Murder, She Wrote--A Time for Murder

by Jessica Fletcher

  “I’m sure there are plenty. I’m just not sure Tyler Benjamin is one of them. I’d like to see the boy, Detective, and I think we need to have a talk with Jim Dirkson as well,” I said. What I couldn’t quite grasp before had crystalized in my mind.

  “The acting principal? Why?”

  “He claims to have spotted Tyler Benjamin lurking in the parking lot when he was leaving the building, right?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Then how is it he wasn’t in his own office when I was waiting to see Walter Reavis?”

  * * *

  * * *

  I guess I didn’t want to believe Tyler Benjamin was a killer. In the minds of many teachers, there’s no such thing as a truly bad kid. We want to believe they can all be redeemed if people like us put in the time. Of course, sometimes kids go bad in spite of the best efforts of their parents, teachers, and coaches. Sometimes it’s unavoidable.

  Had Walter Reavis paid the ultimate price for that oversight?

  Amos Tupper called me back just after noon the following day to let me know that the chief of the Appleton police had left early for the day, freeing up an opportunity for me to speak with Tyler. Frank was out giving flying lessons, Saturday being his busiest day. So, not wanting to inconvenience anyone, I decided to ride my bicycle over to the police station. Grady was at a friend’s house and I made sure to call to make sure they could keep him until I was back home.

  Of the many things Frank and I enjoyed doing together, fishing and bike riding were at the top of the list. We normally wouldn’t have done either with Thanksgiving breathing down our necks and the early bite of the Maine winter that came with that. But that day was unseasonably warm, the air crisp and clean with almost no wind to speak of, and I found myself full of energy as I pedaled across town, careful of the traffic.

  I can’t say exactly why I’ve never gotten a driver’s license. The explanation has shifted over the years, as I’ve sought the answer for myself. There was no catastrophic incident, no near-death experience either with me as a passenger or while I was learning how to drive. I think it comes down to the fact that I simply didn’t enjoy the process. It wasn’t like I felt a panic attack coming every time I tried to get behind the wheel. It was more like once seated there, I lost all desire to be anywhere else and thus drive there. The old saying that it’s not the destination but the journey didn’t apply to me, at least when I was doing the driving.

  People who know me well find it strange that I have a pilot’s license and not a driver’s license. I personally don’t.

  * * *

  * * *

  Tyler Benjamin looked terrified as we walked into the single interview room at the Appleton police station. It was actually the coffee room, but limited space required it to maintain multiple uses. And given the crime rate there in town, it got far more use for coffee than it did for interrogations or interviews. As a result, the single Formica table, which looked as if it had been lifted from the high school cafeteria, was circular instead of rectangular. Around the table were five chairs that also appeared identical to the ones at Appleton High.

  Tyler Benjamin sat at that table, hands and lips both trembling. Tom Jennings, the same uniformed officer who’d been guarding the main office when I arrived at school the morning Walter Reavis’s body had been found, stood against the wall with his arms crossed. He took our entry as his cue to leave. I saw the cuffs lashed to Tyler’s wrists and wanted to cry—something he had clearly been doing, judging by the tearstains down both cheeks. He wore an Appleton High hooded sweatshirt and was trembling visibly. His long, dark hair was damp at the edges and his deep-set eyes appeared more scared than brooding today. He looked at me and tried to smile but failed.

  “Hey, Mrs. Fletcher,” he said, his voice cracking.

  Amos Tupper and I took chairs across from and on either side of him; as usual, I was unable to hold my tongue when I saw something I felt was wrong.

  “Does he really need to be handcuffed, Detective? Can we take the cuffs off?”

  “I’m afraid not, Mrs. Fletcher.” Tupper frowned. “It’s department policy.”

  “There aren’t enough arrests here for this town to have a policy,” I said, not meaning to snap at him.

  “I didn’t do it, Mrs. Fletcher,” Tyler said, near tears. “I swear. I didn’t do it. . . .”

