My heart rose. For three years, maybe four, Olga would remain a student; she would not make that terrific jump in status over me. In three years, or four, I might rise in status myself, though I didn’t see how.
A daydream started. I would take courses in theoretical criminology, and with what I knew about the practical side, get to be a professor at the university. Three years was a breathing spell.
“What’s Olga’s objection to that?” I asked. “She hasn’t mentioned it to me at all.”
“She doesn’t want to be a burden on you all that time. Wants to start earning money.”
“She’s nuts. I’m making plenty for both.” Hell, I got a good salary, and I got half pay from the Army as a major; three hundred and sixty-five bucks every month. You never know your own wife, I thought; Olga’s worried about money.
“We’ll talk it over,” I said, and left. Hal Levy and I knew each other well enough not to bother with the shaking of hands.
Now I had a new worry. Olga was shaky about my earning capacity. She thought I might get fired. It was the only thing that could worry her, because we never spent what I made anyway; we put a little away every month. . . .
Hal would speak to Crossen. I could send a sergeant to the drug store, and go see the other two doctors later. I had better get to the station.
Sergeant Hahn was on the desk. Before I even had a chance to sign the blotter, he said: “Squeal over at the high school. Captain Davis is there, he said to send you the minute you showed, sir.”
So back down to the garage and the department car. Less than a minute to the high school; park the car, check the gun to be sure it’s loose in the holster, up the steps, into the place. I knew where the office was now.
A little girl, a student, was receiving in the principal’s suite. I said: “I’m Lieutenant Bastian. Captain Davis wanted me here.”
Her eyes were wide with excitement. “The chief’s in the principal’s office with Miss Crowther.”
I went in. Eleanor Crowther and Jack Davis were there; so was our Fire Chief, Dave Simpson. So was the principal’s desk, or a desk, or what was left of a desk. Fire had gutted it out; there was a pile of charred wood standing on the concrete floor. The carpet was ruined. Wall-to-wall, too bad. Dave looked around, said: “Oh, Andy. Come and look.”
I went and looked. Then I said: “Arson?”
Dave Simpson was sure. “Arson is the burning of a dwelling in the night time. This was maybe deliberate, yes, but not arson.”
Eleanor Crowther had her hands together, twisting a wisp of handkerchief. It was going to tear in a minute. “I’ve seen this before,” she said. “At a city school. It’s – it’s a very bad symptom.”
She had helped me the night before, under somewhat gruelling conditions. She had reported for work this morning, when she probably should have rested. I softened my voice as much as possible, and said: “Symptom of what, Miss Crowther?”
“Malcontent,” she said. “Disrest.” I suppose she meant unrest. Her voice was very high. “The kids – oh, the kids are about to break loose. It started before by burning the principal’s desk, just like this. And then the library. . . .”
Dave Simpson said: “I’ll post a watchman in the library. And one outside in the files. This is a fireproof building.”
Jack Davis asked: “Is there really a genuine fireproof building.”
Dave Simpson said: “No.”
I was wondering if we could call on Sergeant Ernen to come down and look at this mess. Some of the ashes were papers; I wasn’t a good enough lab man to take latent fingerprints off paper ashes, but Ernie probably was.
Jack Davis said: “Trouble with a school case like this, if you catch your culprit, it’s just juvenile delinquency and a suspended sentence. They ought to make whipping legal.”
I looked at him in amazement. He sounded like one of those sheriff’s posse amateurs, with his brains in his holster. I said: “These are citizens and the children of taxpayers, not a bunch of POWs.” We had met in a prison stockade, guarding Afrika Korpsmen. We’d both been sergeants, then, and we considered ourselves tough; but every time we had to go up to the line, out in the desert, to bring back some more of those sour krauts – as we called then – Jack went to the chaplain and prayed awhile. Not being religious, I had just hoped.
“Coming when Mr. Adams is not here,” Miss Crowther said, “I just don’t know what to do.”
So Walt Adams was still laid up. Bailey Spratt apparently carried quite a wallop, for a gun crank. I said: “Is there a pay booth or a direct wire around? I want to call Walt’s doctor, and I’d soon it didn’t go through the school switchboard.”
