Three Dogs in a Row

by Neil S. Plakcy

  “I live down the road. I stopped by to make sure the dogs were all fed and exercised, and hose down the barn.”

  He looked like he’d stepped out of Green Acres or some other parody of farm life, wearing a pair of denim overalls and a plaid, long-sleeved shirt, with a white undershirt poking out at the neck.

  “Steve Levitan.” I shook his hand, then nodded toward the car. “Mind if I let my dog off his leash to run around?”

  “Go right ahead. Long as he won’t run down the driveway to the street.”

  “No, he’s pretty smart about cars.” I unhooked Rochester’s leash and he took off toward a tall maple next to Rita’s garage.

  “I’ve still got to feed the older pups,” Don said. “You can come with me if you want.”

  No wonder the dogs were barking; they were hungry. I hoped Rochester wouldn’t decide to chow down on whatever Don was putting out.

  Don started toward the barn and I followed. “You known Rita a long time?”

  “Ten years. When she bought this place it was a real shit hole. She fixed it up nice. Hope the next people take as good care of the land.”

  “She get along with most of the neighbors?”

  He laughed hoarsely as we reached the barn door. Rochester was nosing around under the big maple, intent on some scent. “Rita pissed off most everybody she ever met,” he said. “I have the same effect on people, so we hit it off fine.”

  I wondered who he’d pissed off to smash his nose in but didn’t ask.

  “Neighbors over that way are city people,” he said, motioning down a slight rise to an impressive stone mansion a few hundred yards away. “Always complaining about the smell and the noise from the dogs.”

  The yipping and yelping from the tiny dogs reached a new crescendo as Don and I walked into the barn. I could only imagine how it would be to live nearby. I’d have a perpetual migraine.

  I was struck once again by the strong doggy smell, even though I could see the place was clean. In the first of the converted horse stalls, four tiny dachshund puppies, who couldn’t have been more than a week or two old, sucked at their mother’s teats. Their eyes were squeezed shut and they looked like little piglets.

  “Then there’s Hugo Furst,” Don said, pulling a big bag of dog chow down from a shelf. He carried it to a double-wide stall where the older and more independent puppies had been placed. “He’s got the property between me and Rita. There’s a little bitty stream between them, and he says she polluted it with runoff from the dog shit she hoses down there.”

  He leaned over the gate and poured the chow into a trough. It was comical to watch the puppies climb over each other to get to the food, yelping and pushing and nipping with their tiny teeth.

  “You tell Sergeant Stempler about these folks?”

  He shrugged. “Ain’t met no sergeant yet. Just ordinary cops.” He shouldered the half-empty bag and led me back up toward the front door.

  I heard a car pull up outside the barn. “That’s gotta be him. I’m sure he’ll want to hear what you’ve got to say.”

  I went outside, where I saw Rick step out of a patrol car. Rochester launched himself toward him and Rick braced himself against the vehicle.

  The Stewart’s Crossing police department is pretty large for a town of our size, but Rick still went out on patrol sometimes in addition to his detective duties. He was wearing a patrol uniform, too, which was surprising, since he usually worked in plain clothes.

  “What’s with the Offissa Pupp outfit?” I asked. Rick was a fan of the Krazy Kat cartoons, I knew, and had a framed strip with the cat and his canine nemesis hanging in his kitchen.

  “Wicked flu going around the station.” Rick turned his head and coughed. “Hope I’m not getting it, too. We’ve got four officers puking their guts out, so I had to take a shift.”

  “Stay away from me,” I said, holding my fingers up in the shape of a cross. “I don’t need to catch it too.” I nodded toward the barn. “One of Rita’s neighbors is feeding the dogs. He told me about some people who don’t like her.”

  Rick dug in his back pocket for his notebook, struggling to pull it out when his duty belt was loaded with a radio, baton, flashlight, pepper spray and handcuffs. His gun was in a thumb-break holster over his right pocket.

  We had gone to the shooting range a couple of times, and I was impressed at how quickly he could draw and shoot; I had to stand there, focusing and steadying my breathing, before I could get off a decent shot.

