A Simple Suburban Murder (3 page)

"I admire you, Tom. Thirty-eight years old, settled down, living in unmarried bliss with a gorgeous blond. My kids and even grandkids—there's no respect these days—keep trying to fix me up with these creaky old coots. Most of them belong in an iron lung, or do they still have those things in this day and age?"

"I don't know."

"No matter. I used to believe in true love and happiness forever."

Her husband left her thirty-five years ago with three kids to raise. He never came back. I gave her the same answer I always did. "Maybe someday, Meg."

"I've turned down enough men to start a small country of my own." She laughed. "Whoever he is he'll have to do a hell of a lot better than the others."

I smiled at her. "The three of us will go out to dinner soon."

"Great. I'll look forward to it." She held my gaze for several moments. She patted my hand. "You're still in love. I wish you both the best of luck. You of all the people I know deserve true love and happiness." She took a deep breath, and then continued briskly. "Okay, you want the lowdown on Jim Evans."

"You read minds now, Meg?"

"This one wasn't hard. I barely see you for ages. You find somebody murdered in your classroom. You'd have to be a dunce not to be curious about what the hell he was doing there, and who killed him. So of course being a normal person, you'd want to find out more. And where's the best place to find out? Me, of course. I've been expecting you." She gave a furtive look around. "It's still a couple minutes until closing, but I'd rather talk in total privacy in my office."

She hopped off her chair, went to the library door, and took a quick survey of the hall. "Sylvester's been lurking around lately near closing time," she explained. "Maybe he thinks I'm stealing his precious books. I've taken to bringing large bulky purses just to drive him nuts."

I like Meg.

We walked into her office and settled ourselves onto either end of a cozy little couch.

"Are you coping okay with what's happened?" she asked.

"Yeah, I think I'm all right. It'll hit me more later when there isn't as much activity."

"Police, kids, and Sylvester running around all day makes for a lot of hectic," Meg said.

She sighed. "You want to know about Evans. Let's start with the basics: married for twenty years, four kids—two boys, seventeen and thirteen, two girls, ten and eight, taught here twenty-one years, his first job out of college. Marriage has been rocky. There was talk of divorce five or six years ago. It blew over though. They worked out some compromises. He agreed to joint marriage counseling. She agreed to separate vacations once a year. One goes while the other stays with the kids. That sounds strange to me, but in this day and age, who knows? Another part of the agreement is that neither asks questions of the other when they get back."

"Unbelievable."

"Belief is a chancy business, I've found."

"That's true. So what else has our less-than-model husband been up to?"

"He also wasn't much of a model father. A large part of the problem was abuse." "His wife?"

Meg shook her head. "The kids."

"That creep," I echoed my students. "All of his kids?"

"Supposedly he concentrated on the older boy, hurting him significantly at times."

"And nothing was done?"

"You know how it is, Tom. He was never violent enough to put the kid in the hospital, and even then you see parents get away with it time after time. When they are caught with clear proof, getting the system to work in the kid's favor is a rarity."

"I never knew this when I had Phil in class."

"It's not something people are likely to talk about, especially kids. Besides, I presume his stopping the abuse was part of the agreement back those five or six years."

"Do you know if he really did stop?"

"As far as I've heard, yes."

"What about his wife? Why didn't she leave him?"

"Facts first—she's two years younger than her husband, pretty once, now looks ten years older than she is. No education beyond high school, always involved with P.T.A. and room mothers. Why didn't she leave? Who knows? Love, lack of alternatives, fear. It could be any number of things."

"Would she want to kill him?"

"You'd have to ask her that."

I thought for a minute. "How about the family's financial situation?"

"Sometimes he had tons of money. Threw it around all over the place. Other times he was flat broke. Supposedly one time he tried to pawn one of his kid's baseball uniforms."

"What caused the swings?"

"That I don't know."

"That's a hell of a way for a family to live," I commented.

