by Jane Heller
“I’ll say. I guess the parents will be evacuated next. Fischer’s uncles, too.”
I was about to add that it was too bad the cops weren’t there to arrest them instead of overseeing a gas leak, when Janice and I saw Bill—Bill—running into the building, right on the cops’ heels.
“My God!” I said excitedly, as the light in my brain finally went on. “This gas leak thing is a setup, a trap. Bill must have identified the uncles, found out they were all going to school with Levin today, and decided the time was right to call in the police.”
“And the cops must have given Penelope that script to read over the intercom,” she said.
“I’ve got to go back inside,” I said. “If Bill has turned the case over to the police, he shouldn’t even be here. Essentially, he’s out of it now—or supposed to be.”
“Yeah, but what can you do, Nance, except put both of you in the cops’ way?”
“I can help him, Janice,” I said, thinking of Joan Geisinger’s poor husband. “I don’t know how, but I’m about to find out. Can you handle things here without me?”
She nodded. “I’ve got the other teachers around, plus the parents are starting to come out of the building. There’ll be plenty of us to watch the kids.”
“Thanks. I owe you one.”
“You owe me two,” she said. “You never thanked me for fixing you up with Dan.”
I blew her a kiss and ran back inside Small Blessings.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
As I reentered the building, I noticed that there was an eerie calm about the place. I didn’t see a single cop, either. It was as if all the tumult had died down, as if the commotion had drifted out onto the street, leaving the school with an echoey, deserted feeling.
Still, as I made my way back to my classroom, I knew full well that there were about to be fireworks and I began to tense up, gear up for what lay ahead.
Please let Bill be okay, I repeated over and over. Please let him have the sense to step aside and watch the action from the sidelines.
Doubting that he would even consider such a plan, I sped up my pace, scurrying down the hall until I finally neared my classroom.
I stopped when I heard loud, combative voices coming from the open door. I took a deep breath and peered inside.
There was a battalion of cops with their backs to me. I couldn’t see their faces but I could see their pieces. That’s right. The police had Bob Levin and the five uncles at gunpoint. Gunpoint! In my classroom! In my nursery school! Even though the only guns allowed at Small Blessings were glue guns, staple guns, and the very occasional squirt gun!
But that wasn’t the whole story. One of the uncles had a gun too, and he was pressing it against the side of Penelope’s head! The man was actually threatening to shoot my boss if the cops didn’t let everybody go! Of course, what gave the scene an even more bizarre twist was that instead of pleading with him not to carry her off, Penelope was pleading with Bob Levin to make one more donation to Small Blessings before the cops carried him off! She wasn’t worried about losing her life; she was worried about losing her library!
“Drop the gun, buddy,” one of the cops told Levin’s goon. “You’re not going anywhere and you know it.”
“My friends and I are gettin’ outta here,” he countered, tightening his grip around Penelope, “or else this bitch’s brains are gonna go splat all over the ceiling.”
As the cops and Levin’s people fired threats at each other, I looked for Bill. I knew he was around somewhere, but where?
I ducked back out into the hall and went in search of him, sticking my head in the kitchen, sticking my head in the utility room, sticking my head in the neighboring classrooms. I was sticking my head in Victoria Bittner’s classroom when I heard a chair tumble over onto the floor.
“Hello?” I said tentatively, figuring one of Victoria’s kids might be hiding, afraid and alone as a result of all the confusion. “It’s okay to come out now. It’s only Miss Stern from next door. I’d be glad to—”
Before I could finish, Bill emerged from his crouched position behind the piano. “Nancy, what are you doing here? You should have been evacuated with the others.”
I ignored the question and ran to him, threw my arms around him, hugged him tightly. It had felt like ages since I’d seen him. He looked haggard, exhausted, impossibly handsome. “You did it,” I said jubilantly. “You engineered the meeting of Levin’s guys, didn’t you? You got all of them together, cracked the case, and called the police. Oh, Bill. It’s over.”
