by Neil Plakcy
Rochester pawed the German Shepherd’s back, and she rolled onto her side. He kept his golden paw on a black patch on her side. The contrast in the colors was sharp.
“Black,” I said out loud. “Negro is Italian for black, right?”
Scott nodded. “And ponte means bridge.” His eyebrows raised. “Black bridge,” he said. “Negroponte, black bridge.”
“You know someone with that name?”
He nodded. “Jimmy Blackbridge. He was in prison with Felix. Both of them were in Paws Up, but Jimmy kept breaking the rules and we had to kick him out.”
“You think he might have blamed Felix for that?”
“Hard to say. Felix was a good worker, one of our stars. It might have been him who reported Jimmy. Or they could have had some other beef unrelated to the program.”
“I think it has to be related,” I said. “Because it was your address that was spoofed.”
“And you think that Felix went to this house to meet me, and instead Jimmy killed him?”
“Felix was already planning to go to that house. Maybe once Jimmy Blackbridge knew that, he did something that led to Felix’s death. But I’m not a cop, and the first thing I’m going to do is pass this information on to a friend of mine who is. I know he’s been in touch with the Philly cops investigating Felix’s death. I imagine they’ll want to talk to you.”
“We’ll be open tomorrow morning, but then closing early for New Year’s Eve.”
“Trust me,” I said. “When the police have information, they move quickly.”
19 – Final Justice
As soon as I got back in my car, I called Rick and told him what I’d learned. “How do you know that this Jimmy Blackbridge is the one who emailed Felix?”
“I don’t know that for sure. But the email address was from an account called Negroponte, which translates into black bridge. Since he and Felix knew each other, and this guy Scott Higley says the two of them argued, it seems worth investigating, right?”
“Why didn’t Felix get suspicious about the email?”
“Felix didn’t know much about computers,” I said. “Even if he had accidentally hovered over the email address and seen the real sender, I doubt he’d have recognized it was a problem.”
“I’ll call Detective Holland and pass this on. Where are you now?”
“Just left Paws Up, heading home.”
“You’re not going to track down this Blackbridge guy, right? Because you know that’s police business.”
“I know. I’m not stupid enough to go ask some stranger if he killed Felix.” I reached over and scratched Rochester under his neck. “At least not with Rochester with me.”
“Thank God for that,” Rick said dryly. “And while I appreciate your help here, I don’t want you to get yourself in trouble again. No snooping online in places you shouldn’t be, all right? Even if you think it’s the right thing to do.”
“I know. I feel bad about Felix but at the same time I know he was trying to turn his life around. It seems like I’d be diminishing that somehow if I did something that got myself in trouble.”
“That’s a good thought,” Rick said.
On the drive home, I felt at loose ends. I kept thinking about Felix Logato, and wondering if there was something I could have done that might have changed the trajectory that had led to his death.
It was clear that I couldn’t do any more investigating; the police would have to talk to Yunior Zeno and Jimmy Blackbridge, and see what they could discover. I was proud of myself for that understanding, and for the realization that I had to honor Felix’s memory by doing my best to stick to the straight and narrow. Rick believed that I kept interfering in his cases because I couldn’t help myself, and here I was, willingly backing away.
By the time I got home, my emotions were still confused. “Where were you all day?” Lili asked. “You didn’t spend the day at Crossing Manor, did you?”
“No, we were all over the map.” I told her about our visit to the nursing home and Mrs. Vinci’s suspicions, then about the trip to Cobalt Ridge to look at Felix’s email account.
“Hold on,” she said, when I got to the part about the spoofed email address. “You think someone lured him to that house in North Philly in order to kill him?”
“He was already going there to meet his friend Yunior,” I said. “But he did tell whoever sent the email where he was going to be, and when, thinking that it was the guy from Paws Up.”
I told her about Paws Up, and driving down there to meet Scott Higley. “He says he didn’t send that message. But he gave me the name of somebody he thought might have.”
Lili had her hands on her hips. “Don’t tell me you went to see that person, too.”
I shook my head. “I called Rick and gave him the information. I’m not chasing ex-cons all over Philadelphia.”
“Well, that’s progress,” she said. She leaned over and kissed me. “I’ve got some more photo manipulation to do. I’ll be upstairs.”
I went into the kitchen to get a bottle of water. There were three mason jars of chocolate balls on the top shelf, and I opened a jar and pulled one rum ball out. The rum smell was strong, the texture crumbly, with sprinkles of white sugar against the dark chocolate. I popped it in my mouth and the flavors exploded. The rum brought out the richness of the chocolate.
“Those rum balls are for the party!” Lili called from upstairs. “And they need to steep before they’re ready to eat.”
“I only had one and it tasted fine to me,” I hollered back. I grabbed a bottle of cold water and poured some for Rochester, then opened my laptop on the kitchen table. My fingers were itching to do something about Felix’s death and I knew that if I didn’t change gears I’d get myself in trouble. So I logged on to my support group to see what everyone else was up to.
In addition to the message boards, there was a chat room that wasn’t often populated, but that afternoon MamaHack was there, chatting with another hacker whose ID was Fizzy_Water. I logged in and typed, hey.
