4 The Killing Bee (15 page)

"You guys are wasting your time with Laura," I said. "She's more likely to fly to the moon than shoot somebody in the head."

"Her alibi is nonexistent."

"So's her motive. Look, Dave, while you guys screw around and ignore other suspects and threaten to put her in jail, her kid is going through major trauma. His dad died of a drug overdose a while back. I wish you guys would think about that when you make these accusations."

"Fact is, Chief Walsh and all the rest of them would love to bust
you
for the murder. They just can't seem to think of a motive for you, either."

"How about, Meckel and Ms. Helquist and I were involved in a particularly sordid love triangle?"

"Sounds good. I'll run it by them."

"Tell me, have the cops been doing surveillance on me?" Dave hesitated, so I said, "I just want to know if some crazed killer has been on my tail."

"Don't ever tell anyone I told you," Dave said, "but yes, we've been tailing you off and on. Manpower permitting."

So I'd been right about my la
te-night pal who accompanied me to the Spa City Diner. I shifted gears. "They find any fingerprints on the gun, or other exciting stuff?" I wanted to ask if they'd found any shoe prints, but I refrained. My trust for Dave went only so far.

"All we have on
the gun is smudges, like somebody wiped it off on their shirt or something."

"Hmm," I pondered. "I wonder if the killer also wiped prints off the trophy, after killing Meckel."

"We can't be sure the same person killed both of them."

"True. Have you traced the gun?"

"Sure did. It belonged to Helquist herself."

"You're kidding. Somehow I can't picture old Hilda as a pistol-packing mama."

"Hey, a single woman living alone. . . ."

"So what do you figure happened?" I pictured the scene in my head. "Somebody knocks on her door, and she answers it with a gun in her hand. Then whoever it is grabs the gun, shoots her, and leaves her for dead in the front hall."

Dave brought his cup down from his lips, spilling some cappuccino on the table. "How'd you know she died in the front hall?"

Whoops
. "You must’ve told me."

"No, I didn't."

"Then I must have read it in the
Saratogian,"
I said with feigned casualness.

"That little detail wasn't in the
Saratogian
. We kept it back."

"Then Foxwell or Balducci must
’ve mentioned it last night when they were interrogating me."

Dave's nose narrowe
d a little, like he had just encountered an unpleasant smell. He didn't believe me for a second, and he was still trying to decide whether to press me on it when Gretchen Lang walked up. We had made a date to meet at Madeline's so I could give her the winning poems.

I excused myself from Dave's table and walked off with Gretchen. Dave watched me from underneath quizzical eyebrows.

"So was I right or was I wrong?" Gretchen was saying as we sat down at a corner table. "Weren't the poems marvelous?"

"I got a tad weary of reading about how pretty flowers and butterflies are."

"You're just saying that. Admit it, you loved the poems."

Actually it was true, I did enjoy them. I opened up my folder full of prize-winning literature. "And the grand winner for Grade 1 is . . . drum roll, please . . . Gabe Carlson!"

I handed the poem to Gretchen. She read aloud,

If all the snowflakes

Were cookies and lemon cakes,

I wouldn't care about freezing and sneezing,

I'd lay outside

With my mouth open wide.

"That is
fabulous,"
Gretchen said happily. "Great choice. I knew I could count on you."

I gave her the rest of the winners, and she chirped with pleasure. The way she acted, you'd have thought Saratoga Springs was a veritable hotbed of young T. S. Eliots.

Then she checked her watch and got up to go. "I have to run down to the
Saratogian
and tell them who the winners are, so they can put it in tomorrow's paper."

I glanced over at
Dave's table. He was still dawdling there, and I had a feeling that as soon as Gretchen left he'd come over and talk to me some more about Ms. Helquist’s death. Not that Dave would be trying to bust me exactly, but he might get a little too curious.

So I said to Gretchen, "I'll walk you over there,"
and left the espresso bar with her. We headed down Broadway toward the newspaper office.

Saratoga Springs has
a pleasingly old-fashioned layout. You can live there for years and almost never go to a shopping mall, just hang out downtown. Within a block or two of Broadway you can get anything you want—groceries, hardware, Xerox copies. . . .

As we passed Grand Avenue, where L & S Copies was located about two blocks up, I interrupted a monologue from Gr
etchen about the ethereal sweetness of children's poetry. "Some of their poems were anything
but
sweet. They were fierce," I said. "Like there was a poem from Lou Robinson's kid that I almost gave the prize to, it was so raw."

"Funny you should mention that," Gretchen said. "Lou Robinson came to see me yesterday. Wanted to withdraw his son's poem from the contest."

"Really. Did he explain why?"

"Something about the poem not being appropriate. But when I told him I already gave it to our contest judge, he said never mind and took off."

"Did you mention that the judge was me?"

"Yeah, he seemed kind of flustered by that, to tell the truth.
What’s going on between you two, anyway?"

I didn't feel right telling Gretchen I suspected Lou Robinson's wife
—and his son, too—of murder. Or murders. So I said, "Just school politics. Listen, I have to go to the bank, I'll catch you later."

Gretchen effusively thanked me again and moved on down the street. I walked up the marble steps to the Saratoga Trust Bank, then went inside to Barry Richardson's office.

He was on the phone with his wife when I came in, so he waved me to a seat. They were discussing the groceries he would buy on his way home. My mouth watered as I listened to the guacamole ingredients.

