Three More Dogs in a Row

by Neil Plakcy

  “This may be completely irrelevant,” Rick said. “But is there any trade in stolen potassium by you?”

  “Potassium? Like in bananas?”

  “Yeah. Some vials of liquid potassium were stolen from the veterinary office where Logato worked. That’s how he came to my attention in the first place.”

  I wrote “methcathinone” on the paper as Holland said, “Haven’t heard of anything like that. What do you do with them? Inject them?”

  “If you want to give somebody a heart attack, you do,” Rick sad. “Apparently there may also be a way to use potassium in manufacturing a street drug called methcathinone. You know anything about that?”

  “Just heard rumors. Supposedly it’s a Russian drug that gangs are trying to figure out how to manufacture here. You think there’s a connection?”

  “I was wondering if maybe Logato stole the potassium vials for his friend, if he was handing them off on Wednesday.”

  “From what we can tell, this shootout was about cocaine, not potassium,” Holland said. “But stranger things have happened in the Badlands.”

  Rick thanked him and promised to pass on any other information he found, and Holland said that he’d look into the ownership of the building and see if he could bring Zeno in for questioning.

  Rick left, and my bad mood remained. I kept wondering if there was something more I could have done for Felix Logato. Rochester stayed close to me, nuzzling me and licking my hand, and I felt blessed for the opportunities I’d had, that Felix hadn’t.

  “Steve?” Lili called from upstairs. “Are you just going to ignore me?”

  That was certainly not my plan. I hurried up the stairs, Rochester on my heels, and found Lili lounging on the bed wearing some very sexy lingerie. We spent the rest of the afternoon together, though first I helped her remove the bra and panties.

  Tuesday morning I still felt haunted by Felix Logato’s death, and I decided that rather than sit around and obsess, I’d take Rochester back to Crossing Manor, see if we could cheer up some of the patients who didn’t have a lot of family to visit.

  “You go,” Lili said. “I want to make rum balls for Tamsen’s party and they need to steep in the rum for a few days.”

  Rochester was happy to jump into the car with me. I think he missed going to up to Friar Lake, all those construction workers saying hi to him and petting him.

  The snow around the Crossing Manor parking lot had been piled into dirty clumps, though the lot itself had been salted and was pretty clean. I was careful walking Rochester up to the door; I didn’t want to end up like Edith, in the Manor as a patient.

  The lobby was deserted when we walked in. The receptionist’s desk was empty, and there were no patients sitting in the big chairs. “Hello?” I called.

  No answer. I was debating what to do when Marilyn Joiner appeared, in her white coat, wearing the same intricate gold chain around her neck. “Sorry, we’re short-handed today,” she said. “A couple of staffers are out sick, and we’re trying to cope.”

  “If this is a bad time, we can come back,” I said.

  “No, it would be a real help if you could sit with the patients in the lounge,” she said. “We need to clean the rooms and I don’t have enough staff to keep them company there.”

  Rochester and I walked back to the lounge, where we found Mr. MacRae and Mrs. Vinci engaged in an argument. “I tell you, there was nothing wrong with that lady,” Mrs. Vinci insisted. She waved an arthritic finger.

  “We all got stuff wrong with us,” Mr. MacRae said. “Me, I got a bad heart. You can’t see that from the outside.” He saw us in the doorway. “Here come my favorite doggie. How are you, boy?”

  “You feeling all right, Mrs. Vinci?” I asked as I let the dog go toward Mr. MacRae’s outstretched hand. She was wearing a yellow sweater dotted with fake pearls over a polyester blouse in a pink and yellow floral print, with dark blue sweat pants and white terrycloth slippers. At least her clothes were cheerful.

  “Malavath died,” she said. “My roommate.”

  “Yeah, I saw that in the paper. I’m sorry.”

  “Something fishy is going on here,” she said. “She wasn’t hardly sick at all, just that her family needed a place to park her. Her son married a white lady, you know, and didn’t want some old woman in a sari around her house.”

  I sat in the chair beside her, as Mr. MacRae petted Rochester. “What happened to her?” I asked.

