4 The Killing Bee

by Matt Witten

  I had thought about that a lot. "There was a good twenty minutes when Meckel was in his office and that front hallway was empty. Except for the gifted and talented parents coming through with their kids. I figure there was a total of maybe one minute during that twenty-minute period when someone was actually in the hallway. It would have been easy for the killer to go into Meckel's office, get in a quick screaming fight, give him one fateful wallop with the trophy, and then run out."

  Dave sat there looking doubtful.

  "Look, it was only seven-twenty in the morning," I said. "The school wasn't exactly bustling."

  "The problem is, Jake, Laura's not the only one with legal problems," Dave said as he pulled into the emergency room entrance. "You remember the judge saying if you kept investigating, your bail would be revoked?"

  "Don't bother me with petty details."

  "You questioning the Robinsons is a pretty clear case of you violating the judge's order. I'm not sure you want to call attention to that. Unless you want to spend some time in county."

  Good grief. "So what do you suggest I do?"

  Dave didn't answer. But unfortunately I already knew the only solution: I had to get so much evidence that Little Napoleon would feel stupid messing with me.

  I stepped gingerly out of Dave's car, heading for my least favorite place in the universe: the hospital.

  No, that's not quite true. My least favorite place is jail. But hospitals rank right up there.

  I went up to the triage nurse. She determined I wasn't dying, only in severe pain, so it wouldn't matter if I sat and suffered indefinitely in a molded plastic seat in the waiting room. I asked her for aspirin, but she said she wasn't authorized. The hospital could get sued if I had an adverse reaction. I considered vaulting across her desk and searching her cabinets, but decided it would take too much effort.

  Dave came in and sat with me for a while, spreading gloom and pessimism about the murder cases. I eventually asked him to go to my house and babysit my kids so Andrea could come to the hospital and keep me company instead.

  By the time Andrea got there, I had finally been admitted into the examination room. The doctor, a friendly young Pakistani woman, was poking and prodding me in ways I would have enjoyed under other circumstances.

  An X-ray technician took about a hundred pictures of my ribs. I couldn't help remembering that when I was a kid, my father made a big deal of not letting the dentist take too many pictures of my teeth, because he said X rays cause cancer.

  I seemed to have mortality on my mind that afternoon—an unfortunate side effect of being in a hospital. "Should I be worrying about all these head injuries?" I said. "Am I going to end up like Muhammed Ali?"

  Andrea folded her hands together and switched into sympathetic mode, like she always does when I go hypochondriac on her. "Muhammed Ali made a living out of getting banged on the head. That’s different."

  "Is it? Seems to me, every time I get involved in a murder, I end up with a concussion."

  "That only happened one other time."

  "You sure?"

  "Yes."

  "See, I don't remember that. Probably a sign my brain is already shot."

  "Hey, if your brain got rearranged a little, it might not be such a bad thing."

  I rolled my eyes. But the old eye sockets didn't appreciate the effort. "Andrea, would you mind going out to Rite-Aid and copping some aspirin for me?"

  "Don't they have some here?"

  "It’s contraband."

  So Andrea took off on her mission of mercy. That left me alone in the room when Sylvia Robinson walked in.

  I immediately got a visceral fear that Sylvia was going to strangle me with a stethoscope or something and finish off the job her husband had started. But she wasn't holding any weapons in her hands as she perched on the doctor's stool opposite me. She was wearing faded blue jeans and an old yellow T-shirt. Her shoulders were hunched up. Focusing on her up close, she looked a lot older than I'd remembered, like she'd aged ten years in the past week.

  "How are you feeling?" she said anxiously.

  "Couldn't be better."

  "Lou feels terrible about this."

  "Yeah, so do I."

  "I don't know what came over him."

  "I do. He's upset his son killed somebody."

  "That's not true."

  "Then he's upset he killed somebody. Your husband and your son both have slight problems with impulse control, don't they?"

  She gazed steadily at me. "I understand what you're trying to do. You want me to get all upset and say something stupid."

