by Rick Skwiot
“What I am trying to give you, all of you, is that same chance. If you can read and write well, you can begin to make something of yourself—which takes hard work.”
However, my pontificating did little to change Mr. Hawkins’ behavior or study habits, though most of the other students seemed to respond positively.
Then, on November 22nd, I received another email from Dr. Betancourt, again with a blank subject line and a terse message: “Pls c me.” I noted that he again made no mention of the reason for the meeting, as if avoiding leaving any documentation of its substance. It was then I purchased the pocket-sized digital voice recorder.
He kept afternoon office hours, and I found him there the next day. When he saw me he said, “Close the door and have a seat.” I did so. He went on: “I understand, Stone, that when queried by the Athletic Department as to DuWayne Hawkins’ standing in your class you replied that he was likely to fail.”
“At this point it looks like a sure thing.”
“That’s unacceptable. I told you to get him through.”
I told Betancourt of the extraordinary efforts I took with Hawkins and how other students in the class also tried to encourage and help him but to no avail. “I did what I could. But he showed no interest at all in learning—in fact, he actively pushed back and resisted it.”
Betancourt removed his reading glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose as if to dispel a headache. “He attended class? Then he must have learned something.”
“Not judging by the most recent in-class writing assignment.”
“It’s important that he gets a passing grade for this course.”
“Important to whom? DuWayne Hawkins has been passed along his whole life. As a result he’s been robbed of an education. He’s been robbed of his citizenship.”
“Let’s not be overdramatic, Stone. Look at the big picture. Athletics, for better or worse, are an important tool for development and recruitment efforts. As academics we may not like it, but that’s the way of the world these days. I tried to fight this battle before but no one’s listening. I’ll tell you what they told me: ‘Everyone’s job and well-being in the university depends on it, including yours.’”
I noted but did not comment on the implied threat. Instead I said:
“The big picture’s distorted. I’m focused on DuWayne Hawkins and his future.”
“DuWayne Hawkins isn’t the issue here.”
“I don’t understand. If the student in question is not the issue, then who or what is? Our job is to educate students, students like DuWayne Hawkins. That requires standards. And integrity.”
That last comment made Betancourt bristle. “Spare me the lecture. I’ve given the same one myself without effect. Are you going to play ball or not, Stone?”
“Interesting metaphor in this context,” I said. “The best I can do is an incomplete.”
“Not good enough. He needs the credits and advancement to remain eligible. Think about it, Stone. You still have three weeks till grades are due. See that you get him up to a C.”
“Are you asking me to violate departmental standards and university ethical guidelines?” I asked him.
“No,” he said. “I am telling you to see that Hawkins achieves an acceptable level of performance to merit a C grade. I’m under enough pressure. Don’t make it worse.”
Eyes glued to the computer screen, Gabriel reached again for his bourbon. Stone would make a good witness—if there was a crime.
I had one last private conversation with Betancourt on the morning of my final day in the English Department. I found him in his office, strode in, and closed the door behind me.
“Open the door, please,” he said.
“This is a personnel discussion. Confidential matters, not public discourse.”
“What’s it about?”
“First and foremost DuWayne Hawkins. You changed his grade.”
“What knowledge would you have of that?”
“You know damn well I have none. After I submitted my grades, I was locked out of the system.”
“Standard security for former employees.”
“Speaking of which, you weren’t even man enough to tell me face-to-face I was being fired.”
“Call it what you will, Stone.”
“I call it cowardly. You expect me to find another job in three weeks?”
“You knew the stakes. We need team players here.”
“We need educators committed to their profession, not the politics of personal advancement.”
Betancourt fumed. I had learned he was vying to become dean of Arts and Sciences.
“Your arrogance and insubordination annoy me, Stone. You have all the moral superiority and answers, including how best to educate black students without knowing the first thing about it.”
“I don’t see what race has to do with it. Are you saying black students learn differently or need lower standards? I find that view racist.”
“Get out.” Betancourt reached for the phone. “I’ll call security if I must.”
“Call your mother if you want, you little prick. And besides, fuck you.”
I left. I wasn’t proud of those last comments—my wild Irish roots showing. But I had been under some stress personally as well as professionally and at that point figured I had nothing to lose.
His buzzing cell phone pulled Gabriel from his laptop. The caller ID read: GECKO HOME. He answered and heard:
“Some shoddy police work to report, Lieutenant Gabriel. A 911 call Saturday night that didn’t get properly logged. Came in at 9:28 p.m. Cell call of a jumper off Eads Bridge.”
“Confirmed?”
“No confirming call and no answer on the callback. On the audio file the caller sounds like a black female, young. By the time a unit showed up, the caller had left—if she was ever there in the first place. The river had chunks of ice floating in it. Patrolmen figured maybe the caller thought she saw someone in the river. Or more likely it was a prank call. And no one at MoDOT was monitoring the bridge cameras that time of night. Not much to be done at that point. If there was a jumper and the fall didn’t get him, the freezing river would.”
Gabriel thanked him and hung up. He felt sick to his stomach. Stone seemed like a decent guy. He deserved better. Much better.
