by Matt Witten
Saratoga Springs has a pleasingly old-fashioned layout. You can live there for years and almost never go to a shopping mall, just hang out downtown. Within a block or two of Broadway you can get anything you want—groceries, hardware, Xerox copies. . . .
As we passed Grand Avenue, where L & S Copies was located about two blocks up, I interrupted a monologue from Gretchen about the ethereal sweetness of children's poetry. "Some of their poems were anything but sweet. They were fierce," I said. "Like there was a poem from Lou Robinson's kid that I almost gave the prize to, it was so raw."
"Funny you should mention that," Gretchen said. "Lou Robinson came to see me yesterday. Wanted to withdraw his son's poem from the contest."
"Really. Did he explain why?"
"Something about the poem not being appropriate. But when I told him I already gave it to our contest judge, he said never mind and took off."
"Did you mention that the judge was me?"
"Yeah, he seemed kind of flustered by that, to tell the truth. What’s going on between you two, anyway?"
I didn't feel right telling Gretchen I suspected Lou Robinson's wife—and his son, too—of murder. Or murders. So I said, "Just school politics. Listen, I have to go to the bank, I'll catch you later."
Gretchen effusively thanked me again and moved on down the street. I walked up the marble steps to the Saratoga Trust Bank, then went inside to Barry Richardson's office.
He was on the phone with his wife when I came in, so he waved me to a seat. They were discussing the groceries he would buy on his way home. My mouth watered as I listened to the guacamole ingredients.
I looked around the room, and focused on the family photos on the bookshelf. Barry's wife, Ronnie, was a bleached blond from Stony Creek, a sneeze-you-miss-it town northwest of Saratoga. They met on a bicycle trip ten or fifteen years ago, and had been together ever since. Barry had taken a job at the Saratoga bank so they could live near Ronnie's family. They had two children—Justin, the second-grader who had made the Terra Nova cut, and Wendy, a three-year-old. In the photos, they looked like a very happy family.
I wasn't all that impressed by Ronnie, to tell the truth. She talked a lot and didn't seem all that intelligent, a deadly combination. But she couldn't be too dumb—she did work as a nurse, at the Saratoga Hospital. And it sounded like she made a mean guacamole.
Barry said, "I love you, too," to his wife and hung up. Myself, I always feel a little funny saying "I love you" to Andrea on the phone when there are other men in the room. Seems too private somehow. Andrea teases me about it, and sometimes when we're on the phone and she knows there are other men around, she'll try to get me to say the magic words.
"Hey, Jake, what’s up?" Barry said. This quintessential American greeting sounded funny in his British accent. "You heard about Ms. Helquist?"
"Yes, I did."
"What the devil is going on here? People are getting killed right and left."
"Listen, I have a couple more questions about that shouting you heard."
"I was afraid of that," Barry said with a tired sigh. "If I'd known somebody was about to get knocked off, I'd have listened more carefully. You gotta remember, I was making noises in the bathroom myself."
I asked my question anyway. "Do you think the shouting could have come from a boy, instead of a woman?"
Barry stared at me. "What a horrid thought. You think one of the students killed Meckel?"
"I'm considering the possibility."
"Who are you suspecting?"
"I'd rather not say."
Barry sat there and fiddled with a pencil. "I suppose it could have been a boy. I mean, to be honest with you ... if I had to testify in court, I couldn't absolutely swear it wasn't a man."
My jaw dropped. "You're kidding." My field of potential suspects had just doubled.
"I still think it was a woman. But when people scream and yell, don't their voices go up a little higher? Even if they're men?"
"Yeah, they do." Especially if the man was somebody like, say, Lou Robinson, whose voice was relatively high to begin with despite his burly frame.
"I'm sorry, Jake. I've been laying awake at night, replaying the sounds I heard in my mind."
"Have you remembered anything new? Any specific words?"
"Not really."
"Like 'skateboard'?"
Barry shook his head.
"Or 'ADHD'?"
