Dog Helps Those (Golden Retriever Mysteries) (14 page)

The next morning I dropped Rochester off at my office with a fresh rawhide bone, and hung around the cubicles and round tables of the adjunct area for a half hour, waiting for Naomi Schecter to come in, but with no luck. I ended up leaving a note in her mailbox asking her to call or come by my office.

On my way back to Fields Hall, I detoured past Harrison Hall, the dimly lit stone building where the history department was located. Jim Shelton, who was on the graduation committee with me, was the chair of the department. His office was on the ground floor, across from the secretarial area where students got their closed class cards and asked random questions they could have answered by checking the college website.

Jim’s office was lined with bookshelves, and a miscellaneous collection of texts and reference books crowded together with piles of handouts and student papers. His large desk was so covered with file folders and post-it notes there was little room for his keyboard and mouse.

I rapped on the doorframe, and he looked up from his paperwork. “Hey, Steve. Come on in. I was looking over this graduation fiasco.”

“What’s wrong now?”

“The same stuff we were talking about in the meeting. The program that vets student transcripts for graduation keeps breaking down. I’m worried we’ll have to let anyone who applies march in the procession and then clean up the mess afterward.”

“That’s why I stopped by.” I told him what Dustin De Bree had told me, about seeing the check from Freezer Burn to Verri M. Parshall.

He sat back in his big wooden chair. “That’s a serious accusation. But I can’t say it sounds unfounded. I’ve fielded more complaints about computers in offices and classrooms this semester than ever before, and Verri doesn’t seem to care.”

“What do you think we should do?” I asked. “Tell Babson?”

“Not without some proof,” he said. “Verri’s been around forever and she has a lot of support around the campus. Plus she’s a special pet of John Babson’s. Not to mention the fact that she’s got a stranglehold on IT around here.”

“We should talk to Dot Sneiss,” I said. “Maybe we can go at this from a different direction. If this Freezer Burn program is screwing up registration as well as classrooms and offices, then Babson will have to get involved.”

Jim picked up his phone. “Dot? Jim Shelton here. You have a few minutes this afternoon to talk? Four o’clock?” He looked at me and I nodded. “Steve Levitan and I will come over to your office then.”

I stood up. “Thanks, Jim. I didn’t know what do when this kid came in to me. At least now we have a plan.”

I was curious to know more about Freezer Burn. But I didn’t want to go right back to my office and start searching in a way that might be tied back to me. So I walked to the library instead.

When I was an Eastern student, the library was a run-down repository of books older than the statue of old man Fields that stood in front of it. I had once asked one of the librarians where the contemporary novels were and she told me, in very frosty tones, that the library was intended for serious research, not pleasure reading.

As an English major, I had spent many hours in the dusty stacks, searching for research material. Once I returned to Eastern, though, I discovered that the electronic revolution had finally reached Leighville, and the bulk of the collection had been digitized. The old wooden card catalogs had been replaced by sleek metal tables lined with desktop computers, and most of the rows of study carrels now had computers as well. I found one in a back corner and slid into the chair.

All the public computers are automatically logged into the Eastern network under a Guest ID. So short of dusting the keyboard for my fingerprints, there was no way Verri could tie what I was doing in to me personally.

I did a quick Internet search for Freezer Burn, and came up with thousands of hits. The most interesting was a blog called “ihatefreezerburn” which had attracted a lot of comments, mostly from students at colleges that had instituted the software. As an English teacher, it was almost painful for me to read through their ungrammatical, misspelled rants, but one thing was clear: students detested the software.

Not for the obvious reasons—that it might block their access to social networks or personal email. No, they hated it because it caused campus computers to freeze on a regular basis, often in the middle of exams or while a student was trying to research and write a paper. It seemed that no matter how powerful the computer or stable the network, Freezer Burn managed to do something to screw things up.