  “I’ll talk to him. You’d better rein in your crazy dog.” Rick nodded to where Rochester was chasing a squirrel across the grass.

  As I watched, the fuzzy-tailed rodent scampered up the trunk of the big maple. Rochester skidded to a halt by the tree’s base, then got up on his hind legs, his front paws gripping the bark. He woofed a couple of times, and the squirrel hopped out on a branch above him and chittered madly.

  Rochester sat back down on his haunches and stared up at the squirrel. I walked over and grabbed his collar. “Come on, boy, time to get to work.” I clipped his leash and dragged him away from the tree. When he figured out we were heading toward the barn, he scampered ahead of me.

  When we walked inside, I saw Rick at the far end of the big, high-ceilinged room, talking to Don Kashane. I kneeled down and spoke to Rochester. “We’re looking for cobra venom, all right? See what you can find.”

  He looked at me and licked my chin. I laughed and pulled away, then stood. “All right, dog, do your thing.”

  Instinctively, he knew what I was asking, and he tugged his way across the concrete flooring. I stumbled behind him as he went into sled-dog mode, sure he was on the trail that would lead us to Rita’s killer. Just in time, though, I realized all he was doing was making a beeline for the double-wide stall where Don had poured the dog food. The wall around the pen, tall enough to keep the little dogs inside, was no match for a seventy-pound golden, and he stepped right over it. I tugged back on his leash as his big nose was pushing past yapping and snarling Chihuahuas, no more than six or eight weeks old.

  “Get back here, you big goof,” I said, pulling on the leash. My foot slipped on what I realized was dog poop, and I lost my balance and fell backwards on my ass.

  Rick saw me and burst out laughing. “Great detective,” he said. “Found his way right to the food.”

  Don Kashane shook his head and mumbled something about city folk, which irritated me because I’d grown up no more than a couple of miles away and I thought I was far from a city slicker.

  I scrambled up to my feet. “Bad dog!” I said to Rochester. “You’re supposed to be looking for cobra venom, not puppy chow!” I reached over to a roll of paper towels on the wall and started to clean my shoe.

  “Cobra venom?” Don asked. “What do you need that for?”

  “You know anything about it?” Rick asked.

  Don shrugged. “Rita kept a batch of it somewhere. She was old school. She said nothing beat it for taking the pain away from a dog.”

  Rochester decided my shoe-cleaning was a game, and got one end of the paper towel in his mouth. I was balanced on one leg playing tug of war, trying not to fall again, but not willing to let Rochester chow down on the poop-covered paper.

  Having finished their meal, the older dachshunds and Chihuahuas began yelping again. I got the paper out of Rochester’s mouth and pushed my hand against his snout. “Sit!” I yelled.

  Rick was still talking to Don Kashane, but he had to raise his voice. “You know where she kept the cobra venom?”

  “Don’t know. She told me she had it once, but that she kept it put away so nobody could use it by accident.” He looked at his watch. “I’ve got to get back to my own farm. Nobody else gonna to take care of my livestock while I’m farting around over here.”

  “Thanks for your help,” Rick said. “Steve, why don’t you take Rochester outside while I look around in here.” He pulled a pair of rubber gloves out of a back pocket.

  His frown said it was
n’t worth arguing with him, so I followed Don, dragging a protesting Rochester behind me. At least the air was fresh outside. I closed the barn door and once Don climbed into his pickup and drove away, I let Rochester off his leash to go chase squirrels again.

  I paced around the front of the barn. I was disappointed in Rochester. I expected him to head right into the barn and pick up the appropriate clue, even though I knew that was dumb and completely un-doglike. Of course he’d gone for the food. That was his natural instinct.

  Perhaps he didn’t have a nose for crime at all, and the things he’d done to help solve the two previous murders had been pure coincidence. That was what Rick believed.

  Rochester began to get bored, and when that happens he gets in trouble. I walked him over to Rita’s practice ring, and ran him through a couple of exercises. He didn’t like the weave poles, which made me even more determined to force him to master them. “Damn it, Rochester, you know what you’re supposed to do,” I said, dragging him by the collar back to the start. “Just do it.”

