A Function of Murder

by Ada Madison

  It was a dizzying triangle. Everyone had something on everyone else, which seemed not uncommon in political situations. And which was why I tried to steer clear of them.

  Maybe in fact it was more than a triangle—a quadrilateral. “Why are the Johnsons, Mr. Johnson especially, so upset with…Edward?” I asked.

  “Edward wanted to step in and yank Principal Richardson out of there. He could have put him in jail, actually. Since there’s money involved, that makes it fraud. If Edward could have proven it, the city could have taken over the charter. But Mr. Johnson wanted the mayor to just leave the principal alone and throw more money at the school. He thought that would fix the problem of poor grades. Edward wanted to save the charter by having a clean slate. He wanted to report the test scores as they were and work to raise the kids’ grades legitimately.” Kira had already shredded two brown Coffee Filter napkins as she talked. She picked up a third. “Isn’t that the best thing for the kids?”

  It seemed so, but as with all political issues, I fell easily for the latest spin that made some sense. I couldn’t help wonder, though—was all this connected to the mayor’s message to me? Had he intended to tell me something that would make his case for having Principal Richardson charged with fraud? If so, what was it?

  I wanted to take notes on the three-, maybe four-party war, each one having something on the other. I quickly eliminated Nicole’s dad as I remembered his driving off with his family after the dinner at the Inn. There wouldn’t have been time for him to drive all the way across town to where the Johnsons lived, drop off his wife and son, and drive back to stab the mayor. Nasty as he’d been during dinner, I couldn’t envision him leaving the car running, with Nannette and Nathan inside, while he dashed on campus to commit murder.

  The superintendent and the principal, however, were another story. I wouldn’t have been surprised if either of them knew a little tidbit about the mayor that wasn’t fit for a layperson’s ears. My slightly jaded view of the political system at all levels said that’s how the machine worked.

  I thought I’d test my theory on Kira, my current political consultant.

  “Is there anything that either of the men knew about Edward that he might not want revealed?”

  Kira’s eyes went wide, her face reddening. “Of course not,” she said.

  Uh-oh. Could Fran have been right, about that “seeing him” thing? Or was Kira embarrassed that someone might actually believe her fantasy?

  How to deal with Kira’s mixed signals? She’d obviously wanted everyone to think she and the mayor were close. Now that I was calling her bluff in a way, she was pulling back. I saw all the signs of a dreamer, afraid of losing the dream to reality.

  Before I could decide how to proceed, Kira took over again. “There was also that other issue, the waste management contract. The one Mr. Sizemore was trying to force down Edward’s throat.”

  A transparent tactic on Kira’s part, but I was as happy to move off the hot politician-intern button as she was. Kira was smart enough to know that I was looking for motive in the mayor’s stabbing, and that, right now, she was my best bet for information.

  “I remember reading that there were competing bids,” I said, wishing I’d cared more at the time about who’d be hauling away my trash on Friday mornings.

  Kira nodded. “There’s the W. Thomas Company that Edward prefers, and the Stewart Brothers that Mr. Sizemore wants to give the contract to,” Kira said. “It was strange, because they’d always been simpatico on contracts. Mr. Sizemore would do his management consultant thing, making assessments and all, and then make a recommendation, and Edward would agree. But not on this waste management deal. Then, the next thing I know, Edward decides to award the contract to W. Thomas, never mind Mr. Sizemore’s recommendation of the Stewart Brothers, and then terminate Mr. Sizemore himself.”

  “Wouldn’t a city contract just go to the low bidder?” I asked.

  “It’s not that simple. Let me tell you, it’s impossible to keep bids secret anymore. So they have to offer up other value-added things. Like, Thomas would add an extra pickup at the holidays, and the Stewart Brothers would provide a special green waste container free of charge. That kind of thing.”

  Kira went on a bit about waste management, impressing me with her understanding of city businesses. I’d never considered how lucrative the waste business was until I heard her expound in what were probably words she’d heard from the mayor.

  “Think about it,” she said. “You pay them to take away your trash, and then they turn around and sell it.”

  It was obvious as Kira explained it. There were all sorts of ways to sell waste, whether as recyclables or as fodder for research into chemical treatments.

  I found myself imagining Kira doing doctoral work as an extension of her undergraduate thesis, applying mathematics to politics. I saw her extending the work she did, moving on to analyzing strategies and voting systems using sophisticated statistical methods.

  I tried to imagine what the real relationship was between Kira and the mayor. He seemed to have confided in her a great deal, perhaps simply because she was smart and would provide an excellent sounding board.

  In my mental meanderings, I’d missed the fact that Kira was now quietly sobbing. I took her hand and uttered a soothing platitude.

  “I’m okay,” she said. “I miss talking with him.”

  It was clear that the mayor of Henley had loved my student for her mind. I wished I could ask him what his other intentions had been.

  The arrival of a wave of people in small clusters, most likely from the event at the city hall, made it impossible for Kira and me to continue our chat. It was just as well. Our session had run its course.

