Whom Dog Hath Joined (15 page)

Lili was out at a class, so I got the key to her office from
her secretary. Harrow Hall was a modern building, donated by an alumnus who’d
made his fortune in pharmaceuticals, and at his request was shaped like a giant
capsule, with wrap-around windows. Behind her desk, Lili had hung a montage of
photos she had taken. A young Afghan girl played jacks with a female U.S.
soldier in camo gear; the Baghdad skyline was lit by a tracery of what looked
almost like fireworks; a tiny monkey, looking almost human, stared at the
camera from the safety of a tree in a tropical rain forest. The grim beauty of
a panoramic shot of a refugee camp in Darfur, taken from a helicopter.

Student artwork rested on easels and stands -- a woven
tapestry, a rain-smeared photo of the college chapel, an iridescent black
ceramic pot. I left Rochester there with an admonition to behave. Then I walked
over to Fields Hall, where my office had been, feeling nostalgic for all that
had happened since I returned to Eastern. I opened the door to the conference
room for a lovely dark-skinned woman wearing a white jacket with a pleated back
that hovered just above the waistline and snakeskin high heels. She was
Marie-Carmel Etienne, and she taught in the computer science department.

We had met somewhere, so we said hello and walked in
together. Oscar Lavista, the director of IT, was seated at the table speaking
to Jackie Conrad, a friend of mine who taught anatomy and physiology. Oscar was
a moon-faced guy with dark hair and a mole on his chin, a Florida transplant
who had moved up in the department a few months before. Jackie was
fifty-something, with an open, friendly face, framed with blonde curls, and she
had a great sense of humor.

“Are we the committee?” I asked, as I sat down beside
Jackie.

“Still waiting for our chair,” Oscar said. A moment later
the door opened and a balding man in his early sixties walked in. He wore a
white business shirt, yellow power tie and the pants from a pinstripe suit, and
had an unlit cigar in his mouth.

 “I’m Dr. Peter Bobeaux, assistant dean for the humanities,”
he said, laying a leather portfolio on the table. “I’m the chair of this
committee. But I’m new here at Eastern, so I’m  counting on you to show me the
ropes.”

So this was Dr. Bobo, physician for the circus. Lili’s
nemesis, a man who according to Lili drowned his opposition in paperwork. Maybe
this wasn’t the right committee for me.

Bobeaux was about fifty pounds too heavy for his frame, and
there was something overly authoritative about his bearing, but I tried to give
him the benefit of the doubt. I wondered about the cigar, though; Eastern was
primarily a smoke-free campus, though there were a few designated smoking zones
outside a couple of buildings.

The meeting dragged. Despite his pretense at needing our
advice, Bobeaux had a laundry list of complaints about Eastern’s computers,
culled from emails, questions and problems. The learning management system we
used to deliver online courses was too slow, he said. We needed to look into a
replacement.

“We’re on a five-year contract,” Oscar said. “It won’t come
up for bids for another four years.”

“But the faculty are complaining!” Bobeaux said.

“The faculty complain about a lot of things,” Oscar said.
“Most of the things they bring up can’t be fixed.”

Bobeaux shook his head. “That’s the wrong attitude to take, hombre.”

Oscar pushed his chair back a foot. “I resent your use of
Spanish to attempt to disenfranchise me,” he said. “Don’t think because I’m a
Latino and you’re white you can boss me around.”

“Hear, hear,” Marie-Carmel said. “We take a very dim view of
discriminatory behavior at Eastern.” She had a charming bit of a French accent
and I thought I’d read somewhere that she was a native of Guadeloupe, in the
Caribbean.

“I’m not… but I wasn’t…” Bobeaux began. Then he caught
himself and stopped. He bumbled through a half-dozen other problems, each one
shot down by Marie-Carmel or Oscar. I kept my mouth shut and my head down and occasionally
I caught Jackie Conrad’s eye and saw she was keeping mum like I was.

Finally Bobeaux dismissed us. “I have my doubts about the efficiency
of this committee,” he said. “I want to speak to President Babson before we
reconvene.” He glared at all of us. “And you can be sure that each one of you
will be included in that discussion.”

