Schooled in Murder Read online

  I turned to leave and then stopped. In a far corner I saw a designer shower-clog and a foot. I pointed to it. “Who is that?” I asked.

  2

  They stopped rearranging their clothes and looked behind them. I rushed forward. I figured someone might have passed out. The two of them remained motionless. I shoved several boxes aside.

  Gracie Eberson lay on the floor. Someone had crammed one of those oversized chalkboard erasers into her mouth. She wasn’t breathing. I yanked the eraser out. No change. I felt for a pulse. Nothing. I pulled out my cell phone.

  I felt a hand on my arm. It was Benson. “What’s wrong with her?” he asked.

  “She’s not breathing,” I said. “I think she’s dead. I’m calling 911.” I’d been in the Marines. I’d seen death up close. That didn’t make it easier to deal with, but I knew enough not to panic. At the moment, I had a rush of something to do.

  Benson tapped my arm. “You can’t,” he said.

  I looked at him, my thumb poised over the keypad.

  “Nobody can know we were here,” he said.

  I said, “This is an emergency.” I punched numbers and reported where I was and what the situation was. After I hung up, I called the school’s main office rather than hunt for a call button in the nearest classroom. I got the answering machine. It was late. The secretaries must have left for the day.

  Still kneeling, I noticed bruising on Gracie’s face, mottled with bits of chalk dust and lint. I looked up at the two men. I saw a small patch of wetness on the front of Benson’s jeans. Catching my glance, he quickly held a book over his crotch. His face was beet red. Frecking had a gym bag in front of his midsection.

  “Ah, you didn’t see anything?” Benson asked.

  I said, “Was there something to see?”

  Frecking said, “I can explain.”

  I said, “There’s nothing to explain. My only suggestion is the old cliché, get a room.” Benson began, “My wife–” I said, “I don’t want to hear it. I’m not interested.” Frecking said, “We’re–”

  I said, “You don’t owe me any explanations. I saw nothing that was any of my business to report to anyone. Yours isn’t the first kiss exchanged in this school among faculty members. Once again, I suggest discretion.” I pointed at the corpse. “You have a much larger problem.”

  Benson said, “We didn’t see her. We didn’t know she was here.”

  Frecking said, “We didn’t turn on the light. It wasn’t the first time we’ve been in here.”

  More information than I needed. Good to know someone besides the students was up on the trysting places in the school.

  I said, “Let’s step into the corridor. I’m sure the police will be here any moment.” We reassembled outside and several feet down the corridor. It was empty.

  “What are you going to do about what you saw?” Benson asked.

  “Is there a problem?” I asked.

  “We can’t tell anyone we were there. There’s no logical reason for Steven to be up here. People will wonder what we were doing. You can’t say anything.”

  This was more than a bit much. Lying for trysting lovers, gay or straight or in-between, was not my style. And not when a dead body was involved in the equation.

  I held up my hand and asked, “Why would you normally go to this storage room?”

  He said, “To get supplies.”

  “And have you gotten supplies from there in the past?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you might want to say that.”

  “What about Steven?” he asked.

  “What’s wrong with a friend tagging along?”

  Benson said, “Won’t it sound odd?”

  “Not as odd as a dead body in the storage closet.”

  “How can you be so calm?” Benson asked.

  “I’m not dead,” I said.

  Frecking said, “She had a chalk eraser crammed in her mouth. Like someone was trying to shut her up permanently.”

  Both of them were pale. Benson said, “I’ve only seen dead bodies at wakes and funerals of distant relatives. This is spooky.”

  Benson reached out a hand to the wall. “I think I’m going to be sick.” He bent over. Frecking helped him to the nearest washroom. When they were a quarter of the way down the hall, I began to hear distant sirens. Benson was bent over nearly double as they staggered though the washroom door. As it closed, I heard one or both of them puking.

  3

  Everybody showed up, the helpful and the unhelpful. Amando Graniento, our fourth principal in three years, rushed about like a head with its chicken cut off. In moments less fraught with crisis, he was useful for making grave pronouncements about arcane academic minutiae. He’d been a professor at Governors State University for fifteen years before deigning to take a principalship. I heard the most appalling rumor from someone I trusted who had been on the principal interview/selection committee that had picked Graniento. When asked what he would do with a parent who was out of control, Graniento had said, “I will never say no to a parent.” The man was out of his mind. He tended to wear clothes that he thought were trendy. Mostly, he looked like a poster child for hideously clashing colors.

  The heart of the interdepartmental conflict had been Spandrel and Graniento’s doing. Sure, there were other causes. With the change in the retirement rules for teachers in Illinois, there had been a rash of old teachers leaving and thus an influx of new teachers with a lot of new ideas and no ties to the old guard. But Spandrel and Graniento had thrown gasoline on the fire not just once but time after time. They seemed to thrive on the constant fighting. I always got the impression that the superintendent and head of the school board were cheering them on as well.

  The other members of the department, still at school, had been told to wait in the Learning Center. I saw Mabel Spandrel at a distance. She sniffled constantly and wiped her nose. She looked as if tears would flow any second.

