Another Three Dogs in a Row

by Neil S. Plakcy

  12 – Liberty

  We relaxed at the picnic area for a while longer, the three of us stretched out on an oversized blanket, until the sun got too hot. “How do you like being a biker babe?” I asked Lili, as we packed up for the ride home.

  “It’s good except for the helmet hair,” she said. “I’m going to need to condition the hell out of my curls to get them back in shape.”

  “You’re always lovely to me,” I said. “Even with your hair plastered down on your head.”

  “I wish I could say the same to you,” she said, and laughed.

  Back home, Lili said she was going to take a nap, and before I left for Peggy’s she told me what she wanted from the Italian restaurant, Gepetto’s. It was an old school place I’d gone to with my parents, and I’d introduced Lili to it the year before.

  I was happy to take the BMW to Peggy’s and ride in air conditioned comfort, and Rochester seemed content to curl up on the passenger seat without any restraints.

  When Peggy came to the door, she looked better than she had the last time I’d seen her—not so tired, and when she smiled I could see a hint of the old Peggy. She’d pulled her brown hair up into a ponytail, and with no makeup, she looked at least ten years younger.

  “I spoke to Hunter yesterday,” she said, as she led Rochester and me into the living room. “He says you might be able to find someone else who had a motive to kill Carl? Did you find something in those emails?”

  “I’m still working on it,” I said. “But that guy you mentioned, Frank Diehl, he sounds like he had a motive to kill Carl. Diehl was in prison until a couple of months before Carl died. Do you know if Carl saw him?”

  “Frank didn’t come to the house,” Peggy said. “But Carl was out on the bike every weekend, and he’d never tell me who he talked to or hung out with. It used to be that I’d go with him, and I got to know some of the other guys and their wives or girlfriends. I felt left out when he wouldn’t take me with him.”

  Once again, I worried that Peggy had been the one to kill Carl—to be on her own, instead of under the thumb of a manipulator.

  As if she was reading my mind, she said, “I didn’t kill him, you know.” She shifted on the sofa, pulling her knees up to her chest. “Hunter has never asked me that question outright, because I guess he’s afraid of what I might say. Carl may have been a jerk, but he got me out of Club Hott, and I was grateful for that. I was going to go back to work, you know, right before he died. Probably couldn’t get a legal secretary job, but I didn’t care, I’d work at anything just to get my old self back.”

  My heart jumped a bit then. I remembered Peggy’s old self, and I wanted to help her return to it. “I’ll let you know as soon as I have something concrete about Frank Diehl,” I said.

  “Thanks, Steve. It feels good to have someone who remembers me and believes in me.”

  Rochester came over to join us, his big tail waving like mad, and on his way he knocked over a big pile of mail on the coffee table. “Sorry about that,” I said, as I leaned over to pick it all up.

  “It’s my fault. I haven’t been willing to look at the mail for a long time. Probably a ton of bills I’m back due on.” She shrugged. “Won’t matter if they put me in jail.”

  “You can’t let yourself think like that, Peggy,” I said. “Come on, I’ll help you. At least we can separate out the junk and figure out what you need to pay attention to.”

  We sat side by side on the floor in front of the coffee table, and it was almost like we were teenagers again. I began making a pile of junk mail, and handing Peggy the bills.

  “Carl was going to college?” I asked. I held up a piece of mail from Liberty Bell University.

  Peggy snorted. “Not on your life.”

  “Mind if I open it?”

  “Go ahead. I’m going to get my checkbook and pay some of these bills while you’re here to keep me accountable.”

  I slit open the envelope and pulled out a single piece of paper. It was a transcript from LBU, showing that Carl had registered for a freshman composition class in the spring term, which he had failed.

  When I looked more closely I realized there was a typo on the page. It was addressed to Carol Landsea, not Carl. “Look at this,” I said, showing the page to Peggy when she returned with her checkbook. “Carl wasn’t a cross-dresser, was he?”

