Dog Helps Those (Golden Retriever Mysteries) (7 page)

I met regularly with my parole officer, Santiago Santos, and he did his best to help me avoid cyber temptation and the lure of snooping in online places I didn’t belong. And having a best friend who was a cop was a definite help.

We split the check and threaded our way between the wooden booths and the packed tables to the back door, then out into the spring air, that much fresher for the contrast to the fustiness and spilled-beer smell of the bar.

“See you,” Rick said, as we reached our cars. “Remember, don’t burn your bridges—there might be crocodiles in the river.”

“Words to live by,” I said.

The
New York Times
dedicated a couple of inches to Rita Gaines’ obituary—with no mention of murder, just that she had been found dead at her farm. I was impressed at the Fortune 500 CEOs who knew her and contributed reminiscences. I was pleased to see a mention that she had graduated from Eastern and served on the Board of Trustees.

I tried to keep track of every time Eastern came up in the media. I had a Google alert set up to tell me whenever we were mentioned online, but most of those were useless, simply directions to student blogs. But that morning the list was long, as many different papers and websites picked up the obit from wire services. I copied the obits and put them into a file I labeled with Rita’s name.

When I finished, I started work on the first of a series of profiles of graduating students, part of my promotional efforts tied to graduation. Mike hoped to use them as an incentive to get alumni to fund more scholarships.

Faye Tallity had spent the summer between her junior and senior year volunteering with a group that searched for unexploded land mines in Cambodia. In her spare time, she sang lead with an all-girl band called The Thin Mints, which played a lot of campus events. Their music was heavily based in punk, and they dressed in Girl Scout uniforms pierced with safety pins, with their hair dyed bright colors. Faye wrote most of the band’s music, which tended toward the nihilistic, at least based on what I saw of them on YouTube. They had also put out a self-published album on iTunes, which was selling well in the punk category.

I opened a video clip of The Thin Mints playing, “Just Shoot Me” and Rochester sat up and barked. “It’s only a song, boy,” I said. “Go back to sleep.”

He slumped to the floor, and a reminder popped up on my computer. I was due at a meeting to discuss graduation. I left Rochester snoozing and walked around to the registrar’s office at the front of the building.

Dot Sneiss, whom President Babson had spoken to about Felae’s records, was the college official in charge of registration, student records, and matriculation requirements. She chaired the committee, which was composed of a half-dozen members of the faculty and staff. She was a plump, motherly woman with fading brown hair, wearing a pink cardigan over her white blouse.

Her staff worked in an office suite on the first floor of Fields Hall, down the hall and around the corner from mine. When I walked into the conference room there, she was wiping down the white board. “I understand the Stewart’s Crossing police called you for Felae Popescu’s address,” I said.

“I gave him what I had,” she said, turning to face me. “Unfortunately about ten to fifteen percent of our records are out of date at any one time. Students are supposed to update address, phone and email when they register each term, but some of them don’t.”

“So it’s not necessarily suspicious that his info is out of date?”

She shook her head. “If every student who didn’t keep up with us was dangerous we’d be overwhelmed with crime in Leighville.”

The next to arrive was Dr. Jim Shelton from the History Department. As Commencement Marshal, he kept the students in line, organized the faculty procession and carried the mace, a ceremonial staff topped with the Eastern logo, a rising sun. He was about five years older than I was, a genial heavyset man with a salt-and-pepper beard. It was hard to get faculty members to serve on a committee whose responsibilities ran into final exam week; most were busy grading papers then.

But Jim was chair of his department, which meant he only taught one class. He was also chair of the Faculty Senate, and he preferred college politics to academic research and publication. His kids were in their early twenties, and he had no grandchildren to spoil.

Right behind him was Dr. Fred Searcy from the biology department. In the sciences, at least at Eastern, most exams are multiple choice, slid through a machine that grades them automatically, leaving Fred free for committee service if he chose.

He was a slim sixty-something guy in a white lab coat, totally bald, with a friendly smile. I’d seen him working with students and been impressed with the passion he had for his subject and the ease he had in communicating it. He had helped me out a few months before when I was looking for information on a rare plant. I walked over to him. “Hey, Fred, I’m trying to find out some information about cobra venom.”

“You’d need Dr. Conrad,” he said. “She teaches Anatomy and Physiology, and our one course in Zoology. If anybody can help you, she can.”

“Her office in Green Hall?” It was the oldest classroom building on campus and the least “green” of any of our buildings. One of the main targets of the capital campaign was a new building for the physical sciences, with up-to-date computer-equipped labs.

“Down the hall from mine. You can’t miss it. Diagrams of the body systems on the wall around her door.”

“Thanks. I’ll have to check out her office hours.”

“I can do that for you,” he said, as we sat down at the big conference table. He pulled out a smart phone and typed with amazing speed. “Her office hours are from two to five this afternoon,” he said.

I shook my head. “That’s cool.”

“Gotta keep up with the times.”

The rest of the committee was made up of administrative types like me, including a couple of staffers from student advising, a guy from Eastern’s Investment Office, and Verri M. Parshall, a woman I liked to call The Preventer of Information Technology, though her official title was Associate Dean for Technology and Information Systems. She was a classic example of the Peter Principle; she had worked her way up from a data entry operator back when the college kept its records on punch cards, and in my opinion she was scared of any new technology. It was funny that Fred was more comfortable with high-tech than she was.

Dot Sneiss stepped up and called the meeting to order then. “Verri, there seems to be a bug with the program that audits student graduation requests,” she said. “Students are complaining that they need the most recent version of Internet Explorer to access it.”

