Punishment

by Scott J. Holliday

  Barnes said, “Can you describe the man who picked you up?”

  Carla looked down at her hands. One of her feet rolled nervously around.

  “Tell them,” Beatrice said. An air of satisfaction descended on the woman. She folded her arms and smiled, sipped from her cup. She threw one leg over the other, suddenly prim and proper, the adult child claiming victory over the real one.

  Carla said, “I’m not supposed to take rides from him.”

  “From who?” Franklin said.

  “My dad.”

  “Last night,” Barnes said, “Kerri signaled you with her flashlight from her bedroom window. Is that something you two typically do?”

  Carla nodded. “If I’m awake and I see her light, I flash back.”

  “You saw her light last night?”

  Carla nodded again. “I signaled back a few times, but . . .”

  “But she never replied,” Barnes said. “Did you see anything or anyone? Outside the home or in Kerri’s window?”

  “No.”

  “Did you hear anything?”

  Carla hesitated a moment. Her eyes welled with tears. She said, “I heard Kerri scream.”

  8

  “If they saw something,” Franklin said, “they would have called already.”

  They were sitting in the car, parked in front of the house with the cedar tree in the backyard, half a block down from the Montgomerys’. They sipped at coffees gone cold. Barnes had knocked on the door to no answer. He tucked one of his business cards into the doorway crack—“Please call me” written on the back.

  “You want the school or the dad?” Barnes said.

  Franklin shrugged. His slightest movement rocked the vehicle like a Ferris-wheel car. “What’s the point of following up with the dad? Gave his daughter a ride. Big deal.”

  “You know how this goes,” Barnes said. “He was in the area. He might have seen something. A mem—”

  “A memory pull might reveal our guy standing on a street corner, hours before the incident, watching kids get off a school bus?”

  Barnes turned up his palms.

  “Christ,” Franklin said.

  “School or the dad?”

  “Dad’s outside of the machine,” Franklin said. “School’s inside. Your territory.”

  Barnes pulled out and started toward Kenbrook Elementary, taking a left at the first stop sign.

  “Buddy system,” Franklin said. He snickered. “Man, we had that when I was a kid.”

  “For field trips?”

  “Shit. Field trips? Nah, man, you needed a buddy system just to walk down my block.”

  “It was a war zone where I grew up,” Barnes said, slipping into his patented Franklin impression. “Fallujah’s got nothing on Caulfield Ave. Drugs everywhere, cracked-out mothers walking with a baby in shitty diapers, searching for that hit, maybe their Maury Po.”

  “Eat a dick, white trash,” Franklin said. He steamed for a moment, and then said, “There was one dude who lorded over it all. Tyrell Diggs. Drug supplier for everyone within a mile or two. He used to sit on the porch, house at the corner, just across from the bus stop. Me and my friend Marvin used to see him when we’d get off the bus, and he’d say, ‘Get over here, you little lawn jockeys.’ We’d run like hell. But every day he’d say the same thing, ‘Get over here, you little lawn jockeys,’ and it was like . . . man, it was like he was showing me where I’d end up if I didn’t do something.”

  “Well, you did something,” Barnes said. “You should be proud of yourself and your accomplishments.”

  “Didn’t I already tell you to eat a dick?”

  Barnes snorted.

  “All I did was get older,” Franklin said. He stared off through the windshield, unfocused. “Growth spurt, and suddenly Tyrell Diggs is saying, ‘Damn, you one big jockey now. Why don’t you let that crank-box monkey come over here and collect something dope?’”

  “Crank-box monkey?”

  “That’s what Marvin looked like to Tyrell, standing next to me. One of those organ-grinder monkeys. As if being compared to a lawn jockey wasn’t bad enough. He never grew much past five feet, never cared much for school. Next thing you know I’m getting scholarship offers, and he’s my crank-box monkey. My buddy. The kid who used to watch my back and I’d watch his. He’s dead now.”

  “Sorry to hear that.”

