by Neil Plakcy
Then the character who received the message would have to describe how he or she would use that information in the game. I fiddled around with the instructions for a while, then went back to reading. I’d only gotten through a chapter when Rick called.
“I need a beer,” he said. “Hell of a day. You busy?”
“Not really. I picked up some Flying Dog the other day. Called Wildeman Farmhouse IPA. You want to give it a try?”
“Sounds like my day. Full of wildness. Let me pick up the Rascal and I’ll be over.”
I waited for Rick to show up before I opened the first bottle. I had one ready for him when I opened the door and Rascal charged in. “That’s the kind of service I could get used to,” Rick said.
“Get married again.”
He shook his head. “Not to Paula Madden, that’s for sure.”
“Don’t tell me you broke up already? Was it something we said last night?”
“It’s not you, it’s me,” he said. “Isn’t that a laugh? Actually, it wasn’t you or me. It’s Paula. She’s crazy.”
He took a long pull at his beer. “Another break-in last night at Crossing Estates. Turned out to be a friend of Paula’s, and when I got there to talk to the homeowners, she was there. She wouldn’t shut up—the poor people couldn’t get a word in. Just kept criticizing me for not getting these burglaries solved. And that little dog. My god. Yapping right along with her. It was enough to give me a headache.”
“What did you do?”
“I told her that if she couldn’t keep her mouth shut long enough for me to talk to the people, then she needed to scoot her butt out of there. I thought I was making a joke – you know from the dancing. She didn’t take it that way.”
“What did she do?”
“She grabbed her bag so fast the dog nearly fell out. Had a few choice words for me—things I haven’t heard since the last time I had to go down to the state prison in Chester. Then she stalked out and slammed the door behind her.”
He shook his head. “The husband? He got up and followed her, opened the door and yelled after her that was his door she was slamming. Even the wife said she was glad Paula was gone, and what had I done to get her so riled up in the first place?”
“Sounds tough.”
“Good riddance to her anyway,” he said. “Her prejudices were really starting to get to me. You just got a little bit last night. A lot of people, if they’ve never had to deal with people of other races or other backgrounds, they’re frightened, or just need to be educated. Paula was a whole other story. I can’t imagine how she can travel around and buy shoes acting the way she does.”
He took another long pull, and finished his beer. “Got another one of these?”
“Sure.” By the time I got back with the beer, he had calmed down.
“Once she was gone, I finally got to talk to the people, and they didn’t have a single lead to give me.”
“How many burglaries so far?” I asked.
“Six. Whoever’s behind it is very slick. Jimmy the lock on the sliding door, in and out fast.”
“Where do they park?”
“You mean the victims?”
I shook my head. “No, I mean the crooks. You can’t get out to Crossing Estates on foot—it’s too far from anything. So they have to drive in, right?”
He nodded, then took another pull on his beer.
“And every house in the neighborhood has at least a two-car garage and a big driveway. So people don’t park their own cars in the street.”
“Your point is?”
“My point is that the crooks have to park somewhere. Probably not in the driveway of the house they’re robbing, right? Too obvious. So they’ve got to park somewhere close by. And in a neighborhood like that, people notice when somebody’s parked in front of their house.”
“Houses are too far apart,” Rick said. “You could park between them.”
“Still. You could check with the neighbors and see if they noticed anybody parked who didn’t belong.”
“You have a good idea now and then, Frank Hardy,” he said.
“Anything I can do to help, brother Joe,” I said, tipping my bottle against his.
22 – Good People
Monday morning dawned bright and sunny. Rochester and I went for a good long walk around River Bend, meeting up with a couple of his doggy friends and giving him lots of chances to sniff and pee. After breakfast, I loaded him into the BMW and drove directly to Friar Lake. I had a nine o’clock meeting scheduled with Joe Capodilupo to pick up my own set of keys to the new locks. Then at ten I’d arranged to meet Mark Figueroa there and walk him around the property so he could get an idea of the scope of the work ahead of us, assuming that the project was a go.
