A Little Yellow Dog

5

There were at least sixteen police cars parked around the entrance gate of the new school yard. As I approached the external parking lot a uniformed cop stepped out and put up his hand to stop me.

“You’ll have to turn around,” the young white cop told me.

“What happened here?”

“You’ll have to turn around now.” There was no give in his voice.

“I’m the head custodian at the school, officer,” I said. “Mr. Rawlins.”

“You have keys to the buildings in the garden?”

“Yes I do.”

“Then pull around here. Go up to the garden gate and ask for Sergeant Sanchez.”

I turned to Raymond and said, “You better head over to the main office.”

“Huh?” Mouse seemed unaware of the police activity around us.

“Go on and get ready to start your shift.” I didn’t want Raymond to be anywhere around the cops if a serious crime had been committed. Ex-convicts make the best suspects.

“Okay, man,” Raymond said. He got out of the car and made his way slowly across the asphalt yard. Mouse might have changed, but he certainly wasn’t what anybody would call normal. I don’t think you would have gotten a rise out of him if the Russians dropped the bomb on New York City.

I drove a little way up the block and parked in front of the school’s garden gate.

Two uniforms stopped me there. I identified myself and asked for the sergeant. They pointed out a man standing between two large lemon bushes at the front of the glass-walled garden classroom. He was a tall, weedy man wearing a cheap gray suit with no tie. Mexican definitely, dark Mexican. He was talking to Jorge. I could tell by the way Jorge held his head that they were speaking in Spanish.

When I approached, Sanchez gave me a hard look.

“This is Mr. Rawlins, sergeant,” Jorge said. And to me, “Sergeant Sanchez.”

“What’s goin’ on?” I asked.

There was a start of recognition in the policeman’s eyes; recognition that was quickly replaced by suspicion. Sanchez twisted his head toward a stand of bamboo that Wayne Ito, the gardener, kept toward the back of the gardening plots. I followed him and Jorge as they pushed through the long stalks.

On the other side of the bamboo wall stood Hiram Newgate and the gardening teacher, Mr. Glenn. There were also eight cops — in and out of uniform. Laid out on the ground in front of them was the handsomest corpse I’d ever seen. A tall man in brown tweed with curly dark hair that had been oiled. His shoes were fine-crafted snakeskin and his hands were held up over his head in a feminine pose. I didn’t think he was a white man; his skin was dark olive and his nose was wider than most Caucasians’. I wasn’t claiming him for a Negro either. His racial roots could have been from at least four continents, or a thousand islands around the world.

His left temple was concave and deeply discolored. His eyes were rolled up to the top of his head but, too late, they had seen truth.

“Who is he?” I asked, turning to Sergeant Sanchez. I found him studying me.

“Is the gate here usually locked?” he asked without a trace of an accent. There was an education in his diction; a hard-earned learning that came from the late-night interrogations of used and battered textbooks.

“Always,” I said. “Unless there’s an afternoon class going on.”

“Nobody saw him come in.” The sergeant seemed to be challenging me. “He didn’t sleep here.”

There wasn’t anything for me to say.

“Do you recognize him, Mr. Rawlins? Have you ever seen him around here?” Sanchez was taking me in. Maybe he could smell the residue of the street on me.

He’d gag if he ever got a whiff of Mouse.

“Does he look like somebody who’d be here?” Newgate demanded. “He’s obviously a thief or a crook who was killed and dropped here. Listen, sergeant, we’re going to have to try and keep the children away from here. I have to go organize the teachers. So I hope you don’t mind if I leave.”

“You can go,” Sanchez said. “But I’ll need Mr. Rawlins and Mr. Glenn. I’ll need you men to help us look around here. You might see something out of the ordinary that we’d miss.”

“I’ll get Simona,” Jorge said.

“Where is Simona?” I wanted to know.

“We took her in the classroom, Mr. Rawlins. It was me and her found the body. She took it kinda bad, you know.”

“Okay.” Sergeant Sanchez stuck out his bottom lip and nodded. He was very sure of himself. I’ve always been afraid of self-confident cops.

“I’d like to see her too,” I said.

“Make it fast, Mr. Rawlins. I want to get this investigation going.”

The garden course at Sojourner Truth consisted of Mr. Glenn’s afternoon lectures on seeds and zygotes and then going out to the garden plot where the students learned to plant and grow radishes. Mr. Glenn, who had majored in botanic biology at UCLA, gave his lectures in a glass-encased room that smelled of earth. There were no desks in the classroom, because the students were graded on a verbal quiz, given one-on-one, and on the health of their seedlings. The only furniture in the room, other than Mr. Glenn’s high metal desk, was four long benches where the students met for roll call before rushing out to the soil.

