I stopped at the Little League field and ripped the Pirates’ roster off the bulletin board, then drove straight to my mother’s house to tell her I needed her car for a few more days.
The temperature had climbed to an unseasonable eighty-three degrees that afternoon, and my mother had decided to bake a ham shank. A limp-looking Kate sat at the table in the stifling kitchen.
“What are you doing off so early?” I asked my sister.
“I had a headache from the heat.”
“So you came here to get cool? How will the world of high fashion ever survive without you?”
“Nobody feels like shopping with this humidity anyway,” Kate said. “I thought I’d beat the heat tonight. Ron’s taking me to Point Pleasant for dinner.”
“Ah, yes! Ron Haver!”
My mother made herself busy peeling potatoes over the trash can. Ron Haver had become a touchy subject, and she refused to take sides.
“Don’t start, Colleen,” my sister warned me.
“First he suspects me, then Bevin …”
My mother looked up from the potatoes. “Bevin?”
“Never mind, Ma.”
“Ron never suspected you,” Kate said, “even if he did think you weren’t as truthful as you could be.”
“Bevin didn’t kill anyone. I’m going to prove it!”
Kate raked her damp hair with her delicate, French-manicured nails. “How?”
“Bevin?” my mother repeated.
“It seems Kate’s new beau thinks my best friend is a killer, Ma. I know she isn’t, and I’m going to have to figure out who killed Jason Whitley to prove it. I just convinced Ken Rhodes to give me back my column.”
“Good for you, Colleen!” my mother said.
“You’re not going to let her do this, are you?” Kate asked.
My mother came over to the table and pulled out a chair. “She’s thirty-eight years old, and she has a mind of her own.”
“Yeah. Right, Ma. As if.” I opened my bag and pulled out a pad and pen. “I need to find out who had access to the Pirates’ equipment bag. I’m making a list.”
“Neil Caruso had access,” my mother pointed out.
“That’s right! Write it down, Colleen,” Kate said.
“And don’t forget that skinny partner of his,” my mother said.
“She wouldn’t have had access to the equipment bag until after the murder. This is serious. I’m only interested in people who could have taken the bat and actually knew Jason Whitley.”
“A bat? Someone used a bat on that guy?” My mother leaned sideways and swatted the back of Kate’s head. “You might have at least told me Jason Whitley was batted to death!”
“Jeez, Ma! Do you want to give me brain damage? I’m not a kid anymore either!”
“Maybe I should do this at home,” I said.
My mother didn’t agree. “You should do this right now. You want names? I’ll give you names. How about that young coach, Colleen? What’s his name?”
“Eugene …”
“Seinfeld?”
“It’s Steiner, Ma.”
“Do you have all the kids’ names on the team?” my mother asked.
I held up the printed roster I robbed from the field house. “All these kids have parents.”
“But not all the parents go down to watch the games,” my mother said.
“Not every game, but they eventually show up for at least a few innings. Someone could have stepped inside the dugout to hand a kid a glove or a Gatorade and grabbed a bat.”
My mother looked doubtful. “Who had access to that bag when it wasn’t inside the dugout?”
“The coach did,” I told her.
My mother gave me a sharp look. “Ron Haver did not kill that teacher. How could you even suggest something like that? He’s dating your sister.”
Kate laughed.
“Okay, fine! Deductive reasoning. If he’s a cop and he dates your kid sister, he can’t possibly be a suspect.” I scratched Haver’s name off the paper.
My mother got up, rinsed the potatoes, and put them on to boil. She always thought better when she cooked. “What about wives, Col? Are any of your suspects married?”
We all thought for a moment.
“Jennifer Whitley! Don’t forget her. I’ve seen her in the dugout!” my mother said.
Kate put Jennifer’s name down.
“And Kevin Sheffield!” my mother added. “He’s been boinking Jennifer Whitley all along. He might have had access to that bag, too.”
