Three Dogs in a Row

by Neil S. Plakcy

  Monday morning, I woke before Rochester. He lying next to my bed, snoring lightly and probably dreaming about his wild weekend with Rick and Rascal. It gave me no small pleasure to nudge him awake. He yawned, but stayed flat on the floor. “Huh, don’t like it when the shoe’s on the other paw, do you?” I said. I toed him in the side again. “Come on, get up, you lazy lump.”

  Wrong move. He sprung up and began dancing around me in circles. I guess Rascal didn’t wear him out enough. Outside, he was all business, striding forward on all four legs, barely stopping to sniff before peeing, pooping his guts out, then tugging me back home.

  Security had been tightened on the campus as a result of all the newspaper articles. The guards at the front gate were taking their jobs more seriously, too, and the back and side gates into the campus were now either closed or manned by guards. I had to show my ID to get into the parking lot, and again at the front door of Fields Hall.

  Once in my office, I wrote a report on my trip, and a series of thank-you notes to the people I had met. Dezhanne came in for a while to answer the phone and I read through the Sunday papers. The Leighville Gazette featured an in-depth look at security problems at Eastern College, which highlighted the fact that a ruthless killer was still on the loose.

  Babson called at ten to rant about the poor press we were getting. I almost told him it wasn’t my fault Joe got killed, or that the police couldn’t seem to latch onto the guy who did it. But I knew that it was a touchy subject with him so I held back.

  Four newspapers and the AP wire called to check for new developments in the case, and I told them no. Babson declined an opportunity to be interviewed on the campus radio station about security problems, and a TV station in Philadelphia called to say they might be interested in sending a camera crew up, if anything happened. I said I would let them know.

  I left Rochester snoozing in my office and met Sally for lunch at the Cafette, an on-campus sandwich shop in an old carriage house behind Fields Hall. It was a worn, homey-looking place, with old wooden picnic tables and benches. We snared one of the few single tables, off in the corner next to the remains of a brick chimney. Sally was eager to hear about my meeting with Verona Santander.

  “She seemed like a real nice, well-adjusted girl,” I said. “Not the kind who’d make up stories or hold a grudge. Your basic college freshman.”

  “What did she say about Ike?”

  “Well, it’s kind of hard to believe, but like I say, she doesn’t seem to have much reason to lie.”

  I told Sally Verona’s story, and afterwards she sat back in her seat and said, “Shit. What an awful thing to do. And when he seemed like such a good kid.”

  “Even good kids have their faults,” I said. “His is just a little worse than most.”

  “Not just a little. A lot. I mean, that’s a serious breach of ethics. To promise a girl admission if she sleeps with you. ” She shook her head.

  “She never said he promised.”

  “Even so, just to make the proposition is a serious breach,” Sally said. “Why the hell did this have to happen now? When I’m so swamped and I have a million other problems?”

  “What are you going to do about it?”

  “I don’t know. Ike is graduating this semester and I don’t think it’s fair to expel him when we have so little evidence. It happened a year ago, no one was hurt, and it’s going to be Ike’s word against this girl’s. I’m going to have to let him go. I’ll just make up an excuse. I can’t take the risk that he’ll compromise the office again.”

  “You aren’t going to confront him with Verona’s story?”

  “He’ll probably deny it and we’ll have a scene. No, I’ll just tell him there was an indication in Joe’s files that he was to be let go, and I have to go along with Joe’s plans, even though I don’t understand them.”

  I did some more work back at the office, and after making sure Dezhanne had showed up to man the phones while I was gone, I went to teach the tech writing class. We talked some more about research, and how to structure a research paper. Then I set them loose to look for information on their research topics.

  As I walked around the room, I noticed that once again Lou Segusi seemed to be busy working on a paper for some other class. I wondered how many papers the kid had to write in one term.

  “I tried to contact that group,” he said, popping up an internet browser that hid the document he was working on. “See? The Bucks County Nature Conservancy. But both the phone numbers have been disconnected.”

  He pointed at the bottom of the screen. “That first number, that’s Sister Perpetua’s. I cross-referenced it with the Yahoo people search.”

  I recognized the Stewart’s Crossing exchange. “And the other?”

  “Belongs to some guy named Joe. It’s shut off, too. ” He quickly copied the number, then pasted it into the search box. “Dagorian, Joseph R. ” came up as the result.

  “Joe Dagorian?” I asked.

  “Yeah, that’s the guy. You know him?”

  “I did. He was in charge of admissions here. He was murdered a couple of weeks ago.”

  “No!” La’Rose said. “I read about that. Mr. Dagorian was really nice. He recruited me to come to Eastern.”

  I moved on down the line of computers, and Lou went back to whatever he was working on. It was a pretty big coincidence that both Joe and Perpetua had worked for the Nature Conservancy, and both were dead.

  But was it? Both of them worked at Eastern, too. Joe had been around the college forever; he might have known Perpetua, and known she was interested in ecological subjects. And besides, Perpetua’s death was an accident, wasn’t it?

