Red White and Black and Blue

Chapter Nine

Loitering in a car outside an elementary school is a good way to draw unwanted attention if you're not the parent of one or more of the pupils inside. So I parked in what appeared to be the staff lot, locked the shoulder bag in the trunk of the Corolla, and strode up to the uniformed security guard outside the main entrance. The stout, seventyish, Caucasian man was shifting this way and that, looking as if he was about ready to finish his shift and get the heck off school property and go somewhere and have a smoke-I could smell it on him-and a brew. The curb fifty feet away was lined with idling school buses, their drivers poised, awaiting the onslaught.

"Sir, I'm looking for Jennifer Stiver. Is she likely to come out this way?"

"Prob'ly."

"So, school's out in three minutes?"

"Yeah, about that. But the teachers won't be out yet. They mostly stay late."

"Will Jenny be in her classroom?"

"Prob'ly."

"I'm her cousin Donald from Minneapolis. She doesn't even know I'm in town. Aunt Elva thought I should surprise Jenny and she'd get a kick out of that."

"That's nice. She's in room twenty-six. Just tell the office first."

"Thank you, sir."

I stood aside when a bell went off, the entire building seemed to tremble on its foundations, and the doors burst open and unleashed a hopping and skipping swarm of small people jabbering and hollering. The loading of the buses by the drivers and cadres of aides was carried out as efficiently as any UPS overnight sorting operation. None of the hundreds of first-to-sixth graders wandered off or fell under a bus or sneaked behind a bush to smoke pot. Within a fast five minutes, the buses shut their doors and roared down the street in a mighty convoy behind which lesser traffic would soon creep along, in Buddhist-monk-like synchronicity with a universe that was orderly and moral twice a day.

I nodded at the security guy and ambled inside the building, a one-story concrete slab and glass structure with classroom wings extending out from the administrative core and, presumably, a cafeteria and gym in the rear. I waltzed past the office-a sign said OFFICE-and turned down a corridor, hoping this was the wing with room

It was. The door was open, and I peered inside. My idea was, if I approached Jennifer Stiver in any number of other situations, she would likely tell me to buzz off, or even run away. If I approached her in her workplace, she might possibly do either of those, but she might also be such a slave to professional decorum that she'd be willing to talk to me.

"Ms. Stiver?"

"Yes?" She looked uncertain. Was I a parent or stepparent or other family member of a student who she wasn't quite remembering?

"I'm sorry to bother you in your classroom. I'm sure you're up to here with end-of-the-school-year responsibilities. But I know how close you were to your brother Greg, and I'm sure you were devastated by his suicide. I'm Donald Strachey, a private investigator, and I've been hired by other people who cared about Greg to look into the circumstances of Greg's death, and I'm hoping you'll be able to clear up some inconsistencies I've run into about Greg's state of mind in the weeks prior to his death."

She stood next to her desk glaring at me. She was taller than she looked in her Facebook photo, her amber hair was even more meticulously unruly, and her big china-blue eyes were bright with anger.

"You're working for people who cared about Greg? And who exactly would those people be who supposedly cared about Greg? I think you're a fucking liar is what I think you are. Did you by chance call me last night at home?"

"I did. You hung up on me. Can you say fucking in an elementary school? I'm surprised."

"Well, your shock would disappear in a hurry if you spent a day with today's sixth graders."

"Do you wash their mouths out with soap, or how do you handle present-day potty mouthery?"

"No, I do not wash their mouths out with soap, nor do I touch the children in any way whatsoever that could be construed as corporal punishment. What I do is, I explain, without actually saying it, that fuck is a rude word, and life is nicer for everybody if we refrain from using rude words in the same way we should all try to refrain from using rude 84

Red White and Black and Blue by Richard Stevenson behavior. Sometimes this argument makes an impression, although often it doesn't. Back when I was a naive beginning teacher I once asked a boy if he used language like that in front of his parents. He said yeah, he did, and if they didn't like the way he talked, they could go fuck themselves."

"Gee. And you're not allowed to Taser the children?"

"No. Even though electronic zapping would not involve touching a child, it's not permitted. But I am allowed to Taser uninvited classroom intruders such as yourself, or at least to call security. First, though, let me ask you something. Are you by chance working for a life insurance company?"

"No, why?"

She relaxed a little now and looked not so much outraged as merely nettled. "Well, who are you working for, and what's your interest in Greg's death? Greg died more than five years ago. His insurance company, Shenango Life, not only refused to pay out benefits but seemed to be hinting that I had something to do with Greg's suicide. I was the intended beneficiary of his fifty-thousand-dollar policy, and they acted as if I was an accomplice in an attempt to defraud the company. When you called last night, I thought, oh God, it's Shenago Life driving me up the wall all over again."