  He sat on his butt and stared at me.

  If he wanted a showdown, he was going to get one. I glared at him with my hands on my hips. He slumped to the ground and rested his head on his paws.

  Wait a minute, I thought. I was smarter than he was. I knew what motivated him, and I knew how to get it. I remembered seeing a jar of training treats on a shelf in Rita’s barn. I turned slowly and strolled out of the training ring. Rochester remained on the ground, watching me.

  I shut the gate to the ring behind me. That wouldn’t stop him; if he got up a head of steam, he could jump over it. I walked across the grass to the barn, picked up the jar of treats, and walked back outside. Rochester was sitting up by the fence, looking in my direction. Fine. Let him wait for me.

  I took my time returning to the practice ring. When I opened the gate he tried to jump on me, but I said, “Rochester, sit,” and pointed at the ground. When he obeyed, I praised him lavishly and gave him a treat. Then I led him over to the weave poles and carefully led him through, giving him one of the tiny bits every time he did something right.

  By the time Rick finally walked out of the barn, holding a sandwich-sized baggie in his right hand, Rochester was going through the weave poles correctly all at once, for a single treat.

  “Found it,” Rick said, as he approached us. Rochester slumped to the ground, his work complete. “No thanks to you or your dog.”

  Inside the plastic bag I could see a small vial. “Where was it?”

  “Hidden inside a canister in the shape of a sleeping Mexican,” he said. “Sombrero tipped over his knees and everything. Very non-PC, but very Rita.”

  “I can see that. You need anything else here?”

  “I’m going into the house to look for any glass that might have residue of the sedative.”

  “She was drinking her iced tea out of a big plastic tumbler on Sunday,” I said. “I’ll come inside with you. I want to see where she lived.”

  “You can come in but leave the dog out here. Preferably tied up somewhere so he can’t get into trouble.” He pulled a pair of rubber gloves from his back pocket. “Put these on before you come inside.”

  I led Rochester over to Rita’s small practice ring. “Go to town, dog,” I said, letting him in the gate, then closing it behind him.

  He cocked his head and looked at me. “Go on. Practice.”

  He woofed once, and took off for the teeter board. I turned around and walked over to the front door of Rita’s house, then put the gloves on and walked inside.

  Her living room looked like she had simply walked into a Ralph Lauren Home store and bought everything—leather armchairs and sofas, ribbons from dog shows, silver picture frames, and a rustic stone fireplace with a stack of rough-cut logs beside it.

  I snooped around myself, looking for evidence of Rita’s connection to Eastern. Her office was adjacent to the living room, a modern space with an ergonomic chair and sleek metal shelves full of legal and accounting reference books. No sign of her college diploma, artfully framed in Eastern’s blue and white colors, as I’d seen in so many alumni homes. No photos of her with John William Babson or other college dignitaries. Not even an Eastern coffee mug.

  I was itching to get my hands on her computer. It was like a sickness, this nosiness of mine when it came to electronics and databases. I liked to know things. It was incredibly satisfying to snoop in places where I wasn’t supposed to be, whether they were in a company’s online archives, or buried somewhere on a public website. But even when I was arrested for hacking into my then-wife’s credit records, it was for a good cause—to keep her from bankrupting us in her depression over her second miscarriage.

  My unfortunate incarceration had done a lot to tamp down those illicit impulses, but they still bubbled up from time to time. I felt a physical yearning to walk over to Rita’s laptop, turn it on, and let my fingers loose. But that was foolish, as well as illegal. I didn’t know what to look for, or enough about her to guess at her passwords.

  Oh, and there was a cop down the hall, too, one who knew my temptations very well.

  If Rita Gaines had secrets in her computers then they were safe from me. Resolutely, I walked to the kitchen, where Rick had found the big iced tea mug Rita had been drinking from on Sunday, and placed it into an evidence bag.

  “Rita lived well,” I said, nodding toward the high-end appliances, the marble counters and the rack of gleaming copper pots hanging over the prep island.

