Before I even began, he said, “I don’t want any trouble. I was here. I told the cops that I was working on the sets for the new production. Usually several kids are here with me, but the first performance is next week, and my production, stage, and prop managers were all out sick Monday and some of this stuff has to get done. You just can’t count on kids.”
“You were here by yourself,” I said.
“Hey, I’m out of this,” he said. “I talked to the cops. I had no reason to kill Jones. He gave us a big budget that we were real pleased with.”
He opened the lounge door and slipped inside.
That had gone quickly enough; I thought I’d try Fiona. I found her in the departmental office, sitting in front of a computer screen. She didn’t look up as I entered the room. She pressed several keys and one of the figures on the chess board on the screen moved. She looked up. No one else was in the room.
I sat on the desk next to the computer.
“What?” she asked.
“Fiona, someone saw you in the east hallway the night of the murder.”
Her gray eyes stared fiercely at me. “Who’s the liar?” she demanded.
“I don’t want to reveal my source.”
“If it was really a source, and not something you made up, you’d go to the police with it to clear your own name.”
“Do you want me to go to the police with the information?” I asked. I met her gaze levelly.
“Why were you there?” I asked.
She drummed her fingers on the computer keyboard. The machine beeped at her several times as she inadvertently ordered chess pieces where they couldn’t go. She pressed several keys and then returned to staring at me.
“I’m not telling you anything,” she said.
Feeling less than proud of myself I said, “I hear you manage to make a lot of the men on the faculty feel good.”
“What of it?” she demanded. “It’s the nineties. No one cares. So take your threat and shove it.”
“You were there,” I stated.
She banged her hand on the computer console. She spoke through clenched teeth. “Look, if I thought it would really help you, I’d tell.”
“What do you mean, if you thought it would really help me? That’s one of the stupidest things I’ve ever heard anybody say. What were you doing there?”
“I won’t sit here and be insulted.”
I said, “It’s time to tell this to the police.”
I marched to the door. Before I could slam it, she called out, “No, wait.”
I halted with my hand on the door knob.
“I … please come back,” she said. “I don’t want trouble with the police. I’ll tell you.”
I reseated myself on the desk.
She turned off the computer, fiddled with the discs for a minute, gave me a grim smile. “I … This is embarrassing,” she said. “It’s … You can’t tell the police. I didn’t do anything illegal, and I certainly didn’t kill him.”
“Why were you there?” I asked.
She clutched at the chain around her neck, pulling the tiny gold cross that hung there back and forth over the links. “I talked to him. I left him alive.” She paused, her right hand continuing to fool with the cross and chain.
“What did you talk to him about?”
She blushed, then murmured, “He caught me.”
“Caught you?”
“Here in the office. I was, we were … I was having sex with one of the teachers here, who’s not married and who wasn’t here Monday night. Jones walked in on us. We had our clothes half off, and I was—” She stopped, gulped, and resumed. “Each of us thought the other had locked the door. It was after school hours. We weren’t hurting anybody. I know I’m living with someone, but …” She shook herself. “I don’t owe you an explanation about that. Anyway, he caught us.”
“When was this?”
“Last Friday. He said he’d decide on disciplinary action over the weekend. He wanted to see us in his office after school on Monday. Because he went to the hospital with Bluefield, I had to wait until after the chess club meeting.”
“Why’d you go by yourself?”
“It was my fault, my idea. I wanted to have sex here. It added excitement to the whole idea. He was angry that my partner didn’t show up with me.”
“Who was your partner?”
“I’m not going to tell you, now or ever, even if you tell the police. I’m being honest with you as much as I can. I’m hoping you’ll believe me. I can’t believe you’d turn in a fellow teacher.”
She hadn’t wanted to help me the day before, but now she expected me to stand loyally by her.
“What did Jones say?” I asked.
“He wanted me to resign. I refused. He said he’d make the whole thing public, go to the school board.”
“What you did may not have been specifically illegal, but it was certainly dangerous.”
“It wasn’t the first time,” she muttered.
“Any kid could have walked in.”
“And probably would have walked out without saying anything or causing a stink,” she retorted. “Anyway, Jones wanted me to quit. He claimed he was being as nice as he could, trying to avoid a scandal. I don’t think he’d told anyone else before he died.”
“If he hadn’t told anyone, that gave you a good reason to kill him.”
“I didn’t kill him. I’m being honest with you, and it would make a stink if you told, but I’m also being fairly safe. You have no witnesses to this conversation. I can deny anything I’ve said, claim you’re making it up. I’m helping so I can get you off my back. Yes, I know it doesn’t look good, but I had no reason to want him dead. He was actually pretty nice about it. I’ve had offers in private industry. Many people with advanced degrees in math have. It’s not like I haven’t thought of quitting. I left him alive. Promise you won’t say anything.”
“I wasn’t the last one to see him alive, according to what you’ve said, and that would help get me off the hook.”
“You still found the body and you had a fight with him. Please, you can’t tell. My name might be in all the papers. I couldn’t take it. My reputation would be ruined. I’ve been worried that he wrote something down or left some kind of record. I’ve been afraid every minute that the police would be coming to talk to me. I’ve got a resignation written out, but I haven’t submitted it because it might look suspicious to quit right now. When things die down, I’m leaving. I cooperated with you. The least you can do is cut me a little slack.”
