Murder in the French Teacher's Garden

by Andrew Culver

  I couldn’t believe how much she’d survived. Underneath that small frame was a warrior, a fighter.

  “So, Thomas, what bring you here?”

  “Oh, we just had to get out of LA,” I said. “It’s not the place to have a family. Besides, my wife got sick. It’s nothing major – it’s manageable, but she does need to avoid stress and it helps to be near her family. So we came back here.”

  “Did you always want to be a teacher?”

  “No,” I said, hoping to steer clear of the subject that I’d successfully managed to avoid discussing with everyone here. It was embarrassing, but I figured that she just unloaded her whole history to me and the least I could do was be as transparent as she was.

  “To be honest, I trained as an actor out in LA and I even had a few big jobs, some TV stuff. I thought that I would be able to make a living, I even thought I would be one of the big movie actors some day. That’s what I thought was going to happen, I guess. Well, I was also in a relationship that didn’t work out. And my agent just dropped me for no reason, and I had trouble getting a new one, and my actor friends didn’t really do anything to help me out. I kind of drifted around between a bunch of different jobs before I went to grad school and decided to teach.”

  She smiled. “You see, we have both been disappointed. It is not bad, Thomas. After disappointment, that is when life begins. Acting is not so good for a job, no? Always pretending to be someone else.”

  “You’re right,” I laughed.

  “You were probably more like a child before you abandon acting, no? Like a little kid with your head full of Hollywood dreams? With stars in your eyes?” she laughed.

  “Yeah, I was.”

  “And how you meet your wife?”

  “In grad school. She was the kindest and most mature woman I’d ever met. You don’t usually meet girls like that in LA. I guess I realized that I didn’t have to be what I wanted to be when I was fifteen years old and acting in the high school plays. I was a different person.”

  One of the students came up to ask her a question, and she went off to help the girl with something. I moved on to help plant the rest of the sage.

  IT was a long shot, but it was worth a try. I was at Bear’s Book Barn, a sprawling book store on the corner of 1st and Oak downtown. An old hippie named Bear owned it with his wife Julia, and both of them were usually there with their friends. Bear was a Vietnam vet, from what I’d overheard of his conversations. At least one of his buddies was always there, and they were always complaining about the government, the intelligence community, the Department of Defense, the fossil fuel industry, the Big Food corporations, the big book publishing houses, and everything else. I liked the talk and the music they played on the stereo, which was usually old Grateful Dead shows (Bear had been to over fifty of them). I’d been there so many times that I was a regular and they knew my name, although I usually browsed quietly by myself. What I loved about the bookstore was that they had a little coffee bar and it was a two story shop, and they had a great selection of classics and history books as well as conspiracy stuff, alien stuff, theology from every major world religion, and great leftist political science and revolutionary literature. In the back was a little yard where they had a couple of picnic tables and a fire pit, and they would have poetry readings and folk singers out there on nights that weren’t too cold. As usual, that day I browsed for way too long, and finally found Alexander Pope’s great translation of the Iliad, which I’d been looking for for years. I went up to buy it and had to wait for Bear and his wife to finish a discussion they were having with another old, bearded guy in a chair. It seemed to be an argument about Watergate and Nixon’s last few years in office, and the discussion was focusing on whether or not Nixon was brought down by a CIA plot to bring in Gerald Ford, who was an old CIA ally since his days on the Warren Commission.

  They briefly put the discussion on hold to accept my money.

  “Hey, Thomas, how’s it going?” said Bear while Julia made herself a cup of tea.

  “Pretty good, Bear. It’s been awhile, actually. I’m sorry I haven’t been in here in so long.”

  “No worries, my man. Always enjoy your presence in here. Say, what’s going on with that dude who was killed at your school?”

  “Well, I was hoping you could help me figure it out, actually,” I said with a chuckle. “See, I’m not sure anyone’s gonna solve this thing, and…”

  “Is Dave Roberts in charge of the case?” Julia said, turning around from her tea pot.

  “Yeah.”

