Whom Dog Hath Joined (7 page)

“Come on, dogs, get moving,” I said. “We’ve got work to do.”

7 – All Stars

Once we got back to the townhouse, the dogs collapsed in a
pile on the living room floor, and I went up to the office. Lili’s email had
arrived, and I opened the photos and found a close-up of the back label, with
its blue heel patch. Prior to the 1960s, those patches had all been black. So
that was one step – the shoe had been made after 1960.

From the 1960s through the 1980s, Chucks were made with an
extra piece of outer canvas to give extra strength to the inner lining and help
secure the tongue. The shoe I was looking at had that extra piece of canvas,
cut in the curved shape of a line of extra stitching.

I was making progress. That extra piece meant that the
sneaker Rochester had found was at least thirty years old. But from the thick
layer of dust on it, I could probably have guessed that.

Rick called to check on his dog. “He hasn’t destroyed your
house yet, has he?”

“Not a chance,” I said. “I took them both up to town and
tired them out. How are things going?”

“Not making much progress. There wasn’t much in the crime
scene photos to help me narrow in on when the body was left there. Besides the
shoes, I’ve got a belt buckle and some other fiber fragments. Nothing specific
to a particular time.”

“I may be able to help you narrow to within a couple of
decades.” I told him about my sneaker research.

“All this is legit though, right?”

“No, I’m hacking into the Converse corporate database,” I
said. “Of course it’s legit.”

“Just checking. No need to get your panties in a twist.”

I suggested a couple of things Rick could do with his own
panties, and he laughed, and we both hung up.

I went back to my laptop and searched further for something
that would narrow the date when the sneaker was manufactured. Shoes from the
1950s to the early 1970s had toe caps that didn’t touch the edge of the canvas
upper. The ends of the toe caps were not neatly cut in a perfect straight line
but had minor variations from shoe to shoe, as if they were cut freehand. That
matched the shoe in the picture. By adding that characteristic, I could narrow
the manufacture of the shoe to the 1960s and 70s.

Then I hit pay dirt. The Chucks manufactured in the 1970s
used wider piping where the canvas joined the rubber tread-like band and the
smaller size of the toe caps. By taking one of Lili’s close-ups into a photo
manipulation program and comparing it to the Converse website image, I was able
to establish that the narrow piping identified the shoe as manufactured during
the 1960s.

I couldn’t get any narrower than that, and it was always
possible that the shoes had been vintage ones, worn by someone in a later
decade. But when I get caught up in logic problems like that, I always go back to
Occam’s Razor – the idea that the simplest answer is usually the right one. A
young man, late teens or early twenties, had worn those Chucks sometime during
the 1960s, and died while wearing them. What was less clear was how he had
ended up in that hidey-hole at the Meeting House.

The dogs were awake by then, chasing each other around my
downstairs, so I took them out for another long walk. The late afternoon was
still showing the best of Indian summer, and I delighted in watching the dogs
romp together under trees full of yellow, gold and red leaves.

Rick’s truck was in my driveway as we approached the house,
and I let go of Rascal’s leash so he could rush ahead of us to play with his
daddy.

Rick got down to one knee and buried his face in the dog’s
black and white fur. “How’s my boy?” he asked. “How’s my wild and crazy
Rascal?”

He stood up, taking firm hold of Rascal’s leash. “Thanks for
taking care of him. You have dinner plans? I could order us a pizza.”

“Sounds great. I’ve got a six-pack of pumpkin ale I’ve been
wanting to crack open.”

“Pumpkin? That’s gross.”

“Wait til you try it.”

I led him and the dogs inside, and while we waited for the
pizza to be delivered we sampled the ale. Hints of pumpkin pie and nutmeg
blended with the hops for an autumnal mouth feel, saying goodbye to summer in
every sip. Rick admitted that he liked it.

As we drank, I showed him what I’d found about the sneaker. “Good
work,” he said, when we were finished. “That will help me with a missing
persons search, at least until the evaluation of the remains comes up with
something better.”

