Schooled in Murder

by Zubro, Mark Richard

I said, “I’m sorry.”

  “We had wild sex last night. I thought he’d be exhausted. We did it four times.”

  “More information than I need,” I said.

  Morgan said, “I can’t talk about this now. I’ll talk to you later.”

  I didn’t see the cops. I didn’t see any administrators. No friends in sight. I trudged to my classroom.

  9

  Rain still pelted the windows. The drops joined together and formed rivulets down the panes to the puddles of water that always seeped through and onto the ledges inside the windows. I’d been trying to get that fixed for years. No luck there either.

  I sat at my desk for a few minutes and fretted. Then I got fed up and decided to go home.

  My classroom door opened. It was my lover, Scott Carpenter. He wore faded blue jeans, running shoes, and a sweatshirt. Water sluiced off his umbrella as he shook it and then placed it open on the floor. We hugged and kissed. I explained what had happened since we talked on the phone. I finished, “The cops said to hang around. This isn’t good.”

  Scott said, “I called our attorney, he’s on his way.” Seconds later the two detectives barged into the room. Gault said, “We’ll need a DNA sample from you, Mr. Mason.”

  “Why?”

  “We’re investigating.”

  An obvious and incomplete answer. I said, “I need to speak with my attorney.”

  Gault got pissed at that. “You refusing to cooperate?”

  Scott asked, “Why do you want a DNA sample?”

  Gault said to Scott, “Who are you?”

  Scott said, “Scott Carpenter.”

  Vulmea said, “You’re the baseball player.”

  Scott plays professional baseball. He’s good. He’s famous. He was home in October. The team wasn’t that good.

  For a few minutes Scott’s status as a baseball player focused attention on him rather than corpses, killings, and suspects. I call that the “Notting Hill effect.” As in the movie Notting Hill, when the Hugh Grant character shows up at his younger sister’s birthday party with Julia Roberts, who is playing a stunningly famous actress. The family’s reaction is priceless and endearing, and I love the movie. I didn’t have time for the detectives’ being in awe of a star right then, but they weren’t asking me. And for a few moments they’d stopped asking for a DNA sample. They’d get back to it.

  The reigning administrative triumvirate in the school district barged in: Amando Graniento, the principal; Riva Towne, the superintendent; Kara Bochka, the president of the school board and mother of Fred Zileski. Bochka had remarried since divorcing Fred Zileski’s dad. I knew the custody arrangement was complicated and that the biological parents hated each other. Victoria Abbot, the assistant superintendent who had been around earlier, was not present.

  Bochka had a thin hatchet face. She always wore elegant clothes and looked as if she’d come straight from her job as the vice president of a bank in downtown Chicago. I didn’t know her personally, but her public persona was forbidding. I’d seen her at school board meetings putting parents, other board members, and administrators in their place with a withering look, a cutting remark, or the banging of her gavel. We’d been on opposite sides at the negotiations table before. I’d watch her attempting to whittle away at our side. Our nickname for her was Kara the Terrible.

  Fortunately, our current union president, Teresa Merton, was excellent in combating this harridan. Merton was quiet, calm, and low-key in her responses, which initially gave the impression that she was weak and ineffectual, but by the time she was done, the opposition would be gaping at the depth, breadth, and thoroughness of her assault. I wasn’t sure Bochka actually understood all of what Merton said. Bochka struck me as startlingly slow, but when Merton was finished, even Bochka could catch on that she’d been refuted and rebuffed; her arguments demolished and twisted to the point of absurdity.

  Bochka said, “What’s going on?”

  Gault said, “This person is not cooperating with the police.”

  Bochka said, “Of course he’ll cooperate with the police.” Gault explained what the police wanted. Bochka turned to me. “Give them DNA samples.”

  “Are you an attorney?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “Then perhaps your suggestions aren’t as helpful as I need right now.”

