Whom Dog Hath Joined (28 page)

“Was there someplace he could have hit his head?” Lili
asked.

“I couldn’t see anything, but there was some blood congealed
around his head, like he’d hit it or been hit there. I got scared. What if the
police found him? I could be arrested for draft dodging, or worse, for killing
him. I gathered up my stuff and climbed back out.”

“You left him there?” I asked.

“He was already dead. There was nothing I could do for him.”

Except report his death and give his family some closure
after his disappearance, I thought. Then I remembered that Don Lamprey’s family
had hardly missed him.

“When John came back for me that morning, I told him that
Don had decided to go home. I hoped he wouldn’t look in the crawl space, at
least not until I was gone. And I guess that’s what happened.”

He sat back down in the chair. “John took me to the train
station in Trenton and bought me a ticket to Montreal, and I never looked
back.”

“How did you change your name?” Lili asked.

“That was an accident. When I got to the border I scrawled
my name and the agent misread it. I knew I was on the run so I didn’t challenge
him. And I’ve been Peter Bobeaux ever since. I found a sympathetic admissions
officer who helped me take the Canadian GED and get admitted to college. I did
all the work for my degrees.”

“You couldn’t have been so successful if you hadn’t,” Lili
said. I could tell that she’d already decided in his favor, even though at
present we only had his word for what had happened that night. “You have an
admirable teaching and administration record.”

“Thank you.” He smiled at her, and then he was silent for a
moment.

“You have to understand, I was so scared back then. I was
only a kid, and I had no idea what to do. I thought I’d put that poor boy out
of my mind, but then my wife wanted to go to that Harvest Festival last month,
and I recognized the Meeting House. When I heard someone say there was a body
in the wall I hurried over there. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it
since then.”

Rochester got up and padded over to Bobeaux, then sat beside
him, and Bobeaux reached down to pet his head. That decided me. Rochester was a
good judge of character, so if he liked Bobeaux the man couldn’t be all bad.

“The detective investigating the case is a friend of mine,”
I said. “I’ll give him a call and tell him you want to come in and talk to
him.”

Bobeaux nodded, and I called Rick. I handed my phone to
Bobeaux, who explained who he was, and made arrangements to drive down to the
police station in Stewart’s Crossing.

After Bobeaux left Lili’s office, I looked at her. “Do you
believe him?”

“I do. I might have to start to like him, now that I know
what he’s been through.”

“You don’t have to go that far,” I said. “He’s still a
blowhard.” I reached for Rochester and scratched behind his head. “So then who
or what killed Don Lamprey? He didn’t curl up and die on his own.”

“I can’t help you with that,” she said. “I teach art, not
science.”

I stood up. “Ah, but I know someone who does.”

34 – Concussion

Before I left Lili’s office, I checked the
faculty schedules online. “Good deal,” I said. “Jackie Conrad has office hours
now.” I leaned down to Rochester. “You stay here with Mama Lili.”

She groaned at the nickname, and I laughed. If
she was going to become Rochester’s new mom, she’d have to get accustomed to
being called silly names. I zipped up the gun pouch, put my messenger bag over
my shoulder and walked out.

Everywhere I looked, students in T-shirts,
shorts and flip-flops were taking advantage of what was probably the last warm
day of the season. The guy walking in front of me had
If you can read this,
thank a teacher
, on his back. Right below it, though, was
And if you can
read this in English, thank a Marine
. Certainly not a shirt Don Lamprey or
Peter Breaux would have worn.

As I walked to Green Hall, where the science
faculty had their offices, I thought about what I needed to ask Jackie.

She had a student with her when I arrived,
going over the function of the adrenal gland in preparation for an exam. When
she was finished I asked, “Do you have a minute for a non-student-related
question?”

“Absolutely. Come on in.” As I sat, she asked,
“How’s that handsome dog of yours?”

I remembered that the first time I met her,
she’d immediately figured out, from the hair on my slacks, that I had a Golden.

“He’s shaken up at the moment,” I said. “We
had an incident last night.” I told her about the shooting, trying to minimize
its importance, but Jackie wasn’t buying it.

