School Days (15 page)

R
ITA
F
IORE
came into my office at lunchtime, carrying a bag of sandwiches and two cups of coffee.

“Where's your dog,” she said.

“Susan has a dog walker. Pearl's with her this morning.”

Rita nodded.

“I got tuna salad,” she said, “on whole wheat, ham and cheese on whole wheat, egg salad on white, and pastrami on light rye.”

“Excellent,” I said. “Are you having anything?”

“We're sharing,” she said.

“Oh.”

“I want the egg salad,” she said.

“I'll make do,” I said.

She set everything down on my desk, took the lids off both coffees, sat down in my client chair, and unwrapped her egg-salad sandwich. I took the tuna.

“So whaddya want?” I said.

She grinned at me and crossed her legs. She was wearing a pale green linen suit with a long jacket and a short skirt.

“Same old thing,” she said. “Susan's away, and I thought I might fill in.”

“Would that include, say, bopping me on the couch?”

“It would,” Rita said.

“You need to work on your inhibitions,” I said.

“Controlling them?” Rita said.

“No,” I said. “Acquiring some.”

She laughed. I took a bite of my tuna sandwich.

“I take it that's another rejection?” she said.

“Sadly, yes,” I said. “Where were you when I was single?”

“Prosecuting felons in Norfolk County,” she said, “and keeping an eye out for Mr. Right.”

“I'm not sure the Norfolk County Jail was the best place to look. No wonder you never found him,” I said.

She drank some coffee and patted her lips carefully with a paper napkin.

“Actually, I've found him half a dozen times, but he never ripens well.”

“ ‘Songs unheard are sweeter far,' ” I said.

“Thank you,” she said. “How you doing out in Dowling.”

“I am finding out more and more about less and less,” I said. “I will eventually know everything about nothing.”

“Like law school,” she said.

“But with a better class of people,” I said.

We each chewed our sandwiches and drank some coffee and used our napkins.

“I keep you talking, you may change your mind about the couch,” Rita said. “Tell me what you know so far.”

By the time I finished, the sandwiches were gone and the coffee was low in our cups.

“Major Johnson,” she said. “Wow, that was a long time ago. How old would he be now?”

“I figure around thirty.”

“And still gangbanging.”

“Older gang,” I said.

“Why would he help you out like that?”

“Couple of reasons. One, I'm a friend of Hawk's, and he always wanted to be like Hawk. Two, because he felt like it.”

“Just because he felt like it?”

“Yes. He could, and he felt like showing that he could. Being the man is important to Major.”

“So he helped you to prove he da man?” Rita said.

“Be my guess,” I said.

“Is he proving it to you?”

“To me,” I said. “Through me to Hawk, to Yang, to the rest of his crew, to himself. You don't know people will do what you tell them to do, unless you tell them and they do it.”

“God, what a way to live,” Rita said.

“It's the way he's got,” I said.

“You saying he had no choice?”

I smiled and shook my head.

“I'm not navigating the nature/nurture shoals with you again,” I said. “I got no idea.”

“You know as well as I do,” Rita said, “that whatever the psychological reality might be, civilizations have to act as if the individual is responsible for what the individual does.”

“I'd settle for knowing who was responsible for shooting up the Dowling School,” I said.

Rita nodded. She finished her coffee and put the empty cup on the edge of my desk. She uncrossed her legs and recrossed them the other way.

“Perfect moment for a smoke,” she said. “If we smoked. Which we don't. You could take two cigarettes from a Chinese lacquered box on your desk, and light both of them and hand one to me.”

“And look you up and down insolently,” I said, “through the blue smoke.”

“Aladdin's lamp is mine,” Rita said. “You know what strikes me about Dowling?”

“What?”

“You know they did it, but you keep right on pushing.”

“I want to know why,” I said.

“I would, too,” Rita said. “Everything you've told me says they did it, and it was premeditated. But nothing tells me why.”

“It's telling me the same thing,” I said.

