Dog's Green Earth

by Neil S. Plakcy

  Even so, he threatened to follow through with a lawsuit if the association’s insurance carrier wouldn’t pay his wife’s bills, and his anger radiated from the screen. The last line of his latest post was “The next time I see Todd Chatzky I’m going to make sure he hurts as much as Rosemary.”

  Not exactly a death threat, but once again, a time when anger could have taken over common sense and led to Todd’s death.

  Rochester nudged me to remind me it was time for his bedtime walk. Mindful of what had happened to Rosemary Spahr, I took a flashlight with me, shining it ahead of us as we walked to make sure no pothole or pile of debris came into our path.

  9: Suspect List

  Thursday morning dawned rainy and windy, and I had to hurry Rochester through his morning walk, turning around as soon as he finished his business. Then we shared a rowdy few minutes in the kitchen as I tried to dry him and he preferred to shake all over me. Good times.

  He was still damp by the time we had finished breakfast, so I hung a big towel from the headrest on the passenger seat of the BMW. Instead of settling in easily, he pawed it and rolled around until he had created a cushion beneath his butt. “Happy now?” I asked before I put the car in gear.

  He looked up at me mournfully, and I couldn’t help laughing.

  It hadn’t rained up at Friar Lake, and that morning, Rochester and I walked all around Friar Lake looking for potential problem areas. I tried to look at everything through Joey’s eyes instead of my own, focusing on the physical plant.

  Leaves were strewn on the curving road that led up to the hilltop property. Technically, those were the responsibility of the county, which maintained the road, but I wanted the executive leadership team to get a good first impression of Friar Lake, which meant I had to dispatch Juan and Rigoberto with their leaf blowers.

  The exterior windows of the gatehouse needed a good scrub, but the rest of the building looked fine, from the stone threshold to the sloped tile roof. The guys had done a good job cleaning the chapel the day before; the wood rails gleamed with polish, the floors were dust-free, and daylight streamed through the stained-glass windows.

  The hedge around the dormitories needed to be trimmed, and the reception area inside, where a clerk sat when we had folks in residence, smelled too much like ammonia. I checked the wall-mounted air fresheners and discovered that most of them had run out. I made a note to check for new ones in Joey’s stash and get them installed.

  There were at least a dozen items on my to-do list by the time Joey arrived, though they were all minor, and things that crept up on you when you were busy with bigger issues. He showed up as I was finishing my lunch out at one of the picnic tables, Rochester by my side waiting for roast beef tidbits. He was torn between food and Joey, but eventually broke away from me and romped over to Joey.

  “That’s a good boy,” Joey said, scratching behind his ears. “You smell your buddy Brody on me? We’ll have to get you guys together for a play date soon.”

  Joey looked better than he had the day before – he was wearing an Eastern polo shirt, with the rising sun logo on the breast, and the dark circles under his eyes were lighter. But as we got into the details of what had to be done for Friday, his stress popped up again.

  “These are all quick fixes,” I said. “I already sent Juan and Rigoberto out to the road to blow the leaves, and they should be done soon.”

  “Yeah, they were about halfway up the road when I came in.”

  “Let’s see what you and I can accomplish ourselves, and while we’re doing that you can look around for anything else that needs to be done.”

  We replaced the air fresheners and a dead light bulb in one of the classrooms and walked through each of the buildings. Joey had a keener eye than I did, and he found a few more things to fix or replace.

  During that walk, Juan and Rigoberto returned from leaf-blowing and we set them to trimming hedges and general clean up. By the time Joey and I were ready to leave at four o’clock, the only things that remained were a couple of small items I could get done the next morning before the bigwigs arrived.

  “I should be here too,” Joey said. “In case Walter wants to walk around or talk to me after the meeting.”

  “What time is your dad’s surgery?”

