Dog Helps Those (Golden Retriever Mysteries) (21 page)

“Cool. Thanks, Dustin.”

I let Rochester go sniff what he wanted to, and Dustin hurried off. When I got to my office I turned my computer on, and while I was waiting for it to boot up, I unpacked my briefcase. I had brought in all the paperwork I had collected on Saturday at the dog show, and I hoped I’d get some time that day to look into it.

The computer was still booting when I finished that, so I called Jim Shelton. “I’ve been looking into the problems with Freezer Burn,” I said. “I think this guy named Oscar Lavista might have some information.”

“Interesting. I got fed up with going to the help desk with a computer problem I’ve been having for weeks, and I called President Babson’s office. An hour later I got a call from this Oscar guy and he made an appointment to come to my office at eleven to fix things.”

“You mind if I come over then? I’d like to talk to him and apparently he doesn’t get out much.”

He told me I was welcome, as long as I didn’t distract Oscar so much that he didn’t fix Jim’s computer. Mine was finally booted up by then, so I logged into my email account to check for messages.

Instead of the program opening, though, I got an alert that my account had been corrupted and the program needed to restart. For a moment I panicked that someone in IT had discovered I’d been hacking on Friday afternoon—but then, almost by magic, the message disappeared and the email program started normally.

Another Freezer Burn screw-up. I answered some email queries from reporters about graduation and played with Rochester for a few minutes, and at a few minutes after eleven I walked over to Harrison Hall. When I got to Jim Shelton’s office, a portly guy with slicked-back dark hair was sitting at Jim’s computer. Jim was leaning against a wall of shelves mixed with old hard-cover texts with dusty bindings and brightly-colored newer ones.

“Hey, Steve, come on in,” Jim said. “Oscar here’s trying to fix my computer.”

“The problem is with your printer driver,” Oscar said. “The system keeps trying to update the driver, but Freezer Burn won’t let it, and so things freeze up.”

“Can you fix it?” Jim asked.

“I have a way around Freezer Burn, but don’t tell Mrs. Parshall.” He bent over the computer and started typing.

I slid into the chair across from Jim’s desk. When Oscar finished, he pushed the chair back. Before he could stand up, Jim said, “Steve and I are both on the graduation committee and we’ve been hearing lots of bad things about software problems with the Registrar’s office. You think those are coming from Freezer Burn?”

“Don’t have to think,” Oscar said. “I know what the problems are.”

“So you can fix them?”

He shook his head. “That’s too much of a hack. Mrs. Parshall would find out and she’d have a cow.”

“Why?” I asked. “Doesn’t she want the computer systems to work properly?”

He stood up. “I’ve really got to go. I have a lot of work back in the office.”

“Something strange is going on, Oscar. Are Verri M. Parshall and Freezer Burn connected somehow?”

“Mrs. Parshall is my boss. You’d have to ask her if you have any questions.”

“Or we could go to President Babson,” I said. “And then when he fires Verri, she’ll probably take the department down with her.”

“I don’t have anything to do with Freezer Burn. It was her decision to buy the product in the first place, even though I recommended against it. She talks to them directly, too, whenever there’s any problem.”

He lowered his head and hurried out of the office.

“He’s scared,” Jim said.

“I would be, too, in his position. Verri’s a powerful woman around here. She could fire him in a heartbeat if he challenged her.”

“So what can we do?”

“Not sure right now. But at least we have some independent verification that Freezer Burn is the problem, and that Verri’s in deep with the company.” I told him what I’d discovered in my research about Freezer Burn—the newness of the software, and the range of complaints I’d found online about it, both from Eastern and from students at other colleges that used it.

“We have to get this fixed before graduation,” Jim said. “I spoke to Dot Sneiss this morning and her office is still in chaos.”

His phone buzzed. “It doesn’t help that this is final exam week. I’m up to my ass in alligators as it is.”

“I’ll keep thinking,” I said, as he picked up his phone.

I walked back to my office. We had a week before graduation, and I had the feeling that removing Freezer Burn from every computer on campus, installing a replacement program, and troubleshooting the process, would overwhelm even an efficient department. And we couldn’t even start that process until we proved that something was wrong with Freezer Burn, and that Verri M. Parshall was behind the problem.

Back in my office, Rochester had gotten into the pile of dog show paperwork I had left on my desk, and when I tried to clean up I discovered he had the list of trainers under his right paw, with a big splat of drool over Jerry Fujimoto’s name.

I tugged the paper out from under his foot, and he rolled onto his side. I scratched his belly for a minute, then sat up. I did want to talk to Fujimoto, so I looked up his website and found his phone number.

“I saw some of the dogs you trained at the agility show in Bethlehem on Saturday,” I said, when he picked up. “I have a golden retriever I’m interested in showing. You think I could bring him over for an evaluation?” His kennel was in Doylestown, about a half-hour inland from Stewart’s Crossing, so a pretty easy trip.

“Some goldens are pretty dumb,” he said. “Yours have enough sense for training?”

As if Rochester knew I was talking about him, he looked up. “I think so,” I said. I wasn’t about to gush about his crime-solving abilities, though.

“Bring him over late this afternoon, and I’ll let you know what I think,” he said. “Five o’clock?”

I agreed, and hung up. I thought about scooting out of work early and taking Rochester for some practice on Rascal’s course, but as I looked at him, I figured he’d do fine without the prep work. Besides, I wasn’t really interested in training him—I just wanted to talk to Fujimoto about Rita.

I ran through the suspects I’d already looked into. I doubted that Pippin Forrest or his parents had killed Rita because she’d been rude. Paula Madden had walked out on Rita and it was doubtful, given what I knew of Rita’s personality, that Paula would have been able to get close enough to Rita’s iced tea to dose it with the Rohypnol. Sal Piedramonte was angry at Rita, but again, I didn’t think he could get in to see her.