18 – Stages of Decomposition

Jackie Conrad and I walked out together. She pulled a little
puppet from her pocket, a plush gray crab with a starfish attached on a long,
nobby cord. “I was going to offer to lend Dr. Bobeaux one of these but I didn’t
think he’d appreciate the joke.”

“A brain cell,” I said, already familiar with the range of
stuffed animals Jackie used to demonstrate concepts in her anatomy class. The
fuzzy oval with tentacles was e-coli, and the little green blobs with eyes were
gonorrhea microbes.

She turned toward Green Hall, where the science department
was located. “How’s that inquisitive dog of yours?” she asked.

“Rochester? Still getting into trouble. Say, Jackie, do you
know anything about the decomposition rate of dead bodies? Like, for example,
if you stuck one between a false wall and an exterior wall, how long would it
take to start to smell?”

She stopped beside a commemorative bench donated by the
Class of 1923. The campus was littered with those little plaques on everything
from recycling bins to dormitory lounges. She raised the brain cell so that it
dangled from her lobe like an earring.

“If I didn’t already know you have a nose for crime, I’d be
worried about a question like that,” she said, and laughed. “A body begins to
decompose as soon as the heart stops beating. It takes a couple of hours for
the bacteria and other organisms to start decaying and releasing gases, which
causes the smell. If this body was close to the exterior wall, the ambient
temperature would affect it – slower in winter, faster in summer. But in
general it would be about twenty-four hours or less.”

“And how long would the smell persist?”

“Until the remains are skeletonized. We have five general
stages to describe the process of decomposition: Fresh, Bloat, Active Decay,
Advanced Decay, and Dry/Remains. The smell goes away by the dry/remains stage.
Depending on the conditions, again, it could be as few as ten days to as long
as a month or more.”

“Thanks, Jackie. That’s a question that’s been bothering
me.”

“Is this about that body I read about in the paper?”

“Yup.” As we walked, I explained about the sneaker and bone
Rochester had found.

“They don’t have any idea how long the body was there?”

“Probably since the 1960s,” I said. “But I’ve been wondering
why nobody would have smelled the dead body.”

“Where in the Meeting House was the body?” she asked. “Near
where the congregation sits?”

I shook my head. “In the back office area, behind a storage
closet. But wouldn’t you be able to smell it wherever in the building you
were?”

“Again, a lot depends on the environment.” We arrived at the
tall, arched wooden front door of Green Hall. Ironically, it was probably the
least “green” building on campus, and plans were afoot for new state-of-the-art
labs.

I thanked Jackie, and walked to Lili’s office. She was back
from her class, and Rochester was sprawled on the wooden floor beside the wall
of glass windows that looked out on the campus. He didn’t even get up when I
walked in. Traitor.

“How was your committee meeting?” Lili asked.

“Awful, as could be expected. Guess who’s the chair? Dr.
Bobo.”

“You have my sympathy,” she said, as I sat down in the chair
across from her desk. “How are things out at Friar Lake?”

“You know Joe Capodilupo, right? His son Joey started on
Monday as the construction super for the contracting company.”

“Isn’t that nepotism?”

“Joey works for the contractor, his dad for the college. And
everything I’ve seen of Joe Senior says he’s a real straight arrow.” I smiled. “Joey,
on the other hand, doesn’t seem that straight. Since he seems like a good guy.
I might be fixing him up with Mark Figueroa.”

“You are such a
shadchen
, Steve,” she said, using the
Yiddish word for matchmaker. “First you’re trying to get Rick to date this war
widow, and now you’re fixing up Mark. How’d you know this Joey was even gay?”

“I saw the way he and Mark were looking at each other. I did
a little manipulating to push them together. Joey’s going to refinishing the
old pews from the chapel, and Mark will sell them at his shop.”

Then I sat back in the chair and stretched my legs. “It looks
like Rick and I made some progress last night on finding the identity of the
body in the Meeting House.” I told her what I’d discovered.

“You don’t have a last name for either boy?” she asked.

I shook my head. “But I feel like we’re making big
progress.” Suddenly my heart did a quick flip-flop, as I remembered the other
question in the air: having Lili move in. If she did, my life was going to turn
upside down, and so soon after taking on the new job at Friar Lake. It seemed
like my life had become one big chain of changes, and I didn’t like it.

