The Kingdom of Dog

by Neil S. Plakcy

  “He figured out how to open the door to the downstairs bathroom where I keep the laundry basket. By the time I got home I found socks and underwear all over the place.”

  “I told you, you need a crate for him,” I said. “Rochester doesn’t need his any more. Why don’t I bring it over?”

  “Want to bring a pizza with it?”

  I realized I hadn’t eaten dinner and I was starving. “You buy, I fly,” I said.

  “Deal. I’ll order it from Piece A’ Pizza. You can swing by on your way down here.”

  When I was growing up in Stewart’s Crossing, there wasn’t much in the way of ethnic food, and it all came out of the restaurant owner’s family tradition. We drove into the Chambersburg section of Trenton, the Italian neighborhood, to Roman Hall for pasta and pizza. We ate Greek food at the Starlight Diner in Levittown, owned by the Pappases. We picked up bagels from Abe’s, owned by an elderly man who went to the same synagogue we did.

  Now, the ethnicities were all mixed up. Pakistanis owned the pizza parlor, and Israelis the French café in Newtown. The old places where my family had eaten when I was growing up were gone, replaced by Pan-Asian cuisine, chain Mexican and Italian restaurants, and vegan and vegetarian cafés I didn’t know who owned any of them.

  I had taken Rochester’s crate apart and stored it in the garage, leaning up against a wall on the passenger side of the BMW. I opened the garage door, dragged the crate around and propped it in the trunk, and tied it closed with a bungee cord.

  I made Rochester get in the back seat, which he didn’t like. He kept sticking his long snout over the back of my seat and sniffing at my neck. And when I picked up the pizza, a large Sicilian cut with mushrooms, sausage and meatballs, he kept trying to nose open the box on the seat next to me. “No,” I said, elbowing him in the snout.

  He sat back on the seat to pout. “You’ll get yours when we get to Rick’s.”

  Rick came out to help me unload the BMW. “Spoke to your buddy Tony Rinaldi today,” he said. Though it was forty degrees outside, he was wearing a pair of Hawaiian-print shorts and a T-shirt that read “Dial 9-1-1. Make a cop come.”

  Rascal came charging out behind him, as he lifted the pizza box from the front seat. “He said you’re interested in Sister Perpetua,” he said.

  Rochester leaped through the gap between the two front seats and out the front door before I could even get the back door open.

  “Why does everyone call her that?” I asked. “I thought she gave up being a nun when she got married.”

  “Don’t know. That’s what everybody I talked to called her.” The two dogs raced each other around the car as I lifted the crate out, then slammed the trunk closed.

  “Rochester. Sit,” I said. He skidded to a stop, then plopped his butt on the gravel of Rick’s driveway. Rascal stared at him, remaining on all fours.

  “How do you get him to do that?” Rick asked.

  “Training. Rascal. Sit. ” I pointed to the pavement next to Rochester.

  Rascal nosed at Rochester’s ass, and Rochester gave him a short woof. Rascal looked up at both of us, then sat down next to Rochester. Rick shook his head in amazement.

  “After dinner I’ll show you some of the things I do with Rochester,” I said. “Come on, boys, let’s go in the house.”

  They hopped up and followed us in. Rick and I sat down at the table and began to eat. Absently he peeled off a piece of crust and went to hand it to Rascal. “Don’t just give it to him,” I said. “Make him work for it.”

  “What?”

  “Give it to me. ” He handed me the crust and I looked down at Rascal, who was sitting on his haunches next to us. “Rascal. Down.” I pointed to the floor. He just turned his head toward me.

  “Rochester. Down.” I repeated the motion, and Rochester sprawled down to the floor. I handed him the piece of crust, which he wolfed down greedily.

  Then I peeled another piece of crust off, and repeated the instructions to Rascal. This time he knew what to do, and he followed Rochester’s lead.

  “Amazing,” Rick said, shaking his head.

  “It’s about making a connection with the dog.”

