The Crazy School

by Cornelia Read

  “That’s what you want?”

  “Only until I’m ready to come back and take him on myself,” she said. “And I need time for that.”

  “How much time?” I asked.

  “A couple of months,” she said. “No more. You’re the only one strong enough for me to trust, even if you don’t trust yourself. I think Sookie can help you with that. I’ve spoken to her about it, and I’d like you to do the same.”

  “Right now?”

  “She’s in her office.”

  “I can’t,” I said. “I have to go home.”

  “To think about it?”

  “To meet with my lawyer.”

  “Do both,” she said. “I’m depending on you. So are the kids.”

  27

  Well, thank the good Lord you didn’t go talking to that Sookie person,” said Markham after I’d related the day’s events over a glass of the pinot gris he’d shown up with.

  “She’s a shrink,” I said. “There’s, like, doctor-patient privilege or something, isn’t there?”

  “In court, yes,” he said, “but not, however, within that appalling school.”

  “What?”

  “Madeline, every psychologist and psychiatrist employed by Santangelo has to report to him on what’s discussed in their therapy sessions, on campus and off. The whole gang gathers for a weekly check-in meeting—apparently held in the man’s living room each Friday evening.”

  Dean shook his head slowly, disgusted. “Does that include the ones who do the sessions with the kids’ parents?”

  “Especially them,” said Markham.

  “Your young researchers found this out?”

  He nodded.

  “Please thank them for doing such fine work,” I said. “That’s an incredibly useful bit of information to have.”

  “They’re fired up about this. We are none of us liking that man, honey lamb.”

  “How the hell did you guys figure that out, about it not being confidential?” I asked.

  “One of our intrepid staffers wondered how Santangelo managed to breeze unscathed through the forty-eight separate lawsuits brought against him since that school’s inception,” said Markham.

  “By parents?” asked Dean.

  “Parents. Employees. Erstwhile members of his psychiatric staff on three occasions. All settled out of court. All hushed up.”

  “Because he’s got dirt on everyone,” I said. “Jesus God.”

  “Darlin’, that ol’ boy’s got so many folks by the short hairs,” said Markham, “you gotta reckon he’d make J. Edgar Hoover squeal like a pig if they ever duked it out.”

  He tipped his chair back. “Which brings us to two orders of business.” He tapped his fingers against the side of his wineglass, then raised it for another sip.

  “First off,” he said, “ix-nay on the ookie-Say from here on out.”

  “My pleasure,” I said.

  “And second?” asked Dean.

  “Second—as your attorney, Madeline, I need to know what all they’ve got on you.”

  I downed some gris of my own, then cleared my throat and looked Markham in the eye. “Um . . . Sookie’s hip to my whole ‘I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die’ thing.”

  “Taking into account the self-defense aspect of that ordeal,” he said. “We can shake it off, should worse come to worst.”

  “Other than that, I can’t say I’ve been exactly forthcoming. Last week she told me she suspected I’d been molested as a kid. I told her that was bullshit. Which it was.”

  “Think it through carefully, now,” said Markham. “Is there anything else? Anything you wouldn’t want to see in the papers?”

  I stared into my wine, shuffling through the details I could recall from our sessions.

  “ Nada,” I said. “ Rien du tout.”

  Markham raised his glass in my honor, this little grin ramping up at the edge of his mouth.

  “God love you for being repressed, honey lamb,” he said. “WASPs rule, shrinks drool . . . chalk one up for the small preppy world.”

  “Ah, Markham,” I replied, “you’re a man after my own tiny black heart.”

  Dean crossed his arms. “So who else is in on these Friday-night dirt meetings?”

  I shrugged. “None of the teachers that I know of.”

  “And how long has Sookie known about your having killed that guy, Bunny?”

  “I met with her solo Friday afternoon.”

  “Which means she knew about it before Sant-ange-a-hole and company last gathered to shoot the shit,” Dean said.

  “Yes,” I said, “it does.”

