In Dog We Trust (Golden Retriever Mysteries) (34 page)

I introduced Rick.

“Can I offer you anything to drink? Water, iced tea, lemonade?” Mrs. Eisenberg asked.

Rick and I both asked for lemonade, and Mrs. Eisenberg called a white-uniformed maid and ordered for all four of us.

Jeremy flopped down across from us on another gilded couch, and I was worried for a minute that it would collapse under him. Mrs. Eisenberg sat catty-cornered to us in a French Provincial-style armchair. I looked at Rick, and he nodded.

“I have some bad news, Jeremy,” I said. “Two of the students from our freshman comp class have been killed, and I’m helping Detective Stemper here figure out what happened.”

“Melissa and Menno,” he said.

“You heard?”

He nodded. “Tasheba emailed me. She’s friends with this girl Rawanda, who was Melissa’s roommate.”

I looked over at Rick and he frowned at me. I didn’t quite know what that meant, but I guessed I was supposed to keep Jeremy focused. “Were you friendly with Melissa and Menno outside of class?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Sort of.”

We waited. Finally Jeremy said, “I had kind of a crush on Melissa for a while, until it was pretty clear I wasn’t wild enough for her.”

“What do you mean, wild enough?” Rick asked.

“You seen her Face Book page?”

Rick looked confused. “It’s a social networking website,” I said. “Like MySpace, only you have to have a college or university email address to sign up. Supposedly keeps the creeps out.” To Jeremy I said, “Can you show us?”

“Sure.” He pulled himself up off the sofa and disappeared into the bowels of the apartment. The maid entered as he left, handing around crystal tumblers filled with pale yellow lemonade.

“I’m so glad you were able to come up here,” Mrs. Eisenberg said to me, taking a glass from the maid. “I’m sure it’s a great comfort to Jeremy.”

“Dealing with death is difficult for all of us,” I said. “I’m sure it’s tough on Jeremy being away from school with all this happening.”

“He’s been on the phone, talking and texting and instant messaging, nearly non-stop,” she said. “I’m sure it’s just been devastating for him.”

While we waited for Jeremy to return with his laptop, Rick and I sipped our lemonade, and I took a surreptitious look around the apartment, which bore the unmistakable imprint of a high-end decorator. Everything went together too well to have been assembled casually. I wondered if the place had always looked that way, or if it represented the taste of the second Mrs. Eisenberg.

The walls were painted a pale blue, and the accent pillows on the gilded sofas were navy. The paintings on the walls had probably been acquired at high-end auctions, and even the few family photos on the end table were framed in silver.

It had probably been tough for Jeremy, losing his mom so young, and I would have bet anything that his dad didn’t sacrifice too much time at the office to hang out with his son. Did growing up in such fancy surroundings make up for it? Probably not. The rich kids I’d gone to school with at Eastern had taken their backgrounds for granted, assuming that everybody went to St. Bart’s for Christmas or skiing in Aspen over spring break.

When he returned with his laptop, Jeremy looked anything but devastated. As a matter of fact, he looked sort of gleeful. Oh well, if a girl turned me down in favor of a guy who ended up getting her killed, I’d probably feel pretty vindicated, too.

He logged on to the website and pulled up Melissa’s profile.

She certainly showed a different side of her personality than the one I saw in freshman comp. In most of the pictures she’d posted she was barely clothed, and she had several tattoos on strategic body parts. They weren’t the standard butterflies and roses you often see on teenaged girls, either.

She had a devil head, complete with horns, on her right shoulder. A unicorn’s head, with spiraling horn, was positioned suggestively on her left thigh, and she had a barbed wire rope tattooed around her right ankle. Her favorite saying was “Born to be wild,” and in her personal statement she’d written, “I like the contrast between the face I present to the world and my true self, which I keep hidden and only reveal to those I trust.”

I remembered Melissa’s habitual uniform of Fair Isle sweaters and plaid kilts. What were the other students hiding under their outward costumes? Did a boy like Jeremy, with his gangsta-style t-shirts and low-waist pants, cover up a soul that longed for the days of prep school and squash tournaments? Did our football players secretly long to be poets? And did the preppies in their button-down shirts yearn to play the drums at smoky jazz clubs? I already knew that Menno’s simple, Amish-style exterior had concealed his inner thief.

“Did Menno have a page here, too?” I asked.

Jeremy shook his head. “He thought it was all stupid.”

“Did you hang out with him at all?”

He shrugged. “Some. He was working on this independent study project, and he was always asking me for help.”

“What kind of project?” I asked. “Not in English?”

“Nope, in economics. I’d told him my dad was a Wall Street big shot and he thought that made me one, too.”

“What do you mean?”

“He was always asking me stuff. What’s an IRA? How do you cash out a certificate of deposit? Can you set up a Swiss bank account without going to Switzerland? That kind of stuff.”

I looked over at Rick. Probably every time Menno found another of Edith’s assets, he came to Jeremy to ask what it was and what he needed to do about it. “He ever ask for your help with anything?” I asked casually, hoping to hear about how Menno had set up an offshore account somewhere.

“Nah. It was always just asking me what stuff was. Weird stuff, like balloon mortgages. I wouldn’t even know what they were, but my dad insists on talking about work at dinner.”

“A balloon mortgage?”

“Yeah. It’s where you pay off the whole loan at the end of the term, instead of in monthly payments.” I remembered that was exactly the type of loan Edith’s husband Walter had given Jim and Nancy Fancy.

Jeremy looked interested, for the first time. “You think that was why he got killed? Some kind of mortgage scam?”

“We’re looking at lots of different angles,” Rick said.