  She was right. While I sat there and tried to figure out my next ploy, she continued on. "Look, between Kinko's and that horrible teacher, my family has been going through hell. I've been after Lou to see a therapist, and after what he did to you today, he's finally agreed. All three of us are gonna see a therapist. But I want you to know, I've never seen Lou hit anybody before. He's been a little verbally abusive to me and Mark, but he's never been physical. He's a good man."

  While I digested that little speech, and tried to decide whether I bought it, Sylvia said, "I don't like what you're doing to my family. But I understand you're just doing what you feel you have to do. Why don't you just tell me what you want to know, and I'll do my best to answer you."

  Why was Sylvia being so accommodating all of a sudden, after spending the whole week stonewalling me? Was she simply suffering from a sudden attack of the guilts, after her husband's assault?

  Her next comment explained everything—or at least seemed to. "All I'm asking in return is, please don't tell the police what my husband did today. I swear, he's not really like that."

  I didn't make any promises, instead just launched into my questions. I had plenty of them. "Are you going to admit you knew about your son stealing the skateboard?"

  She dropped her eyes. "Yes."

  "And the meeting with Meckel on Tuesday—you figured he would push you about the Ritalin."

  "We were afraid of that, yes."

  She seemed to want to say more. I waited. Finally it came. "What you have to understand is, Lou and I have both been through terrible substance-abuse problems. We lost years of our lives to alcohol and coke. That’s where we met, at an AA meeting. So we both get affected pretty strongly when these so-called professionals recommend some kind of mood-altering drug. We feel like we'd be starting Mark down the same road that almost killed us."

  Everything she was saying added to Lou's motivations to pop Meckel. And her own motivations, I noted.

  "But maybe your son really needed this drug," I said, trying to keep Sylvia riled up so she'd say more than she meant to.

  She gave a grimace. "I'm aware our son needs extra attention. He gets frustrated sometimes. He can have trouble staying on task. But if he's really into something, if he's engaged, then he's not a problem. Like, he can spend three hours at a time putting together one of those Lego sets. Or he'll play math games on the computer forever. He doesn't need drugs, he needs help."

  I sighed. Yet another kid who'd been failed by the schools. My side was hurting, so I shifted a little. "You guys must have been totally furious at Meckel."

  "We were way past furious. We've given up on public schools. We're enrolling Mark at Spring Hill next year."

  Spring Hill was the local Waldorf school. They subscribe to an educational philosophy that’s a little too weird and cultlike for my tastes.

  Actually, three years ago we did send Latree to nursery school at Spring Hill, because it was nearby and the hours were convenient. But then one day Latree came home from school, gazed earnestly into my eyes, and said, "I feel the breath of God upon me."

  "What?" I asked.

  "I feel the breath of God upon me," he repeated, robotlike.

  "Oh, really."

  "Mother Mary watches over us all," he explained.

  Hmm.

  But Spring Hill was a warm, nurturing place in many ways, and might be a good fit for Mark. One m
ajor drawback: the tuition had to be at least six or seven K per year, and Lou and Sylvia weren't exactly dot-com millionaires. "How are you going to afford Spring Hill?" I asked.

  "We'll manage somehow. Dip into Lou's 401(k) from his old job if we have to. Jacob, you have to understand, we love our child."

  "I'm sure you do. But what I'm also hearing is, you hated Meckel. He was gonna turn your only child into a drug addict—and if you said no, then he was gonna force you and your family into the poorhouse."

  Sylvia's hands turned into fists and her eyes blazed. I was afraid maybe I'd pushed too hard, and she was about to spring out of her chair and attack me. Where was that cute Pakistani doctor when I really needed her?

  But Sylvia managed to stifle her rage. "Who are you accusing of murder?" she said through gritted teeth. "Me, my husband, or my son?"

  "I'm still working on that."

  "I was at the store by seven-thirty that morning, working. And Lou and Mark were together, at home, waking up."

