School Days (2 page)

D
OWLING IS WEST
of Boston. High-priced country with a village store and a green, and a lot of big shade trees that arch over the streets. As I drove along the main street, I passed a young girl with long blond hair and breeches and high boots, riding a bay mare along the side of the street, and eating an ice cream cone. It might have been pistachio. I pulled into the little lot in front of the village store and parked beside an unmarked State Police car and went in. There was a counter and display case opposite the door, and a few tables. In the back of the store were shelves, and along two sides were glass-front freezers. Two women in hats were at one table with coffee. A
young couple who looked like J. Crew models were having ice cream at another table. Alone at a third table was a stubby little guy with thick hands and thick glasses, wearing a tan poplin suit and a light-blue tie. I took a wild stab.

“Sergeant DiBella?” I said.

He nodded. I sat down across from him at the table.

“Healy called me,” he said. “I used to work for him.”

There were a few crumbs on a paper plate in front of DiBella.

“Pie,” I said.

“Strawberry rhubarb. Counter girl told me they make it themselves.”

“I better have some,” I said. “Don't want to offend them.”

“Make it two,” DiBella said.

The pie was all it should have been. DiBella ate his second piece just as if he hadn't eaten a first one. We both had coffee.

“I've read the press accounts,” I said, “of the school shooting.”

“They're always on the money,” DiBella said.

“Sure,” I said. “I just wanted to test you against them.”

A couple of local girls came in wearing cropped T-shirts and low-slung shorts, showing a lot of postpubescent abdomen. We watched them buy some sort of iced coffee drinks.

“Be glad when that fad is over,” DiBella said.

“I'll say.”

“You got kids?” DiBella said.

“No.”

“I got two daughters,” he said.

“So you'll be really glad,” I said.

The girls left.

“Healy says the Clark kid's grandmother hired you to get him off.”

“I like to think of it as
establish his innocence
,” I said.

DiBella shrugged.

“Grant fingered him,” DiBella said. “He confessed. You got some heavy sledding.”

“But nobody actually saw him in the school,” I said.

“He was wearing the ski mask.”

“So you only have Grant's word.”

DiBella grinned. “And his,” DiBella said. “ 'Course, he could be a lying sack of shit.”

I nodded.

“Where'd they get the weapons?”

DiBella shook his head. “Don't know,” he said.

“Not family weapons?”

“Nope, far as we can tell, neither family kept weapons.”

“So two seventeen-year-old kids in the deepest dark center of exurbia come up with four nines,” I said.

“And extra magazines,” DiBella said.

“Loaded?” I said.

“Yep.”

“All the same guns?”

“No,” DiBella said. “A Browning, a Colt, two Glocks.”

“Same ammo,” I said. “Different magazines.”

DiBella nodded.

“The magazines and the guns were color-coded with Magic Marker,” he said.

“Sounds like a plan,” I said.

“Yeah. The thing is, they planned how to do it pretty good. But they didn't seem to have any plan for afterwards.”

“You mean to get away,” I said.

DiBella nodded.

“They explain that?” I said.

DiBella smiled. “They don't explain shit,” he said. “All they say is we done it, you don't need to know why.”

“Or how the second kid got away with the cops around the building.”

“My guess? He took off his mask and ditched his guns and ran out with the other kids early in the proceedings.”

“Must have been a Chinese fire drill,” I said.

“Especially before our guys showed up. When it was just the local cops.”

“Did you get there?”

DiBella nodded.

“Me, everybody. I came in with the negotiation team. SWAT guys were already there. The bomb squad showed up a little after me. There were two or three local departments on the scene. Nobody in overall charge. One department didn't want to take orders from another department. None of them wanted to take orders from us. Took a while for the SWAT commander to get control of the thing. And when he did, we still didn't know who was in there, or how many. We didn't know if the place was rigged. We didn't know if they had hostages, or how many. We'd have shot somebody if we knew who to shoot. Kids were jumping out windows and running out fire doors.”

“Who went in?”

“Hostage negotiator. Guy named Gabe Leonard. Everybody was milling around, trying to figure how to get in touch inside, and the bomb-squad guys were trying to figure how to tell if the place was rigged. I was trying to get a coherent story from anybody, a student or teacher who'd been inside and was now outside, and Gabe says, ‘fuck this,' and puts on a vest and walks in the front door.”

“And nothing blew up,” I said.

“Nothing,” DiBella said.

We were out of coffee. I got up and got us two more cups.

“Gabe walks through the place, which is empty, like he's walking on hummingbird eggs. There's nobody else in there except the bodies, and finally the kid, in the president's office, with the door locked. They establish contact through the locked door and Gabe eventually gets the kid to answer the phone. Kid says he will, and Gabe calls out to us and one of the hostage guys calls the number and patches Gabe in, and they're in business. Gabe, and the kid, and us listening in.”

“How'd he get him out,” I said.

“I'll get you a transcript, but basically, he said, ‘Be a stand-up guy. Whatever you were trying to prove, you need to finish it off by walking out straight up, not have us come in and drag out your corpse.' ”

“And the kid says, ‘You're right,' and he opens the door and comes out,” DiBella said. “Takes off his ski mask. Gabe takes his guns, and they walk out together. Gabe said he wouldn't cuff him, and he didn't.”

“Until he got outside,” I said.

“Oh, sure, then the SWAT guys swarmed him and off he went.”

“Film at eleven,” I said.

“A lot of it,” DiBella said.

T
HE
D
OWLING
S
CHOOL
was on the western end of town, among a lot of tall pine trees. I drove between the big brick pillars, under the wrought-iron arch, up the curving cobblestone drive, and parked in front, by a sign that said
FACULTY ONLY
. There was one other car in front, a late-model Buick sedan.

