by Neil Plakcy
We had met somewhere, so we said hello and walked in together. Oscar Lavista, the director of IT, was seated at the table speaking to Jackie Conrad, a friend of mine who taught anatomy and physiology. Oscar was a moon-faced guy with dark hair and a mole on his chin, a Florida transplant who had moved up in the department a few months before. Jackie was fifty-something, with an open, friendly face, framed with blonde curls, and she had a great sense of humor.
“Are we the committee?” I asked, as I sat down beside Jackie.
“Still waiting for our chair,” Oscar said. A moment later the door opened and a balding man in his early sixties walked in. He wore a white business shirt, yellow power tie and the pants from a pinstripe suit, and had an unlit cigar in his mouth.
“I’m Dr. Peter Bobeaux, assistant dean for the humanities,” he said, laying a leather portfolio on the table. “I’m the chair of this committee. But I’m new here at Eastern, so I’m counting on you to show me the ropes.”
So this was Dr. Bobo, physician for the circus. Lili’s nemesis, a man who according to Lili drowned his opposition in paperwork. Maybe this wasn’t the right committee for me.
Bobeaux was about fifty pounds too heavy for his frame, and there was something overly authoritative about his bearing, but I tried to give him the benefit of the doubt. I wondered about the cigar, though; Eastern was primarily a smoke-free campus, though there were a few designated smoking zones outside a couple of buildings.
The meeting dragged. Despite his pretense at needing our advice, Bobeaux had a laundry list of complaints about Eastern’s computers, culled from emails, questions and problems. The learning management system we used to deliver online courses was too slow, he said. We needed to look into a replacement.
“We’re on a five-year contract,” Oscar said. “It won’t come up for bids for another four years.”
“But the faculty are complaining!” Bobeaux said.
“The faculty complain about a lot of things,” Oscar said. “Most of the things they bring up can’t be fixed.”
Bobeaux shook his head. “That’s the wrong attitude to take, hombre.”
Oscar pushed his chair back a foot. “I resent your use of Spanish to attempt to disenfranchise me,” he said. “Don’t think because I’m a Latino and you’re white you can boss me around.”
“Hear, hear,” Marie-Carmel said. “We take a very dim view of discriminatory behavior at Eastern.” She had a charming bit of a French accent and I thought I’d read somewhere that she was a native of Guadeloupe, in the Caribbean.
“I’m not… but I wasn’t…” Bobeaux began. Then he caught himself and stopped. He bumbled through a half-dozen other problems, each one shot down by Marie-Carmel or Oscar. I kept my mouth shut and my head down and occasionally I caught Jackie Conrad’s eye and saw she was keeping mum like I was.
Finally Bobeaux dismissed us. “I have my doubts about the efficiency of this committee,” he said. “I want to speak to President Babson before we reconvene.” He glared at all of us. “And you can be sure that each one of you will be included in that discussion.”
18 – Stages of Decomposition
Jackie Conrad and I walked out together. She pulled a little puppet from her pocket, a plush gray crab with a starfish attached on a long, nobby cord. “I was going to offer to lend Dr. Bobeaux one of these but I didn’t think he’d appreciate the joke.”
“A brain cell,” I said, already familiar with the range of stuffed animals Jackie used to demonstrate concepts in her anatomy class. The fuzzy oval with tentacles was e-coli, and the little green blobs with eyes were gonorrhea microbes.
She turned toward Green Hall, where the science department was located. “How’s that inquisitive dog of yours?” she asked.
“Rochester? Still getting into trouble. Say, Jackie, do you know anything about the decomposition rate of dead bodies? Like, for example, if you stuck one between a false wall and an exterior wall, how long would it take to start to smell?”
She stopped beside a commemorative bench donated by the Class of 1923. The campus was littered with those little plaques on everything from recycling bins to dormitory lounges. She raised the brain cell so that it dangled from her lobe like an earring.
