Dog Bless You (17 page)

A group of the CC kids were hanging around outside
Fields Hall, with no adults or counselors in sight. A couple of them were
smoking, and I thought I recognized the scent of marijuana in the air. That
wouldn’t be the first time I’d smelled it at Eastern, though, and it could have
been coming from some college kid in the area.

I looked around for Ka’Tar but didn’t see him. I
hurried Rochester along before we ran into Tony and he accused me of meddling
in his case.

I talked to Lili while I was fixing dinner, and then
spent the rest of the evening reading. It was such an unexpected pleasure, to
be able to fall into a good book, and yet to be able to feel virtuous about it,
too. I loved to read, and during my year of incarceration I had gone through
book after book from the prison library. The one time Mary visited me I asked
her to bring me a box of books from my bookcase—all the ones from the unread
shelf. She hadn’t paid much attention, tossing books in willy-nilly, so I’d
found myself re-reading Jane Austen and William Gibson—a back-to-back effort
that took me from the distant past to the near future, without a stop in
reality—which was just fine with me at that time.

I finished the second book in the
Hunger Games
trilogy
just before it was time to take Rochester for his walk, and loaded the last
book onto my Kindle with a sense of sadness, realizing I had only that book
left before I would be stepping away from Katniss’s world.

The next morning was not so sunny, with clouds
threatening to put a damper on our walk, so Rochester and I stayed close to
home. When we arrived at Eastern, he settled down with a rawhide chew and I
answered some emails.

I left him dozing and walked to the computer classroom
in Blair Hall. Though I was a few minutes early, Yudame and his crew were
already waiting for me. “Morning, my prof,” he said. “I gots a real good group
for you here.”

I smiled at them as I slipped the card key into the
slot, opening the classroom door. As they filed in, I noticed Courtney, the
tough white girl with the blonde dreads. She reminded me of Katniss, and I
considered how I could use that information in my presentation.

I began with a list of the main characters in the first
Hunger Games
book. Then I began assigning parts. Courtney became
Katniss, and Ka’Tar volunteered to be Peeta, her partner in the game. Once
everyone had a part, I went on to talk and show them bits about communication
in Panem.

“Information is very tightly controlled,” I said. “Can
anybody give me an example?”

No one raised a hand. So, these kids were like my
college-level students in that regard. “How much do Katniss and Peeta know
about the Hunger Games before they begin them?” I asked. I looked down at my
roster. “Rohanna Bhatt?”

“You can call me Ro.” She was one of two Pakistani
girls who sat next to each other. Ro had sleek black hair and olive skin; she
wore a T-shirt and jeans. Zazeem wore a Muslim headscarf that covered her
forehead and her hair. Her skin was lighter than Ro’s but she was badly in need
of acne treatment.

“They watched it on the TV every year,” Ro said. “So
they knew the kind of challenges.”

“But the game changes from year to year,” Courtney
said. “So they didn’t really know shit.”

The class tittered. “You’re both right,” I said. “They
knew the general outline of the games, but they didn’t know what they were
going to encounter. Kind of like you guys coming out here to Leighville, right?
You must have had a general idea of what to expect, but you didn’t know the
details.”

A couple of the kids nodded in agreement. “That’s
because the information about the games—and information about what was going on
in the other districts—was very carefully controlled.” We talked about
information for a while, and then I gave them a writing assignment. The session
wasn’t as much fun as I had hoped it would be, but they had some good ideas,
and I wrote a couple of their sentences up on the board and critiqued them,
pointing out some of the basics of grammar, and then our time was up.

I pulled Ka’Tar aside as the kids were filing out. “How’s
it going?” I asked.

“You the one that sent the po-po to talk to me?” he asked.

It took me a second or two to figure out what po-po
meant. “Yeah. I thought he could tell you more about what happened to DeAndre.”

“DeAndre dead. Ain’t much more to know about.”

