Three Dogs in a Row

by Neil S. Plakcy

  I remembered Lili’s action the night before—not telling Van about the huge mistake he was about to make. He didn’t know me, and he didn’t know her as well as he thought.

  I hung up the phone without saying goodbye. I wasn’t sure which I was more angry about—his assumptions about me, or about Lili. Either way, I wished he had been there, because I’d have loved to punch him in the nose right about then. Instead I banged my fist on my desk, startling Rochester awake.

  “What?” I asked him. He lowered his head onto his paws and gave me a baleful stare.

  A few minutes later, I got pulled into a series of meetings, and put my personal cell phone on mute. When I finished the meetings and checked the display, I noted that Van hadn’t bothered to call me back.

  Before returning to my office, I detoured to the library, hoping they had a subscription to the Wall Street Journal. They did, and I was able to read Van’s latest article. As he’d said to us, he put the blame for the rumors on Rita Gaines. I read the whole article, then checked the comments. So far, no one had figured out that she was already dead by the time the rumors had been posted.

  Should I stir the pot? Be the one to show Van up as an idiot? Nope. I’d leave that to some other enterprising reporter. I wouldn’t spit on him if he was on fire. Or provide any other bodily fluids either.

  On my way back to my office, Jim Shelton buttonholed me. “Hey, Steve. President Babson wants to talk to us about these computer problems. Seems like he’s finally woken up to the dimensions of the problem and he’s going to crack down on Verri.”

  I looked at my watch. It was almost noon, and Rochester would be expecting lunch. But I couldn’t ignore an executive summons; my dog and I both needed me to keep my job at Eastern.

  When Jim and I walked into the President’s office, Dot Sneiss was already there, sitting across from his big wooden desk. Jim sat beside her, and I stood behind his chair.

  “I wish you’d told me about these problems sooner, Dot,” Babson said. “Do you think that if we remove this Freezer Burn from all the campus computers, we can get back on track in time for graduation?”

  “I’m no computer expert. But I can tell you if we don’t get rid of it ASAP, things are only going to get worse,” Dot said.

  He turned to Jim and me. “Dot says you’ve been meeting about these issues with Freezer Burn and that you have additional information on the situation.”

  “I got involved through Lou Segusi, one of my students,” I said. “Lou tutors at the Writing Lab, and one of the kids he works with has a work-study job in the IT department. This student, Dustin, was scared, and his fear was getting in the way of his class work. Lou asked me to speak to Dustin and see if I could help solve his problem so Dustin could concentrate on his schoolwork.”

  “What was this Dustin frightened of?” Babson asked.

  “I met with Dustin, and I could see he very upset. It took me a while to worm it out of him. But eventually he told me that he was doing some filing in Verri’s office and he saw a check that had slipped out of a folder on her desk. The check was from the company that makes Freezer Burn, and it was made out to Verri personally. For twenty thousand dollars.”

  I waited a moment for that to sink in. I knew that Babson had a blind spot when it came to Verri, so I thought I’d better lay it on thick. “At first I didn’t believe him. I know what a dedicated employee Verri has been. I couldn’t imagine that she’d take a bribe from a vendor.”

  I stole a glance at Babson’s face. It was stony, but I couldn’t tell if he was angry with me, or with Verri. I shifted from foot to foot behind Jim’s chair, then said, “I had been having some problems with the software myself, and as I spoke to other people on the faculty and staff, they confirmed that they had been having issues, too.”

  “Hear, hear,” Jim said, and Dot nodded.

  “I knew you were busy with graduation, sir, and I didn’t want to bother you without some concrete proof. I did some checking with a guy from Verri’s office, and he confirmed that there were a lot of problems with the software, and that he had complained to Verri multiple times and that she shut him down every time. I planned to come to you next week with all the information.”

  Babson’s face was still a mask of anger. Crap. I had only done what I thought was right. I didn’t want to get fired because of someone else’s incompetence.

  “What’s this staffer’s name?” Babson asked.

