School Days

by Robert B. Parker

  “My guess? He took off his mask and ditched his guns and ran out with the other kids early in the proceedings.”

  “Must have been a Chinese fire drill,” I said.

  “Especially before our guys showed up. When it was just the local cops.”

  “Did you get there?”

  DiBella nodded.

  “Me, everybody. I came in with the negotiation team. SWAT guys were already there. The bomb squad showed up a little after me. There were two or three local departments on the scene. Nobody in overall charge. One department didn’t want to take orders from another department. None of them wanted to take orders from us. Took a while for the SWAT commander to get control of the thing. And when he did, we still didn’t know who was in there, or how many. We didn’t know if the place was rigged. We didn’t know if they had hostages, or how many. We’d have shot somebody if we knew who to shoot. Kids were jumping out windows and running out fire doors.”

  “Who went in?”

  “Hostage negotiator. Guy named Gabe Leonard. Everybody was milling around, trying to figure how to get in touch inside, and the bomb-squad guys were trying to figure how to tell if the place was rigged. I was trying to get a coherent story from anybody, a student or teacher who’d been inside and was now outside, and Gabe says, ‘fuck this,’ and puts on a vest and walks in the front door.”

  “And nothing blew up,” I said.

  “Nothing,” DiBella said.

  We were out of coffee. I got up and got us two more cups.

  “Gabe walks through the place, which is empty, like he’s walking on hummingbird eggs. There’s nobody else in there except the bodies, and finally the kid, in the president’s office, with the door locked. They establish contact through the locked door and Gabe eventually gets the kid to answer the phone. Kid says he will, and Gabe calls out to us and one of the hostage guys calls the number and patches Gabe in, and they’re in business. Gabe, and the kid, and us listening in.”

  “How’d he get him out,” I said.

  “I’ll get you a transcript, but basically, he said, ‘Be a stand-up guy. Whatever you were trying to prove, you need to finish it off by walking out straight up, not have us come in and drag out your corpse.’ ”

  “And the kid says, ‘You’re right,’ and he opens the door and comes out,” DiBella said. “Takes off his ski mask. Gabe takes his guns, and they walk out together. Gabe said he wouldn’t cuff him, and he didn’t.”

  “Until he got outside,” I said.

  “Oh, sure, then the SWAT guys swarmed him and off he went.”

  “Film at eleven,” I said.

  “A lot of it,” DiBella said.

  4

  THE DOWLING SCHOOL was on the western end of town, among a lot of tall pine trees. I drove between the big brick pillars, under the wrought-iron arch, up the curving cobblestone drive, and parked in front, by a sign that said FACULTY ONLY. There was one other car in front, a late-model Buick sedan.

  The place had the deserted quality that schools have when they’re not in session. The main building had a stone façade with towers at either end and a crenellated roofline between them. The front door was appropriate to the neo-castle style, high and made of oak planking with big wrought-iron strap hinges and an impressive iron handle. It was locked. I located a doorbell and rang it. There was silence for a long time, until finally the door opened and a woman appeared.

  “Hello,” she said.

  “My name is Spenser,” I said. “I’m working on the shooting case and wondered if I might come in and look around.”

  “Are you a policeman?” the woman said.

  “I’m a private detective,” I said. “Jared Clark’s grandmother hired me.”

  “May I see some identification?”

  “Sure.”

  I showed her some. She read it carefully, and returned it.

  “My name is Sue Biegler,” she said. “I am the Dean of Students.”

  “How nice for you,” I said.

  “And the students,” she said.

  I smiled. One point for Dean Biegler.

  “What is it you wish to see?” she said.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I just need to walk around, feel the place a little, see what everything looks like.”

  Dean Biegler stood in the doorway for a moment.

  “Well,” she said.

  I waited.

  “Well, I really don’t have anyone to show you around,” she said.

  “That’s a good thing,” I said. “I like to walk around alone, take my time, see what it feels like. I won’t steal any exam booklets.”

  She smiled.

  “You sound positively impressionistic,” she said.

  “Impressively so,” I said.

  She smiled again and sighed.

  “Come in,” she said. “Help yourself. If you need something, my office is here down this corridor.”

  “Thank you.”

  Inside, it smelled like a school. It was air-conditioned and clean, but the smell of school was adamant. I never knew what the smell was. Youth? Chalk dust? Industrial cleaner? Boredom?

  I had seen enough diagrams of the school and the action in the newspapers to know my way around. There were four offices, including Dean Biegler’s, opening off the central lobby. The rest of the school occupied two floors in each of two wings that ran left and right out of the lobby. The school gym was behind the rest of the school, connected by a narrow corridor, and beyond the gym were the athletic fields. There was a cafeteria in the basement of the school, along with rest rooms and the custodial facilities. A library was at the far end of the left wing. Stairs went to the second floor in stairwells on each side of the lobby. On the second floor above the lobby were the teachers’ lounge and the guidance offices. I began to stroll.

