Three Dogs in a Row

by Neil S. Plakcy

  A minute later I was back with the blanket. Then I had to grab my cell phone. At the last minute I grabbed the plastic bag containing the broken corner of the last biscuit, then I locked the house.

  Rochester’s head rested in my lap, and he couldn’t stop panting. I backed down the driveway and sped out of River Bend as fast as I could, taking the twisty curves well over the residential speed limit.

  The veterinary hospital was near Newtown, and I had to speed up Ferry Road, away from the Delaware, bypassing downtown. All those years of taking the late bus kicked in; I knew how to get there through the back roads, avoiding traffic lights and places where a bored cop might be hanging out looking for speeders.

  “It’s all right, boy, Daddy’s going to make you better,” I said, petting his head as I zoomed one-handed around the narrow country roads. The cold air rushed at my face and stung my eyes into tears.

  At least I think that’s why I was crying.

  37 – The Vet

  I made it to the vet’s in record time. Leaving Rochester in the car, I ran up to the door and rang the emergency bell. Then I rushed back to Rochester and lifted him once again. I was stumbling up to the door when it opened, and a young woman in light green scrubs looked out.

  “Let me help you,” she said. She propped the door and hurried toward me. With her help, I carried Rochester inside. “I’m going to need his weight,” she said, steering us into the hallway, where there was a big scale built into the floor.

  We knelt down and placed him on the scale, then stood up. He looked up at me with his big brown eyes and I knew I would do anything to make him better.

  “I think he ate chocolate,” I said. “A lot.”

  “He’s a big boy,” she said. “Seventy-two pounds. That’s good—there’s more body weight to help disperse the chocolate. How much do you think he ate?”

  “Someone sent him biscuits.” I pulled the plastic bag from my pocket. “I think maybe they were made with chocolate.”

  “That’s terrible. Who would do such a thing?”

  She knelt down and stroked his head on the scale. “Don’t you worry, boy, we’re going to make you better.”

  She stood. “Let’s get him into a room, and I’ll let the doctor know you’re here.”

  With effort, bending at the knees, we got Rochester up off the scale, carried him into an examining room, and laid him on a Formica-topped table. The tech took my name and his and then hurried off to find the doctor.

  Poor Rochester. I hadn’t been able to protect him. When I’d been run off the road, if Rick hadn’t come by and gotten him, he might have been killed. And now, I’d given him poisoned biscuits, and left the bag where he could eat all of them.

  The room was small, dominated by the examining table in the middle. On one wall, a set of cabinets was mounted over a sink. The walls were covered with posters—the anatomy of a cat, the reasons why dogs needed dental care, a huge ad for heartworm treatment. Rochester lay on the table, heaving and twitching, and I petted his head over and over again and murmured to him.

  I couldn’t help it; I started to cry. For Rochester; I loved him and I felt I had let him down by not taking care of him. But it was more than just that. I was crying for all my losses-- my parents, my marriage, my unborn children—everything I’d cared about and hadn’t been able to hold onto.

  I remembered the day when Mary had her second miscarriage. We were at the hospital, in one of those curtained units of the emergency room, and she would not let me hold her hand.

  The first time Mary discovered she was pregnant, we’d told everyone we knew as soon as the home pregnancy test turned color. We’d shared the news of the miscarriage, too, accepting the awkward sympathy of friends and family.

  No one knew about Mary’s spending spree but me, and no one seemed to notice that the miscarriage had bothered me, too. I was the dad, after all. I’d been looking forward to the baby, too, and I admit I’d been hoping that the little bundle of joy would repair some of the cracks that were already appearing in our marriage.

  The second pregnancy was our secret. Only Mary’s OB-GYN and her staff knew. Mary quit her job to reduce her stress level, and she spent most of the day in bed, watching soap operas, eating Ben & Jerry’s, and crying.

  The doctor said it was the hormones, but I think Mary already knew the baby would not come to term, and she was crying for her loss.