Barry kept on shaking. But there seemed to be a little shiftiness in his eyes.
"No words at all?" I prodded.
He finally said, "Listen, maybe I'm imagining this… but I feel like I might have heard the woman, or whoever, shouting the word 'back.' "
"Back?"
"Or maybe Jack, I don't know."
Back, Jack, black, Zack... Reading all those rhyming poems had gotten my mind going. But I couldn't think of any Jacks or Zacks who might be involved in this. "Maybe somebody said, 'Get back!'"
"I'm telling you, Jake, I don't know. I probably shouldn't even have said anything."
"'Back,'" I said thoughtfully. The word was tickling at my brain, but why? "Why would somebody shout that word? Get off my back. Jump back. Don't come back. Don't hold back." I stopped. "Held back. Somebody yelling about a kid getting held back?"
Barry gave a start. "What makes you say that?"
"Why the sudden reaction?" He looked down. "Come on, old chap, spit it out," I said.
Barry was so tense he split his pencil in two.
"You better tell me, before you break any more of those."
He put the two pencil ends down. "This probably has nothing to do with anything. But last week I came into school to teach Justin's class a little bit about investing and interest and so on." He paused. "I mean, it always amazes me how much credit card debt you Americans have. It’s never too early to teach kids about these things."
I nodded impatiently. "Anyway," Barry continued, "I was in Ms. Helquist’s office, signing the visitor's sheet, when Sam Meckel's door opened and Susie Powell came storming out. She slammed the door behind her. She was so upset she didn't even see me standing there, just walked right by me.
"Then after she left, Ms. Helquist and I were just kind of looking at each other awkwardly. And she said, 'It’s hard to deal with, when your child gets held back.'
"So I said something like, 'What are you talking about?' And Ms. Helquist clammed up all of a sudden. But I figured it out. Susie's daughter—it had to be Megan, not Christine—was getting held back. And the only reason Helquist said anything in the first place was she figured I must already know, because Susie and I are friends. Though I sure as hell don't feel like I'm acting like her friend right now."
"Barry, don't feel bad about this. The truth is, I already knew about Megan."
"How do you do it without going crazy, Jake? Don't you feel like you're trying to screw your closest friends?"
I didn't want to go there. In the past I'd had to deal with my sleuthing efforts being responsible for destroying the lives of people I liked—even loved. I told myself it wasn't really my sleuthing that destroyed them, it was their own actions. But still.
I shook off these unpleasant musings and asked, "What day last week did this happen?"
"Thursday afternoon."
It sure sounded like Susie had lied about working things out with Meckel last week. On Thursday afternoon she was still hopping mad at him.
And on Tuesday morning of this week he was killed.
INT. SAM MECKEL'S OFFICE-DAY
Susie Powell screams at Meckel:
SUSIE
You can't do this.
MECKEL
(placating)
Look, Susie—
SUSIE
You can't hold my child back!
MECKEL
It's not the end of the world—
SUSIE
You bastard!
She grabs a trophy off Meckel's desk and swings it at his head. It connects. He grunts, gives a surprised look, and fa
lls. . . .
A little melodramatic. But possible.
An angry mother is capable of anything.
Speaking of mothers. . . . "Where was your wife that morning, anyway? If you don't mind my asking."
Barry gave a wry grin. "Don't worry, it wasn't my wife. Her screaming I would recognize. Anyway, Ronnie was working the seven-a.m.-to-three-p.m. shift at the hospital. She's got a solid alibi."
Then he picked up a broken pencil piece and pointed the sharpened end at me. "But you'll probably check it anyway just to make sure, won't you?"
"I probably will," I said, standing up.
"You're a real hard-ass sonufabitch," Barry said, trying to make it sound like he was joking. But he wasn't. Not really.
Weird. In the old days, back when I was a full-time artiste, nobody ever would have referred to me as a hard-ass sonufabitch.
To tell the truth, it felt kind of good.