  We ate for a while, sometimes giving the dogs food with commands, sometimes not. By the time we finished, they were sprawled on the floor, snoozing, both of them the picture of indolence.

  “So tell me why you think someone murdered Sister Perpetua,” Rick said.

  I told him what I had learned about the connection between her and Joe Dagorian, the Bucks County Nature Conservancy and Bar-Lyn Development.

  “Nobody’s cleaned out her house yet,” he said. “I’ll have to get a search warrant and impound the space heater, see if anyone’s tampered with it.”

  He opened up a half-gallon of Neapolitan ice cream and hogged the strawberry, and I told him about Liliana Weinstock. “You’re dating a doctor,” he said, in a heavy Jewish accent. “Your mother would be so proud.”

  “Just one date so far. And one kiss.”

  When I finished my ice cream, I took Rochester home, where I spent some time stroking his golden flanks, putting my efforts were they were most appreciated.

  22 – Turning up the Heat

  When Rochester and I woke up the next morning, we found that an overnight snowfall had reimagined Stewart’s Crossing for us. Familiar rooftops and trees were reshaped in white, driveways and sidewalks were covered over, and the cars parked along our street were blanketed five or six inches under.

  I let Rochester out in the front yard to pee, and he stained the white snow bright yellow around the corner of the house. Then we went back inside to wait until the streets of River Bend had been plowed, which pleased Rochester, because I spent most of the time lying on the floor rubbing his belly and telling him what a good dog he was.

  Once the plow had passed, I suited up in my thermal long johns, ski pants, long-sleeved T-shirt, and down parka. I dug my LL Bean duck boots out of the back of the closet put on two layers of socks, and strapped myself in. Then I wrapped a cashmere scarf around my neck, pulled on my insulated gloves and my wooly hat, and we went for his morning walk. He swam and dove through the drifts as I stuck to the asphalt. A couple of my neighbors had already shoveled their cars out, but a lot looked like they were staying in.

  My father had a saying about snow. “God brought it, and God will take it away. ” That didn’t prevent him from assigning me to shovel the driveway, though. I wished I had brought a camera, or at least my cell phone, because Rochester looked so adorable covered in a light coating of snow, the white crystals glistening against his golden fur. When he ran, his ears flapped up, making him look like a space alien dog. He emerged from one drift with a big glob of snow just behind his nose, and he kept shaking his head trying to dislodge it.

  By the time we circled back to the townhouse, I was exhausted, but Rochester was still full of vigor, flopping on his back in the snow and wiggling around, making his own kind of snow angel. “What the hell,” I said, dropping his leash and flopping down next to him. I spread my arms and flapped, and then Rochester crawled on top of me, sniffing and licking my chin until I couldn’t stop laughing and had to push him off me.

  I shed my boots, socks, and many layers on my way through the living room, grabbing a towel from the laundry room to clean the road salt from between Rochester’s paws. Then I grabbed another couple of towels and dried him off. It would have gone more smoothly if he hadn’t kept shaking on me, but that’s Rochester.

  A good hot shower rejuvenated me. Rochester was under the bed and wouldn’t come out until I stood downstairs by the front door threatening to leave without him.

  The snow was piled high along the streets and sidewalks throughout the campus. There were still beautiful, virgin patches between buildings, but students were already sledding down the back side of the hill, slaloming between pine trees. I even saw one kid on cross-country skis heading toward Blair Hall. I had to hold Rochester on a tight leash to keep him from romping
through the drifts the way he had back in River Bend.

  I saw Mike in the kitchen around eleven when I went down for a cup of coffee. He was wearing an oversized crimson sweatshirt with a big white H on it over his shirt and tie. “I’ve called Physical Plant three times,” he said. “There’s something wrong with the heat in my office and I’m freezing in there.”

  “I didn’t know you went to Harvard,” I said, pointing at the sweatshirt.

  “I didn’t,” Mike said. “But I went to a fund-raising conference there once. Harvard is just the ideal of fund-raising. I mean, it’s the Harvard of fund-raising. ” He laughed a little at his own joke. “So I bought this sweatshirt, sort of like something to aspire to.”

