Dog's Green Earth

by Neil S. Plakcy

  “You should call in sick today,” she said. “Stay home, take a nap, play with Rochester.”

  “I can’t. Joey’s out with his father and somebody’s got to manage Friar Lake.”

  I looked at the clock. It was hard to realize that only two hours had passed since Rochester and I began walking down the sidewalk between the lakes. “I’d better get a move on. Rigoberto and Juan get there at seven-thirty and they’ll stand around with no one to tell them what to do.”

  “Give me your phone. Joey can go up there for the morning and see his dad in the afternoon.”

  I handed her the phone, and she spoke to Joey while she poured my tea. “That’s taken care of. He’ll be there until noon. Now, I’m going to make you breakfast. We still have some lox left over from Sunday’s bagels, so I’ll make you lox and eggs, and then you’ll take a nap, all right?”

  “Yes, love,” I said. By the time I was finished with breakfast, I was yawning, so I went upstairs and crawled under the covers, with Rochester on the bed beside me. I stroked his golden head, and before I knew it I was asleep.

  By the time I woke, nearly two hours later, Lili had long since left for work. I’d gotten a text from Joey that he was at Friar Lake and everything was fine. I got up and took a shower, and as I was getting dressed Rick called me. “You already at work?” he asked.

  “Nope, I took a nap for a while. Just getting ready to go now.”

  “You think I could come over and talk for a few minutes?”

  “Sure. I don’t have to be up at Friar Lake until noon.”

  He arrived a few minutes later, and while he headed for the kitchen table I got my laptop and joined him there. “I’ve been in the management office,” he said. “You know Mr. Chatzky’s secretary, Lois?”

  I nodded.

  “She’s pretty broken up. She gave me a whole file of complaints people had made about her boss – both paper and digital. Then she had to shut the office down and go home to rest. There are a lot of bad feelings going on around here.”

  “To put it mildly.” While I spoke, I turned on my laptop and brought up the Hi Neighbor site. “Let me show you what’s been happening online.”

  Once I was able to log in to Hi Neighbor, I turned the screen so Rick could see it. “Wow. That’s a lot of messages,” he said, as I scrolled through them.

  “I can go through them for you this evening,” I said. “Pull out the specific issues and which neighbor is complaining about them.”

  “That would be great.” He sat forward in his chair and pulled out the pocket notebook he carried, along with a pen. I noticed that he’d upgraded since meeting Tamsen, who sold advertising specialties. The ones he used now were fancier, with leather covers embossed with corporate logos – product samples, he had told me once. His pen was a gold Cross with a different logo on the body. “Tell me again about last night. You went to a meeting?”

  Rick took notes as I ran through my attendance at the design committee meeting, and the way Todd had showed up near the end. “About what time do you think that was?”

  “The meeting was called for eight,” I said. “We started a few minutes late, and then ran through a bunch of complains. It had to be at least eight-thirty before Todd showed up. He talked for a couple of minutes, and then—”

  “Hold on,” Rick interrupted. “What did he talk about?”

  “Apologized for being late. Said he was on a conference call about changes that came down from Pennsylvania Properties, the company our association hires to manage River Bend. Todd and Lois work for them.”

  He made more notes. “Did he say what kind of changes those would be?”

  I struggled to remember. “Nothing specific. My case came up after that, and I got the approval I wanted, so I left. When I got home Lili was watching a program on TV in the living room. It was about nine o’clock by then.”

  Rick closed his notebook. “I spoke with Mr. Garner this morning. He says that the meeting finished around nine-thirty, but he and Mr. Oscar Panaccio stayed around for a few minutes to talk with Mr. Chatzky about the procedural changes he had learned about on his call.”

  “Did he say what they are?”

  “Chatzky wouldn’t say – or at least that’s what Garner told me. Garner said that Panaccio and Chatzky argued, and Panaccio left angrily.”

  “Throwing Oscar Panaccio under the bus.”

