School Days Read online

  No. He didn’t have a dog.

  14

  I WAS WALKING ACROSS the parking lot with Alex Taglio, toward the main entrance of the Bethel County Jail.

  “What good does it do my guy to talk with you?” Taglio said.

  “What harm?” I said.

  “Say somehow, crazy as it is, you convince people that Clark isn’t guilty,” Taglio said. “My guy already rolled on him. Where would that leave us?”

  “Maybe if he’s innocent, he shouldn’t be rolled on,” I said.

  “He is not innocent,” Taglio said. “I said what if you convince people.”

  “If he’s guilty, I don’t want to get him off,” I said.

  “Oh, fuck,” Taglio said, “I don’t know what I’m arguing about. Rita already talked me into it.”

  “Sexual favors?” I said.

  “I wish,” Taglio said. “You ever?”

  I shook my head.

  “Married?”

  “Sort of,” I said.

  “Sort of?”

  “You?” I said.

  “Mary Lou Monaghan,” he said. “Five kids. She caught me fooling around, she’d cut off my wanker.”

  We went into the jail.

  They got us seated, as far as I could tell, in the same interview room where I’d talked with Jared. When the guards brought Wendell in, they put him in the same chair. Might have been the same guards.

  “First of all, Wendell,” Taglio said, “Mr. Spenser’s got no legal authority here. You don’t have to talk with him if you don’t want to.”

  “Like I got something else to do?” Wendell said.

  He was a big, robust kid with pink cheeks and thick lips and smallish eyes. He had a white-blond crew cut. And he seemed to swagger even sitting down.

  “He asks you something you don’t like, you don’t have to answer,” Taglio says. “He asks you something and I tell you not to answer, you don’t answer. Unnerstand.”

  “Sure, you bet, Alex. I do just what you say and every-thing’ll be really fucking swell,” the kid said.

  Taglio sat back and let his face go neutral.

  “I want to talk with you about Jared Clark,” I said.

  “No shit,” Wendell said.

  “Which one of you got the guns?” I said.

  “Man, I told everybody already. I don’t know where the guns came from. They were just there, man, when we decided we needed them.”

  “Why’d you need them?”

  “To shoot up the fucking school, man. Whaddya think?”

  “Whose idea was that?” I said.

  “I told everybody this shit before,” Wendell said. “Ten times. The cops, the lawyers, the jerkoff fucking shrinks. My old lady. Ten times. We wanted to do it. We did it. Here we are. End of story.”

  I nodded. Fun.

  “What do you think of Jared?” I said.

  “Huh?”

  “Jared,” I said. “What do you think of him.”

  “He bailed on me, man. He put his little sissy tail between his legs and snuck out, left me to deal with the cops.”

  “And it wasn’t supposed to be that way?”

  “Hell, no.”

  “How was it supposed to be?” I said.

  “Stand-up, man. Two stand-up guys in there giving the cops the finger when they finally came in.”

  “But Jared got scared?”

  “Looks like it,” Wendell said.

  “That why you rolled on him?” I said.

  “Rolled?”

  “You ratted him out to the cops.”

  “The fuck wasn’t going to leave me with the bag.”

  “Plus, you got a deal,” I said.

  “That is between us and the District Attorney,” Taglio said. “There’s no reason for you to discuss that, Wendell.”

  “Whatever,” Wendell said.

  “So how do we know you didn’t just make it up that Jared was there?” I said.

  “ ’Cause the fucker confessed, man. Would that be some kind of fucking clue.”

  “Good point,” I said. “Must be a drag after being close with a guy all this time, he bails on you the minute things get rough.”

  Wendell shrugged.

  “We wasn’t so close.”

  “You enter into a plot to kill seven people with a guy you weren’t close to.”

  “Sure, it was like, you know, business partners,” Wendell said and laughed. “Wasn’t like we was gonna get married or something.”

  “But you must have had reason to think you could trust him.”

  Wendell shrugged.

  “But you couldn’t,” I said.

  Wendell shrugged again.

  “Make you mad?”

  “Fuck him, man. I got it done without him.”

  “Got what done?” I said.

  “I took care of business,” he said.

  “You shot those people without him?”

  Taglio put a hand on Wendell’s arm. Wendell looked at him. Taglio shook his head.

  “I’m not talking about that,” Wendell said.

  “You know who shot whom?” I said.

  Wendell shook his head.

  “Did you shoot more or did Jared?”

  Wendell shook his head.

  “There were fifteen people shot,” I said. “One of you must have shot more than the other unless both of you shot at least one of the same people.”

  Wendell shrugged.

  “Maybe you both shot them all,” I said.

  “Fuck you,” Wendell said. “I ain’t talking to you no more.”

  “Everybody says that to me,” I said. “Sooner or later.”

