Dog Helps Those (Golden Retriever Mysteries) (2 page)

I thought about moving; Lili was in Leighville, and our work was, too. But Stewart’s Crossing was the place where I’d felt loved and sheltered by my parents. Where we had my Mexican-themed fifth birthday party, complete with piñata, serapes, and pointy straw hats. Where memories lurked around street corners and behind buildings that were landmarks to no one but me and my friends. It felt like home, and I wasn’t ready to give that up.

“Hey, sweetheart,” I said, when Lili opened the door to me. I leaned forward and kissed her.

She was wearing a calf-length swirly dress in a red and blue pattern, and had a matching scarf knotted around her neck. “Hey, yourself,” she said, when she backed away.

I liked kissing Lili. She always smelled and tasted so good, and I felt my hormones rise just being around her. I nibbled on her ear.

She laughed and backed away from me. “You’re a meshuggeneh,” she said.

Lili’s use of the Yiddish word reminded me that despite her occasional Spanish expletive and her beautiful Hispanic looks, she was as Jewish as I was. Her Weinstock grandparents had left Poland in 1940, but they couldn’t get visas for the US so they had gone to Cuba. Her father had been born in Havana, gone to college there, and married Lili’s mother, a Sephardic woman whose roots were in Spain.

Lili was born in 1965, two years before I was. Her father was an engineer, and in 1970 he was sent to Mexico to learn advanced hydraulics. While he was out from under Fidel’s thumb he realized how repressive the Castro regime was, and he arranged to have his wife, Lili, and her younger brother smuggled out of the country to join him.

After a couple of years in Mexico, the family relocated to Kansas City, joining a small cluster of Cuban immigrants. From then on the Weinstocks moved every few years as her father got jobs. Lili never felt at home anywhere because her background was so odd. Either she was the only Hispanic, or the only Jew. Her parents had funny accents. She started using the camera as a way to frame and understand her existence.

Her language was a funny mix of Yiddish words, Sephardic expressions, and Midwest terms. She said, “Oy vey” and called soda “pop,” and could sing lullabies she had learned from her mother in Ladino, the Spanish-based language of the Sephardim. Yet she was as far from my ex-wife Mary as a nice Jewish girl could be. Mary was a hard-charging executive who liked to be in control of everything. Lili was an artsy free spirit who didn’t like to be tied down.

“Let’s go. We don’t want to be late.” She grabbed her coat and locked the front door. We were going to a reception for an exhibit featuring her students’ work, and then to dinner. I was hoping we could short-cut the exhibit and get to the food—and what was bound to come after.

* * *

e parked in the faculty lot and walked through the gathering dusk to the chapel, at the eastern end of the campus. It was a square stone building in the collegiate Gothic style, with ivy climbing the walls and an ecumenical-looking square spire. Being Jewish, I’d never been in the chapel myself until that evening, though I’d gone to college at Eastern back in the days when dinosaurs roamed the earth.

The main chapel was a large room with a vaulted ceiling and several rows of folding chairs in the middle. As we walked inside, Lili stopped and pointed up. “I love the pattern of that ceiling,” she said. “I’m taking a series of photos of it at different times of day, with different filters. I don’t know what I’ll do with it but I’m interested in the way the light and shadow play against the woodwork.”

I loved the way she looked at the world, always through the camera’s eye. That was represented in the way she’d laid out the student work as well. Around the edges of the room her class had hung their paintings, photographs, drawings and watercolors on fabric-covered dividers. Several low pedestals held small clay sculptures.

“One of my students was having problems getting her work framed in time,” Lili said. “I want to go over and check on her. And I need to make sure that all the students who are exhibiting are here to talk about their work.”

I stopped to survey the first exhibit by the door, a series of photos taken by a senior named Len Scapon. I thought at first that the gorillas, zebras and giraffes in his pictures were from a nature park, but then I took a closer look at the captions. Len had received a grant from a nature foundation the previous summer and spent it hitchhiking through Equatorial Africa, taking pictures of animals out in the wild.

