Dog Helps Those (Golden Retriever Mysteries) (5 page)

“You should call the registrar. They’ll have his home address, phone number, email, that kind of thing. And they’re the only ones who can give out personal data on students.”

I hung up and turned to Rochester, who was lying sprawled on the wooden floor of my office. “You hear that, boy? That nasty woman we met yesterday is dead.”

Rochester lifted his head, but didn’t say anything.

“She was a bitch, but she loved dogs, so she couldn’t be all bad. Don’t you think so?”

Once again he declined to comment. Rochester seemed to have a nose for murder. He had helped me, and Rick, find Caroline’s killer, and dug up some clues that helped solve a murder on campus, too.

I had to admit that I was a curious guy myself. I pulled out a copy of our college magazine in which I knew the Board of Trustees had been profiled, and read the article on Rita Stanville Gaines.

She was an Army brat, born in 1946 at a military hospital in Bad Kreuznach, Germany. She had moved around the world with her family, until she was sent to a girls’ boarding school in Washington, DC. After she graduated, she enrolled at Eastern College. Then she had gone on to get her MBA in finance at Columbia University.

She began her career on Wall Street as a trainee analyst (read glorified secretary), then worked her way up to a brokerage position, starting her own hedge fund in the glory days of the 1980s. She cashed out when Wall Street was on a high and retired to her farm to train dogs and run a private investment firm.

It was interesting that she and I shared two alma maters—I had my undergraduate degree from Eastern, and an MA in English from Columbia, though I was about twenty years younger than she was. I remembered how blasé she had been about her connection to Eastern when I met her at the art exhibition, and it made me wonder again why she was so involved with the college if she didn’t care about it.

I realized that I should probably let President Babson know that Rita was dead, and that one of our students might be a suspect if her death was a homicide. That was going to be a happy little meeting. But I bucked up and stood. “Hold the fort while I’m gone,” I said to Rochester. “Don’t bother to take any messages, though.”

I walked down the narrow hallway, lined with old pen and ink drawings of the campus in the 1880s, and into the executive suite.

“Do you think he’d have a minute for me?” I asked Babson’s secretary, an older woman named Bernadette Bridge. She had unnaturally red hair in a sprayed bouffant.

“Mike MacCormac’s in with him,” she said. “I’ll buzz.”

That was good. Since Mike was my boss, the director of alumni relations, I’d be able to kill two birds with one stone.

Oops. Bad cliché.

Bernadette hung up the phone and said, “You can go right in.”

Babson was sitting behind his big oak desk when I walked in. He was a tall, rawboned man, with penetrating deep green eyes and dark, curly hair he styled with the greasy kid stuff I had abandoned when I reached puberty.

The office was filled with all the trappings of his presidency. On the walls hung lots of Eastern memorabilia, including old football programs and pennants, interspersed with photos of him with prominent alumni. I recognized Rita Gaines in a photo of Babson with the board.

Mike MacCormac was sitting across from Babson, in a spindle-backed chair with the Eastern logo. He typified the no-neck monster stereotype of college athletes. He was thick-set and muscular, with buzz-cut dark hair and a heavy five o’clock shadow, even early in the morning. At thirty-five, he was seven years younger than I was, shorter and stockier.

“Come in, Steve, sit down.” Babson motioned me to the chair next to Mike.

“I got a call from a friend of mine on the Stewart’s Crossing Police,” I said as I sat down. “Rita Gaines’s body was found at her farm this morning.”

“Oh, my,” Mike said. “I spoke to her last week.” His face paled, and Babson’s mouth opened in an “O” of shock.

“What a terrible loss,” Babson said. “She was a real supporter of Eastern. And she was on our Board of Trustees. Oh, my. We’ll have to put out a statement.”

 “The police don’t know the details yet. But there’s at least an outside possibility it was murder. I wanted you both to know as soon as possible.” I explained about meeting Rita at the art exhibit on Saturday night, and how I had witnessed her complaint about Felae’s painting.

“I remember that,” Babson said. “I had to ask Dr. Weinstock to take the picture down, as a personal favor to me. When Rita got hold of something she was like a dog with a bone. She wouldn’t let go.”

“Well, the student in question wasn’t happy,” I said. “He showed up at her farm on Sunday afternoon and threatened her.”

“The police told you that?” Mike asked.

“My friend on the police force has been training his dog at the agility track on Rita’s farm, and he took me and Rochester to see the course. We were both there when Felae showed up.”

Mike leaned forward. “You’re telling me that a police officer witnessed one of our students threaten a member of the Board of Trustees. And then someone murdered her?”

I held up my hand in the universal gesture of
stop
. “We don’t know yet that it’s murder. The police don’t have a cause of death. All I know is that Rick called me a few minutes ago to ask for the student’s name and address.”

“Who is he?” Babson asked.

“All I gave out was his name-- Felae Popescu. I told Rick that only the registrar is authorized to release personal data on students. I think he grew up somewhere in Eastern Europe, but I don’t know if he came to the US with his parents, or on his own.”

 “This is a very tricky situation,” Babson said. “We have to cooperate with the police, and of course we want them to find out who killed Rita, if indeed this turns out to be a murder case. But at the same time we are in
loco
parentis
for these students—especially a young man from a foreign country.”

The doctrine of loco parentis meant that college administrators had a legal responsibility to look after the students in their care—and that we had to be especially careful in protecting Felae until he was formally arrested and the police took over his custody.

“I’d better speak to Dot,” Babson said. He picked up his phone and punched in a number, then drummed his fingers on his desk as he waited for Dorothy Sneiss, the college registrar, to come on the line.

“Dot?” Babson said into the phone. “What do you know about this student—Felix something? Yes, that’s it. You did?” He listened. “All right. Keep me informed if the police come back to you for anything else.”