Rochester was excited as I drove in the access road to Friar Lake—probably wanted to see if he could dig up any more dead bodies. But I kept him on a tight leash as we walked around. I spotted Joe standing in front of the chapel talking to a black guy in the khaki work uniform the Eastern maintenance staff wore.
The black guy’s name was Ford, and he didn’t like Rochester one bit. Every time we ran into him on campus he reminded me that dogs weren’t supposed to be at Eastern unless they were guide dogs.
“Hey, Joe,” I said, as we walked up to them. “Ford.”
Ford glared at Rochester, and I had to pull his leash tight to keep him from jumping on the maintenance man.
“I’ll get on those problems in the dorm, Mr. C,” Ford said, and he turned and walked away—but not before casting one more baleful look at Rochester.
The bald spot on the top of Joe’s bald head had been sunburned, and the white fringe that surrounded it reminded me once again of a monk’s tonsure. “Have a good weekend?” I asked Joe, as he opened the door to the chapel.
“Went down the shore with the grandkids,” he said. “Wildwood Crest. Crowds like you wouldn’t believe.”
I had grown up on Jersey shore summer vacations, or as we said, going down the shore. “I haven’t been there since I was a kid,” I said. “We used to go to Seaside for a week every summer.”
“Looks the same,” he said. “Acres of parked cars and hardly a piece of sand without somebody’s umbrella already there.”
Joe had a roll of plans under his arm, and as we walked around the chapel he pointed out all the work that had to be done. “I’ve got a contractor lined up for demolition as soon as Babson gives me the go-ahead,” he said.
“You think this’ll be a go?” I asked. Joe had been around Eastern a long time, and I wondered if he had any inside information.
“Whether the conference center project gets off the ground now, or a year from now, this building still needs to be renovated. We’ll be knocking out unnecessary walls, removing the old plumbing and electrical wiring, and so on. That should take about a week. Once all the debris is gone we can start the rebuilding.”
“I didn’t realize how big a job it was,” I said as we walked through a side door and out into the cloister, though I was thinking a year from now? What would I do until then?
“This is nothing. You should have been around for building Harrow Hall. Huge construction project right in the middle of the campus. Constantly moving barriers around so that we could bring in materials but not block student access to buildings. That was a nightmare.”
It took us the full hour to walk through each building, making sure that the new locks had been installed and all the broken windows replaced. We were standing in front of the chapel when Mark Figueroa’s white delivery van pulled up in the drive.
Mark hopped out of the driver’s seat. It was almost comical to see him shake hands with Joe—the older man short and dumpy, while Mark was almost freakishly tall and skinny as a stick of beef jerky.
I was surprised to see that he’d brought Owen Keely with him. I’d thought Owen was just his delivery man.
Instead of romping over to say hello, as he did with almost everyone new, Rochester sat on his haunch
es by my side, watching Mark and Owen as if they were invaders ready to steal something.
I guessed Mark to be in his mid-thirties, seven or eight years younger than I was. Owen had to be in his late twenties, yet he looked as sullen as a teenager roped into accompanying his father on a boring excursion. While Mark wore creased khakis and a bright green polo shirt, Owen had on a black pocket T-shirt and faded jeans. If he hadn’t been wearing a belt, I imagine the jeans might have sagged down his butt the way many a teenager’s did.
After I made the introductions, Joe walked us around the chapel, pointing out the way the space would be broken up, and Mark took notes. I was glad to have Joe there, because he had answers to most of Mark’s questions. “This is good material,” Joe said, leaning down to rap his knuckles on the tongue and groove wooden floor in the chapel. “Once we’re done, we’ll sand it, polish it and put a layer of polyurethane over it.”
“We’ll need entry mats for the foyer, though,” Mark said. “In case of rain and snow.”
