4 The Killing Bee (21 page)

I didn't make any promises, instead just launched into my questions. I had plenty of them. "Are you going to admit you knew about your son stealing the skateboard?"

She dropped her eyes. "Yes."

"And the meeting with Meckel on Tuesday
—you figured he would push you about the Ritalin."

"We were afraid of that, yes."

She seemed to want to say more. I waited. Finally it came. "What you have to understand is, Lou and I have both been through terrible substance-abuse problems. We lost years of our lives to alcohol and coke. That’s where we met, at an AA meeting. So we both get affected pretty strongly when these so-called professionals recommend some kind of mood-altering drug. We feel like we'd be starting Mark down the same road that almost killed us."

Everything she w
as saying added to Lou's motivations to pop Meckel. And her own motivations, I noted.

"But maybe your son really needed this drug," I said, trying to keep Sylvia riled up so she'd say more than she meant to.

She gave a grimace. "I'm aware our son needs extra attention. He gets frustrated sometimes. He can have trouble staying on task. But if he's really into something, if he's
engaged,
then he's not a problem. Like, he can spend three hours at a time putting together one of those Lego sets. Or he'll play math games on the computer forever. He doesn't need drugs, he needs
help."

I sighed. Yet another kid who'd been failed by the schools. My side was hurting, so I shifted a little. "You guys must have been totally furious at Meckel."

"We were way past furious. We've given up on public schools. We're enrolling Mark at Spring Hill next year."

Spring Hill was the
local Waldorf school. They subscribe to an educational philosophy that’s a little too weird and cultlike for my tastes.

Actually, three years ago we did send Latree to nursery school at Spring Hill, because it was nearby and the hours were convenient. But then one day Latree came home from school, gazed earnestly into my eyes, and said, "I feel the breath of God upon me."

"What?" I asked.

"I feel the breath of God upon me," he repeated, robotlike.

"Oh, really."

"Mother Mary watches over us all," he explained.

Hmm.

But Spring Hill was a warm, nurturing place in many ways, and might be a good fit for Mark. One major drawback: the tuition had to be at least six or seven K per year, and Lou and Sylvia weren't exactly dot-com millionaires. "How are you going to afford Spring Hill?" I asked.

"We'll manage somehow. Dip into Lou's 401(k) from his old job if we have to. Jacob, you have to understand, we love our child."

"I'm sure you do. But what I'm also hearing is, you hated Meckel. He was gonna turn your only child into a drug addict
—and if you said no, then he was gonna force you and your family into the poorhouse."

Sylvia's hands turned into fists and her eyes blazed. I was afraid maybe I'd pushed too hard, and she was about to spring out of her chair and attack me. Where was that cute Pakistani doctor when I really needed her?

But Sylvia managed to stifle her rage. "Who are you accusing of murder?" she said through gritted teeth. "Me, my husband, or my son?"

"I'm still working on that."

"I was at the store by seven-thirty that morning, working. And Lou and Mark were together, at home, waking up."

"Then I think either you killed him on your own, or Mark and Lou did it together." Once again Sylvia looked ready to tear me apart. "I'm sorry, Sylvia, I'm just calling it like I see it. And I'll tell you something else. Whoever killed Meckel, they really ought to go to the police and confess. Obviously, this death wasn't intentional. It was a tragic accident."

"And what about Ms. Helquist’s death? Was that a tragic accident?"

Sylvia had a point there. Meckel's killer might catch a break
from the cops. But not Helquist’s.

"Do you think one of us killed Ms. Helquist, too?" Sylvia asked.

My head was swimming from Sylvia's questions and her husband's punches. She kept on going. "Why would me or Lou or Mark want to kill
her?
That doesn't make sense. Admit it."

"She must
’ve known one of you killed Meckel. So one of you went over there to shut her up."

"How would she know if we killed Meckel? She wasn't at s
chool that morning. She couldn't’ve seen anything."

I thought back to the phone message Ms. Helquist left for me shortly before she was killed. She knew
something
. But as Sylvia was pointing out, what kind of incriminating evidence could Helquist have had against the Robinsons? Maybe she knew about the whole skateboard affair. But would that knowledge really have scared any of the Robinsons enough to kill her?

Sylvia's face turned pleading. "I don't blame you for being mad at Lou. I'm mad at him too, for what he did to you. But please, sleep on it before you go to the police and destroy my family. If this stuff gets in the papers, Spring Hill won't even let Mark in. He'll be stuck in that horrible middle school."

I understood her desperation. Saratoga Springs has a middle school for sixth- and seventh-graders that's more like a warehouse than a school.

