Another Three Dogs in a Row

by Neil S. Plakcy

  She shook her head.

  “Carl ever give you any fancy lingerie or jewelry?”

  “What’s this about?” She finally showed some emotion. Maybe it was the sugar acting, or the realization of what had been going on.

  “I think in addition to working with your sister on this Liberty Bell scam, he was having an affair with her.”

  She slammed her cup of coffee down on the table. “That bitch. My own sister. Though I can’t say I’m surprised, in the end. She always was a jealous little thing.”

  “I’m sorry, Peggy,” I said.

  “Do you think she killed him?” Peggy asked.

  “Hard to see a motive right now,” I said. I told her I thought Rita was behind the financial aid scheme, and that she had also been collecting fake invoices from him and having the college pay him for non-existent work. “Between those two things, she was making a lot of money from him.”

  “I wouldn’t put anything past her. You know that story about the goose that laid the golden egg, right?”

  I nodded.

  “The goose gets killed in the end. Just like Carl.”

  21 – Vulnerability

  As I drove up to Friar Lake, I went back over my conversation with Peggy. It seemed like Carl’s affair was news to her, but how could she have been so oblivious?

  I had gone over the receipts from the Newtown Arms with her, but she said Carl often told her he was going out with his biker buddies, and she assumed that’s where he was the nights he was out with Rita.

  When I got to the office I engaged in a flurry of emails with my fellow committee members about the questions for our face to face meetings with the candidates on Thursday.

  That kept me busy throughout the morning, and it wasn’t until I was out walking Rochester at lunch that I went back to Peggy’s situation. What else could I do to research what Carl was up to?

  I wanted to know more about Liberty Bell University, and how it easy it might be to scam them. But how could I learn that? Rochester was tugging at his leash, straining to get over to the base of a tree, and I followed him over there. I spotted a broken piece of a keychain, a couple of metal links, and picked it up before he could swallow it.

  Links. LinkedIn. I had set up a profile on the site soon after it opened, though I didn’t do much with it. I accepted connection requests from people I knew, other educators, and fellow Eastern alumni, and that was about it.

  But as soon as we got back to the office, I tried to log in to the site. Of course I’d forgotten my password, and had to jump through a couple of hoops to reset it, but eventually I got in. I did a search among my contacts to see if any had connections to Liberty Bell University, and found a name that seemed familiar.

  Dorothy “Dee” Gamay had been an adjunct instructor in the English department when I first began teaching there myself, and I often saw her in the department lounge between classes. She had a habit of answering her phone with her name, and I remembered once she’d been insulted that someone began speaking to her immediately in Spanish.

  I had refrained at the time from telling her that digame, pronounced like her name, meant “talk to me” in Spanish, so it wasn’t surprising that someone followed her instructions.

  Her profile indicated that she taught English composition for Liberty Bell University, among other institutions. She had stopped teaching at Eastern a couple of years before, though, so I clicked the button that allowed me to send her a message through LI.

  “Hi, Dee, Steve Levitan here. We used to teach together in Eastern’s English department, and I’m looking to pick up some adjunct work. I see that you’ve been teaching at Liberty Bell U. What’s it like? I’d appreciate any advice.”

  I sent the message through and went back to my college email folder, where I was reminded that I still had a couple of those course modules to complete, and I worked through another three before it was time to head for home.

  That evening, while Lili was out shopping for bathing suits with Tamsen, I scanned back through all the results from social media accounts of Carl and the other Angels to see who was the first to mention Liberty Bell University. Though the first was an Angel named Ed Antes, it came a full semester after the first deposit from LBU to Carl’s account. That meant Carl was the first to try out the scam, at least based on the evidence I had.

  Then I went back over all of the emails between Carl and Rita. There were only about a dozen, and the first eight related only to invoices and payments. Buried at the end of the ninth, though, Carl had written, “See you Saturday.”

  I went back to the receipts and cross-referenced the date, discovering that the Saturday in question was one that matched a receipt from the Newtown Arms.

  That was good enough evidence for me.

  I was ready to quit but I thought I’d better review the last couple of emails again. The last one, dated a few days before Carl’s death, was an eye-opener. “I can’t keep doing this,” he wrote. “If we get caught, with my record they’ll send me right to prison. It’s not worth the risk.”

  Rita hadn’t answered him. But that gave Rita a powerful motive – if the goose refused to continue laying golden eggs, it was dangerous to let him keep squawking around her.

  As an English professor, I understood I was mixing up genders. But the situation was the same. Add in the fact that in the past Carl had ratted out his collaborator, Big Diehl, and if I were Rita I’d be worried that Carl’s new-found conscience could lead to big trouble.

  Did Rita know anything about motorcycles, though? Maybe she didn’t need to. She knew a lot of the other Angels, and she could ask one of them for information – or even convince one of them to meddle with Carl’s bike in exchange for taking over his part in the false invoice scam. I even considered Travis at Pennsy Choppers, but I hadn’t found any connection between him and Rita.

