The Crazy School (23 page)

I put on some Strauss, hoping he’d fi nd the schmaltzy mag-nifi cence of the “Blue Danube Waltz” soothing.

“Picture yourself frolicking through sun-dappled forests above Salzburg,” I said.

Dean closed his eyes. “No frolicking. Even the thought.”

“Okay, just picture trees.”

“Can’t,” he said. “This music reminds me of the stewardess.”

“What stewardess?”

“With the polyester lightbulb hat.”

“I think maybe you need some Tylenol. You’re getting delusional.”

He didn’t open his eyes. “Bunny, in
2001
. She cruises around wearing Velcro slippers so she can pass out Space Food Sticks without getting sucked into an air lock.”

“Oh, that stewardess,” I said.

I made him take the Tylenol anyway.

Markham arrived an hour later, looking so exhausted that I immediately fi red up a pot of Bustelo.

He opened his briefcase, lifting out fi les and fanning them out 2 2 2

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across our kitchen table. Then he leaned back in his chair and just stared at them.

“Markham, you okay?” I asked.

“Long night for me and a number of the fi rm’s die-hard young associates back in Boston.”

“Having an attorney is making me feel like Hunter S. Thomp-son,” I said.

“‘When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro,’” said Markham, looking up from his papers. “Just please bear in mind the caveat that I am not now, nor ever have been, Samoan.”

“I’m fi ne with that,” I said, pouring a cup of coffee. “Milk or sugar?”

“No, thank you. I’m in need of all the uncut caffeine I can get this fi ne morning.”

I handed it over. Markham took a healthy sip and threw his shoulders back.

“That has what I’d call a Twenty-Mule-Team kick,” he said, raising his mug in my direction. “Much obliged.”

“Least we can do,” I replied.

He drank off a third of the brew, then placed its vessel carefully atop the kitchen pass-through’s half wall, so as not to put his documents at risk.

“To business, then,” he said. “Of which the fi rst order is your fellow faculty member Gerald Jones.”

“Who may actually have done it,” I said.

“Who graduated ten years ago from Miami University in Ox-ford, Ohio, with a bachelor’s degree from their Richard T. Farmer School of Business, where he was a member of the four-year undergraduate honors program—one of forty students in his freshman class to have made the cut. Graduated fi rst among them, having completed a thesis on”—here he consulted a crisp 2 2 3

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sheaf of papers from the nearest fi le folder—“ah yes, ‘Computer Applications of the Mandelbrot Set in Today’s Investment Banking Environment: Fractals and Financial Engineering,’

with accompanying self-designed software. Special products, et cetera.”

“Gerald?” I said. “Fractals?”

“Indeed,” said Markham. “Good stuff, too. Seven companies tried to hire him before he’d quite fi nished writing the thing, not halfway through his junior year. He spent several years in the thick of it all. London, Tokyo, Manhattan.”

“Seriously,” I said. “Mousy, unprepossessing Gerald.”

“Mousy, unprepossessing Gerald, whose personal net worth is estimated somewhere in the high eight fi gures,” said Markham,

“hard numbers being diffi cult to verify, what with the bulk of his fortune being divided between the Cayman and Channel islands.”

“Markham, the man drives a Datsun. A really
crappy
Datsun.

He’s practically the poster boy for cheap shoes and Sansabelt slacks.”

“And he gave up that rather astonishingly stellar career path for a job at the Santangelo Academy, when he could easily be teaching at Harvard. Or better. Not that he needs to work.”

“So what happened?” Dean croaked from the sofa.

“That is exactly what my young associates back in Boston are even now attempting to determine,” said Markham.

“Nervous breakdown?” asked Dean.

“Fondness for smack?” I chimed in. “Imminent pedophilia conviction?”

“Nary a whiff of impropriety as yet,” said Markham. “He serves on the board of directors for a number of charities. Active 2 2 4

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in the Society of St. Vincent de Paul. Supports scientifi c research with rather heavy donations to several universities.”

“What sort of research?” I asked.

