School Days

by Robert B. Parker

  “Prosecution send in a shrink?”

  “Yes. But Jared refused to speak with him.”

  Outside the window of Beth Ann’s office, the rain still fell. It was colder rain today and was pushed a little more by the wind. Inside the office, it was bright and warm.

  “Do you, in fact,” I said, “regardless of what you can testify to, think Jared was in the grip of compulsion?”

  “I don’t know.”

  We sat for a time then. Beth Ann seemed comfortable enough with the silence. She rearranged her legs again. If she kept doing that, it was possible that I might begin to bugle like a stallion. Which would not be dignified. Beth Ann smiled at me and took a business card from her desk and wrote on the back.

  “Perhaps you will want time to digest what we’ve discussed,” she said. “I’ve written my home phone number on the back, should you need to reach me. Call anytime. I live in Lexington.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  My voice sounded hoarse to me. I put the card in my shirt pocket and stood up.

  “I’m sure we’ll be in touch,” I said.

  My voice was hoarse.

  “I do hope so,” Beth Ann said.

  10

  HEALY GOT ME an interview with Jared Clark at the Bethel County Jail. DiBella took me over and walked me to the interview room.

  The room was gray—walls, floor, and ceiling—with no windows. The gray door was metal and had a small window in it, covered with wire mesh, through which a guard could watch the proceedings. There was an oak table in the room, and four straight chairs. I sat at the table. DiBella waited outside.

  Jared Clark looked badly out of place in his jail coveralls when two guards brought him in. He wasn’t very big, and I was pretty sure he didn’t shave yet.

  One of the guards said, “You’re with Sergeant DiBella.”

  I said I was.

  The guards put Jared in a chair opposite me.

  “Be outside,” the guard said. “Bang on the door when you’re through.”

  I said I would.

  Jared sat back in his chair with his arms folded and looked at me scornfully. I took out one of my business cards and put it in front of him. He looked down and read it without touching it. Then he looked at me, and snickered faintly and shrugged. I folded my arms across my chest and leaned back in my chair and shrugged back at him. Neither of us spoke. The Bethel County Jail was a new facility. It was air-conditioned. I could hear the white sound of cool air moving through the vents. In the far background, I could hear the darker sounds of jail life.

  We did this for a while.

  Jared had light brown hair cut short. His nose was small and sharp. His mouth was thin and not very wide. He was short and seemed wiry. His hands were small. It was possible, of course, that Jared would outlast me. I knew he had noplace special to go, and that staring it out with me was as pleasant as his day was going to get. On the other hand, he was seventeen and alone in a scary place, whereas I was not seventeen, and I was tougher than Bill O’Reilly. I might mean something to him. He’d need to know what.

  And he did.

  “So, what are you,” he said finally.

  “I’ve been hired to save your ass,” I said.

  He snickered again. We went back to quiet again.

  “Who hired you to do that?” he said after a while.

  “Your grandmother,” I said.

  He nodded.

  “She thinks you’re innocent,” I said.

  He nodded, and shrugged and smirked. I was tiring of the smirk.

  “Care to tell me what happened that day in the school?” I said.

  “Me’n Dell took out a lot of assholes,” he said. “Needed taking out.”

  “Dell being Wendell Grant?”

  “Sure.”

  “Can you name them?” I said.

  “Who?”

  “The people you took out.”

  For a moment, I thought he actually saw me. But it passed quickly.

  He shrugged.

  “How many did you take out?” I said.

  He shrugged.

  “Why did they need it?”

  “They were assholes.”

  “And you could tell that how?” I said.

  “Whole school was assholes,” he said.

  And smirked.

  “Lot of that happening,” I said.

  He didn’t say anything. I didn’t say anything. We were back at it.

  After a while he said, “How much she pay you?”

  “Your grandmother?”

  “Yeah. How much she paying?”

  I told him.

  “She can afford it,” he said.

  “Your lawyer wants to plead you crazy,” I said.