We chatted about the weather and the holidays for a few lines, and then I typed, do either of you hack just because you’re curious?
You mean nosy? Fizzy responded.
I guess.
Mama wrote, my shrink sez she thinks I hack for power & control. Hubster makes the cash, kids dictate the schedule w/school, sports, dance, etc. When my fingers itch it’s so I can be in charge.
She and Fizzy got into a debate about kids and whether they should be reined in to do what their parents told them, and I sat back and thought. Back in Silicon Valley, I had been a technical writer for a big catalog sales company. One of my jobs was to create manuals for all company procedures, including any new software we instituted. The company had discovered a hole in its merchandise tracking operations, and bought a packaged program to fill that need.
The shipping department staffers needed instructions on how the system operated, so I was given a log-in ID and password, and I learned how to operate it. Then I started writing my instructions, but I needed some additional documentation that apparently existed on the company’s website, but was behind a firewall. I had emailed and called the company for access, but the company had recently been bought out and most of the staff let go, and no one I spoke to was able to help me.
I was expressing my frustration to one of my co-workers, a heavy-duty programmer named Bruce, and he said, “I can help you out.”
This was back before the days of jump drives and elaborate security precautions at companies and in the online world. Bruce slipped a floppy disk into the drive of my PC and walked me through what was on it.
It was a door to a whole new world. The program sniffed out an open port on a computer at the software company’s office and let me log in as an administrator. I downloaded the files I needed and logged off.
My pulse was racing. I’d broken into a protected site and stolen information. Well, it wasn’t theft, exactly, because it was material that my company had pu
rchased and couldn’t get hold of. All afternoon I kept expecting some law enforcement guy to walk into our cube farm and come up to my desk with a pair of handcuffs.
That didn’t happen. Bruce took his disk back, but the files had been copied to my hard drive. I copied them to another floppy of my own and took them home, and that night, while Mary was watching TV, I installed them on my computer and began playing around.
I became obsessed. I surfed the Internet looking for additional tools, learning how to use them, becoming conversant with terms like IP address, honey pot, and sniffer. I broke into a genealogy site and researched my family. I got into one of those reunion sites and looked up information on classmates and old friends.
I mentioned something in passing to Bruce about what I’d been doing, and he said, in a low voice, “You can’t go around talking about that stuff, dude. That is seriously illegal.”
“But you gave me those tools.”
“Yeah, and I don’t want your big mouth to land me in jail. So keep it quiet.”
I felt chastened, and didn’t say anything more until Bruce came to me a few weeks later. “I’ve got a friend,” he said. “Needs some information. I can’t handle it because I’m going out of town. You want to pick up a few extra bucks?”
Of course I did. No matter how much money Mary and I made, it was never enough to support the big mortgage, the car payments, the credit card bills. Over the next year or two Bruce slipped me a job now and then, and I began to build up my own clients. I never stole anything dramatic – a company wanted to see what a competitor was doing, a divorce attorney wanted to know about hidden assets.
It wasn’t about the money; it was about the thrill of the chase, of gathering this information, of knowing something I wasn’t supposed to. I had always been a curious kid, the kind who was constantly asking questions and snooping around. Discovering the world of computers opened new doors for me, new places to look for information. I was always Googling people that I met, looking at maps and photo albums. Then Mary miscarried for the second time, and my world fell apart.
Back then, like MamaHack, I had felt powerless, almost emasculated. Mary was the driving force in our marriage. We had followed her career to California, and she made all the major decisions, including choosing when to start making a baby. I was a low-level functionary at work, well-paid but under-utilized. I was bored a lot of the time but didn’t have the authority to create new projects for myself that would be more challenging.
Prison, for me, was the ultimate loss of control. The schedule governed when I ate, when I slept, when I worked. I did manage to exert a bit of power, because as I had told Felix, I could help other prisoners with their appeals, and they protected and rewarded me.
When I came back to Stewart’s Crossing I was rudderless. I simply didn’t remember how to manage my own time, my own life. It had taken Rochester, and my jobs at Eastern, to bring me back to life. It was important to me that I recognize all I had regained in the last couple of years, and how easily I could lose it if I made a mistake.
Rochester nuzzled me and I realized that I’d been ignoring him all the time I’d been online. I signed off the computer and played tug-a-rope with him for a while, then took him for a long walk.
Rick called after dinner. “That Blackbridge guy has quite a record,” he said. “Holland looked him up and verified that he’d been at Graterford at the same time Felix was. He used that information you gave me to log into Felix’s email account, and he saw the spoofing. That gives him enough to pull Blackbridge in for questioning, even though Holland still thinks that Felix died during a drug deal.”
“Thanks, Rick,” I said. “I appreciate your following up with Holland, and with me. I’d like to see some justice for Felix.”
“The only real justice is the final one,” Rick said. “If God believes in Felix, then he’ll be okay.”
I remembered that Rick had been brought up as a Roman Catholic, and was a bit surprised that he still believed, after years as a cop. But all I said was, “I hope so.”
