School Days

by Robert B. Parker

  “Anyone know him better?”

  “Nobody I know,” Carly said.

  He looked at the two girls. They shook their heads.

  “So where do the townies hang out?” I said.

  “Place called the Rocks,” Carly said. “Down back of the park, by the lake. They go over there, smoke some weed, drink beer.”

  “You ever been over there?” Pink Top said.

  “Yeah, couple times. Bunch of assholes.”

  “Weren’t you scared?”

  “I go where I want to,” Carly said.

  “Did you witness the shootings?” I said.

  All three shook their heads.

  “We were on the second floor,” White Top said, “Janey and me. They never got there.”

  “I was in American history,” Carly said. “We jammed the teacher’s chair under the door handle to the classroom and everybody got down. They never came in.”

  “Thanks for your help,” I said.

  “Pleasure,” Pink Top said. “Dork Garner isn’t going to tell me who I can talk to.”

  “Me either,” White Top said.

  “I’m glad he tried,” I said. “Worked out well for me.”

  “Bet your ass,” Carly said. “We were so ready to talk to you if we got the chance.”

  “Okay, let’s really sock it to him,” I said. “Ask around. Anybody knows anything, you have my card.”

  “You’re an actual private eye,” Pink Top said.

  “I’ve begun to have doubts,” I said.

  “You must be,” Pink Top said. “Says so right on the card.”

  “Oh, thank God,” I said.

  21

  TWO DOWLING COPS were leaning on a squad car outside the coffee shop. One of them stepped in front of me on the sidewalk.

  “Chief wants to see you,” he said.

  “Everybody does,” I said.

  There was a black Chevy sedan with tinted windows parked on the curb behind the squad car. A cop in plainclothes got out of the front seat and opened the back door.

  “In here,” he said.

  I looked into the backseat. Cromwell was there. I slid in beside him, and the plainclothes cop closed the back door and opened the driver’s door to get in.

  “Wait outside the car,” Cromwell said.

  The cop closed the door and went and leaned with the two uniforms on the squad car in front of us.

  “This mean you like me?” I said.

  Cromwell was wearing his big, terrifying pearl-handled revolver. I felt honored. Cromwell ignored my question. Probably felt it was frivolous. He looked at me with his eyes half closed. It was supposed to make my blood freeze.

  “Optics are amazing, aren’t they?” I said. “We can see out fine through the tint, but people outside can’t really see us much.”

  “Shut up,” Cromwell said.

  The eyes behind the rimless glasses narrowed some more. I squinted back at him.

  “Hard to see, isn’t it,” I said, “with your eyes three quarters shut.”

  “This is your last chance,” Cromwell said finally.

  “It is?”

  “After this, it gets very rough.”

  “Oh,” I said. “That’s when.”

  The front windshield wasn’t tinted. Through it, the three cops leaning on the squad car could look in at us.

  “You might get hurt bad,” Cromwell said, “resisting arrest.”

  “Gee,” I said, “maybe this doesn’t mean you like me.”

  “Do I make myself clear?” Cromwell said.

  “Actually,” I said, “I’m a little murky on some things. Like when your guys arrived, why did they secure the perimeter and stay there while the shooters inside kept shooting?”

  “It was a hostage situation. Anybody knows anything about policework knows you don’t go charging into a hostage situation.”

  “But it wasn’t a hostage situation. It was serial murder in progress.”

  “We had no way to know that,” Cromwell said.

  “The sound of gunshots inside didn’t suggest anything?” I said.

  “Besides, it might have been booby-trapped.”

  “But it wasn’t,” I said.

  “We had no way to know that, either.”

  “So you didn’t go in.”

  “We weren’t going in until we had proper intelligence and appropriate backup.”

  “You’re telling me,” I said, “you didn’t go in because it might not be safe?”

  “Goddamn it, that’s not what I said.”

  “It is what you said; it’s just not what you wanted me to hear.”

