Dog Helps Those (Golden Retriever Mysteries) by Neil S. Plakcy Read Free Book Online

first-floor computer lab in an addition at the back of the building that hadn’t been there when I was a student. Tall windows looked out on a walkway between buildings, letting in a flood of spring sunshine. Computers lined the perimeter of the room. I walked up to the teaching podium and turned on the computer and projector.
    About twenty students either sat at the terminals or at a couple of round tables in the middle of the room. “Hey, everybody,” I said, as I waited for the equipment to warm up. “You all eager for the end of the semester?
    There was general agreement. It was time for the students to present their PowerPoint presentations, so instead of teaching, I got to sit back and listen. I moved to one of the round tables and dropped my bag, then asked Lou Segusi, one of the stronger students, to close all the blinds.
    “Who wants to go first?” I asked.
    Barbara Seville, a petite blonde, raised her hand, then teetered up to the podium on very high heels. When I began teaching the class, right after the midterm break, she had been a bubbly girl, a member of the Booster Club who was always willing to raise her hand with a comment. Because of the death of the woman I’d replaced, Barbara had gone through a lot of emotional upset during the term, and for the last few weeks she’d been very quiet, just keeping her head down and doing her work. I felt bad for her and tried to cut her a break when I could.
    Her presentation was on schizophrenia, and it was marked how her demeanor had changed from earlier in the term. She kept her head down as she spoke, so that we all had to strain to hear her. At least her slides were colorful and filled with information.
    Yudame (pronounced you-dummy), a skinny boy with a wild bush of hair that varied in shade from blond to brown, followed her with a business presentation. With his tie-dyed T-shirt and Birkenstock sandals, he looked more like an escapee from the 1960s than the kind of kid who’d be leaving Eastern on a direct path to an Ivy League MBA, but you never know these days.
    That reminded me of Rita Gaines. As Yudame fumbled with his jump drive, and then getting the presentation going, I wondered what kind of a student Rita had been. Her abrasive personality made me think she’d been talkative in class, even argumentative.
    Yudame’s presentation began with an animation of angels flapping their wings and strumming harps while flying over Wall Street, which got the class’s attention. “I’m going to talk today about people called angel investors,” he began.
    His next slide popped up, a mockup of a stock certificate for Facebook. “Angel investors aren’t creatures from the Bible; they’re rich people who provide startup capital for small businesses, in the hopes that they will get big payoffs.”
    He went on to explain the way an individual or small group might come up with an idea for a product or service, but need money to get it off the ground. “Usually an inventor starts with money from the three F’s: friends, family and fools.” He paused for a laugh.
    “Once the business has shown it has some potential, the inventor turns to outside sources of capital. But venture capital companies like the big Wall Street firms like to see a real product and a record of earnings before they pour millions of dollars in. That gap is filled by angel investors.”
    I was surprised to see Rita Gaines’s photo pop up on the screen. “One of the most prominent local angel investors was an Eastern College alumnus named Rita Gaines. She passed away recently but she made a lot of investments in high-tech companies.”
    I had read a bit about Rita’s investments in her obituaries, and I was pleased that Yudame had done enough research to discover her, and that he was savvy enough to include her in his presentation. And sensitive enough not to add angel wings to her photo.
    We made it through half the presentations that day, with the rest scheduled for Wednesday. As I