Another Three Dogs in a Row

by Neil S. Plakcy

  I had to slow down once I turned off Route 13 and onto Main Street in Morrisville. Every half mile a car or truck was slowing to turn or changing lanes abruptly. By the time I pulled into the parking lot at the Drunken Hessian, my arms were shaky and my back had cramped.

  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 the kind of dive that looked innocent on the outside, sucking in the clueless tourists with quaint charm and delivering flat beer and overcooked burgers served in plastic baskets shaped like Stewart’s ferry boat.

  I pulled my helmet off as Rick came up to me. “You handled the bike pretty well.” Then he smiled. “That is, after you ran over the curb outside the bike shop.”

  I ignored the jibe. “I had to concentrate,” I admitted. “But I liked it. I’ll see how the poker run goes with Bob Freehl before I make any permanent decisions, though.”

  We went inside, ordered a couple of beers and our favorite burgers. I always got the General Lafayette, with ham and swiss over a medium-rare patty, and my mouth was watering as I ordered it.

  Rick looked so neat, with his short hair perfectly in place, that I kept trying to smooth down my own helmet hair. “So, Levitt’s Angels,” he said, after the waitress had delivered our bottles and we’d declined to have them poured out into glasses. “I did some research.”

  “And?”

  “I’ve changed my opinion as I read more closely. They’re not a bunch of doctors and lawyers riding Harleys, but they’re also not as bad as people might think. The younger ones have at least some college under their belt—one of the guys I read about even took police science courses at Liberty Bell University, aiming to be a motorcycle cop.”

  I’d seen the billboards for that for-profit college, which asked students to “strike a bell for freedom of education at Liberty Bell U.”

  Rick picked a piece of lint from the sleeve of his neatly pressed plaid shirt. I knew that he had his shirts laundered at the Wash ‘n Go around the corner from the Drunken Hessian, and his slacks pressed there, too.

  “There are a couple of rotten apples, sure,” he continued. “But you find that almost anywhere.”

  “Let me guess. Big Diehl?”

  He nodded. “He’s one of a couple, along with Carl Landsea, who have records.”

  “Carl gave up Diehl in exchange for a lighter sentence, giving Diehl a motive to kill Carl, now that he’s out of prison.”

  “If you know all this stuff already what do you need me for?”

  “I value your insights,” I said, my tongue only partly in my cheek.

  Rick snorted. “I spoke to a guy on the FBI’s gang task force, and he said the Levitt’s Angels are small potatoes to them, though they have some connections to drug dealing and prostitution. Nothing we didn’t already know, or surmise.”

  “I want to go back to Big Diehl,” I said. “Do you think he has a credible motive for killing Carl Landsea?”

  Rick shrugged. “Not for me to say. Yeah, he could have held onto his anger at Carl and gone after him as soon as he got out of prison. But all the interviews I read with him in the police files paint a guy who was always looking for the next big scheme—more a dreamer than a killer.”

  “Prison can change you,” I said. “It can make you harder if you let it. Or you can recognize you have a new chance when you get out and focus on taking advantage of that.”

  “It looks like his new chance isn’t panning out that well,” Rick said. “His PO told me that he’s living with his mother in Levittown. She has Alzheimer’s and Diehl’s looking after her.”

  That must be the Olga Diehl I’d discovered. I had very mixed feelings about that. On the one hand, I could imagine it was tough for a biker dude like Big Diehl to come out of prison only to end up taking care of a mother with dementia. But on the other hand, I missed my own parents and was sorry I hadn’t had the chance to look after them when they needed me.

  I realized that if Diehl had indeed turned over a new leaf and was focused on taking care of his mother, that left Hunter without a credible alternative suspect to Peggy. I was glad that I hadn’t stopped searching after sending him the email about Diehl.

  “Any other Angels who might have had a beef with Carl?” I asked.

  “Not that I found in the case records. But of course that was mostly about Diehl, not about Landsea.”

  I felt like a balloon that had been punctured. I was back to square one trying to help Peggy, and my shore vacation with Lili was coming up quickly. I needed to focus on the positive of that trip, though, not the deadline that it pushed forward.

  “I am so looking forward to Wildwood Crest,” I said. “Have to keep Rochester out of the ocean, though. I don’t want to spend my whole vacation shampooing salt water out of his coat.”

  “Tamsen wants to get out of the heat, so we might go up to Canada for a week. Still in the planning stages, though. We have to introduce the idea to Justin, and work out the schedules with her sister and make sure Justin can stay with them. Probably take Rascal with us, but if not I’ll check with you and see if you and Lili can keep him.”

  I restricted myself to only one beer so that I’d be clear-headed to ride the bike home, and Rick did the same. It was dark by the time we left the Drunken Hessian, but I knew those local streets by heart and made my way back to River Bend without incident.

  Lili was sitting up in bed with her iPad, reading the photo book, when I came in. “How was your first bike ride?”

  “Pretty good.” I repeated what I had told Rick, that I wasn’t going to make any decisions until after the poker run with Bob on Sunday.

  “You think I could take a test ride with you one day?” she asked. “I used to have a Ducati scooter when I lived in Italy but I’ve never been on a big bike.”

