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“T
hat’s Dinner,” Hank said.

Swell,
I thought.
I have
so
completely misjudged this guy.

“I mean—that’s his name,” he clarified. I let out a silent sigh of relief. I’d never been one to turn down a rack of pork ribs, but had I been on a first-name basis with the entrée… well, I guess I’d fill up on side dishes.

Hank glanced up and down Seventh Street, which was deserted except for a couple making out on a stoop down by Avenue A. “I’ve been waiting for the tranquilizers to wear off before I try to get him inside the house.”

“The tranquilizers?” Maybe I hadn’t misjudged Hank Wheeler after all. Maybe he wasn’t about to eat Dinner for dinner, but what would possess a man to administer downers to a pig? Come to think of it, what nefarious activity must this guy have resorted to in order to get his hands on such a large quantity of them? Dinner looked as though he tipped the scales at around two hundred pounds.

“It was the only way to get him into the truck,” Hank explained. “Without being seen, that is.”

“Without being seen? I would think even the most jaded New Yorker would take note of a pig under the influence.”

“I reckon they would have—if they’d seen him.”

As curious as I was to find out how Hank had managed to render a pig invisible, I was momentarily struck dumb by his use of the word “reckon.” Who did this guy think he was—Brer Rabbit? The men I dated didn’t reckon, they theorized. Or they hazarded guesses.

On the other hand, the men I’d been dating of late weren’t nearly as attractive as Hank Wheeler. I thought back to my list of attributes. I was looking for smart, but not necessarily book smart. So far, so good.

“After he conked out, I rolled him up in an Oriental rug,” he continued. “Got a buddy to help carry him.”

Once again alarm bells clanged inside my head. Was I about to get apprehended for aiding and abetting in a pignapping?

“Don’t you think a leash would have been easier on your lower lumbar?”

“A whole heck of a lot easier. Problem is, there’s a city ordinance against folks keeping pigs—or any other barnyard animals. ‘No pets with hooves,’ is how they put it.”

I hadn’t been aware of the law, but it explained the absence of ovines in Central Park’s Sheep Meadow.

By now Dinner had caught a whiff of the apples and was clambering to his feet. “Let’s get this boy inside,” Hank said, handing me a bruised McIntosh. “Tease him with this here apple, but don’t let him eat it—and hang on real tight. He’s sneaky. After I get the front door open, check to make sure nobody’s coming down the street. Then toss it up to me.”

I could just picture the headline in tomorrow’s
New York Post
:
POLICE POP PERPS IN PLOT TO PILFER PORKY
. Hank ran up the brownstone’s stoop, yanked open the door, and miraculously, I managed to side-arm the apple into his outstretched hand. Dinner scampered up the stoop in hot pursuit.
Not bad for the most nonathletic girl at Camp Arcadia,
I thought. Elinor Ann would have been astonished.

But not nearly as astonished as she became upon hearing I’d ventured into a deserted building with a complete stranger. A complete stranger who was involved in potentially illicit activity with livestock, no less—livestock the rightful ownership of which had yet to be established.

“What were you thinking?” she gasped when I called during the walk home to Ninth Street. “The guy could have been a serial killer!”

“Don’t be ridiculous. Serial killers drive beat-up old Pontiacs, not artfully restored vintage panel trucks.”

“Well, that’s a load off my mind. Tell me—when did you become such an expert on sociopathic behavior?”

“Oh, stop. You sound like somebody’s mother.” Not my mother, of course, but somebody’s. My mother would have said, “Goodness gracious! A pet pig! That doesn’t sound much like a man with a
real
job, dear.”

“I still think you should consider yourself lucky, Dana. For all you knew, he could have been luring you into a house of horrors.”

“Welcome to my house of horrors,” Hank said once Dinner was happily gnawing on his apple in the foyer and the door had been pulled shut. His comment failed to alarm me because the house was indeed horrible. The walls—what was left of them—had been stripped down to their lathing, and the remains of the plaster that had once coated them now blanketed every surface. The central staircase was missing half the risers from its banister, as well as the occasional tread, and wires poked out from assorted holes in the baseboard.