Suddenly Jeremy was full of information. “I thought it was strange, this goofy Amish kid who suddenly wants to know all about high finance,” he said. “Man, I should have suspected something.” The more he talked, the more he remembered about Menno’s questions. “At one point I asked him why he wasn’t asking his professor all this stuff—or at least asking where to look the stuff up.”

“And what did he say?” I asked.

“That it was more like a research project for the professor,” he said. “You know, come to think of it, that’s weird. If it was an econ professor, wouldn’t the professor have known all that stuff already?”

“You never know what some professors know,” I said.

It seemed like we’d learned all we could from Jeremy, and we were just getting ready to go, when he said, “Hey, I remember something else.”

“What’s that?” Rick asked.

“We were watching this TV program in the lounge at Birthday House one day, like way back in the fall, I think.”

“You and Menno?”

“And Melissa, and a bunch of other kids. You know, it was late and there wasn’t anything else on, and nobody wanted to get up and change the channel anyway.”

“What kind of program?” I asked.

“One of those news programs, you know?
60 Minutes
or some shit. They did this whole investigation into identity theft. I just remember it because Melissa was really into it—to her, it was like putting on a disguise, like the way she wore those dorky clothes over her tattoos, like nobody should know who was underneath.”

“You ever talk about it with her afterward?” Rick asked.

Jeremy shook his head. “I only just remembered it now, because I’ve been, like, racking my brain for anything I ever did or said with her or Menno.”

Rick and I stood up, and Mrs. Eisenberg followed. She glared at Jeremy, and he stood up, too. “Thank you very much for your time,” Rick said, to both Jeremy and his mother. “It’s been very helpful to us to get more of a sense of whose these two students were.”

“You can email me if you have any more questions,” Jeremy said. “[email protected].”

“Great. Thanks,” I said.

“Hey, Professor, what are you teaching in the fall? I totally want to sign up for you again.”

“Not sure,” I said. “Check the registration system toward the end of the summer.”

We were in the elevator going down when Rick said, in a fake Valley Girl accent, “I totally want to sign up for you again, Professor. You’re the bomb.”

“What can I say? I have an impact on impressionable young minds.”

Fortunately the elevator opened and I was spared Rick’s response.

While we waited at Penn Station for our train back to Trenton, Rick called Tony Rinaldi to tell him what we’d learned, and I paced around the waiting room, worrying about all the work I had to do.

It was clear that I’d be pulling another all-nighter, if I had any hope of getting the work finished on time. Forget about early delivery, which I’d been hoping for; I’d thought it would be a good way to impress the new client. Now I just wanted to keep the account.

Pacing wasn’t doing me any good, so I picked up a copy of the
Village Voice
. I was scanning the classifieds when one of the ads jumped out at me:

“You: girl in black raincoat, DVD of
Mr. and Mrs. Smith
at Blockbuster on 47
^th
Street. Me: blue polo shirt and jeans. We both agreed Brad Pitt is hot. You probably thought I’m gay, but I’m not. Call me.”

A woman across from me was on her cell phone. “I want the wedding without the husband,” she said. “I want to wear the dress and have a party all about me.”

If only I’d been able to convince Mary to do the same thing, how my life would have been different.

“Our train is still a half hour away,” Rick said when he’d finished his call. “You want to grab some fast food?” When we’d gotten our trays and picked a table that was almost clean, he said, “I think we’re closing in. But I need to know more about all these players. Do you think you could do some of your online magic?”

I was surprised that Rick would ask me to do something that was so opposed to the conditions of my parole, and the surprise must have been evident on my face.

“Nothing illegal,” he said. “And I’ll square anything you need with Santos. I just don’t have the time, or the computer savvy, to do what you can do.”

I knew that if I told Rick I didn’t have the time, that I had to focus on my new client, he’d back off. But I’d been pushing to be involved in the case for so long I couldn’t back out. I’d just have to fit everything in. “What do you need?”

“Right now we have at least three people who could be pulling the strings here. We know all three have some connection to the kids—Menno’s father, the music professor Melissa’s close to, the professor in your department who knows Menno. It could be someone else we know nothing about—but right now we need to focus on these three. Which one of them has the motive here—which one needs money, or has some criminal background?”

“I can put some research together for you.”

“Only legal,” he repeated. “No hacking. Nothing I can’t tell Santos about.”

“Strictly legal,” I said, though in my mind I was crossing my fingers behind my back. Whoever killed Menno and Melissa hadn’t been confined by legality, and though Rick had to be there was no reason I had to be, too.  I had Caroline’s laptop and the neighbor’s network, and as long as I was careful there was no way I was going to get caught again.

Oops. There was that hubris. I’d thought I wouldn’t get caught when I hacked into the credit bureau databases to adjust Mary’s credit rating. I was a master, of course. There was no way anybody would catch me.

See where that attitude got me? Why didn’t I seem able to learn from my mistakes? I spent the train ride working on my client manual, trying not to think about the hacking I had ahead of me, but my fingers itched every time the bad grammar in the manual stopped me and my brain immediately switched tracks.

It was early afternoon when I got home, and I walked Rochester and petted him and told him what a good boy he was. I was tired, and the bumpy train ride to and from New York had made my ribs ache. I got into bed, propped my head behind a couple of pillows, and put Caroline’s laptop on a cushioned board in front of me.  I turned on my own laptop and left it in sleep mode next to me in case I needed it.

I didn’t think Menno had been doing an independent study project for some economics professor, but I wanted to be sure. I logged onto Eastern’s website and did a quick search. I remembered that there were rules about independent study projects, and buried deep in the bowels of the site I found that you had to be at least a junior before you’d be allowed to undertake such a project. I switched to my own laptop and shot off a quick email to Rick and Tony, copying the relevant portions of the document.