School Days (18 page)

D
IX HAD A PERFECTLY
bald head, and big square hands, and a strong neck. I would not have called him handsome myself, but maybe I was just holding him unfairly to the Hunko standard. He looked like he had just shaved before I came in. His head glistened. His nails were manicured. His white shirt gleamed. He had on a blue blazer with bright brass buttons, and the crease in his gray slacks looked like it would cut paper.

“Captain Healy called me about you,” Dix said.

“And you still agreed to see me,” I said.

Dix smiled and didn't answer. Shrinks don't banter.

“You recall the school shootup in Dowling,” I said.

“Yes.”

“I would like you to talk to one of the participants, kid named Jared Clark.”

Dix nodded. He sat erect in his chair, elbows resting on the arms, thick fingers laced across his flat stomach. Eyes resting steadily on my face. Entirely motionless. I wondered what Susan was like in session.

“There's something wrong with him,” I said. “I want to know what.”

“Are you asking me to judge him legally sane or insane?” Dix said.

“No.”

“Does he wish to talk with me?”

“I doubt it.”

“Do you have any predisposed theory on what might be wrong?”

“No. He's . . . He's off. . . . All the pieces don't quite fit.”

“Do you want a diagnosis on the basis of a single interview?”

“Up to you,” I said. “You give me a diagnosis as soon as you think you have one.”

“Unless I have him willingly for a considerable time, it's more likely to be a guess.”

“But an informed one,” I said. “It's not something that you'll have to swear to under oath. I'm just looking for help.”

“Do you think he is innocent?”

“No. I think he did it.”

Dix raised his eyebrows and looked his question at me.

“His grandmother and I want to know why,” I said. “Maybe if we know, there'll be a way to mitigate his sentence.”

“An apostle of the possible,” Dix said.

“Yes.”

“You're with Susan Silverman,” Dix said.

“Yes.”

“So you have some understanding of our business.”

“Yes.”

“What is his attorney's position on this?” Dix said.

“His attorney,” I said, “like everyone else, as far as I can see, except his grandmother and me, including the kid, wants him to disappear quickly into the prison system and never reappear.”

“Would his attorney object?” Dix said.

“He might,” I said.

“Would access be a problem?”

I shook my head.

“The Bethel County DA will get us in,” I said.

Dix raised his eyebrows.

“Really?” he said.

“My deal with Cleary is that he lets us in, and anything we learn will be between us, and not be used in court.”

Dix was silent for a time. Entirely motionless, looking at me.

“What if I determine that he's legally insane and unfit to stand trial.”

“Cleary's a decent guy,” I said. “We tell him what we learn. If he's convinced, he'll have his own people take a look. He wants to win the case, and he's under a lot of pressure to do so,
but he doesn't want to put a seventeen-year-old kid away for life if there's, ah, mitigation.”

Dix was silent some more.

“Why not ask Dr. Silverman,” Dix said.

“She's in North Carolina,” I said.

“Ah, the conference at Duke,” Dix said.

I nodded.

“I've met her several times,” Dix said. “Very impressive woman.”

“Impresses the hell out of me,” I said.

Dix smiled. A breakthrough!

“You have said
we
in talking about the interview,” Dix said. “If I do this, I'll talk to the boy alone.”

“I'll wait outside the room,” I said.

Dix nodded.

“Okay,” he said. “I can do this. Who will be paying the charges?”

“I will.”

“Then you'll need to know my fee.”

“I don't,” I said. “But I think it's part of your deal to tell me.”

“It is,” Dix said.

And he told me.

I
WAS GETTING
pretty bored following Beth Ann Blair around. Pearl seemed to mind less. On the other hand, if she weren't sleeping in the backseat of the Camry, she would have been sleeping on the couch in my office, or the bed in my home. The arc of the experience was fairly tight. It was Friday night. Pearl and I had just finished visiting the patch of grass under the single tree, and were sharing a bottle of water in the car, when Royce Garner, the president of the Dowling School, his very self, pulled up in a Buick sedan and parked near the front door and got out and went in carrying a small suitcase.

“Ho, ho!” I said to Pearl.

We sat that night until 1:30
A
.
M
. without any reappearance by Garner. And at 9:12 the next morning when I got there, with a large coffee, the Buick was still where it had been.

“Highly suspicious,” I said.

But Pearl wasn't with me. She was with Susan's dog runner this morning, in the woods, somewhere west of Cambridge. Probably wasn't much sillier talking to myself than it would have been talking to a dog. The morning crept past. Lunchtime came and crept on by. Fortunately, when I bought the coffee, I'd also purchased half a dozen doughnuts for just such an emergency. I ate a couple. At about three-thirty in the afternoon, Garner came out alone and got in his car and drove away. I followed him uneventfully to a comfortable-looking white colonial house next to the Dowling School. He parked in the driveway, took out his small suitcase, and walked to the front door. Someone opened it, I couldn't see who, and Garner went in.