“There's a reason,” Rita said. “I've been in the criminal law
business a long time for someone as young and seductive as I am, and there's got to be a reason. Doesn't have to be a good reason. But there's got to be something.”

“Uh-huh.”

“And you're going to find it out.”

“I am.”

“You could tell the grandmother the kid did it, take your fee, and go home,” Rita said. “But, of course, you won't.”

“No,” I said.

“Because?”

“Because I won't.”

“So what's your plan?” Rita said.

“Keep pushing at it,” I said.

Rita shook her head.

“You are not a quitter,” she said.

“No,” I said.

Rita grinned and looked at the couch.

“Me either,” she said.

“H
E WAS IN MANY WAYS
the classic victim,” Beth Ann Blair said. “Incommunicative, lonely, without any of the social or intellectual or athletic skills that would have made him acceptable to his peers.”

“Is that why he started hanging with Dell Grant?” I said.

“I don't know. He wouldn't talk to me much. I infer from what we did talk about that he saw Dell as a protector—big football player, hung out with the tough kids from the Rocks. Jared was bullied routinely. I assume he hoped Dell would protect him.”

“Did he?”

“I don't know,” Beth Ann said. “I don't see these kids except in a clinical setting.”

“Did he complain of it?”

“Yes, of course.”

“And?” I said.

“Bullying is very difficult to prevent,” Beth Ann said. “Complaining to the school authorities usually serves only to exacerbate it. I did speak to Mr. Garner on Jared's behalf, and he said he'd alert the faculty to the problem.”

“Did he?”

“I'm sure he did,” Beth Ann said, “but I can't speak for Mr. Garner. You'll have to ask him.”

“Mr. Garner is not talking to me,” I said.

Beth Ann smiled. We were in her office at the hospital, with her degrees behind her on the wall, and her lipgloss gleaming.

“He's a very resolute man,” Beth Ann said. “He feels that the school, and the students in the school, which is what he cares about, are best served by putting this event behind us.”

“And you?” I said.

“I'm inclined to agree. I'm not a forensic specialist, obviously, but I'm quite sure Jared is not in any legal sense insane. He may have been driven to it by loneliness and fear. He may have been victimized by bullies. He may have been corrupted by an Internet life spent in the darker corners of cyberspace. But it is hard to argue that he was not aware that what he did was wrong.”

“How about an irresistible compulsion?” I said.

“No,” Beth Ann said. “No, I think it was simply revenge,
and however sympathetic one might be, it resulted in mass murder.”

“What kind of dark corners,” I said, “of the Internet.”

“I'm not really sure. I know he spent a lot of time online, and the little that he would reveal to me of his inner life, he had some lurid fantasies.”

“Like?”

“Violence. Dominance.”

“And you feel he played those out online?”

“I know the Internet was his solace. He used to access websites that appealed to those fantasies.”

“Got a name?”

“Of a website?” Beth Ann said. “No. He may have told me, but, frankly, I find them repellent.”

“Porn?” I said.

“Perhaps. I did not investigate.”

“How often did you see Jared?” I said.

“Not often enough, I'm afraid,” Beth Ann said. “He was very reticent about getting help.”

“How about Dell Grant?”

“No. I never spoke with him.”

“So you don't have any theories about him.”

“I can't, I'd merely be guessing.”

“And what would you guess.”

“No,” Beth Ann said. “I won't speculate. If I had seen him enough, in a therapeutic setting, perhaps. But speculation is more about the speculator than about the, ah, patient.”

“But Jared's behavior, you feel, was the result of bullying.”

“Which was fed by fantasies of violent domination,” Beth Ann said.

“Were the fantasies the result of the bullying?”

“I can't say. I did not have enough of him. Certainly one reinforced the other.”

I nodded.

“Most of the time, there never is a clear reason,” I said. “Kids do something like this. Theories are offered. None is established. Most of the time, we don't know,” I said. “Do we?”

“Perhaps,” Beth Ann said, “had the perpetrators spent enough time with a therapist for us to have a clear understanding of why they did it, they wouldn't have done it.”