- 11 -
Saturday morning Gabriel woke in a funk. He’d drunk too much and hadn’t slept well. The Stone case was getting to him.
Most of his career he had dealt with serial criminals and screw-ups, people who had chosen a degenerate way of life for whatever reasons. Generally the two things those career criminals held in common were substance abuse and ignorance—at least the ones who got caught. Some saw the light in prison and managed to straighten their lives out, and some were just irredeemably fucked up. Some ultimately got killed in jail or on the streets.
But coping with Stone—a bright guy who, again for whatever reasons, hadn’t been as successful as he likely should have been and who had been wrestling with frustrating and humiliating issues both at home and at work that led to his apparent suicide—was dispiriting.
Further, Gabriel had to contend with City Hall ball-busters—people who held his future in their hands, and squeezed. Then there were the institutional failures: a dedicated teacher fired for adhering to standards, black kids not being properly educated.
He knew things were difficult in the schools. For years he’d dealt with juveniles who got in trouble. If they could read and write then, as Stone argued, there was hope for them. If not, they were lost. And each year more and more hit the streets—dropouts with scant skills and dim prospects, many who turned to crime and drugs.
But raising them right and teaching them was not a cop’s job. Over the years he had gone to the schools to lecture about the dangers of gang involvement and the importance of law and order to the community; he’d worked with juvenile officers when there was an issue and then, when kids messed up, he’d run them down and kick their ass in hopes of
staving off more serious crimes. He sensed that Stone had felt a similar calling—to kick butt so they could write a decent sentence.
Gabriel’s mood could hardly be worse.
He telephoned the North Patrol Division and rechecked regional reports: No one had been pulled from the Mississippi. It had been a week since the call about the jumper. The body—if there was one—most likely was snagged on a bank in South St. Louis or cruising past Natchez, Mississippi. That thought did nothing for his mood either.
He considered calling Ellen Cantrell with the news about the Eads Bridge jumper, but that idea made his stomach churn. It was a part of the job he always hated. Bringing people bad news about a family member and having to deal with their grief, if but momentarily, disturbed him more than it should have. It wasn’t that he was a bleeding heart. He had no problem arresting, subduing, or even shooting some asshole. But seeing innocent people hurt was something else.
Gabriel finally decided that there was no point in upsetting Ellen Cantrell on the basis of an unsubstantiated report that the attending officers found dubious, even if he himself didn’t.
He thought about driving downtown to the Y for basketball—there were usually some better players on Saturday mornings. But what he really needed was some fresh air.
He donned pressed blue jeans, clipped his Smith & Wesson to his belt, and pulled on galoshes, overcoat, and stocking cap. Though he was no longer required to carry a pistol when off duty, he felt light without it. Even at the Y he had it in the gym bag that he carried to the basketball court, not trusting to leave it in a locker.
Gabriel took the elevator down and crossed the boulevard to Forest Park, where the six-mile-long bike path encircling it had been plowed. He strolled through Kennedy Forest to the art museum.
Its north façade overlooked Art Hill, where hundreds of kids and adults rode sleds, toboggans, plastic discs, and flattened cardboard boxes down the long, snow-packed slope to the frozen Grand Basin, cordoned by hay bales. A chaotic scene, with those climbing up the hill dodging those hurtling down. Two large, smoky bonfires burned atop the hill, where children and adults alike gathered to warm their hands before careening back down the hill again.
He recalled speeding down the hill with his son and then, earlier, when he was a boy, on his Champion sled, sitting between the legs of his father, who seemed to enjoy it as much as he did. His mother, who had grown up in sultry Jalisco, remained by the bonfire, encased in coat, scarf, mittens, and wool cap. Now he heard Spanish, English, black dialect, and—coming from an Indian family—what he took to be Hindi, as well as other tongues. Some Muslim parents, judging by the hijabs the women wore, speaking—what? Arabic? Farsi? Urdu? A different, more cosmopolitan city from some fifty years earlier when he started school at Most Holy Trinity. Then most everyone spoke English.
At first it was nuns for him. Brothers later in high school. Jesuits running Saint Louis University. All were exacting, on task. As Stone had told Dadisi, writing a grammatically correct sentence was something most kids back then accomplished in the first grade. How could someone go through twelve years of school and not be able to do it by graduation? No discussion then of race or special treatment for Gabriel and other black kids, albeit he was a racial mixture in a racially mixed school. Everyone was held to the same standards in the classroom and out. Kids who needed extra help got it, black, white, or Hispanic, though the last were rare then. Race came up at times, usually when angers flared between boys competing on the playground. But any racial pejorative that landed on a teacher’s ears was quickly corrected and punished. On the streets, the kids applied their own brand of correction.
Enough reminiscing. And enough of the cold. He turned to head back home to read Stone’s entries. But the thought of it all weighed on him. Not only because of what he was sure would be lugubrious subject matter, but also because he didn’t relish passing his day communicating with the dead. Nonetheless, until he heard otherwise, Stone was still missing and his job was to find him, dead or alive.
