Three Dogs in a Row Read online

  “Yeah, I thought I’d bring him to class with me today.”

  “You can’t do that, Steve. Haven’t you noticed the signs?”

  She pointed to one a few feet away from us, at the entrance to the lot. “No animals permitted on the Eastern campus,” it read.

  I’d never noticed it, because it had never mattered before. “What am I going to do?” I asked. “I have to teach in ten minutes.”

  “I’ll take him up to my office,” she said. “You can pick him up when your class is over.”

  “Thanks.” We walked together to Blair Hall, Rochester stopping to sniff and pee. “I never thought about it,” I said. “I told you that girl brought her dog to freshman comp.”

  “There’s a difference between a little dog you can stick in a purse and a big moose,” she said. “I’d never bring Samson here.”

  All the way to Blair Hall, I kept looking around for college security, expecting them to come roaring up in a little golf cart and insist that Rochester leave the campus. We made it without incident, though when I handed his leash to Jackie he gave me a look that spoke volumes about abandonment.

  I hurried through my presentation on resumes and cover letters and galloped up the stairs to Jackie’s office on the third floor. I needn’t have worried; Rochester was sprawled between piles of books.

  “As long as you’re up here, you should take him to the dog park,” Jackie said.

  “Where’s that?”

  “Down by the river at the foot of the hill. Just below Birthday House.”

  “You want to do that, Rochester?” I asked. “You want to go to the dog park?”

  He tried to do one of his crazy kangaroo jumps, which was just about impossible in Jackie’s crowded office. He knocked over a pile of papers, and when I picked it up I saw one by Menno Zook on the top. “You have Menno, too?” I asked.

  “Last term,” she said. She reached down to rub Rochester’s neck as I hooked his leash. I should have gone right home and worked on my business plan, but I felt like playing a little hooky. If my students could throw together their papers at the last minute, I could delay my business plan for a few more days.

  Rather than walk through campus to Birthday Hall, I scrambled Rochester back into the Beemer and drove down to the river.

  Tasheba Lewis was lounging just inside the dog park fence watching Romeo sniff the butt of a Doberman Pinscher, who seemed to be enjoying the experience. “Hi, Mr. Levitan,” she said as we walked in.

  Rochester began trying to hump poor little Romeo. I tugged on his leash and pulled him off. “Rochester! Sit!”

  “Oh, I know Rochester,” she said. “I thought he belonged to a lady.”

  “My next-door neighbor,” I said. “Did you know her?”

  Tasheba picked Romeo up on her lap and sat down on an ornately-scrolled wrought-iron bench. Rochester put his head right in her lap to continue sniffing Romeo’s private parts.

  “Just here at the park,” Tasheba said. “She liked to talk about skin care.”

  “Skin care?”

  “I use Clinique but she used Kiehl’s,” she said. “We always compared notes.”

  I wished Tasheba had paid as much attention to her notes for freshman comp. “You can let him off his leash, you know,” she said. “He can’t get away.”

  “But what if he goes crazy on some little dog?” I asked.

  “The little dogs can take care of themselves,” she said, as Romeo growled at Rochester, tired of the inquisition.

  I unhooked Rochester’s leash, and he went bounding away from me, toward a pair of whippets. I sat down next to Tasheba and watched Rochester. If only Caroline had said something useful to someone—Tasheba, some other dog owner, Gail at The Chocolate Ear—even me. Then I’d have some place to look for who killed her.

  Tasheba and Romeo left, and after a long time spent running around the dog park, sniffing and pawing and trying to mount every other dog, Rochester’s battery wore down and he came back to sprawl at my feet.

  “Do you know anything about what happened to your mom?” I asked, reaching down to rub behind his ears. “I wish you could tell me if you did.”

  I thought he was tired out, and I considered leaving him off the leash for the walk back to my car—but I was glad I didn’t. Just after we left the dog park I saw three of my freshman comp students—Menno Zook, Melissa Macaretti, and Jeremy Eisenberg, walking together on their way somewhere. I hoped they were going to the library, but more likely they were off to throw Frisbees or buy drugs or burn textbooks on the lawn of Blair Hall.

