by Carrie Smith
“He was waving it as they were going into his office. He was yelling at her.”
“What did he say?”
“I couldn’t make out the words. He shut the door pretty fast.”
“Can you think of any reason he’d get upset about her posting a sign-up sheet?”
“He doesn’t like people posting things on that board without his permission. I always get the postings approved by him before they go up.”
Codella stared at the sign-up sheet again. The top margin had a two-inch tear where Sanchez must have ripped it off a pushpin. “Who reposted it?” she asked.
“Ms. Thomas. She stuck it back up after Mr. Sanchez left for the day.”
“What exactly is iAchieve?”
“I’m not sure. Some computer program, I think.”
“Was anyone else in the office when you left at two?”
“Miguel Espina’s mother was sitting on the bench over there waiting to meet with Mr. Sanchez.”
“Anyone else?”
“Mr. Jancek. He was working on Mr. Sanchez’s radiator before Mr. Sanchez got back from his meeting, and Mr. Sanchez asked him to step out so he could speak with Ms. Thomas alone, so he was standing here with me for a little while before I left.”
Codella thanked the young woman. “I wonder, could you get Mr. Jancek for me?”
Chapter 8
“Tom Broner, please. It’s Dr. Barton.”
“One moment, please.”
Margery Barton stared at her nails as she listened to the soothing instrumental hold music. She replayed her words to Marva Thomas. You need to take charge. You can do that, can’t you? She remembered Marva’s pitiful answer. I think so. What kind of answer was that?
There was no way she could rely on the assistant principal to make good decisions today. Ellie Friedman would have to pull her strings. Marva Thomas had to look good so Margery would look good.
“He’s on another call right now. Can you hang on, Dr. Barton?”
“Yes, I’ll hold.” She cradled the receiver against her shoulder, opened her desk drawer, pulled out lipstick, and slid the creamy balm expertly from one edge of her lower lip to the other without a mirror. Then she pressed her upper and lower lips together to spread the lipstick evenly. The soothing music was getting on her nerves now, so she put the phone on speaker so it wasn’t right in her ear. She had to play this crisis by the book, she told herself. You didn’t get to the top of the Department of Education food chain if you couldn’t handle a crisis. She had her own reputation to consider. She was fifty-one. It was time to get to Tweed. She wasn’t going to turn into one more postmenopausal administrator whose career flamed out in the district hinterlands. She wanted to sit at the big boys’ table with Bernie Lipsie and the other policymakers, and this crisis, she realized, could help her get there. It was like Hurricane Sandy pummeling the Jersey Shore eight days before a presidential election.
“Margery,” Broner finally said. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”
“I’ve got a murdered principal,” she said.
“What? Shit! What happened?”
Margery relayed the details as she knew them. “I don’t trust the AP to handle the press on this, Tom. We need to get in front of the story. Is there someone we can send over there? The news vans are going to start arriving soon, I imagine.”
“Jane Stewart,” he said. “I’ll send Jane. She’s a pro. She’ll control the message.”
“Good.”
“Thanks for the speedy heads up.”
Next Margery called the chancellor’s office. “Dr. Lipsie,” she said to the operator who put her through to Lipsie’s personal assistant. “It’s Margery Barton,” she said, “and I have some urgent news for the chancellor.”
Barton had never called Bernie Lipsie directly, and when his assistant said, “I’m putting you through, Dr. Barton,” she felt like a West Wing advisor about to speak directly with the president.
“What’s up, Margery?” Lipsie’s deep voice startled her. “Did I hear the urgent word? I don’t like that word.”
The adrenaline that exploded in her chest was as intoxicating as the rush she had felt the first time she’d knocked on Chip Dressler’s hotel room door knowing exactly what awaited her on the other side. She pressed her inner thighs together. She wanted to say, Me neither, Bernie, but she had never called the chancellor by his first name, and doing so under these circumstances might strike him as presumptuous or inappropriate.