  "Then I think either you killed him on your own, or Mark and Lou did it together." Once again Sylvia looked ready to tear me apart. "I'm sorry, Sylvia, I'm just calling it like I see it. And I'll tell you something else. Whoever killed Meckel, they really ought to go to the police and confess. Obviously, this death wasn't intentional. It was a tragic accident."

  "And what about Ms. Helquist’s death? Was that a tragic accident?"

  Sylvia had a point there. Meckel's killer might catch a break from the cops. But not Helquist’s.

  "Do you think one of us killed Ms. Helquist, too?" Sylvia asked.

  My head was swimming from Sylvia's questions and her husband's punches. She kept on going. "Why would me or Lou or Mark want to kill her? That doesn't make sense. Admit it."

  "She must’ve known one of you killed Meckel. So one of you went over there to shut her up."

  "How would she know if we killed Meckel? She wasn't at school that morning. She couldn't’ve seen anything."

  I thought back to the phone message Ms. Helquist left for me shortly before she was killed. She knew something. But as Sylvia was pointing out, what kind of incriminating evidence could Helquist have had against the Robinsons? Maybe she knew about the whole skateboard affair. But would that knowledge really have scared any of the Robinsons enough to kill her?

  Sylvia's face turned pleading. "I don't blame you for being mad at Lou. I'm mad at him too, for what he did to you. But please, sleep on it before you go to the police and destroy my family. If this stuff gets in the papers, Spring Hill won't even let Mark in. He'll be stuck in that horrible middle school."

  I understood her desperation. Saratoga Springs has a middle school for sixth- and seventh-graders that's more like a warehouse than a school.

  Twenty or thirty years ago, it was the national fashion to build huge middle schools to dump preteens in for two or three years. Nowadays nobody in the education biz thinks these institutions are even halfway sensible, but because of inertia and economics, kids are still stuck there. The best thing you can say about them is they're better than hospitals or jails.

  But not by much.

  Sylvia was still talking. For someone who was ordinarily quite taciturn, this was impressive. "And the publicity would totally kill our business. Wouldn't you feel like a jerk if it turns out we're innocent?"

  "Look, Sylvia—"

  "Don't you have other leads to follow? What about Mark's teacher? I'll bet she wanted to kill Meckel."

  Whoa, how did Sylvia find out about Melanie Wilson's sexual harassment complaint? "You mean you knew... ?"

  "Yeah, I'm the one who told Meckel in the first place."

  Very strange. "You told him? How did he respond?"

  "He was shocked. He said he'd talk to her, and I got the impression he might fire her."

  "He threatened to fire her for filing a complaint? That must be illegal."

  Sylvia blinked at me. "Filing a complaint? What are you talking about?"

  I blinked back. "What are you talking about?"

  "Her cheating."

  Huh? "Cheating on who?"

  Sylvia looked at me like I was an idiot. "On who? You mean, on what."

  "Look, why don't you start over from the beginning."

  "Don't you know about Melanie cheating on the Terra Nova tests?"

  Andrea better get back with that aspirin soon—real soon. "No, I don't."

  "Melanie spent, like, a month giving her students pretests. Just like all the other teachers did. Only Melanie's pretests included questions from this year's actual tests."

  "Really."

  "And Mark said, during the test she went around the room. And if she saw somebody had circled a wrong answer, she'd point to it and say something like, 'Why don't you think more about this problem.'"

  Sure sounded like cheating, all right.

  "And then some of the questions, she was supposed to read them and the multiple-choice answers out loud. So what she did, she'd always say the correct answer in a different way, with a special, you know, inflection, to make it obvious it was the right answer."

  "Why did she do all this?"

  "Are you kidding? So her kids would get good scores. And she'd look like a good teacher and get rehired. It was a total hustle. That's what I told Meckel."

  "When did you talk to him?"

  "When he was hassling me about that stupid skateboard."

  I nodded, and my aching head instantly regretted it.

  Sexual harassment, sexual orientation, a cheating scandal. . . .

  Sam Meckel and Melanie Wilson had some pretty serious issues to deal with.

  Had Melanie found a uniquely decisive way to solve them?

