In Dog We Trust (Golden Retriever Mysteries)

by Neil S. Plakcy

  “Sure. Just stay out here, OK?”

  He reached down to pet Rochester before he left. “You’re a good boy,” he said. For some reason it took me a minute to realize he wasn’t talking about me.

  He came back a couple of minutes later, talking on his radio. Once again he walked me through how Rochester and I had discovered the bodies, and as I did, I heard the sirens approaching. Soon there was a crime scene team there, a woman from the Coroner’s office and a couple of techs of her own, and a number of cops in black and white squad cars which blocked off access to the area.

  I was getting tired, just standing there with Rochester, waiting for someone to talk to me again. He was antsy; I guess he remembered the last time we’d seen all those cops and flashing lights, and the memories weren’t good ones. Finally Rick Stemper showed up.

  He waved hello to me but went over to Detective Rinaldi. They talked for a while. It was starting to get dark, and I knew Rochester would be hungry and want to go home. I was pretty eager to get away myself.

  After a long time, both Rick Stemper and Tony Rinaldi came over to me. “Rick tells me you have quite a talent for finding dead bodies,” Rinaldi said.

  “I wouldn’t exactly call it a talent,” I said. “More like a misfortune.”

  Behind him, I saw the Coroner’s techs carrying a body out of the woods on a stretcher. I didn’t know if it was Menno or Melissa, and I didn’t want to know.

  “The deceased were both your students?”

  I nodded. “In my freshman composition class.”

  “And you think one or both of them might have tried to run you off the road the other day?”

  “I thought it might have been one of my students,” I said, remembering my confrontation with Lay Zee. “I wasn’t thinking of Melissa or Menno.” I turned to Rick. “You think it was them?”

  “If we believe that they killed Caroline, then there’s a good chance they tried to kill you,” he said.

  “I’d like you to come down to the station so we can talk about all this,” Rinaldi said. “Bring me up to speed, so to speak.”

  “I’m exhausted. And Rochester needs his dinner. Can we do it tomorrow?”

  “Really need you to come in this evening,” Rinaldi said. “While all these details are fresh in your brain. We’ve got a K-9 works out of our station—I’m sure we’ve got some chow down there for your dog.”

  I looked over at Rick, but his face was a blank. “All right,” I said. “My car’s up at the faculty parking lot.”

  “Why don’t you and your dog ride along with me,” Rinaldi said. “I’ll see that you get back to your car when we’re finished.”

  It didn’t look like I had much of a choice. I ushered Rochester into the back seat of Rinaldi’s blue sedan and then got in beside him. “You can ride up front,” Rinaldi said.

  “I’ll stay back here with Rochester, if you don’t mind,” I said.

  It wasn’t my first trip to the Leighville Police Station. My freshman year at Eastern, I’d lived in Birthday Hall, the dorm right up the road from the dog park, though at the time there had been no park there; woods had stretched all the way from the edge of Birthday’s manicured lawn down to the river.

  In an attempt to improve the fitness level of the average student, the college had constructed an outdoor fitness course around the perimeter of the lawn. Wooden sleepers were laid out to simulate certain exercises—step-ups, pull-ups, and so on. The idea was to start at the first station and work your way around the square, ending up back at the front door of Birthday House where you’d begun.

  One spring night just before final exams, I was playing a drinking game in the student lounge with a bunch of my buddies. Yes, we were all under twenty-one, the legal drinking age in Pennsylvania at the time, but ever since I was about sixteen I’d looked old enough to shop at the State Store, the state-run liquor outlet in Leighville, without being carded.

  I don’t remember the TV program we’d been watching in the lounge, but every time one of the characters did or said something, you had to chug your beer. They did it or said it often enough that by midnight we were all in our cups.

  It was a clear warm night, with the illumination of a full moon. One of the guys had the brilliant idea that we should race around the fitness course—naked.

  Hey, it seemed like a good idea at the time.