  I found it hard to understand aspiring to a sweatshirt, but I didn’t say anything. I got my coffee and went back to my office.

  Tony Rinaldi stopped by my office just before noon. “Hey,” I said. “I had dinner with Rick last night. He’s going to get a search warrant for Perpetua Kaufman’s house.”

  “Thanks for the update,” he said, pushing Rochester’s nose away from his crotch. “But just so you know, we police guys do communicate with each other.”

  “Good to know my police dollars are at work. Have you gotten hold of Ike Arumba?”

  “Apparently his singing group was performing at a concert in New Haven,” Tony said. “He’s coming down to the station this afternoon for a chat. I’d like to find out what he has to say about that letter Dagorian wrote. And I’d like to talk to him some more about what he might have seen or heard outside that night. It’s possible he heard something, but because of the dope connection he didn’t want to speak up.”

  “It’s almost noon,” I said. “You want to get some lunch?”

  “Sure. Even policemen have to eat. ”

  I told Rochester I would bring something back for him, and Tony and I walked outside, where a mass of gray clouds had taken over the sky. “Looks kind of grim,” he said. “Instead of walking into town, why don’t we drive somewhere. There’s a pretty good deli around the back side of the hill. You feel like a sandwich?” He held up his hand. “And I promise not to say you don’t look like one.”

  We walked quickly to his car, breathing icicles, and he drove us around to the industrial part of town, where I’d met the homeless man outside the printer’s. “I have to say, I haven’t spent much time in this end of town,” I said when we were seated at a counter looking at the menu. “Even when I was in school, I spent most of my time up on the campus.”

  “I guess any school is like that,” Tony said. He closed his menu and put it down on top of the paper placemat. “Look at me. Lived my whole life in Leighville and never went up to the campus more than half a dozen times.”

  The waitress took our orders and Tony said, “So what’s your theory on this case? Come on, I know you’ve got one.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. I picked a pickle out of a dish on the counter and started to munch on it. “There are so many sides to this case. First you thought it was a personal motive—that Norah Leedom killed him because of that land deal. Then all the possible college issues—Joe’s arguments with Mike MacCormac, the problems getting Bob Moran’s son admitted. Now there’s this possible complication with Perpetua Kaufman. Joe could have been killed for some reason we don’t even know about.”

  “I’m glad to see you’re keeping an open mind. Did Rick tell you anything new about Perpetua Kaufman?”

  “Because she died at home, without a physician present, she had to be autopsied,” Tony said. “I looked up the results. Carbon monoxide poisoning, just like you thought. Cause was supposed to be a faulty space heater.”

  “Rick said he’s going to go over to her house. If there’s anything strange about the space heater, I’m sure he’ll find it.”

  Our sandwiches arrived, and I told him what I’d discovered about Bar-Lyn Investments. “It sounds like the company’s in trouble, and they’ve got a lot invested in this project. Joe and Perpetua were protesting against it—and now they’re both dead.”

  “You have a vivid imagination, you know that, Steve?” he said. “Between Rick and me, we’ll see what’s going on.”

  We ate our sandwiches, talking about mortgages and dogs and the lousy winter weather, and for a little while we forgot about Joe Dagorian and his murder. I ordered an extra plain hamburger patty for Rochester, which the waitress brought over in a little styrofoam box.

  We finished, split the check, and he dropped me back off at Fields Hall. “Take care,” I said. “Let me know when anything develops.”

  I fed Rochester his burger in chunks. “Watch my fingers,” I said. “Daddy is not on the menu.”

  Looking out the French doors of my office later that afternoon, I saw Ike Arumba walking through the snow, his head down, and I wondered what had happened with Tony Rinaldi. But I was too busy putting together a couple of alumni profiles for Mike to give it much thought.

  Sally stuck her head in my door just before five o’clock, when things in Fields Hall were winding down before the weekend. “Got a minute?”

  “Sure. ” I motioned her to a seat across from me.

