School Days

by Robert B. Parker

  In the lobby, I opened the front door of the building. I used my tool bag to keep it from closing, went out, found Beth Ann’s name on the directory. 417. I went back in, picked up my gym bag, and took the elevator to the fourth floor. Number 417 was at the far end of the corridor, on the left, which probably meant Beth Ann paid less for it and didn’t get to look at the lake. I put my gym bag down and knocked. No answer. Breaking into a place isn’t very hard if you don’t mind people knowing you were there. Tossing a place and having no one know it was a little trickier. I didn’t care if Beth Ann knew someone had burgled her. So with a lender pry bar and a little force, I was in quite quietly in about two minutes. The jamb was splintered a bit and the door wouldn’t latch closed anymore. But no one dashed into the corridor and yelled “Stop, thief!” I closed it and put my gym bag down to keep it from swinging open, and turned my attention to the apartment.

  Beth Ann was not an obsessive housekeeper. The breakfast dishes were still on the coffee table. There was lingerie on the floor of the bathroom and a bathrobe tossed across the sofa in the living room. Two empty wine bottles stood on the sideboard, and a cutting board with vestiges of cheese and stale bread sat beside them. In an alcove off the living room, behind the kitchen, was home-office space with a desk and a laptop computer and a file cabinet. The computer was a Mac, which meant I had a feeble grasp of how it worked. I turned it on, and when it lit up, I clicked on the mail icon and read her e-mail. Most of it was innocuous. There were several embarrassing e-mails from someone named roygar, whom I assumed to be Garner. But nothing that added to my sum of useful knowledge. Nothing in the computer referred to Jared.

  I moved to the file cabinet and spent more than two hours going through professional mail outgoing, professional mail incoming, bills tendered, bills paid, credit-card statements, a file of clippings about the school shooting in Dowling, a file of love letters from Garner that would have made a buzzard feel queasy, and about five years’ worth of at-a-glance appointment calendars, none of which told me anything more than she had a busy life. I took the love letters and put them in my gym bag.

  I moved to the desk. It had a checkbook and bank statements in the center drawer. They indicated that she spent a lot of money, but nothing else. I spent an hour on the desk. If I had known what I was looking for, it would have gone faster. I could eliminate places where what I wanted wouldn’t go. But since I didn’t know what I was looking for, I had to look everywhere. I checked under the throw rug in the bedroom, and under the bed, and between the mattress and box spring, and in the towels folded in the closet, and the pockets of coats. I sifted through sweaters and underwear and socks. I looked in the toes of her shoes. I checked behind paintings and mirrors, under couch cushions, behind chairs. In the bathroom, I checked the toilet tank. In the kitchen, I looked into cereal boxes and sugar canisters. I checked in the oven and under the sink. I looked in the refrigerator, in the vegetable keeper, behind bottles of Perrier. I opened the freezer and found something. Under a package of frozen chicken thighs, in a plastic freezer-storage bag with a tightly sealed top, was a six-by-nine brown envelope. In the envelope were pictures of Jared Clark and Beth Ann Blair. Both were naked.

  I said, “Bingo.”

  My voice was loud in the empty apartment.

  There were five pictures; none showed them having sex, and all showed them in affectionate full-frontal nudity. Probably taken with a timer, which would be more difficult in mid–sexual congress.

  She couldn’t get rid of them. There was absolutely nothing else in the apartment that even hinted of any connection to Jared Clark. But whatever made a grown woman take up with an early-adolescent boy made her, in the face of all wisdom, keep these unforgiving mementos in deep concealment.

  I closed the freezer, put the pictures in my gym bag along with my burglar tools, and went out of the apartment. When she came home and found she’d been broken into, she’d go straight to the freezer. In five minutes, she’d know the pictures were gone. She would be sick with worry and fear and maybe shame. Good! I took the elevator down to the lobby. There was no one in the lobby. I went out the front door and walked around the building to where I’d parked my car. The basement door was closed now. I started the car and drove out through the parking lot. All the blue barrels were lined up in an orderly row, waiting for the trash truck. The sun was in the western sky. I looked at my watch; it was after four. I pulled out onto the highway and drove toward Cambridge to retrieve Pearl.

  50

  I MET DIX in the parking lot of the Bethel County Jail.

  “I thought you probably should know before you talk to Jared,” I said. “There was a sexual relationship between him and Beth Ann Blair, the school shrink.”

  “You know this how?”

  “I have photographs.”

  “Which you got how?”

  “By breaking into Dr. Blair’s condo,” I said.

  “Does the DA know this?” Dix said.

  “No one knows it but you and me and, I assume, Dr. Blair.”

  Dix nodded. “Okay,” he said.

  We went into the jail. Cleary was waiting for us at the interview room. I introduced them.

  “Jared know who I am?” Dix said.

  “He’s been told you are a psychiatrist come at our behest to interview him,” Cleary said.

  “Did you tell him he had to talk with me?”

  “I told him he had to show up. Talking was up to him.”

  “Is there any way you can overhear us?” Dix said.

  “Sure,” Cleary said.

  “No,” Dix said.

  “No?”

