The Math Teacher Is Dead

by Robert Manners

“A famous Civil War battleship. It was the type called an ‘ironclad.’ It sank in a storm on New Year’s Eve, 1862.”

  “You’re too smart for your own good, Danny Vandervere,” the policeman looked up at him admiringly, “And you’re not a suspect. Whoever killed Eric would have been covered in blood, and you don’t have a drop on you. I doubt very seriously if you have a duplicate to a costume like that.”

  “Is it possible he killed himself?” Danny wanted to know.

  “Possible, but not probable. To make two deep incisions, with no hesitation marks, one on each side, would require a strength of purpose I don’t think that boy had. But it is possible that he did it himself. Forensics will have to decide.”

  “Poor kid,” Danny pinched the bridge of his nose, willing the tears to stop.

  “I expect plenty of other people might be angry enough to kill him? As you said, he made himself very unpopular with that little outing stunt. He named three other boys besides you, and threatened to name others? Would someone kill him to shut him up?”

  “Possibly,” Danny thought that over for a moment, “There are some people who still wish to keep their sexuality a secret. But I would think they’d have done it a lot sooner. Eric could have broadcast his knowledge from here to China in the last three weeks.”

  “Can you give me some names? Of the boys who might have felt threatened?”

  “I’d really rather not,” Danny said apologetically.

  “If I insist?” the officer suggested.

  “If you insist with formal questioning, at the police station with a lawyer present, then perhaps,” Danny considered the man carefully.

  “Which you know perfectly well I won’t do, since the lawyer will probably be your father, my boss, the Mayor,” Officer Kelly narrowed his eyes suspiciously.

  “Well, I can’t help that,” Danny shrugged, “It’s up to you if you think it’s worth the trouble. But I’m not kissing and telling if I can avoid it.”

  “We’re not talking about ‘kiss and tell,’ Danny, we’re talking about investigating a possible murder. If you know of a boy who had a motive for killing Eric in order to keep his sexuality a secret, and you don’t tell me who it is, you’re obstructing justice.”

  “Well, if you put it that way,” Danny relented, “But I really need your assurance that you won’t tell them you know unless absolutely necessary. I mean, I promised them, and I don’t break promises lightly.”

  “You give me a list of names, written on a piece of paper; I will see if they have alibis; and if they don’t, I will ask them some very discreet questions. I won’t mention your name, and I won’t make it look like I’m singling them out. How’s that?”

  “That sounds fair,” Danny reached for the notepad by the counselor’s phone and took a pen from the cup on the desk. He wrote down the names of all the boys at school he’d had sex with but who hadn’t come out in the last three weeks, “Though you realize that Eric might have made any number of enemies outside of the school. Am I going to have to snitch on every closeted man in town?”

  “Let’s start with these… eight boys, criminy! I didn’t have eight conquests to my name until I was twenty-two… and then we’ll see what comes up. I don’t want you to feel like a snitch.”

  “So, you think I’m beautiful?” Danny went back to the beginning of the conversation to clarify a point that had snagged in the back of his mind.

  “Merely an aesthetic judgement, not a come-on,” Officer Kelly smiled knowingly at the boy, having figured out that his insatiable need for love would make him easy to manipulate if the necessity ever arose, “I’m straight.”

  “You’d be surprised, Officer,” Danny laughed at him, “how many of the men I’ve fucked have said that to me.”

  “And speaking of which,” the officer closed his notebook and looked at Danny with a weary but very intent face, “What do you think of the possibility that this is another murder that has been offered very specifically to you, either as a warning or, as seems more likely in this case, a gift?”

  “I don’t know,” Danny said tensely, “He was a declared enemy, someone killing him for my benefit makes more sense than poor Mr. Janacek, whom I liked very much. But I can’t imagine why someone would do that for me.”

  “If someone is obsessed with you, and mentally unbalanced, it would be quite possible. That this is the second body that was placed directly in your path is very suggestive. I mean, there were a hundred cars in the lot, it seems odd that the killing would happen right in front of yours, not just nearby but immediately in your way, if you weren’t the intended audience.”

