Honest to Dog

by Neil Plakcy

  “I am so glad to see the end of this semester,” she said, as she collapsed theatrically on the sofa. “I’ve been talking to other faculty and it’s not just my imagination. Students this term are worse than ever before.”

  “You say that every semester.”

  The teakettle whistled, and I went into the kitchen to make Lili a big mug of green tea. It was her favorite way of relaxing after a long day. I stirred in a drip of organic honey from New Zealand, then carried it out to her.

  She put the mug up to her nose and sniffed. “That’s heavenly,” she said. “What did you boys do while I was gone?”

  “I read a book by Catherine’s boyfriend Jimmy Burns,” I said. “About a boy named Boogie who falls into a canal a lot like the one in the center of Stewart’s Crossing.”

  “Boogie?”

  I nodded. “It’s a nickname, obviously. But it reminds me a lot of Dougie, which is what we called Doug Guilfoyle at Eastern.”

  “Boogie, whose name reminds you of Dougie, falls into a canal like the one Doug fell into.”

  I nodded, and she sipped her tea. After a moment she asked, “Does Boogie die like Doug did?”

  “That’s where the story changes. Boogie’s friend Noah runs down along the river bank as Boogie gets swept along in the current. Noah remembers a science experiment they did where they learned that wood floats because it weighs less than the amount of water it would have to push away if it sank. He sees a bunch of sticks on the ground ahead of him and he throws them into the water for Boogie to hold onto.”

  “Smart kid. How does Boogie get out of the river?”

  “Apparently they studied beavers the year before, so Boogie uses the sticks that Noah throws him to divert himself into a narrow channel, and then piles them up as a makeshift dam. Then Noah helps him climb out of the water.”

  “Doesn’t sound like best-seller material to me,” Lili said.

  “It’s pretty funny – lots of silly jokes and puns. It’s the first of five books he’s written so far in the series, so it must be doing well enough for the publisher to continue.”

  “The timing is wrong,” Lili said, after sipping more of her tea. “If this is the first of five books it had to come out at least a couple of years ago.”

  I shook my head. “He could have written the book ten years ago, and been inspired by it to help Catherine out.” I got up and started pacing around the living room. “What if Catherine met Jimmy while she was still living in Westchester, and she came to Stewart’s Crossing for him?” I asked. “She told us she’d moved here to be near her cousins, but that could just be a cover story.”

  “Steve. Your imagination is working overtime tonight.”

  I stopped pacing. “You’re right. I just keep thinking there’s something about Doug’s death I should be figuring out.”

  “The only thing you need to figure out is what we can do to help Catherine and her kids,” Lili said. She reached out and took my hand.

  “As usual,” I said. “You are right on target.” I kissed her hand, and then we went upstairs and I put that imagination of mine to a more productive use.

  24 – Ethan’s Confession

  Tuesday morning was busy, filled with answering emails and making phone calls as I made up for my day off. I had to drive down to Eastern around lunchtime to hand in some paper forms, and Rochester and I stopped by Lili’s office to check in with her.

  Her office was on the second floor of Harrow Hall, a modern building shaped like a giant pill capsule, with wrap-around windows. She was sitting on the wood floor with a portfolio of student photos in front of her, and I had to rein Rochester in to keep him from trampling the pictures.

  She stood up and brushed herself off. “Thank you for rescuing me from some of the most banal, ordinary photographs I have ever had submitted for a class.”

  Behind her desk, Lili had hung a montage of photos she had taken. A young Afghan girl played jacks with a female U.S. soldier in camo gear; the Baghdad skyline was lit by a tracery of what looked almost like fireworks; a tiny monkey, looking almost human, stared at the camera from the safety of a tree in a tropical rain forest. The grim beauty of a panoramic shot of a refugee camp in Darfur, taken from a helicopter.