  His voice drifted off, as if he were speaking from someplace else, anywhere else in his mind, I imagined.

  “I know I shouldn’t have been there,” he resumed. “I knew I was breaking the rules of my expulsion, but I couldn’t help it. I had to talk to Mr. Reavis. I made a mistake. I know I was wrong, but I thought if I tried apologizing again . . .” Once more, emotion choked off his words.

  “What did Mr. Reavis say when you tried to apologize and plead your case to him again?”

  “That’s just it, Mrs. Fletcher. It’s like I tried to tell the detective. I never got the chance because I never saw him.”

  “You know you can have a lawyer present, Tyler,” I advised. “You don’t have to talk to us.”

  “I don’t want a lawyer here because I didn’t do anything. I don’t understand why everyone thinks I did. Somebody’s lying.”

  Detective Tupper frowned, obviously having heard that claim when he took the boy’s statement.

  “The guy—the lawyer my parents made me talk to—told me not to talk to the police. But you’re not the police.”

  “True enough.”

  “You were always nice to me, Mrs. Fletcher,” Tyler said, preferring to address me. “Not all teachers treated me like you did. I think I scared them.”

  At that moment, I had no idea why more of the faculty didn’t see this boy the way I saw him. Looking across the table, I certainly didn’t see a killer, but what did I know about such things?

  “In the statement he gave Detective Tupper, Mr. Dirkson claims he saw you in the parking lot,” I said. “He described you as ‘lurking.’”

  “‘Lurking’?”

  “That’s what he said.”

  “It’s a lie, Mrs. Fletcher.”

  “You weren’t in the parking lot?”

  “Yes, but that’s not where he saw me. He saw me when I knocked on the door to the office. Mr. Reavis’s car was still parked in the space reserved for the principal, so I knew he must be there, but the door was locked. So I knocked, and he answered.”

  “Mr. Reavis?”

  “No, Mr. Dirkson.”

  “Wait,” I said, thrown by this. “You’re saying Mr. Dirkson opened the door when you knocked.”

  “More like banged. Nobody responded when I knocked. I was ready to break the door down—that’s how much I wanted to tell Mr. Reavis how sorry I was and ask him if there was anything I could do, anything at all, to make him, you know, change the expulsion to a suspension or something.”

  I turned to Amos Tupper and got the sense he was hearing this version of things for the first time, that Tyler had left it out of his statement. Given how he must have felt after being arrested, I couldn’t blame him for either neglecting to mention that or forgetting about it altogether.

  “If I can’t play football in college, I don’t know what I’m going to do,” Tyler added, sniffling.

  “What time would this have been, Tyler?” I asked him.

  “When?”

  “When you came to the school, when you knocked on the door?”

  “I thought Mr. Reavis would be alone in the office, especially when I saw Ms. Potts leaving.”

  “Alma Potts? Mr. Reavis’s secretary?” I asked, recalling that Alma had been out sick the day of Walter Reavis’s murder.

  “Yes, I watched her driving away.”

  “Her or her car, son?” Detective Tupper asked him.

  “Who else would have been driving her car?”

  “Just answer the quest
ion.”

  “I recognized her behind the wheel. Just a glimpse, but that was enough.”

  “Did you see the license plate number?”

  The boy shrugged, his big shoulders slumping. “No.”

  “So the car might’ve just looked like hers, right?”

  “Well,” he told Amos Tupper, “it was white like hers. Oh, and it backfired.”

  “Backfired?”

  “You know, like a gunshot. I thought it was going to stall.”

  “Tyler,” I started, “I need to ask you again what time this was.”

  He shook his head, his hair flopping about. “I don’t know. I wasn’t wearing my watch.”

  “Was it dark?”

  “Oh, for sure. Ms. Potts’s car had its lights on,” he said, looking toward Tupper briefly. “That’s why I only caught a glimpse of her. Yeah, it was definitely dark.”

