School Days (14 page)

I
WENT TO SEE
Chief Cromwell in his office at Dowling Police headquarters. DiBella had called ahead for me, so they wouldn't open fire when I arrived. But I still had to wait a long time at the front desk. I was willing to. And finally, they sent me on in.

Cromwell mad-dogged me for a while, giving me the deadeye cop stare he was working on. I moved a chair a little closer to his desk and sat down and crossed my legs.

“Hi,” I said.

Cromwell stared some more.

“How ya doin'?” I said.

More staring. Then, when he had me softened up, he spoke.

“You just won't learn,” Cromwell said.

“I can't,” I said. “Nobody tells me anything.”

“What do you want to know, for crissake. We got the killers. They've confessed. What the fuck are you after?”

“I know where they got the guns,” I said.

“Yeah?”

“And how they got the money to buy them.”

“Yeah?”

“You ever have any complaints about either of them?” I said.

“Clark or Grant?”

“Yes.”

Cromwell leaned back in his chair. I noticed the pearl-handled .45 was back in its shiny holster on the corner of his desk. Looked good there.

“Well,” Cromwell said after a while. “I can't talk you out of this, and I can't seem to scare you off.”

“You could try charming me,” I said.

“Would that work?”

“No, but I wouldn't have to punch you in the balls.”

He rocked his spring-loaded swivel a little.

“Nobody wants this opened up,” he said after a while. “The kids' parents, the school, the kids themselves.”

He looked at me heavily for a minute.

“I don't. Town doesn't. We want to wrap it up neat and put it away and get on with it.”

“How 'bout the people who lost someone in the shooting?” I said.

“They want it over. They know we got the bastards. They
want to see them fry, and they want to move on as best they can. Nobody wants you opening up all the fucking wounds again.”

“They won't fry in this state,” I said.

“I know, just a manner of speaking,” he said. “Been simpler if we'd shot them dead on the spot.”

“That would have required you all to actually go on in there and maybe interrupt things,” I said.

Cromwell nodded slowly. All of the General Patton crap seemed to have drained from him. He seemed gray and tired, almost human.

“I know,” he said. “I know.”

“You didn't know what to do,” I said, “did you.”

He shook his head.

“We're a small town,” he said. “Upper-class. Quiet. We never ran into this sort of thing. Most of my guys never fired their weapons except on the range.”

“You?” I said.

He looked at the big six-gun on the corner of his desk as if he'd never seen it before.

“No,” he said.

“Hard to learn on the job like that,” I said. “Most people aren't ready the first time.”

“God, I hope there's no second time,” he said.

“There'll be something,” I said. “Sometime. And you'll be more ready.”

“You're not going to leave this alone,” Cromwell said.

“No,” I said. “I'm not. Either of these kids got a history with you?”

“I don't give out juvie files,” he said.

“I'm not looking for files. Just information. You and me. Alone in the room. Either of them been in trouble you know about?”

“We talked to the Grant kid couple times,” Cromwell said.

He was looking past my left shoulder, out an office window, at the nice, neat stretch of lawn in front of the station. Orderly.

“He was shooting cats with a pellet gun,” Cromwell said slowly. “Strays mostly, but he got a coupla pets and the owners complained and we brought him in and talked with him and his mother. He was maybe thirteen.” He shook his head.

“I've met his mother,” I said.

“She just sort of said the hell with him. Like he's some sort of aberration. It's not my fault.”

“Talk to his grandfather?” I said.

“They begged us not to. Both of them. I felt bad for the kid, tell you the truth. His mother's just a waste of time.”

“The last hippie,” I said.

“Yeah,” Cromwell said. “So we confiscated the pellet gun and told him he was on probation and we were giving him a break, so if he got in any more trouble, we'd go hard on him.”

“Did he?”

“Nothing official. I heard he hung out at the Rocks with the burnouts and freaks. But we never had any reason to bring him in again.”

