Description: THE YOUNG MAN AND HIS PARACHUTE A PHOTOGRAPH OPENS OLD WOUNDS It''s not every day that a young man clad only in boxer shorts embossed with red hearts dies beneath an opened parachute in a small third-floor room in one of New York''s last boardinghouses. It''s even rarer that a visual artist, the owner of a Labrador retriever equipped with a generous belly, a fine mind and an admirable temperament, is called to the scene by the police department before the body is even cold. Yet this is exactly what happened just after ten p.m. on a recent mild March night. I was sitting on my haunches in our cozy apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, looking into the middle distance and allowing a mother lode of Chinese spareribs to settle pleasantly in my gullet. I felt a postdinner nap coming on and was not planning to resist (in this hectic world it is often a struggle to get my twelve-hour sleep quota). Harry, my twenty-something owner, was beginning the third hour of a documentary on the life of Vincent van Gogh, narrated, it seemed, by a narcoleptic whose voice rose at all the wrong moments, as if he had just been poked awake again in the sound booth. Then the phone rang. My owner had already taken me for my evening Numbers 1 and 2 (shortchanging himself van Gogh''s contentious roommateship with Gauguin at Arles) and was loath to be roused from Grandfather Oswald''s La-Z-Boy for anything short of an evacuation of Manhattan for the apocalypse. He let the machine pick up, and Imogen''s voice filled our living room. "Leave a message after the beep," she said before trailing off into an uncertain whisper. "Harry, is it a beep?" The mild but decisive voice of the caller came next. "Harry, it''s Detective Davis. If you''re there, pick up. It''s important. It involves . . . her." Harry flew out of his La-Z-Boy recliner and grabbed the phone. My nose could detect the strong waves of hope, excitement and possibility that my owner shed. I wondered if Detective Peter Davis, the lead investigator in Imogen''s case, had a breakthrough to report. Our lovely Imogen, who had rescued me from the pet-store clods and then included Harry in our domestic arrangements, had disappeared over a year before without a word or lead--foul play suspected. I had not yet informed Harry, but I had spotted her once again disappearing into a subway tunnel after the successful--if brutal--conclusion to our last mystery. That investigation had pushed both Harry and me to great extremes of endurance and ingenuity, and the end found us on the verge of an even larger mystery, which promised to span the globe in a conspiratorial and high-stakes web before it brought some resolution to our loss of Imogen. Detective Davis''s phone call was the beginning of what would prove to be Act II. "I''m here," Harry said into the receiver, then listened without a word. He found a pen amid a pile of paintbrushes on the side table and scribbled down an address. "Okay, Peter. I''ll be there in twenty minutes." My owner hung up the phone, grabbed a light jacket and disappeared through the door and down the stairs without a word to his dog. The peace was shattered--what is peace if it can be broken so easily?--and all prospects of an after-dinner nap seemed to vanish in the face of this fresh anxiety. But fortunately I am built to endure, and soon the soporific magic of the spareribs began to affect me and I closed my eyes for a dreamless snooze. Let me now share with you the particular facts that mark my existence. I am a Labrador retriever who lives in Manhattan, the isle of my birth, to which I am deeply attached. I am also sentient. Other dogs might be as well, to a greater or lesser degree, but few take pleasure from reading the important works of your human literature or make expansive journeys of imagination as Yours Truly does. I am self-taught, having learned to read from the pages of New York''s finest tabloid newspapers laid out for my house-training. The writers, particularly those responsible for headlines, are the unheralded poets of our age (by way of evidence, the Post ''s sublime: HEADLESS BODY FOUND IN TOPLESS BAR). Lest I lose myself in the sometimes lurid virtues of the tabloid, the main challenge of this Labrador''s life is the fact that his prodigious brain--2.3 pounds of smoothly functioning gelatinous gray matter--is trapped within a body as unresponsive to the nuances of thought as a piece of chocolate (a delicacy I am supposed to avoid because my liver cannot handle it). Because of this physical "frozenness," I cannot express in any facial gesture what I am thinking. Blankness is my trademark, though many humans describe my eyes as "soulful." My tail has a life of its own and wags idiotically even when I am in a black mood. Then there is an involuntary body tremble that my owner