"I'm not surprised," I said, "that you were Greg's life insurance beneficiary. Greg's relationship with his boyfriend if that's the correct term for his friendship with Kenyon Louderbush-was apparently troubled. I guess he wasn't about to leave that violently unstable guy fifty thousand dollars."

I didn't know what the cold look she gave me meant, but she abruptly walked over and shut the door to the classroom.

"Okay, sit down."

"Thank you."

"If Mrs. Weaver, the principal, drops in, I'll say you're a friend."

"I told the security guy I was your cousin from Minneapolis."

"Fine. Cousin Donald. Just so no one thinks you're a guy I'm dating. If word went around that I was dating an aging kickboxer, I'd be really embarrassed."

"No kickboxing for me, not to worry. If it's my banged-up appearance you're referring to, it's only rugby. My boyfriend thinks I'm getting a little old for that stuff, but I can't seem to give it up."

This fib had the approximate intended effect. "You're gay.

Okay. Now I'm supposed to see you as less threatening than I did two minutes ago. All right, I do. So, did you actually know Greg?"

She was perched on the edge of her desk now, and I eased onto one of the sixth graders' chairs in the front row. Stiver needed to feel as if she was in charge of the situation, and that was fine with me because in all the most important ways she was.

"No," I said, "I didn't know Greg at all. I'm just learning about him. I've met his neighbors on Allen Street, Janie Insinger and Virgil Jackman, and I've met his thesis adviser, Professor Podolski. They all spoke well of Greg and were very sad when he died. The thing is, someone has hired me to look 86

Red White and Black and Blue by Richard Stevenson more closely at Greg's relationship with someone else who was very important in his life: Kenyon Louderbush. You knew about that, I take it."

A tight look. "Of course."

"And you were aware that it was abusive? That Louderbush beat Greg?"

"Yes." She shook her head and looked as if she might cry.

She walked around and plopped onto the chair behind her desk. "Look, here's the thing if you really have to know. I tried to get Greg into therapy so he could put an end to this horrible, masochistic self-destructiveness. But he wouldn't do it. He said he had to finish his thesis, and that was the only thing he had the energy for. Then when the thesis was done, it was some other reason. He was going to be moving away from Albany, and he said there was no point in starting therapy around here and then quitting, and he would do it after he got settled wherever he ended up. My hope, of course, was that he'd move somewhere far away from Kenyon, and he'd be okay at least until he found someone else who would treat him the way he thought he deserved to be treated. That is, really, really badly."

"That had to do with his father? Insinger and Jackman both said Greg had been beaten as a child by his father. Your father."

"Our stepfather actually, Anson Stiver. Our dad, Jim Cutler, died in a car accident when Greg and Hugh and I were one, four and six, and Mom married Anson the next year and he insisted that we all change our last names. I'm glad," she said, nodding approvingly, "that Greg was able to talk to someone else about how Anson beat him and Hugh almost from the day he moved in. Greg told me he'd opened up about it to a few people, but I never knew who they were.

Kenyon, of course, knew. But to him, that knowledge just gave him the means to exploit Greg in his sick way."

"So Hugh was also abused? But not you?"

"I have no idea why I was spared. Maybe because Mom and I were close when I was young, and I was a girl, and Mom wouldn't have put up with Anson hurting me. But she looked the other way when Anson beat Greg and Hugh. I think she saw it as the price the family was going to have to pay for financial security. Well, it was way, way too high a price. Hugh was so traumatized by his upbringing that he left Schenectady as soon as he turned eighteen, and he hasn't been in touch with any of us since then. Greg actually grew up to be a sane and functioning adult and one of the nicest people I've ever known. Of course he was so fucked up by the abuse from Anson that he must have thought at some level that for him intimacy could only be violent. It all just makes me so really, really mad."

"You know, of course, that Louderbush is now running for governor in the Democratic primary."

"Oh yes. I know that. Who doesn't? And it occurs to me that that's the reason you're here. Am I right, Donald?"

"You are. Kenyon Louderbush is not morally fit for the governorship. He's not fit for the State Assembly either, but if all the assemblymen unfit to serve suddenly vacated the Capitol, it would be a thinly populated institution."

She gave me an I-should-have-seen-this-coming look. "So, which side are you digging up dirt for? McCloskey, I'll bet."