  “They say it was a heart attack,” Mrs. Vinci said. “But she didn’t have no problems with her heart. She was here for the rheumatism.”

  I remembered my great-aunt used that term for arthritis. She always used to ask for her “rheumatiz medicine.”

  “Well, like Mr. MacRae said, we all have stuff wrong with us, and sometimes you can’t see that from the outside. I used to have high blood pressure, before I got Rochester and had to go for walks all the time.”

  Actually, I’d had the high pressure back in Silicon Valley, between the stress of my job and of living with Mary. I’d lost a lot of weight in prison and the pressure had evened out, but I was sure that walking the dog helped keep it down.

  “Seems like a lot of people having heart attacks here,” Mrs. Vinci said. “But when you ask Mrs. Joiner about it she brushes you off.”

  Rochester moved on from Mr. MacRae to Mr. Watnik, the gin rummy player, and I talked to a couple of the other patients. Mr. Fictura was in a corner of the room, grumbling because he’d had to leave his room. “How are you today?” I asked him. “Looking forward to the New Year?”

  “What have I got to look forward to?” he asked. “My son didn’t even come see me for Christmas. Went to some resort in the islands instead. You know what, screw him. I’m changing my will. I’m going to leave everything I got to the dogs and cats. My son, he’ll get a dollar ninety-nine, he should buy a rope and hang himself.”

  Rochester jumped up and placed his paws on the arm of Mr. Fictura’s chair and leaned forward to lick the old man.

  “Rochester!” I said, and I yanked on his leash.

  “You’re a bossy one,” Mr. Fictura said to him, and laughed. “I can relate.”

  Rochester wagged his tail and sat on the floor beside Mr. Fictura. The old man stroked his head for a while. “We should get going,” I said. “Come on, Rochester.”

  My dog wasn’t willing to leave, though. He kept looking up at Mr. Fictura as if he was trying to tell the old man something. Eventually Mr. Fictura slipped back in the chair and his hand hung down alongside it. He began to snore lightly.

  Mrs. Joiner and an orderly came in to start taking the patients down to the cafeteria for lunch. Mr. Fictura grumbled that he’d just finally gotten to sleep, and Rochester pulled to go back over to him but I tugged his leash and we walked out of the lounge.

  There was still no receptionist at the front desk when we passed, but Rochester tugged me over to the front desk, then put his paws up on the counter and sniffed at the computer keyboard.

  “What’s up, boy?” I asked. “Somebody leave a treat over there?”

  He cocked his head and I recognized that look. “What? Is there something on the computer you want me to look at?”

  I glanced around the room. Nobody was around. Rochester moved away from the keyboard and I stood beside it. The screen saver was engaged, and when I hit the space bar the screen came to life. Whoever had been sitting there had begun entering information on Mrs. Divaram into a state form for deaths at nursing homes and extended care facilities.

  A box at the bottom of the form was used to list similar deaths within the same month. Mrs. Tuttle’s name was there, along with another I didn’t recognize. Like Mrs. Divaram, the cause of death in each case was heart failure.

  I heard a door open and quickly stepped away from the computer. “Rochester, don’t rummage in the garbage can!” I said, tugging at his leash. I looked up to see Marilyn Joiner approaching, holding a cell phone in one hand and a clipboard in the other.

 
“Sorry, he’s usually much better behaved,” I said. “Come on, boy, let’s go.”

  He looked at me reproachfully. When we got outside I said, “Sorry, puppy, had to think on my feet. I know you’re a good boy.”

  As we drove home, I thought about the deaths I’d seen on the form. Did that indicate some kind of pattern? It wasn’t unusual for an elderly person, already ill enough to be in a nursing home, to die of heart failure. I had no idea if three deaths in a month was a few, or a lot.

  I turned to Rochester. “What do you think, boy? Was there something on that form that you wanted me to see?”

  He shook his big golden head from side to side, and the tags on his collar jangled.

  “What? Some other computer thing?”