“I have to tell you, Len,” I said to him, “I’m impressed not only by your art but by your chutzpah. If I had told my parents I wanted to do something like this when I was twenty, my mother would have taken my temperature and my father would have taken my passport.”

He laughed. “My folks were real supportive. You need a ton of shots to go to Africa, and my mom’s a nurse. She arranged all the vaccinations for me and even gave them to me herself.”

“Well, it was worth the effort. The photographs are amazing.”

He scuffed his feet. “Thanks.”

Next in line was a skinny, eager kid named Jeremy, whom I knew from a freshman comp class I had taught the year before. He stood nervously by his pictures in a navy blazer that his parents probably hoped he would grow into. He had taken some very atmospheric photos of the campus, focusing on architectural details—a gargoyle, a commemorative stone, a window frame and a huge oak door.

“I really like this one, Jeremy,” I said, pointing at a shot of Fields Hall, the main administration building, shrouded in fog.

We were looking at it together when I heard a woman’s shrill voice rise above the crowd. “They cawl this crap art?” she said, in a heavy accent, half
Jersey Shore
and half
Real Housewives.

Jeremy and I turned in the direction of the voice. A short, slim woman in her mid-sixties, with close-cropped iron gray hair, was pointing at one of the paintings. I recognized the artist, who stood next to it. He was an Eastern European boy named Felae who had been in my mystery fiction class the year before.

The work in question was a gouache of a large, mixed-breed dog with black and brown fur, sprawled on his side on top of a large cross. His front paws were stretched out and bound to the left side of the cross, his back legs bound to the upright. In bright red lettering that reminded me of blood, Felae had scrawled “He died for our sins” at the bottom of the painting.

It was disturbing, to say the least. And the woman, who looked like she spent a whole lot of money on her clothes and purse, didn’t like it one bit. She wore a form-fitting tan cashmere sweater and black pedal-pushers, with pointy-toed black high-heeled shoes that looked like they came from the Wicked Witch collection. “It’s animal cruelty,” she said, her voice carrying.

I saw Lili walk up to her. “It is a creepy painting,” Jeremy said. “But Felae is a creepy guy.”

“You know him?” I asked.

“From class. He’s always mumbling to himself in Romanian or Bulgarian or whatever it is language he speaks.”

I watched as Lili tried to placate the woman, leading her away from the disturbing painting to a series of cheerful watercolors of the Delaware River, painted by a chunky girl named Dezhanne, who I had taught in the same class as Felae. Calling the roll had always made me hungry—my students included Candy, Cinnamon, and Honey, as well as Dezhanne and Felae.

 Dezhanne considered her body a work of art; she was constantly experimenting with piercings, henna tattoos, and strange haircuts. That evening she had huge black disks in her lobes, called ear gauges; matching black lipstick; and kohl ringed around her eyes.

She didn’t look like the kind of girl who would paint light, airy impressionistic landscapes, but then, appearances are deceiving, after all.

I left Jeremy and picked up two glasses of white wine from the makeshift bar in the corner of the room and carried them to where Lili was still speaking with the loud woman. “Wine?” I offered them both.

“I don’t drink alcohol,” the woman said. “Only iced tea, with lots of sugar.”

Lili took one of the glasses from me and said, “Ms. Gaines, this is Steve Levitan. He works in the alumni office here at Eastern.”

“Margarita Stanville Gaines,” the woman said. I thought I recognized the name, and then she said, “I’m on the Board of Trustees. I like to keep an eye on what’s going on around the college.”

That was it. I’d seen her name on fund-raising materials at the office.

“And I have to tell you I don’t like that boy’s work,” she continued. “It’s sacrilegious and distasteful and it needs to come down.”

Her elegant appearance was a real contrast to her uncultured voice. She pulled a cell phone from her pants pocket and flipped it open. “I’m calling President Babson right now.”