The bell rang for fifth hour. If she was the killer, then my knowledge could be just as dangerous to me as it had been to Jones. I said, “I will leave a record of what you’ve said, but I won’t turn it over to the police unless I have to. I appreciate what you’ve told me. You left him alive. Did you see anyone else around when you left?”
“No. The hall was empty.”
“Did you see Dan Bluefield anywhere in the school?”
She hadn’t.
I went back to class. During my planning period I hurried to see Meg. I told her what Fiona had told me.
“You going to tell?” she asked.
“Like she said, she could deny all of it. Welman did say he saw her. She’d have a tough time denying that. I believe Welman, but a lawyer could give him a nasty going-over. The guy is old and the lighting at the time must have been uncertain, and he must have been a basket case after seeing Jones dead.”
“You’ve got people who are better suspects than you. Welman, Fiona, Longfellow the custodian, and probably Younger.”
“I can’t prove any of them killed him. I’m still angry at the police for the way they treated me last night, so I’m not telling them anything until I’m through talking to people. If they decide to arrest me, I’ll have to tell what I’ve learned. I don’t want to spend any time in jail.”
“Could they get you for concealing evidence?” Meg asked.
“I don’t know. It’s a risk I’m will
ing to take. They’re idiots, and I don’t have to put up with it.”
She eyed me carefully and sighed. “I think you’re making the right decision.”
“I’m not sure why I’m protecting her.”
“Because you’re a good guy with a conscience, and she said she was going to quit.”
“I guess. I was going to check in with Carolyn Blackburn to see if Jones told her anything or left a written record, although if he did, I assume she’d have said something to Fiona by now.”
“She’d have said something,” Meg agreed. “He must not have left a record, so Fiona is probably in the clear.”
“Or they haven’t found it yet.”
Meg shrugged. “You still have to talk to Longfellow.”
I glanced at the clock. It would have to wait until after school.
I opened the door to my classroom and stopped. Three items lay on top of my desk that hadn’t been there when I left. I drew a deep breath as I neared the desk and recognized the grayish lump in the middle, a dead rat, its head half severed and its entrails splattered from one corner of the desk to the other. Almost absently I pressed the button for the intercom as I walked the rest of the way to my desk.
In the middle of the gore on each side of the rat’s head was a picture. The one on the left was a nude female centerfold. On the right was a male centerfold, with the genital section slashed to ribbons.
Georgette’s voice came over the intercom. “Yes, Mr. Mason?”
“Has any one seen Dan Bluefield in school today?” I asked.
“Let me check.”
The intercom clicked off. I picked up the trashcan from next to the door. Using the spine of my teachers’ manual, I nudged the mess from the center of my desk into the garbage. I covered it with several layers of paper.
I was furious. Any guilt I felt for beating up Bluefield was gone. There was no doubt in my mind about whom the rat and the nude pictures had come from.
Georgette’s voice came over the intercom. “He’s listed officially as absent. One of the kids here waiting to see Mrs. Dalrymple says he thinks he saw him early this morning lurking in the halls.”
At my request, she sent down Carolyn Blackburn. I showed her the debris. She lifted a hand to her mouth. “This is too horrific,” she whispered.
Carolyn agreed that this needed to be reported to the police. I passed up the temptation to dump the mess on Donna Dalrymple’s desk. Before Carolyn left, I thanked her for backing me up against Dan Bluefield’s claim.
She said, “Besides the fact that I don’t believe you would molest a child, Dan made it tough to believe him when he only reported it the morning after.”
Last hour passed in a blur. I did ask if any of the students had seen Bluefield. They hadn’t. I think I forgot to give them homework, and the kids were fairly stunned about that.
First thing after school I hunted for Marshall Longfellow while keeping a sharp lookout for Bluefield. Once again the elusive Mr. Longfellow proved difficult to find. I had Georgette page him on the intercom, and he still didn’t respond. None of the custodians had seen him for over two hours. We began a search. Carolyn Blackburn, currently doubling as school principal until a replacement could be found, joined the search.
I hunted through the oldest basement of the school, calling his name without getting a response. I explored every corner. The basement was directly underneath the old gym. From the door I could see the old coal furnaces, which had been converted to oil, then to natural gas, and then finally abandoned. They lurked like cold dinosaurs in dank dimness. Add a few shower stalls and this could be the locker room. I proceeded slowly through the room.
Cobwebs brushed against my face when I rounded the huge furnaces. The light became dimmer farther into the room. In one corner, steady drips of water fell from some of the old beams. I guessed I was beneath the shower room. The drips formed into a stream that flowed toward the back of the room. As I proceeded farther, more damp spots appeared on the floor and more drips added to the flowing water. I began to hear a rhythmic rumbling every fifteen seconds; there was a glow in the distance that wasn’t made by the sparsely spaced twenty-watt bulbs in the ceiling. The rumbling grew louder. I sniffed the air and got the reek of raw sewage.