Miss Eng was sitting, head bowed and alone, on one of those benches. She was crying and holding one finger at the center of her forehead, her eyes still seeing that well-dressed corpse.

Jorge sat down and put his arm around her shoulders. He whispered something, and she rose. She looked at me and smiled, but there was no mirth in her heart.

“I never saw a dead man before,” she said.

“I better take her home, Mr. Rawlins. I don’t think she should drive.” Jorge was looking a little green himself.

“All right. We’re not gonna get much work done around here today anyway. You take care of yourself, Simona, you hear?”

She smiled again and let Jorge lead her away. I lingered for a moment after they were gone. The empty room felt safe. I didn’t want to go back out to the police and that corpse; I was anxious but I had no reason to be. Still, I hung back, checking to see that the floor had been properly swept and that the trash cans were empty.

Then I took a deep breath and went out to Mr. Glenn and the cops.

I went with them around the compound while Sanchez asked questions.

“You get many break-ins?”

“Not too many. Lately somebody got into the music room and took about a thousand dollars’ worth of horns.”

“I mean in the gardening compound,” he said.

“Oh, yeah.” I was offhanded. “The boys like to prove that they could climb a twelve-foot wire gate now and then. Once they get in they like to look around a little.”

“Why don’t you put barbed wire up top?”

“Why should I? They hardly ever break anything and the only thing they could steal is some vegetables.” I was bothered by the murder but all I wanted was for the sergeant to take the body away so that I could get back to work.

“How do you explain this?” he asked.

We’d come upon a slender toolshed that was used by the children to house the spades, hoes, and pitchforks when they were hand-weeding or harvesting.

There was a yard-deep hole dug near the shed. Next to the excavation was a small traveling chest that was caked with dirt. There was a canvas sack in the chest that seemed to be full but I couldn’t guess at what it held.

“I don’t know,” I said, answering the sergeant’s question.

“Looks like a hole,” one of the cops surmised.

“You don’t know anything about this?” Sanchez asked both me and Glenn.

A plainclothes cop was squatting by a shovel that lay near the mound of mud next to the hole. There was a deep dent in the scoop.

“I sure don’t know,” Mr. Glenn said.

I suppressed the “Me neither” that was in my mouth.

“Don’t you think you should?” Sanchez asked me just as if I had uttered my denial.

I didn’t have an answer for him.

“Do you have keys to the garden gate?” he asked us both.

“Of course I do,” said Mr. Glenn. In his brown suit and vest he resembled a limp football, with a hard dome of a forehead under a thatch of unruly brown hair.

“What do you mean?” I asked Sanchez.

“Do you have a key to the garden gate?” He spoke slowly, as if to a small child or an idiot.

“Naw, man,” I said. “I mean, why would you think that the killer had a key?”

I sounded smart — too smart. I showed that I knew what the cop was thinking. It was a mistake that I’d never made in the street.

Sanchez gave me a hard look and then said, “The gate was locked when your janitors got here, and there’s not a scuff on those fancy shoes. Somebody had a key.”

“Lots of people do,” I said. “The principal, my janitors, I do, Mr. Glenn does. There’s a set of master keys hanging up in my hopper room down in the maintenance office. Even the district gardeners have a set for when they drop by.”

Sanchez had his eyes on me.

“Anybody here last night?” he asked. “About four or five in the morning?”

“Not s’posed t’be. Nobody works on Sunday, and nobody works that late anyway.” Idabell Turner flitted across my mind but I turned my thoughts back to Sanchez’s questions.

“Where were you when the body was found, Mr. Rawlins?”

“I went to pick up one of my men. His car broke down and he needed a ride.”

“You always give taxi service to your janitors?”

“He’s my night man. If I don’t have a night man we won’t be ready for the morning. The hour or so gets paid back with a full night’s work. Anyway, I took my lunchtime to do it.”

Sanchez just stared. He was a living lie detector.

I was a living lie.

“You two can go now,” he said. “Mr. Rawlins, tell your people that I’ll be around either this afternoon or tomorrow morning. I’ll need to talk to each one of them.”

“Will do,” I said. I wanted to cooperate. I wanted to do my duty. I didn’t have anything to do with that man’s death. But the way Sanchez looked at me made me feel guilty — maybe he could smell something that I had yet to sense.