  “I’m dead,” she said. “What a week. Four high school visits, a meeting of the alumni council on admissions, and a college fair in Scranton that went on for hours. Babson is hounding me about interviewing candidates for my old job, and I’m having trouble finding a temp who can answer the phone without acting like a total moron.”

  She sighed. “And I talked to Ike. I told him I was very disturbed by Verona Santander’s allegations, and that I had found the letter in Joe’s file, and that I was going to have to let him go.”

  “How did he take it?” I remembered seeing him walk and wondered if that was what had upset him, not the visit to the Leighville police.

  “Not well. Basically he made some threats.”

  I was surprised. I’d never taken Ike for the violent kind. “He threatened you?”

  “Not physically. But he said he knew a lot about what had been going on in the admissions office and if I fired him he would, as he said, ‘let people know. ’”

  “Do you think he really knows anything?”

  She nodded. “He certainly made it seem like he did. He mentioned the possibility that our statistics weren’t correct. And that as Joe’s assistant, I’d have to take the fall.”

  She started to cry. “It’s true, you know. Even though I didn’t have anything to do with faking the data, Babson will take it out on me.”

  “I think he’d have to. The publicity would be damning and he’d have to demonstrate that he’s doing something to make a change.”

  “It’s not fair.” She pulled a tissue from the pocket of her plaid skirt and dabbed at her eyes.

  “Does Ike want anything besides his job?” I asked.

  “A letter of recommendation.”

  “I read somewhere that your brain isn’t fully developed when you’re a teenager,” I said. “And the part that’s slowest to develop is the part that understands things like the consequences of your actions. ” I sat back in my chair. “Though in my case that part still doesn’t work that well.”

  “Are you saying I should give in to him?”

  “We’re the adults, so let’s try and look at this rationally,” I said. “Let’s say you stick to your guns and fire him. He tells Babson, or the press, what he knows about the fudged statistics. Joe’s reputation is shot, and Eastern gets a lot of nasty media attention. For sure, our last-minute admissions go down, and our yield goes down, too. Who wants to go to a college under a cloud of scandal?”

  “You think it would be that bad?”

  “Worse. You’d lose your job, too. Even though you did nothing wrong. And it would be really hard for you to get another admissions job, or any job at a college, with something like that circling around you.”

  She started crying again. “Why do you think Joe changed those statistics in the first place, Steve? I mean, he loved
Eastern. Why would he do something to jeopardize it?”

  “Maybe he thought he was helping. Suppose applications were down one year, but Joe thought they’d pick up. So he invented a few extra and things looked just as good. But then the next year they were down further, and he couldn’t reverse the statistics from the year before, so he invented even more. He probably kept hoping things would improve from year to year, and when they didn’t it was harder and harder to tell the truth.”

  “So he kept on inventing and upgrading applications,” Sally said. “Well, we’ll never know the real reason now.”

  “I think the issue of Ike is tied up with what we think of Joe, too,” I said. “Suppose Ike really is innocent, and Joe trumped it up for his own reasons. I don’t think either you or I believe what Ike did was criminal—it was just poor judgment. Even threatening you—that’s just a kid who doesn’t know what else to do. And I don’t think either of us wants to see Joe, or Eastern, go down in flames.”

  “So I let him keep his job.”

  “I’ll write the letter of recommendation for you, if you want.”

  “I might take you up on that.” She stood up. “Well, I have to get back to work.”

  I found myself yawning. I thought I’d better get one last cup of coffee from the kitchen before trying to drive back to Stewart’s Crossing in the dark. That’s when I ran into Ike Arumba.

  23 – He Made A Mistake

  “Say, Mr. Levitan, do you think I could talk to you for a couple of minutes?” Ike asked. “I know you’re friendly with Sally, and I was figuring maybe you could help me out.”

  “Why don’t we go back to my office? We’ll have a little more privacy that way.”

  He nodded and followed me out. “Pretty cold out today, isn’t it?” I said. He nodded. I tried again. “Well, it’ll be spring soon, and you’ll be graduating-- no more Leighville winters.”