Three Dogs in a Row

by Neil S. Plakcy

  The weather was warming up, and River Bend was full of mothers, grandmothers and nannies pushing babies in strollers. When had all those kids been born? Like the crocus blossoms, the budding trees and the baby ducks, they all seemed to pop out when spring came.

  When we got home, I decided to forego working for my clients or polishing my business plan for a while in order to look for Edith Passis’s paperwork among Caroline’s belongings. I’d match up the account number I had with the paperwork I found, and I’d create some kind of spreadsheet program she could use to keep better track of her money. That would be one way to honor Caroline’s memory—to finish the job she’d started.

  Rochester watched me from a position in the doorway between the house and the garage. Working in the chill, my bare arms and legs started to get cold. I picked out five boxes and I dragged each one into the kitchen.

  At that point, I was ready to call it quits. I was cold and sweaty and tired, and I hadn’t made any real headway. But Edith Passis had put up with my lack of piano progress for three years, so I figured I owed her at least another hour or two.

  Plus my supervisor, Rochester, looked like he wasn’t ready to let me give up. So I stripped off my t-shirt and used it to wipe the sweat from my forehead, then sat at the kitchen table to go through the first box of paperwork.

  Everything was out of order, and it took me a few minutes to remember that someone had trashed Caroline’s house the night after her murder, strewing her papers around. I recalled a filing cabinet that had been dumped on the floor, and I groaned. This was going to be worse than grading freshman comp essays.

  It wasn’t until one o’clock that I found the first piece of paper with Edith’s name on it. I took a break for dinner and to walk Rochester, and then went back to work by the light of the hanging lamp over the kitchen table. By the time I gave up at eleven, I’d found a half dozen statements on various accounts. From what I’d seen so far, Edith’s late husband had left her quite well-fixed. None of the paperwork I found matched the account at Quaker State Bank.

  Saturday morning, I took Rochester for a long walk, circling our way through all the different corners of River Bend. We were on Budapest Lane when we saw a father dragging his five-year-old out to his Land Rover SUV. “Yeah, yeah, life’s a disappointment,” he said to the boy. “Come back to me when you’re forty years old and your life sucks and then we’ll talk.”

  That could have been me, I thought, as Rochester sniffed his way along the street. If one of the babies who had begun life in Mary’s womb had come to term, and I was still back in an unhappy marriage in Silicon Valley.

  I was into delaying that morning. I took a leisurely bath, then fixed myself croissant French toast with maple syrup. After cleaning up the dishes and tidying the living room, I had no choice but to finish sorting through Caroline’s boxes. By the time I was done, I’d found eight statements, which showed me that Edith’s financial affairs were a mess. She had a checking and savings account at QSB, brokerage accounts with two different brokers, as well as a 401K account and an IRA, both managed by separate companies, which appeared to have been passed on by Walter, her late husband.

  In addition, it appeared that she held some stock certificates herself and had the dividend checks sent to her, rather than going through one of the brokerage accounts. No wonder she was having trouble keeping track of everything.

  Using Caroline’s laptop once more, I logged on to the website for the company that managed Walter’s 401K. I knew Edith didn’t have a computer, which made me pretty sure she hadn’t yet set up online access to her account, so I did. At every step, though, I had to jump through hoops, often simple things I’d always taken for granted. E-mail address? I didn’t want to use mine, because I didn’t want anyone to think I was trying to hijack her account, so I had to jump to another site and set up a free email account for her there, then once that was set up come back to the brokerage.

  Looking through the papers I had, I was able to piece together enough information—her husband’s social security number, her date of birth and so on—to get the account access established. Finally I got to the point where I could see the records of her most recent transactions.

  I could have invited her to come over to my house and watch me while I did all this—but it was bad enough that I had Rochester hovering around. I didn’t have to explain every last thing I did to him – and I was pretty sure I’d have to do that with Edith.