  A gaggle of young people surrounded our table, and Kira introduced me to her friends from Mayor Graves’s campaign headquarters, mostly young women. I recognized one or two from campus, but none were my students. As we greeted one another with expressions of sympathy and disbelief at the loss of their hero, I couldn’t help assess their potential as killers. Could the mayor’s murderer have been the guy in the black cargo pants who had a suspicious, glassy-eyed expression? Or the one so well built that he could easily apply great force to the handle of a letter opener? Or the tall blond girl with yellow and white plastic daisies on her flip-flops who avoided making eye contact with me?

  It was a wonder cops and homicide detectives like Virgil ever trusted anyone. Maybe they didn’t.

  Eventually I was able to slip away from the Coffee Filter, amid much hugging and many tears. I felt comfortable leaving Kira with her friends, notwithstanding the fact that one of them might be a murderer. Until now, my political naiveté had made me immune to the idea of strife in a political campaign. I’d imagined a campaign headquarters as a hotbed of goodwill with enthusiastic, dedicated citizens, young and old, all pulling together for the same candidate, in a spirit of camaraderie. I remembered Kira talking about a cake her coworkers brought in to recognize that she’d taken in more pledges of contributions than any other volunteer.

  I supposed many people thought of college campuses similarly—a peaceful community of teachers and students, all after enlightenment and knowledge for its own sake—which was far from the truth. While I never regretted my decision to leave the world of software start-ups, I had to admit that campus politics were every bit as complicated and often as nasty as at any institution outside the ivory tower. Every faculty senate meeting had its share of petty grievances and intense turf wars. Should the History Department take the Modern Languages Department’s schedule into account when planning its curriculum? Since the Chemistry Department offers “Science for Poets” to fulfill the science requirement, why doesn’t the English Department offer “Shakespeare for Scientists” for the language requirement?

  The recent faculty debate over commencement speakers came to mind, and brought me back to our deceased mayor.

  I imagined that, more than for most citizens, the list of suspects for the
case of a murdered mayor must be as long as the city phone book. Poor Virgil and his colleagues at the HPD.

  Before I could talk myself out of it, I left Bruce’s car behind the Coffee Filter and headed for my campus office on foot. My plan was to walk down Main Street to the northwest pedestrian gate, directly outside Franklin Hall. I could thus avoid laying my eyes on the bloody fountain. It would forevermore be bloody to me, I realized, no matter what kind of filtering system or treatments the hazmat team brought to bear on it. I’d enter Franklin, retrieve my things, and return to Bruce’s car by the same route. Lugging my robes and briefcase back to the car, even as the day grew warmer, seemed light duty compared to being drawn to the tainted center of campus.

  People were still streaming from the city hall toward the Coffee Filter, among them some faces I recognized. The most unexpected were those of Monty Sizemore and his sister, Chris. They were dressed as if for tennis and, come to find out, that’s exactly where they’d been—playing on the college tennis courts across the street. They looked even younger, with Chris’s long hair in a ponytail and pink scrunchie, and both in designer white shorts and tank tops. I remembered the balloons that adorned the teachers’ cafeteria when Monty turned thirty last year. I hadn’t taken the time today to change my clothes before rushing out to meet Kira, and now my old khaki capris seemed to emphasize how long ago my own thirtieth birthday was.

  “We’d have gone to the service if we’d known about it,” Chris said, indicating the crowds at city hall and seeming apologetic about playing while others mourned.

  Monty swept his arm down to encompass his fit body and classy outfit, his look marred only by a bandage around his calf. Or maybe that was also a fashion statement. “We weren’t exactly dressed for something serious,” he said. “We play almost every Sunday morning.”

  “Yeah,” Chris said. “But I don’t always beat the pants off my brother like today.” She mimicked pounding his shoulder; he mimicked a severely painful reaction.

  “A bad day at tennis is better than a good day working on your patio,” Monty said.

  “He’s putting in a little brick wall and you’d think he was doing major construction,” Chris told me.

  “She’s a tough boss,” Monty told me.

  “Not,” Chris said, with another playful punch to Monty’s shoulder.

  The scene almost made me wish I had a brother.

  “Hey, I called you last night, Sophie,” Monty said. “I wanted to see how you were doing, after, you know, how awful it must have been to be right there when, you know, the murder and all.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “Sorry I didn’t get back to you. It was a rough night.”

  “I’ll bet it was. Do the police know who did it? I mean, do they have any leads?” Chris asked, as if I would know. Weren’t she and her brother the social media generation?

  “Not that I know of.”

  “We thought maybe since you were right there…” Monty said, letting the thought drift off.

  I shook my head. “I’m sure we’ll be hearing something soon.”

  “Yeah, they’ve probably got everyone and his brother on this one,” Monty said. “Maybe even bringing in the state?”

  Since he appeared to be addressing a question to me, I answered. Sort of. “I have no idea,” I said.

  “I thought you had a good friend on the force,” Monty said.

  “Do you want to join us for coffee?” Chris asked, relieving me of the burden of explaining my relationship to Virgil. And also of informing Monty that even if I did know more than he did, I wouldn’t be inclined to share it.

  I declined the offer of drinks, explaining that I’d just come from the Coffee Filter, and added, “I need to get my grades done if I want to take off for a few days at the Cape next week.”