Kate looked up from the pad. “What’s she talking about?”
“We saw Kevin Sheffield with Jennifer Whitley,” I said. “I think they’ve had a thing going on for a while.”
My sister tapped the top of the pen against her front tooth. “The whole table at Domingo’s that night—there’s something strange about them. Think about it. They were together in high school, and years later, they’re all still together. One of them gets bumped off, and we find out the victim’s wife has been carrying on with another guy in the crowd. Another one had an affair with the victim. God only knows what else was going on. It’s weird.”
“I still see my old high school friends all the time,” I told Kate.
“Not like those people do. Besides, don’t they seem like they’re one-upping each other?”
“I don’t think Jennifer Whitley’s like that. Betty Vernon and Sheffield are,” I said. “You don’t happen to have any old high school yearbooks handy, do you? Maybe something from back then would give us a clue to what their little group is up to now.”
“They wouldn’t be in Kate’s senior yearbook,” my mother said from across the room. “They would have already graduated by then.”
“They didn’t put underclassmen in my yearbook, and I graduated two years before them,” I said. “I wish I could get my hands on a copy of their yearbook.”
“I’ll bet they keep old yearbooks in the school library. Maybe Sara can check it out for you,” my mother suggested.
“Yearbooks are in the reference section. You can’t check out reference books,” Kate told her.
“Maybe she can sneak it out!” my mother said.
“It’s not like when we were in school, Mom,” I said. “They use high-tech library police equipment now—the same antitheft machines that they use in the town library.”
“We can go look through the yearbook, can’t we?” Kate suggested.
“In case you haven’t noticed, we’re a little old to pass for high school girls,” I told her.
Kate’s brows wrinkled, deep in thought. “I know! We can go at night when the cleaning crew goes in. They turn off all the alarms to polish the floors and dust.”
“Should we disguise ourselves to look like janitors? I think they all know each other, Kate.”
“Then we’ll need a legitimate reason for being inside the school—like to attend a basketball game.”
“The season’s over,” my mother told her.
I came up with the perfect alibi. “I have to interview Stanley Da Silva for that basketball clinic story. I scheduled it for after school hours and didn’t get the chance to cancel when Rhodes canned my column.”
“If it’s late and the janitors are cleaning—hey, it’s easy enough to lose your way and end up in the school library,” Kate told me.
“Sounds like a plan to me,” my mother agreed.
Generally, the salty aroma of fresh ham roasting inside my parents’ suburban crematorium would have made me drool, even if it was my mother’s cooking. This time it didn’t. I used a blue paper napkin to blot my almost healed eyebrow. It felt too hot to eat, and the Chinese food I had for lunch formed a tight knot in my stomach.
My mother checked the oven before coming back to the table. “Don’t you worry, Colleen. We’ll find a way to clear Bevin’s name. After all, just because she had an affair with that teacher, it doesn’t mean she killed him.”
“You know about Bev’s affair but you didn’t kn
ow she was a suspect? Ron Haver told Kate and she selectively blabbed to you, didn’t she?”
Kate looked all wide-eyed innocent. “I never said a word about anything!”
“Stop picking on your sister! Carmella Testino told me all about it months ago. She said she saw Bevin and Jason Whitley in the municipal lot at that cheap motel down by the bay.”
“And you never said anything about it to me? What was Mrs. Testino doing down there in such cold weather anyway?” I wondered.
“She went with a group to comb the beach. They fill bags with seashells to use in those craft projects they do at the senior center. Those old biddies glue them to anything that doesn’t move. Carmella recognized Bev right away because of her hair.”
“Who else knows about this?” I asked.
“No one. Carmella told me not to tell anyone.”
Which meant nothing at all. If Mrs. Testino swore someone to secrecy, it meant she blabbed the story to at least twenty other people. Poor Bevin! And poor Dennis, too. Still, I held out hope that the story had died with my mother. After all, I had lived my entire life in Tranquil Harbor and hadn’t known Old Lady Testino’s first name was Carmella until two minutes ago.