  They had come in the front door, apparently, and past the offices in the lobby and turned left down the long corridor that ended at the library. Each was wearing a ski mask. Each was carrying two guns. Each had a backpack with extra ammunition in magazines, color-coded to the guns they had. They shot the first teacher they encountered, a young woman named Ruth Cort who had no class that period, and who had probably been on her way from the teachers’ lounge upstairs to the library. She had bullets from two different guns in her. But there was no way to say if she had been shot by one shooter with two guns, or two shooters, one gun each. In fact, they had never been able to establish who shot whom. The guns and the backpacks were simply left on a table in the library when Grant came out, and no one could identify which had been used by whom. The cops had tried backtracking, establishing who had what color coding on which gun, but the eye-witnesses gave all possible versions, and it proved fruitless. There was powder residue on two coveralls that the shooters had discarded in the library, but none on their hands, because they wore gloves. The gloves, too, were discarded, and there was no way to establish which pair belonged to whom. Both had powder residue on them.

  The Norman Keep conceit ended in the lobby. The cinder-block corridor was painted two tones of green and lined with lockers, punctuated by gray metal classroom doors. I went into the first classroom. The walls were plasterboard painted like the corridor. There was a chalkboard, windows, chairs with writing arms. A teacher’s table up front with a lectern on it. Chalk in the tray at the bottom of the chalkboard. A big, round electric clock on the wall above the door. It had the personality of a holding pen.

  I could taste the stiflement, the limitation, the deadly boredom, the elephantine plod of the clock as it ground through the day. I could remember looking through windows like these at the world of the living outside the school. People actually going about freely. I tried to remember what Henry Adams had written. ‘A teacher is a man employed to tell lies to little boys’? Something like that. I wondered if anyone had lied to little girls in those days.

  I moved on down the corridor, following the route of the shooters. I was wearing loafers with leather heels. I could hear my own footste
ps ringing in the hard, empty space. The shooters hadn’t made it to the second floor. The first Dowling cops had shown up about the time the shooters reached the library, and the shooters holed up there. Hostages were facedown on the floor, including the school librarian, a woman of fifty-seven, and a male math teacher who had been in there reading The New York Times. I could almost feel their moment, complete control, everybody doing what they were told, even the teachers. The room was unusual in no way. Reading tables, books, newspapers in a rack, the librarian’s desk up front. Quiet Please. I looked at some of the books: Ivanhoe, Outline of History, Shakespeare: Collected Works, The Red Badge of Courage, Walden, The Catcher in the Rye, Native Son. Nothing dangerous. No bad swearing.

  The windows faced west. And the late sun, low enough now to shine nearly straight through the windows, made the languid dust motes glisten with its gaze. I walked to the back of the library, near the big globe that stood in the far corner. I would have stood there, where I could see the door and the windows, holding a loaded gun in either hand, in command. King of the scene.

  The library door opened as I stood looking at the room, and two Dowling cops walked in. They were young. One was bigger. They were both wearing straw Smokey the Bear hats. Summer-issue.

  “What exactly are you doing here?” the bigger one said.

  “Reliving school days,” I said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “School days,” I said. “You know. Dear old golden-rule days.”

  They both frowned.

  “Chief wants us to bring you over to the station,” the bigger one said.

  The fact that the chief wanted me didn’t mean I had to go. But I thought it would be in my best interest to cooperate with the local cops, at least until it wasn’t.

  “I’ve got my car,” I said. “I’ll follow you down.”

  5

  THE DOWLING POLICE STATION looked like a rambling, white-shingled Cape. The Dowling police chief looked like a Methodist minister I had known once in Laramie, when I was a little kid. He was tall and thin with a gray crew cut and a close-cropped gray moustache. His glasses were rimless. He wore a white shirt with short sleeves and epaulets and some sort of crest pinned to each epaulet. The shirt was pressed with military creases. His chief’s badge was large and gold. His black gun belt was off, folded neatly and lying on the side table near his desk. His gun was in the holster, a big-caliber pearl-handled revolver.

  “I’m Cromwell,” he said. “Chief of Police.”

  “Spenser,” I said.

  “I know your name,” Cromwell said. “Sit down.”

  I sat.

  “Real tragedy,” Cromwell said, “what happened over at that school.”

  I nodded.

  “We got there as soon as we heard, contained it, waited for backup and cooperated in the apprehension of the perpetrators,” Cromwell said.

  I nodded.

  “You ever been a police officer, Spenser?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you know how it goes. You do the job, and the press looks for some way to make you look bad.”

  I waited.

  “We got some bad press. It came from people who do not know anything at all about policework. But it has stung my department, and, to be honest with you, it has stung me.”

  I nodded.

  “We played it by the book,” Cromwell said. “Straight down the line. By the book. And, by God, we kept a tragedy from turning into a holocaust.”

  “Should I be taking notes?” I said.

  Cromwell leaned back in his chair and looked at me hard. He pointed a finger at me, and jabbed it in my direction a couple of times.

  “Now that was a wiseassed remark,” Cromwell said. “And you might as well know it right up front. We have zero tolerance for wiseasses around here.”

  I liked the we. I wondered if it was the royal we, as in we are not amused. On the other hand, it still seemed in my best interest to get along with the local cops. I looked contrite.

  “I’ll try to do better,” I said.

  “Be a good idea,” Cromwell said. “Now what we don’t need is somebody coming along and poking around and riling everybody up again.”