Markham again consulted his fi les. “An eye toward fostering advancements in neuroscience—more specifi cally, in the arena of psychopharmacology. He is apparently considering the endow-ment of a chair, to that end, at one of several prominent medical schools.”

“While preparing for court dates in the aftermath of having grabbed a Santangelo student’s dick during bed check last year.”

“In the aftermath of having
allegedly
done so,” replied Markham, rather sternly, it seemed to me.

“There was a witness,” I shot back.

“Who is now deceased.”

“My point exactly.”

“We can probably rule out the fondness for smack, then,” said Dean.

“Markham, have you ever defended a pedophile?” I said.

“I have.”

“To my knowledge, that’s not exactly behavior tending to spring up unheralded. Out of the clear blue sky, as it were.”

Markham nodded. “With rare exceptions.”

“How much do you know about the circumstances in which Gerald made this career shift?” I asked.

“Circumstances in what sense?”

“Was he fi red? Did he resign? Any dirt at all?”

“Gerald was not fi red, that much we have ascertained to my confi dent satisfaction.”

He reached for his coffee and took a big swallow. “In fact Mr.

Jones resigned in the fi eld . . . Japanese investment bank. Gave no notice, requested no severance, didn’t even bother asking for 2 2 5

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his shares of equity in the company—shares that were literally weeks away from being vested.”

“How many shares?” asked Dean.

“Enough to be worth pursuing,” answered Markham. “Not least since it would certainly have been granted to him if he were, say, taking a leave of absence and had been on good terms with the company’s offi cers.”

“So you don’t know what reason he gave for resigning?” I asked.

“We’ve been given to believe that he may have cited a family emergency,” said Markham.

“Sure, but an emergency for whose family?” I asked.

“We should know more this afternoon. Tomorrow at the latest.”

Dean sat up. “They work fast, your youthful associates.”

Markham dipped his head in agreement, smiling.

I took a sip of my own coffee. “And in the meantime?”

“In the meantime, I want you to lie low.”

“Cross my heart and hope to die,” I said.

“Don’t think I haven’t turned my youthful associates loose with rakes to sift through your
own
background,” he said.

“Bummer,” I said.

“Shootings, suspicious deaths, family hunting compounds spontaneously combusting, not to mention Porsches suddenly inherited. I’m beginning to wonder if you didn’t have a hand in the Watergate break-in.”

I cleared my throat. “Now, listen, Markham . . . Watergate was Nixon’s baby from the get-go. I barely even
encouraged the man.”

“And you listen to me for a moment, Madeline,” he said, more serious now. “I do not want you talking
to
or
about
this Gerald 2 2 6

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Jones—to anyone. Nor second-guessing the state troopers. Nor snooping around on your own. Nor answering a single question from anyone at that damn school, aside from admitting that you are enjoying the brisk November weather here in the Berkshires, before thanking the person asking
so
much for the gracious inquiry.”

I nodded.

“We want you there maintaining a clean record of employment,” he continued. “I don’t care how nicely anyone phrases the merest hint
of wanting information from you—cop, student, teacher, whoever—you refer the curious to me, your attorney, and politely inform them that you are not at liberty to discuss the case, on my advisement.”

“Done,” I said.

“And for God’s sake leave that shotgun of yours at home,” he added.

“You say that with a certain Samoan conviction,” I said.

“Aloha,” Markham replied.

“That’s not Samoan,” I said.

“Nor, as I warned you earlier, am I,” he replied. “Shall I return around seven o’clock tonight?”

“That’d be great,” I said.

“We have a further meeting scheduled with Detective Cartwright. Ten a.m. tomorrow.”

“I’ll be there,” I said.

2 2 7

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33

On my journey to campus, once Dean assured me he was well enough to be left untended that morning, I went through Markham’s prohibitions.

No Gerald. No cop second-guessing. No chatting with anyone offi cial at school.

Which left me Wiesner, in a letter-but-not-spirit-of-the-law kind of way, since the kid wasn’t Gerald, a cop, an offi cial, or even on campus, last I’d heard.

I parked near the dining hall, having passed Santangelo’s completed helipad, on which sat a spanking new chopper. It was a little snub-nosed budgie-looking thing, white with two-tone-blue stripes swooshing along the undercarriage and up to the tail boom.

