Schooled in Murder

by Zubro, Mark Richard

  Francine said, “Aren’t we in danger? How can they keep the school open if we’re in danger? Isn’t there a killer on the loose?”

  Milovec said, “Can you get them to call off school and not have to make up a day?”

  Ah, the I’m-in-deep-mourning-as-long-as-its-convenient faction had been heard from. I said, “I’m sure they’ll follow whatever is the protocol in these situations.”

  Francine said, “I’m frightened. The school district and the union have an obligation to keep us safe. I don’t feel safe. We have to be safe. And the children on Monday, will they feel safe? I’m so frightened. What’s the union going to do about it?”

  To Francine I said, “Can I get you something? Would you like to sit quietly for a while? Do you need to lie down? I’m sure you could go home.”

  “Would they charge me with a sick day?”

  She wasn’t that distraught.

  “Probably,” I said.

  “Well, then, I’ll stay. I’ll be able to comfort some of the other members of the staff. Or should I talk to Teresa Merton? I’ll get some people together, and we’ll talk to her. She’ll make them keep us safe. You are going to do something about this?”

  “This what?” I asked.

  “None of us feels safe in the school.” Once again she repeated her fears, paranoia, and hysteria.

  If she repeated them enough times, I might be tempted to find my own supply of overlarge chalkboard erasers. I said, “We aren’t the police. We don’t have goon squads or a protection racket. This isn’t some poorly written movie with a mafia-teamsters plot.”

  “The union has to do something!”

  “You want armed guards to patrol the halls? To accompany all the teachers? You want one guard per teacher?”

  “Something has to be done. We’re not safe. You should talk to the superintendent.”

  I said, “You were right earlier. I believe the best person to talk to is Teresa Merton. I know she’ll listen to your concern, and she’ll know exactly what to do.”

  “Yes,” Francine said. “You’re right. What about the wake and the funeral? Are they going to call off school for both of those? If they’re during school, are they going to allow us to take time off to go? Or will they pick representatives from among the faculty? I should be one of the representatives. I was close to both to them.” This was news to me. Before I could respond to any of this, she was off down the hall in a flight of panic. I knew Teresa would have the right instincts: to put off Francine’s request without getting Francine upset. I wasn’t sure anything I would say at this moment would mollify Francine. I was leaning toward “Get out of my life” and “Grow up.” Not as helpful in delicate situations as one would like.

  I motioned Milovec farther down the corridor, away from any other teachers. I said, “About Peter Higden.”

  “You ran over him.”

  “No. I found him before I could drive over him. Do you have any idea who might have seen him last?”

  “I don’t know. Everybody’s running around trying to figure that out.”

  “Did he talk to anybody after the meeting?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “If you find out anything, let me know. The more I know, the more I might be able to help you guys out.”

  He looked like he bought this. He left.

  Georgette came out into the hall. “Victoria Abbot, our assistant superintendent, has officially told me to say she’d like to talk to you.”

  Meg had been busy. We stood off to one side of the office. “Is she available now?”

  “She just went into a meeting with Bochka, Towne, Graniento, and Spandrel. I don’t know what it’s about.” Georgette smiled. “She got a call from Meg a few minutes ago. Abbot is one of the few people around here who is likely to be on your side.”

  And the secretaries usually knew everything.

  She added, “Did you know Graniento, Towne, and Bochka met until after one this morning?”

  “What for?”

  “That I don’t know. Towne was complaining about the lateness when he came in.” “Were they meeting here?”

  “I doubt it.”

  I said, “Carl Pinyon had tons of information about who went to out-of-district conferences.”

  “Yes,” she whispered. “We’ve been going nuts the past few minutes trying to figure out how he got it. It will take us a while, but we should be able to figure this out. We secretaries keep a tight rein on things. The more recent data would be in the teachers’ building files, but the old stuff is in storage. It would take hours and hours for several people to find all the data. It’s strange. We’re the only ones who go back there, and none of us have been in weeks. There’s no reason to, and I’d know if someone had been back there for hours. I do the time sheets for all the secretaries and clerks. None of them has put in for excessive overtime, and it would take excessive overtime to find that stuff.”

  “Somebody is desperate,” I said.

  “Or out of their minds,” Georgette said.

  I said, “Was there much of an investigation when Pinyon reported getting those threatening notes?”

  “Oh my, yes. We were told to keep an eye on the teachers’ mailboxes. For a while they were thinking about getting surveillance cameras in the hall. There was no money for it in the budget. He could have put the notes in there himself.” She shrugged. “Hard to tell.”

  The police made their presence known; detectives interviewing, uniformed officers patrolling the halls. They had all kinds of people to talk to about the Peter Higden murder. They were set up in a conference room near the main office of the school.

  18

  I didn’t see Benson in the English department office. I wanted to confront the traitor. My first session for the day was supposed to be learning how to be a Web master. One of the teachers had taken a week-long, six-hours-a-day class. She was now going to teach us all she knew in one hour-and-a-half seminar. Maybe that’s what she would do. Pity. An hour and a half was ridiculous.

