by Neil Plakcy
“Thanks for letting us use your facility,” she said, after I’d introduced myself. “I was worried we’d have to cancel our training session and I know the kids would be so disappointed.” She had a light Spanish accent, pronouncing ‘worried’ more like ‘wooried,’ which was charming.
"It’s our pleasure to help out. I wish they’d had courses like this when I was a kid,” I said. “When I graduated from high school we were just beginning to use DOS-based clones in classes, and they couldn’t do much beyond word processing, games and some limited programming. I didn’t get my first computer until I was in college.”
“I grew up in Cuba,” she said, “and I was lucky to be part of an accelerated program. I was surprised that there wasn’t something like that for my kids anywhere here in Bucks County, so I started Kids Code.”
“It shouldn’t be much trouble to get things set up,” I said. “Do you need any special software installed on the computers?”
We walked around the property, and it was fun to have some to geek-speak with. Even so I was eager to get back to Doug’s spreadsheets, and I was pleased to wave goodbye to her just before lunch.
While I ate my sandwich I used my laptop to open each of the spreadsheet files Doug had given me, and list which ones were connected to individual spreadsheets in the main hyperlinked file. There were about a dozen of them. Another twenty had no links. Did that mean they were still making money?
I called Doug to ask if he wanted me to do anything more, but the call went to voice mail and I didn’t want to be specific, so I just left him a message to call me. When he hadn’t returned the call by the time I left for home, I called again, and once more my call went right to voice mail. Hey, if he was too busy to talk to me, then maybe he was working things out at Beauceron – or putting his exit strategy into play.
Lili and I had dinner together, and I was glad that I had the middle-school program to talk about because I was reluctant to tell her that I was snooping around on behalf of Doug and Rick. I should have told her that I’d broken into the Beauceron server to get that file for Doug, but that would have opened a whole can of worms. Since I wasn’t hacking on my own behalf, I thought I could get away without mentioning it.
My cell rang as I was slotting the last of the dishes into the dishwasher. “I spoke to Tiffany again,” Rick said. “She’s calmed down a lot, says her new boyfriend knows what’s going on and not to worry.”
“Oh, really? And how would he know?”
“She wouldn’t say. His name is Alex Vargas, but that may not be his real one. From everything Tiffany has said, he’s the kind of guy who ought to have a record. I ran him through the system and couldn’t come up with anything.”
“You know how old he is?”
“Tiffany says he’s younger than she is. All that I know besides that is that he was born in Newark and he lives in Hoboken now. Tiffany doesn’t want to tell me anything else. I think she’s afraid of him.”
“When I was a kid my dad had cousins who lived in Hoboken,” I said. “”Kind of a lower middle-class neighborhood. But it’s a hipster town now. All those artists and musicians who get priced out of Manhattan and Brooklyn.”
“This Alex guy is some kind of artist, but of the scam variety,” Rick said.
“I’ll see if I can find anything out there in social media about him,” I said. “According to Tiffany’s Facebook status she’s in a relationship, so he may show up on her page.”
After dinner, Lili went upstairs and I sat down to investigate, beginning once again with Tiffany ‘s Facebook page. She had obviously been sufficiently freaked out by the FBI raid the day before that she hadn’t posted anything new to her wall. In her most recent photos she was with a dark haired guy with tattoos circling around his pumped biceps. Was that Alex Vargas? The way she cuddled up to him indicated he was more than just a casual friend.
I put “Alex Vargas” in quotation marks to narrow down my search results. I got a lot of hits for a singer by that name, but he looked nothing like the guy with Tiffany. The same for a first round draft pick for the Houston Astros, and a fat, bald guy who sold insurance in Passaic.
It took me nearly a half hour of sifting through results before I gave up. Nothing seemed to match the details of the guy Tiffany was dating.
Maybe he used his full name. I tried “Alexander Vargas” but I came up blank again. I gave up and went back to Tiffany’s Facebook page. Maybe there was a clue there.