On the other hand, she didn’t want to call him Dr. Lipsie, either—especially right after he’d called her Margery. That would make her seem so deferential. True, her status was subordinate to his, but acting subservient could make you seem unsuited for a role of greater authority. If you wanted to be a peer, you acted like a peer. She had those PhD letters after her name, too, she reminded herself, and though she wasn’t, as Bernie was, on a first-name basis with the mayor and his appointees, she certainly had plenty of experience rubbing elbows with influential people. Just last night, she had shared a table at Cipriani with the head trustee of Memorial Sloan Kettering, and she had kept him laughing all night.
Barton avoided names altogether as she related the sketchy facts. “It’s a developing situation. I’ve called Tom, and I’ll be in regular contact with the AP over there. I’m sending in a crisis team to advise her and help with the parents and children. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that this unfortunate event has nothing to do with a school employee, but I thought you should be prepared in case you get calls.”
“You’re always thinking, Margery. I appreciate that. We’ll both keep our fingers crossed.” In the silence that followed, she wondered if she was supposed to read anything into his words. Lipsie was newly divorced, according to Gayle Fenton, who knew him well, and at the last few superintendent breakfasts, Margery had noticed him looking over at her, even when she wasn’t speaking. Last Thursday he had chosen a seat right next to hers, even though there had been several other seats he could have taken. He wasn’t the kind of man you would describe as handsome—he was almost entirely bald and his black eyeglass frames made him look like a nerdy college professor—but neither was he unattractive. He wore expensive suits, his cologne smelled enticing, and he was tall and trim. He was no Chip Dressler, but he might, she thought, be a pleasantly surprising sexual partner.
“While I’ve got you,” Lipsie said, “I hear you have your spring iAchieve pilot results.”
“Yes, and the numbers look really impressive.”
“Good for you, Margery. Good for you. You’ve done a remarkable job changing the mind-set over there.”
“I’ve still got a few pockets of resistance, but the numbers tell it all. I have a meeting next week to share the results with my technology leadership team. Then we’ll take the results to the schools. We need to make our case at the teacher level and get their buy-in.”
“Tell Amanda to put your meeting on my calendar. I’ll try to make it.”
“That would be great,” she said, and in the three-second silence that followed, she felt something shift through the satellite connection, like molecules speeding up and changing state, and she decided to take a chance. “Thanks, Bernie. And I’ll keep you posted on this situation.”
“I’ll be waiting, Margery.”
Chapter 9
Milosz Jancek had short, coarse hair that stood up like the bristles of a brush. It was the kind of haircut Codella associated with army drill sergeants in the movies. He had a long face and a slightly crooked nose, and his sunken eyes made him seem permanently pensive.
“I’m Detective Codella from the NYPD,” she said. “Please have a seat, Mr. Jancek.”
He nodded and sat with an expectant lift of his eyebrows.
“Your school principal has been murdered.” She lobbed the news like a stone into a bush to see what would fly out.
His forehead rippled like the earth over a fault line during an earthquake. “Mr. Sanchez? Dead?” He had a slight accent
she couldn’t place. He shook his head. “How? How can that be?”
“You’re the head janitor, is that correct?”
“Head custodian.”
“Some events occurred here yesterday. I don’t know if they have any bearing at all on Mr. Sanchez’s death, but I’d like the whole picture.”
“You mean the boy.”
Codella decided his accent was Eastern European. She had lived in New York nineteen years—since she was eighteen—and that was long enough to know the majority of building superintendents and janitors were from Baltic republics with constantly changing names and borders. Every ethnic group in the city dominated certain professions. Indians ran newsstands and worked in eyebrow-threading outlets. Koreans gave manicures. Pakistanis drove taxis. Greeks ran diners. There were plenty of exceptions, but ethnic typecasting had a kernel of truth at its core. “Tell me what you remember.”