  “Day I left for college, Marvin went right up to that porch where Tyrell Diggs sat for all them years, telling us little lawn jockeys to come over, and he took what Tyrell was offering. He took it, tried to get some crackhead to buy it, and got killed with a homemade blade. Came home for Christmas break and he was gone. Know who was still there, though?”

  “Tyrell Diggs.”

  “Give the man a ribbon.”

  Barnes looked at his partner, one eyebrow raised. “You do something about it?”

  Franklin squinted at Barnes for a moment before looking off. “Here it is, man,” he said. “There’s always gonna be a Tyrell Diggs, understand? There’s always gonna be a cracked-out, toothless mother walking her naked baby down the street. Always gonna be a gun in somebody’s face, a glass pipe on somebody’s lip. And there will always be a bloodsucker, like Diggs, sitting on the porch of a jacked-up house full of baseheads and murderers, talking about ‘Get over here, you little lawn jockeys.’ You can pick ’em off like ducks in a shooting gallery, watch ’em fall, but the barker just resets the game and they pop right back up.”

  “Then you gotta take out the barker.”

  Franklin shook his head. “No can do, brother.”

  “Why not?”

  “The barker is God.”

  They drove in silence for a moment. Barnes pulled into the parking lot at Kenbrook Elementary School, threw the vehicle into park.

  “Carla said we had the day off.” Kerri Wilson’s voice from within.

  “Shhh.”

  They got out of the car. Franklin came around and moved the driver’s seat all the way back before getting in. He unlocked the steering wheel and moved it up, then closed the door and drove off.

  There was a security guard at the front entrance to the school. When Barnes was in elementary school, there’d been no security guards, just fifth graders wearing orange sashes. Safeties. Mostly they’d been kids with a sense of purpose beyond their years. They’d stop you from running, keep you on the sidewalks, write you up if you used a bad word. The word safety had a new meaning these days. The security guard wore a dark uniform not so different from a police officer’s. His radio was attached to his shoulder near his neck. There was a stitched badge on the sleeve, something generic. He seemed a surprisingly tough customer to be standing at the door of an elementary school.

  As Barnes approached, the officer said, “State your business.”

  Barnes showed his badge. “Looking to speak with the principal, some of the staff.”

  The security guard looked past Barnes, looked left, right, and then pushed open the door. “They’re in the gym. Take the first right, keep your eyes to the left. You can’t miss it.”

  Barnes nodded as he went through the door. Before it shut he caught it and turned back to the guard. “You know the custodial staff here?”

  The guard nodded.

  “Knew Dale Wilson?”

  “Seemed a decent man,” the guard said. “Can’t say we hit the bar together, though.”

  “Thanks.”

  The door clacked as it closed. Barnes started down the hallway. He found the scents of construction paper and paste, pencil shavings. The place seemed tiny from an adult perspective. The halls were lined not with lockers but with coat hooks and wooden benches, all empty. The floor tiles gleamed. There were bulletin boards with announcements, one loaded up with pictures from OUR SPRING FIELD TRIP, another with antibullying information.

  Barnes smirked. There had been no antibullying campaigns when he and Ricky were kids. No need for them—bullies just got bullied back. Barnes himself had taken down Freddie
Cohen, a fifth-grade bully who’d taken to picking on third-grade Ricky.

  The altercation with Cohen bloomed in his mind. Freddie had been a big, roly-poly kid, and Barnes had said, “Just being fat don’t make you tough” before he knocked the kid down on the kickball diamond. It might have been the only time he ever found the witty comment before it was too late to use it. He’d had fewer words for Freddie Cohen at their ten-year high school reunion. The man had recently come into some money, bought a few Piggly Wiggly grocery stores in the suburbs of New Orleans, and moved down there to operate them. He acted like a big shot throughout the evening, buying round after round for all his old classmates, all the while sweating through his button-down shirt. Barnes had slipped out the back door before giving into the temptation to knock the guy on his ass again.

  Now he followed the sound of a muffled voice until he came to the gym. He peered through one of the rectangular glass panes on the double door. The glass was crisscrossed with wire in a diamond pattern. Shatter-resistant. Inside the gym there was a man, likely the principal, standing before a bunch of adults seated on the bleachers. He wore a light-gray suit and had a plastered-down comb-over. Thick glasses. Early fifties, maybe late forties. Barnes pushed through the door, and the man stopped talking, turned to him.

