The Trapdoor

  We came into the wings: a dimly lit space. There was no one there. Various shapeless objects lay slung on the floor. Ropes and wires and lights hung on the walls and from the ceiling above us. But that was all we saw. That and—a few steps in front of us—a heavy, gray metal fire door.

  “What the bleeding hell?” said Tammany Bird. We went for the door. Bird threw his massive weight against it. It opened with a loud snap.

  We came out onto the edge of the school playing field: a long expanse of grass that rolled up from a dip to meet the sidewalk at the side of the school. We saw David Brandt. He was just cresting the rise of the hill. He reached the sidewalk. He began walking away.

  Walking. He was walking. Ambling almost. There was nothing hurried about his step in the least. We saw him reach into his pocket as he strolled past a line of parked cars. He stopped before one: a low, black sports car. Casually he put the keys in the door and began to open it.

  “What … I mean, what …” said Tammany Bird.

  “The hell?” I suggested.

  “Come on, damn it,” he said.

  We let the fire door swing shut behind us. We started around the building to the front. Unlike Brandt, we were hurrying. It was something neither of us was very good at. Bird was such a huge man that the effort of carrying his weight made him breathless almost at once. As for me, I’d had it. My body had stood for enough abuse in the last couple of days.

  Before we even came around the school, we were puffing in unison. I started coughing. Bird kept cursing and muttering “Come on” to his own legs. We headed for the patrol car. When we reached it, I leaned against it, trying to catch my breath. Bird unlocked it and let me in.

  I fell into the passenger seat, dragging the door shut behind me. Bird got the car started. With a screech of tires, he pulled away from the curb.

  “You all right?” he wheezed.

  I tried to speak. I was seized with a fit of coughing. I felt the inhaled tar of a lifetime rising in my throat. I felt the blood rushing to my face. I leaned forward, hacking. Bird brought the cruiser around the corner.

  “Eyeah,” I gasped. “I’m fine.”

  The road ran straight. We sighted Brandt’s sports car about three blocks ahead of us. It was cruising along at an even speed through a residential section. Its motion remained cool, unhurried.

  “What the hell is he doing?” Bird said. His breath still whistled in his throat.

  “I don’t know.”

  “I mean, should I turn on the siren?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Should I?”

  “I don’t know.” I coughed.

  “He ain’t running.”

  “No.”

  “Let’s see where he goes.”

  He went another block, then eased to a stop at the stop sign. His right-turn flasher blinked. As we stared after him, he went around the corner out of sight.

  “I’ll be jiggered,” said Bird. He hit the gas. The cruiser spurted forward. I was thrown back against the seat. I grunted. Bird gasped. I coughed. We shot ahead. We reached the corner where Brandt had turned. Another car was moving into the intersection from the left. We ploughed through the stop sign. We heard the blare of a horn, the scream of brakes. We missed a broadside by about a foot. Brandt had disappeared. We raced after him.

  After about three blocks we found him again. He was two blocks ahead of us. He had sidled up to the curb in front of a white colonial home. He was getting out now: casually, slowly. He locked the car door. He strolled up the path to the house. We watched him. He opened the front door and went inside.

  “What the hell? I mean, what the hell?” said Tammany Bird.

  “Just let’s nail him,” I said.

  Bird hit the gas again. The patrol car zipped through another stop sign. We screeched to a halt, skewed at an angle to the curb behind Brandt’s neatly parked car.

  We jumped out. We hustled up the walk. We stood before Dutch doors flanked by thin windows laced with copper cames. Bird rang the doorbell. It went dingdong. I peered through the windows. I saw the front hall and a flight of stairs.

  We waited. There was no answer. Bird rang the doorbell again. It went dingdong again. I looked to my left and saw a large picture window. It hung above a patch of pachysandra planted up against the side of the house. I moved away from the door and began kicking through the pachysandra. I heard Bird whap the door with his palm.

  “Open up,” he shouted. “Open up, Brandt, it’s Chief Bird.”