  When I pulled up her account information, I discovered that she had changed her address to a post office box six months before. Her statements and quarterly dividend checks had been mailed to that address since Thanksgiving.

  It was strange that she hadn’t mentioned it, and even stranger that the post office box was located in Easton. There was no reason for Edith to have set up a box there when there was a post office in Stewart’s Crossing.

  That reminded me of the Quaker State Bank account in Easton. What if Walter had set the account up before he died, and Edith kept using it?

  But the account number indicated the account had been set up in the past year—long after Walter’s death. I started to wonder if Edith had business that took her to Easton. I knew she went to Leighville once a week, but Easton was another forty-five minutes north, in the opposite direction from Stewart’s Crossing.

  Edith paid her bills from the checking account based out of the Stewart’s Crossing QSB branch. Maybe that account and the one in Easton served different purposes—one for her personal expenses, perhaps, and another for her piano teaching revenue and expenses? But Edith had stopped giving private lessons, and only taught at Eastern, where I could see her paycheck was automatically deposited into the account at the Stewart’s Crossing branch.

  It was all too confusing. I went back to the records of the online account, and discovered that her quarterly dividend checks for January and March had been cashed. But they had not been deposited into her checking account. And since these were checks to her, and not checks she had written herself, I couldn’t see any more information, such as the endorsement, and I had no idea what had happened to the money.

  I was about to call Edith and ask her what she was doing in Easton, when I realized that it might be connected to secrets she didn’t want to reveal. What if she was supporting an illegitimate child or grandchild up there? Or doing some charitable work she didn’t want publicized? Or could someone else be diverting her mail and her checks?

  It was all supposition. In any case, I thought it would be better to see what I could do with each one of her statements before I presented her with anything that might be unpleasant.

  I tried to spend some time that afternoon on my client work—what I would have done the day before, if I hadn’t gotten so caught up in Edith’s missing paperwork. Using my own laptop, I reviewed the work I had to do. It wasn’t much; just finish up a set of forms for a client—petty cash reimbursement, vacation requests, and so on. But I was only using half my brain, so I quit after a couple of hours. I just couldn’t stop thinking about Caroline.

  I’d known people before who had died—both my parents, for starters, and miscellaneous friends, neighbors, in-laws and co-workers. But maybe because I’d seen Caroline’s body, or because I’d inherited Rochester, or maybe just because her case was still an unsolved homicide, her death kept haunting me.

  But what could I do about it? Rick was stuck, and if he didn’t know what to do, with all the resources of the police department, how could I know?

  I happened to notice the instructions I’d written for retrieving available employee sick time from an SQL database. Something rang in my head but I wasn’t sure what it was. I turned away from the computer, and Rochester was there, wanting attention. “What’s up, puppy?” I asked, ruffling the fur around his neck. “I know, you miss your mom.”

  That was the connection. I’d seen Caroline’s name in an SQL database. But where? I turned to Caroline’s laptop, leaving Rochester staring at the place where my ha
nds had just been. A couple of keystrokes later, I was back at the site for military brats.

  I ran a couple of queries against the database, looking for people who’d been at the same bases with Caroline, and came up with half a dozen hits. Two people lived in New York City, making it likely Caroline had been back in touch with them: a guy named Christian McCutcheon and a woman named Karina Warr.

  Was McCutcheon the guy whose SUV had been parked in Caroline’s driveway? She’d mentioned a guy in New York to both me and Evelina Curcio. If that was the case, his name and address would be in her PDA.

  Sure enough, both McCutcheon and Warr were there, and hunting backwards through her appointments (a very tedious chore made even more tedious by Rochester’s insistence on banging into my knees while I was doing it) I found a couple of cryptic references.

  Caroline had gone to Utica to spend Christmas with her great-aunt, and she’d stopped in New York City on her way back for dinner on December 30 with Karina, and then a party with Chris. Farther back, ‘Chris – visit’ spanned a weekend in early November.

