Stiff Penalty (A Mattie Winston Mystery) (24 page)

So much for getting an education.

Mrs. Knowles came out of her office and walked over to greet us. She had a friendly face with a warm smile, and her gray hair and matronly build gave her a grandmotherly aura. I couldn’t help but compare her to my own high school principal, Mr. Dean, a tall, skinny, bespectacled man in his fifties, who we determined developed his theories on student behavior from the Gestapo. We called him lean, mean Mr. Dean behind his back.

“I’m Jeanette Knowles, the principal here. How can I help you folks today?”

Richmond produced his badge, made the introductions, and then said, “I assume you’ve heard about Mr. Ames?”

“Yes, yes, a terrible thing. Is it true that you arrested Jacob?”

“Jacob has been detained, but we’re still investigating the case,” Richmond said, giving me a tired look. “Have you ever seen Mr. Ames carrying a laptop around?”

“Sure,” Jeanette said. “Most of our teachers have laptops or tablets. Why?”

“We’re trying to locate Mr. Ames’s laptop. Is it here at the school by any chance?” Richmond’s voice sounded hopeful.

Jeanette dashed his hopes when she frowned and said, “I’m certain he wouldn’t have left it here. Something like that would be a little too much temptation for some of our students, I’m afraid.”

Richmond wasn’t going down without a fight. “If he was going to leave something like that here, where would it be? Did he have a desk? A locker? An office? What about the teacher’s lounge?”

“None of our teachers have private offices. Mr. Ames did have a desk—all of our teachers do, but the locks are rather flimsy, so most of them don’t keep anything of value in them, and we emptied Derrick’s desk yesterday. There was no laptop. We do have some lockers in the teacher’s lounge for our staff to store their personal belongings.”

“I assume that Derrick Ames had one?”

“He did, but it’s empty.”

“I’d like to see it. I would also like to have a look inside the lockers of Jacob Ames and Sean Fitzpatrick.”

“Sean? Why him?”

“We think Jacob may have taken Derrick’s laptop from his father’s house, and since he and the Fitzpatrick boy are friends, we think he may have given it to him to keep.”

“Do you have a warrant?”

“I do not,” Richmond said.

“Then I’m not comfortable letting you search our students’ lockers. Some of our parents might get upset over such an invasion of their child’s privacy.”

“There is no expectation of privacy in a student’s locker,” Richmond said. “The school owns the lockers, and it’s up to you to decide to let us search or not. I think it would be in your best interest to let us search the lockers of these two boys, but if you disagree, I’ll be happy to get a search warrant that will include every locker in this school.”

Jeanette sighed and said, “We just searched Sean’s locker last Friday because he was caught smoking pot in the boy’s room. There was no laptop in there, and we suspended him for the week, so he hasn’t been back since then.”

“If you don’t mind, I’d prefer to look for myself,” Richmond said with a forced, plastic smile.

Jeanette sighed again, louder and more exaggerated this time. I think she sensed Richmond wasn’t going to back down. “Fine,” she said, heading for the office door. “Follow me.”

O
ur search of the teacher’s lounge produced nothing more than stares, whispered speculations, and some strategic ducking whenever the camera was around. Derrick’s locker was empty, just as Jeanette Knowles had said, and nothing turned up in Jacob’s or Sean’s lockers, either. So far our trip to the school was a bust, and Jeannette had a smug, I-told-you-so look on her face. She led us back to the main office, where she stopped inside the door—effectively barring our reentry—and asked, “Is there anything else I can do for you, detective?”

“Did Mr. Ames have any problems with any of the other staff?”

“No, Derrick got on well with everyone.”

“What about the students? Any issues there?”

“Again, no. Like I said, he was well liked by everyone.”

“Was there anyone on the staff he was particularly close to?”

Jeanette thought a moment and said, “He and Sam Littleton seemed to get on quite well. They typically lunched together and talked a lot. They’re both divorced with kids, so they have a lot in common. And then, of course, there’s Mandy Terwilliger, who is a volunteer rather than a member of our staff. From what I hear, she and Derrick were
very
close.” Her voice was rich with prurient suggestion.

“Can you ask Mr. Littleton to come here to the office so we can talk with him?” Richmond asked.

Jeanette gave us a bemused look. “Whatever for?”

“Because I asked you to,” Richmond said, clearly impatient.

