“I do. Don’t you? Yes. Why?”
“All the reasons I just gave you.”
“And…?”
“And…personal reactions to the man, which I don’t think are valid reasons.”
“Why not? You have to be wary of personal reactions, but that doesn’t mean ignore them.”
“Well, all right. It’s the way he looked at me. A few years ago I began to realize that every time I met a man who looked me over like I was a piece of prime breeding stock, and he the blue-ribbon bull, he would turn out to be the same kind of person—an empty-headed incompetent who was so taken with his own sense of magnificence that he couldn’t see that the only prick he had was between his ears. If you’ll pardon my French, as Red Jameson would say. Ned is just too stupid not only to pull this off but to see Vaun as any kind of a threat. In fact, I’d doubt he’s very troubled by the money. You would be, but he very probably thinks it’s his due.”
“You got all that from a look?”
“From a lot of looks over the years, Al.”
He started to laugh, and as before it changed him into someone she could begin to like a great deal.
“Casey, I think I’m going to like working with you,” he chuckled, and as he moved to the car he reached out and slapped her shoulder with a large hand, and then his face collapsed at her reaction.
“Oh, God, I’m sorry, I forgot. Are you okay?”
It took her a minute to catch her breath.
“Oh, yeah,” she finally gasped, “just great. I always stand around with watering eyes, gritting my teeth. Makes me look tough.”
At the high school the final bell had just rung, and Kate steered toward the visitor’s parking against a surge of yellow buses, overladen cars, and clusters of long-legged students with the bodies of adults and the clamor of second-graders. Nothing like a high school to make a person feel short, clumsy, staid, and totally conspicuous. It seemed to affect Hawkin the same way.
“I never feel so much a cop as when I come to a high school,” he muttered.
“Flat feet and a truncheon,” Kate agreed.
“Just the facts, ma’am.” He raised his voice. “Pardon me, ladies, can you tell me where I’d find the principal’s office?”
The answer came as multiple giggles and a flurry of vague waves as the collective of females fluttered away. At the next junction he directed the same question to a group of males, and got vague thumb gestures and deeper guffaws, and the same mass sideways movement. He was drawing breath for a third inquiry when Kate nudged him and pointed to a sign saying Office. They pushed slowly inside to the desk.
The harassed secretary gradually realized that Hawkin was not a student and turned her stubby nose and small eyes in their direction. Her piercing voice cut across the din and caused it to slip several notches as the student bodies took note of the nature of these two intruders.
“Are you Detective Hawking? Mr. Zawalski said that you and Officer Martini would be here and that he’d be back in ten minutes if you’d like to wait in his office.”
The waters parted and the two of them moved meekly under the speculative eyes and the beginning of whispers into the inner sanctum marked Principal. A burst of voices was set off by the closing of the door, and Kate grinned at Hawkin.
“Well, Detective Hawking, what do you bet there’s a scramble for lockers and many flushings of toilets in about two minutes?”
“Sorry for the janitor tomorrow when they’re all backed up.”
The office was large and cluttered, the lair of a proponent of hearty camaraderie and school spirit. Plaques and group photographs of bulky young men in shoulder pads, cheerful young men in baseball hats, and unnaturally tall young men in basketball shorts crowded every inch of wall space. Bookshelves held trophies, a dusty, much-autographed football on a stand, a shelf and a half of multicolored and multisized yearbooks, and several generations of the school mascot, a bear. On the wall behind the door was a yellowed list of scholarship students, three years old. Three small photos of a women’s basketball team huddled together in the corner.
Hawkin moved directly to the bookshelves, pulled out an old yearbook, and took it to the cluttered table. After flipping through it for a moment he opened it flat at the formal portraits of the senior class.
