The Kingdom of Dog

by Neil S. Plakcy

  Last of all he came to Mike for a report on the possible major donors who should get a personal visit. It was obvious that Mike had a staff at his disposal who could pull together a request like Babson’s on a moment’s notice. Mike had printouts of alumni organized by zip code, by class year and by office location. “We’ve got significant clusters in San Francisco, downtown Los Angeles, Hollywood, and Long Beach,” Mike said. “I recommend three cocktail receptions and individual solicitation of these twelve major donors. ” He had lists of whose employers matched employee gifts and records of past donations.

  “This is the kind of research I like to see,” Babson said. “This is professional, quality work.”

  “It’s the only way we’re going to make our total,” Mike said. “We’ve each got to work as hard as we can.”

  I thought Mike was being pretty smarmy, but I held my tongue. I was sure he had more notice than the rest of us about the meeting, and I made a mental note to ask Dezhanne about it.

  Luckily I ran into her on my way back to my office. “No, we just heard about the California thing late yesterday afternoon like you did,” she said. “He sent someone to my Spanish class when it ended to drag me over to work, and he ordered us all pizza and made us stay until like nine o’clock. Everybody was going crazy. You know how he gets—like every little thing can set him off. Total roid rage, if you ask me.”

  “Roid rage?”

  She lowered her voice. “I think he must be taking steroids. I mean, have you looked at his body?”

  “Not my type,” I said dryly.

  “He’s not mine either, believe me. But he’s got muscles on muscles. You don’t bulk up that way naturally. Roid rage is one of the side effects of steroid use—that and limp dick syndrome.”

  “Don’t even go there,” I said. Then I remembered the prescription I’d seen on Mike’s desk for Viagra. Those nasty side effects would explain his needing that drug.

  Dezhanne juggled the folders she was carrying. “It would have been almost comical last night, if it hadn’t been so scary. He was even making the Two J’s work.”

  “The two jays?”

  “Juan and Jose. These two idiots from the football team who are like his personal mascots. They’re always hanging around the office, joking around with him in that dumb jock kind of way. I’ll bet they’re on roids, too.”

  I remembered Tony Rinaldi mentioning a problem with steroids on the campus. Could Dezhanne be right? Were Mike and his buddies involved in it somehow?

  I found myself staring at Dezhanne’s earlobes. In place of her standard disks, she wore these globes that looked like the Death Star from one of the Star Wars movies, with spikes sticking out all over. “Don’t those hurt?” I asked.

  “What?”

  “Those things in your ears.”

  “Honestly, I don’t even notice them,” she said. “I’ve had these in for a couple of days. I’ve been so stressed out working for Mr. M.” She lowered her voice. “Last night, he even said that he was glad that someone had killed Mr. Dagorian. That Mr. D had been a thorn in his side, keeping him from doing everything he wanted, and now the old fart was out of the way.”

  I raised my eyebrows at her.

  “I swear, that’s what he said. Sometimes the guy is just not for real. It was like, get out the whips and beat us until we produce. I don’t know how much more I can take of it. Except that it’s real good money.”

  “I can’t offer you much encouragement,” I said. “I have a feeling things are going to stay this bad until the campaign is over.”

  “Well, at least by then I’ll have graduated and I’ll be out of this place. I will graduate some day, won’t I?”

  “I did.”

  “Yeah, but you came back.” She waved and walked off.

  I turned around and instead of going back to my own office I went to Sally’s. “You have a minute?” I asked, standing in her office door.

  “Sure, come on in. These applications will still be here.”

  I closed the door behind me and sat down across from Sally. She looked tired, with dark circles under her eyes. Her hair was pulled back into a ponytail, and she wore her customary Fair Isle sweater.

  “I was just talking to the work study student I share with Mike, and something she said jumped out at me. ” I told her about Mike’s problems with Joe.

  “You don’t think Mike could have killed Joe, do you?” she asked.

  “The police always say they look for motive, opportunity, and means. Mike had the motive—Joe was always getting in his way, complaining about everything Mike tried to do. You must have seen that, too.”

