Honest to Dog

by Neil Plakcy

  When I held it up I realized it was a jump drive, and that folding the llama’s back legs in a USB port popped out of the llama’s butt. I laughed. I’d seen jump drives in all kinds of shapes from dogs to dice, but I’d never seen a llama. The text on the animal’s flank read “Phone Llama – unlocked GSM cells.”

  Had Rochester found another clue, as he often did? I pocketed the drive so I could check out its contents at home.

  Then he and I walked back to where I’d parked. I wasn’t convinced that Doug had committed suicide, or that he had fallen into the canal accidentally. To me, it looked like murder, and I was determined to find the truth, for Doug’s sake, and so his kids would know, too.

  18 – Hazard Zone

  When I got home, I checked the box of stuff I’d brought home from Doug’s office, looking for clues to his mental state, and once again I was struck by how little he’d left behind.

  His day planner was a thick leather-bound book the size of a hefty paperback novel, with metal rings inside so he could add or remove pages. I started at the beginning of the year, flipping through lists of prospects he met with, noting the way he had marked off the alternate Tuesdays and Saturdays he had with his kids.

  There were no ominous notes, nothing worrying about anyone he met with. There were occasional scribbled messages but nothing that indicated his state of mind, or an inclination toward suicide.

  I went back through his collection of business cards, and then pulled out the pieces of crumpled paper I’d picked up from Doug’s wastebasket. It was a list of upcoming events—his kids’ birthdays, Ethan’s high school graduation in June, a Broadway play he wanted to take Madison to.

  Was that the list of a man about to commit suicide? I didn’t think so. He was looking forward to the future, coming up with ways to connect better with his kids.

  An hour later, Rochester and I headed over to Catherine’s house. I was dreading the grief I would find there, but I knew it was my responsibility to deliver the box, and to provide whatever comfort I could to the grieving. That tradition had been built into me as a kid, going to family funerals and sitting shiva—the process Jews go through after a death, when family and friends gather to mourn together.

  At the last minute, Lili had to back out of accompanying me. Grading those student portfolios was taking way more time than she had expected, and the clock was ticking on getting her final grades in. “Kiss them for me and tell them I’ll see them at the funeral on Monday,” she said. “And that we’ll all get together after graduation, when life is easier.”

  I promised to do so. As I drove toward Catherine’s, I marveled once again at how much the area had changed since I was a kid. When I was born, most of the area around Stewart’s Crossing was farmland. The opening of the section of I-95 to the Scudder Falls Bridge eased a commute from Lower Bucks County to Philadelphia, and as I grew up, more and more of those farms were converted to housing developments.

  Valley Heights, the development where Catherine had bought a house, had sprung up in the eighties, and all the streets were named after famous mountains. Catherine’s house was a three-bedroom split level at the corner of Everest Drive and Denali Way.

  Madison answered the door, her shoulders drooping and her head down. Only when she saw Rochester did she smile. He stepped forward and nuzzled her. “I like your dog,” she said, as she scratched him behind the ears. “Ethan has Pixie up in his room and he won’t let me see her. Can I take Rochester for a walk?”

  “Sure. Just hold on to his leash.” I handed the lead to her and Rochester tugged her forward down the driveway. Catherine appeared in front of us as I heard Madison begin what I was sure would be a long, one-sided conversation with the dog.

  I tried to hand the box of Doug’s stuff to Catherine, but she looked at it like it was nuclear contamination. “Unless there’s something in there I need to know about, I really don’t want any of it,” she said, backing away. She wore a pair of jeans and a dark blue T-shirt, a probable compromise against the all-black of mourning.

  “No papers of note,” I said. “How about if I give it to Ethan? He might want something of his dad’s.”

  “If you want. He’s up in his room sulking with Pixie.”

  I couldn’t blame him; I used Rochester for comfort a lot myself. “How are you holding up?” I asked.