  “Well, nobody’s a clear suspect yet. There are, what, over seven hundred homes in this community? That’s a lot of people with opportunity.”

  “River Bend keeps a record of every visitor,” I said. “You can check with the guard at the gatehouse and get a list of who else was here last night.”

  “This isn’t my first time at the rodeo,” Rick said drily. “I’ve already put that request in. But they only request ID from the driver, not the passengers, so there could be even more people in the area than we know about.”

  “I’ll do what I can with the information from Hi Neighbor to see who has a motive,” I said. “Maybe that will help you narrow things down.”

  “I could use some narrowing,” Rick said. “Right now the medical examiner puts the time of death at sometime between nine PM and three AM, though he hopes to get a better estimate after the autopsy. I’ve got a lot of time to account for and a lot more people to interview.”

  Rick left, his next stop to see Todd’s widow, an orthodontist with an office on Main Street in Stewart’s Crossing. I didn’t envy him that visit.

  8: Speculation

  By the time I got to Friar Lake it was close to noon. I parked in front of my office and walked down to Joey’s building with Rochester. I found him at his desk, with a file folder open in front of him. “Thanks for doing all my filing,” he said, holding up the folder. “It was getting away from me.”

  “You’re welcome. And thank you coming in.” I slid into the chair across from him and Rochester sprawled at my feet. “I had a rough morning.”

  “So Lili said. You found a dead body?”

  “Well, Rochester led me there,” I said. My golden boy looked up at the sound of his name, and I reached down to stroke the soft down at the top of his head. “The guy was the property manager for our homeowner’s association.”

  “That’s awful. The police don’t think you killed him, do they?”

  I shook my head. “He’d been dead for a couple of hours by then.” I shivered, despite the warm air inside Joey’s office. “So, how’s your dad?”

  “He’s getting ready for surgery tomorrow. His heart rate and his blood pressure are stable, though he’s still hooked up to a bunch of monitors.”

  “How do you want me to manage Juan and Rigoberto while you’re gone?”

  “Usually I just tell Juan and Rigoberto what to do every day, but I put together a list for you to follow with them. And I want to come back tomorrow afternoon so you and I can do a final run-through of the property before the executive committee meeting on Friday.”

  “That would be great.”

  We walked outside, where he beeped open his truck, and Rochester sat by my side. “Send my regards to your dad,” I said, as he hopped inside.

  “Will do,” he called.

  I went into my office, where I found the detailed list Joey had assembled for me. I felt I could follow all that. I caught up on my own emails and paperwork, and before I knew it, five o’clock had rolled around and I drove back home with Rochester.

  When he and I walked around River Bend that evening, everyone I met wanted to talk about Todd’s murder. That is, all the humans; the dogs were happy to sniff each other, bark and play. The first pair we spotted was Mindy Ebersol and Angel, a fluffy white Coton de Tulear who would only let Rochester sniff for a minute or two before barking to assert his dominance.

  “Did you hear about Todd?” Mindy asked. She was an accountant in her twenties who favored crop tops and short shorts to show off her gym-toned body. She wore her blonde hair in a ponytail on the top of her head that reminded
me of Pebbles Flintstone.

  “I did,” I said. “It’s terrible.”

  “I heard he was killed right here in River Bend,” she said, with a shiver. “Do you think it was a mob hit?”

  My jaw dropped open. “Like the Mafia or something? What makes you say that?”

  “My friend Susan lives in South Philly and she’s always talking about the Mafia, and how they infiltrate everywhere, from prostitution to soda deliveries. Maybe they’re trying to move in on association management.”

  “I doubt it. But I’m sure the police will check everyone who came in or out last night.”

  “It’s creepy,” Mindy said, as Angel began to bark and Rochester backed away. “I moved out here to the suburbs to get away from crime and it followed me here.”

  I was only a bit astonished at the way she had personalized the crime, even though it had nothing to do with her. Many Eastern students were the same way, assuming that the College and the world were out to get them when they disagreed with a new rule.