  That night, while Mary slept, I went on line and hacked into the three major credit bureaus. It was a matter of a few minutes to find her record and place a flag on it indicating that there was a possible fraud, that the cards in her name should not be honored.

  Hacking had become such second nature to me that I didn’t give a second thought to my actions. For the next week, I focused on taking care of Mary, shutting out my own pain and loss. It wasn’t until two weeks later, when a sheriff appeared at the door of our house with a warrant for my arrest, that I thought again of that hack.

  I didn’t want Mary to know what I had done. I let her believe that I’d been doing work for a client, a guy in Hong Kong who’d hired me for the occasional bit of computer skullduggery. She was angry at me, of course, but we both believed that it was unlikely that a white-collar crime like mine would result in any serious penalties.

  My attorney, though, was less sure. “They’re looking for a scapegoat,” he told me, after I’d been bailed out, and we’d met to discuss strategy. “You did a dumb thing, Steve. If you’d hacked into an ordinary company, they’d let things slide, because they wouldn’t want anyone to know that their systems were vulnerable. But the credit bureaus have their own investigative branches, and they don’t want anybody else to think they can get away with what you did.”

  “What does that mean for me?” I asked. I’d dressed up in a rare suit and tie, trying to make a good impression on this attorney, whose brother had gone to graduate school with Tor.

  “It means they want you to go to jail.”

  My jaw dropped open and I couldn’t speak for a minute. “What do you mean?”

  He recited the relevant statutes for my crime, and the possible penalties. “But I didn’t even steal anything,” I protested. “All I did was put a flag on my wife’s account.”

  “Doesn’t matter. The crime was the hack, not what you did once you were inside.”

  Things just got worse from there. Within a few weeks, we’d accepted a plea deal that prevented me from going to trial, where I could have been sentenced to up to ten years for each hack—a total of thirty in all. In that context, a year behind bars sounded pretty good.

  Within the first month of my unfortunate incarceration, Mary had served me with divorce papers. By the end of the fourth month, my father had suffered a stroke in his sleep. His body had been discovered by a neighbor two days later, when she noticed he hadn’t brought in his daily paper.

  Mary had found a new job within a few weeks after the miscarriage. She put the house on the market, accepted an offer, and bought herself a new condo in San Jose. She took everything she wanted from the house, and had the rest boxed up and shipped to my dad’s townhouse in Stewart’s Crossing.

  She took half the money from our joint accounts; the rest was eaten up by the costs of my defense. There was just enough left over to pay a storage yard to hold the Beemer until I was released.

  I had just received the final divorce papers before my release, and I asked Mary if we could meet one last time, when I’d sign everything for her. We met for lunch at a café near her office.

  As usual, Mary was on a schedule. She didn’t even open the menu, but ordered as soon as she sat down. “Chicken salad, no lettuce, light on the mayo, and can you have the chef slice some grapes into it?” she said. “Diet coke, ice on the side. Thank you.”

  She handed the waiter the menu and stared at me. “Bacon double cheeseburger, medium rare, cheese fries, and a chocolate shake,” I said.

  “You’re killing yourself with food like that,” Mary said.
r />   “And you care because…”

  She frowned. “Do you have the papers?”

  “Yes, Mary. I thought we could do all that after lunch—you know, over coffee and dessert.”

  “I’d rather do it now.”

  I sighed and remembered my father’s admonition. Well, this was one bed I’d never lie in again. I handed Mary a manila envelope with the relevant paperwork in it. “For what it’s worth, I’m sorry,” I said.

  Her face softened for a moment, and I remembered the lively girl I’d fallen in love with, ten years before. “I am, too,” she said. Then she took the envelope from me and slid it into her purse.

  Sitting there on a hard metal chair, next to Rochester on the examining table, I hoped Mary was happy. The miscarriages were a cross between biology and destiny; we shouldn’t have brought children into that crappy marriage, and the universe was letting us know that.

