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hated rival. Little care I! Like a catalog clothes shopper mentally trying on an outfit, I slipped into the role of contract killer. It was a bad fit. For one thing, wasn’t arsenic a strange choice of weapon for a hired gun?
    If I were a killer, my most likely victim seemed to be the late Norman Axelrod, who’d apparently been the man who’d fallen to his death. I had, admittedly, been nearby. I did not, however, feel like the sort of indecisive or doubly cautious person who’d have dosed Norman with arsenic and then shoved him onto some rocks; it seemed to me that I’d have made up my mind one way or the other. Besides, if I’d had a contract to do him in, wouldn’t I be reveling in the afterpleasure of a job well done? Or greedily collecting my pay?
    Most of all, what I’d learned about myself so far suggested that I was a decent human being. Caligula probably felt the same way about himself. Still, the worst character trait I’d discovered in myself so far was a harmless, if pathological, attachment to uncooked rice. I was kind to animals. Clean, too!
    At the moment, for example, I was under a hot shower shampooing my hair. Naked, I’d found far less physical damage than I’d expected. My knees were scraped, and the area around my right elbow was badly bruised and abraded, but most of the blood that had pooled with rainwater had been from superficial scratches on my face. The muscles that ached now would scream tomorrow morning. From my scalp rose a large, tender lump that seemed to account for something important. The medical term eluded me. What I caught was a fleeting memory about the need to awaken a victim every two hours to check the pupils of her eyes. For what? When I got out of the shower, I wiped the steam off the mirror over the sink and stared at myself. To my persisting annoyance, I was definitely not Asian. Although my eyes were distinctly Caucasian, there was nothing else wrong with them, at least that I could see, except for fine lines at the comers. The pupils weren’t of different sizes and appeared neither enlarged nor contracted. Great! I wasn’t a drug addict. I tried to guess my age. I remembered looking at my driver’s license, but if I’d read the birth date, I’d now forgotten it. The face was over thirty and under forty. As to its aesthetics, my main response was considerable relief that I looked less like a golden retriever, even a wet golden, than my earlier glance in the rearview mirror had led me to suppose.
    As to my devotion to animals, observation of my own behavior suggested that my reflexes knew a lot more about my dogs than my brain remembered. For example, after I’d listened to the unknown Bonnie’s arsenical phone message, the dogs had performed an energetic song-and-dance routine that hadn’t fooled me one bit. In response to the performance, which consisted of prancing around while emitting unearthly yet identifiably Arctic yowls and yips, I had not mistakenly decided that the three of us were a vaudeville team. Rather, my legs had taken me to the kitchen, where I’d automatically checked the clock over the stove to make sure that it was after five and thus canine dinnertime. More importantly, I hadn’t just naively doled out dog food. Without pondering the matter at all, I’d led the incredibly gorgeous male—what the hell was his name? I knew it better than my own!—to one of two large Vari-Kennels in the bedroom. Having incarcerated him, I’d then filled two dog bowls, replaced the food bag on the top of the refrigerator, put the beautiful female’s dinner on the floor, and dashed back to the male’s crate, where he quit screaming and thrashing the second I fed him. In other words, empty though my head was, my body wisely expressed a practical knowledge of the malamute vocabulary. It is a lexicon that does not extend to the word share.
    What the hell were their names? How could I have forgotten?! What ingratitude! There I’d been, exposed on a