  Amando Graniento, the principal, said, “If you have nothing to hide, why would you refuse?”

  Ah, the give-up-all-your-rights defense–a great vehicle for bullying by those in power: “If you were innocent, why would you object?” Because it is insulting and demeaning and treating someone as if they were a suspect.

  I said, “I think we all need to calm down.” I turned to Gault and Vulmea. “You’ve made a request. You know that if I refuse, you need a court order. I’ve refused.” To the school personnel, I said, “This is a union matter, a police matter, and a personal matter.”

  Bochka said, “Well, we can’t just have people refusing to cooperate with the police.”

  “Depends on how you look at it,” I said. “Although I admit that, whether it’s an assertion of basic rights or a refusal to cooperate, the result is the same.”

  Gault said, “We’d hoped for more from the school district.”

  Maybe he could bully Bochka, Towne, and Graniento into giving DNA samples.

  The cops broke the impasse by saying, “Don’t leave. We’ll be back.”

  I said, “Wait a second. Has anyone mentioned to you the hate notes Carl Pinyon received earlier this year?”

  Graniento said, “I’m sure that was nothing.”

  Bochka said, “What hate notes?”

  I explained about what he’d received and included the fact that some people suspected he wrote them himself.

  The cops took some notes, then stalked out.

  Bochka turned to Scott. “Who are you?”

  I said, “I’d like to introduce all of you to Scott Carpenter.” I performed proper introductions.

  Towne, Bochka, and Graniento shook Scott’s hand.

  “The baseball player,” Towne said.

  “Oh, yes,” Graniento said.

  They discussed neither his fame nor his fortune. They weren’t fans. It was nearly refreshing.

  Towne said, “We need to speak with you, Mr. Mason.”

  I nodded, said, “Yes?”

  Bochka said, “We can’t have this kind of scandal at this school.”

  “Which kind?” I asked. Did she mean the body or the sexual trysts? Did they know about them? If so, Benson and Frecking should be very afraid. Perhaps it would have been helpful if they had felt that fear before they started humping away at school. I wasn’t naïve. I knew kids and adults attempted illicit trysts where they could. Adults were supposed to know better.

  Bochka said, “A dead body! A teacher. This is awful. The papers are going to drag the school district’s reputation through the mud. There are news trucks outside already.”

  I said, “The concern should be for Gracie’s family and for trying to find out who killed her.”

  “Murder,” Bochka said. “That is just not acceptable in this school.”

  I asked, “There’s a school where it would be acceptable?” “Well, no.” She fluttered her hands on her expensive necklace.

  Yes, I know, we’re all supposed to tremble and quake when we’re talking to school board members. I don’t. There are a few who are not self-important boobs. When you find those, treasure them. The rare times I’ve spoken to school board members, I’ve found them to be just as human as teachers and all the other common folk. Bochka had been on the wrong side of the DNA question. You start something fatuous with me, you better be ready for something snarky in return.

  Bochka didn’t seem to notice my tone. She said, “Could a student have done this? They play so many violent video games. They think violence is acceptable. It’s terrible.”

  I gave myself bonus points for not guffawing in her face at this stunning display of excess
ive inanity.

  “Did the police arrest Mabel Spandrel?” I asked.

  Towne said, “They’ve taken her down to the station for questioning. They claim they’re keeping an open mind. One of them tried to imply that Mrs. Eberson was having an affair with a student.”

  “What exactly did they say?” I asked.

  Towne said, “They say they found evidence of sexual activity in the room where she was discovered.”

  “Why would that imply a student?”

  “Spandrel led them to believe that. She told them Gracie tutored several boys in math. Only boys.”

  “Did she tutor them in that room?” I asked.

  “Well, no,” Towne replied.

  “Why would tutoring imply sexual activity?”

  “Well,” Towne said, “it’s odd. Suspicious.”

  What a crock. I asked, “How is it suspicious?”