  All three of them burst into laughter. “They’re never gonna solve that thing!” Bear said. “Dave hasn’t solved a crime in twenty years. If you called him to get your cat out of a tree, he’d go fishing on his way to your house, forget about the cat, then call you two weeks later to ask how that whole thing ended up with your cat.”

  We all laughed. “That’s why I wanted to talk to you, Bear. I mean, I know this is a bit of a long shot, but you have that Veteran’s Support Group here, don’t you?”

  “Every Thursday night. We’ve had some good groups here lately, unfortunately. Big turnout the last couple weeks. Wish it wasn’t necessary.”

  “Do you know a guy named Anthony Scaleri? Used to teach at Kennedy? He’s a vet, apparently had some mental health struggles?”

  “Yeah, he comes by here. Bob, you brought him to the meetings, right?”

  Their friend, who’d been minding his own business until know, nodded.

  “I met him at another vet’s group down in San Bernardino years ago,” Bob said. “He definitely needed support, man, I’m telling you. Just like all of us. Then I moved up here and started hanging out at this place Thursday nights and a couple months ago he called me up out of the blue and asked if I was still going to meetings, and I said, ‘As a matter of fact I am, you gotta come by Bear’s place.’ So he started coming here.”

  “Well, the reason I’m asking is because it sounds like he used to teach at Kennedy and he had some problems with the guy who was killed at my school.”

  “Are you trying to be a gumshoe, Tommy?” asked Julia.

  “Yeah, I kind of am. The thing is, everyone is trying to frame one of my fellow teachers, a French teacher at our school, and I know she didn’t do it. So I’m just trying to see if anyone else had a motive…”

  “He had some beef with this guy?”

  “The guy who was killed was named Jim Screbbles. He taught at Kennedy and he got Scaleri fired. And I know that he was one of the people who hated Screbbles. I mean, Screbbles had a lot of enemies in town, apparently. But I’m just trying to chase down these leads.”

  “I hear you, man,” said Bear, as he leaned back in his chair and sipped from a cup of coffee. “I don’t know if I can see Anthony like that. You know, I think he’s done a lot of work on himself in the last couple months, actually. When he came in here, there was a lot of anger, I won’t lie. He’d been drifting from job to job, he was at a low point.”

  “Well, he’s been going to the Shambhala Center,” said Bob. “Doing a lot of meditation. I think he’s going through the process to become a teacher there. And he said he was doing a conversion to Buddhism, which is kind of a long process.”

  “Hmm,” I said. “Is there anywhere I could find him?”

  “I could call him,” Bob said. “I have his number and he lives near here. Maybe he’ll come by.”

  “He lives near here?”

  “Yeah, he’s renting out someone’s guest house a couple blocks away. Just ask him what he knows. Here, let me call him.” He picked up the phone and dialed, and we waited.

  “Tony! It’s Bob, I’m down at Bear’s place. The shop. Yeah, are you doing anything right now? There’s a kid here who’s curious about something and we thought you could help him out. You want to walk down here? He’s doing a kind of investigation into something and you might point him in the right direction. Great, see you in a few, brother.”

  “Wow, thanks, Bob,”
I said.

  “No problem. Hopefully he’ll have an answer or two.”

  I read my book in the sofa against the wall, drinking a cup of tea that Julia had given me, when a tall guy wearing jeans and a plaid flannel shirt walked in. He was about fifty, with deep lines in his face, and black hair that was graying around the sides. He wore glasses and I would’ve believed he was a professor at the college if you’d told me.

  “Hey, Tony,” Bear greeted him. “This is Tom. He’s doing some armchair sleuthing and we thought you could point him in the right direction.”

  He looked at me and said hi with a slight smile as he sat down. “Hope I can help, Tom.”

  “Well, I’ll get to the point. I teach at St. Ignatius, and recently Jim Screbbles was found dead there. Everyone in town seems to think my co-worker killed him, but I’m sure she didn’t. They’re going to fire her if we don’t find out who did it. All the parents are telling the diocese to just fire her because she’s a murderer and all this. I know she’s innocent. I heard that you used to work with Screbbles at Kennedy?”

  His face was expressionless during my speech, and he nodded slowly when I finished.

