Murder, She Wrote--A Time for Murder

by Jessica Fletcher

  “Except my fingerprints weren’t found on the murder weapon. Maybe you’re forgetting that, Mrs. Fletcher.”

  “Not at all. But as a former football coach who continues to maintain close ties with the Appleton High program, you would have known Tyler’s prints would be on the trophy. That would explain your choice of weapon. Whether you’re actually guilty or not, how can you, as an educator, in good conscience condemn a boy to life in prison? If nothing else, Mr. Dirkson, you should at least come clean about denying Tyler entry to the office that day.”

  Dirkson’s features flared, his chest puffed up, and his paunchy stomach seemed to flatten a bit. “I have come clean, Mrs. Fletcher, and I’m done explaining myself to a substitute teacher. Maybe you should choose who you work with more wisely, Mr. Tupper.”

  “That’s Detective Tupper.” He rose from his chair enough to lift the phone receiver from its cradle and extend it across the desk. “You want to call the chief, go right ahead. It’ll save me the trouble of telling him about this interview myself. Maybe you’ll even save me the bother of writing out my report.”

  Dirkson snickered, laying the receiver down. “Perhaps you should ask Mrs. Fletcher to write it for you. She seems to be the one in charge here.”

  His remark had been meant to get a rise out of Amos, but the detective simply smiled. “I know there’re folks in this town who don’t have a lot of respect for me. They’re free to think anything they want, but after I solve this case, they’re going to look at me differently.”

  “When you call the chief,” I said, “make sure to tell him the truth about Tyler Benjamin. Giving false testimony is a crime, Mr. Dirkson. You could be hauled out of here in handcuffs.”

  “Over my dead body.”

  “That’s the same thing Walter Reavis said to you, isn’t it?” I said.

  “He called you about something,” Amos Tupper interjected. “Your home number was the last one he dialed, at a time that jibes perfectly with Mrs. Fletcher’s statement.”

  The air went out of Jim Dirkson. His chest seemed to deflate, his whole body went limp in the chair, and his confident gaze turned fluttery and uncertain.

  “Care to tell us the subject of your conversation?” Amos Tupper pressed Dirkson after shooting a glance my way.

  “Walter Reavis was taking certain liberties with the school budget, Detective, particularly with the discretionary funds, and I have the documentation to prove it.”

  “Go on.”

  “Specifically, he was redirecting sums allocated to other areas to staffing, holding on to teachers who were supposed to be laid off and diverting funds to long-term-substitute-teacher costs that were strictly against administrative rules.”

  I felt my stomach sink. Not only had Walter Reavis been in my corner; he’d broken the rules to keep me in the building on a full-time basis.

  “I’m the vice principal,” Dirkson continued, “so curriculum falls under my purview. That’s how I discovered the discrepancies.”

  “You threatened him,” I couldn’t help but say to him.

  “I advised him to come clean, fess up to what he’d been doing so the school board could take proper action.”

  “By which you mean firing him.”

  “That would have been their call.”

  “But you were prepared to force the issue, weren’t you, Mr. Dirkson? And just whom do you think the board would have appointed to replace Mr. Reavis once he was fired or suspended?”

  “What Mrs. Fletcher is saying—” Amos Tupper started.

  “I know what she’s saying,” Dirkson said, his gaze boring into me. “I don’t deny we had a heated argument, that Walter said something to the effect of ‘Over my dead body’ after I told him to come clean or I would. But that’s where it ended.”

  “So the subject of these affairs he’d been rumored to have over the years never came up?” I asked him.

  “Why would it?”

  “Because it occurs to me, Mr. Dirkson, that you could have threatened to expose Walter for that if he didn’t just resign on his own.”

  Dirkson smirked. “I could’ve done that anytime in the past ten years, if the rumors were true. But that’s all they were—rumors. And I’ve heard plenty worse ones passed around about myself.”

  That was the first thing he’d said that I fully believed, but I wasn’t finished yet.

  “It didn’t really end with that phone call, though, did it?” I challenged. “Because you got in your car and came back here. You say you spotted Tyler entering the building, and he claims you opened the door to the office after he knocked. Either way, you came back after a conversation you admit was heated. That’s suspicious any way you slice it.”

  Dirkson rose from his chair, looking neither as tall nor as broad as he had just minutes before. Maybe the bullhorn made the man.

  “I came back to finish my conversation with Walter in person and give him the evidence I’d found in the hope it would spur him to do the right thing. But the door to his office was locked, so I assumed he’d left for the day.”

  “Even though his car was still in the parking lot?”

  “To tell you the truth, I didn’t notice. Now that I look back, it’s clear that Tyler Benjamin had already killed Walter by the time I got back here. That’s why he’s pointing the finger at me instead, Mrs. Fletcher. Even an amateur detective should be able to see that.”

  In that moment, I so wanted Jim Dirkson to be guilty. Thanks to his antipathy toward me in particular, and the way he held substitute teachers and clerical personnel in thinly disguised disdain, nothing would have given me more pleasure in that moment than finding a clue that definitively implicated him in Walter’s murder. Of course, it was as much about finding justice for a man who’d believed in me. But I also wondered how much I might be letting my animosity toward Dirkson cloud my thinking. He’d never bothered to disguise the extreme disappointment and anger he felt over not being appointed to a job he thought he deserved, and he had seemed to make it a point to take his feelings out on underlings like me, who couldn’t push back. Being a bully, though, didn’t make him a killer, no matter how much I wanted that to be the case.

