Dog Helps Those (Golden Retriever Mysteries) (13 page)

“I should do the same thing.” I pulled out my phone and hit a couple of keys to draw in my college emails and started answering them. Lili and I sat outside the café, drinking coffee and eating pastries, both of us doing our work while we waited for Rick to call me.

Just before five, my cell rang. “You can pick up Mr. Popescu,” Rick said. “For now, his alibi checks out, and I know how to get hold of him if I need him.”

I thanked Rick and hung up. “Should we drive Felae back up to Leighville and then get some dinner?” I asked Lili. At the mention of the d-word Rochester’s head popped up.

She shook her head. “I have so much work to do. I’ll drop him off on my way home. And you’re already almost home. There’s no reason for you to shlep up to Leighville.”

The three of us walked back to the police station, Rochester once more in the lead. Felae was standing in the parking lot beside Lili’s Mini Cooper, looking only a bit more cheerful than he had before. I felt pretty cranky myself, since I had expected to have dinner with Lili, and perhaps reap some reward for helping her out with Felae.

Instead I took my dog home and made myself a big pot of shell macaroni with butter and grated parmesan cheese, my childhood comfort food. Rochester got his regular bowl of kibble. I guess that was his comfort food.

I was washing the dishes when my doorbell rang and Rochester launched into a paroxysm of barking. I dried my hands and looked out the peephole to see my parole officer, Santiago Santos, in the courtyard.

He was Puerto Rican, with a bachelor’s degree in sociology from Drexel, and looked like an amateur boxer, about 5-8, stocky, with muscular forearms. “I was in the neighborhood and thought I’d drop in,” he said. “This a good time?”

I stepped back to usher him in. “Sure.”

In the Pennsylvania state parole system, officers visit parolees at their homes. I’d been to his office in Bensalem, for my first visit and to fill out paperwork, and he’d been out to my townhouse in Stewart’s Crossing on an average of once a month since then. They were almost always unannounced visits like this one, as if he was trying to catch me doing something I wasn’t supposed to.

Well, I guess that was his job, after all.

I brought him my laptop, and he sat down at my kitchen table with it as I made us both mugs of tea. One of the conditions of my computer use while on parole was the installation of keystroke software, which tells Santos which keys have been pressed, and which windows they were pressed in. It captures emails, usernames, passwords and chat conversations, and only he has the password to see what’s been recorded.

I wasn’t particularly nervous. I’d been a good boy, keeping my nose clean and resisting the urge to hack into websites.

Rochester was sprawled behind Santos’s chair, and I had to step over him as I brought the pair of mugs to the kitchen table. Santos swung my laptop sideways so I could see what he was looking at. “Rohypnol, Steve?” he asked. “I’m disappointed in you. You know the conditions of your parole. No hacking, no drugs. No illegal activity of any kind.”

My mouth dropped open. Sure, I’d been searching for information on Rohypnol, but it was in a good cause. And if I wanted to trick him, I could—but I’d never even considered that Santos would find anything unusual on my computer.

“You have a reason for this?” Santos asked, looking at me. “Or am I going to have to write you up for a violation?”

My blood pressure zoomed, but I forced myself to stay calm. “Just some research for Rick Stemper,” I said. “We found this blister pack up at a murder scene, and I wanted to see if I could figure out what it was.”

He looked skeptical.

“Honestly, Santiago. You think I’d do that? I committed computer fraud, not a sex crime. And I have a girlfriend. I don’t need date rape drugs.”

“You don’t understand, Steve. Criminal activity isn’t about the actual violation—it’s about a mindset. The idea that you’re someone special, that the ordinary rules don’t apply to you. That you can take what you want, or do what you want.”

His sociology background popped up like that. His analysis did sound like my personality, especially when I was on the trail of some piece of information. But I remembered the mantra I had repeated often when I was in prison. I had committed a criminal act, but I wasn’t a criminal.