  Our superintendent, Riva Towne, arrived. She nodded gravely at everyone, huddled with police, and spoke to the other school board members who showed up. At every opportunity she had lectured people that the school district should be run in a more businesslike manner. I knew for a fact she’d been an elementary teacher in Newton, Iowa, for fifteen years before becoming a school administrator. Her experience in the business world was absolutely zero. Victoria Abbot, the assistant superintendent, entered with her. She looked sick and worried.

  The River’s Edge police, protectors of the suburb in which Grover Cleveland High School existed, mucked about.

  I returned to my room. Two local detectives I didn’t know questioned me. Frank Rohde, my friend on the department, had been promoted to assistant police chief last year. The other cops I knew on the department dealt mostly with juvenile crimes. Since I often worked with behaviorally disturbed kids, I knew some of the cops. But these two were homicide detectives I didn’t know. The older cop was Michah Gault. The other, Earl Vulmea, looked young enough to be one of the kids in my classes. I described my movements from when I first stepped out of the meeting to when I discovered the corpse. I mentioned Benson and Frecking. I didn’t mention what they were doing. Let the cops assume they were looking for supplies. I couldn’t imagine anybody committing murder, then passionately making out seconds later and several feet away. Perhaps my imagination is limited, but I couldn’t picture it. The cops had showed up before Benson and Frecking had returned from the washroom. I assumed they were being kept in another part of the building along with the other faculty members.

  When I finished my statement, Gault, the older cop, shook his head. “You got any witnesses?”

  “I assumed most everybody else was still in the English department meeting. I didn’t see anyone else. Mrs. Faherty, the woman I talked to on the phone, should remember, and my cell phone provider will have a record of the call, time, duration, and to whom. I have no idea where any custodians, secretaries, and teachers from all the other departments might have been.”
/>   Gault said, “You got back to the meeting and only two custodians were there. How come you didn’t see the teachers, or they didn’t see you when they left the meeting?”

  “A lot of people scatter to go home right after a meeting, and I was making a quiet phone call down a hallway where I could watch the rain. It’s not the exit to the teachers’ parking lot.”

  “How well did you know Mrs. Eberson?” Gault asked.

  “Not that well.”

  “How’d you get along with her?” Gault was doing all the questioning.

  “She was a colleague.”

  “Talk with her much, go to lunch with her, have an affair?”

  “No.” The woman rarely looked me in the eye. Faction hatred, homophobia, ignorance, lack of social skills? I never knew. Didn’t care much. Never asked.

  “She taught next door to you.”

  “I’d see her in the hall most days.”

  “She have any enemies?”

  Well, this was getting down to it. They’d find out eventually, if they hadn’t already.

  I said, “The factions in the department fought.”

  “Were you and her on the same sides?”

  “I tried not to take sides.”

  “Personal problems between you two?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Why would there be?”

  “What did you fight about?”

  “In the department, the fights were about everything.”

  “What’s everything?”

  “Who was in charge. Who wasn’t in charge. Who wanted to be in charge. Who was qualified to be in charge. Who got to put out memos. Who was putting out memos. Who was taking notes at meetings. Who wasn’t taking notes. Who was supposed to be taking notes. Who was going on trips. Who was sucking up. Who wasn’t sucking up. Who was being helpful to whom. Who would be a traveling teacher. Who would have their own classroom. Old guard versus new. Dumb versus smart. New, rigidly enforced methodology and curriculum against old guard. If it breathed, it was worth fighting over.”

  Earl Vulmea, the young cop, spoke up. “You guys are teachers? I thought teachers were supposed to be role models.”

  “You been a cop long?” I asked him. “I just made detective.” “Teachers are human,” I said. “Who’d she fight with today?” Gault asked. “We had a faculty meeting. The factions fought. They always do.”

  “Anybody in particular?”

  I told him about the faculty meeting.

  “You didn’t speak up?” Gault asked.

  “Didn’t see the need.”

  “You a coward?” Vulmea asked.

  “Just being a role model.”

  The cops stood up. Gault said, “Don’t leave.” They walked out.

  I called my lover, Scott Carpenter. To my announcement of finding a dead body, he said, “Again.” Using the tone Rocky the Squirrel used when Bullwinkle J. Moose had done something ineptly stupid for the umpteenth time.

  I said, “It wasn’t my fault.”

  “What did I tell you about finding more dead bodies?”

  “Something about lack of chocolate for an extended period of time.” I sighed. “I’ve got dead bodies plopping in my path, and you’re going for humor.”

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

  I filled him in on the horrors I was in the middle of.

  “You want me there?” he asked when I finished.

  “Let me see what happens.”

  “You want me to call our lawyer?”

  “Might not be a bad idea.”

  “You sure you’re okay?” he asked.

  “So far.”

  Scott asked, “They were making out in the storeroom? Isn’t that kind of 1950s behavior? What if kids had walked in?”

  “Maybe they could have gotten extra credit for their sex education classes?”

  “And Benson is married?”

  “Yep, to a female woman of the opposite sex.”

