Dog Have Mercy

by Neil S. Plakcy

  I sat back in my chair. How far might Jamilla go to help her friend? Suppose Omari was terminal, and Jamilla had stolen the potassium to help her make a gracious exit? From her training, I was sure that Jamilla knew what an overdose could do, and it did seem like an easy way to die, especially if Omari was on painkillers that might knock her out.

  I skipped down to the list of Jamilla’s Facebook friends. In addition to Omari and the other women in the picture, Hugh Jonas and Sahima Das were both listed. Hugh’s page was nearly empty, with the generic icon in place of an actual picture. But it did list his workplace and his hometown – Stewart’s Crossing. It wasn’t much, but with his last name, his place of residence and his job, I could do more advanced searching.

  Sahima Das was a recent graduate of Neshaminy High, Pennsbury’s rival. She was a student at Bucks County Community College, which my friends and I had called BC Cubed when we were in high school and fancied ourselves clever. Sahima was a huge social media user. There were dozens of photos of her, her family and her friends, dozens of “check-ins” at movie theaters, restaurants, even the Sesame Place Amusement Park, where she’d had her picture taken with Big Bird.

  Most of her family appeared very traditional – the men in those long white coats with high collars, the short, plump women in colorful saris. There were several photos of Sahima with her grandfather, Dadaji, a small, wizened man who looked like a cross between Yoda and Ben Kingsley in Gandhi. The most recent showed him in a hospital bed, with an IV in his arm and lots of high-tech monitoring equipment around him. He looked very ill; was it possible Sahima had learned about potassium and stolen it to use on him?

  I switched over to the local obituaries but couldn’t find one for Sahima’s grandfather – though it was possible that he had a different last name, and that her name hadn’t been mentioned in a death notice. I realized that between Jamilla and Sahima, I was coming up with more and more desperate and outlandish ideas, but they were all I had.

  When Lili came home, she went upstairs to download the pictures from her camera to the computer, and I continued my research on Dr. Horz’s staff. Hugh Jonas was an enigma. My limited contact with him had given me the idea he was somewhere on the autism spectrum. I knew that people with that condition often became very familiar with one or two particular subjects, like trains or dinosaurs. What if Hugh’s obsession was chemistry?

  Beyond his basic Facebook page, he didn’t have much of a digital footprint. No property in his name, no pictures that matched him. Perhaps he still lived with his parents? I searched for a Jonas family in Stewart’s Crossing and discovered that a Richard Jonas owned a residence on Hill Street. I did a quick search for Richard, and discovered that he was a Realtor in town, and his website had a photo of his family. In the picture, which had been taken several years before, Hugh appeared to be the oldest son. He had to be in his late twenties, an age when most kids would have moved on.

  Would his condition make him easily influenced? What if his father wanted someone to die so he could gain a listing for his real estate business? Would he have asked Hugh to steal the potassium? And could Hugh have done it?

  More wild feats of speculation. I shifted focus to researching local deaths as a result of heart attacks, but it was difficult to gather much data – often an obituary didn’t list cause of death, or said something vague like “natural causes.” It was impossible to tell if any death had been suspicious. I thought about emailing Rick and asking him to look through police records, but there was no evidence to justify such a search. I could always ask him later, if I found anything suspicious.

  It was time to return to basics. For any crime to occur, there have to be means, motive and opportunity. I knew the means; did any of the people at Dr. Horz’s office, who had the opportunity, also have a motive? I made a list:

  Felix Logato Blackmail or other force by criminal associate?

  Elysia Camilleri Eliminate elderly mother?

  Jamilla McCarthy Mercy killing of sick friend?

  Sahima Das Ditto, for beloved grandfather?

  Hugh Jonas Person or persons unknown influencing him?

  Minna Who was she? Did she have a motive?

  I still needed Minna’s last name. The office manager didn’t appear on Facebook or LinkedIn or any of the other social media sites I searched, using different combinations of her first name, the animal hospital, her homeland of Israel, and Stewart’s Crossing.

