Deadline

3

About the time that night that Virgil hooked into a two-pound smally, the Buchanan County Consolidated School Board finished the public portion of the monthly meeting. The last speaker had demanded to know what the board was going to do about buying better helmets for the football team.

“I been reading about how blows to the head turn the boys into a bunch of dummies when they grow up. Murph Roetting’s kid’s still not right after he got took out last season.… I don’t want to think we’re paying a million and a half dollars for a sports complex so we can raise a bunch of brain-damaged dummies.”

The board talked about that in an orderly fashion, each in his or her turn: the five board members, the superintendent, the financial officer. Because school was not in session, they were all dressed in Minnesota informal: button-up short-sleeved shirts and blouses, Dockers slacks for both men and women, loafers and low heels. All their haircuts, ranging from maple-blond to butternut-brown, were gender-appropriately short. They were neat, ironed, and certainly not assertive.

When everybody had his or her turn on the football issue, the board voted to ask community doctors to look into it and prepare a report.

That done, the board ran everybody off, except one fat man, with the excuse that they had to deal with personnel matters, which was almost true.

When the last of the public had gone, they sent Randolph Kerns, the school security officer, to flush out the hallways, including the bathrooms, to make sure everybody had really gone away. He found the school janitor polishing brass, and told him to knock it off and go home. The janitor went.

“We’re clean,” he said, when he came back, locking the meeting room door behind himself.

Jennifer Barns, the big-haired chairwoman and one of three Jennifers on the five-person board, said, “I guess you all know what’s going on. The fact is, if something’s not done, we’re all headed for disgrace and prison. Anybody disagree?”

Jennifer Houser said, “Clancy came around to see me this afternoon. He was threatening me. He said if I didn’t talk to him, he’d put me right down with the rest of you. He seems to think that… I’m a little more honest than the rest of you.”

The other four board members, the school superintendent, the financial officer, the security chief, and the fat man all chuckled; Houser was crooked as a sidewinder rattlesnake.

“So what are we going to do?” Bob Owens asked. He was the senior board member, and one of the founders of the retirement-now scheme.

“We all know what’s got to be done. The question is, can we sustain it?” the third Jennifer (Gedney) said. “I’d rather go to prison for embezzlement than first-degree murder.”

They all went hum and hah, and wished she hadn’t put it quite so starkly. She persisted: “We know what we’re talking about here. Randy?”

“Yeah, we know,” Kerns said. “We could do it right now. Tonight. But you’re right: once we do it, we can’t go back.”

“How would you do it?” Barns asked.

“Been scouting him. He runs right after dark, when it starts to get cool. I’ll come up behind him, shoot him in the back. He won’t suffer.”

“What about his trailer?” Owens asked. “We never did develop a consensus on that.”

“I been thinking about it,” Kerns said. “I know some of you think we should burn it, but that worries me. If they find his body in a ditch, it might have been some crazy kid with a gun. A random killing. If we kill him, and burn his trailer… then it’s obviously covering up something.”

“What if he’s told somebody about us?” Houser asked.

“He hasn’t,” said the ninth man in the room, the fat man, the only one who wasn’t directly involved with the schools. “I told him to hold the whole thing close to his chest. Not to tell a soul — and he doesn’t have any close friends. No: the biggest problem would be if he’s written a lot of it down. What I’d suggest is, Randy takes care of him, in the dark. He won’t be found right away, and I could say I got worried and went up to his trailer looking for him. Give me a chance to go through the place, and clean it out.”

“But what if he is found right away?” asked Larry Parsons, the fifth board member.

“Tell you what,” the fat man said. “I’ll get up on top of the hill about first light, and watch. And at eight o’clock, I’ll go on into his trailer. I got a key.”

Kerns said, “That’ll work. If there’s nobody around, I’ll get him right at the bottom of that last hill before he goes back up to his place. The ditch is deep and all full of cattails. Nobody’ll see him down there.”

Barns, the chairman, looked around the room and said, “Okay. We can do this. Let’s see a show of hands. It’s unanimous, or it’s prison. Do we kill Clancy Conley?”

They all looked around at each other, each of them reluctant to go first. Then the fat man raised his hand, and then Kerns, and then the rest of them.

“It’s unanimous,” Barns said. She unconsciously picked up her gavel and rapped it once against her desk.

