Fail

by Rick Skwiot

  The Gecko focused again on the monitor and began manipulating the mouse. “You have a dirty mind, lieutenant.”

  “I have the mind of an experienced investigator and wounded veteran in the battle of the sexes. If a guy ducks out on his wife and leaves no trail of transport, credit-card purchases, or hotel rooms, I have a hunch he’s getting some home cooking.”

  “Let’s see what we have … Most prominent email recipient is Letty NXS at gmail dot com—Leticia Tatum.”

  “Substance?”

  “Seems mostly school bidniz as opposed to monkey bidniz. Here’s an exciting one titled ‘Question about the subjunctive.’”

  “Sexy.”

  “Well, you do want to fall asleep afterward. Another asking about books she ought to be reading.”

  “Tone?”

  “Seems friendly, lighthearted, nothing incriminating. But he is using his university email account and likely cautious if anything was going on.”

  “Well, the only way to learn is to ask questions. Let’s email Miss Tatum.”

  The old neighborhood. “Old” in a couple senses for Gabriel. Where he grew up, within a few blocks of downtown. Comprised in large part, at least then, of antebellum flats and terraced houses dating back to the 1840s. Even up into the 1960s some still had outhouses in back by the alley and a single coldwater faucet in the kitchen sink. Now officially called the Old North St. Louis neighborhood, adjacent to the former Polish enclave centered on Cass Avenue and the old Irish neighborhood Kerry Patch, it was trying to come back, though with few signs of success. Mere blocks from the infamous Pruitt-Igoe housing project—internationally renowned for its failure and ultimately dynamited into history—the neighborhood now consisted of some rehabbed row houses, a few new townhomes, boarded and decrepit redbrick residences, abandoned storefronts, numerous vacant lots, and, of course, Crown Candy Kitchen, a St. Louis institution.

  As he pulled his Dodge Charger to the curb he noticed two young black men—baggy jeans, black hoodies—on the corner eyeing him. When he stood and made a move toward them, they strode off in opposite directions. He called:

  “You better run, homeslice, or I’ll pat you down just for fun.”

  He climbed a worn limestone stoop to a rehabbed home in the middle of the block and knocked. The door opened a crack and a young black woman peered out over a chain.

  “Letty? I’m Lieutenant Gabriel. I emailed you.”

  “Yeah?”

  He showed her his badge. “I want to talk to you about someone I’m looking for.”

  “I don’t know him.”

  “Who?”

  “Whoever you’re looking for.”

  “I think you do: Jonathan Stone.”

  She frowned. “Professor Stone? He in trouble?”

  “I hope not. But maybe you can help me.”

  She closed the door to unchain it and stood in the jamb looking over her shoulder. Behind her a TV blared and kids squabbled. She turned back, saying:

  “My sister’s babysitting with school out. Pretty noisy.”

  “Walk down to Crown’s with me where we can talk. I’ll buy you a milkshake.”

  She looked him up and down. “Let me see that badge again.”

  He held his I.D. out to her once more. She looked from it to his face and back again.

  “Give me a minute.” She closed the door.

  He stood on the herringboned brick sidewalk, his face stinging from the cold. Most of the houses on the block were gone, as if from aerial bombing. The kids, too. He and his pals were out on the streets year round. Playing football, stickball, and bottle caps, or fashioning some make-believe adventure. The girls had hopscotch, jacks, jump rope, and tag. Now there was virtually no one about. Except for the two who had scurried off as soon as he pulled up.

  Five minutes passed before Letty emerged. They strolled down North 14th Street under a vague sun, she shapely in tight jeans, high-top red sneakers, and a thin black-leather jacket with sheepskin collar despite the freezing air. They passed through a rehabbed shopping district with new storefronts, benches, trees in planters, and stylish streetlamps. But most of the storefronts were empty and no shoppers were to be seen. A chill passed through Gabriel, and he turned up his collar against the north wind.

