Dog Bless You (7 page)

“Very cool.” We made a plan for him to meet me at Friar
Lake on Monday, when the shop was closed. I felt like I owed him something for
agreeing to meet with me, so I scanned the shop for something to buy – maybe
for Lili? I spotted a collection of antique hair combs in a display case and
walked over there. “How much is that one?” I asked, pointing at a fan-shaped comb
sprinkled with rhinestones.

Mark grimaced. “You don’t want that. It’s hideous. If
your girlfriend likes Regaud, she’d probably like this one better.” He pointed
to one in the shape of an Oriental arch. “1920s Art Deco, midnight blue enamel
on a sterling silver base. I can let you have it for twenty-five.”

“Sold.”

I drove back to River Bend, very pleased with the way
the afternoon had worked out. Mark hadn’t committed to everything I needed, but
I had a hook in him, and I thought that once he saw Friar Lake he’d be
intrigued by the challenge. And I had a little gift for Lili for the next time
I did something dumb. All in all, a very productive time.

When I got home there was a generic sedan parked in my
driveway. It belonged to my parole officer, Santiago Santos. He sat in the
front seat, his dark-haired head bent over his tablet computer.

I assumed that Santos’s habit of showing up
unexpectedly was part of his job; if one of his parolees was misbehaving, a
drop-in might catch the ex-criminal in the act. In my case, maybe he hoped to
find me sitting at my kitchen table hacking into some database. Fortunately for
me, the laptop was completely clean.

Santos was intent on whatever he was doing with the tablet
in front of him. Was he looking up my records? Did he have something he was
planning to confront me with?

I smiled weakly and waved as I walked past him, and
said, “Have to let the dog out. Be with you in a minute.” He just nodded.

Rochester was barking like mad and jumping up on his
hind legs when I walked in. I hurried to drop Lili’s gift on the kitchen table
and grab his leash, and then took him out for a quick pee. I kept looking
nervously back at Santos’s car, worrying about what he might have to say. His
visits always set my nerves on edge; I didn’t like having my faults examined,
and I resented the power he had over me. I’d be delighted when my parole was up
at long last and I never had to see him again.

I picked up the evening paper from the driveway and
walked back in the house. After I dropped it on the kitchen counter, I looked
down at the floor and noticed that Rochester had dug one of my black wool
winter gloves out of my closet, and begun gnawing on the fingers. “Bad dog!” I
said. “No! No chewing!”

Santos was right behind me. He was about five-seven and
stocky, maybe ten years younger than I was. “You’re not taking him to work with
you anymore?”

I put the frayed glove down on the table beside the
comb for Lili. “I had to run an errand in Stewart’s Crossing,” I said. “Antique
shop. Not a place for Rochester.”

Santos bent down to scratched behind the big dog’s
right ear. “How’s the boy?” Rochester opened his mouth in a doggie grin and
woofed once.

“I know, it’s a dog’s life,” Santos said to him. Then
he looked up at me. “How’ve you been, Steve?”

“All right. Changes going on at work, though.”

“We can talk over coffee,” he said, and began nosing
around in my living room. His ability to snoop in my affairs irritated me. I
always had a momentary spike in adrenaline, worrying that I might have
carelessly left something around that might incriminate me. But I took a deep
breath. I hadn’t done anything illegal for a long time and there was nothing he
could catch me on. At least, I didn’t think so.

Part of our ritual was drinking coffee as we talked
over my trials and tribulations, so I walked into the kitchen, pulled forward
my cappuccino maker and filled the reservoir with water. Santos was Puerto
Rican by birth, and he favored strong espresso in a demitasse cup. I took mine
with foamed milk, chocolate syrup and whipped cream. I thought the way we took
our coffee said something about our respective world views: his was strong and undiluted,
and mine was complicated and needed explanation and sweetening.

I retrieved the bag of ground coffee from the freezer
and poured some into the filter basket. I slotted it into the machine and
flipped the switch. I opened the container of chicken and rice Lili had made
for Rochester and poured some into his bowl.

I thought about how best to present my new job to
Santos as he retrieved my laptop from the living room and joined me in the
kitchen. Rochester began wolfing down his chow and Santos popped the computer
open and turned it on.

“I just got a promotion at Eastern,” I said, sitting
across from him. “I’m excited, and the new job has real long-term potential.”