  “Oscar Lavista.”

  He buzzed Bernadette and told her to have the man come to his office immediately. Then he shook his head. “Verri has been a member of this community for decades,” he said. “I can’t believe she would do anything to jeopardize our mission. But you never know. Jim, you’ve seen these problems among your faculty?”

  “Absolutely. I’ve had them in my office, with my support staff, and I’ve had reports from my department faculty, and through the Faculty Senate.”

  I started to feel better. Babson wasn’t mad at me. He had to be angry with Verri. I leaned back against the wall as Jim went through a recitation of all the issues he had experienced or heard about—computers locking up in faculty offices and in classrooms; secretaries unable to use purchasing office systems to order supplies; emails not being sent or received. Every aspect of college operations that depended on computers had been affected.

  As he was finishing, Bernadette knocked on the open door and said that Oscar was there. Then she turned and ushered him in. Oscar looked surprised to see so many people in the President’s office. “I was told you were having a problem?” he said.

  Oscar looked younger than I’d thought before, no more than thirty. Probably the moon face and the extra weight added a few years. A moment later Bernadette was behind him with two extra chairs, one for Oscar and one for me.

  “Have a seat, son,” Babson said, pointing to the chair Bernadette had placed behind him. “Do you have something you want to tell me about this Freezer Burn program?”

  Oscar and I both sat down. He pulled a white handkerchief from his pocket and wiped sweat from his forehead. “Are you having problems, sir?”

  Babson leaned forward and smiled. “You aren’t in trouble, Oscar. I know you’ve been trying to point out the difficulties with the software, but you haven’t gotten any attention. I’m ready to listen now. Just take it slowly. I’m not much of a tech wizard like you younger guys.”

  I could see Oscar start to relax. “There are so many viruses out there, sir, and lots of students, and some faculty, aren’t real careful about the programs they install on their computers, and the files they download. So most companies, and Eastern is like a big company, you know, they install software to control what gets access to our network.”

  “I can understand that,” Babson said. “All you have to do is pick up the newspaper to read about the latest attack.”

  “Exactly. It’s our job in IT to protect the College. When we upgraded to Windows 2010, the program we’d been using to monitor the network couldn’t keep up, so we had to shop around for a new one. Mrs. Parshall asked me to handle the requests for proposals and meet with the vendors.”

  It was clear he was proud he’d been handed the responsibility. Then he frowned. “I thought I chose the best one. We have a lot of legacy equipment here—older computers in some buildings, specialty software in departments like math and science, unique equipment for research. I tried to negotiate the cost down as far as I could. But Mrs. Parshall overruled me and went with Freezer Burn even though it was clearly an inferior product.”

  “Did she give you any reason for her decision?” Babson asked.

  Oscar shook his head. “She got really mad. You know how she gets sometimes when you challenge her. I was afraid if I argued too much I’d get fired. My wife has MS and we really need the health insurance.”

  He turned to looked at me, Jim and Dot. “I tried to contact the company myself, to see who I could send a list of bugs to. The president of the company called me and told me tha
t no one from the college other than Mrs. Parshall was authorized to contact them, and that if I continued to bother them he would see that I got fired.”

  He was shaking, and I reached out and put my hand on his shoulder.

  He took a couple of deep breaths and turned back to Babson. “That’s such a weird thing that it made me suspicious, so I looked through all the files on Freezer Burn. There was nothing in the contract about tech support or authorized contacts. So I looked to see if there was anything from MDC—the company that makes Freezer Burn. Nothing there either. I looked online, too. They don’t have much of a website, not even an 800 number for a help desk or anything.”

  He took another deep breath.

  “I was about to give up when I remembered the name of the man who owned the company—Matthew Durkheim. I found a separate folder in Mrs. Parshall’s filing cabinet under his name, and there was a rider to the contract that didn’t go through the college purchasing office—or at least it wasn’t stamped by them. The rider said Mrs. Parshall would get a referral fee if the college signed the deal.” He took a breath. “Twenty thousand dollars.”

