Another Three Dogs in a Row

by Neil S. Plakcy

  19 – Many Motives

  Before I could do any more searching on Rita Corcoran, Peggy called. “I’ve been going through Carl’s bank records, like you suggested,” she said. “I found three deposits, each about six months apart, from Liberty Bell University.”

  “And you never knew Carl was taking classes there?”

  “I’m sure he didn’t. Carl was no kind of student and he used to have to ask me to go over his reports, back when he was a supervisor at the steel mill.”

  “That’s good, Peggy. That adds another piece to the puzzle.”

  “There’s something more, though.”

  She hesitated, and I didn’t want to rush her. Let her say it when she was ready.

  “He was sending money to my sister RJ. Lots of money.” I heard the plaintiveness in her voice. “Why would he do that?”

  “Was she having financial trouble?”

  Peggy snorted. “RJ loves to brag about how much money she makes at her job. You met her once, when we were kids. She’s the one who used to tease me about being a college girl.” She laughed, though there wasn’t any humor in it. “Kind of ironic that she works for a college now.”

  Something tugged at my brain. “What does the RJ stand for?”

  “Rita Jean. She was named after St. Rita of Cascia, patron saint of impossible causes and hopeless circumstances. My mom was pretty desperate by the time RJ was born. She was praying non-stop to Saint Rita to get us out of Trenton. Funny how it took my dad dying for that wish to come true.”

  Had Peggy been praying to the same saint, to get rid of her husband?

  But I couldn’t stop to wonder about that because I had one more question to ask. “Is your sister’s last name Corcoran?”

  “Yeah, she married a loser when she was nineteen and took his name. Eventually she dumped him but she kept the name. How do you know her last name?”

  “The name has come up in something I’m working on. I’ll tell you more once I figure it all out.” The ideas were flying through my brain like the rapid fire of a submachine gun. I tried to slow down and focus. “Would you be willing to give me your sign on and password for your bank account?” I asked.

  “I trust you, Steve. Carl’s salary stopped when he died, so there isn’t that much money in the account, now that I paid all the bills. I’m going to have to get a job soon but I can’t do anything with this criminal charge hanging over my head and this shackle around my ankle.”

  She read out the ID and password, and I wrote them down on a piece of paper by my laptop. I ended the call, promising to get back to her as soon as I had a chance to look through Carl’s account.

  Rochester began nosing me to go out, and while I didn’t want to put down what I was doing, I knew how relentless he could be. I looked at him, and decided he’d be the perfect cover for a visit to Rita Corcoran’s house.

  One of the great things about having a dog is that he gives you a reason to wander past someone’s house, stop and look around while he sniffs and pees. I plugged Rita’s address in Newtown into my phone, then hooked up Rochester’s leash.

  He was surprised that we were getting into the car rather than heading down the street, but he jumped in the front seat and sat on his hind legs as I headed out to the Ferry Street exit from River Bend.

  I rolled the window down for him and cranked up the air conditioning to compensate, and he looked out the window as we drove inland for a couple of miles. Then I executed a couple of turns that brought us to Oak Hills, the neighborhood in Newtown where Rita lived. Unlike in Levittown, there were actually oaks there, and hills. Fortunately the community wasn’t gated, so I was able to drive along the winding streets past one huge stone-fronted house after another, each of them embellished with gables and cupolas.

  I went slowly past Rita’s house. It was two stories, with a central portico, a wing with arched windows to the left and a three-car garage to the right. A couple of young oaks framed the driveway, and flower beds under the windows rioted with pink and white azaleas.

  A block away, I found a parking spot at the end of a cul-de-sac, and I pulled up and took Rochester out on his leash. We walked slowly back toward Rita’s house, Rochester excited by all the new scents and messages from unfamiliar dogs. I didn’t tug him along like I usually did, because I wanted to establish a pattern of slow movement, in case anyone happened to be watching through one of those multi-paned windows.