  “And she presumably broadcast that information before the kids got killed.”

  “I believe I see where your better half is going with this,” said Markham.

  “That makes one of us,” I said.

  “Somebody set you up, Madeline,” Markham said. “And they put some thought into it. The only thing I couldn’t put my finger on was why you looked most suitable for framing.” He paused, his fingers back to using his wineglass for percussion. “When I learned about your troubles last year, the ‘why’ clicked into place.”

  “So now we need the ‘who,’” I said.

  “I’ve got a helluva big staff running background on all concerned, but this wasn’t something civilians were likely to find out, except from you. And you told Sookie.”

  “Like an idiot,” I said.

  “Maybe a smart idiot,” he said. “Maybe a very lucky idiot.”

  “How so?”

  “Think about it,” he went on. “Sookie put you on the agenda last Friday night—ratted you out to everyone on the guest list.”

  “Which is lucky how?”

  “You think those folks are in the habit of CC’ing their minutes to anybody else once they adjourn for the night? I sure don’t.”

  “So you figure someone in that room picked me to take the fall?”

  “We’ve got to surmise that the idea of saying ‘Well, she’s obviously unstable, Officer . . . prone to violence. Sure, and she never would’ve been hired a’tall had we but known she’d killed before’ sounded damn good to whoever it was.”

  “Oh,” I said, “lucky me.”

  “Damn right, lucky you, because that narrows the pool considerably.” Markham reached for the bottle of wine and topped up his and my glasses.

  “So Sookie knew,” he said, “and Santangelo, and the rest of the shrinks. Now we’ve gotta get a bead on whether anyone else did before Tuesday night.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “This boy Gerald,” said Markham, “any way you think he would’ve been privy to that information?”

  “He’s certainly been on staff the longest,” I said, “out of all us teachers. Seems pretty tight with Santangelo.”

  “I’ve gotta say I like our Mr. Gerald Jones for this, what with his having been in charge of that punch bowl,” said Markham.

  “And he benefits from Mooney’s death, given the alleged dick-grabbing,” I said.

  “That he does,” said Markham. “That he certainly does.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “Tomorrow morning we make sure Detective Cartwright is apprised of the facts as we know them, ASAP.”

  “What else?” asked Dean.

  “That poor girl’s necklace,” Markham said. “We need to find out how the hell it ended up in Madeline’s pocket.”

  “I still don’t know,” I said.

  “I’ll tell you straight,” he said. “Barring catastrophe, should this thing come before a grand jury, the only thing I can see giving us trouble is that necklace. The time of death is wide open. All hands on that Farm were tucked in not long after you wandered off into the snow, Madeline, and you’ve got some hours unaccounted for. Your two buddies found you late in the game—plenty of time for you to have sneaked Fay and Mooney up into that attic, and they liked you. They trusted you enough—plenty of people can testify to that.”

  “But I w
as passed out the whole time, when I wasn’t puking my guts out. And I told the cops where I threw up, after someone dosed me, so they’ve gotta know somebody messed with my punch. Not to mention I’m the one who gave them the damn necklace in the first place.”

  “Except there’s no way to know when you drank the punch,” he said, “or when you started throwing it back up. That might’ve happened after you killed the kids, for all they know. It’s not like the best lab in the world can narrow down time of vomit.”

  “So I’m supposed to have ducked outside, waited until the coast was clear, tiptoed back in, enticed the two kids up into the attic, mixed up a couple of poison cocktails, talked them into drinking the shit so as to kill them, whereupon I ripped Fay’s necklace off, which I then stuck in my own jacket after Lulu picked it up and took it to Dhumavati’s apartment—I guess during the time I was pretending to be either delirious or unconscious in her guest bed all night—and on top of that, I made sure my own fingerprints were all over the cups Fay and Mooney drank out of, which I left lying next to their bodies.”

  Markham nodded, fingers rattling along the curve of his wineglass again.

  “That’s ludicrous,” I said. “I mean, come on.”

