In Dog We Trust (Golden Retriever Mysteries) (27 page)

“She’s staying at Irene’s.”

“I’m the detective,” he said. “I know everything.”

“Yeah, that’s what your ex-wife said,” I said, yawning once again.

“Go back to bed, jerkoff,” he said.

I walked him to the front door. “Yeah, your ex-wife probably said that, too.”

I managed to get Rochester fed and walked Thursday morning, though I did have to go back to bed for a nap. I drove to Eastern, and climbed the stairs in Blair Hall with effort. My ribs still ached and a headache still hung around the back of my brain. But I handed back the papers to my mystery fiction class, then stopped by Jackie’s office to say goodbye.

“What happened to you?” she asked. “You look all beat up. It wasn’t that student you told me about, was it?”

I shrugged, and my ribs reminded me that I shouldn’t. I told her about getting run over. “I doubt it was Lay Zee. I don’t think he could get up the energy.”

“I’d report it to Lucas, though. Are you going to be here this summer?”

“Lucas He doesn’t need me. Which is fine; I need to work on a plan for developing my tech writing business.” I didn’t mention that my parole officer would ship me back to prison in California if I didn’t.

“You know Menno Zook, don’t you?” I asked.

“Sure. He’s an oddball, isn’t he?”

“Maybe more than that.” I told her how I suspected that Menno and Melissa had been involved with Edith’s identity theft. “I’d just be careful around them both, if I were you,” I said. “And you might want to check your credit report, just in case they got hold of any of your information.”

“Wow. Thanks. I’ll do that.”

I left her office a few minutes later, and felt sad leaving Eastern that Thursday; I knew I’d have to go back up to hand in my grades and leave the graded papers at the English department, but it was the last time I’d be teaching for a while, and I’d enjoyed the work. I hoped that Lucas Roosevelt would hire me as an adjunct again in the fall, but you never knew with that sort of job; if enrollment was down and he needed fewer instructors, I was low on the totem pole.  I had a feeling that the administration didn’t know about my felony conviction. If they did, I might not be welcome back there. And if my tech writing business didn’t take off, I’d have to take a full-time job somewhere, and I wouldn’t have the time to spare for teaching.

When I got home from Eastern, I had to take a nap. When I woke, I was feeling almost myself again; the headache was gone, and my ribs only ached when I breathed. I went downstairs to make myself some tea, and while I was waiting for the water to boil, I saw Rochester put his front paws up on my dining room table. “Rochester! No! Bad dog!” I said.

He dropped his paws back to the floor, scattering the pile of Caroline’s mail that his paws had landed on. “You are not a good dog,” I said, leaning over to pick up the scattered mail. My eyes landed on Caroline’s cell phone bill.

I suppose I shouldn’t have opened her mail. But I just couldn’t resist.  I know, it’s the story of me and the computer all over again. But thus far, curiosity hadn’t killed this cat, just incarcerated him.

The last call Caroline made had been on the day she died, to what I thought was probably her office voice mail. I took the bill upstairs with my tea and sat down with her laptop, Rochester curled around the back of my chair as if he was keeping me there until I found something useful.

I went back, day by day, Googling every number and trying to identify it. I was pretty successful, except for a handful of numbers, which were probably the cell phones of friends or colleagues. I saw that she’d called Karina Warr’s cell a couple of times, and Chris McCutcheon’s home number.

Nothing else jumped out at me. I copied the three numbers I’d been unable to trace and then put the bill back in the envelope. Too many dead ends; it was getting frustrating.

Just then the phone rang. “Listen, I need to talk to you,” a man’s voice said.

I knew the voice was familiar, but I just couldn’t place it. Layton Zee? Some other student? “Who is this?”

“Chris McCutcheon.”

“Oh. Chris.”

I flashed on Chris and Karina arriving the previous Saturday in Chris’s big black SUV, and the way Rochester had gone nuts. Had Chris run me off the road on Monday night?