He gave me a quick kiss, then shushed me. “It’s not over,” he whispered. “First, Levin’s boss is still at large. I got all of them together except him. Second, there’s a goddamn standoff in progress, right in your classroom. One of them’s got Penelope.”
“Yes, but the police will take care of her,” I said. “They’ll track down the head guy too, now that they’re up to speed on the case. They can do their job now, Bill. Yours is finished.”
“That’s not how I operate and you know it. I’m not leaving until everybody who should be in handcuffs is. Once that happens, the cops can go after the head guy by offering one of these guys a plea bargain. The main thing is to get them in custody.”
I wanted to talk him out of staying. I wanted to persuade him that he and I should run for our lives. I wanted to tell him that he didn’t have to be the hero, that he already was the hero. But why bother? I couldn’t change who he was and didn’t really want to, not anymore.
“If you’re staying, I’m staying too,” I said.
“Go home, Nancy. I’ll call you as soon as we’re done.”
I shook my head. “You need me.”
“No, I need to get into your classroom. I’ve got to end that standoff in there, got to distract Levin’s guys so the police can regain control of the situation.”
“Fine. I’ll distract them. I’ll yell Boo! and Levin will have another heart attack, although he looks as if he’s recovered. He’s probably on medication or something.”
“Nancy.” He sighed. “Time is running out. I’ve got to get into your classroom, whether it’s through a window, an air conditioning duct, whatever.”
“Forget windows and air conditioning ducts. You can get in through here.” I pointed to the interior door that opened into my classroom. It was camouflaged by one of Victoria’s masterpieces—a painted mural of the beach scene she had created especially for the last day of school—so it was easy to mistake it for one of the walls that was covered with her artistry. “The door leads right where we want to go,” I said. “The two rooms are adjoining, Bill.”
“Adjoining?”
I nodded and started poking around Victoria’s classroom, in the cubbies, in the play area, in the book shelves.
“What are you doing?” said Bill.
“Looking for weapons,” I said.
“Weapons?” He permitted himself a wry smile. “Ah, so your plan is to sneak in through this door and pelt the bad boys with Thomas the Tank Engine storybooks?”
“Do you have a better idea?”
“Not yet.”
“Then why don’t you zip it and give me another minute?” I continued to search for something to use against the crooks, something that would unnerve them, make them vulnerable, make them putty in the police’s hands.
“Putty! That’s it!” I said, forgetting to keep my voice down.
“Shhh.”
“Sorry.”
“Are you talking about Silly Putty?” asked Bill.
“Close. I’m talking about Space Mud,” I said. “It’s a little softer than Silly Putty. Wetter too.”
“Look, Nancy. I’m sure you mean well, but—”
“Come here.” I pulled Bill over to the sand table, which is a furniture staple in most preschool classrooms. It’s basically a rectangular frame on legs with a plastic tub that fits inside. Sometimes, we fill the tub with sand. Sometimes, we fill it with finger paint. Sometimes, we even fill it with ch
ocolate pudding. The point is to have the children stick their hands in it, stick their toys in it, play touchy-feely in it. “A sensory experience” is how the teachers’ manuals describe it. On this last day of school, Victoria had filled the tub inside her sand table with Space Mud. “It’s slime, Bill,” I explained when he continued to seem bewildered. “You must have seen it when you visited my class in January.”
“I’ve probably blocked it out,” he said.
“Oh, stop. It’s supposed to look gross, but it’s just a combination of Elmer’s glue and water and Borax. Judging by this batch, Victoria added some green food coloring to hers.” I removed the cover from the sand table, took hold of Bill’s hand and dunked it in the squishy, goopy, blobby Space Mud.
“Yech,” he said, withdrawing it instantly. “What do you propose to do with this stuff?”
