Killing Mr. Griffin (3 page)

“Like who?” Jeff asked. “Greg and Tony?” “Blabbermouth Greg? Are you kidding? We don’t want him. And Tony’s a hood. He’s got a police record from that time he got caught hoisting that radio equipment. No, we want somebody above suspicion. I’d say Dave Ruggles.” Betsy frowned. “He’d never do it.” “I think he would.” “Dave’s president of the senior class!” Jeff said. “He wouldn’t go for something like this!” “He’ll do it.” Mark spoke with certainty. “I know more about Dave than you do. He likes a challenge.” “Well, nobody would suspect him, that’s for sure.” Betsy still sounded doubtful. “He seems so straight.” “So do you, babe.” Jeff reached over to ruffle her blond hair. “The all-American girl—head cheerleader-homecoming queen—teachers’ pet.” “I’m not Griffin’s pet.” Betsy moved her head

so that her hair slid out from under his fingers. “Okay, Mark, I’ll take your word on Dave. If you say he’ll do it, he probably will. Is he the decoy?” “No,” Mark said. “I don’t think he’d go for that. He wouldn’t stick his neck out that far. I’ve got the decoy all picked out Sue McConnelL” “Sue McConnell?” Jeff repeated the name blankly.

“Who’s that?” “I know,” Betsy said. “It’s that junior who’s taking our lit class. The little creep with the glasses. Oh, Mark, you’re really too much!” She started to laugh. “I’m not kidding,” Mark said.

“I mean it. She’s the one.” “Why her?” “Well, for one thing, she’s a grind. You know what she got on that mid-semester test? I saw the grade when Griffin handed back the papers. It was a B. Besides that, she doesn’t go around with us. Nobody would ever tie us together. You know what a decoy is, don’t you? It lures things into traps by looking innocent.” “I wouldn’t recognize her if you stuck her in my face,”

Jeff said. “Like you say, she doesn’t go around with us. How do you think you’re going to get her to be a part of this?” “Dave can do it,”

Mark said. “Dave? How?” “She’s got a thing for Dave,” Betsy said, nodding. “Mark’s right about that It sticks out all over her. She sits in class and stares at him as if she were starving and he were a chocolate bar. It’s kind of pitiful, really.” “I don’t know how you can notice stuff like that,” Jeff said in bewilderment “I’m in that class too, and I can’t even think who she is. Okay, I’ll believe you.

She has the hots for Dave. That still doesn’t mean she’ll be part of a

kidnapping. If Griffin’s giving her

B’s, she’s not hurting in there. For all we know she may even like the bastard.” “She doesn’t,” Mark said. “She’s used to A’s. She gets back a paper with a B or C on it and crumples it up and dumps it in the trash. She’s homely and she’s lonely and she’s one unhappy chick. If Dave will put a little sunshine into her life, she’ll give him the moon.” “What are you anyway, some kind of psychologist?” Jeff regarded his friend with undisguised awe. “How do you know stuff like that?” “I watch people. I notice things.” Jeff thought of Mark in class, sitting silent in the seat behind him, regarding everyone and everything from beneath those heavy, half-closed lids—studying faces, analyzing expressions, drinking in details and storing them away in the iron-gray filing cabinet of his mind. “I guess you must.” He remembered the first time they had met each other. Jeff had been twelve then, big for his age, standing head and shoulders above the others in the seventh-grade classroom. He had felt huge and selfconscious. His voice had already been starting to change. When roll was called he had answered with a froglike croak, and the rest of the class had burst into laughter. Even the teacher had smiled, and Jeff had felt the sting of hot tears in his eyes. He had blinked them back, furious at himself, hating all of them. Choking on his own fury, he had wedged himself into the seat behind his desk, wishing he could disappear beneath it. His eyes had shifted sideways, and he had found himself caught by the gaze of the boy in the seat across from him. He was a strange-looking boy with a face like a fox and cool, appraising,

gray-marble eyes. The boy had continued to stare at him without a flicker of anything that looked like honest interest. He had just stared. Jeff had dropped his own eyes. A few minutes later he had raised them again. The boy was still staring. When lunch period arrived, Jeff had stayed in his seat, pretending to shuffle through papers until the classroom was empty. Then he had gotten up and gone out the door into the hall. The boy had been standing there, waiting for him. “You get mad too easy,” he had said, falling into step beside him. “You let everything hang out. That’s not good.” “What’s it to you?” Jeff had asked angrily. “Who the hell are you, anyway? I’ve never seen you around before.” “My name’s Mark Kinney. I’m new in town. Moved here to live with my aunt and uncle.” The boy had been a good six inches shorter than he, but he walked tall. Jeff had the strange feeling that they were the same height. “You’re Jeff Garrett.”