  15

  WENDELL GRANT’S MOTHER’S name was Wilma. She ran a little health-food store near the center of town, with four tables outside, where you could sit and consume sassafras tea and bean sprouts on whole-grain bread. She was a pale woman with big, dark eyes and dark, straight, shoulder-length hair, which was beginning to show some gray. The day I went to see her, she was wearing an ankle-length gray dress with blue flowers, and leather sandals. There was no sign of makeup.

  It was three o’clock in the afternoon. The store was empty of customers, and Wilma Grant sat with me at one of the small tables on the sidewalk outside the store. She drank some tea. I didn’t.

  “He just never . . .” she said.

  I nodded.

  “He never was what I wanted him to be,” she said.

  Her nails were square and clean, and devoid of polish. Her hands looked as if she washed them often.

  “And Wendell’s father?” I said.

  She shook her head.

  “No father?” I said.

  “Except in a biological sense,” she said. “I’m a single mother. His father is an anonymous sperm donor.”

  “And you’ve never been married?”

  “No.”

  “Are you a lesbian?” I said.

  “Not being married doesn’t mean you are homosexual,” she said.

  “I know,” I said.

  “Are you married?”

  “No.”

  She smiled slightly and nodded.

  “I have had men in my life,” she said. “But I never wished to marry them.”

  “But you wanted a family.”

  “I wanted,” she said, “someone to share my life. I wanted to teach him and show him and talk with him and be with him. . . .” She stared down the long, still, tree-canopied, almost-empty street. “I wanted someone that belonged to me.”

  “Hard alone,” I said.

  “You have no idea,” she said.

  “Maybe I do.”

  “He was nothing like that. It almost seems as if from the time he was born, he was angry and defiant and just exactly what I didn’t want him to be.”

  “Tell me about him,” I said.

  She started to cry. I waited. After a while, she stopped.

  “What was he like?” I said.

  “He was a bully,” she said. “My son, a bully. And he p
layed football in school.”

  “Not a good thing?” I said.

  “God, no. I think it’s a brutal and dehumanizing game. All these loutish young men trying to hurt each other on the field, while the girls jump around and cheer and show their legs. It is frightful.”

  “What position did he play?” I said, just to be saying something.

  “I don’t know. I don’t know anything about football.”

  “Did you ever see him play?”

  “No.”

  “How was he academically.”

  She shook her head.

  “He had no interest in the life of the mind,” she said.

  “Who taught him to shoot?” I said.

  “Shoot?”

  I nodded.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Certainly there have never been guns in my house.”

  “A woman living alone?” I said. “Not even for protection?”

  “I would rather be killed,” she said, “than take a life.”

  “No boyfriends, or uncles, or anyone that might have taught him?”

  “No.”

  I nodded. We were quiet. A fat yellow cat came around the corner of the store and jumped up onto the table. Wilma picked him up and put him in her lap, where he curled into a fat yellow ball and went to sleep.

  “Where might he have gotten the guns?”

  “I don’t know,” Wilma said. “I know nothing of guns.”

  “Maybe the other kid got them,” I said.

  “Jared Clark?”

  I nodded.

  “I don’t know. I barely know him.”

  “He was pals with your son, wasn’t he?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How did you come to get Alex Taglio for a lawyer?” I said.

  “My father.”

  “Your father recommended him?”

  “Yes.”

  “And your father’s name is Grant?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Hollis Grant.”

  “He lives in town?”

  “Yes.”

  “How’s he know Taglio?”

  “I don’t know,” Wilma said. “I suppose he asked one of his attorneys.”

  “He has attorneys?” I said.

  “My father is a very successful man,” she said. “Grant Development Corporation.”

  “In town?” I said.

  “He lives here. His business is next town over.”

  “Is he close to his grandson?”

  “Mr. Spenser, please don’t put me through this anymore. No one is close to Wendell. He carries my name. But he is so unlike me I tremble to think what a terrible person my donor must have been.”

  “You accept that he did it,” I said.

  “Yes. My father and I have employed Mr. Taglio to see that his rights are protected. But he has committed an unspeakable crime, and he should go to jail and stay there.”

  “So you don’t wish him to get off?” I said.

  “No. We can only try to help him spend his time in a less unpleasant prison.”

  “Like the easiest room in hell,” I said.

  She didn’t say anything. She stroked the cat, and stared down the empty street, and shook her head a number of times.

  16

  “HOW MANY ROUNDS were fired in the school?” I said.

  “Best count is thirty-seven.”

  “How many missed?”

  “Seventeen,” DiBella said.

  “So some folks got shot more than once.”

  “One took four rounds,” he said.

  “Anything there?” I said.

  “Nope, nothing we could find. Rounds came from two different guns, but whose and why four times? Don’t know. One of them might have shot him twice with each of his two guns, or two of them maybe shot him twice each with one of their own guns.”

  “Who got the four hits?” I said.

  “Ruth Cort, Spanish teacher.”

  We were in his car. Pearl, against all regulations, was in the back. She leaned her head into the front and sniffed DiBella’s ear. He shook his head as if there were a fly in it.