I closed the classroom door behind me. “Come on, I’ll
walk over to lunch with you,” I said.

“DeAndre sounds like he was a good brother,” I said to
Ka’Tar as we walked under the shade of an overarching maple tree. Light
filtered through the leaves and dappled the flagstone path.

“We got the same pops,” he said. “But we didn’t even
know each other til a couple years ago.”

“Really? How’d you meet up?”

“DeAndre come looking for me. Said the po-po was
looking for our pops, come talk to him, and they say he got a brother. He
really into
Star Trek
, just like my moms. We used to do the salute
thing, you know?” He held up his damaged hand. “He was like, bro, you got a
head start on bein’ Vulcan. We used to talk about bein’ long-lost cousins of
Tuvok – you know, the black dude.”

“He talked to you about coming down here?” I asked as
we approached the glassy front of Burgers Commons.

“Yeah, how pretty and shit it was. Told me to come to
this program.”

We got to the front door, and Chinelle came up to us.
“Hey, Tar,” she said shyly.

“How you doin’, beauty?” he asked. He put his arm
around her shoulder and opened the door for her, and I left the two of them to
their romance.

I stayed with the CC kids through lunch. I sat between
a shy light-skinned black boy named Steehle Mills and a Chinese girl named Wong
Wei, though I wasn’t sure if her first name was Wong or Wei. We talked more
about
The Hunger Games
, and then I walked back to my office with a
pocket full of food for Rochester. I took him out for a walk, thinking about
the coincidence of DeAndre’s brother showing up so soon after his body was
discovered. Had Ka’Tar been involved in whatever DeAndre was doing? Or was he
in Leighville just because DeAndre liked the town and the college and told him
about the program?

Lili came over as I was getting ready to leave for the
day. “I found something interesting,” she said. “I want to show you.”

She came over to my desk, and I got up and let her sit
down at my computer. “What did you find?”

“I was looking for photos of the abbey,” she said. “I got
onto Pinterest, and found that one of the monks who used to live at Friar Lake
set up a board for the abbey. I found a couple of old ones I can incorporate,
as long as I get the monk’s permission. And then I saw this one, which looks
pretty recent.”

She turned the monitor so I could see. “Do you think
that’s DeAndre there?”

The picture was of three men standing in front of the
chapel. The elderly man on the left wore the plain brown robe and rope belt I
had seen at the drop in center.

“Holy crap,” I said. “That’s Brother Anselm, for sure. And
the white guy on the right? That’s Owen Keely, who’s living with his parents
down the street from me, and who’s working for Mark Figueroa.”

I stood up and started pacing around. “So Owen Keely
has been out to Friar Lake before. I knew it. Yesterday morning I asked him if
he’d been to Friar Lake before, and he said back when he was a kid. Why didn’t
he mention this trip?”

“Because he was there with DeAndre, and DeAndre’s
dead,” Lili suggested.

“That implies that he knew DeAndre was dead—which would
mean he had something to do with it.” I sat down in the spindle-backed chair by
the desk. “Do me a favor? Open up my jump drive. I saved a booking photo of
DeAndre there. We can compare it.”

She turned to face me. “How did you get hold of his
booking photo?”

“It’s all good,” I said. “I guess booking shots are
public domain, and there’s a company that posts them online. If you want them
to remove it, you have to pay them. I just copied the picture from there.”

She opened the folder on my jump drive and we compared
pictures. “That’s him,” I said. “Wow. That adds a whole different dimension. Tony
Rinaldi ought to talk to Owen.” I dug my cell phone out of my pocket and dialed
Tony. I got his voice mail. But the message was too complicated to leave, so I just
left my name and said, “I’m emailing you. Call me when you get the message.”

Lili got up and I returned to the computer. “I’ve got
to get back to Harrow Hall,” she said. “Tomorrow morning the CC kids start
working with the pictures they took. I want to get some things set up for
them.”

“Dinner?” I asked, as my email program opened.