  “Not in this lifetime.” She looked at the sheet. “And this isn’t his social security number, either. I know, I’ve had to fill it out enough times lately.”

  I wondered if the number there was one of the ones from the spreadsheet that LoveMySled28 had sent Carl. “Can I take this home with me?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “Sure, if you want to.”

  I spent the next half hour sorting through mail while Peggy wrote checks. Carl had left enough in their joint checking account to cover her for a few months, but she’d eventually need to get a job—that is, if she wasn’t in prison.

  By the time we were done, she had paid the cable, the phone, the electric, and a bunch of credit card bills under her name and Carl’s.

  Before I left, I called Gepetto’s and placed a to-go order. “Thanks for coming over, Steve,” Peggy said. “I appreciate it. I didn’t realize how far behind I had gotten on the mail and the bills.”

  “Glad to be of help. And I’ll let you know when I find out anything else useful.”

  She kissed my cheek and petted Rochester, and the dog and I drove down to Gepetto’s, the kind of place with leatherette booths, posters of Italy on the walls, and placemats with maps of the country on the tables.

  My mother had a specific dish she ordered at each kind of restaurant. Chinese, she got shrimp with lobster sauce. Seafood, she’d get shrimp scampi. And at an Italian place, it was chicken parmigiana. I’d ordered that dish in her memory, with the tortellini alla panna for Lili, a half dozen garlic rolls, and a pair of cannoli.

  I had to put the bag of food in the back hatch because the smell was too tantalizing and Rochester would have gone nuts. As it was, he kept trying to scramble into the back to get to the food, and a couple of times I had to tug on his collar and get him back into his seat.

  Back home, I spread the feast out on the kitchen table. Late afternoon light flooded in from the courtyard outside, glancing onto the white wooden chairs and the butcher-block tabletop.

  “You used to go to this place as a kid?” Lili asked as we sat down.

  “Yup. My dad commuted to work with a couple of guys from Levittown, and they were always recommending restaurants to him. Local joints, of course – back then we didn’t have all these national chain places like we have today. If you went to an Italian restaurant, it was owned by an Italian family and everybody who worked there was related. We used to go to a Greek diner sometimes, and a Chinese place, but that was about it for ethnic food.”

  “We moved around so much that we never were able to establish favorite restaurants,” Lili said. “And besides, my mom was such a good cook that it was hard to justify going out to eat.”

  “My mom wasn’t a cook,” I said. “And she figured Friday was her night off, after working all week. She loved seafood, but my father refused to go to seafood restaurants on Friday nights because of all the mackerel snappers.”

  “And what, pray tell, are those? A special kind of fish?”

  I laughed. “No, it was my father’s nickname for Catholics who couldn’t eat meat on Fridays., which was still a big thing when I was a kid. He was worried that all the Catholics would fill up the seafood restaurants on Friday nights, so if my mom wanted shrimp or lobster sometime, it had to be on a different night.”

  I fed Rochester bits of chicken but resisted giving him any of the garlic rolls, because I knew that garlic was toxic to dogs, and even though I probably could have gotten away with giving him a small taste, I didn’t want to risk a visit to the vet’s emergency room. Been there, done that.

  After dinner, Lili went upstairs and I took a quick look at the spreadsheet
of Social Security numbers and compared them to the transcript that had come in the mail to Birch Valley. Sure enough, the number Carl had used to register at Liberty Bell U was one of them. Had he registered under the name Carol? Or was that just a typo the college had made?

  I called Peggy. “Did you and Carl have a joint checking account?” I asked.

  “Yup. I didn’t make any money after I stopped dancing, so Carl paid all the bills.”

  “Can you see if Carl ever got a deposit from Liberty Bell University?”

  “Why would they have paid him? He didn’t work there.”

  “There’s a scam you can run,” I said. “You register for a class at a college like Liberty Bell U. You get financial aid, like a Pell Grant. That money goes to the college, and they take out the cost of the tuition and then send the remainder to the student.”

  “You think Carl did that?”

  “I’m not sure. But if the college gave him some money, then that’s a good explanation for it.”