  Jared shrugged.

  “You okay with that?” I said.

  Shrug.

  “You crazy?” I said.

  “You ever kill anybody?” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “You crazy?”

  “No.”

  He smirked.

  “Are you comfortable spending the rest of your life in the jug?” I said.

  He shrugged.

  “Have you thought about it? Sixty, seventy years?”

  Shrug.

  “Can’t do the time,” he said, “don’t do the crime.”

  I was quiet for a moment.

  “You don’t think it’ll happen,” I said.

  He shrugged.

  “You don’t think you’re going away forever.”

  He shrugged again and smirked. What range.

  “Even though you confessed,” I said.

  Shrug, smirk.

  “You know something I don’t know?” I said.

  He snickered. And shrugged. And closed with a smirk. Three for three. I had really broken through.

  We sat for a while longer.

  I stood up.

  “This has been great,” I said.

  He stayed seated, looking at the middle of my chest.

  “Next time, you might want to extend your emotional range.”

  “Huh?”

  “Work on sneering,” I said.

  I went and knocked on the door to get out. Behind me, I heard Jared snicker.

  11

  IT WAS DARK by the time Pearl and I got home. The rain had stopped, but the air was still heavy with its threat. The first thing I did when we got into my apartment was feed Pearl. It prevented her from crying and following me around, bumping my leg with her head. Then I made myself a tall scotch and soda and took it with me and stood in the front window and looked down at Marlboro Street. It was wet from the day’s rain, and the streetlights made it gleam. Up the street, a white Explorer pulled up, and a well-dressed woman got out and headed into one of the town houses on the city side of the street. Even in the dim light, I admired her backside as she walked up the front steps. She rang the bell. I studied her backside. After a moment, someone opened the front door and a runtish Jack Russell terrier came out and barked at her, and then ran back in and she followed. The door closed. The white Explorer pulled away. I drank some scotch and looked at my watch. It was 8:35. Here and in North Carolina. We usually talked before she went to bed. I drank some more scotch. Pearl came and looked out the window with me for a moment and didn’t see anything to engage her. She turned away and went into the living room and got up on the couch.

  The excitement of the woman with the good-looking butt had passed. Marlboro Street was peaceful again. I thought about calling Susan. It was early. Eleven o’clock was the more-or-less scheduled time. She probably wouldn’t be there. Probably out to dinner with someone other than me. If I called and she wasn’t there, it would make me feel a little unhappy twinge in the pit of my stomach. Better to wait.

  I drank some scotch.

  I couldn’t think of any way I could possibly keep them from sending Jared Clark away for the rest of his life. He said he did it. He showed no remorse. And it was certainly hard to like him. Besides, he deserved to do
some time for aggravated smirking. I had deposited the retainer, but I hadn’t spent it. I could give it back to Mrs. Ellsworth and tell her the kid was guilty as charged.

  My glass was empty. I went to my kitchen and added fresh ice and Dewar’s and a lot of soda.

  “Kid’s a creep,” I said to Pearl.

  She opened her eyes on the couch and looked at me without raising her head. I sat on the living-room side of my kitchen counter.

  “I wonder if Mrs. Ellsworth knows that?”

  Pearl seemed disinterested.

  “She must have some idea,” I said.

  I drank some scotch.

  “There’s no one in there,” I said to Pearl. “Unless it’s all denial and bravado, and there’s a scared little kid in there.”

  Pearl had no reaction.

  “It doesn’t feel like denial,” I said. “It feels like empty.”

  I liked the way the tall glass looked with the pale scotch and soda over the slick ice, and the hint of moisture glossing the outside of the glass. I liked the way the ice felt against my upper lip when I drank.

  “Malt does more than Milton can. . . .” I said.

  Pearl had heard me say it before.

  “Always thought Auden said that until some guy corrected me at one of Susan’s parties. He said it was Housman. I was scornful of the poor, dumb, pretentious bastard, but I felt in fairness I should look it up.”