“No, I’ll just grab something on my way home.” She
leaned down and kissed my cheek. “Talk to you tomorrow.”

I typed out a message for Tony Rinaldi, and copied Rick
Stemper on the email too, since Owen lived in Stewart’s Crossing and I thought
he’d want to know. Then I hit send.

I was on my way home with Rochester riding shotgun when
Rick called my cell.

“I got your email about Owen Keely,” he said.
“Coincidence, since I’m looking for him myself.”

“Why?”

“Mark Figueroa called me this morning. Some stuff is
missing from his shop, and when he tried to reach Owen at home, Mrs. Keely said
that he had gone away for a while.”

“I knew there was something shifty about him,” I said.
“Poor Mark. Did Owen steal a lot?”

“Hold on, Hardy Boy. Don’t go accusing anyone of theft
until all the facts are in. Mark’s missing a few hundred bucks in cash and a
couple of small pieces of jewelry he said could add up to a couple of grand,
depending on whether they’re pawned or sold for gold.”

“Come on, Rick. Owen goes missing at the same time as
Mark’s stuff. Not a big leap.”

“Hey, you’re the one with the imagination,” Rick said.
“I’m sure you could spin a half-dozen stories without Owen Keely as the bad
guy.”

“I feel bad for Mark. I thought he looked really happy
when Owen was around. And the only time I actually saw the guy smile was when
he was with Mark.” I told him about finding them looking for plants along the
canal. “And his parents are probably going to be broken up, too. I know they
put a lot into getting him off drugs.”

“Once an addict, always an addict,” Rick said, and for
a brief second I thought he was talking about me and my hacking addiction. "Hey,
you want to meet up at the Drunken Hessian later? Seven o’clock?”

“Sure. “ He hung up, and I decided to detour past
Mark’s antique shop on the way home. “You’re going to have to stay in the car,
boy,” I said to Rochester, lowering the windows as I pulled up in the narrow
driveway next to the antique store.

He woofed, but then settled down on the seat, his head
resting across the gear shift box. The lowering clouds that had been around all
day were still overhead, but it didn’t look like it was going to rain.

I walked up the short steps onto the porch of the
gingerbread Victorian, and then opened the door. The little bell rang, and Mark
came out from the back. “Sorry about Owen,” I said.

“It’s my own fault,” Mark said. “I always pick the
wrong guys.”

“Hey, you were doing his mother a favor by hiring him,”
I said. “Not your fault.”

“Oh. I thought you knew—when you saw us down by the
towpath the other day.”

The tumblers clicked. “So you were a couple, too?”

“I wouldn’t call it that. We never went out anywhere on
a date or anything. Now I’m thinking he was just stringing me along.”

He looked pretty miserable. “You shouldn’t let it get
you down,” I said. “At least you got rid of him quickly, and cheaply. I was
stuck with my ex-wife for years, and it cost me a whole lot more to get rid of
her.”

He smiled. “I suppose I could look at it that way.”

“Hey, I’m meeting Rick for dinner at the Drunken
Hessian at seven. Why don’t you join us?”

“I wouldn’t be good company.”

“You’ll be better than Rick. Come on.”

“I could use a beer or two,” he admitted.

“Cool. See you then.”

I drove Rochester home, fed him dinner, and took him
for a long walk. Then I sat down on a kitchen chair. “You think I can trust you
outside the crate this time?” I asked him. “No chewing on gloves, or anything
else?”

He slumped on the floor in front of me. “How about if
we compromise?” I stood up and walked over to the entrance hall closet. I had a
folding gate there I had used when Rochester was very young, to keep him on
whatever floor I was on. “I’ll put up the gate, and you can have the whole
first floor to yourself. But if you misbehave…”

He rolled on his side and waved his front paws in the
air.

I put up the gate, made sure he had water, and locked
the door behind me. As I walked out through the courtyard, I looked back and
saw him with his nose pressed against the sliding glass door.

