Dog Helps Those (Golden Retriever Mysteries) (8 page)

Rochester was bored by my concentration on the computer, and he got up and nosed against my leg. I had gotten to know his moods, so I knew this was a “play with me” moment, rather than a “take me outside” one. What the hell, I couldn’t do anything on the computer until the sync process was finished.

I grabbed a blue plastic ball from my top drawer and squeezed it. It let out a couple of little shrieks that drove Rochester wild, and I tossed it across the room. He scampered after it, his toenails clicking on the wood floor. He grabbed the ball in his mouth and made it squeak again. “Bring me the ball,” I said.

He ignored me. Every couple of seconds the ball would slip out of his mouth, and he’d grab it again. “Fine, be that way,” I said. “I have work to do.”

I looked at my to-do list. Next up was another graduating student profile, this one of Boris Oxhoff, a business major who had done an independent study project during his junior year on microfinance, the practice of loaning small amounts of money to entrepreneurs in the developing world and other economically deprived locations.

During the summer break between his junior and senior year, Boris had run his own microfinance project in North Philadelphia. He began raising money with a series of yard sales, asking Eastern students for their castoffs. Then he caught the attention of a wealthy alumnus who staked him to ten grand.

Boris loaned $250 to an immigrant from Senegal who wanted to start her own tailoring business. He advanced $500 to a guy who did yard maintenance in the Northeast and who needed a new lawn mower. Boris had his own website, with a whole list of those whom he had helped, accompanied by their testimonials. According to the spreadsheet he posted there, 95% of his loans were being paid off regularly; the remaining five percent had been written off due to serious illness or death of the recipient.

I admired him, as I did all the other graduates I was profiling. When I was an Eastern senior on the verge of leaving Leighville, I was like a blind puppy newly weaned, with no real sense of the world or where I would fit in it. I had contributed nothing to the world and had no idea where my true talents were.

What were they, anyway? Like Rochester, I had a nose for crime—only mine was usually on the wrong side of the law. I could follow the logic of code until I found a place where I could slip past a host computer’s defenses, where I could assume a user’s identity, access passwords or other forbidden information. I had never used that ability for malicious purposes, but I knew that I could.

Fortunately, I hadn’t discovered that ability until I had the maturity to handle the knowledge. Perhaps my ex-wife and my parole officer might dispute that—but if I’d been a teenager in today’s environment, and figured out how to hack, I know I’d have gotten into much more trouble. I seriously doubt I’d have had the maturity or insight to have turned out like Faye Tallity or Boris Oxhoff.

I finished the profile on Boris, then caught up on my email inbox. By then Rochester had given up on the squeaky ball and gone back to sleep. I retrieved the plastic ball, wiped the saliva off it, and put it back in my desk drawer.

Around three o’clock I walked back over to Green Hall to talk to Dr. Jackie Conrad about cobra venom. The last time I took biology was in high school, so I could barely make sense of the posters outside her office.

She was talking to a student about the way the blood pumped through the heart, so I waited out in the hall until she was finished. When the young woman left, I stuck my head in her door. “Dr. Conrad? Dr. Searcy suggested I talk to you. My name is Steve Levitan.”

“Have a seat.” She motioned me to the chair across from her desk. Her office was littered with textbooks, piles of papers, and small furry hand puppets in strange shapes. She was fifty-something, with an open, friendly face, framed with blonde curls, and I hoped she wouldn’t close up when I asked her about a poison.

“You look too old to be a student and too young to be a parent. What can I do for you?”

“I work in the alumni relations office, but my question has nothing to do with the college.” I explained about Rita Gaines’ murder and the use of the cobra venom.

“I met her,” Dr. Conrad said. “About a year ago. The science faculty did a meet and greet with the Board of Trustees. She was a dog breeder, wasn’t she? And if I can say it without speaking too ill of the dead, wasn’t she something of a bitch herself?”

“You’ve got that. Any idea where somebody could get cobra venom? And how common it would be?”

