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know me.”
    There was a silence then, as we both waited.
    “I got your number from your brother-in-law.
    Ted.”
    “Oh,” I had said, my voice catching in my throat.
    I closed my eyes and thought about the last message on the tape from Clifford’s answering machine.
    “You don’t know me,” a woman’s voice had said. “but I have a beautiful basenji bitch, pointed, she just needs one more major, and I was interested in Magritte, you know, if you hire him out at stud.” Sex, it can fucking ruin you.

6
    It Looked Like an Enormous Bowling Ball

    IT WAS SO cold when I got up, I could see my breath indoors. One disadvantage of living in the cottage is that I get to pay my own heat bill, and by necessity and nature I’m cheap. If Dashiell were a malamute, I could say I keep the place as cold as the inside of a refrigerator to prevent him from blowing his coat. But the truth is, if he were a malamute, he’d blow it anyway. You really can’t fool Mother Nature.
    I went downstairs and opened the front door for Dash. A moment later, he was back with the New York Times , which gets pitched over the locked gate in an electric blue plastic bag.
    It was going to be cold and windy with a chance of snow toward evening, the homeless were causing safety and sanitation problems at Penn Station, Tiffany’s was advertising a diamond bracelet for about the price of a one-bedroom apartment, and a man in Oregon had poisoned his wife, who, the Times reported, had survived to testify at his trial, in his defense.
    I fed Dashiell, got dressed, and headed downtown to Clifford Cole’s loft.
    Where Dennis had warmed the cavernous space with color, Cliff’s studio area was white—tin ceiling, walls, and wooden floor all done in a shiny enamel so that when i arrived, the sun was bouncing off whatever surface it hit, except of course the paintings, where the light seemed to become absorbed into the canvas. The paintings apparently had not been touched since the murder, and I made a note to find out who owned them now. Then I took some photographs of the studio.
    All the paintings in the large room were Cliff’s, all huge, some telling their story in three or even four canvases. There was one set of three canvases, hung so that there were only inches between where one stopped and the next began, that took up the entire north wall of the huge space. The first canvas showed a pale blue wail with a window. Out the window was a single branch with buds, a March branch, and on the pale wooden floor a yellow and black ball, the kind that squeaks when squeezed. The second canvas showed more of the same place, blue wall, no window this time, a single wooden chair with a black baseball cay» with a red B on it hanging over the left-hand corner of the ladder-back, a green frog under the chair, the same kind Henri had gotten for his Jimmy dog and then kept “for memories.” The third canvas showed the blue wall, the pickled whitish wooden floor, and the back end of Magritte, as if he had been caught walking out of the picture. In the lower right-hand corner of the last panel of the triptych, Clifford had printed the title of the painting in small, neat letters, all lowercase: out, damned spot.
    There was another painting of Magritte on the south wall, this one called rising son. It showed another underfurnished room. Even the paint was used starkly in these portraits. The color was rich, but the brush strokes were very even, and you could see the texture of the canvas as part of the painting. At the top of the portrait, you could see the white-socked feet of the basenji, as if this time Magritte were floating up out of his own portrait.
    There were two paintings standing against that wall, both done at the beach. In one, an oversize close-up of part of a wooden beach house, painted in shades of gray: you could see through the large window that it was raining indoors. The small printed title read home, sweet home. The other painting showed Magritte