  His tongue rolled out, and he yawned. Had he been trying to tell me to look for something online, and seeing Mrs. Divaram’s form was coincidental? I found it hard to believe that he’d intuited something from a computer with the screen saver running.

  But he did have a nose for clues. If it wasn’t the form, could it have been the computer itself? Was he trying to tell me to hack into the nursing home’s system for some reason? Or some other computer?

  Not for the first time, I wished the dog could just tell me what he wanted.

  18 – Black Bridge

  All the way home my brain buzzed, trying to make a connection to computers. As I was pulling into River Bend, I remembered that Felix had used his roommate’s computer to email me and to access the grammar materials. Was it possible there would be some piece of information on that computer that could help find out who killed him?

  I made a U-turn and drove back out the gate toward US 1. I remembered meeting one of Felix’s roommates the day I visited, and I hoped he might be there, and willing to let me take a look at Felix’s email account.

  Traffic was heavy, and I was stuck for a while behind a panel truck advertising a company as “The Picasso of Plumbers.” I wondered if that meant your pipes would come out all weird and twisted. At the entrance to Cobalt Ridge, a teenaged girl slouched on a bus bench, her rats nest of dreadlocks pulled up into a bun on the top of her head and secured with a rubber band. Her neck was wreathed in tattoos.

  “And people say cursive writing is dead,” I said to Rochester.

  An old Toyota was parked in the driveway of the house on Calicobush Road, with a bumper sticker for a Christian Exercise group called Witness Fitness. I walked up to the front door, where Dan Symonds answered my knock. “If you’re looking for Felix, he’s gone,” he said. “The cops came by and said that he’s dead.”

  “I know,” I said. “I was hoping to take a look at his emails, if you don’t mind. He was using your computer, right?”

  “Yeah, he had a Gmail account and I let him use my laptop for that, and for writing that stuff you asked him for.”

  “You think I could take a look at it?”

  “What for?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I keep feeling that there was something more I should have done for Felix. And now that he’s dead I feel like the only way I make up for that is to help the cops figure out what happened to him.”

  “You work for the cops?”

  I shook my head. “I have a friend who’s a cop in Stewart’s Crossing,” I said. “Sometimes I find out information and give it to him.”

  Dan Symonds still looked suspicious. “Please?” I asked. “I need to do this.”

  “All right. If you can make it quick. I’ve got to get to work soon.” He reached down and scratched behind Rochester’s ear. “You’re welcome, too, bud.”

  Dan’s laptop was on the dining room table. “Felix didn’t know much about computers,” Dan said. “He wasn’t real sharp on computer security. His password was felixthecat, which I kept telling him was dumb and too easy for somebody to crack.”

  I sat at the laptop and logged into Felix’s Gmail account. The first thirty messages or so were spam that had come in since the last time Felix checked his email. The first email that was personal was a response from Scott Higley, a staffer at Paws Up, the agency that had worked with Felix when he was in prison, teaching him to train dogs.

  I started at the bottom of the message, where the email correspondence began about a week before Christmas. Higley had emailed Felix to check on him and see how he was doing. “I know the holidays are tough,” Higley wrote. “Maybe we should get together sometime and talk.”

  Moving up, I read Felix’s response. He told Higley that he’d lost his job and asked if Paws Up knew of any openings anywhere. From the date of the message, I realized Felix had sent it soon after he and I had talked, and I was glad he’d taken some action to look for new work.

  The most recent message was a response from Higley that he had a couple of ideas, and that it would be a good idea for them to meet somewhere soon. So Felix had had some good news, I thought. I was pleased about that. I didn’t like the idea that he had died in despair.

  I checked the “sent mail” folder and found that Felix had replied to Scott Higley. He was going to be in North Philly on Wednesday, if Scott wanted to meet with him then.

  There was nothing further either to or from Higley. Rochester came over to sniff at the laptop, and he nudged my elbow with his nose. That caused the cursor to move, and to hover over the email address.

  While the display name was “Scott Higley” the actual sending address was negroponte@hotmail.com. I doubted that someone writing from an organization would use a different email account with a different name, which meant that someone had spoofed Felix into believing he was this Scott Higley.