My doughnuts were gone. I knew what I knew, and there was no reason to keep reknowing it. The next step was to figure out what to do about what I knew. So I went home.

Actually, I went to Susan's house. The dog runner had left Pearl there, so I went and let Pearl out and fed her and sat at the counter in Susan's silent, immaculate kitchen and drank some Johnnie Walker Blue with a lot of ice and soda.

After she finished eating, Pearl snuffled rapidly through every room in the house once more to make absolutely sure Susan was in fact not there. Then Pearl came back in the kitchen and settled onto the couch provided for her.

“I know,” I said. “If I had a better nose, that's what I would have done, too.”

Pearl raised her head and wagged her tail at me from the couch.

“She'll be back,” I said. “Couple of weeks.”

Pearl settled onto the couch and put her head on her paws and watched me, moving her eyes only, in case I should suddenly try to eat something. I drank some scotch. Susan's place sounded like an empty house, the hush of the air-conditioning, the barely audible hum of the refrigerator, the hint of street sound. Occasionally, the creak of floor joists settling half a millimeter. I could smell her perfume. The house was rich with colors: gold and green and burgundy and brown and tan and cream. There were rugs and drapes and throws, and paintings and lamps and trays, and stuff that had no other function than to be stunning.

My drink was gone. I went to the refrigerator and got more ice. There were a couple of Lean Cuisines in the freezer. In the main part of the refrigerator, there was half a bottle of Kendall-Jackson Riesling, and a navel orange. There was no cork in the half-empty bottle; it was covered with a small Baggie fastened with a blue elastic band. I smiled. Everything spoke of her. I added scotch and some soda to my drink and sat back at the counter. Around the kitchen were pictures of me and Susan and Pearl. There were seven pictures of Pearl. Three of me and Susan. If I weren't such a Hunko, it might have given me pause. The house was her: elegant, flamboyant, beautiful.
A thing worth doing
, Susan always said,
was worth overdoing.
I stood and took my drink and walked into the
living room. Everything you could sit on in there had so many pillows on it that you'd have to move them to make room for your tush. There were more pictures of Pearl and me. Same ratio. There was a picture of her mother and father, dark-haired and European-looking, though I knew her father ran a drugstore in Swampscott. There were pictures of Susan with people I didn't know. There was no sign of her ex-husband.

I went into the bedroom. The Spenser/Pearl ratio improved. There was one large picture, of me with Pearl beside me. The picture, in a big, clear acrylic frame, sat on her night table. There were no other pictures. There were so many decorative pillows on the bed that you couldn't sit on it, either, let alone sleep. I looked at the bed for a time and smelled her perfume more insistently. I felt my stomach tighten.

“Couple of weeks,” I said. “Couple of weeks.”

I went to the kitchen for a refill. Pearl had lost all interest in me, and was asleep now on her couch. I sat back on my stool at the counter and felt the scotch move through me happily.

So, Beth Ann and Royce were spending nights together. So what? What Beth Ann was telling me about Jared didn't jibe with what everyone else was telling me about Jared. So what?

I wondered if the romance with Garner was surreptitious. I wondered if Garner were married. Someone had greeted him at the door when he went home. I wondered what it all had to do with Jared, if anything. I sipped my scotch. Susan's home was built in the nineteenth century. It had high ceilings and wide hallways. Her office was downstairs. Her self was
everywhere. If I weren't so autonomous and self-reliant, I would have missed her like a bastard.

“Being a seasoned investigator,” I said to Pearl, “I have found that when there's stuff you don't know in a case, it's best to find it out.”

Pearl was on her back, her head lolled off the couch, and she looked at me upside down. I finished my drink.

“Tomorrow,” I said.

I got up and went to Susan's bedroom and cleared space among the pillows and went to bed. Pearl joined me later in the night.

I
HAD RETURNED
my Camry. Pearl was off to the woods with the woman Susan insisted on calling Pearl's personal trainer. I sat in my office with coffee, going through the scrapbook of press clippings that Lily Ellsworth had given me when I first met her. I thought I remembered something, and I was right. There was a picture of Royce Garner with Mrs. Garner beside him, talking to a group of parents during the crisis. She looked like an answer to the question
Why does Mr. Garner fool around?
Of course, she might be a wonderful human being. But unless the camera lied flagrantly, no one would mistake her for pretty.

So it was surreptitious. Garner was cheating on his wife with Beth Ann. Why Beth Ann would wish to cheat on anyone with Royce Garner was imponderable. So I didn't ponder it. Instead, I pondered what I could do with what I had learned. After a while, I decided on B&E, with blackmail a fallback position, and took my coffee, got my gym bag of tools, went to my car, and headed out to Beth Ann's condo to implement my plan.