  “The rich are different from you and me,” Rick said.

  “Yeah, they have more money. And since when are you quoting F. Scott Fitzgerald?”

  “Hey, I read. And I know the Hemingway quote you parroted back, too.”

  Rick and I paced back through the house one more time, but nothing struck either of us as evidence. By the time we stepped out the front door, Rochester had escaped from the practice ring and was jumping against a big metal trash can next to it, as if trying to knock it over.

  “Here, boy. Come on, let’s hit the road.” I patted my thigh a couple of times.

  Rochester jumped against the can again, and this time it tipped over. “Rochester! What are you doing?” I hurried to the can, where he had begun nosing through the garbage.

  “Is there something in the trash can?” I said, as I reached him. “Did you find a clue, boy?”

  “Steve,” Rick said from behind me.

  I grabbed Rochester’s collar and pulled him away. “No, maybe he did find something after all.” He sat on his haunches next to me with a woeful look on his face.

  “It’s probably just a food wrapper,” Rick said.

  “No, that’s his ‘I found something’ look.” I still wore the blue plastic gloves Rick had given me.

  Rick shook his head as Rochester slid down onto his haunches beside me. “Go for it,” he said.

  “You’re not helping?”

  “I’m just sitting here with Rochester, watching you work.”

  He plopped down on the grass next to the dog, and Rochester stuck his big head in Rick’s lap. I got down on my knees and started pawing through the garbage. Rita hadn’t emptied it after the training class on Sunday, and it was a mess of dirty paper towels, treat wrappers and soda cans. Toward the bottom, there was a half-empty bag of doggie treats, a gourmet brand that was way out of my budget. I shook my head at the idea of people so rich they could throw away something I couldn’t even afford.

  Rochester stuck his head toward me and sniffed. “So you found some treats,” I said. “Fine. Have one.”

  I handed it to him and he sucked it down greedily, then looked eagerly at the bag. “You can have more later,” I said. I crumpled the bag and stuffed in my back pocket.

  As I began putting the trash back in the can I spotted an empty blister pack of the kind used for round tablets. All six pills had been popped out, leaving only a few tiny shreds of foil on the back. There was a faint trace of white residue on the plastic.

>   “You see this?” I asked. “Think it held dog medication?”

  Rick shrugged. “No idea. I used my last evidence bag inside, so let me get another one from the car, just in case.”

  While he was gone, I pulled out my phone and took a couple of close up shots of the packaging. By the time Rick returned I was innocently feeding Rochester more of the meaty-smelling expensive treats.

  “You want to get some dinner?” I asked, as I piled the rest of the garbage back in the can.

  “You kinda smell like trash,” he said. “You should go home and take a shower. Wash those clothes, too. Whatever you do, don’t go see Lili smelling like that or you’ll be single faster than you can say loser.”

  10 – Freezer Burn

  I followed Rick’s advice. I drove Rochester home with the windows down and took him for a quick walk. I tossed a frozen pizza in the oven, then began running water in the big Roman tub in the master bathroom. I threw my clothes in the washing machine, and once the bath was ready, I turned the washer on and climbed upstairs.

  I grabbed a whole stack of towels and left them on the counter, then stepped into the tub. Rochester came over and stood next to me. “How about it, boy? You want a bath, too?”

  He looked at me with his soulful deep brown eyes. “Come on in, then.” I grabbed him by the scruff of his neck and lifted him up, and then he clambered into the tub with me. I had to give his hind legs a boost.

  The tub was plenty big for one person, but not so comfy for a person and a big dog. I sat up on the low ledge and picked up a big plastic pitcher I kept on the windowsill above the tub, filled it, and dumped it on Rochester.

  He wasn’t the type of dog to go splashing in a pool or lake, but he submitted to bathing pretty well. He stood there as I rinsed him down, then massaged shampoo into his fur. I had to hold him to stop him from shaking, though, and then keep one hand on his back while I rinsed him down. I accompanied the bathing with lots of reassuring noises, telling him what a good boy he was, and how soon he would be a lean, clean puppy machine.