  While I was puzzling over how else I could track her, Rochester nuzzled my leg. He had a red stuffed starfish hanging limply in his mouth. It was a toy he’d had for as long as he’d lived with me, and he’d always taken loving care of it. Now, though, all the stuffing was gone, along with one of the starfish’s arms and both its eyes.

  “What happened here?” I asked. I took the starfish from him. “Did Brody do this?”

  He sat on his butt and stared at me.

  “I guess he did. Well, we can fix that. I’ll get you a new one.”

  I turned to Google and typed in “red starfish dog toy” and then selected to view images. I shifted the laptop’s screen so Rochester could see, and pointed to one that looked similar. “You want that one?” I asked.

  He nuzzled my hand. “I’ll take that as a yes,” I said. I clicked the image and was taken to the site where I could order one for him. When I finished with that, Rochester wasn’t satisfied. “I’m sorry, puppy. But toys can’t come out of the computer.” I closed the order window and shifted the screen so he could see the Google search page. “See? All you can do is look for things.”

  He woofed, and nodded his head. Of course. I hadn’t tried a simple Google search for Minna, because I thought I’d probably get a million hits, none of them useful. But as Rochester had pointed out, sometimes the simplest solution is the right one.

  Rochester slumped beside me and I stared at the results on the screen. There were over forty-seven million hits, beginning with a company that offered “innovative sexual health products.” A San Francisco art gallery, a bridal shop in the United Kingdom, a Brooklyn company that sold hand-made textiles. There was nothing that looked promising.

  However, one of the results I got came up in Hebrew. Though I’d taken three years of the language in preparation for my bar mitzvah, all I had retained was a grasp of the alphabet. I stared at the screen for a moment and then remembered that the letters read right to left, not left to right as in English. It still didn’t make much sense to me, but I sounded out the first word, which appeared to be Minna, or some variation.

  I copied the text and pasted it into Google Translate. It’s a clunky service, but I wasn’t trying to create a literary masterpiece, just find out if I had the right Minna.

  The translation was kind of funny. “Mini brash nick” appeared to have been a nurse in the Israeli city of Ra’anana. She had decided not to take the NCLEX examination for US licensure, she wrote, because she was tired of dealing with people. She preferred animals.

  Rochester got up and padded away, and a moment later I heard the sound of puppy wrestling in the kitchen. At least Rochester was keeping Brody occupied.

  I did some more searching and figured out that Minna’s last name was Breznick, and that she lived in Crossing Estates, the high-end suburban neighborhood outside town. Her husband was a cardiologist and she had two teenaged children.

  Since she had been a nurse, she’d know about potassium. But I didn’t know enough about her to guess at a possible motive. What I did know, though, was that I was going to put together enough suspects so that if Felix was innocent, he didn’t pay for someone else’s crime. He deserved the chance to keep moving forward with his life.

  14 – Support

  Lili came downstairs as I was closing my laptop. “How do you feel about New Year’s Eve?” she asked.

  I looked up at her. “In a general sense?”

  “In a party sense.”

  “You want to have a party?”

  She shook her head. “I just got an e
mail from Gracious Chigwe. Do you know her?”

  “Don’t think so.”

  “She’s a professor in the Sociology department. I met her during new faculty orientations when I started last year. She’s originally from Botswana, but she went to graduate school in Scotland.” She sat on the sofa. “She’s having a party Wednesday night, a bunch of the faculty, and she invited us.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Rochester hates loud noises. Usually I have to stay with him on New Year’s Eve and July fourth or he gets very nervous.”

  At the sound of his name, my big golden dog came rocketing into the living room, trailed quickly by a small white imitation. “Rick owes us a favor,” Lili said. “And if he’s busy, then Joey and Mark do, too.”

  “I guess that means you want to go.”

  “It would be good for both of us. We’ve been cooped up here for a week. Besides, it will give me a chance to get dressed up. I haven’t done that in a while.”