  Lili was passionate about photography, and was often frank with students who she felt weren’t putting their all into their work. I looked down at the pictures. “They don’t look that bad.” They were pretty shots of the Eastern campus, the old stone buildings, the tall trees and the grassy lawns.

  “They look like promotional shots for the college,” Lili said. “The student who took them has a good eye for perspective, but that’s about it. She takes her pictures, develops them and submits them.”

  She pointed at one of a girl in an Eastern sweatshirt reading a glossy brochure about the college. “Look at this picture,” she said. “No current student would ever read that thing—it’s just to entice potential students to come here. So that means the photo was staged, and to me that makes it a dishonest picture.”

  Honesty was a particularly tricky concept for me—I’d done some things in my hacking career that most people would consider dishonest, like breaking into protected websites, but I had always justified my behavior because I felt I was pursuing a greater good. “It’s not believable, but does that make it dishonest?”

  She walked to her desk and sat down. “There is a difference, at least to me. I don’t believe that the girl was reading that brochure, and my student found her and took her picture because she thought it was an interesting statement about college. So it’s not believable. But it’s also dishonest, because she’s trying to convince her audience – in this case, just me, but think about newspapers and websites – that this was a true photo, when it’s not.”

  She riffled through the pile of photos on her desk and picked up a shot of an old tombstone in a cemetery. “This is an honest photo, in my opinion,” she said. “First there’s the inscription – beloved husband and father– and the dates. This man lived from 1840 to 1861.”

  “He died when he was twenty-one,” I said. “That had to be young, even back then.”

  “And he was already married and a father.”

  My mind flashed back to Doug Guilfoyle. Older than this man, certainly, but still leaving behind young children.

  “It’s a sad photo, and it’s an interesting choice because this guy was about the age of the student. But the photographer also paid attention to the light and either waited or worked his way around until the shadow fell over the stone.” She pointed at the picture. “So there’s a deeper element here, about the shadow that someone’s death leaves over those left behind.”

  “Interesting.”

  “And see in the background? There were lots of tombstones to choose from, if the kid just wanted to take a gloomy picture. He paid attention to what was on the stone, to the lighting, to the meaning. There’s an honesty in this picture that says something to me.”

  We talked for a few more minutes, and then I kissed her goodbye and drove back to Eastern. On the way, I kept thinking about honesty. In Sunday school, I’d learned about the basics of Judaism, and always been fond of the quote Rabbi Hillel had given, when asked to provide the essence of Judaism while standing on one foot.

  “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” he had said. I also liked the bit from the Hippocratic Oath, “First, do no harm.” It was the way I’d tried to live my life, though not always with success. In trying to protect my ex-wife, I had hacked into the three major credit bureaus. In retrospect it was a stupid move, of course, but at the time I’d thought I was doing it to protect her, and myself, from falling back into debt after her second miscarriage.

  The state of California had judged that a dishonest act, one that went against the common standards of behavior, and I had been punished with a year in prison, and another two years on parole.

  I had broken a few more laws since then as a hacker, always justifying my acts because I was pursuing justice
in some way. I wanted to create a particular result, so I manipulated data and information. Was that any different from the student who’d posed her subject?

  When I returned to Friar Lake, I finally had the time to go back to my research on the financial irregularities at Beauceron. I spent the rest of the afternoon on the rest of the suspect properties, looking through public records for ownership, bankruptcy, tax liens and other proceedings. Each property that had two spreadsheets was in trouble, some worse than others.

  I put what I had found into a short, simple report. The unusually high returns Beauceron promised, the discrepancies between the income on the real spreadsheets and the fake. I emailed the report to Rick, then closed down my computer.

  I was convinced that someone was manipulating the numbers at Beauceron. But was it Shawn? On my way back to River Bend I called Lili and offered to pick up dinner, and I brought home a pair of big chicken Caesar salads for us. We were just finishing when my cell rang with a number I didn’t recognize. “Can I speak to Mr. Levitan?”

