The Boxer and the Spy (13 page)

“We’re going to give this one more minute,” he said. “Then we will get up and go out and tell our friends to mail their letters.”

She stared contemptuously at Terry. Sally Trent, the most powerful woman in the state, being confronted by two stupid little kids. She wanted to spit on them.

After nearly a minute she said, “There are things I can give you.”

T
he female assistant stuck her head in the office door.

“Everything going well?” she asked brightly.

Mrs. Trent waved her away. The door closed again.

“Yes,” Mrs. Trent said, “I have a relationship with Paxton Bullard.”

Terry and Abby looked at each other.

“How old are you,” Mrs. Trent asked, “seventeen or so?”

“We’re both fifteen,” Abby said.

“Well, you look older,” Mrs. Trent said. “But even more to the point, you are probably not able to understand this sort of thing. But ...” She took a breath. “Paxton is a long-time friend of my husband’s. He and Gerry were friends in college. When Gerry was head of the planning board, here in Cabot, Paxton came to him with a scheme. The school had just instituted an ambitious technical arts program, one of the first of its kind in an, ah, affluent school like Dawes Regional. He had a plan to use the resources of the technical arts program to build houses for nothing, and sell them for a great deal, and keep the money. Obviously he needed the kind of help only town officials could provide.”

Abby was sitting straight in her chair, with her knees and ankles together, fully absorbed in what Mrs. Trent was saying. Terry looked at her profile. He didn’t know if she looked older than fifteen. But he knew she was beautiful.

“My husband is a weak man. But he is loyal to his friends and, sad to say, I guess, is a bit greedy. I was head of the selectmen at the time. He asked me to do some things that seemed innocent, and I did them for him. He did some things. And among the things he did was to imply that he was speaking for me and to sign my name to a number of documents, which, in short, allowed this project to proceed.”

Neither Terry nor Abby said anything. The story was starting to be told and they didn’t want to break the spell. Mrs. Trent seemed almost dreamy as she talked.

“I’m very orderly,” she said. “And very careful. I was reviewing my recent activities on the board when it struck me that some of the decisions I seemed to have signed on to were specious.”

Terry wasn’t exactly sure what
specious
meant. But Abby would know, and until he could ask her, he had a pretty good idea from the context.

“I confronted Gerry, my husband, and he confessed to me. He begged me to let it go. He’s terrified of Paxton. Most people are, I suppose. He’s so big, and he has all those muscles, and he has such an explosive temper. But I have a conscience, and I have a duty to those people who elected me to represent them. So I went to Paxton, and I said,
‘This has to stop, now! ”’

She paused for a moment, looking not at them really, more past them, at something that seemed far away. Terry and Abby sat motionless, waiting for her to go on.

“He laughed at me,” Mrs. Trent said. “He is a troglodyte. Some sort of antediluvian beast, I think.”

A couple of other words he’d have to ask Abby about.

“He said there was no paper with his name on it,” Mrs. Trent went on. “He said that if we did anything to expose the scheme, he’d take my husband and myself down with him and that we’d fall a lot farther and land a lot harder.”

Again she paused, again the faraway look of soft sadness.

“My husband is a weak fool, and he’s not terribly bright,” she said finally. “But he’s my husband and I love him. I could not expose him to that, and Bullard knew it.”

She had shifted from “Paxton” to “Bullard,” Terry noticed.

“And then ...” She paused again, as if she were fighting off tears. “And then he said that to cement our new conspiracy, our new partnership, so to speak ...”

She stopped and put her hands on either side of her face and pressed, as if she were trying to keep herself together.

“He said that I had to become his mistress....”

She slid her hands together and buried her face in them and sat for a long time.

“Does Mr. Malcolm know about this house thing?” Terry said.

Her voice was muffled as she spoke with her face still in her hands.

“I assume so,” she said.

“How about Kip Carter?” Abby said. “Where does he fit in?”

Mrs. Trent straightened and took a Kleenex from her purse and dabbed at her eyes, carefully, so as not to disturb her makeup. Her eyes looked dry, Terry thought. Then she folded her hands, still clutching the Kleenex, and placed them in her lap.

“Paxton uses him as a kind of enforcer with the kids,” she said calmly. “He helped Kip with his scholarship to Illinois. And he, I believe, supplies Kip and some of his pals with steroids. Paxton uses them himself, I know. Perhaps it accounts for his vicious temper.”

“What do you mean,
enforcer?”
Abby said.

“Make sure all the kids that knew about the project didn’t get nosy or talk about it the wrong way,” Mrs. Trent said. “You know. If they thought something was wrong and it was the principal’s fault, they might tell somebody. But, and you probably know these rules better than I do, they wouldn’t squeal on one of the other kids.”

“Plus Kip Carter is the biggest wheel in the school,” Abby said.

“And the toughest guy,” Terry said.

“So,” Abby said, “yes. You’re right. Kids would much rather not rat out Kip Carter. Loyalty, fear ...” Abby moved her hands in sort of random circles as she searched for the right word.

“Tribal loyalty, perhaps,” Mrs. Trent said.

“Yes, that’s right,” Abby said.

“How’s he get away with all this?” Terry said.

“He is both school superintendent and principal of the high school,” Mrs. Trent said. “That’s quite unusual. Not unheard of, but unusual. It gives him unusual autonomy.”

Another one for Abby,
Terry thought.
Must mean something like
power.

“And Jason?” Terry asked. “Do you know what happened to Jason Green?”

Mrs. Trent shifted again in her chair, so that she was facing more toward Terry. She crossed her legs the other way and smoothed her skirt. Then she looked up and gazed hard and straight at Terry.

