“They asked a million questions. They wanted to know all about even the most minor set-to. Well, what could I say? We do fight. There were a million witnesses to today’s battle, not to mention all the other fights we’ve all had. I’m not the only one who’s had public fights with these people, but I’m the only one who had somebody murdered right after. I think I’m in trouble.”
Brook Burdock entered the room and hurried over to the table. Brook was the kind of guy who was always just a few minutes late for everything. He was a few pounds overweight and a couple years past forty. He struck me as a bit too bluff and friendly, seeming to be a bundle of energy that was always ready to burst forth. Brook worked out once every two weeks and called himself in shape. His wife dressed him in trendy male fashions from Ralph Lauren that never fit quite right. He sat down and said, “The kiss-asses are dying. Dead. Dead. Dead. I am going to do a dance of joy.” He drummed his fingers on the tabletop.
Luci gasped. “That’s awful,” she said.
Brook thumped his hands on the table, a drummer giving himself a cue. “There is news. You are not going to believe this.”
“What?” Luci asked.
“It is the latest hot rumor. They arrested Mabel Spandrel for the murder.”
A round of astonishment swept the group.
Morgan said, “I knew it. I knew it. Those two were having an affair.”
Jourdan leaned forward in that hot-gossip-tell-me-more posture. He asked, “They were lesbians?”
“I’ve seen them go out drinking together constantly,” Morgan said.
Brook said, “I was told they met secretly at bars on the near north side of Chicago, but I assumed that was to plot and plan. I’m not so sure it’s proof they were having an affair.”
Luci asked, “You have proof of an affair?”
“I don’t have videotape, no,” Morgan admitted. “But I know Gracie drives to Mabel’s house, and then they go off together.”
Jourdan said, “Gracie’s been sucking up like mad to her since she was hired. She’s been her spy on the rest of us. You’ve seen her taking notes at every single meeting.”
I thought maybe she was just efficient and conscientious. I asked Brook, “Did someone say why they think Mabel killed Gracie?”
“Nobody saw Mabel after the meeting.” “That’s it?” I asked.
“That’s what I heard,” Brook said. “I haven’t been this happy in ages. I am not going to be a hypocrite. I hate those ass-kissers. I have always hated those ass-kissers. I hope some more of them bite the dust, and I hope it’s painful, and they suffer for a very long time.” Luci said, “She’s dead. It’s sad.”
Morgan said, “You were trying to avoid a Chuckles the Clown moment a few minutes ago.”
“Well, that was bizarre, but this is gloating.”
“You can be a hypocrite if you like,” Brook said, “but I’ve heard you talk about them in public and private. You hated them as much as I.”
“That may be so,” Luci said, “But now she’s dead.”
“I know that,” Brook said. “I hated her when she was alive. Sometimes the evil do die young.”
Not often enough, I thought. I said, “It was murder. Those who fought with them are going to be suspects.”
“I didn’t kill her,” Brook said. “I’ve got rock-solid alibis for every second from after that meeting to now. Nope. She’s dead. I’m glad. They’ve tried to undercut the rest of us. They’ve stabbed us in the back. They run to Spandrel or Graniento to tattle on the rest of us. They are awful colleagues. This time the suckup died young. I, for one, am celebrating.”
Jourdan said, “I’m worried about being a suspect. I have no witness, no alibi. After I left the meeting, I went to my classroom to cool off. I shouldn’t have said those things. I should have kept my big mouth shut. I always regret it after those fights, but I can’t help myself.”
Morgan said, “You’re standing up for us. We appreciate it.”
Jourdan said, “Maybe others should be speaking up. Did anybody else hear the rumor that Mabel Spandrel is planning to resign as head of the department? If that’s true, there’ll be more bodies than just this one. Who would replace her? Gracie was the assistant head of the department. Would she have just moved up? There are teachers a lot more senior than Gracie who deserve that job. And now that she’s dead and if Mabel quits, would we have to replace both of them?”