Only one photo included Alex Vargas. I copied it, cropped it, and uploaded it to Google’s image search to see if I could find a match. No luck. The picture was too blurry.
Rochester came nosing over to me. “How are you, puppy?” I asked him, and I scratched under his neck. He put his front paws up on my thigh and sniffed at me. I petted him, and he rested his head against my laptop keyboard. Before I could pull him away, one of Lady Gaga’s songs began to play. “I know that you may love me, but I just can't be with you like this anymore, Alejandro.”
“Of course!” I said. “Rochester, you’re a genius!” I tugged him down and shut off the music. I didn’t bother searching Facebook again, because if Alejandro had a page there I was pretty sure Tiffany would have linked to it. Instead I Googled “Alejandro Vargas.”
I checked the image results first, since I had an idea of what Tiffany’s new boyfriend looked like. Sure enough, I found a photo tagged with his name that matched the ones on Tiffany’s page. So Alex was just a nickname for Alejandro.
Using the name Alejandro Vargas, I found a very interesting article from a small town paper in North Jersey from about a year before. The Vargas I was looking for had been arrested for drug possession. The situation had arisen after a neighbor called the cops because he was playing his music too loud, and when the cops arrived, they found a group of men who appeared to be high on drugs. The tenant, Alejandro Vargas, was on probation and pursuant to the terms and conditions of his probation, the cops were allowed to conduct a search of his apartment.
In that search, they discovered nearly twenty pounds of marijuana, as well as hash oil, THC pills, THC-laced chocolate bars, and THC infused bottled lemonade, much of it packaged for resale and commercially labeled. I knew that THC was the chemical in marijuana responsible for its intoxicating effect, but I hadn’t known you could put it in lemonade, of all things.
For a moment I imagined the guy with the tattooed biceps behind a lemonade stand with a bunch of dopers lined up. Then I went back to the article. Vargas had been arrested for possession of marijuana for sale and booked into the Morris County Jail on $20,000 bail.
I couldn’t find any follow up to the arrest, but I emailed Rick the link to the article in case he could get into police records and see what had happened to Vargas.
Lili came downstairs then. “You’ve become a Lady Gaga fan?” she asked. “I heard that song play.”
“Just an accident,” I said. “Rochester and I were fooling around and his nose hit the keyboard.” I stood up and shut down the laptop, then stretched. “Time for your walk, boy?”
I didn’t want to tell Lili what I was looking for – at least not until there was something concrete. Not that she’d run to Tamsen and spill the beans, but Rick had asked for privacy and I wanted to honor that. As long as that promise didn’t get either of us into trouble.
11 – Floater
I still hadn’t heard from Doug Guilfoyle by the time I left for Friar Lake on Wednesday morning. I kept thinking about him and his problems, though, as I traveled the twisting road upriver, passing luxury developments that had begun to pepper the landscape with huge houses and three-car garages. From everything I’d read, family size was shrinking—almost all my friends had only one, maybe two children. Who needed all that space? When I was growing up, most kids shared bedrooms or bathrooms, and families lived in tight quarters. Would all this space help them get along? Or not?
I’d seen photos at Catherine’s house of the home she and Doug had shared in Westchester Co
unty, and it was as much of a mansion as any of these. Now she’d taken a step down to an ordinary suburban split-level, and he was in a crummy rented apartment. How many of those families along the River Road would end up in similar circumstances?
And where was the money coming from to pay for all that? Illicit schemes like the one that was going on at Beauceron? For the first time since I lost my software job in California, I was making a decent living, but I’d never be able to afford a million-dollar home or even to replace my aged Beemer with a brand new model.
Didn’t I already have enough to think about? It was like I told Rochester when he was too eager to sniff a passerby or play with a new dog. Mind your own business.
I’d only been at Friar Lake for a few minutes when Rick called me. “Hey, did you find out anything more about Alex Vargas?” I asked before he could say anything. “What happened after he was arrested?”