  After class, I walked outside with Lou Segusi and Barbara Seville. As we got outside she suddenly took off, running up to a big black Lincoln Town Car. A tall man in a camel-hair coat got out and she kissed his cheek. I recognized him as her father. The two of them talked as Bob Moran approached, giving Seville a big clap on the back like old friends.

  Did they work together, I wondered, as I walked back to my office. Did Barbara, who was a sophomore, know Marty Moran, who was two years younger and trying to get into Eastern? I realized I’d never asked Tony Rinaldi what he’d learned about Bob Moran. I made a mental note to call him when I returned to my office, but I didn’t have to bother, because he was there waiting for me.

  Rochester was still asleep in the corner. “Dog’s not doing a very good job of security,” Tony said.

  “He had a big weekend. How’s the investigation going?”

  “Not so good. Nothing unusual in Dagorian’s phone records. His email, though, that’s another story.”

  “How so?”

  “Tell me about this guy Mike MacCormac. He seems to have exchanged a lot of very angry emails with Dagorian.”

  “Mike? He’s my boss. Ex-football player, very aggressive, very determined. He’s the guy with the main responsibility for this big fund-raising campaign we’re running. He and Joe used to argue all the time.”

  I looked at him. “Did Mike threaten him?”

  Rinaldi shook his head. “No. Everything was about the college, and this fund-raising campaign. Nothing personal, nothing like a threat. ” He sighed. “If this case gets solved, it’s going to be through police work. You go on your hunches and you go with the clues, and sometimes you just have to start all over again. Maybe you get a lucky break and you solve a case the first time out, but that’s the exception, not the rule.”

  “You don’t get very many homicides here in Leighville.”

  “No, but we do get drug cases up on the campus, and burglaries and muggings occasionally. You use the same skills to try and solve homicides, but the stakes are higher.”

  “What ever happened with Bob Moran?” I asked. “You know that after Joe died, his son was offered admission here.”

  “I’m treading lightly,” Tony said. “He’s a big cheese in town, you know. Friends with the mayor and the chief of police. I met with him agai
n this morning—told him I wanted to get some background on who was where the night Dagorian was murdered.”

  “Did he say anything?”

  “He didn’t confess, if that’s what you’re asking. But I checked, and his prints are in the FBI’s IAFIS database, because he was in the Army in the first Iraq war.”

  “Do they match the print you got from the knife?”

  “Nope.”

  “But that print could have been from someone else, you know,” I said. “Maybe Moran picked up a knife that another guest had used, and made sure to wipe his own prints off, or use gloves.”

  “You really read too many mysteries,” Tony said.

  “What was his specialty in the military?” I asked. “Was he trained in how to subdue sentries? Because I read somewhere that the Army trains you to go up behind a sentry and slit his throat, to keep him from making any noise. And that’s what happened to Joe, wasn’t it? His throat was slit from behind?”

  “I don’t have access to that kind of information myself,” Tony said. “And I have no cause to go searching for it, when his fingerprint doesn’t match the one on the knife.”

  “And it doesn’t match anyone in the AIFIS database?”

  He shook his head.

  “Have you spoken to Ike Arumba?” I asked. “The tall, skinny kid from The Rising Sons?”

  He opened his notebook and paged through it. “Nope. Too busy trying to find something on Moran, and going through Dagorian’s records.”

  “Well, maybe you should.” I told him about my visit to Verona Santander, and the letter we had found in Joe’s file indicating he was going to fire Ike.

  “How serious is something like that up here?” he asked. “It’s not like the girl didn’t consent, though of course there was some implied pressure. But boys have been diddling girls since Adam and Eve.”

  “We have a strict policy against sexual harassment,” I said. “The college really cracked down after a situation a couple of years ago where a girl said she was forced to have sex with a couple of boys at a frat party.”

  “I remember that case. I wasn’t the investigator, but I know it was hell to get details out of anyone up here.”

  “I hate to get him into trouble; he seems like a pretty good kid. But you should talk to him.”

  “Can I get a copy of the letter?”

  I buzzed Sally and asked her. “I guess so,” she said. “I’ll make a copy.”

  “One more thing,” I said to Tony, after I hung up the phone. “Does the name Perpetua Kaufman mean anything to you?”

  “Sounds like a Jewish saint.”

  “You’re not far off the mark. She was a former nun who taught here at Eastern. She died over winter break. Somebody told me it was a faulty space heater.”

  “And?”

  “And she knew Joe Dagorian. She and Joe were the two leaders of a local ecological organization. It just struck me as strange that both of them would die so close to each other.”

  “People die every day,” he said. “She was an elderly woman, this ex-nun?”

  “Yeah.”

  “We get lots of deaths of elderly people in the winter. Some of them from exposure, some from falls, some, like this lady, from bad space heaters, or carbon monoxide. But you’re right, it is a funky kind of coincidence. Spell the name.”

  I did. “But she lived in Stewart’s Crossing. You ought to call Rick Stemper and see what he knows about it.”

  “I do know how to interface with other law enforcement agencies,” Tony said drily. He stood up. “I appreciate your time, and the lead on the kid and the ex-nun. I’ll do some checking up on both of them. You never know what I’ll find. They say police work is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.”

  “I thought they said that about genius.”

  “You mean they aren’t the same thing?” He smiled, put on his fur hat, and walked out.

