The Wrong Quarry (Hard Case Crime)

by Collins, Max Allan

  “But nobody calls it that,” Sally told me, at the wheel of her baby-blue Mustang. The interior was pink. “Just Stockwell High. You know?”

  She had picked me up at six-thirty at the Holiday Inn, and I was getting to like having hot-looking females drive me around.

  “Who was Horace J.?” I asked her.

  We were pulling into the big parking lot of the massive tan-brick complex, two wide modern-looking stories bookended by an auditorium and a field house—an impressive facility. Either local taxes were high or the Stockwell family was a friend to education.

  “I think he invented the buggy whip or something,” Sally said. “Or maybe that was Isaac. Before my time, you know?”

  She was pulling into a space near the front. We were one of only a score or so of cars. Parent-teacher night was apparently not a big draw.

  “I’m not a local,” she reminded me, “you know?”

  She was a lovely girl, even if she did attach “you know” to everything she said. You know? But what red-blooded highschool boy wouldn’t overlook an annoying vocal habit for all that frizzy tawny hair, those big blue eyes, that pug nose and those plump cherry-lipsticked lips, puckering naturally, an effect heightened by a slight overbite.

  Tonight Sally Meadows was dressed conservatively, at least compared to the girls-just-wanna-have-fun wardrobe from Vale’s digs the other day—a navy-red-and-white plaid dress with a thrift store cowboy belt under a brown tweed blazer with leather elbow patches and collar, and purposely clunky-looking navy sneakers with white laces. The plaid dress, a tad longer than mini-length, vaguely said Catholic school girl uniform, which as fashion statements went seemed to me a pretty damn good one.

  I, by the way, was back in journalist mode, white shirt, dark tie, and gray jeans, the fleece-lined jacket over that. No guns in the pockets tonight. Or knives either.

  “Listen, Jack,” she said. We’d already agreed I would call her Sally and she would call me Jack. “I’ve never been to one of these stupid nights, you know? So I’m gonna be moving quick past some of these classrooms.”

  “Okay. Who do you think I should be talking to?”

  “Strictly the artsy-fartsy crowd—Mr. Dennis, drama, Miss Hurlbutt, cheerleading, actually she’s a gym teacher, you know? Mr. Brady, school newspaper, Mr. Jacobs, swing choir.”

  “Seems like Candy was involved in just about all the arts at Stockwell High.”

  “Not just about all, all, you know? She even took art class, drawing and shit, but that teacher’s not worth talking to—just the ones involved with pageant prep.”

  “Pageant prep—getting girls ready to participate in Miss Teenage Missouri and the like?”

  She bobbed her frizzy head. “Right. And for Candy to take all that creative junk, she had to get special dispensation, you know?”

  “What?”

  “There’s a limit at HSSH on how many arts any student can get involved in.”

  HSSH appeared to be another name for Stockwell High.

  She was saying, “Because her family pours so much into the school and stuff, not just arts but athletics...the Yellow Jackets rule in this part of the state...the administrators made an exception for Candy. She could take all the arts classes and activities she wanted.”

  “The Yellow Jackets—that’s the name of the football team?”

  “And basketball and baseball, any HSSH teams.”

  A few parents were heading into the school with unhappy teenagers in tow, as the girl and I sat in her car, talking.

  “Sally, did Candy getting paid all this special attention make her...unpopular around school?”

  She put a finger to a cheek—pink fingernail polish. “Well, I was probably the only close friend Candy had around school, you know? I was really into dance like her, and we kind of clicked right from jump street, over at Roger’s studio. I call him Roger because we’re friends. But I call him ‘Mr. Vale’ in front of the other girls.”

  “Probably wise. So, then, she was unpopular with her classmates?”

  She frowned in thought. “No. It’s hard to explain. She was envied, that’s for sure. And I think she was probably hated. But not unpopular, you know?”

  “I don’t know, Sally. Explain it to me.”

  “Well...let me ask you this. Do you think I’m good-lookin’? Kinda cute, wouldja say?”

  I would have set fire to the Sistine Chapel, for a half an hour with her.

