The Principal Cause of Death

by Mark Richard Zubro

  “We are not going over to the house to beat him up and get him to confess. Not after yesterday,” Scott said.

  I didn’t contradict that statement. Mr. Bluefield would have to come up with an alibi for Friday night at a later time.

  “What about Mr. Bluefield as a murder suspect?” I asked.

  “No motive,” Scott said. “But if Bluefield or one of the murder suspects burned the house, we’re still in danger. Bluefield’s got to be pretty pissed at us for busting up his drug concession.”

  I nodded agreement. Bluefield could be a big problem.

  We drove toward my place to get Scott’s car. Halfway there Scott said, “I hope this weather holds.” It was another gorgeous day.

  I said, “I hope we aren’t too late to get the color up at the cabin.”

  He murmured agreement.

  “Motive,” I said as we pulled into my driveway. I had a hard time looking at the charred remains. “We’ve got to find out why somebody would kill him. Let’s go to the school,” I said.

  “We are not breaking in,” Scott said.

  “Who said anything about breaking in? They let one of the local churches use it for Sunday school classes. We shall simply walk in.”

  “And clues will leap out at us?”

  “I want to look around Jones’s office, if I can. Maybe I’ll be able to spot something of significance the police missed.”

  Scott gave an audible sigh of resignation. I chose to ignore it.

  We pulled up at the school as the congregation began to filter out the doors. We found Georgette, Carolyn Blackburn, and one of the assistant principals, Edwina Jenkins, in the principal’s office. They looked startled to see us.

  “What are you doing here?” Georgette asked.

  We told them about the latest developments with the Bluefields.

  Carolyn said, “Edwina is taking over as acting principal tomorrow. We needed to organize a few things.”

  Edwina wore thick black horn-rimmed glasses. She’d been a physics teacher for ten years and then went back to get her administrative certification. She’d been one of the assistant principals for the past three years.

  We chatted for a short while, then walked out of the office. Georgette followed us. She said to Scott, “I didn’t want to make a scene in there, but I know you’re Scott Carpenter, the baseball player. I go to as many games as I can in the summer. I love watching you pitch. I never thought I’d meet you. I’d heard you and Mr. Mason knew one another. I hardly believed it.” She did her most scatterbrained twitter-and-giggle act until she got to the part about wanting specific autographs and specific souvenirs for specific grandchildren.

  Carolyn and Edwina left a few minutes later. Carolyn said to Georgette, “Before you leave, be sure to remind Mr. Longfellow that you’re gone. That way he won’t waste time wondering if you’re still here.” They left.

  “Longfellow works on Sundays?” I asked.

  “If you can call it work,” Georgette said. “I’ll look for him, and he’ll be drunk in some corner. I don’t tell on him because it’s not my business. None of the custodians likes to come in on Sundays, but Longfellow is in trouble because of the other day when you found him asleep. I think they’re going to make him go to an alcoholic rehabilitation clinic.” She leaned closer to us and whispered, “I hear if that doesn’t sober him up they’re going to fire him. I don’t trust him. I wish they’d fired him years ago.”

  I said, “Georgette, you could do us a big favor.”

  “I promised to help you any way I can, and now, with your house burned down … anything I can do to help.”

  “This is pretty serious, Georgette. You don’t have to do it if you don’t want, and I don’t blame you if you get angry at me for asking, but it really might help.”

  Georgette said, “I could never be angry at you, Mr. Mason.”

  I know many principals keep an active file on all the teachers in their building. The police might not be aware of it because it was held separate from the official file kept in the district office. I explained to Georgette that I wanted to look in the active teacher files.

  She didn’t respond for a minute, and I thought I was out of luck. Then she said, “If Mr. Carpenter had some souvenirs in his car, we could run out and get them. You could wait here, Mr. Mason; perhaps even waiting next to that cabinet over there might be more comfortable.” She pointed to a file drawer across the room. She paused at the door to the office. “I guess I won’t need my purse just walking out to Mr. Carpenter’s car.” She tossed it on her desk, linked her arm in Scott’s, propelled him out the door. She was already twittering at a hummingbird’s pace.

