Dog Bless You (9 page)

Though I looked for inspiration everywhere, I couldn’t
find any. I returned to my office, feeling glum, but perked up as soon as I
walked into my office and saw Lili at my computer, typing like a fiend. “Hey,
sweetie. What’s up?”

“Give me a minute to finish this email and then I’ll
tell you all about it.”

With Lili monopolizing my desk and computer I wasn’t
sure what to do. So I opened the glass jar full of tiny imitation T-bone steaks
and Rochester’s head popped up like a puppet on a string. I figured he was
feeling well enough to manage a treat or two. I sat down on the floor next to
him, fed him the treat, and scratched behind his ears.

As I watched Lili type, I felt a bit grumpy. She could
do anything online she wanted, without worrying about a parole officer lurking
in the bushes, and I couldn’t. But then my inner adult piped up and reminded me
how I’d gotten myself in trouble, and that it was my own fault I had those
restrictions.

“Sorry,” Lili said, turning toward me. “I wanted to
come right over and tell you but you weren’t here and I figured I might as well
send some emails and get things rolling.”

“Are you speaking English? Because I’m not following.”

“I thought President Babson spoke to you.”

“You mean Monday? About Friar Lake? But what does that
have to do with you?”

“You didn’t talk to him this morning?”

“No.”

She pushed a couple of stray tendrils of auburn hair
away from her face. “He called this morning and asked me to come over to his
office. I had no idea what he wanted, but you know him, he’s always full of
surprises. He told me he wants me to put together a coffee-table book about the
history of the Friar Lake property. He thinks he can sell copies to alumni as a
fund-raiser.”

“Why you?”

“The pictures, of course. He asked if I’d be willing to
not only take current shots, but dig into some archives and pull out older ones
as well. I’m interested in the process of restoring old photographs anyway, and
how we can apply new technologies to the process. You know that article I’ve
been working on.”

I nodded. Lili was a good writer, but sometimes her
prose got too academic and convoluted, and she brought things to me for
clarification.

“Where are you going to fit this in?” I asked as I
stood up. Lili was already running the fine arts department, teaching, taking
photos of her own, working with the College Connection kids, and working on
academic articles. I didn’t want her getting so busy that she’d squeeze me and
Rochester out.

“The fall schedule is already set, and the department
only has a half-dozen courses running in the summer term. Matilda could run
that department without me.”

Matilda was her secretary, a formidable Filipina who
shared Imelda Marcos’s taste in shoes—though on a much lower budget.

“Babson offered me another release time for the fall to
work on this. Teaching my seminar for The College Connection will only take a
few hours. And we’ll get the benefit of working together.”

I was still having trouble following her logic. “How’s
that?”

“You’ll have to write the text for the book, of course.
Babson was clear about that. This is my project, but he knows what a great
writer you are.”

I could just imagine Babson laying on the blather. I
knew a lot of couples whose relationships had fallen apart when they spent too
much time together, and I was afraid of what Lili would think when she saw how
little I knew about construction and running a conference center, but I didn’t
want to say anything and spoil her excitement.

“Just think, we’ll be able to spend the rest of the
summer together.” She came over to me, and stepped up on her toes to kiss me.
At five-ten she’s tall for a woman, but still a couple of inches shorter than I
am. Her lips tasted like strawberries. “Won’t that be fun?”

 “Yeah, fun,” I said.

“We’ll have to do some research.” She sat back down at
my computer. “I’ve already done some quick searching for archival information
on Benedictine properties. We may even be able to squeeze in a road trip.”

“I’ll look forward to it.”

“You hear anything more about that poor man whose body
we found?” Lili asked. “Was he a monk or a friar?”

“No idea. Haven’t heard anything from Rick or from Tony
Rinaldi.”

“I hope they’re able to get him reburied quickly.
That’s so sad, the way his body was rising up out of his grave.”

“Sad, or symbolic,” I said. “Even more so if it was
Easter.” I opened my mouth wide. “But this is Eastern College. What if we
witnessed the start of the second coming?”

“Go back to work, goofball.” She kissed me goodbye and
she left.

Her mention of the dead body reminded me of the email
I’d sent anonymously to the Leighville Police Department the night before. I
was curious to know if he’d learned anything more about the body’s identity,
and if the information I found had been helpful. But calling him up to ask
would defeat the purpose of the anonymous address, and open a whole new set of
problems for me. Instead I tamped down my curiosity and tried to focus on
programming for Friar Lake.