“Cobra venom.” She thought for a minute. “Of course, she was a dog breeder.”

That connection made no sense to me, but it seemed to turn a light bulb on over Dr. Conrad’s head. She turned back to her computer and started typing. “I used to be a vet,” she said. “Long ago, when we were still treating woolly mammoths for broken legs and tooth decay. We used cobra venom for something... I just can’t remember what.”

While she typed, I looked more closely at her furry hand puppets. They weren’t little teddy bears or pigs or even any animal I recognized. The closest to anything I knew was a fuzzy tan oval with brown tentacles—it looked like a mutant jellyfish.

She kept typing, muttering to herself, opening and closing windows. “There it is!” she said in triumph. “Acral lick granuloma.”

Once again I thanked my lucky stars I had never had an interest in science. “Excuse me?”

She turned back toward me, and the breeze created by her chair moving rattled the bones of the plastic skeleton hanging behind her. “Cobra venom is a powerful neurotoxin that acts as a painkiller when administered in small quantities. We used to use it to treat something called an acral lick granuloma. You have a dog, don’t you? Collie or golden retriever?”

“A golden. How did you know?”

“The fine hairs on your slacks. At a glance it looked like one of those two breeds.” She looked up. “Imagine your dog gets a tiny sore, say on his paw, and he licks it. Putting medication doesn’t help, and it starts to spread, and the skin around the area gets thick, scarred and irritated. That’s an acral lick granuloma.”

“Yuck.”

“It’s very tough to handle. You end up with little pockets of bacteria, broken hair follicles, plugged and scarred oil glands and dilated and inflamed capillaries. If you surgically remove them, the dog just licks at the sutures or incision line after the surgery heals and creates a brand new granuloma right where the original one was.”

“Sounds terrible.”

“It is. Some theories say that the dog’s focus on licking it is psychological, and today vets prescribe anti-anxiety drugs to stop the licking, and antibiotics to clear up the sores. But back in the day, we used cobra venom to numb the nerves and shut out the pain.”

I shivered, thinking what would happen if poor Rochester ever had one of those. I was sure it would drive both of us crazy.

I picked up one of the puppets. It looked like a plush gray crab with a starfish attached on a long, nobby cord. I thought Rochester would destroy it in about sixty seconds.

“I keep those around in case I need an extra brain cell,” she said, holding another of them up to her head and wiggling it so the starfish part bobbed up and down. She turned the label toward me. “See? It’s a brain cell.”

“I could use a few of those myself.”

“I use it in class. This is e-coli,” she said, holding up the fuzzy oval with the tentacles. “And these? They’re gonorrhea microbes.” She showed me a handful of little fuzzy blobs with eyes. “You don’t want to have these hanging around your system.”

“Certainly not.”

“Where were we? Oh, cobra venom. Your victim might have used cobra venom in the past for a problem, and still had some around her kennel.”

“Not
my
victim,” I said. “Just a kind of – victim.”

I thanked Dr. Conrad. “I’ll bet if you were teaching here when I was a student I’d have liked science.”

“Back when you were a student the kids came to college better prepared,” she said. “But thank you for the compliment.”

On my way back to my office I called Rick. “Did you find any cobra venom at Rita’s farm?”

“When we did the search we didn’t know the cause of death. I need to get back up to the farm later.”

I told him what I’d learned from Jackie Conrad. “Rita probably had some of the venom in her kennel. Want Rochester and me to meet you there?”

Rick groaned. “Come on, Steve, you’re not a detective.”

“But you know Rochester has a unique talent for this kind of thing. And don’t you want to get this case solved?”

I waited. It was almost like I could hear him thinking through the phone. Finally he said, “Nobody else can know about me taking you out there.”

“Of course not. And it’s not an active crime scene any more, right? You’ve already been through the place.”

“I’ll meet you at five-thirty. We should still have enough light.”

I started to say something else, but he said, “You should hang up before I realize what a dumb idea this is and change my mind.”

I did what he suggested.