“I want to come down and talk to you,” he said. “Finish up what we were talking about on Saturday. Without Karina in the way.”

“I don’t think you have to say anything to me. Tell it to the police.”

“I want to talk. Can I drive down tomorrow? I need to get this resolved.”

This kind of thing always happens towards the end of the episode—the killer comes after the detective. Only I would make sure that Rick Stemper was around to protect me. “OK,” I said. “You know where I live. When can you get here?”

“I’ll be there at one.” He hung up.

I called Rick. “I told you to stop messing around in this case,” he said.

“And I told him to talk to the police. He said he had to talk to me.”

“What time is he showing up?”

I told him. “I’ll be there.” I thanked Rick and hung up. I felt pretty smug about pulling Rick in as my witness and backup. Despite the fact that his prints didn’t match the one on the shell casing, Chris McCutcheon was still high on my list of suspects and I was worried what he might do—especially since I was still feeling crappy after the hit-and-run accident.

Rick was at my house the next morning, Friday, at 7:30, wearing a t-shirt, shorts and running shoes. “I came to borrow your dog,” he said. Rochester went into spasms of joy upon seeing Rick, jumping up and down and doing the deranged kangaroo routine he’d once saved for me.

The two of them took off, and about forty-five minutes later they were back. Sweat was streaming off Rick’s face and soaking his t-shirt; his short brown hair was plastered to his head. Rochester was panting, his long tongue lolling out of his mouth like the red carpet at some fancy event. He went straight for his water bowl, and after slurping up the contents, spilling half of it on the floor, he flopped on the tile with a happy grin on his face.

“You’re coming back at one, right?” I asked.

Rick shook his head.

“No? But I don’t want to meet with Chris McCutcheon alone.” I felt my voice getting higher by at least an octave.

“Good. Maybe I’m knocking some sense into your head after all. I’m not coming back at one because I’m not leaving. I’ve got clean clothes in the car. I’m going to take a shower and hang out until McCutcheon arrives. He may be planning to show up earlier to sabotage you.”

“Wow. Good thinking.”

“That’s why I’m the detective.”

While Rick showered and dressed, I made chocolate chip pancakes for us and gave Rochester his chow. Then Rick settled down with my laptop and his cell phone at the dining room table. I didn’t tell him that I had Caroline’s laptop upstairs; it wasn’t the kind of thing I wanted him to mention to Santiago Santos.

I went upstairs and started going through the list Santos had given me, looking for anything I could do. I didn’t have the mechanical aptitude for construction, and I had the feeling I’d probably slice my hand off if I tried to become a meat cutter. I called the social service agencies on the list and got the dates for workshops and training sessions, enduring a humiliating litany of questions. No, I didn’t have substance abuse problems. No, I was not a registered sexual offender. I did not need debt counseling or a psychological evaluation. I just needed a job.

Just before one, the guard called to announce Chris McCutcheon. I told him to have Chris park in the guest parking lot—I wanted to see if Rochester would go nuts again if he didn’t see the car.

“You going to hide somewhere?” I asked Rick.

He gave me a look. “No. I’m going to sit right here.”

Chris was surprised to see Rick, who was wearing a tan polo shirt with the Stewart’s Crossing Police emblem embroidered on the breast. But he was happy enough to see Rochester, who did his gleeful visitor dance for Chris—unlike the mad, wild beast he had become the previous Saturday. Maybe it was the car, after all.

“I wanted to clear some stuff up with you,” Chris said, as the three of us sat in the living room. Since we didn’t need his fingerprints any more I didn’t bother to offer him anything to drink.

“Like what?” Rick asked.

“Like what happened to Caroline’s dog, for starters.” He looked down at his knees, then back up at us. “I’d only had my license for like a week,” he said. “And it wasn’t even my fault. I wasn’t speeding, just driving along this road that ran along the perimeter of the base. And I felt the wheel bounce, like I’d run over something.”

“Let me guess,” I said. “Caroline’s dog?”

He nodded. “He must have gotten out of the house and run away. There was a lot of underbrush out there; I didn’t even see him.”

