Three More Dogs in a Row

by Neil Plakcy

  “But she responded to you. I’m sure she told you more than she would an ordinary cop.”

  “Are you going to talk to her yourself?”

  He nodded. “Already called her this morning. I need to know more about who he hung out with, and who he might have told about this reliquary thing he was looking for. She wanted to see what Friar Lake looked like for herself, so the chief agreed to cover her train fare. She and the boy are coming into Trenton on Sunday morning. I’m going to pick them up and drive them out there. I hope to get her talking again.”

  “She’s a nice girl,” I said. “I think she’ll give you whatever she can.”

  “Tried the phone number she provided for the half-brother, and it was disconnected. I’ve got a cop in the Bronx heading out to the location to see if he can track the kid down.”

  He stood up. “Thanks for the help, Steve. I appreciate it.”

  “Do you know how he died?” I asked.

  “The ME says blunt force trauma to the back of the head. He picked out some wood fragments from the wound, and he’s trying to identify them.”

  “There’s a lot of wood at the abbey,” I said. “Pews and moldings and stuff. I have to go up to Friar Lake one day next week with the guy who’s going to help with the furnishings. I can look around and see if there’s anything broken off.”

  “Good idea—but I’ll take care of that.”

  “Okay. Sure. Let me know if I can do anything else for you.”

  “You can get some better locks installed up there. All it takes is a couple of teenagers looking for a place to party, and they could do some serious damage.”

  “Good point. I’ll call the guy from facilities right now.”

  After he left, I phoned Joe Capodilupo and told him how I’d been able to get into the property. “I had no idea there were so many easy access points,” he said. “I’ll get a locksmith up there this afternoon to add some deadbolts, and I’ll get a survey started on Monday morning to patch up any broken windows.”

  That was easy, I thought, sitting back in my chair. It was going to be nice to have people I could call on, rather than have to do everything myself.

  Of course, when it came to snooping around crimes, I did tend to want to keep my hand in.

  17 – Crown Jewels

  I finished updating my resume, and read it out loud to be sure I hadn’t made any mistakes I wasn’t catching. I already had an ID and password for Eastern’s computer system—but that one didn’t work for the hiring site, or for the page where I could print a copy of my undergraduate transcript. And each one had its own criteria for credentials, so I couldn’t use the same ones I used for work.

  It was a long, tedious process, filling in the online application, stopping to find addresses of past employers, verify dates and so on.

  At twelve, I took a break to meet Lili for lunch. It was in the high seventies, but under the sheltering branches of the oaks, elms and maples that dotted the campus, it was shady and pleasant. Without warning, Rochester took off after a squirrel, dragging me along behind him. The squirrel darted up the rough trunk of a maple and disappeared into its canopy of branches, which shook slightly as it darted away.

  Rochester put his paws up on the tree trunk as if he was going to climb up after the little rodent. “Come on, you goofball,” I said, tugging on his leash. “We’re going to be late for lunch.”

  We met Lili at the Cafette a few minutes later. She looked beautiful and yet bohemian, as always, in a sleeveless sundress in a flowery print, with her curly hair pulled into a ponytail. Her bright yellow ballet flats echoed the sunshine of the daisies in her dress. I snagged us a picnic table in the shade, and Lili went inside to pick up salads for both of us. Rochester sprawled beside me on the cool slate, ever alert for any dropped food or offered tidbits.

  I played a round of Words With Friends on my cell phone until Lili stepped outside, balancing a cafeteria tray loaded with salads, drinks and utensils. I jumped up and helped her bring everything to the table.

  “What have you been working on so diligently?” I asked, as I speared a piece of chicken and some lettuce from my salad.

  “You know how it is when you get online,” she said. “One link leads to another and when you check the clock hours have passed.” She caught my eye, then said, “Oh.”

  Lili knew about my intermittent history as a computer hacker, including the year I’d spent as a guest of the California penal system. She knew, too, that sometimes I couldn’t resist snooping into online places I didn’t belong, but she didn’t know the extent of my hacking.