“If I didn’t already know you have a nose for crime, I’d be worried about a question like that,” she said, and laughed. “A body begins to decompose as soon as the heart stops beating. It takes a couple of hours for the bacteria and other organisms to start decaying and releasing gases, which causes the smell. If this body was close to the exterior wall, the ambient temperature would affect it – slower in winter, faster in summer. But in general it would be about twenty-four hours or less.”
“And how long would the smell persist?”
“Until the remains are skeletonized. We have five general stages to describe the process of decomposition: Fresh, Bloat, Active Decay, Advanced Decay, and Dry/Remains. The smell goes away by the dry/remains stage. Depending on the conditions, again, it could be as few as ten days to as long as a month or more.”
“Thanks, Jackie. That’s a question that’s been bothering me.”
“Is this about that body I read about in the paper?”
“Yup.” As we walked, I explained about the sneaker and bone Rochester had found.
“They don’t have any idea how long the body was there?”
“Probably since the 1960s,” I said. “But I’ve been wondering why nobody would have smelled the dead body.”
“Where in the Meeting House was the body?” she asked. “Near where the congregation sits?”
I shook my head. “In the back office area, behind a storage closet. But wouldn’t you be able to smell it wherever in the building you were?”
“Again, a lot depends on the environment.” We arrived at the tall, arched wooden front door of Green Hall. Ironically, it was probably the least “green” building on campus, and plans were afoot for new state-of-the-art labs.
I thanked Jackie, and walked to Lili’s office. She was back from her class, and Rochester was sprawled on the wooden floor beside the wall of glass windows that looked out on the campus. He didn’t even get up when I walked in. Traitor.
“How was your committee meeting?” Lili asked.
“Awful, as could be expected. Guess who’s the chair? Dr. Bobo.”
“You have my sympathy,” she said, as I sat down in the chair across from her desk. “How are things out at Friar Lake?”
“You know Joe Capodilupo, right? His son Joey started on Monday as the construction super for the contracting company.”
“Isn’t that nepotism?”
“Joey works for the contractor, his dad for the college. And everything I’ve seen of Joe Senior says he’s a real straight arrow.” I smiled. “Joey, on the other hand, doesn’t seem that straight. Since he seems like a good guy. I might be fixing him up with Mark Figueroa.”
“You are such a shadchen, Steve,” she said, using the Yiddish word for matchmaker. “First you’re trying to get Rick to date this war widow, and now you’re fixing up Mark. How’d you know this Joey was even gay?”
“I saw the way he and Mark were looking at each other. I did a little manipulating to push them together. Joey’s going to refinishing the old pews from the chapel, and Mark will sell them at his shop.”
Then I sat back in the chair and stretched my legs. “It looks like Rick and I made some progress last night on finding the identity of the body in the Meeting House.” I told her what I’d discovered.
“You don’t have a last name for either boy?” she asked.
I shook my head. “But I feel like we’re making big progress.” Suddenly my heart did a quick flip-flop, as I remembered the other question in the air: having Lili move in. If she did, my life was going to turn upside down, and so soon after taking on the new job at Friar Lake. It seemed like my life had become one big chain of changes, and I didn’t like it.
I didn’t tell Lili any of that, though. I stood and
kissed her goodbye, and Rochester and I went back to my car. Dead leaves were accumulating around the bases of the trees, and the wind had a bit of a chill, a reminder that winter was coming.
As I drove down river, I thought more about how my life had changed since I’d come back to Stewart’s Crossing. Progress had happened in fits and starts, from taking Rochester into my life to beginning full-time work for Eastern. Early that the summer Lili had mentioned that sometimes she didn’t feel like there was room for her in my house, because I had so many of the boxes my father had left behind stacked in the living room and the garage.
I’d been determined to show her the opposite was true. And in addition to unpacking those boxes, I’d come to terms with some difficult things in my past, like my guilt over being unable to attend my dad’s funeral because I was in prison. So lots of cobwebs were getting swept out.
