In Dog We Trust (Golden Retriever Mysteries)

by Neil S. Plakcy

  “I had one of those when I was six.”

  I thought I had done a good job, and it made me cranky that Rick didn’t seem to recognize that. Suppose I’d found the key piece of information that would lead to the crime being solved. I thought I deserved a little commendation.

  When we pulled up at the Yardley railroad station, Rick said, “Look, you did get the Curcio woman to talk. And I appreciate that. But don’t go getting any ideas. I’m the cop here, and I’m the one who does the detecting. If you find anything out, you bring it to me.”

  “Message received,” I said. That didn’t stop me from spraying gravel as I peeled out of the railroad station lot, though.

  Chapter 9 – Ten-Digit Number

  I’d been home for an hour when my doorbell rang, and Rochester began barking. As I tramped down the staircase, I could see Ginny Pryor through my sliding glass doors. Then I remembered Irene’s suggestion that Ginny get the listing on Caroline’s townhouse.

  “Hi, Steve,” she said. “Rick Stemper told me you have a key to Caroline’s house. He hooked me up with her great-aunt and I’m going to list it.”

  “Sure, come on in.”

  “I see you decided to keep Rochester.” She reached down to rub behind the dog’s ears. He jumped up and down like a crazed marionette, only settling once Ginny was sitting at the kitchen table across from me.

  “What can I say? I’m a sucker. Nobody else would take him and I couldn’t just drop him off at the pound.”

  “Caroline would be happy,” she said. “If I can borrow the key from you, I’ll get a copy made. I’ve got to get a cleaning service in before I can advertise it.”

  She said she’d take a cup of coffee, and as I started grinding the beans she said something I didn’t hear. When I’d finished, I asked her to repeat it.

  “Have you heard anything more about what happened?” Rochester had curled his big golden body around her feet, keeping her from getting up.

  “Nothing since the night after she was killed.” As I poured the grounds into the coffee maker and set it, I reminded her about the break-in at Caroline’s, though I didn’t mention that I’d been in the house afterward to pick up Caroline’s laptop. “I’m afraid you’re going to have a lot of cleaning to do.”

  As I poured the coffees and we drank, we speculated about what was going on, but neither of us had much to offer. I gave her the key, and she said she’d be back after a trip to the locksmith. I spent the next half hour playing with Rochester. I couldn’t motivate myself to go back to grading papers after reliving what had happened to Caroline.

  Ginny returned and said, “You were right, the house is in terrible shape. There’s no way I can get it ready to show without taking everything out. There’s just too much damage. I’m going to arrange with a thrift shop to come and pick up the furniture, but I want to pack up Caroline’s personal things for her aunt.”

  She reached down for Rochester, who placed his big head in her lap. “You know Caroline’s model doesn’t come with a garage, and I’m going to need a place to store those boxes until her aunt can have them shipped up north.”

  “Let me guess-- you want to use my garage.”

  “It would save her aunt some money,” she said. “And it wouldn’t be for more than a couple of weeks.”

  I planned to keep my Beemer in the garage during the summer, and to do that I needed to sort through the boxes and other debris left over from my move. “Sure. That’ll give me a reason to clean the garage up, and then I can get the car in there once Caroline’s boxes go.”

  “Great. I’ll let you know when I get the cleaning service. I’ll have them carry the boxes over and stack them for you, so you won’t have to do anything. ”

  “Any afternoon is good for me,” I said. “I’ve been coming home right after my classes finish because I don’t want to leave Rochester alone for too long. I can’t afford to keep replacing cell phones and eyeglasses.”

  “You’re so good to take care of him.” She reached down and scratched his belly, and he sighed with contentment. I was starting to get accustomed to him, though I still didn’t think I had room in my life for a dog.

  Rochester was settling in to life with me, but there were certain behaviors that the amateur psychologist in me couldn’t help but diagnose. Whenever there was a loud noise – a gate banging shut on someone’s courtyard, a trash can lid flipping shut, an insistent car horn—Rochester was alert, and sought me out. Even once he’d established I was still alive and breathing, it was hard for him to settle down again.

