by Neil Plakcy
I finished the second book in the Hunger Games trilogy just before it was time to take Rochester for his walk, and loaded the last book onto my Kindle with a sense of sadness, realizing I had only that book left before I would be stepping away from Katniss’s world.
The next morning was not so sunny, with clouds threatening to put a damper on our walk, so Rochester and I stayed close to home. When we arrived at Eastern, he settled down with a rawhide chew and I answered some emails.
I left him dozing and walked to the computer classroom in Blair Hall. Though I was a few minutes early, Yudame and his crew were already waiting for me. “Morning, my prof,” he said. “I gots a real good group for you here.”
I smiled at them as I slipped the card key into the slot, opening the classroom door. As they filed in, I noticed Courtney, the tough white girl with the blonde dreads. She reminded me of Katniss, and I considered how I could use that information in my presentation.
I began with a list of the main characters in the first Hunger Games book. Then I began assigning parts. Courtney became Katniss, and Ka’Tar volunteered to be Peeta, her partner in the game. Once everyone had a part, I went on to talk and show them bits about communication in Panem.
“Information is very tightly controlled,” I said. “Can anybody give me an example?”
No one raised a hand. So, these kids were like my college-level students in that regard. “How much do Katniss and Peeta know about the Hunger Games before they begin them?” I asked. I looked down at my roster. “Rohanna Bhatt?”
“You can call me Ro.” She was one of two Pakistani girls who sat next to each other. Ro had sleek black hair and olive skin; she wore a T-shirt and jeans. Zazeem wore a Muslim headscarf that covered her forehead and her hair. Her skin was lighter than Ro’s but she was badly in need of acne treatment.
“They watched it on the TV every year,” Ro said. “So they knew the kind of challenges.”
“But the game changes from year to year,” Courtney said. “So they didn’t really know shit.”
The class tittered. “You’re both right,” I said. “They knew the general outline of the games, but they didn’t know what they were going to encounter. Kind of like you guys coming out here to Leighville, right? You must have had a general idea of what to expect, but you didn’t know the details.”
A couple of the kids nodded in agreement. “That’s because the information about the games—and information about what was going on in the other districts—was very carefully controlled.” We talked about information for a while, and then I gave them a writing assignment. The session wasn’t as much fun as I had hoped it would be, but they had some good ideas, and I wrote a couple of their sentences up on the board and critiqued them, pointing out some of the basics of grammar, and then our time was up.
I pulled Ka’Tar aside as the kids were filing out. “How’s it going?” I asked.
“You the one that sent the po-po to talk to me?” he asked.
It took me a second or two to figure out what po-po meant. “Yeah. I thought he could tell you more about what happened to DeAndre.”
“DeAndre dead. Ain’t much more to know about.”
I closed the classroom door behind me. “Come on, I’ll walk over to lunch with you,” I said.
23 – Interesting Findings
“DeAndre sounds like he was a good brother,” I said to Ka’Tar as we walked under the shade of an overarching maple tree. Light filtered through the leaves and dappled the flagstone path.
“We got the same pops,” he said. “But we didn’t even know each other til a couple years ago.”
“Really? How’d you meet up?”
“DeAndre come looking for me. Said the po-po was looking for our pops, come talk to him, and they say he got a brother. He really into Star Trek, just like my moms. We used to do the salute thing, you know?” He held up his damaged hand. “He was like, bro, you got a head start on bein’ Vulcan. We used to talk about bein’ long-lost cousins of Tuvok – you know, the black dude.”
“He talked to you about coming down here?” I asked as we approached the glassy front of Burgers Commons.
“Yeah, how pretty and shit it was. Told me to come to this program.”
We got to the front door, and Chinelle came up to us. “Hey, Tar,” she said shyly.
“How you doin’, beauty?” he asked. He put his arm around her shoulder and opened the door for her, and I left the two of them to their romance.
