this morning. I was vacuuming a bull mastiff and there was Ray, standing there with his dewlaps hanging out.”
“You should report him.”
“Bern, it’s a sign of how desperate he is. You know how Ray and I get along.”
“Like oil and water.”
“Like Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bern, but he came into the Poodle Factory because he’s concerned about you. And he’s convinced you could clear up this case for him if you put your mind to it.”
I chewed thoughtfully. “This must be the Lavrenti Beria,” I said. “With the raw garlic and the horseradish.”
“And I have to tell you I agree with him.”
“That’s good,” I said. “It’s even better that garlic agrees with me, because the Zinoviev seems to be laced with it, too. It’s probably just as well that I don’t have a date tonight.”
“He says the Nugents are back. He’s been to see them a couple of times. He’s really investigating in a big way. It’s not like him, Bern.”
“He must smell money.”
“I don’t know what he smells. Not Luke Santangelo, because they must have aired out the place by now. Bern—”
I tossed the Zinoviev wrapper and watched Raffles make his move. He was on it like a pike on a minnow. “He likes sandwich wrappings from the deli best of all,” I told Carolyn. “The smell makes him nuts.”
“You should get him a catnip mouse, Bern. He’d play with it by the hour.”
“You don’t get it, do you? I don’t want to buy toys for him, Carolyn. He’s not a pet.”
“He’s on staff.”
“That’s right. The last thing I want to do is play with him. These are training sessions, they’re for his reflexes.”
“I keep forgetting. I look at the two of you and it looks for all the world like you’re having fun, so I forget that the relationship is essentially serious.”
“Work can be fun,” I said, “if you’re goal-oriented.”
“Like you and Raffles.”
“That’s right,” I said. “There’s something else you should know, besides the fact that Raffles is not a pet, and that’s that I’m no Kinsey Millhone.”
“You think I don’t know that, Bern? You’ve been a lot of things in your life, but you’ve never been a lesbian.”
“What I mean,” I said, “is that I’m not a detective. I don’t solve crimes.”
“You have in the past, Bern.”
“Once or twice.”
“More than that.”
“A few times,” I conceded. “But it just happened. One way or another I wound up in a jam and in the course of getting out of it I happened to stumble on the solution to a homicide. It was serendipity, that’s all. I was looking for one thing and I found something else.”
“And that’s what happened here, Bern. You were looking for something to steal and you found a dead body.”
“And I went home, remember?”
“But you went back.”
“Only to go home again. Thomas Wolfe was wrong, you can go home again, and I did. I’m out of it, Carolyn. They dropped the charges, did I tell you that? For me the case is over.” I flipped a paper ball, but Raffles was still busy killing the last one. “If you want somebody to solve it,” I said, “why don’t you try the cat?”
“The cat?”
“Raffles,” I said. “Maybe he’ll figure it out for you, like in those books by What’s-her-name.”
“Lillian Jackson Braun.”
“That’s the one. Everybody’s stymied, and then the genius cat breaks a T’ang vase or coughs up a hairball, and that provides the vital clue that nails another killer. I forget his name, this crime-solving cat.”
“It’s Ko-Ko. He’s Siamese.”
“Good for him. He’s been doing this forever, hasn’t he? Ko-Ko must be getting a little long in the fang by now. She ought to call the next one The Cat Who Lived Forever. I can’t believe some Siamese is that much sharper than old Raffles here. Go ahead, ask him who did it. Maybe he’ll knock a book off the shelves and answer all your questions.”
“You think you’re pretty funny, don’t you, Bern?”
“Well…”
“Well, what the hell,” she said. “Raffles, what’s the solution to the mystery of the stiff in the tub?”
Raffles stopped what he was doing, which was the systematic demolition of one of the sandwich-wrapper mice. He backed away from it, extended his front paws, stretched, extended his back paws, stretched again, and then arched his back, looking like something that belonged on a Halloween card. Then he wagged the tail he didn’t have—I can’t think of another way to say it—and leaped straight up in the air, grabbing at something only he could see. He landed