  “Well, yes, but it seems so random. Mr. Janacek and Eric had nothing in common, my relationships with each of them were entirely different. And the modus operandi was different in both cases. I thought killers stuck to a preferred method; how often does a strangler suddenly become a slasher?”

  “Not very often,” Officer Kelly agreed, “but if this is a new hobby, the killer might not have settled on a preferred method yet.”

  “Do you think more people will be killed?” Danny was horrified by the suggestion.

  “If it’s the same killer, yes I do. Nobody stops at two unless they’re stopped by someone or something.”

  “So far it’s been a friend and an enemy. Who would be next?”

  “I don’t know, Danny,” the officer stood up and laid his hand on the boy’s shoulder, “But keep your eyes open, OK? I don’t mean to frighten you, but it might be you next.”

  16

  Eric’s death had even less of an impact on the students of Vandervere High than Mr. Janacek’s had: though some might have felt guilty about their treatment of Eric in the last weeks of his life, he was essentially an outsider, new to Vandervere and not well-liked; his coming and going was just a blip in the school year — a dramatic and memorable blip, but a blip nonetheless.

  The administration responded anyway by bringing the grief counselors back, as well as papering the school with suicide-prevention literature; though the nature of Eric’s death had not been released to the public, it was easier to think the unfortunate boy had killed himself — teenage suicide is terrible, but also fairly common, while murder was too scary to contemplate.

  There was no funeral or even a memorial service, the body had been shipped back to San Diego for burial as soon as the coroner released it; the entire Bettancourt family went with it, staying away for three weeks. And when Sandra returned to school just before Thanksgiving, she was consoled and made much of for having bravely endured the death of her cousin.

  Danny, however, knew that Eric had not committed suicide, since Officer Kelly told him the coroner’s findings as soon as the body was released. Eric had definitely been murdered: though the second cut appeared to have been made with the boy’s own hand wrapped around the box-cutter, the first cut was too deep at the initial point of incision, indicating a downward arc of the blade that could not have been self-inflicted. Someone of approximately the same height had stood directly in front of Eric and brought the blade down on his neck, left-handed, then as he lay bleeding to death made the second cut with his unresisting right hand on the blade. And since there were no defensive wounds, the killer had to be someone Eric knew and trusted.

  Officer Kelly gave him this information as a warning, but Danny could not see where he could apply the knowledge — it was too vague and wide-ranging a threat. He couldn’t very well walk around with a body-guard, or go into hiding, and there didn’t seem any point in changing all of his routines when there was no way of knowing which part of his life contained the danger. Then the threat was forced to take a backseat to the rest of Danny’s life in November, when preparations for the play went into high gear, Midterm exams loomed, and college applications started to crowd into the Seniors’ consciousness.

  Danny had already done his SATs, having taken the first October date available and breezed through the exams with a respectable 2206, losing most of his points in the mathemat
ics section — which, since he intended to major in English Literature, wasn’t an issue. He’d already received communications from Harvard assuring him of a legacy entrance if he chose to apply, since his brothers, his father, his uncle, in fact every male Vandervere for over a hundred years, had attended Harvard before him.

  However, Danny was in semi-secret negotiations with Stanford, using the Aunt Ems’ address for his applications so his father wouldn’t know about it until and unless it was fait accompli. Attending a university other than Harvard would be considered base rebellion, the likes of which had not been seen by the Vandervere family since Aunt Mathilda had refused to marry back in 1941, and Danny wanted to avoid kicking that particular hornet’s nest until it was absolutely necessary.

  He was keeping his fingers crossed for Stanford for two reasons: first, he wanted to enter college on his own merits rather than as a legacy candidate; and second, he wanted to be near San Francisco, which he had visited the previous summer to buy his school clothes, and fell in love with its energy, its weather, and its huge gay population.