  I reached the window and peered in. I saw a living room, appointed with wooden, colonial chairs. Modest but stately. It was lit only by the light from outside. Beyond it I saw a long hall. It was completely dark. At the end of the hall was a room, lighted from within. It looked like a den. I saw a leather desk chair and part of a desk. Then I saw Brandt.

  He was in the den. He moved into my vision from the left of the doorway. He was carrying a revolver.

  “Bird, Bird, he’s got a gun!” I shouted.

  Reflexively the chief grabbed the door handle and tried to shove the door open. It wouldn’t budge.

  I saw Brandt sit down in the chair. He opened a drawer of his desk and brought something out of it. A little box. Bullets. He cracked open the revolver’s cylinder. He fumbled with the box.

  I kicked my way through the pachysandra, heading back to Bird. The chief was still trying to open the door.

  “Shoot the goddamn lock off!” I cried.

  He paused, faced me. “Wells,” he said, “I’m the chief. I don’t carry a weapon.”

  I threw myself at the door. Slammed against it with my shoulder. I grabbed my shoulder and screamed in pain.

  “Bust the window,” said Bird.

  “You bust the window. Ow, God.”

  “Cut my goddamn hand off,” Bird muttered. He stepped to the left. With a short, sharp blow, he hit one of the glass panes with the heel of his palm. The little pane cracked in half. The top half fell inward. Quickly the chief wriggled the bottom half free and tossed it into the pachysandra. He reached through the pane. I grabbed the door handle.

  “’Fi cut myself …” Bird muttered as he fumbled for the lock. “… take it out of your goddamn hide …”

  “Hurry.”

  “You want to do this?”

  “Would you hurry.”

  “I’m sixty-three goddamn years old … Got it.”

  I heard the latch shoot back. I pressed the handle. The door swung open. I went over the threshold running.

  “Hey,” Bird shouted. “He’s got a gun, remember?”

  But I was tearing through the living room, dodging the chairs. I raced into the darkened hallway. There was Brandt before me as I ran. I saw him snap the revolver shut. His face, though pale, was still calm. I was five steps from the door. If he wheeled and fired, I was a dead man.

  He raised the revolver. But he did not turn. He placed the long barrel of the gun snugly under his right eyebrow.

  I crossed the room’s threshold. I leapt at him.

  He pulled the trigger.

  33 There have been a dozen moments in my life like that one. There have been too many. Gunshot moments that seem to spread across the fabric of time like an ink stain.

  I felt my body in the air. I felt my hand wrapping itself around Brandt’s wrist. Every atom of me seemed awake to the instant, and the instant seemed to last forever.

  The gun went off. It wasn’t very loud. Like every pistol shot I’ve ever heard, it sounded phony: like the rolls of caps I used to set off with a baseball bat when I was a kid. I had time to think about that as I flew toward Brandt, as I grabbed his wrist, as he fired. As I rolled across the desk, as I tumbled off and fell to the floor in what seemed like slow motion, I had time to imagine Brandt’s blood and brains erupting above me, time to expect a rain of gore to come pouring down over me in the moment to come.

  I hit the floor. Time suddenly sped up again. I felt the blow of the fall. I felt my breath knocked out of me. The room spun. I saw Br
andt’s face, twisted in horror. I saw Bird, frozen at the door.

  Then the rain came. But it wasn’t a rain of blood. It was a gentle, vaguely ridiculous snowfall of plaster and paint. The shot had blown a hole in the ceiling.

  The gun had gone spinning out of Brandt’s hand to land at Bird’s feet. The chief stooped over heavily and picked it up.

  Seated at his desk, the principal of the Grant Valley High School buried his face in his hands and sobbed.

  “How many have there been?” said Bird.

  Brandt sat hunched in a metal chair at a long table. The chief sat across from him. I was leaning against the wall. We were in the station’s conference room: a naked rectangle of a place, with only the table and chairs for furniture. There were no windows.

  Brandt sat with his hands folded in his lap. His eyes were turned down to the table. He had the bare, dazed look some men get when they take off their glasses. His lips worked for a long time before any sound came out.