  “They’re taking him in for prep at seven-thirty,” he said. “My mom and my brothers and I will be there then, and my brothers are going to leave for work as soon as he goes into surgery. The doctor says they won’t get started until nine at the earliest, and the operation should take between four and six hours.”

  “That’s good. You can come up here after they take him in, and then leave as soon as the lunch is over and Walter is done with you.”

  “I hate the thought of leaving my mom there all alone,” Joey said.

  “The truth is that neither of you can do anything. Can Mark go over and sit with her for a while?”

  “He doesn’t open the store until noon, so I guess he can stay with her. And my sister-in-law Becky could go over for a while until she has to pick the kids up from school.”

  “See, you can manage. And the most important thing will be to be there when he wakes up from the surgery. He’ll be in the ICU, right? So I’m sure they have limited visiting hours. Once he’s awake and resting you can spend time with him over the weekend.”

  After Joey left to return to the hospital, I got a text from Rick asking if I was free to meet him at our favorite hangout, the Drunken Hessian, a bar in the center of Stewart’s Crossing.

  I replied with the word yes and a couple of beer mug emoticons. I did some more paperwork, then shut down the computer and hurried home so that I could feed and walk Rochester before meeting Rick at the Drunken Hessian. Lili was out at photography exhibition in New Hope, so I left the dog alone, with such a big collection of bones and chew toys that it looked like a pet store threw up in my living room.

  The Drunken Hessian was a bar slash tourist trap in the center of town. A plaque outside said that an inn of some kind had been on that spot since the Revolutionary War, and the décor hadn’t much changed, except for the introduction of indoor plumbing. The sign depicted one of the Hessian soldiers whom Washington had surprised at Trenton on Christmas day, looking like he’d had quite a few too many.

  It was a two-story building painted white, with dark green shutters. Small windows indicated rooms on the upper floor that had once been rented out but were now used for storage. In warm weather you could sit on the broad front porch and watch the traffic trickle by on Main Street.

  I met Rick in the parking lot and we walked in together. He looked like he hadn’t been getting much sleep, and I felt guilty that I’d woken him up the day before and essentially shoved the case on to his plate. “If I hadn’t called you, would you still have gotten the murder case?” I asked. “Or would it have gone to Jerry?”

  “I was up next on the roster. The call from dispatch came in about five minutes after your call, but at least I was awake then and could sound coherent.”

  We walked into the dim bar, past the sign that read “Suit Yourself and Seat Yourself.” We picked up a couple of plastic menus, though we already knew what we were going to order, and chose a booth toward the back. The server, a skinny kid in a red and blue Hawaiian shirt and pink shorts, hustled over to us. “Dogfish Head Amber Ale, no glass,” I said. “Ham cheeseburger, medium rare, with fries.”

  “Ditto on the beer, but I’ll have bacon on my cheeseburger, and I don’t want to see any blood.”

  “Medium well, then,” the server said. “Back with your beers in a minute.”

  “Too much blood in your daily life?” I asked.

  “I grew up on McDonalds burgers. They come one way – done.” He sat back against the tall wooden booth. “You get any ideas from that website?”

  “A couple,” I said. He pulled out his leather-bound notebook and I told him about Drew Greenbaum and the lien against his mother’s house. “I can’t make a connection that killing T
odd would help Drew, but he was really angry when he left the design committee meeting.”

  “Anger is always a good motivation,” Rick said.

  The server brought our beers. “I’m still going through all the material from Hi Neighbor, but I found one direct threat against Todd, from a guy named Zane Spahr.”

  “Spell it?”

  I did. “His wife complained to Todd about potholes in the street, and one day she was out power walking, stumbled over one and fractured her tibia. Her husband says it’s all Todd’s fault, that he should have fixed those potholes as soon as she notified him.”

  “Not a very happy place, your River Bend,” Rick said. “Makes me glad I don’t live in a homeowner’s association.”