  My brain started to buzz. Matthew Durkheim. That was the name Van was chasing down. He owned MDC, the company that made Freezer Burn? What was going on there? But I had to pay attention to what was going on in Babson’s office. I’d think about Durkheim and MDC when the meeting was over.

  “Do you have a copy of that rider?” Babson asked.

  “Unless Mrs. Parshall took it out, it should still be in the folder under his name,” Oscar said.

  “I’m going to ask you a question, Oscar, and I want you to think about it carefully before you answer,” Babson said. “Can you remove Freezer Burn from every computer on campus?”

  “It’s a two-part answer, sir,” Oscar said. “The first part is easy, but the second part is time-consuming and labor-intensive.” He looked over at the computer terminal on Babson’s desk. “Do you turn your computer off every day?”

  Babson shrugged. “Not usually.”

  “That’s the problem. See, every computer on our network goes through a series of setup instructions. I’m sure you’ve seen the routine as you wait for your computer to warm up. The easy part of removing Freezer Burn is that we just remove the command that executes the program from the startup routine.”

  “That’s all?” Dot asked.

  Oscar turned to her. “The difficult part is that the change won’t take effect until you turn your computer off and reboot. Since not everyone does that every day, we’d have to send a technician out to every on-campus computer in order to make sure that all traces of Freezer Burn disappear. That could take some time.”

  “What if we prioritize critical systems?” I asked. “Registration, mainframes, servers, and so on. And we send a college-wide email notifying faculty and staff of the problem. Tell them if they’re experiencing problems, all they have to do is reboot. Then over the summer you can come up some kind of diagnostic and isolate any computers that still have problems.”

  Everyone looked at me. “I thought your background was in public relations, Steve,” Babson said.

  “I used to work in high tech,” I said. I turned to Oscar. “How about it? Would that work, as a band-aid?”

  “Sure,” Oscar said. “We could probably have something like that in place by midnight, at the latest. But I couldn’t do it without Mrs. Parshall’s approval.”

  “That won’t be a problem,” Babson said. He looked at Jim, Dot and me. “I’ll take this from here,” he said. “Thank you all for bringing it to my attention.”

  The three of us walked out. “I’m glad we didn’t have to talk to Verri ourselves,” Dot said. “I’d suggest we all stay away from the president’s office for a while, too. I’ve seen her temper, you know. I saw her throw a glass ashtray at one of her techs once when he couldn’t fix a problem right away.”

  “She was the assistant director of student life, back when I was a new faculty member,” Jim Shelton said. “The brothers of Kappa Sigma were serving grain alcohol in their punch when they weren’t supposed to. Verri set out to prove they were. She walked into the middle of a party with one of those remote lighters you use for a barbecue and used it on their punch bowl. The bowl went up in flames and then so did the living room of the frat house.”

  “You’re kidding,” I said.

  “Cross my heart with a Maidenform bra,” Jim said.

  “I heard that story,” Dot said. “She had to move to Physical Plant after that. Babson put her in charge of renovating the frat house.”

  “Were any students hurt?” I asked.

  “A few singed eyebrows,” Jim said. “Nothing more serious. But it did mark Verri as a force to be reckoned with.”

  “No wonder Babson’s been treating her with kid gloves,” I said. “I hope he has the Fire Marshall standing by when he talks to her.”

  “Or the police,” Dot said.

  26 – Wrong Directions

  When I got back to my office, Rochester attacked me. I didn’t blame him; after all, I’d ignored him all morning, between phone calls, meetings and library research. I wrestled him into submission, hooked his leash, and took him out to empty his bladder.

  As we walked downhill toward the lunch trucks, I called Rick. “Get the email I sent you this morning? About the six companies Rita’s fund invested in, and the three of them that were getting trashed online?”

  “Haven’t had a chance to check in yet. I’ve been busy running around the county. I interviewed every person who trained a dog with Rita, current or past. You were on target with the people you talked to—I eliminated them from my list.”