Twenty or thirty years ago, it was the national fashion to build huge middle schools to dump preteens in for two or three years. Nowadays nobody in the education biz thinks these institutions are even halfway sensible, bu
t because of inertia and economics, kids are still stuck there. The best thing you can say about them is they're better than hospitals or jails.

But not by much.

Sylvia was still talking. For someone who was ordinarily quite taciturn, this was impressive. "And the publicity would totally kill our business. Wouldn't you feel like a jerk if it turns out we're innocent?"

"Look, Sylvia
—"

"Don't you have other leads to follow? What about Mark's teacher? I'll bet
she
wanted to kill Meckel."

Whoa,
how did Sylvia find out about Melanie Wilson's sexual harassment complaint? "You mean you knew... ?"

"Yeah, I'm the one who told Meckel in the first place."

Very strange.
"You
told him? How did he respond?"

"He was shocked. He said he'd talk to her, and I got the impression he might fire her."

"He threatened to fire her for filing a complaint? That must be illegal."

Sylvia blinked at me. "Filing a complaint? What are you talking about?"

I blinked back. "What are
you
talking about?"

"Her cheating."

Huh?
"Cheating on who?"

Sylvia looked at me like I was an idiot. "On who? You mean, on what."

"Look, why don't you start over from the beginning."

"Don't you know about Melanie cheating on the Terra Nova tests?"

Andrea better get back with that aspirin soon—real soon. "No, I don't."

"Melanie spent, like, a month giving her students pretests. Just like all the other teachers did. Only Melanie's pretests included questions from this year's
actual tests."

"Really."

"And Mark said, during the test she went around the room. And if she saw somebody had circled a wrong answer, she'd point to it and say something like, 'Why don't you think more about this problem.'"

Sure sounded like cheating, all right.

"And then some of the questions, she was supposed to read them and the multiple-choice answers out loud. So what she did, she'd always say the correct answer in a different way, with a special, you know, inflection, to make it obvious it was the right answer."

"Why did she do all this?"

"Are you kidding? So her kids would get good scores. And she'd look like a good teacher and get rehired. It was a total hustle. That's what I told Meckel."

"When did you talk to him?"

"When he was hassling me about that stupid skateboard."

I nodded, and my aching head instantly regretted
it.

Sexual harassment, sexual orientation, a cheating scandal. . . .

Sam Meckel and Melanie Wilson had some pretty serious issues to deal with.

Had Melanie found a uniquely decisive way to solve them?

15

My tête-à-tête with Sylvia was interrupted when the Pakistani doctor came in with the X rays. "Hi," she said. "Is this your wife?"

"Not exactly. This is the lady whose husband beat me up."

"It was a misunderstanding," Sylvia said quickly.

"I see," the doctor said. "Well, anyway, good news for everybody: your ribs, collarbones, hip bones, et cetera, are all miraculously unbroken."

Sylvia and I both heaved simultaneous sighs of relief. My headache lifted. I felt like hugging the doctor, but my ribs, however unbroken, weren't up to it.

I've noticed an inte
resting thing about me and doctors. Whenever they give me good news, I always think they have a good bedside manner. But whenever their news is bad, their bedside manner also seems bad.

In any case, the doctor left a little bit later, as did Sylvia. I promised her I wouldn't go to the cops just yet.

Then Andrea came with the aspirin. I took a couple for good luck, and Andrea and I bid the hospital farewell. I wouldn't miss it.

"The kids got pretty worried when they heard you were in the hospital," Andrea said as we headed for her minivan. "They'll be thrilled to see you."

"We're not going home just yet," I said.

"Why not?"

"Because we're going to Melanie Wilson's house." Then I told Andrea all about Melanie's cheating.

Andrea shook h
er head, disgusted. "Those standardized tests make people insane."

I gave her directions, and we drove over to the East Side and onto Me
lanie's street. The salutary effects of hearing good news from the doctor began to wear off, and the aspirin hadn't kicked in yet. "Andrea, you feel like taking the lead with Melanie? My head hurts, and she likes women better, anyway."

"She won't like me when I'm done with her."

"I don't doubt it."

Andrea pulled up to the curb outside Melanie's house. She started to get out, but then I noticed a little red car across t
he street pulling away. A familiar perfect profile was behind the wheel.

"Andrea, wait." She tinned and I pointed. "That's Melanie. She's taking off."

Andrea slammed the minivan into gear and burned rubber as she did a screeching U-turn.

