I called her and got no answer. That was a surprise; it was Sunday night, and I knew she didn’t like to drive after dark. I was worried enough to call Gail Dukowski and see if she knew anything.
I liked Gail, and I’d always been attracted to pretty blondes with a head for business. “I hope it’s not too late to call,” I said, when she answered. “I know you get up early to bake.”
“No, it’s OK,” she said. “What’s up?”
I wondered if she’d go out with me, if I asked. That wasn’t what I’d called for, but the thought jumped unbidden into my mind.
Then I remembered my felony conviction, and focused on the business at hand. “I called Edith’s and she didn’t answer. Do you know if she went out of town?”
“Yes, she went to see her cousin in Charleston,” Gail said. “Just for a few days, though. I think she’ll be back Tuesday or Wednesday.” She sighed. “She’s having her handyman recaulk her tub and shower while she’s gone. I wish I had a guy who could do that sort of thing for me.”
I laughed. “You’d probably want more than just caulking,” I said.
She laughed, too. “Well, yeah. And it wouldn’t hurt if he was cute and had a sense of humor.”
I had the definite impression that Gail was flirting with me, and so I flirted back. “Modern women,” I said. “You want it all.”
We carried on like that for a few minutes, and when we hung up I was smiling.
The smile faded once I checked the balance of the fraudulent account. A lot of money was moving around, but the account held a minimal balance. A few weeks before, there had been a $400,000 deposit—one which had remained in the account just long enough for the check to clear.
Poor Edith, I thought. She had been victimized. I wondered if the culprit was the handyman she’d mentioned; but if you were smart enough to cheat an old lady out of $400,000, would you come back to caulk her bathtub? I wouldn’t.
On Tuesday afternoon, I stopped by Jackie’s office after class to say hello. I saw Menno Zook coming out and remembered that she taught the developmental writing class, and that she’d mentioned him to me at the start of the semester. She’d had him as a student in the fall and liked him, though she knew he was going through a rough patch getting accustomed to college.
“How’s Menno doing?” I asked. “Is he complaining about me?”
She shook her head. “No, he thinks your class is fine. I’m just his general sounding board. I can relate to him. He’s like me. A fish out of water. We’re both far removed from our home environments.”
Jackie had grown up in Newark, the oldest of three kids in a single-parent household, and I figured it hadn’t been easy for her. Menno’s life was dramatically different, growing up on a farm in Amish country. But I could see her point; he was the only Amish kid at Eastern, as far as I knew, and though there were a sprinkling of other black faculty and black students, she had to feel isolated.
“How are things going?” I asked, settling into the chair across from her.
She shrugged. “Swamped, as usual.” She pointed at a stack of papers. “That’s my afternoon and evening project. Sometimes I wish I could just run them all through a paper shredder and be done with it.”
“Give it a try sometime,” I said. “See if the students notice the difference.”
She laughed. “You are a bad influence on me. And if I let you stay in my office, I’ll never get any grading done. Begone with you.”
“Have it your way,” I said, standing up. “But you could just give them all A’s and then you’d have plenty of time to hang with me.”
“And when Lucas Roosevelt found out, he’d hang me out to dry,” she said. “Remember, I don’t have tenure yet. I have to be on my best behavior.”
“Ah, the joy of being an adjunct,” I said.
“I’m going to throw something at you. Like these biscuits for Rochester.”
She tossed me a plastic baggie. This time the biscuits were somewhat darker than the ones she’d sent home before. “Carob,” she said. “Dogs can’t eat chocolate, you know. It can kill them. But carob is OK.”
“Thanks. I’m sure he’ll like them.”
“You’re welcome. Now git.”
I got, leaving Jackie to an afternoon of marking up papers. I would have sworn I saw her getting into a black SUV and hot-footing it out of the parking lot as I was walking to my car, but it could have been someone else.
That night, I had just returned from walking Rochester when Rick called. “You gonna be home for a while?” he asked. “I want to run something by you.”