  “For a good prosecutor? That version of events would feel like manna from heaven.”

  “Oh please,” I said.

  “I could sell it to your average jury while standing on my head, drunk as a goat. If you weren’t my client, I’d be dancing your husband round the living room right this minute, singing ‘Waltz Across Texas.’”

  “I don’t believe it,” I said.

  “You should believe it,” he said, “and let me tell you why.”

  “I’m all ears.”

  Markham pointed a finger at me. “Because poison is the favored MO of women, first off,” he said, “especially when they murder kids—and most of ’em think the very best way to divert suspicion is to mix themselves a weak little dose for tossing down, after the fact.”

  I felt the wine coming back on me.

  “The only thing you’ve missed,” he continued, “is trying to blame it on the proverbial ‘bushy-haired stranger’—preferably some fellow who’s a wee tad dark-complected.”

  “Markham, I didn’t—”

  “Course not,” he said, cutting me off as he reached across the table to pat my shaking hand. “But whoever did this knew how to make it look like a woman was responsible.”

  “Does it help that I’m probably the only teacher on campus who didn’t have access to the arsenic they were using to kill rats down at the Farm?”

  He laced his fingers through mine. “The lab results came back. Those children weren’t killed with arsenic. There’s no connection to the rat bait collected from the scene. What you all drank was cyanide. You did get a weaker dose, with some other stuff mixed in to make you hallucinate.”

  That explained the spiders.

  “We just gotta get that necklace off the table, is all,” he said. “After that, it’s gonna be a cakewalk, darlin’. Just you watch.”

  He turned to Dean. “I want you to tuck this little lady into bed, sir, soon as I leave. Maybe a little warm milk, you got any. I want you both to get a good night’s sleep, and you should rest easy as pie, because I’ve got all the angles covered here, and there’s no need to fret over a thing.”

  He squeezed my hand. “I mean that with the utmost sincerity, Madeline. What I said just now wasn’t meant to scare you, but I need you to know how these things play out. ’Sides which, some prosecutor tries pulling that tired old line of hooey on us in court? I’ll kick his ass, eat his lunch, and charm the pants off his wife in the bargain. Poor bastard won’t even know what hit ’im.”

  Cartwright waved us over to his desk while getting all irate with whomever he was talking to on the phone.

  “Well, you tell Bobby I’d like to know what the hell they thought they were doing with a batch of C-4 up at GE in the first place! Crap like that gone missing, and he expects us to hunt it down? What the hell was he thinking—blow the place up, make sure nobody comes back to work?” He shook his head, looking like it was about to blow right off the top of his thick neck.

  “No,” he said.

  “No.”

  He looked at me and Markham, pinching his thumb and finger together to ask for a moment, like some hitchhiker beseeching drivers for a short ride. “That’s not my problem, any of it. And you can tell him I said we’ll be looking over those permits with a fine-tooth damn comb . . . Oh, for chrissake, of course we’ll deal with it, but I’m not about to drive right up the minute he— Get Bailey started on it. Yes, of course he’s good. Best we’ve got for something like this.”

  Then he barked, “I’ve got an interview. Just take care of it,” and slammed down the phone.

  Markham propelled a glad hand across the desk after the requisite courtesy beat.

  “Beg pardon if our arrival’s made you feel rushed, Detective Cartwright,” he said. “We’ve shown up early and certainly don’t want to put you out.”

  Cartwright was on his feet, wrapping Markham’s hand in his own meatier paw. “At your service, Counselor. It doesn’t rain but it pours.”

  “Don’t I know it,” said Markham.

  “Ms. Dare, we hope you’re feeling the picture of health,” Cartwright said, giving my hand a hail-fellow-well-met mauling in turn, coupled with a look that seemed intended to express a bashful-but-good-humored “And that you’ll forgive us for that night-you-spent-puking-in-jail spot of confusion” chaser.