“I was in Mr. Sanchez’s office. Janisa called me in because it was very cold in here. It’s still cold. You feel it? I was trying to fix the radiator, and Officer Delia rushed in and asked me to help her find a student, so I called one of my janitors, Mr. Rerecic, to help me, and we found him in the auditorium, hiding between the rows.”
“What did you do when you found him?”
“We took him out to the hallway, and I watched him while Mr. Rerecic went for Officer Delia. She came for the boy and then I came back to the radiator.”
“What did you see in the office when you came back here?”
He winced apologetically. “Not much. I was kneeling over there with my back to the door.” He pointed to the radiator behind Sanchez’s desk, just below the window.
“I see. When did Mr. Sanchez come in?”
“I’m not sure. I didn’t check my watch.”
“Did he speak to you at all?”
“Just to say he needed his office for a while. He asked me to come back later.”
“What did he need his office for?”
“Some private meetings, I suppose.”
“What meetings?”
“I’m not sure.”
Codella waited for him to mention the principal’s meeting with Marva Thomas, but he didn’t, so she asked, “Did you see Ms. Thomas?”
“Yes, she was in the office too.”
“Did Mr. Sanchez speak with her?”
“They went in his office.”
“And then?”
He shrugged. “I left to tear down the lunchroom. Our gym doubles as a lunchroom. Mr. Rerecic and I had to fold up the tables before the afternoon PE classes.”
“According to Janisa, you stood with her for a while in the outer office.”
“Yes, but not for long. Just a minute or two.”
“Did you hear anything Mr. Sanchez and Ms. Thomas said to each other?”
Jancek shook his head.
Codella ran her fingers through her hair. “How long have you worked here, Mr. Jancek?”
“This will be my thirteenth year.”
“I imagine you see and hear many things around the school. Are you aware of anyone who might have wanted to harm Mr. Sanchez?”
Jancek shook his head. “I can’t see that. People complain, sure, but kill?” He shook his head again. “Mr. Sanchez was hardworking. He was a good man. He’s an immigrant like me. I was an engineer in my country,” he said proudly. “In Croatia. Then the war started. I came here for a better life. So did Mr. Sanchez. And he’s just trying to help all these kids who came here for a better life. Why would anybody kill him?”
Why did anybody kill another person? Codella thought. “When he asked you to leave his office, was that the last time you saw him?”
“Yes.”
Codella stared at the custodian like an insect under a magnifying glass. Was he nice, or was he too nice? That was always the question you had to ask yourself. In her job, trust had no place. You couldn’t take anyone at face value. “Where were you on Monday evening, Mr. Jancek?”
“When I left work, I went straight home. I work. I go home. That’s about it for me.” He shrugged. “I watched the Knicks.”
“Do you live alone?”
He nodded.
“The Knicks had a good third quarter.”
“But a terrible fourth. They have no defense,” he said.
“What about Carmelo’s dunk?” She was testing him.
“They should have called the foul on him, but I’m a Knicks fan, so I’m glad they didn’t.”
She nodded. “Is there anything else you can tell me?”
He shook his head. “I wish I could. Nobody’s perfect, but he was a good principal. He was good for this place.”
She took out a card and handed it to him. “If you hear or think of anything that might help us, please call me.”
It was 10:48 AM when Jancek left and Codella returned to Thomas’s office. The assistant principal looked up from her computer and Codella said, “You didn’t mention that Mr. Sanchez called you into his office yesterday.”
“He calls me into his office every day.”
“Does he tear down sign-up sheets every day, too?”
Marva Thomas didn’t answer.
“Tell me about iAchieve.”
“It’s a technology program the district piloted in four schools last year,” she said.
“Why did he pull the sign-up sheet down?”
“He doesn’t like notices to be posted without his permission.”
“Then why did you post it in the first place?”
“It came in a pouch from the district office—straight from Margery Barton.”
Codella stared at Thomas’s thin fingers poised above her keyboard. “You also didn’t tell me Sanchez suspended a teacher yesterday.”