I couldn’t focus, though. I kept thinking about the
dead guy. Could I casually call Tony? It had been two days, after all. Would he
have the autopsy results? I picked up the phone to call him, then put it down
again. If the information I’d found had been useful, he’d probably be too busy
arresting people to talk to me.

I picked up Rochester’s leash and he jumped up from the
floor. Maybe some fresh air would lead to fresh ideas. As we walked around the
back of Fields Hall, I remembered my previous work career, as a technical
writer and web developer. What would have drawn me back to Eastern for some
kind of executive learning course?

As a tech writer, I had to know the basics of how
everything worked at the company, because I had to write the instruction
manuals. I’d taken a workshop on inventory management (a big snooze) and one on
logistics and transportation (an even bigger snooze.) I’d also been sent for seminars
to learn new software as we incorporated it.

There was no way we could compete with the big business
schools, though. Our faculty didn’t have the depth or breadth or real world
experience. I decided that I needed some input from someone on the faculty. The
problem was that even though I’d been back at Eastern for a little over a year,
I didn’t know that many professors.

The only professor I felt
completely comfortable with was Lucas Roosevelt. He was one of my favorites
when I was an undergraduate, and when I returned to Eastern I was stunned to
realize he was only about five years older than I was, and had become the
department chair.

Lucas (he was always quick to
point out that he was not related to
those
Roosevelts, as his family
name had been Rostnikov prior to arriving on Ellis Island) was willing to give
me
a chance
as an adjunct, and we had shared shots of
Cuban rum smuggled in from Canada for him by a grateful student to celebrate.
I called his office in Blair Hall and
found that he was free. Well, that would give me a start.

Rochester was sleeping on his back, his rear paws extended
and stretching the skin of his belly so taut he reminded me of a skinned rabbit
hung up to dry outside a hillbilly’s house. I snuck out without waking him.

Eastern’s campus, usually so busy, was dreaming
sleepily in the summer heat. A pair of girls had spread a beach towel on the
sunny lawn in front of Fields Hall. Wearing bikinis and oversized sunglasses,
they were both reading—one a big art history textbook, the other a paperback
edition of
The Great Gatsby
.

A cluster of students lounged on the grass beneath a
towering maple, each of them intently reading—a mix of textbooks, novels, a
Kindle, and a couple of iPads. I remembered my own days as an undergrad. I’d
relaxed under that same tree with my own friends, and an assortment of books –
all paper, of course—for classes from English literature to introduction to economic
theory.

There were more students reading on the stone steps of Blair
Hall, which housed the English department. It had undergone an unfortunate
makeover in the sixties, and a lot of the character you could see in old
photographs had been stripped out—the wood moldings, the stone finials—and
replaced with fluorescent lights and linoleum floors.

Candice (“Don’t call me Candy”) Kane, the English
department secretary, was away from her desk, though I could see that the
spider plants she cultivated were still going strong. Lucas’s door was open,
and I stuck my head in.

“My dear boy, how good to see you!” Lucas boomed. He
was a tall, lanky man, with somewhat of a resemblance to Abraham Lincoln in his
rail-splitter days, though with no beard or stovepipe hat.

Because I was a former student, I was always going to
be a boy to him, despite how close we were in age. “Have a minute?” I asked. “I
need to do some brainstorming.”

“My brain is always available,” he said, motioning me
to a seat across from him. “Doesn’t get enough of a workout these days, but
can’t complain. What can I help you with?”

I sketched out the broad outline of the Friar Lake
project. “I was walking outside, and I passed a whole group of students
lounging on the lawn reading. About half were holding physical books and the
other half e-readers or tablet computers.”

Lucas shook his head. “I can barely remember those
days, when I had the whole summer off to read.”

“That’s what I was thinking,” I said. “And I remembered
my senior seminars, a half dozen or so of us sitting around talking about
books. One of those was with you.”

I vividly remembered Lucas in front of our seminar
group. He could recite whole passages of the middle English of Geoffrey Chaucer,
quote from T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland,” declaim sonnets and gesture to Shakespearean
dialogue. He made those works come alive in front of us, while challenging us
to analyze, think, paraphrase and examine.

