Three Dogs in a Row

by Neil S. Plakcy

  Richard Seville was arraigned for the murders of Joe Dagorian and Perpetua Kaufman. I didn’t mention the case, or my part in it, to Barbara when I saw her in the technical writing class. Lou Segusi began volunteering with the campus writing center, and he told me he was considering going on to get a master’s degree so he could become an English teacher. He moved in with a friend who had an apartment off-campus for the rest of the term.

  Tony Rinaldi got a search warrant for Juan and Jose’s room, based on the steroids Rochester found and Mike MacCormac’s confession that he had been buying from them. Babson had a long talk with Mike, and Babson said he could keep his job if he submitted to periodic drug tests.

  Juan and Jose rolled on the dealer who had been supplying them with the steroids, back in their home town of Jersey City. They were both released on bail, but because they had been selling to fellow students as well as Mike, they were both expelled. I was glad to see them go, and I’m sure Lou was, too. A couple of weeks later, after his cast was off, a pretty, dark-haired girl met him outside the classroom as the tech writing class was finishing. He introduced her as Desiree.

  Norah Leedom announced that she was retiring from Eastern at the end of the semester; she was taking the money from the sale of the land she and Joe had owned in Vermont and financing a long trip overseas. She had a book in mind, she said, about Joe and their life together. I asked if it would include the details of the murder and she said, “No, I’ll leave that to some mystery writer.”

  Book Three: DOG HELPS THOSE

  1 – Agility Training

  “And you said I went dog crazy when Rochester came to live with me.” I shook my head and looked around my friend Rick’s fenced-in back yard. He had arranged poles, tubes, and a kids’ teeter-totter to form an obstacle course. “What is all this stuff?”

  “It’s for agility training,” Rick said. “Before you go any farther, Steve, I know. I’m puppy whipped. This is all for Rascal.”

  I adopted my golden retriever, Rochester, when his previous owner, my next-door-neighbor, was murdered. Seeing me and Rochester together made Rick want his own dog. Just after Christmas, he brought home Rascal, a black and white Australian shepherd from the Bucks County Animal Shelter in Lahaska. And now, barely five months later, he was as crazy about his dog as I was about mine.

  “What’s agility training?” I asked Rick, leaning up against the chain-link fence.

  Rick and I went to high school together, and met up again when I returned home to Stewart’s Crossing after a marriage, a divorce and a brief incarceration for computer hacking. Rick became a patrol cop, then police detective; he’d put on a few pounds in the twenty-some years since high school, but hadn’t we all. There were bags below his eyes and a couple of laugh lines around his mouth. Otherwise he looked the same; unruly mop of brown hair, broad shoulders, athletic build.

  “It’s an obstacle course that Rascal and I run together,” he said.

  “You climb through that tunnel?” I pointed at a long polystyrene tube with intermittent ridges that held its shape.

  Rick shook his head. “I lead him through everything and reward him when he does it right.”

  The two dogs were lolling next to each other in the shade of a big maple tree, lush with new buds. They had sniffed each other, then raced around the yard for a while, until they collapsed together, their tongues hanging out.

  It was hot back there in the bright sunshine, so I peeled off my windbreaker and tossed it on the fence. “Show me.”

  Rick reached into his pocket and pulled out a dog treat in the shape of a tiny T-bone steak. “Rascal want to play?”

  The shepherd jumped up and rushed over to Rick, sitting on his haunches at my friend’s feet.

  “Let’s show Steve and Rochester how you climb the seesaw.” He led the dog to the board and motioned Rascal to begin climbing. Delicately, the shepherd raised one black-and-white paw and placed it on the board. Then he stepped up, one paw after the other until the board began to rise behind him. He paused when the board was nearly balanced.

  I saw Rochester sitting up under the tree, watching the action.

  “Come down,” Rick said, standing at the far end of the board, holding out the treat. Quickly, Rascal scampered down the board as it fell to the ground, then jumped up to snatch the treat from Rick’s hand.

  “What a good boy,” Rick said, reaching down to scratch behind Rascal’s ears.