  She nodded. “I can’t remember a meeting when Joe and Mike didn’t argue. But would you kill someone over that?”

  “I’m sure Mike is under a lot of pressure to perform,” I said. “You’ve seen the way Babson operates. Any of us could be fired if we don’t provide the results he wants. That could really be stressing Mike out. ” I pointed at the piles of paperwork around her. “Look at you—you’re working hard, and you’re stressed. What if Mike just broke?”

  “At the launch party,” she said. “He was under a huge amount of pressure that night.”

  “And we’ve both seen him go off on people. Suppose he argued with Joe again, and he just lost control.”

  “But what about the knife? Why would he be carrying the knife?”

  “We know that Joe and Mike argued a couple of times that night. Suppose Mike just couldn’t take it anymore, and decided it was time to end it with Joe once and for all. He picked up the knife and then stalked Joe until he was outside.”

  “Have you told this to that police officer?”

  “Rinaldi? No. It just came to me, based on what Dezhanne said. I wanted to talk to you first.”

  “Well, I don’t think you should say anything yet. You don’t have any real evidence, after all. It’s just a bunch of speculation and what if. And Mike’s your boss. If he’s innocent, and he finds out you talked to the police about him, you’ll be fired so fast.”

  “But what if he’s not?”

  “If he’s not, the police will figure it out. They look for evidence and stuff. Things that really prove something.”

  I sighed. “I guess you’re right. ” Even as I said it, though, I was thinking about how I could get some of that evidence Rinaldi would need.

  “Steve. Look at me.”

  I looked at her. “If Mike killed Joe MacCormac, and you start nosing around, you’re putting yourself in danger. You have to leave it up to the police.”

  I stood up. “I hear you. Listen, I’ll let you get back to work. I need to do some thinking.”

  I walked slowly back to my office. As I passed Mike’s, he saw me through the open door and motioned me in. “How’s your research going?” he asked. “You find out anything yet?”

  For a moment I was startled, and my pulse raced. Did he know I was talking about him? Then I remembered I was supposed to be working on alumni profiles for him. “I started,” I said. “But then Babson sent us all off on this California thing.”

  “You have to learn how to work with him. He’ll ask for something, then send you off in thirteen different directions, and then expect you to come up with that first thing he asked for. You need to narrow your focus.”

  It was like everything he said had a dual meaning. Narrow my focus? To him as the murderer?

  “I’ve seen that police guy in and out of your office a few times,” he said. “You’ve been spending a lot of time trying to solve Joe’s murder, haven’t you?”

  “I’ve been trying to help out. You know it’s not good PR for us to have an unsolved murder on our campus.”

  “Or for fund-raising either. But I’m worried that you’re drawing too much attention to them by pursuing this. If I were you, I’d let the police do the work. You know, it’s dangerous to play around in something like murder.”

  I couldn’t figure out what Mike’s game was, but I thought I’d
play along. The adrenaline rushing through my veins made me bolder. “I know,” I said. “But the police think the killer might be Ike Arumba, from the Rising Sons. I just don’t believe he did it. I can’t sit by and let him take the rap if he’s innocent. The sooner we can get this resolved, the sooner we can all move on. Eastern College will survive this—it’s gone through worse.”

  He stood up. He was bigger than I was, a couple of years younger and a lot stronger. I remembered that he had played football in college, and thought that was why those two football players, Juan and Jose, were always hanging around with him.

  Or were they some kind of henchmen for him? Could they have helped him kill Joe? I backed toward the door of his office. It was lunchtime, and many people in the building had gone out. Was anyone close enough to hear me if I yelled for help?

  “I’m the best fund-raiser this college has ever had. I could be at Harvard right now. And if I can carry off this capital campaign I will be. I’ll be the best fund-raiser there is. I wouldn’t let a two-bit admissions director stop me, or interfere with my plans. No one can tell me how to run my office. I know what I’m doing. I’m in control.”