* * *
I went home, where the temperature was at least ten degrees cooler. I needed to get away from Kate and my mother to properly think things through. I didn’t have a psychic bone in my body, yet I felt certain the reason for Jason Whitley’s death had something to do with the high school.
I went into the den and sat at my desk, staring at the names on the list Kate and I had made in my mother’s kitchen. It needed narrowing down, and I had to get serious about who would have had a compelling reason to see the teacher dead.
The high school connection wasn’t there for Bevin, and hers was the first name I crossed off the list. I also omitted the names added for my own personal revenge. I crossed off Neil’s name, much as it pained me to do so. I crossed off the Steiner kid’s name, too. He wouldn’t have a reason to kill anyone. The parents of kids on the team didn’t count either, at least not yet, and I disregarded the roster I stole from the clubhouse. Maybe later, the names would come in handy. At present, they were nothing more than a distraction.
I turned on the computer, opened the Word program, pulled up the file titled Jason Whitley Notes, and started typing.
Jennifer Whitley, who went hand in hand with Kevin Sheffield, remained. They were an item, and either separately or together they would benefit from Whitley’s death—she by being single, he by having Jason out of the way.
I hit the tab twice and typed in my thoughts.
Da Silva’s name also remained. Deep down, I had the feeling Da Silva didn’t much care for Jason Whitley. Sara and her friends would call them frenemies. The Teacher of the Year award could have been a reason for murder, but that felt more like reaching. It had to be something bigger than that—something worth killing for. I hit the tab and typed.
And Betty Vernon! She’d certainly earned her spot on the list. She had an affair with Jason Whitley and had been replaced with a new lover. It could very well have been a crime of passion.
I typed it all in and saved the file, then sat back to think it through. There were just four names to focus on, and I thought my reasons for suspecting them were solid.
I stared at the screen, as if I would magically come to a brilliant conclusion by just reading what I had written. After twenty minutes, my eyes burned and my brain went fuzzy. I needed to know far more about these people than their affairs and petty squabbles.
The interview at the high school, I knew, would be a great place to start digging down deep into these four lives. I decided I would add a few additional questions of my own to those Ken Rhodes had suggested—the kind of questions he would never approve of.
15
Harbor Regional’s hallways were nearly deserted when Kate and I arrived for my interview with Stanley Da Silva on Thursday night. Only a handful of students lingered outside the building after their senior fundraiser meeting. We roamed the corridors for ten minutes in search of the athletic department. For some reason, we always came back to the main office. With the exception of the red-and-gray color scheme, nothing seemed familiar.
“Can you believe we spent four years here?” Kate complained. “They changed things around on us.”
Nick Charles had Nora. Sherlock Holmes had Watson. I got stuck with Kate—and she didn’t believe in low-profile dressing. Her sleeveless Versace number looked more appropriate for a nightclub, and her kinky gold sandals sounded like tap shoes on the polished tile floor. I wore comfortable reconnaissance jeans, my sneakers were silent, and my pocketbook had enough room to hold a complete set of Funk & Wagnalls.
Beyond the glass window in the main office, Betty Vernon and Kevin Sheffield were embroiled in a heated argument. The Vernon woman towered over Sheffield, so much so that the vice principal appeared to be shouting at her breasts. They saw us out in the hallway and abruptly ended their conversation.
“I wonder what that’s all about,” I said.
Kate pulled me away from the glass. “They could be fighting over a student,” she said, “or even a parking space. It’s not our business. One thing at a time, please.”
“I want to come back this way after the interview,” I told Kate. “Maybe we’ll meet one of them and get them to talk.”
Kate gave me one of her are you stupid looks. “Do you really think those two teamed up to kill Jason Whitley?”
“Stranger things have happened,” I reminded her.
“Fine. We’ll come back this way, but you’d better move your butt right now. You’ll be late for Da Silva.”
