by Neil Plakcy
He relaxed visibly.
“What program?” I asked.
“Called Paws Up. They bring in these shelter dogs that nobody wants because they got problems. This one Staffordshire Terrier mix came to stay with me. He’d been a bait dog and he went between scared and vicious, and you never knew which was gonna come out.”
He pushed up the sleeve of his shirt and pointed to a scar in the middle of a tattoo of the island of Puerto Rico with the word “Boricua” in script beneath it. “See this? He bit me real bad. But I got him calmed down and trained so good he got a family in the Northeast to take him in.”
He was about to leave when I said, “Listen, I hope you don’t think I’m meddling in your private business. But Dr. Horz said you need some help with your writing. I’d be happy to give you some tutoring.”
He looked suspicious. “Why?”
I shrugged. “Because I’ve been where you are. When I went to prison, I lost my job, my wife divorced me, and all my friends but one melted away. I got lucky when I moved back here, and a couple of people took chances on me, helped me get my life going again. Just want to pay it forward.”
He nodded. “Yeah, I got one friend who stuck by me, Zeno.”
I must have misheard him, because I asked, “Zero?”
“Zeno,” he said more clearly. “Yunior Zeno. My home boy from Mayaguez. But he speaks as bad as me. At the program, they gave us a lot of help, but they weren’t there to teach us to write good. And nobody I know can help me with that.”
“You know where Friar Lake is?” I asked. “Up River Road by Leighville?”
He shook his head. “But I can find it. That where you live?”
“It’s where I work. It’s owned by Eastern College. If you come by I could get you started with some stuff to read, some practice exercises.”
“I’m off tomorrow,” he said. “That good?”
“Sure. Come by any time in the afternoon.” I pulled out a business card and handed it to him, then wrote directions from Stewart’s Crossing on the back of a flyer for a new kind of doggie halter. “You have access to a computer somehow?” I asked.
“My buddy Dan has one he lets me use for email and stuff,” Felix said. “He’s one of my roommates.” He took the directions and shook my hand. “I really appreciate this.”
I led Rochester to the check-out desk. We stood beside a tall potted plant waiting for a petite black woman to check out ahead of us. Her brindle cat crouched at the rear of a carrier, but Rochester was more interested in nosing behind the plant.
“Rochester, please,” I said, tugging on his leash. When I looked at him, he had a torn piece of paper in his mouth. I reached down and pulled it away.
It was sticky with his saliva, and I had to use a wipe from the dispenser on the counter to clean it off. It was the left-hand side of a permission slip from Pennsbury High, where Rick and I had gone. The student’s last name was Brezza, but the paper had been torn vertically after that. It didn’t seem to be important, so I crumpled it up and tossed it into the trash.
I paid for the visit and we walked outside, where Felix leaned against the building in a sheepskin coat, puffing a cigarette. “Thanks again faw helping me,” he said.
“My best friend’s always complaining about me being an English teacher,” I said. “I guess it’s a habit I can’t break.” At least it was one habit that wasn’t likely to get me in trouble, I thought.
4 – Little White Angel
Flurries had begun to float down from the overcast sky. With Rochester beside me, resting his big golden head on his paws, I left the vet’s and drove down Ferry Street, busy with last-minute shoppers in big SUVs.
As I turned onto the River Road to head toward my job at Friar Lake, I thought about potassium. Why would someone steal it? Wasn’t it one of those vitamins you could buy at the drugstore?
I remembered that when Mary was pregnant for the first time, she’d had malaise and muscle weakness, and been diagnosed with a potassium deficiency. She was a picky eater, and wouldn’t eat many of the foods that were high in the vitamin, like tomatoes, potatoes and bananas. Her doctor had given her an injection and prescribed some additional vitamins.
After her miscarriage, that was one of the reasons she had seized on. Had the baby been deprived of some essential nutrient? As soon as she discovered she was pregnant the second time, she had gone on a strict diet and nutritional regimen, but that hadn’t helped, and she miscarried in the fourth month of that pregnancy.