  I backed away a little more, very slowly. I remembered those angry emails he had sent to Joe, that Rinaldi had mentioned? Was there really a motive there?

  I was thinking fast, but I was very aware of everything around me. I scanned the office for things to throw at Mike, to knock him down or stun him so he couldn’t chase me as I ran down the hall toward the front door of Fields Hall.

  “Joe thought he was so important,” Mike continued. “Just because he’d been at Eastern since Jesus wore short pants. He thought he could run this college. He took away my telethon volunteers to recruit high school students. He wanted to have me fired. Hah! Can you imagine that! Every time I made a suggestion, Joe criticized me. All he cared about was his obscure scholarship funds. For a Nebraska high school student who intends to major in English. For a child of Ukrainian immigrants who wishes to study United States history. You know the kind of silly, Mickey Mouse funds he liked to set up.”

  I felt like Scheherazade in the Tales of the Arabian Nights, talking to save my own life. I wondered how to divert Mike’s attention, to stall him until someone else showed up. “Joe was pretty set in his ways. You must have argued with him a lot.”

  “I’ll be frank with you Steve, because I know it’ll go no further. This is the slowest time for a campaign, after the nucleus fund has been collected and the first surge of pledges have been paid in. Everybody gives at the beginning, and then at the end we make a big pitch to get over the top, but during the middle it’s slow. I can’t afford to distract my attention or my staff’s attention. That’s the only way we’ll ever succeed.”

  “And when Eastern succeeds, you’ll be the hero,” I said.

  “I’ll be hot when this campaign is over, Steve. I’ll be the best fund-raiser around if I can carry this campaign off. Imagine, five hundred million dollars for a dinky little college like Eastern. I can go anywhere, do anything I want when this is over. I’ll be able to write my own ticket. I’m not going to let anybody stand in my way. And that means I need you to back off talking to the police. Let this thing die down of its own accord.”

  Let it die down because you don’t want to get caught, I thought. “I can’t do that,” I said.

  “I was afraid you wouldn’t listen to reason,” Mike said. “You don’t want me to take the next step.”

  Mike’s right hand pulled quickly out of the pocket of his sports jacket, and I saw the glint of metal. I jumped back, banging against the door frame. I thought my heart was going to beat its way out of my chest.

  Then I realized Mike was holding a cell phone. “You don’t want me to call President Babson and have him tell you to back off.”

  He looked at me strangely. He must have seen the fear in my face. “What, did you think I was going to knife you or something?”

  I nodded.

  “Jesus. ” He sat back down in his chair. “Are you telling me you think I killed Joe?”

  I was having trouble catching my breath, but I managed to say, “You had a motive.”

  “Steve. You’ve been watching too many cop shows on TV. Sure, Joe was stonewalling me at every opportunity. But I’m a lot smarter than he ever was. I anticipated everything he tried to do and blocked him. He could have stayed alive for years and it wouldn’t have bothered my plans one bit.”

  His desk phone began to ring. “And there’s another thing. I think you have to be a little off balance to go so far as to kill someone. And I know exactly where I’m putting every footstep I take.”

  He picked up his phone and I took that opportunity to duck out of his office.

  29 – Playing Hooky

  When I got back to my office Rochester was all over me. It was like he smelled the leftover fear on me. I spent a couple of minutes just petting him and thinking. I still wasn’t sure Mike MacCormac hadn’t killed Joe—but I recognized that I didn’t have any evidence against him and I didn’t want to look like a fool pushing Rinaldi. And if the same person had killed Perpetua Kaufman, then I didn’t know how Mike could have a motive against her.

  I realized that I still hadn’t told Tony about the photos from Barbara Seville’s portfolio. I dialed the Leighville police station and sat on hold for a minute while he came to the phone.

  “If you’re calling with more support for Ike Arumba, you can give it up,” he said. “I checked the timetable and there’s no way he could have killed Dagorian and still made it up to the stage to sing.”

