Dog Knows Read online

  Dog Knows

  a golden retriever mystery

  by Neil S. Plakcy

  Copyright 2018 Neil S. Plakcy

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  Reviews for the series:

  Mr. Plakcy did a terrific job in this cozy mystery. He had a smooth writing style that kept the story flowing evenly. The dialogue and descriptions were right on target.

  —Red Adept

  Steve and Rochester become quite a team and Neil Plakcy is the kind of writer that I want to tell me this story. It's a fun read which will keep you turning pages very quickly.

  Amos Lassen – Amazon top 100 reviewer

  In Dog We Trust is a very well-crafted mystery that kept me guessing up until Steve figured out where things were going.—E-book addict reviews

  Neil Plakcy's Kingdom of Dog is supposed to be about the former computer hacker, now college professor, Steve Levitan, but it is his golden retriever Rochester who is the real amateur sleuth in this delightful academic mystery. This is no talking dog book, though. Rochester doesn't need anything more than his wagging tail and doggy smile to win over readers and help solve crimes. I absolutely fell in love with this brilliant dog who digs up clues and points the silly humans towards the evidence. – Christine Kling, author of Circle of Bones

  This book is for Brody and Griffin, and for their daddy.

  A big sloppy golden thank you to Christine Jackson, Sharon Potts and Ramona DeFelice Long, for their help in bringing this book together.

  1 – The Girl She Was

  Rochester clambered up onto the sofa next to me and rested his head on my lap, as if he was sharing the weight of the world with me. I stroked his golden flanks and told him what a good puppy he was, and he snuffled against my hand.

  My golden retriever was five years old, though we didn’t know his exact age or birthday because he’d been a rescue. In his way, he’d rescued me, too, because I was in a bad place when he came into my life. Looking back, he was only one of those who’d stepped in when I needed someone—the most recent, of course, being my girlfriend Lili, who came toward the sofa and surveyed the situation.

  “Not much room for me, is there?” she said, her hands on her hips.

  “We’ll always make room for you.” I shifted a few inches toward the arm of the sofa, and reorganized Rochester’s eighty-pound bulk so Lili could join us. She was a shapely woman, though not quite what my father would have called zaftig. Just enough curves to satisfy me, auburn hair in a loose curl, and a smiling mouth perfect for kissing.

  Which was what I did as soon as she was settled. I was a couple of inches taller than she was, but sitting together like that our height difference didn’t matter. Rochester sat up in the space between us, staring at us as we kissed, and I had to pull away and rub under his chin. “Nobody’s ignoring you, puppy,” I said. “But sometimes Mama Lili and I need some us time.”

  She scratched under his belly, and he opened his mouth wide in a big doggy grin. My infatuation with Rochester was clear from the golden retriever knickknacks on the shelves of the bookcase beside us, where photo frames shaped like dog bones jostled for space with my collection of hard-cover mystery novels and some of the classics of literature that remained from my college days.

  Much of the furniture had come from my parents’ house, including the mahogany dining room table and matching breakfront, and the torchiere lamp in the corner with an elaborate glass shade.

  My father had bought the sofa and matching leather recliner when he moved into the house, only a couple of years before he passed away and left it to me. I appreciated his good taste in furniture as Lili and I chilled there.

  When my phone rang, I glanced at it and saw it was a call from Hunter Thirkell, an attorney in the small Bucks County town of Stewart’s Crossing where we lived. I was surprised because it was eight o’clock at night.

  I’d met Hunter a few years before, when he handled my father’s estate. He had a brash, New York personality at odds with our sleepy Pennsylvania town, but he’d created a thriving practice in everything from wills and power of attorney to criminal defense, and he’d represented me years before when I had to meet with the police as I investigated the murder of my next-door neighbor.

  “Hey, Steve, how’s the hacking game going?” he asked. His voice was so loud that Rochester perked up his ears. Lili got up and went over to the dining room table, where she opened her laptop.

  Hunter knew that I’d served a year in the California prison system for computer hacking, and whenever I ran into him around town, he’d tease me about the latest hacking case and ask if I was involved.

  I didn’t appreciate being reminded of the past I’d worked so hard to put behind me, and even though I understood that was his awkward way of maintaining a friendship, vague as it was, I did my best to shut down any questions.

  “Listen, Hunter. I don’t do that stuff anymore, and I’m tired of you bringing it up.”

  I was about to hang up when he said, “Steve, wait. I’m sorry. I know I go overboard sometimes.”

  “You do.”

  “But I need your help, and I don’t know anyone else I can ask.”

  “My help with what?”

  “I took on a new client. Maybe you’ve heard about her in the news. The Black Widow of Birch Valley.”

  “I’ve heard of her,” I said. “Margaret something, right? Aren’t they saying she killed three husbands in a row?”

  “That’s what the press is pushing. But right now she’s just accused of killing the last one, a bum who died when the brakes failed on his motorcycle.”

  “And this has what to do with me?”

