacket from a hook near the door, and in a moment he was gone.
    I was going to leave, too. In fact, I couldn’t wait to get out of there. But then I noticed the door to the office. It was ajar.
    I walked inside and sat in Avi’s chair, putting the keys he’d given me down and placing my hands on the smooth surface of his ruddy teak desk. The computer was to my left, the files to my right. The bookcase behind me covered the entire wall. On the wall to my left, in a simple oak frame, was a photo of Lisa frozen in the middle of doing Cloud Hands. I hesitated for only the briefest moment before turning on the computer.
    â€œInsatiable curiosity,” Frank Petrie used to say, “it’s what makes you broads so damn good at the job.”
    I slid the chair closer, preparing to work. So many secrets, I thought, so little time. But then I looked back at the keys. I already had these. Lisa’s mother had given them to me.
    No one had taken Lisa’s keys to lock up after the murder.
    Whoever killed her already had a set.

9
    Forever, She Said
    The last time in her life a woman feels really comfortable about being seen in a bathing suit is when she’s six, and God knows, I hadn’t seen six in a dog’s age. Nonetheless, there I was in the doorway of the ladies’ locker room at the Club, wishing I had a dog to hide behind. Unfortunately, I’d left him at home.
    At least it wasn’t rush hour at