  Pearl’s breathing was steady on the couch. I wasn’t sure she was listening.

  “It was Housman,” I said.

  I drank some scotch. My apartment was thick with silence. The scotch made it seem full of portent.

  “I hate when I’m wrong,” I said.

  Pearl took no notice.

  “I can’t tell her,” I said.

  Pearl shifted and stuck her feet in the air and leaned them against the back of the couch and looked at me upside down for a moment before she closed her eyes again.

  “I don’t actually know he’s not innocent,” I said.

  “Why would he lie?”

  “Maybe he’s crazy.”

  “Maybe he’s simply bad.”

  “Bad?”

  “You don’t believe in bad, how you going to believe in good?”

  “You metaphysical devil.”

  Pearl’s position as she slept had caused her mouth to fall open and her tongue to loll out the left side of it. I looked at her.

  “Yeah,” I said. “That’s about where I am.”

  12

  IN THE MORNING it was still not raining, and still on the verge of it, when Pearl and I drove out to Dowling to visit Jared Clark’s parents. They lived on some rolling green acreage, in a large, white house with a three-car garage.

  It was cool with the foreboding rain. I left Pearl in the car with the windows partly open and walked to the front door and rang the bell. The woman who answered was only a few soft pounds short of heavy, with a kind of blank, blond prettiness that had probably gotten her cheerleading work in high school.

  “Mrs. Clark?” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m Spenser.”

  “Oh, yes. Thank you. Please come in.”

  She was wearing a bright orange top and white pants and on her feet an attractive pair of flip-flops with orange straps to match her top, and in the center of each strap an ornamental plastic flower. I followed her into the enormous living room. It had the spontaneity of a furniture showroom, and gleamed with the spotless silence of for-company-only. Her husband was standing by the fireplace at the far end. He went perfectly with the room. He had on a pink polo shirt with a discreet alligator on the chest, pleated olive Dockers, and dark leather sandals. He was a nice-looking guy with sandy hair. His face had the same softness his wife’s did. He walked to me and put out his hand.

  “Ron Clark,” he said.

  We sat. I had the sense that my butt may have been the first one ever to press against the barrel-backed red armchair I was on.

  I declined coffee, fearing I might spill some. Ron and his wife sat together across from me on a couch. They decided against coffee, too.

  “How can we help,” Ron said.

  Here it was. I didn’t like it, but at least it was quick. We didn’t have to waste time talking about how rainy the summer had been.

  “Do you believe he’s guilty?” I said.

  Mrs. Clark began to cry. Her husband put his hand on her thigh and patted it.

  “He’s our only child,” Ron said.

  I waited. Mrs. Clark continued to cry quietly, her head down, staring at her husband’s hand on her thigh.

  “Since he was born,” she said quietly, “he had this distance about him.”

  The crying seemed to be tears only. Her voice was clear. Her husband nodded.

  “It was like he was always thinking about something else,” she said.

  “Maybe if we’d had other children,” her husband said. “Maybe if he’d had a brother . . .”

  “He was never really a bad boy,” his mother said. “His grades were good. He was never in trouble. He was just never with us, exactly.”

  We sat silently in the lifeless, perfect room.

  After a while I said, “Do you believe that he’s guilty?”

  Still crying, without looking up, Mrs. Clark nodded yes. I looked at Ron Clark.

  “My God,” Clark said, “he confessed.”

  “Why do you suppose he did it?” I said.

  Mrs. Clark’s head was still down. She continued to cry quietly.

  “We’ve asked each other a thousand times,” she said.

  “Sometimes,” Clark said, “sometimes I think that maybe he did it for no reason. He did it because he wanted to.”

  “What does he say?” I asked.

  “He doesn’t,” Clark said. “He won’t talk about it.”

  “Is he mad at you?” I said.

  “He doesn’t seem to be,” Clark said. “You think, Dot?”