20 – Very Agatha Christie
The next morning, after I had fed and walked Rochester, I couldn’t resist the impulse to go online and look for information on Jimmy Blackbridge. I wasn’t going to confront him. I just wanted to see what he looked like, know what kind of guy he was.
I did a couple of general searches, and one of the sites that I pulled up listed other people who might be connected to the person I was searching for. A couple of the names there were Negroponte. That reassured me that I was on the right track.
Jimmy didn’t have a Facebook account, but he was tagged in a photo of a group of twenty-somethings celebrating a birthday. He was slim and wiry, with dark hair combed back from his forehead. He had a square jaw and a chipped front tooth.
He was wearing what I’d grown up calling a wife-beater, a form-fitting white T-shirt without sleeves. His right arm showed off impressive biceps, and a tattoo of a lion’s head, mouth open in mid-roar, with the words “Take the Lion’s Share” in script beneath it.
He had his left arm around a big-busted, big-hipped girl named Merlys, and when I zoomed in on the photo I saw his fingers had been tattooed with the word G A M E in a Gothic script. I recognized that; a guy I’d known in prison had that on one hand, and the word O V E R on the other.
I repressed a shiver. Was he the guy who had killed Felix Logato? Was the tattoo on that fist the last thing Felix ever saw?
I shut down the computer. I had to get that image out of my head. So I did what I often do when something bothers me; I played with my dog. I tossed a tennis ball and he retrieved it, though after two runs he refused to give it back to me. We played tug-a-rope and then I scratched his belly.
By then, I had started to believe, against my heart, that Felix had stolen the potassium from Dr. Horz, and that he’d been planning to hand it over to Yunior in North Philly the day he died. I didn’t know the specifics, but I assumed that Yunior wanted to kill somebody and have it look natural, and that he’d forced Felix to steal the vials.
By late afternoon I was still depressed and didn’t feel like going out to a party that night, but I’d promised Lili and I knew she was looking forward to it. I fed Rochester and drove him over to Rick’s, then returned home. Lili was already in her slinky black dress by then, though she was barefoot and hadn’t put up her hair yet. “What time is it?” she asked.
“Only eight. We’ve got plenty of time.”
“For you, maybe. It takes a lot of work to make me beautiful.”
I took her hand. “My darling, you look beautiful to me all the time.”
“That’s sweet,” she said. “But I still need to get ready.”
It was close to ten by the time we left the house, carrying a platter of Lili’s homemade brownies as a hostess gift. The night was cold and clear, and there wasn’t much traffic as we drove to Crossing Estates, where Gracious Chigwe lived. As we approached the gate, though, we were stuck behind an RV with “Jesus is Lord of All” written in huge letters across the back.
“Hard not to miss that message,” I said.
We parked down the block from the house and walked up. It was a big split level, all lit up, and from the driveway we could hear the sound of classical music. I put on a smile and we walked inside.
Gracious met us at the door, a pleasant woman with what Alexander McCall Smith would have called a “traditional build.” She took our coats and directed us to the refreshments in the living room. I got cups of punch for Lili and myself, and then she walked over to one of her colleagues to talk art.
Across the room, I saw Jackie Conrad from the biology department. It was probably the first time I’d seen her in anything other than her white lab coat. For the party, she’d worn a maroon velvet dress with short sleeves. When I got close I noticed that her dangling earrings were shimmery silver lizards.
“You didn’t wear your brain cells as earrings?” I asked her.
“I figured I wouldn’t
need them, since this is only a faculty gathering,” she said. “Most of our faculty are operating short a few brain cells anyway.”
“I’ll drink to that,” I said, lifting my punch cup and clinking it against hers. We chatted for a few minutes about some of the others at the party, and then I remembered I had a question for her. “What do you know about potassium?”
“That depends. You want to know its chemical function? Remember, I’m a biologist, not a chemist.”
“Is there a difference between potassium in liquid form versus in a pill?”
“Yes. When a doctor prescribes you a pill, it’s so that your potassium levels will rise gradually, compensating for a deficiency in diet, for example. If you add potassium to an IV for delivery, the level goes up very fast. You have to watch carefully or the patient could suffer cardiac arrest.”
“If you had a vial of liquid potassium, how could you get it into someone’s IV?”
She looked at me closely. “Every time you come to my office you ask the most intriguing questions. Are you investigating something else now?”
I explained to her about the potassium theft from Dr. Horz’s office, and how I’d been looking into it.
“You think someone stole the potassium in order to commit a murder?” she asked. “How very Agatha Christie.”
“It’s a solid reason why someone would steal it,” I said. “So could you get it into someone’s IV easily?”
“Very easily.” She looked around the room and spotted a pad and a pen beside the telephone. “Let me show you.” She drew two parallel lines. “This is your IV tube.” Then she drew a small circle along one side. “This is a port. Every IV has one. You insert the vial into the port and release the potassium into the fluids.”
“So anybody could do it?” I asked. “You don’t need to be a nurse?”
“You only need to be able to get close enough to the person,” Jackie said.
I saw Lili across the room motioning to me, so I left Jackie and walked over to her. She was talking to Gracious. “Thank you for inviting us,” I said. “It’s a lovely party.”