“Evening,” I said. “Wow, those asparagus look great.”
“First of the season. I’m Furst, and I raise ‘em.”
For a minute I misheard him and thought he was talking about poker. But then I made the connection. I picked up a bunch of asparagus. The spears were crisp and straight, and the heads were compact. “I’ll take two of those,” I said.
As if on cue, Rita’s dogs erupted in a new round of barking as Furst flipped open a brown paper bag.
“How many dogs do they have back there? Sounds like a hundred.” I knew there were closer to fifty, but I thought asking the question might be a good conversation opener.
“Too many,” Furst said. “But not for much longer. Woman who lived there got herself killed, so all them little Chihuahuas and dachshunds will be moving on.”
I picked up a head of lettuce and sniffed it. It smelled fresh and earthy. “Bet it won’t come soon enough for you.”
“You got that. I got nothing against dogs, you know.” He looked beyond me to where Rochester had his front paws on the windowsill of the passenger door. “Got two of ‘em myself. But that witch Rita, she had forty or fifty at a time. And it’s not just the noise, either. She hosed down the kennels and the dog shit ran right down into my land.”
“Isn’t manure good fertilizer?” I asked innocently.
“Not dog shit, with all the chemicals in their food. But you can be sure, my produce is one hundred percent pure and organic.”
I picked out some ripe Jersey tomatoes, a couple of zucchini, and a few other vegetables and then pulled out my wallet. “I’ll take two heads of lettuce, too. So the woman who lived there got herself killed? Run over or something?”
He shook his head as he took the bills from me. “Nope. Somebody poisoned the old bitch. If I knew who, I’d shake his hand. You have a nice night, now.”
“Thanks. You, too.”
I could see Hugo First was glad that Rita was dead. But had he hated her enough to kill her? I couldn’t say.
As I drove back toward Stewart’s Crossing, I realized that I didn’t have a main course for dinner—just the asparagus and the lettuce. I could have stopped at the McCaffrey’s grocery and picked something up, but it was on the other side of town and I didn’t feel like going all the way over there. Instead I called Rick. “You want to grab a burger at the Drunken Hessian?” I asked.
“I’m wrapping up here. I have to head home and feed Rascal. Why don’t you come over to my house and we’ll order a pizza?”
“Sounds good to me. You can spare a bowl of chow for Rochester, can’t you?”
“I can, but I’m not sure Rascal will share.”
“Rochester will see to that, don’t you worry.”
I pulled up in Rick’s driveway as he was getting out of his truck, and Rochester bounded out of the car and rushed up to him. As I got out I could hear Rascal going wild inside his crate in Rick’s living room. Rochester and I followed Rick inside, where Rascal was up on his hind legs shaking the metal bars of the crate as if he was Jimmy Cagney in some old prison movie.
Rick opened the crate and Rochester and Rascal went wild together. Rick opened the door to his back yard and said, “Go pee!”
Rascal took off, Rochester right behind. Rick opened the fridge and pulled out Sam Adams beers for himself and me. His kitchen hadn’t been changed much since the house was built in the fifties; he’d put in a new fridge, oven and dishwasher, but the Formica cabinets were original, as was the big stainless steel sink and the brown and tan patterned linoleum floor.
By the time Rick had the beers opened the dogs were back inside, and while I distracted them with some squeaky toys he put two bowls of food out on his kitchen floor. They both chewed noisily as he called in the pizza order to Giovanni’s, in the shopping center in downtown Stewart’s Crossing. Luckily we both liked the same kind—a thick crust with spicy Italian sausage crumbled and scattered over a base of homemade tomato sauce, freshly sautéed mushrooms and shredded mozzarella from an artisan cheese maker in New Hope.
“I drove out past Rita’s on my way home from Eastern,” I said, after I’d taken my first swig of beer. “I wanted to check out the neighbors.”
“Why? You’re not going Nancy Drew on me again, are you?”
“Hey, I’ve been able to help you before. And I told you, I prefer the Hardy Boys as a reference, not Nancy Drew.”