  “Yeah, I taught at Kennedy for thirteen years. He came in and became in charge of our department. He kind of got me fired, actually. And I now understand that it was…I guess you could say it was the universe coming in and saying, ‘It’s time to move on.’ I believe in karma. I wasn’t happy teaching there anymore. He did me a favor. I know that now. I was angry for awhile. But you know what? In our veteran’s group here we talk a lot about anger, and how to let it go. And at the Shambhala Center we talk about it too – but most importantly, we work with it. I look at it, I examine it, I understand how it works in me, and I understand that it’s just an illusion. That job is not something I need to be attached to anymore. It was not the right job for me anymore. But there was a kid…let me remember his name…Bruno White. Yes, I remember him. He was a student of Jim’s. Jim failed him. I think that was Jim’s first or second year at Kennedy. But Bruno hated Jim so bad that he broke into his classroom one weekend and left a bunch of rotten eggs all over the place. He then threw toilet paper all over his house, called his house and made threats, tried to fight him in class one day. He told everyone he would kill him, literally. He told all his friends and everyone, I will kill Mr. Screbbles. Jim told the police and filed charges and testified against him and they put him in juvenile hall and it just spiraled downward. Bruno is still around – he’s one of the drug dealers up here who sells drugs to kids at Kennedy. I’ve seen him around a few times, unfortunately. In the past I was in a few circles that he shared, but I’m beyond that now. He’s been back in jail a few times I think, for theft and battery and things like that.”

  “Interesting,” I said. “I’m sorry you had to teach kids like that.”

  “Oh, most of them aren’t that bad,” he said. “But the classes are big, the kids can be rambunctious, and you just snap. That’s what happened to me. So Jim was killed at your school?”

  “Yes. I found the body.”

  “What was he doing there?”

  “Well, I think he was trying to destroy our garden so he could win that competition. The strange thing is that someone burned down his garden at Kennedy about a week earlier.”

  He laughed. “This is a real soap opera. Well, I don’t know if Bruno still hates Jim Screbbles, but that’s something he would do. And it probably wouldn’t be the first garden he’s burned to the ground.”

  I thanked the whole group and they moved on to other topics, and I told them I had to get going, and I left to get groceries at Robert’s down the street and then headed home.

  KATIE’S parents were bringing the boat out of storage after the long, cold winter, and the weather was warm, so they took the whole family out for an evening ride on the lake. Her parents were there, as well as her sister Jen and her husband Doug and their two daughters, and her dad’s friend Alex, who worked at the hotel.

  Jen’s husband Doug had been working at the hotel for years now and was kind of a right-hand man to Gene, and I could never tell what he actually did there. As we prepared to leave the dock I helped to untie the boat, and a warm breeze blew across the lake.

  “This doesn’t suck!” said Katie’s mom, taking out a picnic basket full of wine, cheese, prosciutto and crackers and other things. Gene was behind the wheel with a cigar in his mouth, and we slowly left the cove and entered the middle of the lake. It was a fairly busy day on the lake and there were sailboats, motor boats and kayaks cruising lazily around.

  “So Doug, how are the Memorial Day bookings shaping up?” Gene asked his son-in-law.

  “Eighty percent capacity,” Doug said, cracking open a strawberry-lime flavored White Claw, the mineral water with five percent alcohol content. He liked them because they were ninety calories or something. Everyone in the boat was wearing Ray Ban sunglasses except me.

  “Money in the bank,” Gene said. “It’s weekends like that that make it all worth it.”

  “Do they even make it worth it to deal with Sam Trainor?” Jen asked.

  Gene thought. “Just barely.”

  “Who’s that?” I asked.

  Gretchen poured me a glass of white wine and told me. “He worked at the hotel five years ago, Tom.”

  “More than five,” Gene corrected.

  “It was awhile back. He only worked there for what, three months, Gene?”

  “Seventy-three days.”

  “He was fired for not coming to work and for just doing a terrible job, and then he sued the hotel and they’ve been in litigation ever since then.”