We continued on down the narrow hallway, which was bisected by a much larger one. We turned left this time instead of right and found ourselves walking toward the front of the building.
“The gym is near the side entrance, isn’t it?” Kate asked.
“I think so,” I said, finally getting my bearings.
A janitor pushed a mop just outside the girls’ lavatory. Down the hall, the doors to the boys’ gym were propped wide open. I reached inside my bag and took out my notebook.
“Can you come inside with me, Kate? Just in case?”
“No can do. Only rubber soles are allowed on the gym floor. These are Prada, dearie.”
“I beg your pardon,” I said. “Maybe you can remove them?”
Kate shook her head. “Bare feet would make me too short to wear this outfit.”
I went inside the gym alone and skirted the basketball court. An open steel door led to the miniscule athletic department office. Inside, Stanley Da Silva lounged in an office chair. His huge, sneakered feet rested on top of a dented metal desk.
“Come on in, Mrs. Caruso. Have a seat. I hope you don’t mind doing the interview here. I thought the setting might help with your story, even if the air doesn’t circulate all that well on this side of the building.”
The setting? Dozens of dusty trophies sat on wall shelves to remind Stanley Da Silva of his glory days. The noxious odor of gym socks drifted in from the locker room. All in all, Da Silva’s office was a horrible place to conduct an interview on a steamy Thursday evening.
“Maybe that’s a good thing, considering the smell,” I said.
Da Silva sniffed the air and shrugged. “I hardly notice it anymore. I wish you came a few minutes earlier. I was shooting baskets on the court. I like to practice now and then. Free throws, mostly, because of my bad knee. I’m still a great shooter.”
And humble, I thought, but said, “I’m sure you are. Can you fill me in on the particulars of your basketball clinic?”
“As you know, I hold the Harbor Regional point record for regular season play. We went to the finals that year.”
Considering Harbor Regional’s uncanny knack for losing basketball games over its fifty-plus years of existence, I doubted Stanley Da Silva had encountered much in the way of competition at the high school. Year in and year ou
t, the lanky kids who made the team were mostly uncoordinated, unathletic boys who couldn’t sink a basket if it were hung three feet off the floor.
“So you intend to use that experience to help local youngsters become better athletes?” I asked.
“Skills must be developed, Mrs. Caruso. You build on strengths and compensate for weaknesses. Not everyone is born gifted. Not every child has the magic touch. I’ve been blessed.”
I wanted to knock Da Silva’s big feet off the desk and send him crashing back into the cinderblock wall. Instead, I took out the notebook from my bag and began to write down every boring word. “That’s very generous of you to give something back to the community, Mr. Da Silva. Tell me about the clinic itself.”
“What would you like to know?”
“Dates, times, age groups, the location site of the clinic—maybe a few of the finer points of the game.”
“Are you a basketball fan?” he asked me.
“I’ve never sat all the way through a basketball game in my entire life,” I admitted.
“I still don’t understand why the Crier didn’t send a real sports writer to do the interview. How come they sent you?”
I knew a put-down when I heard one. “How come you’re not on the Lakers?”
Da Silva sniffed. “If I didn’t blow out my knee, I could have been a Laker.”
“And I could win a Pulitzer. How about the clinic?” I pressed on.
“It runs five days a week, Monday through Friday …”
I filled nine pages with hasty notes before my hand started to cramp. Cleaning toilets and gutting fish held more appeal than forty-five minutes of the Stanley Da Silva story.
“I think I have all I need,” I said when I couldn’t write another word. “If you have some old high school basketball clips I can take with me, I’ll be on my way.”
Da Silva went to the file cabinet and opened the top drawer. “I just happen to have a few.”
He gave me an overstuffed file folder with clippings from the Town Crier, the Home News, and the Newark Star Ledger. I shoved them in my bag along with my notebook. “Very impressive. I’ll let you know when the story will run.”
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