  For a few seconds I listened to her receding voice and their departing footsteps. Then I hurried to the cabinet. Locked. Then I realized why Georgette had so elaborately left her purse. I grabbed the keys out of it. Moments later I had the file drawer open. I checked the files of the people we’d talked to. In all of them I found notes that Jones had made about each of their problems. Donna Dalrymple had been caught with Bluefield not once, but twice. I wondered why Jones hadn’t simply fired her outright. Al Welman hadn’t been completely honest with me, either. Jones had a list of infractions Al had committed for the past six months of school. Next to each problem, Jones had listed the date, the time, and what directive he’d given Welman. Old Al hadn’t been a good boy. Jones had listed all his failures to comply with rules: attendance forms not completed, grades turned in late, lesson plans inadequately prepared, and on and on. Al had told me about less than half of them. It’s not nice to keep information back from your union rep. Could turn him or her into a fool at meetings with administrators—or, worse, maybe lose you your case because the union rep didn’t have all the information. Amazingly enough, in more than half the teacher complaints I’ve had to handle, the teachers have left out something vital. Something they’re ashamed of or embarrassed about. Can’t blame them, really. Reputation can be central to a person’s life.

  On Marshall Longfellow: Jones had caught him in the school basement numerous mornings, sleeping off the effects of alcohol. The guy had gotten drunk at school and never gone home.

  I was surprised to find extensive notes on Clarissa Hartwig, the student teacher, and even more to discover that he thought she was totally incompetent and would make an awful teacher. I wondered if he’d told her or the professors at Lincoln University. A report like that could easily endanger her whole career.

  Before reaching for the next file I took a quick glance into the hallway. I didn’t want Marshall Longfellow accidentally being competent enough to catch me, and I didn’t know how long Scott and Georgette would be gone. She was being kind enough to help; I didn’t want her to get in trouble if I got caught. I assumed they were doing their best to give me time.

  As I riffled through the next file, another concern resurfaced: Maybe the killer was someone from outside the school, to whom we would have no clue, or perhaps one of the other teachers who had problems with him that I didn’t know about. I didn’t have the time to hunt through all the personnel files. I’d have to stick with Meg’s information from the day before, that none of the other school personnel had a motive for murder.

  In Max Younger’s file, I found that the David Mamet of the Grover Cleveland theater department had directed promising graduates to a shady talent agency in Chicago. Jones had several notes about getting runarounds when he called them. He’d planned to visit them next week.

  Fiona Wilson, clotheshorse, woman about town, physics genius, and computer wizard, had offered Jones delights beyond his wildest imaginings while trying to sit on his lap in his office chair.

  Jones had been harassing Denise Flowers. The un-tenured Ms. Flowers had been observed up to four or five times a week, in all of her different classes, and in each one Jones had found flaws. Some of which were preparing lessons poorly, making silly threats of discipline, coming to class late, and glossing over difficult material.

  I’d pulle
d the file drawer all the way out when I first opened it. At the very back was a piece of paper sitting alone and unfiled. I pulled it out. Part of a much larger memo, it started in the middle of a sentence. It was the documentation on Dan Bluefield, including a list of dates and times when Jones had met with the boy or the father or both. After each date was an anecdotal record. I hunted quickly for the rest of the documents.

  I heard footsteps coming down the hall. I kept the Bluefield information, stuffed the last folder into its alphabetical place, shut and locked the file drawer, and returned the keys to the purse.

  Scott and Georgette walked in smiling a moment later. Georgette took her purse and got ready to leave. I told her that we wanted to interview Marshall Longfellow, so she didn’t have to go looking for him.

  In the hall after Georgette left, Scott said, “I like her. She’s sort of like Meg, only on fast forward. Lot of common sense there. Did you find anything?”

  I told him.