Miss Crowther said: “I already called Dr. Levy. He won’t permit Mr. Adams to leave his bed. He says there’s danger of a fractured bone, and concussion.”
Funny that Hal Levy hadn’t mentioned it a few minutes ago. He knew I was a close friend of Walt’s. But then, thinking it over, it wasn’t funny at all. Doctor’s ethics. Never tell an ousider anything.
Well, police ethics were the same; there was stuff it would have been unethical for me to tell Olga. To me, doctors were just another brand of civilian.
“When you’re acting principal, Miss Crowther, who is assistant acting principal?”
She looked puzzled. “I don’t know. It’s never come up.”
“It’s up now. How about your gym teacher?”
“Mr. Eldrey?”
“If that’s his name,” I said. She was going cheesewit on me. We weren’t going to get anywhere till I got her out of there and under a doctor’s care. I said: “He a good man?”
“Oh, yes, I’m sure. . . .”
Jack Davis was looking at me gratefully as I took over. I opened the door, told the student secretary to ask Mr. Eldrey to come to the office, and went back. “Miss Crowther, who’s been in here this morning?”
“Oh, dozens of people,” she said. “Students for this and that, the janitor, me to get some of Mr. Adams’ papers. I’ve been in here and out again and –”
“One other question. Is Dr. Levy your physician?”
“Why, no. Dr. Barnhart.”
I looked at Jack Davis for permission to go hunt a phone. Of course, the one that had been on Walt Adams’s desk was ruined; a mess of melted plastic and gaping wires. It was possible that it had loused up the whole local exchange, shorting out in the fire.
Jack didn’t give me the nod to go. Instead he walked gravely out of the office. My chief was giving a good imitation of a broken reed.
Miss Crowther watched him go, incuriously. Then she walked over to me on her high heels, and took my arm in her two hands. “Lieutenant Bastian, you’re very strong, aren’t you?” Since she was kneading my biceps, the question sounded as though she wanted me to move furniture, but I guess she was referring to my moral stamina. “You are going to stop this, aren’t you?”
“Miss Crowther, you’re in safe hands.” To be doing something, I turned to Dave Simpson, bright and blue and gold in his fire chief’s uniform. “What would burn a desk like this?”
“Walt Adams kept a big can of lighter fluid in his desk. It probably got hot from burning paper, exploded, and – wow!”
“Yeah. Wow.” This time when I tramped to the door, Miss Crowther went along. I could feel her fingernails through the wool of my sports jacket. I said to the kid outside: “You call Mr. Eldrey?”
She nodded, and then saw Miss Crowther over my shoulder. “Oh, Miss Crowther, Nora and I always go to the cafeteria around this time. Could I?”
I said: “Nope. No, sit tight for a few minutes. And get those people I asked you for.”
She said: “But Nora Patterson and I –” Then she remembered what had happened to Nora, and shut up. I stared at her. Glowering eyes told me I had made a teen-age enemy. Very alarming, very frightening. According to current literature, I should get under a bed someplace and cower.
But the kid was bursting with information, and I didn’t want her spray
ing it around the school cafeteria and starting a panic. Anyway, she was chubby enough; she didn’t need any milk.
I ought to swear her in as a junior officer. But I had left my mail-order G-man kit at home in the toy closet. I towed Miss Crowther back to the centre of the room and then decided to sit on the leather couch; it had been far enough away from the desk to be unscorched.
But when I sat down, Miss Crowther sat down, too, still holding on to my arm; and now she lowered her head to rest on my shoulder.
Jack Davis chose that moment to come back in.
“Dr. Barnhart’s up in the city,” he said. “His office nurse said to take Miss Crowther home and put her to bed. She’s got some sedative pills on prescription, and it’s all right to give her two. I tried to get Miss Hellman, but she’s tied up. You’ve got the duty, Andy.”
“Jack –”
“I’m chief,” he said, happily. “You gotta do what I tell you. Anyway, the lady seems more at home with you than with me.”
“She’s in lousy shape,” I said. I was aware that we were talking about Miss Crowther as though she wasn’t there, but she didn’t seem to mind, or even to know it.
I said: “I’ve got an assault case on my hands.”