  21 – Who’s A Good Boy?

  Soon after Tony left, I heard a heavy, erratic pounding reverberating through Fields Hall. I realized it was coming from the alumni and development office, next door to mine. I pushed the door open and saw Mike MacCormac standing in his office, punching the wall. He looked up in mid-punch, saw me standing there, and laughed uncomfortably.

  “Good strong walls,” he said. “Did you hear me?”

  “Uh-huh. What’s the matter?”

  “You know, typical frustrations. I just, uh, can’t let it build up inside me, you know? Otherwise it makes me crazy. So I take it out on my wall, sometimes on the floor. Sometimes I go over to the gym and borrow a punching bag.”

  I struggled to find something to say, looking around the office for inspiration. On the floor at my feet was a doctor’s prescription, and I picked it up and placed it on his desk. As I did, I noticed that it was for Viagra. I wondered what a young guy like him was doing with a drug for erectile dysfunction, but didn’t want to say anything. I didn’t want him turning his aggression against me.

  “You’ve got a lot of responsibility. You can’t let it get to you. ” I shrugged. “Take it easy on the wall, or we’ll be sharing a suite of offices.”

  As I walked out I passed Juan and Jose, the football players. Why were they always hanging around Mike’s office? Was it just that he had been a football player? Shouldn’t they be buddying up with Sam Boni instead? They didn’t seem to be work-study students, because I never actually saw them working.

  I went back to my office and checked my email, where I saw a response to my message to Lili. My hand shaking a little, I clicked the mouse to open it. “It was nice to run into a familiar face in the big bad city,” she wrote. “We’ll have to get together again sometime around Leighville.”

  Well. What did that mean? How did people start dating again, at forty-three? Did I have the patience for the delicate dance of getting to know you, or for figuring out symbols and codes I hadn’t thought about since my post-college dating days?

  I looked to Rochester for advice, but he was still asleep. I wasn’t quite desperate enough to call Tor or Rick and ask advice, so instead I stewed around in my office, unable to concentrate on much.

  Dezhanne stuck her head in my door as I was trying to put together a press release on an ecological awareness program the biology department was sponsoring. “I’m clocking out. By the way, I aced my organic midterm. You know, the one I was stressing about last week.”

  “So the pre-med thing is back on?”

  “Until the final exam,” she said and walked out, her curls bouncing.

  I looked over to where Rochester lay, and as if he sensed my gaze on him, he looked up, yawned, then stood up and came over to me. “Who’s a good boy?” I asked, scratching behind his ears.

  He jumped up and put his paws on my groin, nearly knocking me over. “All right, I get the hint,” I said. “It’s time for us to go home.”

  I struggled with him to get his leash on, and once I had him hooked up, he took off toward the office door, dragging me behind him. I had to struggle to lock the door behind us, with him tugging the leash forward.

  As we drove home along the River Road, darkness falling around us, I thought about Joe Dagorian again. So many problems swirled around him—his opposition to the capital campaign, his possible corruption or incompetence in the building of the gym, his resistance to granting admission to Bob Moran’s son. And now the possibility that something was going on with the Bucks County Nature Conservancy.

  Add to that the statistics Joe had been fudging. If he released them, the effect on Eastern’s reputation could be disastrous. That kind of dishonesty wasn’t tolerated well in academia, and many competing institutions would jump on the issue and use it against us.

  When we got home, I took Rochester for a quick walk, then fed him his dinner and sat down at my laptop. I had been a good boy for a long time, not snooping in places I wasn’t supposed to go, meeting all Santiago Santos’s requirements. But I wondered if there was something I could find out myself, something Rinaldi mig
ht not be able to discover.

  I began with the Bucks County Nature Conservancy. An internet search revealed a number of mentions of the group on websites and in the local paper, and I read them all. Most of them were simple things like meeting notices, but an extensive article in the Courier-Times discussed a developer’s plans for a tract of undeveloped land along the Tohickon Creek, and opposition toward the plans from Joe’s group.

  A development company called Bar-Lyn Investments wanted to build an assisted living facility for the elderly along the creek. The BCNC was concerned about the loss of habitat for various kinds of flora and fauna, as well as the damage from construction and increased vehicle traffic through the area.

  In early January, Joe had spoken up at a zoning meeting against reclassifying the zoning from agricultural to a residential category that would allow adult congregate living, and the commission had agreed to table Bar-Lyn’s request pending an evaluation of the ecological consequences.

  I followed a link to Bar-Lyn’s website, and discovered that it was a real estate development company based in Upper Bucks County, which built and operated several small shopping centers. The ACLF was its biggest project, and a statement on the company’s home page indicated it hoped the zoning problem would be solved quickly so that construction could proceed.

  I was intrigued, so I did some more searching on Bar-Lyn Investments. I found that each of the small shopping centers the company owned was heavily mortgaged—always a bad sign, especially in this economy. Searching for commercial property, I found vacancies at all of Bar-Lyn’s centers.

  I looked up the property records for Joe’s house, and the land he co-owned with Norah in New Hampshire. I didn’t care enough to try to hack into the property appraiser’s database, just checked the public records.