  Barnes showed his badge to the principal, showed it to the staff on the bleachers. Many nodded; some turned to one another and exchanged looks. Otherwise the gym was now as quiet as a Monday-morning chapel.

  “Excuse me a moment,” the principal said, holding up a finger to his staff.

  As the principal approached, Barnes checked his notes. Mr. Eric Nichol. He flipped the book closed and pocketed it.

  “Would you like to speak in private, Detective, uh . . . ?” He stuck out his hand to shake.

  “Barnes.”

  The principal took Barnes’s hand into both of this own, gripped it like a rope he’d found while plummeting. “I’m Mr. Nichol, the principal here at Kenbrook.”

  Barnes turned until Nichol was between him and the staff. He spoke in a low voice. “I’ll need to speak to your custodial staff, plus one of your teachers.” He looked over the principal’s shoulder to find the teacher from Dale Wilson’s dream among the staff. He found her pretty face in the crowd. Wilson’s heart fluttered in Barnes’s chest.

  “Mrs. Macintyre?” Nichol’s head tilted down, and he looked at Barnes over top his glasses. “Kerri’s teacher.”

  “Oh, God no.” Kerri Wilson.

  “Shhh.”

  “No,” Barnes said. He flicked his eyes to the teacher again. “Brunette. Blue top, gray skirt.”

  Principal Nichol looked, then turned back to Barnes. In a low voice, he said, “Ms. Taylor?”

  “Don’t single her out,” Barnes said. “I’d like to speak with her in private. Can that be arranged?”

  “But she’s not my teacher.”

  “Shhh.”

  “I can have her called to my office.”

  Barnes tapped his pen on his knuckles. “Call the custodial staff down, plus a few teachers, including both Macintyre and Taylor.”

  Nichol nodded. He turned to the seated staff. “I’ll be just a few minutes with the detective. He’d like to speak with some of you in private, so please don’t leave until you’re dismissed.”

  9

  Principal Eric Nichol sat in the pocket of his U-shaped desk. There was a wall of shelves behind him—mostly filled with binders and textbooks—and a bulletin board on the left-hand side. No cork could be seen beneath the overlapping thumbtacked paperwork. On the right there was a motivational poster. It showed a mountaintop framed in black, and underneath that, ASPIRE. Barnes had already grilled the principal about what he knew, which was virtually nothing. Dale Wilson had been a fine, dependable custodian, his daughter an exemplary student. Oh, there had been some trouble with Kerri being bullied due to the fact that her dad was on staff, but Kerri was a tough little girl. She’d handled it well.

  Nichol had gone silent then. His eyes became unfocused. Barnes had seen it before—the moment of clarity that hits someone who had been close to a murder victim, the fresh realization that the victim would never come back. It often came on the heels of the first time they used was instead of is.

  “Call them down now, please,” Barnes said.

  Nichol snapped out of his trance. He pulled his desktop microphone over to him and pressed the button. It gave a shot of feedback before he spoke into it. “Would the custodial staff as well as Mrs. Macintyre, Mr. Fredrickson, Mrs. Jones, Ms. Taylor, and Mr. Ellison please come down to the principal’s office?”

  Barnes said, “I assume there’s a basement or a boiler room?”

  Nichol nodded. “Basement.”

  “After we’re done here, I’d like to see it. Meantime, I’d like to speak with each of the people you’ve called alone.”

  “That’s no problem,” Nichol said. He settled into his chair.

  “Mr. Nichol,” Barnes said, “that means you.”

  Nichol smiled. He got up and left the office.

  Barnes perched on the edge of Nichol’s desk, one leg up, one foot on the ground. He reveled in the novelty of being on this side of things in a principal’s office. He’d spent his share of time in the office as a boy, most notably for loading his science-class rocket up with a pack of thunder-bombs. Ricky’s idea. They’d exploded beautifully against the blue sky. The kids had oohed and aahed while Mr. Cunningham pinch-gripped Barnes’s earlobe and dragged him away.