  I said, “You’re a very attractive girl, Sally.”

  “Thank you. I think I probably am, by most yardsticks. But if Candy was here—if I was standing over there and she was standing next to me, right now? You wouldn’t even notice me. It would be like I wasn’t even there, you know?”

  “Did you like her?”

  She swallowed, nodded bravely. “I loved her. She was misunderstood. Because I came in from out of town, a new kid and all? And didn’t have any...you know, baggage from grade school and junior high, we hit off. Like I say, we were really into dance classes, but I don’t have any ambitions for Miss Teenage Missouri or anything, so I wasn’t any competition to Candy.”

  “Why aren’t you part of the pageant scene? You’d be a natural.”

  “I’m just not into it—kind of phony baloney, I think. But my opinion isn’t important. You’re trying to understand Candy, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Well, a girl like Candy—so beautiful, with all those designer clothes, so totally talented, a cheerleader and prom queen and everything—that’s somebody other girls wanna get next to.”

  “Even if nobody notices them standing beside her?”

  “You still want to bask in it. Add to that how rich she was, who her family was, and you bet other girls wanted to be around her. Be seen as part of her clique. Only she really didn’t have a clique, you know, other than the two of us hanging out.”

  “Was she nice to other girls? I hear she was a spoiled brat at home—maybe she was a brat at school, too.”

  “I guess she kind of was. She could seem stuck-up. She had to have her way, you know? She knew how good she was, how pretty, how smart, how talented. But she wasn’t mean. Not a bitch or anything.”

  “What about guys?”

  She smiled and rolled the big blue eyes. “All the guys loved her. All the guys wanted her.”

  “And I understand a lot of them got her.”

  That got a nod and a smirk out of her. “Candy was no tease. I mean...she put out. She liked doing it. She bragged about how good she was at, you know...head? She didn’t think there was anything wrong with having a good time.”

  “And that didn’t cause her any trouble?”

  Her perfectly plucked eyebrows rose. “She broke a lot of hearts. She’d be with a guy for a month, then dump him. And after giving him...everything. Drove ’em bananas. And she would have little flings on the side. If she had an argument with her steady, Rod, he’s captain of the football team and a real hunk, she would use that as an excuse to run around on him. She could be a total bimbette sometimes.”

  “How did Rod take that?”

  “How do you think?”

  “I saw a picture of him. He looks like a big guy, a real bruiser. Did he ever hit her? Hurt her?”

  Frowning, she shook her head. “Oh, no, he’s a real pussycat when he’s not playing sports. He would yell at her and even cry—he’s very romantic, you know?”

  “You know Rod well, do you?”

  “Oh, we’ve been dating. I suppose I’m his steady now.”

  That had me blinking.

  She picked up, “I can arrange so you can talk to him. He’s very nice. He’s no rocket surgeon, but he’s got a good heart. Might be here tonight. Grades are always an issue with Rod.”

  “Color me shocked.”

  “Do I sense disapproval, Jack? I know I’m a kind of substitute Candy for him. I’m no fool. I know he’s drawn to me because I was her best friend.” She swallowed and winced. “I hate talking about her like she’s gone.”


  “She is gone.”

  “I mean...talking about her in the third person. Like she’s... dead.”

  “I think she probably is.”

  She glanced off to her right, where the lights of Stockwell’s housing developments were the only stars twinkling tonight, thanks to the grumbling overcast sky. “Candy could be out there somewhere, couldn’t she...? She could be?”

  “You’re right,” I said. She seemed on the edge of tears. “We don’t know for sure Hey, let’s go in.”

  We walked up the big wide sidewalk. She looped her arm in mine. She only came up to my shoulder. “Listen, if anybody asks, you’re my Uncle Jack. My aunt’s brother from out of town.”

  “You live with your aunt?”

  “My mother’s dead,” she said with a nod. “Father, too. And you’re doing a story on Candy’s disappearance for...what paper is it?”

  “The St. Louis Sun. You seem to have this all figured out, Sally.”