"Real sad," Meg replied.

"What about at school, Meg? The kids today hinted about him trading grades for sexual favors from the senior girls."

"I very much doubt it. I've heard the rumor. I've never been able to confirm it." Her voice got angry, showing the tough woman underneath. "But if I found out he was, the bastard would've been out on his ass and in jail, and I'd have been the one to throw him there." Her voice returned to normal. "But as I said, no confirmation on that one, and my sources are the best in the school. That doesn't mean he wasn't doing it. My sources are great but not omniscient."

"How'd he get along with the faculty?"

"For some talking to him was like being beaten to death with an all-day sucker. I thought it was phony. To others, especially secretaries in the math department, he was incredibly cruel."

"Any particular enemies in the department itself?"

"Definitely yes, although I can't give you names. The department is intensely competitive. You've met Leonard Vance, the department head?"I nodded.

"The man is brilliant but slightly nuts. He's the only faculty member who's been here longer than me."

"Is that the part that makes him nuts?"

She smiled, brushed aside my crack with a wave of her hand. "No, he's harmless enough. He's been divorced twenty years. He's been asking me out for the past ten. I always turn him down. He isn't my type. As for the department, he's got them tuned to an incredible pitch. The competitiveness comes from him. Over the years he's gotten a lot of work out of his staff and the kids. At what cost I'm not sure."

"So, the math department is not heaven on earth," I said.

"You can say that if you want. What's important is I don't think you'll find your murderer there. They're an academically competitive group, but as personalities I'd mark them in the wimp category."

"Then who did it, Meg?"

"While my sources are good, catching murderers is not in their job description."

"How reliable is your information?"

"It's better than gossip or rumor. Is it absolute truth? I don't know if such a thing exists. Is it factual? I think so. I do know the last time I steered somebody wrong was over seventeen years ago."

"Are you going to volunteer this information to the police?"

"Are you sure you were in the marines? I never volunteer, honey. If they want to talk to an old gossip they can come to me. I suspect they'll find out most of this information without me."

I thought over what she'd said. "One other thing," I asked. "What about the older boy? Do you know anything about him? The kids said he might be gay."

"There I can't help you. I keep a strictly adult grapevine. Long ago I decided to let kids be themselves. They have their world. We adults have enough problems in our own."

I rose to leave. "Well, thanks, Meg. You've been a big help."

"Say hello to Scott for me."

"I will," I said and left.

I realized my briefcase and overcoat were still in my classroom. The school was cold and quiet. The windows were dark. My footsteps echoed on the wooden floors in the dimly lit halls. At my classroom door I paused over the police seal. It was nothing but a piece of ribbon loosely stretched across the doorway. I opened the door, stooped under the ribbon, and walked in. I didn't bother to turn on the lights; the soft glow from the hall was sufficient for me to make my way to the desk. I glanced to where the body had been. There were only mute desks resting for the next day's onslaught. I picked up my things and turned toward the door.

A shadow in back of the room moved. I turned toward it.

"Who's there?" I said.

There was a flash and a roar. The briefcase burst out of my hand.

— 2 —

I
dove to the floor and scrambled behind the desk. I heard the outer door slam. Seconds later another shot split the night. Glass shattered. I waited. Silence ticked by. I felt the breeze from the hole in the window. I raised my head slightly to try to get a view outside. I couldn't see anything. Then I heard footsteps, people hurrying. A minute later a small group clustered in the doorway.

"Tom?" It was Meg, her voice edged with fear.

"I'm here, Meg. Don't turn—" Before I could say it the lights flashed on. I saw Sylvester with his hand on the switch. He stooped under the police ribbon and entered the room. He presented a fantastic target for anyone still outside. Stupidity can kill, but in this case the victim survived. Maybe they realized how useless it would be to shoot only one administrator.

"Will someone turn off the lights," I hissed from behind the desk.