I turned a corner behind the last and largest of the furnaces. On a small platform raised above the dampness of the floor by plastic milk cartons was a twin bedframe with a bare, prison-thin mattress on top. On it lay Marshall Longfellow, sound asleep. Mounted on the wall ten feet from the bed was a vast array of gauges and switches along with a blizzard of wires connected to them and trailing off in every direction. The humming noise came from a large puddle just below the electric mess.
The inflowing water from the drips gathered here, but I soon realized the problem was greater than I thought. Every fifteen seconds, when the noise came, water burbled up from the middle of the pool of water. I watched this happen several times, and I realized that at every rumble the water poured in; when the noise stopped, the water receded. But every cycle brought the dank pool an inch higher. It had already reached several of the wires, from which occasional sparks emanated.
I wasn’t about to attempt disconnecting anything. The smell from the pool of water was ghastly. I guessed the sump pump was malfunctioning. I’d helped Scott replace the one in my basement, and he’d taken extra care to make sure it was connected right for just this reason. He’d told me some people connected the sump pump to the sewage system: unhealthy, and a violation of the building codes. If the pump backed up or otherwise malfunctioned, sewer water could pour into bathtubs, toilets, or sinks.
Avoiding the pool of water, I shook Longfellow awake. He snorted and snuffled for several seconds, then saw me and said, “I wasn’t asleep. I’m wide awake.” He struggled to get up.
“Be careful where you step!” I warned him.
He looked at the floor and quickly moved his feet away from the dampness.
“You better do something before this starts some kind of fire,” I said.
“We got to get this water mopped up,” he said.
“Shouldn’t we turn off this electricity first, or at least get the sump pump turned off?” I said.
“Oh yeah, right.” He scratched his head.
I moved back a step as the water surged closer. I had no intention of being electrocuted because some drunken fool couldn’t find a switch.
“We’ve got to get to the circuit breakers,” he muttered. “We’ve got to cut the power before the water gets any higher.”
“Where is it?” I said.
As he pulled his befuddled self together, I hurried in the direction he indicated. After fumbling around in the dimness for five minutes, I found the control panel. None of the switches were labeled. They were all in the same position, which I presumed had to be on. Tentatively I flipped several of them, not sure what part of the complex I was denying electricity to. If a switch didn’t turn off any electricity here, I immediately flipped it back on.
Halfway through my random search, lights in the basement winked off. At first I thought I’d done it, but I hadn’t flipped a switch just before the lights winked out. A howl of complaint came from where I’d last seen Longfellow. I stayed where I was and stopped flipping switches. I assumed if Longfellow didn’t have a flashlight, then at least one of the other custodians would come hunting the reason for the power failure.
I listened to the dripping of water and the cursing of the custodian, neither of which seemed tremendously imaginative. A few minutes later a glow of light formed at the opposite end of the room. In five minutes the entire custodial staff stood around me and the control panel, flipping switches back and forth, trying by trial and error to see which switch controlled what. Longfellow joined us early on in the process. His years of expertise as head custodian led him to continually comment, “No, asshole, try another one.”
Finally, light restored, underlings dispatched, wires disconnected, and the threat of fire eliminated, I t
apped Longfellow on the shoulder. “I need to talk to you,” I said.
He looked annoyed but followed me to a corner behind one of the grime- and soot-encrusted furnaces.
He said, “You’re not going to tell about …” He cleared his throat. “About my needing to take a rest.”
“I need information,” I said. “You talk to me, tell me the truth, and I don’t say anything.”
He nodded glum agreement.
I told him he’d been seen outside the principal’s office on Monday night at the time of the murder.
“No,” he said.
“Carolyn Blackburn would love to know about your little nap,” I said.
His bloodshot eyes wouldn’t meet mine. “I can’t help it,” he said.
I asked him what he couldn’t help.
“I need to calm my nerves,” he said. “It helps me relax. I’m not an alcoholic. I can say no. It just helps me. But Jones, that bastard, he wouldn’t see it that way. He told me to stop drinking on the job. All last year I stopped. Just once or twice this year I took a sip.” Longfellow drew a sharp breath and turned his bleary eyes on me. “He caught me last Friday at noon. I was down here. No principal ever came down here before. He did. I’ve been here thirty years and him less than two and he was going to put me on probation, like some kid who doesn’t even have a high-school diploma. He wanted to humiliate me in front of everyone. Said if I wanted to avoid that I could resign. He smirked at me. I know he’s been looking for an excuse to get rid of me.”
“Why did you go down to his office Monday?” I asked.
“I had an appointment. I was a few minutes early. It was a short interview. He told me he wanted my resignation Tuesday morning. If he didn’t get it, I would be fired at the next board meeting, which is tonight.”
“Did you fight with him, argue about it?” I asked.
“I tried, but he said he didn’t want to hear it. He said it was real simple. I quit or I got fired. He hadn’t told Carolyn Blackburn yet. He was giving me a chance to do the right thing. Pissant little snot. I’m glad he’s dead.” He glanced at me quickly. “I didn’t kill him. He was alive when I left him. You can’t tell anyone this. You promised if I was honest you wouldn’t tell.”
The Principal Cause of Death Page 8