  That meant it had to be after the sun went down, which would’ve been four thirty or so this time of year. I had left the office, after hearing Walter Reavis arguing with someone over the phone, around quarter to four, when there was still light left in the sky. The office door hadn’t been locked, and I’d seen no sign of Jim Dirkson. I tried to remember whether the door to his office, located across the hall from Walter’s, was open or closed, but I couldn’t.

  “What else did you see when Mr. Dirkson opened the office door, Tyler?”

  “Er, nothing.”

  “Did you see Mr. Reavis?”

  “No, Mrs. Fletcher, I didn’t see anything. Just Mr. Dirkson. He wouldn’t let me in. I lied and told him Mr. Reavis had asked me to stop by, but he told me to get out, that he was going to report me to the police for trespassing or something. He said I was going to jail. He never did like me. You know that.”

  Truth be told, I think our acting principal, Jim Dirkson, hated kids in general. Why he chose education as his profession, I’ll never understand.

  I looked at Tyler Benjamin and tried to reconcile my own experiences with the boy with the reputation for violence that had led directly to his expulsion. I couldn’t help myself from taking our conversation in another direction.

  “Tell me about this outburst you had in class, Tyler, the one that led to your expulsion.”

  His eyes moistened with tears. He swiped a sleeve to wipe them away, no easy task with his hands lashed together. When he responded, he kept his gaze angled downward, casting me an occasional furtive glance.

  “Mr. MacMillan’s got it in for me, Mrs. Fletcher. He told me to go to the office and see the principal, and I wouldn’t go.”

  “Why did he tell you to leave class?”

  “He doesn’t like me.”

  “That’s not a reason to tell a student to go to the office.”

  “I didn’t do anything other than say something to the kid next to me when he was passing out a quiz—that’s all. And he still sent me to the office, which meant I was going to get a zero. I couldn’t just take that. I had to stand up to him. I think he was smiling when I was yelling at him because he knew he had me.”

  “Did you threaten Mr. MacMillan in any way?”

  The boy shrugged his broad shoulders. “I don’t know. I don’t think so, but I don’t remember everything I said. I guess it’s possible.”

  “Did you explain all this to Mr. Reavis?”

  “I saw Mr. Dirkson first. He’s the one who told me I was going to get expelled over this. I saw Mr. Reavis later, but he said there was nothing he could do. His hands were tied, he said. It was in the school board’s hands. Don’t you get it, Mrs. Fletcher? If I was coming to school that day to hurt somebody, it wouldn’t have been Mr. Reavis. It would have been Mr. Dirkson or Mr. MacMillan. I was coming to see Mr. Reavis to beg him for another chance. It wasn’t like I hit anybody or something.” The boy’s eyes welled with water again, and this time he made no effort to swipe away the tears, which now poured down his cheeks. “I didn’t do it, Mrs. Fletcher. I don’t want to go to prison. They told me I could spend the rest of my life there.”

  “You’re not going to prison, Tyler,” I promised him.

  “You’re just a teacher. What can you do about it?”

  I glanced at Amos Tupper and then back at the boy. “I can find the real killer.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  The present

  You caught the real killer, right?” Mort asked me when I stopped my narrative there, the SUV still running.

  I nodded. “Turned out, it—”

  “No, don’t tell me.”

  “I was just about to get to the best part.”

  “All right, tell me.”

  My phone rang before I could resume my tale, and HARRY lit up in the caller ID.

  “Harry,” I greeted him, on speaker.

  “He’s not available.”

  “You called me,” I reminded him.

  “Must have been a butt dial. Who is this?”

  “What did you find out about Lisa Joy Reavis?”

  “Who?”

  “The topic you must be calling about.”

  “Oh, yeah. How about this? I’ll let you know when I’ve got something, and I’ll make sure the next time you hear from me, it’s not my butt placing the call.”

  “I’d appreciate that, Harry.”

  “But since I’ve got you on the line now, an update would seem to be in order,” he told me. “The last confirmed whereabouts of one Lisa Joy Reavis were at Robert E. Lee Elementary School in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, home of the Crimson Tide. Prior to that she received her degree in education at the University of Virginia. One of my daughters got her degree in teaching, you know.”