  But that was still in the future, and Danny had enough in the present to keep him occupied: he was rehearsing four days a week with the drama club, constantly running his lines as Tybalt, trying to inject some kind of passion or even believability into the lines he’d memorized very easily but tended to deliver like a computerized answering machine, as well as choreographing and coaching the fencing scenes with Jeremy and Jack; at the same time, he was preparing to compete in the regional fencing championships, and had to remember, while he was working out, which moves were for show in the play and which were for serious competition; and then he had somehow got sucked into the Senior Prom Planning Committee, and was meeting with other students and faculty weekly to plan a dance that was six months away, which he didn’t care about in the least, but as a Vandervere was expected to be part of.

  Danny didn’t get to see much of Ash in this period, though he made every effort to keep in touch with the boy by phone and at school. Ash had revealed his sexuality to various people he knew during the weeks after the Great Coming Out, but did not join Danny’s new clique, preferring to spend his time alone with his art rather than gab about fashion and politics with The Gays.

  Inspired by the beauty of the pastel sketch Ash had done of him (which he’d had framed and hung over the fireplace in his room) Danny had convinced Ash to take part in the school’s annual Art Show in February; he’d also promised to pose for a portrait to be included in the show as soon as the play was over with and he had some time to himself. He’d gone over to Ash’s house twice to help him choose which of his older works he wanted to include, and spent some time charming Ash’s mother and his mother’s boyfriend (an attractive but dour man with an epic 70s-style handlebar mustache).

  With all this going on, there simply wasn’t room in Danny’s quite capacious mind to worry about the possibility that there might be a lunatic running around Vandervere killing people and dropping them in his path. And so he didn’t worry about it.

  The play was performed a week before school would let out for Winter Break, three consecutive performances that would allow everyone in school and their relatives to come see it; and the ticket sales were brisk, the promise of a lavish production and advance notices of successful dress-rehearsals had drummed up a much larger audience than previous years’ plays had enjoyed.

  Danny was too concerned with Jack’s and Jeremy’s fencing to worry too much about his own performance; he knew he was bad, but also knew from watching the videotape of dress rehearsal that he wasn’t the worst actor on the stage, and he had enough stage presence to make up for his lack of emotional verisimilitude. He also had his lines word-perfect, which even the best actors were still skipping and stumbling over on opening night. He was used to being looked at, and had no more stage fright than he would have felt at a dressage competition or a fencing match.

  He felt foolish, though, while performing in the ball scene, where all he did was whine and bitch to Lord and Lady Capulet about Romeo’s presence at the ball, and that feeling of foolishness made him intensely uncomfortable — he’d never felt like he was doing something silly when performing sports, but speaking lines he didn’t really understand and didn’t believe in felt very silly indeed.

  But when he got to the fencing scene, he felt much more comfortable. He was very proud of the choreography he’d created for the scene, first for himself and Jeremy, then for himself and Jack, and very proud of the success of his coaching the two inexperienced swordsmen into a very flashy and technically competent display of arms.

  Jeremy’s and Danny’s romance made the fight between their characters rather interesting: anyone could see they were involved with each-other, even if they didn’t know the boys personally; and so while hurling insults and bandying innuendo for their scene, there was a palpable subtext to their dialog that made the scene quite riveting.

  When Danny drew his sword for the first time, there was a delightful gasp from the audience: the rapiers had been custom-made for the production, the triangular blades had little ball buttons at the tip and were dull at the edges, but as polished as mirrors on the faces, catching the light beautifully when the swords zinged through the air; they were also equipped with springs at the tang so the blade could retract the entire length of the pommel, making the eventual stabbings look that much more realistic.

  “I am for you,” Danny declaimed grandly, taking a sweeping bow with his head high and one eyebrow up, his rapier slithering in a wide X before slashing against Jeremy’s.

  “Gentle Mercutio,” Jack pleaded, trying to get between them without touching the crossed swords, “Put up thy rapier.”