"Hey, don't go crazy," I said. "We can always catch Melanie later
—"

But Andrea was a woman possessed. "No time like the present," she said as we tore off. I had no idea our Honda Odyssey could move like that. I mean,
it’s fine for driving kids to little-league practice, but the thing only has four cylinders.

Andrea taxed every one of those cylinders to the max. She blew past a slow-moving SUV and squealed around the corner, closing the distance between us and the little red car. There were still two cars and a motorcycle separating us, but Andrea made short work of them. In a cloud of exhaust fumes, and with
various horns beeping at her, she left those other vehicles in the dust.

I was so astonished, I forgot to scream. Since when had my wife turned into Nicholas Cage?

Ahead of us Melanie sped up, doing her own imitation of an action-adventure hero. She roared down Nelson Avenue, going through two red lights. Andrea blasted through right behind her, leaning on the horn. The pedestrians at the corner of Nelson and Union stood there and gaped. One grizzled old guy gave a pinched frown, and even though we were buzzing by at sixty miles an hour, I could tell exactly what was going through his mind:
Bunch of crazy New Yorkers. This town is going to the dogs.

I finally got my equilibrium back and was about to yell at Andrea to stop. But just then, Melanie stopped. Screeched to a halt, in fact, right in front of us. These airbags sure as hell better work, I thought as I gasped
—

But Andrea slammed the brakes, and we stopped an inch short of Melanie's car.

There were a few seconds where nobody moved. I guess we were all thinking about our near brush with death—or at least with major car repairs.

"Andrea, you are a total lunatic," I said when I got my breath back.

"I did kind of overdo it," she agreed, breathing pretty uncertainly herself.

But when Melanie stepped out of her car, and we did too, Andrea immediately got back into her Kinsey Millhone persona. She needed it, too, because Melanie was on the warpath.

"Are you out of your mind?" Melanie shouted. Her gorgeous face was disfigured by anger and fear. "You almost killed us all!"

"You shouldn't have run away," Andrea said coolly.

"I ran away because you scared the shit out of me. What would you do if some idiot came charging after you like that!"

"I don't believe we've been introduced. My name's Andrea. I think you've met my husband
—"

"Yes, I have, and fuck you both. Stay out of my fucking life." This woman had a mouth on her. She stomped back to her car.

"You cheated on the Terra Nova tests," Andrea said.

Melanie stopped and glared at her. But she didn't say anything, just opened her car door and started to get in.

"And Meckel found out. He told you he was firing you. That’s why you killed him."

"He wasn't gonna fire me," said Melanie. "He was gonna hold it over my head, unless I slept with him."

Then Melanie stepped away from the car and got in Andrea's face. "But the whole thing's a lie, anyhow. I never cheated on those tests. Sylvia Robinson made that up to get back at me."

"Yeah, right," my wife said. "I'm sure we can find other parents who'll confirm what Sylvia said."

"Why are you people out to get me?" Melanie said, giving her hair an angry toss. And then, as I watched her blond hair tossing, I suddenly saw something else, too.

The late-afternoon sun was angling down toward
Melanie’s little car, and over her shoulder I caught a shiny metallic glint in her front seat. No, not in her front seat actually, in her glove compartment. It must have sprung open when Melanie braked her car so abruptly.

The two women kept jawing at each other like
guests on the Jerry Springer show, but I no longer heard all their words. I moved toward Melanie's car, stooped down, and looked in the glove compartment. Sure enough, that glint belonged to a flashlight.

And not the two-dollar plastic kind that you can find in half the glove compartments in the world. This was a big, hard, metal flashlight.

The kind that, if somebody swung it at your head, could cause a pretty nasty concussion.

I opened Melanie's car door. "Hey," she said. I reached down and gr
abbed the flashlight by the handle as Melanie snapped, "Get out of there."

I ignored her and
examined the head of the flashlight. "What are you doing? Give me that!" she yelled, and came at me.

I put the flashlight behind my back. She reached around and tried to grab it away. Then I held it up high where she couldn't reach it. But she shoved me back against the car and grabbed again.

Throwing all sense of chivalry to the winds, I aimed a forearm at her perky nose and drove her backward. Then Andrea came up and gave her a hard shove in the stomach, pushing her back even farther.

Melanie put her han
d to her side.
God, she's reaching for a gun.

But no, she was just putting her hand on her hip, trying to give herself some attitude. It didn't work. Her eyes were too scared.

Now that Melanie was far enough away from me that she couldn't snatch the flashlight—especially with Andrea as my bodyguard—I lowered it down to eye level so I could examine it again.

