Another Three Dogs in a Row

by Neil S. Plakcy

  “How do you know about them?”

  I had to wait until she’d finished trimming my eyebrows to answer. “A friend of mine from high school dated one of them. Peggy Doyle. Or Peggy Landsea, now.”

  She stopped in mid-trim of my right sideburn. “Get out of here. You know Peggy?”

  “Sure, long time. We went on the summer study program in France together.”

  “Small frigging world, isn’t it? I have to say, Peggy was such a quiet, mousy kind of girl I was stunned she had the balls to kill Carl.”

  “You think she did it?”

  She began trimming again. “Isn’t that what the police say?”

  “Yeah, but I’m not sure. Like you said, she doesn’t have the personality to kill somebody.”

  “We all can do things we never think we can,” Elise said darkly. “You keep an animal in a cage long enough, it’ll do anything to break out.”

  “Carl kept a short leash on Peggy?”

  “Carl was a lot like Shane and Phil,” Elise said. “Always covering up the control shit with sweet words.” She stepped back and motioned me to look in the mirror. “And Phil told me that Carl was a real horndog. He was having an affair for at least part of the time he and Peggy were married.”

  “Another biker’s girl?”

  She shook her head. “Phil would never tell me her name, but he said I’d be surprised if I knew the kind of woman she was.” She pulled off the cape and shook it out. “I took that to mean she was either prettier than I’d expect, or smarter.”

  I thanked Elise and tried to pay her, but she said the cut was on her, because she was so glad to reconnect with me. I stuck a twenty in the tip jar when she wasn’t looking.

  So Carl was cheating on Peggy, and with an unexpected woman. Unexpected in what way?

  11 – Passion

  The entrance gate to River Bend was broken when I got home, so I had to take out my wallet and show my driver’s license to the guard in order to get in. I dropped my wallet on the seat, and when I carried it into the house I left it on the dining room table.

  Rochester, of course, was all over me, so excited to see me after I’d abandoned him for an hour. I trekked upstairs, Rochester dogging me, and found Lili reading in the bedroom. I’d replaced my parents’ bed with a king-sized four-poster, though I still used an Amish quilt my mother had bought when we visited Lancaster as a kid. When Lili moved in, she brought her collection of framed photos by famous artists, which shared space with a watercolor of an old Pennsylvania barn that spoke to me when I spotted it at an estate sale.

  She liked my haircut, and after I shucked my shoes and my shirt and emptied my pockets into the jewelry box on the nightstand, I left her there and went back downstairs to look at the password cracker program.

  For a moment I didn’t realize what I was looking at—why wasn’t the screen zipping through possible passwords? Then I realized the software had finally been able to open up the zip file that LoveMySled28 had sent Carl, and I was looking at the unzipped contents of the file.

  All I got, though, was a single Excel spreadsheet of nearly 200 nine-digit numbers. At first I thought they might be phone numbers, so I arranged them in numerical order, looking for recognizable area codes. But then I realized that my own phone number, with area code, exchange and number, was ten digits, not nine.

  Credit card numbers? I thought they had to be longer than nine digits, and I did a quick check with a site that would tell you if a credit card number was authentic, based on its ability to pass a series of tests called the Luhn algorithm. It wasn’t something you wanted to bother with yourself, but if, for example, you were accepting credit card numbers online, you’d want to be sure the number you were given was a valid one before completing the transaction.

  The numbers I had couldn’t be credit card numbers, because they weren’t long enough – those had to be sixteen to nineteen digits long in order for the Luhn algorithm to work. But if they weren’t card numbers, what were they?

  I was staring at the screen mindlessly when I heard Rochester licking something. He’d had a hotspot a couple of months before, so I was alert to the sound of his tongue working over some place or thing. “What are you up to, boy?” I asked, as I looked up.

  He had my wallet between his paws, and several of my credit cards had spilled out. “Oh, Rochester!” I said. “That is not yours.”