  “Uh-oh, here comes Rochester,” I said. The big goofy golden bounded up to Rick and Rascal but ignored the possibility of a treat. Instead he hopped right on the lower end of the board and began to climb up.

  He hesitated only for a moment when the board came level, then bounded down and ran up to me, his mouth wide open in a doggy grin. “Rochester doesn’t even need the treat for motivation.” I reached down and scratched his neck. “Do you, boy?”

  He woofed.

  “Maybe not motivation, but reward.” Rick held a treat out to Rochester, and my traitorous dog grabbed it.

  Like Rick, I was forty-two, though I was an inch or two taller than he was, with a body made for sitting behind a computer, not chasing criminals. We had originally bonded over the mutual bitterness of our divorces, but now we came together because of an underlying friendship and the love of our dogs.

  “Come on, Rascal and I will go through the course, and then you and Rochester can follow.” Rick led Rascal over to the gate, and then took off at a run, the dog right behind him.

  “Go on, through the tunnel.” Rick motioned forward, and Rascal got down on his front paws and scrabbled his way in and through. “Good boy!” Rick said, handing him a treat and urging him forward to a set of three wooden steps back to back. Rascal climbed up the steps then down, got another treat, then pawed delicately up the teeter-totter.

  I laughed at the display, but Rochester obviously didn’t share my humor. I had to hold on to his collar to keep him from following.

  “Now the weave poles.” Rick urged Rascal forward to dart around a set of poles, in and out, and it made him look like he was following a very determined, agile squirrel.

  A plane soared high overhead through the cloudless sky, and in the distance I heard someone firing up a lawnmower. A bee buzzed by in pursuit of pollen. It was the sort of glorious spring day which made me wonder why I’d ever left Pennsylvania, and glad I’d come back.

  Rascal jumped up on a low, square table, and Rick counted off on his fingers as Rascal sat there. At the count of three Rascal took off toward the limbo pole, but instead of going underneath he jumped over it. Then he raced back to the gate and sat down.

  Rick loped after him. “Good boy.” He patted the dog on the head and gave him another T-bone. “He should have stayed on the table for a count of five. We’re working on that.”

  Rochester was still straining to follow in Rascal’s paw-prints, so I let him go. He ran right to the tunnel and squirmed inside. Then he stopped.

  “You’ve got to run to the end,” Rick said. “So he knows where to go.”

  “There’s only one direction,” I protested, but I hurried to the end of the tunnel and clapped for Rochester. “Come here, you goofball.”

  He rushed out of the tunnel and jumped up on me. “Up the steps next,” Rick said. “No stopping.”

  “Come on, Rochester.” I motioned him toward the steps, and he went right up and then down as he was supposed to. Then, with me urging him on, he did the teeter-totter again, and then I led him to the weave poles.

  He was baffled, even after having watched Rascal. Instead of running between the poles, he ran around them a couple of times, barked, then jumped up on the table. “That’s Rochester’s way of saying those weave poles are dumb,” I said.

  I held up my fingers as Rick had, counting to five, then motioned Rochester down and toward the limbo pole, which he cleared gracefully.

  “You should bring him to my training class.” Rick handed Rochester a T-bone, which he gobbled greedily. “Tomorrow
afternoon, out Scammell’s Mill Road.”

  “You take him to a class to learn this?” I asked, as I followed him back inside, the dogs right behind us.

  They collapsed on the kitchen floor, and Rick brought two bottles of beer out of the fridge. “This woman has a big farm out where Stewart’s Crossing meets Newtown,” he said. “She has a huge agility course set up, way more stuff than I have. She breeds Chihuahuas and dachshunds, but most of the course works for big dogs, too.”

  For the past few months, I’d been dating one of the professors at the college where I worked. As Rick and I sat down at the kitchen table, he asked, “How’s Lili these days?”

  Liliana Weinstock was an amazing photographer and the head of the fine arts department. She was beautiful and funky and talented, and she and Rochester got along well. But she had also been divorced twice, and we both agreed to take things slow. “She’s doing well,” I said. “It’s the end of the semester, though, so she’s swamped with all this department chair stuff, as well as finishing up her own classes.”