The place had the deserted quality that schools have when they're not in session. The main building had a stone façade with towers at either end and a crenellated roofline between them. The front door was appropriate to the neo-castle style, high and made of oak planking with big wrought-iron strap
hinges and an impressive iron handle. It was locked. I located a doorbell and rang it. There was silence for a long time, until finally the door opened and a woman appeared.

“Hello,” she said.

“My name is Spenser,” I said. “I'm working on the shooting case and wondered if I might come in and look around.”

“Are you a policeman?” the woman said.

“I'm a private detective,” I said. “Jared Clark's grandmother hired me.”

“May I see some identification?”

“Sure.”

I showed her some. She read it carefully, and returned it.

“My name is Sue Biegler,” she said. “I am the Dean of Students.”

“How nice for you,” I said.

“And the students,” she said.

I smiled. One point for Dean Biegler.

“What is it you wish to see?” she said.

“I don't know,” I said. “I just need to walk around, feel the place a little, see what everything looks like.”

Dean Biegler stood in the doorway for a moment.

“Well,” she said.

I waited.

“Well, I really don't have anyone to show you around,” she said.

“That's a good thing,” I said. “I like to walk around alone, take my time, see what it feels like. I won't steal any exam booklets.”

She smiled.

“You sound positively impressionistic,” she said.

“Impressively so,” I said.

She smiled again and sighed.

“Come in,” she said. “Help yourself. If you need something, my office is here down this corridor.”

“Thank you.”

Inside, it smelled like a school. It was air-conditioned and clean, but the smell of school was adamant. I never knew what the smell was. Youth? Chalk dust? Industrial cleaner? Boredom?

I had seen enough diagrams of the school and the action in the newspapers to know my way around. There were four offices, including Dean Biegler's, opening off the central lobby. The rest of the school occupied two floors in each of two wings that ran left and right out of the lobby. The school gym was behind the rest of the school, connected by a narrow corridor, and beyond the gym were the athletic fields. There was a cafeteria in the basement of the school, along with rest rooms and the custodial facilities. A library was at the far end of the left wing. Stairs went to the second floor in stairwells on each side of the lobby. On the second floor above the lobby were the teachers' lounge and the guidance offices. I began to stroll.

They had come in the front door, apparently, and past the offices in the lobby and turned left down the long corridor that ended at the library. Each was wearing a ski mask. Each was carrying two guns. Each had a backpack with extra ammunition in magazines, color-coded to the guns they had. They shot the first teacher they encountered, a young woman named Ruth Cort who had no class that period, and who had
probably been on her way from the teachers' lounge upstairs to the library. She had bullets from two different guns in her. But there was no way to say if she had been shot by one shooter with two guns, or two shooters, one gun each. In fact, they had never been able to establish who shot whom. The guns and the backpacks were simply left on a table in the library when Grant came out, and no one could identify which had been used by whom. The cops had tried backtracking, establishing who had what color coding on which gun, but the eye-witnesses gave all possible versions, and it proved fruitless. There was powder residue on two coveralls that the shooters had discarded in the library, but none on their hands, because they wore gloves. The gloves, too, were discarded, and there was no way to establish which pair belonged to whom. Both had powder residue on them.

The Norman Keep conceit ended in the lobby. The cinder-block corridor was painted two tones of green and lined with lockers, punctuated by gray metal classroom doors. I went into the first classroom. The walls were plasterboard painted like the corridor. There was a chalkboard, windows, chairs with writing arms. A teacher's table up front with a lectern on it. Chalk in the tray at the bottom of the chalkboard. A big, round electric clock on the wall above the door. It had the personality of a holding pen.

I could taste the stiflement, the limitation, the deadly boredom, the elephantine plod of the clock as it ground through the day. I could remember looking through windows like these at the world of the living outside the school. People actually going about freely. I tried to remember what Henry
Adams had written. ‘A teacher is a man employed to tell lies to little boys'? Something like that. I wondered if anyone had lied to little girls in those days.

I moved on down the corridor, following the route of the shooters. I was wearing loafers with leather heels. I could hear my own footsteps ringing in the hard, empty space. The shooters hadn't made it to the second floor. The first Dowling cops had shown up about the time the shooters reached the library, and the shooters holed up there. Hostages were facedown on the floor, including the school librarian, a woman of fifty-seven, and a male math teacher who had been in there reading
The New York Times.
I could almost feel their moment, complete control, everybody doing what they were told, even the teachers. The room was unusual in no way. Reading tables, books, newspapers in a rack, the librarian's desk up front. Quiet Please. I looked at some of the books:
Ivanhoe
,
Outline of History
,
Shakespeare: Collected Works
,
The Red Badge of Courage
,
Walden
,
The Catcher in the Rye
,
Native Son
. Nothing dangerous. No bad swearing.

The windows faced west. And the late sun, low enough now to shine nearly straight through the windows, made the languid dust motes glisten with its gaze. I walked to the back of the library, near the big globe that stood in the far corner. I would have stood there, where I could see the door and the windows, holding a loaded gun in either hand, in command. King of the scene.

The library door opened as I stood looking at the room, and two Dowling cops walked in. They were young. One was
bigger. They were both wearing straw Smokey the Bear hats. Summer-issue.

“What exactly are you doing here?” the bigger one said.

“Reliving school days,” I said.

“Excuse me?”

“School days,” I said. “You know. Dear old golden-rule days.”

They both frowned.

“Chief wants us to bring you over to the station,” the bigger one said.

The fact that the chief wanted me didn't mean I had to go. But I thought it would be in my best interest to cooperate with the local cops, at least until it wasn't.

“I've got my car,” I said. “I'll follow you down.”