But oh, what a house it must have been, and would be again someday. The floorboards were mahogany, and the ceilings were easily eighteen feet high.

“What happened to this place?” I asked, which seemed a more polite question than the one I wanted to pose, which was, “Do you own this entire building and, if so, how much did you pay for it?”

“Rumor is it was a—uh, house of ill repute—for the past couple of
decades,” he said. “Sure makes sense to me. The upstairs is chopped up into about twenty little bitty rooms. The property wound up getting seized by the city, and they finally got round to auctioning it off a few months back.”

“Please don’t tell me you managed to pick it up for a dollar.”

He laughed.
Nice teeth,
I thought to myself. “Not hardly. Even in this sorry condition it went for—I don’t know. Millions, I guess.”

“You guess?”

“Oh, it ain’t mine.”

Briefly I wondered how many years the additional charge of breaking and entering would add to my sentence for pignapping, but then I recalled the words painted on the side of Hank’s truck.

His eyes traveled up and down the staircase. “Yeah, this here house here sure is one big project.”

Briefly I wondered whether a word nerd could ever hope to find lasting happiness with a man who uttered phrases like “this here house here.”

“The owner’s some kind of world-famous chef,” he explained. “He’s based over in Spain, but he’s got a deal to open a restaurant on Central Park South next year.” He shrugged. “Must be nice. Me, I’m just the contractor.”

I was actually relieved to hear him confirm it. The idea that an attractive man—of greater-than-average height who wore no wedding band, flossed regularly, and drove an enviable vehicle—would also turn out to be landed gentry… Well, next thing I knew, Dinner would sprout wings and fly around the vestibule. Or my alarm clock would jangle me into disappointed consciousness. “Just the contractor” was perfectly fine. And I was sure that, in time, I would come to find his colloquialisms charming. Especially if he fell in love with me.

“Are you also the pig sitter?”

“Nope, he’s all mine. Had the perfect setup for him, too—a first-floor apartment up there on East Twenty-ninth Street. It came with its own
little private courtyard.” Hank inclined his head toward Dinner. “I put one of them pet flaps in the back door so he could go in and out to his heart’s content. I’ll tell you, that was one happy pig.” The loving expression on his face made me think that Hank Wheeler might well be a modern-day Saint Francis of Assisi—only better, since contractors aren’t obliged to take vows of chastity and poverty the way I believe saints are.

“So what caused you two to relocate?”

He grimaced. “Last weekend the landlord went and moved his daughter into the unit right over mine. She looked out the window and—well, here we are. For now, anyways. What with all the work I got to do to get this place livable, that chef won’t be leaving Spain anytime soon.”

I glanced around the decrepit front hallway, taking in the assorted hazards that could maim or prove fatal to humans, let alone pigs. “Don’t you think this environment’s a little dangerous for him?”

“Not all of it.” He grabbed my hand, causing all the molecules in my body to perform the macarena, then led me to a doorway covered with heavy canvas. “Come see our living quarters.” He pulled back the cloth to expose a long corridor, dimly illuminated by a single anemic lightbulb.
This is it,
I thought, rewriting the headline in tomorrow’s
Post
to read:
ARTIST FED TO PIG IN GRUESOME THRILL KILL.

Then again,
I thought, eyeing the bag of apples in Hank’s other hand,
Dinner seems to be a vegetarian.
I allowed myself to be ushered down the corridor and into a room that would not have looked out of place on the cover of a decorating magazine showcasing the most over-the-top kitchens in the Northern Hemisphere. I was nearly blinded by the expanse of stainless steel countertops. Hand-painted porcelain tiles and futuristic appliances competed for my attention.

He pointed to a door adjacent to the glass-fronted refrigerator. “The butler’s pantry is plenty big enough for my bed and his pallet. The two of us’ll be fine in here until I get round to finding us someplace permanent.”

