Three More Dogs in a Row

by Neil Plakcy

  I watched them play, then suddenly Rochester disengaged himself from Rascal and sprinted toward a tall, beefy-looking guy with brown hair, heading away from downtown on foot. He jumped up on the guy, nosing him in the groin.

  “Rochester! Down!” I called, and hurried forward.

  Rochester dropped to the ground and rushed back to me. “Sorry!” I called.

  As Rochester darted around me, the guy approached us. He was in his late twenties, with a round, open face. “Maybe you can help me,” he said, in an accent that pegged him from somewhere Down Under. “I’m somewhat lost. I’m looking for a chocolate shop. I think it would be called More than Chocolate.”

  “Nothing by that name in town,” I said. “Though there is a café called The Chocolate Ear that serves great pastries.”

  “You wouldn’t happen to know who runs it, would you?” he asked, as I clipped Rochester’s leash back to his collar. Rascal scudded up beside us, and I hooked him up, too.

  “I do. She’s a friend of mine. Gail Dukowski.”

  “Bless you!” he said. “That’s who I’ve been looking for.” He reached out to shake my hand. “Declan Gallagher.”

  “Steve Levitan.” We shook. “How do you know Gail?”

  “She used to date my roommate Randy in New York,” he said. “When I was in graduate school at Columbia.”

  I told him that I’d gone to school there as well, and discovered that long after I’d gotten my MA in English he had been in the business school on an international exchange program from New Zealand. He had a Southern Hemisphere charm, relaxed posture, clipped language with a hint of the exotic. There was a warmth and friendliness about him, even after only a few minutes’ acquaintance, that made me like him.

  “I had a bit of a crush on Gail back then,” he said. “Though she only had eyes for Randy. I ran into him last week, and he told me they’d broken up and she’d moved down here. I remembered her talking about the chocolate shop and so I thought I’d look her up.”

  “Come on, we’ll walk you down there,” I said. “Gail loves Rochester, and she always has a biscuit for him.” I reached down to scratch around Rascal’s neck. “And one for you, too, Rascal.”

  As we walked, I said, “It’s a nice day for a drive down from New York.”

  “I’m not there anymore,” Declan said. “I was, with a manufacturing company in Brooklyn. But their business tanked, and they couldn’t afford to sponsor me for the H1-B visa beyond my year of practical training. Fortunately, I managed to get myself a much better job, with an electronics company, so I won’t have to go back home. They filed for my visa and I got it last month.”

  “Congratulations,” I said. “Where is this company?”

  “Up the road a bit,” he said. “In an industrial park outside Newtown.”

  The dogs were well-behaved as we walked down the shady sidewalk, though they were eager to sniff out every interesting scent. “Up ahead,” I said to Declan. “Those green and white awnings? That’s The Chocolate Ear.”

  The elderly hippie I’d seen at the Harvest Festival stepped out of the café as we approached. Rochester balked and wouldn’t move forward as the man approached us. “Buy some candles or soap?” he asked, opening a worn leather satchel. “All handmade.” He pulled out a couple of strong-smelling bars wrapped in brown paper and tied with what looked like horsehair. “Just sold some candles to the lady inside.”

  Rochester growled. “Sorry, the smell doesn’t seem to agree with my dog,” I said. I tugged on both dogs’ leashes and we stepped into Main Street to go around him.

  Declan asked the old man, “How much?”

  “Five bucks.” He handed one of the bars to Declan, who lifted it to his nose to sniff.

  “I’ll take it.” Declan pulled a bill out of his wallet and handed it to the old man, who stuffed it into the pocket of his jeans.

  “I hope Gail likes lemon,” Declan said to me when the man had passed.

  I handed the leashes to Declan and stuck my head in the door when we got to the café. Gail’s mother Lorraine was working the register and I asked her, “Can you tell Gail I’ve got an old friend of hers out here?”

  Lorraine was a petite dynamo, with neatly coiffed gray hair and a perpetual smile. I took the dogs back from Declan as she introduced herself to Declan. “Did you work with Gail in the city?” she asked.