Gabriel sat at his dining table with his laptop and a cup of coffee, looked out to the snowy park one last time, and opened the file titled “Corruption in the public schools.” It began with a quote from Mark Twain: “Every time you stop a school, you will have to build a jail.”
Culling information from numerous sources, Stone painted a grim picture of St. Louis schools—not that they were that exceptional. Kansas City’s and East St. Louis’s were even worse, he contended.
The failing schools were depressing already low property values and contributing to neighborhood disintegration and crime. Both St. Louis and Kansas City Schools had recently lost accreditation. Students were fleeing en masse to other districts, charter schools, and private schools.
In St. Louis they were escaping a school system where children quickly fell below reading and math standards. Recent graduates, presumably Stone’s grammar students, recalled frequent fights, low attendance, and low standards. Half the students would never graduate.
Many feared gang activity in and around the schools. Other reasons for dropping out included pregnancy, apathetic parents, incarceration, disciplinary problems, and repeated academic failures. In St. Louis alone, hundreds dropped out each year, swelling the number of at-risk youths on the streets. Nationally, seventy percent of state-prison inmates were dropouts, wrote Stone.
Gabriel skimmed the lengthy document—it ran some twenty thousand words including copious endnotes—and focused on its conclusion.
The learning crisis in American inner-city public schools (though it exists in varying degrees in poor rural and suburban districts as well) amounts to widespread educational malpractice. Over the past forty years academic achievement has plummeted while education expenditures per student have doubled.…
Gabriel turned off his computer. His gaze lifted to the park outside. In his mind he saw the kids sledding on Art Hill. If Stone was right, an educational crisis festered without concerted action to alleviate it. Which made Gabriel’s job tougher. More and more discouraged and vulnerable teens on the street, more anger, resentment, gang activity, and mayhem.
But right or wrong, Stone’s well-meaning idealism and pontificating didn’t get him far. Just a pink slip and a plunge.
- 12 -
Monday morning Gabriel was at his desk at the North Patrol Division when he got a call from downtown. A Mississippi towboat crew had discovered a body wedged against a barge in South St. Louis. The corpse, white male, had already been transported to the city morgue. He sipped his coffee, feeling it eat at his stomach.
Gabriel drove downtown, parked his car on the street across from Police Headquarters and walked down the block in chill morning air. Now called the Office of the Medical Examiner, the city morgue, a squat, two-story building of white stone, sat behind City Hall on Clark Street, two doors down from headquarters.
He detested dead bodies, detested going there. The last time was the warm October evening when he walked the half block from his office to see his detective, Baker, who had been shot and had left behind a wife and three young children. Light brown like Gabriel, Baker looked alive as he lay naked on the gurney. But when Gabriel impulsively grasped his hand, its chill carried through him and down his spine like iced electricity. Afterward, he walked back to headquarters where the suspect was under arrest and ‘rang up long distance.’ Wrong number—which landed him in the North Patrol Division.
Now once again inside the building, Gabriel was greeted by an autopsy tech, a young woman named Kolb. She took him into the cooler in the southwest corner of the first floor, where dozens of white-sheeted bodies lay on gurneys—manila toe tags for most, red tags for homicide victims. The atmosphere didn’t exactly smell bad. But there was something in the air that suggested death.
“Your guy’s in the freezer. Wait here a minute and I’ll get him,” Kolb said.
He waited. Light came from outside through glass-block windows and from fluorescent lights on the ceiling. In the r
ight corner was a body scale where gurneys could be wheeled. Behind him a curtained area, on the other side of which was a window where people came to view and identify the dead. The air felt a few degrees warmer than outside.
He moved toward the gurney that Kolb rolled from the freezer. Under the sheet was the outline of a body. She pulled the sheet back to reveal a black body bag.
“I did the blood blotter for DNA before we put him on ice,” she said.
“That may not be necessary. I think I can I.D. him.”
“You think so?” she said, zipping open the black bag.
Gabriel winced. “What the hell happened to his face?”
She shrugged. “Likely got chewed by a tug prop. The river’s treacherous: snags, eddies, undertows. Not uncommon for a swimmer, dead or alive, to get sucked under a barge.”
“Blond?”
“More or less.”
“Fingerprints?”
“Dubious. Looks like something’s been chewing on them as well or that he was trying to grab onto something. You might get partials.”
“Right. Carry on.”
Gabriel turned and moved back outside.
He walked across Clark Street and entered City Hall. Upstairs at Ellen Cantrell’s offices her secretary told him she was out. He glanced up at the portrait of Angelo Cira on the wall and took a breath. He had wanted to get this part over with.
“Where can she reach you?”
Gabriel frowned. “I’d like to see her in person. This would only take a few minutes.”
The man made a note. “I’ll see what I can do and call you.”
Gabriel walked over to Locust Street and the YMCA, where he picked up a game with downtown workers and junior execs. It felt good to jog up and down the court even though the other players were weak. He let them do the shooting just to keep it competitive. Usually this was the best therapy, physically and emotionally. But today it was hard keeping his head in the game. The image of the mangled corpse in the morgue kept slipping back into consciousness.