Three Dogs in a Row

by Neil S. Plakcy

  I had thought once about dating Gail, the bakery owner, but she was a lot younger than I was, too. Was something keeping me from looking at available women? Or was I just not running into them, working on a college campus?

  16 – Joe’s House

  I was depressed as I walked back up to Fields Hall through the cold, wet chill of February. Suddenly, Eastern College had become a hotbed of news, all bad. It was as if we had stripped the pleasant, small-town collegiate veneer off the place and found something ugly and sordid underneath.

  When Horatio Wilcox, Eastern’s founder, moved the college up the hill from its beginnings in a church in Leighville, he took over both the Fields estate and the Fields fortune. He hired a firm of architects to create a campus for his new school. The Collegiate Gothic style was flourishing in our vicinity at the University of Pennsylvania and Bryn Mawr College, and Wilcox wanted the same for his campus.

  The major new buildings were Wilcox Hall, to house the liberal arts and humanities; Pennsylvania Hall, which held classrooms and laboratories for the physics, chemistry and mathematics departments; and President’s Tower, a large granite bell tower. Dormitories and eventually fraternities followed, and then a new hall for the study of languages and the humanities in the 1940s. In the 1950s Eastern built a new laboratory building and then in the 1960s the new gym.

  The campus, which had begun by dominating the top of the hill, as Fields had intended his mansion to do, began to spread over it. Long dormitories flanked the oval drive, fraternities and sororities sat on either side of the gates, and new construction spread over the back side of the hill. Only the main lawn, within the arc of the driveway, remained untouched. It was shaded by old elms and provided a pleasant place to relax or study on warm afternoons. An old wrought iron fence protected it from the clamor of Main Street, which stretched away east to the center of Leighville.

  Rounding a corner, I saw Tony Rinaldi ahead of me and called to him.

  “Just walking around,” he said. “Sometimes I think that if I just spend enough time up here the answer will come to me.”

  “Well, it’s a college. We’re supposed to provide an education.”

  “And I wonder about that. What makes these kids come to Eastern, to Leighville? My father came to work in the Fields factory. I was born here, and never had much reason to leave. But you came here to go to school. What made you do it?”

  “Money,” I said. “Eastern made me a better offer than any of the schools in the Ivy League. See, those schools all signed the Ivy Financial Agreement, which stipulates that no student should have to decide between any of the signors on the basis of financial aid. Eastern routinely makes a practice of over-guessing the Ivies and stealing away the middle-class ones who don’t get a lot of financial aid elsewhere.”

  “Makes for a pretty middle-class school, doesn’t it?”

  “Oh, we give a lot of scholarships to smart kids from poor families, and a certain number of rich kids come here for the academics or because it’s small. Our one disadvantage is our location. Leighville can’t match the cosmopolitan atmosphere of Cambridge, New York or Princeton.”

  We walked along a path that had been cleared of slush, but a few little puddles remained. I walked carefully, but Rinaldi, in his shiny black boots, just plowed along. “So you came to Eastern in 1985,” he said. “Why’d you leave?”

  “I went to graduate school at Columbia, and then got a job in the city. Met my ex-wife, fell in love, got married. When she got the chance for a big job in California, we packed up and went. Never thought about coming back to Bucks County.”

  Tony already knew about my time in prison. “When I got out on parole, I didn’t know where to go. But my father had just died and left me his townhouse, and it was easier to come back here than to start all over somewhere else.”

  We reached the front door of Fields Hall and Tony said, “Listen, Steve, I’m the first to admit it when I need some help. And right now my investigation is stalled. I cleared Norah Leedom and Thomas Taylor, and I can’t find enough information on Bob Moran to get a subpoena. I spent the morning going through Mr. Dagorian’s emails and phone records, and I didn’t find anything I already knew.”

  “I found some things, though,” I said. “Come on inside and I’ll fill you in.”

  As we walked into my office, I told him about the problems Sam had found with the gym, and the statistics Joe had been fudging, and the resignation memo.