I said sure, I’d be home, and about a half hour later he was at my door. Rochester went crazy, jumping up and down in glee, as if I ignored him and he had hopes that this stranger might give him a biscuit or a belly rub.
Rick had just come from work, and as he walked into my house he pulled off his tie and unloosened the collar of his gray-and-beige striped shirt. His short hair was mussed and he looked like he hadn’t been getting enough sleep.
We made small talk over a couple of beers, then he got down to what he wanted. “I spoke to those two people you emailed me about,” he said. He opened up his notebook and consulted it. “Karina Warr and Christian McCutcheon.”
My pulse raced for a minute, but he seemed more interested in them than in how I’d gotten hold of their information. “Uh-huh,” I said. “You get anything interesting from them?”
He shook his head. “Neither of them knew anything,” he said. “They were all friends when they were teenagers, back when all three of their fathers were stationed at Camp Henry, a military base in Korea.”
“And?”
“And I think there’s something more. It’s just a gut feeling, but one or both of them is hiding something from me.”
I looked at him, and my brain raced ahead. “Evelina Curcio,” I said.
He nodded. “You got her to talk, when she wouldn’t talk to me,” he said. “You think you could give it a try with these two?”
My first reaction was to back off. “Evelina Curcio talked to me because I ran into her at the memorial service—I caught her off guard. What’s to say either of these two will talk to me?”
He took a sip of his beer. “I don’t want to say Caroline’s murder hasn’t upset me—because it has. I don’t see a lot of dead bodies. But you’re a civilian. You don’t see the stuff a cop sees. So I know Caroline’s death has hit you harder than me.”
I reached down to stroke Rochester’s golden head. “I think maybe you can relate to these guys,” Rick said. “Go up to New York. Meet with each one. Play it just the way it is—you knew Caroline, you lived next door, you feel bad that she’s dead. You just want to talk to someone else who knew her.” He smiled. “Plus you get to play Nancy Drew.”
“How about Frank or Joe Hardy instead?” I asked. “Somehow the whole teenaged girl thing doesn’t work for me.” We came up with an email message I could send, where I indicated that I hoped it wasn’t an intrusion, but I’d been trying to find someone I could talk to about Caroline. I said I’d be in New York that weekend, and would appreciate the chance to sit down and chat.
“I have to get permission from Santiago Santos in order to leave the state,” I said. “I’m supposed to give him at least two weeks’ notice.”
“I’ll square it with him,” Rick said. I sent the messages, and decided to turn the weekend into a mini-vacation. First, though, I had to find someone to take care of Rochester while I was away. I called Ginny Prior first; I figured she owed me a couple of favors. But her husband Richard (as she always said, ‘not the burned-up comedian,’) was allergic to dogs. “Annie will do it, though,” she said, referring to her neighbor. “She loves dogs, and she always liked Rochester.”
I called Annie next, and she agreed I could drop Rochester off on Friday morning. I worried what he’d think; would he imagine that like his mom, I was abandoning him?
Through Eastern, I had access to a small private hotel in mi
dtown that gave discounts to academics, and I was able to get a last-minute reservation for Friday and Saturday nights. I emailed my graduate school roommate, Tor, to let him know I’d be in town, and surfed around to see what the hot shows on Broadway were. By the time I was done with all that, I had an email response from Karina Warr.
“I know exactly what you’re going through,” she wrote. “Caroline’s death has just devastated me.” She suggested we meet for brunch on Sunday morning, and I wrote back to agree.
When I clicked “send,” my email client downloaded anything new, and there was a message from my newest client, the HR manager I’d been working on the forms for. It was the equivalent of a dear John letter; she was breaking up with me.
Reading between the lines, it was clear she’d heard about my criminal past and wasn’t comfortable giving me access to sensitive information. She offered to pay for the work I’d done, if I returned all materials to her within 24 hours.