  There were about a dozen of us. We stripped down in the lobby and left our clothes in a big, sloppy pile, then took off outside.

  I think we were about halfway through when the cops arrived. I guess we’d woken up some of the nerds in the dorm who thought sleep was important for success at final exams.

  A couple of the guys got away, but they pulled in at least nine or ten of us. The cops wouldn’t let us go in the dorm to retrieve our clothes, so we were jammed into the back seats of squad cars, an uncomfortable position among a bunch of naked, drunk teenagers.

  “Hey, get your hands off me, you mo,” I remember my buddy Nick howling.

  I was the guy in the middle. “Your ass is touching my ass,” I said. “Both of you. Scoot over toward the door.”

  I don’t remember the name of the third guy, but I remember him saying, “Daddy, he’s touching me,” to the cop.

  “Simmer down back there,” the cop said.

  By the time we got back to the station a couple of the guys had thrown up, and we were all sobering up fast. But when Nick kicked off the trend to give fake names, we all followed suit. My name, if I recall, was Joe Mamma.

  They threw us all in a holding cell, and the guys who stunk of vomit had to stay over in the corner. The rest of us tried to maintain a proper distance between us, tried to avoid sizing up each others’ equipment. But there wasn’t much else to look at, and the whole experience was probably in danger of disintegrating into a circle jerk when one of the cops threw a pile of clothes into the room and we fell on them like wolves on fresh kill.

  They never did get our names, but they let us loose at first light to make our way back to campus on foot. After that, I made a point of steering clear of any interaction with the Leighville Police Department.

  That is, until I arrived at the back door of the station in Tony Rinaldi’s sedan.

  The department’s located on the first floor of the town hall, on College Avenue in the center of town. It’s a three-story brick building with a memorial to Leighville soldiers killed in various wars in a little grassy patch out front.

  The offices of the mayor, the town council, the tax assessor and so on were upstairs. The left half used to belong to the fire department, with the right for the police, but some time when I was in California the town fathers built a state-of-the-art fire station a few blocks away and renovated the police department. I didn’t remember much of the building from that first visit, but I could tell that the town had put some bucks into the new station.

  The desk sergeant took Rochester away to get him some dinner, and I followed Rinaldi down a carpeted hallway to an interrogation room. “Where’s Rick?” I asked as we walked in. “Is he going to come in here, too?”

  “Detective Stemper’s putting together his own statement,” Rinaldi said. “You just tell me your side of the story.”

  “Am I under arrest?”

  “Just want to talk to you about what happened,” Rinaldi said.

  “Should I have an attorney?”

  “It’s your right to have an attorney present whenever you want,” he said.

  “Aren’t you going to read me my rights?”

  He looked like he was getting frustrated, but he took a minute to settle himself. “As I’ve said, you’re not under arrest. Therefore, I don’t have to read you your rights.”

  I thought for a minute. Rinaldi seemed like a nice guy, and he came recommended by Rick—but still. “I’d like to call my attorney, please,” I said.

  He nodded. “Sure. You need a phone?”

  “I can use my cell.”

  I didn’t have an attorney, p
er se. A guy named Hunter Thirkell had drafted my father’s will, and he’d been helpful to me in getting things settled when the state of California wouldn’t let me come to Stewart’s Crossing in person. I’d gone to see him when I returned to town, just to say hello, and in the course of getting to know him I’d discovered that he’d been a prosecutor in juvenile court in New York when he was fresh out of law school. “My job was to put kids behind bars,” he had said.

  Since then, he’d moved to the country, where he’d built up a general practice. Since he was the only attorney I knew in Bucks County, I called him.

  Rinaldi offered coffee but I figured police coffee would be pretty lousy and asked for tea instead, and he went to get it.

  “You haven’t been arrested, and you haven’t been charged?” Hunter asked, when I explained the situation to him.

  “That’s what the detective said.”

  “You made a good choice to call me. Don’t say anything til I get there.”

