The Kingdom of Dog

by Neil S. Plakcy

  “Not yet. We’re still checking his motive and his alibi.”

  All through the morning, aumni called me. Reporters called me. Parents of current students called, and so did students and faculty members and even support staff from other offices. “Yes, it’s safe to park in the faculty lot,” I said. “No, we’re not planning to give guns to our security guards. No, no one else has been murdered on campus.”

  At eleven-thirty we all gathered in Babson’s office and he opened our staff meeting, as he usually did, with a ten-minute tirade about the inefficiency he had seen around the campus since we last had met. He paid a prodigious amount of attention to detail-- out-of-date bulletin boards, scarcity of recruiting materials in the admissions office waiting room, overflowing trash bins outside the dorms, an untended leak in the lobby of the gym. He delivered yet another pile of Ivy League clippings to me, and a Stanford viewbook to Sally.

  Sam Boni was cheerful and cool in giving his report, and maintained his equanimity even when Babson railed about the ineptitude of the women’s volleyball team. “The ball goes over the net!” he yelled. “Not under it. Not into it. Do they need someone to tell them that?”

  “They know, President Babson. Remember, they’re playing for the fun of it, for the chance to compete. They do their best.”

  I aimed for a friendly professionalism in my report. “Even though Joe’s murder was tragic and resulted in some unpleasant sensationalized publicity for Eastern, we’ve gotten a great deal of good publicity as well. Every article mentions the attractiveness of the campus, the academic strengths of the college and the quality of the student body.”

  “Murder trumps a pretty campus or a bunch of smart students, Steve,” Babson said. “You’ve got to get these reporters to stop mentioning Joe’s death or trying to link it to security issues here. That kind of news does us no good at all.”

  “I won’t let you down,” I said.

  “See that you don’t.” He turned to Sally. “How are things going in your office?”

  “We’ve been swamped with calls and emails,” she said. “We’re expecting a flood of late applicants that could potentially move our selectivity ratio up by several percentage points.”

  “Even with all this news of the murder?” he asked.

  She nodded. “Steve’s right. Most people aren’t paying attention to Joe’s death or any potential safety issues. They’re just seeing Eastern’s name and reputation, and that seems to be spurring them to apply.”

  Mike MacCormac reported on the progress of the capital campaign. “Individual contributions are coming in more rapidly than we expected. Corporate and foundation support is also proving easier to obtain. It seems the publicity surrounding Eastern recently has made our name much more recognizable.”

  Mike stood up and started to pace back and forth in front of the table. “Even with this early support, our alumni and friends will have to realize,” he said, pounding the air with his fist as he talked, “That their support is essential to the success of this campaign, and to Eastern’s future. We have an elderly faculty, a decaying physical plant and a declining applicant base. But we have a solid academic program and an excellent national reputation, and with enough money behind us we can fix any leak, recruit any student, hire any professor. We can do what must be done to make Eastern number one.”

  I stole a glance at Sally, and had to smother a giggle. It was like seeing a younger Babson with a darker beard, but a Babson possessed with a vision of Eastern.

  “Just as much as any professor on this faculty, we’re educators,” Mike said. “We have to get the message across to our donors that Eastern needs their dollars, we need their support.”

  In his fervor he reminded me of those television evangelists whose passion rages through them like a fever. His face had gotten a little red, and his eyes positively glowed like one of the Ayatollah’s henchmen who had just gunned down a Yankee imperialist in the name of the Holy Jihad. Babson grinned benevolently behind him. Though Babson had no children of his own, he had infected Mike with enough of his spirit and belief in Eastern to make him as close to a son as he could.

  Both he and Babson could be frightening. I was glad that reporters like Pascal Montrouge hadn’t been exposed to their level of fanaticism. While it would make great copy to show the megalomania at the Eastern’s head, it wouldn’t be a good thing for my career in public relations.