Santos had installed tracking software on my personal
laptop so he could check my activity every visit. He looked up from his log-in.
“Great. Not something in computers, I hope.”

Even though I knew it shouldn’t, his remark rankled. I
was a grown man and perfectly able to distinguish between appropriate and
inappropriate computer use, though sometimes I didn’t follow my own best
instincts, and I hated the way he kept flinging my past in my face.

 “No more than normal,” I said, determined to stay calm.
“I’m going to be running a conference center for the college.” As I explained
to him about Friar Lake, and how Eastern had come to acquire it, he ran the
tracking software.

“Doesn’t sound like there will be much for you to do
before the place opens, though,” he said, when I finished. “My
abuela
used to say
cuando el diablo no tiene qué hacer, con el rabo mata moscas
."

Rochester looked up from his food bowl.

"The devil finds work for idle hands to do,"
Santos translated.

“My dad used to say that idle hands are the devil’s
workbench,” I said. There was my dad again, popping into my mind. “But there
won’t be any danger of that. My workbench will be pretty busy. I have to
coordinate all the furniture and decorations, and work with the faculty to
organize a series of course offerings, so we can launch our programming as soon
as the place is ready.”

The cappuccino machine began to drip and I got up to
fix our beverages. When I was in high school, my parents had taken a tour of
Italy, and my mom had brought home a set of demitasse cups. I pulled out one of
those cups and poured some of the thick coffee in for Santos. I carried it over
to him with a couple of packets of raw sugar, then returned to the counter to assemble
my drink.

When I left the California state penal system, I moved
in with a bachelor friend in Silicon Valley for a couple of weeks. He had a
friend who managed a coffee shop, and I applied for work there as a barista. Unfortunately
my criminal record prevented me from getting a job where I’d handle cash. Even
though I was a white-collar criminal whose only offense was breaking and
entering into computer systems, I couldn’t be trusted to work a register.

I did like making coffee, though. The ritual was
comforting, and so was the drink, once I had the coffee stirred up with cocoa
powder and raspberry syrup. The mug was nearly overflowing by the time I topped
it off with whipped cream and chocolate sprinkles.

“How’s everything else going?” Santos asked when I
returned to the table. He often reminded me that a strong support system was
important in keeping his parolees out of trouble, and he worried that I had no
close family in the area.

“Still friendly with Rick, still dating Lili.” I held
up the package with the comb. “Just bought her a present today.”

Santos knew Rick Stemper professionally, and he often
said he was glad that my best friend was a cop. “Very good,” he said. “You know
I like the structure of owning a dog. And your girlfriend’s a very sharp
cookie. But I’ve worked with you for nearly two years now, Steve, and I don’t
think I’ve seen much of an adjustment in your attitude during that time.”

He picked up the dainty coffee cup and sipped. “I want
you to succeed. Not just while you’re under my supervision, but after your
parole is up. You’ve never really copped to the fact that what you did was
wrong. Not just against the law, but wrong.”

I wanted to argue, but it was true. I still believed
that by hacking into those databases, I had been doing what I thought was right
for Mary and for our marriage. Yeah, I knew that the law said something else.

“And until you get that idea in here,” he said, tapping
his head, “you’re still in danger of winding up back where you don’t want to
be. In prison.”

He swigged the last of his espresso and shut down my
laptop. “Congratulations on the new job,” he said. “Just don’t screw up your
life by letting your ego get ahead of your brains.”

“Got it,” I said.

I wasn’t a real rebellious kid, but I hated it when my
parents made blanket statements like that. If they said “don’t,” it made me
want to “do.” Especially when it was something my friends were doing. My dad
used to say, “If your friends jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge would you want to
do that, too?”

I was always tempted to say yes, considering that it
wasn’t all that easy for a teenager to get to Brooklyn from Stewart’s Crossing,
so it was a pretty unlikely possibility.

I restrained my smart mouth, though. Santos picked up
his tablet, gave Rochester a goodbye scratch, and walked back out to his car.

I locked the front door and turned back to the kitchen,
where I spotted my frayed glove. “What’s up with the glove, puppy?” I asked
him. “It’s July. Where did you even get this?”

I truly believed that Rochester had an instinct for
crime-solving. Whenever he did something out of the ordinary, I had to stop and
wonder if he was trying to send me a message. But a winter glove? What could
that mean?