  “And I certainly like to see you in all your finery.” I wiggled my eyebrows. “As well as out of it, of course.” The dogs settled in a heap as I retrieved my cell from the top of the china cabinet, where I’d put it to keep it out of Brody’s reach.

  “Hey,” I said, when Rick answered. “Lili wants us to go to this New Year’s Eve party, and I don’t want to leave Rochester on his own because he doesn’t like fireworks. Are you going to be home?”

  “Yeah. I don’t like to leave Rascal alone either. You want to bring Rochester over? He can stay the night. Between the two of them they should be all right.”

  “That would be great,” I said, and gave Lili a thumbs up.

  “Call me Wednesday and let me know when you want to drop Rochester off.”

  I wanted to go back to my research on Dr. Horz’s staff, but I wasn’t going to make the same mistakes with Lili that I’d made with Mary, burying myself in my work and ignoring her. “Can I see some of the pictures you took today?” I asked.

  “There’s nothing to see yet,” she said. “You know my process. I take a lot of pictures and then I throw most of them away, and eventually I find the ones I want to work with. So all I have now is a whole lot of pictures of snow.”

  Instead of going upstairs to look at the computer, we snuggled together on the couch and talked. “I went past the Chocolate Ear when I was out, to get a hot chocolate and a croissant,” she said. “Your matchmaking efforts this summer seem to have worked out. Gail is still seeing that guy from New Zealand. They spent Christmas with Gail’s mother and her grandmother.”

  The Chocolate Ear was a café in the center of Stewart’s Crossing, and Lili and I had become friends with the owner, Gail Dukowski. During the summer I’d convinced her to give a guy from her past, a friend of her ex-boyfriend, a chance.

  “And Mark and Joey are still together,” I said. “What can I say? I’m a born shadchen.”

  “Born yenta, more likely,” Lili said, and I started tickling her. Rochester and Brody wanted in on the action, and we ended up in a group romp that I hope washed away all the residual tension from our argument that morning.

  * * *

  Saturday morning was bright and sunny, so I took both dogs for a long walk around River Bend. When we returned Lili was in the kitchen frying bacon, and the aroma drove the dogs nuts. They kept nosing her and sniffing her, and Brody tried to get his front paws up on the counter beside the stove.

  She expertly flipped an omelet onto a plate, and handed it to me, and I picked a couple of rashers of bacon from the plate where they were draining. I fed a bit to each dog. “This is a nice treat,” I said.

  “Would you mind if I went out for dinner tonight?” she asked, as she began making her own omelet.

  “Not at all. Who are you going with?”

  “Van called while you were out with the dogs. He’s going to be in the neighborhood, and he wants to get together.”

  “In the neighborhood? What possible reason could globe-trotting reporter Van Dryver have to be in the neighborhood of Stewart’s Crossing?”

  “He’s researching a story,” she said. “On the New Homeless – families displaced by the economic crisis. When he mentioned that, I thought he and I could share some ideas.”

  “Have I ever mentioned that I don’t like him or trust him?” I asked.

  She groaned. “Not this jealousy again. Van and I are just colleagues, Steve. I keep telling you that.”

  I took a deep breath. Lili had been steadfast in denying any romantic interest in Van, that their brief dalliance years before had been enough to convince her he wasn’t relationship material. It was time for me to man up and trust her.

  “Have a good time,” I said. “You can even tell him I said hello.”

  “I will.” She leaned over and kissed my cheek. “Thank you.”

  “No need to thank me. We both have lives, and pasts, and that’s not going to change.”

  While it was still sunny, I wanted to fix a loose gutter on the townhouse, and I discovered that I’d run through my entire roll of duct tape. My dad had been a big believer in the power of duct tape to remedy almost any household problem, and I’d inherited that notion. The closest place to get a new roll was at the drugstore in the center of town, so I told Lili I’d be right back and drove over there.