The third photograph was of Vaun. To her left smirked a pair of sun-bleached twins named Aaronson; to her right another blond face looked out, a chubby boy with the euphonic name of Alexander Alarzo. Framed by the blond, tan, smiling faces, Vaun’s hair seemed immensely dark and her startling eyes were a luminous near-white on the page. The photographer had caught the hint of amusement in her still face, and she looked an exotic creature set down inexplicably amongst the oblivious natives. Down the page the pattern of black and white rectangles of near-adults was broken by a famous, or perhaps infamous, picture of Richard Nixon gesturing a V-for-victory sign. Beneath that picture it said, “Marie Cabrera,” and under that, “Escaped our Camera.”
An uncomfortable premonition stirred in Kate. Hawkin turned the page. Marcia Givens to Richard Larson. One more page, and again the presidential visage grinned up at them. “Andrew Lewis. Escaped our Camera.”
“Damnation.” Hawk slammed the book shut.
On cue, the door opened, and the flustered pink face looked in. The upturned little nose twitched.
“Would either of you like a cup of coffee?” She spoke in a more normal voice, the masses in the outer office having miraculously departed. (To their lockers? wondered Kate. Surely not all of them!)
“Not right now, thanks,” said Hawkin. “Maybe later. We do need a telephone, though. Is there a direct outside line, one that doesn’t have any other extensions?”
“Oh!” The pink face got pinker, and she sidled into the room and planted her solid backside against the closed door. She looked so like some television caricature of a blue-rinsed lady thrilled at the chance to assist a professional sleuth that Kate had to bite down a giggle. The secretary spoke in a whisper that could be heard in the hallway.
“Oh, yes, Mr. Zawalski has a private outside line, right in his phone. You just punch the last button, number nine, on the bottom, and he’s the only one that has access to it. I mean, his phone is the only one. I mean, it’s perfectly private.”
She grew so pink during this speech that Kate began to worry that something internal was about to burst, and was relieved when Hawkin gravely thanked the woman and gently pushed her out the door, closing it firmly behind her.
“You go ahead,” he said to Kate. “When Zawalski shows up I’ll have him take me to see the art teacher and then head for the playing fields.”
“I don’t see a phone book.”
“Start with Trujillo, then. I’ll get you one.”
Kate sat at the large desk and began punching numbers. She heard Hawkin’s jovial voice calling, “Hey, beautiful—” before the door cut it off. She had barely finished giving the code of her billing number when he reappeared, laughing, giggles spilling through the door behind him, and tossed the thin book onto the desk. “So long, schweetheart.” He sneered, and disappeared.
She shook her head. What an odd man was Alonzo Hawkin.
She met Hawkin on his way back to the office, walking with a man who looked more like a retired accountant than the force behind that massive display of homage to physical prowess. This little white crow of a man hopped along next to Hawkin (who looked, she realized, as if he had played football at one time) bobbing his head and flapping his hands energetically. His birdlike quality extended even to his handshake, feathery skin over frail bones, and he fluttered on to the office while Hawkin and Kate spoke quietly.
“Trujillo says there’s no change, but she’s stabilized enough that they’re talking about taking her off the machines tomorrow. The lab results are in—it was chloral hydrate in the whiskey. Your classic Mickey Finn, plenty to put her to sleep after one drink, and she had two large ones, on a totally empty stomach. The stomach contents also sh
ow remnants of some kind of cold pills, which may have contributed to it. The doctor Trujillo talked to says the reaction was ‘unexpectedly profound,’ but not unheard of. Funny she didn’t taste it.”
“You ever had Laphroaig whiskey?”
“Isn’t that what Tyler was drinking?”
“And Vaun Adams. It would mask the taste of pretty much anything. What else did you find?”
“I reached the co-op, but the woman who keeps track of their delivery schedule is off for the day, though the man I talked to thought she might stop in again at five. I didn’t tell him what I wanted, only that it was urgent. Did you have any luck?”
“The art teacher is a sixty-two-year-old lady with thick black shoes and a white bun who remembers Vaun Adams well, tried to encourage her to paint more watercolors and still lifes, and thinks it’s a pity Vaun never made a name for herself in the art world after she got out of prison, she seemed such a talented child. The coach is new, never heard of Andy Lewis. Zawalski’s only been here twelve years. He’s going to check Lewis’s records to see who his teachers were.”
