In Dog We Trust (Golden Retriever Mysteries) (15 page)

Sure enough, both McCutcheon and Warr were there, and hunting backwards through her appointments (a very tedious chore made even more tedious by Rochester’s insistence on banging into my knees while I was doing it) I found a couple of cryptic references.

Caroline had gone to Utica to spend Christmas with her great-aunt, and she’d stopped in New York City on her way back for dinner on December 30 with Karina, and then a party with Chris. Farther back, ‘Chris – visit’ spanned a weekend in early November.

I wondered if either of them had been notified about Caroline’s death. Rick had called Caroline’s great-aunt, but would he know her friends?  Was there anything more on her calendar about them?

I keep my calendar in Microsoft Outlook, and Caroline did the same thing. But the calendar was just as empty as her PDA had been. She probably hot-synched the two of them together—I did—so there was no reason why one would be different from the other.

While I had Outlook open I checked Caroline’s email. It had been three weeks since she had been shot, and there were over a hundred new messages in her mailbox. Instead of an address connected to her ISP, or internet service provider, Caroline’s email was a free one offered by SUNY for alumni. So the address would remain open until someone told the university she had passed away.

Dozens of the messages in her inbox were spam—Nigerians needing help laundering money, stock tips, offers for breast or penis enhancement. When I got rid of all of those, I was still left with fifty messages.

A quick survey showed me that there were a half-dozen that seemed personal. I put them aside, and started going through the rest, one at a time. A lot were digests of online lists, and I tried to identify each list and see if it might be relevant to her death.

In the end, there were two that interested me. One was on golden retrievers, which I signed up for myself. The other was a message board for those military brats, connected to the website and SQL database I’d found.

The rest were banking or finance-related, and after a quick scan I got rid of all those. By then, it was time for dinner and Rochester’s evening walk. He was restless, and we ended up leaving River Bend, crossing a bridge over the canal, and walking along the Delaware for a while. It was dark and starry by the time we got home, both of us frozen and tired.

I broiled a steak for myself and fed a few pieces of it to Rochester, washing mine down with a Sam Adams Winter Wheat. Then I spent four hours going through every post and didn’t find a single point of interest. It was boring reading the mundane details of people I’d never met. There were requests for information: “Anyone who lived on or near Bad Kreuznach from 1986-1990,” for example. There were endless threads about current TV shows, musicians I’d never heard of, and political rants.

Chris McCutcheon wasn’t a poster—at least not over the last couple of weeks—but Karina Warr often posted on the social life threads. She seemed to have something to say about every party, concert or singles’ night in New York, and the desperation rose off those posts like a foul smell.

When I lived in New York, before I met Mary, I’d been a minor player on that kind of party circuit. There was a network of second-tier college alumni groups—Bates and Bowdoin and Tufts and Oberlin and Eastern, among many others—and there were often singles mixers, sneak previews of art openings and so on. I was an assistant editor on a magazine for meeting planners at the time, and I used to go out after work a couple of times a week, either with college friends, to work-related events, or the very kind of parties Karina Warr attended.

I’d met Mary at one of them. We always disagreed on which event it was; I insisted it was a fund-raiser at the Frick Museum, while she was sure it was a party at South Street Seaport. “I remember the fish guts,” she always said.

A nice way to remember our meeting.

She wasn’t conventionally beautiful, with frizzy brown hair she was always struggling to tame, wide-set eyes, and a high forehead, and when she laughed, her whole face lit up. She had enough charisma to light the Statue of Liberty’s torch.

We’d bonded over books, movies and music. Our tastes were in synch, and for our first date we went to an off-Broadway show a friend had given her tickets to, a spoof of
Cats
called
Dogs
. Her friend played a cocker spaniel, and though he had a good voice, the lyrics, the costumes and the choreography were worse than anything you’d see in a suburban high school production. We’d laughed the whole time, pulling on straight faces to compliment her friend backstage.

Though I’d known lots of smart women at Eastern, Mary combined her intelligence with street smarts and business savvy. She was working in marketing for one of the big banks, and she achieved one success after another. She convinced her bosses to place ads in foreign language newspapers, and soon new accounts were zooming in ethnic enclaves like Jackson Heights and Brighton Beach.

She arranged sponsorships for street festivals, set up career-day visits by bankers, and carried out a dozen other clever ideas. We celebrated every promotion at classy restaurants and with spending sprees at Bergdorf’s. When she was offered the job in Silicon Valley, it was a big promotion with a lot more money, the chance to manage all marketing communications for a high tech company, and I saw it as the chance for Mary to continue to blossom. I was happy I could be there to share in her success.

I gave up searching around nine, and sprawled out on the couch to relax after hunching over the computer. Rochester jumped up next to me, then rolled over onto his back and rested his head in my groin, snuffling and waving his front paws.

“OK, I get it,” I grumbled. “You don’t have to turn on a neon sign.” I reached for the TV remote with one hand and started scratching his stomach with the other. As mindless sitcoms unraveled before us, I stroked him, wondering what I had done to fill my nights before he had arrived in my life.

On Sunday morning, I walked Rochester and then retreated to bed to read the paper. He complicated matters by insisting on sharing the queen-size with me, and by refusing to stay in one place. Every time I’d get the sections I’d read organized along with the ones I hadn’t, he’d move around and mix everything up.

I was relaxing on the sofa around three o’clock when Rochester came over and started butting me in the side with his head. “You want something, boy?” I yawned and stretched. “Come on, I’ll take you out for a walk.”

The walk didn’t do it for him, though. He was still in a playful mood when we got home, and he kept hopping around, trying to get me to play. “I have work to do, Rochester,” I said, but he wouldn’t stop.