  “He said we made him feel like he had to work over-time for no extra pay,” said Gene’s friend Alex, who had been quiet until now. “He said he had severe depression and he was entitled to disability treatment, even though he wasn’t diagnosed with the depression until after we fired him. The guy just won’t give up.”

  “He’s just making stuff up at this point,” Gretchen said. “And he has one of those ambulance chasers for a lawyer.”

  “The guy’s been disbarred from like three other states,” Gene added. “He’s just a slime ball. Oh, Doug,” he said. “Ari called yesterday. I’ll be going out to LA for arbitration, probably next week. We gotta wrap this thing up.”

  “Will you settle?” I asked.

  “We settle everything if we can,” Alex said, As Gene steered the boat around the lake to get a better view of the sunset. “It’s the cheapest option. Going to court could close down the hotel. The juries always take the side of the guy who was fired. They see you as a big bad business owner who has trillions of dollars. They don’t see a guy with a family who could lose his whole business.”

  “Tom, what’s going on with the murder at your school?” Gretchen said, leaning back against the seat as the wind whipped through her hair.

  “It’s still a mystery,” I said. “Not sure who did it yet. I don’t think Dave Roberts is going to get anywhere.”

  “Dave’s too busy fishing and waiting till retirement,” Gene laughed, puffing his cigar. “I love the guy, but Elmer Fudd would solve the crime before Dave would.”

  “Well, I don’t think Madame Gallard did it,” I said.

  “She and Tom are joining forces, “ Katie said. “They’re trying to solve it before she gets fired. Tom is going all Sherlock Holmes on me.”

  “Oh, are you two doing some sleuthing?” said Gretchen with a cackle. “That’s cute! Do you have any leads?”

  I took a sip of my wine. “There’s one guy who hated Jim Screbbles so much that he actually threatened to kill him, told people he would kill him, and has been in juvenile hall and everything. One of his former students. Kid named Bruno White.”

  “Oh, I went to school with the Whites,” Jen said. “I knew his older sister Crystal. I still talk with her actually, she lives in Redlands. You know what was funny? She was a really good student. You would never guess they were related. Yeah, Bruno was
a mess. He would run away from home a lot. You know, I’m supposed to meet her at the brewery this weekend. Maybe you guys could come along and we could see if her brother fits the description of the killer,” she laughed. “Honestly, this is sad, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he killed someone.”

  Gene’s parents, who were familiar with the family, backed up her statements. I was told there was also an even older sister, who had moved across the country, and Kate’s mom gave me the rundown of the family. They had been a pretty successful family in Redlands and the dad was in real estate, but after 2008 they lost everything and relocated to a small house in the mountains where the dad had restarted his real estate career with spotty success. The conversation then turned to houses that he had sold, and houses in general in the mountain communities, and the values of homes these days, and we drifted pleasantly in the lake as the sun went down.

  LATER that week we had a Faculty Retreat on campus, where we spent the morning praying, doing teaching self-reflections and team building exercises (Pictionary, a scavenger hunt, a cornhole tournament). Then we moved on to housekeeping, curriculum development, technology stuff, bringing our classrooms into the 21st century, and other professional things. In the back of my mind was the news Katie and I were expecting that day. She’d taken all the blood tests and we were going to find out the health and sex of the baby at any moment via email. I was strangely calm even though this news would define the rest of my life. Still I managed to participate and pay a reasonable amount of attention to the activities.

  During lunch our IT guy, an affable forty-something man named Alberto, made burgers for the staff, grilling in the quad on a big gas grill that I didn’t know the school had in its possession. Alberto had been one of the first to congratulate me when I told the faculty my wife was pregnant, and he was a nice guy who had a lot of opinions about barbecuing. But what I noticed was that his teenage son was there helping him, and they were working like a team. Alberto was calmly telling him to prep the next round of burgers, and the kid would lay them all out on a sheet and season them, then put the slice of cheese on each one. I thought, that would be nice, to have a son, and we could be buddies, grilling together, going to baseball games, going on hikes together. I noticed there was a certain dad quality to Alberto. You could trust this guy. He was a solid, reliable man, who wasn’t going to do anything crazy. That was my future, I thought. I was going to be a grownup.