  He shook his head. “I was a roommate of Randy’s.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Well, I’ll tell Gail you’re here.”

  I wondered at her cool reaction. I guessed she hadn’t liked Gail’s boyfriend much.

  Declan and I stood in the shade of the awning, watching the traffic pass on Main Street. The dogs sprawled beside me on the pavement, but they both hopped up when Gail stepped out the door.

  Gail’s blonde hair was pulled into a neat ponytail, and she wore a gray cotton blouse, jeans and kitchen clogs. I noticed she was staring at the man with me. “Declan?” she asked. “Wow! It’s been what, a year or so? The last time I saw you was at graduation.”

  “Hello, Gail.” He stepped forward and kissed her cheek. “It’s lovely to see you again. And I’m so pleased you were able to realize that dream we talked about.” He waved his hand to encompass the chocolate shop.

  “It’s so good to see you,” she said. “But how did you track me down? I don’t even know your last name and I didn’t think you knew mine.”

  I thought I saw Declan blush. “I saw Randy in New York, at a Columbia cocktail party.”

  “Is he still as obnoxious as ever?”

  Declan burst out laughing. “I didn’t know you saw him that way. He is rather full of himself, you know, being an investment banker.”

  “He was that way as a student. It just took me a long time to see it.”

  “Well, we got to talking, and he mentioned you two had broken up. I had to do some detective work to find you. Helped by my new best friend over here.” He reached down to scratch behind Rochester’s ears. The dog looked up at him with an expression of delight.

  “I still remember how sweet you were, the morning I first heard from my mother that she was sick.”

  “How is she doing?” he asked. “She looks quite well.”

  “The surgery was easy but the rehab wasn’t,” Gail said. “But she’s much better now, thank you.” She seemed to realize that she was holding a pair of dog biscuits in her hand, and she gave one to each dog. I could sense the awkwardness between Gail and Declan—but that was something they’d have to work out on their own.

  Lorraine stuck her head out the door. “What can I get for all of you?”

  “Nothing for me. I’ve got to get back home.” I shook Declan’s hand. “Congratulations on the new job and the visa. I hope we’ll be seeing you around Stewart’s Crossing.”

  Gail looked from me to Declan, then reached out a hand to him. “Well, come on inside. I can see we’ve got a lot to catch up on.”

  They walked into the café, and after the dogs had cleaned up every biscuit crumb, we walked back through town to River Bend. I was pleased to be able to bring Gail and her old friend together. I’d seen a sadness in her now and then, and I’d chalked it up to her mother’s illness, and worry over Lorraine’s recovery. But maybe it was partly to do with that failed relationship.

  It was clear that Declan wanted something more than friendship with Gail, and I hoped he’d be able to bring some happiness back to her. The dogs dallied with smells around an ancient sycamore, and I realized there had been plenty of time for Lili to get home and email me those sneaker photos.

  “Come on, dogs, get moving,” I said. “We’ve got work to do.”

  7 – All Stars

  Once we got back to the townhouse, the dogs collapsed in a pile on the living room floor, and I went up to the office. Lili’s email had arrived, and I opened the photos and found a close-up of the back label, with its blue heel patch. Prior to the 1960s, those patches had all been black. So that was one step – the shoe had been
made after 1960.

  From the 1960s through the 1980s, Chucks were made with an extra piece of outer canvas to give extra strength to the inner lining and help secure the tongue. The shoe I was looking at had that extra piece of canvas, cut in the curved shape of a line of extra stitching.

  I was making progress. That extra piece meant that the sneaker Rochester had found was at least thirty years old. But from the thick layer of dust on it, I could probably have guessed that.

  Rick called to check on his dog. “He hasn’t destroyed your house yet, has he?”

  “Not a chance,” I said. “I took them both up to town and tired them out. How are things going?”

  “Not making much progress. There wasn’t much in the crime scene photos to help me narrow in on when the body was left there. Besides the shoes, I’ve got a belt buckle and some other fiber fragments. Nothing specific to a particular time.”