“So what did you find? Anybody confess?”
“Not yet. I leave the waterboarding to the cops. Have you looked into any of them? I know that the Hubbards have been complaining about the noise and the smell of her dogs.”
“Already checked their alibis. They were at some fancy soiree on Sunday night in Manhattan, and they stayed over at their Fifth Avenue penthouse. Doormen on both the evening and day shifts verified.”
“They could have hired someone. People that rich don’t do their own dirty work.”
“And you know about that how? From reading?”
“I know a few things.”
The doorbell rang and the dogs exploded in barking. I pulled a twenty from my wallet and handed it to Rick, then grabbed both dogs by their collars.
“Rochester, this isn’t even your house,” I said to him. “Shut up.”
He took his cue from Rascal, though, and neither dog would stop barking until Rick had closed the door on the scared-looking delivery boy.
The pizza smelled great, and both dogs sat on their haunches next to us as we began to eat. “You know I’m not giving you any,” I said to Rochester. “So you can give it up.”
“A little crust won’t hurt him.” Rick pulled two pieces off and tossed them into the air, one after the other. Rascal jumped up and wolfed his down, and Rochester followed his lead.
“Your dog is teaching mine bad habits,” I said.
“Your dog is smart enough to figure it out without mine to teach him. You took him up to Rita’s with you this afternoon?”
“Yup. But he didn’t discover any new clues.”
Rick nearly choked on his pizza. “Gee, imagine that.”
“I did talk to Hugo Furst, too. The guy on the north side of Rita’s. He’s awful glad she’s dead.”
“Yeah. But that doesn’t mean he killed her.”
“You check his alibi?” I finished my slice and took another swig of beer.
“His wife says he was home all night.”
“Not much of an alibi,” I said.
“Good enough for now. Besides, I’m thinking I need to look more into her dog breeding and training business. You know as well as I do how crazy dog people can be. And I’ve started hearing some rumors about the way Rita treated people she sold dogs to.”
“Well, we saw how bitchy she was on Sunday.”
“I’ve got a list of all the people whose dogs she trained, including the ones who only came over for agility practice, like me, and another list of everyone who bought a dog from her for the past five years. Tomorrow morning, first thing, I start calling them all. And then there’s an agility show this Saturday at Northampton Community College in Bethlehem. You remember those people we met on Sunday-- Matthew and Carissa? They’re both scheduled to show there. I was thinking we could take Rochester and Rascal up there for the show, talk to people.” He looked at me. “Since you’re so eager to be Joe Hardy to my Frank.”
“Hey, isn’t Frank the older brother? I want to be Frank.”
“Tough shit. I’m older than you are, so I get to be Frank.”
It was true; Rick was about three months older than I was. I groused for a while, and complained when he threw more crust to Rochester, but we both knew I wouldn’t turn down the chance to go to the dog show with him and nose around. I guess it was Joe Hardy for me.
Better that than Fred Jones or Shaggy Rogers from Scooby-Doo. Though like Scooby, Rochester was goofy and prone to get into trouble.
16 – Unauthorized Snooping
Friday morning I dropped off a head of lettuce and a bunch of
asparagus at Lili’s office. “How’s the grading coming?” I asked, as Rochester walked around her office, sniffing the art books on a low shelf next to her window.
Her office was a large, well-lit room in Harrow Hall, the fine arts building, and the walls were hung with student drawings, paintings and charcoal sketches. She had her auburn curls pulled up to the top of her head in a Pebbles ponytail, and she wore a T-shirt from an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum.
“Only a dozen portfolios left to look over,” she said. “You have it easy in the English department, you know. Papers are so simple. You can email them, print them, carry them around if you need. Try grading a refrigerator-sized oil painting sometime.”
“Rochester, stop sniffing,” I said. “You’re not an art critic.” He came over to me and I rubbed behind his ears. “Think you’ll be free for dinner tonight?”
She shook her head. “Sunday. Brunch?”
