Three Dogs in a Row

by Neil S. Plakcy

  I tried to remember but couldn’t. “What was it?”

  “Judy’s Last Song. You can’t get gayer than that. A dachshund, and Judy Garland.” He shook his head. “It’s a wonder we lasted as long as we did.”

  “So how did you meet Rita? Through this guy and his dog?”

  “Yeah. Judy hated me, and every time I came over she peed. He thought it would be good for the two of us to bond—me and Judy, I mean, not me and Rita. We went to the farm a couple of times for training lessons, but I couldn’t stand her, and I couldn’t stand the dog. Eventually I couldn’t stand the guy either.”

  “You know somebody killed her, right?”

  “We didn’t stay in touch. But I’m not surprised. I hope someone sicced a Rottweiler on her, or a pit bull.”

  “Poison,” I said.

  “Ooh, a woman’s weapon. I always wondered if she was a dyke. Maybe some disgruntled lover. I know I might have poisoned the guy I was seeing if I hadn’t broken up with him.”

  That was an interesting idea. Had Rita had any romantic connections, either male or female? I made a note to ask Rick.

  It didn’t appear that Mark had much of a motive to kill Rita Gaines. At least he was one more suspect knocked off my list. I thanked him, and started walking toward the door. As I went, I noticed a framed photograph leaning up against an old table, of a couple in the rain standing on a street in what looked like Paris. I stopped to look at it.

  “The photographer’s name is Francois Regaud,” Mark said. “He was a French photojournalist of the same era as Cartier-Bresson. Nowhere near as well known, though.”

  I liked it and thought Lili might, too. “How much?”

  He leaned the picture forward and looked at the back. “I have $250 on it, but I’ll give it to you for $200.”

  I gulped. “You think it’s too expensive for a first real gift?” I asked. “We’ve only been dating a couple of months.”

  “I think it’s perfect. She likes photography?”

  “She’s a photojournalist herself.”

  “Then this is just right for her. It’s romantic, it’s beautiful, and she’ll connect to the photographer. I’ll even knock off another ten percent because I know it’s going to a good home.”

  I paid for the picture and walked back out to Ferry Street, carrying it under my arm. Traffic was still backed up, and up ahead I saw the flashing red and blue lights of a squad car parked in the Drunken Hessian’s lot. My first thought was that someone had sped through the intersection after waiting too long, and caused an accident.

  A young officer, probably no older than my Eastern students, was on the sidewalk talking to the heavyset woman who’d been lumbering across the street. As I approached I heard him saying, “Bethea, I’ve told you this before. You need a different hobby. You can’t just walk back and forth across the street, stopping traffic.”

  “I got rights,” the woman said. “I can cross the street. There ain’t no law against it.”

  “Get in the car, Bethea. I’m taking you home.”

  Traffic was finally moving smoothly through the intersection as I walked up to the curb. A couple of cars honked at Bethea as the cop forced her into his back seat, and she waved at them.

  When I got to the café, Gail was sitting out front with Rochester, and there was a big piece of carrot cake on the table in front of her. “You bought that for Lili, didn’t you?” she asked, as I rested the photo against the wall of the café.

  “Yeah. You think she’ll like it?”

  “How can she resist? Paris, lovers, the rain? I wish I had a boyfriend who bought me pictures like that.” She petted Rochester once more, then stood up and went back into the café. I ate the carrot cake she’d left for me and paid my bill, then took Rochester and the photograph home. When I was settled, I called Rick again, and this time I reached him.

  “I’ve been doing my Joe Hardy routine, like you asked,” I said. “Pip Forrest’s parents are school teachers, and I think any parent who names his kid after a hobbit doesn’t sound homicidal to me.”

  “You’d be surprised. But go on.”

  I told him about visiting Madd About Shoes with Lili, and then about my trip to Doylestown to meet with Jerry Fujimoto. “We can knock both of them off the list. I don’t think either of them could get close enough to Rita to poison her. Paula left Rita on very bad terms, and Jerry told me Rita wouldn’t let him on her property.”

