Three Dogs in a Row

by Neil S. Plakcy

  Freshman comp passed in the same sort of fog, and after class I went up to the faculty lounge, where I saw Jackie Devere, a full-time professor I’d become friends with, making herself a cappuccino. “You’re lucky you didn’t get shot, too,” she said, when I told her what had happened. “If you’d been a few minutes later it might have been you.”

  “I never thought about that. I just assumed they were shooting at her.”

  “But why would someone shoot her?” she asked. “You said she was quiet.”

  I shrugged. “You know the saying. Still waters run deep. Though if that’s the case, we’ve got a lot of Mindanao Trenches here at Eastern.”

  “The poor dog,” she said. “To lose her mother, and then be caged up in a strange house.”

  “He’s not caged up,” I said. “He can go anywhere in the house he wants.”

  “You didn’t put him in a cage?”

  “He’s not a circus animal.”

  “I don’t mean a cage. I mean a crate. You leave a young dog like that in a crate during the day so he doesn’t tear up the house while you’re gone.”

  I remembered seeing a big metal box in Caroline’s kitchen. At the time, I’d been so concerned with getting Rochester’s food, and then with the police, that I hadn’t thought to wonder what it was doing there.

  “I think I’d better get home,” I said. I grabbed my cell phone and beat-up leather backpack and hurried to my car, giving up on the idea of meeting with any phantom students. All the way home I imagined seeing my house in shreds when I opened the door.

  It wasn’t too bad. Rochester had gotten hold of a stuffed bear my ex-wife had given me one Valentine’s Day, its paws wrapped around a box of chocolates. That year I’d given her a book of Spanish love poems in translation. She’d taken one look at the book, then appropriated the chocolate. The bear had been with the stuff Mary had packed up and shipped to Stewart’s Crossing while I was in prison, and I’d never gotten rid of it. I guess I needed to remind myself that I’d loved someone once, and been loved back.

  Bear stuffing was scattered around my tile floor. The head was under the dining room table, three paws lay in the kitchen, and Rochester was still working on the torso when I came in.

  “Not yours!” I said, trying to tug the poor bear out of his mouth. He wouldn’t give it up. “Listen, mister, you are a guest in this house. And not for much longer, either. Now give me that bear!” I pulled and tugged, and what was left of it exploded into a pile of fluff.

  As soon as I had the living room cleaned up, I called Rick. “I need to take this dog wherever he’s going,” I said. “Soon.” I ranted for a couple of minutes about the stuffed bear, but even to my ears it sounded dumb.

  “She didn’t make any arrangements,” Rick said, when I let him get a word in. “Her only living relative is a great-aunt in upstate New York. She’s too old to take him. I’m interviewing the co-workers later. Maybe one of them will want him.”

  “What do I do in the meantime?”

  “If you don’t want to hold on to him, you can always take him to the pound.”

  I hung up and looked at Rochester. He lay at my feet, his head on his paws in a gesture that seemed to say he was sorry. My anger deflated. “It was time for me to get rid of that bear anyway. But you’re going into that crate from now on, mister.”

  I dragged him out to the courtyard to wait while I went next door to Caroline’s. I knew it wasn’t the crime scene, and Rick hadn’t told me to stay out, so I figured it was OK to go over there and get the crate. Caroline’s doormat read, “Who are you? Why are you here? What do you want? Go away!” I’d never noticed it before, and I laughed as I let myself in.

  Once inside, I couldn’t resist a detour to check out the bookcase. As I’d expected, it was filled with a combination of English lit books and popular best-sellers, leaning towards female authors and romantic plots. Jane Eyre was filed alphabetically under Bronte, and I decided I’d borrow it for a few days and refresh my memory of her dog’s namesake.

  It was creepy snooping around a dead woman’s home. And I couldn’t ignore that what I was doing was snooping. I was looking for some more dog toys to keep Rochester from chewing up my stuff—but along the way I was noticing that Caroline’s closet was filled with business suits and white blouses, that her library of DVDs leaned toward romantic comedies, and that all her diplomas were framed and hung on the wall of her office.