  “How well do you know those two guys?”

  “Benson is in the department, so I sort of know him. Frecking I’m aware of from being on a cross-curricular committee with him.” During the meetings Frecking had never said a word and spent his time surreptitiously reading a sports equipment catalogue he’d hidden under the table.

  “Be careful,” Scott said. “Don’t trust anybody. This is murder.”

  I told him I’d be more than careful.

  4

  I diddled and dithered and wondered what the hell was going on. I graded a few papers. One of my Lord of the Rings posters was starting to come loose from the wall. I retaped it.

  I poked my head outside my door. Various members of the rival factions had clustered at opposite ends of the hallway. I made my way to the teachers’ lounge for some coffee. I’d have preferred to go home. It was near seven. I was hungry. Not hungry enough to snarf past-its-sell-by-date candy the machines in the lounge disgorged. Someone had started a new pot of coffee. I washed a cup and poured. I took a seat at a table near the back.

  Morgan Adair entered a moment after I sat down and joined me. He was in his early thirties and a friend. He was one of the youngest members of the non-suckup faction. The factions didn’t break down strictly along age lines, although the suckups did tend to be younger.

  Morgan said, “This is awful. I heard you found the body. Are you okay?”

  “It’s not something I’m looking forward to having happen again.”

  He leaned close and said in a breathless whisper, “I’ve got to tell you this as long as no one else is here. I know what happened to Gracie is awful, but I haven’t had a chance to talk to you in the past couple days.”

  I raised an eyebrow.

  “I met a guy.”

  “Congratulations,” I said. I tried to work up an “I care” look. I must have been successful, because I didn’t detect a dampening in his headlong gush about his new love. I was tired and out of sorts. Hot new boyfriends and dead bodies were not a good mix. Morgan had been trying to find Mr. Right since he got out of college. The long series of tales of his dating woes could fill a season at the Lyric Opera. Morgan was tall with dirty-blond, short, spiked hair.

  He burbled into my ear. “And he teaches right here at Grover Cleveland. He is a hunk.”

  “Oh, really?”

  “He’s a stud. I’m not supposed to tell anyone. He’s very closeted, but I know I can tell you.” I got an awful feeling.

  “Steven Frecking. We met in Chicago at a bar last Friday night. We were both surprised to find out we taught in the same school. I sort of recognized him. He’s sweet and funny. We’ve been out twice since then.”

  The arrival of two more of our colleagues spared me the choice of whether or not to tell him he was dating a philandering boob.

  Luci Gamboni and Jourdan Chase entered and joined Morgan and me around the table. Luci Gamboni said, “You really found her with an eraser crammed in her mouth?”

  “Yep,” I said.

  Gamboni held her hand in front of her face. She had straight black hair that hung down to her ample bosom.

  Jourdan Chase said, “It’s not funny.”

  Gamboni said, “It is, in a sort of a Chuckles the Clown kind of way. I mean, I’ve been hoping someone would shut that cow up since the day she was hired. You know what Gracie said to me the day she was hired? She said, ´Why do you have the honors classes?’ She claimed they should be spread out among all the teachers. Me! I’ve been here practically since they built the place. I waited my turn for the best classes. She just wanted to step right in and hog the whole show. And as for going places for conferences. Well!”

  Jourdan said, “Those statistics Pinyon had didn’t look right to me. I don’t remember going to a conference in the early eighties.”

  Luci said, “Even if we have been to conferences before doesn’t mean we should or shouldn’t go again. They’re all like Gracie. She couldn’t wait her turn. Stupid cow. And she said older teachers should have to give
up their classrooms! And travel! On carts! So young people could have rooms. I don’t work thirty years in a place to get a low-class assignment. That’s against the union rules, isn’t it?”

  After all these years of not coming to my senses, I was still our building’s union rep. I said, “They need to show cause to make a change in working conditions.” Being made to schlepp all your materials from class to class using a cart was considered the lowest-class assignment.

  Luci said, “These new teachers have no concept of what it’s been like. The fights we had to get this far. What it took for me, for us, to get what we have.” Luci was the commando grandmother in our department.

  “Selfish,” Jourdan said. “They only want what’s good for them, not for the group.”

  “And if we dare to criticize them, we’re accused of not being team players,” Gamboni said. “Team players? We were working in teams in this department when most of them were still in diapers. Team players? And a few of us are barely ten years older than they are, but they think we’re all ancient.”

  Morgan asked, “Did you touch the body?”

  “I checked for a pulse.”

  Morgan shuddered. “I couldn’t do that.”

  Gamboni said, “We’re turning into the Cabot Cove of the educational world.”

  Jourdan said, “That could be a good or bad thing depending on who dies.”

  Gamboni said, “Oh dear.”

  Morgan said, “You’ve had some experience with this kind of thing, Tom. What do you think?”

  I said, “Whatever’s happened in my past doesn’t give me any special insight now. I know the police don’t like it when amateurs try to interfere.”

  “Who would want to kill her?” Morgan asked.

  “All of us,” Luci said. “Look at that fight today. Jourdan, what did the police say to you?”