Morgan said, “More important right now is, who killed Gracie? It could be someone from outside, although that doesn’t make a lot of sense. They’d have to hunt through the school, wait for the meeting to get over, and know she’d be in that storeroom.”
Brook said, “It could have been someone from outside who was very patient and very determined and very desperate.”
Morgan said, “Yeah, but for that kind of person to succeed, there are a lot of things that would have to go right. They’d have no ID, no idea what other people’s schedule was. I think it’s got to be somebody in the school.”
Everybody nodded agreement.
Luci said, “It’s not likely a kid. Would any of them still have been in the building?”
I said, “A few athletes might have been in the gym, but that’s a long way to go undetected or risk being seen.”
Jourdan said, “So it’s got to be one of the adults, faculty or administrators or custodians or secretaries.”
Morgan said, “It wasn’t done with a conventional weapon, so they can’t blame the metal detectors for not working.”
I wondered if the killer held Gracie down or knocked her out first and then crammed in the eraser. The boxes hadn’t been disturbed, so I didn’t think there’d been much of a struggle–although the storeroom is a mess most of the time, so it would have been hard to tell. The bruising I’d seen on her face might have meant the killer had held her down.
Brook said, “Maybe they’ll think it’s Francine. Maybe she finally got fed up with nobody listening to her peace overtures and turned to violence.”
Luci said, “Remember that peace party she tried to have over the holidays last year? I heard she made this huge spread and decorated until she nearly died and nobody went.”
“It was sad,” I said.
“Did you go?” Brook asked.
“I was out of the country.”
Brook persisted. “Would you have gone?”
“No,” I admitted. I didn’t go to a lot of faculty parties. This was where I worked. This wasn’t normally where I socialized.
Morgan said, “I’ve never been able to figure out how anybody knew she went to all that trouble if nobody went to the party.”
Brook said, “It can’t be nobody went. Someone must have gone, but I don’t know who.”
Jourdan said, “They’re going to think one of our faction killed her.”
Luci said, “They can’t think we did it. None of us are like that.”
“Who would be more logical?” I asked.
“But killing her wouldn’t gain anything,” Morgan said. “She was assistant head of the department, so her position would be vacant, but would somebody kill for such an unimportant position?”
“I can’t imagine it,” Luci said.
“It must have gained somebody something,” I said, “otherwise she wouldn’t be dead.”
Brook said, “Spandrel would have only picked another suckup. Maybe they’re finally turning on each other. They have no morals. They’re worse than Nazis. They’d turn on each other in a heartbeat.”
“You have evidence of this?” I asked. “They seem to pretty much stick together.”
So did the non-suckup faction, for that matter, but I adjusted my comments to my audience.
Jourdan said, “Not a one of them has ever broken ranks.”
Brook asked, “Do I have evidence they have no morals, or that they’d turn on each other? Once you’ve stabbed someone in the back, what’s another one or two? What more logical step than to commit murder?”
“Maybe
she crossed one of them,” Morgan said. “Maybe she was a traitor to them.”
“Again,” I said, “do we have any proof of that?”
No one did.
Jourdan said, “None of us would have done it. I mean, come on. Murder? Over this stuff?”
Brook used the old cliché, “Wars have been fought for less.”
“What’s going to happen tomorrow?” Luci asked. “It’s that stupid institute day. Maybe they’ll cancel it because of the death.”
Brook said, “These asshole administrators are never going to call off school.”
“What about Monday?” she asked. “I hope this is over by Monday. I’m not going to have to give up my planning period, am I? I have work to do.” This work during her planning time consisted mostly of making personal phone calls and surfing the Web, planning her next vacation, then erasing the evidence of her Internet searches. It would be like Luci to obsess about the part of an issue that affected her. Destruction of half the planet? Was it going to bother her schedule? If not, then it wasn’t a problem.
“Grief counselors,” Brook Burdock said. “The school is going to be lousy with them. I’ve never seen such hypocritical nonsense in my life.”