  A laptop computer sat on her desk, and I was tempted to turn it on and snoop around. Maybe there was a clue lurking there on the hard drive, an electronic diary that expressed her fears, a date book with a fateful meeting. But Santiago Santos, sitting on my right shoulder, told me it was wrong. I wasn’t a cop, so I had no busy trying to figure out who killed Caroline. Leave that to the police.

  And don’t leave your fingerprints on any unauthorized computers.

  I flattened the cage and carried it back to my house, with Jane Eyre and the rest of Rochester’s toys, along with doggie toothpaste, shampoo, and a whole plastic bucket of grooming supplies. I wasn’t planning to brush his teeth, trim his nails, or use any of the other expensive products, but I figured I’d have them prepared for his next owner. I played tug-of-war with Rochester for a while, until he got bored and went back to sleep under the dining room table.

  I went up to my office—in my model, it’s on the upper level—and checked my email. There were a couple of messages from my tech writing clients, and I had a small project that kept me busy until it started getting dark, when I took Rochester for a walk. This time I had plenty of grocery bags with me, and I found I enjoyed having some company.

  True, I didn’t go as fast with Rochester as I did alone, and I didn’t appreciate having my arm yanked out of its socket when he saw a dog or cat or squirrel he wanted to play with, but I was getting accustomed to him. I would be sorry to see him go—but go he would.

  My ex-wife had always said I was too self-centered to be in a relationship. She was probably right; at least, I didn’t go along with every decision she made and every idea she had. She always said she was the flexible one, who accommodated herself to my moodiness, and my need to spend quiet hours reading. By the time I got out of jail and moved to Stewart’s Crossing, she’d already latched onto the guy who would be husband number two.

  I didn’t begrudge her any happiness. We both felt we had settled for each other—we’d been in our late twenties when we met, living the single life in cheap rentals in iffy Manhattan neighborhoods, and the dating pool was growing narrower. Those who hadn’t already been snapped up seemed to still be single for a reason.

  Her neuroses blended with mine—she liked to clean, and I was a mess; she spent every penny she earned and needed me to keep her on a budget—the usual routines. If she hadn’t asked for a divorce, I think we’d still be married. Unhappy, for sure, but carried along by relationship entropy. The way space junk continues to circle the earth long after it’s been ejected or blown apart.

  Did I regret that old life? The one where I was moving up the corporate ladder, married to a pretty, intelligent woman, with the hope that we’d start a family? I tried not to feel sorry for myself. I had taken those proverbial lemons and made lemonade, and if the brew was a little tart now and then, I just pursed my lips and got on with things.

  After our walk, I went back to the computer, outlining a fire safety manual for a warehouse client. When I looked up, it was bedtime, and I went to find Rochester for a quick walk before we settled in. I found him on the dining room floor, with my cell phone in his paws.

  “Rochester!” I yelled. “What are you doing? Dogs don’t need cell phones!”

  He leaned his head down and put his paw over it. “Oh, you think if you can’t see me then I can’t see you? You’re about as smart as one of my students.”

  That’s when I saw that the bottom half of the phone was a mangled mass of metal and plastic. “Rochester! That was my phone!”

  I pulled it away from him. “B
ad dog! Not yours!” I looked around for a newspaper I could roll up to whack him with, but all my papers were already in the recycling bin. I settled for a couple more “bad dogs” and then surveyed the phone. It was not salvageable. I couldn’t even call Rick Stemper to complain because the only place I had his cell number was plugged into my phone.

  “What am I going to do with you?” I asked. “Do you know the words ‘animal shelter’? That’s where you’re going if you don’t shape up and behave.”

  He looked at me and cocked his head.

  “You’re not the sharpest knife in the drawer, are you?”

  I found his leash where I’d left it on the dining room table, and it was as if somebody had plugged him into an extension cord. He turned into a manic creature, jumping and skittering around on the tiles like a kangaroo on crack.