“I’m sure you remember your own college days,” I said, trying to stop the situation before it got worse. “It’s a time for experimenting, figuring out who you are and what matters to you. I’m sure that’s what Felae is doing.”

“I knew exactly what I wanted to do when I came to Eastern,” the woman said. “Make money. Lots of it. And I did.” She turned away from us, but I heard her say, “John? Rita Gaines here.”

I mouthed a word to Lili that rhymed with witch, and she smiled. As we stood there, I hoped we could get rid of the woman soon so Lili and I could do on to dinner.

Then Rita turned to Lili. “President Babson has authorized me to have that boy’s painting taken down. Make it happen.”

I was afraid Lili was going to explode, but she smiled tightly, then said, “May I speak to President Babson, please?”

Rita thrust the phone at her, and Lili introduced herself. “I’m concerned that the student could accuse the college of censorship,” she said. “I’m Felae’s professor and while I agree the painting is controversial, it’s not gratuitously violent. It raises important questions about animal cruelty that I believe deserve to be discussed in an academic environment.”

I watched as Rita’s eyes widened. She was clearly a woman who expected to be obeyed without question.

Lili listened for a moment. “I understand,” she said finally. “Yes, sir, I will.”

She handed the phone back to Rita. “President Babson suggested that we isolate Felae’s painting from the rest of the exhibit and post a content warning. I hope that satisfies your concerns.”

I had seen Lili face down a lunatic with a gun, so I was already impressed with her—but my pride in her swelled as she smiled at Rita Gaines and without waiting for a response, said, “I’ll talk to Felae and see that it happens.”

Rita was fuming, so I tried to shift her attention. “What was Eastern like when you were here? Did we have a good business program?”

“It was terrible. I had to major in economics and half my teachers had no business experience at all. I couldn’t wait to get out of here and get my MBA.”

I smiled. Since I had started working at the college I’d come in contact with a lot of alums. Many of them had almost nothing positive to say about the current crop of students or the state of the college, and yet they were consistent donors and loved to talk about how great Eastern had been when they were younger. Rita was certainly different.

“Serving on the Board of Trustees is a big responsibility,” I said. “I admire you for your commitment to the college.”

“My accountants tell me I can either give money away or pay it to Uncle Sam.” Her accent grated on me, reminding me of a couple of cousins on my father’s side who grew up in the suburbs of Newark. My dad, who was from the same area but spoke without a hint of an accent, had always looked down on those cousins and I’d inherited his prejudice.

 “With the state of the country today I’ll be damned if I pay a penny in taxes,” she continued. “And I don’t have time to waste vetting a lot of different charities. I have a farm just down the river, so Eastern is convenient to me. Most of my donations come here, and I stay on the board so I can make sure the money doesn’t get wasted.”

Across the room from us we could see Lili talking to Felae. From his defiant body language, the boy seemed to be arguing, but she stepped over to the wall and removed the painting. She carried it into an anteroom of the chapel, with Felae following.

The lights in the chapel dimmed a bit. “I understand that the Fine Arts department only has the room reserved until eight,” I said.

“I’ve seen all I need to.” Rita turned and strode toward the door.

“Pleasure meeting you,” I said under my breath. I remembered what Rick had said to me earlier—see you, wouldn’t want to be you.

Lili returned to me after Rita had left. “I had to make nice with Felae, and it wasn’t easy,” she said.

“You handled things well with Rita,” I said. “Impressive. Was that Babson’s idea, or was it yours?”

“Mine. He asked me to remove the picture as a personal favor. But I wasn’t going to back down from that hyena in high heels.”

She drained her white wine. “Now let’s get some dinner. Something sweet to wash away the sour taste in my mouth.”

I didn’t stay over at Lili’s that night, but I didn’t get home early, either. I took Rochester out for a quick pee, and then went to bed, planning to sleep in. Sadly, at seven o’clock the big bossy dog was nosing me and licking my face. “Come on, Rochester,” I said. “Let me sleep.”