  Cromwell’s voice had gotten hoarse as we talked.

  “We contained it,” he rasped. “Goddamn it, we contained it.”

  “You were scared,” I said. “And you didn’t know what to do. And there are some kids dead who would be walking around today if you’d gone in there sooner.”

  “You sonovabitch,” Cromwell croaked.

  He took his big pearl-handled gun out and started to point it at me. I took hold of the barrel before he leveled it and bent it back so the gun was pointing at the roof of the car. He struggled to level it. But I held it there. So we sat, sort of frozen in place. The three cops out front glancing through the windshield couldn’t see much in the backseat, and whatever they saw didn’t look like trouble. They stayed where they were.

  “Let go,” Cromwell said, “or I’ll shoot.”

  “You’re a small-town police department. You never saw anything like this before. You had no hands-on experience. You were scared. So you hunkered down and waited for the Staties.”

  “Let go,” Cromwell said.

  His voice was so thick, he seemed to be having trouble squeezing his words out.

  “Okay, it was a fuck-up,” I said. “And it cost lives. But it was sort of an understandable fuck-up, unless it was one of your kids got killed.”

  “Let go.”

  “It’s the coverup that’s going to kill you,” I said.

  Cromwell didn’t speak. He had taken hold of his gun with both hands and was trying to force it down enough to point it at me. He couldn’t. Then he tried to pry my fingers off the gun barrel. He couldn’t.

  Through the front windshield, I saw the three cops at the squad car turn their heads to stare at the coffee shop. I looked out the back in the same direction. The kids had come out of the coffee shop to see what was up. They stood in a ragged row on the sidewalk, watching.

  I was holding his gun barrel with my left hand. I shifted slightly in the seat and, with my right hand, punched him in the crotch. He gasped and doubled over and I took the gun away. While he gasped against the pain, on the seat next to me, I snapped open the cylinder, took out the big .45 slugs, closed the cylinder, and put the empty gun back in his holster.

  “You been hit in the balls before,” I said. “You know the pain will pass. While it’s passing, let me hold forth for a moment. I am going to find out what happened and why and where they got the guns, and how they learned to shoot, and then we’ll see. I am going to share my concerns with the State Police Homicide Commander in Boston, guy named Healy. If he doesn’t hear from me every day he’ll be out here looking for me, and he’ll know who to ask.”

  Beside me, Cromwell, still bent over, had started taking deep breaths.

  “That aside,” I said, “I got no reason to embarrass you. I will leave you out of anything I can, as much as I can, unless you’re guilty as hell . . . or unless you annoy me.”

  Cromwell slowly straightened. His shoulders were still hunched, and he kept his hands over his groin, but he was sitting more or less upright.

  “Where’s my bullets,” he said.

  I handed the six big bullets to him. He took them and made no move to reload.

  “I don’t want trouble with you,” I said.

  He didn’t look at me.

  “But remember one thing,” I said. “You don’t want trouble with me, either. It might work out well i
f we gave each other a good leaving alone.”

  Cromwell still wouldn’t look at me. I waited a moment. He didn’t say anything. So I got out of the car. The three cops looked at me carefully. Several of the kids started to clap, and most of them joined in. I gave them a V-for-Victory sign. Cromwell never moved from the backseat.

  Pink Top said, “You go, Big Daddy.”

  “I do,” I said.

  And did.

  As I strolled off down the street toward my car, with the plaudits of the crowd still ringing in my ears, I had a sort of tense, targety feeling between my shoulder blades.

  I’d had it before.

  22

  I HAD A DATE for a drink with Rita Fiore in the late afternoon at the Ritz Bar on Arlington Street. It was raining again, and the cars on Boylston Street had their headlights on early as I walked down from my office with my raincoat collar turned up and my Pittsburgh Pirates cap tugged down over my forehead. People were leaving work, and the sidewalk was a moving jumble of umbrellas. With my natural agility, however, I was able to avoid injury. Rita was at a window table when I got there.