I stayed with the CC kids through lunch. I sat between a shy light-skinned black boy named Steehle Mills and a Chinese girl named Wong Wei, though I wasn’t sure if her first name was Wong or Wei. We talked more about The Hunger Games, and then I walked back to my office with a pocket full of food for Rochester. I took him out for a walk, thinking about the coincidence of DeAndre’s brother showing up so soon after his body was discovered. Had Ka’Tar been involved in whatever DeAndre was doing? Or was he in Leighville just because DeAndre liked the town and the college and told him about the program?
Lili came over as I was getting ready to leave for the day. “I found something interesting,” she said. “I want to show you.”
She came over to my desk, and I got up and let her sit down at my computer. “What did you find?”
“I was looking for photos of the abbey,” she said. “I got onto Pinterest, and found that one of the monks who used to live at Friar Lake set up a board for the abbey. I found a couple of old ones I can incorporate, as long as I get the monk’s permission. And then I saw this one, which looks pretty recent.”
She turned the monitor so I could see. “Do you think that’s DeAndre there?”
The picture was of three men standing in front of the chapel. The elderly man on the left wore the plain brown robe and rope belt I had seen at the drop in center.
“Holy crap,” I said. “That’s Brother Anselm, for sure. And the white guy on the right? That’s Owen Keely, who’s living with his parents down the street from me, and who’s working for Mark Figueroa.”
I stood up and started pacing around. “So Owen Keely has been out to Friar Lake before. I knew it. Yesterday morning I asked him if he’d been to Friar Lake before, and he said back when he was a kid. Why didn’t he mention this trip?”
“Because he was there with DeAndre, and DeAndre’s dead,” Lili suggested.
“That implies that he knew DeAndre was dead—which would mean he had something to do with it.” I sat down in the spindle-backed chair by the desk. “Do me a favor? Open up my jump drive. I saved a booking photo of DeAndre there. We can compare it.”
She turned to face me. “How did you get hold of his booking photo?”
“It’s all good,” I said. “I guess booking shots are public domain, and there’s a company that posts them online. If you want them to remove it, you have to pay them. I just copied the picture from there.”
She opened the folder on my jump drive and we compared pictures. “That’s him,” I said. “Wow. That adds a whole different dimension. Tony Rinaldi ought to talk to Owen.” I dug my cell phone out of my pocket and dialed Tony. I got his voice mail. But the message was too complicated to leave, so I just left my name and said, “I’m emailing you. Call me when you get the message.”
Lili got up and I returned to the computer. “I’ve got to get back to Harrow Hall,” she said. “Tomorrow morning the CC kids start working with the pictures they took. I want to get some things set up for them.”
“Dinner?” I asked, as my email program opened.
“No, I’ll just grab something on my way home.” She leaned down and kissed my cheek. “Talk to you tomorrow.”
I typed out a message for Tony Rinaldi, and copied Rick Stemper on the email too, since Owen lived in Stewart’s Crossing and I thought he’d want to know. Then I hit send.
I was on my way home with Rochester riding shotgun when Rick called my cell.
“I got your email about Owen Keely,” he said. “Coincidence, since I’m l
ooking for him myself.”
“Why?”
“Mark Figueroa called me this morning. Some stuff is missing from his shop, and when he tried to reach Owen at home, Mrs. Keely said that he had gone away for a while.”
“I knew there was something shifty about him,” I said. “Poor Mark. Did Owen steal a lot?”
“Hold on, Hardy Boy. Don’t go accusing anyone of theft until all the facts are in. Mark’s missing a few hundred bucks in cash and a couple of small pieces of jewelry he said could add up to a couple of grand, depending on whether they’re pawned or sold for gold.”
“Come on, Rick. Owen goes missing at the same time as Mark’s stuff. Not a big leap.”
“Hey, you’re the one with the imagination,” Rick said. “I’m sure you could spin a half-dozen stories without Owen Keely as the bad guy.”