  I had let myself get swept up in the prop wash of the power boat that was Mary Bronstein Levitan. I had buried myself in my work, letting the ones and zeros of computer code take me away from any possibility that we could make that marriage work.

  I kept on crying, for those two miscarried children, and for Rochester, who was the child I’d adopted to replace them, without knowing that’s what I was doing.

  Somewhere in there the tech came back and took Rochester’s vital signs and a sample of his blood. I hardly noticed.

  I was almost cried out by the time the doctor came in. “I’m Doctor Lee,” she said, reaching out to shake my hand. She was a slim Asian woman in her mid-thirties, in a white doctor’s coat with her name stitched over the left breast. She looked tired, but she smiled when she looked at the dog.

  I introduced myself. “And this is Rochester.”

  “Hi, boy,” she said, petting his head. “Not feeling too good?”

  He thumped his tail against the counter top a couple of times.

  She gave him a complete physical, listening to his heart, feeling his stomach, looking at his eyes with a pen light. “What time did he eat the biscuits?”

  “I gave him one after we came back from our walk,” I said. “And that was just after dark. Say six o’clock?”

  “And the rest of them?”

  “Hard to say. I was upstairs working when he got up on the counter and dragged the bag down. But it was within a half hour of that.”

  She rubbed Rochester’s head. “He’s thrown up a couple of times?”

  I nodded.

  “That’s good. There are two things we do when a dog eats something like chocolate, that’s poisonous for him. First, we want him to vomit, to get as much of the chocolate as possible out of his system.”

  “OK.”

  “Then we give him activated charcoal diluted in water. The charcoal binds to the poison and keeps it from being absorbed. I’ll send Tracy in with a slurry of charcoal, and Rochester will have to drink it all. Then I’d like to keep him overnight, just to monitor his symptoms.”

  “Whatever you think is best.” She left, and the tech came back a few minutes later. Between us, we got all the charcoal into Rochester. By the time we were finished, he was able to sit up, and he jumped down to the floor without any help from either of us.

  Tracy produced a short fabric leash from one of the drawers, and hooked it to Rochester’s collar. I got down on the floor next to him. “You be a good boy,” I said, leaning my head against his fur. “They’re going to make you all better, and I’ll come back for you tomorrow.”

  “You can settle up with the receptionist tomorrow when you pick him up,” Tracy said, as she opened the door. “And we have your phone number, so we’ll call you if anything comes up.”

  Rochester moved slowly, limping a little, as Tracy led him out of the room.

  38 – A Walk in the Park

  I didn’t sleep much that night, and as soon as the sun was up, I drove to the park at Washington’s Crossing. I didn’t want to stick around River Bend, because I didn’t want to have to tell the other dog owners where Rochester was, but I needed to walk and think.

  I started to organize the facts as I paced under the old oaks and maples that had seen Washington’s men gather for their Christmas day attack on the Hessians at Trenton. I covered big sections of the park, pausing at the statue of Washington and his men in their Durham boat, and by the time I returned to the parking lot, I thought I knew how everything had played out.

  From the car, I called Rick on my cell and arranged to meet him at the station. From the vet’s office, I learned that Rochester had passed the night well, and was waiting for me to get him. After a quick shower, I dressed and started on my errands.

  First was a raspberry mocha at The Chocolate Ear, and a shoulder to cry on. For once, I had no papers to grade, and no prospect of any in the immediate future. I still treated the coffee drink as a reward.

  Edith Passis was there, in conversation with Irene Meineke. “The bank has identified three accounts in the Cayman Islands where most of my money was transferred,” Edith said. “It’s a long process, but with those accounts frozen, there’s a chance I can get a lot of the money back.”

  “I’m glad, Edith.”

  “And I’ve decided I’m not teaching any more. My arthritis is too bad, and I just don’t like that long drive up to Leighville.”

  The fact that a pair of students had betrayed her trust added to that, I thought, but I didn’t say anything.