  “Actually, Roger did. He ran me through it. He’s a wonderful teacher.”

  “Not everybody thinks so,” I reminded her, opening one of the heavy steel doors.

  “Oh, everybody knows he’s a wonderful teacher,” she said, stepping inside. “It’s just that some people think he’s also a sex killer, you know?”

  The school was as modern within as without, and the kind of money spent here was perhaps best represented by the huge fancy mosaic cartoon bumblebee you saw upon entering, engulfing the facing wall. The Yellow Jackets ruled in Stockwell.

  Sally escorted me around the school. Either on her own or at Roger Vale’s prompting, she had very efficiently made appointments with each of Candy’s teachers deemed the appropriate ones for me to interview. Like the real parent-teacher meetings this evening, I’d be limited to fifteen minutes each.

  I was fine with that. I was breaking a rule, or at least ignoring an important strategy, being this visible in a town where I was working. But spending a few minutes with people, in my journalist pose, shouldn’t make too great an impression. I hoped.

  My looks were inoffensively pleasant enough to allow me to get laid occasionally, then run into a woman a year later and maybe not get recognized. I could be sitting next to you on the plane as you read this, or in the next deck chair by a hotel pool, and we’d smile and nod and exchange words about the weather, and I’d be gone from your memory by tomorrow. Sooner.

  Still, I was here to ask questions about a missing girl, and not just any missing girl, but Candy Stockwell, prom queen/beauty pageant contender/most popular girl/notorious slut/envied/talented/hated/spoiled/rich (but not, Sally insisted, a bitch). Maybe alive, probably dead.

  So I just might be remembered.

  Candy may have been as good an actress as her drama teacher would soon insist, but I didn’t think she could have been any better than Sally. At every stop, little Miss Meadows introduced me as her uncle who was doing an article on Candy’s disappearance. She asked to be forgiven for scheduling the appointment on the false pretense of a parent-teacher talk, but her uncle would only be around for a few days and she would really, really appreciate it if they could help him out, you know?

  Then she would smile sweetly and prance out in all her schoolgirlish pleated glory. So effective was this exit that it became my method of determining my interviewee’s sexual preference and predilection for fooling around with a student, gauged by whether a teacher watched her entire departure, and if so, what expression that teacher wore.

  Not exactly fair, but unlike teachers, assassins can’t lose their certification.

  Mr. Dennis liked to conduct his parent-teacher talks on the stage of the impressive Clyde S. Stockwell Auditorium. He had set up three director’s chairs next to a little table with a water pitcher and some paper cups. He was in his late fifties or early sixties, and I pegged him as gay when he didn’t glance at Sally’s exit, which had seemed particularly impressive on stage.

  “Thank you for putting up with this imposition,” I said, giving him a businesslike smile.

  Our voices echoed a little in the auditorium.

  “Not at all,” he said. “I am pleased to see some movement on this matter. We were all just starting to give up hope.”

  He had an oblong, well-lined face with regular features, his head large for his slender frame. His eyes were gray and languid behind dark-frame glasses and his steel-gray hair was immaculately cut and combed. He wore a black sweater over a gray shirt with a red bow tie; his darker gray slacks had a nice crease, and he was in black slippers.

  Throughout our brief interview, he clasped his hands in front of his chest, fingers entwined, and made his points emphatically, even when emphasis wasn’t required, as if he were giving me pointers on my performance.

  “Will you be taking notes, Mr. Quarry?”

  “No, I’ll make my notes after we talk. Anyway, I don’t intend to quote you by name.”

  “Ah. Merely as a source. I see. That’s actually a relief.”

  “I thought it might be. I’ll be asking some questions that require opinions, and hope you will express frankly any suspicions or theories you might have. Without risk of putting yourself in a compromising position.”

  “All right. I like the sound of that. Have you the Stockwell family’s by-their-leave to pursue this line of inquiry?”

  “Jenny Stockwell is helping me. She arranged an interview with her brother Lawrence earlier today. Her father has declined to speak to me.”

  He nodded. “Yes. That is no surprise. By all accounts, the elder Stockwell is devastated, and who could blame him?”

