"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 eyewitnesses 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 cinderblock 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.
l 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 usually going about freely. I tried too 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."
Chapter 5
THE DOWLING POLICE STATION looked like a rambling, white-shingled Cape. The Dowling police chief looked like a Methodist minister I had known once in Laramie, when I was a little kid. He was tall and thin with a gray crew cut and a close-cropped gray moustache. His glasses were rimless. He wore a white shirt with short sleeves and epaulets and some sort of crest pinned to each epaulet. The shirt was pressed with military creases. His chief's badge was large and gold. His black gun belt was off, folded neatly and lying on the side table near his desk. His gun was in the holster, a big-caliber pearl-handled revolver.
"I'm Cromwell," he said. "Chief of Police."
"Spenser," I said.
"I know your name," Cromwell said. "Sit down."
I sat.
"Real tragedy," Cromwell said, "what happened over at that school."
I nodded.
"We got there as soon as we heard, contained it, waited for backup and cooperated in the apprehension of the perpetrators," Cromwell said.
I nodded.
"You ever been a police officer, Spenser?"
"Yes."
"Then you know how it goes. You do the job, and the press looks for some way to make you look bad."
I waited.
"We got some bad press. It came from people who do not know anything at all about policework. But it has stung my department, and, to be honest with you, it has stung me."