“How about moving the table right next to the connecting door, opening the door as surreptitiously as possible, and then grabbing handfuls of the Space Mud—balls of it—and hurling it at Levin’s guys? If it lands in their eyes, it’ll either bounce off them or stick to them—blinding them for a second or two with any luck. If it lands on their face, it’ll adhere to their skin and then drip down onto their clothes—not a comfortable sensation. And if it lands on the floor in front of them, it’ll make them slip and fall—also good for our team. It’ll distract them in any event. You did say you wanted to distract them, didn’t you, Bill?”
He stared at me, his expression skeptical, but he stuck his hand back into the tub and swished it around in the slimy substance.
“See? It’s kind of fun,” I said when he wasn’t so quick to pull his hand out this time. “And best of all, it’s not a gun. I know you must have one on you, Bill, but I’d rather you didn’t use it unless it’s absolutely necessary. We are in a nursery school.”
“I left the gun at home. I have kids of my own, remember?”
I was about to tell him what a wonderful, sensitive, caring man he was when we both heard Penelope scream. Things were not going well inside my classroom.
“Okay. The Space Goo is worth a try,” Bill conceded.
“Space Mud,” I corrected him.
“Right. It’s not exactly the armament of choice for resolving a hostage situation, but we’ve got to do something.”
“When in Rome,” I reminded him.
We lifted the sand table and carried it over to the door between the two rooms, then opened the door and peeked through. Sure enough, the goon was still holding the gun to Penelope’s head.
“How’s your arm?” Bill whispered to me.
“I won’t be pitching for the Yankees this season, but it’s not bad,” I said.
“How about your aim?”
“We’ll see.”
We plunged our hands into the tub of Space Mud, pulled out blobs of the green glop, reared back, and fired.
“Whoa, baby!” I said, after chucking my first slime ball and watching it make contact with Bob Levin, the primo slime ball. It landed smack on his head—on top of his curly brown hair—and stuck to it. Stunned, he reached up and tried to yank the glutinous stuff off, only to yank off his toupee!
“Well, what do you know?” I laughed, nudging Bill. “The Polo King wears a rug.”
He barely acknowledged me. He was more concerned with his own targets. He had missed the guy with the gun on his first try and ended up hitting Penelope—in the mouth. Talk about stunned! She had been ranting about how the scandal would kill enrollments at Small Blessings when the goop shut her right up. It clung to her lips, then oozed down her chin, into her neck, onto her precious pearls.
We kept going back for more Space Mud and flinging it—and causing a major uproar in the process. All the participants were ducking now, trying to defend themselves, but we didn’t give up the fight until Bill shot his wad, so to speak. He threw a fastball at Penelope’s gun-wielding assailant—at the guy’s family jewels, to be perfectly candid. His intention wasn’t to maim him (Space Mud does get hard the longer it’s exposed to the air, but not that hard); he just wanted to make him drop the gun. Mission accomplished.
Once Penelope was freed, the cops descended on the bad guys, although they had their ups and downs getting to them—literally.
Some of our errant throws were now gooey, sticky puddles on the floor, and navigating across the room was a little treacherous. I felt sorry for Mr. Alvarez, Small Blessings’s janitor, whose final day of the school year would include the cleanup of my otherwise tidy classroom.
Detective Burt Reynolds, who arrived at the scene as Levin and his partners were being handcuffed and led away, offered Bill a begrudging thanks for his help in the Nancy Stern murder investigation.
One look at their body language and I could sense immediately that Bill had been right about how territorial cops and private investigators are; neither side really wants the other’s input, and both sides really want the credit for solving cases.
Or was it something else I was sensing? The minute Bill spotted the detective, he seemed angry at Reynolds—angry as opposed to competitive—and I didn’t know why, other than that the cop wasn’t exactly Mr. Congeniality.
“Hey, buddy. Nancy here deserves a thank-you too,” Bill told the detective in an uncharacteristically challenging tone. “Your guys wouldn’t have been successful today if it hadn’t been for her ingenuity.”