“I feel bad for Mark. I thought he looked really happy when Owen was around. And the only time I actually saw the guy smile was when he was with Mark.” I told him about finding them looking for plants along the canal. “And his parents are probably going to be broken up, too. I know they put a lot into getting him off drugs.”
“Once an addict, always an addict,” Rick said, and for a brief second I thought he was talking about me and my hacking addiction. "Hey, you want to meet up at the Drunken Hessian later? Seven o’clock?”
“Sure. “ He hung up, and I decided to detour past Mark’s antique shop on the way home. “You’re going to have to stay in the car, boy,” I said to Rochester, lowering the windows as I pulled up in the narrow driveway next to the antique store.
He woofed, but then settled down on the seat, his head resting across the gear shift box. The lowering clouds that had been around all day were still overhead, but it didn’t look like it was going to rain.
I walked up the short steps onto the porch of the gingerbread Victorian, and then opened the door. The little bell rang, and Mark came out from the back. “Sorry about Owen,” I said.
“It’s my own fault,” Mark said. “I always pick the wrong guys.”
“Hey, you were doing his mother a favor by hiring him,” I said. “Not your fault.”
“Oh. I thought you knew—when you saw us down by the towpath the other day.”
The tumblers clicked. “So you were a couple, too?”
“I wouldn’t call it that. We never went out anywhere on a date or anything. Now I’m thinking he was just stringing me along.”
He looked pretty miserable. “You shouldn’t let it get you down,” I said. “At least you got rid of him quickly, and cheaply. I was stuck with my ex-wife for years, and it cost me a whole lot more to get rid of her.”
He smiled. “I suppose I could look at it that way.”
“Hey, I’m meeting Rick for dinner at the Drunken Hessian at seven. Why don’t you join us?”
“I wouldn’t be good company.”
“You’ll be better than Rick. Come on.”
“I could use a beer or two,” he admitted.
“Cool. See you then.”
I drove Rochester home, fed him dinner, and took him for a long walk. Then I sat down on a kitchen chair. “You think I can trust you outside the crate this time?” I asked him. “No chewing on gloves, or anything else?”
He slumped on the floor in front of me. “How about if we compromise?” I stood up and walked over to the entrance hall closet. I had a folding gate there I had used when Rochester was very young, to keep him on whatever floor I was on. “I’ll put up the gate, and you can have the whole first floor to yourself. But if you misbehave…”
He rolled on his side and waved his front paws in the air.
I put up the gate, made sure he had water, and locked the door behind me. As I walked out through the courtyard, I looked back and saw him with his nose pressed against the sliding glass door.
Mark Figueroa was walking toward me as I pulled into the Drunken Hessian’s parking lot. “Do you live above the antique store?” I asked, as I met him halfway.
“Cuts down on the commuting time,” he said. “Hard to get away from work, though. I’m always thinking of something I need to do and then going downstairs.”
“And Owen?”
Mark looked sheepish. “He didn’t like to stay overnight—said that his mother would worry about him. So last night I didn’t think anything of it when he walked out. Must have been some time after eleven. “
“That’s the last time you saw him?”
“Yup. He was supposed to come in at ten this morning—that’s when I open. But he didn’t, and I waited an hour to call his cell. No answer. So I called Marie to ask about him. She said she was worried, because he’d never come home last night.”
He pulled the door to the Drunken Hessian open and ushered me in ahead of him. “I was worried about him—what if he’d gotten into an accident on his bike somewhere after he left me. But I had a couple of deliveries that needed to be made, and he wasn’t there, so I closed the shop up and took the van out.”
The hostess was a tough-looking older woman who’d been working at the Hessian for as long as I could remember. “Table for two?” she asked.
“Three,” I said. As she was pulling out the menus, Rick walked in and joined us.