  “Come, sir, your passado,” Jeremy insisted with a roguish grin, pushing Jack away with his elbow and shimmering his rapier against Danny’s. They thrust and parried playfully as Jack went through his lines of trying to dissuade them from their fight, then eventually became more intent in the battle; since Danny had no more lines for the rest of the scene, he settled in to concentrate on the fencing.

  He was shocked into momentary immobility, though, when one of his slashes produced a gaping cut in Jeremy’s sleeve, drawing a thin line of blood on his arm; Jeremy was so wrapped up in his role that he kept going without even apparently noticing the cut, but Danny’s mind was running into overdrive: something was terribly wrong, there was no way a buttoned rapier with dulled edges could have cut through a layer of thick wool and another layer of woven cotton to break skin… somehow or other, Danny’s sword had been made razor sharp.

  It took every ounce of his fencing skill to get through the rest of the scene without touching Jeremy with the sword again, and when it came time to stab Jeremy under Jack’s arm, he had to take very careful aim to get the sword in between the two of them without touching either of them.

  But he did manage it, and hurried off stage while Jeremy went into his death scene, enhanced for the audience by the fact that he was actually bleeding, though on the arm and not where he had supposedly been stabbed… he was clutching a large white handkerchief over the pretended wound in his side, which slowly turned red as he squeezed the fake blood bladder hidden inside it.

  The moment Danny was offstage, he examined his sword in the light: the button was gone, the tip was quite sharp, and all three of the edges had been sharpened as well; pushing the blade against the cinder-block back wall, he discovered that the spring mechanism had also been tampered with, the tang welded almost invisibly to the guard, and would no longer retract. If he had stabbed Jeremy with that sword as he had rehearsed, Jeremy would really be bleeding to death right now.

  Thinking fast, Danny locked the deadly weapon in his dressing-room locker, grabbed another rapier out from among the props, checked to make sure it was dull and had a button, and dashed back onstage for the rest of the scene; taking every opportunity to examine Jack’s sword to ensure that its button was in place, he engaged in the more prolonged match that wo
uld culminate in his own character’s death and the end of his active participation in the play… the next two times he appeared onstage would be as a corpse, and that required no acting at all. He just had to be patient and lay still next to the bleeding Jeremy on the floor while Anna MacAllan screamed for justice as Lady Capulet and Todd Wilmot hemmed and hawed as the Prince, eventually making up his mind to banish Romeo and ending Act III, Scene I.

  When they’d been carried offstage, Danny leapt up and ran over to Jeremy, who was accepting congratulations from the cast for a very moving death scene. His arm was still bleeding and he still hadn’t noticed it.

  “Jesus Christ, Jeremy, you’re bleeding!” Danny whispered to him, so as not to be heard over Felicia Goode and Rosemary Jackson as Juliet and the Nurse in the next scene.

  “Oh, my God,” Jeremy whispered, noticing it for the first time and gazing at it in dreamy confusion, “How did that happen?”

  “Somebody sharpened my sword, I cut you,” Danny grabbed Jeremy’s arm to look more closely at the wound, which had bled copiously but was really quite shallow. He pulled Jeremy into the dressing room and grabbed the first-aid kit, wrestling the boy out of his doublet and shirt so he could clean and bind the wound.

  “Why would somebody sharpen your sword?” Jeremy asked, wide-eyed with amazement.

  “I don’t know,” Danny lied… he knew why, it was so that Jeremy would be killed; but he didn’t know who or how, so he kept that to himself so as not to scare Jeremy.

  “My beautiful costume!” Jeremy moaned when he saw the cut sleeves of the doublet and the shirt.

  “Your beautiful arm,” Danny said, running his hand over Jeremy’s incredibly smooth soft skin, momentarily distracted from his fear by all the exposed flesh… he’d never seen Jeremy unclothed before, and his torso was exquisite, completely undefined but amazingly graceful in line and with a breathtaking complexion.

  “My arm will heal,” Jeremy pointed out, still focused on the ruined garments until Danny reached out and ran his thumb over a large pink nipple and made the boy gasp, “Quit that, not here!”