Schooled in Murder

by Zubro, Mark Richard

  Still I kept my temper. There was a homophobic conspiracy. My paranoia was justified. Destroying these people would hardly be enough.

  I asked, “Who wrote the Pinyon hate notes?”

  Milovec said, “We set it up to try and get sympathy from some of the teachers who were sitting on the fence. Some people were put off by Peter being anti-Semitic and prejudiced.”

  I asked, “He’s African American. Why would he be prejudiced?”

  “Same reason Clarence Thomas is against affirmative action, I guess. I don’t know. He was. It was funny.”

  “Were you involved in the double dipping and gambling?”

  “No. Graniento was pissed about that. He didn’t know it was going on. He also didn’t know that Spandrel had gotten us into the files to find out all that information Pinyon had.”

  “Graniento wasn’t aware of that either?”

  “He knew a lot, but Spandrel and Bochka did most of the planning before this week. I think Spandrel wanted Graniento’s job. She’s tough.”

  “Was Higden in debt?” I asked.

  “He owed tons of money to bookies. He even owed nearly a thousand to the guys in the PE department.” “Why didn’t you play?” I asked.

  “My girlfriend would kill me if she knew I was gambling in school. She’s a teacher, too.”

  “Peter was double dipping?”

  “Sure,” Milovec said. “My understanding is that it was the common practice. More common than not. Why is it a big deal?”

  “It’s cheating,” I said.

  “Everybody does it at all the schools I’ve ever heard of.” “Where did Pinyon get his statistics from?” “A bunch of us went on a Saturday with Spandrel and went through the files.” “That’s illegal,” I said.

  “Have the file police arrest me,” Milovec said.

  “Why bother?” I asked.

  “Huh?”

  “Why bother doing all that work in the first place? What is so fucking important about going to conferences? Whose idea was it to gather all the statistics illegally? Why even take such a useless risk?”

  “I was told to.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “I didn’t have a choice.”

  “Of course you did,” I said.

  “Fine,” he said. “Spandrel didn’t want to let any of the old guard out of the district. She figured if she had the statistics, she could give her people permission to go to all the conferences and never let the old guard go anywhere.”

  “So people were right. It was fixed so the old guard was screwed. And you rigged the statistics.”

  Milovec licked his lips. “A little,” he admitted.

  “Frank Jourdan said he couldn’t remember going to any conferences in the eighties. We’ve talked to a retired teacher who knows you were making stuff up. Why bother to go through the files if you were just going to make things up?”

  “Okay, fine. At first it was going to be legitimate, but it took too damn long. We had to have enough to make it look real. Who would remember that far back?”

  “If you twisted those statistics, what other crap have you been making up these past few years?”

  “Spandrel switched things to meet her needs. We had to take action. She wanted to call Homeland Security on you and get you in trouble. She even suggested putting dope and drugs in your car or in your desk in your classroom.”

  “Call Homeland Security?”

  “And say you were a terrorist.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “We couldn’t figure out how to make a call that couldn’t be traced. The government can get records of everything. We needed to do it anonymously. We thought of trying a pay phone in Chicago, but so many places have security cameras now. We couldn’t be sure of where it would be safe. We thought of all kinds of things.”

  I said, “If I wasn’t so pissed off, I think I’d be honored to have been that much of a threat to you guys.”

  “Spandrel hated you. She’d have done anything to destroy you.”

  And now was he bailing on her, trying to save his own ass? Blaming someone else in an attempt to save his job? He had to have been really frightened of us going to the police with his lie.

  “Teachers spying on teachers is pretty low. Why did you guys agree to that?”

  “We never knew what you were up to. We knew you were plotting and planning against us. We had to find out what you were going to pull.”

  I said, “I never met with anybody to plot and plan. As far as I know, the old guard never met. They never got themselves organized enough.”

  “So you say. In public you were always neutral or pretending to be. Maybe they never invited you to their meetings.”

  “Did you find evidence of their perfidy?”

  “No, but we knew they were fighting us. When we spied, we were supposed to get materials on whether they were obeying all the school rules. You know, doing lesson plans. Check their computers to see if they’d been used for personal things.”

  “It was okay with you to spy on us?” I kept harking back to that because it was such an astoundingly traitorous thing to do. In the pantheon of things they’d done, it wasn’t up there with murder and what they’d tried to do with me, but I was dealing with one shock at a time.

  “Hey, Spandrel said it was okay to spy. She said it would help her.”

  “Did it?”

  “I guess not enough.”

  Spandrel was not the brightest. All that time and work of professionals spent on spying. What a waste.

  “Why try and claim that Eberson was having an affair with a student?”

  “That’s where Spandrel got the idea about you.”

  “Why turn on Eberson?”

  “The funny thing about Gracie is that she was the most homophobic of all of us. She hid it better than most of us, but when she and Peter were together it was something. They hated you, but on Thursday, she was dead. We had to make sure nothing reflected back on us. She could be smeared and blamed if things started to go bad.”

  Or Spandrel had more in mind and didn’t confide her entire plan to Milovec.