“How do you know that?” “I listened at roll call. I remember names.”

The boy’s shorter legs had lengthened their stride to keep pace with Jeff’s longer ones. “I’m gonna do something after school. Something real interesting. Want to come?” “What?” Jeff asked, interested despite himself. “What are you going to do?” “Do you like cats?”

“Not especially.” “Neither do I. I’ve got a plan. Something I’m going to do with a cat. You coming?” “Will it take long?” Jeff had asked.

“I’ve got a paper route.”

“Not long.” “Okay, I’ll come then.” He had looked at the boy more closely now, at the odd, wide-cheeked face, the tight, tan skin, the sparkling gray eyes. There was something almost magnetic about those eyes. “What are you going to do?” “You’ll see.” “Where are you going to do it?” “Behind the school. Behind the cafeteria where they keep the garbage cans. I’ll meet you there at three-thirty.” “Okay. Why not?” He did not know why he agreed. He had no real interest in meeting anybody anywhere when school was over. But he had said, “Okay.” And he had gone. Now, five years later, he heard himself saying again, “Okay. Okay, why not?” “Good boy,” Mark said, and Betsy flashed him a smile of approval. Jeff slid his hand along the back of the seat until it rested behind her head. This time she did not pull away. “It’ll be fun,” she said. “Like a game. We ought to have something fun to remember from high school. When my dad was in school, do you know what he did? He and a friend of his got a copy of a key to one of the doors of the building, and one night they took a horse out of a farmer’s pasture and put it in the girls’ restroom. He still talks about it—the way a bunch of girls went in the next morning and came screaming out!” “We’ll remember this the same way,” Mark said.

“You’ll tell your kids about it. Griffin, thrashing and crawling, begging us not to hurt him—that’ll be something to remember, all

right.” He wasn’t smiling. Mark seldom smiled. But his face was aglow with a strange luminosity, an inner light that seemed to come through his skin and give it an odd, ethereal radiance. His eyes, what could be seen of them under the drooping lids, had the glint of smoked glass caught in a ray of sunlight. No one would ever have called Mark Kinney handsome, but there were moments when he had a special beauty, something so striking and strange that it stopped the heart and caused those near him to catch their breath. It was a transformation Jeff had come to recognize. He had seen it for the first time back in junior high school, on that day they had met each other—the time that Mark had set fire to the cat.

Davy, is that you, dear?” “Yes, Gram. Who else?” “Aren’t you going to come in to see me?” “Sure. Just a sec.” David finished spreading mustard on a slice of bread, laid a hunk of cheese on it, and doubled it over. Picking up the sandwich with one hand and a glass of milk with the other, he left the kitchen and walked through the small, dark living room into the bedroom beyond. The old lady was in her accustomed place in the armchair by the window, the spot from which she could look directly across into the bedroom window of the house next door. She was wearing her blue flowered housecoat, and her long hair was pulled back and held in place with a blue ribbon, so that it fell, limp and gray, over the slanted shoulders and down the back in the style of a teenage girl. “So, an after-school snack is more important than coming in to say hello to your grandmother?” “Not usually, Gram.

Today I missed lunch.” David crossed the room and leaned over to place a dutiful kiss on the pink, rouged cheek. The skin felt cool and dry to his lips, and so soft that it seemed to sink beneath the pressure of the kiss and lie there, indented. “What have you been doing today?” “What do I ever do? Watch the game shows. A lady today from Kansas City had to guess something behind a curtain that cost five thousand dollars. What do you think it was?” “Any clues?” “The man—the one who asks the questions—he told her, “It runs.”” “A car?”

David guessed. “That’s what she thought, but it turned out to be a racehorse, can you imagine? Did you ever think a horse would be worth that much money? The poor lady didn’t get anything except some little consolation prize like a hair dryer or something. It doesn’t seem fair, does it? They kept saying things to make her think it was going to be a car.” “Well, that’s how it goes, I guess.” “But it wasn’t fair.” The weak old eyes settled upon David’s sandwich. “What is it you have there, Swiss cheese? That does look good.” “Would you like me to make you one?” “Well, maybe just a half. Your mother went off to work this morning and didn’t bother to leave anything fixed for my lunch, only a little bit of tuna. She didn’t even leave a Jello-O. I know we have some. I saw the package last night when she brought it home from the grocery.” “I’ll make it up. If I do it now, it’ll be

jelled by dinner.” “Make up the green. It’s got the most flavor.”