  I wondered if either of them had been notified about Caroline’s death. Rick had called Caroline’s great-aunt, but would he know her friends? Was there anything more on her calendar about them?

  I keep my calendar in Microsoft Outlook, and Caroline did the same thing. But the calendar was just as empty as her PDA had been. She probably hot-synched the two of them together—I did—so there was no reason why one would be different from the other.

  While I had Outlook open I checked Caroline’s email. It had been three weeks since she had been shot, and there were over a hundred new messages in her mailbox. Instead of an address connected to her ISP, or internet service provider, Caroline’s email was a free one offered by SUNY for alumni. So the address would remain open until someone told the university she had passed away.

  Dozens of the messages in her inbox were spam—Nigerians needing help laundering money, stock tips, offers for breast or penis enhancement. When I got rid of all of those, I was still left with fifty messages.

  A quick survey showed me that there were a half-dozen that seemed personal. I put them aside, and started going through the rest, one at a time. A lot were digests of online lists, and I tried to identify each list and see if it might be relevant to her death.

  In the end, there were two that interested me. One was on golden retrievers, which I signed up for myself. The other was a message board for those military brats, connected to the website and SQL database I’d found.

  The rest were banking or finance-related, and after a quick scan I got rid of all those. By then, it was time for dinner and Rochester’s evening walk. He was restless, and we ended up leaving River Bend, crossing a bridge over the canal, and walking along the Delaware for a while. It was dark and starry by the time we got home, both of us frozen and tired.

  I broiled a steak for myself and fed a few pieces of it to Rochester, washing mine down with a Sam Adams Winter Wheat. Then I spent four hours going through every post and didn’t find a single point of interest. It was boring reading the mundane details of people I’d never met. There were requests for information: “Anyone who lived on or near Bad Kreuznach from 1986-1990,” for example. There were endless threads about current TV shows, musicians I’d never heard of, and political rants.

  Chris McCutcheon wasn’t a poster—at least not over the last couple of weeks—but Karina Warr often posted on the social life threads. She seemed to have something to say about every party, concert or singles’ night in New York, and the desperation rose off those posts like a foul smell.

  When I lived in New York, before I met Mary, I’d been a minor player on that kind of party circuit. There was a network of second-tier college alumni groups—Bates and Bowdoin and Tufts and Oberlin and Eastern, among many others—and there were often singles mixers, sneak previews of art openings and so on. I was an assistant editor on a magazine for meeting planners at the time, and I used to go out after work a couple of times a week, either with college friends, to work-related events, or the very kind of parties Karina Warr attended.

  I’d met Mary at one of them. We always disagreed on which event it was; I insisted it was a fund-raiser at the Frick Museum, while she was sure it was a party at South Street Seaport. “I remember the fish guts,” she always said.

  A nice way to remember our meeting.

  She wasn’t conventionally beautiful, with frizzy brown hair she was always struggling to tame, wide-set eyes, and a high forehead, and when she laughed, her whole face lit up. She had enough charisma to light the Statue of Liberty’s torch.

  We’d bonded over books, movies and music. Our tastes were in synch, and for our first date we went to an off-Broadway show a friend had given her tickets to, a spoof of Cats called Dogs. Her friend played a cocker spaniel, and though he had a good voice, the lyrics, the costumes and the choreography were worse than anything you’d see in a suburban high school production. We’d laughed the whole time, pulling on straight faces to compliment her friend backstage.

  Though I’d known lots of smart women at Eastern, Mary combined her intelligence with street smarts and business savvy. She was working in marketing for one of the big banks, and she achieved one success after another. She convinced her bosses to place ads in foreign language newspapers, and soon new accounts were zooming in ethnic enclaves like Jackson Heights and Brighton Beach.