  * * *

  * * *

  “Are you going to release Tyler Benjamin?” I asked Detective Tupper outside the school office after we’d wrapped up our interview.

  “From what I heard in there, Mr. Dirkson’s sticking to his story,” he reminded me.

  “His statement is still the only thing linking the boy to the murder. It’s his word against Tyler’s.”

  “There’re also Tyler’s fingerprint on the murder weapon, Mrs. Fletcher.”

  “Sure, but he’d handled the trophy previously, remember? Of course, his fingerprint would still be there.”

  “That’s a fair point. But we can’t deny the fact that he threatened a teacher—”

  “Something he denies.”

  “—and had those two previous classroom outbursts, establishing a pattern it’s difficult to explain away.”

  “Tyler Benjamin didn’t kill Principal Reavis, Amos,” I said with more assurance in my voice than I had a right to include.

  “How can you be so sure about that?”

  “I don’t know. I just am. Just assume for one moment that Tyler’s telling the truth and Jim Dirkson really was in the office around the time Walter Reavis was murdered. This would be the same Jim Dirkson who admits he argued with Walter over the phone and then drove back to the school in what might well have been a fit of rage.”

  “So why lie about being in the office, Mrs. Fletcher?”

  “Because Tyler showed up at the perfect time for Dirkson to set him up as the killer. He knew it would be his word against the boy’s, and whom would the police be more likely to believe?”

  “I see your point,” Detective Tupper said, frowning. “But that
doesn’t give us nearly enough to make a case against the now acting head of the school, does it?”

  “Not yet,” I conceded.

  * * *

  * * *

  After last period was over, I sat at Bill Gower’s desk in a fog. The afternoon sun was streaming through the windows, just as it had during my last conversation with Walter Reavis in his office, because Alma Potts hadn’t been there to close his blinds as was her custom. It didn’t surprise me one bit that Walter had been diverting funds to avoid having to lay off teachers—cooking the books, as they say. He had more than gone out on a limb for me; he’d risked his job for me and others to do the right thing by the eight hundred students who filled the school a hundred and eighty days every year. He was an old-school educator and arguably not a great fit for an educational system that relied increasingly on test scores and that had made budget cuts the rule instead of the exception. He had been a teacher for fifteen years himself before moving over to the administrative side of things. I imagined he’d spent many days sitting just as I was now, doing the best job possible of reaching his students.

  With the sun blazing into his eyes.

  I got up and pulled the blinds down gently, so as not to disturb the tape that was already keeping them together. Maybe Walter Reavis had allocated the money for new blinds to holding on to more teachers, something I could hardy argue with, given that—

  I felt something hit me like a pillow to my face. I thought I was about to lose my balance and actually clutched the radiator to stop from falling, my knees having gone wobbly. I felt something flutter in my stomach as an icy feather scratched at my spine.

  * * *

  * * *

  Alma Potts’s Chevrolet Cavalier thumped and bumped its way forward, belting out a final backfire before settling on its way. The buses, even the single late one, were long gone, so the parking lot was pretty much empty when I stepped out in front of the car before Alma could swing onto the exit drive leading to the street.

  “Is something wrong, Mrs. Fletcher?” she asked, rolling her window down. “Do you need a ride?”

  “No, Alma.”

  That was when she spotted Amos Tupper approaching from behind a nest of bushes set around a single maple tree, with Tyler Benjamin by his side. The two of them were trailed by a pair of Appleton’s uniformed officers, Tom Jennings and another whose name slipped my mind.

  “Son, is this the car you saw leaving the parking lot the afternoon Principal Reavis was murdered?” Amos asked when he was close enough for Alma to hear him.

  The boy swallowed hard. “It’s definitely the car I heard leaving. There’s no mistaking that backfire.”

  I looked back at Alma.

  “Come to think of it, Mrs. Fletcher,” she said, “I did come back to the office to pick up some spreadsheets so I could work on them at home. But the young man was right: The office door was locked, and I’d forgotten to bring the right set of keys with me, I’d rushed out so fast.”

  I nodded, pretending as if I believed her. “Did you notice Jim Dirkson inside?”

  “No, I didn’t,” she said with her eyes straying beyond Amos to those two uniformed officers.

  “But for the record, you are confirming at least a portion of Tyler’s story.”

  “I suppose I am.”

  “Then why didn’t you do so earlier this afternoon when Detective Tupper and I interviewed Acting Principal Dirkson?”

  Her eyes teared up. “I was afraid he’d fire me, and I can’t afford to lose my job, the medical benefits and all. I’m a single mother trying to raise two teenagers.”

  “I understand, Alma.”

  “You do?” she asked, a ring of hope lacing her voice as if there might yet be a way out of this.

  “Yes. I understand that you murdered Walter Reavis.”

