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I still hadn’t heard from Doug Guilfoyle by the time I left for Friar Lake on Wednesday morning. I kept thinking about him and his problems, though, as I traveled the twisting road upriver, passing luxury developments that had begun to pepper the landscape with huge houses and three-car garages. From everything I’d read, family size was shrinking—almost all my friends had only one, maybe two children. Who needed all that space? When I was growing up, most kids shared bedrooms or bathrooms, and families lived in tight quarters. Would all this space help them get along? Or not?
I’d seen photos at Catherine’s house of the home she and Doug had shared in Westchester County, and it was as much of a mansion as any of these. Now she’d taken a step down to an ordinary suburban split-level, and he was in a crummy rented apartment. How many of those families along the River Road would end up in similar circumstances?
And where was the money coming from to pay for all that? Illicit schemes like the one that was going on at Beauceron? For the first time since I lost my software job in California, I was making a decent living, but I’d never be able to afford a million-dollar home or even to replace my aged Beemer with a brand new model.
Didn’t I already have enough to think about? It was like I told Rochester when he was too eager to sniff a passerby or play with a new dog. Mind your own business.
I’d only been at Friar Lake for a few minutes when Rick called me. “Hey, did you find out anything more about Alex Vargas?” I asked before he could say anything. “What happened after he was arrested?”
“Not yet. I’ve got bigger problems right now. You know a guy named Douglas Guilfoyle?”
“Doug? Why do you want to know something about him?”
“Just answer the questions, Levitan.”
The way Rick used my last name indicated business. “Sure, I know Doug. We went to Eastern together, and he helped me out with a program at Friar Lake last weekend.” I didn’t think it was necessary to add that he’d asked me to look into fraud at the company where he worked.
“That explains why there was a contract with your name on it in his back pocket,” Rick said. “No wallet, so that paper is the only ID he had on him.”
“Huh?”
“A woman out running this morning spotted something floating in the Delaware Canal south of the Ferry Street bridge. She thought it was a dead animal until she got closer. Then she called the cops.”
“Hold on,” I said. “Are you saying that Doug Guilfoyle is dead? But I just had breakfast with him yesterday.”
“That’s when you saw him last? Speak to him after that?”
My mind was racing as I explained about the calls to Doug he hadn’t returned. Doug was dead? How could that be? His poor kids. “How did he die? Did he drown?”
Rick didn’t answer. Instead he said, “I need some background from you as soon as possible. At the station?”
“I can be there in a half hour.” I hesitated, then asked, “Have you called Catherine yet?”
“Catherine who?”
“What do you mean, Catherine who? Catherine Guilfoyle. Doug’s ex-wife. Your girlfriend’s cousin.”
“Holy shit. I just met the woman on Sunday and never got her last name. You mean this dead guy is the ex she was bitching about?”
“He’s not just a dead guy,” I said. “His name is Doug Guilfoyle. In college everybody called him Dougie.”
“Sorry,” Rick said. “You’re right. Obviously you knew Mr. Guilfoyle, and I need to know him as well as you do in order to figure out what happened to him.”
“I’ll fill you in on what I know when I get there. In the meantime, call Tamsen.”
I let Joey know I was going out and asked him to keep an eye on Rochester again. Then I drove right back down the River Road, thinking about Doug Guilfoyle the whole way. My stomach felt like acid, and every time I remembered an incident from college I started to tear up.
To distract myself I focused on what could have happened to him. He’d been depressed about losing the job at Beauceron and destroying the new life he’d worked so hard to build. Had he been sad enough to commit suicide? Maybe he’d left his wallet in his car, or maybe it had floated out of his pocket when he was in the water.
Perhaps he had he been mugged, had his wallet stolen and either slipped or been pushed into the canal? I tried to remember if there had been similar incidents in town. The Boat-Gazette, our local weekly newspaper, listed all the incidents from the police blotter. Most of the ones I could recall were domestic incidents, noise complaints and traffic accidents, interspersed with the occasional house break-in.