  “That would be awesome.”

  It rained the next morning, which was frustrating because I wanted to test out the bike some more. And even more joy – I received a notice from the human resources department that I had twelve online course modules to complete, on everything from sexual harassment to firearms on campus to new issues in financial aid.

  I watched the first three videos and took the corresponding quizzes. Then I switched over to the thousand and one details I had to handle before the arrival of a group of incoming freshman for STEM workshops in early August. When lunchtime rolled around, it was still rainy, so I ate my sandwich at my desk. I gave Rochester a couple of pieces of turkey, and then he rolled onto his side for a nap.

  I sat there staring out the big glass window at the trees. If Frank Diehl didn’t kill Carl Landsea, and I was assuming that Peggy didn’t either, then who did? One of the Angels? Someone else? How would I figure that out?

  Rochester rose and came over to me, nudging my arm to see if I had any more turkey to give him. I hit the computer mouse with my elbow, and it woke up my computer, which was open to my email screen.

  I remembered that I hadn’t finished going through the deleted emails, and I resolved to do that at home. “Thanks, boy,” I said, as I ruffled his ears. “I appreciate the help. But I still don’t have any more turkey to give you.”

  He yawned and slumped to the floor again. But remembering the emails I had to look through energized me. Maybe there’d be a new clue in one of those.

  10 – Another Old Friend

  I couldn’t get back to the deleted emails until after we’d had dinner that evening, and I’d given Rochester his post-prandial walk. I made it a short one, though, because it was still drizzling, the streets damp and littered with wet leaves.

  I went through each of the messages that had mentioned Levitt’s Angels, and I was surprised to find Phil
Prior on the list, and to discover from that for a while he had dated a girl I knew in high school.

  Elise Lewis sat next to me in homeroom for two years, where we were placed alphabetically. We had joked at the time that no one could come between us—Levitan and Lewis. Since then she’d married and divorced and gone back to her maiden name. We had become Facebook friends a couple of years before.

  I logged in there, and looked her up. She was a stylist at a hair salon in Levittown, and most of her posts were pictures of hair styles, either those of celebrities or ones she had cut. She liked the same kind of music we had in high school, Bruce Springsteen and Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes, and her movie favorites were all romantic comedies.

  I sent her a message asking if we could get together some time. I didn’t want to tip my hand about the Angels or Peggy Doyle, so I simply said I was eager to catch up with folks I had known back in high school.

  I spent a few minutes scanning through recent posts, then switched over to my hacker group to see if I’d gotten any responses to my question about the curious thrill I got logging into Carl’s email account, even though I had legitimate reasons for being there.

  MamaHack, a wife and mother who was about my age, had responded the night before. “I still feel weird when I have to log into my kids’ schools to check their grades or sign permissions,” she wrote. “Even though it’s perfectly legitimate for me to be there. I guess this is something that’s gotten wired into our brains.”

  She closed with “DON’T DO ANYTHING WRONG!!” in all caps, followed by a couple of heart emojis.

  I sent her a brief thanks, and added that I was doing my best to stick to the straight and narrow, though I added that it was hard when there was so much temptation around.

  As I finished, a message popped up from Elise Lewis. “I have to work tomorrow evening but the salon’s dead slow after six,” she wrote. “Want to come by? We have a Keurig machine in the back.”

  I made sure to mention Lili in my response, so that Elise wouldn’t think I was flirting. “My girlfriend says I’m looking kind of shaggy, so slot me in for a cut at six-thirty. We can talk while you make me handsome.”

  She responded a little later with “LOL, I’ll do my best.”

  By bedtime, the rain had stopped, though branches still dripped on me as I took Rochester for his last walk of the day. Had hacking gotten wired into my brain, I wondered, as we walked, stopped, and walked again. I already knew that I had to be vigilant around my use of those hacking tools to be sure I never stepped over the legal line. But had something happened to my brain so that even legitimate work triggered those old impulses?

  The next morning dawned sparkly and fresh. Rochester demonstrated that he wasn’t eager to hop into the sidecar by planting his front paws on the driveway and lowering his head. I pulled a treat out of my pocket and waved it in front of him, and he looked up.

  I tugged a bit on his leash, and he looked up, at the treat in my hand and then at me. He sat up and put his front paws on the sidecar, and I helped him up and into the seat. I gave him the treat then, and he chewed it noisily while I strapped him into the harness.

  Travis had said that as long as I had him strapped in and drove carefully, I didn’t need a helmet for him. “They’re mostly for dogs who ride pillion,” he said. “If he gets comfortable enough with the bike that he can ride on the seat behind you, come back and we’ll custom-order a helmet for him.”

  Rochester strained against the harness and whimpered, and I scratched behind his ears and told him he was a good boy. Then I sat on the bike and turned on the engine, and he crouched low on the seat.

  “Maybe this isn’t a good idea, boy,” I said. He looked up at me with a mournful expression.

  “I tell you what, let’s try a few miles, and if you really don’t like it we’ll come home.”