I looked around t
he room, and focused on the family photos on the bookshelf. Barry's wife, Ronnie, was a bleached blond from Stony Creek, a sneeze-you-miss-it town northwest of Saratoga. They met on a bicycle trip ten or fifteen years ago, and had been together ever since. Barry had taken a job at the Saratoga bank so they could live near Ronnie's family. They had two children—Justin, the second-grader who had made the Terra Nova cut, and Wendy, a three-year-old. In the photos, they looked like a very happy family.

I wasn't all that impressed by Ronnie, to tell the truth. She talked a lot a
nd didn't seem all that intelligent, a deadly combination. But she couldn't be too dumb—she did work as a nurse, at the Saratoga Hospital. And it sounded like she made a mean guacamole.

Barry said, "I love you, too," to his wife and hung up. Myself, I always feel a little funny saying "I love you" to Andrea on the phone when there are other men in the room
. Seems too private somehow. Andrea teases me about it, and sometimes when we're on the phone and she knows there are other men around, she'll try to get me to say the magic words.

"Hey, Jake, what
’s up?" Barry said. This quintessential American greeting sounded funny in his British accent. "You heard about Ms. Helquist?"

"Yes, I did."

"What the devil is going on here? People are getting killed right and left."

"Listen, I have a couple more questions about that shouting you heard."

"I was afraid of that," Barry said with a tired sigh. "If I'd known somebody was about to get knocked off, I'd have listened more carefully. You gotta remember, I was making noises in the bathroom myself."

I asked my question anyway. "Do you think the shouting could have come from a boy, instead of a woman?"

Barry stared at me. "What a horrid thought. You think one of the students killed Meckel?"

"I'm considering the possibility."

"Who are you suspecting?"

"I'd rather not say."

Barry sat there and fiddled with a pencil. "I suppose it could have been a boy. I mean, to be honest with you ... if I had to testify in court, I couldn't absolutely swear it wasn't a man."

My jaw dropped. "You're kidding." My field of potential suspects had just doubled.

"I still
think
it was a woman. But when people scream and yell, don't their voices go up a little higher? Even if they're men?"

"Yeah, they do." Especially if the m
an was somebody like, say, Lou Robinson, whose voice was relatively high to begin with despite his burly frame.

"I'm sorry, Jake. I've been laying awake at night, replaying the sounds I heard in my mind."

"Have you remembered anything new? Any specific words?"

"Not really."

"Like 'skateboard'?"

Barry shook his head.

"Or 'ADHD'?"

Barry kept on shaking. But there seemed to be a little shiftiness in his eyes.

"No words at all?" I prodded.

He finally said, "Listen
, maybe I'm imagining this… but I feel like I might have heard the woman, or whoever, shouting the word 'back.' "

"Back?"

"Or maybe Jack, I don't know."

Back, Jack, black, Zack
... Reading all those rhyming poems had gotten my mind going. But I couldn't think of any Jacks or Zacks who might be involved in this. "Maybe somebody said, 'Get back!'"

"I'm telling you, Jake, I don't know. I probably shouldn't even have said anything."

"'Back,'" I said thoughtfully. The word was tickling at my brain, but why? "Why would somebody shout that word? Get off my back. Jump back. Don't come back. Don't hold back." I stopped.
"Held back.
Somebody yelling about a kid getting held back?"

Barry gave a start. "What makes you say that?"

"Why the sudden reaction?" He looked down. "Come on, old chap, spit it out," I said.

Barry was so tense he split his pencil in two.

"You better tell me, before you break any more of those."

He put the two pencil ends down. "This probably has nothing to do with anything. But last week I came into school to teach Justin's class a little bit about investing and interest and so on." He paused. "I mean, it always amazes me how much credit card debt you Americans have.
It’s never too early to teach kids about these things."

I nodded impatiently. "Anyway," Barry continued, "I was in Ms. Helq
uist’s office, signing the visitor's sheet, when Sam Meckel's door opened and Susie Powell came storming out. She slammed the door behind her. She was so upset she didn't even see me standing there, just walked right by me.

"Then after she left, Ms. Helquist and I were just kind of looking at each other awkwardly. And she said, '
It’s hard to deal with, when your child gets held back.'

"So I said something like, 'What are you talking about?' And Ms. H
elquist clammed up all of a sudden. But I figured it out. Susie's daughter—it had to be Megan, not Christine—was getting held back. And the only reason Helquist said anything in the first place was she figured I must already know, because Susie and I are friends. Though I sure as hell don't feel like I'm
acting
like her friend right now."

"Barry, don't feel bad about this. The truth is, I already knew about Megan."

"How do you do it without going crazy, Jake? Don't you feel like you're trying to screw your closest friends?"

I didn't want to go there. In the past I'd had to deal with my sleuthing efforts being responsible for destroying the lives of people I liked
—even loved. I told myself it wasn't really my sleuthing that destroyed them, it was their own actions. But still.

I shook off these unpleasant musings and asked, "What day last week did this happen?"

"Thursday afternoon."

It sure sounded like Susie had lied about working things out with Meck
el last week. On Thursday afternoon she was still hopping mad at him.

And on Tuesday morning of this week he was killed.

INT. SAM MECKEL'S OFFICE-DAY

Susie Powell screams at Meckel:

SUSIE

You can't do this.

MECKEL

(placating)

Look, Susie
—

SUSIE

You can't hold my child back!

MECKEL