  “She insists that the bum had a lot of bad shit going on, that he was always emailing people, though she never saw any of the messages. We know from the evidence the police collected that right before he died, he wiped out everything in his email account. She’s sure that if somebody can retrieve all that stuff, it will exonerate her. The police have his laptop but they’re not doing shit to recover anything from it. I need somebody who can go into his email account and get back everything he deleted.”

  “There are companies that can do that,” I said.

  Rochester sniffed at the hand holding the phone, and I scratched him behind his ears with my other hand.

  “And they’ll charge through the nose,” Hunter said. “I took this case pro bono because I believe Peggy’s innocent.”

  “Peggy? I thought her name was Margaret.”

  “Yeah, that’s her legal name. But I used to see her dance at Club Hott, back when I was going through my divorce, and she went by Peggy then.”

  “Come on, Hunter. You’re lusting after an exotic dancer who’s already killed three husbands?”

  Rochester butted his head against my leg. I didn’t know what he was trying to tell me—should I be nicer to Hunter? Get him off the phone? I gently pushed him away.

  “I’m not lusting after her, Steve. She’s a good lady who’s had a rough life.”

  “She told you that while she was giving you a lap dance?”

  “You know what? Forget I asked. I’ll find somebody else. Somebody with a shred of human decency.”

  He must have been on a land line, because I heard a bang through the phone as he hung up. This time, when Rochester put his paws up on my leg and leveraged himself up to face me, I scratched under his chin. “Don’t worry, puppy, I’m not going to get in trouble.”

  Lili looked up from the dining
room table. “I don’t normally like to pry in your conversations but that one just begs for explanation.”

  “Hunter Thirkell.” Lili had met him once or twice when we were out and about in Stewart’s Crossing. “He’s representing that woman accused of killing three husbands.”

  “I read an article about her in the Boat-Gazette,” Lili said. That was the local paper for Stewart’s Crossing, a mix of local ads and digested versions of Bucks County and national news. “She met her first husband when they were students at the community college. He overdosed a couple of years into their marriage.”

  “He was a junkie?”

  “Apparently his parents died when he was a kid, leaving all their assets in a trust fund for him. He started using to medicate his pain, and eventually it got to be too much for him.”

  “And her second husband?”

  “He was a drug dealer, and he forced Margaret to be his mule, bringing drugs in from South America. She got caught, flipped on him, and then he died before he could go to trial.”

  “Ouch. Two bad husbands in a row.”

  “Tell me about it. Though at least neither of mine were into drugs the way hers were.”

  She sighed. “I kind of empathized with her because I’ve been through two husbands myself, though I never had any interest in killing either of them.”

  “Good to know. Hunter says the third husband was a biker who died when his brakes failed. That tally with what you read?”

  She nodded. “The article said she had means, motive and opportunity in all three deaths. What does Hunter want from you?”

  “To retrieve the last victim’s emails, because he thinks they’ll exonerate his client.”

  “And the lap dance part?”

  “She was an exotic dancer at Club Hott in Levittown for a while,” I said. “That’s how Hunter made her acquaintance.”

  “I remember that from the article,” Lili said. “That’s how she met husband number three.”

  Rochester jumped to the floor and rolled on his back. He waved his legs in the air—his equivalent of an exotic dance, letting me know he wanted his belly rubbed. I got down on the floor beside him and obeyed.

  “Hunter gets around,” Lili said.

  “That he does.”

  “You going to help him?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t want to put myself in jeopardy to help a total stranger, who’s most likely killed three times. Let the criminal justice system work.”

  Despite the fact that I’d gone to prison myself, I had faith in the system. I did the crime, and did the time. Everyone I met while I was incarcerated was guilty of something, even if it wasn’t the specific crime he’d been sentenced for. Sure, I’d read of cases where poor, illiterate people of color had been railroaded for crimes they didn’t commit, but that didn’t seem the case here.

  Lili went back to her grading, and I played with Rochester on the floor for a couple of minutes. But Hunter’s plea kept echoing in my head, and I couldn’t resist the urge to see what the papers were saying about his client. To paraphrase a quote I’d heard somewhere, losing one husband was unfortunate, two careless, and three downright criminal.

  I sat across from Lili at the dining room table and opened my laptop. I was intrigued at the tabloid-like story that spilled forth from newspaper websites. Margaret Landsea had married a kid she met in her political science class, whose parents had died in a car crash when he was twelve. The insurance settlement had gone into a seven-figure trust fund for him, which he was able to access when he turned twenty-one.

  With all that money, you’d think the couple would have been set for life, but according to the article the young man suffered the loss of his parents greatly, and he soothed that pain with illicit drugs. Three years into his marriage to Peggy, he died of a heroin overdose.

  At the time, no one questioned the situation. He was a junkie without any family beyond his wife, who had been hustled into a rehab program. Eventually she remarried, a Colombian who went by the name of Juan Perez—though eventual investigation revealed that was about as false as every other thing in his life. Nine years into that marriage, she was arrested as she arrived in Miami on a flight from Medellin. The customs agent noticed she was sweating profusely, and upon examination she was discovered to be carrying six condoms filled with cocaine in her vagina.

