There was some general grumbling from the audience, but Todd glared until everyone was quiet again. Then he turned to the committee. “Please return to the issue at hand. The rules are clear. There isn’t anything the board can do once a lien has been placed against a homeowner. Mr. Greenbaum will have to take out a mortgage against his mother’s property to pay off the lien or find a private buyer who will agree to pay off the lien.”
“How can you people be so heartless?” Greenbaum demanded. “My mother has lived here since River Bend was built.”
Earl Garner slammed his gavel against the table. “You heard the property manager. There’s nothing the association can do. We need to move on.”
Greenbaum stormed out of the building, hurling curses at Todd and the committee. I was glad that I wasn’t up next, because the committee and the crowd were still agitated, and the next homeowner was turned down almost immediately.
When my name was called, I handed each committee member the pages I had printed for them—my father’s deed, and the transfer to my name and several pictures of the house from different angles, that were date stamped soon after his purchase, and showed the sign in question.
“Because this sign was clearly visible over five years ago, it’s has been grandfathered in,” I said. “I’d like a letter from the association confirming that.”
“There’s no such thing as grandfathering,” Panaccio said.
“There is, according to section five, paragraph three of the by-laws.” I handed each of them a copy of the relevant section, and Garner, the attorney, read through it quickly.
“It appears there is,” he said, when he looked up. “I’ll have to make a note to the by-laws committee to review this so that we don’t have to make exceptions like this in the future. Request granted.”
Panaccio started to complain but Garner looked at him. “You may be a biologist, but you can read, can’t you, Oscar? The paragraph is pretty clear.”
Garner and Panaccio began arguing. I looked over at Todd Chatzky, and he nodded at me, so I stood up and walked out.
One small victory for the little guy, I thought, as I walked home. If only all my problems could be solved so easily.
6: Dark Discovery
I should have been happy that night. I’d won my small victory over the design committee. I was taking care of Joey’s responsibilities at Friar Lake. And I’d begun the process of bringing in more revenue.
But I found it hard to sleep. I worried about the future—how long could I hold on to my job, especially if I couldn’t do what President Babson wanted? If I had a heart attack like Joe Capodilupo, how could Lili manage to look after me and Rochester? I remembered a cartoon I’d seen online, an old man with a cane, who said, “Oh, crap, I forgot to have children to take care of me in my old age.”
When the clock’s digits finally clicked over to five am, I gave up and slipped out of bed. I dressed quietly so I wouldn’t disturb Lili, and padded downstairs, Rochester right behind me. I grabbed a flashlight and a plastic grocery bag and hooked up his leash.
The crescent moon looked like a courtesan resting on her back, the stars her attendants. A couple of houses had front lights on, and I saw the occasional light in a house, usually in an upper window behind glass blocks, which indicated a bathroom. For the most part, though, River Bend looked like the early scenes before an attack in one of those disaster movies, eerily quiet and empty.
Maybe because the side streets were so dark, Rochester was determined to walk along River Bend Drive, where period streetlamps reminded me of those from the Narnia books and movies. I half-expected Mr. Tumnus the faun to step out from behind one.
Much of the area close to the Delaware north of Stewart’s Crossing was swampy with a high water table. When River Bend was built, the developer had dredged a series of lakes, using the fill to build up the land for homes and townhouses. The centerpiece of the neighborhood was a pair of lakes with a tree-lined walkway between them. I took Rochester there only occasionally, because it was a long hike from Sarajevo Street.
That night, though, we both needed a good long walk. During the day we often saw birds there and the occasional small mammal, but there were no signs of life as we approached, not even the warning call of a bird or a duck.
We approached the pathway between the lakes, where a series of benches lined the path, facing each other at intervals. At night they were dark, boxy shapes that held a hint of menace, and I tried to hurry Rochester along. Something made him stop at one of the benches. It looked like a sprinkler had gone off in the middle of the night, leaving the pavement wet, and he wanted to sniff it.
Then a slight wind picked up, moving the night smells along, and I realized from the coppery tang in the air that it wasn’t water on the pavement. It was blood.
I tugged Rochester’s leash and pulled him back. With my hand low and tight around the flat cord, I took my phone out of my pocket and stepped closer. I initiated the flashlight app and used the light to follow the bloody trail that led beneath the bench. A two-foot wide space was between the back of the bench and the hedge that separated it from the lake behind.
A man’s body rested on the dirt behind the bench. “Oh my God,” I said. “Hello? Are you okay?”
There was no response except a low woof from Rochester. The bloody trail led back to the man’s stomach, which looked like it had been ripped open with a knife. I watched him for a moment, looking for a rise and fall of his chest, no matter how slight, but I couldn’t see anything.
If he was dead, then this was a crime scene, and I didn’t want to get close to him and contaminate it. If he was alive, there was nothing I could do to help him, with only rudimentary first aid skills. So I called 911.
“Please state the nature of your emergency,” a nearly robotic female voice said.
“I’m on River Bend Drive in Stewart’s Crossing and I found a man who has been stabbed,” I said, struggling to keep a quaver from my voice.
“Is he still breathing?”