That left Mark Figueroa. If I eliminated him, I’d have to start on the list of Rita’s current clients.

A Hardy Boy’s work is never done.

As I was finishing a salad I’d brought from home for lunch, an email came through reminding all faculty, full-time and adjunct, that our grades were due in the computer by Wednesday at 3 pm, so I took the opportunity to log in to the mainframe to enter mine while I thought of it. Most of the grades were As, with a couple of Bs and a single F, for a student who’d dropped out right after spring break.

As Jim Shelton had predicted, I ran into trouble. The first time through, I only got a couple recorded before the system generated an error message and kicked me out. My second and third attempts wouldn’t even let me into the mainframe. Fortunately, the fourth time I was able to get in, enter all the grades, and log out before the system crashed. To be sure, I logged back in and checked, and they were all recorded.

I used the last few minutes of my lunch hour to check out Pip Forrest’s parents, on the off chance that one of them had a criminal record for homicide—or anything else that might convince me to leave them on the suspect list. His father was a high school guidance counselor, and his mother taught social studies in middle school. They didn’t fit my internal profile of people who could dope up a woman then shoot cobra venom into her veins.

Dot Sneiss called as I was finishing. “Any chance you could help us out over here?” she asked. “I wouldn’t even think of asking, but we’re desperate. The students are lined up all the way out the front door of Fields Hall, and I need a couple of bodies with computer access I can recruit to run graduation audits.”

“If you show me what to do, I can help.”

“I’ll come right over to your office with the instructions.”

She arrived a few minutes later, and waved a hand distractedly at Rochester, who remained against the french doors. “I’ll get you logged into the student database. Then you follow these steps to retrieve and print the students’ transcripts. You compare them against these degree requirements. If they’ve met everything, you go into the database and check this field. Then you save everything, and move on to the next student.”

“Sounds simple. I used to be a computer guy so I think I can handle it.”

“You’re a lifesaver. Everyone else I’ve called is busy with final exams and their own messes.” She stood up. “I’ll be back with a couple of students, and we’ll keep sending them down your way for the rest of the afternoon. If you have to stop just let me know.”

The first senior arrived a couple of minutes later. She was African-American, with her shoulder-length dark hair in elaborate dreads.

“This is my first go-round with this system, so it may take some figuring,” I said, as she sat down across from my desk. She was getting a bachelor of science in biology, and she thought she had satisfied all her requirements. I printed her transcript and we went over it together, and it looked good to me. I checked the box on her record and set her receipt to print.

“Thank you so much!” she said. “I’ve been waiting since seven o’clock this morning.”

Rochester sat up and barked once, and I saw a line of students was already waiting outside. The next four cases were fine. Rochester got accustomed to the in and out traffic, and I got comfortable with the clunky, DOS-based student records system. Then it crashed.

“Oh, my god,” the student I was working with said. “Does this mean there’s something wrong with my record?”

“I doubt it. Just the crappy program.” I rebooted my computer, and while we waited, Rochester got up and walked over to the boy, who was fidgeting. Rochester stuck his head under the boy’s hand, and he started rubbing his hand down Rochester’s back. By the time my computer came back up, the kid was calmer, and I signed off on him for graduation.

The parade of students continued. My back ached from sitting hunched over the computer for so long, and I itched to get up and stretch or take Rochester for a walk.

While the next student walked in I called Dot Sneiss. My call went to her voice mail, and I asked, probably more plaintively than I meant to, how long she needed me to work that afternoon. It was almost four and I had an appointment in Doylestown at five with Jerry Fujimoto.

I helped another four students before Dot called back. “Sorry, things are still crazy here,” she said. “Though they’re getting better. I’ll stop directing students your way, so if you can finish up with those you have, that would be great.”

I told her that was no problem—until I ran into Harryette Caffey.

She had to spell her name twice for me before I got it. “My dad’s name is Harry,” she said. “But my friends call me Yeti.”

“You mean like the…” I couldn’t think for the moment. I knew a yeti wasn’t a monster, but… Then I remembered. “The abominable snowman?”

She looked at me. “I spell it Yetty. Not the other way.”

“Okay.” I pulled up her file and found she was missing one of her requirements, a computer proficiency class. “How come you didn’t take it when you were a freshman?”

“They told me I didn’t need to because I had taken computer courses in high school.” She pushed her chest out a bit, and I wondered if that was a strategy she often used with male faculty.

“You remember who told you that?”

She looked at me like I was crazy. “It was four years ago.”

I called Dot again, and once more I got her voice mail. I left the message with my question. “Sorry, but can you wait while I get through the rest of these kids? As soon as Mrs. Sneiss calls me back I’ll be able to finish up with you.”

“I’ve been waiting all day,” she said.

“Let’s recap,” I said. “You haven’t taken a required course so I can’t certify you for graduation. If you wait around until I get a call back, I’ll see what I can do for you. If you want to leave, you can take the computer course this summer and graduate in August.”

Yetty leaned forward in her chair. “I can’t do that. I’m going to Europe next week.”

“Then you don’t have much choice, do you? Wait out in the hall.”

Maybe I was abrupt, but I had three more students before I could leave for Doylestown, and I was tired after spending the afternoon with this crappy program and a series of nervous kids.

She went to the end of the line, and I got through the rest of the students. Dot still hadn’t called me back, and Rochester was getting antsy. I didn’t know what to do.

“Have a seat,” I told Yetty. I went online and looked at the course outcomes for the computer class. Students had to be able to use a keyboard and a mouse, exhibit basic familiarity with the Microsoft Office suite of programs, and be able to use an Internet browser to search for information and visit websites.