Schooled in Murder

by Zubro, Mark Richard

  “How long has this been going on?” I asked.

  “It was going on for sure last year, and I think from when they started working here.”

  “How do you know they did this?” I asked.

  “As you know, we keep all the records in the office. Last year, Luci Gamboni came to me. She’d transposed two kids’ grades, an honors kid and an LD kid. One was supposed to be an A the other an F. It would have been embarrassing for her to have to explain to Spandrel and Graniento that she’d messed up. She came to me. I’m not supposed to, but on occasion teachers are desperate at the end of grading time. I help. I went in to switch it, but the honors kid’s grade was already switched. The LD kid’s grade was the same. Someone fixed the one and not the other.”

  Scott said, “Maybe she just forget and didn’t realize she only messed up the one.”

  “Luci had the original printout. It was clearly wrong for both of them on it. No, someone had changed the one and not the other. So I began to keep track.”

  Some of us always printed our grades after we posted them to the computer. It was just a bit of redundancy that could save a ton of time if the computer system went kaflooey.

  Scott said, “You mean you made copies of the grades for the whole school? Isn’t that a lot of paperwork?”

  “You change the font and make the type size smaller, do a merge and compress, you get a lot on a few pages.” She smiled. “And I have a flash drive with a very large memory, and a back-up drive with an equally large memory. I have chronological records for the past few years: copies of what the teachers put in, and copies of what came out. I’d spend a weekend after each grading period with my husband at home going over them. It was tedious work but very satisfying. If I can be part of bringing those people down, I will be very happy.”

  Scott said, “You must hate these administrators.”

  “Only some of them. Graniento and Spandrel inflict misery on good teachers for no reason. Their decisions are capricious. They make no sense, about our work or the teachers’.”

  Scott asked, “How do you keep up that befuddled front?”

  “They look down on the secretaries. To them we’re all women with fewer degrees than they have.”

  Scott said, “Did you get a chance to talk to Frecking and Benson? They must be frightened out of their minds.”

  “I only managed to find Benson. He’s petrified about his wife finding out.”

  “He should be,” Scott said.

  Meg said, “Are they going to tell the cops the truth?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Meg said, “I also found out that Peter Higden was going to be disciplined for doing drugs.”

  I said, “It wasn’t on school grounds.”

  “You knew about this?” Meg asked.

  “I always keep faith,” I said. “You know that.” And I did. Gossip is one thing. Something told to me in confidence as part of my union duties stayed in confidence.

  Scott asked, “What happened?”

  Meg said, “I heard several versions, each more ludicrous than the last. Supposedly on days the kids aren’t here, like institutes and parent conferences, he’d go out at lunch and get high and drink.”

  “He was never drunk,” I said.

  “He only did drugs?” Scott asked.

  “He never admitted to anything,” I said. “I’ll say this much in this extremity. Three witnesses saw him. Two parents and a teacher. The teacher turned him in. The parents confirmed it. He was called in. He denied it was him. Absolutely, simply bald-faced lied.”

  “Are they sure it was him?” Scott asked.

  “One of them recognized the license plate of the car he was sitting in.”

  “And they’re sure it was drugs?” Scott asked.

  “They said they were close enough to see that it wasn’t a cigarette, and they claimed they could smell it. Other teachers said they smelled it on him when he got back to school.”

  Meg asked, “Did they inspect his classroom and his car?”

  “No. It wasn’t reported until the following day. They had no physical proof. It wasn’t on school grounds. He wasn’t caught or arrested by the police.”

  Meg asked, “Who were the parents and teacher?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I’ve come up with a few things,” Meg said. Our food arrived. I barely touched mine. Meg said, “On Peter Higden, did you know he played cards at lunch most regular days with members of the PE department? It was poker, and they were gambling.”

  “In school?” Scott asked.

  She said, “Tom knows how labyrinthine all those old PE locker rooms and offices are. They’ve got more storage down there than the rest of the school combined. They play in the athletic director’s office.”

  I asked, “How high were the stakes?”

  “Five-dollar ante for each pot. Dollar raises. Limit of four raises.”

  Scott asked, “How do you get that kind of information?”

  “The women in the PE department don’t like the men, although a few of them have dated a few of the men. One of the women is not happy. My notion is that she is jealous about being frozen out of the games. She’s not planning to turn them in. She doesn’t think they know she knows.”

  Scott said, “Gambling is illegal on school grounds, right?”

  “Yep,” Meg said.

  Scott said, “We aren’t talking multimillion-dollar gambling debts, are we?”

  “Schoolteachers?” Meg said. “Hundreds for sure. Most likely not thousands. Certainly not millions. At least, not that I was told. Besides the athletic director, there were a couple of other coaches, plus Steven Frecking, and Higden.”

  Scott said, “Can’t they get fired for that?”

  “You’d get in trouble, sure,” I said. “But unless it was significant amounts of money or a mob-connected, people-getting-hurt thing, I don’t see them losing their jobs. Probably a letter in their file and a warning not to do it again.”