He hung up. “She provided the police with the address and phone number she had on file. If they want any information on his academic or disciplinary records, though, they’ll have to give us a subpoena.”

Mike turned to me. “Can you ask this friend of yours to hold back the details of the investigation from the press? Until they know for sure if her death has any connection to the College?”

“I can ask,” I said. “I don’t think Rick would release any details of an active investigation anyway.”

Babson drummed his fingers on his desk again. “Keep an eye on things, will you, Steve? Let us know if her death ends up having anything to do with Eastern? We had enough bad publicity over Joe Dagorian’s death. And draft a statement for me—something about how much we appreciated Rita’s support and we express our condolences.”

“I’ll get right on it.” The statement would be easy; it was going to be tougher to convince Rick Stemper to keep me in the loop on his investigation.

It was already noon when I left Babson’s office, so I detoured to the Cafette, an on-campus sandwich shop in an old carriage house behind Fields Hall. It was a worn, homey-looking place, decorated with Eastern pennants and faded T-shirts, with old wooden picnic tables and benches.

I got extra roast beef on my sandwich so I could share with Rochester. The goofy dog jumped up to greet me as soon as I walked in the door. It was either love, or the smell of the meat. I called Rick and left a message for him, then I peeled open my sandwich. I was about to hand off a piece of meat to Rochester but I remembered what Rick had said. I had to eat my own meal before I fed the dog.

I couldn’t hold out, though. After I’d taken a couple of bites I gave into his mournful look and fed him a piece of beef, which he wolfed down greedily. At least he didn’t like potato chips, so I had the whole bag to myself.

When I finished eating, I took Rochester out for a quick pee, then returned to my desk to focus on Rita Gaines. I had developed a standard press release for the death of benefactors and emeritus faculty, and I plugged in what I could find about Rita’s background and her commitment to Eastern College, and how sad we all were about her death. By one-thirty I had a draft complete, which I emailed to Babson for his review. He emailed me back with the OK, and I sent out the statement to the local media.

I looked at the clock and realized it was time to teach. I jumped up and tossed Rochester a treat, which he gulped immediately. “Stay out of trouble while I’m gone, big guy.”

When I returned to Bucks County, Lucas Roosevelt, the chair of the English department, had done me a huge favor and hired me to teach a couple of classes. So when he had called me a few weeks before and asked for a favor in return, I felt I had to oblige. He was in trouble because one of his elderly adjuncts had passed away halfway through the semester, and he had to scramble to find someone to fill in for her.

He asked me to take over her class in professional and technical writing. I’d already taught the class when I was adjuncting, and I had a strong background in tech writing anyway. Teaching made me feel involved in the real work of the college. But more than that, I enjoyed being in the classroom, and especially teaching tech writing. I focused on the concept of audience, and on how material could be presented in a bunch of different ways—in reports, flyers, presentations, and so on. I allowed the students to choose their subjects, as long as the I got to learn about new things every time I taught, from drifting to heart disease to the nutritional requirements for school lunches.

I walked across the campus to Blair Hall, mixing in with the restless tide of students moving between classes. I followed a bushy-haired kid whose T-shirt read “Don’t tell anyone, but I’m in the witness protection program.”

Most of Blair Hall was dark and gloomy, with tall, gothic-arched windows and dusty fluorescent lights hung on pendants. The classrooms had rich wooden wainscoting and scuffed floors, and I had fond memories of seminars in the small rooms on the third floor, a professor and a handful of students discussing the meaning of life and literature.

At least that’s the way I remember it. My classmates and I were probably as uncommunicative as today’s students, and our professors must have felt like brain surgeons, probing our heads for any spark of intelligence.

My class met in a first-floor computer lab in an addition at the back of the building that hadn’t been there when I was a student. Tall windows looked out on a walkway between buildings, letting in a flood of spring sunshine. Computers lined the perimeter of the room. I walked up to the teaching podium and turned on the computer and projector.

About twenty students either sat at the terminals or at a couple of round tables in the middle of the room. “Hey, everybody,” I said, as I waited for the equipment to warm up. “You all eager for the end of the semester?

There was general agreement. It was time for the students to present their PowerPoint presentations, so instead of teaching, I got to sit back and listen. I moved to one of the round tables and dropped my bag, then asked Lou Segusi, one of the stronger students, to close all the blinds.

“Who wants to go first?” I asked.

Barbara Seville, a petite blonde, raised her hand, then teetered up to the podium on very high heels. When I began teaching the class, right after the midterm break, she had been a bubbly girl, a member of the Booster Club who was always willing to raise her hand with a comment. Because of the death of the woman I’d replaced, Barbara had gone through a lot of emotional upset during the term, and for the last few weeks she’d been very quiet, just keeping her head down and doing her work. I felt bad for her and tried to cut her a break when I could.

Her presentation was on schizophrenia, and it was marked how her demeanor had changed from earlier in the term. She kept her head down as she spoke, so that we all had to strain to hear her. At least her slides were colorful and filled with information.

Yudame (pronounced you-dummy), a skinny boy with a wild bush of hair that varied in shade from blond to brown, followed her with a business presentation. With his tie-dyed T-shirt and Birkenstock sandals, he looked more like an escapee from the 1960s than the kind of kid who’d be leaving Eastern on a direct path to an Ivy League MBA, but you never know these days.

That reminded me of Rita Gaines. As Yudame fumbled with his jump drive, and then getting the presentation going, I wondered what kind of a student Rita had been. Her abrasive personality made me think she’d been talkative in class, even argumentative.

Yudame’s presentation began with an animation of angels flapping their wings and strumming harps while flying over Wall Street, which got the class’s attention. “I’m going to talk today about people called angel investors,” he began.