Morgan said, “At least the lazy-ass social workers will have something to do.”
All public schools in Illinois now had, by law, crisis teams. Each teacher had to have a copy of the district’s “crisis plan” that had to be attached visibly to some part of their classroom. I don’t know one teacher who has read it or one teacher for whom it has made a difference. Certainly the administrators all feel more important because it gives them something to do and makes them feel like they’re protecting kids. They can shuffle paper instead of actually talking to teenagers. The stark reality is that insane things do happen, and sometimes they can’t be prevented. And that’s sad, but you cannot live your life because you fear the sky is falling.
I come down on the side of taking all necessary precautions, but madness and useless panic resulting in nonsensical paperwork and pointless rules are not my style.
The referred-to social workers at Grover Cleveland High School were a stunning collection of younger men and women who desperately wanted to be in private practice. I don’t remember one child in whose life they actually made a difference. Of course, they didn’t have to report to me, but teachers usually hear.
Jourdan said, “And the kids will be weeping. They loved Gracie Eberson. She never gave homework. Never.”
Some of the young teachers believed in the philosophy that kids won’t do homework so why bother to assign it? I thought anyone who held that philosophy was a lazy-ass fool who didn’t belong in the classroom. Yeah, it’s a battle to get them to do homework. What did these young teachers think they were going to do when they got in the classroom? And those silly studies claiming homework is harmful? Yeah, it’s too burdensome for some parents to say things like, “Do your homework” to a teenager. That might require enforcing a rule, turning off a television, hanging up a phone, not texting a friend, postponing an Internet chat. Those parents want to be their kid’s friend, and they don’t want to be the bad guy. They don’t want to be the one to say no. Letting teenagers run the asylum was not an option, at least not yet, not in my classroom.
Luci said, “She was the most popular English teacher among the kids. She and her ilk cultivated them as friends.”
Morgan said, “The ones I can’t stand will be the students who didn’t know her and who are weeping. Trust me, there will be tons of those. Remember when that junior died in a drunk-driving accident? His teachers barely knew him, and before the accident he didn’t have friends. No one sat with him in the cafeteria at lunchtime, but the weeping went on for weeks. It was sad that the kid was dead and that he’d been lonely, but they were taking advantage.”
Brook shuddered. “Teenagers clustered together in the halls and washrooms feeding on each others’ melodramatic nonsense.”
“Did Gracie have kids of her own?” I asked. “A husband?”
Luci said, “She married her childhood sweetheart right out of high school. They’ve got four boys, six, four, two, and the one she had in August. I’ve seen pictures. Cute kids.”
“It’s going to be awful for them,” I said.
Luci said, “I met the husband once. He seemed nice enough. An electrical engineer who couldn’t get a job out of college. He opened a coffeehouse. How does a family recover from this?”
Time and pain, I thought. What else was there when faced with a relatively young person’s unexpected death? As the Deborah Kerr character says in the movie of Tennessee Williams’s play Night of the Iguana, sometimes you just have to endure.
Jourdan said, “I hope Mabel did it. Even if she didn’t, she’s been arrested, and she’ll be humiliated. That’s what I want. To see her humiliated. She is an asshole and a moron and evil incarnate and a Nazi.”
“We’ll get you a thesaurus in a minute,” Morgan said.
The door to the faculty room crashed open.
5
Ludwig Schaven rumbled in huffing and puffing. He was three hundred pounds at least, by far the most heavyset man in the department. His jet-black hair was slicked back from his forehead. He’d played tackle on his high school football team. After his third concussion, the doctor told him to stop playing before he did permanent brain damage. There were those of us who thought the damage had already been done. His friends called him Looie. The less kind in the opposing faction tended to call him Looie the Loon.