Clancy Conley was a human train wreck. He hadn’t started out that way, but he’d discovered speed halfway through journalism school, and that started his slow slide to hell, if hell can be defined as being a reporter/photographer/paste-up man on a small-town weekly newspaper.

In his twenties, he’d moved around, going from the Cape Girardeau Southeast Missourian to the Cedar Rapids Gazette, peaking at the Omaha World-Herald, where, after a three-day run on the really fine pharmaceutical Dexedrine, he got in a violent one-sided argument with the city editor. One-sided because the city editor didn’t understand a word he was saying.

“He sounds like a chicken. He thinks he’s using words, but he’s just going puck-puck-puck-puck puck,” he told the executive editor, as they both peered through the blinds on the executive editor’s office. Conley was flapping his wings around the city desk.

From there it was Sioux Falls, South Dakota, then Worthington, Minnesota, then through a run of smaller and smaller rural towns, finally landing, at forty-five, at the Trippton Republican-River, which was mostly supermarket advertisements, with a smattering of school board news, sheriff’s news, county commission news, city council news, and paid obituaries.

Then, in Trippton, Conley had inadvertently discovered that the school board was stealing the school system blind, taking out nearly a million dollars a year from a budget of thirty-nine million. It was all hard to see — for example, who really knew if the school buses got ten miles per gallon or eight, or exactly where they got the stuff that went into school lunches? — but it added up.

Conley got the first tip from a school bus driver who knew how much diesel her Blue Bird used, and how much the school said she used. The same driver suggested that he talk to a lady who worked in the high school cafeteria, about food costs. The anecdotal information had been confusing, but suggestive. Then Conley stole a confidential school budget document that made it all perfectly clear.

He was thinking about the document as he puffed along Highway A, going west out of Trippton, the night after the school board meeting. He’d started running every night, because it was one thing he’d once done well. He was now twenty pounds overweight, but had been forty pounds overweight at his forty-fifth birthday. The discovery of the school board embezzlement had stirred some of the original journalistic vinegar in Conley’s veins. He’d stopped drinking, mostly, and didn’t do speed more than twice a week. His weight was down, his brain was clearer.

He was even thinking that after he broke the school story, and moved to a bigger paper, he might actually start looking for something with tits. So his life was changing for the better. His biggest current problem would be explaining how he got the detailed budgetary information.

He didn’t cover the school board himself; the paper’s editor, Viking Laughton, did that. And the bare fact was, he’d broken into the school finance office on several weekend nights, cracked the finance officer’s computer, and had taken photographs of the computer screens over fifteen nerve-racking hours.

It had taken him the best part of six months, and two more break-ins, to winkle out all the details. He’d then confided the findings to Viking “Vike” Laughton, the fat man who owned the newspaper.

Vike had been astonished: “I never saw it in them. They must be taking out a hundred thousand dollars a year, each of them.”

“Something like that,” Conley agreed.

Vike told him to keep it all top secret. “This here’s a Pulitzer Prize, boy, if we play it just right,” he said, slapping his hands on printouts of the budget documents.

Vike suggested Jennifer Houser as the one likeliest to turn on the others — he’d been covering the school board himself, for years, and was familiar with all the members.

Conley had finally gotten to Houser just that afternoon.

“This is going in the paper next week, Jen,” he’d told her. “Everybody’s going down, but when the police arrive, I’ll tell them that you were the person who cracked the case. I’m sure, if you cooperate, they’ll take it easy on you. You might have to do a little jail time, but you ask anybody who’s been to jail, and they’ll tell you — a little is way, way better than a lot. Way better.”

She’d started crying, and asked for a couple of days to think it over. Conley had just put the paper to bed for that week, and had time, so he’d agreed: “Two days is fine, Jen. Take three, if you need it. But… it’s going in the paper one way or another, next week. I’ve already cleared it with Vike.”

She’d crack, Conley thought. He was coming to the bottom of the hill, by the cattail swamp, just before the last hard climb back up to his trailer, his running shoes flapping on the warm blacktop. A truck came up in front of him, slowing as it went by, and Conley moved over to the shoulder. Wasn’t sure, but it looked like Randy Kerns behind the wheel.

He turned his head to look back, but the next thing he knew, he was lying in the cattails, the cold water soaking through his shirt and shorts.

Before he died, which was only a few seconds later, it occurred to him that he wasn’t too surprised.…

Vike was really, really close to the school board.