Verri was in her mid-fifties, and everything about her was brisk and no-nonsense, from her short, gray-brown hair to her man-tailored pants suits. “Then they need to download it. It’s free.”

“But that version is still very shaky on the Mac,” Jim Shelton said. “I had a student show me the problem he was having.”

“The Macintosh is not part of the college’s supported hardware package,” Verri said. “We’ve installed computers all over campus for students who don’t have their own PCs.”

“The ones in the lobby outside our office are always breaking down,” one of the staffers from student services said. I was pretty sure her name was Shireen, but her long dark hair blocked her name tag, so it could have been Shirley, too. “Students keep complaining to our office staff.”

“Then your staff needs to put in a service request.”

“We do that, almost every day,” Shir-something said. “But you need to manage your equipment better.”

“I’m happy to remove the computers from your lobby if you prefer,” Verri said, pointing outside. She wore no jewelry beyond a plain watch, and no polish on her fingernails. She probably used a DOS-based computer, too. No fancy icon-based systems for her. “Frankly I’d be happiest if we restricted on-campus computer use to as few people as possible.”

“You can take that up separately,” Dot said. “Let’s get back on track here.”

She explained the process of degree audits; apparently the online system wasn’t working properly, so each student who wanted to graduate would have to schedule an appointment with an advisor.

“There’s no way we can meet with every graduating student in the next two weeks,” Shir-something protested. “Verri, can’t you make the system work properly?”

“I don’t appreciate your personal attacks,” Verri said. “If you have a problem, you need to call the help desk and put in a ticket.”

“The help desk phone number is always busy,” Jim Shelton said. “I call at least once a week with a problem in my office or in a classroom. All I get is a recorded message telling me to send an email.”

Verri looked at him like he was stupid. “If you and the rest of the faculty didn’t make so many requests, we wouldn’t be so overwhelmed.”

“They aren’t requests, Verri,” he said. “If you maintained the computers on campus better, or you let faculty download programs they need, we wouldn’t be calling you all the time.”

“I have more productive things to do than listen to your gripes.” Verri stood up. “Dot, you can email me meeting notes with anything you need from my department.”

“My email address is corrupted,” Dot said. “I’ve been waiting three days for a tech to come to my office and fix it.”

“Put in another request,” Verri said. “I can’t do anything for you unless you go through the proper channels.”

She turned and strode out of the conference room. The foam rubber soles of her orthopedic shoes squeaked on the hardwood floors. “Well,” Dot said, sighing. “Where were we?”

It was Phil Berry’s turn next. He was an African-American guy in his mid-thirties with close-cropped black hair and skin the color of milk chocolate, a financial geek who had worked at one of the big Wall Street firms and escaped before it imploded. Now he managed the college’s investments. Most of the time I could barely follow him because of all the financial jargon.

He pulled out his BlackBerry and punched a couple of keys.

Okay, Phil Berry was black, and he had a BlackBerry. I suppressed a giggle as he started to speak. Dot had given him the responsibility for coordinating our commencement speakers, and for once I understood everything he said.

The meeting dragged on all morning and I started to wonder if we were ever going to finish. A few minutes before noon, Fred Searcy said, “Sorry, folks, I have a class.”

He stood up. Dot Sneiss said, “I think we’ve covered everything. I’ll send out the meeting notes and then we’ll reconvene in a week.”

I walked out with Fred. “I don’t really have a class,” he said. “But Dot will go on all day if you let her. I need my lunch.”

I laughed, and continued down the hall to my own office. As soon as I walked in the door, Rochester jumped up and nuzzled me. “You want to go for a quick walk?”

He went into the downward-facing dog yoga position, always an indication that he was ready to play, and I hooked up his leash. I opened the french doors and we walked out into the chilly sunshine.

We strolled around the azaleas, blossoming in shades of red and purple. A bee buzzed around the blossoms of a honeysuckle that grew on a wooden trellis. While Rochester sniffed the fresh mulch laid around the newly trimmed boxwood hedges, I sat on a wrought iron bench.

Despite the aggravation of working in a complex organization, I liked my job, and I thrived on the energy and enthusiasm of a college campus. Sure, I worked with some difficult people—like Verri Parshall; the idiot in the payroll department who screwed up the direct deposit of my paycheck; and a bunch of the faculty, who sometimes seemed to forget that the students were our whole reason for being at Eastern.

Which reminded me of Rita Gaines, and made me wonder again what she was doing on the Board of Trustees. Why was she wasting her time with us, if she didn’t care about students or have fond memories of Eastern? Was there something good underneath the hard surface she showed to the world?

Rochester circled back and hopped up on the bench. He rested his head in my lap. “What do you think, boy?” I asked. “Was Rita Gaines a good person because she liked dogs?”

Suddenly he sat bolt upright, then lunged off the bench. I grabbed his extendable leash just in time to keep him from chasing a squirrel with a death wish all through the campus, though it felt like my arm had been jerked out of its socket in the process.

Maybe he wasn’t so focused on crime-solving as I thought.

I picked up a sandwich from one of the food trucks at the bottom of the hill, then spent my lunch hour at my desk transferring “To do” list items from my pad into my office computer and my iPhone. Sadly, the two can’t talk to each other because I’d have to get the Preventer of Information Technology to allow a tech to come to my office and install the relevant software. She told me she didn’t “see the necessity as reflected in the college’s priority statements for informational technology.” That’s bureaucrat speak for “leave me alone, jerkwad.”

I know that language well, because I spent close to ten years, right up to my unfortunate incarceration, in the corporate world myself. If I wanted, I probably could have hacked into my desktop computer and installed the software myself—but I had promised Santiago Santos and Mike MacCormac that I’d keep my nose clean.