  “It just is,” Towne said. “That policeman said they had evidence of sexual activity. Isn’t that why they want DNA samples?”

  I asked, “Did they say what kind of evidence they found?”

  Towne leaned toward me and lowered her voice. “Fresh semen.”

  “In the room?” I asked. “On her body? Was she sexually assaulted?”

  “I don’t know,” Towne said. “I heard a couple rumors from different sources, and the police hinted. They must suspect something or someone.”

  Graniento said, “Do you think the police believed Pinyon’s notes are part of a murder? Pinyon didn’t die. Gracie did.”

  I said, “It was a threat, and it happened here. I have no idea about the connection.”

  “We’ve got to find out something,” Bochka said. “We can’t be kept in the dark. I don’t like that older detective, Gault. He was rude to me. I’m going to report him to his superior.”

  “How was he rude?” I asked.

  “He told me not to interfere in the investigation. I’m president of this school board. I’m responsible to the voters. All I did was try to go into the storeroom to try to see what was going on.”

  “He was just doing his job,” Towne said.

  Bochka pointed at me. “Haven’t you had experience with this kind of thing before?”

  The bodies-plopping-in-my-path reputation had preceded me. I repeated what I’d said to the members of the factions. “I’m sure I don’t have much more insight than anyone else. You’re already annoyed with the cops. You said they were rude. If they knew someone was trying to investigate, they’d be more than rude.”

  Bochka said, “You seem to know some of the River’s Edge police. Could you ask them?”

  I said, “I have no official standing.”

  “Yes, but you know these people,” Towne said.

  “The one I know best is not here,” I replied.

  Graniento said, “This questioning could go on for hours. They’re demanding to talk to custodians, secretaries, members of other departments. It’s awful. Our reputation will be ruined. The teachers are saying awful things about what’s been going on in the English department.”

  Like the truth, I thought.

  Graniento was continuing. “They’ve got more questions for everyone. Every petty bit of squabbling is going to come out. Every minor tiff and spat. The police are going to know all of this. It’s all going to get into the papers.”

  I said, “Then maybe it will stop. It should have stopped a long time ago.”

  “What do you mean?” Graniento’s voice was low and threatening.

  “With your implicit consent, this infighting has escalated tenfold since you’ve been here. You may or may not have encouraged it, but you did nothing to stop it. You took no action. Other administrators have been around longer, and they’ve done nothing to stop it. One could lay some of the guilt for this murder on yourselves, if the motive for the killing turns out to have been driven by the interdepartmental war.”

  Graniento said, “We’ve done nothing.”

  I said, “We must have a different definition of nothing.”

  Among other things, Graniento and Spandrel had rammed a new curriculum and new pedagogy down the throats of the members of the English department. They’d modified and ordered implemented what’s called the “workshop model.” It’s a methodology that makes some sense. Students learn by doing rather than passively listening to lecture after lecture. However, there is an emphasis on group work often to the exclusion of individual achievement. It also demands a level of attention to individual students that is difficult for some teachers to attain while still controlling a class. Graniento and Spandrel had demanded the model be used but that the kids work silently. They never fully explained how group work was supposed to be done silently or, if it was silent, how it was group work. They’d insisted on teachers’ having at least thirty individual contacts with students during each class period, and they’d showed up in people’s classrooms with charts and ledgers, keeping track. They’d stopped counting mine after fifty in one class period. Well, that day the kids needed help writing correct openings for essays. What was I supposed to do?

  The administrators had soon tired of the onerous duty of being in so many classrooms. Fortunately for the teaching staff, the administrators have tons of paperwork to shuffle.

  Towne said, “All schools have problems.”

  Bochka said, “No one told the school board about any problems.”

  “Bull,” I said. “One rumor I heard is that you met with one of the factions in the department and were openly supporting them.”

  “That is absolutely not true.”

  I said, “It was just a rumor.” Which I had from an impeccable source.

