by Neil Plakcy
Rochester and I made our way home, and then I drove up to the Eastern campus, with the big goof riding shotgun and his head out the window. He seemed to have recovered, but I was going to keep on mixing the chicken and rice with his food for a day or two and make sure that he finished all the pills Dr. Horz had prescribed.
I spent the morning cleaning up my files, deciding what I could trash and what I ought to send over to Ruta del Camion at the News Bureau. My only big projects were a couple of fund-raising events over the next few weeks, and I put together a report with everything I’d done, including all my press contacts.
Using the college’s online email and calendar program, I scheduled a meeting with Ruta, so I could explain what I was giving her. Most of my materials were digital, and I zipped them up and then emailed the lot to Ruta. The paper files went into a cardboard box, which I’d carry over when I met with her.
Within a couple of minutes after I’d sent the meeting request, Ruta called me. “Hey Steve,” she said. “I just got a weird call from a reporter. He said that he understood a dead body had been found on Eastern property. I told him I had no idea what he was talking about. You hear anything?”
“Not on the campus,” I said. “Out at Friar Lake. Do you know about Babson’s plans for a conference center out there?”
“Just the outline. You know about this body?”
“I found it,” I said. “Or to be more specific, my dog did.” I explained to her what I knew. “I don’t know if the police have identified the body yet.”
“So it’s a big no comment from us,” Ruta said. “If you hear anything, will you let me know?”
“Sure thing, Ruta.” When I hung up, I looked back at my computer. What was I supposed to do for the next year? I’d already met with Joe Capodilupo and with Mark Figueroa. The missing piece seemed to be the kind of programming I would be running out at Friar Lake.
Babson had given me a free hand in developing the slate, but I was sure he’d have a lot of input as I began to come up with program ideas. I figured the first thing I could do was remind myself what kind of research and scholarship we had going on at Eastern, so I could investigate building programs based on that.
I had a boss once who said that he liked to practice MBWA – management by walking around. He’d stroll past our cubicles, checking in on us, getting involved in conversations and decisions. It might have worked for him; I preferred to practice MBWR – management by walking Rochester.
“Want to go for a walk, puppy?” I asked.
He jumped up and nodded his head in agreement. Or maybe he nodded because he liked going for walks.
We went down the hill behind Fields Hall, where Rochester could romp among the pine trees and be admired by fawning students. I liked the slower pace of the campus during the summer. Most students were only taking one or two classes, and there were a lot of pick-up Frisbee games on the lawns that Rochester could join. Girls sunbathed in skimpy bikinis while boys pretended to read in the shade. There was always the faint sound of music coming from somewhere.
Though I looked for inspiration everywhere, I couldn’t find any. I returned to my office, feeling glum, but perked up as soon as I walked into my office and saw Lili at my computer, typing like a fiend. “Hey, sweetie. What’s up?”
“Give me a minute to finish this email and then I’ll tell you all about it.”
With Lili monopolizing my desk and computer I wasn’t sure what to do. So I opened the glass jar full of tiny imitation T-bone steaks and Rochester’s head popped up like a puppet on a string. I figured he was feeling well enough to manage a treat or two. I sat down on the floor next to him, fed him the treat, and scratched behind his ears.
As I watched Lili type, I felt a bit grumpy. She could do anything online she wanted, without worrying about a parole officer lurking in the bushes, and I couldn’t. But then my inner adult piped up and reminded me how I’d gotten myself in trouble, and that it was my own fault I had those restrictions.
“Sorry,” Lili said, turning toward me. “I wanted to come right over and tell you but you weren’t here and I figured I might as well send some emails and get things rolling.”
“Are you speaking English? Because I’m not following.”
“I thought President Babson spoke to you.”
“You mean Monday? About Friar Lake? But what does that have to do with you?”
“You didn’t talk to him this morning?”
“No.”
She pushed a couple of stray tendrils of auburn hair away from her face. “He called this morning and asked me to come over to his office. I had no idea what he wanted, but you know him, he’s always full of surprises. He told me he wants me to put together a coffee-table book about the history of the Friar Lake property. He thinks he can sell copies to alumni as a fund-raiser.”
“Why you?”
“The pictures, of course. He asked if I’d be willing to not only take current shots, but dig into some archives and pull out older ones as well. I’m interested in the process of restoring old photographs anyway, and how we can apply new technologies to the process. You know that article I’ve been working on.”
I nodded. Lili was a good writer, but sometimes her prose got too academic and convoluted, and she brought things to me for clarification.
“Where are you going to fit this in?” I asked as I stood up. Lili was already running the fine arts department, teaching, taking photos of her own, working with the College Connection kids, and working on academic articles. I didn’t want her getting so busy that she’d squeeze me and Rochester out.
“The fall schedule is already set, and the department only has a half-dozen courses running in the summer term. Matilda could run that department without me.”
Matilda was her secretary, a formidable Filipina who shared Imelda Marcos’s taste in shoes—though on a much lower budget.
“Babson offered me another release time for the fall to work on this. Teaching my seminar for The College Connection will only take a few hours. And we’ll get the benefit of working together.”