  “I know exactly what you mean,” I said. “When I was a web developer I used to spend hours not only checking things on our company’s site, but researching other companies to see how they were approaching problems.”

  “I’ve been finding out all kinds of things about Friar Lake,” she said, pouring a small container of dressing over her salad. I had learned that she always ordered sauces and dressings on the side, though I didn’t know why—she ended up using everything provided anyway. “It was founded nearly two hundred years ago by a French Benedictine fleeing from the Reign of Terror, when his abbey in Paris was destroyed. Did you know that its real name was The Abbey of Our Lady of the Waters?”

  “Rick told me. He used to play CYO basketball there.”

  “How was your trip to New York? Did you find out anything more about the man whose body we found?”

  “Tony Rinaldi sent me to this drop-in center on the Lower East Side,” I said. In between eating my salad and drinking a bottle of water, I explained about meeting Brother Macarius and Brother Anselm.

  “Doesn’t it sound kind of outlandish to you?” She handed a small piece of chicken down to Rochester, who wolfed it up greedily. “A hidden treasure? And what would this guy do with it, if he found it? Take it to a pawn shop?”

  “I don’t know if he was thinking that far ahead,” I said. “He heard this story from the monk, and then took off to look for the reliquary.”

  “That’s an assumption,” Lili said. “There could be some other reason why he was at Friar Lake.”

  “Such as?”

  “Think about it, Steve. It’s an abandoned property. Remote enough that no one would stumble on it, but easy enough to get to if you know where it is. DeAndre could have been dealing drugs, or storing stolen property there. There are a whole bunch of reasons why he could have been killed, and most of them are a lot more probable than some Indiana Jones story.”

  We stood up to dispose of our trash. “Have they done an autopsy yet?” Lili asked.

  I nodded. “Tony came by my office this morning. DeAndre was hit in the back of the head with a big hunk of wood.”

  “Do you have some time?” Lili asked. “Want to come over to my office and see what I’ve found so far about the Abbey’s history?”

  I looked at my watch. I needed to get back to my office and finish my application for the job at Friar Lake. But I could spare a half hour.

  Lili took Rochester’s leash. He was on his best behavior as we walked back to Fields Hall, past students dozing in the sun and a single maintenance worker trimming hedges, wearing a ball cap with a towel hung down the back to protect his neck from the sun.

  Her office was on the ground floor of Granger Hall, the fine arts building. We waved hello to her secretary Matilda, and walked into Lili’s glass-walled office. As she sat down at the computer, I pulled over the spindle-backed wood visitor’s chair so I could look over her shoulder as she talked.

  “My notes are a summary of what I’ve found online so far, starting with that French Benedictine monk, Dom Auguste Sanconnier.” She had found a portrait of him online and pasted it into the document. He was a beak-nosed balding guy with rounded jowls, wearing a similar outfit to the one Brother Macarius and Brother Anselm had worn.

  “I guess those guys never had to worry about changing fashions,” I said, pointing. “Do you think their hemlines went up and down with new coll
ections of monastic wear?”

  “Doubtful,” Lili said. “Dom Auguste came to the US and settled in Philadelphia. According to an account I found, in the early 1800s he met an Irish immigrant named Theodore Fitzpatrick who owned a coal mine outside Easton. Fitzpatrick was concerned about the spiritual health of his workmen, and he invited Dom Auguste to come up to Easton and celebrate Mass.”

  “So monks are kind of like priests?” I asked. “We didn’t cover any of that in Sunday School or Hebrew School.”

  “I didn’t study it in shul either. But I looked it up. As long as the monk is an ordained priest, too, he can celebrate the Mass.”

  Liliana Weinstock was the daughter of an Ashkenazi father with roots in Poland and a Sephardic mother whose family traced its lineage back to Spain. Her parents were both born in Cuba, met and married there, and Lili was born there, though she had grown up in various locations around the US. Her language was a mix of Yiddish, English, Spanish and Ladino, the Spanish dialect of her mother’s ancestors. She was by far the most interesting woman I had ever met.