  I reached over and took the wallet from him, then scooped up the cards from the floor. One of them was my social security card, which I’d had laminated years before to protect it.

  I’d long since memorized the number. All nine digits of it, I realized. Like the numbers on the screen.

  “Rochester, you’re a genius!” I jumped up and got him a dental treat, and while he chewed on it I looked at those numbers. If I reformatted them to include dashes after the first three letters, then the next two, they looked just like Social Security numbers.

  I found another site, this one that would validate SSNs. I typed in the first number, and a results screen popped up. According to Social Security Administration data, this SSN had been issued in Pennsylvania sometime between 1966 and 1967. It did not appear in the SSA Death Masterfile, which indicated it was still valid.

  I tried a couple of other random numbers from the file, and got back similar results.

  Somehow, LoveMySled28 had gotten hold of nearly two hundred social security numbers, and forwarded them to Carl Landsea. But what was Carl supposed to do with them? Sell them to illegal aliens?

  He didn’t work in yard maintenance or house cleaning, where he might meet illegal aliens, and I found it hard to imagine Carl sitting around at a titty bar asking guys if they wanted to buy social security numbers.

  There were a lot of things you could do with someone’s social security number. Use it and a birthday to get a driver’s license, a bank account, establish a credit card, and so on. But all of that was relatively sophisticated, and I didn’t see Carl as the kind of guy who could handle a big scheme like that.

  Friday morning I called Hunter and verified that he’d received my email about Frank Diehl. Even though I didn’t feel that strongly about Diehl as a suspect anymore, I wanted to follow up. “Peggy told me that he’s the one Angel she thinks could have killed Carl.”

  “I looked over what you sent, and I reached out to the prosecutor to ask him what he thinks.”

  “I found something else.” I explained about the file of Social Security numbers that Carl had received by email.

  “I don’t see how they can provide reasonable doubt that someone other than Peggy killed Carl unless you can find out more about what Carl was supposed to do with them,” Hunter said. “You know anything about the guy who sent them?”

  “Just his email address. But I can keep digging.”

  “You do that, and keep me in the loop.”

  I had some free time at Friar Lake that afternoon since the volume of college emails dropped off dramatically on Friday afternoons. I had no programs set up the following week, and Lili and I were planning to leave for Wildwood Crest in a week, so I wasn’t going to start anything big.

  I spent a few hours looking online at all the things you could do with a stolen Social Security number. The Social Security Administration warned that a thief could use your number to establish credit cards or loans without your knowledge and leave you on the hook for big bills.

  Another site warned that a thief could access your Social Security or unemployment benefits. They could quickly drain those resources, preventing you from collecting those funds when you need them. A thief could also file a fraudulent tax return in your name, claiming your refund. I knew a lot of people who waited until the very last minute to file their returns—giving thieves a couple of months to file a return before the legit person had a chance to. Even if you weren’t due a refund, the crooks could manipulate your data to make it look like you deserved one, and take it.

  Someone could also use your information to initiate cost
ly medical treatment, then leave you on the hook for deductibles and co-pays. I read an article about an ordinary guy who had worked for a while in a doctor’s office. He was a daydreamer with a passionate desire to live on an island in the South Pacific, surrounded by sexy women serving him tropical drinks. He stole Social Security numbers from patients and used their information to fill hundreds of prescriptions for opioids and other pain relievers, then sold them on the black market. He was just about to board a flight for Tahiti when the FBI arrested him.

  He’d confessed to having tunnel vision – focused so hard on achieving his goal that he ignored the moral and legal implications of what he was doing. He was following his passion, he said.

  What kind of passion had caused someone to kill Carl Landsea? Elise Lewis had said that Carl was controlling. Peggy’s emails to Carl had a desperate tone—could she have been so caught up in wanting him to love her that when he didn’t, she killed him?