I was passing through Washington’s Crossing when my cell phone trilled with the Hawaii Five-O theme. “Yo, Rick.”
“What did you tell that woman in Pittsburgh?” he demanded.
“Huh?”
“You spoke to a woman in Pittsburgh,” Rick said, speaking slowly as if he was talking to a child. “She called Amos Carter and told him a professor was going to speak to him.”
“Oh, yeah. That was just a cover story.”
“And you didn’t think to mention that to me?”
Rochester looked like he was about to launch himself out the car window at a passing cat, and I said, “No!”
“Excuse me?”
“I wasn’t talking to you, I was talking to the dog. So? What’s the big deal?”
“The big deal is that this guy was expecting a professor to call him, and when I said that I was from the police he got confused and he put his son on the phone. The son doesn’t want him involved with the cops. I think he’s afraid we’re after him for something.”
“You want me to call him?”
“No. I want you to go over there with me. You can spin your professor bullshit, and we’ll see if that gets the son calmed down, and gets the father to talk.”
“You’re welcome for the tip, Mr. Ungrateful,” I said. I looked at my watch. “When do you want to go?”
“I’m on my way to your house now. Should be there in about ten.”
“Crap. I’m almost home, but I haven’t fed Rochester or given him his evening walk.”
“Get a move on, then.”
19 – Difficult Times
By the time we reached our townhouse, Rick was pulling up in the driveway. I poured some chow in Rochester’s bowl, put up the gate to the second floor, and made sure there was water in his bowl. “Back soon, puppy,” I said, hurrying out the front door as he attacked his dinner with gusto.
Bristol is an old town, one of the oldest in Pennsylvania. It has three claims to fame: it was an early commercial center, and the Delaware Canal begins there, the one that runs through Stewart’s Crossing on its way to Easton. And then there’s “The Bristol Stomp,” a 1960s song by the Dovells, which you still hear played all over Bucks County.
“You have an address for the Carters, I presume,” I said, getting into Rick’s truck.
“No, I figured we’d triangulate the cell phone signal when we get close,” he said, slamming the truck into reverse and backing out my driveway. “Of course I have an address.”
“Why are you so angry at me?” I asked, holding onto the door as he rocketed down Minsk Lane. “I’m just trying to help you.”
“Investigation is my job,” he said. “And yet somehow you manage to wiggle your way into my cases.”
“I thought you wanted my help.” He stopped to wait for the gates to River Bend to open and allow us out. “I can get out here if you don’t want me along.”
“I don’t like needing your help,” he said. “It makes me feel like I can’t do what I’m supposed to.”
“That’s dumb,” I said. “You don’t do your own autopsies, do you? Collect the crime scene data? Prosecute defendants?”
“They’re all part of the team,” he said.
I crossed my arms over my chest. “And I’m not?”
“You’re an amateur.”
“And an ex-con,” I said. “I’m always going to be that in your mind, aren’t I? No matter how long we’re friends, and how much I do to show you that I’m trying to change?”
“I didn’t mean that.”
“That’s the way it came across. What would the chief of police say if he knew you were friends with a felon?”
“He can’t tell me who my friends are.”
“But if he knew that I was helping you with this case, he wouldn’t be happy, would he?”
Rick sighed deeply. “He wants me to get this case cleared. So he’ll have to live with how I do things. I’m sorry I snapped at you. I’m frustrated because I can’t seem to get any traction on my own.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t say anything. We took US 1, the highway that stretches all the way from Fort Kent, Maine to Key West, Florida, which my father always called Useless One, to its connection to Route 13, and headed for Bristol.
When I was a kid, we went that way all the time – my dad had friends in Tullytown, near the Delaware, and we often visited them. During summer school, I took swimming lessons at a pool down there, and once we ate dinner at a restaurant made from an airplane. It made me feel good to pass those bits and pieces of my childhood, reminding me of the connections that I had to my parents and my community.