“Let me show you what I was doing.” I sat down next to him and pulled up the photo I had enhanced, and matched it to the sites I’d been searching. “If you don’t mind, I’ll give Detective Stemper a call,” he said when I was finished.

“Go right ahead.”

He stood up and walked toward the doorway so I couldn’t overhear his conversation. I sat there petting Rochester and fuming. How had I been so stupid? I knew Rohypnol wasn’t legal in the United States, but I’d still left an audit trail on my laptop looking for it. It wasn’t fair. I hadn’t tried to buy the stuff. Any other Joe could have done what I did without penalty. But I was still paying for one stupid thing I had done in California, three years before.

Scratching behind Rochester’s ears calmed me down. Then Santos returned to the kitchen. “Rick confirms you were looking into the Rohypnol for him. But Steve, you have to remember you can’t do anything you want. You’re a convicted felon, on parole. Everything you do has to go through that filter.”

“For another six months,” I said.

“And if you don’t learn to change your habits you’ll do something stupid and end up in prison again. I see a lot of guys like you, Steve. You think you’re smarter than the system. But the system always wins.”

We talked for a while about my job, and how I was using computers there, but I was still simmering with resentment and couldn’t get him out of the house fast enough.

I was determined not to let Santiago Santos interfere with what I thought was right. Of course, I was going to report as required, and let him know every time I changed residence or job. I had surrendered the handgun my father left me to Rick, to hold until my parole was over, because simple possession of a gun was enough to violate me.

But ordinary online searching was allowed under the terms of my parole. So I wasn’t going to let Santiago Santos threaten me. If I wanted to help Rick investigate Rita’s murder I damned well would.

It looked like Felae hadn’t killed her—but who else might have? What new information could I discover that could be useful to Rick?

I got up and started pacing around the house. I didn’t have far to go; the downstairs of my townhouse is compact, with a living room, dining room, kitchen and breakfast nook. I didn’t count the laundry alcove, where I had a washer-dryer, or the guest bathroom.

Rochester hauled himself up from the tile floor and began following me. “Go lay down, dog,” I said, pointing at a round, fluffy bed I had bought for him. He stood there and looked at me.

I slid open the glass door that led to the walled courtyard that protected my house from the street. I had planted a row of lilac bushes when I moved in, and tiny purple clusters of buds had begun to appear. I was eager for them to open and fill the air with perfume. Rochester crowded up against my legs, sniffing the fresh air.

From down the street, I heard my neighbor Thad Hertz blasting Bill Halley’s “Rock Around the Clock.” He liked to sit in his driveway in the evening, sharing his taste in music with the whole neighborhood. At least it wasn’t rap.

Neighbors. Don Kashane said that several of Rita’s neighbors had complained about her. Who were they? Would any of them have had a motive to kill her?

I returned to the laptop and called up the property appraiser’s records for Bucks County. I entered Rita’s name—but got no results.

Huh? Didn’t she own the property?

I scrabbled around for the paper Rick had written her name and address on, and once I found it I entered the address, on a street called Berkey Farm Road. The property was owned by an entity called StanVest LLC. Well, that made sense; I remembered her full name was Margarita Stanville Gaines.

From the record, I saw that she had paid a half-million dollars for a home, a barn, and four acres, some ten years before. I stepped back a level and entered “Berkey Farm Road” in the search box. While the system searched for the records for all her neighbors, I opened a new window and pulled up a map program. I wanted to see a visual of her property and how it abutted her neighbors.

Berkey Farm Road was a north-south dead-end off Scammell's Mill Road, which led east to Stewart’s Crossing. I went back to the main window and noted that there were only three addresses on the road. By going back and forth between screens, I figured out that as you turned from Scammell’s Mill Road toward Rita’s, Don Kashane’s farm was on the left. A property belonging to Mark and Selena Hubbard was on the right; Rita’s was next to it.

The road dead-ended into a thirty-acre farm owned by Hugo and Marjory Furst. A tiny stream ran from the Tohickon Creek along the north side of Rita’s property, forming the border between her farm and the Fursts’.