  “Life is all a big game to you, isn’t it?” I said, when I grabbed hold of his collar and clipped the leash on. “Well, the rules are different here, pal.”

  My god. I was channeling my father. That was one of his favorite mantras, the idea that the world was not fun and games, that one day life was going to give me a big punch in the teeth and he wasn’t going to pay for the orthodontia.

  When Rochester and I returned from our walk, I tried to coax him into his crate, but he wasn’t having any of it. He scampered to the landing halfway up the stairs, where he stopped and watched me. After a quick attempt at dog-proofing, I turned out the lights downstairs and climbed up to the second floor. Rochester was under my feet the whole way, and when we got to the top of the stairs, he took off toward my bedroom. As I followed, I saw him take another flying leap and land on my bed, and he wasn’t budging.

  “All right,” I said, standing by the side of the bed, trying to be stern. “But tomorrow when I leave for work you’re going into that crate.”

  He looked like he would go along with that. I picked up Jane Eyre and got into bed, planning to read for a while, but Rochester wanted to crawl all over me and be petted—so my plans changed. “Are you a good boy?” I asked, ruffling his ears. “Is Rochester a good boy?”

  He finally had enough reassurance, and retreated back to the end of the bed. He was still there when I turned the lights out.

  5 – The Break-In

  I’m not sure if it was Rochester’s leap from the bed that woke me, sometime after two a.m., or his barking—probably a one-two punch. “Rochester! Shut up!” I said. I jumped out of bed and went looking for him. He was in the office, where my house backed onto Caroline’s, barking at the wall.

  “Are you crazy?” I asked, grabbing his collar. “You’re going to wake up the whole neighborhood.”

  He wiggled out of my grasp and ran back to the bedroom. When I followed, I saw him jumping into the Roman tub in the master bathroom, and leaning his paws against the window frame. “What’s the matter, boy? What do you see?”

  I stepped into the tub and stood next to him. From that angle, we could just see a corner of Caroline’s bedroom window—and the pinpoint of a flashlight moving around in the darkness inside. “Good boy!” I said, patting his head before I jumped out of the tub and rushed to the phone to call 911.

  I reported the burglary in progress, and thought about getting out my dad’s 9 millimeter handgun from the bedside table and standing watch at Caroline’s front door until the police arrived. Of course, since I’d never mentioned to Santiago Santos that I owned a gun, and it was probably a violation of my parole, I didn’t think that was a good idea, especially because I was neither Starsky, nor Hutch. So I returned to the window with Rochester, where we watched and waited. The pinpoint of light was gone, and I started to worry that I had imagined it. Suppose the police showed up and there was no one inside Caroline’s house. They’d think I was crazy.

  A squad car pulled up five minutes later, red and blue lights flashing. By then I was dressed and went outside to meet them. “You called this in?” asked the female officer, whose badge identified her as P. Reinhardt.

  “I saw a light moving around inside there.” I pointed up at the master bedroom window. “And my dog—well, it’s really her dog—he heard something and started barking.”

  That wasn’t the order things happened, but I was nervous.

  “You’re sure no one’s home?” Officer Reinhardt asked.

  As we walked up to the front door, I explained about Caroline. The entrances in River Bend have glass sidelights on either side of the door, and the glass panel next to Caroline’s doorknob had been smashed. The door was unlocked.

  Reinhardt used a handkerchief from her pocket to open the door. From behind her, I saw that the living room was a shambles—books strewn all over the floor, the sofa cushions slit and stuffing everywhere.

  “It wasn’t like that this afternoon,” I said.

  She and her partner went inside, while I waited by the street. She came down a few minutes later. “The upstairs was trashed, too,” she said. “There’s no one there now.”

  She called for a crime scene investigation, and Rick Stemper showed up a while later, wearing a pair of jeans and a polo shirt and looking like he’d just rolled out of bed. It was a replay of the previous night—cops everywhere, Rick asking me questions. This time he took my fingerprints, to eliminate them, he said.

  My pulse started to race. I’d had my prints taken in California, of course, which meant that when Rick entered them in his system, my record would pop up. I thought about telling Rick about my incarceration and parole—but it wasn’t the time.