  “I didn’t expect to feel so much grief,” she said, as we walked into the living room. “I was so angry at Doug for so long, before and after the divorce, and now I realize I was using that anger to shield myself from the pain. Now that I can’t be angry at him anymore, it’s all coming home.”

  I hugged her, and she rested her head on my shoulder for a moment. “I know it’s hard,” I said. “I was a zombie for a while after my father died.” I backed away. “I was in prison then, and all I could think of was how much I had disappointed him.”

  “I’m trying to hold it together,” Catherine said. “For the kids’ sake. But it’s even harder than pretending everything was all right as my marriage was falling apart.”

  The last time I’d been in that room, for the pirate-themed birthday party, it had hummed with joy. Now there was an undercurrent of sadness, even though the overstuffed sofa, the coffee table, the hutch filled with china were all the same.

  “How about the kids. How are they doing?” I asked, as we sat.

  “They’ve been through the wringer, I’ll tell you. First the divorce, then the move away from all their friends. Now this. Thank God I have Jimmy. He’s been a rock the last few days. I can see how good he must be in his classroom because he really knows how to connect with Ethan and Maddie.”

  “Jimmy?”

  “Jimmy Burns. One of the first things I did when we moved here was look for a writers’ critique group. Jimmy teaches English at George School and he writes kids’ books. He’s been running this group for a while. We really connected.”

  So he was the new boyfriend Madison had told her father about, and who Tamsen had also mentioned. “I’m glad,” I said. “I want you to know that you can count on Lili and me, too. You know, if you want to send Maddie and Ethan over to us sometime so you can have some time to yourself.”

  “That’s very sweet of you,” she said. “I had to stop writing when all this started happening, and I need to get going again. But it’s tough to find the time. I can manage about an hour in the morning while the kids are in school, but then there’s laundry and shopping and running them around to sports.”

  “Other writers I know say it’s important to set up a schedule,” I said.

  She nodded. “Tammy says the same thing. Doug used to take the kids every other Tuesday night, and she volunteered to have them over for dinner on the nights they weren’t with him, so I could focus for a couple of hours. Fortunately Ethan got his license a few months ago so he can drive them over there.”

  Tuesday night, I thought. “So they were at Tamsen’s the night Doug died?”

  She nodded. “Maddy has been so upset. She said that if she and Ethan had been with Daddy he wouldn’t have fallen in the water.”

  With Ethan and Madison out of the house on the night Doug died, Catherine probably did not have an alibi. Could she have made arrangements to meet Doug by the canal? Why? Suppose he’d called to talk to the kids. Could she have agreed to come out and meet him by the canal, then seized the opportunity to push him in?

  Once again, I was letting my imagination get away from me. I pushed that thought ahead as Madison came back into the house with Rochester. “Your dog is really strong,” she said. “He pulls a lot more than Pixie does.”

  “You think Pixie would want to see Rochester?” I asked.

  Madison twirled a couple of plastic bands around her wrist. “I dunno.”

  “Come on. Why don’t we see if Ethan will let Pixie out.”

  I followed her up the stairs, where she stopped in front of a door with a nuclear hazard sign on it. “My mom got Ethan that sign because he doesn’t like to clean u
p his room,” Madison said. “I clean mine every day.”

  “I’m sure your mom appreciates that.” I knocked on the door. “Ethan? It’s Steve Levitan and Rochester.”

  Rochester put his nose down to the doorsill and sniffed, and from inside we heard the Yorkie’s shrill bark.

  Ethan opened the door. His hair was unkempt and it looked like he hadn’t washed his face in a while. A few dark hairs sprouted from his chin, and my heart choked up as I realized Doug wouldn’t be around to teach him to shave.

  “You can’t come in,” Ethan said, but Rochester didn’t pay him any attention, just shoved right past him to romp around with Pixie.

  The knuckles of Ethan’s right hand were scraped, as if he’d been hitting something, and I flashed back to my freshman year at Eastern, when I’d gotten upset that no girl would talk to me at a frat party, and how I’d gone back to my dorm room and punched the wall a couple of times.