I didn’t tell Lili any of that, though. I stood and kissed
her goodbye, and Rochester and I went back to my car. Dead leaves were
accumulating around the bases of the trees, and the wind had a bit of a chill,
a reminder that winter was coming.

As I drove down river, I thought more about how my life had
changed since I’d come back to Stewart’s Crossing. Progress had happened in
fits and starts, from taking Rochester into my life to beginning full-time work
for Eastern. Early that the summer Lili had mentioned that sometimes she didn’t
feel like there was room for her in my house, because I had so many of the
boxes my father had left behind stacked in the living room and the garage.

I’d been determined to show her the opposite was true. And
in addition to unpacking those boxes, I’d come to terms with some difficult
things in my past, like my guilt over being unable to attend my dad’s funeral
because I was in prison. So lots of cobwebs were getting swept out.

I was passing through Washington’s Crossing when my cell
phone trilled with the
Hawaii Five-O
theme. “Yo, Rick.”

“What did you tell that woman in Pittsburgh?” he demanded.

“Huh?”

“You spoke to a woman in Pittsburgh,” Rick said, speaking
slowly as if he was talking to a child. “She called Amos Carter and told him a
professor was going to speak to him.”

“Oh, yeah. That was just a cover story.”

“And you didn’t think to mention that to me?”

Rochester looked like he was about to launch himself out the
car window at a passing cat, and I said, “No!”

“Excuse me?”

“I wasn’t talking to you, I was talking to the dog. So?
What’s the big deal?”

“The big deal is that this guy was expecting a professor to
call him, and when I said that I was from the police he got confused and he put
his son on the phone. The son doesn’t want him involved with the cops. I think
he’s afraid we’re after him for something.”

“You want me to call him?”

“No. I want you to go over there with me. You can spin your
professor bullshit, and we’ll see if that gets the son calmed down, and gets
the father to talk.”

“You’re welcome for the tip, Mr. Ungrateful,” I said. I
looked at my watch. “When do you want to go?”

“I’m on my way to your house now. Should be there in about
ten.”

“Crap. I’m almost home, but I haven’t fed Rochester or given
him his evening walk.”

“Get a move on, then.”

19 – Difficult Times

By the time we reached our townhouse, Rick was pulling up in
the driveway. I poured some chow in Rochester’s bowl, put up the gate to the
second floor, and made sure there was water in his bowl. “Back soon, puppy,” I
said, hurrying out the front door as he attacked his dinner with gusto.

Bristol is an old town, one of the oldest in Pennsylvania.
It has three claims to fame: it was an early commercial center, and the
Delaware Canal begins there, the one that runs through Stewart’s Crossing on
its way to Easton. And then there’s “The Bristol Stomp,” a 1960s song by the
Dovells, which you still hear played all over Bucks County.

“You have an address for the Carters, I presume,” I said,
getting into Rick’s truck.

“No, I figured we’d triangulate the cell phone signal when
we get close,” he said, slamming the truck into reverse and backing out my
driveway. “Of course I have an address.”

“Why are you so angry at me?” I asked, holding onto the door
as he rocketed down Minsk Lane. “I’m just trying to help you.”

“Investigation is my job,” he said. “And yet somehow you manage
to wiggle your way into my cases.”

“I thought you wanted my help.” He stopped to wait for the
gates to River Bend to open and allow us out. “I can get out here if you don’t
want me along.”

“I don’t like needing your help,” he said. “It makes me feel
like I can’t do what I’m supposed to.”

“That’s dumb,” I said. “You don’t do your own autopsies, do
you? Collect the crime scene data? Prosecute defendants?”

“They’re all part of the team,” he said.

I crossed my arms over my chest. “And I’m not?”

“You’re an amateur.”

“And an ex-con,” I said. “I’m always going to be that in
your mind, aren’t I? No matter how long we’re friends, and how much I do to
show you that I’m trying to change?”

“I didn’t mean that.”

“That’s the way it came across. What would the chief of
police say if he knew you were friends with a felon?”

“He can’t tell me who my friends are.”

“But if he knew that I was helping you with this case, he
wouldn’t be happy, would he?”

Rick sighed deeply. “He wants me to get this case cleared.
So he’ll have to live with how I do things. I’m sorry I snapped at you. I’m frustrated
because I can’t seem to get any traction on my own.”