Another Three Dogs in a Row

by Neil S. Plakcy

“Frank. But he had some other name in the gang, some kind of dumb pun. I only heard it once or twice so I don’t remember.”

  “I’ll keep an eye out for one of the Levitt’s Angels named Frank,” I said. “I’m curious, though. They used email instead of texting each other?”

  Peggy snorted. “Carl still had one of those old flip phones,” she said. “He said his fingers were too big and he was too old to get into texting.”

  I let her think about other suspects for a while, but she couldn’t come up with anyone else, so eventually I stood up. “I’ll keep in touch and let you know when I make progress.”

  * * *

  When I got home Lili was out, and I was glad she wasn’t there to see me retrieve the ladder from the garage and carry it up to the second floor. She’d know immediately what I was doing, and I wasn’t ready to tell her everything yet.

  I set the ladder up in the hallway outside the second bathroom and climbed up, pushing away the hatch that led to the attic crawl space, where I kept my secret laptop.

  It wasn’t quite so secret as it had been – Rick and Lili both knew that it existed, and that I kept the hacking tools on it up to date, even though I didn’t use them. But I stored it in the attic so it wasn’t easy for me to turn to it.

  It had once belonged to Caroline Kelly, Rochester’s first mom, and after she died I loaded my hacking tools on it and used what I learned online to help Rick figure out who killed her. It was a dinosaur by then, at least six or seven years old, a couple of pounds heavier than the newest models. The hard drive was small by contemporary standards, but big enough to handle the software I had stored there.

  Since then I had used the tools there occasionally, for the most part in legal pursuits.

  I closed up the attic and returned the ladder to the garage. While I waited for the old laptop to boot up, I thought about the legality of what I was doing. I was no lawyer, but I had studied up on the technicalities of hacking over the years. Because Peggy was Carl Landsea’s legal heir for the time being, she had the authority over his possessions, including access to his electronic data, and she had willingly granted that access to Hunter, and then to me.

  It also was not illegal for me to try and figure out Carl’s password and gain access to his email, because I was doing it under Peggy’s authority.

  At least, that’s the way I read the law, and I was going with that interpretation. I turned on my regular laptop and logged into a database I subscribed to, that promised to find out everything about everybody, from past addresses to family connections to criminal records. I plugged in “Carl Landsea” and began adding to the information that Peggy had given me.

  Carl had been born in Bristol, a few miles downriver from Stewart’s Crossing. He was a few years older than I was, and I figured out that he’d graduated from Pennsbury High like Peggy, Rick and I had. Carl had a spotty employment record, or at least the software only provided a couple of jobs, from the Fairless Works steel mill to his last job at a bike shop called Pennsy Choppers in Tullytown, one of the municipalities that included parts of Levittown.

  He had four connections to other people—a woman who I assumed was his mother, who had died some years before, a sister named Charlene Landsea Brattain, an ex-wife named Miriam Coyne Landsea, and Peggy herself.

  I kept searching, finding an address in Bristol where I thought he’d grown up, and an old phone number. I added all that information to the keywords and numbers to my list.

  Carl also had numerous felony and misdemeanor convictions, but I saved that information into a file for future reference. When I was finally confident I’d found out everything I could about him, I turned back to Caroline’s laptop and chose one of my password cracking tools, one which was commonly used to perform what were called dictionary attacks. It took text string samples from a file called a wordlist, containing popular and complex words found in a dictionary as well as real passwords cracked before. I was able to add all Carl’s information to the wordlist as well. Because it used its own database, it could be called an offline password cracker, as opposed to one that looked for data online.

  I plugged in all the data I had, and then I opened a connection to Carl’s email provider, a free service called MyEMail.com. As with most secure sites these days, the server at MyEMail.com had installed a program that kicked you out after too many password attempts. Fortunately, my password software had a feature that got around that, though it meant the connection was cut every three tries and had to restart. I could see it was going to take some time, so I got up and made myself a café mocha.

  Rochester was on me like a fly on a pile of shit, following me to the kitchen, then back to the dining room where the laptop was still working. I watched for a few minutes as Google Chrome opened up the log-in page for MyEMail.com, auto-filled Carl’s address, then threw in a potential password. After three tries, the MyEmail.com server put up an error message, and my software shut down the browser, then opened it afresh and reconnected to the log-in page.

  It was mesmerizing to watch the software try and fail to get into Carl’s account, then start over again when pushed.

  Kind of like my life. Starting over when pushed.

  6 – Bad Guys and Trouble

  While I waited for the password software to come up with the right combination, I turned back to my regular laptop and looked at the police records I’d found for Carl Landsea. Maybe I could find information there that would lead Hunter toward a different suspect for Carl’s murder.

  Carl had three arrests for disorderly conduct, a “summary offense” in Pennsylvania. That meant it was a less serious charge than a felony or misdemeanor, and not a criminal conviction.

  The most recent of the arrests, though, had been prosecuted as a third degree misdemeanor. Carl had escaped prison time but had been fined a thousand dollars.

  Then I found two arrests for “Possession of other Controlled Substances Penalties (Heroin, Cocaine, LSD/Acid, Ecstasy/MMDA, Meth, and prescription drugs including Vicodin and Oxycontin or illegal steroids).”