Carl Pinyon, he of the travel chart at the meeting, and Basil Milovec, another leader of the suckups, followed in Looie’s wake. Milovec was in his late twenties, black hair in a jumble of natural ringlets the envy of women in both factions. Most days of the week, he wore tight black jeans that emphasized what a stud he thought he was. He was thin and scrawny with a scruffy goatee which he let students tease him about relentlessly. He was a taciturn young man given to reciting Wordsworth in the faculty lounge at lunchtime. He believed that teaching teenagers poetry was the way to save their souls. Probably better than drugs, but I wasn’t sure by how much.
They marched up to us. “I heard you people,” Looie screamed, then banged his fist on the table. “I heard you people. You were saying terrible things about Mabel and Gracie.”
Morgan said, “How long have you been standing out there?”
“Long enough,” Looie said. “They’re all true,” Brook said.
Did anybody really think this was a good time for a fight? Obliviousness in the face of tragedy was more than simply a presidential failing.
Listening outside other people’s doors was a tactic some of the more immature members of both factions had adopted. It was depressing. Many of us wound up talking in whispers in the middle of rooms. I would never admit to deliberately leaning over to a colleague and whispering a string of nonsense words when I thought one of the suckups was trying to listen.
Jourdan barked. “Lower your voice. Be a professional.”
Mistake.
Schaven went nuts. He roared at full volume. “We’re the ones who are professional. We’re the ones who are trying to make this school better. You’re the ones who are trying to destroy children.”
Jourdan said, “And sucking up is the way to be professional? Spying on the rest of us is the way to be professional? Sucking up and spying help children how?”
“We’ve never spied on anyone. None of us would do that.”
Luci said, “I walked in on Gracie Eberson going through my files. I saw her. She didn’t notice me at my classroom door. She was going through everything. She made some lame excuse and left. When I checked the computer, I found it had been tampered with. Not hard to figure she was up to something.”
Milovec spoke for the first time, “Exactly what good would that do?”
Luci said, “Precisely. She wouldn’t need to use my computer to get on the Internet. Why bother? There was no point in hunting in my stuff. She couldn’t
have been looking for curriculum materials. All she had to do was ask. There was nothing in those files.”
“So what’s the problem?” Milovec asked.
“Snooping on other people’s computers, hunting through other people’s files and desks is okay with you?” Jourdan asked.
Schaven banged his fist on the table. “You have to stop talking about Gracie and Mabel.”
Jourdan said, “We still have constitutional rights. You Nazis aren’t in charge yet. Who are you going to report us to? Gracie’s dead and Mabel’s been arrested.”
Milovec said, “Mabel was not arrested. They’re just taking some time to ask a few more questions.”
“Yeah, right,” Brook said.
Schaven said, “There are laws about slander.”
I had heard more than enough. I stood up and said, “I’ll see you all later.”
This brought proceedings to a halt.
Carl Pinyon said, “We’d like to talk to you.”
“All three of you?” I asked.
“It’s a union issue,” Pinyon said.
I agreed to speak with them.
The others began to stand up and clear their places. While I was washing my cup at the sink, Jourdan sidled up next to me and said, “Can I talk to you?”
I was going to have to give out numbers like at the deli counter. I told him I’d see him after I talked to the suckups.
6
Once out in the hall, Schaven said, “Let’s talk in Milovec’s classroom, it’s closest.”
It was also directly across the hall from the storeroom, which now had crime scene tape over the doorway. I was suspicious about their motives, but I was willing to listen to them.
The four of us huddled up near Milovec’s desk.
The key with a lot of faculty is they often tell their union representative a lot of things, sort of like their father confessor. For example, Milovec two years ago had been worried about what would happen if the administration found out he was having an affair with one of the Spanish teachers who, at the time, had been married to another guy. I didn’t see a problem, but he was worried. Over time I became his confidant about his little conquests with female members of the faculty. So often straight guys have absolutely no one else they can talk to. He did confess to using school e-mail accounts to send the Spanish teacher letters. At the time, I strongly suggested he not use the school accounts. My current understanding was that Milovec was engaged. His confiding in me had stopped, presumably so had his affairs. I didn’t ask. Wasn’t my business.
Schooled in Murder Page 3