Detective Reynolds seemed amused by Bill’s remark. “So she’s pretending to be a cop these days.” He chuckled. “A few months ago, she was pretending to be a celebrity journalist. What’s she gonna pretend to be next week? A professional wrestler?”
Obviously, the detective hadn’t forgotten our first conversation, when I had confessed to making believe I was the other Nancy Stern. It wasn’t very nice of him to try to embarrass me with it now, I thought. He was a pain in the ass, as a matter of fact. No wonder Bill hadn’t wanted to deal with him.
“For your information, Detective Reynolds,” I said, straightening my posture, “I pretended to be another woman because I felt that my life was inferior to hers. I’m sure I don’t have to explain what it’s like to feel inferior. Not to you, Detective. You must have plenty of days when you’d rather be anyone but yourself.”
I smiled sweetly, linked my arm through Bill’s, and left the building with my man by my side.
Chapter Thirty
Since our graduation ceremony had been so rudely interrupted, Janice and I were forced to mail the children’s diplomas to them. We did not mail Fischer’s, however. I wanted to stop by his apartment and deliver his in person, to show him I still cared about him no matter what his father had done. I was also eager to see how he was managing now that Levin and his cohorts were behind bars; how he and his mother were coping with the scandal swirling around them. Co-op boards aren’t particularly forgiving when a resident of the building turns out to be a felon, and I could easily imagine the board that oversaw the Levins’ opulent digs tossing Gretchen and Fischer out on the street.
When I arrived at their apartment the Friday before Memorial Day, I found that the family was, indeed, packing up.
“We’re moving to the Connecticut house,” Mrs. Levin informed me after thanking me profusely for bringing Fischer’s diploma. She not only didn’t hold a grudge against me for my part in her husband’s downfall, she seemed downright grateful.
“For the summer?” I asked as we stood in the foyer.
“For the foreseeable future,” she said. “The house is in my name. Bob’s lawyers can’t touch it. And the public schools are excellent up there.”
“Public schools? I thought Fischer was going to Horace Mann. Wasn’t that why you and Mr. Levin donated so much money to Small Blessings? So Penelope would write Fischer a glowing recommendation? Wasn’t it extremely important to you that your son got into the best private schools?”
Gretchen Levin smiled wistfully and invited me to sit down in the living room. I checked the bottoms of my shoes before following her onto t
hat white carpet.
“A lot of things used to be important to me,” she said with a deep sigh. “But discovering that the man you married is a thief and a murderer, not to mention a sniveling coward, can alter your priorities significantly.”
The bit about the sniveling coward referred to Bob Levin’s willingness, within seconds of his arrest, to surrender the name and whereabouts of the organization’s kingpin. I’d nearly fainted when Bill came home that night and told me who it was.
“Detective Reynolds?” I gasped after he’d broken the news.
“The very same,” he said. “I suspected him from the get-go but didn’t have a stitch of proof.”
“But what made you suspect him?” I asked. “He’s a cop, for God’s sake.”
“You spend enough time around cops, you can smell the bad ones a mile away. According to Levin, who gave Reynolds up hoping to save his own skin, the detective needed money and figured gem thefts would be a quick way to make some.”
I flashed back to the first time I’d met Burt Reynolds, in his office at the police station just after Nancy’s murder. He’d told me he needed money, come to think of it; griped about having a wife he was dying to divorce; claimed she wanted big bucks in alimony but he wasn’t a rich man. Yes, that’s what he’d said. I remembered distinctly.
“Now it all makes sense to me,” I’d mused to Bill. “The way Reynolds blew off your theories about the case. Obviously, there was more than professional rivalry going on between you. He was afraid you’d find out what he was up to.”
I was replaying that conversation in my mind when Gretchen Levin asked if I wanted something to drink, drawing me back to the present.
“No, thanks,” I said, feeling bitter on her behalf about what a rat her husband turned out to be. “All this must be very traumatic for you and Fischer.”
“We’ll be fine. Truly.”
“I hope so. I worry about that little guy, you know. He’s very dear to me.”