Mark Figueroa was walking toward me as I pulled into
the Drunken Hessian’s parking lot. “Do you live above the antique store?” I
asked, as I met him halfway.

“Cuts down on the commuting time,” he said. “Hard to
get away from work, though. I’m always thinking of something I need to do and
then going downstairs.”

“And Owen?”

Mark looked sheepish. “He didn’t like to stay
overnight—said that his mother would worry about him. So last night I didn’t
think anything of it when he walked out. Must have been some time after eleven.
“

“That’s the last time you saw him?”

“Yup. He was supposed to come in at ten this morning—that’s
when I open. But he didn’t, and I waited an hour to call his cell. No answer.
So I called Marie to ask about him. She said she was worried, because he’d
never come home last night.”

He pulled the door to the Drunken Hessian open and
ushered me in ahead of him. “I was worried about him—what if he’d gotten into
an accident on his bike somewhere after he left me. But I had a couple of
deliveries that needed to be made, and he wasn’t there, so I closed the shop up
and took the van out.”

The hostess was a tough-looking older woman who’d been
working at the Hessian for as long as I could remember. “Table for two?” she
asked.

“Three,” I said. As she was pulling out the menus, Rick
walked in and joined us.

We slid into the booth, and Mark said, “I was just
telling Steve what happened. I made my deliveries, and got back to the store
around one. Had a customer waiting, wanted to buy this porcelain statue she’d
had her eye on for a while. When I pulled it out for her I noticed that there
were a couple of pieces missing from the shelf. She paid in cash, and when I
went to make her change I realized the petty cash was gone.”

The waitress came over, and we ordered a pitcher of
beer and a platter of nachos.

“After my customer left I took a good look around.
That’s when I realized I’d been robbed. I called Rick and he came right over.”

Rick picked up the narrative. “We made a list of
everything missing, and Mark signed the complaint. I drove over to Owen’s
parents’ house. Didn’t realize they lived just down the block from you. I
recognized Mrs. Keely from seeing her on that three-wheeled bike of hers.”

“I’ve known Marie for a couple of years,” Mark said.
“I’ve been in and out of her house a dozen times. Used to see the pictures of
her kids and I always thought Owen was a real stud. Then when he came home from
rehab and was staying with them, I met him one day, and he was a hundred times
sexier than he was in the pictures.”

The waitress delivered the pitcher and three tall
pilsner glasses. I poured as Mark continued, “I don’t usually lust after
straight guys, but there was something about Owen that really floated my boat. The
next day he showed up at my shop and he… well…”

Mark’s face reddened.

“When I was in prison, there wasn’t anything like gay
or straight,” I said. “I never fooled around with anyone, but I saw guys have
sex with each other just for the human touch, or for the power.”

“I tried to get Owen to talk about his past—had he been
with other guys, that kind of thing. He’d never say anything. I guess he wasn’t
really gay at all – just having sex with me so he could take advantage of me.”
He turned to Rick. “What did Marie say when you talked to her?”

“We had a long talk about Owen and all his problems. He
had nightmares, and it was tough for him to adjust to being home.” He looked
over at Mark. “You knew about the drugs, right?”

Mark shrugged. “He admitted he’d had some problems with
drugs in the past. But he swore he was clean.”

“That’s what his mother said, but he wouldn’t be the
first kid to hide something like that from his parents.”

“And he isn’t a kid,” I said. “How old is he?”

“Twenty-eight,” Mark said. He picked up his beer glass
and took a long drink.

Rick nodded. “I looked through his room. He didn’t have
much there, but his parents said he hadn’t come home with much, either. Some
clothes in the closet and the dresser. Nothing personal, though.”

“Didn’t he have some friend who came to help him with
moving furniture?” I asked. “You think he could be staying with him?”

“Striker. I suppose.”

“You have this Striker’s real name and address?” Rick
asked, pulling out his pad and pen.