  “Don’t take it too hard. I’m sure the police will find out who did it.”

  A couple of minutes later we rounded a corner and ran into Eric Hoenigman and Gargamel. We both unclipped our dogs’ leashes and Rochester and the big English setter romped through one of the open lots between pods of townhouses. The grass was up to their ankles, and Eric said, “I hope the new property manager leans on the landscapers better.”

  Man, Todd was barely cold at the Medical Examiner’s office and Eric was already talking about his replacement. “I hope so, too.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised if it was the landscape contractor who killed him,” Eric said. “I heard that Todd was always arguing with him.”

  “Really? How’d you hear that?”

  He shrugged. “Just one of those things you hear, walking around. Makes me glad I’m an engineer and I never have to talk to clients or suppliers. Just sit at my computer with my headphones on and put pieces together.”

  He called Gargamel over and Rochester followed. We hooked up their leashes again and Rochester and I went in the opposite direction, toward home. We passed Norah, the neighbor who’d been worried about having to remove her big clay pots, and she expressed relief that Todd was dead. “He was a jerk and I for one won’t miss him,” she said. “They need to get a woman in that job. Women are more collaborative and willing to work together to find solutions to problems.”

  Poor Todd, I thought, after we left Norah. He had started out so well at River Bend, and I thought at heart he was a good guy in a tough situation. But none of the neighbors at River Bend seemed like they’d miss him, and no one seemed to care that he was a human being whose life had been extinguished much too early.

  As Rochester and I returned up Sarajevo Court, I spotted Bob Freehl, a neighbor whose house sported a yellow circle on its garage. It was supposed to be an indication to the landscapers to skip his house, because he did all the planting, trimming and grass-cutting himself, but he’d complained in the past that the dumb crew ignored it.

  Every tree and flowering plant in his yard was perfectly separated from its neighbor, like a little kid who refused to let different foods touch each other. I noticed for the first time that there was theme to his yard as well, the flowers graduating in size from the tiny pansies we called Johnny-jump-ups to daises and black-eyed Susans.

  “You heard about the property manager, I guess,” Bob said. He’d been planting a gold chrysanthemum in his front yard, and he stood up and wiped his hands on his faded jeans.

  Because Bob was a retired cop, I felt comfortable telling him that I had found the body early that morning.

  “I heard it was one of the neighbors, but I didn’t get your name,” he said. I figured Bob must still have his sources at the department. “This keeps up, we’re going to need our own CSI team for Stewart’s Crossing.”

  “One murder isn’t a streak,” I said.

  “It’s only one murder, but the crime in this little town is skyrocketing,” Bob said. “You gotta pay attention, Steve. Burglaries, vandalism, all those little things start to add up.”

  “Broken windows,” I said.

  He looked at me curiously. “You know about that theory?”

  “The way I understand, if the police pay attention to the little problems then criminals will be less inclined to act.”

  “That’s the idea, at least,” Bob said, nodding. “Though with somebody getting murdered practically in our back yard it may be too late for that.”

  I didn’t think Stewart’s Crossing was turning into a hot spot for crime, though I had to agree with Bob that there had been a lot of small incidents in the recent past. When we got home and I sat down to dinner with Lili, I asked what she thought about that

  “I’ve been in a lot of desperate places around the world,” she said. “And in every one of them, the police had lost control of the big crimes, as well as the small ones. Though in places like Afghanistan and Nicaragua there were much larger forces at work. I doubt there’s a lot of political unrest in Stewart’s Crossing that could lead to a crime spree.”

  “And yet, there are so many problems people are complaining about, on the street and on that Hi Neighbor site. Don’t you think that’s the first step in bigger crimes?”

  “Like Todd Chatzky’s murder? I don’t follow the logic there.”