  “I think we’re going in the wrong direction. Somebody had insider information about the companies Rita invested in—stuff only Rita could have known—and posted it online only an hour or two while after her death.”

  “Why would somebody do that?”

  “I haven’t figured that part out yet. But you should read the article in today’s Wall Street Journal. The reporter lists all six companies, and what the rumors were. He thinks Rita made all the postings because she was nasty and starting to have dementia, but she couldn’t have, because she was already dead by the time they were posted.”

  “That’s why you wanted to know the time of death.” Then it sounded like he had turned away from the phone. “Jesus Christ, not Bethea again.” He came back. “Listen, Steve, I’ve gotta go. Crazy lady on the premises.”

  “The woman who keeps crossing Main Street? I saw her the other night.”

  “Yeah. She’s been doing that for a while, but last night she made the mayor late for a meeting of the Knights of Columbus, and I’ve got him and half the business leaders in town complaining.”

  I ended the call and slipped the phone in my pocket as we reached the food trucks. I got a sandwich and gave Rochester part of it as we sat at one of the stone tables outside the Cafette. I could finally focus on what I’d learned in the meeting with Oscar Lavista.

  Matthew Durkheim, who had trained his dog Calum with Rita, owned a company called MDC, which made the Freezer Burn software. But where else had I heard the name MDC? I puzzled over it all the way back to my office.

  I wanted to do some online research, but I had college work to do. I was busy answering emails when my cell phone rang, and I saw from the display that it was Tor.

  “Hey,” I said. “Great dinner last night.”

  “Yes, very excellent. Lili is very beautiful, very intelligent and charming. Sherry thinks she is perfect for you.”

  “I’m relieved. Especially now that I know what she really thought of Mary.”

  He laughed. “Sherry is very clear about her opinions.”

  “I know you didn’t call just to tell me what Sherry thinks of Lili. Did you find out anything about the companies in Rita’s funds?”

  “I am emailing you the list. You should have it now.”

  Sure enough, my email program popped up a little ghost wind
ow in the lower right side of my screen that indicated a new message from Tor. “Thanks,” I said. “We’ll see you this weekend.”

  “Absolutely.” He hung up, and I opened the message. The answer to the question that had been bothering me was right there—MDC was one of the companies that Rita’s fund had invested in. So Matthew was ultimately behind that twenty-grand check to Verri Parshall that Dustin De Bree had accidentally seen.

  I looked up Matthew Durkheim in the alumni database. All we had was an office address and phone number in Manhattan. Because I was curious, I dialed it from my office phone. A woman with a throaty, sexy voice answered.

  When I asked to speak to Matthew, she said he wasn’t in.

  “Do you know when he’ll be available?”

  “This is the main reception desk,” she said. “I don’t have a copy of Mr. Durkheim’s schedule. But I’d be happy to take a message for him.”

  “No thanks,” I said, and hung up.

  I dialed Rick and got his voice mail, where I left him the information about Matthew. I went back to Tor’s message. Rita’s fund had invested in six companies, and there had been negative information posted online about three of them. MDC and two others had escaped.

  I did some quick searching and read the rumors. To my untrained eye they weren’t that serious. There were production problems with one company, server issues at another, and at the third, the baby company, the CEO’s son had been diagnosed with autism.

  Yes, all three could cause trouble for a new company. But were they enough to derail a whole investment fund? If Rita were still alive, could she have talked her way through them? And why weren’t there any rumors posted about MDC, and its crappy Freezer Burn software? Surely Rita, with her Eastern connections, must have heard something about the problems, even if Matthew had been shielding her from any other client complaints.

  I was puzzling those questions when Mike buzzed. “Do you have any time to help out?” he asked, and his voice was plaintive. “We’re getting swamped here.”

  I left Rochester enjoying his squeaky ball, and spent the next hour printing check-in lists for every reunion class, making sure that we had flagged all our top donors and prospects for special attention. Then Mike asked me to take a walk along Fraternity Row and make sure all the on-campus frats had cleaned up their yards.