“I don’t think so. There’s a lot of blood around his stomach, but it’s not still coming out of the body.”
“Step away from the body,” the woman said. “Give me your exact address.”
“There isn’t an exact address,” I said. “I’m somewhere between Trieste and Zagreb.”
“Trieste, Italy?”
“No. Trieste Drive and Zagreb Way. In Stewart’s Crossing. Use Google Maps if you can’t find it.”
“I am dispatching an ambulance and a police officer,” she said. “Please remain on the line.”
“I have to call the community security,” I said. “I’ll wait here for the police.”
I ended the call and pressed the button for the gatehouse at the Ferry Street entrance. “My name is Steve Levitan and I’m standing with my dog on the sidewalk between the two big lakes, off River Bend Drive. Can you please send the rover over here? There’s a dead man behind one of the benches.”
“Stay where you are,” the guard said. “I’ll have the rover come right over.”
One of the advantages of living in a gated community is that in addition to the guard at the gate, we have another who rides around the property, keeping an eye out for trouble. But by leaving the body hidden between the bench and the hedge, the killer had managed to keep the rover from noticing anything.
I looked back at the body, trying to see if I recognized him. His face was turned away from me, but I could establish that he was white, wearing dark slacks and a light-colored shirt in a pattern I couldn’t make out in the dim light. From the curled position of the body I couldn’t tell how tall he was, but he appeared to have an average build—not too slim, but not heavyset either.
Rochester kept straining toward the blood, and I had to take a couple of steps back. I sat on the opposite bench, petting his fur and letting his presence calm me, until I saw the green and yellow light bar on top of the rover’s SUV. I stood up and waved my phone toward the car, letting the flashligh
t beam bounce from tree to hedge.
The guard driving the rover parked at one end of the sidewalk and came up toward me, playing his flashlight on the pavement in front of him. He was a young African-American guy, barely older than the students at Eastern, and he looked nervous. “There’s a dead man here?” he asked.
I pointed my flashlight toward the bench. “Behind there. I already called 911.”
He stepped close, and I was about to warn him not to contaminate the scene when he stopped and shone his flashlight on the body. Then he stepped back and turned to me. “You were out walking your dog this early in the morning?”
“Couldn’t sleep. He sniffed the blood there and tugged me over.” I didn’t want to confuse the situation by noting that this was not the first dead body Rochester had found.
We stood together in an uneasy silence until his radio crackled. “Rover one, this is Ferry Gate. Ambulance on its way to your location.”
We both turned toward Ferry Street and watched as the lights of the ambulance approached. Before it came to a stop there was another call from the gate, that a police car was on its way as well.
I knew what was going to happen because I’d seen it before. Stewart’s Crossing didn’t have its own crime scene investigation unit; they would have to rely on one from the state police. A detective from the Stewart’s Crossing PD, either Rick or Jerry Vickers, would be summoned to the scene, depending on which was on call.
I decided to take control of that process and called Rick’s cell phone. He was usually at his desk by seven-thirty, and often rose early to go for a run, so I didn’t feel too bad about waking him—it was nearly five-thirty by then.
“What?” he said sleepily.
“Dead body. River Bend. Can you take it?”
“Oh, Steve. You’re killing me, you know that?”
“I know. I don’t like this any more than you do.”
“On my way. I’ll call dispatch and take it.”
The ambulance parked behind the rover’s SUV, and a pair of EMTs, a tall man and a shorter woman, approached us. Both were barely older than the security guard.
“He’s behind the bench,” I said, pointing, and the guard and I stepped out of their way.
The female EMT squeezed behind the bench, careful not to step in blood, and tried to take the man’s vital signs. Then she spoke into the radio on her shoulder. “At the scene on River Bend Drive. No sign of life.”
She stood as the police car pulled up. The officer who approached us was about the same age as the guard and the EMTs, and I felt old. “I’ll call for a detective and the crime scene unit,” he said. “No one touch anything, okay?”
I stood around awkwardly with the police officer, the security guard and the two EMTs. The female made friends with Rochester, squatting down to pet him, and he was happy with the attention.
The cop turned to me and the security guard. “Either of you recognize the man?”
“Can’t see his face, the way he’s turned,” I said. He had to be a River Bend resident, didn’t he? Who else would be on foot in the community in the middle of the night? There was no guest parking area nearby. The security patrol had been aggressive in ticketing cars parked there overnight, which was against yet another of the rules, so if he’d come in and parked, they ought to find the car eventually.
Two more police cars arrived, and the officers moved us down the sidewalk and set up a cordon around the area. Close to six o’clock, Rick arrived in his truck. He greeted the officers and the EMT, and then walked down to where I had been told to wait, by the farthest bench from the body.
“The CSI team is coming from the State Police barracks in Trevose,” he said. “Should be here within a half hour. Tell me exactly what happened.”
“I couldn’t sleep, so I got up at five to take Rochester for his walk,” I said. “It was dark and creepy, and Rochester wanted to stay where there are streetlights, so we walked up along River Bend Drive.”
I took a deep breath. “I didn’t see any people or vehicles out as we came over here. Rochester tugged me along the path between then lakes, and then stopped at a pile of something liquid.”