“Not yet. I’ve got bigger problems right now. You know a guy named Douglas Guilfoyle?”
“Doug? Why do you want to know something about him?”
“Just answer the questions, Levitan.”
The way Rick used my last name indicated business. “Sure, I know Doug. We went to Eastern together, and he helped me out with a program at Friar Lake last weekend.” I didn’t think it was necessary to add that he’d asked me to look into fraud at the company where he worked.
“That explains why there was a contract with your name on it in his back pocket,” Rick said. “No wallet, so that paper is the only ID he had on him.”
“Huh?”
“A woman out running this morning spotted something floating in the Delaware Canal south of the Ferry Street bridge. She thought it was a dead animal until she got closer. Then she called the cops.”
“Hold on,” I said. “Are you saying that Doug Guilfoyle is dead? But I just had breakfast with him yesterday.”
“That’s when you saw him last? Speak to him after that?”
My mind was racing as I explained about the calls to Doug he hadn’t returned. Doug was dead? How could that be? His poor kids. “How did he die? Did he drown?”
Rick didn’t answer. Instead he said, “I need some background from you as soon as possible. At the station?”
“I can be there in a half hour.” I hesitated, then asked, “Have you called Catherine yet?”
“Catherine who?”
“What do you mean, Catherine who? Catherine Guilfoyle. Doug’s ex-wife. Your girlfriend’s cousin.”
“Holy shit. I just met the woman on Sunday and never got her last name. You mean this dead guy is the ex she was bitching about?”
“He’s not just a dead guy,” I said. “His name is Doug Guilfoyle. In college everybody called him Dougie.”
“Sorry,” Rick said. “You’re right. Obviously you knew Mr. Guilfoyle, and I need to know him as well as you do in order to figure out what happened to him.”
“I’ll fill you in on what I know when I get there. In the meantime, call Tamsen.”
I let Joey know I was going out and asked him to keep an eye on Rochester again. Then I drove right back down the River Road, thinking about Doug Guilfoyle the whole way. My stomach felt like acid, and every time I remembered an incident from college I started to tear up.
To distract myself I focused on what could have happened to him. He’d been depressed about losing the job at Beauceron and destroying the new life he’d worked so hard to build. Had he been sad enough to commit suicide? Maybe he’d left his wallet in his car, or maybe it had floated out of his pocket when he was in the water.
Perhaps he had he been mugged, had his wallet stolen and either slipped or been pushed into the canal? I tried to remember if there had been similar incidents in town. The Boat-Gazette, our local weekly newspaper, listed all the incidents from the police blotter. Most of the ones I could recall were domestic incidents, noise complaints and traffic accidents, interspersed with the occasional house break-in.
Suppose Doug had been deliberately targeted. He’d said Shawn was asking a lot of questions. Did that mean Shawn had discovered Doug was onto him and pushed him into the canal?
I had to add Catherine to the list of those with motive to kill Doug. She’d probably get a big life insurance payout, and be able to marry again without worrying about losing her alimony.
There was always the possibility it was just an accident. Doug had told me himself that he couldn’t swim. What if he’d fallen into the canal and been unable to climb back up onto dry land? The previous week, I’d seen the high water level and the fast current.
The Stewart’s Crossing Police Station was a squat, one-story building from the 1970s built in the poorer neighborhood of town, at the corner of Canal Street and Quarry Road. I slipped my driver’s license under the receptionist’s window and told her I was there to see Rick, and waited in the dingy, 60s-era lobby until he came out and led me back to his scuffed wooden desk in a big bullpen area.
“Doug told me he couldn’t swim. Do you think he fell into the canal? Or was he pushed in?”
“Hold on, cowboy. You go first. Tell me everything you know about this guy.”
I figured the part about running around Birthday Hall naked when Doug and I were seniors wasn’t relevant, so I skipped ahead to Tor’s recommendation that Doug handle the seminar at Friar Lake.