  Knots of teachers loitered in the halls. I found Benson lurking in his classroom.

  “Go away,” he said.

  I said, “Fuck you, you lying son of a bitch.” I stood in the doorway and decided I wasn’t going to move. He was far slighter and shorter than Frecking. I wasn’t going to wrestle the twerp, but I wasn’t going to let him past me until I got some answers.

  He said, “You’re a shit for telling on us.”

  “I told the police you were there.”

  “You mentioned sex to them.”

  “After you denied you were there.”

  “They want a DNA sample.”

  “You’re screwed.”

  “It’s your fault.”

  “I’m not the closeted married man making out in storage rooms with dead bodies in the back. You lied about me, you shit. It’s all going to come out.”

  “Am I going to lose my job?”

  “It’s likely.”

  “Doesn’t the union have to help me? You’re the union guy. I want someone else besides you as my rep.”

  “No,” I said. “You don’t get to choose.”

  We’d had this fight before in the district. The union decides who the reps will be. You don’t get to pick and choose. What happens if the individual picks and chooses is that they usually select a friend who is neither qualified nor likely to know any of the proper procedures or rules of conduct, how to keep notes, or ins and outs of the contract and is as big a fool as himself. It’s nearly like when clients say they want to represent themselves at trial, only this time they want their best friend to be their lawyer. That’s why they created professionals, to be used and paid for.

  He said, “I want someone else.”

  I said, “Fine, we’ll waste our time looking for Teresa Merton. She’ll tell you the same thing.”

  “Well, you’ve got to help me. Somebody does.”

  “Has to? For this conversation, you need to focus on the lies you told. I
n fact, you might want to consider resigning before the administration finds out what you were doing. It’ll be easier on you and your record if you do.”

  “We weren’t doing anything that odd. A whole lot of other people have done the same thing.”

  “Very probably true. Again, you have the getting-caught-in-a-lie issue, a big problem when you already have a dead-body issue.”

  “Don’t you understand? I had no choice in what I said. I couldn’t admit what I was doing. My wife would kill me.”

  Which would add to our corpse count. At the moment, if his wife strangled the stupid shit, I would lead the cheering. As long as I wasn’t the one who found the body.

  I said, “There are always choices. The union will give you professional representation in contractual matters. My memory might be a little shaky, but I don’t think the contract has a permissible fucking-in-storage-rooms clause. I’ve got questions this morning, and I expect the truth. Maybe the administration won’t find out. Maybe because you’re in the suckup faction, you’ll get away with it. I don’t know. Sometimes I get the impression that being in the suckup faction could save you even if you raped a nun at high noon in the cafeteria. You people are a menace.”

  “Go ahead, be nasty. Do you think it’s helping?”

  “I’d be happy to threaten you with telling the administration if you don’t give me answers to questions.”

  “Will you help me if I answer them?”

  “There’s no question that I’m going to help you. Don’t start that the-union-rep-refused-to-help-me crap. We can meet with Teresa Merton if you like. She will listen and then turn things over to me. However, I may be convinced to keep silent. That depends on your answers. To be totally honest, as a union building rep, at this moment my advice would be as I said earlier: if I were you, I would find a way to quit. Today.”

  “I can’t. My wife will find out.”

  I sighed. “You really want to live your life as a closeted gay man?”

  “I’m not gay.”

  I wanted to beat him into insensibility. I also understood. Every gay man understands being in the closet.

  I said, “Let’s try a few questions.”

  He shrugged.

  Better than a flat no.

  I asked, “Do you know if Gracie Eberson and Mabel Spandrel were having an affair?”

  “I never believed the rumors. They did meet for drinks, but meeting for drinks isn’t an indicator of two people having an affair. Sometimes I went out with the crowd. My wife usually came with. Some of the wives and husbands do.”

  “How about rumors of Gracie having an affair with a student?”

  “I never heard of anything.”

  I asked, “Do you know where Carl Pinyon got his statistics?”

  “No idea.” I couldn’t tell if he was lying.

  “Any notions on what those hate notes he got were all about?”

  “No.”

  “How well did you know Peter?”

  “Higden was a shit. A total shit. He only cared about himself. I never trusted him. He could be charming. A few of the stupidest parents loved him. All the kids loved him. He was sneaky. He was one of the administration’s main spies.”

  “How did he spy?”

  “He’d report anything he heard.”

  “I thought you all did that.”

  “Some of us were loyal.”

  “Loyal to whom?”

  “Who was going to give us tenure? The union can’t save our asses if they don’t give us tenure.”

  It was useless to pursue a debate on loyalty. I asked, “Was Peter there when you went out drinking?”

  “Sometimes. It wasn’t always the same people. It kind of varied. I didn’t take attendance.”

  “Did you have an affair with him?”

  “No.”

  “Give him a blow job in the storage room?” “No. This is getting absurd.”

  I said, “You got that right. What I don’t get is why you people are so desperate to do all these things?”

  “What things?”