  “Hey, Professor,” Melissa said. She wasn’t wearing her usual uniform of Fair Isle sweater and plaid kilt; instead she wore black pants and a white blouse under an open parka. I saw the edge of a tattoo peeking out just above her collar.

  Menno and Jeremy were dressed like typical college males—jeans that rode down around their hips, baggy t-shirts advertising some hip-hop artist, hooded sweatshirts artfully left open. The only things that distinguished them were Menno’s Biblical beard and Jeremy’s multiple piercings. He was wearing matching earrings, which looked like pencils stuck through his earlobes rather than behind his ears. They both echoed Melissa’s greeting, though with somewhat less enthusiasm.

  Rochester went nuts, barking and jumping and straining at his leash. “Sorry,” I said. “He’s not usually like this.”

  Menno gave me one of the looks he reserved for Tasheba and Romeo. “He’s a pretty dog,” Melissa said tentatively.

  “Pretty badly behaved at the moment,” I said, wrestling him away from them. “Have a nice afternoon,” I said over my shoulder, as I dragged Rochester down the lawn toward my car. He didn’t settle down until we’d reached the parking lot.

  “What’s up with you, psycho dog?” I asked. “You get overheated running around out there in the dog park?”

  His only response was to climb back into the front well of the Beemer.

  8 – Our Lady of Sorrows

  Romeo was back with Tasheba on Wednesday, sitting in his Burberry bag, though at some point he’d lost his matching bow. It didn’t go with his image. “In honor of Romeo’s return, let’s talk about doggerel,” I said, after the class had settled down. I pulled out our text and found the definition in the index. “Doggerel is defined as ‘crudely or irregularly fashioned verse, often of a humorous or burlesque nature.’” I paged forward in the book as I said, “Let’s see if we can find some examples.”

  We read through some Ogden Nash, and Menno Zook perked up when he heard about purple cows. “There’s no such thing as a purple cow,” he said. It was clear he thought the rest of the class believed that there were, the way they thought milk came from a refrigerated cabinet at the grocery store, not the udders of a big sloppy farm animal. And perhaps some of the city-bred students, like the three Jeremys, Dianne and Dionne, thought so.

  “That’s right, Menno,” I said. “That’s where the humorous part comes in.” In his denim overalls and plain white shirt, Menno didn’t look like he had much of a sense of humor, but I persevered. All he needed was one of those straw hats to look like an Amish farmer. Though Lancaster, a big Amish stronghold, is just a couple of hours west of us, I somehow doubted Eastern did much recruiting there.

  “Here’s another example, again in honor of Romeo,” I said. I turned to the board and wrote two lines there.

  Turning back to the class, I said, “Alexander Pope wrote this: ‘I am his majesty’s dog at Kew; pray tell me sir, whose dog are you?’ What can we say about this poem?”

  Either Dianne or Dionne said, “It’s a couplet.”

  “That’s true. Remember, we said that a two-line stanza is called a couplet. This is a particular type of couplet—an epigram. Two lines that rhyme, and make a clever or humorous statement.” I looked around. “Anything else?”

  Melissa Macaretti said, “The dog is a metaphor, isn’t it?” She was as rigorous in her clothing as Menno, back in her standard uniform of kilt and sweater
. Her dun-colored hair hung around her head in shapeless waves, tamed by a white headband.

  “Absolutely,” I said. “Pope is saying that anyone who can be jerked around by a boss – on a leash, if you will—is a dog, metaphorically speaking.” I guessed that made me Santiago Santos’s dog, I thought with a jolt, remembering my still unfinished business plan.

  “Or a student,” Jeremy Eisenberg said, half under his breath, and we shifted into a discussion of simile and metaphor, and the class sped by—at least for me. I can’t speak for the students.

  The next day I met with the mystery fiction class, which I referred to as my “grocery list.” The students included Beri, Honey, Felae, Candy, Dezhanne, and Cinnamon; I told Jackie I got hungry just calling roll.