  “Yeah, I’m hearing a lot of that.”

  “Then on my way home, I stopped by Mark Figueroa’s store. The dog he was training wasn’t even his, and he broke up with the guy anyway.”

  “So nothing you did panned out.”

  I guess I got defensive. “Mark asked a good question -- did Rita have any disgruntled lovers?”

  “Not that I’ve heard. I’ve talked to a couple of her friends, and some cousins in New York, and none of them mentioned any romance in her life.”

  “Oh, one more thing. Lili dragged me out yesterday to meet this ex-boyfriend of hers, an investigative reporter for the Wall Street Journal. He’s looking into Rita’s death.”

  “The Wall Street Journal? What the hell for?”

  “He said there are some problems cropping up with her investment funds. You know anything about that?”

  “Not at all. He give you any clues?”

  “Not a one. Except he mentioned that he knew the college had invested some money with her.”

  “I can’t see there’s any connection there,” Rick said. He paused for a minute. “So. An old boyfriend, huh?”

  “Yeah. Not my favorite way to spend a Sunday morning, I can tell you.”

  “How was she with him?”

  “Not very happy,” I said. “Which made me happy.”

  “Well, that’s good.”

  “What do you want me to do now?” I asked. “Keep going with more of the people who bought dogs from Rita?”

  “Hold off on that,” Rick said. “I’m going back full tilt on Rita first thing tomorrow morning.”

  “What happened? You nabbed the orchid thief?”

  “Not exactly. I reached out to this national organization of orchid breeders, and they put out some feelers for me. Turns out there’s an epidemic of orchid theft up and down the East Coast, and the FBI is on the case. I turned over my files to an agent from the Philly office.”

  “Wow, look at you. Consorting with the FBI.”

  “At least I’m on the right side of them,” Rick said.

  That stopped me. Of course Rick knew everything about my rap sheet—what I hadn’t told him, he’d figured out on his own.

  “Hey, I didn’t mean anything,” Rick said. “Just tossing shit. You know.”

  “No worries,” I said. “Listen, I’ll type up my notes and email them to you.”

  “Thanks, Steve. I mean it.”

  “The name is Joe. Joe Hardy,” I said, before I hung up.

  After I sent Rick the email, I brushed Rochester’s teeth, as promised, using a new chicken-flavored toothpaste he liked. Then I took him out for a long walk—or rather, he took me, since he led the way the whole time, pulling and tugging impatiently when I couldn’t keep up. I had to agree with Jerry Fujimoto—Rochester knew he was in charge.

  Tuesday morning was gray and drizzly, so Rochester got a quick walk and we drove up to Leighville, where the weather wasn’t much better. I barely had time to go through my emails and answer the most pressing ones before I had to leave for a meeting of the graduation committee. “Try to stay out of trouble, all right?” I said to Rochester. He looked up from gnawing a rawhide, and I scratched him behind his ears before I walked out.

  There was still a line at the Registrar’s office as I pushed and squeezed my way into the conference room. I spread out the information I had on Freezer Burn, preparing for a private confab with Dot and Jim after the meeting was over.

  Once everyone was in place, Dot began by telling us that the credentialing situation was still very serious. “We
got a lot of help yesterday, and that cleared some of our backlog. If we don’t get this computer situation resolved quickly, we may be faced with huge problems. Verified transcripts for graduate schools and transfer applications, financial aid audits, summer school registrations… it boggles the mind.”

  Suddenly the room was filled with the theme from the Indiana Jones movies. “Sorry, I have to take this,” Dot said. She turned away from us, but a moment later said, “I’m afraid I have to cut this short. I’ve got an emergency.” She hurried from the room before I could tell her what I’d learned about Freezer Burn, and Jim Shelton was right behind her.

  I began to put my papers together as the rest of the group scurried out. By the time I finished Phil Berry and I were left alone. He was punching some keys on his phone as I stood up.