  She arranged sponsorships for street festivals, set up career-day visits by bankers, and carried out a dozen other clever ideas. We celebrated every promotion at classy restaurants and with spending sprees at Bergdorf’s. When she was offered the job in Silicon Valley, it was a big promotion with a lot more money, the chance to manage all marketing communications for a high tech company, and I saw it as the chance for Mary to continue to blossom. I was happy I could be there to share in her success.

  I gave up searching around nine, and sprawled out on the couch to relax after hunching over the computer. Rochester jumped up next to me, then rolled over onto his back and rested his head in my groin, snuffling and waving his front paws.

  “OK, I get it,” I grumbled. “You don’t have to turn on a neon sign.” I reached for the TV remote with one hand and started scratching his stomach with the other. As mindless sitcoms unraveled before us, I stroked him, wondering what I had done to fill my nights before he had arrived in my life.

  14 – Accidental Detective

  On Sunday morning, I walked Rochester and then retreated to bed to read the paper. He complicated matters by insisting on sharing the queen-size with me, and by refusing to stay in one place. Every time I’d get the sections I’d read organized along with the ones I hadn’t, he’d move around and mix everything up.

  I was relaxing on the sofa around three o’clock when Rochester came over and started butting me in the side with his head. “You want something, boy?” I yawned and stretched. “Come on, I’ll take you out for a walk.”

  The walk didn’t do it for him, though. He was still in a playful mood when we got home, and he kept hopping around, trying to get me to play. “I have work to do, Rochester,” I said, but he wouldn’t stop.

  I followed him into the kitchen, where he stopped and sat down next to the kitchen table, sniffing at Caroline’s laptop, which I’d left there. I remembered that there were still a few of Caroline’s email messages that I hadn’t read, and sat down and turned it on. As soon as I did, Rochester was satisfied, and he sprawled around behind my chair.

  I’d saved the half-dozen personal emails she had received for last. She wasn’t a great correspondent; no one yet had sent worried messages asking why she had been out of touch for weeks.

  The last message from Karina Warr was a response to one Caroline had sent about a book she was reading, another in her series of novels centered around romantic heroes. “Wake up and smell the cappuccino, girl,” Karina had written. “Guys like that don’t exist any more and you’re wasting your time hoping one of them is going
to ride through your little town and swoop you up in his arms.”

  The only message from Chris McCutcheon was one asking when Caroline would be in New York next.

  How do you respond to your dead neighbor’s friends asking about her? Send an email from her account? An email from your own account? A phone call? Hi, you don’t know me, but I lived next door to your dead friend.

  In the end, I passed the buck to Rick Stemper. I copied the contact information for both Chris and Karina into an email to Rick from my own account. Before I clicked send, though, I stopped to think.

  How could I explain having access to Caroline’s email? I didn’t want to tell him about her laptop, because I didn’t want word to get back to Santiago Santos that I’d been using another computer. I got up to pace around the downstairs, made more complicated by Rochester following me around.

  Once again, I’d gotten myself into trouble, trying to do what I thought was right. You’d think that six months in the California penal system might have taught me a lesson—but no. I sat back down at my laptop, at the email to Rick. “I was cleaning up my inbox and saw a message from Caroline,” I typed. “I thought maybe she’d used ‘Rochester’ as her email password, so I gave it a try. Hope it doesn’t get me in too much trouble!”

  I hoped that would be a convincing explanation, and that instead of focusing on me he’d contact Chris and Karina and see if they knew anything that might shed light on her death.

  Feeling guilty, I spent a couple of hours researching potential clients, and then playing with Rochester. After dinner I looked back at Edith’s paperwork, and realized that each of the accounts Edith had lost track of had been shifted from her home address to the same post office box in Easton.

  I wasn’t sure how to move forward, though, once I’d figured all that out. Was Edith the one who’d changed the addresses, and opened the account at the QSB branch in Easton? Or had someone stolen her identity? The more I thought about it, the less it seemed that sweet, elderly Edith was hiding some dark secret in Easton, and the more it seemed that she was the victim of an ongoing fraud.