“The green it will be.” He left the bedroom and went back to the kitchen. The remains of the sandwich makings were spread out on the table, and he eyed them carefully, wondering if he had left enough cheese for the promised sandwich. Deciding that he had not, he took some out of his own and replanted it between two fresh slices of bread.

He put a pan of water onto the stove to boil and opened the cabinet where his mother stored foodstuff. There were two boxes of Jell-O, cherry and banana. “Good old Mom,” he muttered resignedly. “She bought everything but green.” There were times when he wondered if his mother did this sort of thing deliberately, knowing that the old woman liked lime Jell-O and knowing too that he would be the one stuck with telling her that it wasn’t there. As soon as he allowed such a conjecture to cross his mind, he was swept with guilt. His mother did well to make it to the grocery store at all after a full day taking dictation and typing. In her place another woman would have forgotten the Jell-O completely, or maybe even not have come home at all. There were women who did that, just took off and went when things got too rough for them. He had read an article on that subject only recently.

The author had given some startlingly high number of such cases and had said that runaway wives in America were soon going to equal or exceed the number of runaway husbands. But his mother would not be one of them, of that he could be sure. To begin with, she wasn’t a wife and hadn’t been one for over ten years. On top of that, she was super responsible Everybody told him that—his aunts, the neighbors, even their minister. “I hope you appreciate your mother,” the Reverend

Chandler had said one Sunday after services. “There aren’t many women who would do what she has-taken an invalid motherin-law into her home to love and care for after being deserted by her own husband.

Your mother’s a saint, son, and don’t you forget it. You’re a lucky boy to have the opportunity of growing up in her home.” “I know it, sir,” David had assured him, conscious of his mother standing behind him, knowing without looking that she had heard the minister’s words and was pleased by them. When they reached the car she had been smiling a little and the harsh lines between her eyes and at the corners of her mouth had softened. At that moment she had looked startlingly like the girl in the wedding picture that David had found one day in a suitcase in the attic. “Would you like to stop and pick up some ice cream on the way home?” she had asked him. The pleasant mood had stayed with her most of the rest of the day. “Davy?”

“Coming, Gram. I’ve got your sandwich.” He carried it in to her on a plate. “Do you want some milk?” “No. It curdles in my stomach.

That’s what happens when you get old. Have you made the Jell-O?” “I’m getting ready to now.” Back in the kitchen he poured the boiling water into a bowl and mixed in the banana gelatin and added ice. He set the bowl in the refrigerator and ran more water into the sink over the breakfast dishes. He dumped in detergent. David Ruggles, President of the Senior Class, King of the Sink! His lips curled wryly. What would

the kids at school think if they could see him now? David had never overestimated himself. He knew

exactly who he was and what he could do with what he had. He knew he was handsome. It was an unusual sort of handsomeness, but it was there, and it worked. He looked exactly like his father. He couldn’t remember his father very well, but he knew what he looked like from the wedding picture. His father had been a small man, slightly built, with the most beautiful face in the world. When David looked at himself in the mirror he saw that face looking back at him, fine boned, delicate, perfectly shaped with gentle eyes and a fine, sensitive mouth. He wondered sometimes what his father had been like as a person, with a face like that. He compared the face with his mother’s, strong and sensible, and he tried to imagine the two of them together, laughing and joking and holding hands, kissing perhaps. It was impossible. In his mind his father’s face was floating on a cloud, his mother’s coming in the door behind a bag of groceries. One was a dream, the other reality. He finished sponging the dishes and ran hot water from the tap straight over them to wash off the suds. His mother didn’t like him to do this as it used up too much hot water, but it was fast and easy. From the back room his grandmother called, “Davy? Is the Jello ready yet?” “No, Gram. It’ll be a couple of hours. I just put it in the fridge.” He left the kitchen and went in to pick up the sandwich plate. “Do you need anything more?” “Yes,” the old woman said. “I have to go to the little girls’ room.” “Oh, Gram, can’t you wait awhile?” “I’ve been waiting all day.” He knew this was not true.