  “Then come with me to Rita’s class tomorrow. Though I have to warn you she’s a pain in the ass, and her little dogs can drive you crazy with their yapping.”

  “You make it sound so appealing.” I tipped my beer bottle back. The brew was sharp but had a citrus aftertaste, and it made me think of summer.

  “It’s really fun. And you haven’t laughed until you’ve seen a Chihuahua stuck on the teeter-totter when it’s just about balanced, going back and forth like it’s possessed.” He smiled at the memory. “And Rita’s got a mouth on her like a sailor when the dogs don’t behave. It’s a crack up.”

  We moved to the living room and Rick put a golf tournament on the big-screen TV. We played with the dogs, joked about the golfers on the screen, and downed another pair of beers. Then I looked at my watch. “Dinner with Lili tonight,” I said. “What time is this class tomorrow?”

  “Eleven. I’ll pick you and Rochester up in my truck at ten-thirty.”

  I stood up. “All right. See you.”

  “Wouldn’t want to be you,” he shot back, the way we’d spoken back in high school.

  All in all, though, I thought as I drove home in the old BMW sedan that was a relic of my past life in Silicon Valley, I had managed to rebuild pretty well. Sure, I still had to meet with my parole officer, and my finances were tenuous, if improving with every week of full-time work. I had started at Eastern as an adjunct instructor in the English department before I managed to score my current administrative gig, and I still taught occasionally when I could.

  I had a great dog, a sweet townhouse and an even sweeter girlfriend. While I was still married and living in California, my dad sold our family house and moved into a townhouse in River Bend, a gated community of townhouses and single family homes tucked between the Delaware River and Stewart’s Crossing’s downtown, bordered on two sides by a nature preserve. He died while I was in prison, and left the townhouse to me, his only child. As I drove through the gates and waved at the security guard on duty, I thought again how lucky I was to have had a place to come home to.

  When we got home, I fed Rochester and took him for a quick walk around the neighborhood. It was especially beautiful in the springtime, and even though the sun was going down and the air getting nippy, I enjoyed walking with Rochester. He took so much pleasure in nature—sniffing every bush and tree for messages left by other dogs, chasing squirrels and ducks, rolling in the grass. Forsythia hedges were coming into bloom and all the maples and oaks budded with new growth. The air was sweet and floral, lights were coming on in houses around us, and I could hear the high sound of a child giggling mixed with car engines and someone’s lawnmower.

  We walked down the long access road to the neighborhood, bordered on both sides by the nature preserve, and passed the place where I had found Caroline Kelly’s body. Rochester stopped to nose around, and I wondered if there was still some scent of his former mistress months later.

  Was it her death that had set him on a life of crime detection? Was he happiest when he was nose to the ground in search of a villain, as he’d done twice before? Could he settle down to a happy life if I asserted myself as the alpha dog in our pack?

  2 – They Call This Art?

  I took a shower, got dressed, and left the door of Rochester’s crate open in case he wanted to sleep inside it. Then I drove upriver to Leighville, where Lili rented a small house on the outskirts of town. It was only a half-hour drive, and I was able to do it on auto-pilot, since I’d been making that same drive to work at Eastern for over a year.

  I thought about moving up there; Lili was there, and our work was, too. But Stewart’s Crossing was the place where I’d felt loved and sheltered by my parents. Where we had my Mexican-themed fifth birthday party, complete with piñata, serapes, and pointy straw hats. Where memories lurked around street corners and behind buildings that were landmarks to no one but me and my friends. It felt like home, and I wasn’t ready to give that up.

  “Hey, sweetheart,” I said, when Lili opened the door to me. I leaned forward and kissed her.

  She was wearing a calf-length swirly dress in a red and blue pattern, and had a matching scarf knotted around her neck. “Hey, yourself,” she said, when she backed away.

  I liked kissing Lili. She always smelled and tasted so good, and I felt my hormones rise just being around her. I nibbled on her ear.