12
My illusions about being a hard-ass sonufabitch were quickly shattered, however, when I got to Mt. McGregor Correctional Facility. Walking alongside the swaggering guards past the surly inmates reminded me who the real hard-asses were.
We were doing a dress rehearsal for our one-act festival that day, and it was quite a ruckus. The actors forgot their lines, the techies forgot their cues, and the playwrights ran around yelling at everybody.
Dress rehearsals of new plays are always like that, of course. But in prison, as I was about to learn, the usual nuttiness can get unusually dangerous.
During the intermission, I pulled aside a promising twenty-year-old playwright and multiple murderer named Chino. I recommended to him that he cut half a page of dialogue because it was deadly dull and repetitious.
I guess I should have put it more diplomatically, because Chino took umbrage, to say the least. He got up in my face. We were off in a dark corner of the auditorium, behind some stage flats, and there were no guards around to protect me. Maybe some of the other inmates would have stood up for me—maybe not—but they weren't nearby either.
"My play is only boring to you 'cause you a stupid cracker and you don't know shit," Chino said, snarling. "You ain't making me change my motherfucking play."
I stared at him, which was difficult to avoid since his face was only a few inches away. My heart was pounding so badly, I was sure he could hear it. How should I respond? He looked like he was thinking about punching me, or worse. I thought back to all the horror stories I'd heard about homemade shanks.
But as I stood there, fearful though I was, I somehow was able to remember how I used to feel when one of my plays was in rehearsal and the director would suggest a major revision. My first impulse was always a fierce urge to strangle the director, then drop him in a vat of boiling oil for good measure.
Those painful memories gave me enough empathy that I could say to Chino, pretty evenly, "Nobody is going to make you change your play. I'm the director and you're the writer. That makes you the boss."
Chino stood there, stunned that I was giving in so easily. I stood there too, not backing down, to make clear I wasn't giving in out of fear.
Then I said, "But I still gotta tell you, Chino, you'd have a better motherfucking play if you cut half of a motherfucking page."
With that I walked away.
Come to think of it, maybe I did have a little hard-ass in me.
I stayed at the prison for an extra hour and a half. God knows the show needed every last bit of rehearsal time we could muster. Andrea was picking up the kids today, so there was no need to rush back to the bus stop.
On my way home, I decided to stop at the Y and work off my prison tension. I figured I'd spend a cheerfully mindless half hour running on one of the Y's two treadmills.
But when I hit the gym, my plan to be mindless didn't pan out. Elena Aguilera was on the other treadmill. She had it cranked up high and she was running fast and sweating freely, like she had some serious tension of her own she was getting rid of. Over against the wall, her daughter Luce was drawing brightly colored pictures of what looked like female matadors. In addition to being academically gifted, Luce was one heck of an artist.
I eased onto the second treadmill. "Howdy, fellow revolutionary," I said.
Elena began running even faster. "Don't talk to me about revolution. I have no heart for it today."
"Hey, we can't let a couple of murders stop us. The school board meeting about special programs is tomorrow. We should go."
"I can't believe they'll be doing business as usual."
"According to the paper, there'll be a tribute to Meckel and Helquist, then they'll do their regular agenda, or at least some of it."
"I don't care what they're doing. All I want is a nice quiet weekend. No muertos, nobody getting arrested, no school politics. . . ."
"So who decides on your tenure, now that Meckel's gone?" I asked, as casually as I could.
"You got me. Maybe the superintendent, or maybe they'll hire an interim principal."
I nodded, and ran for a few moments without saying anything. Then I tried, "Too bad Meckel was killed. I'm sure he would've given you tenure."
I glanced sideways to gauge her reaction. But she didn't give me much. All she said was, "We'll never know."
But what if Elena did know? Maybe Meckel had decided to reject her, and Elena found out, and she hit him with the trophy in a fit of rage.
And maybe Ms. Helquist knew what Meckel had decided, and somehow she connected that with the murder... so Elena ended up killing her, too.
"So do you have any idea who killed Ms. Helquist?" Elena asked.
