My elbow hurt. I rubbed it and remembered. “You set traps, just in case somebody wandered back here, didn’t you?” I asked.
“Sorry about that. But the very first afternoon, there were like a million teachers all over the stage. I hadn’t counted on that. I thought of it like a doorbell, just so I’d know somebody was coming.”
I forgave him, although my knees still ached.
“Lots of days, I’d prop the door and sit out in the square a couple hours. Amazing how invisible you can be if you decide to. Nobody noticed there; nobody noticed here. If I could have shaved, I bet I could have sat in the classes. ‘The Purloined Letter,’ remember? Everybody’s looking for it, and it’s on the fireplace mantel in front of them all along.”
Like I said, Poe is always a winner.
“Wednesday night, I came back here and watched the TV in the faculty lounge and found out he was dead. I took the radio from the gym office and heard later Mom had turned herself in. I was really surprised. I couldn’t believe she’d ever hurt anybody, no matter what they did to her. I watched, my whole life, and she never fought back, except when he tried to go for me. Then I heard she was out on bail and I called and said not to worry, but she did. She came here.”
“I couldn’t stand thinking about him hiding, scared. I didn’t know there would be people staying after school.”
They both looked at me. Hugh looked hopeful. Lydia was her chronically frightened self. It was going to take a lot of time and help to get past that.
“This is the truth,” Hugh said. “My mother ran upstairs. She knew he wouldn’t hurt me—bullies don’t when you’re bigger than they are. We were having the worst shouting match. He was ranting about the bible, for some reason.”
“About Adam and Eve,” I suggested.
“Yes. And then on and on about somebody else—he had a lot of names for that somebody—upsetting the apple cart so that now every single person he counted on was against him and he couldn’t trust anybody anymore. Not a living soul. That’s exactly what he said. It was insane—we were fighting, but it had nothing to do with me or anybody I knew. He was drinking the whole time and then, suddenly, he was out of steam. Past the point where he’d go up and hurt her again. In fact, pretty close to passing out. And I left. And that’s all.”
“Then the question is, who came into the house after Hugh?”
“The question is, who was left?” Lydia asked with the mildest hint of black humor. And then she looked meditative and sad, and I could almost read her thoughts. If she was no longer protecting Hugh, who was she protecting, and whose jail sentence would she serve?
“Why don’t you enjoy your reunion and try not to worry about it for a while,” I suggested. “Go home.”
“You aren’t going to tell the principal?” Hugh asked.
“I don’t think this comes under the normal rules, do you? Besides, the staff can do with a little mystery, with the legend of the hungry poltergeist.”
“My car’s around back,” Lydia told her son. “In the alleyway.”
“Hurry, before you get towed,” I said, and, after gathering up a few possessions of Hugh’s, they took their leave.
The Not-a-Garage Sale population had exploded, mostly with parents peeling children off the booths. Neil’s balloon still bounced above the crowd, but it was tied to the cashier’s stand.
I scanned the room for Mackenzie’s salt and pepper curls, but couldn’t find them. I sincerely hoped this didn’t mean that Jinx had delayed her departure. Neil, engrossed in conversation with a light-haired man, saw me, called my name and waved. I saw his friend begin to turn toward me, and fearing they would invite me to join them, to hear more birth and labor statistics, I turned away and nearly bumped into Sasha.
She carried a bulging LIFE!! JOY!! canvas sack. Portrait of a New Age ecologically correct flea-market maven.
“I found two more frames,” she said. “Not to mention a fantastic hat.” The latter looked like a veiled stack of rattan pancakes, but happily, Sasha knows what she likes and invites you to view it, not editorialize on it, so I didn’t have to admit that it made her look like a charwoman in a British mystery.
“I’ll wear it tonight. With these.” She pulled out a pair of fairly intact black lace gloves that would give her frostbite. “Lars will love it.”
Heroically, I kept silent. Lars’s deficiencies would become apparent on their own as surely as did images in Sasha’s darkroom trays.
“Where’ve you been?” she asked. “I was looking for you.”
“Should have looked backstage. The most amazing thing just happened.”
“Tell me en route to the exit,” she said. “If I don’t leave, nothing amazing will ever happen to me. He’ll be at my place in fifteen minutes.”
