“I’ve been teaching high school for twenty-two years,” Davis began without being prompted. “I love it. I know the pay isn’t great. I know it’s not prestigious. But I adore the students. I love to teach. I love to help them on their way. I love when they come back and visit me.”
Davis stopped.
“Why did Aimee come here the other night?” Myron asked.
He didn’t seem to hear. “Think about it, Mr. Bolitar. Twenty-plus years. With high-schoolers. I don’t say high school kids. Because many of them aren’t kids. They’re sixteen, seventeen, and even eighteen. Old enough to serve in the military and vote. And unless you’re blind, you know that those are women, not girls. You ever check out the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue? You ever look on the runway at top fashion shows? Those models are the same age as the beautiful, fresh-faced ones that I’m with five days a week, ten months a year. Women, Mr. Bolitar. Not girls. This isn’t about some sick attraction or pedophilia.”
Myron said, “I hope you’re not trying to justify sexual affairs with students.”
Davis shook his head. “I just want to put what I’m about to say in context.”
“I don’t need context, Harry.”
He almost laughed at that. “You understand what I’m saying more than you want to admit, I think. The thing is, I am a normal man — by that I mean, a normal heterosexual male with normal urges and desires. I’m surrounded year after year with mind-bogglingly beautiful women wearing tight clothes and low-cut jeans and plunging necklines and bare midriffs. Every day, Mr. Bolitar. They smile at me. They flirt with me. And we teachers are supposed to be strong and resist it every day.”
“Let me guess,” Myron said. “You stopped resisting?”
“I’m not trying to make you sympathize. What I’m telling you is, the position we’re in is unnatural. If you see a sexy seventeen-year-old walking down the street, you look. You desire. You might even fantasize.”
“But,” Myron said, “you don’t act.”
“But why don’t you? Because it’s wrong — or because you don’t really have a chance? Now imagine seeing hundreds of girls like that every day, for years on end. From the earliest times, man has striven to be powerful and wealthy. Why? Most anthropologists will tell you that we do it to attract more and better females. That’s nature. Not looking, not desiring, not being attracted — that would make you a freak, wouldn’t you say?”
“I don’t have time for this, Harry. You know it’s wrong.”
“I do,” he said. “And for twenty years I fought back those impulses. I stuck with the looking, the imagining, the fantasizing.”
“And then?”
“Two years ago I had a wonderful, gifted, beautiful student. No, it wasn’t Aimee. I won’t tell you her name. There’s no reason for you to know. She sat in the front of the class, this amazing bounty. She stared at me like I was a deity. She kept the top two buttons of her blouse undone….”
Davis closed his eyes.
“You gave in to your natural urgings,” Myron said.
“I don’t know many men who could have resisted.”
“And this has what to do with Aimee Biel?”
“Nothing. I mean, not directly. This young woman and I started an affair. I won’t go into details.”
“Thank you.”
“But eventually we got found out. It was, as you might imagine, a disaster. Her parents went crazy. They told my wife. She still hasn’t forgiven me. Not really. But Donna has family money. We paid them off. They wanted to keep it quiet too. They were worried about their daughter’s reputation. So we all agreed to not say anything. She went on to college. And I went back to teaching. I’d learned my lesson.”
“So?”
“So I put it behind me. I know you want to make me out a monster. But I’m not. I’ve had a lot of time to think about it. I know you think I’m just trying to rationalize, but there’s more to it. I’m a good teacher. You pointed out how impressive winning Teacher of the Year was — and that I’d won it more than any other teacher in that school’s history. That’s because I care about the kids. It’s not a contradiction — having these urges and caring about my students. And you know how perceptive teens are. They can spot a phony a mile away. They vote for me, they come to me when they have a problem, because they know I truly care.”
Myron wanted to vomit, and yet the arguments, he knew, were not without some perverse merit. “So you went back to teaching,” he said, trying to get him back on track. “You put it behind you and…?”
“And then I made a second mistake,” he said. He smiled again. There was blood on his teeth. “No, it’s not what you think. I didn’t have another affair.”
“What then?”
“I caught a student selling pot. And I turned him in to both the principal and the police.”
“Randy Wolf,” Myron said.
Davis nodded.
“What happened?”
“His father. Do you know the man?”
“We’ve met.”
“He did some digging. There were a few scant rumors about my liaison with the student. He hired a private eye. He also got another teacher, a man named Drew Van Dyne, to help him. Van Dyne, you see, was Randy’s drug supplier.”
“So if Randy was prosecuted,” Myron said, “Van Dyne had a lot to lose too.”
“Yes.”
“So let me guess. Jake Wolf found out about your affair.”
Davis nodded.
“And he blackmailed you into keeping quiet.”
“Oh, he did more than that.”
Myron looked down at the man’s foot. The blood had let up. Myron should get him to a hospital, he knew that, but he didn’t want to lose this momentum either. The odd thing was, Davis did not seem in pain. He wanted to talk. He had probably been thinking about these crazy justifications for years, rattling alone in his brain, and now finally he was being given the chance to express them.
“Jake Wolf had me now,” Davis went on. “Once you start down the blackmail road, you never really get off it. Yes, he offered to pay me. And yes, I took the money.”
Myron thought about what Wheat Manson had told him on the phone. “You were not just a teacher. You were a guidance counselor.”
“Yes.”
“You had access to student transcripts. I’ve seen how far parents in this town will go to get their kids into the right college.”
“You have no idea,” Davis said.
“Yeah, I do. It wasn’t that different when I was a kid. So Jake Wolf had you change his son’s grades.”
“Something like that. I just switched the academic part of his transcript. Randy wanted to go to Dartmouth. Dartmouth wanted Randy because of his football. But they needed him to be in the top ten percent. There are four hundred kids in his class. Randy was ranked fifty-third — not bad, but not top ten percent. There is another student, a bright kid named Ray Clarke. He’s ranked fifth in the class. Clarke got into Georgetown early decision. So I knew he wouldn’t be applying anywhere else….”
“So you switched Randy’s transcript with this Clarke kid’s?”
“Yes.”
Now Myron remembered something else, something Randy had said about trying to win Aimee back, about that backfiring, about having the same goal. “And you did the same thing for Aimee Biel. To make sure she got into Duke. Randy asked you to do that, didn’t he?”
“Yes.”
“And when Randy told Aimee what he’d done, he figured that she’d be grateful. Except she wasn’t. She started investigating. She tried to break into the school computer and see what happened. She called Roger Chang, the number-four kid in the class, to see what his grades and extracurricular activities were. She was trying to put together what you guys had done.”