  “It will be private between the boy and me,” Dix said.

  Cleary didn’t like Dix’s manner.

  “Why?” Cleary said.

  “I need to be able to assure him that what he says is between me and him.”

  “You could lie a little,” Cleary said.

  “No,” Dix said. “I couldn’t.”

  “So what if I don’t agree?” Cleary said.

  “I won’t do it unless you agree.”

  “So why do I care if you do or don’t?” Cleary looked at me. “I’m doing him the favor.”

  “Private or not?” Dix said.

  “Christ, you are a real hard-on,” Cleary said. “Aren’t you.”

  “Glad you noticed,” Dix said. “Private or no?”

  “Private,” Cleary said.

  “Thanks,” Dix said and opened the door to the interview room and went in. The door closed behind him.

  “Embarrassing,” I said to Cleary, “the way he sucked up to you.”

  “I’m just the people’s attorney,” Cleary said.

  “That’s what filled him with awe,” I said.

  “Probably,” Cleary said. “You want some coffee?”

  “The coffee here any good?” I said.

  “Unspeakable,” Cleary said.

  “I’ll have some,” I said.

  The coffee was in fact brutal, but I drank it manfully.

  “You’re giving us a lot of slack,” I said to Cleary.

  He shrugged and sipped his coffee and made a face.

  “I got a conviction,” he said. “I can play it a little loose.”

  “And you want to know more than you do,” I said.

  He shrugged again. “I’d like things to make sense,” he said, “if they can.”

  “We both know they often don’t,” I said.

  “Doesn’t mean there’s no sense to be made,” Cleary said.

  I nodded. We drank our coffee. Cleary put down his cup, as if he was relieved to have finished it. He stood.

  “I got work to do,” he said.

  “Thank you,” I said, “for setting this up.”

  “Dix finds out anything interesting,” Cleary said, “you know where I am.”

  “I do,” I said.

  After Cleary left, I sat alone in the ugly room for two and a half more hours, and used the time to not drink any more coff
ee. It was nearly one o’clock in the afternoon when Dix came out of the interview room.

  51

  THE RANGE of lunch choices around the Bethel County Jail was narrow. We left Dix’s car in the jail lot and I drove us to the village market in Dowling, where I had eaten pie with DiBella the first time I met him. We took a little table inside and ordered a couple of sandwiches. Dix ordered coffee with his. I had a glass of milk to cleanse my palate. A nearly intact pie sat promisingly under a glass dome on the counter.

  “Your boy is retarded,” Dix said.

  “That’s a fact or an informed guess?”

  “Like most other branches of medicine, psychiatry is both an art and a science. Most of our conclusions tend to be informed guesses.”

  “His grades are good. He was on course to graduate. He seemed able to plan a shootout at his school. How retarded can he be?”

  “Mildly,” Dix said.

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means mildly. We can test him at length and come up with a number, but for our purposes, mildly retarded will work.”

  “So how come no one seems to have noticed it?” I said.

  “No one else was looking for it. You knew that there was something wrong with him.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Actually, his parents probably noticed it, too.”

  “And didn’t want to see it.”

  “Yeah. It’s probably why his grandmother was so protective. He always been retarded?”

  “I’d need a lot more time to answer that, and I’m not sure it would be time well spent. My guess is that he’s functionally retarded.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning he has not learned to function at the level one would have anticipated.”

  “So he may not have been born retarded.”

  “He may not. There are a number of possible explanations. But the fact remains that he is now at least mildly impaired.”

  “Could he live a, I don’t know what to call it, normal life?”

  “With help,” Dix said, “probably.”

  “He say anything about his relationship with Beth Ann Blair?”

  “I didn’t ask. He didn’t tell,” Dix said. “I was not there to question him about the crime.”

  “You think it had something to do with the crime?”

  “In fact, of course, I don’t know,” Dix said. “A relationship which had proceeded to nudity, between a fully sexual adult woman and a barely pubescent retarded boy, would be a very powerful event in the boy’s life. And if that boy stands accused of mass murder . . .”

  Our sandwiches sat waiting and waiting on their paper plates on the counter. I stood up and got them and set them on the table. Dix had ham on light rye. I had tongue on light rye. I got a second glass of milk for me and another coffee for Dix.

  “Is he retarded enough that we could use it in some sort of impairment defense?”

  “I need more information. I’d want to know what role the woman played in his behavior.” Dix took in a long, slow breath through his nose and let it out. “But basically, I doubt it. I doubt that his mental retardation prevented him from understanding the illegality of his actions any more than, if you are an accurate reporter, and I suspect that you are, it prevented him from some rather lengthy and careful preparation for his crime.”

  I nodded.

  “If, on the other hand, you could establish some sort of obsessive circumstance with Dr. Blair . . .”

  “Whatever the circumstance,” I said, “it couldn’t have been good.”

  Dix shrugged.

  “You think it could be okay?” I said.

  “I have been doing what I do,” Dix said, “for a long time. I have found almost nothing that people do which is always good or always bad. How about you?”

  I nodded.

  “But for a kid like that,” I said, “to suddenly start murdering people at random. Isn’t the crime itself proof that the criminal is crazy?”