  Garbage and recycling must be scheduled for Mondays, because Rita and many of her neighbors already had their bins and cans out, and Rochester was eager to sniff each of them. The recycling bins were rectangular, made of dark blue plastic, without lids. You could get a real sense of what the neighbors ate and bought by scanning them.

  I saw glass wine bottles from The Velvet Devil merlot and a mix of Sangiovese and Shiraz called The Blood of Hipsters. Piles of New York Times and Wall Street Journals, along with a stack of the distinctive salmon pink of the Financial Times. Lots of bottles of designer water, empty granola bar boxes and almond milk cartons.

  When we got to Rita’s house, I peered down at the contents of Rita’s recycling bin, while Rochester paused to sniff and pee. Right on top was a presentation folder with the Liberty Bell University logo on the font. I took a quick look around and didn’t see anyone watching. I reached down and picked up the folder.

  It was empty—except for a business card in a slot on the inner right side. Rita J. Corcoran, Assistant Director of Financial Aid.

  I pulled out the card and dropped the folder back in the recycle bin. That was the confirmation that Rita was the missing link I needed. Rita was Carl’s sister-in-law, and she worked at LBU. Wyatt had sent those social security numbers to Carl in that encrypted spreadsheet, and Carl could have asked Rita what to do with them.

  Rochester and I circled around the neighborhood, and as he took in all the different scents, I thought about how I could implicate Rita Corcoran in the financial aid scam going on at Liberty Bell University.

  I could apply myself, of course. See how easy it was to figure out the FAFSA. But if I was being honest, I probably made too much money to qualify for a Pell Grant, and I wasn’t going to go so far as to falsify my information.

  Did I know anybody broke enough that I could recruit? But I didn’t want to encourage anyone to break the law.

  Another thought jumped into my head. Suppose Carl and Wyatt had concocted this scheme themselves, and Rita had figured it out and was going to report back to her superiors at LBU. Maybe Carl threatened her and she had killed him to protect herself.

  When I got home, I used the information Peggy had given me to log in to Carl’s bank account. He had gotten about $4,000 each time over three semesters, but it looked like he was giving Rita a commission --- about fifty percent of the net amount he received, shortly after each of the three deposits from Liberty Bell University.

  Rita had made an easy two grand by rubber-stamping his paperwork. When I added in all the other Angels, and the number of social security numbers Wyatt Lisowski had come up with, Rita was pulling in real money. Two hundred fake IDs times two grand a pop, with the possibility of multiple registrations by the same person.

  Was it enough to support her lifestyle, though? She probably didn’t make much money working for LBU. Peggy had said that Rita’s ex was a loser, so it was unlikely he was paying her much alimony, if any at all.

  I exported Carl’s bank records to a spreadsheet and started manipulating the columns, looking for other suspicious transactions. He had a PayPal account, and he regularly pulled money down from that account into his bank. I went back online and clicked on a transaction.

  It was a vendor payment from Liberty Bell University, for something called IT consulting. That made me laugh. Carl seemed like the kind of guy who could barely manage his own online transactions, not someone you’d hire for IT work.

  The amount was $990, which immediately set off a red flag. At Eastern, I had the authority to make purchases and pay invoic
es up to a thousand-dollar limit. Anything over that required a signature from my supervisor, the vice president for external affairs. If Rita was the one at LBU paying Carl, then it made sense she’d keep the amount under a thousand dollars.

  I went back to Carl’s bank account, and found a PayPal payment twice a month for the last two years. Each of the PayPal deposits matched the email invoices he had sent to Rita, and then to a payment a day or two later to her—in this case, eighty percent of the invoice amount. In all, Rita had netted about $19,000 tax free from the transactions.

  Had Rita done the same thing with other members of the Levitt’s Angels? If she had, we were talking about an extra hundred grand a year if she recruited ten guys for the same scam. Enough to provide the funds she’d been using to pay down her mortgage so quickly.

  I remembered what Elise Lewis had said, that her ex-boyfriend Phil had told her Carl was cheating on Peggy, with a woman who’d surprise Elise. Elise had thought that meant the woman was either prettier or smarter than she’d expect. But it would be a surprise, too, if Carl was having an affair with his sister-in-law.