Thomas shrugged. “You didn’t ask, and it didn’t seem particularly pertinent.”
“I would rather be the judge of what is pertinent, Ms. Thomas. Tell me about this Bosco.”
“There’s not much to tell. He’s been at the school for seventeen years. He swears he wasn’t sleeping.”
“And you believe him?”
“It’s his word against Delia’s. I certainly don’t intend to ask a classroom full of ten-year-olds to testify one way or the other.”
“What did you think of Sanchez’s decision to suspend him?”
Thomas shrugged again. “Eugene has his faults, I admit, but I would have handled it differently.”
“Did you often disagree with Mr. Sanchez’s decisions?”
Thomas looked her straight in the eye. “I wouldn’t say that.”
“What time did Sanchez leave the school yesterday?”
“Around three thirty.”
“Is that when he usually calls it quits?”
“He wasn’t calling it quits.”
Her incomplete answer sat between them like a challenge. Ask the right question and you might get what you’re after.
“Then what was he doing?”
“Visiting a student’s home.”
“What student?”
“Vondra Williams.”
Codella hid her irritation. “Who is Vondra Williams?”
“One of our third graders. She lives in the Jackie Robinson Village.”
“And he went there by himself?”
“I assume so.”
“Why?”
“Vondra’s missed a lot of school this year. We called Child Protective Services, but they hadn’t gone to her home yet, and Hector, well, he always likes to take matters into his own hands.”
“So he makes home visits?”
“Once or twice a week lately. He thinks he can improve our truancy rates.”
“And is he?”
Thomas shrugged noncommittally. Codella was more than a little annoyed that the assistant principal hadn’t mentioned the home visit sooner. She was even more annoyed with herself for not having asked a question to elicit the detail sooner. Was her mind not fully engaged? Was she rusty? Was she showing signs of that posttreatment condition
cancer survivors referred to as “chemo fog”? She certainly had the other typical aftereffects—the persistent dry mouth and neuropathy. “Is there anything else you haven’t told me, Ms. Thomas? Now would be the time.”
Thomas shook her head.
“Do you have that list of teachers and parents I asked for?” She didn’t hide her irritation.
Thomas held it out.
“E-mail it to me as well.” Codella placed her card on the woman’s desk. “Right away, please. And I need a recent photo of Sanchez. Do you happen to have one?”
Thomas called out to Janisa. When the assistant appeared, she said, “Janisa, please print a copy of Mr. Sanchez’s photo from the website.”
Janisa walked out, and Codella turned back to Thomas. “Who’s his next of kin?”
“He isn’t married. I don’t know of any relatives in the city. His mother lives in Puerto Rico. I can check if we have a number on file.”
“Do it, and while you’re at it, please e-mail me Margery Barton’s contact information. And Ms. Thomas?” She waited until the assistant principal made eye contact. “There’s to be no one in his office until we review its contents.”
“But our student files are in there.”
“I understand, and we’ll be as expeditious as possible. In the meantime, no one in that office and no one on that computer.”
“I’ll lock the door,” she said a little too casually.
“And Detective Ragavan will seal it with tape.”
Chapter 10
Barton was still thinking about Bernie Lipsie when she picked up her Samsung. Call me now, she touch-typed with two thumbs. As she waited for her cell phone to ring, she imagined Chip in one of his crisp Brooks Brothers shirts sitting in a McFlieger-Walsh conference room feeling the vibration of his Blackberry in his front pants pocket. She replayed Monday afternoon in her mind—Chip sitting on the edge of the king size bed at the Mandarin, looking down at her as she kneeled next to the bed and took him deep in her throat. She had taken him in so far that she had gagged a little, and the sound had gotten him so excited that he had lifted her off her knees, spread her legs, and pounded her into the mattress so hard that she had cried out. It would have been rape, except that she had enjoyed it as much as he had. What would sex be like with Bernie Lipsie? Would he want the same things Chip wanted? Would he have the nerve to demand them?