  “But she was having sex with Spandrel?”

  “So what? That didn’t stop them from hating you.”

  I asked, “Did you see Peter after the meeting?”

  “We all did,” Milovec said. “Schaven, Pinyon, and me. We met to discuss what to do next. The meeting didn’t last long.”

  “And you didn’t tell the cops this?”

  “We knew to keep our mouths shut.”

  If he was telling the truth, the three of them could surely vouch for each other about where they were at the time of Gracie Eberson’s death. Unless he was lying or covering now. I asked, “After the meeting, you didn’t see Spandrel, Graniento, Towne, Bochka, or Eberson?”

  “No. It was just us guys.”

  “Who was the last to see Peter?”

  “I guess I was. He asked me for a few bucks to tide him over.”

  “How much?”

  “A hundred. I couldn’t spare it. My girlfriend would notice. We live together, and we’re kind of in debt, paying back our student loans, and we’ve got an expensive condo together. We have a lot of bills. The wedding is going to cost a fortune.”

  I said, “And whose idea was it to get Fred Zileski to lie?”

  Milovec shuffled his feet. “Spandrel and Bochka cooked it up. Bochka was sure her kid could be trusted.”

  I said, “He could be. To be honest.”

  “Yeah, well, you guys weren’t all saints.”

  I said, “You don’t see the difference between making things up, telling vicious lies, ruining people’s careers, and having philosophical differences over educational issues?”

  He said, “All’s fair.”

  I held myself very still. I stared out the window for some time. The sun had nearly set. The lights were still out. Gloom gathered in the shadows.

  Milovec asked, “Are we done?”

  Without looking a
t him, I nodded.

  Milovec scuttled out.

  46

  I sat on a low cabinet in the back of the room. I leaned one arm on a stack of books and stared out the window. Dark grays and browns were fading rapidly to black. I didn’t bother with the lights. The gathering shadows matched my mood. I watched darkness envelop cars and trees. I’d calm down for a moment and then become upset anew.

  I called my attorney. He said he’d come out for a meeting. Scott called on his cell moments after I hung up from the attorney. He was merging from the Stevenson Expressway onto the Dan Ryan. He’d gone ten feet in the last twenty minutes. He told me he loved me and he’d get here as fast as he could. Frank Rohde was still out on an investigation. I called Meg and told her what happened.

  “Do you want me to come back?” she asked.

  “Scott will be here soon.”

  She reassured me over and over.

  After we hung up, I continued to stare outdoors. Depression and anger warred for mastery. Fred Zileski told the truth, and I was free. I had the goods on these people, and they would pay. Pay for the rest of their lives, if I could help it. I’m not the kind of guy who dedicates his life to revenge, but at that moment, I could have been convinced.

  The shadows deepened. I shivered.

  My classroom door opened. Brandon Benson was a third of the way to the front before I moved to get between him and the door. He hadn’t turned on the lights. He heard the movement and turned back. I flipped on the lights. I said, “What are you doing here?”

  He started to rush toward the door, but I was between him and it. He said, “I have to go.”

  “You in the habit of sneaking into teachers’ rooms after you think they’ve gone home?”

  “I wasn’t sneaking.”

  “You in the habit of going to board members’ houses?” I asked. “Or going out drinking with them on Thursday and Friday nights?”

  “I can’t talk to you.”

  “You don’t have a choice.”

  “You can’t make me.”

  “Why would you take part in such a conspiracy? Why would you agree to be part of so many lies? Your current crime is that you were making out with a guy. That is no longer a felony in this country. It would be frightening to a married man, but even if you aren’t gay, you must be able to sympathize with a teacher who is being lied about.”

  “I’m not part of a conspiracy.”

  “And you’re in here sneaking around.”

  “You can’t prove anything,” he said.

  “Ah,” I said, “but I can. People are blabbing. All the lies are going to come out. All the conspiracies are going to be unmasked. All of it. You and your cohorts’ day is over.”

  He began to cry. I let him find his own goddamn tissue. “I can’t do this,” Brandon Benson said. He sobbed mightily.

  I didn’t care. The son of a bitch had lied and been part of all the planning. If they wanted my vote, Benson could join the corpse count.

  “Why?” I asked.

  He wiped his eyes, blew his nose, then said, “Maybe I’d be next. They are ruthless, vicious. I’m afraid of them. I’ll always be afraid of them. I don’t have tenure. I need my job. I’ve got bills. We’ve got a kid coming. I need the family coverage insurance. They made me lie. They said they’d tell what I’d been doing in that room. That I’d been having an affair. With a guy. They threatened me.” He sobbed again.

  It would be great to think that giving tenure actually had something to do with teacher competence. Mostly I’d seen it used by administrators to get even with teachers they didn’t like–teachers they couldn’t cow, or bully, or intimidate.

  I asked, “How’d they find out what you were doing?”

  “The police told them.”

  So the cops had tattled.

  My voice rose over the histrionic weeping. I said, “So you’d prefer to lie and destroy my life.”