  Through the glass he saw the staff members queuing up in the outer office along the secretary’s desk. Ms. Taylor was there. Butterflies in Barnes’s stomach.

  Nichol sent in the first of four janitors. Barnes grilled the man lightly, specifically asking whether he had any kind of business dealings with Dale Wilson, anything they were cooking up? No.

  “Had Wilson ever mentioned any clowns or anything regarding clowns?”

  “Huh? No.”

  It was the same with the rest of the custodial staff.

  Mrs. Macintyre was a mess. Her cheeks were awash with tears, her eyes bloodshot. She had a plastic crayon box with Kerri printed on a tag stuck to the top. “These were hers.” She held out the box with a shaky hand. The crayons inside rattled.

  “Get it together, sister.” Andrea Wilson’s voice.

  “Shhh.”

  Barnes took the box. The woman bawled until he let her go.

  The other teachers were appropriately saddened by what had happened. More than that, they were shocked and scared. Barnes’s presence brought them the same finality it had brought Mr. Nichol. He grilled them as he did the custodial staff, but it was all just for show, a way to safeguard Ms. Taylor from being ground through the gossip mill. Nichol sent her in last.

  Jessica Taylor sat down before Barnes and drew a lock of hair behind her right ear. Barnes’s heart rate spiked. Dale Wilson had lusted after this woman with the intensity of a schoolboy crush. Being in her presence had frightened Wilson and turned him mute, just as it was now turning Barnes. He fought to push words from his mouth. “You’re new to the district, Ms. Taylor?”

  “Yes. Last year I was subbing in Redford. This is my first full-time position. I’m very happy to be here. And please, call me Jessica.”

  Barnes nodded. “Must have been tough, subbing?”

  “The money is okay, especially when you can get a long-term.”

  He guessed she was in her late twenties. Her face was round and pretty, and she had a small scar nearly hidden in her right eyebrow. Her eyes were large, blue, and expressive, easily her best feature. There was an honesty to her, like she’d tried on a few lies here and there, found they didn’t fit, and scratched the concept of dishonesty altogether. “A long-term?”

  “Some teachers know they’re going to be out for a month or two, maybe pregnancy or some other medical leave, so they seek a long-term sub.”

  “I see. You knew Kerri Wilson?”

  “Only in passing. She was
in a different grade, different room.”

  “And her father?”

  “Custodian, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “I guess I saw him in the halls,” she said. “Seemed like an okay guy.”

  “Did he ever approach you or say anything to you?”

  “Not that I can recall,” Jessica said.

  “Nothing about him made you suspicious?”

  Jessica cocked her head. Her eyes widened. “He’s not a suspect, is he? I mean, he didn’t . . . ?”

  Barnes shook his head. “Did he ever make you feel uncomfortable?”

  Jessica dipped her head and blushed. Barnes could tell she was used to men leering at her the way Wilson had, conjuring fantasies. The girlie magazines of Barnes’s youth didn’t feature all those naked librarians and teachers for no reason.

  She said, “He was married, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “So what’s a harmless crush?”

  Dale Wilson’s cheeks grew hot on Barnes’s face. Garbled phonetics echoed in Barnes’s mind. “Nothing ever happened between you two?”

  “No.”

  “Can you think of anything out of the ordinary regarding Dale or Kerri recently? Anything that seemed off with either of them?”

  She looked off for a moment, then shook her head.

  “Does the word calavera mean anything to you?”

  She shrugged.

  “Okay, then,” Barnes said. He stood up from the edge of the desk.

  “Wait a minute,” Jessica said. “Calavera. That’s Spanish, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Dale Wilson knew Spanish.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I guess I’m only assuming he did. Yesterday I was on my way to class after lunch. He was coming out of one of the janitors’ closets and something fell from his pocket. An index card. I picked it up and handed it back to him. I wouldn’t have read what was on it, but the lettering was so big it was impossible not to see.”

  “Written in black marker?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did it say?”

  “Demasiado tarde. Translated into English, it means ‘too late.’”