  When Rinaldi returned with my tea, I told him that my attorney was on his way. He nodded. “All right. I’m going to do some research and the desk sergeant will let me know when your attorney gets here.”

  He left me alone in the room with my tea. It was probably overreacting to call Hunter when Rinaldi just wanted to ask me some questions about Melissa and Menno, but I’d been spooked by Rick’s conjecture that one or both of them had run me off the road the week before.

  I wondered where Rochester was. Had the desk sergeant found some dinner for him? Would somebody walk him? My mind wandered back to the day Caroline had been shot. The experience had traumatized Rochester—the sound of the bullets, the smell of the discharged firearms, the speeding black SUV. Would this experience upset him further? Would we never be able to come back to the dog park without being haunted by bad memories?

  And if Menno and Melissa had killed Caroline Kelly, then who had killed them?

  Chapter 29 - Interrogation

  My mind was still rambling when Hunter showed up. He’s a genial blond guy, a couple years younger than Rick and I, and about fifty pounds heavier than he should be. At just over six feet, he was an imposing figure, whether in his suit and tie or in casual clothes, as he was that night-- an extra-large navy polo shirt, khakis and deck shoes. “How’re they treating you?” he asked when he came in and shook my hand.

  “Fine. I just want to get this over with.”

  Tony Rinaldi came in then, and after the introductions we sat down. After getting my permission, he turned on a tape recorder, and established his name and rank, my name and Hunter’s, and the date, time and location of the conversation. “I’d like you to start way back at the beginning,” he said. “Tell me about your neighbor—Caroline Kelly?”

  “I only knew her at all because of her dog,” I said. “Rochester. The golden retriever. She used to walk him every morning and every night, and I’d be out walking myself around the same time. We would stop and chat now and then.”

  Rinaldi had light-green eyes, which were arresting in combination with his brush-cut dark hair. They gave him a look of intensity that I was sure suspects found unsettling. “So your relationship was cordial?”

  I nodded.

  “You liked her dog?”

  “He was OK. I wasn’t much of a dog person.”

  “Yet you took over ownership of the dog after she was shot.”

  “There was no one else. He was going to the pound if I didn’t take him in.”

  “But at the pound, he might have found a family, right? He’s what, a purebred golden retriever?”

  “As far as I know.”

  “Those go for what, close to a thousand dollars, right?”

  “Are you suggesting I killed Caroline so that I could get her dog? Because that’s ridiculous.”

  Hunter reached over and touched my sleeve. “Let’s not jump to any conclusions, Steve,” he said. “Detective, is this all necessary? I don’t see how it relates to the two bodies Professor Levitan found this afternoon.”

  “It’s just curious, is all,” Rinaldi said. “Your neighbor was shot, a woman you hardly knew, and yet you seemed to have a lot of motivation to keep your hand in all the details of the case.”

  I looked at Hunter, who nodded. “I wouldn’t call it motivation,” I said. “Curiosity. And Rochester has a knack for finding useful information.”

  Rinaldi’s eyebrows raised. “The dog?”

  “It’s probably all coincidence. But he led me to the shell casing and to the information on Caroline’s friends.”

  “Which didn’t pan out,” Rinaldi said.

  “That’s true. But I still felt obligated to report it to Rick Stemper.”

  He gave me a look which I interpreted to mean I had been keeping Rick busy with useless diversions, and I was very glad that Hunter was there.

  We were sitting at a blond wooden table, in hard, straight-backed chairs in a matching wood. There were two posters on the wall, both advertising scenic Bucks County. One was a photo of rafters running the rapids upriver on a summer day, a mix of men and women in orange life jackets gripping paddles.

  The second was a shot of Pennsbury Manor, William Penn’s home. We’d gone there on school field trips, learned about life in Colonial times from ladies in white aprons, walked through the herb garden and tried to avoid the smell and noise of the nearby landfill. That part didn’t show in the poster.