“You’ve got more than that,” Jack Davis said. “Los Angeles got a make on little John Davis –” he grimaced, “on his fingerprints. His real name is Wright, thank God. Next of kin is a father up the coast; he’ll be arriving today. I want you to talk to him. I’m damned glad I’m chief,” Jack Davis said. “And to think, I got it by getting out of the Army two years before you did, even if you were my superior.”
“Very funny. Funny indeed.”
He said: “Truth is, I’d better hang around my office. Drew Lasley’s going to sock one of those possemen pretty soon.”
“Bailey Spratt?”
“He’s the worst. There are others. By the way, the one you climbed, Joe Harg, resigned from the posse; you must have made him see the light.”
“Maybe I ought to be an evangelist.”
Jack smiled. I was sitting on the couch, with Miss Crowther hanging on to my arm; Jack was leaning against the wall; Dave Simpson was poking around the burnt desk.
Jack Davis said: “If we could hang those three break-and-entries on somebody, there’d be less posse heat.”
I nodded. I’d forgotten them. They had started the whole amateur police trouble, but I had forgotten them. I said, vaguely: “I checked it to Juvenile Probation. Just kid stuff.”
Dave Simpson misunderstood me. He looked up from the desk, and said: “Yeah. Time was, I remember, when they sent bulletins marked secret around to the fire stations, about thermite, and what it was and how it could burn through concrete. Now, any kid who’s in a science club knows, and over at the malt shop where they all go, there’s probably a couple of comic books telling you all about it. Sometimes I wonder if all this education is a good thing. Thank God, they didn’t use thermite on this job.”
He was making a joke, and he and Jack Davis laughed. And then, after a minute, I felt like laughing, too, because I remembered Miss Bridge and what she had said about the Spratt case and the other burglaries. I had just broken them. I said: “See you in a few minutes,” and went outside, still laughing, though I was about to break a minor law or two.
It was a slight trick of memory to remember the other two names, besides Spratt, on the complaint sheets. Stern and Thorne. I asked the student clerk if she would get the Stern kid and the Thorne kid and the Spratt kid up to the office. “Both Thorne boys and Elaine Stern, too?”
“Just the boys,” I said, “and then you can take your coffee break.”
“Milk,” she said. “Nora and I always drink a bottle of milk and eat a piece of fruit in the middle of the morning. For our complexions.”
“Okay.”
“They’re all in 10-B,” she said. “I could stop and send them up on the way to the cafeteria.”
“Okay.”
She went out, swishing slightly, for practice. I sat on the edge of her desk and tried a cigarette; my throat was dry and it didn’t taste right. Jack Davis stuck his head out of the inner office and said: “Hey, Andy, your lady friend is getting the screaming meemies.”
“Really?”
“No, just the muttering kind so far. How about getting her out of here?”
“In a minute. I’m imitating a detective. Get out of here. This is illegal.”
The boys arrived in a group, all four of them. Young Spratt was not as round faced as his father, but twenty years of rich food would heighten the resemblance. The others looked like boys; the only interesting thing about them was that the Thorne boys, though they were in the same class, were a foot different in height. I asked them if they were twins.
The shorter one said: “We’re not even related.”
“Oh. Which one of you lives on Coronado Lane?”
Big one did. I sent the little one back to class. I yawned, and puffed on my nasty tasting cigarette. I said: “I’m Lieutenant Bastian, police. All three of you guys had break-ins at your houses. Which of you did it?”
Six young eyes looked back at me with the innocent expression of a dairy cow. A six-eyed dairy cow.
I shrugged, and blew smoke at them. “Okay, men, now we take a walk. We go down to the police station, and we line you up, and we bring in the man who runs the malt shop here by the school, and we ask him which of you suddenly had a lot of extra money. Let’s see, there was liquor taken, too. We find out if any of you missed school from being sick. We call that a hangover.”
Then I acted like they weren’t there. I blew smoke at the ceiling. I let my coat slide back to show the gun in its clamshell holster. In other words, I acted. Like a dick on TV.
Finally the Thorne boy broke it. “We didn’t have anything to do with it.”