  He didn’t like thunder, and as soon as the first crack rang out he scurried for the safety of the dark area under my bed, and I had to get down on all fours, grasp a handful of hair at the back of his neck, and drag him out when the storm passed.

  He didn’t like fireworks or motorcycles either, and when a delivery van pulled up anywhere in the neighborhood he began to bark. Reasoning with him did no good. “He’s three houses down, Rochester,” I’d say. “Thank you for warning me but you can go back to sleep now.”

  Instead he would pace around for a while, all his senses on alert on the off chance that some evil UPS driver would be delivering a package to me. The nerve of those guys in brown.

  I didn’t know if he’d had any phobias before, but he sure did now. He always had to know where I was in the house, and even if he was asleep on the carpet at the foot of my bed, and I tiptoed downstairs, he woke and followed me.

  It was particularly annoying when I was trying to clean up or organize—I’d be moving things between office and bedroom, or trying to make the bed, and there would be this huge golden retriever underfoot. “Settle down, Rochester!” seemed to have no effect. Only when I stayed in to one place in the house—the bed, the kitchen table, the computer—could Rochester do the same.

  The next day, the two Puerto Rican women Ginny had hired to clean Caroline’s house stacked a dozen boxes in my garage, all labeled by the room where the things had come from. Rochester was very eager to sniff each box and I had to manhandle him back into the house to get ready for his evening walk.

  Even after we returned, Rochester was determined to get into those boxes, so I opened the first one he sniffed, just to show him there was nothing there for him.

  It was a box of books, and the one on the top was called Befriending Your Golden Retriever. I picked it up and flipped through sections on weaning, feeding, and training. Rochester was very interested in what I was doing, and nosed the book as I turned the pages, until I saw a picture that looked so much like him he could have posed for it.

  The dog in the photo was the same honey-gold color, with the same squarish head. They both had a couple of curlicues of golden hair mixed into an otherwise straight coat, and the same large, alert brown eyes. The other photos showed that there was a lot of variation within the breed—some goldens were thinner, with narrower faces, and they ranged in color from ivory to deep red. But Rochester was the star, what the book called “the breed standard.”

  “Hey, boy, that’s you,” I said, pointing. He sniffed the page.

  Caroline had made some notes throughout the book, in margins, particularly in the section on training, and I’d been able to understand what she meant. But here, she had written a cryptic series of numbers above the picture that looked like Rochester. I wondered if it was a phone number—there were ten characters in the sequence. Could it be a golden retriever owner, or breeder? Maybe whoever it was knew something about Caroline that would help Rick understand what had happened to her. I decided I wanted to show him that I could investigate, too.

  I carried the book with me to the office and turned on Caroline’s laptop. I was still nervous about doing anything regarding Caroline, however legal, on my own computer, because I worried that Santiago Santos wouldn’t approve. I Googled the number—but it turned out to belong to an industrial cleaning service in Terre Haute, Indiana. Oh well, so much for showing Rick. I wasn’t done investigating, but that number was a d
ead end.

  By this point, Rochester had given up on sniffing at me, and gone to lie down on the carpet behind my chair—locking me in place, because I couldn’t move the chair backwards without running over him.

  Since he’d adopted me, I decided I’d have to do what I could to make a good home for him. I went back to Caroline’s laptop and started Googling resources about dogs, and goldens in particular. I passed several hours that way, and when Rochester got up and stretched, I was free to back away from the computer—but only to take him outside.

  I was getting more and more puppy-whipped.

  It was most evident when I was out walking him, and we came upon another neighborhood dog. With Caroline, he’d met and befriended almost every Shih-Tzu, every Newfoundland, and every dog of any size in between. I could barely walk him a few hundred feet without him spying another dog ahead and dragging me down the street behind him like the streamers on a just-married car.