I was still having trouble following her logic. “How’s that?”
“You’ll have to write the text for the book, of course. Babson was clear about that. This is my project, but he knows what a great writer you are.”
I could just imagine Babson laying on the blather. I knew a lot of couples whose relationships had fallen apart when they spent too much time together, and I was afraid of what Lili would think when she saw how little I knew about construction and running a conference center, but I didn’t want to say anything and spoil her excitement.
“Just think, we’ll be able to spend the rest of the summer together.” She came over to me, and stepped up on her toes to kiss me. At five-ten she’s tall for a woman, but still a couple of inches shorter than I am. Her lips tasted like strawberries. “Won’t that be fun?”
“Yeah, fun,” I said.
“We’ll have to do some research.” She sat back down at my computer. “I’ve already done some quick searching for archival information on Benedictine properties. We may even be able to squeeze in a road trip.”
“I’ll look forward to it.”
“You hear anything more about that poor man whose body we found?” Lili asked. “Was he a monk or a friar?”
“No idea. Haven’t heard anything from Rick or from Tony Rinaldi.”
“I hope they’re able to get him reburied quickly. That’s so sad, the way his body was rising up out of his grave.”
“Sad, or symbolic,” I said. “Even more so if it was Easter.” I opened my mouth wide. “But this is Eastern College. What if we witnessed the start of the second coming?”
“Go back to work, goofball.” She kissed me goodbye and she left.
Her mention of the dead body reminded me of the email I’d sent anonymously to the Leighville Police Department the night before. I was curious to know if he’d learned anything more about the body’s identity, and if the info
rmation I found had been helpful. But calling him up to ask would defeat the purpose of the anonymous address, and open a whole new set of problems for me. Instead I tamped down my curiosity and tried to focus on programming for Friar Lake.
I couldn’t focus, though. I kept thinking about the dead guy. Could I casually call Tony? It had been two days, after all. Would he have the autopsy results? I picked up the phone to call him, then put it down again. If the information I’d found had been useful, he’d probably be too busy arresting people to talk to me.
I picked up Rochester’s leash and he jumped up from the floor. Maybe some fresh air would lead to fresh ideas. As we walked around the back of Fields Hall, I remembered my previous work career, as a technical writer and web developer. What would have drawn me back to Eastern for some kind of executive learning course?
As a tech writer, I had to know the basics of how everything worked at the company, because I had to write the instruction manuals. I’d taken a workshop on inventory management (a big snooze) and one on logistics and transportation (an even bigger snooze.) I’d also been sent for seminars to learn new software as we incorporated it.
There was no way we could compete with the big business schools, though. Our faculty didn’t have the depth or breadth or real world experience. I decided that I needed some input from someone on the faculty. The problem was that even though I’d been back at Eastern for a little over a year, I didn’t know that many professors.
The only professor I felt completely comfortable with was Lucas Roosevelt. He was one of my favorites when I was an undergraduate, and when I returned to Eastern I was stunned to realize he was only about five years older than I was, and had become the department chair.
Lucas (he was always quick to point out that he was not related to those Roosevelts, as his family name had been Rostnikov prior to arriving on Ellis Island) was willing to give me a chance as an adjunct, and we had shared shots of Cuban rum smuggled in from Canada for him by a grateful student to celebrate. I called his office in Blair Hall and found that he was free. Well, that would give me a start.
12 – Tug of War
Rochester was sleeping on his back, his rear paws extended and stretching the skin of his belly so taut he reminded me of a skinned rabbit hung up to dry outside a hillbilly’s house. I snuck out without waking him.
Eastern’s campus, usually so busy, was dreaming sleepily in the summer heat. A pair of girls had spread a beach towel on the sunny lawn in front of Fields Hall. Wearing bikinis and oversized sunglasses, they were both reading—one a big art history textbook, the other a paperback edition of The Great Gatsby.
A cluster of students lounged on the grass beneath a towering maple, each of them intently reading—a mix of textbooks, novels, a Kindle, and a couple of iPads. I remembered my own days as an undergrad. I’d relaxed under that same tree with my own friends, and an assortment of books – all paper, of course—for classes from English literature to introduction to economic theory.
There were more students reading on the stone steps of Blair Hall, which housed the English department. It had undergone an unfortunate makeover in the sixties, and a lot of the character you could see in old photographs had been stripped out—the wood moldings, the stone finials—and replaced with fluorescent lights and linoleum floors.
Candice (“Don’t call me Candy”) Kane, the English department secretary, was away from her desk, though I could see that the spider plants she cultivated were still going strong. Lucas’s door was open, and I stuck my head in.
“My dear boy, how good to see you!” Lucas boomed. He was a tall, lanky man, with somewhat of a resemblance to Abraham Lincoln in his rail-splitter days, though with no beard or stovepipe hat.
Because I was a former student, I was always going to be a boy to him, despite how close we were in age. “Have a minute?” I asked. “I need to do some brainstorming.”
“My brain is always available,” he said, motioning me to a seat across from him. “Doesn’t get enough of a workout these days, but can’t complain. What can I help you with?”