  “Why are you wearing a black hat with a P on it,” she said.

  “Pittsburgh Pirates,” I said. “Goes with my raincoat.”

  Rita was drinking a martini. She had already ordered me a scotch and soda, which sat waiting. I took off my hat and coat and put them on the floor and sat down in front of the scotch.

  “Johnnie Walker Blue,” Rita said.

  “I deserve no less,” I said and took a pull.

  “Susan still gone?” Rita said.

  “Yes.”

  “Is it possible she’s not coming back?” Rita said.

  “No.”

  “Well, it happened once before,” Rita said.

  “That was two other people,” I said.

  “So not this time?”

  “No.”

  “Damn,” Rita said. “Any chance we could pretend, like for an evening?”

  “I could not love thee half so well,” I said, “if I loved not honor more.”

  “Oh . . . fuck!” Rita said.

  “Or not,” I said.

  “You probably didn’t even quote it right.”

  “Everybody’s a critic,” I said.

  She reached across and patted my hand.

  “How’s everything in Dowling?” she said.

  “The community is united in its conviction that I’m a nosy pain in the ass and should be stonewalled.”

  “Poor baby,” Rita said.

  “The thing is, nobody, not even their parents, seems interested in how two teenaged boys acquired four semiautomatic handguns and ammo, and enough skill to hit two-thirds of their targets.”

  “Close range,” Rita said.

  “Maybe. But when people pick up a hammer for the first time, they miss the nail more often than that.”

  “So you’re saying it wasn’t the first time.”

  I nodded.

  “Were these kids marginal?” Rita said.

  “It’s hard to tell,” I said. “The Grant kid played football. The kids I’ve talked with so far say that Clark was sort of a nobody.”

  “Any pattern to who they killed?” Rita said.

  The waiter came by. We ordered another round. He went away.

  “I don’t know enough yet,” I said. “DiBella says no.”

  “He any good?” Rita said.

  “Healy says he is.”

  “And Healy is good.”

  “Very,” I said.

  Trying to stay out of the rain, a youngish woman wearing a stylish red raincoat and walking a small dog pressed in against the window next to where I was sitting. I looked at her.

  “Are you looking at her ass?” Rita said.

  “I am,” I said. “I’m a detective. It’s my nature.”

  The waiter brought the fresh drinks.

  “You are right across the table from one of the great asses on the East Coast, and you’re looking at her ass out the window.”

  “I can’t see yours,” I said. “If you wanted to go outside and press it against the window . . .”

  “In the rain?”

  I shrugged. Rita grinned.

  “Besides,” she said. “I’m using it to sit on.”

  “What a waste,” I said.

  We each drank.

  “Maybe they just hated school,” Rita said.

  I nodded.

  “I was talking to some kids yesterday,” I said. “One of them said something.”

  Rita waited quietly. For all her mouthiness, she had a great capacity for intelligent silence as needed.

  “She said that everybody’s walking around in school barely able to stand it, and these guys just went a little further and couldn’t stand it. ‘These guys went kaboom,’ she said.”

  Rita nodded.

  “My brother,” she said, “married a nearly perfect knee-jerk upclass suburban mom. She’s dreadful. But the poor bastard loves her, and there it is. When my nephew was three, she was worrying about getting him into the right preschool. Kid’s fifteen now. He’s under pressure to make sure he gets good grades so he can get into a good school. He needs to show good extracurricular activities to get into a good school. He needs to be popular with his classmates. Which means be just like them. Dress right, use the proper slang, listen to the proper music, go away on the proper vacations. Live in the right neighborhood, be sure his parents drive the right car, hang with the right group, have the right interests. He has homework. He has soccer practice and guitar lessons. The school decides what he has to learn, and when, and from whom. The school tells him which stairwell he can go up. It tells him how fast to move through the corridors, when he can talk, when he can’t, when he can chew gum, when he can have lunch, what he is allowed to wear . . .”