“You think the person who killed that boy at
the Meeting House is after you now?”

I shook my head. “He died over forty years
ago, and we’re not even sure that someone killed him. His death might have been
an accident.” I leaned forward. “C
an you get a concussion somehow,
recover, and then die from it later?”

“That’s certainly not the kind of question I get from
students. You think that might have happened to this boy?”

I nodded, and explained, without using his name, what Peter
Bobeaux had told me. “I’m wondering if the guy could have gotten hit on the
head somewhere, but then recovered enough to go back to the Meeting House and
fall asleep.”

“And never wake up,” she said.

“And never wake up.”

She turned to her computer and did some typing. “First of
all, a concussion is basically a disturbance of brain function that follows a
blow to the head. You said this other boy saw blood around the dead boy’s
head?”

“Yes.”

“Was there an autopsy?”

“There wasn’t a lot of body left after forty years,” I said.
“But there was some damage to the skull that was consistent with a head
injury.”

“You sound like you’ve watched a lot of cop programs on TV,”
she said drily. “Okay. So let’s assume he hit his head somehow. Now, loss of
consciousness is relatively rare in concussions – only about ten percent of the
time. So it’s likely he was still awake and functional after he got hit.”

“Wasn’t there an incident a while ago?” I asked. “An actress
who hit her head while skiing?”

“I remember that. She went back home, didn’t she? And didn’t
get treatment, and then died soon after.” She did a quick search. “It says here
that she suffered blunt trauma to the head, which is consistent with your
victim. In a case like hers, ‘blood from a damaged but still-pumping artery can
quickly pool in the brain, creating pressure that must be relieved before
irreparable damage is caused'.”

She sat back. “They call this syndrome ‘Talk and Die’,” she
said. “Patients can walk and talk, without realizing how serious their injury
is.”

“So that could have happened to this boy,” I said. “He could
have hit his head when he was out somewhere, and then gone back to the Meeting
House. He told the boy he was with that he had a headache.”

“That’s consistent,” she said.

“The boy with him said that he might have been smoking dope,
too.”

“That could have contributed to his unawareness of how
serious his condition was,” she said. “And as you and I have both seen,
teenagers think they’re bullet-proof. He probably just shrugged the headache
off.”

“So the question now is how he hit his head in the first
place,” I said. “He could have been out walking in the woods around the Meeting
House in the dark. Or somebody could have hit him. Either on purpose or
accidentally.”

“There’s your difference,” she said, sitting back. “Between
an accident and a murder.”

The word “murder” reminded me that someone had shot at me,
and that I had my dad’s handgun in my messenger bag. I thanked Jackie and left
Green Hall. Everywhere I looked I saw college students fooling around – pushing
each other playfully, tackling in a pick-up football game, riding a skateboard.
Had what happened to Don Lamprey been an accident?

It seemed like a good possibility. He could have gone out
for a walk in the woods, knocked up against a branch and, despite the blood,
thought nothing of it. He was nineteen, after all, and on the run from a
different life-threatening situation.

But suppose he’d gone out to the woods for more than just a
walk – to connect with a dealer who might buy the dope he’d stolen from his
brothers. When I was a teenager, we had to sit through endless anti-drug movies
and lectures. People who used drugs were bad, and those who sold them were even
worse. Suppose one of them had knocked Don out, taken his dope and his cash?

The cash. According to his brother, Don Lamprey had stolen almost
a thousand dollars he and his brothers had earned from their dope sales back in
Zelienople. Where had it gone? Had it disintegrated? Or had whoever killed Don
stolen it?

I stopped outside Harrow Hall and dialed Rick. “Follow the
money,” I said.

“I’m right in the middle of my conversation with Breaux or
Bobeaux or whatever his name is. What are you babbling about?”

“Arnold Lamprey said that his brother stole nearly a grand
from him,” I said. “But there wasn’t any money with the body, was there?”

“No.”

“Ask Breaux about it. Did Don flash the cash around? Did
Breaux pick his pocket after he was dead?”