  Gail came out from behind the counter to bring me my raspberry mocha and a little chocolate tart. “How’s Rochester?” she asked. “I haven’t seen you in here for a while. I’ve got a biscuit just waiting for him.”

  I told the three of them what had happened the night before. They were all horrified. Gail reached out for my hand. “I hope you know I’d never send him chocolate biscuits.”

  “I know.” It was nice to hold her hand for that moment, but I couldn’t stick around. The Stewart’s Crossing police station was nowhere near as elaborate as the one in Leighville. It was a squat, one-story building from the 1970s built in the poorer neighborhood of town, at the corner of Canal Street and Quarry Road, at the edge of downtown. Quarry Road was one of the main east-west streets in town, running from the river’s edge, over the canal on a two-lane bridge, across Main Street and up the hill toward Newtown and Lumberville. Cops could get almost anywhere in town within minutes.

  Rick was sitting at a scuffed wooden desk in a big bullpen area; there were three other desks around him shared by other detectives, behind the gated front area where the sergeant sat. I handed him the envelope the biscuits had come in and the plastic bag containing the last uneaten piece, and sat down across from him. “What do you want me to do with these?” he asked, holding up the envelope.

  “I want you to prosecute Jackie for trying to poison my dog,” I said. “I’m going to tell you why. Edith told me that in October, her gutters got clogged with autumn leaves, and she complained to Melissa, the work-study student in the music department. Melissa gave Edith Menno’s name, because he always needed money.”

  “Hold on,” Rick said. “You mind if I tape record this?”

  “Not at all.” He pulled a tiny digital recorder from his desk and led me into an interview room at the back of the station. He turned the machine on, recited his name and mine, and then asked me to start again.

  “Menno made himself an indispensable handyman to Edith, who was accustomed to her late husband, Walter, doing everything for her,” I said. “Sometime after that, Menno, Melissa and Jeremy Eisenberg watched a TV program on identity theft in the lounge at Birthday House. Menno, who had seen how disorganized Edith was with her financial paperwork, saw her as a prime target.”

  “How do you think they got a copy of Edith’s social security card, and a driver’s license in Edith’s name with Melissa’s picture and signature?”

  “Teenagers have been coming up with fake ID for decades. Remember when we were their age, and our licenses were printed on paper? When I w
as seventeen I cut numbers from my Cinderella license and pasted them over the numbers on my permanent license so that my birthday was moved back three years, and I could buy liquor at the State Store in Leighville.”

  Rick reached over and shut off the tape recorder. “Don’t tell me those things,” he said. He rewound the recorder a minute or so, and we started over again.

  “Menno moved to Easton with his father after they were shunned by the Amish community in Lancaster, so he probably knew the Quaker State Bank branch on Northampton Street was so busy that no one would have time to check Melissa’s fake ID. Maybe he even knew the teenaged manager didn’t have enough experience to recognize fraud.”

  I was pleased that Rick seemed to agree with everything I said, so I went on. “Around that time, Menno started removing checks from Edith’s mailbox and giving them to Melissa to endorse and deposit into the fraudulent account at Quaker State Bank. Then they redirected Edith’s account paperwork to the post office box in Easton so that she wouldn’t notice she wasn’t receiving her checks.”

  “Pretty sharp for a couple of kids,” Rick said.

  “You’re right. The person who was behind it all must have been directing them to some degree. Menno knew Jeremy Eisenberg’s father worked on Wall Street, and he began asking Jeremy questions about cashing in Edith’s CD, and about opening an account in Switzerland or the Cayman Islands.”

  “I don’t think Jeremy was the one behind them, though,” Rick said. “Like, no way he could be that smart, dude.”

  I laughed. “Maybe that was when they involved Jackie Devere, when there was so much money building up in the fake account that they didn’t know what to do with it. Even smart, sneaky teenagers have limited horizons, after all. What did they know about hundreds of thousands of dollars? Jackie’s stepfather was from Grand Cayman, which meant she might have known something about the islands.”