Wait. He had discovered a hand out at Friar Lake. Was
he trying to tell me that the body it was attached to had been there since
winter? But the Benedictines had still been at the abbey then, and Lili’s
impression was that the body had been left there in springtime.

“What is it, boy? If the glove doesn’t fit, you must
acquit? Oh, wait, that’s from the O.J. Simpson case. You weren’t even born
then.”

I slipped my hand into the glove and held it, palm up
the way the hand had come out of the ground.

Rochester came over to nuzzle me, and licked the
leather palm of the glove. It was lighter than the rest of the glove, and for
some reason reminded me of the way a black person’s palm was often lighter than
the surrounding skin.

“Is that it, Rochester? Are you trying to tell me that
the hand you found came from a black person?”

He tossed his head up and down a couple of times, which
could have meant anything from yes to no to I want to play. He jumped up and
put his front paws on the kitchen counter, pushing the newspaper to the floor.

I picked it up, and sat down with it at the kitchen
table. I flipped through quickly, until I got to the police blotter column in
the local section. A body had been found at the former Abbey of our Lady of the
Waters. Leighville police were investigating.

So much for keeping the news of the body from President
Babson. I’d have to make an appointment with him the next day to tell him what
I knew.

My phone rang as I was thinking about how to phrase
that bit of information. I thought the call might be from Santos, having
forgotten something—but instead it was Rick Stemper. “Hey, Frank Hardy,” he
said. “You and your dog want to go for a ride?”

“Sure, brother Joe,” I said. “Where are we going?”

“I’ll tell you when I get there. Be ready in five
minutes.” He hung up before I could ask him if he’d heard anything from Tony
Rinaldi about the identity of the body at Friar Lake. But I’d certainly ask him
when I saw him.

I hooked Rochester onto his leash, and we were sitting
on the grass in front of the house when Rick pulled up in his truck. Rascal
jumped up and rested his black and white paws on the side rail, and he and
Rochester barked at each other.

I unhooked the tailgate, and Rochester jumped up into
the truck bed and began tussling with his friend. I secured the gate, then
climbed into the front seat next to Rick.

“So?” I asked. “Where are we going?”

“Crossing Estates. I downloaded a list of every address
from the property appraiser’s website. We’re going to look for any houses that
look like they fit the pattern for these burglars. Then I can write up a
warning to go out from the chief along with some instructions on how to improve
their safety.”

“Why are you taking me along?”

“I need somebody to write down the information and all
the uniformed cops are busy.”

I flipped down the visor to avoid the glare of the
setting sun. “How come you’re not in a squad car if you’re on department
business?”

“I’m trying not to be too conspicuous,” he said. “Just
in case the bad guys are out doing the same thing.”

“Cool,” I said. “I just finished a session with my good
buddy Santiago Santos.”

“How’s that going?”

“I’m getting tired of this constant supervision. It’s
been almost two years—my parole is up in the fall. By now Santos should have
seen that I don’t need a nanny.”

“You haven’t exactly been abiding by the terms of your
parole,” he said as we pulled out of River Bend and he turned inland. He held
up a hand. “I know, I’ve enabled you a couple of times, asking you to snoop
around for me, or ignoring where some of your information has come from.”

That was true. Rick was a cop, but a pragmatic one, and
he’d accepted information from me in the past that helped bring bad guys to
justice, even though I was sure he knew that I didn’t get the data legally.

“I’m not kidding myself, and you shouldn’t either,”
Rick said. “You agreed to the terms of your parole when you left prison. You’ve
been able to hide some stuff from Santos in the past, and I haven’t said
anything to him. But he’s no dope. He knows. He also knows he has to catch you
doing something to violate you, which is why you’re still free.”

“You think he does?”

Rick shook his head. “Here’s your real problem, Steve.
Not your interest in online snooping. This idea that you’re the only smart guy
in the room. Which is most assuredly not true.”

I wanted to protest, but what Rick said was pretty
true. There was a steady stream of traffic and our stop-and-go progress
irritated me further. I just wanted us to go. Somewhere. I didn’t care where.

“I’m not a moron either,” I said, thought I knew I was
sounding defensive. “I want to take control of my life again, and I don’t want
to report in to anyone. I told him about the new job at Friar Lake, and all he
wanted to do was lecture me.”

I shifted in my seat. “Anyway, not to change the
subject or anything, but have you spoken to Tony Rinaldi lately? Hear anything
from him about the body Rochester found up at Friar Lake?”

