Schooled in Murder (16 page)

I tried to put this delicately, “You were never invited to join them?”

“In the bedroom? No. I have a lover. You’ve met Bernice.” I vaguely remembered a heavy-set woman.

I said, “You weren’t worried about drinking with the head of the department?”

“She wasn’t head of my department.”

“How’d this all get started?”

“I was on some stupid cross-curricular committee with them. We’d go to lunch together. We had great times. We started going out in the evening. Sometimes it was just a girls’ night out. Sometimes others would join us, most often Peter Higden, sometimes Ludwig Schaven and Basil Milovec, maybe a few others.”

“Were Higden, Schaven, and Milovec in on the sexual activity?”

“We all stopped at my place, but Schaven and Milovec were never there without me being there.”

“You sure?”

“What do you mean?”

“Maybe they went back when it was only supposed to be Eberson and Spandrel.”

“I can’t imagine Schaven. He’s very involved with his kids. He wouldn’t have the time.”

“He had time to go drinking.”

“That was once in a while.”

“You left Higden out of the list of who was there when you weren’t.”

“Spandrel and Eberson would laugh about him. He said he enjoyed doing it with two women. Should I be telling you this? I’m so worried.”

We’d always trusted each other. I said, “It might help catch the killer.”

“Oh right. Well, I’m not sure how this would, but Spandrel and Eberson said Higden wasn’t as good as something hand-held. That he wasn’t very …” She lowered her voice. “Big.”

“Oh,” I said. More information than I needed, but I wasn’t going to stop her either.

“And,” her voice got even lower, “not just small, but really small, and that he wasn’t very good. He got done in minutes–sometimes seconds. The three of us would laugh about it. Is that terrible?”

“I don’t think so. For Peter, maybe–not for you. Has Spandrel tried to talk to you at all today?”

“I tried to find her, but she’s been in meetings all morning.”

“You were buddies with that faction,” I said. “What did they say about the old guard in the English department?”

“They never said anything about you. That might have been because they know we’ve worked together with the gay kids.”

I asked, “Did they ever talk about why they were so desperate to impose their views on the rest of us?”

“Not really. Mostly we were out partying and having a good time. They’d make fun of the people in the other faction sometimes.”

“Spandrel would make fun of other staff members in front of teachers in the department?”

“I know she isn’t supposed to, but she would sometimes.
” She shook her head and said, “As long as none of this comes down on the kids or me.”

“I wouldn’t worry,” I said.

She ran her hands through her clipped-short hair. “Two friends of mine are dead. It’s just so awful.” She sniffed and gulped. “And I’m a little scared. What if the deaths had something to do with them being together? Could Spandrel be in danger? Could Spandrel be …”

“A killer?”

“She wouldn’t. She couldn’t.”

“She might have been afraid of Eberson or Higden or you telling.”

“I never would. They never had. None of us would. Why be afraid now?”

Good questions to which I had no answers.

22

I hurried to the library to find Meg. When I walked in, Scott was sitting behind the circulation desk. I smiled. We hugged briefly. He asked, “You okay?”

I nodded.

Meg strode in. She said, “Let’s blow this dump.”

On institute days teachers had an hour for lunch.

We picked up Georgette in the office and left. Meg drove.

I filled them in on what I’d learned.

When I finished, Meg told us what she found out. “I have a confirmation on the lesbian affair angle as well.”

Scott said, “I don’t get it. Who cares if they’re lesbians?”

I said, “They were both married.”

“To guys?” Scott asked.

“Yep.”

Scott said, “Maybe the husbands were pissed off.” “One or both,” Georgette added.

Meg said, “My sources say neither spouse knew about the infidelity. Medium-reliable on the source.”

Meg had a classification system for her sources, from unreliable to medium to very reliable.

We stopped at the Pancake Palace on LaGrange Road.

Georgette asked, “Is somebody saying that one of them would break into the school, or sneak into the school, and kill his wife’s lover or his wife?”

“It could happen,” Meg said, “although it doesn’t strike me as probable.”

I said, “Having tawdry affairs is way up there on the gossip meter, but I’m not sure it adds up to murder. Although if either husband knew …” I shrugged. “That could change things.”

Scott said, “Isn’t this all kind of sordid? This school district is like
Peyton Place
on speed.”

I said, “You’ve heard my stories over the years. Obviously murder is out of the ordinary, but tawdry affairs, sure.” Plus, I’d been in on union meetings where I heard about adults behaving in ways that most people would find extremely odd.

Meg said, “If Peter Higden was doing three-ways with them, it’s a connection. It’s sexual. It’s got passion. It’s just not clear if that is the connection that led to murder.”

“Do we tell the cops?” Georgette asked.

Scott said, “Not until we talk to our lawyer. And remember, we don’t have the word of any of the individuals involved. We only have secondhand knowledge.”

“They used Choate’s apartment,” I said. “She wasn’t part of it.”

“Said she wasn’t,” Scott said. “Trust no one.”

“Why would she tell me if she had something to hide?”

Scott said, “I think we need to be completely suspicious.”

I nodded, then said, “Pinyon getting that information about teacher travel is suspicious.”

Meg said, “The deaths came immediately after that.”