  “In 1810, Fitzpatrick donated some land to the Benedictines, and funded the construction of the original chapel and a small dormitory,” she continued. She had found an old etching of the abbey from the mid 1800s, when only those two buildings existed.

  “Let’s see what we can find out about Joseph Bonaparte,” I suggested. “Was he even around when the abbey was there?”

  “The student’s best friend,” Lili said, typing. “Wikipedia.”

  We both laughed. The online encyclopedia was generally a good resource—but as a starting point for academic research, not the end. She and I both found ourselves referring to Wikipedia whenever we needed a quick fact or two, though neither of us would ever cite it as a source in an academic paper.

  Bonaparte’s bio indicated that he had lived in New Jersey from 1817 to 1832, which jived with the early years of the abbey. At least part of that time was in Bordentown, which wasn’t far away—on the other side of the Delaware, and a dozen or more miles downriver.

  “He was French, and so was Dom Auguste,” Lili said. “So it’s logical they would have known each other.”

  “Look up St. Roch,” I said, and I spelled it for her. She found his bio on a site indexing Catholic saints, and we read his story. His remains were allegedly carried to Venice in 1485, where, according to the site, they were still venerated at the church of San Rocco.

  “There you are,” I said. “St. Roch is in Venice. Not in Bucks County.”

  “You’re so quick to jump to conclusions,” Lili said. “Not so fast. There’s nothing that says St. Roch’s whole body is still in Venice. His thumb could be somewhere else.”

  “Hitch-hiking?”

  She elbowed me. “Didn’t you say that the monk said something to you about Joseph Bonaparte looting the crown jewels of Spain?”

  “You think somebody stuck the saint’s thumb in a crown? Gross.”

  “Don’t play dumb, Steve. You know as well as I do that 'crown jewels' means more than just crowns. Haven’t you been to the Tower of London?” She did some more typing. “See? The term means ‘jewels or artifacts of the reigning royal family of their respective country.’ So a reliquary holding some part of a saint’s remains could easily be considered part of the crown jewels.”

  “All right. How can we tell if the Spanish crown jewels included a reliquary like the one Brother Anselm described?”

  We did another search, which was less than helpful. There was no definitive listing of anything like the crown jewels of Spain, though we did find several sources that confirmed that Joseph Bonaparte had looted the Spanish treasure during his reign in Madrid, and that he had sold them in the United States. It wasn’t a big leap to assume that he’d kept aside a few pieces, and that he had donated something—whether it contained the thumb of St. Roch or not—to the Abbey of our Lady of the Waters.

  “So what do we have?” I asked Lili, as I pushed her visitor’s chair back into place. “We know that the abbey was in existence when Joseph was in the area. We know he stole some fancy items from Spain, and brought them to the U.S. And we know that St. Roch was the patron saint of dogs.”

  “It’s like a jigsaw puzzle with some pieces missing,” Lili said. “We’ll keep filling the pieces in as we find them.”

  I noticed the use of the word “we.” It looked like the investigative team of Steve and Rochester had enlisted another member.

  18 – A New Start

  I left Lili at her office and walked Rochester back to Fields Hall. I spent another hour working on my online application for the Friar Lake job, and then finally was able to click the “submit” button. And because I knew how easy it was for a computer system to screw up, I sent an email to Elaine in HR confirming that I had completed my application, and that I looked forward to talking with her soon about the remainder of the process.

  I wasn’t sure that any of what Lili and I had found about the abbey’s history had anything to do with DeAndre Dawson’s death, but I typed a quick email to Tony Rinaldi about it. And since there was nothing illicit about what we’d done, I was able to use my college email address to send it to him.

  My phone buzzed, and I thought perhaps it was Elaine – but it was Babson’s secretary, and she told me he wanted to see me. “I’ll be right down,” I said.