  “Yeah, I read about your exam grade issue on Facebook,” Monty said. “You’ve got your work cut out for you.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Elysse Hutchins?” Chris said, in that way of saying something as if it were a question, but that you should already know the answer. She might as well have asked, Are you that out of it?

  “I’m still not sure what you mean,” I said, then realized I might be confirming their suspicions.

  “Facebook? Elysse is pretty unhappy?” Chris said, again using her disbelieving tone.

  “About what?” I asked, though I had a pretty good idea. I just needed to know if the whole Facebook community knew about Elysse’s problem with me.

  “It’s all over Twitter, too,” Monty said. “She started a Facebook page for it last night and she had, like, two hundred Likes by midnight.”

  Chris laughed and poked her brother. “And there’s another one. You and your ‘Likes.’” She turned to me. “From what I read, it does seem like you were a little harsh, Sophie,” she said.

  I was dazed, and not just by the bright sun. “I was harsh?” I asked, glad that the noisy crowd passing us on both sides masked my increasingly loud responses.

  “You know, marking her down for a little slipup in formatting her answer,” Chris said.

  “It really should be about content,” said Monty, who had all of two semesters of teaching under his belt. “I try to look past the small errors and go for what the kid is really trying to say. It’s the substance that matters.”

  I made a conscious effort to relax my shoulders rather than take a swing at Monty, which would have ended badly for me.

  Like many adjunct professors, Monty taught only one class, “Marketing Research,” to students in our newly added International Business major. His main occupation was working for a management consulting firm in Boston, whatever that meant. I’d been over my head reading both his class description and the “about” paragraphs on his firm’s website during the weeks when we on the hiring committee were reviewing his application. Terms like “estimates of market potential,” “organizational sustainability,” and “outsourcing management” were outside my wheelhouse. Nothing like a good, old-fashioned statistics class for clear topics: sampling, estimation, testing.

  I took a second deep breath. A crowded sidewalk on Main Street in Henley, Massachusetts, was not the place to defend myself or explain my pedagogical philosophy. Especially on a day like today, with mourners in various stages of grief and relief. Besides, the Sizemore siblings each had seven or eight inches on me; it was hard to present a good argument while straining to look up at your opponents.

  “Is that how Elysse put it?” I asked, as calmly as I could. “‘A slipup in formatting’? There’s a lot more involved than that.”

  “Whatever,” Monty said, causing my jaw to tighten again, to the point of pain.

  “She has perfect timing, too, huh? There’s only about two million students getting grades this month, from somewhere or other,” Chris answered.

  “And maybe ninety percent of them thinking they deserved a couple more points,” Monty added.

  “Make that ninety-nine percent of them, if they’re your students,” Chris said to her brother, giving him a playful grin. One might almost think they’d rehearsed this skit.

  “Well, at least they’re not on Facebook with it,” Monty said. Apparently the brother and sister duo forgot I was there for a moment.

  Monty addressed me again. “Don’t have to tell you about statistics, though, right, Sophie?” When I didn’t answer, Monty continued. “Elysse has a great target audience. If she had a product to sell, I’d say now would be the time.” At this point, he swung an imaginary tennis racket in the air and we all watched an invisible ball soar over our heads.

  Chris seemed finally to realize that I wasn’t enjoying the banter. She stopped smiling and looked at her watch. “I need some coffee,” she said. “Sure you don’t want to join us, Sophie?”

  “I’d love to”—I looked at my own watch—“but, wouldn’t you know, I’m late for a meeting.”

  I’d had enough of Frick and Frack. All I wanted was to get to a place where I could check out Ely
sse’s Facebook postings. And possibly unfriend the Sizemore sibs.

  As I walked, I became more and more agitated about the interaction I’d had—make that, endured—with Chris and Monty. One minute I decided to flunk Elysse outright; the next I was convinced I should give her full credit and avoid what could turn into a major hassle. My smartphone was too hard to read in the glaring sun, or I would have stepped to the side and logged on right there.

  I wasn’t proud of an “I’ll show you” idea that popped into my head as I considered calling Virgil and annotating the list of names I’d given him of faculty who voted no on Mayor Graves for commencement speaker. “Something just occurred to me,” I could tell him. “I thought you should know that Christine Sizemore stormed out of the room when we lost the vote. And, while I’m thinking of it, I heard that her brother Monty Sizemore’s management consulting firm was hired by the mayor’s office and then suddenly fired over a contract dispute for waste management.” Take that, Sizemores.

  I chided myself for vengeful thoughts and for forming an opinion about Elysse’s post before I looked at the primary source.

  The Sizemore team had seemed happy to aggravate me, but with a little distance I could chalk it up to their age. If one of their students had done something similar, their response would most likely have been different. They might even have joined in the thread and given the student a run for her money or simply had fun with it. How did I suddenly become old at forty-four?

  Rring, rring. Rring, rring.

  I took a call from Bruce. I spared him my angst over the grading issue and updated him on my itinerary.

  “Watch out for the corner of Henley and Main,” he said, as I approached it. “There was a demonstration of sorts in front of city hall most of the morning and I think it’s still closed off.”