“And afterwards, there's all the clutter,” I said.

“Clutter?”

“People trying to justify their behavior,” I said. “People trying to deal with grief. People trying to deal with rage. People trying to cover up failures. People trying to place blame. People trying to shift blame. People eager for revenge. In effect, it's done now, and we've caught the bastards. What difference does
why
make?”

“One can understand that feeling. A lot of innocent people died, for no good reason.”

“We don't know what the reason was,” I said. “We don't know if it was a good one or a bad one.”

“There is no good reason for people to be murdered.”

“Maybe not,” I said. “But that's the slippery slope to abstraction. I'm just trying to find out what happened here.”

“Unfortunately,” Beth Ann said, “we know what
happened . . . and I'm very much afraid that we'll never know why.”

We both sat looking at the ground we'd replowed. Beth Ann was wearing a yellow flowered dress with ruffled shoulder straps and a low, square-cut bodice, which framed the ebb and fall of her bosom very nicely as she breathed.

“Did Jared do a lot of fantasy searches on the school computers?” I said.

“Oh.” Beth Ann smiled. “Surely not. They are carefully restricted.”

I nodded. Without doing anything, Beth Ann seemed to radiate sexual possibility. With Susan's absence, I was becoming steadily more preoccupied with sexual possibility, and neither Rita Fiore nor Beth Ann Blair was helping. I stood.

Beth Ann said, “You have my card.”

But what I seemed to hear was
Would you like to come to my home in Lexington and have sex until the autumnal equinox?

“Yes,” I said. “I have your card.”

T
HERE WAS A FOR SALE
sign in front of the Clark home when Pearl and I parked in front and I got out. A sprinkler was watering the front yard to the right of the front walk. I heard the vacuum cleaner going when I came up the front walk. It shut off after I rang the bell, and in a moment, Mrs. Clark came to the front door wearing sandals and jeans and a white tank top. Her hair was done, however, and her makeup was on.

“Mr. Spenser,” she said.

“I'm sorry to intrude again,” I said. “But may we talk a little more?”

“Ned's not home,” she said.

“You'll be just fine,” I said. “I just need to ask a little more about Jared.”

She didn't invite me in. But she didn't shut the door, either.

“Please leave him alone, Mr. Spenser,” she said. “You can't help him. You can only make it worse. I've begged my mother to let it go. But she won't. She never does. . . .”

She shook her head hopelessly.

“Mostly I'd just like to borrow Jared's computer for a few days,” I said.

“Jared didn't, doesn't, have a computer.”

“Has he ever?”

“No.”

“Isn't that unusual?”

“Jared was an unusual boy,” Mrs. Clark said.

“Did he ever talk about being bullied?”

“No.”

“Would he have told you?”

“I don't think he was being bullied,” she said. “I would have known.”

I nodded.

“How?” I said.

“I'm his mother,” she said. “I would have known.”

“And Wendell Grant?” I said. “How did he end up hanging with Wendell Grant?”

“You asked me that before,” she said. “Poor Jared had too few friends for any of us to be picky about those he did have.”

“So you did know Wendell?”

“No, but people, after . . . after it happened . . . they were saying, ‘How could you let Jared hang around with him' . . . I didn't know, and if I did . . .”

She shrugged.

“Do you know where he would have had access to a computer?” I said.

“School, town library, places like that, I suppose. But he wouldn't have used one. I don't think he even knew how.”

I was quiet. She was quiet. Somewhere next door or across the street, a dog barked. Sitting in the driver's seat of my car, Pearl barked back. Communication is a great thing. The sun shining through the languid sweep of the sprinkler made tiny rainbows in the spray.

“Please,” Mrs. Clark said. “Leave him alone. Leave us alone. Jared won't even see us. We can't even live here anymore. We'll have to move and start over. Do you know, can you imagine . . . ?”

I shook my head. Tears had welled up in her eyes.

I said, “Neither of the above, Mrs. Clark. I'm sorry.”

Then I went back down the walk and shooed Pearl out of the driver's seat and got in and drove away.