I tried to push those memories away and focus on the upcoming Christmas holiday, and the time I’d be able to spend with Rochester and Lili. As I drove up the River Road, I passed white split-rail fences hung with pine boughs and a stately Norway spruce decorated in vertical strings of lights, which glowed even in the gray morning light.
I turned in at the driveway up the hill to Friar Lake, Rochester looking eagerly out the side window. The property’s original name was the Abbey of Our Lady of the Waters, and after Eastern purchased it, contractors had begun exterior work on the property: a new, wider access road up the hill, paved sidewalks between buildings, improved water mains and electrical service, roof and gutter repairs.
With the cold weather, the contractors had moved indoors to update the electrical and plumbing systems, refinish wood floors and add new carpet and tile. Eventually the new classroom and dormitory furnishings would arrive.
As the property manager I had a large, airy office with big windows in the abbey’s gatehouse, a small stone building at the top of the hilly drive. A second office was being used by Joey Capodilupo, the construction superintendent for the renovation of the property.
From what I could see, Joey was keeping the contractors on schedule and doing good work. His father was the head of physical plant for Eastern College, so I knew Joey had a great background for the job. As I parked, I noticed that Joey had hung a wreath studded with cranberries on the front door of the gatehouse, and a small pine tree at the edge of the property had been decorated with stars and Santa hats made from carpet scraps and bits of lumber. A white angel perched precariously on the top.
A dusting of early snow rested on the high pines beyond the chapel building and the air was cold and damp. When I let Rochester out of the car, he scampered over to a hedge and left his mark, then followed me inside. I spent the morning sending emails, filling out purchase orders and answering phone calls.
Just before noon Joey came in. He was a tall, good-looking guy in his early thirties, wearing neatly pressed jeans and an off-white fisherman’s sweater. He had an Eastern College ball cap on his head.
“How’s it going?” I asked.
“My dad says because this is Eastern property, I have to shut the site down when the college is closed—something about insurance, I think. And only Christmas and New Years are paid holidays so the crew is bitching about missing so many days. All morning I’ve been shifting them around to other sites that aren’t closing down, and I can’t get any of my own work done.”
“Anything I can help you with?”
He sat down in the chair beside my desk, stretching out his long legs, and Rochester got up from his place beneath the picture window to rest his head in Joey’s lap. “There is something,” Joey said, scratching Rochester’s ears. The big dog yawned a happy grin.
“What’s that?”
“Mark and I are supposed to go off on a cruise this weekend,” he said. “Seven day Western Caribbean.”
A few months before, I’d introduced Joey to my friend Mark Figueroa, who ran an antique store in Stewart’s Crossing, and they had started dating. “What’s the problem?”
“Brody.” Joey’s golden retriever puppy was about six months old. He was almost pure white, with a streak of gold down his back and some gold around the fringes of his ears. “My parents were supposed to take him for the week, but you know my dad fell last week and fractured a couple of ribs.”
“Yeah, I heard. How’s he doing?”
; “Says it hurts to breathe. I tell him not to, but he doesn’t listen.”
I laughed.
Joey leaned forward. “So he can’t handle Brody, and my mom says she’s done raising kids, and she’s not going to be walking a puppy out in the cold and the snow.”
“I know what that’s like,” I said. “I didn’t get Rochester until he was already a year old, but he’s still a big puppy, and he wears me out sometimes.”
“But having a second one isn’t so bad,” he said. “They play with each other, they keep each other occupied.”
I realized where Joey was going. “You want me to take in Brody while you go away?”
“Would you, Steve? I’d owe you one. Mark and I both would.”
I’d only met Brody once, at a party during the fall, and I remembered him as a ball of endless energy. “How come you don’t just board him somewhere?”
Joey shook his head. “I’ll cancel the trip before I leave Brody in a cage.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’d have to ask Lili. And I’m not sure Rochester would like having a puppy around. He’s kind of spoiled.”