frequently mistakes for bladder-based urgency because it jingles the tags on my collar (not that I am ever ungrateful for regular outings to the sidewalks, dog runs or parks of New York). Owners, please never underestimate the importance of liberal access to Numbers 1 and 2--no need to make us test our house-trained credentials. Being unable to choose when I can relieve myself and under what conditions is symbolic of the many restrictions in my life. I cannot, for example, simply walk out the front door of our apartment and wander the streets without a human chaperone. For most of my relatively short life (I will be six in November) I have not minded these restrictions. I have had wonderful people to whom I belonged and who belonged to me. I have had my books and a cozy corner in which to discreetly enjoy them, to listen to the wind or the rain on the drainpipe and mull over the wisdom of the classics and the music of words. But then Imogen disappeared and people died and I needed to apply whatever strengths I had to protecting my owner and learning the truth. Prior to this development I had always steered clear of trying to communicate with humans. As warm as my relations are with Harry, I never trusted the species as a whole. There is always some P. T. Barnum in the woodwork, ready to try to make a buck from the latest animal freak, or, worse still, an overly zealous scientist eager to shave off every inch of a Labrador''s fur and snap on the electrodes to prove that we are a higher form of life. No thank you. But despite my reluctance to "shine," the necessities of protecting my owner and solving a mystery required that I construct a bridge between species. I did this by using Harry''s favorite cereal, Alpha-Bits, and composing messages from "beyond" out of the friendly little letters. Harry is susceptible to the idea of the paranormal. Ghosts, spirits, communication from beyond now make up part of his worldview. Someday, I hope, this irrational fever will pass, but we all nurse our wounds differently and losing Imogen was a harsh blow. For my part, I stick to reason and those elements of intuition and dog sense that have helped me navigate this life. Perhaps I stick to these things a little too much. The point, though, is that I used Harry''s susceptibility as a way to introduce the messages I wrote and make them credible. The messages came from a spirit guide whom I dubbed Holmes. My uncritical owner left the stone unturned and I was never found out, even though near the end I had Holmes indicate that I had been "inspired" and that my owner should follow my lead. Harry returned to our apartment after three hours, and I awoke from my after-dinner slumber to find him smoking one of his emergency cigarettes as he came through the door. Things were clearly very grim. Fortunately, my owner often gives voice to his recent experiences and thus keeps his dog well informed. The following is a narrative of what transpired after Harry left our apartment, which I have pieced together from his reiteration of events and information I gathered soon after. My owner had taken a taxi to the address provided by Detective Davis. He stepped out of the cab to find himself standing before a large red-brick residential building in the East Village. Most of the windows were dark, but one room on the third floor was ablaze with light, and Harry saw figures appear and disappear in the window: a man with a tape measure; someone else in a big white suit with a face mask. It was a forensics team collecting evidence. "No one in. No one out," a police officer said. He stood between Harry and the entrance to the building. "Detective Davis told me to come," Harry said. The policeman stepped aside. Harry climbed a short flight of stairs and, entering through the open front door, found himself in the lobby of what could have been mistaken for a New England bed-and-breakfast if it were not filled with an oddly incongruous bunch of foreign nationals, drag queens and vagrants. "Wow," Harry muttered as he absorbed the scene. Rough-and-tumble bachelor-athlete type though Harry may be, even my owner knows that doilies, woven wicker baskets, plastic cornucopias with waxy grapes do not typically belong in the East Village and definitely not with this pirate crew. "They''re the residents," Detective Davis said from the landing of the interior staircase. He spoke loudly, as if he wanted everyone to hear. "Come on upstairs, Harry." Harry did as he was told and began to climb the several flights of stairs to the third floor. "Interesting place," Harry said. "What is it?" "A boardinghouse," Detective Davis said. "Probably one of the last ones in Manhattan. There used to be hundreds, thousands even. Then they turned most of them into SROs--single-resident-occupancy bu

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