He pulled out a big tape measure, and he and Owen measured the doorways and the depth of the foyer. Owen always held the end of the tape, and Mark called out measurements to him, which Owen wrote down on a clipboard. Rochester sprawled on the wood floor, always watching them.
“Look at these,” Mark said, pointing at a series of carvings along the side wall. “They’re beautiful.”
“The stations of the cross,” Owen said. “We had them in St. Ignatius in Yardley.” He walked up stand beside Mark in front of the first one. For a moment, I could see him as a wide-eyed kid in Catholic school, like Rick must have been. I wondered if Owen had played CYO basketball, too.
Mark nodded. “I think so, too. There are fourteen of them. This is the first one, where Jesus is condemned to death.” He turned to Joe. “These are very valuable. If you’re not going to preserve them, you need to find a safe way to cut them out of the walls.”
Joe looked closely at the wall. “Can’t take them out without destroying the wall,” he said. “Probably why the Benedictines left them behind. I think we can put them behind glass eventually.”
“That’s good,” Mark said. “Next up I want to measure the dormitories. How do we get there from here?”
“Over this way,” Owen said, pointing toward a side door beside a row of three small rooms which I assumed had been used for confessions.
“You’ve been here before?” I asked.
“Catholic school trip,” he said. I remembered Rick had mentioned the same kind of trip, but I wondered if Owen really would have remembered such a detail from so long before. Had he been up to Friar Lake since then? And if so, why?
We walked through the dormitory building, and Joe showed us how the building was going to be reconfigured into four-bedroom suites, each with a bathroom. The walls between the monastic cells would go, and the single antiquated rest room would be demolished.
“Gonna be a very different place when we’re done,” Joe said.
Maybe I was reading too much in, but a couple of times I noticed Owen checking the security of locks, pressing against windows and so on. The walk through with them took another hour and a half, and after they were gone Joe and I still had more checklist items to go over.
“I’ve got a trailer coming in as soon as I get the OK,” Joe said. “Going to set it right over at the side of the driveway. There are three offices and a john inside. Once we started, you can have one of the offices.”
“Who’ll be in the others?”
“Construction superintendent for one. Probably use the other as a plan room or for meetings. I’ll be coming out most days to check on things, but it would be good to have somebody from the college on-site all the time.”
“Doesn’t look like I’ll have anything else to do,” I said.
Rochester and I left Friar Lake around twelve-thirty, and I detoured past Crazy Chicken on my way back to the office. I ordered the three-piece meal at the drive-through, then parked and led Rochester over to a metal table outside the restaurant. As I ate, I fed him bits of chicken and biscuit, then went back to the office.
He slumped contentedly in the corner while I scrambled to put together my program for the College Connection kids the next morning. I created a series of challenges for the kids that would improve their communication skills while showing them what college level work was all about. I figured I should have a PowerPoint presentation to introduce them to what I wanted, and I began searching for and embedding movie clips.
That’s when Santiago Santos walked in.
I felt an immediate surge of panic – would he quibble with what I was doing? Suppose he wanted to make sure I wasn’t illegally downloading movies? Then I took a deep breath and said, “Good afternoon.”
“Afternoon,” he said, sliding into the visitor’s chair beside my desk. He peered over at my computer. “Watching movies?”
Rochester looked up at him, then rolled over and went back to sleep. I gave him a quick rundown of the College Connection and what I was putting together. “But you must have come over here for some reason,” I said. “Since we just met last week. What’s up?”
“Spoke to Rick Stemper at the gym,” he said. “You’re snooping around a police investigation again?”
“You make it sound like a crime,” I said. “Tony Rinaldi from the Leighville Police asked me for some help. It’s connected with my job here, and I got permission from the college president. Why is that your problem?”
“My problem,” he said, emphasizing the word, “is that I am in charge of keeping you on the straight and narrow. Every time you step off the path you’re supposed to be on, there’s a chance you can revert back to your old habits.”
I crossed my arms over my chest and stared at him.