What an understatement,
I thought.
The entire von Trapp family would be fine in here
. Hank pushed a button, and a massive bamboo panel magically disappeared into the ceiling, revealing a lush, if unkempt, backyard. “I’ll bury apples out there for him to dig up after dark, when nobody can see him.”

“Bury them? How come?”

“To keep him busy for longer than ten seconds. Watch this.” He reached for a felt ball that I surmised had been marketed as a dog toy, pulled an apple from the bag, and inserted it into a hollow pocket in the middle of the ball. He tossed it on the floor. Dinner expertly batted it with his snout until the pocket faced upward, then pounced on it with his front hooves. Out popped the apple.

“Impressive,” I said. “You know, I think that was only five seconds.”

“I reckon you’re right. Pigs are real smart.”

And so am I,
I thought to myself,
for coming up with a concept as brilliant as my Twenty-Men-in-New-York theory
. Hank Wheeler was living proof of its efficacy. And he smelled great. It wasn’t cologne—a man wearing scent had always been a deal breaker for me—but some sort of personal pheromone that made me want to rest my head against his shirt and inhale deeply.

“So tell me, Dana Mayo,” he said. “You got a husband I should know about?”

“That depends. You got a wife I should know about?”

“Sure don’t. Just my young son here.”

“Does that mean Dinner’s the ‘Son’ in ‘Hank Wheeler and Son’?”

“Sure does.”

What a relief. A pig was the kind of offspring I could handle.

Hank left his position against the countertop and began to approach me. “I’ll tell you what, Dana. I sure am glad you happened by today. If you hadn’t stopped that guy from breaking into my truck, I don’t guess I’d have no tools right about now.”

That was quick,
I thought to myself.
His colloquialisms are already starting to grow on me
. “Where are you from, anyway?” I asked.

“Las Vegas.”

“Las
Vegas
?!” Elinor Ann said as I ascended my building’s front steps. “I thought you just told me he was a reckoner.” She paused. “Dana, I don’t think people reckon in Las Vegas. Now, please don’t take this the wrong way, but—I think this Hank Wheeler might be some sort of con man.”

“That’s what
I
thought! But it turns out he’s from just
outside
Las Vegas. He grew up on a farm. His family trained animal acts for the casinos.”

“Okay, now I’m sure he’s a con man. I’m going to log on to
America’s Most Wanted
as soon as I hang up.”

Despite my brain’s best efforts to create a mental image of a young Hank Wheeler frolicking in the Nevada dust with assorted camels and elephants, I, too, had been overcome with skepticism at the time. Didn’t ex-convicts invent revisionist stories about their childhoods while paying their debt to society, to be trotted out to gullible females shortly after parole was granted?

By now he was standing so close, I would have been able to count his eyelashes if I’d felt like it. But I had better things to do. I put those party-pooping, suspicious thoughts right out of my head and asked him if he’d ever met Siegfried and Roy.

“Just Siegfried.”

Obviously any form of derisive outburst on my part would have completely ruined the moment, so I bit my lower lip and met his gaze. Dinner stirred from his post near the sink and trotted over. He nosed in between us and planted his hoof on my foot, pinning me to the spot.

Hank leaned in even closer, and I treated myself to another big whiff of pheromones. Man, this guy smelled better than God’s breakfast. “What are you doing tomorrow night?” he said.

I
suppose
he could be telling me the truth about his upbringing,
I thought to myself.
Elephants need room to roam.
“Uh… nothing… I reckon.”

There. I’d said it. I’d reckoned. It wasn’t such a bad word once one got used to it.

He grinned. I grinned back, which isn’t easy to do with two hundred pounds’ worth of pig crushing one’s instep, coupled with the nagging suspicion that one’s potential life partner is selling one a bill of goods. “Then how about you and me go out on a date?”

“I’d like that,” I replied, all the while wondering whether I would be able to walk out of there without dragging my mangled foot behind me when the time came to make my grand exit.