Are You Nuts? Page 7

I believed that.

  He gave me more details than I needed for the next few minutes about opening the new building, difficulties with teenagers on probation, and impossible teachers. I let him talk. It’s always a bright idea to keep on the good side of a custodian. After the school secretaries, they are the most powerful people in a school. He finished, “Didn’t you have some kind of trouble yesterday afternoon?”

  “You heard about that?”

  “My staff has to report any problems to me at the end of the day. One of the kids said you talked to him.”

  A snarling but loquacious teenager. I asked, “Which of your people were on duty last night?”

  “I heard Meg Swarthmore is a friend of yours. You worried about her being accused of murder?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I already talked to the cops. They’ve cleared my people. They were in each other’s presence the whole night.”

  “They went to the john together?” I asked.

  “My folks vouch for each other. Do you have somebody to give you an alibi?”

  “I was home.”

  “Alone?”

  “Yes.”

  “I was with my wife. Sounds like you’ve got more to worry about than I do.” He walked away.

  Working with the list I had gotten from Carolyn, I returned to the high school and went in search of people to question.

  First, I stopped outside the library. The light inside came from several skylights they’d installed in the roof in the past year. Warm sunlight flooded the room. Police barrier tape covered all the entrances. I had to do all my observing from the doors. I could see nothing of significance from my vantage point.

  At the entrance to the old wing, I saw a few people sitting in folding chairs outside the science office. These must be people waiting to be interviewed. A young cop near the door said to me, “Can I help you, sir?”

  “I wanted to talk to a few people.”

  “Were you at the PTA meeting last night?”

  “No.”

  “Then if you could leave, sir, that would be a help to the police.”

  There was no point in crossing her. I retreated. The school was starting to heat up in all its unair-conditioned splendor. I supposed I could simply wait around the corner for people to come by.

  Lydia Marquez came trundling down the corridor toward me. Not often in our lives do we get to see evil incarnate walking toward us. Lydia was probably in her early forties. She did not have horns, a tail, and cloven feet. She was in a sleeveless rayon shirt that revealed mounds of flesh best left covered. If the overstuffed-sausage-casing look ever became fashion law, she’d certainly dwarf the competition. Her jeans were baggy enough to cover the bulges of the back end of a rhinoceros. The pant legs billowed around her, making her resemble somewhat a tent on legs. Her fat butt jutted out behind her. She had a downcast look. Her look said even if a busload of comedians showed up at her house, she’d be too tired to laugh. If there was a street, I’d have walked across it to avoid her.

  I didn’t have to worry about whether to approach her or not. Once she made eye contact with me, she marched over and planted herself directly in front of me.

  She introduced herself, then said, “I’ve heard so much about you, but then who in the district hasn’t?”

  “I’d rather be loved than famous. Didn’t somebody say that?”

  “There’s something I don’t understand about you.”

  “What’s that?”

  “What I don’t get is if all the running around and arguing and fighting is all worth it.”

  “It’s worth it for Meg. We’re more than good friends.”

  “No, I meant with all these television shows. It certainly can’t be fun.”

  “I don’t define my life by doing only that which is fun.”

  “Maybe I didn’t say that well. There’s got to have been an enormous emotional toll on you. Is it worth it? Is the price you’re paying in emotional health, psychic strength, loss of sleep, physical and emotional exhaustion, worth what you are getting out of it?”

  This was almost more nasty than a melodramatic confrontation. At least then I could make sarcastic and witty cracks while she prattled on like an imbecile. Now she was coming across almost as someone who cared that I lived and breathed. Now I was being melodramatic.

  She concluded, “For a choice you made, you are suffering a great deal.”

  “The choice I’m making is to stand up to people like you.”

  “You know, you really aren’t very important.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “You may have been on television, and you may have tenure, but in the larger scheme of things, you aren’t very significant.”

  “How kind of you to point that out to me.”

  “Retribution will be exacted.”

  “By whom? You? For what?”

  “I may not be the instrument. God will decide.”

  “How nice for him or her.”

  “Blasphemer.”

  “I guess.”

  She pointed a finger with a large turquoise ring on it at me. “I’m a school board member here. You have to treat me with respect.”

  “No, I don’t. Respect isn’t something just conferred on someone because they get a few more votes than someone else. Just think Richard Nixon, and you’ll get the point.”

  Her jaw twisted at an odd angle. A vein in her forehead seemed about ready to pop. I wondered if causing someone to have a stroke was actionable. While she was deciding whether to explode or not, I asked, “What time did you leave the meeting last night?”

  She began walking away. “You’ll be sorry.”

  This was the second person in less than an hour to just up and leave. I wondered if this was the new “mature person’s response” to stress. Certainly I could put her in the lifelong-enemy category.

  In the teachers’ lounge, I found two people, heads together and laughing hysterically. When I walked in, they greeted me warmly.

  Rachel Seebach, a member of the English department, said, “You should have been at the meeting last night. I’d like to have bust a gut laughing. Meg was hysterical.”

  “You were both at the meeting?”

  They nodded.