Green Hall was at the far side of the campus, near the football stadium, and since it was such a nice afternoon I took a detour in that direction. I felt guilty that I didn’t have Rochester with me; I rarely took a walk without him. But this once I’d let myself get away with it.

One of the guys in my dorm freshman year was a football recruit, and many of from that dorm I maintained a friendship through all four years, which meant I saw a lot of football games as an undergraduate. I remembered those fall Saturdays well—the crisp autumn afternoons, the cheers I knew by heart, the camaraderie of my fellow students.

A soccer field stood next to the stadium, bracketed on two sides by bleachers like the ones at my high school. Beyond it was a big grassy lot where students played pickup games of football, baseball and volleyball, and right next to that was one of the big student parking lots.

I wandered around for a while, then returned to my office, where I sent an email to President Babson updating him on the status of the investigation into Rita Gaines’s death—I didn’t have much to report, but at least the papers hadn’t figured out it was a murder, or that Felae Popescu was a suspect. I was considering what else I had to do that day when Lou Segusi rapped on the door jamb of my office. Rochester woofed once in greeting, but didn’t get up.

“Hey, Prof, got a minute?”

“Sure, Lou, come on in.”

He wore an Eastern hoodie and jeans, and slouched in the spindle-backed chair across from my desk. “What’s the problem you wanted to talk about yesterday?” I asked.

“Well, it’s not my problem, really. It’s this other guy’s.”

“Uh-huh.”

“No, really, it’s his. He works for the help desk.”

“Oh, God. Not with Verri M. Parshall. That must be a nightmare.”

“Yeah, that’s kind of his problem.”

I remembered dealing with Lou earlier in the term, when he was having his own troubles, and how difficult it was to pull information out of him. “And?”

“It’s really stressing him out, and he’s falling behind in his assignments, which is why he came to the Writing Lab,” Lou said. “It’s not that he can’t write, he just can’t focus with all this crap going on.”

“I’m not following you, Lou. And it’s getting late, and I’ve got a meeting tonight.”

“Oh, like AA or something?”

I cocked my head and looked at him. “Are you completely nuts? Whatever meeting I have is none of your business.” I flashed on big-mouthed Lou telling all his friends that his Prof was in Alcoholics Anonymous and hurried to add, “Although to be clear I don’t belong to any twelve-step program.”

“Sorry, my bad. Anyway, this guy Dustin. He doesn’t know what to do. But I told him you were cool and totally tuned in to the administration, and you had helped me.”

“Lou, I still don’t understand what Dustin’s problem is.”

“I’ll let him explain it. Can I have him come by here tomorrow?”

I looked at my watch. It was time for me to leave for Rita’s farm so I had to get Lou out of my office. “Sure. I’ll be here.”

“Very cool. Thanks, Prof!”

He jumped up and hurried out, showing more animation than I’d seen in a while. I shook my head. I had no idea what Dustin’s problem was, but hopefully he’d be easier to talk to than Lou.

I loaded Rochester into my old BMW sedan, but instead of driving down to the Delaware and taking River Road south, I headed out a long, winding road I knew would take us close to Rita’s farm. He leaned out the window, sniffing the fresh air and occasionally woofing at something we passed.

When I was in high school, I was active in a lot of clubs—the newspaper, the literary magazine, and the miniature golf team. At least a couple of days a week I had to take the late bus home.

Our regular school bus made the trip from Stewart’s Crossing to the high school in about twenty minutes. Our driver picked up kids from our neighborhood, The Lakes, then got on the highway that went to Levittown. But the late bus ranged a lot farther, taking curving country lanes lined with farms and fields. By the time I got my driver’s license I knew most of the back roads and where they went.

When I returned to Stewart’s Crossing after nearly twenty years away, I found the landscape had changed a lot. New developments had taken the place of farms, and wooded fields had been replaced by shopping centers. The 18
^th
-century stone farmhouses had been renovated and locked behind high, wrought-iron gates, and many of the stop signs had been replaced by traffic lights.