  It had never been the time. All those nights at The Drunken Hessian, the times we ran into each other at The Chocolate Ear or at the grocery, I’d kept from mentioning it. I was lonely, and Rick was my only friend in town, and I thought that he wouldn’t want to hang out with me if he knew about my record.

  So I kept quiet. I did say, “You know I was there yesterday. I went back again this afternoon.”

  Rick raised an eyebrow. “Just can’t stay away, can you?”

  I explained about the crate, and that I’d gone through the house, looking for Rochester’s toys. I didn’t mention looking through her closet or her books—I didn’t think he’d understand. I was glad that I hadn’t touched her computer. I could just see Santiago Santos raising his bushy eyebrows as he asked me to explain what I was doing with my neighbor’s computer, when the conditions of my parole restricted me to a single laptop with an audit trail.

  That alone might be enough to violate my parole and send me back to California as a guest of the state.

  While Rick and the male officer performed a complete search of the townhouse, I stood outside with Rochester, making small talk with Officer Reinhardt. “We see this kind of thing now and then,” she said. “Somebody dies, and it gets in the paper, and some jerkwad takes that as an open invitation to rip the dead guy off.”

  It didn’t seem like that kind of burglary to me. A jerkwad like she was describing would want to get in, steal whatever was handy, and get out. But I kept my mouth shut.

  It was close to four-thirty that morning before I took Rochester back to my own house. “You’re a good watch dog,” I said, leaning down to stroke his head. “You heard somebody and you warned me. That’s a good dog.”

  As I sat on the floor, stroking his golden fur, I felt all the nervous energy and adrenaline of the last few hours catch up with me, and I yawned. And then I started to think. It was clear this wasn’t the kind of obituary-motivated robbery Officer Reinhardt thought it was. After all, the Courier-Times hadn’t even identified her. Somebody was looking for something in Caroline’s house—that’s why they had ripped open the pillows and the couch and dumped the contents of the drawers.

  Was the burglar the same person who’d killed Caroline? If so, what had he been looking for? Had he found it? What if he hadn’t—would he be back?

  What if it was Rochester he was looking for? Or what if he thought I had whatever it was—would he come after me next? I couldn’t confess these feelings to Rick;
it just wasn’t a guy thing to do. So I sat and told Rochester instead. I worried, and petted the dog, and the acid feeling in my stomach dissipated a little—but not that much.

  The next morning I was on auto-pilot. I took Rochester out for a walk, then sat in the living room with him watching mindless morning TV shows. My mystery fiction class doesn’t meet until 12:30 on Tuesday and Thursday, and I use those mornings for grading papers or working on client projects. But I was exhausted, and my brain was still having trouble wrapping around everything that had happened.

  At eleven-thirty, I motivated myself to get dressed for work. When I was ready to head out, I stood by Rochester’s crate and asked him nicely to go inside.

  Surprisingly, he did.

  I felt better about leaving him alone, but my brain was still fuzzy from lack of sleep, so I stumbled through my mystery fiction course and hurried back home as soon as I could, stopping at the cell store for a new phone on my way. They were able to move the SIM card from the old phone to the new, so I didn’t lose any numbers. I went right back to bed after taking Rochester out for a quick pee, and he joined me up there for a mid-afternoon nap.

  When I awoke, I was too restless to stay in the house. It was sunny and crisp outside, and I thought maybe a good long walk would help clear my head. I got Rochester’s leash, and he began jumping around the living room floor in a repeat of the previous night’s performance. This time, though, I refused to chase him. I sat in a kitchen chair and waited for him to come to me.

  “I guess you do want to go for a walk, too, don’t you?” I asked when he did. However, as soon as I tried to clip the leash onto his collar, he ducked his head between his paws.

  “Is this a game? I try and hook you up and you hide from me? You know, even if you can’t see me, I can still see you.” I was able to wrestle him enough to get his leash on, and I grabbed a jacket and a couple of plastic bags.