The Kingdom of Dog

by Neil S. Plakcy

  This time he looked actively miserable. We got into my office, where the space heater I had turned on earlier had made some progress. Rochester, though, was still sprawled by the French doors, his back against the glass. I couldn’t understand how he liked that cold against his skin—but then, there are a lot of things about that dog I still don’t understand.

  I motioned Ike to the chair across from my desk, and we both sat. “What can I do to help you?”

  “Well, it’s kind of hard to explain.”

  Rochester got up from his place by the French doors and walked over to Ike, putting his head in Ike’s lap. Ike began to stroke his head.

  “I’m the one who spoke to Verona Santander. Her story sounded pretty credible. But I believe there are always two sides, and I’m willing to listen to yours if you want.”

  “She’s nuts, that girl, you know?” he said quickly. “I mean, she was cute, and she seemed pretty bright, and she asked a lot of good questions about Eastern and she seemed real interested.”

  I nodded.

  “So then after my program was over she came up and said, well, if I was eating all alone and looking for some company, she could show me a good place to go. We went to this restaurant, and we had a really nice dinner and a good conversation, and she said her parents were out of town and did I want to come over for a little while.”

  His shoulders slumped and he looked ready to cry. Rochester snuffled against his hand. “Yes?” I said as gently as I could.

  “Well, I thought it was out of line, you know, but then I said, what the hell? I mean, I was all by myself in town and otherwise I would just go back to my hotel room and watch TV. So we went over there, and she started coming on to me. I mean, I know high school girls and all, but she was pretty advanced. She was, like, stroking my leg and all, and well, you know how a guy gets like that.”

  I couldn’t help smiling a little. “I understand.”

  “You see I couldn’t talk about this to Sally. I just couldn’t say it.” Rochester sensed the crisis was over, and he slumped down on the floor next to Ike.

  “So anyway she was really coming on to me and I knew it was wrong to do but I just couldn’t help myself. So we did it and then after a while I went back to my hotel room and went to sleep, and when I got back I put a good write-up on her into her file. Not because of that night or anything, but she was a smart girl and she wanted to go to Eastern, and that’s what I said. I mean, if you’ve met her and talked to her you can see it was the truth.”

  “I’ll take a look in her file.” I made a note on the pad next to my phone.

  “Oh, sure, please. There’s nothing there I’d want to hide. So anyway she wrote me a nice note after I got home, and I put it in the file, and then we admitted her and she wrote me another note and asked why I didn’t answer the first one. So I wrote her back and thanked her for her notes and said we looked forward to having her at Eastern in the fall. I was trying to be real careful, see, to keep it from developing into anything.”

  “I see.”

  “A copy of my note is in the file. So then she sent me a real nasty note and said she was going to Barnard where they respected her as a woman. So I said, hey, this comes from left field, and I put it in the file and I forgot about her. The next thing I know, maybe six months later, old Joe starts to get real cold to me and I don’t know why. So then at that party, the bunch of us guys were standing around outside, smoking, you know, and old Joe came up and told me that he could tell I didn’t have a good moral character, if I was, you know, getting high.”

  Rochester rolled over on his back and started waving his legs. I got up and found one of his rawhide bones next to the file cabinet, and stuck it into his mouth.

  “When we were talking old Joe brought up the whole thing with Verona, and said that he had written a letter to President Babson back when it happened, and he’d been holding on to it, but now, you know, he was going to send it. I mean, like, he hadn’t even talked to me about it, and here he was writing to the President that I should be expelled.”

  Rochester ground away at the bone as Ike shivered. “Expelled! And I’ve only got the rest of this semester. I mean, it was bad enough that he didn’t want to give me a job after graduation-- we had only talked about it a little, nothing was firmed up, but I was counting on it. It just freaked me out.”

  He stopped. “Hey, how did you know to talk to Verona? Did old Joe tell you?”