  “I may be able to help you narrow to within a couple of decades.” I told him about my sneaker research.

  “All this is legit though, right?”

  “No, I’m hacking into the Converse corporate database,” I said. “Of course it’s legit.”

  “Just checking. No need to get your panties in a twist.”

  I suggested a couple of things Rick could do with his own panties, and he laughed, and we both hung up.

  I went back to my laptop and searched further for something that would narrow the date when the sneaker was manufactured. Shoes from the 1950s to the early 1970s had toe caps that didn’t touch the edge of the canvas upper. The ends of the toe caps were not neatly cut in a perfect straight line but had minor variations from shoe to shoe, as if they were cut freehand. That matched the shoe in the picture. By adding that characteristic, I could narrow the manufacture of the shoe to the 1960s and 70s.

  Then I hit pay dirt. The Chucks manufactured in the 1970s used wider piping where the canvas joined the rubber tread-like band and the smaller size of the toe caps. By taking one of Lili’s close-ups into a photo manipulation program and comparing it to the Converse website image, I was able to establish that the narrow piping identified the shoe as manufactured during the 1960s.

  I couldn’t get any narrower than that, and it was always possible that the shoes had been vintage ones, worn by someone in a later decade. But when I get caught up in logic problems like that, I always go back to Occam’s Razor – the idea that the simplest answer is usually the right one. A young man, late teens or early twenties, had worn those Chucks sometime during the 1960s, and died while wearing them. What was less clear was how he had ended up in that hidey-hole at the Meeting House.

  The dogs were awake by then, chasing each other around my downstairs, so I took them out for another long walk. The late afternoon was still showing the best of Indian summer, and I delighted in watching the dogs romp together under trees full of yellow, gold and red leaves.

  Rick’s truck was in my driveway as we approached the house, and I let go of Rascal’s leash so he could rush ahead of us to play with his daddy.

  Rick got down to one knee and buried his face in the dog’s black and white fur. “How’s my boy?” he asked. “How’s my wild and crazy Rascal?”

  He stood up, taking firm hold of Rascal’s leash. “Thanks for taking care of him. You have dinner plans? I could order us a pizza.”

  “Sounds great. I’ve got a six-pack of pumpkin ale I’ve been wanting to crack open.”

  “Pumpkin? That’s gross.”

  “Wait til you try it.”

  I led him and the dogs inside, and while we waited for the pizza to be delivered we sampled the ale. Hints of pumpkin pie and nutmeg blended with the hops for an autumnal mouth feel, saying goodbye to summer in every sip. Rick admitted that he liked it.

  As we drank, I showed him what I’d found about the sneaker. “Good work,” he said, when we were finished. “That will help me with a missing persons search, at least until the evaluation of the remains comes up with something better.”

  The pizza arrived, a large with mushrooms and spicy Italian sausage, to the accompaniment of a canine crescendo of barking that made it seem like we were in an echoing kennel, barks and yips and the scrabble of toenails on the tile floor. I body blocked the dogs, took the pizza from the delivery guy and handed it off to Rick, then paid and tipped as the dogs trampled over themselves to follow Rick to the kitchen.

  We dug in. There was no matching real, Jersey-style pizza from your neighborhood joint, where the mushrooms came from the farmer’s market and the sausage and cheese from local farms. “I need to ask your advice about something,” I said, feeding a piece of crust to each dog, both of whom were sitting attentively beside our chairs.

  He drained the last of his beer and held out the empty bottle for another. “What’s on your mind?”

  I got up and retrieved two more beers from the fridge. “Lili asked if she could move in with me and Rochester,” I said, as I sat back down.

  “I didn’t realize you’d been dating her that long.”

  “It’s been six months. But her lease in Leighville is running out, and she figured she’d ask me before she renewed.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I told her I needed to think about it.”

  Rick looked up at me. “And?”

  “I’m thinking. When I got out of prison all I wanted was to be left alone. The first couple of weeks I was back here I hardly left the house—just for food and supplies. It wasn’t until after I got my first adjunct teaching gig at Eastern that I started to feel like a human being again, that I could be among other people.”