Jeanette Knowles narrowed her eyes at him, folded her arms over her chest, and adjusted her stance, looking ready for a fight. The grandmotherly aura had disappeared. “I think I have a right to know why you want to talk to one of my employees,” she said, her lips tight. “I heard that Jacob Ames has been arrested for the murder of his father, so I don’t understand your need to go fishing among my staff for any other suspects.”

“We’re trying to tie up a few loose ends.”

“Such as?” Jeanette said, her voice demanding. I imagined it was very effective on any students who were under fire.

Richmond sighed and smiled at her. It wasn’t a particularly friendly smile. “That’s really none of your business. Now can you get Mr. Littleton down here for us, or do I have to get a search warrant and disrupt the entire school day by searching this whole building and inviting all the parents to come by so I can talk to the students, too?”

I swear I saw light sabers spring out of Jeanette’s eyes. Her jaw muscles clenched like a pugilist’s fists. “Let me guess,” she said, her voice as venomous as a rattler’s bite. “You were one of those kids who visited the principal’s office a lot in school, weren’t you?”

“Yes, I was,” Richmond said, biting back. “And as a result, I saw things. Lots of things. And that principal ended up not only getting fired, but being sent to prison.” He paused for a few seconds, and Jeanette’s eyes opened a little wider. “Now I’m tired of your verbal jousting.” Richmond lifted his arm and looked at his watch. “You’ve got thirty seconds.”

Though I wasn’t counting, I’d wager that Jeanette used twenty-nine of her allotted seconds before she finally caved, though she never took her icy glare off Richmond. She spun around and barked out an order. “Melanie, can you please find Mr. Littleton and ask him to come to the office?”

“Sure.”

Melanie got up from her chair and headed out of the office at a fast clip, head down. Since Jeanette had to step aside to let Melanie go by, Richmond took advantage of the moment and entered the office. The rest of us followed.

Jeanette scowled but wasn’t done yet. She turned to Richmond and said, “I want to sit in on any interrogations you do.”

“These aren’t interrogations,” Richmond said, his glare even icier. “They are interviews. And the only one you may sit in on is yours.”

I could tell Jeanette didn’t like this answer. Her lips and jaw muscles twitched with unspoken objections, but, wisely, all she said was, “You may use the conference room over there.” She pointed the way, then stomped back into her office, slamming the door behind her.

“Wow,” I said, looking over at Richmond with newfound respect. “It’s a good thing it wasn’t Jeanette who was killed because if it was, we’d have a list of suspects as long as my arm. And I have very long arms.”

“She’s a power-hungry bitch,” Richmond grumbled.

Hurley leaned toward me and whispered, “I love your arms. They’re the perfect size to reach everything they need to.”

I blushed. Now he loved my arms. Surely the whole of me couldn’t be too far away. Then I remembered that it really didn’t matter anymore.

I noticed that Charlie, who had stood in the background silently through all of this, was staring at Richmond with a curious expression. “Did you really get your high school principal fired and jailed?” she asked.

“I did. The asshole was buying drugs from some of the students in exchange for bumping up their grades or letting them slide on their offenses. I caught on because I got sent to the principal’s office a lot for getting into fights. I had a weight problem, and a lot of the kids made fun of me. I dealt with it by trying to beat the crap out of them.”

“Hunh,” Charlie said.

Suddenly lean, mean Mr. Dean didn’t seem so bad.

We all headed for the conference room that Principal Knowles had indicated. Once inside, Charlie grabbed Hurley by the arm and hauled him down to one end of the long table that was in the room. “Let me show you how to set up the camera in order to get the best audio and video.”

I watched as they bowed their heads together, and twice Charlie took hold of Hurley’s hand and guided him to the appropriate holding places, which fortunately were on the video camera and not on her body.

The door to the conference room opened, and Melanie walked in with Mr. Littleton in tow.

“Hello, Mr. Littleton,” Richmond said. He waved a hand toward the opposite side of the table and added, “Please have a seat.”

Melanie backed out with a wary look while Sam Littleton, who looked like a young Michael Caine, made his way to the seat Richmond indicated.

Hurley and Charlie settled into chairs at their end of the table, and Richmond and I sat across from Littleton. I decided to let Richmond do all the questioning unless there was something that jumped out at me that he didn’t ask.

“We’d like to talk to you about Derrick Ames,” Richmond said after Charlie gave him a go-ahead nod. Hurley had the camera in hand, but Charlie was leaning into him, watching the screen.