  She laughed and backed away from me. “You’re a meshuggeneh,” she said.

  Lili’s use of the Yiddish word reminded me that despite her occasional Spanish expletive and her beautiful Hispanic looks, she was as Jewish as I was. Her Weinstock grandparents had left Poland in 1940, but they couldn’t get visas for the US so they had gone to Cuba. Her father had been born in Havana, gone to college there, and married Lili’s mother, a Sephardic woman whose roots were in Spain.

  Lili was born in 1965, two years before I was. Her father was an engineer, and in 1970 he was sent to Mexico to learn advanced hydraulics. While he was there he realized how repressive the Castro regime was, and he arranged to have his wife, Lili, and her younger brother smuggled out of the country to join him.

  After a couple of years in Mexico, the family relocated to Kansas City, where there was a small cluster of Cuban immigrants. From then on the Weinstocks moved every few years as her father got jobs. Lili never felt at home anywhere because her background was so odd. Either she was the only Hispanic, or the only Jew. Her parents had funny accents. She started using the camera as a way to frame and understand her existence.

  Her language was a funny mix of Yiddish words, Sephardic expressions, and Midwest terms. She said, “Oy vey” and called soda “pop,” and could sing lullabies she had learned from her mother in Ladino, the Spanish-based language of the Sephardim. Yet she was as far from my ex-wife Mary as a nice Jewish girl could be. Mary was a hard-charging executive who liked to be in control of everything. Lili was an artsy free spirit who didn’t like to be tied down.

  “Let’s go. We don’t want to be late.” She grabbed her coat and locked the front door. We were going to a reception for an exhibit featuring her students’ work, and then to dinner. I was hoping we could short-cut the exhibit and get to the food—and what was bound to come after.

  * * *

  We parked in the faculty lot and walked through the gathering dusk to the chapel, at the eastern end of the campus. It was a square stone building in the collegiate Gothic style, with ivy climbing the walls and an ecumenical-looking square spire. Being Jewish, I’d never been in the chapel myself until that evening, though I’d gone to college at Eastern back in the days when dinosaurs roamed the earth.

  The main chapel was a large room with a vaulted ceiling and several rows of folding chairs in the middle. As we walked inside, Lili stopped and pointed up. “I love the pattern of that ceiling,” she said. “I’m taking a series of photos of it at different times of day, with different filters. I don’t know what I’ll do with it but I�
��m interested in the way the light and shadow play against the woodwork.”

  I loved the way she looked at the world, always through the camera’s eye. That was represented in the way she’d laid out the student work as well. Around the edges of the room her class had hung their paintings, photographs, drawings and watercolors on fabric-covered dividers. Several low pedestals held small clay sculptures.

  “One of my students was having problems getting her work framed in time,” Lili said. “I want to go over and check on her. And I need to make sure that all the students who are exhibiting are here to talk about their work.”

  I stopped to survey the first exhibit by the door, a series of photos taken by a senior named Len Scapon. I thought at first that the gorillas, zebras and giraffes in his pictures were from a nature park, but then I took a closer look at the captions. Len had received a grant from a nature foundation the previous summer and spent it hitchhiking through Equatorial Africa, taking pictures of animals out in the wild.

  “I have to tell you, Len,” I said to him, “I’m impressed not only by your art but by your chutzpah. If I had told my parents I wanted to do something like this when I was twenty, my mother would have taken my temperature and my father would have taken my passport.”

  He laughed. “My folks were real supportive. You need a ton of shots to go to Africa, and my mom’s a nurse. She arranged all the vaccinations for me and even gave them to me herself.”

  “Well, it was worth the effort. The photographs are amazing.”

  He scuffed his feet. “Thanks.”

  Next in line was a skinny, eager kid named Jeremy, whom I knew from a freshman comp class I had taught the year before. He stood nervously by his pictures in a navy blazer that his parents probably hoped he would grow into. He had taken some very atmospheric photos of the campus, focusing on architectural details—a gargoyle, a commemorative stone, a window frame and a huge oak door.