  “Joe gave a Xerox of the note to Sally to review before he sent it. She asked me to talk to Verona when I was in New York this past weekend.” I looked at him. “Did you argue with Joe the night of the party?”

  He nodded. “I mean, it was bad timing and all, but I guess I was a little buzzed, and I wasn’t really thinking. I just wanted to find out what was going on. Finally he said we would talk about it the next day and I said OK and I went back inside.”

  Rochester stood up with his rawhide bone in his mouth and walked back over to his place by the French doors. I looked beyond him at the snowy landscape. “Did you see anyone else out in the garden?”

  “I was too freaked out about what old Joe said.” He leaned forward . “Do you think you could, maybe, talk to Sally about me?”

  “I’ll tell you, Ike, I think she’s being pretty fair. Nobody’s reported you or suspended you or even put you on probation. You made a mistake, everybody’s human, I know, and I sympathize with you, but Sally’s in a bad position now and she can’t take a chance that you’ll make another mistake now when she’s particularly vulnerable. And she hasn’t said anything about getting you expelled, so you can finish up at Eastern and go on, even if you don’t work in the office anymore.”

  “She won’t give me a chance not to make a mistake either,” he said. “Listen, I understand what you’re saying and I even understand that Sally doesn’t feel she can trust me anymore. What I’m asking for is a chance to earn her respect again, you know? I mean, that place is a zoo right now, and if she’d let me, I’d do anything for her. Stuff that doesn’t involve student contact, for example. I mean, how can I screw that up? Just ask her if she’ll give me a chance. And take a look at Verona’s file. You’ll see everything I’m saying is true.”

  “Why is this so important to you?” I asked. “I know it’s a job and you get paid, but you could get another job.”

  Ike blushed and looked down. “See, I really like doing that kind of thing,” he said. “Old Joe had nearly promised me a job and I thought I could go that route for a couple of years, see if I liked it. Now I’m sorta without a rudder, if you know what I mean.”

  I did know what he meant. I’d felt the same way when I came back to Bucks County after my stint in prison, with no idea what I could do to put food on my table.

  Ike took in a deep breath. “And besides, I feel bad about what I did. I figure maybe I can work it off, you know, like penance or something. Like saying twenty Hail Marys only I’d be filing twenty files or sending out twenty viewbooks.”

  “And what about the threat you made to her?”

  “I knew old Joe was faking numbers because I took statistics last year, and he asked me to put together the numbers for him. ” He looked down at his lap. “I kept my own set of everything, and I kind of slipped something to this girl I know at the Daily Sun.”

  “You told a reporter for the student newspaper that Eastern was fudging its admissions data?” I must have said that with more force than I intended, because Ike looked up in alarm.

  “Not everything,” he said. “Just kind of a hint, you know? So that Sally would know how much this means to me, that I’m really serious about wanting to keep working.”

  I shook my head. “That was dumb, Ike. You’re really making me question your judgment now. I mean, that information could destroy the college.”

  “But I won’t give her anything more, I promise,” he said. “If I can just keep my job.”

  I remembered my own problems with the authorities, when I had hacked into the wron
g database and gotten my fingers caught where they shouldn’t have been. I’d been desperate myself then, scrambling for anything that could help me hold on to my job, my marriage, everything I had in my life.

  No one had extended me a helping hand back then, and in the end I’d lost it all. Ike was a lot younger than I was, a lot more able to bounce back—but maybe he could make a change, if someone just cared enough to help him out.

  “I’ll see what I can do,” I said.

  24 – To Save A Career

  I collected my stuff and walked down to Sally’s office, but she had already left for the day. Rochester and I walked back to the parking lot, and I while he stopped to sniff and pee I looked around and marveled at how pretty the campus was blanketed in white. I loved the collegiate Gothic style of the architecture, all the arched entrances and tall buildings with spires.

  Several of the older buildings had huge wooden doors with iron handles, often with leaded glass windows inserted. Ivy crawled up the stone walls and pine trees stood sentinel at many entrances. I was less fond of the modern buildings on campus, which seemed to be built of soul-crushing concrete, without the higher aspirations of the older buildings.