  “Was Candy the talented girl everyone says she was?”

  “Very gifted. Her sophomore year she was excellent in Skin of Our Teeth. The last two years we’ve done musicals in conjunction with swing choir, and she nabbed leads in both—Godspell and Pippin.”

  “You’re involved in helping prepare some of the girls for beauty pageant competition?”

  “Yes. It’s a fairly barbaric, painfully out-of-date tradition, but I’m afraid it’s terribly popular in Stockwell, and when in Rome....”

  “So you know Roger Vale, then?”

  “I know Roger. He’s very gifted.”

  “You’ve worked with him?”

  “Yes, a consummate professional. And I will save you the trouble of asking your next question—no, I do not believe he had anything to do with Candace’s disappearance. As much as I appreciate how the Stockwell family supports the arts in this community, I believe they...particularly Clarence...are bogged down in old attitudes. They have a prejudice toward Roger that fogs their judgment.”

  “You mean, because he’s gay.”

  He raised his chin and looked down his nose at me. “I suppose he might be gay, but I can tell you flatly, in dealing with him, many times, I have to say it never came up.”

  Sometimes a straight line is just too easy.

  “But,” I said, “you assume that they assume he’s gay.”

  “That’s fair. That is fair. You might find this difficult to believe, but I deal with the same prejudice. Just because I am involved in the theater arts. Actually, I am a happily and long-married man. Ethel is head librarian at the Stockwell Library.”

  “Congratulations. Do you think it’s possible that Candy is a runaway?”

  Hands still clasped, he pondered. “I don’t believe so. We were fairly close, Candace and I. I was helping her explore various college options, seeking programs that might serve all of her gifts—dance, vocal music and of course drama. She never gave the slightest indication that she might be considering running off to try for Broadway or film. She was smarter than that. She was many things, our Candace, but stupid was not one of them.”

  “If she was murdered, who might have done it?”

  The languid eyes flared suddenly. “Must it have been someone local? Couldn’t she have been spirited off by some maniac who saw the lovely girl and simply had to have her?”

  “Just some crazy kill
er drifting around America, looking for high school girls to kidnap and kill.”

  “And more, Mr. Quarry. And more. What debauchery that poor child may have suffered before facing a tragic death boggles. The heights of the human soul have no ceiling, and the lows of its depravity no floor.”

  “Who said that, Shakespeare?”

  “No, Mr. Quarry,” he said, and smiled like a pixie. “I did. Just now.”

  Miss Hurlbutt, the cheerleading coach, sat with me in the gymnasium on the first row of the bleachers. She was in a yellow Yellow Jacket sweatshirt and black sweatpants, as if she’d just come from practice. The ponytailed bottle blonde was apple-cheeked and about forty, with her weight just starting to be a problem. But with that dimpled smile, who gave a shit?

  She shook her head, watching Sally’s exit. “There’s a waste.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Ever see that kid dance, that Sally? She’s a natural. But I have had zero luck recruiting her for cheer. I hate seeing potential go unrealized. So what can I do you for?”

  I gave her the standard spiel, and again invoked Jenny Stockwell as a reference.

  “Listen,” she said, “Candy was a hard worker. This talk about her being a stuck-up little bitch, buncha bull. She interacted well with the other girls. Team player.”

  “I don’t suppose there’s any room for a diva in cheerleading.”

  “You got that right. And I admired Candy for that, because she was a star, if this school ever had one. Best actress HSSH ever saw, fantastic soloist in swing choir, and she stole every darn recital out at Vale Dance Studio.”

  “You know Roger Vale?”

  She nodded. “Mr. Roger has lent a hand helping my girls, the ones who’re prepping for pageants. Oh, I know it’s a bunch of sexist baloney, but it’s a way a girl can get some confidence ...and a nice scholarship.”

  “Candy Stockwell didn’t need a nice scholarship.”

  “That’s for dang sure. But she needed something, or else she wouldn’t have participated, would she?”

  “What do you mean, Miss Hurlbutt?”