  “That’s good to hear,” I said. “But I was calling about something else. Maybe you’ll think this is weird but it kind of fits. ” I told him about finding Barbara’s photographs at Joe’s house, and the connection between the Bucks County Nature Conservancy and Bar-Lyn Investments. “Both Joe and Perpetua were involved in trying to stop Bar-Lyn from building.”

  I could hear him taking notes. “I’ll look into it,” he said.

  I hung up feeling a little better, though I still didn’t feel like working. I forced myself to go back to the personality profiles for Mike, because he had asked for them twice by then, and I didn’t want to be empty-handed when he asked again.

  By three o’clock I was dead bored, flipping through my email searching for a distraction. Babson had sent a message detailing revisions to the college budget. It was written in bureaucratic jargon, the kind of language I was seeking to eliminate in representing the college, but it boiled down to more money for Mike’s fundraising efforts and less in the pot for the rest of us. I reflected for a couple of minutes about how Mike’s single-mindedness seemed to be working, and I was depressed to realize that I could never be that way.

  “Knock, knock,” Lili said from my doorway. Rochester looked up at her, then put his head back down.

  “Hey, come on in.” I motioned her to the chair next to my desk.

  She was dressed in jeans and a thick Icelandic sweater, with a colorful wool scarf, and her curly hair was pulled back from her face. She had a messenger bag slung sideways around her neck. “I’m bored,” she said. “I need to get away. I was hoping I could convince you to play hooky with me. We could drive out and see that property where the pictures were taken.”

  “An inspired idea. I need to get out of here, too.”

  From the Bucks County Nature Conservancy site, and a mapping program, I pulled up directions to the property Bar-Lyn Investments owned.

  I stood up. “Come on, Rochester, let’s go for a walk. ” I stretched his expandable leash a couple of times, expecting him to jump up and go in to his deranged kangaroo routine, but instead he stayed in place.

  “He’s usually much friendlier.” I pulled on my coat, scarf, and hat, and reached down to hook up Rochester’s leash. He turned away from me, trying to hide his head.

  “No nonsense, dog.” I reached around his downy neck and hooked the leash, but he decided to play dead. I tugged on the leash,
to no avail. “I’ll drag you out of here if I have to.”

  Lili was giggling. “Here, let me try.” She held her hand out and I handed her the leash. Immediately, Rochester leapt up, then tackled her.

  “Rochester!” I said.

  “It’s all right,” she said, reaching down to scratch behind his ears. “Are you a good boy?”

  “No,” I said, as he woofed and nodded his head.

  She let him have his head as we walked out of Fields Hall. “Want to take my car?” I asked. “You can navigate.”

  I opened the back door of the BMW and Rochester looked at me like I was crazy. “He usually sits up front with me,” I said. I tugged the leash again, and he jumped up onto the back seat.

  We drove up along the River Road to Point Pleasant, then turned inland on Tohickon Hill Road, taking a couple of turns on small lanes that skirted woods and farmland. “That must be it,” Lili said, pointing ahead, to where a large sign proclaimed that it was the future site of Tohickon Creek Adult Living, a project of Bar-Lyn Development.

  I parked at a wide space in the road and Lili and I climbed out. I opened the back door and Rochester scrambled out, immediately sniffing a bush and peeing. Lili pulled a very expensive-looking camera from her messenger bag and hung it around her neck.

  The photos Barbara had taken were next to a piece of water, so we walked the property looking for the creek or one of its tributaries. It was chilly but bracing, not really freezing, and there was still enough sun to warm the open spaces. While Rochester romped and sniffed, Lili and I walked along the water, looking for the Common Shooting Star.

  “It’s too early for it to be blossoming, but we should be able to recognize it by its foliage,” she said. She stopped periodically to take pictures—a couple of me, a couple of Rochester, some of the landscape.

  “I needed this,” she said. “I was going stir crazy in my office.”

  “I’m glad you came by. I’ve been stewing about Joe’s murder too much. ” I told her about my confrontation with Mike MacCormac.

  “You’re not too bright, are you?” she asked, stepping up close to me. “You shouldn’t go around confronting people you think are murderers.”