  “You think President Babson knew about these inaccurate statistics? And the problems with the gym?”

  “You’d think if he did, he’d have fired Joe on the spot,” I said. “But Joe was still here.”

  “Could someone else have known about it, and be blackmailing Dagorian? This Zamboni guy?”

  “Sam Boni, not Zamboni. Why kill Joe if the blackmailer could get money out of him?”

  “Dagorian couldn’t pay, or wouldn’t,” Tony said. “He was going to resign anyway. Maybe he threatened to take the blackmailer down with him.” He sighed. “Every time I try to talk to somebody from this college I get stonewalled. It’s the old town and gown thing. And it’s not the first time it’s happened to me lately. We got a tip that students up here were selling steroids, but I haven’t been able to dig any deeper than that.”

  For as long as the college had been in existence, conflicts had simmered between it and the community. When I was in school at Eastern, Leighville residents complained when the college wanted to build a new gym on previously open land, and the college administration fought against passage of an ordinance that would restrict what it could do with its property. Students got into trouble at bars and stores, and sometimes thought they were better than the locals. Occasionally there had been violence, and the break-in rate soared during college vacations when students left valuables behind.

  “What can I do to help?” I asked.

  “I need more background on people who might have had a grudge against Joe Dagorian,” he said. “It’s my impression that this is an inside job, because of the circumstances. The killer had to be familiar with this building in order to know where Mr. Dagorian was going. He had to know about this event and that it would provide a good cover for him. We think he may have tried to hurt the college, too, by killing Mr. Dagorian at your party.”

  “You think someone killed Joe just to hurt Eastern?”

  “He was killed because somebody wanted him dead. What I’d like you to do is just keep your ears and eyes open. Anything you hear, anything you see, that you think might be important, if you could let me know. I know a college is a little world of its own, and you being in this world you might catch something that an outsider wouldn’t. You know, it’s funny but even though I’ve lived here in Leighville all my life I’ve never been very comfortable up here at the college. And this murder doesn’t make me feel any more comfortable. No, sir, not at all.”

  I looked at the clock and realized I was due in Blair Hall to teach tech writing. I hurried to class and played Perpetua Kaufman’s video presentation on writing research papers. When the video was finished I asked, “Who has an idea about a topic?”

  Dead silence.

  “OK, let’s talk about how to choose a topic. Let’s say you’re interested in the environment. That’s a huge topic, so you have to narrow it down. Any ideas?”

  “Global warming?” Lou suggested.

  “Still a big topic. You could narrow it down to the shrinking of the polar ice cap, or rising sea levels, because big icebergs in the Arctic are melting.”

  “Or hurricanes,” La’Rose said. “I read something how global warming leads to this El Nino thing, which makes more hurricanes.”

  “You could write about an endangered species,” Barbara said. “Like an animal or a plant.”

  “Great. See how we’re getting down to something that’s manageable in a short paper? I want you all to spend some time brainstorming your topics, and then before the end of class we’ll go over them again.”

&nb
sp; I sat down at my computer and answered emails, then walked around the room. Lou Segusi was working on a long paper about academic responsibility. “You’ve made a lot of progress,” I said, looking over his shoulder.

  “Oh, this is a paper for another class,” he said. “I’m not sure what I’m going to write about here yet.”

  “Well, you should be focusing on this class while you’re here. If you finish what you have to do for me, then you can do your other work.”

  “But this paper’s due tomorrow,” he said. “Please, prof?”

  “You give me a topic, I’ll let you keep going on that.”

  “How about that group Sister Perpetua belonged to?” he asked. “Bucks County Nature Conservancy? I was looking at their website and it looked really interesting. I could write about them.”

  The name was vaguely familiar but I couldn’t place it. “What do they do?”

  “Local activism for environmental stuff. They volunteer as docents at parks, and they do surveys of wildlife and stuff.”

  “Sounds good. That’s an opportunity for primary research, too.”

