An Educated Death (33 page)

"Our troubles are none of your business. Russ Hamlin is nothing but a rabble-rousing gossip who doesn't know enough to keep things to himself," Bill said. "Go away and leave us alone."

But Kathy was determined to defend herself. "I was
not
neglecting Laney, I just couldn't stand to have her around," Kathy said, "knowing that that careless little girl could do what I've tried and tried and can't do! Why can't you go away and leave me alone? Leave both of us alone. We didn't kill her. We just didn't want her to have that abortion—"

"Kathy, be quiet!" Bill said. "This is none of their business. This is private. Personal. It doesn't have anything to do with Laney's death."

"The two of you are having fertility problems?" I said.

"Infertility problems," Bill said in a loud voice. "We have been tested and prodded and drugged and scraped. We spend half our lives taking our temperatures. Our sex life is a joke. We might as well be making love on an examining table there are so many people looking over our shoulders. I've been intimate with a test tube so many times I feel like an adulterer every time I see one. We are devoting all of our emotional energy to trying to have a baby and then Laney comes waltzing in one day and says she's pregnant, can we tell her where she can get an abortion?"

Kathy buried her face in her hands and refused to look at me but Bill, despite having cautioned Kathy not to talk, suddenly had a lot to say. He went on talking, his voice rising. "We explained our situation. Asked her to consider having the baby and giving it to us. Kathy's parents have plenty of money. We could have sent her somewhere, supported her, given her anything she needed. She laughed in our faces. Laney could be very cruel. She said she was sorry about our troubles but she wasn't about to ruin her life and her figure having a baby at seventeen just so she could give it to us." He broke off, his voice quivering with emotion, and put his arms around his wife.

"So you started ignoring her because it was too painful to deal with her?"

"We tried to talk to Josh," Kathy said in a barely audible voice. "We assumed the baby was his and we thought he might have some influence over her. He didn't even know that she was pregnant. They had a terrible fight about it. He was extremely upset by the news. But I don't think he killed Laney. Despite what she did to him, he still loved her."

"What about you? Did you know Laney was planning to have an abortion last weekend?"

"Yes. I tried to talk her out of it. She wouldn't listen."

"So the two of you, even though you knew that a child—and Laney Taggert was still a child—a child under your care was going off on her own to have an abortion, didn't do anything to help her or make sure that she would be safe? You were willing to let her go into the city on the train and have an abortion? With no thought for the consequences?"

"Don't you understand?" Bill Donahue roared, leaping toward me and grabbing me by the arm. "Are you an idiot? She was killing a baby!" He pulled me out of my chair and propelled me across the room. "We didn't want to help her. We wanted to kill her!"

At that moment, Officer Hennessey leaned into the room, vigilant and alert. "Is there a problem in here?" he asked. It was the understatement of the decade.

 

 

 

Chapter 17

 

 

Officer Hennessey was an experienced cop. It showed in his timing, which was perfect, and in the cool, careful way he surveyed the scene. His quick eyes took in my staggering progress toward the door, Bill Donahue's aggressive stance, and Kathy's furious face. He stepped quickly forward and took the briefcase from me. "Finished?" he said.

"You bet." I exited with all the dignity I could muster and then collapsed against the wall, stunned by the emotional firestorm I'd just come through. I was in no shape to be shoved around, but that wasn't what bothered me. What bothered me was how unbalanced their personal situation had made the Donahues, and how readily the community had closed around them and protected them, protection that gave them access to and responsibility for vulnerable students when they no longer had any emotional energy to spare for anyone but themselves. I assumed it had been done with the best of intentions, faculty communities being so close, but sacrificing a dormful of students to the Donahues' personal crisis represented a serious lapse of judgment. It was something Peter Van Deusen needed to know about.

"Guy got a little upset with you," Hennessey said.

"I'm afraid I bring that out in people sometimes. I have a habit of asking the wrong questions."

"Or the right ones," he said, grabbing my arm. "Just through here is a little kitchen with plenty of tea bags. I think you could use a cup right about now, couldn't you?" He got me settled at a little table with a cup of steaming tea, sat down across from me with his own mug of coffee, and said, "Want to tell me what happened in there?"

"Are you supposed to debrief me?"

He shook his head. "Just thought you might want to talk about it. You looked a little shook up when you came out."

"You can say that again. I think Donahue wanted to dismember me. He may look like a big teddy bear, but he is one angry man!" I'm a great one for keeping things to myself, but after yesterday, it didn't seem like a bad idea to share what I had learned. Just in case someone did kill me, it wouldn't hurt to have a second person who knew what I knew. While my tea cooled, I told him what had happened. He was a good listener, quiet and watchful. Obviously Rocky didn't hire men in his own image, for which I was grateful. I wasn't up for bombastic explosions and difficult questions today.

The warm tea had a soothing effect. I could have put my head down on the table and gone to sleep, but I had to see Russ Hamlin and then others. I had a long way to go before I could sleep. A long way. "Thanks for the tea," I said, "it was kind of you."

"You sound surprised. Are the police not supposed to be kind?"

"That's mostly been my experience." It would take all my fingers and some toes to count the number of times a cop, including Andre, has yelled at me or badgered me or tried to keep me from doing what I had to do because I was woman and needed protecting.

"Well," he said with a rueful smile, "I guess we'll have to change all that."

I pondered that statement as we crossed the campus to the Stannard Theater and got someone to direct us to the green room. I was never a theater person myself, too private for public exhibitions, but Joe Hennessey was, or had been. On our way down the stairs to the bowels of the building, he explained that the green room is where the actors wait. As we walked through the darkened, deserted halls, I was glad I had Hennessey with me. I kept expecting someone to jump out of a doorway and bop me on the head.