  Rick had bought his parents’ home when they retired to Florida, in a neighborhood near the one where I had grown up. The houses there were fifty or sixty years old, split levels and ranches, with established landscaping, perfect for families. Tamsen, on the other hand, lived in a newer development in the hills outside town. “Is there an HOA where Tamsen lives?”

  He shook his head. “There’s a movement to start one, so they can build a wall around the community and put up a guard gate at the entrance. With all the petty crime going on in town right now it’s gaining momentum, though I don’t think it will do any good. And it’ll create a whole level of hassle nobody needs.”

  The server brought our burgers. I sliced mine in half so that it was less likely to fall apart on me and was pleased to see it was just how I liked it, a rich pink in the middle.

  “Can the medical examiner narrow down the time of death?”

  “Closer. Between nine PM and midnight.”

  We ate in silence for a minute or two. “Do you know anything about the weapon?”

  “A knife with a smooth edge, not serrated. Blade at least five inches long.”

  “I have a knife that I inherited from my father,” I said. “It’s about the right length and has a sharp blade. It fits in a leather holster that snaps on to my belt.”

  “And you carry this?”

  I shook my head. “It’s in a drawer in my bedroom. Last time I used it was to cut some branches that sprawled over into the courtyard.” I picked up my burger again. “The point is that it’s not that uncommon to have a knife like that, and a guy could carry it on his belt, you know, in case he ever needs to use it.”

  Rick looked at me. “For what purpose?”

  “Rochester has gotten his leash tangled in bushes a couple of times, and I’ve had to break the branch to get him loose. You get a pebble in your shoe, a knife blade is a good way to get it out. I could list you a half dozen other reasons.”

  “I’ll trust you on that.”

  We finished up and Rick told me he’d investigate Drew Greenbaum, and Zane Spahr. “And I’ll keep looking through Hi Neighbor.”

  “Seems like the site ought to be called Goodbye Neighbor,” he said.

  “I’ll send them a message about it.”

  10: The Way the World Works

  Friday morning I took Rochester out at dawn. Maybe it was just the turns we took, but the neighborhood looked much friendlier than it had two days before. Intermittent streetlights were still on along the curving streets of River Bend. Many houses had installed small solar lights along driveways and leading up to front doors – which I was sure the design committee would object to, even though I thought they were nice.

  Then we turned a corner to discover one of those lights shattered on the street in front of a house on Bratislava Place, and I had to pull Rochester away so he didn’t get glass in his paws. I realized that bulb and its casing had been on the street for a couple of days. Why hadn’t the maintenance man who rode around in a golf cart emptying the dog waste cans and picking up tree branches cleaned that up? Or the person or family that lived in the house?

  Maybe there was a point to restricting some elements of home design, if people weren’t going to clean up their own problems. Not signs like mine, though.

  On every block it seemed a father in business suit or a mother in sweatpants and T-shirt was hurrying sleepy-eyed kids into the car. The public-school bus picked up kids at either end of River Bend, so parents often drove their kids the couple of blocks to the exit, or even to local private schools like the George School in Newtown.

  When I was a kid there were no gated communities, and the school bus traveled through The Lakes, the neighborhood where I’d grown up. The bus stop was around the corner from our house, so in winter I’d stay inside until I saw it lumbering down the street, then make a last-minute dash to the stop to hop on.

  My father thought that was the ultimate in laziness. He had grown up in Newark, and it cost a nickel to ride the streetcar to his high school. He almost always walked, to save the nickel. And the snow was a lot higher back then, and life was harder.

  Yeah, I remembered the stories. But I would have no kids to repeat those stories to, or to tell stories of my own.

  When I got to Friar Lake at nine, Rigoberto and Juan were already hard at work. Juan swept the front steps of the chapel, while Rigoberto ran the leaf blower through the parking lot one last time.

  Rochester and I walked the whole property, looking for last minute problems, and then at ten o’clock the caterers arrived. I let them in the rear of the chapel and showed them around the kitchen. We’d used the same company for the past year, but they had a high turnover rate, so the staff was always new.