"What happened to your flashlight?" I asked.

Melanie didn't respond, just stood there panting.

"Looks a little banged up."

And indeed it did. One side of the flashlight head was dented. No doubt that happened when the flashlight was putting a dent in my own head.

I inspected the flashlight carefully. "
What’s this little red speck?" I said. "Could it be blood?
My
blood?"

Melanie curled her lips, and her hands balled into fists. She reminded me of a trapped animal, a large cat of some sort. Is there such a thing as a blond jaguar?

Now the truth is, there
was
no red speck on that flashlight. But hopefully Melanie didn't know that. "Guess I'll bring this to the cops," I said. "I'm sure they can match the DNA."

"You sonufabitch," said Melanie.

Now Andrea got into it. "You practically kill my husband, and you have the balls to-"

"Look, I
had
to hit him," Melanie said.

Aha!
Now if we could just get her to keep talking. "Why'd you have to hit me?" I asked.

"Why do you think? Because you were about to catch me. Hey, it was dark in Meckel's office that night. I didn't know who you were, I thought maybe you were gonna kill me. I was just protecting myself."

"Why were you there in the first place?"

"Oh, hell." Melanie looked suddenly tired, and her face drooped. "You know why I was there."

"Yes. To cover up for your murder."

Her face jumped back into full alert mode. "No, I didn't kill him!"

"It’s time to give up, Melanie," said Andrea softly. "It’s all over. You know that."

"I didn't kill anybody. Yeah, I broke into Meckel's office that night, but
that’s
all
I did!"

"Why'd you break in?" Andrea asked.

"It's like I told you. He wrote up a report about me cheating, and threatened to go to the superintendent with it. I just wanted to get it back. I knew it was in his desk somewhere."

"But Meckel was already dead. He couldn't hurt you anymore. So why'd you want it back so bad?"

"I didn't want the new principal seeing it. Or the police."

"Why the police?"

"I don't know. 'Cause cheating is, like, illegal."

"Get real," Andrea said. "You wouldn't break into the school after midnight and risk arrest because you were nervous about some little cheating scam. It was the murder you were scared about."

Melanie shook her head vigorously. "I just wanted to take that stupid report home and burn it. That’s all. What if the new principal gave it to the superintendent? It would go on my record. I'd never get another job."

Andrea and I looked at each other. "Sounds like an excellent murder motive to me," she said.

"Me, too."

"Oh, for Christ
’s sake," Melanie said.

"Why didn't you j
ust go into Meckel's office during the day, instead of sneaking in at midnight?" Andrea asked.

"Because I knew I'd never get in there. That old witch, Ms. Helquist, she was always there."

"You didn't like Ms. Helquist?" I asked.

"What, now you want to frame me for that one, too? Look, I'm sorry I hit you on the head, but except for that I never hurt
anybody."

"If
that’s the story you wanna go with, fine," I said. "Come on, Andrea, let’s hit the police station. Melanie, we're 'borrowing' your flashlight."

"
It’s not fair," Melanie said. "I didn't cheat, I swear. You can't believe anything the Robinsons say. They're, like, pathological liars."

Melanie was following Andrea and me to our car. I got in the driver's side, still yakking, still trying to coax a confession out of her. "We'll let the cops sort it all out," I said. "Too bad you weren't smart enough to get rid of the flashlight."

"What about that friend of yours, Elena Aguilera?" Melanie said bitterly.
"She
cheated. Why don't you tell the cops about
her?"

Andrea and I both
stared at Melanie. "Elena?" Andrea asked.
"Elena
cheated on the tests?"

Melanie realized she was onto something. She curled her lips triumphantly. "
That’s right. You sic the cops on me, and I'll rat on Elena. There goes
her
teaching career down the toilet. Especially when the cops find out everything else she did."

I was sitting in the car with the door still open. "Okay, I'll bite. What else did Elena do?"

"She gave one of her kids a higher grade on his report card than he deserved. Because Meckel pushed her into it."

"Which kid was this?"

"Mike Lawrence."

Holy tamale. I turned to Andrea, who was still standing outside the car by the passenger side. "His father is Scott Lawrence, the jerk on the school board."

"Why would Meckel push Elena about this kid's grade?" Andrea asked.

Melanie shrugged. "I guess his dad had some kind of pull."

I figured I knew exactly what that pull was. Lawrence was blackmailing Meckel about the computer purchase.

Melanie pointed a finger at us. "If you guys really
want to catch the murderer, you should go after Elena, not me. She's the one who was there at the school that morning."