  I walked back up to the front of the room. “Listen up for a minute,” I said. “Lou’s idea lends itself to primary research. You all know the difference between primary and secondary research?”

  They looked like I’d asked for the difference between air and water. Something they should know, but couldn’t quite put into words. “You do primary research when you go out and experience the world. You ask questions, look for things in the real world.”

  “Like the police?” La’Rose asked.

  “Kind of,” I thought, thinking of Tony Rinaldi and the way he was investigating Joe Dagorian’s murder. “You could write a questionnaire about attitudes toward smoking, or teenaged sex, or abortion, and then compile the results. Or in Lou’s case, he could attend a meeting of the group he’s interested in, maybe volunteer with them.”

  “And what’s the other?” Barbara asked.

  “Secondary research is the kind you guys usually do. You read books and magazine articles written about your subject, about the first-hand research other people have done.”

  They went back to work, and by the end of our hour and a quarter it looked like they were all on track to decent topics.

  The rest of the afternoon passed quickly. I ran into Norah and Sally in the lobby of Fields Hall as we were all leaving for the day. “I have to go over to Joe’s house and pick up some things,” Norah said. “I’m not looking forward to it.”

  “Do you want us to come along with you?” Sally asked. “Steve and me?” Rochester barked once. “And Rochester, of course.”

  “That would be so nice,” Norah said. “It’ll be the first time I’ve been there since… well, you know.”

  Rochester hopped into the passenger seat of the BMW, and we followed Norah’s SUV down the hill, with Sally behind us. We negotiated the suburban streets along the river to Joe’s house. “You’re going to have to be a good boy,” I said to him. “No digging around in things that don’t belong to you. You hear me?”

  He just sat with his head on his paws. Sometimes he’s worse than a teenager.

  The three of us parked on the street in front of Joe’s house. “I just keep going over that evening in my mind,” Norah said as we all walked up to the front door. “I keep feeling I might have seen something or heard something important but I just can’t remember.”

  “Run through once again what you did that night,” I suggested. “Sometimes it helps to have someone else listen.”

  Norah fished around in her shoulder bag for the key to Joe’s front door, took a deep breath, and inserted it in the lock. The door swung open. The air inside was musty.

  We walked inside, and she turned up the heat and started turning on lights. “I was talking with Mike MacCormac about John Babson-- we were watching him move around the room. I saw Babson head toward the French doors and I decided I’d go to outside myself and have a cigarette.”

  “So President Babson was outside, too?”

  “I think so. I didn’t see him. I was on the east side of the building, where Joe… was found.”

  “Did you see anyone else outside?”

  Norah was quiet for a while. “I heard several of those young men from the Rising Sons. They were hiding outside behind the door that leads in to the admissions hallway, laughing and talking. I smelled some marijuana smoke. I found a sheltered place between trees and pulled out my cigarettes. Joe was pacing around outside like he had something serious on his mind. But when he saw me, he lit into me again about smoking.”

  “You shouldn’t, you know,” Sally said. “Sam shows his kids these slides of what their lungs look like after smoking. It’s gruesome.”

  “I know, dear. I heard enough of it from Joe.” She walked into the kitchen and began rinsing the dirty dishes in the sink and stacking them in the dishwasher. “I told him that he ought to stay out of my business,” Norah continued. “He started yelling about selling the land in New Hampshire, and that’s when I told him he frustrated me so much sometimes I could kill him.”

  “Which those women waiting to go inside overheard.”

  She nodded. “I stubbed out my cigarette and went inside. I didn’t see Joe again until… until they took him away.”

  “So you didn’t see Bob Moran? Apparently he saw you.”

  “The electric car man? What in the world was he doing there?”

  “He’s an Eastern alum. His son is applying for the fall class, and Joe wouldn’t let him in.”

  “Really? Do you think he killed Joe?”

  “Rinaldi says he doesn’t have enough evidence to subpoena Moran’s fingerprints,” I said. “But he’s looking into him.”