  “That’s me. Who’s calling?”

  “It’s Ethan. Ethan Guilfoyle.”

  Ethan? Why was he calling me? I’d only met him a couple of times, and if he needed an older guy to speak with it seemed like he knew Rick much better.

  “I was wondering. Um. Do you think, uh, that I could... you know.”

  “Do you need help with something, Ethan? I’m happy to help out if I can.”

  “Can I come talk to you sometime?” he said, in a rush. “I won’t take too much time, but I just kind of need to talk to somebody and you knew my dad.”

  When he stopped to take a breath I said, “Absolutely. You want to come over to my house? Meet somewhere?”

  “I have my mom’s car. I could come to your house. You live in StewCross, don’t you?”

  It was funny to think that today’s kids used the same nickname for our hometown that my classmates and I had, twenty or thirty years before. I gave him my address and he said he’d come right over.

  I found Lili in the kitchen, cleaning up after our take-out dinner. “What do you think he wants?” she asked, after I told her about the call.

  “He said something about how I knew his dad. So maybe he wants to talk about his father for some reason.”

  The gate called to announce Ethan’s arrival, and I opened the door to his knock. In the glow of the light over my front door, Ethan appeared younger than sixteen. He had a light sprinkle of acne on his forehead, and he kept his arms close to his body, as if he was trying to take up as little space as possible.

  He looked behind me to see Lili and Rochester, then took a couple of steps backward. “If this isn’t a good time,” he said.

  “I was about to take Rochester for a walk. You want to come with us?”

  “Sure.” He reached down to scratch Rochester under his chin.

  I got the golden’s leash and we walked out into the cool evening. Rochester led the way, sniffing and peeing, and Ethan and I followed, neither of us speaking. In the glow of a street lamp, I looked at Ethan. He wore no jacket, just a T-shirt, and I could see that lifting those barbells in his room was building muscles.

  Was he strong enough to have pushed his father into the canal after an argument? Was that why he’d come to see me, to confess?

  My brain was racing toward what I could say, how I’d have to call Rick, when Ethan said, “You and my dad were friends, right?”

  “Back in college,” I said.

  “But you were talking to him over the last couple of weeks, right? Before he, you know, died.”

  “That’s true. We hadn’t seen in each other in a long time and we had a lot to catch up on.”

  “Did he... was he...”

  I didn’t know where Ethan was going, so I couldn’t prompt him. I just waited for him to spit it out.

  “Was he mad at me?”

  “Not at all,” I said. “Every time your dad and I talked about you or your sister, it was always that he loved you both, that he’d moved down here to be closer to you.”

  “But I was mean to him. I wanted to go to a concert at this club in Greenwich Village with some of my friends from home, and he said I was too young to go into the city by myself. I got really mad at him and I told him I hoped he died. What if he killed himself because of what I said?”

  Ethan was on the edge of crying, so I put my arm around his shoulder. “Sometimes we say things to people that we love that we don’t mean. You should have heard some of the things I said to my father when I was your age.”

  I remembered those screaming matches when I was a teenager and I only wanted to do the exact opposite of whatever he asked. “I used to tell my dad that I hated him, that he was mean, that he didn’t care about me.”

  Ethan sniffled. “What did he say?”

  “Back then? Usually something like ‘go to your room’ or ‘you’re grounded.’ It wasn’t until I was older that I started to see that my dad hadn’t just been mean or hateful. That whatever he did was because he loved me and wanted to protect me.”

  Rochester tugged me forward and I let go of Ethan’s shoulder. “That’s probably why he didn’t want you to go into the city by yourself. He wanted to make sure you didn’t get lost or confused or have somebody take advantage of you.”

  “My friends are taking a train into Grand Central,” he said. “But the train I’d have to take from Trenton goes to Penn Station, and he said it would be too confusing to get from there to the Village.”

  “That’s true,” I said. “I lived in Manhattan for a couple of years and I still have trouble getting around sometimes.”