  The car was cold, and I kept one hand on Rochester for warmth until the heater kicked in. He didn’t seem to mind. When we got home, we took another long, snowy walk, and I felt invigorated by the cold.

  I missed the snow when I lived in California. Mary and I had gone skiing in Tahoe once, but she wasn’t really a cold-weather kind of gal. I wondered how Rochester would like cross-country skiing. I’d tried it once, years before, in Vermont, and I liked it. I was thinking maybe I could give it a go again. Maybe with Rick, Rochester and Rascal romping along beside us.

  Then Rochester pulled so hard on his leash that I nearly fell forward, and I reconsidered that plan.

  The townhouse my father had left me suited us both pretty well, though the one thing it was missing was a fireplace. I wished Rochester and I could have dried off in front of a nice, crackling fire, but instead I pulled out the last towels and dried him off, then ran a load of laundry. He crawled under my bed to lick himself in private places, and I sat up and read a mystery novel, trying to ignore the feeling that I was inside one myself.

  The next morning, Rochester and I walked into Fields Hall just before nine. My cell phone began to ring, and I had to struggle to pull off a glove and find the phone in my pocket. Rochester must have sniffed something across the lobby, perhaps some discarded tidbit, and he tried to tug me over there.

  “Hold on, dog,” I said, grabbing the phone just before the call went to voice mail.

  Rochester kept pulling, and I had to yank hard on his leash. I answered the call, which turned out to be a wrong number.

  I finally let Rochester have his head, and he went right over to the metal bin which contained copies of The Eastern Daily Sun, the campus newspaper, and sat down.

  I picked up a copy of the paper, remembering Ike’s admission that he’d leaked some information to a girl he knew who wrote for the paper, and once I’d done so Rochester stood up and headed down the hall.

  Juggling his leash and the paper, I opened the front page. The headline at the bottom of the page was “Are we really as good as we think we are?”

  My heart sank as I hurried behind Rochester to my office. I kicked off my boots and unhooked his leash, and he walked over to his place by the French doors. As I unreeled my scarf and shrugged out of my coat, I skimmed the article.

  Fortunately the reporter, Rose Hippz, didn’t make any concrete allegations. She just hinted that there were irregularities in the admissions office, and wondered if things would be changing now that Joe Dagorian was gone.

  I buzzed Sally, but the receptionist said she was at a school visit that morning. And Babson’s secretary said that he was having breakfast with a group of wealthy alumni and wasn’t expected in the office until eleven.

  My next call was to Tony Rinaldi. After a few preliminaries he came on the line. “I think we’re making some progress,” he said. “Your friend Mr. Arumba was awfully unhappy about speaking to me.”

  “You just have a way with people.”

  He laughed. “Well, I’ll tell you, I didn’t like some of his answers. More than that, I didn’t like his attitude. He was definitely trying to hide something.”

  “Did you confront him about that girl in New York?”

  “Uh-huh. That’s when he really got scared. He denied the incident, he denied that Dagorian had ever confronted him about it. He denied even being out in the garden that night.”

  “Can’t blame him for that. Smoking dope is still illegal in Pennsylvania, isn’t it?”

  “I’m not trying to put a couple of college kids behind bars for getting high,” he said. “I’m looking for a murderer.”

  “If it matters, he confessed everything to me,” I said. “But he swears Joe was alive when he went back into Fields Hall.”

  “I wish I could put this case to bed, but I need more than a jittery kid who denies everything to make an arrest. I’ve got some boys on it, though. I told him not to go anywhere without telling us.”

  I told him about Ike’s threat, and how desperate he was to hold on to his job in the admissions office. “That’s a motive,” Tony said. “Listen, gotta go. Talk to you later.”

  Sally came into my office as I was hanging up. “How was your school visit?” I asked.