  We were reading a Raymond Chandler story at the time, and we talked a lot about the hard-boiled tone. “He’s just so matter-of-fact about people dying,” Beri complained. She was a sunny blonde who wore skirts so short they just covered her butt. “I mean, I know people who have died, and I’ve been bummed out.”

  “But Chandler doesn’t know these people,” Dezhanne said. She wore a T-shirt which read, “Change is inevitable, except from vending machines,” and I had managed so far in the semester to avoid asking her if she knew she had been named after a mustard. “It’s different when someone you know dies.”

  “And it’s different how they die,” Felae said. He was from Moldova or Romania or some other gloomy Eastern European place that had been immortalized as a model or street name in River Bend. It had been built when the Soviet bloc was breaking up, so each model was named for a country and each street for a city. My two-bedroom townhouse, with an attached garage, was the Latvia. Caroline’s, which had no garage, was the Estonia. I knew there were models for Serbia, Lithuania, and Croatia. The largest was the Montenegro, which I’d heard one of my neighbors call the Mount Negro.

  I lived on Sarajevo Court, which ran into Minsk Lane. I thought it was funny that my grandparents and great-grandparents had struggled to escape the real Minsk, only to have me end up driving past street signs that would have read better in the Cyrillic alphabet. It was that old demon, irony, again—like the year I spent sharing a tenement apartment on New York’s Lower East Side with my graduate school friend Tor, paying a thousand dollars a month. I discovered, when my parents came for a visit, that my father’s family had lived down the block for a few years upon their arrival in the New World. “At least you have a toilet inside,” he’d said at the time.

  Felae had a mordant view of the murder mystery. “It’s one thing to have your grandmother die of a heart attack, and another to have her throat sliced.” He was a husky, dark-haired guy, like a Russian spy in some BBC Cold War drama, while the rest of the class would be innocent bystanders killed during a terrorist attack.

  Beri, Honey and Dezhanne made groaning noises, and I tried to divert the conversation back to discussing the story’s literary merit. Driving to Center City Philadelphia later, though, I kept thinking about what the students had said. If Caroline Kelly had been felled by a massive heart attack, a stroke, even a cancerous tumor, would I have felt as I did?

  I had to put aside those thoughts, though, when I got into the city, stuck for blocks behind a family of born-again Christians from Massachusetts driving a Volvo wagon filled with herb tea. I resisted the urge to slam into their bumper to see if Jesus would protect them from fender-benders. I had a feeling he wouldn’t.

  Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrow was a small, somber building, built of gray stone, with a stained glass window of the Virgin Mary facing the street. I arrived at the church, a block off Rittenhouse Square, just before Caroline’s memorial service began. About a dozen people were seated up front, and I slipped into a pew by myself. A middle-aged priest in a black cassock read a few prayers, and then a couple of Caroline’s co-workers walked up to the pulpit to speak about her.

  The last one was Evelina Curcio, who said that Caroline had been her mentor. “As you all know, when Caroline came to Quaker State Bank I was her secretary,” Evelina said. “I was having a tough time finishing up the last courses for my associate’s degree, and Caroline was very good to me. So many nights she stayed late to help me with my homework, and she kept telling me, ‘You can do it, Evelina. You can do it.’”

  Her voice broke, and it took her a moment to regain her composure. She was a stout woman in her late thirties, Caroline’s age, with frizzy brown hair. She wore a neat dark suit and sensible black shoes, and spoke with the same gentle accent I’d heard on the voice mail system.

  “It’s thanks to her that I got my promotion out of the secretarial pool. And as you may already know, I’m graduating with my associate’s in May, and I’m going to start on my bachelor’s at Temple in the fall.” There was some light applause in the audience. “And it’s all thanks to Caroline. I know that God has made her one of his special angels.”

  The priest returned to the pulpit for a few final prayers, and then invited everyone to share some refreshments, sponsored by the bank, in the social hall.

  As I was getting up to follow the others out of the sanctuary, I spotted Rick Stemper behind me, and I lagged back to talk to him.

  “What brings you down here?” he asked.