  When Mike finished, Babson banged his fist on the table. “I want you all to remember that this campaign is my legacy. Generations of students will remember my name. I’m depending on every one of you to make my vision come true.”

  He stood up. “Meeting adjourned,” he said as he turned and walked out.

  “And have a nice day,” I said under my breath. Sally laughed.

  15 – A Nose For News

  There were more phone calls when I got back to my office, and more questions about campus safety. Around four o’clock, Tony Rinaldi called. “I wanted to give you a heads up on some bad news,” he said. “We got a partial print from the knife, and it doesn’t match Thomas Taylor—or Norah Leedom, for that matter. So it looks like he’s in the clear.”

  “What about Bob Moran?” I asked. “Didn’t you say that he was out in the garden with Joe, too?”

  “Yeah, but he’s got an attorney and he’s not talking.”

  “Can you get his fingerprints?”

  “We can. But since he’s not cooperating, it requires a subpoena, and I’m going to need a lot more evidence before I can ask for one. So far, I don’t have anyone who witnessed them talking, and we don’t have evidence that he made any threats toward Dagorian.”

  I walked back down the hall to President Babson’s office to pass the news on to him, but he had already left for a fund-raising cocktail party in New York. I decided to wait until the morning to tell him.

  Back at my desk, I didn’t have much appetite for work. So I gathered up my stuff, hooked up Rochester’s leash, and closed my office. I shivered as Rochester and I walked back to my car, and not just from the cold or the bitter wind that had picked up. Leighville was dangerous. Eastern College was dangerous.

  I spent an hour or that evening grading the tech writing class’s memos about the death of Perpetua Kaufman. I discovered that she had lived in Stewart’s Crossing, too, in a little house along the canal, between Main Street and the Delaware River. I remembered those houses—there were twelve of them in a row, all built to house canal workers back in the 1800s. When I was a kid the residents used to decorate them all together as the twelve days of Christmas. I wondered which house had been Perpetua’s—the partridge in a pear tree? The twelve drummers drumming? Or some anonymous number in between? My favorite as a teenager had been the six geese-a-laying; my friends and I made a lot of snickering jokes about geese getting laid.

  The next morning I read the Gazette and the Courier-Times at my desk. Both carried the story of Thomas Taylor’s release. That combined with the news about security issues at Eastern to keep the story of Joe’s murder going. Both papers were full of speculation about the case, wondering if someone on the faculty or staff was the murder, and that perhaps Eastern College was a co-conspirator.

  I went down to the kitchen for coffee when I finished reading, and Rochester followed me, hoping one of the staff had left something edible at his level. Sally was sitting at the big oak table, wearing her usual Fair Isle sweater, this one with a big “Go Eastern, Young Student” button just below the collar. She had papers spread out before her and a big mug of coffee at her side. “I had to get out of my office,” she said. “Or Joe’s office, really. The phone just doesn’t stop ringing, and I have to pull together some statistics for Babson.”

  Rochester put his paws up on the table and nosed at a piece of paper. “You can’t eat that, Rochester,” I said, tugging him back to the floor by his collar.

  “What kind of stats do you need?” I asked. “I did some statistical work in the past, mostly with databases.” />
  “An admissions office lives and dies on yield,” she said. “That’s the percentage of students who are offered admission who accept the offer. As the yield goes down, we have to accept more and more students to make a class, and the qualifications we consider get lower and lower.”

  Rochester jumped back up to the table. His paw grabbed a piece of paper and tossed it to the floor.

  “Rochester! Bad dog!” I said, leaning down to pick up the paper.

  He nudged his head against my arm, and he tried to grab the page in his mouth as I got up.

  “What is it about this paper?” I asked. “Did someone spill some food on it?”

  I looked down. “This is the report Joe published last year. Wow. We got thirty-five hundred applications last year. I didn’t realize it was that many.”

  “Thirty-five hundred? That’s not right.” Sally fiddled around with her papers. “Here’s the number. It was twenty-eight hundred.”

