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said to myself, You can’t just tell a dog to do that. He’s a dog. Even if you could, how do you tell him without saying anything? A secret signal? Telepathy?
    “Good boy,” said Sam on his way to the kitchen to pour himself another gallon of vodka.

4
    I like to gaze at my face in the mirror. Not out of vanity but relief.
    I’m ashamed to say the worst thing to ever happen to me wasn’t losing Potato Pete. It was getting blown up along with a table full of hors d’oeuvres when a car bomb went off outside the restaurant where Sam and I were having lunch. It was a kiss on the cheek by a big salad bowl that did the real damage, taking out my left ear and leaving me looking like the Phantom of the Opera’s little sister.
    The relief comes in two installments. If it hadn’t been for Sam, I’d be dead. And if it wasn’t for a team of wiseacre plastic surgeons, I’d be a mangled mess.
    The kicker is they improved on the product. I had all the work done at a hospital on the Upper East Side. Count the number of face-lifts they do per day versus reconstructive surgeries and follow the logic.
    We’re not talking Greta Garbo, but it could have been a lot worse.
    The bigger challenge is the hair, which I can’t even blame on the explosion. It’s called strawberry blond, which means some people think it’s red and some think it’s blond. Either way, there’s way too much of it. They say every woman hates her hair. I don’t hate my hair; I just can’t do anything with it but pretend it doesn’t look like an orange Brillo pad the cat’s been playing with.
    Or as my nurturing dad used to put it, “Ya look like an Irish Rastafarian.”
    I suppose I could cut it all the way back, slash it into submission. But then I worry about the face, still sort of round despite the clever nip and tuck.
    The morning I went over to see Eunice Wolsonowicz I brushed it out as best I could and shoved on a hair band, my go-to solution since grade school.
    The house wasn’t far from where they’d found Sergey’s body, but it took a while to find it. One problem was the mailbox. There wasn’t one. And no street number. Just a driveway interrupting a wall of tangled vines and brush that grew along the road. Halfway down the drive was a little green-and-white sign that said PONTECELLO. If you didn’t know where you were before turning in the driveway, you had no business being there.
    The house was Hamptons cedar siding with white trim and ivy climbing all over the place. The shingles were the old style—really wide and nearly black with age. But the house was only an anchor for the landscaping, the main attraction. It took my breath away. Big old trees with trunks the size of sequoias, a putting-green lawn, and mountains of flowers in every color nature and genetic engineering could connive. Arch-top gates, picket fences, stone walls, and pergolas knitted everything together, and a tall privet hedge toward the rear of a side yard surrounded a swimming pool that looked like a pond in the middle of Sherwood Forest.
    A pair of pickups with trailers was parked in front of the house. I parked alongside and went up to the door to ring the bell.
    “Not here,” came a voice from one of the trucks.
    “Oh, hi,” I said. “I’m looking for Eunice Wolsonowicz.”
    “Still not here,” said the guy in the driver’s seat, sipping from a travel mug and chomping on a wad of cinnamon bun.
    I walked back down the path and leaned on the door of the truck.
    “I didn’t see you there,” I said.
    “That’s ‘cause you didn’t look.”
    “You know where she is?” I asked.
    “Nope.”
    “When she’s coming back?”
    He shook his head.
    “What do you know?” I asked.
    He let his head drift over in my direction.
    “More’n you, apparently.”
    I reached in the window and patted him on the cheek. This is the kind of thing young women can often get away with. Usually the guy on the other end likes it, and this was no exception. He thought I