  Norah straightened up. “I need to find the deed for the land. Joe’s interest becomes part of his estate and the attorney needs it. Will you be OK out here for a few minutes?”

  “Sure,” Sally said.

  I walked over to Joe’s bookcase and started browsing, while Sally sent someone—probably Sam Boni—a text message. As Norah had said once, Joe wasn’t much for literature. Most of the books on the shelf were non-fiction, many of them about sports. I picked up a copy of The Farmer’s Almanac and was paging through it when I realized Rochester was pawing at a pile of papers on the bottom shelf. They slid forward onto the ground. I said, “Oh, Rochester, what are you doing?”

  He looked up at me with a doggy grin, like he was expecting a treat for messing up Joe’s house. I sat down on the floor and started putting the papers back in order, Rochester’s head in my lap, nosing at everything.

  “This is getting old, Rochester,” I said. “I wish you could talk, so you could just tell me what you want me to know.”

  He barked once.

  “He agrees with you,” Sally said, looking up from her phone. “You need a hand down there?”

  “Sure. ” The papers had slid everywhere. Most of them were copies of correspondence—it didn’t look like Joe had much of a filing system. Insurance claims were next to newspaper clippings which were next to doctors’ reports.

  “This is weird,” Sally said, holding up one piece of paper.

  “Weird how?”

  “This is a copy of a student’s application essay and portfolio, from last year.”

  “Why would Joe have that at home?”

  “That’s a good question.”

  I looked over at it. The student was Barbara Seville, who was in my tech writing class, and it included a series of nature photographs she had taken.

  “Put it aside,” I said. “We can take it back to the college and see if it relates to anything.”

  Rochester kept nosing at the papers and I kept pushing him away. After a while, Norah came out of the bedroom with the paperwork she had come for, and she sat down on the floor with us and kept looking. “He was such a pack rat,” she said. “Look at this. I remember when we went on this trip, a couple of years after we were married.”


  She held up the brochure for a small inn in Vermont. “Why in the world would he have kept this?”

  “Maybe he had a good time,” Sally said.

  We ended up putting together a whole folder of questionable documents to look over ourselves and possibly pass on to Tony Rinaldi. We parted company then, and Rochester and I drove home.

  17 – A Gentleman and Verona

  The next morning was bright and sunny, very unusual for February, and I relished my brief morning walk with Rochester. A slight breeze made the air crisp, but I zipped up my down parka, slipped on my rabbit fur-lined gloves, and strode off into the wind. Rochester, of course, had his own fur coat.

  I was only moderately chilled by the time we got to Fields Hall, and it took just a cup of hot chocolate and the warmth of my office to put me right again. Looking over the list of Sam’s priorities for the athletic program, I remembered what he had said about Joe’s supervision of the gym construction.

  He was obviously not qualified to manage a project like that, but because he was a loyal Eastern man he accepted his assignment and muddled through. Joe’s main skill seemed to be his love of Eastern College and his loyalty to it. I wondered if that was what had also gotten him killed. It struck me as funny that Joe would have made a great fund-raiser for Eastern if he hadn’t been so opposed to the idea.

  More worrying than Joe’s botched construction job was his inability to handle the admissions office. He was good at convincing kids to come to Eastern, one on one. But the fudged numbers that Sally was discovering were dangerous. Suppose that information got out to the press and the general public? Eastern’s reputation would take a nose dive, and the capital campaign would flounder. People are much more willing to give their money to a successful, thriving college than one that’s down on its luck.

  Even more worrying was the realization that Joe might have been killed to prevent that information getting out. Suppose he was going to retire, as he had hinted to Norah, and he wanted to leave with a clean slate. And suppose his malice toward fund-raising led him to see an opportunity to wipe us out while coming clean on his own. I could see someone stopping him, and unfortunately the someone I kept seeing was John William Babson. I’d have to mention to Tony Rinaldi that Norah had seen Babson heading outside just before Joe was murdered.