“I thought we could recreate the seminar experience,” I
continued. “Small groups of alumni and other intellectually curious adults,
focused on a single topic, over a long weekend.”

Like many of the friends and classmates I kept in touch
with, I missed the intellectual stimulus of the academic environment, and I
regretted the gaps in my education. There were whole disciplines I’d never
studied, from sociology to astrophysics, and hundreds of authors and books I
wanted to read but lacked the time or the motivation.

I knew accountants who belonged to book groups, doctors
who collected art, business people who loved to travel. If I could replicate
the Eastern experience in a few intense days, I thought I might have a chance
at succeeding.

“What do you think, Lucas?” I asked. “Is it possible to
create that same feeling students have?”

“If we can’t, then we don’t deserve to be called
professors,” he said. “Suppose we took some of the content of one of those
seminars and narrowed it down? Instead of a whole semester on modern American
novels, we focused on one author—Hemingway, for example.”

I nodded. “But they can’t spend the whole weekend
reading. We’d have to mix things up. We could have them read
The Sun Also
Rises
before they arrive. Then we could show that Woody Allen movie,
Midnight
in Paris
. And add some videos of the running of the bulls in Pamplona.
Throw in some Spanish wine and tapas.”

“I think we’re on to something here,” he agreed. “We
talk about Hemingway’s notion of masculinity, provide some examples of how he
prefigured some of the more modern writers like Raymond Carver. Very doable in
a long weekend.”

 “I’d sign up myself,” I said. “Can I put some ideas
together and then bring them back to you? You could help me find the right
faculty.”

“I’d be delighted. Count me in for the Hemingway
seminar.”

I stood up. “Thanks, Lucas. I feel like I have a
direction now.”

When I got back to my office, Tony Rinaldi was sitting
on the floor playing tug-of-war with Rochester. I was a bit disconcerted to see
him. There was no way he could have tracked that email back to me, but he could
be guessing. Guesses, though, were not enough to violate my parole.

“Don’t get up on my account,” I said, as I walked in.

Tony looked embarrassed. He stood anyway, brushing some
of Rochester’s long golden hairs from his black slacks.

“What can I do for you?” I sat down behind my desk, and
he sat across from me.

“Got a little problem.”

“I don’t like the sound of that.” I expected him to
mention the anonymous emails but he had something different in mind.

“Neither does the chief of police. Turns out that guy
whose body you found? The ME figured out that he was African-American. Called
the Benedictines, and discovered they had no black monks or friars living out
there.”

“I thought he was black,” I said. “Or at least
Rochester did.”

“How did he know? He have a different bark depending on
the race of the victim?”

“He got a black winter glove from my bedroom and
started chewing it,” I said. “You know, black glove, black hand.”

Tony raised his eyebrows. “You have some crazy ideas
about that dog, Steve.” He paused. “Anyway, because of the position of the hand
that was still underground—it was underneath him, so it was protected by his
clothes – there was enough skin that the ME could pull off some prints.”

“Find a match?”

“Yup. His name is DeAndre Dawson and he has a criminal
record that would stretch from here all the way back to New York City, where he
was last known to reside.”

“Then how did he end up dead at Friar Lake?” I asked.

“That’s what I need your help to figure out.”

“What can I do? I told you I just got this job two days
ago. I don’t know anything about the property.”

 “Right now DeAndre is residing at the medical
examiner’s office, lined up for his turn on the autopsy table. That’ll tell me
what the cause of death was. But while I’m waiting for those results, I want to
figure out what DeAndre was doing down here.” He leaned back in his chair. “I
made a couple of calls to New York, and spoke to his parole officer. He said
that DeAndre used to hang out at a drop-in center on the Lower East Side called
The Brotherhood Center.”

“And?”

“And the center’s run by a couple of Franciscan
friars.”

“Any connection to Friar Lake?”

“I don’t know as yet.” He took a deep breath. “I hate
to drag a civilian into a murder case, but we’re stretched thin in our
department as it is, and I have nothing to base a warrant on, and places like
that have an innate distrust of the cops.”

I was surprised. Tony Rinaldi was actually going to ask
me for help? That was a big turnaround in his attitude.

“You have a way of getting people to talk to you.” He
held up his hand. “I know you say it’s all the dog. But you’ve been able to
find out information from people who wouldn’t talk to the police in the past. I
was hoping I could convince you to go up there and talk to people. You’re from
the college, you discovered the body, you just want to talk to people, satisfy
your curiosity.” He grinned. “You have a lot of that.”