That was all I needed. I said: “We? How come you can speak for anybody but yourself? You guys call yourselves the Three Musketeers or something?”
And they all got red in the face. Oh, I am a smart cop; I can out-think Class 10-B any day of the week. I sat down at the typewriter, typed: “We, the undersigned, robbed our parents’ houses and made it look like someone had done it from outside,” and handed it to them.
There was damned little palaver before they signed. I shooed them back to class, and went back to the sooty inner room. I handed Jack Davis the sheet. “You take care of this, captain.”
He looked at it and gaped. “How did you get this?”
“Illegally,” I said. “You’d better not ask. By the way, Probation calls these cases S & H, for Son and Heir.”
He grinned, uncertainly. It really wasn’t much of a document; but maybe he could use it to keep Bailey Spratt quiet. I doubted it; all it would do was bring a charge of malfeasance against me. But at least Jack Davis would get off my neck about the break-and-entries.
Miss Crowther had hold of my arm again. I said: “Let’s go. I’m taking you home.”
Dave Simpson laughed. “Cops have all the fun. Us firemen, just once in awhile, have to break down a bathroom door that gets stuck. I’m on my way, Andy. I’ll notify the insurance company that covers municipal property; they’ll have investigators here in no time.”
“I’m checking it to them,” I said. “If you see any reporters, tell them the police have decided it definitely is an accident. We haven’t, but it will keep the Vista calmed down while we all work.”
“A good idea,” Dave said. He made his good-byes, and started out. At the door he passed the gym teacher, Mr. Eldrey. I told him he was acting principal; he took one look at Eleanor Crowther and nodded, silently. For once I had run into a strong, silent guy; maybe my luck was turning. He just went into the outer office and phoned the custodian to move a desk up into the principal’s office. He and Jack Davis could handle what had to be handled.
Chapter Twelve
Broad daylight in Naranjo Vista, and me driving along with a lady slumped over on my shoulder. No grief, no dan
ger; Olga and jealousy had never met except in a case history about someone else.
Miss Crowther was out like a lady after a three-day drunk. Her cheeks tried to bore through the cloth of my coat, and her lips mumbled nonsense syllables. I knew where she lived; I drove towards there at a decent, legal pace.
No danger, and I had been right – no grief; and I had been wrong. Our automatic traffic equipment turned the light to red, and I stopped in the right-hand lane; before it could turn green, another car pulled up alongside me.
From over a patch of adhesive tape, a hating eye glared at me. My pal, Bailey Spratt.
His voice was harsh. “A little smooching party, lieutenant? Having a joy ride on the taxpayers’ time?”
Temper, Bastian, temper. “Morning, Mr. Spratt.”
The light changed; I started up. So did he, bearing to the right, pushing me towards the kerb. Either I went, or the paint on the car did. Paint cost money; I went.
When my tyre hit the kerb, I stopped. Bailey Spratt was climbing out of his car; I removed Miss Crowther from my shoulder, leaned her against the right door, reached over to make sure the door was locked, and then got out on my own side.
He was the right height – under five feet ten. He was strong enough to beat a girl into subjection, to trap her while she clawed at his face. He was everything I hated in the world.
And, of course, I knew he hadn’t harmed Nora Patterson, that my dreams of hanging the crime on him were fantasy. It would have been a pleasure, but it just wasn’t so. Manners. I said: “Something I can do for you, Mr. Spratt?”
“Yep. You can tell me where you were all morning. I been trying to get you.”
“Why, Mr. Spratt. I’ve been working. To be specific, I took a trip to the county seat, to the sheriff’s building there. On duty.”
His small eyes blinked at me in our strong, healthy sunlight. “Don’t you think I’m not making a call there myself, later today.”
“Mr. Spratt, I’d like to give you a famous old American saying, slightly changed. ‘Get there first with the most beefs.’” Then, suddenly, I grinned, and put out my hand. Pure phoney, but this was duty, too. “Let’s start all over again. I’ve really got no beef against you; since you never heard of me before yesterday, you have none against me. Let’s stop sniffing around each other like a couple of strange dogs.”
A Nice Girl Like You (Lt. Andy Bastian Mysteries Book 2) Page 10