  “Better you than me. I don’t know you. Well, okay, I know you’re rich. You’re famous. You’ve been on talk shows. You sit there at those faculty meetings as if you’re better than us.”

  “I may or may not be better than you are, but you are moral poison. You’d tell lie after lie after lie, and you wouldn’t care how much it hurt someone else. And if they weren’t lies, they were distortions. Did you kill Eberson or Higden?”

  “No. I didn’t know Gracie was in there. I swear to god, I didn’t know she was in there.”

  “Who told you to lie?”

  “They all did.”

  “They who?”

  “The superintendent, the head of the board, the head of the department, the principal.”

  “Did they tell you why?”

  “No. They just told me what to do. I had to do it. I didn’t have time to think. I couldn’t discuss it with anyone outside that group. I couldn’t tell my wife any of this. How could I tell her I was cheating on her?”

  “Weren’t you frightened that one of them might be a killer?”

  “No. They just told me what to say. I guess I assumed one of them might have done it, or they were all in on it, but everybody kept saying it was the old guard. I didn’t want to think about it. I wanted to save my skin. Maybe somebody would kill me. I was scared. I’m still scared. Why aren’t you yelling at Milovec? He’s still here. I saw him heading down to the office. He’s a big part of this. Some of them are still here. Go confront them. They said they were going to meet after school today. They’re really pissed at you about the grades and test scores thing.”

  I said, “I didn’t do wrong.”

  “But you brought it out in the open.”

  “That was a group of us.”

  “But they blame you,” he wailed. “I was supposed to come up here and see if you’d gone. If you had, I was supposed to download everything from your computer onto my flash drive. They were determined. They are determined.”

  “Still planning?”

  “Supposed to be.”

  I thought for a while.

  “Am I going to lose my job?” he asked.

  “You will if I have anything to say about it. Are you going back to join them?”

  He stood for a moment in silence. “No,” he whispered. “No, I’m going home. I’m going to talk to my wife. I love her.”

  I didn’t hold out a lot of hope for that relationship.

  47

  Anger trumped all my other emotions. These people were plotting their lies even as I stood in my classroom. I told myself, Wait for Scott, wait for your lawyer, wait.

  But I was furious.

  The honesty of a single teenager.

  I told myself I should be able to be calm.

  But I wasn’t.

  My tears earlier were gone, replaced by steely resolve to fight anyone and everyone. I stalked out.

  First, I hunted for the head of the department. All the classrooms I passed were empty. No one was in the English department offices. I stomped down the stairs to the main office. The conference room was dark. The district offices were in an attached building next to ours. Unlike the main building in the school complex, their air-conditioning worked in summer and the heat system kept them nice and toasty in the winter. They were steps ahead of us in the high school on both counts.

  I found the superintendent, Riva Towne, still in. Her secretary barred the way. I said, “I have important information about the murders. I’ve got to talk to her.”

  “I was told to keep you out,” Harriet Smithers said. She smiled grimly. “However, you’ve done wonders for the secretaries since we got into the union. And Georgette is a friend. She told all of us to help you if she wasn’t around.” She nodded her head toward the double doors.

  I didn’t knock.

  Towne looked up from her desk. She was on the phone. She said, “I’ll have to call you back,” and hung up. I realized that I should have called Scott on my cell phone and left it on. Anger had trumped planning.

  “What are you doing here?” Ice and anger radiate
d in her tone and manner. I didn’t note the slightest trace of professionalism.

  I stood in front of her desk. I said, “I’d like to take a picture of you sitting here. I’d like to sell it on eBay so that people can see what ´evil incarnate’ looks like.”

  “That’s insubordination,” she said. “You’re fired.” Her eyes were flinty, her lips compressed into a sharp line.

  “Really? We’ll have to have an insubordination seminar. Do you have a witness to what I said? Oh, of course not, it’s just us. Or maybe you could get somebody to lie about it. That seems to be your management style. Get people to lie and hate each other and fight and get nothing done. The same ploys the other administrators in this district use. Unfortunately for you, the jig is up. Everything is going to come out. The statistics rigging. Teachers spying and lying. Having a teenager make false accusations. All of it.”

  For the first time she looked wary, but she wasn’t ready to back down yet. She said, “I’m surprised they haven’t arrested you. You’ll be lucky to have a job here. You run around being insubordinate because you’ve got a rich boyfriend.” She stood up. “Get out.”

  “It’s not that easy,” I said. I was breathing hard. I was nearly speechless with wrath. It was difficult to form the words, but I intended to get all of this out in the open.

  She said, “You look like you’re out of control.”

  I said, “I don’t believe you’re ever going to meet someone as angry as I am now. And you’re going to listen. Let’s start with Fred Zileski.”

  She bit her lip.

  I said, “Never trust a teenager to keep his mouth shut.” She said, “No one’s going to believe what a teenager says.”

  “Which would work against people believing what you wanted him to say about me. Your larger problem is that you’ve got to be more careful when you’re concocting a massive conspiracy. Somebody might wind up telling the truth. You’re amateurs. You involved too many people.”

  “You intimidated that boy. You can’t harass students.”