"I was thinking maybe you," I said in a joking tone, again gazing sidelong at her.
She rolled her eyes. "You're loco."
I changed tacks. "I want to ask you about one of the kids in your class."
"Mark Robinson again?"
"No, this year's class. Scott Lawrence's kid."
Finally, I got all the reaction I could have wanted—and more. Elena looked over at me for a split second too long, and didn't notice her running had slowed. She banged her feet against the back of the treadmill, then tripped and fell off. "Aieel" she yelled.
I managed to get off my treadmill without tripping and Luce jumped up from her drawing. We helped Elena back up.
"Are you okay, Mommy?" Luce asked scared.
"Sure, honey, I'm fine. Just broke a couple of bones, that's all."
"You want to walk it off?" I suggested.
"I'm fine." She went back to her treadmill. "I gotta do five more minutes of running, so I can eat chorizo tonight with a good conscience." She began running again, and I did too. Meanwhile Luce drew a big purple sword for her matador.
"Why do you wanna know about Mike Lawrence?" Elena asked.
"I'm curious. I met his father."
"Kid is nothing like him, thank God. Sweet little boy like Mike, I always wonder if he'll grow up to be a mal huevo like his dad, or will he get lucky and avoid that tragic fate."
"What do you have against his father?"
That brought her up short. For a second I thought she'd fall off the treadmill again.
"Nothing. Guy's an asshole," she said.
Then she turned off the machine. Quickest five minutes I ever saw. "Vamonos, Luce," she said. "Time for a shower, a nice dinner, and two days of doing nothing."
With that, Elena and Luce hurried off.
Why did Elena get so riled up about Scott Lawrence?
I was so busy puzzling over this question that within ten seconds I found myself sprawled on the floor, bemoaning a twisted ankle.
Like most red-blooded, patriotic Americans, I generally look forward to Friday afternoons. Although I'm not a nine-to-five guy myself, that time of the week still feels uniquely peaceful.
But this particular Friday afternoon was different. When I got home, Latree and Charizard had only gotten there a minute earlier, because their bus was late. Much more worrisome than the late bus was the state of Latree's right eye. It w
as turning black and purple, and he was crying hysterically.
"God, what happened, Latree?" I said in alarm. I'm no good in medical crises, I just freak out. Luckily Andrea was on the case. We were all in the kitchen, and she was getting ice.
"I got punched," Latree squalled through his tears.
"Who punched you?"
"Mark Robinson."
I was so intrigued by this news I almost forgot to be upset. Andrea brought over some ice cubes wrapped in a kitchen towel. "Here, honey, put this on your face."
"Ow, that’s cold!" Latree yelped.
"It'll make you feel better," Andrea said.
"It’s too cold. Do I have to?"
Latree seems to have inherited my extreme distaste for physical pain.
While Andrea and Latree got the ice situation straightened out, Charizard said, "I hate Mark Robinson. I'm gonna go right up to him and kick him where it hurts."
"You better not," Latree warned. "He's big."
"I'll kick him and then run away real fast."
"Where did this happen?" Andrea asked.
"On the bus. He was on it today because he was going to a friend's house."
"Did you tell the bus driver he hit you?" I said.
"No, the bus driver was busy."
Andrea put her hands on Latree's shoulders. "If something like this ever happens again, I want you to tell him anyway. I don't care how busy he is."
"Why did he hit you?" Charizard asked, beating me to the punch.
"Because he's a jerk."
"Why else?" I pressed.
Latree's banged-up eye was covered with the towel. The other eye looked at me anxiously. "You promise you won't get mad at me?"
"Of course."
"Because I know you don't like it when I do too much murder investigating."
"Is that what you were doing on the bus?"
"You promised you wouldn't get mad," Latree said.
"I'm not mad, just tell me already!"
"Okay, okay. I was asking him questions, that’s all. Like, how'd he get his skateboard back from Mr. Meckel, did he steal it? And when did he get to school on Tuesday, stuff like that."
"And what did he say?"
"Nothing. He basically just punched me."