  Rachel was in her midtwenties. She wore casual shorts and a Harvard University T-shirt. From the grime and dust on her hands, I presumed she’d been unpacking textbooks in her room. Rachel was fun to sit next to at department meetings. She had plenty of sarcastic comments to share under her breath. The funniest times were when she would make a joke, I would laugh, and she would sit stony-faced as if she had nothing to do with my roaring mirth.

  I said, “Meg’s been arrested for murder.”

  “We know,” Rachel said. “That’s part of what is so funny. I can maybe picture Meg slowly reading someone to death, but not bopping them over the head.”

  “Everybody knows how it happened?”

  “I heard it was the Oxford English Dictionary. The abridged, one-volume edition.” This comment was from Jim Geraghty, another member of the department. A good-looking man, he spent a great deal of time campaigning to be English department chair. He was pleasant enough and usually on my side in interdepartmental squabbles.

  “You guys aren’t sorry Jerome’s dead?”

  “Are you?” Jim asked.

  “I worked with him a few times with the union.”

  “I’m sad about him dying,” Rachel said, “but it’s like at a wake, especially when you didn’t know the person. Laughter helps sometimes, and Meg was so funny last night.”

  I put some quarters in the pop machine, got a soda, and sat down at their table.

  I said, “I wish I’d been there. What happened?”

  “Well,” Rachel began, “first one of those religious-right people got up and said we should start the meeting with a prayer and saying the Pledge of Allegiance.”

  Jim continued, “Louis Johnson just gave a weak smile and said he guessed it would be okay. Before anybody
could object or say something intelligent, there we all were standing up praying and pledging.”

  “Louis is a waste of good breathable air,” Rachel said. “Before Amelia Gregory could get halfway through her opening statement, Lydia Marquez stood up and said she had a point of order. Poor old Louis never had a chance. Before long both sides were shouting to be heard. Carolyn Blackburn finally took control. That helped keep things sane, but it didn’t keep people from saying some pretty nasty stuff.”

  Jim put in, “While Meg was giving her talk at the lectern, one of them walked up with a Bible and waved it in front of her. All Meg said was, ‘It would help some if you were literate enough to read that.’”

  “Did anyone see Jerome leave?”

  “We’ve been trying to figure that out,” Jim said. “Each of us has been in to talk to the cops. They told us not to discuss it among ourselves, but this is the biggest thing to happen in the school in ages. We’re curious too.”

  “As near as we can figure,” Rachel said, “he left about the time the voting began.”

  Jim nodded. He added, “We know for sure he didn’t come back and wasn’t there for the announcement of the results.”

  “They talked about you a little,” Rachel said.

  “That didn’t get far,” Jim said. “They can’t just take off after a teacher at some PTA meeting. A lot of the teachers lined up to talk after that. Their side could barely get a word in edgewise. We’ve got to protect our own.”

  “Who left when?”

  “Hard to remember,” Rachel said. “Louis Johnson announced the vote so he was there at the end. A lot of people were still around. There wasn’t an organized exodus.”

  I said, “The police must be keeping a huge chart on who was where when.”

  “Maybe not,” Rachel said. “They’ve got their suspect. When they talked to me, they seemed to be more interested in confirming what they already knew. If I were you, I’d be suspicious of everyone.”

  Jim said, “To save you the embarrassment of asking, Rachel and I left the meeting together. We stopped at Oleantha’s Sports Bar in Orland to get something to eat. We left about midnight.”

  “Thanks.”

  Rachel said, “What’s really tough to figure is, who comes under more suspicion? Those who left or those who stayed?”

  I said, “If they left the room before Jerome, they could have simply waited for him and lured him away. If they left after him, they might have caught up with him. Either way the killer could have come back to the room afterward and no one would have been the wiser. They’d never be able to pin the time of death down that closely so that a minute-by-minute analysis of movements is going to help.”

  “Does anybody know why Jerome left the room?” Rachel asked.

  “He could have simply been going to the bathroom,” Jim said.

  “There are washrooms between the gym and the library,” I said. “He had to be going out of his way and there had to be a reason. Maybe he was meeting someone.”

  “Trysting in the library stacks,” Jim said. “You’ll be disappointed to know that nobody came to the meeting covered in blood and gore. I’d have noticed. Nobody acted suspicious.”

  Rachel asked, “How is Meg holding up?”

  “I haven’t been able to talk to her.” I needed to call Todd and check on his progress with getting Meg bail.

  Jim asked, “What was it like being on those television shows?”

  “More exhausting than I ever thought it would be.”

  Beatrix Xury burst into the room. “Isn’t it awful about Meg and Jerome,” she gasped. She stood in front of me holding a calibrated thermometer in her hand.

  We all nodded and murmured at her.

  “I can’t believe something like this would happen in our district. Can you imagine? Are any of us safe? Are they going to take action to protect us?”

  “I hadn’t thought to ask,” I said.

  “Well, you should. There’s a murderer on the loose. You’ve got to do something.”

  “I’m going to prove Meg innocent.”

  Beatrix rounded on me and held out the thermometer. “I presume you’re going to file a grievance about the lack of air-conditioning. I just checked seventeen different rooms. Mine is over eighty-nine degrees.”