“What'd you do with the pellet gun?” I said.

“Give it to my sister's kid, lives outside Stockbridge.”

“And he probably uses it to shoot cats,” I said.

Cromwell shrugged.

“Maybe,” he said. “But he's not doing it here.”

“Anything with Jared Clark?”

“No. Never even heard of him until the Grant kid fingered him after the shooting.”

“Ever talk with anybody about him?” I said.

“Talked with the school shrink.”

“Dr. Blair?”

“Yeah. You met her?”

I nodded.

“She's something, isn't she?”

“She is,” I said. “What did she tell you?”

“Classic stuff,” Cromwell said. “Jared was bullied a lot. Kids picked on him. Pushed him around. She feels he allied himself with Grant so that Grant would protect him.”

“Why would Grant protect him?” I said.

“Don't know. He was the school tough guy. Big kid. Football player. Who would have thought it, him having the mother he did?”

“Sometimes, I guess, the apple falls as far as it can from the tree,” I said.

He nodded.

“You know of any previous connection between Clark and Grant?” I said.

“No. But, you know how it is, they don't pop up on the screen unless they are causing trouble.”

“And these guys weren't?”

“Except for the cat killings,” Cromwell said.

“Love to know how they got together,” I said.

“Maybe Blair knows,” Cromwell said. “Ask her. Be a good excuse to talk with her.”

“I will,” I said. “Maybe she'll show me her knees.”

“You gonna tell me about where they got the guns?” Cromwell said.

“No,” I said.

“Isn't that sort of like withholding evidence?” Cromwell said.

“It's not like you need it for a conviction,” I said.

Cromwell nodded.

“Just thought I'd ask,” he said.

I
T HAD BEEN
a wet summer. Outside my office window, it was raining again. I was watching it. Pearl was resting on her couch. Later, when the excitement died down, I might read the paper. My phone rang. Pearl had no reaction. She didn't care about phones. I didn't, either, but somebody had to answer, so I picked it up.

A
N HOUR LATER
,
Pearl and I pulled up in front of the Dowling village market. The rain was steady but not abusive.
Through the steady sweep of the wipers, I saw him in front of the market, the red-haired kid from the Rocks. He was pressed against the front of the building, trying to stay dry. He was wearing the zippered top of a warm-up suit, his cap on backward, and sucking on a cigarette. His jeans were baggy, and his sneakers were black Keds high-tops. Retro. When he got in the front seat, Pearl growled at him from the back.

“What's wrong with him?” the kid said.

“Her,” I said. “She doesn't like you.”

“She bite?”

“Not today,” I said.

I reached back and patted her. He hunched forward and a little sideways in the passenger seat, away from Pearl.

“Where we going,” I said.

“How much is the reward?” he said.

“Depends on what you show me,” I said.

“I'm going to take you where they did a lot of shooting.”

“So you said. Let's go there and see what we see.”

“But there's some reward.”

“Absolutely,” I said.

I couldn't figure out what I was going to get from this, but Spenser's Crime Buster Rule #8 is
Always look.

We drove past the park that backed up to the Rocks, and down a narrow road that skirted the west end of the lake, and parked in a dirt turnaround next to a rutted dirt road.

“It's down this road,” he said.

I nodded. We got out of the car. Pearl didn't like the rain much, but she loved the woods. She struggled with her ambivalence for a moment and then committed to the woods. I
took my gun out from under my raincoat and put it in my raincoat pocket. Then I started back up the paved road we'd just driven down.

“Hey,” the red-haired kid said, “where you going. It's in here.”

“We'll come on it,” I said, “from a different direction.”

“Man, in this rain? Through the woods? We'll get soaked, everything's all wet in there.”

“Different direction,” I said.

Spenser's crime buster rule #8a:
Don't blunder into something while you're looking.

Pearl was bred to be a hunting dog, before she made a career change and became a lap dog. And sometimes her instincts resurfaced. She ranged far ahead of us, snuffling everything, and circled back to check with me before she ranged out again. She'd probably let me know if there was somebody in the woods.