  “I didn’t, actually. You never told me, Harry.”

  “She didn’t last long enough in the profession for me to. Kept getting laid off and ended up teaching at a Catholic school for less than you pay me.”

  “I don’t pay you anything . . .”

  “My point exactly.”

  “. . . because you never send me a bill.”

  “I’m going to make an exception in this case. A hundred times my normal rate to make up for all the other work I’ve done for the great Jessica Fletcher.”

  “What is your normal rate?”

  “I don’t have one. Hey, is Mort there?”

  I looked across the front seat of his SUV. “How’d you know?”

  “I’m a detective. It’s my business to know.”

  “You heard the car running, right?”

  “I prefer to call it using my powers of deductive reasoning.”

  Mort rolled his eyes.

  “Getting back to Lisa Joy Reavis . . .”

  “Getting back to Lisa Joy Reavis,” Harry McGraw picked up, “she took this job at Robert E. Lee Elementary in Tuscaloosa, where she remained for five years. By all accounts from the people I was able to track down, she was one of the most popular teachers in the building.”

  “Why do I think this story doesn’t have a happy ending?”

  “Because it doesn’t. Lisa Joy Reavis died in a car accident the summer after her fifth year at Robert E. Lee Elementary. And wait for it. . . .”

  “Don’t tell me she . . .”

  “That’s right, my dear Jessica. Lisa Joy Reavis just might have been murdered, too.”

  Mort looked as stunned as I was.

  “Is this based on factual evidence or that overactive imagination of yours?” I asked Harry.

  “I don’t have an overactive imagination. In fact, I don’t have any imagination. It’s why I never read your books.”

  “Thanks, Harry.”

  “You’re welcome. Anyway, we’re going back a bunch of years now, fourteen to be exact. There was one detail the detective on the case could never quite figure out. He just retired as chief of the Tuscaloosa Police Department, and I managed
to track him down.”

  “Have I told you lately how good you are at this?”

  “Not enough. Ever heard of Highway Four-thirty-one, Jess?”

  “Since I never got my driver’s license, I don’t pay a lot of attention to highways, Harry.”

  “You should make an exception in this case, because it’s right up your alley. Highway Four-thirty-one, aka the ‘Highway to Hell,’ is generally regarded as one of the most dangerous roads in the world, never mind just Alabama or even the country as a whole. It runs north to south along the eastern portion of the state, and Lisa Joy Reavis had the misfortune of being on it on a stormy night with even worse visibility than usual.”

  “Misfortune doesn’t normally equal murder.”

  “A tire blowing out caused the crash. Remember I told you there was one detail that just-retired chief couldn’t figure out?”

  “You mean, what you shared not more than thirty seconds ago?”

  “I’ve learned to take nothing for granted, my dear lady, just like the former police chief of Tuscaloosa, Alabama—specifically, the presence of butane on rubber samples lifted from the blown tire.”

  “Butane, as in lighter fluid?”

  I pictured Harry nodding as he responded, “The very same. What the chief didn’t know, but I was all too happy to inform him of, was what happens when you inject butane into a tire through the valve stem using a syringe.”

  “Don’t tell me, Harry: The butane causes a blowout.”

  “Boy, I can’t put anything over on you, can I? You should consider doing this kind of thing for a living. Say, have you ever considered becoming a writer?”

  “Right now, I’m seriously considering hanging up.”

  “No, you aren’t, because I haven’t gotten to the best part yet: specifically, that the butane rolls around the inside of the tire until the rubber heats up sufficiently and then boom!”

  “How hot are we talking, Harry?”

  “Well, critical mass for that boom would be around a hundred and seventy-five degrees. At fifty miles per hour, after traveling twenty miles, the average tire temperature would be around a hundred and fifty. But since Ms. Reavis was driving an SUV with tires known to heat up faster and hotter, we’re talking the perfect crime here.”