  Behind Ethan I saw a pile of T-shirts and jeans on the floor, an open backpack with school books spilling out of it, a pair of barbells in the corner. “You want to come out to the back yard and let the dogs play?” I asked. “We could toss around a Frisbee or a tennis ball.”

  “I’m in the middle of a game,” he said, nodding back toward his computer.

  Pixie dashed out into the hallway, followed by Rochester. “This is a box of your dad’s stuff from his office,” I said. I held the box out, embarrassed at its lack of contents, but Ethan glanced at it and took it from me. Then he stepped back and slammed his door shut.

  “My mom says Ethan is acting out,” Madison said, as the two dogs raced down the stairs.

  “Sometimes it’s hard to come right out and say what we’re feeling,” I said. “Especially when we’re sad, or angry. So we do things to distract us from what hurts. That’s probably what your mom means.”

  “Every time I think about my dad, it makes me sad. But my dad always told me and Ethan that we had to be nice to Mommy because the divorce was hard for her, so I try not to cry in front of her.”

  “That’s brave of you,” I said. “But I’m sure that your mom wants to know how you’re feeling, so it’s okay to cry when you feel bad. Maybe she needs to cry sometimes too, and she’s afraid to show you. If you cry together maybe it will make both of you feel better.”

  She didn’t say anything, but I could see from her face that she was processing the information. “Now let’s go play with Rochester and Pixie,” I said.

  She and I took the dogs into the back yard, threw balls for them, and watched them romp around. It was funny to see my big dog cowed by the Yorkie, who yipped sharply whenever he did something she didn’t like. I looked up at the back of the house once and noticed Ethan watching us, but as soon as he saw me he turned back into the room and pulled down the shade.

  When Madison and the dogs were tired out, we all went back inside. I wanted to leave, but Catherine had brewed a pot of coffee and brought out an Entenmann’s cake. It reminded me of when I was a kid and my aunts and uncles, or my mother’s cousins, would drop by for coffee, conversation and a piece of Entenmann’s.

  Madison took her piece of cake up to her room, and I joined Catherine at the table. “Are you going to be able to stay here in Stewart’s Crossing?” I asked, between bites of coffee cake. “It would be tough for the kids to have to move again.”

  “I can’t imagine giving up my support network here,” she said. “It’s great to have cousins like Tammy and Hannah so close. I should be able to manage, though I’m going to have to look for a job.”

  She picked up her coffee cup but waited to take a sip. “Back when Doug and I were divorcing, my attorney fought for Doug to take out a five-million-dollar life insurance policy. The interest on the payout was supposed to replace my alimony and child support in case anything happened to him.”

  She sipped her coffee. “Back then I was worried that Doug worked so hard he might give himself a heart attack. I had no idea something like this would happen.”

  Five million dollars, I thought. That was a seven-figure-motive for murder, especially if Catherine wanted to remarry and knew that would cause her to lose her alimony.

  “You’re coming to the Meeting for Worship on Monday, aren’t you?” Catherine asked. “That’s the Quaker equivalent of a funeral. Even though Doug didn’t have any religious belief, I thought it would be good for the kids. It would be nice to have someone there who knew Doug when he was younger. Maybe you could say a few words about him.”

  I couldn’t tell the story of our drunken, naked romp around Birthday House, and I didn’t want to speak about Doug’s suspicions about Beauceron. “I’ll think of something,” I said.

  I thought of Ethan and Maddy, both of them suffering the loss of their father. I wanted his children to remember Doug well. I’d truly have to consider what I wanted to say, knowing that the memory of that service would be with them for the rest of their lives.

  When Rochester and I got home, I was feeling the weight of grief, and I spent some time on the floor playing tug-a-rope with him. At one point, he backed away from me, tugging hard, his tail wagging like mad. It brushed something off the coffee table, which landed on the tile floor with a clatter.