  “Anybody spots me with a hound in the car,” he said, “I’ll be running radar traps on the Mass Pike again.”

  “Claim it was my wife,” I said, “and I’m insulted.”

  “Sure,” DiBella said.

  We were cruising through Dowling with the air-conditioning on low and the windows up. In the cool silence, the thick, rural greenery and the white, exurban houses outside the tinted glass of the car windows looked like some sort of theme-park display. New England Land.

  “Know anything about Hollis Grant?” I said.

  “Wendell’s grandfather? Sure, everyone in this part of the state knows about him.”

  “Tell me what you know,” I said.

  “Big developer in central and western Mass,” DiBella said. “Shopping malls. Civic centers. That kind of thing. He’s not much into residential, I don’t believe.”

  “Successful,” I said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Rich,” I said.

  “Yep.”

  “Connected.”

  “You bet,” DiBella said. “Very active in politics. Donates a lot of money to a lot of people.”

  “He a gun guy?” I said.

  “Hell,” DiBella said, “I don’t know.”

  DiBella pulled the car off the road and into an overlook area by a small river. The river dropped off some short falls and washed over some tumbled boulders, and made white water. The trees flourished near the river and stood high and thick above us. The moving water had a green tone to it. DiBella shifted in his seat a little and put his right arm over the back of the seat and patted Pearl.

  “You think he’s got something to do with this?”

  “No idea,” I said. “I’m just channel surfing. The guns bother me.”

  “Yeah,” DiBella said. “Far as we can tell, there were no guns in either house, no shooters. Coming up with four nines is not all that easy for a couple of prep-school kids in Bethel County.”

  “And how to use them,” I said. “We maybe forget, because we’re used to guns. But you get a sixteen-, seventeen-year-old kid with no experience and no knowledge, give him a nine with an empty magazine and a box of bullets, and he’s going to have trouble loading the bullets into the magazine, and putting the magazine into the piece, and getting a round up in the chamber.”

  “If he’s mechanical and he has time, he could probably figure it out,” DiBella said.

  “Probably, but to hit twenty out of thirty-seven shots. . . .” I said. “In a real shootout, not on the range, with a handgun . . .”

  DiBella nodded.

  “I been shooting most of my life,” he said. “I’d take that.”

  “There anyplace around here people shoot?”

  “Local cops use our range in Talbot,” DiBella said.

  “Public welcome?”

  “No.”

  “Any place where a private citizen could shoot?”

  “Pretty good deer and pheasant around here in season,” DiBella said. “I think there’s a couple of hunting clubs got private range licenses.”

  “Names?”

  “I can get them,” DiBella said. “We haven’t been chasing this as hard as you are.”

  “Of course not,” I said. “You got one guy red-handed, and the other guy confessed. You got a slam dunk, why not take it?”

  “It’s not like they didn’t do it,” DiBella said. “We’ll send them to jail.”

  “If they go,” I said, “maybe somebody else needs to go with them.”

  “I got no problem with that,” DiBella said.

  “So where did they get the guns, and how did they learn to use them?”

  “I thought you were supposed to clear this kid,” DiBella said.

  “I take what the defense gives me,” I said. “I go where I can go, see what I find.”

  17

  FROM THE WINDOW of Hollis Grant’s unimpressiv
e office in an industrial park he’d built, you could see straight across the parking lot and observe the westbound lane of the Mass Pike. Hollis himself was only a little better-looking than his office. He was a strong-looking, overweight guy with not much hair and a lot of red face. He was wearing khaki pants and work boots and a white dress shirt with the sleeves rolled to his elbows. The office was small and full of architectural drawings and spec books. There was a drawing table along one wall. The walls were done in plywood paneling. Hollis himself sat not at a desk but at an old table littered with papers, a calculator, two phones, a computer, and a big, clear-plastic T square.

  “I’m looking into that shooting your grandson was involved in,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “Make sure everything is as it seems to be.”

  “So what do you want with me,” he said.

  “Do you know Jared Clark?” I said.

  “Kid that was with Wendell? No, I never met him.”

  “You close with your grandson?”

  “Hard to be close with Wendell. There was no father in his life. I tried to provide him some of that. . . .” He shook his head. “But my daughter didn’t want me to teach him any of the things I knew.”

  “Like what?” I said.

  “Sports, business, tools, stuff that men might know.”

  “What did she want for him?”

  He shook his head slowly.

  “She wanted him to be her prepubescent toy forever.”

  “Difficult to achieve,” I said.

  “I tried to tell her he was going to grow up and would need to become a man. She said it didn’t mean he had to be a man like me.”

  “What did she mean by that?” I said.

  “You met her?” he said.

  “I have.”

  “Miss Crunchy Granola. She was born in 1963 and grew up to be a hippie.”

  “Timing is everything,” I said. “What’s her problem with you?”

  He shook his head again.

  “I’m, oh, hell, I don’t know. I’m too rough for her. I like contact sports. I was in the Navy. I sometimes vote Republican.”