The school hallway wasn’t nearly long enough for the entire story, and certainly not for what I’d hoped, some fresh insight into who, then, had killed Wynn Teller.
“My money’s on dopey Wholesperson,” Sasha said. “For some obscure ideological reason. Anyway, let’s talk tomorrow. You going out tonight?”
I nodded.
“Good,” she said. “I was afraid you might be moping for J. Edgar. J as in Jinx’s, as in property of, you know.”
“We have a lot of updates to take care of,” I began, but she opened the glass inner door, releasing the vestibule’s freezing air, so I stood behind it, watching her like a prisoner through the clear thick barrier. “I’ll give you a call tomorrow.”
“Not too early.” Winter whistled through the door opening. Sasha scowled.
“What?” I said.
Her nostrils flared. “If I didn’t have to get going,” she said, and then she shook her head. “I have a score to settle. I haven’t forgotten.”
“What? Did I do something?”
“You? Him! I could swear that was Mr. No Show, the CPA creep who stood me up. Behind you. Please tell me he isn’t your date tonight.”
“Mackenzie is. Jinx left. There was nothing between them.” I turned to see the man who’d stood her up, but saw only trouser cuffs turning the bend in the staircase.
She released the inner door, blew a kiss, and left. No avoiding the bookstall now, but there wasn’t that much longer to go. I took a deep breath, set my shoulders, and resolved to diligently unload used books on all passersby until the day’s session ended.
Which turned out to be one more fine and unhonored resolution. “Mandy?” a voice called from above.
I looked up. “Neil?” He bent over the top landing. I could see his thinning hair and one shoulder. “Could you give me a hand?” he said. “I have this…problem.”
Ill-timed periods and pregnancies were referred to that way, but neither condition seemed likely to apply to Neil Quigley.
“I can’t talk about it from up here,” he said.
A delicate social problem? Maybe his pants had ripped and he thought all women knew how to sew. Maybe he’d been asked to prepare a speech, say something about his baby and needed coaching from the oral book report lady. Maybe he couldn’t remember which hospital Angela was in. I walked up the staircase, mystified. From the landing midway, I could see that Neil looked rather green. Maybe he was ill, afraid to go back to being the center of the crowd.
It is amazing how many theories you can create walking up one flight of stairs, especially when it’s double-wide and double-long.
Amazing, too, how once upstairs, all the theories dissipated and I was able to instantly diagnose Neil’s true problem.
Not a split seam, not a virus, but a sandy-haired man standing against a classroom door where he couldn’t be seen from below, pointing a silver-chased old-fashioned ivory-handled gun at him. At us.
And just as immediately I knew that this time, this gun, this threat, was for real.
This was serious. Dead serious.
Twenty-Three
I LOOKED AROUND. NOT ANOTHER SIGN OF LIFE ON THE ENTIRE FLOOR. NO ONE below. The merry shoppers were using the gym’s outside exit.
“Clifford made me do it, call you up here. I feel awful, but I didn’t know what else to do,” Neil said. “The gun and all…”
Clifford. Clifford Schmidt. The Sneeze. The surviving partner. “You’re the one,” I said before I censored myself.
“I am?”
I’d meant the one Sasha had seen. The one whose cuffs I’d glimpsed ascending the staircase—the better to wait and entrap me. He probably had his gun at Neil’s back all along. The one who’d stood Sasha up Wednesday night. The night Wynn Teller was murdered.
“Why’d he want me up here?” I whispered to Neil.
“Enough!” Clifford said. “You two don’t have anything left to talk over. No more lawsuit, no more anything except a tragic end to the entire mess.” I didn’t understand much, except that it didn’t sound healthy for me, and I suddenly remembered our brief conversation the other afternoon and how he’d complained of loose ends he had to clean up.
I tried to remember
what else
had been said in
Schmidt’s office, but it seemed vague and insubstantial. Something about Neil and practicality?
Clifford waved his gun like a traffic policeman’s baton, directing us into Neil’s classroom, a fit setting, I feared, in which to become a footnote to history. Stay tuned. Story at eleven.
I wondered if Cliff appreciated the symbolism of the event. I wondered, had my own room been unlocked, whether I would have found literary overtones to this ambush. And then I wondered if I were showing early signs of dementia.