  “I could ask you the same thing.”

  “It’s my job,” he said. “What about you?”

  I told him about what I’d learned about Caroline’s predecessor, and this time he didn’t ask how I’d found out. We walked down a musty hallway, and he said, “I spoke to Evelina Curcio a couple of days ago and she didn’t say anything about a previous boss.”

  “That’s why I think she might talk to me,” I said. “Nothing personal, Rick, but you’re a cop.”

  “You noticed.”

  “Let me give it a try, all right?”

  He shrugged, but after pulling a bottle of cold water from a tray I walked over to Evelina Curcio and introduced myself. “Your remarks were very moving,” I said.

  “Thank you. Even though Caroline was my boss, I thought of her as my friend.”

  “I wish I’d known her better,” I said. We talked for a few minutes, and I told her that I had adopted Rochester.

  “Oh, Caroline would be so happy,” she said. “She loved that dog.”

  “He’s very lovable.” I paused. “I just wish I knew more about what could have happened to her,” I said. “It haunts me, you know? Seeing her like that, and then living next door to her house, and having her dog—she’s always on my mind.”

  I looked at Evelina. “Do you have any idea who wanted to hurt her?”

  She shook her head. “She didn’t tell me much about her background,” she said. “Just that she’d moved around a lot. And she was still trying to get settled here, and maybe to find herself a guy.”

  “What about at work?” I asked. “I understood there was some bad blood about her promotion.”

  She squirmed a bit, and cast a guilty look around us to see who might be listening. The rest of the bank’s employees were talking together in a group, though, and so Evelina lowered her voice and said, “Mr. Hemminger—Caroline’s boss. He was the manager of financial planning and analysis, and her title was senior analyst.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Every company has financial assets,” she said. “Cash, securities, real property, and so on. Caroline would study interest rates and make decisions about how to invest the bank’s money. Sometimes she would look at decisions Mr. Hemminger made and she wouldn’t agree with them. But he wouldn’t listen to her.”

  She looked around again, just to make sure no one was overhearing us. “She got suspicious and started looking into his decisions. She asked me to help her.”

  “It’s obvious she trusted you.”

  She smiled weakly. “We found what Caroline thought was a suspicious pattern. Mr. Hemminger had been buying corporate bonds from a real estate development company, but they weren’t the right grade.”

  “Grade?”
I asked.

  “We only bought double-A bonds or better. These were BBB—it just means they weren’t as safe as double-A. There was more chance that this real estate company would default on paying the bonds and then the bank would be stuck.”

  I nodded. “OK. I get it.”

  “Caroline did some searching, and she discovered that the company was run by Mr. Hemminger’s brother-in-law, and they were in some financial trouble. She thought it was unethical for him to be investing in those bonds, and she reported him to the president of the bank.”

  We were getting somewhere. “I’ll bet he didn’t like that.”

  She shook her head. “No, he didn’t. He was suspended, and as the security guards were escorting him past Caroline’s office he stopped to yell at her.”

  “You were there?”

  She nodded. “He told her that she would be sorry she messed with him.” She shivered with the memory.

  “Wow. That must have upset her.”

  “It did. Afterward, she was crying in her office. I had to sit with her and keep telling her that she did the right thing.”

  “You were a good friend to her.”

  She smiled. “I owed her so much.”

  “What happened?” I asked. “To this guy Hemminger?”

  “He filed a lawsuit against the bank. The lawyers said Caroline was going to have to testify.”

  Rick was going to love this, I thought. Here was a motive wrapped up with a red ribbon. “I’ll bet that scared her,” I said. “Especially after he threatened her.”

  One of Evelina’s coworkers, a man in a navy suit with a red tie, came over to say something to her, and I shook her hand and walked away. The rest of the employees were walking out together, and I ended up leaving with Rick Stemper.

  “You drive in or take the train?” he asked.

  “Drove. You?”

  “Train. You can give me a ride back to the Yardley station.”

  In the car, creeping up I-95 at rush hour in the commuter lane, I told him what Evelina Curcio had told me. “I’ll check it out,” he said.