  Rita paused and took a drink.

  “Boy,” I said. “Ready for corporate life.”

  She nodded.

  “And the rest of the world is telling him he’s carefree,” she said. “And all the time he’s worried that the boys will think he’s a sissy, and the school bully will beat him up, and the girls will think he’s a geek.”

  “Hard times,” I said.

  “The hardest,” she said. “And while he’s going through puberty and struggling like hell to come to terms with the new person he’s becoming, running through it all, like salt in a wound, is the self-satisfied adult smirk that keeps trivializing his angst.”

  “They do learn to read and write and do numbers,” I said.

  “They do. And they do that early. And after that, it’s mostly bullshit. And nobody ever consults the kid about it.”

  “You spend time with this kid,” I said.

  “I do my Auntie Mame thing every few weeks. He takes the train in from his hideous suburb. We go to a museum, or shop, or walk around and look at the city. We have dinner. We talk. He spends the night, and I usually drive him back in the morning.”

  “What do you tell him?” I said.

  “I tell him to hang on,” Rita said.

  She was leaning a little forward now, each hand resting palm-down on the table, her drink growing warm with neglect.

  “I tell him that life in the hideous suburb is not all the life there is. I tell him it will get better in a few years. I tell him that he’ll get out of that stultifying little claustrophobic coffin of a life, and the walls will fall away and he’ll have room to move and choose, and if he’s tough enough, to have a life of his own making.”

  As she spoke, she was slapping the tabletop softly with her right hand.

  “If he doesn’t explode first,” she said.

  “Your jury summations must be riveting,” I said.

  She laughed and sat back.

  “I love that kid,” she said. “I think about it a lot.”

  “He’s lucky to have you. Lot of them have no one.”

  Rita nodded.

  “Sometimes I want to take him and run,” she said.

  T
he wind shifted outside, and the rain began to rattle against the big picture window next to us. It collected and ran down, distorting reality and blurring the headlights and taillights and traffic lights and colorful umbrellas and bright raincoats into a kind of Parisian shimmer.

  “I know,” I said.

  23

  SINCE WE WERE WALKING through a park and down by the lake, away from any roads, I took Pearl off the leash and let her bound about like a rhebok. The rocks were an outcropping of basalt left by some vast meltdown some eons back. Scattered in the area were some boulders, probably deposited by a glacier some other eons back. The basalt sloped over the lip of a hill and down toward the lake shore. Scattered about on its surface were a bunch of prototype suburban dropouts who had been deposited more recently. I counted three girls and ten boys, plus one guy who was too big to be a boy. He was an obvious bodybuilder, heavily tattooed and of apparently mixed ethnicity. I guessed Asian and Hispanic.

  Riding the smell of the lake was the rich scent of marijuana. Pearl smelled it and stopped. She was not bumptiously friendly. When she spotted the group, her ears went down and she came over beside me.

  “My name is Spenser,” I said. “I’m looking into the school shooting.”

  “Well yippee iyoh ki yay,” one of the kids said.

  He was a gangly guy with hair so red it was nearly maroon. He looked a little unfocused. Beside him, the big older guy stared at me silently. He had on jeans and motorcycle boots and no shirt. Most of his upper body was ornamented.

  “I was wondering what you all could tell me about Wendell Grant,” I said.

  “So who’s that with you,” the red-haired kid said, “Dr. Watson?”

  One of the three girls threw a pebble at Pearl. It missed, but Pearl shied a little closer to me. I looked at the girl. I knew how it was going to go, but there was no help for it.

  “Next person bothers the dog, goes in the lake.”

  Everybody looked at the big guy with the tattoos. He remained seated on the rock.

  “That’s my girlfriend you talking to,” he said.

  “Good to know,” I said. “Wendell Grant hang around with you all?”

  “I’m talking to you, pal,” the big guy said.

  “Squint your eyes a little,” I said.

  He stood.