The Principal Cause of Death

by Mark Richard Zubro

  “I know.”

  Meg said, “I’ll try and revive the old grapevine and see what I can find out.”

  I thanked her and left.

  I knew who I wanted to find, and I knew where he’d be.

  Al Welman was one of the oldest members of the faculty. He ate at a desk in the English department office every day. I knew what he would be wearing. It was Wednesday and every Wednesday since I’d taught at Grover Cleveland, and I’d been told since long before then, he’d worn his brown cardigan sweater, brown corduroy pants, brown shoes, brown socks, tan shirt, and black tie. Each day’s outfit included some outward affectation: an umbrella, a beret, a scarf, a six-inch-wide smile button, a rose in his lapel.

  Since it was Wednesday, he’d be eating a tuna-fish sandwich with mustard and no mayonnaise. He’d have a red pen stuck behind his left ear and a stack of papers in front of him. After he was through with them, the student essays he graded would bleed red ink. He ate and graded at the same time. All of us English teachers have tricks to wade through the stacks of papers. The trash can, when no one else is looking, is the English teacher’s greatest friend. Welman graded every single paper the kids turned in, taking the concept of dedication to the point of madness.

  Welman had hated Robert Jones with an incredible passion and as a creature of habit would have been in the school grading papers during the time the murder was committed. I wanted to find out what he knew.

  I found him in the predicted position.

  One of the last things Jones had done as principal was announce that he would be revising every English teacher’s schedule at the beginning of the next semester. This may not compare with other upheavals in history, like the Russian Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, but to the English department at Grover Cleveland High School, he might as well have announced World War III.

  The head of the department, at three meetings last school year, two meetings this summer, and one meeting a week ago, reassured us that as little disruption would occur as possible. Teachers get into ruts. Some of us teach the same thing for years and are quite content. We feel we’ve paid our dues and earned those classes of bright seniors and other less fractious students, and here was Robert Jones, after one year and one month on the job, ordering the restructuring of the entire department.

  I attended the meetings between Jones and the department head because I’m the union’s building representative. I was there to prevent Jones from screwing with the union contract. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find anything he did that violated it. I had no real objection to the changes he wanted, other than the minor annoyance of revising lesson plans, something I don’t find to be traumatic.

  In private meetings with the head of the department, Jones used Al Welman as his example of the need for change. Al was too poor to retire and had only a meager pension to look forward to. By common consent, he got the easiest assignments in the department. The last couple of years he’d had trouble with even these. Most of the rest of us tried to take some of the burden off him. The quarterly paperwork for his homeroom got done on a rotating basis by other staff members. We quietly had schedule changes for the few discipline problems he had in his classrooms. Still, he’d become less and less effective in his teaching every year.

  Al and I had met with Jones numerous times. They had arguments and once even a shouting match. It got so that Al wouldn’t say hello to Jones in the hallway without me, as union rep, being present.

  Yet, I couldn’t deny the reason of Robert Jones’s argument. He wanted the best education possible for the kids at Grover Cleveland, and they weren’t getting it from Welman. I thought Jones could have been kinder in the way he went about his work, but perhaps there isn’t a way to tell someone who’s been working the same job for forty years that he isn’t any good anymore.

  I thought Jones reached the point of being inhumane and cruel when he told Welman that he had to teach an “out-of-license” biology class. They can do that in Illinois. As long as you teach at least half of your classes in your major area, they can assign you to anything else for the rest of the day.

  I knew trying to teach biology would destroy Al, but I didn’t lose my temper until Jones made a sneering crack about how “we all have to be willing to change.” I hadn’t raised my voice, but I let him know in no uncertain terms how unfair he was being. Didn’t have the slightest effect.

  After one of these meetings Jones had asked me to stay after for a minute.

  He remained seated as I stood near the door. “You know, I’m making these decisions in the best interest of the students. He can’t make it anymore.”

  I remembered gazing at Jones silently as he threatened to be in Welman’s classroom as often as possible to observe the old man.

  This is one of the administrators’ tricks when they don’t like a teacher. They come into your class and observe you. Formal observations happen to teachers depending on the school district’s policies and the union contract. The observation then leads to evaluation. Numerous and constant observations are a good way to unnerve any insecure teacher, and even a competent person doesn’t dance with joy at the prospect of an administrator hanging around the classroom constantly.

  “What harm is he doing?” I’d asked.

  “You know as well as I what harm. These kids deserve the best education. He isn’t giving it to them. I was brought in to improve this school. I’m going to do it.”

  This statement put it mildly. Rumor among the teachers was that he’d been told to “go into that high school and clean it up, especially the deadwood among the faculty.” For the first year his effect had been minimal. To start the second year, he’d put his program of change into high gear.

  Despite Welman’s dislike for Jones, I didn’t see him as a murderer, but his name was high on my list of people to talk to. Driven to desperation, even Al might try anything.

  Welman greeted me effusively. “Heard you beat up that snotty Bluefield kid. It’s about time that little shit got what was coming to him.” He sipped from a cup of tea. The back corner of the desk he sat at held a one-burner warmer that always had a pot of water ready to be heated up for his favorite beverage.