  Was that possible? Rita was an attractive woman, and she resembled Peggy in superficial ways—the same perky nose and sprinkle of freckles. But she was younger and her face and body looked less lived-in than Peggy’s. She dressed well, wore makeup effectively, and had a high gloss. Maybe Carl found that attractive, fooling around with a younger, better-looking version of his wife.

  What did Rita get out of it? The chance to screw up her sister’s marriage?

  I realized that from the beginning of this investigation, I’d had the idea that Carl Landsea was a loser. That’s what Hunter had called him, and it had never occurred to me to look at him objectively.

  I pulled up a bunch of pictures of Carl and scanned them. He had a handsome face, and the wrinkles across his forehead and laugh lines around the edges of his mouth gave him character. In most pictures his hair was neatly trimmed, and he was clean shaven. For a guy in his late forties, he looked pretty good. He didn’t have much of a beer gut, and in one picture he was wearing a sleeveless T-shirt and his tattooed biceps were ropy.

  Maybe he wasn’t as much of a loser as Hunter had said. When he began dating Peggy, he had a solid job at the steel mill. Sure, he had a police record, but so did I. I could see how women would find the mix of his good looks, his motorcycle and the tinge of danger very attractive.

  But could I prove that Carl and Rita were having an affair?

  I looked to Rochester for advice, but he was busy chewing. Then I realized he’d finished with the dental stick and had a piece of paper in his jaws. “Come on, boy, you know you can’t chew paper,” I said, tugging it away from him. “Too much fiber for you.”

  It was a credit card receipt for the dinner the night before at Le Canal. “You may be onto something, boy,” I said.

  A guy I worked with in California had been stepping out on his wife, and she’d hired a private detective to follow him. It was too late for that, but I remembered that when she did sue for divorce, she found a lot of evidence in her husband’s credit card receipts. Could I discover the same thing about Carl?

  I logged back into his bank account and realized that he had a credit card from the same bank, and I was able to click the link on the left-hand menu to see all his transactions.

  There hadn’t been any since his death, of course. Peggy must have had her own card. I tracked back through grocery and gas charges, until I found one for the Newtown Arms, a fancy restaurant in a converted colonial-era farmhouse. They specialized in farm-to-table cuisine, growing much of what they served in their own gardens.

  I’d wanted to go there with Lili until I saw the prices on the menu, then put it aside for a special occasion. Starters began in the double digits, and a steak was forty-five bucks—with side dishes extra.

  From the tab on the receipt, it looked like Carl had been there with a guest, and I strongly doubted he’d taken Peggy there. Paging backwards, I found a couple of purchases of lingerie online, as well as a few receipts from an expensive jewelry store in Newtown.

  That solved the question of what Carl had been doing with the extra cash he’d made through the scams with Rita.

  I’d have to confirm with Peggy that those dinners and gifts hadn’t been presents to her, but I was already pretty sure of the answer. It was nearly ten o’clock by then, too late to call Peggy with difficult news.

  If Carl and Rita were having an affair, that may have been how Rita roped Carl into the two scams at Liberty Bell University. I went back to one of the lessons I’d learned from Rick about the motives for murder. He’d conveniently categorized them as the four L’s – love, lust, lucre and loathing.

  Rita could have killed Carl because he’d fallen out of love with her, or because he refused to leave his wife for her. Maybe he wanted to stop participating in the LBU scams with Rita – he’d had a couple of brushes with the law, particularly the last one with Big Diehl, and that might have made him scared about doing anything that might put him in jail.

  If Rita knew he’d flipped on his former friend, she might have killed him, or had him killed, to protect herself. Too many motives, and my head started to spin.

  I looked over to Rochester. “What do you think, boy? You have any ideas on what’s going on?”

  He looked up at me, yawned, and rolled over on his belly for a rub.