  They’d forgotten an extension cord, so I had to get them one from Joey’s office. I was running all around the property until eleven-thirty, when President Babson’s secretary Cecilia Sanchez pulled up in her vintage Ford Mustang. She was a charming Venezuelan woman who ruled Babson’s office with a velvet glove over an iron hand.

  “How’s everything going?” she asked, after we’d said hello.

  “All in hand.” I’d banished Juan and Rigoberto to the rear of the property, where they could trim some of the trees that bordered on the nature preserve – keeping busy but not interfering with the event.

  Joey rushed past us in his truck as we walked up to the chapel. Cecilia raised a well-trimmed eyebrow but said nothing, and I walked her through all our preparations. The next hour moved quickly as members of the board of directors and the executive council arrived. President Babson stood on the steps of the chapel greeting everyone with handshakes and hugs.

  He had aged since I first returned to Eastern some five years before, but it I couldn’t see it. His jet-black hair showed no signs of gray, and he worked the crowd with the enthusiasm of a man twenty years younger. I had heard rumors that he might retire when he reached sixty-five, in a year or so, but I doubted it. He lived and breathed our very good small college, and I couldn’t imagine him doing anything other than running it.

  Walter Gibbs arrived in the middle of the crowd. He was a tall man with ebony skin, gray streaks in his black hair, and a slight stoop. I noticed the way he stood by his car surveying the property and hoped he wouldn’t find anything to complain to Joey about.

  I hadn’t been invited to the meeting, or the lunch following, so I stayed in the kitchen, where I could eavesdrop. Babson gave an eloquent speech about the state of the college, citing rising average SAT scores and the percentage of students who had been valedictorians or salutatorians at their high schools.

  “We are also increasing the representation of students who are the first in their family to go to college,” he said. “As you may know, we tread a delicate line in our attempts to achieve diversity in our student body. We will never set racial quotas or give preferential treatment to any minority group, but by focusing on those who need our help to become successful college students, we feel we are achieving our diversity goals.”

  That was a clever work-around. Sure, there were white students who were the first in their families to go to college, many of them children of immigrants. But it was also a way to give an extra boost to minority students without favoring them because of th
eir race.

  “We have added some language to our non-discrimination statement as well.” He looked down at the paper in front of him and read, “Eastern College does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, ethnicity, genetic information, national origin, marital status, sex, disability, or age in its programs or activities.”

  One of the board members, an older woman with a blonde bouffant whose family owned the biggest car dealership in the Delaware Valley, raised her hand. “What does that mean, genetic information?”

  I could see Babson trying to figure out how to answer that while remaining politically correct. Cecilia stood up and walked over to him and handed him her phone. He peered down at it. “Ah yes, here’s the government regulation. I’m quoting here. The Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act of 2008, also referred to as GINA, is a federal law that protects Americans from being treated unfairly because of differences in their DNA that may affect their health. The law prevents discrimination from health insurers and employers.”

  He handed the phone back to Cecilia, who returned to her place. “What that means in a nutshell is that we’ve always had people among us who feel that they were born into the wrong gender, but now they feel more comfortable expressing that concern and taking steps to become more comfortable in who they are.”

  He leaned forward. I’d always believed he had students’ best interest at heart, no matter what he did, and I admired him for that. “We are also seeing a trend in our students toward gender non-conformity—young women who prefer to wear men’s clothes, for example, without specifically making a statement about their sexual orientation. We want all those people, our students, faculty and staff, to feel comfortable at Eastern.”

  Walter Gibbs raised his hand then, and Babson called on him. “The issue of bathroom use has gotten a lot of press lately, and as a result, I’ve initiated a survey of all restroom facilities in college buildings. We’ll shortly be preparing a brochure indicating the location of all single-use restroom facilities so that everyone can feel comfortable using them.”