  Graniento said, “I let my department heads have a free rein. They make the choices.”

  Scott and I sat on the tops of school desks that were next to each other. He watched each of them intently. Occasionally, one of them would glance at him, but none addressed themselves to him. I took great comfort from his presence.

  Towne said, “The police seem very impatient.”

  I said, “Cops often are.”

  Towne said, “We want to seem cooperative.”

  Graniento said, “They were talking about fights among the faculty. What they said about today’s meeting was a disgrace. Adults shouting at each other? In a school?”

  I said, “You encouraged it.”

  “I beg your pardon,” he said.

  I said, “At the meeting with the new teachers this year, on the opening day of school, you told them to speak up, to challenge the way things have been done.”

  “You were there?” Towne said.

  I said, “The union building rep talks to the new teachers on the first day every year. We give them contracts and some dos and don’ts. One of them told us what you’d said. The others confirmed it.”

  “Who told?” Graniento asked.

  I said, “I’m not going to tell you.”

  “That’s insubordination,” Graniento said.

  “No, actually, it’s not. I’ve heard you use that term to attempt to frighten, bully, demean, and silence those who oppose or disagree with you, but insubordination is very clearly delineated in the school code. I suggest you peruse it.”

  “You encourage rudeness?” Towne asked Graniento. Graniento said, “I didn’t mean for them to be rude at meetings.”

  I said, “You’ve encouraged them to come to you. I’ve got ten rumors all year that they run to you with departmental problems. That you encourage them. That you’ve been undercutting the heads of one, some, or all of the departments since the day you showed up.”

  Graniento said, “Mrs. Spandrel and I speak every day. I have no problems with her.”

  “She’ll be glad to hear that,” I said. “So will the rest of the heads of the departments.”

  Graniento said, “I have most certainly not encouraged dissent.”

  “I’m just telling you the rumors,” I said. “You know the truth of them. Who knows how many of them will get into the m
edia?”

  Bochka said, “That’s one thing we’re concerned about, the media.”

  “And the Internet,” Towne added.

  Bochka said, “You’re the union person in the building. Reporters might call you.”

  This was getting down to it. Police. Media. Containment. Cover your ass. Control publicity.

  I said, “Are you asking me to lie? And nobody’s going to be able to control the Internet.”

  Bochka said, “I’m not stupid. I know I can’t control what someone puts on the Internet, but nobody believes what’s on the Internet, do they? No, it’s the regular media.”

  “Or the police,” Graniento said. “Couldn’t you get them to not say things to the media?”

  Towne said, “Nobody wants you to lie, but maybe if we all said the same thing.”

  I said, “I don’t have the power to stop what the cops say to the press. I doubt reporters are going to call me. If they do, I will handle them as I always do.”

  “How’s that?” Bochka said.

  “With professionalism and respect.”

  Bochka said, “I guess I may have heard rumors about the English department. That the teachers are out of control.”

  I said, “How is that a concern of the school board?”

  “Everything that happens in this school district is a concern of mine.”

  “It is and it isn’t,” I said. “If you’re micromanaging the place, it might be. My understanding is that school board members are supposed to take care of the budget and set policy.”

  Bochka said, “Any parent can be concerned.”

  I said, “And parents can be out of control.”

  Towne said, “Mr. Mason, we’re serious. There may have been flaws in the system, problems in the school, but we need your help. Can’t you call someone?”

  “The main person I know is no longer in homicide. The others I know are in the juvenile youth services department, not homicide.”

  “But they must speak to their friends. Don’t you still talk to your friend?”

  “What is it that you think he’d tell me?”

  “We’d like to get inside information,” Towne said. “We’re hoping you’ll help.”

  We went around and around on handling cops and finding out what was going on and about not telling reporters what was going on. Reluctantly, I agreed to do what I could. I didn’t say precisely what I’d do, or when I’d do it, or how vigorously I’d pursue it, but that I’d give it a shot.