  “Eight,” he said hoarsely. The deep, sincere voice was gone. “Ten maybe.” He knit his brows like he was trying to work it out. “I’ve been at the school ten years. Maybe ten.”

  Bird heaved an enormous sigh. “One a year,” he said.

  “I truly have tried to stop it,” whispered Brandt. “I truly have.” He looked up, first at Bird, then at me. He appealed to us. “They’re just so beautiful.”

  “And young,” said Bird.

  Brandt’s head fell. His lips pressed together. “I truly have tried. I knew no one would understand. I knew it would come out eventually, and then … Do you think … Do you think I’ll have to go to jail?”

  “Well, that depends.” Bird rubbed his big face with his big hand. “There is the little matter of statutory rape. Are you positive you don’t want an attorney?”

  “Yes.” I could barely hear him. He said it again. “Yes. What good would an attorney do me? I don’t care what happens. Everything’s over for me anyway. My career, I mean. Over. That’s all that’s ever really been important to me. My career. The kids …”

  A moment passed in silence. Then Bird said, “Tell us about Nancy Scofield.”

  One corner of Brandt’s mouth lifted in a miserable smile. “A sweet girl. A sweet, sweet girl. You don’t know … You don’t know the hell I’ve been through since she … Oh God, it’s been so awful for me.”

  “Do tell,” said Bird, under his breath.

  “She was just … so lonely. An ugly-duckling type, didn’t fit in anywhere, didn’t realize her own … potential for … for sensuality.”

  Both Bird and I turned our faces from him.

  “Oh, I know what you’re thinking,” said the principal, looking up quickly. “You’re thinking I’m a terrible man. But I’m not. Not really. I made her very happy for a while. It’s just … she was just … too lonely. She started to care for me … too much, and I … I told her. I told her it was wrong, that it had to end, but she wouldn’t listen. And when it was over …” He lifted his shoulders. “She just cried and cried.”

  “How long was that before she killed herself?” Bird asked him.

  “About a week, a little more. It lasted through the summer. I didn’t want it to. But she cared so much, I …”

  It explained the transformation in Nancy’s character. Her happiness through the summer. And the sudden plunge.

  Now Bird shifted heavily in his chair, straightening. “Okay,” he said softly. “Now tell us about Michelle.”

  Brandt blinked. “Michelle.”

  “Michelle Thayer.”

  Slowly he began to shake his head. “I never … Not with Michelle … no, I never …”

  “But she knew about you and Nancy, didn’t she?”

  “No, I …”

  “Nancy called her on the hotline and told her.”

  “The hotline? I didn’t …”

  “Mr. Brandt,” Bird said. “You were willing to kill yourself to keep from facing a scandal.”

  “I … I don’t know … I’d been waiting for it to happen so long … I …”

  “What about Michelle? Were you willing to kill her too?”

  Brandt’s mouth did not drop open: it yawned open slowly. His eyes, too, widened in the long shock of the blow. Then he whispered, “Oh God. Oh God. Oh God.”

  “Where were you the night Michelle Thayer hanged herself?” asked Bird.

  And Brandt laughed once suddenly. “Where?… Where was I? You sound like a television show.”

  “Not a television show, Mr. Brandt. Where were you?”

  “I … I have no idea. Yes, I do. Wait. Yes, I do. I was at home. I got a phone call from her homeroom teacher, Mrs. Cotes. She called me. It was … it was early in the morning. Six or so. Before school started.”

  “What about that night?”

  “I was at home. I was …”

  “What?”

  “I was drinking. Because of Nancy.”

  Bird and I looked at each other. “Anyone call you, visit you at home that night?” the chief asked.

  “No, I … Yes, wait! Yes! Coach Wily did. Bob Wily, the gym coach. He called me. To talk to me about a football player … he’d been having trouble in school … he wanted to tell me that they’d talked. I can’t remember the student’s name, but he called me. I swear.”

  Their voices droned on. Bird asked more questions, Brandt fumbled through his shock for the answers. But now, as I leaned against the wall, I was no longer listening. My mind drifted away.