  That was a lot more serious, and I did a quick look up for the penalties involved in such crimes. For a first offense, Carl could have received up to a year in prison with a $5,000 fine, while a second offense generated the same fine but added an additional year in prison. From what I could tell, however, the first arrest had been dropped, and Carl had pled out to another fine and “time served” for the second.

  I couldn’t tell from the government database I was using, one that was open to the public, whether Carl had been using the drugs himself, or just selling them.

  Carl’s situation was typical of many of the guys I’d met in prison. Most of them had been arrested multiple times, on increasingly serious offenses, before they’d actually served time, and even then, they’d made plea deals or gotten early release that limited their actual time in prison.

  The prosecutor in my case had tried to get me a five-year sentence, but the judge had reduced that two years because of my emotional state at the time of the crime – my attorney argued that because of the effect on me of Mary’s miscarriages, I wasn’t thinking clearly. For good behavior, and because the California penal system was undergoing one of its periodic purges, I’d spent only one year inside.

  Carl’s record showed he wasn’t exactly a Boy Scout—though given what the press had revealed about the discriminatory practices of that organization, the cliché had ceased to have any real meaning.

  When Lili came home, I jumped up to help her bring in groceries as Rochester danced around her. “I saw some gorgeous eggplant at the farmer’s market,” she said. “I thought we’d make eggplant parmigiana for dinner.”

  “And by we, you mean me,” I said.

  “It is your favorite recipe.”

  “That’s true. And I’m glad to make it for you.”

  She kissed me on the lips. “That’s sweet. I thought I might take Rochester out for a walk along the canal and take some pictures. The college finally
came through with some funds to buy new cameras for student use, and I want to get a handle on the features myself before I hand them over.”

  “What kind of camera?”

  “It’s a new Panasonic model, with interchangeable lenses and a 20 megapixel sensor. It also has a high resolution viewfinder that tilts, so I can take some selfies with Rochester if I want.”

  I was a bit jealous she was going off with the dog, leaving me home to cook, but I reminded myself that we were a family of three—Lili, Rochester and me—and if she wanted to take selfies with the dog it just meant that she loved him.

  “I’m glad you’re so excited,” I said. “You take the dog, and I’ll get started on the eggplant.”

  She either didn’t notice the extra laptop on the dining room table, or she didn’t mention it. Rochester did his usual happy dance when he heard the clatter of his leash, though he did look back at me in confusion when he realized I wasn’t going with him and Lili.

  I checked the password generator and it was still making its three tries then rebooting, so I began slicing and breading the eggplant, then sautéing it. The quiet repetitive work helped me focus on my ideas about Peggy Landsea.

  Could she be innocent? I wanted to believe it, because I knew the girl she had been, and I had already found evidence that Carl Landsea was a bad guy. And when we spoke about Carl, she genuinely seemed to be mourning him. From my experience in prison, I knew that bad guys attracted trouble, in the form of other bad guys, and that meant there might be other suspects in Carl’s death.

  Hunter was only interested in developing reasonable doubt that Peggy was guilty, but I realized that I wanted more – I wanted to know who killed Carl, and why.

  That was just the kind of fascination that had gotten me in trouble in the past.

  I finished preparing the eggplant parmigiana, layering the fried slices with mozzarella cheese, mushrooms and tomato sauce, and slid the casserole into the oven to bake.

  For a while, I sat at the laptop in the dining room, mesmerized by the constant stream of possible passwords on the screen. I let my mind wander back to the Peggy I had known as a kid.

  She was always so enthusiastic, never letting on how her difficult childhood had affected her. Her sisters weren’t quite so cheerful, though, and I remembered meeting her baby sister RJ once. One night toward the end of the semester Peggy’s car broke down and I was able to borrow my dad’s car and drive us up to class. I went over to Peggy’s house to pick her up, and RJ, who had to be eleven or twelve, kept dancing around the car, calling Peggy “college girl” teasingly.

  “Your sister must be proud that you’re going to college,” I said, as we drove away.

  “She’s not, really. I’m the first one in my family to go to college and she’s just imitating some of my relatives who think I’m getting above myself,” she said.

  My parents had always pushed me to go to college, so I admired Peggy so much then for her tenacity. I couldn’t reconcile the girl she had been with the Black Widow of Birch Valley.

  Suddenly, the password generator found the right log in combination, and Carl’s online mailbox popped up on the screen. I was in! I wrote down the password – a version of Carl’s childhood address mixed with special characters. Then I turned to the list of emails that had come in since his death.

  I’d deleted a dozen spam message by the time I heard Lili’s car pull up in the driveway. I quickly saved Carl’s password to the laptop’s desktop, then shut everything down. Then the timer on the oven began to ring, signaling that the eggplant parmigiana was done. When Lili and Rochester came in, I was in the kitchen pulling the casserole from the oven.

  “How’d the photo session go?” I asked, as Rochester romped over to me and tried to stick his nose into the casserole.