  They were clearly handling a better class of criminals in Leighville these days than they had when I was a college student. “I know you went over all this with Detective Stemper in Stewart’s Crossing, but it would be very helpful if you could run through exactly what happened on the evening that Ms. Kelly was shot.” Sensing an objection about to arise from Hunter, Rinaldi looked at him and said, “Since the homicides may be related, it would be helpful for me to get the story direct from a witness, rather than just reading through Detective Stemper’s notes.”

  I looked at Hunter, and he quirked an eyebrow, as if it was up to me. I decided to plunge in. “It was just after dusk,” I said. “I heard three shots, in quick succession, but at the time I didn’t realize they were gunshots. You always hear people banging, doors slamming, that kind of thing. It wasn’t until I saw Rochester come running toward me that I thought something was wrong.”

  He looked at his notes. “You mentioned something about a black car,” he said.

  I nodded. “Right after I heard the shots, this black SUV came barreling past me. Again, I didn’t think much of it, at first. It’s a long run from the gatehouse of River Bend to River Road, and people often drive down it pretty fast.”

  I picked up the Styrofoam cup of tea, which had cooled down, and noticed my hand was shaking a little. I took a sip of the tea, which needed sugar—or flavor of some kind. I put the cup back down on the table before I could spill any of it.

  “You and Detective Stemper are old friends, isn’t that right?” Rinaldi asked. The tone of his voice was just this side of grating—very determined, edgy. As if he wasn’t going to stop asking questions until he had the answers he wanted.

  “We knew each other in high school,” I said. “We ran into each other a few months ago and got friendly.”

  “So your friendship with him gave you an inside track on the investigation.”

  Hunter said, “Detective?”

  “Just trying to establish some facts, Counselor.” Rinaldi looked back to me. He was wearing a long-sleeve oxford cloth button-down shirt in light blue and a navy rep tie with some kind of small emblem on it. He’d unbuttoned the top button of his shirt, and the tie hung a little bit crooked.

  “Let’s get to what happened this afternoon,” he said. “What made you drive Ms. Kelly’s dog all the way up to Leighville for exercise?”

  I noticed the way he kept referring to Rochester as Caroline’s dog, as if the whole series of murders and thefts revolved around ownership of an excitable golden retriever, but I didn’t say anything. I explained about dropping my grades
and graded papers off at the college. “I thought I’d take Rochester with me and he could run at the dog park.”

  I was turning into just the kind of goofy dog owner I’d always made fun of. If I’d left Rochester at home, he’d have slept all day, and I’d be home with him instead of stuck at the police station in Leighville.

  “Tell me about the accident,” Rinaldi said.

  I sighed. This was turning into a huge deal, and I just didn’t have the energy. My ribs were aching, and all I wanted to do was go home and sleep for hours. But I described walking with Rochester along the canal, how he’d run off, and I’d tracked him down by the River Road.

  “You don’t seem to have much control over the dog,” Rinaldi said. “He got away from you this afternoon, didn’t he?”

  “That was different,” I said.

  “Sorry, I interrupted you,” Rinaldi said. “You tracked the dog down on River Road.”

  “I got his leash on him and we were walking home, sticking to the right side of the street, where there’s a shoulder. The next thing I knew, I was waking up in the hospital.” I shrugged. “You’ll have to get the rest of the details from Detective Stemper.”

  “I will. You recovering all right?”

  “A couple of cracked ribs and a bear of a headache,” I said. “As a matter of fact, I’m getting pretty worn out. Will we be finished here soon?”

  “Shortly. Anything else I can get for you? More tea?”

  “I’ll manage. What else do you need to know?”

  “So you’ve been laid up at home for the last few days? Recuperating?”

  “Uh-huh. And grading papers. That’s why I had to go up to Eastern today, remember? To hand in my grades and drop off papers for students to pick up.”

  “And then?”

  Once again, as I’d done at the scene, I walked Rinaldi through Rochester’s escape from the dog park and run into the woods, the barking, and the way I’d followed him in and discovered the bodies. “You didn’t disturb anything?”