Damn. I’d enjoyed the technical aspects of putting together the forms, and thought I’d done a good job. I’d been hoping she would have more work for me, that her firm could be the centerpiece of my business plan for Santiago Santos. The worst part was her implication that I had been less than forthcoming to her about my background—which was true. Irrelevant, but true.
I spent another hour cleaning up the project and then emailing everything back to her, promising to delete all files from my hard drive. I tried to be very professional, closing with an offer to consider any other work she might have for me—though I knew the chances of that were slim.
I stayed up late on Wednesday night, Rochester sprawled behind my chair, looking for additional work to replace what I’d lost. I found myself bidding on jobs for as little as $50, just to establish relationships. It was a sucky way to build a business, but it was all I had.
Chris McCutcheon’s response to my invitation came through on Thursday evening, and he was a lot less welcoming. He did say he could meet me for coffee on Saturday afternoon, though, and I emailed back to confirm.
I went downstairs for coffee, and Rochester followed me down. While I was in the kitchen waiting for the water to boil, I heard him in the dining room, and my developing instinct told me to check him out.
He had his paws up on the dining room table, and he was pushing at Caroline’s laptop with his nose. “You don’t need a computer,” I said, pulling him to the floor. “Look, Rochester. I have papers to grade and I can’t mess around with Caroline’s laptop now. If you won’t leave it alone I’ll put it away.”
He stared at me and barked once. “Fine,” I said. I carried the laptop up to my bedroom and placed it on the top shelf of the closet. When I came back downstairs, Rochester was dozing by the kitchen table.
While the coffee maker was percolating, I got out the stack of instructions the tech writing class had written and began marking them.
The doorbell rang ten minutes later. Rochester went into his crazy routine, and I peered out through the peephole to see Santiago Santos on my doorstep.
My pulse raced as I opened the door. “Hey,” I said. “An unexpected pleasure.” What a close call. If he’d come just a little earlier, he would have spotted Caroline’s laptop on the dining room table. The terms of my parole were clear; I was allowed one computer, which had to have the tracking software installed. Just having Caroline’s laptop in my house was enough to violate my parole, especially if he impounded it and found the special software I’d installed.
“Rick told me about your trip to New York,” Santos said, unbuttoning his jacket with one hand and petting Rochester with the other.
“Yeah, he asked me to do him a favor,” I said. “Is it OK with you?”
“I just don’t want you to get distracted,” he said. “How are you coming with your business plan?”
We sat down in the living room, and Rochester sprawled at my feet. I didn’t want to tell Santos about the client who had dropped me, so instead I focused on all the work I was applying for. It was a pretty impressive list—though it was just a list, at present, and I hadn’t gotten much response to my latest bids.
“Good job,” he said, when I was finished. “I’m going to OK your trip, but I expect to see a strong business plan when we meet up next.”
I wanted to argue that I was already showing good faith by helping out the Stewart’s Crossing police, but I’d already learned it didn’t do any good to argue with a parole officer. So I just agreed that I’d have a killer plan ready, shook his hand one more time, and he left.
Of course, between tracking Edith’s finances, grading papers for my three classes, taking care of Rochester, and playing Joe Hardy to Rick’s Frank, I wasn’t sure what else I could do, but hey, sleep is overrated, right?
Chapter 15 – Identity Theft
Friday morning, I packed up Rochester’s crate, his food and water bowls, his food, and a half dozen toys, along with my stuff for New York. I stuck the crate in the trunk and tied the lid shut with a rope, then loaded Rochester into the front seat.
Annie’s house wasn’t far from mine, just past Main Street and up the hill, where a couple of suburban developments clustered on what had once been farmland. The houses were big split-levels on large plots of land, and Annie’s front yard was littered with a Big Wheel, a couple of headless dolls, and the remains of a plastic fort. She had two dogs, a Shih-Tzu and a terrier mix, but she insisted they would both get along with Rochester.
“And you don’t even need to unpack the crate,” she said, pointing back to the Beemer. “My boys will keep Rochester in line.”