In the office they found the principal fluttering, the pink-faced secretary giggling, and neither of them proceeding with any efficiency. Kate wondered in despair how long this was going to take. It involved a trip into the back room and a search through a cabinet, but eventually the secretary came up with the right year’s microfiches clutched in her hands and led them all to the reader. Zawalski fussed with the various switches and knobs until Kate finally commandeered the chair, slipped the proper sheet under its glass plate, and whizzed the transcripts across the screen until she zeroed in on Lewis, Andrew C. No photograph in these transcripts. The grades listed were unexceptional: in addition to the required senior courses of English 4 (for which he had received the grade of C), History 3 (C), and a foreign language (Spanish, a B+), he had taken wood shop (C+), Art 1 (C-), and a study hall. He had also been on the football team, but a search on the walls of Zawalski’s office had already proven fruitless.
Two of his teachers had moved, two had retired, and the English teacher had died in a plane crash three years ago. The coach had also retired, but lived nearby and came to all the games, to contribute his expertise to the efforts of the current coach. The secretary, whose name most horribly turned out to be Piggott, found the telephone numbers of the retired coach and teachers, and got from the district offices the last addresses of the two who had moved. Kate went back to the telephone. Ten minutes later she hung up with the information that of the local people one teacher had died, one was recovering from a stroke and could not be disturbed until at the earliest next week, and the coach would be delighted to see them any time that afternoon, and what would they drink?
Hawkin stood up.
“I’ll go see him. You see what you can scrape up here, about Vaun and Lewis. You might glance at Ned Jameson’s records too, out of curiosity. But first, why don’t you call, what’s his name, the police chief here? Webster?”
“Walker.”
“Right. See if he remembers anything funny about Lewis. I know he was never arrested, but there might have been rumors. Follow your nose. ‘Ferret about,’ in fact. I’ll see you in an hour or so.”
19
To Hawkin’s surprise the principal seemed eager to go along, so the two of them drove off to a very solid hour of football talk, home brewed beer that tasted of plastic, and a heavy-handed determination on the part of Hawkin to fight the tide and keep the talk on Andrew Lewis.
At first wizened little Coach Shapiro could remember no Andrew Lewis, eighteen years before.
“There was a Tommy Lewis, ten years ago.”
“That would be his cousin. Andy Lewis was only here for one year. You might remember him because he was older than most of your kids, came back after a couple years to finish his degree.”
“We had two or three of those—wait a minute. Lewis. Yes, oh yes, Lewis, good arm, fast on his feet, but not much of a team player, wanted to stick out too much. Had to bench him a couple of times. He’d insist on trying for an impossible run instead of making a pass. Quit before the end of the season, I think.”
“That sounds like him.”
“There was something else, too. What was it? Never had any problem with my memory before I retired,” he complained. “Now it’s like running in mud. There was something he was involved in, later, some kind of trouble. Ah, got it! That girl. It was that girl, the one who killed the little Brand child and went to prison. She was Lewis’s girlfriend for a while, wasn’t she? Is that why you’re here? It was a long time ago. Wait a minute. Where did you say you were from?”
“San Francisco,” Hawkin admitted, and the coach was on it in a flash.
“Those little girls they’ve been finding in the mountains? Is that why you’re here? You think she’s done it again, and you’re trying to find her through Lewis? You’re wasting your time, I’d say. He’s been gone for a long time.”
“Yes, Mr. Shapiro, I know that.” He neither confirmed nor denied the man’s assumption, but retreated into a convenient, if true, formula. “We have some questions we’d like to ask Mr. Lewis; we think he can help us clear up a case we’re working on. One of the problems we’re having at the moment is that we don’t know what he looks like, other than vague descriptions. We’re trying to find a photograph of him. Would you by any chance have one?”