  It was late Friday afternoon by then, and most of Fields Hall had already shut down, But John Babson was still working the phones. I had to wait for him to finish his conversation.

  “What’s the latest about this body at Friar Lake?” he asked as soon as he hung up. “Were you able to find out the information the police needed?”

  He motioned me to the chair across from him, and I told him about my trip to New York and what I’d discovered about DeAndre Dawson.

  “That’s just the kind of rumor we don’t need to get started,” Babson said. “Buried treasure. Far more likely that he was just using the property for some criminal activity. I want this wrapped up as soon as possible, Steve.” He steepled his hands. “I may have misled you a bit about the Friar Lake project.”

  “Misled me?” Crap. What if he hadn’t meant to promise me the job at all? Had I just been spinning my wheels all week?

  “I have a lot of authority around here, as you know,” Babson said. “But I do have a Board of Trustees to report to. I’m afraid that in my enthusiasm for the project I might have neglected to mention that the final approval has to come from the Board, at their next meeting. I have everything lined up properly – but if there’s a scandal brewing about the property then my plans might be derailed.”

  And I might be out of a job, I thought. “I’ll do my best to keep a lid on things,” I said. “I’ve already been in contact with Ruta del Camion, and we’re both agreed that the College shouldn’t have any comment until we know more about who the dead man was and what he was doing out at Friar Lake.”

  “I’m not sure that will be enough,” Babson said. “Let’s talk again on Monday morning. If we can’t get this resolved quickly I might have to postpone my presentation to the Board. And I don’t want to do that unless I absolutely have to.”

  “Understood,” I said. I walked back to my office through the empty halls. My head was swirling with ideas – worry about my job and that future I’d been imagining with Lili, topics for adult education seminars – and reasons why DeAndre Dawson might have been at Friar Lake.

  Working on auto-pilot, I closed up my office, rounded up Rochester, and drove home. After I fed him dinner, while my own was in the microwave, I wrote down a list of questions I had. Seeing them all in black and white helped calm the turmoil in my head, even though I was no closer to answering any of them.

  That evening, I took Rochester for a long walk down along the Delaware Canal. Our research into the 19th century reminded me of what an important role the canal had played in transporting coal from the mines of the Lehigh Valley down to the port of Philadelphia. And beyond that, it
was a beautiful evening with a light breeze, and the canal was a great place to let Rochester loose to enjoy himself.

  We walked out of River Bend, past the guard house, to Quarry Road, which led from an old long-unused stone quarry uphill, down to the river. We crossed the bridge over the canal, and then detoured into the park that ran along the old towpath. I let him off his leash and he romped ahead, while I took my time. The canal banks bloomed with daisies, black-eyed Susans, and the tiny pansies we called Johnny Jump-Ups. Birds twittered in the weeping willows and occasionally a fish splashed in the slow-moving water.

  Rochester began barking. He was a few hundred feet ahead of me, his paws once more up against a tree. Another squirrel? I loped down the path toward him.

  “If you found another body, Rochester, you’re going to be in trouble,” I called.

  By the time I reached him, he was back down on the ground. A moment later, Mark Figueroa stepped out from behind the tree where Rochester had been barking.

  “Busted,” he said. “Your dog must be some kind of apprentice cop.” There was a smudge of dirt on his right cheek, and his forehead was sweaty. He held a small plant with drooping purple flowers that looked like some kind of orchid. Bits of dirt dripped from his hands.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “Aquilegia Canadensis,” he said. “Wild columbine. I’ve been collecting them for a flowering bed at my house.”

  “Not exactly criminal activity,” I said.

  He shrugged. “It’s state land. You could call this theft.”

  “Seeing as how I’m not a law enforcement officer, I’ll let you go,” I said. “Assuming Rochester agrees.”

  I scratched him under his neck, and he woofed. “See, you’re in the clear.”

  “I found another one!”

  We both turned at the sound of a voice, and saw Owen Keely emerging from the underbrush a few feet away. He had a similar plant in his hands, and he was smiling—the first time I’d seen him look happy.