I wondered how many child-labor hours at the Farm “Dr.”

David had double-billed his students’ families for, in order to swing the purchase, betting he would’ve hit up Gerald for a sweetheart loan had he known the guy’s bank balance.

I climbed out of my car into the cold dry world, eyeballing 2 2 8

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the bulk of the school’s population through the dining hall’s picture window. Not a happy bunch.

The tables and salad bar had been shoved against a far wall, all the chairs pulled into a wide lumpy circle along the room’s perimeter. The kids were seated in those, along with Dhumavati and some of the shrinks. As Lulu had explained to Markham, mere teachers got the fl oor—a clot of blank-eyed, cross-legged misery huddled on the threadbare carpet’s center, like a band of early Christians resigned to their matinee-martyr fate.

I slogged into that shabby Coliseum and took my place among them, wondering whether to expect lions or gladiators.

As if it mattered.

Nobody said a word when I grabbed a spot of carpet next to Lulu. Nobody said a word for the next hour, either. We all just sat there, looking at the ceiling or the fl oor or the windows, anything but each other.

Someone behind me had a bad cough. Mindy kept sniffl ing, then dabbing at her nose with the same soggy Kleenex.

Gerald picked at the carpet’s weft, his pants riding up to reveal inches of thick white tube sock above each cheap wing tip.

There was a pair of galoshes lined up neatly beside his left hip—the short kind that slipped over your shoes only after a struggle, what we used to call “rubbers” before the advent of AIDS. Useless for warmth or protecting anything more than your shoes when the slush was deep. Anachronisms, like those thin plastic rain bonnets that folded up into little packets when they weren’t protecting old-lady hairdos from rain and wind.

I wondered if Gerald had dressed this badly in Tokyo or London. Whether his prissy octogenarian fashion sense was the mark of tone deafness or subterfuge.

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He started picking at his socks, stifl ing a yawn.

I tried to picture him as a ruthless pedophile and killer.

Couldn’t do it. Maybe the camoufl age was doing its job.

If not him, who?
I wondered glancing around the room, picking individual faces out of the silenced dozens in attendance.

Mindy with her chafed nostrils, pink enough to rival today’s fl uffy sweater.

Forchetti cracking his knuckles in a distant chair, grown-up black eyebrows clenched in that baby face.

Dhumavati checking her watch while trying to hide a yawn of her own.

Tim stretching out his legs, no doubt hoping to avoid their falling asleep, as mine were.

Lulu literally twiddling her thumbs, humming some snatch of Andrew Lloyd Webber under her breath.

Sitzman on the verge of sleep, snapping his head back up each time it started sinking toward his chest.

The usual suspects, none of them prime.

No Wiesner, no Santangelo. Skeleton half-crew for the adults, who did their Sitting in alternating duty-roster shifts, but kids had to suffer the full daily complement—two hours at a stretch, with half-hour meal and ten-minute toilet breaks.

Nobody could leave for the bathroom at any other time, which I supposed was some kind of homage-nod to Werner Erhard’s early EST sessions on Santangelo’s part. Or maybe he just fi gured full bladders might do more to speed a confession than straight guilt ever could.

Probably true, if you came right down to it. Not that that was any excuse. And fuck him for not being here in the room, too. Ever. Fuck him for setting up all these bullshit rules and 2 3 0

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“traditions” and torturous, meaningless crap in the name of therapy.

Fuck Freud.

Fuck Jung.

Fuck Werner Erhard, and his little dog too.

Santangelo was just the latest charlatan to wrap himself in their snake-oily mantle of overpriced navel-gazing hooey.

Who was it helping? How was it a good idea to cancel classes for kids who’d missed years of school already, locked down in wards and hospitals and sanitariums before they’d gotten “well”

enough to end up here?

Maybe they didn’t need to get crammed full of Yalta or Maya Angelou—maybe Wiesner was right, and that stuff wouldn’t help, either—but they sure as hell deserved better than this.

Double
-fuck Santangelo for his lip service to “solidarity with the kids” if he couldn’t stomach it himself.