  “When do you think this would have happened?” she asked. I heard her flipping through pages in the background.

  “Probably January,” I said.

  “Son of a gun,” Peggy said a moment later. “Here it is. A little over four thousand dollars, in mid-January.” She blew out a breath. “I never thought Carl would be sharp enough to figure something like this out.”

  “I don’t think he was behind it,” I said. “I think it’s something to do with the Levitt’s Angels. Did you know a guy who used the email address of LoveMySled28?”

  “I only knew the guys by their names, not their email addresses,” she said.

  I told Peggy I’d get back to her, and hung up. Who was LoveMySled28? How could I find that out without trying to hack into his email server? I was mulling over that question when Lili came in to the bedroom. “Want to watch a movie?” she asked. “There’s a bunch of new ones on Netflix.”

  I’d rather watch a movie with Lili any time rather than risk falling down the slippery slope into hacking, so I postponed looking for LoveMySled and said, “Sure, let’s pick one.”

  We spent the next couple of hours watching a mindless romantic comedy, and the only problem I had with it was how unrealistic it was. If you were lucky, you found someone like Lili to fall in love with and share your life with. If you weren’t, you could end up the way Peggy Doyle had, living with jerks and then a widow three times over.

  There was probably something to be said for getting free of those bad situations, though I knew that even ending a bad marriage, as I’d had with Mary, came with a lot of pain and sadness. I could only imagine what it must be like to go through that three times. I hoped I never had to experience it again.

  13 – A Good Hand

  I didn’t get to look for LoveMySled Saturday night after the movie was over, and Sunday morning I had to get ready for the poker run. I loaded Rochester into the sidecar and we trolled down the street Bob Freehl’s house.

  The day was warm and partly cloudy, and Bob said it was perfect weather for the poker run. “Not too much sun to cause a glare on the road, or to roast you,” he said, as I idled my bike in his driveway while he got ready.

  “You’re bringing the dog with you? Really?”

  “Why not? It took him a while, but he likes the sidecar.”

  Bob snorted, then swung his leg over his bike and turned it on. He let me take the lead for a while as we drove to Willow Grove Mall, where we’d sign in and get our first card, and when we arrived he said that for a newbie I handled the bike pretty well.

  The mall parking lot was filled with bikes and bikers, and I kept Rochester on a tight leash as we walked over to the registration table. I looked around for anyone wearing the Levitt’s Angels logo on shirts or jackets but I didn’t see any.

  Most of those around us looked like weekend warriors —older guys with tricked-out bikes who soothed a bit of mid-life crisis with a fancy motorcycle and the illusion that they were wild enough to rebel against suburban conformity.

  Guys like Carl, though, were the real rebels, because they didn’t have the advantages that the men in Brooks Brothers polo shirts and expensive leathers did. In the end, though, weren’t we all the same, looking for a bit of freedom from constricting lives?

  I didn’t feel trapped the way I knew some of my friends did. A couple of my college friends complained about wives who weren’t interested in sex anymore, jobs that felt like tombs, and kids who caused constant worry. For guys like that, a bike could represent real freedom.

  I had a job I liked that paid me well, a relationship with Lili that still felt new and exciting, and the love of a good dog. I’d been able to reinvent myself after prison. So what was so appealing to me about the motorcycle? Did I really want to buy one and ride it around, or was I playing a part as I looked for information about Carl Landsea’s murder?

  If that second idea was the real one, then I was striking out. None of the guys I saw in the mall parking lot looked like a Levitt’s Angel, and I worried that I was wasting an entire day looking for evidence that wasn’t there for me to find.

  I could complain about that, or I could enjoy the ride. I chose the second option. Bob took the lead as we headed up Route 611 to our first stop, at the Mercer Museum in Doylestown. It was a towering concrete castle where I’d gone on school field trips. It collected the objects that documented the lives and tasks of early Americans prior to the Industrial Revolution. I thought Lili might like to visit, and that she’d find interesting stuff to photograph, and I made a mental note to talk about it with her.