I was curious, but I was reluctant, too. When I was a
kid, my mother had cousins in Brooklyn, and every now and then when we’d go
visit them we’d stop on the Lower East Side to pick up authentic New York
bagels or pastrami or other Jewish delicacies that were hard to come by in the
wilds of suburban (read goyish) Pennsylvania.

Then Tor and I had lived on the Lower East Side years
before, right after we both graduated from Columbia, and it had been a pretty
marginal neighborhood. I felt I was lucky never to have been mugged or burgled.
After years in the suburbs, was I too soft to face tough areas? I had no desire
to revisit the Bowery or Needle Park. I had enough panic in my life as it was.

 “I don’t know, Tony. Tough neighborhoods are out of my
wheelhouse.”

“Please? Take the dog if you want. He’ll protect you.”
He smiled again. “Talk to the monks, see if there’s any connection to Friar
Lake. If they have any idea what DeAndre was doing down here.”

Rochester got up from his place by the French doors and
came over to me.

“See, the dog wants you to go,” Tony said.

“When do you need this information?”

“Depends. How soon do you think you could get up to New
York?”

“I’ll have to check with President Babson. If he’s
willing to give me some time to look into this for you, I could probably go up
there tomorrow.”

“That would be great. I’ll email you the details I have
about the drop-in center.” He reached over and scratched behind Rochester’s
ears. “You see what you can do to help out, boy.”

Rochester woofed in agreement.

“Any other irons in the fire?” I asked casually.

“I looked into that email you sent,” he said, and for a
moment I forgot that I’d sent two messages – one legit and one cloaked. “About
the chop shops.”

“Yeah?”

“Went out there this morning. The place was completely
shut down. Doesn’t mean there isn’t a connection, but it’ll take some time to
track where those guys went.”

“It was a try,” I said.

He nodded, then looked at me. “You know anything about
grow houses?”

My heart skipped a beat but I stayed cool. “What do you
mean?”

“Somebody sent us an anonymous tip about a potential
grow house out on Tinicum Creek,” he said. “I passed it on to the state police,
and they made a big bust out there this morning.”

“Wow.”

He stood up. “Yeah. Gave me some good cred with the
state guys. And always nice to knock a couple of crooks out of town. Wish I
could thank whoever sent in the tip, but like I said, it was anonymous.”

“Probably a neighbor,” I said. “Or a rival.”

“You never know with anonymous tips,” he said. “Let me know
if you go up to New York and what you find out.”

“I will.”

I checked with Babson’s secretary. He was in a meeting,
she said; she could squeeze me in to see him at four. I sent an email to Ruta
del Camion, telling her that the dead body at Friar Lake had been identified,
but there was still no indication of a connection to Eastern.

Then I did some basic Googling on DeAndre Dawson. Nothing
that Santiago Santos would object to—just checking public records to find the
dates of his incarceration. I was well aware that such information was readily
available online; I’d found my own records online as soon as I had access to a
computer after leaving the California penal system.

I began with the New York state criminal records
system. Everyone who had ever been in the system since the 1970s was listed
there, except youthful offenders (who were governed by different statutes) and
a few other categories.

DeAndre’s record began with his name, sex, race and birth
date. Since he was born in March 1990, he had celebrated his twenty-second
birthday a few days before his death.

He had been arrested and convicted in New York County
of two class D felonies, assault and attempted robbery. I knew that assault
meant committing physical harm to another person, and that robbery meant taking
money or goods from another person using force. He had served two years at Sing
Sing and then been paroled in early January.

I figured Tony already had this information, but it was
useful for me if I was going to New York to talk to people about him. I kept
surfing around, looking for information on DeAndre. There wasn’t much. I found
a few addresses and phone numbers, all on the Lower East Side, with no
indication as to which was the most recent. I wrote them all down, on the off
chance that talking to someone at one of those locations might turn up a clue.

At four I walked down to Babson’s office. I had been
rehearsing what I wanted to tell him; I didn’t want the dead body to be a big
deal, but I needed some time to help Tony. As soon as he waved me into his
office I jumped in. “Do you remember Sergeant Rinaldi from the Leighville
Police? He was up here a lot this winter after Joe Dagorian was murdered.”