  Though most of the holiday snow had melted, there were still piles of it around the edges of the drugstore parking lot, and I walked carefully across the pavement, wary of ice. Once inside, I loosened my scarf and put my gloves in my pocket, and headed for the catch-all aisle, where locals who didn’t feel like heading out to the superstores along the highway could buy everything from ice scrapers to drain cleaner. I found a good-sized roll of tape and headed for the register.

  I stopped short at the vitamin aisle. Did they really sell potassium in drugstores? In what form? I meandered down the aisle until I realized the supplements and vitamins were all in alphabetical order, then pushed past dietary fiber, goldenseal, and neroli oil, until I reached the Ps.

  There were four different brands of potassium supplements, on its own or mixed with calcium and magnesium. I picked up a bottle of potassium and looked at the label. It contained 99 mg of potassium, “from potassium citrate and potassium aspartate.”

  Was that the same as what had been in the vials stolen from Dr. Horz’s office? I made a note of those names, paid for my duct tape, and drove home. I opened my laptop and went to the student’s best friend, Wikipedia, where I learned that potassium citrate was a potassium salt of citric acid. Not helpful, since the last time I’d taken chemistry was back in high school. I did understand that it was used to control kidney stones.

  Since Wikipedia had no entry for potassium aspartate, I had to look farther for a definition. It was a nutritional supplement that combined potassium with another salt compound, aspartate, which helped the body absorb the potassium more effectively.

  None of that made much sense to me, so I pushed it aside and focused on what I did understand: that when you don’t pay attention to dogs, they get into mischief.

  Lili was upstairs in the office doing some research on homelessness so I stayed downstairs, reading and playing with the dogs. She joined me in walking them that evening. “There’s stuff for salad in the fridge,” she said. “And a couple of TV dinners.”

  “I’ll be fine,” I said. “I have the dogs to keep me out of trouble.”

  I bypassed both the options Lili had mentioned and boiled up a big pot of elbow macaroni, topping it with butter and grated parmesan cheese. My mother had gone back to work soon after I was born, and hired a live-in housekeeper to take care of me and do the housework. Roxie lived with us for about ten years, and when I was sick and had to stay home from school, she made me elbow macaroni that way, though back then the only way we bought grated cheese was from one of those green cans that didn’t need refrigeration.

  Now I bought artisan pasta, organic butter and shaved Parmesan that came in plastic tubs with an artist’s rendering of an
Italian farm on the label, but the end result was the same: comfort food. Since I had time to kill while I waited for the pasta to boil, I pulled a box cake mix, left over from my bachelor days, from the cabinet. I added eggs, oil, water and some vanilla extract, and popped it in the oven before I sat down to eat.

  By the time I’d eaten and fed the dogs, the cake was done, and I set it on the counter to cool – far back to keep away from inquisitive canine noses and tongues. I played fetch with the dogs until the cake cooled, then iced it with a can of chocolate frosting. Both dogs were desperate to join me in licking the spoon and bowl, but I had to shoo them away.

  By nine o’clock, I started to worry about Lili. A lot of the country roads around Stewart’s Crossing ice up at night, and I kept imagining her, slightly tipsy after a dinner lubricated by alcohol, sliding out of control on a bad patch of road. I thought about calling her cell, but I didn’t want to seem like I was checking up on her, and if she was on her way home, that momentary distraction could be enough to send her careening off the road.

  I wasn’t jealous; I knew deep down there was no way that Lili had scooted off to some no-tell motel with Van Dryver. And I knew that Lili was a strong, capable woman who could take care of herself. So what was I worried about?

  Opening my heart and my life to Lili had been a big leap forward for me. Mary had served me with divorce papers as soon as I was arrested, and it hurt not to have her stand by me during my trial. After all, what I’d done had been for her as well as for myself.

  I comforted myself at the time by calling her a bitch and a variety of less printable names. After a while, I admitted that our marriage was on the rocks anyway, and would have ended sooner or later. But the experience had scarred me more deeply than I knew at the time.