“No good cop is going to want you to do anything illegal, Steve. And if you dig around online where you’re not supposed to, you’ll only get yourself and this other cop in trouble.”
My first instinct was to justify myself – but I knew I’d only end up digging myself deeper into trouble. So I held my temper down and said, “You don’t have anything to worry about.”
“Keep it that way,” he said. He pushed his chair back and stood up. Rochester looked up at him again.
“I deal with a lot of addicts in my job,” Santos said. “And you’ve got all the traits I see in them, except for the runny nose and the bloodshot eyes. I may only be in charge of you for the next couple of months, but trust me, I will be watching you.”
Then he turned and strode out. I grabbed my cell phone, ready to call Rick and ream him one for ratting me out to Santos. What business did he have anyway, talking about me behind my back? That wasn’t something a friend would do.
Was he really my friend, though? Or was he just using me, my dog, and my abilities when it suited him? My anger boiled up, and suddenly Rochester jumped up and put his paws on my thighs, leaning forward to lick my face.
“Go away, dog,” I said, pushing him back. But he wouldn’t give up, and he kept nosing me, then frolicking around on the floor, chasing his tail. I started to laugh and then gave in, playing with him for a couple of minutes until my anger had dissipated. Rick probably hadn’t seen what he did as ratting me out – more like protecting me from my own bad impulses. And that was something a friend would do, right?
I went back to my presentation and finished embedding the movie clips. By the time I was done I was really looking forward to meeting with the kids the next morning.
Tony Rinaldi called me late in the afternoon. “Thanks for your help on Saturday with Shenetta,” he said. “I wouldn’t have gotten her to open up if you hadn’t come over.”
“I bet you would have. She seemed to get along with Tanya.”
“Yup, looks like Tanya might be able to help her out. She has an LPN going on maternity leave in August—just after Shenetta finishes her class work.”
“That’s good. Any of the leads she give you pan out?”
“Still working o
n them. I’ve been trying to track down the half-brother, but he and his mom left the place they were living on short notice and didn’t leave a forwarding address. Shenetta said she’ll let me know if the kid calls her. Called his school, too, but they only had that address, and since he’s not registered for summer school they said the only thing they can do is wait for him to show up in the fall.”
“I know where he is,” I said. “Right here in Leighville.”
I explained about the College Connection, and that I’d met Ka’Tar the day before.
“Why didn’t you call me as soon as you met him?”
“When he told me that he knew DeAndre was dead, I figured you’d spoken to him already.”
“You know where I can find him?”
“The kids are staying in Birthday House and eating at Burgers Commons.” I looked at my watch. “You could probably catch up with him over there in about half an hour. Look for a tall skinny kid with a big bush of brown hair. That’s Yudame, and he’s the sort of camp counselor in charge of Ka’Tar’s group.”
We said good bye and he hung up. I really wanted to join Tony for his talk with Ka’Tar—but he had said he didn’t need me, and I had to honor that. A short while later, I hooked up Rochester’s leash and we headed for my car.
A group of the CC kids were hanging around outside Fields Hall, with no adults or counselors in sight. A couple of them were smoking, and I thought I recognized the scent of marijuana in the air. That wouldn’t be the first time I’d smelled it at Eastern, though, and it could have been coming from some college kid in the area.
I looked around for Ka’Tar but didn’t see him. I hurried Rochester along before we ran into Tony and he accused me of meddling in his case.
I talked to Lili while I was fixing dinner, and then spent the rest of the evening reading. It was such an unexpected pleasure, to be able to fall into a good book, and yet to be able to feel virtuous about it, too. I loved to read, and during my year of incarceration I had gone through book after book from the prison library. The one time Mary visited me I asked her to bring me a box of books from my bookcase—all the ones from the unread shelf. She hadn’t paid much attention, tossing books in willy-nilly, so I’d found myself re-reading Jane Austen and William Gibson—a back-to-back effort that took me from the distant past to the near future, without a stop in reality—which was just fine with me at that time.