  “Another round of interviews would seem to be in order,” he said.

  I agreed.

  He examined the Bluefield document briefly. “I don’t understand its significance,” Scott said.

  “I’m not sure there is any,” I said, “but I’d like to know where the rest of it is, and I’d like to know what it said. If he was keeping notes on Bluefield, maybe it meant he was going to take action. Maybe he wasn’t as big a buddy as Dan thought.”

  Scott glanced at the notes again. “I don’t think this was stuff against the kid,” he said. He pointed to the names. “It’s about Bluefield senior mostly, not the kid.”

  “He was after Mr. Bluefield?” I asked.

  Scott shrugged. “We could try to check it out, but I can’t imagine Bluefield succumbing to our normally irresistible charms.”

  We found Marshall Longfellow without too much trouble. He was sitting with his back to us in a rusting folding chair on top of the gym roof. I checked there after looking in the heating/air-conditioning room I’d discovered him in on Thursday. He sat far enough away from the edge of the roof so he wouldn’t be seen from below, but close enough so he could see all the vista. Walking toward him I saw that from this angle River’s Edge looked almost like a peaceful New England town on the ripe edge of fall.

  Closer to his chair I noted five or six empty beer cans scattered around him. He’d forgotten his resolve in less than two days. I figured he’d passed out in his drunken state and wasn’t moving for that reason. I was wrong. He wasn’t moving because he was dead.

  Everybody showed up: the cops Daniels and Johnson; the school personnel, led by Carolyn Blackburn and the school-board president; reporters, lurking in the background. The police interviewed us separately and together.

  Except for making sure he was dead, we hadn’t touched anything. “How’d he die?” I asked. We hadn’t been able to see any obvious wounds.

  “They don’t know yet,” Daniels said. “Could be natural causes, but this is another coincidence, and like I said the other day, I don’t believe in them. Two deaths in five days in the same school. Your house burned down. Something is definitely screwy.”

  In their questioning, Daniels and Johnson were polite and correct, but they gave me no reason to trust them or confide in them. Before we left we talked to Carolyn and the school-board president, Jessica Allen.

  Carolyn said, “This is sick. The guy wasn’t the greatest custodian on earth, but still.”

  Allen nodded her agreement. She asked, “Are you all right, Mr. Mason? I realize this has been a tough time for you and your friend.” She hadn’t done a recognition dance after being introduced to Scott.

  “As well as can be expected,” I said, and thanked her for asking. “Who else was around today?”

  “That congregation,” Carolyn said. “They’ll probably have their own church by next summer. I can’t wait. It’ll be less of a problem all around. No setting up chairs in the gym, no keeping a custodian on duty.”

  “I meant, were there any school personnel on duty besides Marshall Longfellow?” I asked.

  Carolyn said, “I’d have to check the records, in fact the police asked me to, but as far as I remember, Marshall was it.”

  “Do you think it was murder?” Jessica Allen asked. She was an attractive, intelligent-looking woman, perhaps in her middle forties.

  “I don’t know,” I said. I didn’t want to get into a discussion of murder suspects. A few minutes later we left.

  As we sat in the truck Scott said, “This is a revolting development.”

  I reached over and mussed his hair. “I could use some ideas, not age-old clichés.”

  “Okay. If it’s murder, who profits from Longfellow’s death? So far we’ve got lots of people who benefit from Jones’s murder.”

  “Good question about Longfellow. We don’t know anything about his private life,” I said. “If he was murdered, it could be for reasons totally unrelated to school.”

  “Or, he saw something that day and he got killed for what he knew,” Scott said.

  “Also possible,” I said. “For now, the police will check into all that background stuff on him. Maybe Daniels can tell us some later, including how he died. It might not be murder.”

  We decided to pursue the information contained in the files.

  Donna Dalrymple slammed her door in our faces.

  Next we tried Al Welman. His excuse for not telling me all the nasty things Jones accused him of was “I forgot.”