We slid into the booth, and Mark said, “I was just telling Steve what happened. I made my deliveries, and got back to the store around one. Had a customer waiting, wanted to buy this porcelain statue she’d had her eye on for a while. When I pulled it out for her I noticed that there were a couple of pieces missing from the shelf. She paid in cash, and when I went to make her change I realized the petty cash was gone.”
The waitress came over, and we ordered a pitcher of beer and a platter of nachos.
“After my customer left I took a good look around. That’s when I realized I’d been robbed. I called Rick and he came right over.”
Rick picked up the narrative. “We made a list of everything missing, and Mark signed the complaint. I drove over to Owen’s parents’ house. Didn’t realize they lived just down the block from you. I recognized Mrs. Keely from seeing her on that three-wheeled bike of hers.”
“I’ve known Marie for a couple of years,” Mark said. “I’ve been in and out of her house a dozen times. Used to see the pictures of her kids and I always thought Owen was a real stud. Then when he came home from rehab and was staying with them, I met him one day, and he was a hundred times sexier than he was in the pictures.”
The waitress delivered the pitcher and three tall pilsner glasses. I poured as Mark continued, “I don’t usually lust after straight guys, but there was something about Owen that really floated my boat. The next day he showed up at my shop and he… well…”
Mark’s face reddened.
“When I was in prison, there wasn’t anything like gay or straight,” I said. “I never fooled around with anyone, but I saw guys have sex with each other just for the human touch, or for the power.”
“I tried to get Owen to talk about his past—had he been with other guys, that kind of thing. He’d never say anything. I guess he wasn’t really gay at all – just having sex with me so he could take advantage of me.” He turned to Rick. “What did Marie say when you talked to her?”
“We had a long talk about Owen and all his problems. He had nightmares, and it was tough for him to adjust to being home.” He looked over at Mark. “You knew about the drugs, right?”
Mark shrugged. “He admitted he’d had some problems with drugs in the past. But he swore he was clean.”
“That’s what his mother said, but he wouldn’t be the first kid to hide something like that from his parents.”
“And he isn’t a kid,” I said. “How old is he?”
“Twenty-eight,” Mark said. He picked up his beer glass and took a long drink.
Rick nodded. “I looked through his room. He didn’t have much there, but his parents said he hadn’t come home with much, either. Some clothes in the closet and the dresser. Nothing personal, though.”
“Didn’t he have some friend who came to help him with moving furniture?” I asked. “You think he could be staying with him?”
“Striker. I suppose.”
“You have this Striker’s real name and address?” Rick asked, pulling out his pad and pen.
Mark shook his head. “I know I shouldn’t have, but I paid the guy in cash. He was kind of paranoid, wouldn’t even tell me his last name. But Owen vouched for him, and it was easier that way. No paperwork.”
I turned to Rick. “Was Owen’s bicycle at his parents’ house?” I asked
Rick shook his head. “Nope. I spoke to the guard. No video surveillance at the gate, and the night guard didn’t notice Owen come back in.”
The nachos arrived and as he reached for a chip, I noticed that Mark was wearing a nice gold signet ring, and asked, “He didn’t take any of your personal stuff, did he? No jewelry or anything?”
He shook his head. “No. But that reminds me—I found an earring in the van this afternoon, when I was cleaning it out after my deliveries. Wasn’t from my stock.”
He dug in his pants pocket and brought out a gold earring with a thumbnail-sized red stone hanging from it. “That’s a genuine ruby,” he said. “I checked. Must be worth something to someone.”
Rick took it from him. “This looks like one from a pair that was taken from the Orlandos,” he said. “The house that was burgled Sunday night. The wife described something like this to me.”
“You think Owen was using my van for burglaries?” Mark asked.
“Remember, we saw Owen driving the van around Crossing Estates when we were there last week,” I said to Rick.
“That’s right, you called me, Rick,” Mark said. “But it wasn’t strange that he’d be out then. We have to deliver when the customer is home to accept the merchandise, and sometimes that’s in the evening. And we had to coordinate when Owen’s friend could come down and help.”