I followed him into the kitchen, where he stopped and sat down next to the kitchen table, sniffing at Caroline’s laptop, which I’d left there. I remembered that there were still a few of Caroline’s email messages that I hadn’t read, and sat down and turned it on. As soon as I did, Rochester was satisfied, and he sprawled around behind my chair.

I’d saved the half-dozen personal emails she had received for last. She wasn’t a great correspondent; no one yet had sent worried messages asking why she had been out of touch for weeks.

The last message from Karina Warr was a response to one Caroline had sent about a book she was reading, another in her series of novels centered around romantic heroes. “Wake up and smell the cappuccino, girl,” Karina had written. “Guys like that don’t exist any more and you’re wasting your time hoping one of them is going to ride through your little town and swoop you up in his arms.”

The only message from Chris McCutcheon was one asking when Caroline would be in New York next.

How do you respond to your dead neighbor’s friends asking about her? Send an email from her account? An email from your own account? A phone call? Hi, you don’t know me, but I lived next door to your dead friend.

In the end, I passed the buck to Rick Stemper. I copied the contact information for both Chris and Karina into an email to Rick from my own account. Before I clicked send, though, I stopped to think.

How could I explain having access to Caroline’s email? I didn’t want to tell him about her laptop, because I didn’t want word to get back to Santiago Santos that I’d been using another computer. I got up to pace around the downstairs, made more complicated by Rochester following me around.

Once again, I’d gotten myself into trouble, trying to do what I thought was right. You’d think that six months in the California penal system might have taught me a lesson—but no. I sat back down at my laptop, at the email to Rick. “I was cleaning up my inbox and saw a message from Caroline,” I typed. “I thought maybe she’d used ‘Rochester’ as her email password, so I gave it a try. Hope it doesn’t get me in too much trouble!”

I hoped that would be a convincing explanation, and that instead of focusing on me he’d contact Chris and Karina and see if they knew anything that might shed light on her death.

Feeling guilty, I spent a couple of hours researching potential clients, and then playing with Rochester. After dinner I looked back at Edith’s paperwork, and realized that each of the accounts Edith had lost track of had been shifted from her home address to the same post office box in Easton.

 I wasn’t sure how to move forward, though, once I’d figured all that out. Was Edith the one who’d changed the addresses, and opened the account at the QSB branch in Easton? Or had someone stolen her identity? The more I thought about it, the less it seemed that sweet, elderly Edith was hiding some dark secret in Easton, and the more it seemed that she was the victim of an ongoing fraud.

Edith was going to be upset—and since there was something criminal going on, Rick would get involved. There was a lot more work to be done—Edith was going to have to contact each of these companies, let them know that there was fraud on her account, and then wait while they completed their own internal investigations.

I called her and got no answer. That was a surprise; it was Sunday night, and I knew she didn’t like to drive after dark. I was worried enough to call Gail Dukowski and see if she knew anything.

I liked Gail, and I’d always been attracted to pretty blondes with a head for business. “I hope it’s not too late to call,” I said, when she answered. “I know you get up early to bake.”

“No, it’s OK,” she said. “What’s up?”

I wondered if she’d go out with me, if I asked. That wasn’t what I’d called for, but the thought jumped unbidden into my mind.

Then I remembered my felony conviction, and focused on the business at hand. “I called Edith’s and she didn’t answer. Do you know if she went out of town?”

“Yes, she went to see her cousin in Charleston,” Gail said. “Just for a few days, though. I think she’ll be back Tuesday or Wednesday.” She sighed. “She’s having her handyman recaulk her tub and shower while she’s gone. I wish I had a guy who could do that sort of thing for me.”

I laughed. “You’d probably want more than just caulking,” I said.

She laughed, too. “Well, yeah. And it wouldn’t hurt if he was cute and had a sense of humor.”

I had the definite impression that Gail was flirting with me, and so I flirted back. “Modern women,” I said. “You want it all.”

We carried on like that for a few minutes, and when we hung up I was smiling.

The smile faded once I checked the balance of the fraudulent account. A lot of money was moving around, but the account held a minimal balance. A few weeks before, there had been a $400,000 deposit—one which had remained in the account just long enough for the check to clear.

Poor Edith, I thought. She had been victimized. I wondered if the culprit was the handyman she’d mentioned; but if you were smart enough to cheat an old lady out of $400,000, would you come back to caulk her bathtub? I wouldn’t.

On Tuesday afternoon, I stopped by Jackie’s office after class to say hello. I saw Menno Zook coming out and remembered that she taught the developmental writing class, and that she’d mentioned him to me at the start of the semester. She’d had him as a student in the fall and liked him, though she knew he was going through a rough patch getting accustomed to college.

“How’s Menno doing?” I asked. “Is he complaining about me?”

She shook her head. “No, he thinks your class is fine. I’m just his general sounding board. I can relate to him. He’s like me. A fish out of water. We’re both far removed from our home environments.”

Jackie had grown up in Newark, the oldest of three kids in a single-parent household, and I figured it hadn’t been easy for her. Menno’s life was dramatically different, growing up on a farm in Amish country. But I could see her point; he was the only Amish kid at Eastern, as far as I knew, and though there were a sprinkling of other black faculty and black students, she had to feel isolated.

“How are things going?” I asked, settling into the chair across from her.

She shrugged. “Swamped, as usual.” She pointed at a stack of papers. “That’s my afternoon and evening project. Sometimes I wish I could just run them all through a paper shredder and be done with it.”

“Give it a try sometime,” I said. “See if the students notice the difference.”

She laughed. “You are a bad influence on me. And if I let you stay in my office, I’ll never get any grading done. Begone with you.”