  “Now that I’m on the administration side, I have a whole different attitude toward graduation,” I said. “When I was a student, and even as an adjunct, it was a big milestone. Now it’s just another day in the calendar.” I looked over at him. “That the way you see it?”

  He looked up from his phone. “Right now I’m grateful for any day that doesn’t involve me getting fired.”

  I sat back down. “Fired? Why?”

  “I got a heads up last night that one of our investment positions is in trouble,” he said. “You ever meet a woman from the Board of Trustees named Rita Stanville Gaines?”

  “Sure. You know she was killed, right?”

  “Yeah, I read her obit in the Journal. There are rumors going around on the street now that at least one, maybe more, of the companies she invested in might be going under, and that’s causing shares in her high-tech fund to tank. That’s dragging down the rest of her funds.”

  “What does that have to do with you getting fired?”

  He sighed. “I invested some of the college’s funds with Rita.” He sat back in his chair. “StanVest laid out capital in two ways. First, as an angel—putting money into startup businesses. But Rita also ran limited partnerships for seed funds and incubators, which is essentially like being a second-tier angel investor. That’s where I put some of Eastern’s money—in those seed funds.”

  “Isn’t that kind of risky?” I asked. “I mean, Eastern’s a conservative institution.”

  “In the investment business, there’s a tradeoff between risk and return. If you put everything you have in very safe places, like federally insured bank savings accounts, you get a very low return on your money. If I did that for Eastern, I wouldn’t bring in enough interest income on our endowment to bridge the gap between what we earn from tuition and what it actually costs to run this place.”

  “So you have to make some riskier investments to bring in higher returns.”

  “Exactly. Because Rita was our alumna, and she was on our Board of Trustees, I thought that balanced some of the risk in investing with her. After all, she wouldn’t steer her alma mater wrong, would she?”

  I was an English teacher, so I knew a rhetorical question when I heard one. “But now she’s dead, and her company is in trouble,” I said. “So that means Eastern is, too.”

  “Because nobody knows right now which of the startups she funded are in trouble, all of them are suffering, and so is StanVest. And that means everybody who invested with StanVest is, too.”

  “And because you’re the guy who put Eastern’s money with StanVest, you’re under the gun.”

  “Yup. And you know what’s ironic?”

  I shook my head.

  “I have this stock gossip program that pops up alerts for me. It had the rumors about StanVest before anybody else. But I can’t get it to work on my college computer because Freezer Burn blocks it.”

  “What’s ironic about that?” I asked. “Freezer Burn blocks everything.”

  “The company that makes Freezer Burn is one of the ones StanVest invested in—using college money.” He held up his BlackBerry. “The program is meant to run on a desktop PC, so I had to run it on this. I’ve been having problems getting the BlackBerry synched to my office computer so I was using my wife’s phone for a while. She saw the alert but never mentioned it to me.”

  “For want of a nail,” I said.

  Phil looked confused.

  “Sorry,” I said. “It’s an old proverb. “For want of a nail, the horseshoe was lost, for want of a shoe the horse was lost, and so on, down to for want of a battle the kingdom was lost. Supposed to mean that one little thing can trigger a whole avalanche that can have major consequences.”

  “Jeez, don’t go saying things like that,” he said, standing up. “You’re going to freak me out.”

  I was already freaked out, I thought, as I walked back down the hall to my office. As I’d already figured out, if problems with faculty entering grades cascaded into financial aid and accreditation troubles, Freezer Burn could end up causing us major trouble. If you added in financial losses and damage to the college’s investment portfolio, then Eastern could really be in danger of collapse.

  When I got back to my office, Rochester jumped up and yipped sharply twice. “Yes, I know, I left you,” I said. “Come on, I’ll take you out.” Fortunately the sun had come out, though the grass was still wet. As soon as he peed, I tugged him back indoors.

  I had to grab a roll of paper towels and dry Rochester’s paws before he tracked mud all over my office and I had to deal with an irate cleaning staff, who were already cranky about the amount of golden hair that showed up in their vacuum cleaners.