"Does that matter? What counts is that Louderbush is forced out of the race and never gets to be governor."

"You know, after Greg died I almost went to the police about Kenyon. I truly believed that Greg's death was legally a form of manslaughter. That Kenyon had somehow driven Greg to take his own life. But I was so upset over the whole depressing mess that I was just paralyzed for a while. I stayed out of school for two terrible weeks and barely got out of bed. The only reason I eventually got my act together was, I was terrified I'd be fired. And with all my student loans I just couldn't afford to lose my job here. Also, I missed my kids. So I came back to school and just concentrated on saving my teaching career. And time went by, and I got distracted by one thing or another, and I never did turn Kenyon in. But I felt I had to do something. So instead I wrote Kenyon a letter."

"What did you say in the letter?"

"I told him he was cruel and heartless and psychologically disturbed, and that I blamed him for Greg's death, and I knew that someday his bad karma would catch up with him and he would pay for all the suffering and pain he had caused."

"You sent this letter to Louderbush's office?"

"Yes, I did. I didn't care who saw it."

"Did he reply?"

She shook her head and laughed once. "Well, I think he did."

"What do you mean?"

"It wasn't until about a month later that I received a plain envelope at my apartment mailbox with no return address.

Inside the envelope was a one-page letter that had been typed on a word processor and wasn't signed. The writer was careful not to reveal anything about his identity, but it was obviously from Kenyon. He said I didn't understand his relationship with Greg, and if I did I would not be so judgmental. He said he and Greg had loved and needed each other, and they had been planning to find a way to control their own worst impulses-that was the term he used-and make a life together. I thought, a life together? The man was delusional. He was married with children and was a family-values conservative in the Legislature. He might have convinced Greg that they had some kind of future, and he might even have believed it himself at some level. But I thought it was a sick joke."

"Did you tell him that?"

"No. I was thoroughly disgusted, and I just decided to move on. I have to say, I rarely thought of Kenyon until I saw that he was running for governor. That's when it all came flooding back-Greg and Kenyon and the violence and the suicide-and I was sick in my soul all over again. I thought, I can't let this go. I have to do something. So I called the Republicans and told them about Greg and about Kenyon."

"You called the Ostwind campaign? When was this?"

"Back in January, right after New Year's. It never occurred to me that they wouldn't take me seriously, but that's exactly what happened. A woman called me-Meg-something-and 90

Red White and Black and Blue by Richard Stevenson she said it wasn't right for the campaign to be prying into their opponents' personal lives. She asked me what proof I had of an abusive relationship. I said I believed what Greg had told me, but on top of that I only had the typed letter from Kenyon that wasn't signed and could have been written by anybody. When I told her this, she said I had better forget the whole thing. She said it was hearsay. That was her word: hearsay."

"Legally, that's true. But you weren't initiating a legal proceeding."

"No, I was trying to stop a total asshole from becoming governor of New York."

"That's exactly what I'm trying to do."

"It really upset me that the Ostwind people didn't get what I was saying. I mean, I'm a Republican and I want Merle Ostwind to win. I was trying to help, for fuck's sake."

"Yes, you were."

"Well, anyway, I guess this proves that you aren't working for the Ostwind campaign. You don't represent some belated attempt to take my information seriously."

"No, that's not what I'm doing here."

Now she looked even more troubled. "So I guess that means you are working for Shy McCloskey. You're trying to get the goods on Kenyon and hurt him politically."

"You could draw that conclusion, Jennifer. By a process of elimination."

She shook her head. "Oh crap. This puts me in a real bind.

Of course I want to stop Kenyon from getting elected. But I don't really know how helpful I can be to you, because certainly don't want to see Shy McCloskey win the election.

He's way too liberal. McCloskey is in the pocket of the unions.

That includes the AFT, which protects lazy, ineffective teachers who should have been canned years ago but are still ruining children's lives because liberals like Shy McCloskey are too cowardly to face reality and are too beholden financially to the unions. Greg explained to me years ago how all that worked, and since then I've added to my knowledge of liberalism's failures with what I've seen with my own eyes."

This was not what I had tracked Jennifer Stiver down to hear her say. "But don't you think Greg would want Kenyon Louderbush stopped from being elected governor?"

She got teary-eyed again and sniffled. "Yes. Yes and no.

No and yes. I know Greg was very, very hurt by his masochistic relationship with Kenyon. But would he have wanted Kenyon to become governor of New York? In all honesty, I'd have to say I'm not really sure he wouldn't have."