  “That’s a big gap,” I said.

  “Let me see that report.”

  I handed it to her and she scanned it. “It says here that our yield was a one in seven ratio, but the real numbers show more like one in five.”

  I sat down across from her, and Rochester plopped on the floor behind my chair. “Are you sure?”

  “See for yourself. ” She passed a bunch of pages to me and turned the calculator so that it faced me. I started adding the numbers for the different categories of students.

  I added them twice, just to be sure. “You’re right,” I said. “Maybe when Joe put out this report he just made a mistake.”

  “These aren’t mistakes. These are lies. ” Sally picked up her coffee mug, cradling it in one hand, but didn’t drink. “With a one in five ratio, we’re a lot lower than the Ivies or many of the other schools in our category. You know how keen Babson is on competing with Harvard and Yale.”

  “Have you checked any of the other statistics we published last year?” I asked. “SAT scores and so on?”

  She shook her head. “I guess we should, though.”

  We needed more information than she had in the kitchen, so Rochester and I followed her back to her office. He curled up in the corner near the heater while she and I sifted through documents and called up computer files. It was nearly lunchtime before we were finished.

  “This is scary,” Sally said. “Joe pumped up our average SAT scores a few points and gave us a couple of National Merit Scholars who actually went somewhere else. He even inflated the percentage of minority students here. We’re talking serious breach of ethics, and more important, we’re talking serious problems with admissions that Joe wasn’t admitting.”

  “We’re talking public relations nightmare, too, especially with both the press and the police nosing around.”

  “I don’t know if Babson knows about it and I’m afraid to be the one to tell him,” Sally said.

  I heard a banging noise and looked up. Rochester had gotten up from his place by the heater and was nosing his head against the bottom drawer of Joe’s file cabinet, which Sally had left open.

  “What’s up, boy?” I asked, going over to him. “You have something else you want to point out to us?”

  He shook his head and snorted. There were still a couple of thin manila folders left in the drawer, and I pulled them out. “What are these?” I asked.

  “Joe’s correspondence files. I haven’t looked at them yet.”

  I opened the first folder and started flipping through pages. “Boring, boring, boring,” I said. I went to the next, which was more of the same. Travel receipts, memos about various high schools and their college counselors. I didn’t hit pay dirt until the last one.”

  It was a memo Joe had written to Babson, hand-typed on Eastern memo paper. In it, Joe announced his retirement from Eastern. He said he was using that opportunity to admit that he had been fabricating statistics.

  “Wow,” I said. “Something like that could destroy the campaign.”

  “Do you think anyone else knew about it?” Sally asked. “Maybe Babson did. Maybe he killed Joe to cover this up.”

  Like every expensive, private liberal arts college, Eastern had some serious problems-- declining applicant pool, less federal scholarship aid, rising tuition. And our problems were worse than we thought. “Babson’s a little crazy,” I said. “But murder? No. Plus he wouldn’t have done anything to jeopardize the campaign.”

  I handed the memo to her. “Look, we’ve got to keep this a secret for a while. Let the campaign get rolling. We’ll figure out how to let the news out little by little.”

  I went back to my office, got my coat and scarf, and took Rochester down the hill for a quick walk and so that we could grab lunch from one of the trucks. I ordered Rochester a plain hamburger, no bun. When I got back to my office I ate at my desk, feeding him bits of chopped beef between bites of my sandwich.

  I went back to Blair Hall at two, taught the tech writing class about business letters, and worked at connecting their names to their faces. As usual in any class, a few kids stood out at first—Lou, the guy who was always working on papers, La’Rose, the black girl with the elaborate hairdos, Barbara, the tiny blonde elf. Once again, I thought Yenny was a girl and was confused when a boy answered as I called the roll. The other kids blended together but I hoped I’d get to know them all eventually.