The old man burst into cackles, slapped his knee, and pushed himself to his feet. He gestured for Hawkin to follow him and shuffled into the next room, which had once been designed as a bedroom but was now what might be called a study, or a storage room, or a segment of primordial chaos. Filing cabinets with overflowing, unclosable drawers sat on top of dressers and chests; storage shelves, floor to ceiling, towered along the walls, in front of the window, as an island in the middle of the room. Every flat surface was laden with precarious, bulging cartons and grocery bags filled with papers, books, ribbons, trophies, and just plain debris.
“Memorabilia of forty years’ teaching and coaching. Always told myself that when I retired I’d spend happy days sorting it out, but somehow I never seem to find time for it. Can’t think where to begin, for one thing. My wife wouldn’t even come in here, terrified something would fall on her. I used to bring a chair in here to have a smoke. Damn fool of a doctor told my wife I had to give them up, but she’d never come in here.” He surveyed the incredible room with the complacent pride of a grandfather, and Hawkin’s blood ran cold at the thought of what an errant spark could do. “Anyway, to answer your question, there’s probably a picture of your Andy Lewis in here somewhere, but God alone knows where.”
He led them back into his living room, which seemed in retrospect a paragon of tidiness and order. Hawkin drew a deep breath and prepared to spend a chunk of taxpayers’ money.
“Mr. Shapiro, if I arranged some help for you, would you be willing to go through your…memorabilia…and see if you can find any photographs of Andrew Lewis?”
Chief Walker listened, screamed, and agreed to send a man the next day. Hawkin suggested three or four additional sorters—unemployed housewives?—and some muscular teenagers to carry and load. Walker screamed again, and Hawkin spoke the soothing words of financial responsibility and reminded him not so gently of the murdered children, to say nothing of the fire hazard. They parted, if not friends, at least colleagues.
Shapiro seemed thrilled with the arrangement, and they left him a-babbling of a show at the local historical society and pulling at Zawalski’s coattails for a display of his prizes at the high school’s next homecoming game.
Hawkin rode back to the school brooding darkly over the possibility of a conspiracy that reached back eighteen years, and the very absurdity of it put him into a foul mood. Kate, on the other hand, was positively bubbling over with news and had some color in her face for the first time that day.
“Al, you’ll never guess what I found out.”
“Oh, Christ, Martinelli, let’s not play guessing
games, huh?”
Her face went blank and her chin went up, and Hawkin kicked himself for a clumsy fool.
“Yes, sir. Would you like to hear the results of my—”
“Casey, stop. I’m sorry, I’ve been drinking bad beer, thinking bad thoughts, and I need a toilet. I’ll be back in a minute, and we’ll start again.” He went out, and a while later there was a dim rumor of rushing water and he came back.
“Okay, now, what have you come up with?”
She eyed him cautiously, but retreated from formality.
“Walker couldn’t find anything, but the town Lewis came here from is about sixty miles north of here, and Walker knows the man who was sheriff at the time. He’s retired, but he still lives there. I phoned around and finally tracked him down at his daughter’s house, and I explained who I was and asked him if there was a possibility that the name Andrew Lewis meant anything to him. He didn’t answer at first, so I started to explain that it would have been twenty years ago and he had no record so he’d probably never even been arrested as a juvenile, but he cut me off and said in this very quiet voice that there was no need, he remembered Andrew Lewis very well, what did I want to know? I left it general, that we were looking for him for information he might have concerning a murder, but he cut me off again, and said—shall I read it to you? I got most of it.” She held up her notebook, and at his nod went on.
“He said, ‘I wondered how long it would take before he got caught with something.’ I started to say that we were only trying to find him, but he said, ‘I knew twenty-five years ago that Andy Lewis was rotten, and I knew eighteen years ago that he had something to do with that little girl’s death.”
“What?” said Hawkin, incredulous.
“That’s what he said.”
“You mean he thinks Lewis did it?”
“He didn’t say that. He was very careful not to. Just that Lewis was involved in some way. Shall I read the rest of this?”