The pizza arrived, a large with mushrooms and spicy Italian
sausage, to the accompaniment of a canine crescendo of barking that made it
seem like we were in an echoing kennel, barks and yips and the scrabble of
toenails on the tile floor. I body blocked the dogs, took the pizza from the
delivery guy and handed it off to Rick, then paid and tipped as the dogs
trampled over themselves to follow Rick to the kitchen.

We dug in. There was no matching real, Jersey-style pizza
from your neighborhood joint, where the mushrooms came from the farmer’s market
and the sausage and cheese from local farms. “I need to ask your advice about
something,” I said, feeding a piece of crust to each dog, both of whom were sitting
attentively beside our chairs.

He drained the last of his beer and held out the empty
bottle for another. “What’s on your mind?”

I got up and retrieved two more beers from the fridge. “Lili
asked if she could move in with me and Rochester,” I said, as I sat back down.

“I didn’t realize you’d been dating her that long.”

“It’s been six months. But her lease in Leighville is
running out, and she figured she’d ask me before she renewed.”

“What did you say?”

“I told her I needed to think about it.”

Rick looked up at me. “And?”

“I’m thinking. When I got out of prison all I wanted was to
be left alone. The first couple of weeks I was back here I hardly left the
house—just for food and supplies. It wasn’t until after I got my first adjunct
teaching gig at Eastern that I started to feel like a human being again, that I
could be among other people.”

I took a sip of my beer. “Rochester helped a lot,” I said.
“Dealing with him, having to talk to neighbors when I was walking him – all
that stuff got me back in the rhythm of life again. And Lili’s different from
Mary. I can talk to her and not feel completely at a loss. She’s enough like me
that we have a lot in common—including the need for time on our own. But
different enough to always be interesting.”

“And you love her?”

I nodded. “I’ve been thinking about that a lot. I do.”

“So what’s the problem? Living together doesn’t mean you
have to be in each other’s pocket twenty-four seven. She teaches, and she spends
a lot of time taking pictures, doesn’t she?”

I nodded. “And developing them, and then manipulating them
on the computer.”

“So you can be on your own then. And when you want to be
together, you can be.”

“When did you get so smart?” I asked, taking the last slice
of pizza.

“Years of experience.” We finished eating, talking idly
about people we had gone to high school with, and then he and Rascal left, and
I cleaned up the pizza debris.

The last person I had moved in with was Mary. When I met
her, she was sharing a one-bedroom in a brownstone on the Upper East Side with
a college friend, and my grad school roommate Tor and I were sharing a crappy
studio apartment on the Lower East Side.

When Tor got a big raise, he was ready to move up to better
digs with his girlfriend. Mary’s roommate was getting married, and Mary
couldn’t afford the rent on her own. It seemed like time for all of us to get
started on our real lives, so when Mary asked me to move in with her I said yes
without a second thought.

A year later, her company offered her a promotion, which
entailed a move to Silicon Valley. By then, we were both tired of city life, of
graffiti on the streets, bums on every corner, the smell of urine in the
subway. Moving to California would mean we could afford to buy a house,
especially if we married and I got a decent job out there. We’d been together
for two years by then and it seemed like the next step.

Lili and I were too old to let real estate decisions run our
lives. If we were going to move in together, it needed to be because it was the
right thing for both of us. But was it?

When Rochester and I got back inside from our walk, I called
Lili. “I got the sneaker pictures – thanks.” I told her what I’d found out.

“That’s good,” she said. “I spent most of the day working on
some of the photos I took yesterday at the Harvest Festival. Hardly looked at
the clock.”

“I know how that gets.” I paused, thinking about how to
bring up what we’d talked about that morning. Then I heard a beeping sound
coming from somewhere in her apartment.

“Crap, that’s my timer,” she said. “I took some film
yesterday, too, and I’m developing it in the bathroom. I’ve got to go before it
gets ruined. Talk to you tomorrow.”

“Sure,” I fumbled, and then the line was dead.

Since I was moving closer to making a decision about Lili
moving in, it was time to broach the question to Rochester. I hooked his leash
and he dragged me out the front door. “You like Lili, don’t you, boy?” I asked,
as we stopped by the base of an oak tree.