  I sent Hunter an email with all the information I’d discovered on Rita. But I knew that he ran a one-man law firm with limited resources, and if I wanted to be sure Rita was the person who’d killed Carl, I had to meet her myself to get a feel for her. How could I do that? I didn’t think I could go through Peggy, because she was pretty pissed at her sister.

  I went online to the Liberty Bell University website and found a course on introduction to computer forensics. That was the kind of course I’d been considering, so I had a real reason to learn more about it, and LBU. I clicked on a link that said, “How can I pay for my courses,” and was led to the financial aid page, with instructions on how to fill out my FAFSA, and the kind of aid programs students might quality for.

  At the bottom of the page was a link that read, “Want to meet with one of our advisors? Click here!”

  I did, and I came to a page featuring a calendar and instructions on how to make an appointment. I could choose “any advisor” or I could select one from a list.

  Rita Corcoran’s name was right there, and I clicked the link to set up an appointment with her. Her next available one was the next day, Wednesday, at three o’clock. The college was housed in a glassy high-rise in Langhorne, near the Oxford Valley Mall, and If I left Friar Lake at two, I could make it down there easily. I didn’t think there was any danger she’d remember me, or my name, from one chance encounter twenty-five years before.

  A note at the bottom of the web page said that service animals were welcome at Liberty Bell University, and I looked over at Rochester. “What do you think, boy? Can you pretend to be a service dog?”

  The year before at Halloween, I’d found a halter and vest in Rochester’s size that read “Service Dog” on the side. I’d added “Dis” to the word service, so it read “Disservice dog” and considered the vest his costume.

  I had read a lot on line about people who pretended that various pets were service animals in order to take them on planes without paying. They claimed that their dogs, cats, even pot-bellied pigs eased their nerves when flying. One woman had even tried to take a peacock on a flight from New York to Miami as he
r service animal.

  She’d been denied, of course. But that had raised a hue and cry about service animals on planes, leading many of the airlines to crack down.

  I wasn’t trying to get Rochester on a plane without buying him a ticket, and I did want to give him a chance to sniff Rita Corcoran and see what he thought of her. Nobody was going to arrest me for pretending he was my service dog, and I could say that he helped me with feelings of anxiety connected with going out in public. That would tie in to my reason why I wanted to take online courses, and eventually get myself into a career I could do from home.

  Lili returned a short while later, with a pair of new bathing suits, and she tried them on for me. The first was a form-fitting one-piece, with a scooped neck that dipped down into the curve of her breasts, and looked very sexy. The large blue and black lines were slimming – but of course I refrained from pointing that out.

  The second looked almost more like lingerie than a bathing suit, with spaghetti straps over a rounded top and a flirty skirt with white waves against the black fabric. “I love them both,” I said. “But then, I’ve always said you had good taste.”

  “I was reluctant to buy this one,” she said, of the one with the tiny straps that she still wore. “But Tamsen convinced me.”

  “What kind of suit did she get?”

  “She’s more adventurous than I am, and skinnier, too. She bought a bright blue bikini and then another that looks kind of like this one, but in white.”

  “Rick’s going to have to push his eyes back in his head,” I said.

  She slid down the straps of the bathing suit. “And you?” she asked.

  “I love you no matter what you wear,” I said. “Even if you’re not wearing anything.”

  And that led where I wanted it to go. I pushed aside all thoughts of Peggy Landsea and her problems, and let myself live in the moment with Lili.

  Rochester even obliged by slumping down on the floor in the bedroom doorway, as if he was protecting us while we were vulnerable.

  22 – Disservice

  Before I left for work the next morning, I dug out the service vest I’d converted into a Halloween costume and ripped off the extra “dis” from the word “disservice.” I tossed it into the back of the car.

  When I got to Friar Lake, I checked my personal email and found a message from Dee Gamay, the adjunct I’d emailed about working at Liberty Bell U.

  “The place is a cluster-fuck,” she wrote back. “If you can teach anywhere else instead, go for it. The administration is a bunch of money-grubbers who complain if you fail a student, even if they don’t do the work.”

  Dee was clearly still as outspoken as she was when I knew her, which was good for my purposes. If LBU was really more concerned with taking students’ money than educating them, then that kind of climate would make it easier for Rita to operate her Pell grant scam.

  “You wouldn’t believe the kind of emails that come out of that place, too,” Dee continued. “It’s as if the whole administration needs remedial writing skills because even the vice presidents make errors with comma splices and run-on sentences, and everyone seems to think that you should Capitalize Random Words.”

  I laughed, but at the same time I was sad. What was the use of pressing Eastern students to write properly if they got into a work world where that didn’t matter?

  Dee’s final rant was about the use of the reply all button in emails. “It’s bad enough to get a poorly written message the first time, but then it pops back into your in-box ten more times from people who keep including it. I have learned a lot about the kind of scams students put through from reading messages that aren’t intended for me, though.”

  I thanked her for the advice and said I’d certainly push Liberty Bell U to the bottom of my search list. Then I sat back. The for-profit college seemed to embody all the worst things I’d read about such places—a focus on money and not on student success. A very welcoming environment for scams like the ones Rita appeared to be running.