  Rochester suddenly stopped, turned around, and put his paws up on Ethan’s waist.

  “Rochester! Get down!” I said.

  Ethan laughed, and said it was all right. He petted Rochester’s head, and then the dog went back to the ground and continued forward.

  “Did you apologize to your father?” Ethan said, after a moment or two. “For all the times you were mean to him?”

  “All the time. The older I got the more I understood what my father was getting at. I used to call him up, when he was here in Stewart’s Crossing and I was living in California, and tell him things I’d seen, tell him how I heard things he used to say coming out of my mouth. He just laughed.” We reached the end of the street and turned around to head for home. “Parents know that their children love them, and they don’t mean the bad things they say.”

  “But I can’t apologize to my dad.”

  “Sure you can,” I said. “Listen, Ethan, do you believe in God?”

  He shrugged. “I guess so. My mom and dad never made us go to church or anything. Just to the Quaker meeting once in a while.”

  “Well, I believe in God,” I said. “And I believe we each have a soul that survives after our body is gone. So that means your dad’s soul is out there, keeping watch over you and Madison. He can’t be here in person, but I know he’d hope that you thought about the lessons he tried to teach you, that you were trying to be a good person.”

  “So you think I could, like, pray to him?”

  “I don’t know if prayer is the right word,” I said. “More like talk to him. Sit down on your bed at home, close your eyes, and see your dad in your mind. And then tell him whatever you want to say.”

  We followed Rochester on a circular route through River Bend, back to where Ethan had parked his mother’s car. “Thanks, Mr. Levitan,” he said.

  “Call me anytime you need to talk.” I hugged him, feeling his damp face against my shoulder. I was glad that he hadn’t killed his father, sad that Doug couldn’t be here with his son. I’d have to do my best to help when I could.

  25 – The Wheels of the World

  Wednesday morning dawned sunny and warm enough that I could sit outside the Chocolate Ear to wait for Rick, who’d emailed the night before about the report I had sent him. So much had happened since I’d had breakfast there with Doug and I couldn’t help thinking of
him as I sipped my cappuccino, sitting on a white wrought-iron chair under the dark green awning with Rochester at my feet.

  Rick came out of the café with a cup of coffee in one hand and a dog biscuit in the other. Rochester jumped up and took the biscuit from Rick’s hand, then slumped at my feet, chewing industriously.

  “Remember that picture we saw on the wall at Las Iguanas?” I asked, as Rick sat down across from me.

  “The one with Guilfoyle and a couple of his friends,” Rick said.

  “Yup. One of those friends was Alex Vargas.”

  “Tiffany’s Alex Vargas?”

  “One and the same. Isn’t that a weird coincidence? I met a guy at the funeral who said they were all close—him, Doug, and Alex. Doug called them the First Husband’s Club. Can you find out if Vargas has an alibi for the night Doug was killed?”

  ”I told you. Guilfoyle’s death was suicide. Case closed. Nothing more to investigate. Plus, there is no way I’m going to drag Tiffany into this. She’s already enough of a mess over this business at the clinic.”

  “Can you at least look into that report I sent you? Doug thought someone was fiddling with money at Beauceron, and I owe it to him to follow through.”

  “You have this idea that the law is something you can twist around to your own advantage,” Rick said. “How’d you get this information, anyway? Hack into their system? You think the end justifies the means, pal, and you’re wrong. You want justice but if you don’t obey the law, then what’s the point.”

  “I told you. Doug gave me a set of spreadsheets to look at.”

  When I taught college level writing, I insisted that my students pay attention to their language, using exactly the right words to say what they wanted. The corollary to that was that you could also choose your words to convey different levels of meaning, to clarify or obscure it. Doug had indeed given me the original spreadsheets, so I wasn’t lying, just omitting that I had indeed hacked into the Beauceron server in order to download the locked spreadsheet with the real numbers.