  At the Crown Candy Kitchen the lunch crowd had dissipated. A North St. Louis icon that had first opened for business a hundred years earlier, it served as an anchor for the neighborhood. But Gabriel feared that wasn’t nearly enough to keep it from drifting further into decay.

  They sat across from each other in a booth against the wall. When the waitress came Letty ordered a chocolate banana malt with whipped cream and nuts.

  “Just coffee for me,’ said Gabriel.

  “You sure?” said the waitress.

  He laid a hand on his stomach. “Don’t tempt me.”

  Gabriel sat looking to the tin ceiling, studying the menu on the wall behind the soda fountain, and eyeing the old jukebox nearby. “I used to come here with my wife when we were in school. Before you were born.”

  “You lived here?”

  “On Howard. Old row house. Had to go around back and climb wooden stairs to get in. Gone now.”

  “I’ve seen pictures of the neighborhood. Looked okay then.”

  Gabriel saw them, too. Had lived them.

  The waitress delivered Letty’s malt and his coffee and then retreated.

  “You fond of Professor Stone?”

  “Why are you looking for him?”

  “Between you and me, he hasn’t been seen for a week. His wife is worried.”

  “So he is married.” She pursed her lips around the straw and sipped at her malt. Then she lifted a bit of whipped cream from its top on her finger and licked. “He wore a wedding band, but you never know.”

  “But you liked him.”

  “I learned lots from his class. He helped me. Made me want to be a teacher. I’m going to major in English.”

  “What about as a woman?”

  She looked down at her malt and shrugged a shoulder. “Sure. Everyone did.”

  “You emailed him a lot.”

  She looked up and leaned forward, elbows on the tabletop. “You know what it’s like. Someone wants to help you, you take what you can get. Figure a way to do something. Maybe I was crushing on him, but I can get that anywhere. He knew it was there if he wanted it. But he didn’t want it for whatever reason. The other—I saw he could really help me. I need to take care of me first.”

  “I understand.”

  “But he wanted something from us, too. Maybe it was for his doctorate paper—what do you call it?’

  “Dissertation.”

  “Yeah, his dissertation. He was always asking us about our schools—our grade schools and our high schools. We were studying grammar and writing but he always made us write about that: what we did in class, what we did after school, what textbooks we had, what reading and studying we did, what sort of teachers we had. He had us write about the bad stuff, too: the fights and the troublemakers and the subs who were marking time. About the kids who came and went and you never saw again.”

  Gabriel ignored his coffee, focusing on Letty’s malt. Its banana aroma wafted to him, taking him back to his school days and Janet.

  “You said all the girls liked him. Any more than others?”

  Letty smirked. “Whitney’d go up after class and shake her little titties at him. Go to his office. But he had nothing to do with her either.”

  “You know for sure?”

  “She would have told everyone.”

  “Probably just as well then.”

  “If he had anything going on with anyone we would have known. You can tell. People think they can hide it but they can’t.”

  Like Ellen Cantrell.

  “Not everyone in class appreciated him as much as you did.”

  “Some had trouble. They couldn’t get it. Or didn’t want to.”

  “You mean like DuWayne Hawkins?”

&n
bsp; “DuWayne Hawkins is an ass. Thought that bouncing the roundball and acting the fool was enough to get him what he wanted.”

  “Did he dislike Stone?”

  “He didn’t care one way or the other. He was dozing half the time.”

  Gabriel sat thinking. Sometimes his hunches bore fruit. Sometimes they didn’t. This seemed like one of the latter.

  Letty said, “Did I help you?”

  “Yes. Helped me eliminate some possibilities.”

  She sipped at her malt then said: “Then can you help me?”

  His eyes locked onto hers but she looked down, long eyelashes curling over her cheeks. Traffic ticket? Boyfriend in trouble?

  “If I can. What’s it about?”

  “Find out about Alonzo.”

  “Who?”

  “Alonzo Watkins. He was in Professor Stone’s class. I saw it in the paper Saturday morning. Got himself shot over in Hyde Park.”

  “Killed?”