“Please? Could you ask Lili? Maybe I could bring Brody over tonight, for a visit, see how he and Rochester get along?”
I looked at my dog. “What do you think, Rochester? You want to have a puppy come to visit?”
He thunked his plumy tail on the carpeted floor, and rested his head in Joey’s lap again, looking up at me with those big brown eyes. I sighed. “Come over tonight. You can ask Lili yourself, see if she’s as much of a sucker as I am.”
Joey bounded up out of the chair, and I could see in him the same kind of enthusiasm that Rochester demonstrated.
I still needed to talk to faculty members about programming for the spring, but it was impossible to get hold of any of them during that last week, as they scrambled to finish their grading and then escape for the holidays. So I focused on developing copy for each of the programs I had planned for the spring and the summer and researching what it cost to place ads in selected publications.
I had seminars planned on personal financial planning; the resurgence of interest in Jane Austen; a historical retrospective of the 1960s; and one on the process of new drug approvals, co-facilitated by a member of our science faculty and an alumnus in the field.
But the question of the missing potassium kept floating around the edges of my thoughts, and after I finished the work on my plate I went back online to look for more information. I found an interesting article on the Department of State’s website about the use of potassium in processing cocaine. Potassium permanganate could also be combined with pseudoephedrine to produce methcathinone, a synthetic stimulant similar to cocaine. On the street it was called Cat, Jeff or Charlie; it was usually snorted, but could be smoked, injected or eaten. Unlike potassium, it was a Schedule 1 controlled substance. It had been prescribed as an anti-depressant in the Soviet Union for decades, where it was called Ephedrone, and was frequently abused.
I’d read about the inroads the Russian Mafia was making in the US. Could they be bringing methcathinone production to our shores? Would it be the next crystal meth? It was closely related to methamphetamines, according to the bit of chemistry I understood. The article indicated that it was difficult to produce in amateur labs, but suppose someone had perfected a process? And suppose that process needed potassium in its liquid form, rather than the pills you could buy at the drugstore?
By the time I got home that evening, my brain was full of drug-related drama, but I had to switch back into dog daddy mode.
I laid the bag from the vet’s down on the counter and told Lili what kind of treatment Rochester needed. “The vet tech taught me a neat trick this morning,” I said. “Let’s see if I can do it.” I took one of the big antibiotic pills and pried open Rochester’s mouth.
“I’m not hurting you,” I said. “Chill out, dog.” I dropped the pill in, closed his jaws and massaged his throat the way I’d seen Felix do it.
Rochester slumped to the floor. I was sure he was going to spit the pill out the moment I turned my back but when I got down and opened his mouth again, the pill was gone. “Amazing,” I said. In the past I’d had to trick him by coating the pill with sticky peanut butter or cheese and hoping he wouldn’t notice. That had worked about fifty percent of the time.
I ruffled his fur and told him he was a good boy, and then he lay by my feet as Lili and I ate dinner. After we finished, I filled a shallow basin with warm water and poured in a few drops of the iodine, watching as the water turned a reddish brown. I wet half of a clean towel and gathered fresh bandages for Rochester’s paw. Then I sat on the floor and called him over.
He approached reluctantly. I told him to sit, and he leaned down to sniff the water in the basin. I had to pull his snout away before he started to drink. “Not for drinking, puppy. Now come on, stop wiggling! I need to get your bandage off.”
We began to wrestle. Sure, I was bigger than he was, and stronger, but when an eighty-pound golden doesn’t want to do something, it takes more than brute strength. I had to call in reinforcements. “Lili!”
She joined us on the floor, stroking Rochester’s head as I unwrapped the bandage and then stuck his paw in the brown water. He didn’t like that, but I spoke to him in low, reassuring tones, and Lili continued to pet him. After a couple of minutes, I pulled the paw out and wiped it down, then dried it, Rochester wriggling all the time.
The phone rang, and Lili stood up to answer it. “Sure, send him in,” she said, and then turned to me. “Joey Capodilupo is at the gate to see us?”