  She avoided jail time by turning state’s evidence against Perez. Before he could go to trial, though, he was found dead in their home. The coroner believed that he had been attempting to inject heroin into his veins, but accidentally introduced a bubble of air instead, causing a fatal heart attack.

  After another stint in rehab, Margaret began dancing at Club Hott. I did a quick records search and found that Hunter’s divorce had gone through a few months after Perez’s death. So it made sense that he’d have run into her then, some seven years before.

  Hunter had remarried a couple of years later, and according to the newspaper Margaret Perez had met and married husband number three, Carl Landsea, about the same time. He was a shift supervisor at US Steel’s Fairless Plant, and an active member of a biker group called Levitt’s Angels.

  After four years of marriage, he died in a motorcycle accident, and an investigation revealed that someone had tampered with his brakes. Within a few weeks after Carl’s death, Margaret Landsea had been arrested, based on evidence provided by an anonymous caller and later verified by Margaret herself that Carl was abusive toward her.

  That’s when the story hit the news, and I realized I’d been following it off and on for the past three months. An eager young district attorney had discovered the deaths of her previous two husbands, and a reporter for the Bucks County Courier Times had coined the “Black Widow of Birch Valley” nickname, after the Levittown neighborhood where she and Carl had lived.

  The reporter had assembled a collage of photos of Peggy at different times. In a fuzzy group shot, she was a freckle-faced teen posing with the pre-law club. In her mug shot from the drug mule arrest, she looked old before her time, with bags under her eyes, her hair a scary mess of tangles like Medusa. A promotional photo from her Club Hott days focused more on her figure, with a narrow waist and artificially enlarged breasts, but when I zoomed in on her face I saw the same sadness.

  She looked familiar, and I knew she was about my age—had I known her at some point?

  I looked at Rochester, who was snoozing on the floor. No help there.

  I went back to the article. Her name was Margaret Ann Doyle Stanwood Perez Landsea. Hunter had called her Peggy, though.

  Peggy Doyle. “Oh, shit,” I said out loud.

  Lili looked up. “What?”

  “I know her,” I said. “At least I did when I was a kid. Peggy Doyle.”

  “She went to school with you?”

  I nodded. “More than that. I told you my parents sent me on a summer study program to France when I was a teenager, didn’t I?”

  She nodded. “You said you were too young but they sent you anyway.”

  “I was a couple of months short of my fifteenth birthday, and everybody else on the course was older. But I was shy, always had my nose in a book, and my parents thought that sending me on a summer study program abroad would open up my horizons and give me more self-confidence.”

  Our school system was a wealthy one, full of the sons and daughters of doctors, lawyers and engineers, and the administration was keen on offering lots of opportunities for us. I could have studied Spanish in Salamanca, German in Frankfurt, or European history in Luxembourg. Instead my parents chose the French language program at the University of Grenoble.

  “I didn’t know any of the other kids, but Peggy adopted me and I tagged along with her and her friends. I never would have taken the cable car up to look over Grenoble, gone to the beach in Nice, or found my way to the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris, if she hadn’t taken me under her wing.”

  Lili smiled. “You were such a cutie pie back then. I’ve seen the pictures. So skinny yo
u disappeared if you turned sideways, with that mop of brown hair.”

  “And I’m not a cutie pie now?” I protested.

  “You filled out, and you’re losing your hair. Today I’d call you handsome, not cute.”

  I was mollified. “Peggy was so full of energy and enthusiasm that I couldn’t help liking her. Gradually I learned her back story – she was the oldest of four girls born in rat-a-tat order. She grew up in a run-down neighborhood in Trenton. Her father was a drunk who rarely worked, and her mother was a maid. Her father died when she was nine, and Peggy had to take care of her younger sisters and at night, help her mother with ironing and dressmaking.”

  “That’s so sad,” Lili said. “How did she get to Stewart’s Crossing?”

  Sad was one of Rochester’s words—whenever he heard someone say it, he hopped up and offered comfort in the form of a cold black nose and a long pink tongue. Lili petted him as he rested his head in her lap.

  “Three years after her father died, her mother married a widower she’d been cleaning for and moved the girls here to one of the big split levels on the other side of town. Once her family had some money, she babysat for neighbors, walked dogs and did whatever she could so she could go on that trip to France. I was amazed that after everything she’d been through, she was so eager to reach out and grasp everything the world had to offer.”

  “I’d think the opposite,” Lili said. “That her background would make her eager to see what the rest of the world was like.”

  I shook my head. “That’s because of who you are, and the way your parents moved around so much when you were a kid. Lots of the kids I grew up with had no desire to leave Bucks County—they wouldn’t even go on field trips to New York or Philadelphia. Look at Rick – he’s never lived anywhere but here.”

  Rick Stemper was my best friend, a police detective in Stewart’s Crossing. He had gone to the community college and the affiliated police academy, and he was perfectly happy to spend the rest of his life in his home town.

  “It doesn’t sound like Peggy got far, either,” Lili said.