The Carters lived in a brick duplex a couple of blocks in from the river. We parked on the street and walked up to the front door. Rick rang the bell.
A bulky fifty-something man with tattoos twirling around his arms answered the door. “Mr. Carter?” Rick asked. “I’m Rick Stemper, from the Stewart’s Crossing PD. We spoke earlier today.”
“I told you, my father doesn’t want to talk to the cops.” He tried to close the door.
“Mr. Carter, my name is Steve Levitan,” I said. “I’m the one who spoke to the woman at the Friends’ Meeting in Pittsburgh, who gave me your father’s name and phone number. Rick isn’t interested in arresting your father for anything. We just want to ask him if he can help us identify a young man who died back in the sixties.”
The man crossed his arms over his chest. “How can he do that?”
Rick explained about finding the body at the Meeting House. Carter shook his head. “I grew up a Quaker,” he said. “My parents used to drag me and my sister to Meetings. Couldn’t wait to get away from it. Joined the Marines, finally felt like I’d found a place I belonged.” He sighed. “Come on in. He loves to talk about that old stuff.”
He ushered us into the front room. The carpet was frayed, the furniture worn, but it was clean and welcoming. I liked the fact that there was a bookshelf against one wall, stacked with hard covers old and new.
“Pop!” Carter yelled. “Come on down here.” He motioned us to chairs. “My wife’s out at work, or I’d offer you something.”
“No problem,” I said. “Thank you for letting us come in and talk.”
Amos Carter was eighty at least, and as frail as his son was robust. He had sparse white hair and he hadn’t shaved for a couple of days. He wore a faded plaid shirt and jeans that were a size too large, gathered at the waist by a leather belt.
“These are the guys who wanted to talk to you,” the younger Carter said.
Rick and I stood back up and introduced ourselves to Amos Carter, then we all sat. Rick looked at me, and I took the lead. “I understand you were involved in the anti-war movement back in the 1960s,” I said. “I’m not a Quaker, but Rick and I grew up with lots of friends and neighbors who were, and I’ve always been interested in the Friends and the way they put their beliefs into practice.”
Amos’s voice was quavery but he didn’t hesitate. “They were very difficult times,” he said. “I was fortunate to be too old for the draft, but I felt it was my obligation to help those boys who did
n’t believe in the war.”
“We found a body recently, which appears to be one of the boys who came to Stewart’s Crossing on his way to Canada,” I said. “We’re trying to find his name so we can contact his next of kin. We think he came from western Pennsylvania, and that maybe he was helped along by the Meeting in Pittsburgh. That’s why I called out there, and that’s how I got your name and phone number.”
“We helped a number of boys pass through,” Amos said. “I don’t know that I’ll remember all of them.”
“This boy’s name was Don,” I said. “He grew up on a farm, and had three older brothers. He tried for the farming exemption, but he was turned down. Unfortunately, that’s about all we know.”
“Don. Let me think.” He frowned. “I’m afraid my memory isn’t what it used to be.”
When I got to be Amos Carter’s age, I wondered, how much would I remember about things that had happened long before? Would I forget everything I knew about hacking? Would my ten-year marriage disappear? Would I remember having a dog named Rochester, and how much he meant to me?
Then Carter said, “I did take some notes back then. Maybe the information you’re looking for is there.”
He stood up, grabbing the arm of the chair for support, and walked over to the bookshelf. From the pattern of the wood beneath a shallow coat of white paint, it looked handmade, someone piecing together scrap lumber, with a strip of crown molding glued to the top of the highest shelf.
While Carter flipped through the books, I looked around the room. A fireplace already stocked with logs for the winter, a scattering of Reader’s Digests and TV Guides on the coffee table, a big-screen plasma TV the only modern note. Above it hung an embroidered sampler with a picture of an evil-looking bulldog wearing a Marine drill instructor hat and the slogan, “I Love a Devil Dog.”