He shook his head. “Nope. But it was probably one of
the monks.”

“I don’t think so. Lili thought the body looked to be
about three months old, and the monks were gone before that. And you’ve told me
yourself that there are criminals all over the county—grow houses and meth labs
and chop shops. He was probably some kind of crook, and his body was dumped
there because the property was abandoned.”

“Steve, Steve. You’re getting yourself worked up over
something that’s none of your business.”

“Since Rochester found the body, I feel some kind of
responsibility to find out who it is, and what happened to him or her. If it’s
murder, then whoever did it deserves to be brought to justice.”

“And you don’t see the irony in that?”

“I did the crime, and I did the time. That doesn’t make
me believe in justice any less. And besides, I admit – I’m curious. There’s
nothing wrong with that.”

“Besides the fact that curiosity killed the cat?”

“Yeah, but satisfaction brought him back.”

He shook his head, slowed and signaled for the left
turn that would take us into Crossing Estates. Two curving fieldstone walls
sheltered the entrance to the community.

“A group of residents are starting a petition to close
off the property and put up guard gates,” Rick said, while we waited for
traffic to clear.

Crossing Estates had been built before the mania for gated
communities had reached Bucks County. Though there were thick hedges alongside
the road, anyone could drive right in.

“That’s a big project,” I said.

“Yeah. There’s already a community association, but
it’s very loose, and membership isn’t mandatory. The pro-gate folks have to push
through a zoning change and have the county assess the homeowners for the
expense. Going to take some time.”

We turned into the main drive. Huge homes with
fieldstone exteriors and broad driveways sat on half-acre lots. Landscaping
varied from house to house, though it looked like each had come with a maple or
an oak in the front yard. Some homes sported flowerbeds, others thick patches
of pachysandra around the tree bases. But almost every lawn was lovingly
tended, probably by a maintenance company.

“I remember when this was all farmland,” I said. “That
must be why there are so few older trees here.”

“Me too. I remember coming home from State College after
I hadn’t been out this way in a while. Drove up with my dad, and I was shocked
to see all these houses going up.” He pulled up just inside the stone entrance
and grabbed a clipboard from the back. “Each of the four different models has
the same sliding doors at the back -- part of the original design. So each
house is a potential target. The trick is to start narrowing down the list.”

“How are we going to do that?”

He showed me the form he’d prepared. “We check off
these criteria for each house. Do they have an alarm company sign out front? Are
there luxury cars in the driveway? As the sun sets we’ll be able to tell if
someone can see inside the house.”

He pointed to the first house ahead of us. “1200
Conway,” he said. “See the little sign for ADT? That’s one of the big alarm
companies. So we check that off on our list.”

“Skateboard and bike dumped on the front lawn,” I said.
“So they have kids, which means the house is less likely to be empty, right?”

“Good call. All the families that have been hit so far
either have no kids, older teens, or kids in college.”

We checked all the houses on Conway, and then turned
onto DeKalb. Number 1500 was a strong prospect—no alarm sign, Mercedes in the
driveway and uncurtained windows on the dining room. A glowing chandelier
illuminated a china cabinet full of knickknacks, and beyond it, in the living
room, we saw a big-screen TV.

I took the notes as we cruised along the curving
streets. I was surprised at how many of the houses looked vulnerable. My mother
grew up in Trenton, my father in Newark, and they were alert to all kinds of
dangers. From a young age I had been taught not to talk to strangers, to accept
candy or to get into cars. I noticed the way my mother held her purse close to
her body, the way my father seemed extra alert in dark parking lots.

We had a Sunday subscription to the
New York Daily
News
, which dedicated its center spread to the crime of the week. I gobbled
up the details of knife-wielding robbers, kidnappers, murderers and child
molesters. When it was time for me to go to Hebrew School in Trenton, my mother
arranged a carpool for me. I remember asking, “How will I know it’s safe to get
in the car? What if someone kidnaps me?”

“If they steal you by day, they’ll bring you back by
night,” my father said from behind the screen of the evening paper.

“No one’s going to kidnap you, Steve,” my mother said.

“But last week in the newspaper—”

“Enough,” my mother interrupted. “Finish your dinner. I
worked all day and I want to get out of the kitchen.”

I might have grown up a bit paranoid, but when I
finally moved to New York myself, I was already street-savvy, despite having
grown up in the 'burbs.