“Listen,” I said, “you’re making—”
“—a big mistake. I know. I saw those movies, too,” Clifford Schmidt said. “But this isn’t a mistake. It’s unfortunate, but you have no one to blame but yourselves. You stir things up, wake up sleeping dogs, and you can’t complain about what happens next.”
“I don’t even know what you’re talking about!”
“Of course not.” He closed the classroom door. Neil and I stood awkwardly, like gangly students on the first day of school. “Okay,” Cliff said. “You, Quigley—over here.” He indicated the desk closest to the door. He pulled a folded piece of paper out of his pocket, and then a clean sheet. “Copy this,” he said. “Word for word. Make it look nice, it’s your confession.”
“I’m not going to—” Neil began.
“If you aren’t writing by the time I finish this sentence, I’ll shoot her, and my typed note will have to do. Your call.”
“They’ll trace the typewriter,” I said. “They always do.”
Cliff looked mildly amused. “Did. It’s harder to trace a laser printer. I’ll take the chance.”
With an imploring glance at me, Neil started writing.
“You, over there!” Cliff pointed to the window wall. I sat where he indicated, in the front row, and hoped that if I barely moved or breathed or made noise, he might forget about me.
He was one of the people Wynn Teller had told his son he could no longer trust. His partner, but what had been going on?
“I’m sorry about this.” Cliff rubbed a palm over the barrel of the gun. I could have almost believed he was holding a toy, or a very fancy cigarette lighter. It was lovely in its own way, with the silver design, the sort of thing the cowboy in the white hat carried.
Even I could understand why guns like that one would be passed on to Lydia, and how any friend of the family or business partner would be apt to know about such a collection.
“Nothing personal,” Clifford said. “Merely survival.”
“We aren’t referring to my survival by any chance, are we?” I muttered.
He had a mean, dry chuckle.
If I lived, I vowed to have a serious talk with Sasha. How could she have accepted a date with him in the first place?
“A man works a lifetime to build something up,” Schmidt said. “He can’t sit by while people ruin it, can he?”
“It hasn’t been a lifetime. You’re barely forty, I’ll bet.” Actually, he looked closer to fifty, but flattery never hurt anybody, especially a man with thinning hair. “You have years and years—”
“I’m not interested,” he snapped. Maybe he was only thirty-five and I’d insulted him.
“What good do you think this’ll do you, Cliff?” Neil asked. There was a desperate quaver in his voice, and I was embarrassed by his attempt to ingratiate himself. You don’t call the man trying to murder you by his nickname.
“A whole lot. I’ll have an income, to mention one fairly basic item. Without your interference, TLC will go on, thank you. You don’t have much muscle left, do you?”
I thought he was referring to Neil’s physique.
“It burned,” Neil said softly.
“Oddly enough,” Cliff said, “my books look just fine. I wouldn’t have done this, but you won’t give up. You should have stopped once the place burned down. It’s really too bad.”
He relaxed, almost strutted, relocated nearer to Neil, the better to intimidate him.
“Been a lot of pressure on you. I’m sure your coworkers will remember how disturbed you seemed this week. And then, alas, your wires sprung and you killed the man you had wanted to sue when you didn’t have a case anymore. And now, filled with remorse, and maybe still a little of the crazies, you shoot your partner over there—”
“His what?” I said. “Me? Are you talking about me?”
“Be quiet. You don’t think I understood why you were suddenly appearing at the office every single day?” He didn’t even look at me when he said it. “You shoot her,” he said to Neil. “And yourself. End of one very sad story. When we rebuild, we may name the place the Neil Quigley Memorial Learning Center. How would that be?”
“Why did you kill him?” Neil asked. “At least tell me that. You must have known all along what was going on. You’re the one with the business background.”
It was okay for Neil to act like this was a talk show, but I was afraid that in lieu of a commercial break, I was going to be blown away, so I listened with half an ear and searched for an escape with all the rest of me.
I stretched. Clifford watched with a little manly interest, then must have remembered I was a short-timer, as he ignored me again. “I was never for his style,” he said. “He wasted money left and right—splashy TV ads, a PR firm on retainer, bills for business entertaining that would choke a horse, the clothing, the car. Even crazy gifts for his wife every so often—fur coats, trips.”
Lydia. I’d thought this was all about her, and it wasn’t. Even in this drama so central to her life, she was a bit player.