  I let Rochester have the rope and leaned down to pick it up. It was the jump drive he had found by the canal, the one from a company called Phone Llama. Since I wasn’t sure what was on the jump drive I didn’t want to risk sticking it into my regular computer, so I pulled Caroline’s laptop from the closet. Because of the kind of sites I surfed with it, I’d installed a lot of extra security provisions on it.

  I got no malware warnings, so I clicked on the directory to see what was on it. I was disappointed that all it appeared to hold were a bunch of pictures of someone’s kids. A boy in a baseball uniform stood at home plate holding a bat. A younger girl in a princess dress. Family parties, kids at play. No one in the photos looked familiar, and even the backgrounds didn’t ring a bell with me.

  Where had the drive come from? I Googled the company name, and came up with a website in Spanish. The left column contained a cartoon of a llama like the one the jump drive resembled. The animal held a cell phone against one ear with his front leg. A speech bubble coming its mouth read “Llámame!”

  I used the automatic translate feature from my browser, but all I could find was what I expected. They sold unlocked GSM phones. Since I didn’t have any idea that Doug was planning an overseas trip, or needed to make calls to foreign countries, I figured it was a dead end.

  Well, not all the clues Rochester found could be good ones, right? Sometimes he was just a dog looking for something to chew, or something that smelled good.

  19 – What Ricky Likes

  “Do you know if Catherine has an alibi for Tuesday night?” I asked Rick.

  We were heading up Route One on Sunday morning, toward Rick’s meeting with Tiffany at a diner in Union City.

  “You think I’m that much of a slacker? She says she was home alone that night. But I already told you that I’m considering Guilfoyle’s death an suicide, so it doesn’t matter where she was.”

  “And you know about the five-million-dollar life insurance policy?”

  “Again. You are not following me. Where she was, what she inherits, whether she was mad at him or still loved him, doesn’t matter.”

  I crossed my arms over my chest and looked out the window.

  “Look, Steve. I know you liked the guy, and you feel bad that he died. But sometimes we have to accept that things happen. You have to stop looking for trouble where there isn’t any. There’s enough in the world to worry about without that.”

  We hopped on the turnpike, through the area that most people think of when you say New Jersey – oil refineries and run-down apartment buildings jammed up against the roadway, a permanent smoggy haze in the air. Rick handed me his phone. “Tiffany messaged me the directions,” he said. “Can you read them?”

  I told him to take I-495 toward the Lincoln Tun
nel. Tiffany had ended her message with a bunch of emoticons—little hearts and kisses. Guess she wasn’t bitter about their divorce, or at least she wasn’t anymore.

  We got off the highway at John F. Kennedy Boulevard and headed south, toward the border of Hoboken and Union City. Since I had Rick’s phone in my hand, I used it to check the address for the Center for Infusion Therapy.

  “The clinic where Tiffany worked is up ahead on the right,” I said, as we approached it. “That low white building with the yellow ramp in front.”

  All the signs were in both English and Spanish, and small decals pasted beside the front door advertised the insurance they accepted.

  “Small building,” I said. “They must not see a lot of patients.”

  Rick didn’t even look over. “Tiffany says most of the building is office space—there are just two exam rooms.”

  We continued about a half-mile down the street to the restaurant where we were meeting Tiffany. It was like driving through a foreign country—signs were embellished with the flags of various Latin American countries, the wording in Spanish and Portuguese. The Phone Llama store was wedged between a bar called Las Iguanas and a karate dojo with signs in both Spanish and Japanese.

  We found the café but the narrow street was crowded with parked cars, and we had to travel an extra block to find a space. A church up the street was letting out, and the sidewalk was busy with people in their Sunday best. The women wore low-cut dresses in bright colors, the men natty suits with wide lapels or white guayaberas.

  “Did Tiffany grow up around here?” I asked Rick, as we walked.

  He shook his head. “The Bronx.”

  “How’d you meet her?” Since Rick and I had only been casual acquaintances in high school, I hadn’t kept up with him, and we hadn’t become friends until I’d moved back to Stewart’s Crossing.