  “But two people are dead,” Georgette said. “And it is something illegal. It could be part of a pattern.”

  Meg said, “Eberson was not in the noon group. It was all male. What else I heard was that supposedly the ones at the table were participating in a scheme to double dip on athletic pay.”

  I said, “I’ve heard rumors about that. Nobody actually ever complained or got in trouble.”

  Meg said, “The word I have is they organized themselves pretty well.”

  “How does that work?” Scott asked.

  I said, “Say there are four football coaches. Maybe three stay on the field and one goes to another job at a gas station or fast-food restaurant. They rotate and still get full pay for coaching but are actually around for only three fourths of the time.”

  “Nobody notices?” Scott asked.

  Meg said, “They cover for each other. They’re buddies. They play poker every day. The problem is that they were afraid someone in their group was turning traitor.”

  “And they didn’t know who?” I asked.

  “Right,” Meg said.

  I said, “And Peter was a suckup in our department, so maybe suspicion fell on him. Not enough for a guilty verdict, but a definite he’s-buddies-with-the-administration, I-wonder-what-the-son-of-a-bitch-is-up-to kind of way.”

  Meg said, “Frecking was the youngest member of the group. They were suspicious of him, too. He’s bluff and studly and friendly, just like Peter, and he was a real athlete at his college as opposed to most of these overweight pretenders. He played in some minor Bowl game his senior year. He’s popular, but he’s the one they know the least.”

  I said, “He’s petrified of coming out to them.”

  Scott said, “For some people, popularity gives them all the more reason to be frightened. They fear losing their status, their reputation.”

  I asked, “What would it benefit Peter to tell on his buddies about the double dipping or the gambling?”

  Meg said, “I don’t know. Supp
osedly the guys had a fight one day this week. It’s another medium-confidence source. The games may have stopped.”

  I said, “Maybe that would explain Peter being dead, although I’m not convinced, but that doesn’t account for Gracie Eberson being murdered.”

  Meg said, “She was definitely not part of the group.”

  Scott said, “We’re sure the two murders are connected?”

  I said, “We can’t be sure of anything, but you don’t have two murders within hours of each other in the same school being a coincidence.”

  “Wait,” Scott said, “was someone going to tell about the card games or the double dipping or both?”

  “My source wasn’t sure. She was pretty angry.”

  “Is this normal in a school?” Scott asked. “You guys sound like the teamsters except none of the bodies are missing. Yet.”

  “Normal?” I asked. “You get petty jealousy everywhere. Workers fight, disagree. Why wasn’t somebody angry or at least offended about Higden being openly anti-Semitic?”

  Meg said, “Nobody ever called him on it. Nobody mentioned homophobia either. The only other thing I got were accusations in the department about teachers stealing.”

  “Stealing what?” Scott asked.

  “Supplies, teachers’ manuals, old tests, just about anything that isn’t tied down. Peter claimed the woman who retired and had his room before him had stripped the place clean and left him nothing.”

  I said, “Ah, that is so not true.” The last day Sandra Barkin had come to me. She was in her seventies and hadn’t been able to retire at a younger age. She’d stayed home to raise her kids and only started teaching in her forties. Then her husband had died. He’d been a freelance writer and had never made a lot, so his social security was negligible. She’d had to keep working. She was one of the feistiest of the old guard and had battled with those who she considered evil–up front and in their faces. Spandrel had hoped Barkin’s retiring would let her run amok. Barkin had come to me that last day to say that she knew they would accuse her of stealing. She made Georgette and me come down to her classroom. She’d showed us every textbook, teacher’s manual, test, and all the remaining classroom supplies. Then she’d taken us out her classroom door, locked it behind us, and given the key to Georgette. She’d said, “They’ll accuse me. You know the truth.”

  I told all this to Scott and Meg, and Georgette nodded her confirmation. Then I added, “I heard Peter accusing her. I said what I knew, and Jourdan and Morgan defended her. It was another point of conflict.”

  Scott said, “It doesn’t sound very important.”

  I said, “I don’t know. In a place where everybody is counting up the smallest slight to use in the next battle, you don’t know what’s going to set anybody off.”

  Meg promised to keep listening. Georgette went back to the office. After a brief hug, Scott left.

  23

  I slipped into the back of my afternoon seminar, in which the members of the English department were supposed to learn yet another new grade book program. This one was to be implemented before January first. It was the third new program in four years. The administration kept buying the cheapest one. They never got the service contract or warranty that required the company to come in and train the teachers. The administration got what they paid for. We constantly had to learn new programs from scratch.

  The new program was similar to the one I was using, but different enough for the company to charge thousands and thousands of dollars for the upgrade. Some of my colleagues insisted they’d never learn the new program. And it was a mess. I’d been doing my grades electronically for years. I didn’t mention that to a lot of people. But they knew. And some were jealous. They needed to get a life. One huge life. Judging themselves by what I was doing in my classroom was nuts.

  Luci Gamboni had saved me a seat. She leaned over and whispered, “Are you all right?”