He seemed delighted to have new playmates, and after watching him growl and wrestle with Annie’s dogs, I drove to the Trenton train station, where I caught the New Jersey Transit train to New York.
I’d taken that train many times as a teenager. Since then, the fields the train ran past had turned into housing developments, and the stations had become more run-down, but sitting by the window, watching the landscape rush by, I could have been seventeen again.
I remembered that longing I’d had, wanting to get out of my little town. Columbia had been my first choice for college, but Eastern had given me a full scholarship and there was no turning that down. My parents had promised I could go to Columbia for graduate school, and I had.
I’d loved living in the city, right up until the day the moving van came to the apartment Mary and I had shared on the Upper East Side and taken our worldly goods on a cross-country trip. I still remembered that last cab ride to the airport, staring back at the skyline as we crossed into the Bronx and wondering if I’d made a huge mistake.
Of course I had, but it took another eight years for both of us to figure that out. Now, going back to the city was like recapturing a bit of my lost past, and every time I took that train in I felt the same anticipation I had as a teenager.
My hotel room was about the size of the master bathroom in my townhouse at River Bend. There was a two-foot clearance on each side of the queen-sized bed, and the window looked out on an airshaft, but I was back in Manhattan.
I spent the afternoon shopping, cleaning Balducci’s out of gourmet stuff I knew I couldn’t get in Stewart’s Crossing, and then met my old friend Tor for dinner that night.
Tor was a Swedish exchange student in business school when I was in the MA program in English, and we’d lived together for a year in the graduate dormitory, then shared a couple of crummy apartments on the Lower East Side until I met Mary. Tor and I were young and single together in the city, and that’s a bond that you always share—remembering drunken adventures in Tribeca, parties that lasted til dawn, getting lost in the Village on the way to some strange theater event Tor’s girlfriend had invited us to.
Tor had gotten himself a green card and begun his career in investment banking when we lived together, working eighty-hour weeks, traveling to every little Podunk town that wanted to float a municipal bond. He’d gone through a string of girlfriends until he found one who would put u
p with his work ethic. Sherry, a former model, now sold high-end real estate and worked as hard as Tor.
The effort had paid off for him; now he was a partner, with a huge co-op apartment on the Upper East Side. He traveled everywhere by town car, and his kids went to expensive private schools in Riverdale. I was lucky he could squeeze in dinner with me, but one of his deals had gone sour the day before and he was at loose ends.
I couldn’t help comparing our lives since we had lived together. When Mary and I left New York, Tor and I were on parallel courses, heading for happiness and prosperity. I’d worked just as hard in Silicon Valley as he had on Wall Street, but the dice had rolled his way and not mine.
I didn’t mind at all, though, because I knew that if I needed anything Tor could provide, I only had to ask him. I’d considered, when my marriage broke up, asking him for a leg up on a job in Manhattan, but I realized it would be going backwards, trying to reclaim my lost youth—which seemed more and more lost every time I looked in the mirror.
He knew about my trouble in California; he’d even offered to hire an attorney for me if I needed. I worried, as I was on my way to meet him at a fancy steak house in the meat packing district, that things might be awkward between us, based on how my life had fallen apart, but he greeted me outside with a big bear hug. Tor looks like he should be winning an Olympic medal in the giant slalom; he’s six-three, blond and blue-eyed, his build gone beefy in middle age.
“Hey, you have been such a stranger,” he said. “You come all the way back from California, but down there in Pennsylvania you are almost as far away.”
“I’m not the one with the high-powered career. Every time I invite you and Sherry to come down to Bucks County you have too much work to get away.”
“Soon. We will make it soon. Now, we eat.”
We ordered massive porterhouse steaks, drank imported beer, and talked non-stop for two hours. The restaurant was elegant in an understated way—wooden booths with thick cushions, fake gas lamps and a pressed-tin ceiling. It was filled with people like Tor—prosperous, well-dressed, men whose ties alone cost more than everything I had on my body.
In Dog We Trust (Golden Retriever Mysteries) Page 12