  Jim said, “I sure wish the union could do something about the heat. It’s going to be miserable with these kids in here. Most of the faculty are bringing fans from home. How can kids learn anything with the heat engulfing them? It’s like trying to teach underwater.”

  Rachel added, “Can’t you do something?”

  “They won’t let us take them outside anymore,” Jim said.

  “Yes,” Rachel said. “One parent complained last year that her child wasn’t learning because they took them outside one day for one class period.”

  One parent complaining in the River’s Edge school district was enough to start an avalanche of administrative panic.

  “What are you going to do?” Beatrix demanded. She looked triumphant. Finally, she’d picked an issue that would have broad public support.

  “If you don’t get satisfaction from the administration, you should call the Occupational Safety and Health Administration,” Rachel suggested. “They can file suit and make them fix the air-conditioning.”

  Everybody always wants to help.

  I said, “They can investigate. If the administration can show they’re making a good-faith effort to fix things, OSHA won’t do anything.”

  “Is the administration trying to fix this?” Beatrix asked. “I don’t think so. You’ll have to do something. It isn’t just me complaining. Everybody is upset.”

  “I’ll get on it,” I said.

  “It’s about time.”

  “Beatrix, what time did you leave the PTA meeting last night?” I asked.

  “I left early. No one was interested in listening to me. I went to the hardware store to buy this thermometer.”

  “Anybody see you leave?”

  “I don’t need to check my movements with anyone. You will find the time on my receipt from the hardware store. Then I went home. I’ve told you and the police as much as I wish to about the meeting.”

  Beatrix stalked out.

  Rachel said, “In the ‘Moron Olympics,’ Beatrix would win all the gold medals. That woman needs a personality transplant.”

  I said, “She’d probably get a donor who was a serial killer.”

  “We’d be better off,” Rachel responded.

  “Sure wish you could do something about the air-conditioning,” Jim said. “My room is in that odd corner between the old and new wings. It is totally ghastly.”

  That was one of the main things about being a union official. There was always another person with a new problem to be solved immediately. I went in search of heat relief and suspects.

  I stopped in the office. Georgette wasn’t in. Edwina was going through some files on the counter. She wore black horn-rimmed glasses and a pantsuit the color of a caffè latte, heavy on the cream.

  I said, “Can we fix the air-conditioning?”

  “Fat chance.” Her attitude toward me was kind of weird—at times flippantly sarcastic as if she were willing to dare me to try to get something changed.

  I asked, “Can you say OSHA?”

  “You wouldn’t.”

  “I would and can.”

  She shook her head. “We’re doing everything we can.”

  “When did that start? I heard it wasn’t going to be fixed.”

  “Five minutes before you came in.”

  “I’d like you to have to work in the heat like the rest of us. I bet if your office was miserably hot, it would get fixed.”

  She smiled at me. “Feel the atmosphere in here? It did get fixed. We’ll get on your complaint right away.”

  I walked out. Edwina was good at telling lies to your face. There must be a course on the graduate level called Bald-Faced Lying for Administrators. I had no doubt Edwina had gotte
n an A.

  I used the phone in the English office to try to find out Meg’s status. Frank Murphy wasn’t in. Todd’s secretary said he was still in River’s Edge. There was no answer at Meg’s. Out of perversity, I decided not to call OSHA right then. I know it’s immature, but I felt hard-pressed, and not calling immediately was my little way of rebelling. As if it made some kind of big-deal difference.

  In the corridor near the line of people waiting to be questioned by the police, I spotted Mavis Lukachevsky. She beckoned me over. I followed as she led me into an empty classroom.

  “What’s up, Mavis?” I asked.

  “Georgette gave me the address of Beorn Quigley, that man at the meeting dressed in the battle fatigues.” She handed me a slip of paper with a name and address on it.

  “Thanks.”

  “He really frightened me. I think he was armed.”

  “A concealed weapon?”

  “If anyone would have one, he would.”

  I examined the paper she gave me. “He’s the owner of a feed store?”

  “Yes. He comes from a very prominent family. They’ve lived in the district a long time.”

  She handed me a file folder with several pages of copies in it.

  “What’s this?”

  “Georgette told me I should give them to you. She said you would never tell the superintendent.”

  “Carolyn won’t find out from me. Thanks for your help.”

  “Thank Georgette. Not only are all the secretaries making the calls we’re supposed to make, we’re finding out information and passing it on to her. She likes Meg and you a lot. You’re nicer than the other union people who call the district office. You’re polite and never make impossible demands.”

  Mavis glanced over her shoulder and saw Edwina looking at us through the glass in the office. Mavis moved her head slightly in Edwina’s direction. “Anybody asks, I gave you the health files you requested on kids you’re going to have in your classes.”

  I looked in the folder. Under the first few documents there were health notices. Always tell as much of the truth as you can. It is important to get health information on the students you’re going to teach. If a kid has some special health need, and you ignore it because you didn’t read the proper health notices, you might be held liable. Georgette would have been bright enough to know this and planned ahead for a cover for the file.