  “He doesn’t seem to feel very much of anything,” she said softly.

  “His grandmother thinks he’s innocent,” I said.

  “My mother-in-law,” Clark said, “has a lot of money. It makes her think anything she wants to believe is right.”

  “Mrs. Clark?” I said.

  “Often wrong but never uncertain, my father used to say.”

  “Was she close to Jared?”

  “She thought so,” Ron said.

  “Did Jared like her?” I said.

  “Hard to tell with Jared,” Dot said.

  “She wouldn’t even know,” Ron said. “She’s so damned self-absorbed. She thinks he’s innocent because he’s her grandchild, and her grandchild can’t be guilty of anything.”

  Dot Clark looked up at me. Crying had not helped her makeup any.

  “Ron is quite hard on my mother,” she said. “I know she cares for Jared.”

  “Were he and Wendell Grant close?” I said.

  “I guess so,” she said. “I didn’t really know a lot about Jared’s friends.”

  I looked at Ron. He shrugged.

  “If he did do the shooting,” I said, “do you know where he might have gotten the guns?”

  They both shook their heads. It was a question every cop they’d talked to had asked.

  “Do you wish me to prove him innocent?” I said.

  They stared at me. Then at each other.

  “We do not wish to have our hopes raised,” Ron said carefully. “We are struggling to accept what is.”

  “Do you have any idea?” Dot said. “How could you possibly? We’ve lived here in this town for almost twenty years. We moved here to be part of this. To be part of a small town, and have friends, and know everybody and have everybody know us and . . .” She was looking straight at me and rolling her hands as she spoke, as if she were mixing bread dough.

  “They all know us now,” Ron said.

  Dot finished her sentence as if he hadn’t spoken.

  “. . . feel, like, the rhythm of c
ommunity life. To belong to something.”

  “And now?” I said.

  Ron shook his head slowly.

  “How could you possibly prove him innocent?” Dot said.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “May I look at his room?”

  13

  “MAY WE LEAVE YOU,” Dot said. “We don’t really like to come in here.”

  “Sure,” I said. “I’ll just sort of look around and think a little.”

  “Ronny and I will be downstairs,” she said, and went.

  I sat on the edge of the kid’s bed. The room was blue and as soulless as the living room. The walls were darker blue, the ceiling a lighter shade. The bed was perfectly made with a brand-new blue quilt, with matching designer pillows stacked against the headboard. There was a bureau against the far wall, and a closet. A television sat on top of the bureau. There were no pictures on the walls. I opened the drawer in the bedside table. It was empty and clean. The drapes on the big window beside the bed were a darker blue than the walls. I looked under the bed. Nothing. Not even dust. I felt around under the mattress. Nothing. I stood and went to the closet. It was empty. I opened the bureau drawers. They were empty and lined with clean white paper. I went back and sat down on the kid’s bed again.

  As soon as he was gone they had cleaned out his room. It was as if they had emptied the room of him. Tried to render it pre-Jared, as if they could return life to the time when they had moved here and it was mostly possibility. There was no vestige of him. There had been no pictures in the living room. None of the cheap garish cardboard-framed school photographs that every parent had of every kid. No team photographs. No musical instruments. No CDs. It was as if he’d never existed, as if he’d never lain on this bed in the darkness and thought about sex or eternity or the American League. As if there had been no imaginary passions, no fantasized moments of derring-do, no terrifying moments of imagination when life’s limitations nearly overwhelmed him. No graphic sexual conquests of women older than himself.

  The room was empty and neutral and impenetrable. The only story it told me was that it had no story to tell. I got up and very carefully smoothed out the quilt where I had sat. I looked out the window. From here, I could see my parked car. I couldn’t see clearly from here, but Pearl might have been sitting in the driver’s seat. It was darker now than it had been, and rain began to spat disinterestedly against the window. I wondered if Jared had had a dog. I looked at the neat, color-coordinated, blank room upstairs in the neat, color-coordinated, blank house.