  She bit her bottom lip and blinked away tears. “I don’t think so. He’s a nice boy. Real quiet. Paper said the mothers shot him in the back.”

  Gabriel walked Letty home and continued strolling on to Howard Street and the address where he grew up. Just a vacant lot now: snow-covered earth and busted bricks. He pictured his mother in the kitchen singing as she often did while going about her chores. Gabriel took in a deep breath and let it out in a cloud. Everything changes. Nothing changes.

  Back in his office at the North Patrol Division Gabriel found a brief online Post-Dispatch story on the shooting incident from the previous Saturday morning—the day Stone disappeared. Alonzo Watkins, nineteen, discovered in Hyde Park after neighbors reported the sound of gunshots. Wounded once in the back. Apparent robbery—though what would a North Side college student have worth stealing? Probably a laptop. But then he had seen kids stabbed for a pair of sneakers. Watkins was taken to Barnes-Jewish Hospital, critical condition. Police were investigating.

  Gabriel pulled up the department’s digital case file. It revealed that Watkins had likely deboarded the #04 Natural Bridge bus at ten p.m. and was walking home on Salisbury Street. The contents of a backpack were found scattered on the sidewalk near the body: spiral notebooks, textbooks, chess pieces, and chess clock. The bullet, small caliber, had entered just left of the spine, passed below the heart—doubly lucky there—and pierced a lung. A full recovery was predicted. In a follow-up interview at the hospital the victim claimed not to have recognized any of his three assailants. He could not or would not give a description except to say they were—surprise!—African-American males between ages fifteen and twenty-five. In other words, he was scared shitless silent. Or plotting his own justice.

  Gabriel emailed what he had learned to Letty. Then he sat staring at his desktop. If Stone had read the article about Alonzo’s shooting, how would it have affected him?

  Gabriel’s eyes fell on his library copy of English Grammar for Idiots, which lay on his desk. He reached for it to see what tense he was using when he asked himself the question. If he was going to find the English professor, he should start thinking like one.

  - 10 -

  Friday’s special at the bar of the ground-floor pub in his building was fried cod. It wasn’t his favorite, but he could down a few low-carb beers, chat with Alice the barmaid, and watch as the Blues skated on a TV above the back-bar mirror. He liked hockey about as much as he liked the cod, but the place had a dark, clubby atmosphere conducive to steady drinking if not clear thinking. The conversation around the bar consisted of lighthearted kvetching about the crappy hockey team, the crappy football team, the crappy weather. Standard St. Louis fare.

  He finished dinner and made his way back upstairs where he found the Saint Louis U. basketball game on TV and muted the sound. It had been three decades since he’d played forward for the Billikens, and now their guards were taller than he was. He sat on the sofa with his laptop and slid in the flash drive The Gecko had given him.

  In addition to the files he had downloaded from Stone’s Cloud IX storage, The Gecko had copied Stone’s cellphone history from the previous four months and written an analysis: skimpy usage. Some twenty calls over the period to Ellen Cantrell’s cell, half that many to Martha Walczyk at the English Department. No pattern change just prior to his disappearance. In other words, nothing interesting.

  He then opened Stone’s first-listed folder, “Corruption in academia.” In addition to a text file, it contained three audio files. Gabriel opened the text file and read:

  This first report documents—via eyewitness intelligence—one incident of educational malpractice and corruption. Alas, it is but the tip of a dark and malevolent iceberg poised to sink American society.…

  Gabriel sniffed. “‘Alas,’” he said aloud. And the iceberg metaphor—a bit melodramatic. He decided he needed a drink to wade through the formal verbiage and went to the kitchen for a bourbon. He settled in again and scanned the next couple pages of summary—overwritten, in his humble cop-opinion—until he came upon a sub-head:

  The Instructive Case of DuWayne Hawkins

  Among the students in this correspondent’s Remedial Grammar Section was one DuWayne Hawkins, a lanky youth with a wide smile that he displayed but infrequently. A recent junior-college transfer and starting forward on the basketball team, Mr. Hawkins—like the other seventeen students enrolled in the class, all of whom had gone through twelve years of “education” in St. Louis Public Schools—could not write a grammatically correct sentence except fortuitously. Issues included missing verbs (“he my teacher”), verb-noun non-agreement (“we was walking down the street”), awkward syntax, and God-awful spelling.