  It could have been the same kind of tunnel vision that the Tahiti-bound office manager had experienced. When Mary suffered her second miscarriage, I could have hugged her, told her how much I loved her, and talked about ways we could both heal without going back into debt. But instead I got the idea of flagging her credit reports, and that’s all I focused on.

  I realized only later that the reason why I’d focused on that credit bureau option was because I didn’t love Mary enough to overcome all that had come between us—and I knew in my heart she didn’t love me enough, either. But instead of facing that pain, I’d turned to hacking.

  I never would have hurt Mary, but I could see how someone like Peggy, with fewer options, could have turned to the idea of killing Carl. Especially if she knew enough about his motorcycle to be able to fiddle with the brake chain. That was a lot more passive than attacking him with a knife, for example. And Peggy was smart enough to know that if she was careful, no one might connect her with the accident.

  Then the newspaper reporter had discovered the deaths of her two previous husbands, and she’d been pilloried in the media and all but convicted there, even though she’d never been charged in either of the first two deaths.

  Once again I worried that Peggy had killed Carl, and that if I was successful in helping Hunter establish reasonable doubt, I might be contributing to letting a murdered go free.

  I kept churning through those issues as I drove home from work, walked Rochester, and sat down to dinner with Lili. She’d made a big salad of Romaine lettuce tossed with chunks of rotisserie chicken, cherry tomatoes from the farmer’s market, and Caesar dressing.

  I looked up from the bowl in front of me. “You know I love you, don’t you?”

  She put down her fork and looked over at me. One of her auburn curls had come loose and she tucked it behind her ear. “Of course. And I love you, too.”

  “I just don’t understand how love can curdle so much that someone could kill for it,” I said. “I mean, I loved Mary, then our marriage fell apart and I realized I didn’t love her anymore. But I never would have hurt her.”

  “That’s you, Steve,” she said. Her smile was the kind that reached all the way up to her eyes. “You’re controlled by a different kind of passion.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The term curiosity killed the cat? You’re that cat. You have a passion for digging into things, for finding the truth, even if sometimes that leads you down the wrong path.”

  I took her hand in mine. It was soft, except for a callus where her finger regularly pressed the shutter button on her camera. Her nails were perfectly shaped, polished in silver with white tips. “So you’re saying I don’t love you enough to want to kill you?”

  “I certainly hope you never want to do that,” she said. “I’m just saying that different peoples’ brains are wired differently.”

  “And what do you feel passionate about? Photography? Teaching?”

  “I went through some heavy-duty therapy after my marriage to Philip ended,” she said. “I was worried that something was wrong with me, that I kept making bad choices in romance, that maybe I was too selfish to commit to someone.”

  “I don’t see that,” I said. “You’re not selfish at all.”

  She nodded. “My therapist helped me see that my passion is a lot like yours—I want to help people, to do good in the world. My photojournalism was an extension of that, and so is my teaching. I feel like through my pictures I was able to provide evidence of injustice, and help make real changes in people’s lives. And teaching does the same thing for me, without all the danger of traveling through war zones.”

  “Though you’re willing to take a motorcycle ride on the wild side now and then?”

  “With you driving?” She leaned over and kissed me lightly on the lips. “I think that’s just the kind of ride I’d like to take.”

  * * *

  Saturday morning dawned gorgeous and sunny, and not as hot as it had been, so Lili and I decided to take a ride up along the canal and find a good place for a picnic. I wore a pair of board shorts and a microfiber fisherman’s shirt, with sneakers and white socks with the Eastern College rising sun logo— one of my recent birthday presents from Lili.

  She wore a floaty strapless sundress with a light jacket over her shoulders to protect them from the sun as we drove. While she finished packing a cooler with lunch, I loaded Rochester into the sidecar, then got on myself. As I was adjusting the chin strap of my helmet, Lili stuck the cooler into a slot behind Rochester, then slid in behind me, with her helmet already in place.