The kid was right, the bushes and low branches were wet and pressed their wetness against us as we moved through them. But I had no way to know this wasn't a setup, and until I did, I'd have to act as if it was. But it wasn't. We came into a clearing in the woods and saw Pearl sniffing something carefully. There was no one there, no sound of anyone anywhere, nor did Pearl act as if there was anyone. I took my hand off my gun, though I left it there in my pocket. I took a look at what Pearl had found. It was the desiccated body of a dead cat.

“This is the place, man,” the kid said. “I'm freakin' soaked.”

The cat had been shot. I could see the shattered skull
where the dry skin had receded. I could tell Pearl was considering picking it up. I told her not to. As I circled the clearing, there were other dead cats, and a shiny scatter of brass. I picked up one of the casings. It was nine-millimeter. I scuffed through the leaf meal bed of the clearing. There was more brass. Probably a couple of hundred rounds. Pearl nosed out several more cat remnants, and I had to admonish her again. There were a couple of squirrels, too. And a raccoon and some empty cat-food cans, the labels peeling off, the inside cleaned by all the squirrels and birds and bugs that had fed from them since the cans were opened.

“They come up here and shot a lot,” the kid said.

He looked miserable. His sweatsuit jacket was soaked through. He was trying to smoke a damp cigarette. Because his hat was on backward, the rain drove straight into his face. But he was too fashion-conscious to turn the hat around.

“That would be Grant and Animal?”

“Yeah, and Jared, too, the other guy.”

“He come with Animal and Dell?”

“I guess. I don't remember. I just know I seen him up here, too, when there was shooting.”

“You watch them shoot?” I said.

“Jesus, no,” he said. “You think I'm going to hang around Animal when he got a gun?”

“When did they start?”

“Last winter. They'd come up here in the freakin' snow.”

I stood with my coat collar up and my hands in my pockets and looked at the clearing. Pearl, deprived of cat carcass,
had gotten under the low branches of a big evergreen at the edge of the clearing and was sheltering there.

“So I get some reward?” the kid said.

I nodded.

“How much?”

“Shhhh,” I said.

I kept looking. The empty cans probably meant that the cats had been lured here with cat food. The shell casings meant they had fired a lot. Some of the trees along the far edge of the clearing showed bullet scars, and a big cardboard box, now limp in the rain, looked as if it had been used as a target. I went and looked closer. It had; the crude figure of a man had been drawn on it. It was full of bullet holes. There were cardboard ammunition boxes around, faded and misshapen by long exposure. The foam interior case, where the bullets had sat, each in its own hole, was impervious to decay and would probably be there long after everyone had stopped remembering the Dowling School Massacre.

“So how much, mister? I showed you this place, huh? How much.”

I got my wallet out and took five twenties and gave them to him.

“A hundred?” he said. “That's all? I thought there was a big reward.”

“The big reward is for big help,” I said. “I wouldn't have given you that much if it weren't raining.”

“Shit, man, I'm risking my freakin' ass, Animal found out. . . .”

“Animal's not a factor,” I said. “What can you tell me about Jared Clark?”

“Nothing. I didn't know him. I didn't know Dell, neither, 'cept he hung with Animal.”

“But Jared didn't.”

The kid shook his head.

“I just seen him come up here to shoot sometimes.”

The sound of rain was different in the woods. There was no other sound competing with it, and its passage among the trees and bushes made a larger rushing sound than you heard in the city.

“Let's get out of here,” I said and turned down the dirt road.

Pearl saw me move and was on her feet and moving with me. She knew the car was in that direction, and that it was dry inside the car. Her lap-dog training had kicked in.

“I don't think it's right,” the kid said. “You tole me there was a reward. It ain't freakin' right I get a hundred.”

“Bring me something else,” I said. “Maybe I'll give you more.”

We left the clearing.