  “Now, sir, you just let us know,” Markham drawled, “should there be anything you need time to take care of this morning. I want you to know we’re at your service, Ms. Dare and myself. You’re responsible for a great deal, Detective . . . goes without saying . . . As such, please do not hesitate to avail yourself if it would lighten your load.”

  “No need, no need,” said a grinning Cartwright, hands up in the air all “pshaw,” fighting charm with charm.

  “You’re sure? You say the word, sir, we’d be happy to return at your convenience.”

  If Markham had had a cheekful of Red Man, he would have spat on the floor as proof of his down-home bonhomie.

  “Let’s just get ourselves a little peace and quiet so we can talk without further interruption,” said Cartwright, the gracious host sweeping us toward the interview rooms. This time he opened the door on a bigger one, made cheery by the addition of a window. “After you, Ms. Dare.” He practically bowed me in.

  Bigger table in there, too. Two chairs on either side, with pens and a pad of notepaper in front of each.

  “Can we get you anything?” asked Cartwright. “Coffee, soda?”

  There was a pitcher of ice water on the table, four glasses.

  “That water’ll do me just fine, Detective,” said Markham, “thank you kindly.”

  “Ms. Dare?”

  “No, thank you.” I looked out the window.

  Snowing.

  Gentle drifting flakes, making everything beyond the glass look sweetly Grandma Moses.

  Markham walked around the table to draw out a chair for me. “Madeline?”

  “Let me just see what’s keeping Officer Baker,” said Cartwright, “then we can get things under way.”

  “No rush,” said Markham.

  Cartwright bowed again, then swung the door to behind him.

  “He’ll probably leave us rot for a good while now,” said my attorney, shooting his cuffs. “The piker.”

  “How long?”

  He looked at his very thin watch. “Let’s say a couple hands of canasta. Too bad I left the cards in my other briefcase.”

  “Point being?”

  “He’s got to piss on his turf,” said Markham. “Course, now, if I were court-appointed, we’d be talking all-day bridge tournament, heel-cooling wise.”

  “If you were court-appointed,” I said, “I’d no doubt be smoking Bugler hand-rolleds in Framingham by now, clad head to toe in a most unbe
coming shade of orange.”

  He grinned at me. “Your godfather’s ring gets more kissable by the minute, don’t it?”

  I nodded, even more nervous. “Any words of wisdom you’d like to share with your client before the po-leece deign to grace us with their presence?”

  “Three of ’em,” he replied. “‘Don’t say shit.’”

  He poured us each a glass of ice water. “Just you sit back while I sing for my supper here, darlin’. We want to make sure that nice uncle Alan gets his money’s worth.”

  28

  Cartwright and Baker surprised us, coming back to the interview room after a mere ten minutes of heel-cooling on Markham’s and my part.

  My attorney fairly leaped to his feet, hand extended. “Officer Baker? Markham Dwight Stuyvesant, counsel for Madeline Dare.”

  She shook it, nonplussed.

  We got resettled at the table, pens and file folders and clipboards and notepads now arrayed in front of each seat, with Baker at the helm of a tape recorder.

  After the rustle and blather of preliminaries, Markham looked from Cartwright to Baker, then back.

  “What we have here,” he said, “is a failure . . . of communi cation . . .”

  Cool Hand Stuyvesant.

  Yeah, that was exactly what we needed.

  But then Markham started kicking some serious ass.

  “We know that my client had no compelling reason to have committed these homicides,” he said, “especially when compared to some of the other members of the school’s faculty.”

  He touched on some of the same points he’d scared me with the night before, though not all. Not by a long shot.

  He revealed little that Baker and Cartwright didn’t already know, but managed to nudge them toward a far wider pool of suspects all the same.

  “I think you’ll agree that my client is the last person whose affairs warrant further investigation,” he said.

  The two cops, rapt, asked a question here or there, but each inquiry seemed more like some little Hansel-and-Gretel chunk of bread thrown down in hope of their safe return, rather than any serious attempt to stop following my attorney deeper and deeper into a forest of his own design.