  Dix smiled at me.

  “You know and I know that if you start asking that question too insistently, you find yourself on a slippery, slippery slope. If doing the crime is proof of insanity, and sanity is a defense against conviction, then the crime is its exculpation, and no one is responsible for anything.”

  “And ten thousand years of what might optimistically be called civilization,” I said, “goes right down the slope, too.”

  “On the other hand, if Dr. Blair was involved, and he was obsessed, and you have a good lawyer available . . .”

  “Would you examine him further?” I said.

  “As needed,” Dix said.

  “Would you testify?”

  “I would testify to what I believed to be the truth,” Dix said.

  “Or as close as we can get to it,” I said.

  “One can get pretty close,” Dix said, “if one keeps at it.”

  “Keeping at it is one of my best things,” I said.

  “Apparently,” Dix said.

  When we finished our sandwiches, we had some pie. It was blueberry this time. And none the worse for being so.

  52

  “GARNER’S HUMPING the school shrink?” DiBella said.

  We were sitting in DiBella’s car, parked on the main street in Dowling, a block from the Coffee Nut.

  “Wouldn’t you?” I said.

  “Yeah, sure, but why would she?”

  “Excellent question.” I said. “When there are studs like you and me around.”

  “I’m not so sure about you,” DiBella said.

  “Actually, I included you,” I said, “to be kind.”

  DiBella nodded. “Now we got that out of the way,” he said. “And the school shrink was humping the Clark kid?”

  “She was at least taking her picture naked with him.”

  “You wouldn’t have it on you,” DiBella said.

  “Degenerate,” I said.

  “Sure, like you haven’t studied it,” DiBella said.

  “Of course I have,” I said. “It’s evidence.”

  “Of what?” DiBella said. “Blair’s snatch?”

  “Well,” I said. “Yes.”

  “Maybe I should see what I can dig up on both of them,” DiBella said. “Garner and Blair.”

  “I thought you had this case closed already, and were just humoring me,” I said.

  “I’m in the habit,” DiBella said. “I may as well humor you some more.”

  “Hard to believe it wouldn’t have something to do with the shooting,” I said.

  “Pretty big set of coincidences,” DiBella said.

  “I don’t know where it takes us,” I said.

  “That’s why it’s called investigation,” DiBella said. “We see where it takes us.”

  From the backseat of DiBella’s car, Pearl barked at a tan mongrel that went by on the other end of the leash from a middle-aged woman in cropped pants and a straw sun hat.

  “Did you know,” DiBella said, “that I’m not allowed to transport animals in my car?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I did know that.”

  DiBella nodded. I asked Pearl to stop barking. Which she did.

  “I’ll keep an eye on Blair and Garner,” I said. “Maybe you could check out their history a little.”

  “Of course,” DiBella said. “I have the vast resources of the criminal justice system at my fingertips. At your fucking service.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Your shrink says the kid is retarded?” DiBella said.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Cleary know that?” DiBella said.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “What’s he say?”

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “Cleary says that a lot,” DiBella said. “Which one you going to tail?”

  “I’ll probably take turns,” I said. “And maybe I’ll have a talk with Mrs. Garner.”

  “Gonna rat him out?” DiBella said.

  “No. I’ll make up some excuse,” I said. “But it might energize him a lit
tle if he knows I talked with her.”

  “The way she’s probably energized already,” DiBella said, “knowing somebody’s got her husband’s number.”

  “And if they’re energized together, maybe they’ll do something.”

  “Like what,” DiBella said.

  “No idea,” I said, “but maybe I’ll catch them doing it.”

  53

  MRS. GARNER was everything her picture in the paper had led me to believe she would be: squat, grim, and graceless. She let me into the house sullenly, and pointed me into a chair in the living room.

  “Sorry to bother you,” I said.

  “But you’re doing it anyway,” she said.

  “I am,” I said cheerily.

  The living room was shabby. The couch was a dark oak frame covered with worn green plush. It sagged in spots where too many people had sat too heavily for too long. I sat in a straight-back rush-bottom chair on which the original rush had been replaced by an inexpensive plastic substitute. She wore a grayish housedress with a tiny floral print on it. Her sneakers were old and white and low, with the toe cut away in one of them to relieve pressure on a bunion. Her gray hair was in a tight perm. There was a fireplace, which appeared to burn a gas log. On the wall above it was a much too big portrait of Garner in academic robes, wearing a mortarboard and holding a rolled-up scroll of some kind.

  “What do you want?” Mrs. Garner said.

  I gave her a wide, warm, and compelling smile. “I’m just trying to tie up loose ends of the terrible shooting at the school,” I said.

  She showed no reaction. Maybe she hadn’t noticed my smile. I laid the smile on her again. Women have been known to show me their undergarments when I give them that smile. Thankfully, Mrs. Garner did not. She was sitting in a large padded rocker. On the table beside her was a decanter of something, maybe port. She was drinking some of it from a small wineglass. She didn’t offer me any. I didn’t mind. Port is never my first choice, and especially so on the morning side of lunch.

  “Did you know either of the boys?” I said.