Cops and Robbers

Tom

The squeal was at a junior high school; they’d found a missing teacher, dead.

It was about eleven in the morning, a cloudy day that promised rain for later on. Ed and I drove over in the Ford and parked in the school zone out front. It was one of the old gray stone school buildings, three stories high, looking more like a fortress than a place for kids. A concrete-covered play yard was on the right, surrounded by eight-foot-high chain link fence. Nobody was in it.

A recent fad among the kids has been to write nicknames on walls and subways and all over the damn place in either spray paint or felt-tip pen, both of which are very tough to get rid of, particularly from a porous surface like stone. The fad is for a kid to write his name or his nickname or some magic name he’s worked out for himself, and then under it write the number of the street he lives on. “JUAN 135,” for instance, or “BOSS ZOOM 92,” that kind of thing.

The fad had hit the school building. As high as a child’s arm could reach, the names and numbers were scrawled everywhere on the walls, in black and red and blue and green and yellow. Some of the signatures were like little paintings, carefully and lovingly done, and some of them were just splashed and scrawled on, with runlets of paint dripping down from the bottoms of the letters, but most of them were simply reports of name and number, without flair or imagination: “Andy 87,” “Beth 81,” “Moro 103.”

At first, all of that paintwork looked like vandalism and nothing more. But as I got used to it, to seeing it around, I realized it gave a brightly colored hem to the gray stone skirt of a building like this, that it had a very sunny Latin American flavor to it, and that once you got past the prejudice against marking up public property it wasn’t that bad at all. Of course, I never said this to anybody.

Inside, we went to the principal’s office, and he said he’d show us where the body was. Walking down the corridor with us, he said, “The room was a girl’s lavatory, but all of the plumbing is out of it now. That’s as far as they got with the modernizing plan.” He was balding, about forty, with a moustache and horn-rim glasses and a slightly prissy manner, as though he were more sinned against than sinning.

We got curious stares from the teen-agers we passed, so apparently the news wasn’t general yet about the discovery of the teacher’s body.

Ed said, “Why didn’t you report her missing?”

“So many of these younger teachers,” the principal said, “they’re apt to take two or three days off without warning, we didn’t think a thing of it. Another teacher noticed the smell this morning, that’s why she happened to look.”

I said, “We’ll want to talk to her. The other teacher.”

“Of course,” he said. “She’s in the building at the moment. With Miss Evans, what we think happened, a group of them must have decided to rape her, and took her in there. At some point she must have fought back. I don’t think they brought her in there with the intention of killing her.”

Intentions didn’t matter, if she was dead. None of us said any more, until the principal stopped and pointed at a door and said, “She’s in there.”

I went to the door as Ed said to the principal, “What about her family? You try calling her at home?”

I opened the door and took a step in, and the smell hit me in the face. Then, in the dim light through the dirty translucent windows, I saw her lying on the floor over against the green wall. Plaster showed white where they’d pulled the sinks out. She’d been there for a week, and there were rats in the building. “God,” I said, and backed out, and slammed the door.

The principal was answering Ed’s question, saying, “She lived alone in—” Then he noticed, and said, “Oh, I’m terribly sorry! I should have warned you, I suppose.”

Ed took a step toward me, looking worried. “You okay, Tom?”

I waved my hand at him, to keep back away from the room. “Leave it for the ambulance.” I could feel the blood draining out of my head, a sensation of coldness in my arms and feet.

The principal, still prissy but bewildered, said, “I’m really very sorry. I took it for granted you were hardened to that sort of thing.”

I pushed past the two of them, needing to get outdoors. Hardened to that sort of thing. Jesus H. Christ!