  “I guess what I mean is that when little things go wrong, they start to accumulate, and people get more and more angry. Then bad things happen. Drew Greenbaum’s mother fell over a broken piece of sidewalk and now she’s going to end up in a nursing home. Something small leads to something larger. I’m not necessarily saying that bad landscaping can lead to murder, but it’s hard not to make some connection.”

  Lili gave me her password and sign-in for Hi Neighbor, and after she went upstairs to read, I settled down with my laptop at the dining room table to take a closer look at the complaints on the website, as I had promised Rick.

  Over three hundred messages had come in since Lili signed up for the site a few months before. There was no export feature for the material there, and people often changed the subject line of their messages even when they were following up on a comment about a specific problem, so it looked like it was going to be a big project to review all the material.

  I decided I ought to go back to the earliest message and see what I could pick up, but before I did I took a glance at the most recent issues. Drew Greenbaum asked if any other homeowners had dealt with liens against their properties, but no on had responded.

  I sat back from the computer. The poor guy was stuck in a very bad position. At least Earl Garner had volunteered to help him, until Todd shut him down. I wondered if Greenbaum had followed up with Todd, maybe later that evening after the meeting was over. He’d certainly been angry. Could that anger have led to violence?

  What were any of us capable of, after all? Look at me. I’d been pushed to my limit after Mary’s second miscarriage, and though I knew what I was doing was illegal, I’d let my emotions tug me into hacking those databases. If I’d been pushed in a different direction, could I have killed someone, in the heat of the moment?

  Though I felt sorry for Drew Greenbaum, I put him first on the list of suspects I was collecting for Rick. I wasn’t sure if he had any of the three criteria: means, motive and opportunity. But he was angry enough that if he’d gone home, stewed over his problems for a while, and then gone in search of Todd, with a knife to emphasize his threat—well, who knew what could have happened.

  From what Rick had told me in the past, a knife was a very personal way to kill someone. You had to get up close and physically stick the blade in, past layers of skin and flesh. It wasn’t like a gun, which you could fire from a few feet away without the visceral connection.

  That kind of speculation always made me feel nauseous, so I pushed it away and went back to what I did best, collecting and organizing information. I created a spreadsheet and worked on the posts from Hi Neig
hbor for a couple of hours, organizing neighbors by complaints. It was too early to see any patterns, but I knew that it would take patience and work to draw real information out of the data.

  I couldn’t figure out how to use any of the software tools I had at my disposal to speed up the process. I could have initiated a program to look for key words, for example, but I didn’t know what the key words were until I read more of the data. Though there were certain terms that popped up, like paint and grass, too often they were used in other contexts.

  From the details they provided, I recognized several neighbors I knew by sight but had never spoken to. An older man on Zagreb Lane who had a long line of azaleas that wrapped around the front and sides of his house, who was always outside watering, trimming or weeding them. A competitive cyclist who wore a skin-tight top advertising Emirates Airlines. A skinny woman in her sixties who ran every morning, and whose business cards advertised her as “Your Running Realtor.”

  All of them were either complaining, or the subject of complaints. Several people said the cyclist had nearly run them down, while the runner catalogued every landscaping problem she noticed on her trips through the community.

  I also recognized a woman I thought of as “the power walker.” I had seen her many times, pumping her arms as she speed-walked down the street. I had no gripe against her because she was always aware of her surroundings, unlike other walkers whose attention was glued to their phones. She crossed the street whenever she saw a dog or a group of kids playing.

  She came up in a post by her husband, Zane Spahr. He said that his wife, Rosemary, had complained numerous times about potholes in the street. A few days before, she had been walking and stumbled over one of those places where the street was damaged. She had fallen and fractured her tibia. They had filed a complaint with Pennsylvania Properties, but Todd claimed that he couldn’t do anything without the approval of the board.

  Zane Spahr didn’t believe that. His lawyer had warned him that suing the association could have negative effects on his own property values and those of his neighbors, if the association had to pay a settlement. Insurance rates for the association would go up if negligence was proved.