“Oh crap, I completely forgot.” I let go of the dog, and he scampered up to the stair landing. I explained the situation to Lili. “I didn’t say yes or no,” I said. “It’s up to you.”
She put her hands on her hips. “So you want to make me the bad guy?”
“Not at all. But I know Rochester can be a handful, and I wouldn’t blame you if you said you couldn’t cope.”
“We’ll see how the dogs get along,” she said.
I followed Rochester up to the landing and rubbed some antibiotic ointment into the wound, then wrapped it with a fresh bandage. As soon as I finished, he began to bark like mad and rushed toward the front door.
I flipped on the outside light and opened the door to Joey, Mark and Brody. Mark was at least three inches taller than Joey, about six-six or so, and scarecrow-skinny. Both of them were bundled up with scarves and heavy coats. “Come on in,” I said.
The little white puppy needed no invitation. He jumped up over the threshold and sniffed at Rochester. Joey reached down and unclipped his leash, and the two dogs -took off, tearing around like Indy 500 racers.
“I guess Rochester likes him,” I said.
“We were just going to have dessert,” Lili said, though I had no idea she had anything planned. “Can I offer you some carrot cake? Coffee? Cappuccino?”
There was general agreement, and we walked into the dining room, the guys shedding coats and scarves and the dogs racing up and down the stairs. Lili brought out the leftover cake from Saturday night, and I turned on the cappuccino maker and began brewing. By the time I returned to the dining room, everyone was sitting around the table, and Brody had his paws up on Lili’s thigh. “Aren’t you a little white angel,” she said. She ruffled him behind the ears. “You’re adorable.”
Rochester snuffled his way in beside the puppy, large and in charge. Mark pulled a couple of dog treats from his pocket and handed one to each dog.
“I thought you were the one who didn’t like dogs,” I said to him.
“I’m learning,” Mark said. “Notice the khaki pants? They don’t show the white hair so much.”
“So I guess Steve told you,” Joey said to Lili, as we started to eat. The dogs slumped on the floor together, chewing their treats. “We’re flying to Miami Sunday morning for a seven-day cruise. My dad was supposed to take Brody but he fractured a couple of ribs.”
“
And you won’t consider boarding?” I asked, in a last attempt.
“I wouldn’t leave Brody at a kennel,” Joey said. “I’d cancel the cruise first.”
“Please, Steve?” Mark asked.
I looked at Lili, who was already besotted by the puppy, calling him shayne punim, Yiddish for “pretty face.” He had finished his treat and was begging for cake. She looked at me and we both smiled. Then I looked down at Rochester. “You’re sure about this, dog-o? You’re going to help look after the puppy?”
He slapped his tail a few times on the floor. “I’ll hold you to that,” I said.
5 – Light
After Joey and Mark left, Lili lay down on the sofa with a book, and I went upstairs to the desktop computer. I was still curious about why someone might have stolen potassium from Dr. Horz’s office.
I discovered that it was a very important mineral for the proper function of all cells, organs and tissues in the body, that it was crucial to heart function and important in normal digestive and muscular function. But as I remembered in Mary’s case, if someone had a potassium deficiency, a doctor could easily prescribe the remedy. Why steal the stuff? Couldn’t you just buy some at the drugstore?
Further snooping revealed that having too much potassium in the blood caused a condition caused hyperkalemia. Older people were particularly at risk for that, because their kidneys often didn’t do an adequate job of removing potassium. Having too little potassium was called hypokalemia. But again, if you had that, why not get a doctor’s prescription, or buy the pills yourself at the local pharmacy?
I wanted to call Rick and ask him what he thought was going on, but I resisted, because he’d told me many times before that he didn’t appreciate my meddling in his cases. And since it wasn’t like there was a murderer on the loose, I didn’t see the urgency in pushing myself forward.
The next morning I read the Bucks County Courier-Times over breakfast while Lili read the Philadelphia Inquirer. I’d started getting the Inquirer after Lili moved in, because she wanted better coverage of international issues than the local paper provided.