“Why didn’t you tell anybody?” I asked.

“My father was a real hard-ass. He’d have taken the keys away from me for a year. And for something that wasn’t even my fault. ‘We all have to accept responsibility for our actions, Christian,’ he used to say. I wanted to ask him if he took responsibility for moving us around every two years.”

“What about Caroline?” Rick asked. “Didn’t you want to at least tell her?”

“She had this huge crush on me,” Chris said. “I knew it, and I was kind of flattered. If she’d found out, she’d have hated me.”

“And you never told her, even after all these years?”

“I wanted to. You know, just to clear the air? But then we hooked up for a while, and I didn’t want to mess that up. Especially after she moved down here and got Rochester, I knew that she would hate me and never want to talk to me again.”

“And why tell us now?” Rick asked.

“I’ve got this deal about to go through,” he said. “In Brooklyn. I’m buying this old warehouse, going to convert it to condos. I need city approval for the deal, and if you guys keep nosing around, asking questions, they might get cold feet. I’ve leveraged everything I own on this deal—if it goes south I’m in receivership.”

“Talk to me about malicious mischief,” Rick said.

Chris looked at him. “Those charges were so bogus,” he said. “The first building I bought? It was this little one-story in Washington Heights. Some Dominican dude who it turns out was just fucking with me.”

“So you fucked with him?”

Chris frowned. “No, man. I was naïve—it was my first deal. The guy told me he’d signed the papers and sent them to his attorney. So I thought the building was as good as mine, and I went in there to start rehabbing. I cleared out all the trash and started knocking down walls. Dude comes in, goes ballistic on me.”

“And?” I asked.

“He didn’t want to sell. He was just trying to hold up his tenant for higher rent. When he saw I’d started tearing the place apart, he called the cops. I paid to have everything fixed, and the judge gave me a suspended sentence.”

“And the second time?” Rick asked.

“Another asshole. I was buying this fourplex in Jackson Heights, in Queens. One of the units was vacant, and somebody broke in, to use it as a shooting gallery.”

He looked at us to make sure we knew what he was talking about. I’m sure Rick did, but I had no idea why someone would try and set up a gun range in an abandoned apartment. “For drugs,” he said. “That’s what they call them. These abandoned buildings where the junkies hang out.”

He leaned back on the sofa. “There wasn’t a shred of evidence to connect me, but somehow the asshole got in that I had a prior, so the judge thought I was just trying to knock the price down. He gave me a hundred hours of community service. I could have fought it, but it was easier just to go along.”

“What did you have to do?” I asked. Rick shot me an angry glance, but I was curious.

“I worked with Habitat for Humanity,” he said. “Fixing up properties in Bedford Stuyvesant. It was pretty cool. I still help them out when I can.”

I looked over at Rick, and he shrugged. I knew the fingerprints didn’t connect Chris to the shell casing, and Karina’s theory that his psychopathic behavior had begun with killing Caroline’s puppy was beginning to look flimsier than Jeremy Eisenberg’s research paper on Ecstasy, which had represented it as a happy kind of drug, what pot was to the sixties.

“You ever let Karina borrow your car?” Rick asked.

Chris frowned. “She drives like shit. But yeah, I let her sometimes. She works for this fast food place; she’s the one goes out to look at new locations, and sometimes it’s too far for a cab and there’s no other way out there but to drive. But I try to have excuses whenever I can.”

“She borrow your car back in March?” Rick asked.

Chris thought about it for a minute, and then recognition dawned in his eyes. “You mean, like when Caroline—no way, man. Karina can’t shoot a gun for shit. I know—I’ve been to the range with her. Plus, Caroline was like her friend, almost her only female friend. She’d never have shot her.”

“Not even over you?” I asked.

“Especially not over me,” he said. “I admit, I’ve been bouncing back and forth between them. Never at the same time, you know. But I’d break up with one of them and then see the other, and we’d hook up for a while. Then break up again.”