He was too busy sniffing the ground to answer. But I already
knew what he’d say, if he could talk. Lili smelled good, she slipped him
treats, and she gave nice scratchy belly rubs. I doubted he’d mind if she was
around more often.

But with no input from him, I was on my own once again, and
if I made the wrong decision, I might be alone for a long time.

8 – Always Someone Smarter

Monday morning I took Rochester for a long walk, and we
heard the yard workers before we saw them. River Bend employs a staff of
immigrant men to trim our hedges, weed our flower beds and mow our lawns. The
community is large enough that they begin at one end and work from street to
street, and by the time they have finished they start over again.

My dog did not like the men who carried leaf blowers over
their shoulders; he shied away from them, planting his paws on the pavement
until I dragged him forward. I figured it was the noise. He didn’t like
thunder, either, and fireworks drove him nuts.

“Come on, dog, I’ve got stuff to do.” I had a long day ahead
– the exit interview with Santiago Santos, and then a meeting to go over paint
and carpet samples for Friar Lake.

After returning to Bucks County I became an adjunct
instructor and then an administrator at Eastern College, my alma mater, a “very
good small college,” as the publicity had it. One day about four months before,
the college president, John William Babson, had called me into his office. I’d
thought at the time that I was being fired – but instead, he had a new job for
me.

Eastern had recently completed the purchase of a
nineteenth-century monastery a few miles from the campus. Officially called Our
Lady of the Waters, it included a hilltop chapel and dormitory, several
outbuildings and about fifty acres of woodland. At the base of the hill was a small
body of water known as Friar Lake. Mendicant friars, those religious men who
spent their lives among the poor, retired to a house at the water’s edge to
lives of country peace and quiet, the soothing sound of lake water lapping, the
rhythms of nature around them.

The church had decided to consolidate facilities, so the
monks and the friars moved to western Pennsylvania and Eastern bought the
property. Babson had given me the opportunity to create a conference center for
the college on the grounds. Though I had little background in the skills
required, he had faith in me, and I had been scrambling to learn as much as I
could since I got the assignment.

Part of my responsibility was overseeing the choice of
materials for the interiors, and since my idea of decorating is a comfortable
sofa and a big-screen TV, I recruited my friend Mark Figueroa to help me. He had
a degree in interior design and ran an antique store in downtown Stewart’s
Crossing jammed with an eclectic mix of antique furniture, fifties dinnerware, and
the kind of kitschy crap I’d seen at the Harvest Festival.

He’d been reluctant to help me out at first, because he had
his own business to manage, but he had warmed up to the work, and I was eager
to see the paint and carpet samples he’d put together.

While Rochester and I walked, I tried to focus on getting
through the meeting with Santiago Santos. Until I had that certificate of final
release, I was still a parolee, and the state of California, through Santos,
had control over me.

I had done some foolish things since leaving prison—almost
all of them involving the very crime I had done the time for. I had continued
to think I was the smartest guy in the room, that I could break into websites
and find the information I wanted without worrying about the consequences.
Suppose Santos discovered the way I had hacked into the Quaker State Bank
system while investigating Caroline’s murder? Or the many other small hacks I
had committed in search of the truth about other crimes?

He never knew that I’d kept my hacking software on Caroline’s
laptop, hidden in my attic. In addition to it, I had used computers at Eastern
College to do research I didn’t want Santos to know about. Hell, I’d even had a
handgun in my possession, an inheritance from my dad, and hadn’t reported it
until one of my students was shot with a similar weapon and I had to surrender
it for forensics evaluation. Since it was against the terms of my parole, Rick
had held it for me after the ballistics didn’t match the weapon used.

If Santiago Santos wanted to turn me in for parole violations,
there were plenty of ways he could do it.

I wished I could take Rochester with me, for the comfort of
his company, but I was sure dogs wouldn’t be allowed in the Bucks County
Courthouse in Doylestown, where the regional office of the Parole Board was located.
I left him on the first floor of the townhouse, with the gate up blocking the
stairway to the second floor. The tile was strewn with his toys—his squeaky
blue plastic ball, the frayed rope we played tug-of-war with, a miniature piano
keyboard that played different squeaks depending on where the dog bit down.