Rochester got up from his place behind me, walked over to his water bowl, and slurped for a minute. Then he came back to me and rubbed his wet face on my leg. “I’m not your towel, dog,” I said, but my mind was on what Don Kashane had said. The Fursts were angry that dog waste from Rita’s property was polluting the stream, and the Hubbards hated the noise and smell from Rita’s kennels.

Which one to start with? I flipped a mental coin and landed on the Hubbards. It was such a common last name, though, that I came up with over six million hits. Finally using a combination of words and quotation marks, I landed at the site for
Country House Journal
, a glossy magazine that featured custom homes in rural settings.

I discovered a photo-heavy feature on the Hubbards’ home, written by Naomi Schechter, who had once been an assistant professor in the English department at Eastern. When she was denied tenure, she had turned to a freelance career, though she still taught a course or two as an adjunct. We had a nodding acquaintance; during the past year, we had shared space in a narrow room full of computers and semi-private cubicles where part-time faculty could meet with students.

The sprawling, two-story house had a living room as big as my whole downstairs, with rustic, exposed-beam ceilings, flagstone floor and walls hung with modern art. The rest of the rooms pictured were equally lavish.

I could imagine that the Hubbards, whose property was valued at over a million bucks, wouldn’t be happy about a bunch of yapping, smelly dogs next door. From the article I could tell Naomi had interviewed the Hubbards, and I opened another new window onto the Eastern College website, where I was able to find out that Naomi had office hours the next day from ten to twelve. I made a note of it.

A motorcycle zoomed down Sarajevo Court, and Rochester jumped into guard-dog mode, his toenails scrabbling on the tile floor as he rushed toward the door, his bark deep and throaty.

“Quiet, Rochester!” He kept barking, until he was sure that the motorcycle was long past. “You really are not in charge around here, you know.”

He looked at me and smiled a big doggy grin, then slumped back to the floor.

The article mentioned that Mark Hubbard was the CEO of a computer software company, and with that information I was able to pull up his corporate bio and a picture of him and his wife. He was a tall, slim man with salt and pepper hair, while Selena was a buxom dark-haired brunette at least twenty years younger.

They also owned a penthouse overlooking Central Park and a vacation getaway on St. Bart’s. Well, if Rita’s dogs got on their nerves at least they had someplace else to go.

The Furst property was appraised at only a hundred grand, which was surprising considering how much bigger it was than Rita’s or the Hubbards’. But an asterisk noted that it had an agricultural exemption, hence the lower value. I opened a new window with Google Earth, and looked at the satellite photos of the area. I could pick out Rita’s house and barn, the Hubbards’ sprawling mansion, and the Furst farmhouse and a big barn. The area around the house showed evidence of constant cultivation. Cows grazed in a field beside the barn, and I wondered if Furst had a dairy operation as well.

It was bedtime by then, so I took Rochester for a walk around River Bend. Thad had gone in, shutting down his music, and the neighborhood sang with crickets, frogs and the distant hum of a car engine. Rochester chased a squirrel and tried to clamber under a forsythia hedge, abundant with yellow blooms, but I pulled him back. I heard the Philadelphia train approach the crossing at Scammell’s Mill Road, a couple of miles away, the long whistle that always reminded me of faraway places.

I used to hear that whistle all the time as a kid, and because I knew you could hop on the train in Stewart’s Crossing and get to Philadelphia, and from there to anywhere, it resonated with me and how I wanted to travel far away from Bucks County, see those places I could only read about in
National Geographic
. I remembered lying in our back yard on summer afternoons, watching planes fly high overhead, wondering where those people were going.

Now I was content to be back home. I hadn’t seen the world, but I’d lived in Manhattan and Silicon Valley, vacationed in Europe and Mexico and the Caribbean. With luck, I’d hold on to my job at Eastern, and Lili and I might go somewhere together. As a photojournalist, she had traveled a lot more than I had, but I hoped she still had places she wanted to see—with me.