  He looked down at the floor, and I blew out a breath. “Nothing ventured, nothing gained,” I said, and I backed the bike carefully out of the driveway. I drove slowly through River Bend, getting a feel for the way the bike shifted with the dog in the sidecar. I couldn’t take curves as quickly as I might have, and the speed bumps throughout the community were a particular problem.

  By the time we’d traveled a few miles up River Road, I felt comfortable with the bike, and gradually Rochester got accustomed to the ride. He sat up on the seat, as much as he could with the restraints, and sniffed the air with his long snout. Whenever I could I reached over to pet him. I was relieved that he enjoyed the ride, and I relaxed and enjoyed the warm breeze at it rushed past me, bringing with it the funky smell of the river, mixed with automobile exhaust and fertilizer. Not the best combination, but it was exhilarating, even better than riding in a convertible with the top down.

  By the time we reached Friar Lake, Rochester was a motorcycle convert. He didn’t even want to jump out of the sidecar, as if he thought he could convince me to keep on driving.

  I spent a chunk of the day completing more of those online programs, including one on first time in college students, another on student privacy, and a third on financial aid. Because aid fraud cost the government nearly $200 million dollars a year, Eastern had to institute new measures to track the reasons for class failure, and we had to add an indicator on our grade roll that identified whether a student who failed had done so because of lack of attendance, or just poor performance.

  I remembered that Rick had mentioned at least one of the Levitt’s Angels had gone to college at Liberty Bell University, one of the for-profit colleges that had sprung up in the last couple of years in the Philadelphia suburbs like mushrooms after a spring rain. I applauded anyone who wanted to better him or herself through education, but from what I’d read, colleges like LBU were more concerned with collecting tuition than providing education.

  But maybe I was just a snob with an education from a very good small college, as Eastern billed itself.

  When it was time to leave Friar Lake, Rochester hopped eagerly into the sidecar. It was windy along the river, and I had to clutch tightly to the handlebars to keep the bike from wavering. It was tougher than I remembered from riding in California – but I was also ten years older, and I needed to give myself time to get back in the groove of riding.

  Lili and I ate an early dinner and I told her I was heading out for a haircut. “You don’t need a barber,” I said to Rochester, when he wanted to come with me. “You take care of getting rid of excess hair yourself.”

  “Which reminds me,” Lili said. “Somebody ought to vacuum up the dog hair soon.”

  “I can do that when I get back.” I kissed her cheek and body-blocked Rochester from following me out the front door.

  I’d had enough of biking for the day so I drove the BMW out to Levittown. The Curl Up and Dye Salon was located in a strip shopping center near the Oxford Valley Mall, sandwiched between an emergency medical clinic and a comic book store.

  I recognized Elise Lewis right away, more from her Facebook pictures than any long-ago memories. Her hair was probably a shade or two blacker than natural, and her eyes were rimmed with black mascara. “Steve!” she squealed when I walked in. “Wow. Long time no see.”

  We hugged. “We always said nothing would come between us,” she reminded me. “Except maybe twenty years or so.”

  “You look good, Elise,” I said, when we pulled apart. “You’ve been here in Levittown since we graduated?”

  “I married a Marine,” she said. “We moved around for a while. South Carolina, Germany, California, Okinawa. But I always knew I wanted to come back home.”

  “And you did.”

  She nodded. “Come on, sit in the chair and I’ll tell you whole sordid story.”

  She kept talking as she wrapped the cape around my shoulders. “Shane was always a controlling bastard, but for the longest time I thought it was the Marines who were making him act that way. We were in foreign countries, so of course he was concerned about my safety, who I went out with, where I went.�
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  She grabbed her clippers. “Anything special you want?”

  I shrugged. “Work your magic.”

  “When we got back to the States it only got worse. He had to know the passwords for my email and my Facebook, and if he didn’t like something I posted, he’d delete it. We fought more and more, and finally I walked out.”

  She began buzzing the back of my head with her clippers. “My dad died around that time, and the divorce took a long time, so I moved back in with my mom for a while and went to beauty school.”

  “Sorry to hear about your dad,” I said. “I guess we’ve been on kind of parallel paths.”

  I told her about Mary’s miscarriages, my hacking, and our divorce. “My dad died while I was in prison, so I moved into the townhouse he bought in Stewart’s Crossing after my mom died.”

  “Getting old sucks, doesn’t it?” Elise said, as she tilted my head down. “You keep losing people you love.”

  “At least I found someone new,” I said. I told her briefly about Lili. “How about you?”

  “After my divorce, my self-confidence was in the toilet,” she said. “I dated a couple of guys, then landed on this one guy, Phil. He treated me like a queen—flowers and jewelry and dinners out.” She shrugged. “But eventually I realized he was just the same as Shane, just showed the control stuff differently.”

  I remembered Professor del Presto’s comments about choosing someone who would make us change in the way we knew we had to. How many times would that have to happen before we could break our bad patterns?

  She started snipping stray hairs. “He was a biker, and he kept calling me his lady, taking me out with this group of guys he hung around with to show me off like I was a thing, not a person.”

  “A group of bikers?” I asked, grateful she’d finally given me the opportunity to shift the conversation toward what I wanted to know. “Not the Levitt’s Angels?”