  With his age-mottled hand he set the teacup down, and picked up half of his tuna sandwich and took an enormous bite. Al was a little over six feet tall, with wisps of white hair greased down and pulled straight back from his forehead. I watched him chew for a moment. With his mouth half full he said softly, “I’m glad Jones is dead. I hated him. He had no right to harass me that way. I’ve given the best years of my life to this school and he wanted to throw me out like last year’s trash. I hated him when he was alive and I still hate him.”

  “He gave you a lot of unnecessary trouble,” I said.

  “Damn right.”

  Before he got launched into a full tirade against Jones, I said, “You know I’m a suspect in the murder.”

  He nodded and took another bite.

  “I’m trying to find out who was around last night. I know you grade papers in here late some evenings. Maybe you could help me with who you saw, maybe even when they left.”

  “Including me.”

  I’d avoided saying that. Welman had a temper and a one-track mind, not a good combination. I’d seen a couple of his tantrums with the kids. Years ago they must have been effective in cowing a teenager. Now even the freshmen laughed when he tried it. He’d do an only slightly milder version of a tantrum with the rest of the faculty, but what we really dreaded was his one-track mind. During a departmental meeting, if he got an idea stuck in his head, he never let go. He could hold a wrongheaded notion, a grudge, or simply a whimsical thought for years.

  “I want to clear myself and find the killer,” I said. “It’s hard for me to imagine anybody I know being a murderer, but it’s possible somebody from around here did it.”

  Welman took another bite of sandwich, giving himself time to think, or maybe hoping I’d go away. Finally, he glared at me and said, “I g
uess I owe you. You saved my butt more than a couple of times.”

  I said, “I don’t see why you need to do this annoyed-curmudgeon act in the first place. Everybody knows you stay late. Eventually you’d be on any list of suspects. I don’t think you killed him, but we all know the problems you were having with him.”

  “Don’t push me,” he snapped. “Maybe I have my own reasons for being reluctant to talk. Maybe you’ve saved my ass, but maybe I think you make a good suspect. Maybe I think they might suspect me and why should I try to protect you? They think you did it. What good would it do me to try and help you?”

  “You’d say that if you had something to hide.”

  “I’d say that even if I didn’t have anything to hide. I don’t want to be a suspect in a murder. You want to be snotty to me, fine, but then I don’t help.”

  “I wasn’t being snotty. I just don’t understand the big problem with talking to me.”

  “Oh, don’t you? I’ll explain so even your young ears can hear properly. See, I know you tell the other teachers what a fool I am in these meetings. You tell them how stupid you think I am.”

  I’d only told Scott that, not anyone on the faculty. I began a protest, but he raised a hand to forestall me, and he continued. “I know what you people do to cover for me. I know what contempt you all have for me. I know you all just want me to quit and go away. Not going to happen. I’m going to be here a long time. All I have is my teacher’s pension when I retire. That paltry sum is not going to be a lot, so I’m going to be here for years to come. And I didn’t kill him. I was up here grading papers. I didn’t see anybody else. I didn’t move from here until after seven.”

  I tried to reason with him. I told him I’d never told what happened in meetings, but he refused to believe me, and no matter what I tried to talk about, he’d come back to my blabbing about his behavior in meetings with Jones. I decided to ask Meg to talk to him. They’d known each other for years, and she could sometimes get him to see reason when the rest of us couldn’t. As I left, he was already back to grading papers.

  Next I walked down to the office to try Georgette. She often knew which teachers were in late. She buzzed around me solicitously for a minute or two; then I asked her who might have been in after six yesterday.

  “You’re investigating,” she said.

  “I want to find out the truth,” I said.

  “I know. Being the prime suspect must be hard.”

  “Is that what people are saying?”

  She tittered. “It’s what everybody’s saying, but when anybody accuses you of murder, I defend you.”

  “People are accusing me?”

  “Not in so many words, but people wonder, you know. A little aura of trouble around somebody, and you find out who your true friends are real fast. Over the years I’ve seen it happen to any number of people and for much smaller issues than this. People don’t like to be around trouble.” She patted my arm. “I’ll help you.”

  I leaned toward her across the counter and repeated my question about who’d been in the building late yesterday.

  She thought for a minute then said, “I know Marshall Longfellow, the director of building and maintenance, was here. They were trying to fix the heating for the third time this week. He had some man from the electric company with him the last time I saw him, around four.” She leaned over the counter and whispered. “I shouldn’t tell you this, but under the circumstances … I know he got yelled at by Mr. Jones yesterday for not getting the heat fixed. They had words around noon. We could hear them out here in the office. They weren’t as loud as you were after school, but it was pretty bad.” She lowered her voice even more. “Mr. Jones threatened to fire him.”

  “You told the police this?”

  “Oh, yes, but I don’t know what they decided to do about it. And”—she leaned even closer—“I know Mr. Longfellow drinks on the job, but I didn’t tell the police that. Should I have?”

  “I don’t know.” I thought a minute, then asked, “Who else was here?”