  I was back to nodding again. Cromwell liked nodding.

  “So, who hired you?” Cromwell said.

  I thought about that for a moment. On the one hand, there was no special reason not to tell him. Healy knew. DiBella already knew. On the other hand, it didn’t do my career any good to spill my client’s name to every cop who asked. Besides, he was annoying me. I shook my head.

  “You’re not a lawyer,” Cromwell said. “You have no privilege.”

  “When I’m employed by an attorney on behalf of a client, there is some extension of privilege,” I said.

  “Who’s the lawyer?” Cromwell said.

  “I’m not employed by a lawyer,” I said.

  “Than what the hell are you talking about?” Cromwell said.

  “I rarely know,” I said.

  I smiled my winning smile.

  “What’s our policy on wiseasses around here?” Cromwell said.

  “Zero tolerance,” I said. “Except for me.”

  Cromwell didn’t say anything for a time. He folded his arms across his narrow chest and looked at me with his dead-eyed cop look. I waited.

  Finally, he said, “Let me make this as clear and as simple as I can. We don’t want you around here, nosing into a case that is already closed.”

  I nodded.

  “And we are prepared to make it very unpleasant for you if you persist.”

  I nodded.

  “You have anything to say to that?” Cromwell said.

  “How about, Great Caesar’s Ghost!” I said.

  Cromwell kept the dead-eyed stare on me.

  “Or maybe just an audible swallow,” I said.

  Cromwell kept the stare.

  “A little pallor?” I said.

  Cromwell stared at me some more.

  “Get the hell out of here,” Cromwell said finally.

  I stood.

  “You must have screwed this up pretty bad,” I said.

  “If you’re smart, you son of a bitch,” Cromwell said, “you won’t be back.”

  “I never claimed smart,” I said, and walked out the door.

  At least he didn’t shoot me.

  6

  FRESH FROM MY TRIUMPH with the Chief of Police, I thought I might as well go and charm the kid’s lawyer, too.

  Richard Leeland had an office in a small shopping center, upstairs over the village grocery. From his window you could look at the eighteenth-century meeting house which lent New England authenticity to the town common, so you wouldn’t get confused and think you were in Chicago.

  “Wow,” he said, “a private eye. We don’t run into many private eyes out here.”

  “Your loss,” I said.

  “I’m sure,” Leeland said. “May I ask you a question?”

  He was a tall, slim man with a well-tanned bald head. He looked like he’d be good at tennis or bike riding.

  “Sure.”

  “Who hired you to try and clear Jared?”

  “You don’t know?” I said.

  Leeland smiled.

  “It’s why I’m asking,” he said.

  I thought about it for a minute. It made no sense that he didn’t know, and it made no sense for me to keep secrets from my client’s lawyer.

  “His grandmother,” I said.

  “Oh, God,” Leeland said, “Lily.”

  “Oh, God?” I said.

  “She means well,” Leeland said, “but she’s beginning to show her age.”

  I nodded. Leeland was silent, his left hand at his mouth, looking at me, squeezing his lower lip between his thumb and forefinger. I waited.

  After a while he said, “Jared confessed, you know.”

  I nodded.

  “The Grant kid says Jared was with him.”

  I nodded.

  “Doesn’t that s
eem like you really have no case?” Leeland said.

  “I have a case,” I said. “I just don’t know the outcome.”

  “The boy’s guilty,” Leeland said.

  “Mrs. Ellsworth thinks otherwise.”

  “For God’s sake, Spenser. She wouldn’t believe it if she saw him do it.”

  “So you’re going to plead him?”

  “Guilty, see if we can bargain.”

  “How about insanity?” I said.

  “He knew what he did was wrong,” Leeland said.

  “Irresistible compulsion?” I said.

  He shrugged.

  “Won’t fly,” he said.

  “You have a shrink talk to him?” I said.

  “We have the Dowling Academy consulting psychologist.”

  I nodded. “Name?”

  “Why do you want to know?” Leeland said.

  “I want to talk with him or her.”

  “I don’t know if I should tell you,” Leeland said.

  “You think I can’t find the name of the Dowling Academy consulting shrink?” I said.

  Leeland shrugged.

  “Her,” he said. “Dr. Blair, Beth Ann Blair.”

  “See,” I said, “how easy that was?”

  “Mr. Spenser,” Leeland said. “The boy is guilty. I know it, his parents know it, everyone knows it.”

  “Except Mrs. Ellsworth,” I said.

  Leeland ignored me.

  “My job,” he said, “quite frankly, is to try and soften the consequences the best way I can.”

  I nodded.

  “Have you ever tried a murder case?” I said.

  “Not really.”

  “Not really? How do you not really try a murder case?”

  “I guess I meant no, I haven’t,” Leeland said.

  “Do you know who’s prosecuting?”

  “Bethel County District Attorney’s office.”

  “Know the prosecutor?” I said.

  “His name is Francis Cleary.”

  “Be interesting to know how many murder cases their guy has tried.”

  “I’m a damned good lawyer,” Leeland said. “I resent what you’re implying.”

  I nodded. Spreading good will wherever I went.