At quarter of five, after a shower, breakfast, coffee, and a hit of E-mail, I should have done some work, but as I’d told Dr. Foote, fatal dog attacks are not a sunrise topic. I had a second project, but Rita and my third-floor tenants had made me promise to conduct the research for it only when they were out of the house. They’d also made me swear to ventilate the building after each experiment. I’d have done that anyway. You can grind chicken livers and mix them with commeal, or douse calves’ liver in garlic powder and sherry, or just nuke a slab of lamb’s liver in the microwave, but no matter what kind of liver you use and how you cook it, it stinks. Dogs disagree. Yes, indeed, as you’ve probably guessed, my new project was a cookbook. The original working title had been A Hundred and One Ways to Cook Liver. It soon became apparent that I’d underestimated the scope of my subject. Two Hundred and One...? Five Hundred and One...? Or even (gasp!), A Thousand and One Irresistibly Tempting Ways to Cook Liver, Liver, and More LIVER?Times best-seller list, here I come!Anyway, in Ceci’s case, the observation about elderly people waking early was true, and she’d mentioned that her dog group began to gather in the park at dawn, so I felt free to call her and accept the invitation to accompany her.