Meg responded, edging carefully around Sylvester to the light switch. She turned them off. "Are you all right?" she asked.

"Yeah," I said. I crawled over to the window, reached up carefully, and lowered the blinds. Then I stood up and brushed myself off. I turned the lights back on. All the desk and file cabinet drawers gaped wide open. Large drifts of the contents cascaded around the back of the room.

"What are you doing in here?" Sylvester demanded. "And what was that noise?" Several of the night custodians moved into the room behind Sylvester.

I examined the tattered remnants of my briefcase.

"We'll have to call the police. The window will have to be boarded up," Sylvester complained, "and look at this mess. More trouble. I'll never get out of here tonight."

I examined the damage. The shot had passed through the briefcase and blown off a section of the top corner of the desk. I'd turned the correct direction at the right instant, or maybe whoever fired had poor aim, or the darkness was too much of a hindrance. For the first time since I found the body I felt fear. My room hardly qualified as simply being the next convenient place the killer came to for dropping a body. Now Sylvester's question wasn't so dumb. Why me?

Scott said the same basic thing later that night. I lay on my stomach on the couch in blue jeans and white gym socks. He was similarly clad, perched on top of me, massaging my back.

He's the only one who has that perfect touch, between a caress, tickle, and massage, that is pure bliss. I hadn't been able to get hold of him all day. His heavy and erratic schedule of speaking engagements often left us only the brief minutes before bed in which to talk. When he got to my place, I'd told him of the events of the day.

"So what did the police say the second time?" he asked.

"Not much. There was no one around outside by the time they arrived. No one saw anything, so there was nothing they could do. They wrote it off as random vandalism against the school. They didn't seem terribly concerned."

"Well, I am," he grumbled in his deep voice.

I shifted my weight slightly. He gets heavy, but I love the backrubs. He's six four, well muscled, without an ounce of fat on him.

"I found a flashlight the intruder dropped. It wasn't random violence. I think it's connected to the murder. But what could I have that the person who murdered Evans could want? That's what I've been thinking the past few hours." I shook my head. "I don't know what I'm in the middle of."

"Danger," he said.

"Yeah, that, and murder, but why? I barely even knew Evans." His fingers kneaded my lower back. "I'm going to keep trying to find out what I can. There must be some connection."

"I'd like to help," Scott offered.

"Thanks," I said.

"And the first thing I think I should do is move in with you until this is settled."

Scott's been campaigning to move in for several years. Meg's right, I do love him, but cohabitation might be difficult. One reason is he's extremely closeted. Being a professional baseball player makes it harder for him, of course, but he keeps his orientation and my existence desperate secrets. He hasn't told anyone in his family, or any of his friends or teammates. I don't care to live that way. We spend a lot of holidays with my family. His family is in Georgia and doesn't know about us, he visits them once a year without me. My father and brothers get puffed up with pride having a star baseball player in the house. My nieces and nephews love him. Last Christmas he spent hours rolling around outside in the snow with them. At least once each visit my mother and sister corner me in the kitchen to tell me how wonderful he is and then say that we should live together. I fend them off.

"Lift up," I said. I felt his weight ease. I flipped onto my back. He sat back down. I looked up at him. "Until this is settled it might be a good idea," I conceded.

"And I should put in that alarm system."

He's been trying to get me to install a security system. He's hideously mechanical. I have seen him lay his hands over a crippled machine and the damn thing heals. I think they're afraid of him. They know he means business. He could put in an alarm system easily enough. Until that moment I'd always thought it was silly for me to have one. Now I wasn't sure. I told him I'd give it serious consideration.

He leaned down and kissed me. I reached back and switched off the lamp. I put my arms around him and pulled him close.

The next morning he cooked breakfast while I got ready for school. Over breakfast we talked options.

"I'm going to cancel my schedule today," he said.

"Don't," I said, "there's no need. There's not much to do. I'll be safe at school."

He gave me an exasperated look. "You weren't yesterday."