Suppose Doug had been deliberately targeted. He’d said Shawn was asking a lot of questions. Did that mean Shawn had discovered Doug was onto him and pushed him into the canal?
I had to add Catherine to the list of those with motive to kill Doug. She’d probably get a big life insurance payout, and be able to marry again without worrying about losing her alimony.
There was always the possibility it was just an accident. Doug had told me himself that he couldn’t swim. What if he’d fallen into the canal and been unable to climb back up onto dry land? The previous week, I’d seen the high water level and the fast current.
The Stewart’s Crossing Police Station was a squat, one-story building from the 1970s built in the poorer neighborhood of town, at the corner of Canal Street and Quarry Road. I slipped my driver’s license under the receptionist’s window and told her I was there to see Rick, and waited in the dingy, 60s-era lobby until he came out and led me back to his scuffed wooden desk in a big bullpen area.
“Doug told me he couldn’t swim. Do you think he fell into the canal? Or was he pushed in?”
“Hold on, cowboy. You go first. Tell me everything you know about this guy.”
I figured the part about running around Birthday Hall naked when Doug and I were seniors wasn’t relevant, so I skipped ahead to Tor’s recommendation that Doug handle the seminar at Friar Lake.
I went through my meeting by the canal with Doug, his kids and his dog, and how Doug had told me he couldn’t swim. Rick was busy taking notes. “We talked about our divorces and how he’d come down here to be close to his kids, but Catherine was making things difficult for him.”
“Tamsen says Catherine has a different take on that,” Rick said. “I called her right after you made the connection for me. I’m meeting Catherine later today so she can identify the body, and I’ll get her side of the story then. But go on.”
“We talked about the presentation he was going to give, and then when we were up at Friar Lake over the weekend he asked me to look into the company he was working for. He was worried there was something suspicious going on and that if he got caught up in it he might lose his securities license.”
“Define ‘something suspicious,’” Rick said.
I related Doug’s concern about the strip shopping center, and my discovery that Beauceron was keeping two sets of spreadsheets.
“How’d you find that out?” Rick asked.
“Doug gave me his ID and password. I didn’t do anything illegal.”
He snorted. “Giving you a password is like opening the henhouse door to the fox.”
“Don’t be a jerk. Remember, you asked me to look for information on Tiffany and the raid on her company for you.”
He held up his hand. “Sorry. That was out of line. You are a good person to look into that kind of thing, because you know what’s right and what’s wrong.”
I nodded. “Thank you. I met Doug for breakfast yesterday morning at the Chocolate Ear, and he was pretty worried about what I found. He asked me to see how many other linked spreadsheets there were, and I did a bit more checking. I called him a couple of times yesterday to tell him what I found, but he never answered his phone and the only message I left was for him to call me.”
I leaned forward. “Do you think maybe he was killed to protect what’s in those files?”
“Until the ME tells me otherwise, I have to assume this is either an accident or suicide. Especially since you just told me he couldn’t swim.” He looked down at his notes. “Did he seem depressed after your breakfast? Possibly thinking of taking his own life?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “It was pretty clear he was going to have to leave Beauceron and look for a new job, and he was worried about paying his alimony and child support.”
“Is there a Mr. Beauceron?” Rick asked. “Somebody I should speak to about Doug?”
“A Beauceron’s a kind of dog, a French version of a German Shepherd. The managing partner is a guy named Shawn Brumberger. He was at the cocktail reception at Friar Lake last weekend.”
I spelled the name for him, and then he pushed back his chair and stood up. “Thanks for coming in. This has been really helpful.”
“Tamsen said that Catherine’s dating someone new,” I said. “You should ask her about him. And Doug told me that if she remarried, he could stop paying alimony.”
Rick remained standing. “I know. Thanks for coming in.” He nodded his head toward the door. “Do I need to show you the way out?”
“I’ll try not to let the door hit my butt as I go,” I said.