  “The football team and all the coaches, of course, but they were out in the field. You could ask them if anybody came into the building.” She tapped a well-manicured finger on the Formica countertop while muttering to herself, “Let me think. Let me see.” She reached back to her desk, grabbed a clipboard, and riffled through the stack of papers attached to it. “Here,” she said. Her finger pointed to a brief list of afterschool clubs.

  I saw the chess club, the debate team, and the cheerleaders. Fortunately yesterday had not been an exceptionally busy after-school time.

  “Of course,” she said, “this doesn’t include teachers who may have been staying after school on their own, or who may have kept kids after.”

  “Thanks, Georgette. At least it’s a start.”

  She smiled at me and patted my arm again. “I’ll help you any way I can,” she said. And I knew she would.

  I didn’t have time to talk to anybody then because lunch was almost over. In my room I checked my master schedule and found that Fiona Wilson, faculty sponsor of the chess club, had a planning period at the same time I did.

  I knew Fiona Wilson from last year, when I was working on the discipline committee with her; she was the most organized and competent person on the committee. She taught all the advanced physics and chemistry courses. I found her in the science department offices. She wore a gray skirt and a crisply starched white cotton blouse, plus a pair of tiny diamond earrings but no other jewelry. She sat at one of the three desks in the room. Masses of paper overwhelmed their tops, except for brief spaces in the center where a teacher could grade more tests and add to the clutter.

  She looked up from grading papers and gave me a brief smile. We exchanged greetings. Then I said, “I understand there was a chess club meeting last night.”

  “And you’re checking on possible suspects other than yourself.”

  I nodded.

  We hadn’t become friends while working on the committee, but we had been on the same side in most of the disputes, and the final report came close to most of what she or I proposed. A few of the teachers had wanted to move us back to the Stone Age in discipline; a few even came close to the idea of torturing the students for misbehavior. I hoped Fiona Wilson remembered the committee work fondly enough to help me out.

  Without further preliminary she said, “The meeting ended at five-thirty, before the murder took place. I stayed in my classroom. I wanted to work on the computer with a chess problem one of the students brought in. I played with it for an hour and a half. I told this to the police. I have no witnesses that I stayed here all that time, but no one saw me wandering the halls toting a lethal weapon.”

  Somebody totally forthcoming. I could be suspicious about that at my leisure.

  She said, “We’ve all heard you’re the star suspect. Did you kill him?”

  I detected humor in her voice as she talked, but a certain wariness as well. I said, “I didn’t kill Jones,” then asked, “You talk to him much? He have a lot to do with your programs?”

  “Rarely saw him. If he had anything to do with the science department he saw Andy.” Andrew Buchman, head of the department. Out sick yesterday; I’d checked the list of absent faculty with Georgette earlier. I’d managed to eliminate six out of the 258 faculty members.

  I couldn’t think of a nonthreatening way to ask the next question, so I plunged ahead. “You ever fight with Jones?”

  Her answer was cold and distant. “I’ve been very helpful, but I don’t want to be involved in this. I answered the questions the police asked. I’d rather not go through this with you, if you don’t mind. No, I never fought with him.” She turned back to her desk, looking at me over her shoulder. “I have papers to grade before eighth hour.”

  That helpful conversation left me with enough time to hunt for Marshall Longfellow, head custodian. Janitors have had strange reputations since the book Up the Down Staircase was published in the mid-sixties, and probably bef
ore. Nothing the custodial staff did at Grover Cleveland would change that.

  I tried Longfellow’s office, and the main storage rooms. I found most of the custodial staff clustered in a small lounge on the third floor in the oldest section of the school. One of them saw me and immediately said they were on their afternoon break. The stack of doughnuts on the table looked big enough to last them through the next ice age. Their lethargy led me to the supposition that they’d been sitting there eating them since the last ice age. I asked for Longfellow and got a lot of shrugs. With ten minutes left to go before class started, I gave it up and walked back toward the stairs.

  On the second-floor landing I noticed a door slightly ajar. I pushed it open; it led outside to the roof of the gym. I stepped out and looked around. I heard clangs from a room-sized heating unit twenty feet in front of me. I approached quietly. This had to be the housing for one of the many heating and air-conditioning units scattered throughout the complex. The view was glorious. You could see half the south suburbs of Chicago, with the forest preserves and all the trees in their full autumn glory. I wanted to admire the view longer, but I had to go to class soon.

  I had to walk to the other side of the structure before I found a door. It was open and I walked in. Marshall Longfellow stood next to a large engine. My mechanical training is even less than that of a bored cow so I couldn’t possibly recognize its function or what he might be trying to accomplish in fixing it. He hadn’t heard me enter, and the doorway was in shadow, so I hadn’t cut off much light. Inside was mostly gloom. Near Longfellow a single bare light bulb glared at his work.

  Filth-enshrouded work clothes covered a corpulent body. Nearly seventy years old, refusing to retire, he had a snow-white beard flowing onto his chest, and long white hair forming a bushy halo around his head. His red face and the grease streaks he got from scratching his beard were the only color variations in the mass of white. Think of a demented Santa Claus and you’ve about got it.