My neighbors in Crossing Estates didn’t seem to have
that same awareness that crime lurked around every corner. My parents were
never burgled, mugged or carjacked, and I don’t believe they ever saw a dead
body outside of a funeral home. What had happened to me? Was I over-concerned,
or were the people in these big houses clueless?

It began to get dark as we approached the intersection
of Mifflin and Lincoln, having finished about half the properties on the list. Rick
asked, “You know what all these streets have in common?”

“They’re all paved?”

“Numb nuts. They’re all named for Revolutionary War
generals.”

“How do you know that?”

He shrugged. “I liked US history in college. Recognized
a couple of the names, and so I looked them up.”

“Want to teach a class at Eastern? You could connect
the American Revolution to
The Hunger Games.
”

“I’ll pass,” he said. “I have enough to do keeping
track of real life.”

The dogs started barking in the back of the truck as a white
van approached us on the cross street, moving very slowly. As it got closer I recognized
it.

“That’s Mark Figueroa’s van. He hired this son of one
of my neighbors to work for him.” I leaned forward. “That’s strange. He left
Mark’s store at about three. Wonder why he’s still out here this late.”

“You’d be surprised how late deliveries come out here,”
Rick said. “People work all day, and then when they get stuff it needs to be
assembled.”

“All Owen said before he left Mark’s was that he was
delivering a sofa,” I said, as he drove through the intersection.

“Hold on. Owen? Owen Keely?”

“Yeah, his parents live down the street from me.”

Rick turned into a driveway, then backed out and
returned the way we’d come. “Owen’s a person of interest at the moment,” he
said. “You remember where he was making his delivery?”

I thought. “I wasn’t paying much attention. Sorry.”

“No worries.” Rick pulled up against the curb and we
watched Mark’s van move slowly down Conway Street.

“What’s going on?” I asked. “Why are you interested in
Owen?”

“He’s been strange since he got back from Afghanistan,”
Rick said. “We’ve had to escort him out of The Drunken Hessian a couple of
times because he got loud with the bartender.”

The Hessian was one of the oldest bars in Bucks County,
in the middle of downtown Stewart’s Crossing. Rick and I had spent many hours
there together since my return.

“I thought at first he might have lost his license for a
DUI,” I said. “Because I only see him riding a bicycle.”

“Can’t be that, or he wouldn’t be driving the van. He’s
probably just too broke to afford a car.” Rick stayed at the stop sign and we
watched the van continue down Conway.

The van turned right, and Rick eased through the stop
sign and followed. As we did, the van exited Crossing Estates, heading out
Ferry Road towards town. “I’ll have to give Mark a call tomorrow,” Rick said.
“For now, we should get back to our original plan. We still have Phillips,
Schuyler, St. Clair and Spencer to check.”

As it got darker it was harder to identify the houses
with alarm signs, but easier to see inside. There were an awful lot of plasma
TVs, game systems and small electronics in Crossing Estates.

“You want McDonalds before I take you home?” Rick
asked. “My treat.”

“Thanks for the offer, big spender,” I said. “But
Rochester’s still got an upset stomach, so he’s getting boiled chicken and rice
for dinner, and if I ate a hamburger in front of him without giving him some
he’d never forgive me.”

Rick dropped me and Rochester off at home, and I boiled
up some fresh chicken and  rice, which I mixed in with some of his regular
chow. I heated up a TV dinner for myself. We ate together in the kitchen, and
then I took him out for his evening walk.

A car was cruising slowly down Sarajevo Court, and my
first reaction was to think someone was scoping out houses for burglary. Was
that because of my cruise through Crossing Estates with Rick earlier? Or just
because of the way my parents had raised me?

The car sped up after it passed us and disappeared
around a corner. As Rochester sniffed and peed, I thought about crime and
wondered if I could find any information on line about crime in Bucks County.
Maybe I could discover something that would help Rick with the spate of
robberies he was investigating. Or maybe by figuring out where the crime was
around Friar Lake, I could give Tony Rinaldi a clue to the identity of the dead
body that had been buried out there.

My heart rate accelerated as I thought about it, and I
tugged on Rochester’s leash to get him moving back toward home. I felt that
same surge of adrenaline I got whenever I contemplated doing snooping online.
It was probably what Rick’s burglars felt when they found a house to break into,
that sweet sense of breaking society’s bounds.