“It’s an awful thing that happened to him,” Littleton said. “I don’t know what I can do to help, but I’m willing to try. You said on the phone that you were interested in a text message I sent Derrick on the day of his death?”

Richmond nodded, and Littleton took a smartphone out of his pocket, tapped the screen a few times, and handed it to Richmond.

“He never answered me,” Littleton said as Richmond read the text. When he was done, he handed the phone to me, and I read the message, which said,
WANT TO GET A BEER AFTER SCHOOL TOMORROW NIGHT
? before handing the phone off to Hurley so he could film what it showed.

Richmond turned his attention back to Littleton. “Were the two of you pretty close?” he asked.

“We were friends,” Littleton said with a shrug. “We have . . . had a lot in common. We both have German parents, we’re both divorced with kids, we both like to play darts.”

“Darts?”

“Yeah, we belong to a league down at the Anywhere bar. It meets every Thursday night.”

“Do you know if Mr. Ames had any enemies?”

Littleton shook his head. “No, everyone liked him. He was an easygoing, friendly guy.”

“No fights with anyone down at the bar?”

“Fights? No,” Littleton said, dismissing the issue with an expression that suggested the idea was ludicrous. “It’s a friendly bunch down there.”

“Were there any problems you were aware of between him and any of the other teachers? Or any of the students or parents?”

Littleton looked as if he was thinking hard, and after a few seconds, he shook his head again. “Nope. He was active in the PTA and held regular parent-teacher conferences. And he got along great with the kids, though he did have some problems with his own from time to time.”

“Such as?”

“Well, the divorce thing. That’s always hard on kids. He and Jacob would argue a lot.”

“About what?”

“About whether or not Derrick and his wife were going to get back together, about Jacob’s behavior, Jacob’s choice of friends . . . all the usual teenage stuff.”

“What sort of behaviors did Jacob and Derrick argue about?”

“Jacob has a tendency to lash out without much provocation. His fuse is a short one. And Derrick didn’t like some of the kids he was hanging out with.”

“Which kids?”

“Well, that Fitzpatrick kid, for one. Sean is a troublemaker, and he and Jacob seem to feed off one another.”

“Can you give some examples?”

“Well, back around the holidays, they started a fire in the boy’s bathroom just to get out of a math test they didn’t want to take because they hadn’t studied. Then Derrick caught Jacob and Sean smoking out in the parking lot and went ballistic. Two weeks ago, the boys broke into the biology lab late one night during a basketball game and set free all the fruit flies that were being bred in jars for a genetics study the kids were doing. There were seven periods’ worth of fruit-fly colonies, with probably two dozen jars of flies for each class. Not only did it mess up the whole study; we had to close down the cafeteria for two days to get rid of the damned things. We still find them in the teacher’s lounge from time to time if someone leaves a piece of fruit sitting out for more than an hour.”

Richmond’s cell phone chirped, and he took it out of his pocket and cast a quick glance at the screen. “Excuse me,” he said. “I need to take this.”

He got up and walked to a far corner of the room to take the call. As much to satisfy my own curiosity as to provide some privacy for Richmond, I took over the questions with Littleton. “What about Derrick’s social life? Was he seeing anyone?” I asked.

“Oh, yeah, he recently hooked up with one of the moms who volunteers here, Mandy Terwilliger. She’s a looker,” he said, his eyes growing big. “A couple of the other men around here have made plays for her, me included. But she never gave any of us the time of day until Derrick came around. They hit it off, though they were trying to keep things under the radar—for the kids’ sakes, I suppose.”

“Did Derrick talk to you about his relationship with Mandy?”

“Some, yeah,” Littleton said with half a shrug.

“Did he say anything recently about breaking things off with her?”

Littleton shook his head. “No, in fact, things between them seemed to be pretty good. Although, last Friday when we had lunch he did say that he might have to cool things down with her for a little while if Jacob didn’t come around soon. He always put his boys first.”

Richmond disconnected his call, returned to the table, and said, “Thank you, Mr. Littleton. I think that’s all we need for now, but if you think of anything else, please call me.” He slid a business card across the table, and Hurley walked over and handed the man back his phone.

Littleton nodded, took both items, got up from his chair, and left the room.

“What’s up?” I asked Richmond.

“They found Derrick’s laptop.”