  “Are you walking him, or is he walking you?” one of my neighbors asked that evening.

  “He’s the only one who knows the answer to that, and he’s not talking,” I said, as Rochester tugged me onward.

  At home, he was establishing that he was in charge as well. I learned to secure my small objects, and we had entered a period of truce when I was no longer losing anything valuable to Rochester’s ravenous jaws.

  Now that I was a dog owner, I saw dogs everywhere I looked. Despite the on-campus signs, Tasheba wasn’t the only student at Eastern with a puppy; I saw big black dogs running around the parking lot, a mutt rolling on his back in the grass while his owner read nearby, a girl parading two Dachshunds who were so tiny they looked more like rats than dogs.

  At the mall, I saw the head of a teacup Yorkshire Terrier sticking out of a woman’s pocketbook, and a pair of white dogs so low and fluffy they looked like walking floor mops.

  I was also much more aware of crime news on TV or in the paper. Every time I saw a woman stabbed by a jealous boyfriend, a man whose car had broken down run over on I-95, or a convenience store clerk stabbed in a botched robbery, I remembered Caroline. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I should be doing more to find out who killed her, but I didn’t know what I could do. I was resisting the temptation to go back on line and try to hack into different databases.

  Late Saturday afternoon, Rick Stemper called me. “My date bailed on me tonight,” he said. “Like I believe she has contagious gingivitis. Want to meet me for dinner? We were supposed to go to some Chez Shithole in New Hope, but I’d be just as happy with a burger at The Drunken Hessian.”

  He was at the bar when I arrived, chatting up a busty blonde in a low-cut top. As I was walking in the door, she said something to him, shrugged, and walked away.

  “Women,” Rick said. “Can’t live with them, and can’t kill them.”

  “At least not if you’re a police officer. What was up with the blonde?”

  “Had to get home and finish grouting her bathroom tiles,” he said.

  We sat down at a table in the back, and ordered beers and burgers. “I did a little computer searching on Caroline,” I said, after the beers had arrived. “Did you know that her boss was fired, and she replaced him?”

  “By ‘a little computer searching,’ what do you mean?” Rick asked.

  I shrugged. “You know, Google, search engines, that kind of thing.”

  Rick fiddled with the handle of his mug for a minute. It was cheap plastic, embossed with the logo of The Drunken Hessian, a redcoat unsteady on his feet. “I know about your trouble in California,” he said, after a while.

  I felt an immediate adrenaline surge. “Oh,” I said.

  “You even supposed to have a computer?”

  “I am. My parole officer has some tracking software installed so he can make sure I’m not getting into trouble.”

  I didn’t mention that I’d figured a way around it, using Caroline’s computer and a neighbor’s network. Professional secrets, you know.

  “That’s good. Because I wouldn’t want you to get into trouble because of Caroline. I’ll admit, I haven’t made the kind of progress I’d like, but I’ve still got some things to look into, some leads to follow.”

  The waitress brought our burgers over, and I spilled some beer trying to move the mug out of her way. I couldn’t seem to get control of my nerves. After we’d messed with ketchup, napkins, and so on, I asked, “Does it matter to you—my trouble?”

  He took a bite of his burger, and said, “Should it?”

  I shrugged. “You’re a cop. Maybe you’re not supposed to hang out with criminals.”

  He raised his eyebrow at me. “Hanging out with a parolee doesn’t bother me, if hanging out with a cop doesn’t bother you.”

  “How’d you know?” I asked. “You look me up in your system or something? The state of California send out a be-on-the-lookout?”

  “Santiago and I work out at the same gym,” he said. “He tells me about all his clients in Stewart’s Crossing, and in return, I keep an eye on them.”

  “That what this is—keeping an eye on me?”

  “You can call it that if you want,” he said. “I prefer to think of it as hanging out with an old high school friend.”

  There was an uncomfortable silence for a minute or so, while both Rick and I sipped our beers and I thought about what to say. He spoke first. “Listen, I am your friend, Steve. If you’re running into any problems, I hope you’ll talk to me about them.”