  Rochester wasn’t the only dog on the run, and he sniffed a female yellow lab while we waited in line in the museum’s parking lot. The lab rolled onto her back and Rochester got up close and personal with her, but she didn’t seem to mind. “She’s a love sponge,” the guy with her said.

  “Yeah, mine is too,” I said. “How’s yours with the bike? Mine is just getting accustomed to the sidecar.”

  “She rides pillion behind me, with her paws up on my shoulders,” he said. “I’ve got a seat back there with a harness, and she loves the sled as much as I do.”

  The word sled jumped out at me. “Forgive me, ‘cause I’m new at this,” I said. “But do a lot of guys call their bikes sleds?”

  He shrugged. “It’s one of those terms,” he said. “Ride, beast, old lady. Different guys have different terms.”

  “You seem to know your stuff,” I said. “Would you mind if I emailed you a question once in a while?”

  “No problem. I love talking about bikes.” He dug a card out of his wallet and handed it to me. “I do home inspections for a living, so let me know if you ever need my services.”

  I took the card, and noticed that the email address was a business one, brian@homeservices.com. Could he also be LoveMySled28?

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “Keep the rubber side down,” he said, and held out his hand for a fist bump.

  I returned the gesture, and a few minutes later Bob and I picked up our second cards and then continued up Route 611 to Easton. As Bob had said, it was a good day to be out on a bike—not too hot, and the Sunday traffic was light.

  As I rode, I thought about how I could track down LoveMySled28. It was an odd enough phrase that I could do a simple Google search, and then if necessary dive into some of my more esoteric databases. Rochester leaned over and nuzzled me, reminding me that I was there to enjoy the ride, and I took a couple of deep breaths and focused on the scenery, and on making sure I was riding correctly.

  Our next stop was the Crayola Experience in Easton, a combination museum and factory that showed off all the various products the company produced, and how they were made. We didn’t go inside, though—just stopped quickly on the street out front and picked up our next card.

  I hadn’t been to Easton for a few years, and it hadn’t changed much – pretty much a postcard of decline in the industrial northeast. Closed stores on the main street, little traffic—tho
ugh maybe that was because it was a Sunday. Once again, there was no one at the stop who looked like a member of a biker gang. I saw a lot of denim vests and Harley Davidson T-shirts, but none of them displayed the Levitt’s Angels logo.

  Then we swung over to Route 212 south, heading to our next stop at the Quakertown Farmer’s Market. There was more traffic on 212, lots of lights and stop and go, and I had a lot of time at red lights to think about what in the world I was doing at this event. Was I going to become a recreational biker?

  No.

  We’d been on the road for nearly two hours by then, and my butt hurt and my arms had begun to ache from clutching the handlebars. I’d only done this because I thought I might run into one of the Levitt’s Angels, and it didn’t seem like that was happening. I felt pretty stupid by the time Bob and I pulled up at the market.

  I flexed my arms and back muscles. I’d pay for this ride later, I was sure. I was tempted to call it quits, leave Bob to finish the run and head for home with Rochester. But I’d come this far, and I had to finish. I had collected a seven and a pair of eights by then, so I had the potential to put together a decent hand, and my competitive instinct kicked in, too.

  I walked Rochester over to the grassy verge next to the market so he could sniff and pee, and while I waited for him to finish I spotted a guy of about my age with a shaved head and a Levitt’s Angels jacket.

  I let Rochester lead me in the guy’s direction. He was standing by his bike, texting on his phone, and when he looked up I said, “So, Levitt’s Angels. You must have known Carl Landsea.”

  He glared at me. “What about it?”

  “I knew his wife when we were kids. You think she killed him?”

  “What are you, some kind of cop?”

  I shook my head. “Just a guy. But because I knew her back when I’ve been following the story.”

  “Carl was an asshole,” the biker said. “He did all kinds of stupid shit and then ratted out Big Diehl to slide. Whoever killed him did the world a favor.”