“It’s a date.” I leaned down and kissed her. “I’ll let you get back to your appliances.”
Rochester and I left Harrow Hall and walked up the hill toward Fields Hall, past the library. I looked at my watch. Nothing much on my agenda, so I had time for some more sleuthing. I took Rochester back to my office, closed the door, and put up a note that I was in a meeting.
Then I returned to the library and found my way back to that same secluded carrel where I’d been the day before. I turned the computer off then on again, hitting the same key sequence so I could disengage Freezer Burn. Then I let my fingers do some walking.
One of the things I learned during my years as a tech writer and web developer was that often computer people get so cocky they ignore basic safeguards. I found a list of all the techs who worked for Verri M. Parshall and played around with breaking into their email accounts. And what do you know? Her assistant director, Oscar Lavista, used 1-2-3-4 as his password. It’s like he was almost begging me to break in and read his mail.
Once again, my adrenaline was racing and my fingers tingled. But then my hacking instincts kicked in. It seemed almost ludicrous that he’d make it so easy—perhaps he was setting up a honey pot, a trap to detect hackers. We’d had one of those where I worked, a false entry into the website with some decoy files. I opened the computer’s task manager and made sure no security-oriented programs had opened and were writing anything to remote directories.
While I gave the system a minute to be certain nothing was going to kick in, I looked around. The other computers were occupied by students, and I was conspicuously older than they were. What would I say if someone I knew came by and spotted me?
Of course. I’d say that my office computer was acting up and I was waiting for tech support. Given all the problems we’d been having with Freezer Burn, anyone on the college staff would believe me.
When I was pretty sure no alarms had been triggered, I opened Oscar’s email account. It didn’t look like a decoy; I had access to hundreds of emails he had sent and received.
I shook my head. Not only was his security shoddy, his mail folders were poorly organized. I was trained to manage my inbox; every time I dealt with a message I either deleted it or placed it in a relevant folder for archiving. But Oscar didn’t believe in that. He had a mix of opened and unopened messages in his in-box. He didn’t even bother to delete those campus-wide spam messages we get about toner cartridges, union votes, and farewell parties for staffers most people didn’t even know.
Was he incompetent, though, or just overworked? As I read through the messages he had sent, I saw that he understood the issues involving not only Freezer Burn, but the other software and hardware he dealt with. The time stamps on his messages indicated he was often responding to questions late at night.
He had clearly tried to communicate to Verri the problems that the techs were having with Freezer Burn, and every time she shut him down. I wondered if he’d be a good informant. Perhaps he’d be willing to go on record about problems in a way that Dustin De Bree couldn’t afford to.
I couldn’t get into Verri’s account; she was smart enough to use a complicated password that was hackproof, at least without the advanced tools I had hidden away at home.
I looked up Oscar’s profile on the campus Intranet. He was a moon-faced guy with dark hair and a mole on his chin. I didn’t think I’d ever seen him. He held an associate’s degree as a computer tech specialist from Broward College in Florida, and had been with Eastern for two years.
Should I suggest that Jim Shelton or Dot Sneiss talk to him about the problems with Freezer Burn? Or approach him myself? I pushed away from the computer, stood up and stretched.
“Hey, Prof, what are you doing over here?”
Once again, my adrenaline zoomed. I looked behind me and saw Lou Segusi holding hands with Desiree in front of a display of illuminated manuscripts from the college’s collection. I didn’t even need the excuse I’d prepared—a simpler lie came right to my tongue. “Just needed to use a computer for a couple of minutes and I didn’t want to go all the way back to my office. How are you doing, Lou?”
“Two final exams, and I’m done,” he said. “And I heard from Penn State—I got accepted into their Master’s of English Ed program.”
“Congratulations. How about you, Desiree? You graduating this term?”
“If I can. My degree audit’s all screwed up, and the lines at the registrar’s office are out of control.”
“Desi’s moving to State College, too,” Lou said. “She’s getting her master’s in environmental science.”