Why use it, then? I navigated my way to the corporate website. Freezer Burn was an independent start-up company, run by a couple of IT wizards who had cut their teeth at Microsoft and Apple. The video explaining the software had high production values, and I could see how someone might be seduced. It looked like they were preying on fear, promising system administrators that Freezer Burn would reduce vulnerability to hackers and viruses, protecting student data and network integrity.

One warning flag to me was that they were only on release 2.02. I knew that meant it was only the second patch, or revision, to the second version of the software. I couldn’t imagine how anything so new could manage to negotiate with the wide variety of hardware and software you’d find on a college campus—everything from the homemade programs the math department used to format equations to the sophisticated databases that managed registration and grade processing. I knew from experience that the computers on the Eastern campus were a patchwork of older and newer models, both PC and Mac, with a range of operating software and peripheral equipment. Every time Microsoft comes out with a new edition of Windows, people complain that their older printers and other equipment are left behind because the developers didn’t bother to build in the capability to work with those older, nearly obsolete pieces of equipment. I had the feeling that problem would be even worse with a new company like Freezer Burn, which wouldn’t have the resources to devote to tracking down every old piece of software and hardware and creating drivers to accommodate them.

I rebooted before I left the library. One good thing about Freezer Burn was that it would erase my browsing history on that computer. It was almost lunchtime, so on my way back to Fields Hall I picked up a roast beef hoagie. I had missed those big, beefy sandwiches when I lived in New York and California; nobody makes them the way they do in Philly and its suburbs. I liked my hoagies on a fresh-baked crusty Italian-style roll, layered with Russian dressing, shredded lettuce, sliced tomatoes, and thin sheets of rare roast beef. Heaven on a bun.

I took it back to my office to eat, where Rochester was delighted to see me. Or maybe it was the hoagie. He sat up right next to my desk, and I fed the fatty bits of beef to him. I had just crumpled the wrapper and tossed it in the trash when he woofed once and I looked up to see Naomi. She was a short, compact woman wearing a man’s blue and white striped shirt over black pedal-pushers, with a ruby starburst pin over her right breast.

“Oh, Steve, it’s you,” she said. “I wasn’t sure when I saw your note. You’re an administrator now?”

I stood up. “Yeah. You know what a sucker’s game adjuncting is. Had to find a better way to pay the bills.”

“Tell me about it. Freelancing is only marginally better.”

We both sat. “Thanks for coming by. I know this must be a busy time for you.”

“I’m only teaching two courses this term, so I’m almost finished grading.” Rochester shuffled over to Naomi and sniffed her outstretched hand.

“Do you remember interviewing Mark and Selena Hubbard about their house?”

“Oh, God, them,” she said. “Don’t tell me he graduated from Eastern?”

I was puzzled for a moment, then realized she’d made a connection to my job. “No, but he and his wife live next door to Rita Gaines, who was on the Board of Trustees. She was murdered this past Sunday, and President Babson asked me to keep tabs on the police investigation to manage any PR fallout.”

I sat back in my chair. “The police detective investigating the crime is a friend of mine, and I was out at Rita’s house with him the other day. One of her other neighbors said the Hubbards and Rita had squabbled, and when I saw you’d interviewed them I thought I’d ask you about it.”

“If you’ve been out there, you know how the place smelled.” She looked down at Rochester. “No offense to you, doggie, but when a bunch of you get together you can make a real stink. Not to mention all that yapping.”

“Yeah, I know. That bothered the Hubbards?”

“You bet. Apparently Rita only had a few dogs when they moved in, but over the years she developed a real breeding operation and things got worse and worse.”

She fished in her bag for a tissue and blew her nose. “It’s a beautiful home, but they can’t keep the windows open in the spring or the fall. They can’t go outside in the summer and swim in the pool or have a barbecue. The noise and smell of Rita’s dogs was a real sore point for them.”

“They complained?”

“Especially Selena. She’s a former beauty queen from Venezuela and Mark spoils her rotten. Second marriage, you know.”