It was mid-morning when I got there. The sun was bright. The weather was cool. The condo parking lot was half empty. A guy in a white sleeveless undershirt was rolling a big blue trash barrel across the lot. He set it down at the far edge of the lot, beside another one, and turned and went back around the building. After he disappeared, I drove around behind the building and down a slight grade. At the basement level, a big door stood open. The guy in the undershirt came out with another big blue barrel. He had a wreath tattooed around the biceps of his left arm. I parked in a guest overflow slot near the basement door. The guy in the undershirt ignored me, and when he was out of sight, I left my car, took my small gym bag with me, and walked into the basement. I was in an open area where there were at least ten more of the big blue barrels. Ahead of me was a corridor. I went down it. There was a boiler room to the left, and at the far end, two elevators. I got in one. I punched the button for the lobby and went up.

In the lobby, I opened the front door of the building. I used my tool bag to keep it from closing, went out, found Beth Ann's name on the directory. 417. I went back in, picked up my gym bag, and took the elevator to the fourth floor.
Number 417 was at the far end of the corridor, on the left, which probably meant Beth Ann paid less for it and didn't get to look at the lake. I put my gym bag down and knocked. No answer. Breaking into a place isn't very hard if you don't mind people knowing you were there. Tossing a place and having no one know it was a little trickier. I didn't care if Beth Ann knew someone had burgled her. So with a lender pry bar and a little force, I was in quite quietly in about two minutes. The jamb was splintered a bit and the door wouldn't latch closed anymore. But no one dashed into the corridor and yelled “Stop, thief!” I closed it and put my gym bag down to keep it from swinging open, and turned my attention to the apartment.

Beth Ann was not an obsessive housekeeper. The breakfast dishes were still on the coffee table. There was lingerie on the floor of the bathroom and a bathrobe tossed across the sofa in the living room. Two empty wine bottles stood on the sideboard, and a cutting board with vestiges of cheese and stale bread sat beside them. In an alcove off the living room, behind the kitchen, was home-office space with a desk and a laptop computer and a file cabinet. The computer was a Mac, which meant I had a feeble grasp of how it worked. I turned it on, and when it lit up, I clicked on the mail icon and read her e-mail. Most of it was innocuous. There were several embarrassing e-mails from someone named roygar, whom I assumed to be Garner. But nothing that added to my sum of useful knowledge. Nothing in the computer referred to Jared.

I moved to the file cabinet and spent more than two hours going through professional mail outgoing, professional mail
incoming, bills tendered, bills paid, credit-card statements, a file of clippings about the school shooting in Dowling, a file of love letters from Garner that would have made a buzzard feel queasy, and about five years' worth of at-a-glance appointment calendars, none of which told me anything more than she had a busy life. I took the love letters and put them in my gym bag.

I moved to the desk. It had a checkbook and bank statements in the center drawer. They indicated that she spent a lot of money, but nothing else. I spent an hour on the desk. If I had known what I was looking for, it would have gone faster. I could eliminate places where what I wanted wouldn't go. But since I didn't know what I was looking for, I had to look everywhere. I checked under the throw rug in the bedroom, and under the bed, and between the mattress and box spring, and in the towels folded in the closet, and the pockets of coats. I sifted through sweaters and underwear and socks. I looked in the toes of her shoes. I checked behind paintings and mirrors, under couch cushions, behind chairs. In the bathroom, I checked the toilet tank. In the kitchen, I looked into cereal boxes and sugar canisters. I checked in the oven and under the sink. I looked in the refrigerator, in the vegetable keeper, behind bottles of Perrier. I opened the freezer and found something. Under a package of frozen chicken thighs, in a plastic freezer-storage bag with a tightly sealed top, was a six-by-nine brown envelope. In the envelope were pictures of Jared Clark and Beth Ann Blair. Both were naked.

I said, “Bingo.”

My voice was loud in the empty apartment.

There were five pictures; none showed them having sex, and all showed them in affectionate full-frontal nudity. Probably taken with a timer, which would be more difficult in mid–sexual congress.

She couldn't get rid of them. There was absolutely nothing else in the apartment that even hinted of any connection to Jared Clark. But whatever made a grown woman take up with an early-adolescent boy made her, in the face of all wisdom, keep these unforgiving mementos in deep concealment.

I closed the freezer, put the pictures in my gym bag along with my burglar tools, and went out of the apartment. When she came home and found she'd been broken into, she'd go straight to the freezer. In five minutes, she'd know the pictures were gone. She would be sick with worry and fear and maybe shame.
Good!
I took the elevator down to the lobby. There was no one in the lobby. I went out the front door and walked around the building to where I'd parked my car. The basement door was closed now. I started the car and drove out through the parking lot. All the blue barrels were lined up in an orderly row, waiting for the trash truck. The sun was in the western sky. I looked at my watch; it was after four. I pulled out onto the highway and drove toward Cambridge to retrieve Pearl.