  It is said that the longer people teach, the more they become like the kids in the grade level they deal with, but this was a bit much. He stuck to that excuse. I found myself shouting at him at one point. He had tears in his eyes as he responded, “Don’t yell at me. You’re one of my few friends. Please stop.”

  As soon as he said it, I felt rotten for yelling at the poor old guy. We weren’t that close. If I was one of his few friends, what must the rest of his life be like?

  We told him about Longfellow. He seemed genuinely shocked. Without prompting, Al told us he’d been home alone all afternoon working on the Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle.

  At the student teacher’s house, Ralph Hartwig let us in. He told us he expected Clarissa back any minute from shopping at Orland Square. She’d been gone since eleven in the morning. Plenty of time to get to school to do murder.

  We talked baseball for fifteen minutes before the front door opened. Clarissa walked in without any packages. She saw us and threw her keys across the room. She shook a finger at Ralph and yelled, “I told you if they came back, you were not to let them in.”

  Ralph looked petrified and put upon. He mumbled, “They’re only trying to help.”

  I said, “Marshall Longfellow is dead.” That stopped her onslaught for a moment.

  “Who is he?” Clarissa asked.

  I explained.

  “And you came here to find out if I killed him?” she accused.

  “No,” I said. “We came here to find out if Jones had turned in any reports on you to the university.”

  Abruptly she plopped onto an ottoman. “He told me he was going to tell my professor at Lincoln University. Jones came in to observe my classes before I was ready. He’d sit there writing for the entire class period. I got so nervous. I forgot kids’ names, what I was doing, what questions to ask, what homework to assign. It was chaos.”

  “When was he going to tell?” I asked.

  “I didn’t kill him,” she said.

  “He hadn’t done it yet,” Scott said.

  She gazed at him for a moment, then lowered her head and shook it. She spoke toward the carpet. “He told me he was going to do it this week. Are you going to tell the police?”

  “No,” Scott said.

  We found out she’d had an interview with Jones only a few minutes before I’d come upon her with Bluefield in the science room.

  Ralph said, “I appreciate your not telling the police. Clarissa’s had it rough. She’s wanted to be a teacher for a long tim
e. He just wasn’t fair to her. He never gave her a chance.”

  We left.

  Max Younger wasn’t home.

  Fiona Wilson met us at the door in a filmy negligee. Strange wear, I thought, for a Sunday afternoon, but then there were days when Scott and I walked around the house all day in our Jockey shorts. Those are often my favorite days.

  After she invited us in, Fiona asked if we wanted to accompany her to her bedroom while she slipped into something more appropriate for visiting. She cast many covetous glances at Scott. He didn’t seem to notice. He walked over to the top of the television set, picked up a photo in a frame, and asked her, “Who are these people?”

  “No one you know,” she said, and disappeared down the hallway.

  I joined Scott. The picture was of Fiona with what could easily have been a husband or boyfriend; a golden retriever sat in front of them. The picture had been taken in this room.

  Fiona’s house was typical of the vast majority of the newer sections of River’s Edge. One of four types of tract homes offered by a builder with the family room downstairs, kitchen, dining room, and living room on the ground floor, and bedrooms upstairs.

  Fiona came back down in a bright pink sweat suit.

  Scott and I sat on the couch in the living room. Fiona sat in a purple plush armchair. She swung her legs over the side, put her arms behind her, and threw her head back. I wondered if she desired the effect, which was to emphasize the considerable heft of her breasts. She’d picked the wrong crowd to play for.

  I said, “Fiona, what did Robert Jones do when you came on to him in his office?”

  She looked startled for only an instant, then slowly ran her bright red fingernails up her thigh and over her abdomen, stopping just short of her ample chest endowment.

  She said, “Like all men, he was interested. I enjoy sex and when he came on to me, I figured why not? I can’t imagine how you found out, but its your word against mine. He’d be in as much trouble, more even, for coming on to me. So you can take your shady suspicions and shove them up your ass.” She delivered this last line with casual defiance.