“Cool. Well, good luck to you both.”
I gave them a brief wave and left the library, relieved that no one had caught me with Oscar Lavista’s email account on my screen.
When I walked back into my office, Rochester hopped up from his place by the french doors. But instead of coming over to greet me, he jumped up on the low table by the window and posed there, his head up. He looked at me as if I was supposed to understand what he was doing.
But I was baffled. He held his right paw up to me, as if he wanted me to shake. I took it and said, “Yes, pleased to meet you.”
As soon as I let his paw go, he jumped down and ran in a couple of circles around me. “I get it,” I said. “You’re practicing for the next dog show.” I motioned him back up to the table, and he jumped up. Then I held out my hand the way I’d seen Rick do, counting down the five seconds, and when I finished, Rochester jumped down.
I laughed, gave him a treat, and sat down at my computer, only to discover that the entire college’s email system was down. I experienced a momentary pang of guilt, worrying that I’d done something to trigger the catastrophe. But that wasn’t possible; all I’d done was disable Freezer Burn on a single computer.
It was a pleasure to be able to get some work done without the constant interruption of incoming messages, though. I had a boss once who called it “being in the zone,” when you got so wrapped up in your work that you were most efficient and didn’t even notice time passing. I spent the morning finishing all the press releases on the student award winners, and then wrote a quick program to search through the databases for alumni who lived near a winner and also had given us an email address. When email access was restored just before noon, I sent the press releases out in small batches to avoid getting caught in some alum’s spam detector.
I’d made myself a big salad that morning using the fresh lettuce from Hugo Furst’s farm stand, and I sat at my desk and thought about Rita Gaines as I ate. Her killer must have brought the Rohypnol to her farm. But had he or she known about the cobra venom, or found it once Rita had been knocked out?
Rochester wasn’t happy with my vegetarian lunch; he’d eat the occasional chunk of carrot or zucchini slice, but for the most part he was a carnivore. He had to be happy with a couple of treats from my desk.
Either way, it seemed, the killer had to be someone who was familiar with Rita’s farm. I remembered Rick saying that he had a list of the people who had trained their dogs with Rita,
as well as those who had bought dogs from her, and I called him.
“How are you doing with that list of dog people?” I asked.
“Haven’t even looked at it,” Rick said. “There was a break in at the Crossing Florist last night—somebody stole about a hundred expensive orchids. I’ve been swamped with that. Turns out the florist is best friends with the mayor’s wife.”
“You want me to look at the list for you?”
He groaned. “Steve.”
“Hey, we’re going to that dog show tomorrow. You should be prepared in case we run into anyone who might be a suspect.”
“I really hate you, you know that?”
“Oh, come on. You know you don’t mean that. Just send me the list. You know you want to.”
“If I didn’t have this other case that the chief was hot for…”
“I know, I know. I’ll do some quick research for you, just to help you focus.”
“Fine. I’m emailing you the list now.”
“See you tomorrow morning. I’ll call you if I find anything before then.”
The email popped into my inbox a minute later, with three Excel spreadsheets attached. I saved them all to my jump drive and then opened the first one up.
It covered the casual clients who, like Rick, brought their dogs up to Rita’s occasionally for help with agility training. I was interested to note that Rick had been paying Rita twenty bucks a week for her help in preparing Rascal.
I opened the other two spreadsheets. One included a worksheet for every dog Rita had sold for the last five years, including the dog’s parentage, current owners, and any medals won at dog shows. The other was similar, but these were dogs Rita trained for both obedience and agility.
The sheer number of people was overwhelming, and I started to think that Rick had played me the way Tom Sawyer did when he got his friends to paint that fence for him.
I decided to begin with Rita’s training clients, because I’d seen the way she behaved, and it was easy to imagine her pissing someone off. There were a dozen embedded worksheets, one dog per sheet. Eight were current clients, and four were people who had trained with Rita in the past. I opened up the worksheet for the first of the ones who were no longer Rita’s clients.
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