  20 – Golden Eggs

  Monday morning I dropped Rochester at Friar Lake with Joey, and drove into Leighville to meet with the hiring committee in a conference room on the Eastern campus.

  We had a series of Skype calls set up with our semi-finalists, and my ears perked up when one of the candidates spoke about working at a for-profit college like Liberty Bell University.

  “It’s very challenging to create engaging programs for students who never come to campus,” she said. “How do you develop a sense of community between people who never meet face to face? I focused on creating interactive online programming like discussion groups for first-time in college students, for veterans, and other special interest groups. Interestingly, I worked closely with our financial aid office, trying to discover which students were actually committed to college, versus those who were taking their Pell grant money without doing any work.”

  Dave Moretti, the guy from financial aid, nodded along. “That’s an interesting approach. We’ve been having some of the same problems at Eastern with Pell scammers and ghost students, though of course not as much as institutions with a lower tuition cost.”

  I wondered which of the Angels had been the first to participate in Rita’s scam. I guessed it was Carl, because she knew him through Peggy, but I made a note to go back over the social media posts I’d found and see if any of the Angels had posted anything about LBU before Carl had accepted his first payment.

  The interviews took up most of the morning, and then we had to discuss each candidate and choose which ones we wanted to bring in for face-to-face meetings. When we got to that point, I had to mention that I’d be out of town the following week on vacation. That reminded me that I had to finish up on what I was doing for Hunter Thirkell and Peggy Landsea before I left, as I’d promised Lili I wouldn’t take my hacker laptop, and that I’d do my best to be present during our vacation.

  With Lili beside me, accompanied by Rick and Tamsen, Justin, Rochester and Rascal, that would not be a problem.

  That evening Lili chatted about the vacation as I prepared dinner. “Tamsen and I are making plans to do things together,” she said. “We’ve made reservations at family-friendly restaurants for the five of us a couple of times, and the rest of the time we’ll alternate nights with Justin so each couple gets some time together.”

  “We need to stock up on treats for Rochester and Rascal,” I said from the stove. Rochester recognized his name, and the word “treat,” and immediately came up and nuzzled my leg.

  “You said the word,” Lili said, laughing. “Now you’ve go
t to follow through.”

  It was time for him to get one of his dental sticks anyway, so I gave it to him and he took it into the living room to chew away. I worked on the spreadsheets for a while that evening, and eventually went upstairs, where Lili and I cuddled for a while, until Rochester demanded his last walk. As we strolled down the dark, humid streets of River Bend, I looked up at lit windows and wondered what was going on behind them. Happy couples? Angry ones? Husbands and wives hiding secrets from each other?

  Fortunately Rochester reminded me that our real purpose was so that he could sniff and pee on interesting places, and I gave up wondering about other people’s lives and focused on my own.

  It was Monday night, and we’d be leaving early Sunday morning for the trip down the shore. Our Airbnb rental began that day, and ran until Saturday evening, when we’d leave to return home.

  That meant I had the rest of the week to figure out what had happened to Carl Landsea.

  Tuesday morning I called Peggy. “Mind if I stop by on my way to work?” I asked her. Levittown was the other direction from Friar Lake, so it was quite a detour, but I wanted to ask Peggy my questions face to face, rather than over an impersonal phone call.

  “Sure. I’m not doing anything.”

  When I got off Route 13 to head to Birch Valley, I spotted a Dunkin’ Donuts, and I went through the drive-through and picked up a half dozen donuts and a pair of coffees. Ten years in Silicon Valley had made me a coffee snob; I bought the best beans, ground them myself, used filtered water. But I figured Peggy could use the sugar and caffeine to get through our conversation.

  “You didn’t have to bring anything,” she said, when she took the box of donuts from me. “Though I appreciate it.”

  Rochester and I followed her into the kitchen, where we sat at the table and dug into the donuts and the coffee. “What brings you over here?” she asked. “Must be something bad that you didn’t want to tell me over the phone.”

  “Kind of,” I said. “Have you ever been to the Newtown Arms restaurant in Newtown?”