  Rochester considered any kind of canine maintenance a game. One that included paper was his favorite, so half my effort went into keeping him from chewing the towels.

  Once that ordeal was over, he relaxed on the floor for a nap and I turned to my computer to look for the article Phil had mentioned. I could only read the first paragraph, because the rest was behind a paywall—you had to have a subscription to read it. But I could see the byline was Van Dryver, which meant I already knew what it said.

  I dug around until I found the business card Van had given me on Sunday. I’d assumed he’d be the one calling me for information, not the other way around. I hoped he might know which of the companies Rita had invested in was in trouble, and if it was one of the ones Phil had put some of the College’s money into as well. I wasn’t sure what I would do with that information, but I always believed that knowledge was power. I dialed Van’s number and left a message.

  Then I called Rick. This was information he ought to have, too. Perhaps the motive for Rita’s murder was in her investment business, not among her neighbors or her dog-training clients. I had to leave him a message, too.

  Frustrated, I considered what other sources I had for information.

  I looked at my dog, who was staring up at me from the floor. “Why didn’t I go to business school, Rochester? If I had an MBA maybe I’d be able to make sense of this.”

  He woofed once, and then I knew what I had to do. I called my old graduate school friend Tor.

  23 – Estate Planning

  Tor was probably the busiest guy I knew, yet he answered his cell phone as soon as I called. “Hello, Steve! You are well, I hope?”

  “Yeah, doing pretty good. Do you have a minute for some questions?”

  “Of course. The market is slow today.”

  Tor was a Swedish exchange student in business school when I was in studying for my MA in English at Columbia, and we were roommates there, and then for a few years after, until we both married and our lives diverged. He was a successful investment banker, married to a former model, with two kids in expensive private schools.

  “You know anything about a company called StanVest?” I asked.

  “Ah, you are up on the latest news, even though you are far from Wall Street. Yes, I knew Rita Gaines. She was a savvy investor, but she took many risks.”

  “Can you tell me why her company is in trouble, in layman’s terms?”

  “That may take more than a few minutes, my friend.” Though his English
was almost perfect, he still had the slightest hint of a Swedish accent. “Perhaps you will come up to New York this weekend?”

  It was Tuesday, and I had a feeling things might break out faster than that. “Any chance you might be free for dinner tonight?” It was an hour up to the city, and I thought it would be worth making the midweek trip, if Tor could meet me.

  “Your timing is excellent! Bjorn and Lucia are away this week, on a trip to Washington, DC with their school. I will see if Sherry can join us. You must get yourself a wife again, Steve!”

  “Well, I have been dating someone,” I said. “I might be able to convince her to come with me.”

  “Good, good. Can you make a seven-thirty reservation?”

  “Lili’s favorite restaurant in the city is Donatello’s on West 45th. If we go there I think I can persuade her to join us. You feel like Italian?”

  “No, I feel like I am Swedish. But I can eat Italian food. I will call them.”

  I agreed to meet him and Sherry there when I got to the city, confident that Tor could secure the table, and then called Lili. “Think I can tear you away for dinner in New York tonight? At Donatello’s?” I gave her a quick rundown on StanVest and Tor.

  “I have two more portfolios to grade, then I’m free, at least for now,” she said. “Car or train?”

  Even two round-trip train tickets would be cheaper than bridge and tunnel tolls and an evening’s parking in Manhattan. I pulled up the schedule online. “There’s a six o’clock from Trenton. Can I pick you up about four, and we’ll make a pit stop at my house to drop off Rochester?”

  “Sounds great. It’ll be fun.”

  “By the way, I called your friend Van to ask if he knew anything more about Rita Gaines than he put in the article. I’m hoping he’ll call me back.”

  “He doesn’t take calls unless he wants something,” she said. “But he’ll take mine.” I didn’t love the sound of that, but it was what it was. Like I’d told Lili on Sunday, we both had pasts.

  I hung up and began considering lunch options. Mike MacCormac stuck his head in my office door. “You free for a powwow with Babson about this Rita Gaines situation? He’s paying for La Sandwicherie.”