Eventually we came to a door with Green Room stenciled on it in black letters. As Hennessey opened the door we could hear the sound of angry voices. Most of the room was dark but the center, where an open space surrounded a miniature stage, was brightly lit. Russ Hamlin, dramatic in head-to-toe black, stood with his hands on his hips, glaring up at the hulking figure of Bill Donahue. They hadn't heard us come in. Hennessey shut the door quietly and we faded back against the wall and watched the scene unfold.

"You gossiping little faggot!" Donahue yelled. For such a mild-looking man, he sure yelled a lot. "Why did you have to tell that bitch about Kathy? It wasn't any of her business."

Hamlin spread his arms wide, a stage-gesture protestation of innocence, executed a graceful half-turn, and walked a few steps away. "You've got it all wrong, Bill. I
didn't
tell her about Kathy. She asked me some things about Kathy and all I said was she'd have to ask Kathy those questions directly. What's wrong with that?"

"Liar!" Donahue said. In the bright light I could see little flecks of spit fly out when he spoke. I half expected him to say "Liar, liar, pants on fire," he sounded so childish, but he didn't.

"She says you told her that Kathy had been neglecting Laney." He took a menacing step toward Hamlin and I felt Hennessey shift beside me, poised to intervene if necessary. "Why did you tell her that?"

Hamlin danced away again, calling back provocatively, "Well, it was the truth, wasn't it?" He'd reached the edge of the small stage. He placed his hands on the edge of it and leapt gracefully up, standing so that he was now taller than Donahue.

"She doesn't need to know everything about our lives just because one of our students died. It's not her business—"

"You're wrong, Bill. Let's see... now, what was it Dave Holdorf said to me when he asked me to go and meet with her? Oh, yes... that she was checking out our procedures for keeping track of the students and ensuring their safety to be sure Laney didn't fall through the cracks somehow. That's just what happened to her, wasn't it? Poor little Laney fell through the cracks while you and Kathy were agonizing about your inability to reproduce." He glided away across the stage. "Seems to me that that was precisely her business."

"That big cow! I can't believe Dorrie hired her. She has no tact and she doesn't understand anything about private schools. She's no good with people. Just because Laney got careless and fell through the ice and drowned is no excuse to turn our private lives inside out." I felt Hennessey's hand on my shoulder, restraining me, though he didn't really need to. I wasn't about to go charging up and interrupt the conversation just because Bill Donahue didn't find me smart or attractive. People never like you when you're threatening to them.

"Where have you been, Donahue? On the moon?" Hamlin's voice was heavy with scorn and disbelief. "Laney's death was no accident. Nor was the attempt to poison Dorrie's consultant. And now Carol Frank is missing. You look surprised, Bill. What's the matter, too busy cozying up to a test-tube to pay attention to what's going on? It's all over the campus." He backed away from Donahue, his hand on his chest. "Oh, I get it. You and Kathy did her in because she wouldn't sign over the kid and now you're playing innocent, is that it?"

"You bastard!" Bill Donahue jumped up on the stage himself, landing with an awkward thump and clambering to his feet. As he jumped up, Hamlin jumped down.

"I'm no bastard," he said. "I'm a perfect blend of both my parents and we can trace ourselves to back before the
Mayflower.
Why don't you go home and have sex or something? I'm trying to work."

"Well, at least we know it wasn't your baby, don't we? Your kind doesn't reproduce. You probably did her in yourself because you were so jealous that Josh was interested in her instead of you."

"My, my," Hamlin said, marching back and forth with his hands on his hips as he stared up at Bill Donahue, "do I detect a bit of homophobia there? You're assuming that just because I'm small and graceful and interested in theater, I must be gay, right? It might surprise you to know that it was Laney I was in love with and not Josh." He clapped his hands together, imitating a small child's delight. "It does surprise you, doesn't it? I can see it all over your face. You really don't know much about people, do you, except in that narrow-minded, black-and-white student council president sort of way. Unlike you and your greedy, self-centered little wife, I knew it would be bad for Laney to have a baby at seventeen." There was a stool beside him. He sat down on it, twining his legs around the rungs, seeming remarkably unafraid of Donahue's looming anger.

"Kathy isn't greedy," Donahue insisted. "She's sad. She couldn't see—neither of us could see—why it didn't make sense for Laney to have the baby and give it to us."

"No, I suppose you couldn't see that, could you. Did she ask you for money?"

Donahue shook his head angrily. "She knew better than to ask us to finance the murder of a baby."

"She never asked me," Hamlin said sadly. "And I would have been so glad to help. Do you have any idea who the father was?" He sounded hopeful.

"Of course not!"

"So it wasn't you? You didn't get sick of those test tubes and jump at the chance to stick it into a real woman?"

Donahue kicked furiously at the stool, sending it over with a crash, but Hamlin, lithe as a cat, landed on his feet and danced away a few steps. "Look, this is really stupid, you know, us fighting like this. Our real goal ought to be to find Laney's killer. Isn't that right, Ms. Kozak?" He spun around in our direction, threw his arms wide, and bowed slightly.

I walked toward the light with Hennessey trailing after me. Bill Donahue stood on the brightly lit stage, pounding one fist into another. All his body language said how clearly he wanted to hit Hamlin, and probably me, as well. Instead he slammed a fist into the black wall beside him, punching a hole in the black-painted cardboard. "Oh cut it out, Bill," Hamlin said. "We're still using that." Donahue vented his anger by punching a few more holes and then stormed out without another word.

"Bravo," I said, the sound of my clapping hands echoing in the empty room. "Quite a performance."

He sketched a brief bow. "Thank you, thank you. Always do better with an audience, of course."