“No,” Mrs. Trent said. “As God is my witness. I do not know what happened to Jason Green.”

T
he posse of kids gathered around them as they came out of the storefront.

“What’d she say? ... She tell you anything? ... What’d she tell you? ... What happened? Do we mail the letters?”

“Hang on to the letters,” Terry said. “Don’t mail them. Don’t lose them. Just stand by on the letters.”

“What’d she say?”

Terry shook his head.

“Abby and me are going to go to the café and go over what she said. Give us some time to do that, okay?”

“To the café,” Tank shouted, and pointed grandly down the street. From the patrol car, the cop looked at them with mild amusement and shook his head slightly. As they trooped down the street, Sally Trent and her assistant came out of the storefront and got in a car. The car took them away, and the police car went with them. In the shadow of the theater entrance, Kip Carter stared after them.

It was a slow time in the café. Too late for lunch, too early for supper, but kind of late for a coffee and a snack. Terry and Abby went to a booth in the back and sat across from each other and ordered coffee.

“Paxton?” Terry said.

“He always signs everything P. F. Bullard,” Abby said. “I never knew his name was Paxton.”

“What do you suppose the ‘F’ stands for?” Terry asked.

“Fauntleroy?” Abby said.

They laughed and sipped their coffee.

“Do you believe what she told us?” Terry said.

“Of course not,” Abby said.

“No?”

“Remember she said there were things she could give us.”

“Yeah?”

“She gave us her husband and her boyfriend,” Abby said.

“What don’t you believe?”

“Most of it,” Abby said. “For instance, say the basic events are true, and Bullard’s making money off the school, and maybe distributing ‘roids to some of his jock faves.... You think he’s going to risk getting fired, maybe going to jail, and losing, what, a million dollars? On the house-building thing? You think he’s going to risk all that to have sex with Sally Trent?”

“Is that what he did?”

“Sure,” Abby said. “Essentially she said, he said, have sex with me or I’ll turn us all in.”

“She said he said that his name wasn’t on any documents.”

“Maybe,” Abby said. “Maybe it wasn’t. But if he tells his story, you think he won’t get connected to it? You think he would think that?”

“No.”

“Correct. So if we believe her story, he’s willing to risk everything to have sex with her.”

“She does have pretty good legs,” Terry said.

Abby slapped his forearm.

“Stop that,” she said.

He grinned at her.

“Well,” he said. “One thing, when we were peeking in, while you were hiding your eyes and saying ‘eek,’ I was taking a look, and I don’t know all that much about it, but she didn’t act like she was doing anything she didn’t want to do ... you know?”

“Yuck,” Abby said.

“But you do know what I mean?”

Abby blushed slightly.

“Yes,” she said. “So you don’t believe her either?”

Terry held his coffee mug in both hands and sipped from it while he looked at her over the rim of the mug.

“Here’s what I think,” he said. “I think Bullard is involved in making money out of the house-building project. I believe he takes steroids, and I bet he gives some to Kip Carter. Mr. Trent’s probably involved too. And maybe something happened to Jason because he found out about this. He was in the tech arts program, you know.”

“But if Jason found out anything, would he tell Mr. Bullard?”

“He might have told Mr. Malcolm, or asked him about it, or something,” Terry said. “And Malcolm told Bullard.”

“Are you saying that Mr. Bullard killed Jason?” Abby said.

“I don’t know. We got this bunch of illegal stuff going on and right in the middle of it Jason dies, and when we start asking about it, Bullard and Kip Carter are on us like a heavy storm.”

“Why not Mr. Malcolm?”

“Possible, I suppose. But he hasn’t been bothering us like Bullard ... and not for nothing, but if someone got killed and the two suspects were Mr. Malcolm and Mr. Bullard, who would you guess?”

“Yes,” Abby said. “You’re right. Mr. Bullard.”

“Sure,” Terry said.

“So how much do you think Mrs. Trent was involved?” Abby said.

“She’s in it up to her, ah, blue butterfly,” Terry said.

They both laughed.

“And the rest of it, how she loves her husband, and she didn’t know they were forging her name, and Bullard forced her to ...” Abby made a face and shivered.

“Crappola,” Terry said. “That’s the best she could come up with at the moment. By the time it reaches the press, if it ever does, imagine how bad everyone will feel for her.”

“I wonder what she’d say if she found out I didn’t take a picture with my cell phone?” Abby said.

“We never said you did,” Terry said.

“Not exactly.”

“So I think she’s in it all the way, that she probably had the affair with Bullard first, and they thought up this scheme, and she dragged her husband into it, and ...” Terry finished his sentence by turning both palms up.

“Yeah, she’s a terrible woman,” Abby said. “I agree with you.”

“So where do we go from here?”

“We got enough to probably ruin her chance to be governor and get Mr. Bullard fired,” Abby said.

Terry nodded.

“But we started this to find out what happened to Jason,” he said.

“And we still don’t know,” Abby said.

“No.”

“And Kip Carter?” Abby asked.

“He’s unfinished business,” Terry said.

“Because?”

“He threatened you,” Terry said.

“It doesn’t bother me,” Abby said. “Why should it bother you?”

“It bothers me,” Terry said.

“So what do we do next?” Abby said.

“I don’t know,” Terry said. “But it’s not over yet. We still have to find out what happened to Jason.”

“And then it’s over?” Abby said.

“Almost,” Terry said.

Abby looked at him silently. He patted her arm.

“Maybe somebody else will do something else,” Abby said.

“We stirred things up enough,” Terry said. “Something ought to happen.”