  I took a deep breath. I had to redirect the conversation, because I didn’t want to lie to Rick and I didn’t want to tell him what I’d been doing, especially now that I knew he worked out with my parole officer. “Santos is on my back about a business plan, and I don’t know how to go about it,” I said. “He wants me to show him how I’m going to get new clients, but so far, I’ve only been working for people I already know, former coworkers who’ve gone on to other jobs.”

  I played with a packet of sugar. “But will anybody who doesn’t know me want to hire me? Do I have to tell them about – you know?”

  “What does Santos say?”

  “He said I can’t lie, but I don’t have to volunteer the information, either. But what if they ask one of my references? What if they Google me? There were a couple of articles in local papers about my arrest. The information’s out there.”

  “You could look for guys who got a second chance of their own,” Rick said. “They might be sympathetic to your situation.”

  “Or they could be super-careful, worried that I might bring them fresh trouble.”

  “Why don’t you start out looking for small jobs,” Rick said. “Somebody who’s going to pay you fifty or a hundred bucks isn’t going to waste time Googling you. Then you’ll be there if they have bigger jobs.”

  “That’s a great idea. There are a lot of websites out there that advertise little freelance jobs. I could build up my portfolio that way. And Santos would see that I’m making progress.”

  Though I was glad of the advice, the exchange with Rick left me feeling uncomfortable all weekend. Sunday morning, I took Rochester for a nice long walk, then retired to bed to work my way through the paper and the New York Times crossword. I’d always loved puzzles, and in jail I’d begun satisfying my curiosity by crosswords, word searches, acrostics, and anything else that kept my brain working and my fingers away from the keyboard. Kind of like a nicotine patch for hackers. By noon, though, I had no more excuses to avoid my business plan.

  I went online, looking for sample business plans, and found a few. The first question they all asked was where the market was for my product or service. That was easy; I knew a lot of companies had been downsizing, cutting back their staff of technical writers and outsourcing projects on a freelance basis.

  I started making a list of websites where freelance work was offered. I found a few jobs I could bid on, and every so often I had to stop working on my plan to put together a proposal. By the time I closed the laptop on Sunday even
ing to take Rochester for his walk, I felt I’d made some progress. I hoped that Santiago Santos would agree, and that he’d get off my back a bit.

  Chapter 10 – Like a Kid for the Childless

  Maybe it was Rochester’s influence, but I’d enjoyed Romeo’s presence in the classroom. I was a little disappointed when Tasheba was late on Monday morning, arriving without her little dog.

  Teaching that morning was like walking through quicksand, or explaining retirement investment to my ex-wife. Slow going, without any promise of results. The high point was when Dionne or Dianne asked what “seersucker” meant.

  Jeremy Eisenberg said, “A seersucker is a person who gives blow jobs to clairvoyants,” and everyone in the class who understood the words laughed—about half. His tongue stud glinted when he spoke, and a new dumbbell pierced his chin.

  Toward the end of the period I wanted to give them a chance to brainstorm ideas for their next paper—“An event that changed my life.” All three Jeremys wanted to write about high school graduation; Dionne was going to write about selling Girl Scout cookies, while Dianne wanted to write about her mother’s MS diagnosis. Or vice versa.

  Billy Rubin, who made no bones about thinking English class would have no meaning for his life as a physician, wanted to write about meeting one of his neighbors, who drove a Porsche, and discovering the man was a doctor. It was the inspiration for Billy’s career choice.

  Neither of the Melissas had any idea what to write about. Tasheba announced she was going to write about adopting Romeo, whom she found at the Humane Society in Leighville. Menno grumbled, “More animals,” so I turned to him.

  “What about you?” I asked. “Have you thought about what you’d like to write about?”

  “My father stole some cows from one of our neighbors, and when he got caught the community shunned us,” he said. “We had to sell the farm and move away. I want to write about that.”