I didn’t go directly home from Serge’s. First I crossed back over the highway, walked uptown to the Gansevoort Street dog run, a private, locked run for members only, and looked through the chain link fence at the dogs playing ball to see if there were any pulis there. If I wanted to hide a purebred dog, I’d hide it in plain sight, especially a breed like the puli—cords hanging over their faces, most of them black, except to their owners, they all look pretty much alike.

But there were no pulis there, only the more popular breeds—two Goldens, a chocolate lab, even more popular now that President Clinton had one, a Dalmatian, two mixed breeds, and a border collie, crouching, her eye on the ball she was waiting for her owner to throw, as intense as if she were herding sheep.

I waited for the toss.

“Get it, Mavis,” the woman said, the dog halfway there before the words were out.

We crossed the highway at Gansevoort Street, heading for Beasty Feast on Hudson. If someone were bringing a puli in, or having food delivered for one, they would know it. That is, if Lady were still in the Village and if her new owner spared no expense, feeding her premium dog food in lieu of a supermarket brand.

The woman who ran the store began to shake her head.

“No one came in with a puli in the last few weeks.”

The delivery man shook his head, too.

“No deliveries for pulis.” He scratched the tip of his nose with one finger. “There’s a new Tibetan terrier on Jane Street. Cute as a button. And Jack Russells, you’re looking for a Jack Russell, I can give you twenty addresses.”

I left my card, just in case.

I tried their other stores, too—the one on Washington Street near Charles and the one all the way over on Bleecker, near Sixth Avenue.

If I was going to meet Venus at the gym every day, I needed new shoes. The ones I was wearing let me feel every crack in the sidewalk. I walked around the corner to Sixth Avenue and dropped an obscene amount of money on a pair of cross trainers that made me feel as if I were walking on marshmallows.

The salesman, a skinny old guy, his mustache wiggling as he slowly enunciated each word, cradled one of my pathetic-looking old sneakers in one hand.

“There are only so many miles in a pair of shoes,” he said, turning my shoe over, shaking his head. “Do you want me to toss these?”

“No. I’ll give them one last walk,” I told him. “For closure.”

On the way home I stopped at Beverly Hill’s Laundro-mutt to see if anyone had a puli bathed recently. No one had.

At Pet’s Kitchen, Dashiell put his paws up on the counter, and Sammy inserted a doggie bagel into his mouth. We both listened as Dashiell crunched, a viscerally pleasing sound, as basic as it gets.

I asked my question. Sammy shook his head. No new customer with a puli. But he promised to call, just in case.

When we got home, Dashiell hit the water bowl in the garden big time, then crashed at the base of the oak tree, too tired to make it into the house. I went inside, dropped the shoe box on the table, and snagged the cordless phone and the directory, calling the rest of the grooming shops, same question: Someone new come in with a puli to be bathed?

“Saw the sign,” one guy said. “Didn’t see the dog.”

“Too bad.”

“Good luck, lady,” he said. “Tough thing, losing a dog like that, never knowing what happened to her.”

I left my number, just in case.

I sat on the steps, the phone in my hand, thinking about the bunchers—people who steal pet dogs to sell them to laboratories to be experimented on—but I thought they mostly worked the ’burbs, taking dogs off porches and out of yards, dogs left outside when the owner wasn’t home, trusting dogs, lonely dogs, easy as pie to steal.

Lady wouldn’t have been out alone.

And the door at Harbor View closed and locked automatically. You couldn’t leave it open if you tried, not unless you put something in front of it to hold it open. Surely someone would have noticed, had that been the case.

I looked up the animal shelters and called those, too. Sometimes even when you report a dog lost, the report gets lost, falls through the cracks, and when the dog comes in, no one puts two and two together, gets it back where it belongs. But no, no pulis had come in. And when I asked if there’d been an unusual number of thefts reported, I was told no, there weren’t, not this summer.

“Thefts in the city usually take place in Central Park, or Riverside,” a man with a gravelly voice told me. “Owners have the dogs off leash and get involved in a conversation, they turn around, seems like a minute later, the dog is gone. Last time we got a lot of those calls,” he said, “was last fall, Riverside Park, mostly way uptown, near the university. Nothing recently.”

Dashiell had rolled over onto his side and fallen asleep, his head resting on one of the exposed roots of the tree. I sat there, the directory on my lap, just thinking. Then I got up, switched directories, got the residential one. When you don’t know which pieces of information are significant, you need to gather them all; as my erstwhile employer Frank Petrie used to say, you never know.

I looked up Harry Dietrich to see where he might have been headed the last time he left Harbor View. The Upper East Side. Park Avenue. Where else would a rich man live?

Had he been heading north, toward the subway? Had he heard the wheels of the bicycle bumping over the broken sidewalk? Had he turned around, curious?

After a moment, I looked up Eli Kagan, because knowing more is always better than knowing less, and besides, I was too hot to climb a flight of stairs and take a shower. No Eli Kagan in Manhattan. Either not listed, or in another borough. I’d find out tomorrow.

Sitting there, not wanting to move, I looked under W next. There was a Venus White right in the neighborhood, at the Archives, the pricey rental building that formerly housed the Federal Archives, with a gym, a supermarket, a dry cleaner, and a catering place on the ground floor. The building was bounded by Christopher, Greenwich, Barrow, and Washington Streets—an easy walk to work, nice, open views, maybe even a river view, just like at work.

I wouldn’t have thought a nonprofit institution would pay its manager enough to live at the Archives, but she did have that lovely pin she was wearing at the gallery, and the clothes she wore didn’t look as if they came from Kmart.

Thinking about Venus’s story, I pictured her at the gym, remembering the necklace she wore while she was working out. It must have been under her shirt at work, because I hadn’t seen it there; but at the gym, there’d be nothing to hide it under, not an ounce on her body she needed to cover up with a big shirt or loose pants, everything out there, looking terrific. Including that necklace.

It looked like the heart Carder advertised every few weeks in the Times—the ad saying, Start something, or, Because she has your heart, something like that, the heart and chain sold separately, the whole shebang costing slightly more than my yearly nut for renting the little back cottage on Tenth Street I’ve lived in for four and a half years.

It sure didn’t look like the kind of jewelry a woman would buy herself.

If Venus had been so lonely, where had it come from—the married man she met on-line?

And why was I hearing about him anyway? What did he have to do with a missing dog, a dead old guy, a bunch of witnesses who don’t speak and couldn’t tell you the time of day if they did, and this gorgeous, mysterious black woman who hires me because she thinks her life’s in danger, then won’t tell me why?