  * * *

  * * *

  Alma just stared at me in response, a still shot as opposed to a moving picture, looking utterly frozen.

  “I don’t think you had any intention of killing him,” I continued. “I think you did come back for those spreadsheets, just as you claim. Then, when you saw he was still in his office, alone, you decided to confront him. He was carrying on with another teacher, wasn’t he? The rumors about him having tawdry affairs from time to time over the years, rumors I scoffed at, were true. Maybe you warned him to stop or you’d report him at long last. All because you were jealous. That’s it, isn’t it, Alma? That’s why he brought you with him from the middle school when he was named principal of Appleton High. Because the two of you were having an affair at the time.”

  Alma Potts looked up at me from the driver’s seat, her eyes welling with tears. She didn’t bother denying a thing I had said; there was no point.

  “Things spun out of control, didn’t they? An argument ensued. Maybe it was Walter who threatened to fire you. That’s when you grabbed the trophy from his shelf. The football must’ve popped off from the figurine’s grasp, so Walter leaned over to pick it up. That’s when you struck him, when he was starting to stand back up, which explains why it appeared someone taller than he killed him. You could only have done it in a fit of pent-up rage that had been building when he started carrying on with a woman who wasn’t you.”

  Alma Potts sniffled. “She wasn’t the only one over the years. But I kept quiet the whole time, hoping someday he’d come back to me.”

  “You locked his office door on the way out, just the way Jim Dirkson found it when he returned to finish the argument he’d started with Walter over the phone. That’s why Dirkson thought Walter had left for the day. The two of you must’ve missed crossing paths by mere minutes. And then Tyler Benjamin knocked on the main office door while our now acting principal was inside. The boy was telling the truth all along.”

  “It’s a sad story you’ve spun, Mrs. Fletcher. You should try your hand at writing mysteries someday. Fiction, because you can’t prove any of this.”

  “Except for one thing, Alma. When I met with Mr. Reavis a few hours before, during sixth period, his blinds were open and the sun was in my eyes because you weren’t in school to close them. But when the body was found the next morning, his office blinds were closed.” I hesitated, to make sure she could catch up with my thinking. “Who closed them? Who would have had reason to close them? You, Alma, as was your custom. Something you did every single day and couldn’t resist doing just a few minutes before the confrontation that ended in murder.”

  Amos Tupper drew even with me. “Please step out of the car, ma’am, and keep your hands where I can see them.”

  Alma glanced at Tom Jennings and the other uniformed officer again before climbing out of her battered Chevy, slowly and with her hands in view. Amos signaled the patrolmen forward to take her into custody, one already with his handcuffs out.

  “I didn’t mean to do it, Mrs. Fletcher,” Alma insisted, her voice cracking. “I didn’t plan to do it. It just sort of . . . happened. One moment we were arguing, and the next he was lying on the floor and I was holding that bloody trophy. I wiped it clean as best I could with Kleenex and hid the bloody wad in my bag. I wish I could take it back. How I wish I could go back in time and change everything.”

  Tom Jennings fastened the cuffs in place and started to lead Alma toward his squad car, the second officer falling into step behind him. Alma ground her feet to a halt and looked back at me one last time.

  “I loved Walter. If I hadn’t loved him, this never would have happened.”

  “‘It’s only in love and murder that we still remain sincere,’” I said.

  Alma regarded me quizzically. “Did you make that up?”

  “No, it’s a quote from the playwright Friedrich Dürrenmatt.”

  “I’m impressed, Mrs. Fletcher.”

  “Well, Alma, I am an English teacher.”

  Amos Tupper drew closer to me, and together we watched he
r being placed in the back of the squad car.

  “You know,” he started, “that bit about her closing the blinds never would’ve held up in court.”

  “Of course, Amos, but I also knew it wouldn’t have to. Once Alma Potts knew we had her, it was over.”

  He nodded reflectively as the squad car drove off with lights flashing but no siren. “Maybe she was right, Mrs. Fletcher.”

  “About her not having planned the murder?”

  He turned toward me, smiling. “No, about you writing mysteries.”

  Chapter Twenty-two

  The present

  When I’d finished, Wilma gazed out over the rolling, manicured golf course that had browned with the fall. A chill breeze whipped through the trees, making me realize how cold I felt after completing the story I hadn’t told anyone in a very long time and had never committed to paper.

  “I never knew all the details,” Wilma said, shivering as she continued to gaze out over the golf course.

  “She confessed after the prosecutor’s office offered to reduce the charge.”

  “Did you believe her, Jessica?”

  “I believe she never intended to kill Walter Reavis. I believe she came back to the school that day to plead with him to take her back. I believe she’d been in denial, and the anger had built up in her until it spilled over and she felt she had to act. I believe she told Walter she was going to report him if he didn’t stop . . . or come back to her.”

  “That doesn’t sound like Alma.”

  “Murder didn’t sound like Alma either, Wilma.”

  “Anyway,” she said, trying to change the tone, “Amos Tupper followed you to Cabot Cove, didn’t he? After he left the Appleton police force just after Alma went to prison.”

  “He drove a bus for a time, figuring he was done with police work. But then the sheriff’s job here opened up, and he was hired.”