  “I’ve been better,” I murmured back.

  Spandrel walked up to me and said in a stage whisper, “You’re late.”

  Schaven, Pinyon, and Milovec walked in.

  I nodded toward them and said, “As are they.”

  She frowned and drifted over toward the three even later comers.

  The Advanced Grade Acquisition and Distribution Techniques Gradebook software had enough bells and whistles to cause a hard drive to have a seizure. It would allow parents to go online and see every grade their student got during the quarter by assignment. Some teachers were furious about that. They didn’t want parents to be able to see their grade books. I always gave parents a printout listing their kids’ assignments and grades. Silly me, wanting to give parents and kids precise, up-to-date information about what the child was learning in my classroom.

  Spandrel mostly hovered near the suckups. They chatted and laughed during much of the presentation. The leader of the seminar walked past them several times and glared. It didn’t help.

  About half an hour into it, Luci leaned over and said, “Is this right?”

  I looked at a page filled with grades, student names, averages, point count. She tapped her finger near the bottom left of the screen. “I was practicing with last year’s grades. I made a copy so the original wouldn’t be messed up. Look at that.”

  “I’m not sure what I’m supposed to be looking at.”

  She pointed at the very bottom row. “That’s Fred Zileski’s final grade from last quarter last June. I know I gave him an F. He’s the first kid that’s flunked one of my classes in three years. They’ve got to work to flunk my class. Bochka the bitch, our idiot school board president, tried to get me to change the grade. She got Graniento and Spandrel on my case. I refused. Somebody changed the grade.”

  “Maybe the kids did it. They can hack into anything.”

  “But this new program will be the first one to open grades to the Internet. Last year’s grades were only on the school network.”

  “Kids can break into that.”

  “Not into mine. I double protected it with a secret code. You taught me that. I did the same thing you do on your computer so the kids can’t sabotage it. No one knew the passwords and codes. No one except Spandrel. She had to have it to get into the program for when they printed out the grades. She had to be the one who changed the grades.”

  I said, “That’s against the contract.”

  We’d had that problem in the district before. Administrators wanting to increase graduation rates to look good on national statistics routinely went in and changed grades. The state of Illinois took extraordinary measures to keep the yearly statewide tests secret and sacrosanct prior to testing. That hadn’t stopped cheating. And Luci had certainly heard the rumor that Spandrel was feeding the suckups information so that the scores of the kids in their classes would be higher than those of the old guard. Another problem was that PE teachers were notorious for conniving to get grades for athletes changed. And with the No Child Left Behind bullshit, the problem of the accuracy of records was endemic.

  Luci said, “I know Spandrel did it. No one else could have done it. I’m going to confront that bitch right now.”

  “No,” I said.

  “No? I’m going to fight this. This is an outrage.”

  I said, “Yes, we’re going to fight this, I just don’t think this is the exact right moment for it.”

  She looked uncertain. She leaned close. “What is going on?”

  Graniento and Spandrel were drifting in our direction. I said, “Let’s discuss it with Teresa Merton on Monday. You aren’t the first one to complain, but you may be among the first to be able to prove it. Print out what you’ve got there.”

  Graniento and Spandrel were upon us. Luci tapped my computer screen. “Are you sure that’s what I need to do next?”

  I was at a command page and moved my mouse to explain the next step in the new program.

  24

  I wanted to talk to Ludwig Schaven. I found him sitting in his chair behind his teacher’s desk. He b
arely glanced at me as I walked in.

  “Did the police tell you anything?” he asked.

  “No,” I answered.

  He had posters of great literary figures in history on his walls. Each had a pithy saying by the author under the portrait.

  When I got to the front desk, I said, “You’ve lost two friends. I’m sorry.”

  He looked at me. “Not very many people around here seem to be sad. They’re running around worrying about themselves. We should be thinking about Gracie and Peter.” He sighed.

  He stared out the window for a few more moments, then said, “What is wrong with these people?”

  “Which people?”

  “Gracie and Peter are dead. They walk around as if somehow it was the fault of two dead people that their living, breathing, lucky asses were inconvenienced.”

  I said, “That’s kind of sad.”

  “And people are still willing to fight. I’m ashamed of how I acted in the teachers’ lounge yesterday evening. Shouting at moments like that. I was just so upset. Gracie was a good friend.”

  “It’s hard when friends die, especially when they’re young.”

  “It’s so sad.”

  “We’re you close to Peter?”

  “I didn’t go out drinking with them much. If you weren’t part of the drinking group you weren’t on the outs with them, but you weren’t one of the in-crowd either.”

  I said, “I heard Peter was part of a group that gambled on school grounds at lunchtime.”

  “Peter gambled a lot everywhere. I heard he had several bookies in Chicago.”

  “Was he in debt?”

  “He used to brag about owing a dime or making a dime. I never knew if that was a hundred dollars or a thousand. Could that have been the cause of his murder? Although that wouldn’t explain Gracie’s.”

  “If he owed a vicious bookie a ton of money or was late on payments, Peter could have been in trouble.”