  I did some work and finished another one of the online courses the administration had prescribed for me, and after a quick lunch it was time to leave for my appointment with Rita Corcoran. Rochester was surprised when we left Friar Lake so early. But he enjoyed sticking his big head out the window and sniffing the afternoon scents, first on River Road and then on I-95.

  Liberty Bell University didn’t have a campus, just a couple of floors in a high-rise across the street from the Sesame Place theme park. Convenient if Big Bird or Ernie needed some continuing education, I guessed.

  A yellow and green roller coaster towered over the brightly colored pavilions, and for a moment I experienced a pang of longing, wishing I had a child to take there and introduce to the wonders of the Muppets and the joys of swings and slides. Rochester nosed me as I pulled into the LBU parking lot, reminding me that I had him to love and care for.

  The building was a generic glass tower, eight stories of reflective panels that hid whatever was going on inside. Before we got out I fitted the vest onto Rochester and attached the harness. “Best behavior now, boy,” I said to him, as I checked the fit. “You’re going undercover as a service dog so you’ve got to play the part.”

  He gave me a big doggy grin and licked my face, and I laughed.

  I let Rochester pee, then led him up to the front door. He wasn’t happy with the short leash attached to the harness—he was accustomed to being a free-range dog, only limited by the six-foot-length of our ordinary leash.

  “Heel,” I said to him, tugging him beside me. He looked up at me.

  “Don’t give me that. You know what heel means.” I leaned down and whispered in his ear. “Remember, you’re under cover as a service dog.”

  Then I stood up again and pressed the automatic button for the sliding door into the lobby. A security guard sat behind a half-round desk, but she was more interested in her cell phone than in us, so I walked over to the display on the wall and found that the financial aid office was in suite 300.

  Rochester behaved pretty well, sticking close to me as we rode in the elevator, though he might have been nervous about the unfamiliar surroundings. Either way he was playing the part of a service dog pretty well.

  I pushed open the door to suite 300 and walked up to the reception desk. “I have an appointment with Ms. Corcoran at three,” I said. “Steve Levitan.”

  She typed my name into her system and told me to have a seat. Either she didn’t notice Rochester or she was accustomed to service animals accompanying their humans.

  A few minutes later, a younger version of Peggy opened a door and called my name. At first glance she was far prettier than Peggy, though up close I could see she’d achieved that look with lots of makeup, and the smooth skin of her forehead and cheeks implied she’d had some work done as well.

  “Are you a veteran?” she asked me. “I see you have a service dog.”

  “No, I have some social anxiety,” I said. “Rochester helps me get over that in unfamiliar situations.”

  That wasn’t far from the truth. “Well, service dogs are welcome on the Liberty Bell campus,” she said.

  Rita led the two of us down the hall to her office. “Why are you interested in Liberty Bell University?” she asked, as she sat down behind a generic office desk. Piles of folders on either side of her made a kind of a wall between us.

  I explained that I was interested in computer forensics. “I have a job now, but I’m looking toward the future.” I leaned in a bit, conspiratorially. “I also have a felony conviction on my record. Is that going to be a problem here?”

  “How long ago?”

  I gave her the timetable.

  “No, it sounds like it won’t be a problem,” she said. “If you were still in prison, or if you served time for a drug-related offense, you’d be excluded from certain Federal programs like the Pell grants. But a computer offense doesn’t matter for financial aid purposes.”

  She turned to her computer screen and
started typing, then asked, “What was your gross taxable income last year? That’s the first step in determining if you’re eligible for a grant. Otherwise we’ll have to look at loan programs.”

  I’d done some reviewing myself. I knew that most students who qualified for Pell Grants, the ones that Carl and the other Angels had been abusing, had family incomes of under $20,000. So I took a page from Rita’s book and said that I’d made about nineteen grand the year before.

  She smiled. “Good, that should make you eligible for a Pell Grant.” She talked for a couple of minutes about what that meant, how much money I could get and so on.

  I was more interested in her body language than in her words. She seemed pretty open, like everything she was saying was the truth. Rochester was getting bored, though, so I thought I’d better move on. “My work hours can get kind of crazy,” I said. “What happens if I start the class and can’t finish it?”

  “Then you’d fail,” she said. “But as long as you do some work and try to pass the class, we won’t hold it against you.” She wagged a finger at me. “But the government is pretty strict about students who register for classes just to get the Pell Grant money and then never show up.”

  “You can do that?” I asked.

  “You’d be surprised at how many people try that. It’s part of my job to keep on top of that kind of behavior. Faculty members have to file reports with my office about students who don’t show up for class, or, if they’re registered in an online course, don’t log in and do any work.”

  Interesting. If Rita was the one who collected that data, she could manipulate it.

  We wrapped things up a few minutes later. I promised to go online and fill out the FAFSA, and she offered to help me if I ran into any problems. Then Rochester and I left.

  We were in the elevator before I realized he had something in his mouth. I tugged it out and found it was a business card. Rochester had partly chewed off the name, but the rest of the card was intact, including a seal from the Office of Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Education.