  I took a sip of my beer. “Rochester helped a lot,” I said. “Dealing with him, having to talk to neighbors when I was walking him – all that stuff got me back in the rhythm of life again. And Lili’s different from Mary. I can talk to her and not feel completely at a loss. She’s enough like me that we have a lot in common—including the need for time on our own. But different enough to always be interesting.”

  “And you love her?”

  I nodded. “I’ve been thinking about that a lot. I do.”

  “So what’s the problem? Living together doesn’t mean you have to be in each other’s pocket twenty-four seven. She teaches, and she spends a lot of time taking pictures, doesn’t she?”

  I nodded. “And developing them, and then manipulating them on the computer.”

  “So you can be on your own then. And when you want to be together, you can be.”

  “When did you get so smart?” I asked, taking the last slice of pizza.

  “Years of experience.” We finished eating, talking idly about people we had gone to high school with, and then he and Rascal left, and I cleaned up the pizza debris.

  The last person I had moved in with was Mary. When I met her, she was sharing a one-bedroom in a brownstone on the Upper East Side with a college friend, and my grad school roommate Tor and I were sharing a crappy studio apartment on the Lower East Side.

  When Tor got a big raise, he was ready to move up to better digs with his girlfriend. Mary’s roommate was getting married, and Mary couldn’t afford the rent on her own. It seemed like time for all of us to get started on our real lives, so when Mary asked me to move in with her I said yes without a second thought.

  A year later, her company offered her a promotion, which entailed a move to Silicon Valley. By then, we were both tired of city life, of graffiti on the streets, bums on every corner, the smell of urine in the subway. Moving to California would mean we could afford to buy a house, especially if we married and I got a decent job out there. We’d been together for two years by then and it seemed like the next step.

  Lili and I were too old to let real estate decisions run our lives. If we were going to move in together, it needed to be because it was the right thing for both of us. But was it?

  When Rochester and I got back inside from our walk, I called Lili. “I got the sneaker pictures – thanks.” I told her what I’d found out.

>   “That’s good,” she said. “I spent most of the day working on some of the photos I took yesterday at the Harvest Festival. Hardly looked at the clock.”

  “I know how that gets.” I paused, thinking about how to bring up what we’d talked about that morning. Then I heard a beeping sound coming from somewhere in her apartment.

  “Crap, that’s my timer,” she said. “I took some film yesterday, too, and I’m developing it in the bathroom. I’ve got to go before it gets ruined. Talk to you tomorrow.”

  “Sure,” I fumbled, and then the line was dead.

  Since I was moving closer to making a decision about Lili moving in, it was time to broach the question to Rochester. I hooked his leash and he dragged me out the front door. “You like Lili, don’t you, boy?” I asked, as we stopped by the base of an oak tree.

  He was too busy sniffing the ground to answer. But I already knew what he’d say, if he could talk. Lili smelled good, she slipped him treats, and she gave nice scratchy belly rubs. I doubted he’d mind if she was around more often.

  But with no input from him, I was on my own once again, and if I made the wrong decision, I might be alone for a long time.

  8 – Always Someone Smarter

  Monday morning I took Rochester for a long walk, and we heard the yard workers before we saw them. River Bend employs a staff of immigrant men to trim our hedges, weed our flower beds and mow our lawns. The community is large enough that they begin at one end and work from street to street, and by the time they have finished they start over again.

  My dog did not like the men who carried leaf blowers over their shoulders; he shied away from them, planting his paws on the pavement until I dragged him forward. I figured it was the noise. He didn’t like thunder, either, and fireworks drove him nuts.

  “Come on, dog, I’ve got stuff to do.” I had a long day ahead – the exit interview with Santiago Santos, and then a meeting to go over paint and carpet samples for Friar Lake.

  After returning to Bucks County I became an adjunct instructor and then an administrator at Eastern College, my alma mater, a “very good small college,” as the publicity had it. One day about four months before, the college president, John William Babson, had called me into his office. I’d thought at the time that I was being fired – but instead, he had a new job for me.