I went through my meeting by the canal with Doug, his kids and his dog, and how Doug had told me he couldn’t swim. Rick was busy taking notes. “We talked about our divorces and how he’d come down here to be close to his kids, but Catherine was making things difficult for him.”
“Tamsen says Catherine has a different take on that,” Rick said. “I called her right after you made the connection for me. I’m meeting Catherine later today so she can identify the body, and I’ll get her side of the story then. But go on.”
“We talked about the presentation he was going to give, and then when we were up at Friar Lake over the weekend he asked me to look into the company he was working for. He was worried there was something suspicious going on and that if he got caught up in it he might lose his securities license.”
“Define ‘something suspicious,’” Rick said.
I related Doug’s concern about the strip shopping center, and my discovery that Beauceron was keeping two sets of spreadsheets.
“How’d you find that out?” Rick asked.
“Doug gave me his ID and password. I didn’t do anything illegal.”
He snorted. “Giving you a password is like opening the henhouse door to the fox.”
“Don’t be a jerk. Remember, you asked me to look for information on Tiffany and the raid on her company for you.”
He held up his hand. “Sorry. That was out of line. You are a good person to look into that kind of thing, because you know what’s right and what’s wrong.”
I nodded. “Thank you. I met Doug for breakfast yesterday morning at the Chocolate Ear, and he was pretty worried about what I found. He asked me to see how many other linked spreadsheets there were, and I did a bit more checking. I called him a couple of times yesterday to tell him what I found, but he never answered his phone and the only message I left was for him to call me.”
I leaned forward. “Do you think maybe he was killed to protect what’s in those files?”
“Until the ME tells me otherwise, I have to assume this is either an accident or suicide. Especially since you just told me he couldn’t swim.” He looked down at his notes. “Did he seem depressed after your breakfast? Possibly thinking of taking his own life?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “It was pretty clear he was going to have to leave Beauceron and look for a new job, and he was worried about paying his alimony and child support.”
“Is there a Mr. Beauceron?” Rick asked. “Somebody I should speak to about Doug?”
“A Beauceron’s a kind of dog, a French version of a German Shepherd. The managing partner is a guy named Shawn Brumberger. He was at the cocktail reception at
Friar Lake last weekend.”
I spelled the name for him, and then he pushed back his chair and stood up. “Thanks for coming in. This has been really helpful.”
“Tamsen said that Catherine’s dating someone new,” I said. “You should ask her about him. And Doug told me that if she remarried, he could stop paying alimony.”
Rick remained standing. “I know. Thanks for coming in.” He nodded his head toward the door. “Do I need to show you the way out?”
“I’ll try not to let the door hit my butt as I go,” I said.
12 – Financial Records
For the third time that morning, I drove along River Road, and once again my brain was occupied with thoughts of Doug Guilfoyle. The poor guy had been so determined to reestablish a connection with his kids that he’d turned his life upside down, leaving a successful career on Wall Street and taking the job with Beauceron.
It reminded me of my own situation, when I left prison and returned home to Stewart’s Crossing. I’d been fortunate that the chair of the English department, who’d taught me as an undergraduate, took pity on me and hired me as an adjunct. President Babson was willing to overlook my police record and trusted me to run Friar Lake.
What would I have done if I hadn’t had those chances? If I hadn’t adopted Rochester, or become friends with Rick, or met Lili? Imagine all the good things Doug Guilfoyle could have done if he’d had the good luck I had.
I went back over in my head every interaction I’d had with Doug, from our first meeting by the canal to our breakfast the day before. Was there anything else I could have done? Something I could have done differently? Or was someone watching him and tracking what we’d done together?
I still kept up with the chatter on some dark web sites dedicated to hacking, where I’d heard of companies that were integrating physical and digital security, keeping track of where their employees were and what they were doing, looking for anomalies that might indicate unauthorized activity.