  She wrapped her arms around my waist as I turned the bike on. It was the first time I’d ridden with someone else, and I went slowly at first, as I had the first time I rode with Rochester. The aerodynamics of the bike changed with the extra weight, and I had to lean farther into turns than I had before. I tried to ignore the distraction of Lili behind me, her body up against mine, her hands around my waist.

  I drove the way I usually went to Eastern, turning right out of River Bend, heading toward the Delaware, and then left on the River Road, past the vacant lot that had once held a ride-on miniature train where my parents took me when I was a kid. Now it was a fallow field of tall grasses, ash and oak.

  By then I felt better, and that old feeling of flying kicked in. I accelerated a bit as we zoomed past new suburban developments in between fields and farmhouses. Water-loving willows clustered by the river’s edge, their branches drooping gracefully over the bank and the swiftly-flowing water.

  I slowed as we approached a mini-park along the river, with a couple of picnic tables and a boat launching station. I turned carefully from the paved road to the gravel parking lot, and then pulled up to a stop at a parking space parallel to the road.

  We were the only people there and so I released Rochester from his harness so he could race around sniffing madly. Before I could take off my helmet, Lili insisted on taking a couple of photographs of me on the bike. I posed with my hands gripping the handlebars, trying to look like a real biker rather than the suburban wannabe that Travis at the bike shop had seen in me. When I saw the pictures I realized I wasn’t very successful at it, but Lili was happy with the shots so I didn’t complain.

  While I threw a branch for Rochester to retrieve, Lili spread out an old waxed cloth on one of the picnic tables and laid out sandwiches and fruit, with a couple of biscuits for Rochester. As befits his moniker as the golden thiever, he grabbed the branch and refused to return it to me, holding it in both his paws and gnawing on the end.

  The oak tree above us cast shadows of its mitten-shaped leaves on the table and the ground, and I positioned myself on the bench so I could be in the shade. I opened a thermos of lemonade and poured glasses for both Lili and me. “It doesn’t get much better than this, does it?” I asked her, as we lifted our glasses in a toast.

  “Not often,” she said.

  Rochester gave up on the branch when we started to eat, positioning himself between Lili and me so that he could accept tidbits fr
om each of us. We were relaxing in the sun when my phone rang from a local number I didn’t recognize. Out of habit, I answered.

  “Steve? It’s Peggy Landsea.”

  I looked over at Lili, who was watching me. “Hey, Peggy. How are you holding up?”

  “About as well as can be expected. I’ve been cooped up in the house for so long I feel like I haven’t breathed fresh air in days. I could use some company. You feel like coming over?”

  “How about late this afternoon?” I asked. “My girlfriend and I are upriver a few miles having a picnic.”

  “Oh, I don’t want to disturb you,” she said. “We can do it another day.”

  I looked over at Lili. “If you go over to Levittown you could bring us back Italian from that place I like on Route 13,” she said.

  “No, this afternoon is good,” I said to Peggy. “Say four o’clock?”

  We agreed, and I hung up. “She’s got you roped in, hasn’t she?” Lili asked. “I can see it in your face.”

  I started to protest, but she stopped me.

  “That’s okay. I’m not jealous or anything. I know you’re a knight errant in search of damsels to protect and truths to uncover, and I love you for it.” She smiled. “I wish there was something else we could call each other, though. Boyfriend and girlfriend sound so juvenile. And if you suggest boo or bae I might have to hit you.”

  “I agree with you. Partner’s too businesslike, and significant other sounds like something for a tax return.” I cocked my head. “You want to be my lady?”

  “And you can be my man,” she said.

  We both began to laugh. “It makes us sound like we’ve just stepped out of some 1970s song,” I said. “You could call me your beau. I like that.”

  “Short for bozo?” Her eyes danced. “How about we settle on something like ‘my love’? That works for both of us.”

  “I can do that, my love,” I said. The words rolled off my tongue easily.

  Then Rochester came to nose his way between us. “You’re my love, too,” I said, scratching behind his ears. “No need to be jealous.”