  But unlike most of his classmates, Mr. Hawkins showed scant interest in learning to write a simple sentence in standard English. He did little other than mock the efforts of others. When I met with him privately and questioned him on his attitude, he scorned the need to speak and write conventional English—or even to study in order to pass the course and maintain his athletic eligibility. “I’ll get by,” he said cryptically.

  “No, you won’t, not without working and learning this,” I told him.

  He laughed and looked down at me as if I were a poor, misguided fool—which riled me. However I soon came to learn what fueled his derisive response.

  After mid-term I received an email from English Department Chair Armand Betancourt asking me to see him. When I found him in his office he asked me how DuWayne Hawkins was doing in class.

  “Not well,” I answered. I went on to tell Betancourt that Mr. Hawkins came to class but did little work and showed little improvement. He turned in acceptable homework assignments but didn’t actively participate in group workshop-exercises. His poor performance on in-class writing assignments and quizzes led me to suspect that he harbored a grammatical Mr. Hyde who completed his homework—or had a tutor who did so.

  “See that he gets through the course,” said Betan-court.

  “That depends on him. This isn’t unscrambling dense literary theory,” I said. “It’s basic grammar and writing. He has to want to learn. But he obviously doesn’t.”

  “Then motivate him, Stone,” said Betancourt. “You’re the teacher. That’s your job.”

  I thought to argue that point—that adult university students attending voluntarily, presumably in order to learn, were thus already sufficiently motivated—but understood the futility of it. “Perhaps,” was all I said. But that was enough to make Betancourt grit his teeth.

  “Get him through,” he reiterated. “He needs a C or better. And I need Administration off my back.”

  That ended the conversation. I retreated to my office and transcribed it as best I could from memory. In subsequent meetings with Professor Betancourt, reported below, I carried a hidden digital audio-recorder. Thus those conversations are transcribed verbatim. Copies of those audio files can also be found in this folder. According to Missouri law, private conversations can be legally recorded with the consent of onl
y one participant.

  “You sly mother,” Gabriel said aloud with a smile. He looked up to see that the Billikens had taken an early eight-point lead. He sipped his bourbon and read on:

  Nonetheless, I took Professor Betancourt’s admonitions to heart. For in-class exercises I paired DuWayne Hawkins with the most advanced students, hoping their enthusiasm and work ethic might infect him. It did not. I personally worked with him in class when feasible and offered to tutor him privately—an offer to which he did not respond. Once in class, when I asked him a question, he mumbled something incomprehensible.

  “Mr. Hawkins,” I said, “please speak up and enunciate. And try to use complete, grammatical sentences. That’s what we’re about here.”

  “How we talk.”

  “I know that’s how you talk among your peers or at home. We all speak in dialect of one sort or another,” I told the class. “But we need to know and be able to use grammatically correct English that communicates effectively with all people in the English-speaking world—which is growing globally. We’re trying to expand your world and empower you.”

  “You making us little Honkies,” said Hawkins. “So the Man keep us down.”

  The class laughed at that. But I found it galling.

  “No, Mr. Hawkins, quite the opposite. I’m trying to liberate you. Doors are open. All you have to do is step through. But you need to check your dialect at the door. Think of it as a remnant badge of slavery—along with the attitudes that go with it, such as sullenness, sloth, and a sense of grievance. People are trying to help you, not oppress you.” He glared at me and shifted uneasily in his seat. But others in the class sat up and took note, so I went on.

  “My family also came to America in chains—not the literal chains your ancestors may have worn, but legal chains, as indentured servants. And I would still be a servant, doing some menial task—maybe flipping burgers—if I hadn’t learned the standard language of my family’s adoptive homeland.