Scott said, “Killing turkeys causes winter,” the catchphrase he and I used to summon logic police to counter remarks such
as “That hurricane hit because you are sinners.” Proximity does not mean causation, a concept the religious right and far too many other people find difficult to master.

Meg smiled, “I get the idea, but something caused them, and we can’t find anything logical–to us. Something has to be logical to the killer.”

Georgette said, “None of the secretaries know who got into the files. It has to be an administrator. I don’t suppose the police would take fingerprints in the storage room.”

Meg said, “Probably not on what we’ve got so far.”

I asked Georgette, “Who was fixing grades?”

She ticked the points off on her fingers. “Spandrel, the head of the department, changed answers on the kids’ standardized tests. Graniento, our beloved principal, fixed grades for athletes and to keep the graduation rates up. I have copies of everything from before they started messing with the computers and each subsequent day.”

“How long has this been going on?” I asked.

“It was going on for sure last year, and I think from when they started working here.”

“How do you know they did this?” I asked.

“As you know, we keep all the records in the office. Last year, Luci Gamboni came to me. She’d transposed two kids’ grades, an honors kid and an LD kid. One was supposed to be an A the other an F. It would have been embarrassing for her to have to explain to Spandrel and Graniento that she’d messed up. She came to me. I’m not supposed to, but on occasion teachers are desperate at the end of grading time. I help. I went in to switch it, but the honors kid’s grade was already switched. The LD kid’s grade was the same. Someone fixed the one and not the other.”

Scott said, “Maybe she just forget and didn’t realize she only messed up the one.”

“Luci had the original printout. It was clearly wrong for
both of them on it. No, someone had changed the one and not the other. So I began to keep track.”

Some of us always printed our grades after we posted them to the computer. It was just a bit of redundancy that could save a ton of time if the computer system went kaflooey.

Scott said, “You mean you made copies of the grades for the whole school? Isn’t that a lot of paperwork?”

“You change the font and make the type size smaller, do a merge and compress, you get a lot on a few pages.” She smiled. “And I have a flash drive with a very large memory, and a back-up drive with an equally large memory. I have chronological records for the past few years: copies of what the teachers put in, and copies of what came out. I’d spend a weekend after each grading period with my husband at home going over them. It was tedious work but very satisfying. If I can be part of bringing those people down, I will be very happy.”

Scott said, “You must hate these administrators.”

“Only some of them. Graniento and Spandrel inflict misery on good teachers for no reason. Their decisions are capricious. They make no sense, about our work or the teachers’.”

Scott asked, “How do you keep up that befuddled front?”

“They look down on the secretaries. To them we’re all women with fewer degrees than they have.”

Scott said, “Did you get a chance to talk to Frecking and Benson? They must be frightened out of their minds.”

“I only managed to find Benson. He’s petrified about his wife finding out.”

“He should be,” Scott said.

Meg said, “Are they going to tell the cops the truth?”

“I don’t know.”

Meg said, “I also found out that Peter Higden was going to be disciplined for doing drugs.”

I said, “It wasn’t on school grounds.”

“You knew about this?” Meg asked.

“I always keep faith,” I said. “You know that.” And I did. Gossip is one thing. Something told to me in confidence as part of my union duties stayed in confidence.

Scott asked, “What happened?”

Meg said, “I heard several versions, each more ludicrous than the last. Supposedly on days the kids aren’t here, like institutes and parent conferences, he’d go out at lunch and get high and drink.”

“He was never drunk,” I said.

“He only did drugs?” Scott asked.

“He never admitted to anything,” I said. “I’ll say this much in this extremity. Three witnesses saw him. Two parents and a teacher. The teacher turned him in. The parents confirmed it. He was called in. He denied it was him. Absolutely, simply bald-faced lied.”

“Are they sure it was him?” Scott asked.

“One of them recognized the license plate of the car he was sitting in.”

“And they’re sure it was drugs?” Scott asked.

“They said they were close enough to see that it wasn’t a cigarette, and they claimed they could smell it. Other teachers said they smelled it on him when he got back to school.”

Meg asked, “Did they inspect his classroom and his car?”

“No. It wasn’t reported until the following day. They had no physical proof. It wasn’t on school grounds. He wasn’t caught or arrested by the police.”

Meg asked, “Who were the parents and teacher?”

“I don’t know.”

“I’ve come up with a few things,” Meg said. Our food arrived. I barely touched mine. Meg said, “On Peter Higden, did you know he played cards at lunch most regular days with members of the PE department? It was poker, and they were gambling.”

“In school?” Scott asked.

She said, “Tom knows how labyrinthine all those old PE locker rooms and offices are. They’ve got more storage down there than the rest of the school combined. They play in the athletic director’s office.”

I asked, “How high were the stakes?”

“Five-dollar ante for each pot. Dollar raises. Limit of four raises.”

Scott asked, “How do you get that kind of information?”

“The women in the PE department don’t like the men, although a few of them have dated a few of the men. One of the women is not happy. My notion is that she is jealous about being frozen out of the games. She’s not planning to turn them in. She doesn’t think they know she knows.”

Scott said, “Gambling is illegal on school grounds, right?”

“Yep,” Meg said.

Scott said, “We aren’t talking multimillion-dollar gambling debts, are we?”