  “Not good. All anyone wanted to talk about was crime and murder. A couple of kids even said their parents would never let them go to Eastern after what happened.”

  “Ike Arumba cried on my shoulder yesterday afternoon,” I said. “In his version of what happened in Portland between him and Verona Santander, she comes off as a teenaged temptress and he’s her innocent victim. Of course, he knows what he did was wrong, but he’s not really willing to accept much of the blame.”

  “You believe him over Verona?”

  “I think the truth is somewhere between both stories,” I said. “But I think it’s close enough to Ike’s version to warrant giving him a second chance. I’d like to take a look at Verona’s file and see if what he told me matches up with what’s in there.”

  “Did you see the Daily Sun this morning?”

  “Yeah. He told me yesterday that was going to happen. But I think if you back off, he will, too.”

  “Steve.”

  “Wait, Sally, before you make up your mind. Remember he’s just a kid, and you might be taking his whole career away from him before he starts, just for one mistake. A bad mistake, all right, but he wants you to let him prove himself again. He really wants to work in admissions and he wants you to let him try and show you he’s a decent guy.”

  “You must have believed him,” Sally said.

  “Well, yeah, and I’ve made a few mistakes myself. I’d hate to see him suffer so much for just one.”

  “I kind of like him myself,” she said. “We hit it off right away, what with both of us coming from the Northwest. I probably should give him a second chance. And as you say, if I keep him away from the candidates, he doesn’t have much room to screw up.”

  “Excuse the pun,” I said. We both laughed. “He also told me Joe was recommending to Babson that he be expelled, and he confronted Joe in the garden and they argued.”

  Sally’s mouth dropped open. “Do you think Ike killed him?”

  “Ike had a powerful motive. But the killer used a knife from the kitchen, and Ike didn’t know Joe was considering having him expelled until they talked outside.”

  “He could have had the knife with him.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe he just did.” Sally stood up. “I’ll pull out Verona’s file for you. Meanwhile I’ve got to get back to wade through everything that came in this morning.”

  I grabbed lunch at the Cafette, unwilling to go too far in the cold, and was glad when it was time to head to the tech writing class. When I walked into the classroom, I saw Lou
Segusi sitting at a computer, trying to type one-handed with his left hand. His right arm was in a cast.

  “What happened to you?” I asked.

  “Had a little accident. But I can’t let it slow me down. I’ve got a lot of papers to finish over the next few weeks.”

  “Why don’t you just ask for extensions? Any professor can see it’s tough for you to type like that.”

  He shook his head. “Then I’ll just get farther behind.”

  “What are you majoring in, Lou?”

  “English. I want to be a professional writer when I graduate. Not a novelist or anything—I’m not that creative. I just like to write. I’m thinking I could get a job as a technical writer or work for a magazine. That’s why I wanted to take this course.”

  “I was a tech writer myself for a long time. I’d be happy to talk about it with you sometime.”

  “Would you, Mr. Levitan? That would be great. I’m graduating this term and I don’t really know where to look for jobs.”

  “You have time tomorrow afternoon?” I asked. “Say, two o’clock? Come over to my office in Fields Hall and we’ll do some brainstorming.”

  “Cool. My parents will be so relieved if they see I have some kind of direction.”

  I launched the class into more discussion of their research papers, and then I set them loose for research and writing. As I watched Lou peck away at the computer, once again I wondered how many papers this kid had to write in a term. I was an English major myself, and most of what I had to do when I was a student was read—novels and short story collections and anthologies and reference books. Sure, I had to write papers, too, but usually just a couple each semester.

  There was something hinky about him, I decided. I wasn’t sure what it was, but I was going to do some probing the next day when we met in my office.

  25 – Bad Dog!

  I met Tony Rinaldi on the way to my office. Tony patted his head absently, then closed my office door. “I’m close to making an arrest in Dagorian’s murder,” he said, sitting down across from me. “I wanted to give you a heads up.”