  The thing of it was: I believed him. Bird would check it out with the gym coach, sure, but I was already certain that Brandt was telling the truth. He was a creep, one way and another, our principal. He was the kind of walking scar a teenaged girl could carry with her for a long, long time. But I knew the minute he heard Michelle’s name that he hadn’t killed her.

  And then, in the next minute, I thought I knew who had.

  It didn’t come to me all at once. It more or less rose up out of my undermind until I was just sort of standing in the middle of it, looking it in the face. It was as if I’d been collecting personalities for the past few days—the Scofields, the Summers, Brandt, all the people I’d talked to. That I’d stored them all somewhere carelessly, in a jumble. And now, as I stood there with Bird and Brandt going at each other, now they sorted themselves out for me and I saw all of them for what they were.

  Bird glanced up at me as I excused myself from the room. A wan glance. Annoyed. It was me who’d gotten him into this in the first place, stuck him with a scandal he didn’t need. And here I was ducking out at the first opportunity. But it was moving toward afternoon, and I had plenty to do.

  I wanted to be sure this time. I wanted to be absolutely sure.

  34 The station house occupied the first floor of the county hall. Most of the files and records were on the fourth. An ancient elevator the size of a warehouse took me up there. It let me off in a huge expanse, almost glaring with the light of its huge windows. Gleaming in that light under pale fluorescents were dozens of battered, gunmetal filing cabinets. A few ancients sat on high stools here and there, files open on the tables before them. Their frail, liver-spotted hands listlessly turned the pages. The place stank of dust and the unexamined facts.

  I went to the central desk. An old woman there gave me some forms. I filled them out. She gave me some files. She carried my forms away slowly. I guess they also went into a file somewhere. Everything went into the files.

  I took my files to a table. I sat on a high stool. I began to read. The afternoon hours passed into evening. The seconds and the minutes and the hours. They went on and on like an old man’s yarn. I kept the files before me. The pages of them fluttered by beneath my hands.

  At four-thirty on the dot the old lady at the central desk rang a little bell. As if by reflex, the other old people around me closed their files and carried them back to her. I followed suit. I wasn’t finished, not completely. I could have gone on for another day, at least. But I had enough for what I wan
ted. I wanted to flush my killer out, and I had enough for that.

  I debated for a moment whether to go right to Chief Bird. I decided to wait. In the first place, I was guessing and I knew it. After Brandt, I didn’t have the guts to drag Bird on another wild-goose chase. I didn’t think it would accomplish much. This one was smarter than Brandt. This one would ask for a lawyer, would make no confessions. This one, also, was after me. I was the one who could tap the rage and self-hatred that might bring out the truth. There would be time, I thought, to call Bird in if things got out of hand.

  The long November dark had fallen by the time I headed for the Summers’ place. The night was as cloudy as the day had been, and colder. I drove into the Grant Valley woods on unlighted roads. Only the big houses here and there behind the trees marked the way.

  The ranch house itself looked warm and inviting. All its big windows were bright with yellow light. Alice Summers opened the door for me. I saw that little worried smile of hers fade from her pretty face.

  “Why? …” she began, and then thought better of it. She knew her job. She turned over her shoulder and said, “Walter, would you come here please.”

  I waited. Then the tan and handsome face of the politician was before me—glowering at me, in fact, with its best expression of moral outrage.

  “I don’t think we have any more business with you, Mr. Wells,” he announced.

  “Think another time,” I told him. He began to shut the door in my face. “Think about Capstandard.” The door stopped closing. “Think about American Regions,” I said, “and about United Metals.…” The door swung open. Summers looked pale beneath his tan, but he managed to keep his moral outrage in place. “May I come in?” I said.

  Well, he didn’t say no anyway. I went in. I walked into the broad living room where the trophies of Summer’s manhood were displayed. Michael Summers was seated in a leather easy chair, sipping a soda. He smiled when he saw me and began to stand up. The smile died when he saw the look on his father’s face. He sat down again.

  Walter Summers went past me, and I went after him. He led me out of the room and down a short hallway. We passed into a small study, all studded leather and dark brown wood. Globes and pictures of hunting dogs. More musk, more trophies.