“I guessed.”

“He does everything he can to please her. Fortunately he’s got the money to do it.”

“You think he’d go so far as to kill Rita?”

She shuddered. “I wouldn’t put it past either of them. One day when I was at their house a couple of petals had fallen off the roses in the living room and the maid didn’t clean them up fast enough. Selena let loose on her in Spanish. And you know how Mark made his money, right?”

I shook my head. “I thought he owned a company.”

“Yeah. He started out in business with a partner who was some kind of genius programmer. Within a year he had screwed the partner out of his ownership. He leveraged the business to buy a competitor, and then he took off. Buying companies, gutting them and then dumping them. He’s not a nice man.”

She looked at her watch, a Swatch with gaudy designs along the plastic band. “Gotta run. I’m actually on my way out to the Hubbards’ now. I’m ghost-writing a business book with Mark.”

“After all you know about him?”

“That’s how I know it all. And he’s paying through the nose because this is a big vanity project for him. When you’re a freelancer, you’ve got to go where the money is.”

“I know that. I worked my butt off trying to start a tech writing business when I first moved back here.” I stood up and shook her hand. “Thanks for coming by. And good luck with the book.”

“It doesn’t have to sell,” she said. “I just have to finish it. Right now I’m half writer, half therapist. Fortunately I have a high tolerance for nuts with money.”

After she left I sat back at my computer. So Mark Hubbard was a corporate raider with a spoiled wife and no conscience. Would he have gone so far as to kill Rita Gaines to please his wife and protect his country idyll?

I spent the next couple of hours researching details of our honorary degree recipients and then knitting them into a press release that didn’t bore the pants off the reader.

Just before four o’clock, I took Rochester out for a quick pee. Students stood, sat and lounged in an endless line that snaked out of the front door of Fields Hall and along a flagstone path that led to the Cafette. I overheard a girl say, “I am so glad to be getting out of this place. I have this friend who’s a junior, who says her father has gotten three tuition bills for the fall, all with different amounts. He’s going crazy.”

I saw Yudame from my tech writing class halfway along the line. He was wearing a T-shirt with the psychedelic logo for the movie
Taking Woodstock
, along with artfully torn jeans, which had either come from the Goodwill store in Leighville or a fancy Manhattan boutique. I couldn’t tell the difference. “Looks like you’re camped out for tickets for a rock concert or something,” I said.

He shook his head. “Yo, my Prof,” he said. “I wish. Just these skeezy graduation audits.”

Like many other students, in class Yudame spoke well – excellent grammar, enunciating the last letters of words, never using slang. But outside? It was another language. Level of discourse was one of the things we talked about in tech writing—targeting your speech and writing to your audience.

“Audits?” I asked. “Like to make sure your bills are all paid up?”

“Nah. There’s some kind of epic fail with the big brother computer system. So you got to make sure you ain’t got probs with your classes – you gots all the ones you need, or the haters be making sure you ain’t getting no diploma. So we all gots to wait in this line and talk to a dude in meat space.”

He looked like that prospect didn’t thrill him. But that was the net generation; most of my students would rather interact with computers than people, and they’d rather text a friend than meet up in person.

He leaned down to pet Rochester, who reared up and put his paws on Yudame’s jeans. The kid just laughed and scratched behind his ears. Maybe they were from the thrift store. Or Yudame’s parents were so rich it didn’t matter. At Eastern you never know.

I returned Rochester to my office, then walked back around the corner to the registrar’s to meet with Jim Shelton and Dot Sneiss. Fields Hall was an old fieldstone house that had been retrofitted a hundred years ago as an office building, and many of the spaces inside were unusual in shape. The registrar’s lobby was an odd half-hexagon, with three teller-like windows and a rope to organize those waiting in line. But so many students had crammed into every corner of the room that I had to excuse myself and squeeze past to get to the door that led to Dot’s office.