Despite the number of times this sort of thing had happened to me, it was still difficult to report. “At first I thought it was a malfunctioning sprinkler, but then the wind shifted and I smelled the blood. He kept tugging me toward the bench, and when I shone a light I saw the body and I reined him in before he could get close enough to disturb anything.”
I was relieved to come to the end of the story. “I called 911 and then the front gate. Then you. That’s all I can say.”
“You don’t know who it is?”
I shook my head. “Couldn’t see the face.” I visualized the body in my mind again, and something nagged at me about the pattern on the man’s gray shirt. Where had I seen that before? I concentrated, and Rochester nuzzled me, and then I remembered the houndstooth pattern I’d seen earlier that day.
“I think I know who it is,” I said.
7: Houndstooth
“Well, don’t keep a secret,” Rick said. “Who is it?”
“I can’t be a hundred percent sure without seeing his face, but I think it’s Todd Chatzky. He’s the association manager, and he came to a meeting last night of the design committee.”
I quickly ran through the letter I’d gotten and my victory. “Todd showed up toward the end of the meeting, and he was wearing a shirt with a houndstooth pattern. I remember looking at it and thinking that was a good sign, you know, the way those checks look like the edge of a dog’s tooth?” I knew I was rambling and took a deep breath.
“Stay here for a minute,” Rick said.
As he walked back toward the body, he fiddled with his cell phone, and then he used the flashlight as he knelt beside it, staying clear of the blood trail. Then he walked back to me. “Yeah, I checked the pattern online and it’s houndstooth. Seen that kind of pattern, but never made the connection before.”
He sat down beside me, and Rochester nuzzled his leg. “Tell me what you know about this manager guy.”
I ran through some of the problems going on in River Bend while we waited for the CSI team to arrive. “Lili turned me on to this online site called Hi, Neighbor. I haven’t looked at it too closely, but I’ve seen a lot of complaints posted by people who live here.” I mentioned some of the ongoing issues, like the inattention to landscaping, the broken sidewalk, and the fine management program.
“Sounds like a lot of people were unhappy with Mr. Chatzky,” Rick said when I finished.
“Unhappy, yeah. Like wanting to get him fired. Not killed.” I shivered. “There were a couple of people who said things at the meeting last night, but nothing serious.”
“Tell me,” Rick coaxed.
I explained the problem of the man with the black door, and how he had told the committee to fuck off and die. “I know, it’s not a real threat. I’m just repeating it.”
Then I told him about the Yiddish curse Drew Greenbaum had used.
“A sugar rope? Really? Do they even make something like that?”
I shrugged. “Maybe back in the old country. Most of the Yiddish phrases my parents used didn’t make any sense. I remember my mother used to have this phrase when she thought something was useless. When I asked her what it meant, she had to go into a long business about how doctors used to use leeches on sick people, and this phrase was that it was as useful as using leeches on the dead.”
“You Jews certainly have colorful language,” Rick said. “The worst thing my father ever said to me when I was misbehaving was ‘I hope you grow up to have children like you.’”
“Yeah, my parents said that one, too. I used to counter my father with ‘I hope I don’t have a child like you!’”
I shrugged. “Guess neither of us are going to have that problem.”
“I don’t know. If I marry Tamsen, I’ll get to help raise Justin as he goes through adolescence.”
“Feel free to
complain anytime, then.”
The sun was rising, and River Bend was waking up, the streets beginning to fill up with early morning dog walkers, parents taking their kids to school, and people leaving for work. Lots of cars slowed down as they passed the cluster of official vehicles, but the security guard kept them moving.
The CSI team arrived and began their work, Rick stood up to walk over to them. I texted Lili that Rochester and I were sitting out by the lake looking at the sunrise—which was true, though not the whole story. I’d tell her the rest when I saw her.
Rick asked me to stay until the CSI team was able to turn the body so that the man’s head was visible. “Just confirm for me what you told me,” he said. “That it’s Mr. Chatzky.”
When he was ready, I walked over with him, keeping Rochester’s leash tight. “Yeah, that’s Todd,” I said.
“All right. You go home. Have some hot tea, get a good breakfast in you. You’ll feel better after that. I’ll get in touch with you later to learn more about this Hi Neighbor site.”
I agreed and walked Rochester back home. Fortunately, he’d done his business before we discovered Todd’s body, so we were able to move quickly. Even so, Lili was up in the kitchen waiting for us. “You were gone a long time,” she said.
I sat at the kitchen table. The sense of what I’d seen caught up with me, and I didn’t think I could move for a while. “Can you feed Rochester and make me some tea?” I asked. “And then I’ll tell you.”
She poured chow in a bowl for Rochester and sprinkled it with a packet of probiotic dust, then put it down for him. She put the teakettle on the stove and then came to sit across from me. “What’s wrong?”
Slowly, I told her everything that had happened that morning. “Oh, Steve,” she said, and she took my hand. “How terrible.”
I was glad that she didn’t complain that Rochester kept finding bodies. I wasn’t ready for any kind of light-hearted comment.
“I know there was nothing I could do for him by the time we found him, but I still feel pretty awful.”
Dog's Green Earth Page 4