“You have a ghoulish imagination,” Rick said. “But I’ll ask
him.”

When I got back to Lili’s office, she was deep in
conversation with a student, analyzing a black and white photo, so I grabbed my
dog and waved goodbye. My car had been baking in the sun, so I had to turn the
air conditioning on full blast and open the windows until it cooled down.
Rochester stuck his head out his window, and I was tempted to do the same
thing. Not only to cool down – but to blow away all the dark thoughts that kept
popping into my head.

When I got back to Friar Lake I found an email from Mark
Figueroa. He wanted to resign from doing any design work. No excuse given.

Crap. That might have pleased Joey Capodilupo but not me.
Without Mark’s help I’d be lost. I called his store. “Can we talk about this,
please?” I asked.

“There isn’t anything to talk about.”

“Sure there is. How about we meet for a coffee at The
Chocolate Ear. Say 5:30? I’ll buy. Please?”

He sighed. “All right.”

I hung up and took Rochester for a walk around Friar Lake,
checking on progress. Plumbers had begun work in the gutted dormitories,
electricians were in the kitchen, and the pews had been stacked to one side of
the chapel.

It was interesting to see the way the basic structure of the
old buildings had been preserved: slate roof, stone buttresses, stained glass
windows in the chapel. Eastern’s campus was the same way – old buildings repurposed
for new uses, new ones constructed to fit into the overall look of the campus.  Even
the Meeting House in Stewart’s Crossing was a mix of original construction and
later renovation, so that the long-ago vision of those first Quakers was still
evident to today’s worshippers.

Rochester’s discovery of the tennis sneaker, only two weeks
before, had shown us that what had happened back in 1969 could still have
reverberations for the people who survived those years. I was still tempted to
hack, and Rick’s frequent references to those activities showed me he sometimes
thought of me as an unrepentant criminal.

Our romantic histories were still with us, too. My ideas
about women had been formed by my marriage to Mary, and I knew I was moving
more carefully with Lili because of them. She had her own past love life – two
ex-husbands and various other flings. Rick’s marriage had imploded when his
wife left him for a firefighter; Tamsen’s husband died a war hero; and Mark had
been treated badly by boyfriends. Even Gail must have had problems with that
ex-boyfriend who’d roomed with Declan.

We all had our talents, too. Lili was an excellent
photographer and teacher. Mark had design skills, Rick was a dogged
investigator. Gail was a terrific baker, and Declan had managed to begin his
career and get the work permit he needed to stay in the States. I knew I was a
decent writer and a competent teacher – but what if my one true skill was
hacking, which was illegal? How could I leave my past behind if it meant also
giving up the thing I was really good at?

I wondered if we could put together a program that would
explore some of the conflicts from the sixties, and the reverberations that
were still with us today. Maybe a history professor could sketch out the
timeline, and someone from sociology talk about the long-lasting effects of the
war on our country.

I was once again excited about my job, and hurried back to
my office, tugging Rochester along, so I could get back to work.

35 – Café Confrontation

By the end of the day, I had the outline of a program on “The
1960s and Beyond” prepared and I was researching recruiting faculty to carry it
out. I was so caught up in ideas that it took me a minute to recognize that my cell
was ringing.

“Hey, Rick,” I said, the phone cradled at my ear, still
typing possibilities.

“Finished up with Dr. Bobeaux, aka Peter Breaux,” he said.
“It’s an interesting story. What did you think of it?”

“Lili believes him, and I guess I do, too. Did you ask him
about the cash?”

“He swears he didn’t know Lamprey was carrying any money. He
said he had about a hundred bucks of his own, that’s all. And when I pressed
him, he started telling me all this stuff he did in Canada to make money before
his scholarships kicked in.”

“You want to compare notes on what he told you versus what
he told Lili and me?”

“Yeah, that’s probably a good idea.”

We made plans to meet at The Chocolate Ear for a few minutes
before my rendezvous with Mark Figueroa. “Hey, did you ever get a chance to
look around for shell casings where somebody shot at me last night?”