  15

  My tête-à-tête with Sylvia was interrupted when the Pakistani doctor came in with the X rays. "Hi," she said. "Is this your wife?"

  "Not exactly. This is the lady whose husband beat me up."

  "It was a misunderstanding," Sylvia said quickly.

  "I see," the doctor said. "Well, anyway, good news for everybody: your ribs, collarbones, hip bones, et cetera, are all miraculously unbroken."

  Sylvia and I both heaved simultaneous sighs of relief. My headache lifted. I felt like hugging the doctor, but my ribs, however unbroken, weren't up to it.

  I've noticed an interesting thing about me and doctors. Whenever they give me good news, I always think they have a good bedside manner. But whenever their news is bad, their bedside manner also seems bad.

  In any case, the doctor left a little bit later, as did Sylvia. I promised her I wouldn't go to the cops just yet.

  Then Andrea came with the aspirin. I took a couple for good luck, and Andrea and I bid the hospital farewell. I wouldn't miss it.

  "The kids got pretty worried when they heard you were in the hospital," Andrea said as we headed for her minivan. "They'll be thrilled to see you."

  "We're not going home just yet," I said.

  "Why not?"

  "Because we're going to Melanie Wilson's house." Then I told Andrea all about Melanie's cheating.

  Andrea shook her head, disgusted. "Those standardized tests make people insane."

  I gave her directions, and we drove over to the East Side and onto Melanie's street. The salutary effects of hearing good news from the doctor began to wear off, and the aspirin hadn't kicked in yet. "Andrea, you feel like taking the lead with Melanie? My head hurts, and she likes women better, anyway."

  "She won't like me when I'm done with her."

  "I don't doubt it."

  Andrea pulled up to the curb outside Melanie's house. She started to get out, but then I noticed a little red car across the street pulling away. A familiar perfect profile was behind the wheel.

  "Andrea, wait." She tinned and I pointed. "That's Melanie. She's taking off."

  Andrea slammed the minivan into gear and burned rubber as she did a screeching U-turn.

  "Hey, don't go crazy," I said. "We can always catch Melanie later—"

  But Andrea wa
s a woman possessed. "No time like the present," she said as we tore off. I had no idea our Honda Odyssey could move like that. I mean, it’s fine for driving kids to little-league practice, but the thing only has four cylinders.

  Andrea taxed every one of those cylinders to the max. She blew past a slow-moving SUV and squealed around the corner, closing the distance between us and the little red car. There were still two cars and a motorcycle separating us, but Andrea made short work of them. In a cloud of exhaust fumes, and with various horns beeping at her, she left those other vehicles in the dust.

  I was so astonished, I forgot to scream. Since when had my wife turned into Nicholas Cage?

  Ahead of us Melanie sped up, doing her own imitation of an action-adventure hero. She roared down Nelson Avenue, going through two red lights. Andrea blasted through right behind her, leaning on the horn. The pedestrians at the corner of Nelson and Union stood there and gaped. One grizzled old guy gave a pinched frown, and even though we were buzzing by at sixty miles an hour, I could tell exactly what was going through his mind: Bunch of crazy New Yorkers. This town is going to the dogs.

  I finally got my equilibrium back and was about to yell at Andrea to stop. But just then, Melanie stopped. Screeched to a halt, in fact, right in front of us. These airbags sure as hell better work, I thought as I gasped—

  But Andrea slammed the brakes, and we stopped an inch short of Melanie's car.

  There were a few seconds where nobody moved. I guess we were all thinking about our near brush with death—or at least with major car repairs.

  "Andrea, you are a total lunatic," I said when I got my breath back.

  "I did kind of overdo it," she agreed, breathing pretty uncertainly herself.

  But when Melanie stepped out of her car, and we did too, Andrea immediately got back into her Kinsey Millhone persona. She needed it, too, because Melanie was on the warpath.

  "Are you out of your mind?" Melanie shouted. Her gorgeous face was disfigured by anger and fear. "You almost killed us all!"

  "You shouldn't have run away," Andrea said coolly.