  “I’m impressed that that this camera has a Leica rangefinder, because I used them for years when I was a photojournalist. If it’s as good as I think it is I might use the rest of the money I have to buy a Leica 8-18 mm lens which students can use for landscape, cityscape and street pictures. There’s also a great portrait lens also designed by Leica that I can use in the school studio to teach portrait lighting techniques.”

  It struck me that Lili spouted off the technical specs for the camera the way I babbled about computers and hacking software. The passion for our interests was something else we had in common.

  We talked more about the camera as we ate, and then, because I cooked, Lili volunteered to clean up. While I helped her ferry the dirty dishes to the sink, I mentioned that Peggy had asked me to retrieve the deleted emails from Carl’s account.

  She frowned.

  “It’s all legal,” I said. I repeated what I had told Rick about Peggy’s authority to access anything Carl left behind, and the way she had authorized me to act on her behalf.

  “I thought she was accused of killing him. How can she be his heir under those circumstances?”

  “Innocent until proven guilty,” I said.

  “And what happens if she does get convicted? Does that put you in a bad position?”

  I shook my head. “Not according to Hunter, and he’s the attorney. I’m also working at his direction, so anything I do is covered under attorney-client privilege.”

  “Even though you’re not the client.”

  I struggled not to get irritated. Lili was only looking out for me. “Anything I do at either her direction or Hunter’s comes under that same protection.”

  She sighed. “I said it before and I’ll say it again. I trust you. And I’m glad you told me what you’re doing.”

  I leaned over and kissed her. “I love you, too, and I’m sticking to my promise not to do anything to jeopardize our relationship.”

  She began washing the dishes, and I went back to my hacker laptop on the dining room table. I sent Hunter a quick email letting him know that I had made contact with Peggy, and was working on retrieving Carl’s emails. Then I opened up Carl’s account and quickly downloaded the new messages to a file I saved on my jump drive.

  It felt creepy logging into a dead man’s account, and I was pleased that my fingers didn’t tingle the way they usually did when I was digging somewhere I didn’t belong. Maybe it was that I had the right to be there—or maybe I was learning.

  After the file downloaded, I checked the Trash folder in Carl’s email account. He must not have been all that savvy, because everything he had deleted from years before his death was still stored there. Once again, I downloaded the data and saved it to a file. My stomach felt weird and my anxiety level was high, so I was glad when I had all the data and I was able to log out.

  When I first promised Lili and Rick to stop hacking, or at least control my impulses, I had joined an online support group for hackers, and I logged into it then. I wanted to see if anyone else had experienced similar feelings while doing something ostensibly legal.

  A couple of the regulars had dropped out, either because they could control themselves on their own, or because they had backslid. I hadn’t been that active myself because I wasn’t having too many problems.

  No one was online at the moment, so I made a post in which I described in general terms what I’d done, and how I’d felt. “Anyone else feel this way? Is this progress?”

  Lili was sitting on the couch by then, reading, and I shut down the laptop and joined her there with my Kindle. I’d always been a big mystery reader, but over the last few months I’d developed more of a taste for historical work. It was a relief to read something that no connection to computers, social media or hacking. At the moment I was reading a mystery set in Rome just before Julius Caesar was murdered on the Ides of March, and I was eagerly moving forward to see how the author would incorporate the historical detail with his own plot.

  We read together for a while, with Rochester sprawled on the floor beside us, and I pushed away all thoughts of Peggy Landsea and computer hacking. At one point I looked up to see Lili engrossed in her book, and I realized how lucky I was
to have found her.

  As if he knew what I was thinking, Rochester got up on his haunches and sniffed my hand. “You too, boy,” I said, continuing out loud the discussion in my head. “Always you, too.”

  Lili looked up but didn’t say anything, just smiled, and went back to her book.

  * * *

  Sunday morning as we finished a breakfast of lox and eggs, Lili announced that she wanted to go out and take more pictures with the new camera. “You don’t mind, do you?” she asked. “It’s such a beautiful day and I want to experiment with different light levels.”

  “Go right ahead,” I said. “I’m going to start looking through all the messages I downloaded from Carl Landsea’s email account.”

  She went upstairs to get dressed, and though she kissed me on the cheek on her way out, I was already ankle deep in Carl Landsea’s email account.

  I began with the file of recent messages. Almost all of them were junk, as though his personal contacts had known of his death, but for a few weeks he got regular email updates from the Levitt’s Angels email list until someone manually removed him.

  None of those messages were very interesting—mostly questions about technical problems or suggestions for places to ride. I hadn’t expected to see any mention of criminal activity—even the dumbest cons these days knew enough to keep things out of writing. I did manage to collect the names and email addresses of a half-dozen other Angels. I wasn’t sure what I’d do with them, but I created a spreadsheet and input that data, which at least gave me the illusion that I was making progress.

  After about an hour, I got antsy. The work ahead of me was boring and tedious, and I wanted to do something active. I looked over at Rochester, the way he was splayed on the floor facing me, his front paws flat on the floor and I had a momentary image of him riding a motorcycle that way.

  “Biker dog,” I said to him, and laughed.

  He looked up at me as if he didn’t understand, and I held my hands out as if I was gripping handlebars and said, “Vroom, vroom!”