  From there, I walked over to the gym for a brainstorming session with Sam Boni. Athletic supporters (no pun intended) are among a college’s most loyal and vocal fans. I was hoping that Sam would have some ideas about how we could reach out to them as part of the capital campaign. I found him up on a ladder in the new gym, peering above the acoustic ceiling tiles.

  “So that’s where you find your athletic talent,” I said.

  “No, this is where we find our leaky pipes. Under the job description for athletic director you find ‘Responsible for maintenance of one new gym, poorly constructed, one old gym, seldom used, one aging field house and one poorly equipped boathouse, too far away to be practical.’”

  The new gym wasn’t all that new, but Eastern’s original gym, a high-ceilinged square with wooden floors, was still used for occasional events. The new gym, built in the 1970s, had been state of the art when I was a student. “What’s the matter with this gym?” I asked. “I always thought it was in terrific condition.”

  “You were also in school here twenty-five years ago.”

  I winced. “Don’t remind me. But tell me what’s wrong.”

  He counted off on his fingers. “Poor planning, shoddy construction, skimping on the quality of piping, inadequate ventilation. You want me to go on? I’d love to, but you’re not supposed to speak ill of the dead. Our pal Joe awarded the contracts and supervised the construction of this place.”

  “Joe Dagorian?”

  “One and the same. During that time when he was in charge of physical plant. Have you noticed we’ve already replaced that brick facing on the front of the building?”

  “I just thought it was general beautification.”

  “Poor insulation. Water was seeping in through the mortar and cracking the walls. Hell of a job to fix it.”

  “You think he just did a bad job?” I asked.

  “I think he let a lot of the contractors get away with murder. Either he didn’t know what to look for, or he deliberately looked the other way.”

  “I can’t believe Joe would do that to Eastern.”

  “I can believe anything of anybody,”Sam said. “Especially if there’s money involved. I’m not saying anything, mind you. ” He put his palms straight out in front of him. “But you get that idea when you live with these problems.”

  “And I always thought we had great facilities. How can we use this information to get donations to the capital campaign?”

  “Come on into my office and I’ll show you what I found.” Sam was wearing a tight-fitting red alligator shirt, sweat pants and high-top sneakers. He still had an athlete’s physique, the kind
I had only aspired to when I was in college. Years of running had given me good cardiovascular conditioning and a certain flexibility, but I had never managed the kind of tone Sam had. It didn’t seem fair that he was smart, too, but he had graduated cum laude from Pepperdine and had an MA in physical education and an MBA in management from USC. Word around the campus had Sam aiming for a higher managerial role once the campaign was in full swing.

  On the way we talked about the police progress on Joe’s murder. “Sally said you two were looking for some information for the police. She said there were a lot of people who had grudges against Joe.”

  I looked at him. “You hear a lot from Sally”

  He blushed a little. “We’re trying to keep it quiet. Eastern’s a small place and news travels fast.”

  “Your secret’s safe with me.”

  When we got to his office, he pulled up a file on his computer and sent it to the printer. “This is a list of my priorities. We need a new weight room with some state-of-the-art equipment. I’d love to have a physical therapist on staff to work on conditioning with athletes across sports. I can always use more money for athletic scholarships. And we need funds for general maintenance on all facilities.”

  “From what I know from Mike, the general funds are the hardest to get,” I said. “But I can help you put together some materials for the campaign to get specific donations—the weight room, the scholarships and so on. Can you put together a list of students I could interview and photograph? And do you have any good video clips from games? I’m thinking of doing more with YouTube and other social networking sites.”

  We made a list of everything we could do for each other, and I walked back to my office, thinking about Sally dating Sam. I had to admit to being jealous. I liked Sally and I had been thinking, way at the back of my mind, about asking her out, even though I was a lot older than she was.

  I had thought once about dating Gail, the bakery owner, but she was a lot younger than I was, too. Was there something that kept me from looking at available women? Or was I just not running into them, working on a college campus?