  “Inflict your semi-valid theories and practices on people with their own semi-valid theories. What does it gain you? How do you profit from people fighting? From people hating each other?”

  “Hey, I don’t do any planning. I’m just trying to do what I think is best for kids. I get caught up in the fights because the other side is so unreasonable.” Many members of the old guard were unreasonable. It would be so great if one side was all good and the other was all bad.

  “And you thought being part of fights was helpful to this, how?”

  “Look,” he said. “I know you’re angry. I guess I’m stuck with you as union guy, but I don’t know any of this shit. Do you really think I should resign?”

  “Yes.”

  He thought a few moments, then shook his head. “I just can’t.”

  I said, “If you change your mind, talk to me. If the administration wants to talk to you, I suggest you find me before you do. My strong recommendation is you not talk to them without a union rep present.”

  I left.

  Georgette ran into me in the hallway near the office. She handed me a note, leaned over, and whispered, “Read that.”

  19

  It was a note from Victoria Abbot, the assistant superintendent. It said to meet her outside the teachers’ parking lot entrance immediately. I was already late for my assigned seminar. I passed through the library on my way to our tryst and mentioned it to Meg.

  I finished, “I don’t know her.”

  “She tries to fly below everybody’s radar. She navigates the politics of this district like a fish in a hurricane.”

  “Huh?”

  “As far under water as possible. If any administrator in this district can be trusted, it would be she. Just don’t press your luck.”

  As I was turning to go, I said, “If I don’t come back, I want at least one person to know where I was going.”

  “You’re that suspicious?”

  “I’d like to believe I don’t need to be.”

  The assistant superintendent was not among the huddle of teachers and custodians catching a quick smoke outside the building. I walked a few steps into the parking lot. The wind gusted but the rain had cleared. It was a perfect, crisp, clear, autumn morning. I looked over at the line of administrators’ cars in their assigned parking spaces, the ones nearest the entrance, a sore spot and cause of vicious fights at the negotiations table. In the driver’s side of a black SUV I saw someone gesturing toward me. I walked closer. It was Abbot. I hurried forward.

  Her window slid down as I got closer. She peered in each direction and said, “Get in.”

  I did.

  She put the car in gear and pulled out of the parking lot. I glanced at the trees and lawns of suburban quiet and dismissed thoughts of wild kidnappings.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “Meg talked to me. She was a dear friend of my mother’s. I’m scared.”

  “Of what?”

  She said, “You need to be very, very careful. I can’t say much. I’m sorry.” She seemed to peer at each passing car, examining the drivers and passengers.

  “Careful about what?”

  “Everything you do and say.”

  “I beg your pardon.”

  “I can tell you a little, but please, please, don’t ask me for more. I’m trying to help. Truly, I am. And please don’t tell anyone we talked. Please just listen.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “Part of the reason I can’t tell you much is that I don’t know much. Bochka, Graniento, Towne, and Spandrel are in this up to their eyeballs.”

  “In what?’

  “Everything.” At LaGrange Road she turned right and headed south.

  “You wouldn’t want to be a bit more specific about that?”

  “I can’t.”

  “Did they kill Eberson and Higden?” “I don’t think so. No. I’m warning you about keeping yourself safe
.”

  “Are they planning to kill me?”

  “They don’t have that kind of nerve. I don’t think.” She pulled into the parking lot of a new Starbucks near the entrance to Interstate 80. She maneuvered the car far away from all the others and let it idle.

  “Then what is it?”

  Her hands gripped the steering wheel. Her face was white with fear. Her eyes darted around the parking lot. Any car that got close was subject to inspection.

  “Are you afraid someone is following us?”

  “That we might be seen together.”

  “Why is that bad?” I asked.

  “This whole thing is a mess. Murder! In my school! I’ve had a terrific career in education. I’ve loved it. I still love it.” “Are they trying to fire you?”

  “They can have the damn job. I’d prefer to go back to being an elementary PE teacher. That was bliss. Little ones running about. That was the good part about being in education. Bochka, Graniento, Towne, and Spandrel are in on something together. They may be trying to fire you.”

  “For what?”

  She said, “This is just terrible.”

  I was exasperated. “Are you going to tell me what ´this’ is?”

  “I can’t. I just can’t. Just be careful. Trust no one. Absolutely no one. Including me. It’s a good thing you’ve got a lawyer. I hear he’s good.”

  I said, “Have they been having secret meetings?”

  “I’ve been to at least one meeting at Bochka’s house. You weren’t mentioned at that time. I think there may have been other meetings that I was not at. They don’t completely trust me.”

  “What do they discuss at these meetings?”

  “The one I was at was about the next textbook adoption. They want to pick the book themselves, without the teachers.”

  “Don’t they realize that will cause another huge fight?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why not use the current system?”

  “Because they can’t control a faculty committee.”

  “Were Eberson and Spandrel having an affair?”

  She gaped at me. “They were at the meeting with me.

  They didn’t strike me as a couple. They have husbands.”

  “Was Higden there?”