  “Do you know if Felix knew anyone named Negroponte?” I asked Dan.

  He shook his head. “He didn’t bring friends over, and we didn’t talk about his life,” he said. “Listen, can you wrap it up? I need to get moving.”

  “Sure. Just give me two seconds.” I scanned quickly through the rest of Felix’s email but there was nothing else that looked interesting. I Googled for Paws Up and discovered that they had an office on Roosevelt Boulevard in Northeast Philly. I wrote down the address and phone number, thanked Dan, and took Rochester outside.

  While he sniffed and peed, I called the phone number for Paws Up. A woman answered. “Paws Up. This is December.”

  “Can I speak to Scott Higley?” I asked.

  “He stepped out for a few minutes, but he should be back in about a half hour. Can I have him call you?”

  “No thanks. I’ll call back.” I hung up. It wasn’t that far from Levittown to Northeast Philly – I thought I could make it to the office in about half an hour. And I figured Scott Higley would be more willing to talk to me in person than over the phone. I was curious to know if that message had really come from him, or if he knew who might have been impersonating him online.

  I made a U-turn on Calicobush, careful to avoid running over a little girl in a pink bicycle helmet with a glittery silver tiara glued on top of it. As I head south on US 1, I was hit by a pang of nostalgia, for all the years my parents had taken that road into the city, before I-95 existed. Most of the landmarks I remembered were long gone, but where the road changed names, from Lincoln Highway to Roosevelt Boulevard, I saw the familiar sight of a pair of cemeteries, then a big hospital.

  I passed the signs for the Northeast Philadelphia airport and then started checking street numbers. Just beyond the Rolling Thunder Skating Center, I found the office of Paws Up, in a single-story house. I pulled into the parking lot and let Rochester out.

  He lifted his snout and sniffed the air. “You smell other doggies around?” I asked.

  He didn’t answer, but he did tug me over to a leafless tree and peed copiously at its base. Then we walked up a short ramp to the front door. A young woman at a plain metal desk looked up. “Can I help you?”

  The office was small, with one door that led to a bathroom and another to an office behind her. “I was hoping I could talk to Scott Higley. My name is Steve Levitan and I’m a friend of so
meone who was in the program.”

  A middle-aged man in a wheelchair rolled to the doorway. “I’m Scott. How can I help you?”

  He rolled back into his office and Rochester and I followed. A female German Shepherd was on the floor beside Scott’s desk, and she stood up. Her ears were raised and she was focused on Rochester. She had a black snout and a triangle of black fur above her eyes. The rest of her alternated between brown and black.

  “Sophie, down,” Scott said. “She gets kind of protective of me.”

  “Rochester’s very friendly,” I said. “Can he say hello?”

  “Sure.” Rochester moved slowly toward the female, keeping his overall body low, as if in submission. Sophie sniffed him, and he sniffed back, and very quickly he was sprawled on the floor beside her.

  “You have a good dog,” Scott said. “You train him yourself?”

  I shook my head. “I adopted him at about a year old. He was already way smarter than any ever dog I’ve ever met.”

  Scott nodded. “What brings you here?”

  “I was a friend of Felix Logato’s,” I said. “I understand he was in your program?”

  “Felix is a good guy,” Scott said. “He got a rough start in life but I have a lot of faith in him.”

  “When was the last time you saw him?”

  He looked at me curiously, but said, “About six months ago. He finished his time and told me he had a job lined up at a veterinarian’s office. What’s this about?”

  “I guess you don’t know, then,” I said. I told him about Felix’s death.

  “That’s awful. We try our best to help the guys while they’re inside, and give them skills they can use in the world. But sometimes it doesn’t work out.”

  “I think Felix was set up.” I explained about the message trail I had read. “You didn’t email him last week?”

  Scott shook his head. “And if I had, I would have used our email server.”

  “Do you know anyone named Negroponte? That was the name on the account.”

  “Negroponte? Italian name, sounds like South Philly to me. Felix didn’t get down that way, as far as I know. Italians and Puerto Ricans clashed a lot in prison.”