I sketched out the broad outline of the Friar Lake project. “I was walking outside, and I passed a whole group of students lounging on the lawn reading. About half were holding physical books and the other half e-readers or tablet computers.”
Lucas shook his head. “I can barely remember those days, when I had the whole summer off to read.”
“That’s what I was thinking,” I said. “And I remembered my senior seminars, a half dozen or so of us sitting around talking about books. One of those was with you.”
I vividly remembered Lucas in front of our seminar group. He could recite whole passages of the middle English of Geoffrey Chaucer, quote from T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland,” declaim sonnets and gesture to Shakespearean dialogue. He made those works come alive in front of us, while challenging us to analyze, think, paraphrase and examine.
“I thought we could recreate the seminar experience,” I continued. “Small groups of alumni and other intellectually curious adults, focused on a single topic, over a long weekend.”
Like many of the friends and classmates I kept in touch with, I missed the intellectual stimulus of the academic environment, and I regretted the gaps in my education. There were whole disciplines I’d never studied, from sociology to astrophysics, and hundreds of authors and books I wanted to read but lacked the time or the motivation.
I knew accountants who belonged to book groups, doctors who collected art, business people who loved to travel. If I could replicate the Eastern experience in a few intense days, I thought I might have a chance at succeeding.
“What do you think, Lucas?” I asked. “Is it possible to create that same feeling students have?”
“If we can’t, then we don’t deserve to be called professors,” he said. “Suppose we took some of the content of one of those seminars and narrowed it down? Instead of a whole semester on modern American novels, we focused on one author—Hemingway, for example.”
I nodded. “But they can’t spend the whole weekend reading. We’d have to mix things up. We could have them read The Sun Also Rises before they arrive. Then we could show that Woody Allen movie, Midnight in Paris. And add some videos of the running of the bulls in Pamplona. Throw in some Spanish wine and tapas.”
“I think we’re on to something here,” he agreed. “We talk about Hemingway’s notion of masculinity, provide some examples of how he prefigured some of the more modern writers like Raymond Carver. Very doable in a long weekend.”
“I’d sign up myself,” I said. “Can I put some ideas together and then bring them back to you? You could help me find the right faculty.”
“I’d be delighted. Count me in for the Hemingway seminar.”
I stood up. “Thanks, Lucas. I feel like I have a direction now.”
When I got back to my office, Tony Rinaldi was sitting on the floor playing tug-of-war with Rochester. I was a bit disconcerted to see him. There was no way he could have tracked that email back to me, but he could be guessing. Guesses, though, were not enough to violate my parole.
“Don’t get up on my account,” I said, as I walked in.
Tony looked embarrassed. He stood anyway, brushing some of Rochester’s long golden hairs from his black slacks.
“What can I do for you?” I sat down behind my desk, and he sat across from me.
“Got a little problem.”
“I don’t like the sound of that.” I expected him to mention the anonymous emails but he had something different in mind.
“Neither does the chief of police. Turns out that guy whose body you found? The ME figured out that he was African-American. Called the Benedictines, and discovered they had no black monks or friars living out there.”
“I thought he was black,” I said. “Or at least Rochester did.”
“How did he know? He have a different bark depending on the race of the victim?”
“He got a black winter glove from my
bedroom and started chewing it,” I said. “You know, black glove, black hand.”
Tony raised his eyebrows. “You have some crazy ideas about that dog, Steve.” He paused. “Anyway, because of the position of the hand that was still underground—it was underneath him, so it was protected by his clothes – there was enough skin that the ME could pull off some prints.”
“Find a match?”
“Yup. His name is DeAndre Dawson and he has a criminal record that would stretch from here all the way back to New York City, where he was last known to reside.”
“Then how did he end up dead at Friar Lake?” I asked.
“That’s what I need your help to figure out.”
“What can I do? I told you I just got this job two days ago. I don’t know anything about the property.”
“Right now DeAndre is residing at the medical examiner’s office, lined up for his turn on the autopsy table. That’ll tell me what the cause of death was. But while I’m waiting for those results, I want to figure out what DeAndre was doing down here.” He leaned back in his chair. “I made a couple of calls to New York, and spoke to his parole officer. He said that DeAndre used to hang out at a drop-in center on the Lower East Side called The Brotherhood Center.”
“And?”
“And the center’s run by a couple of Franciscan friars.”
“Any connection to Friar Lake?”
“I don’t know as yet.” He took a deep breath. “I hate to drag a civilian into a murder case, but we’re stretched thin in our department as it is, and I have nothing to base a warrant on, and places like that have an innate distrust of the cops.”
I was surprised. Tony Rinaldi was actually going to ask me for help? That was a big turnaround in his attitude.
“You have a way of getting people to talk to you.” He held up his hand. “I know you say it’s all the dog. But you’ve been able to find out information from people who wouldn’t talk to the police in the past. I was hoping I could convince you to go up there and talk to people. You’re from the college, you discovered the body, you just want to talk to people, satisfy your curiosity.” He grinned. “You have a lot of that.”