Dark Places Page 14

  “Do you check all the exits around campus every night?”

  “Most days I don’t come on until dinnertime, around four-thirty or so, then I clean up in here and check doors after everybody’s in bed.”

  “I guess you didn’t see anybody lurking around on the night of the murder?”

  “What night was that?”

  “Did you notice anything unusual any night this last week? Anything you found suspicious?”

  “No, ma’am. Everybody was just glad Mr. Classon was gone on vacation.”

  “Doesn’t sound like you liked him much.”

  Willie fiddled with a black onyx initial ring on his right hand. It was that old-fashioned kind teenage boys used to give to girls, one with a fancy gold W. Willie was uncomfortable now. “No, ma’am. He weren’t very nice to people.”

  Bud showed up with a heaping tray of fast food. “Man, this place is dirt cheap. All this just cost me five bucks.”

  Bud sat down and handed out our fare. Willie unwrapped a cheeseburger, looking around at the other kids, amazed he was eating in the cafeteria, just like anybody else.

  “Guess what, Bud? Willie said he can’t sit down in here. Said the director won’t permit it.”

  “Bummer, Willie. Bet you’d like to tell the director where to stick it, huh?”

  Willie chewed his burger, chased it with a swig of Vanilla Pepsi. “Yeah. He’s . . .” he glanced around, acting guilty as hell. “I shouldn’t be saying stuff like this. They fire people here all the time.”

  Bud said, “You aren’t gonna get fired for talkin’ to us. Tell us more about Dr. Johnstone. He give you lots of trouble?”

  “Yeah. He’s a weird man. I got treated better at the hospital where I used to mop floors. They pay me better here, though.”

  “What’d you mean ‘weird’?”

  “You know, just likes to mess with people’s minds. Like last summer, he comes up to me and says, ‘You aren’t doing your job, son. I saw some weeds this morning on campus, at least fifteen inches tall, and I want them cut down.’ So I says, ‘Yes sir, where is those weeds and I’ll get right on it.’ Then he says, ‘That’s your problem. Find them and take care of it by the end of the day, or you’re fired.’”

  I sipped my Pepsi. “Somebody needs to talk to that guy. Tell him he’s not God Almighty, just a crackpot in summer shoes.”

  Bud said, “Yeah. Somebody oughta give him a lesson in nice.”

  Willie grinned, looked a little less cautious. He liked us. I wondered if he had any friends. He struck me as a serious loner. “You live here on campus, Willie?”

  “I got a little place that I can stay at when I want, just down the hall over there.” He pointed past the kitchen. “I got a little house, too, a ways down the road from here. Got it left to me.”

  It occurred to me that Maxine Knight had mentioned Willie’s name. “Mr. Classon’s secretary said Classon disliked another custodian here and picked on her. You know anything about that?”

  For the first time, Willie forgot calm and caution. He stiffened up and looked angry. “Yeah, she’s my friend. Her name’s Wilma Harte. She’s real nice, too, real nice.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “You know, she just did stuff for people, stuff nobody paid her for. She left here and didn’t tell nobody why, but everybody thinks it’s ’cause of Mr. Classon. I’d come down to the boiler room where we got our desks and she’d be cryin’ her eyes out.”

  “What kind of things did he do to her?”

  “He called her stupid or made fun of her work shoes being cheap and ugly, stuff like that. She liked horror movies, and he said she was the horror and oughta star in them.”

  Tears actually welled in his eyes.

  I said, “I’m sorry, Willie. You miss her a lot, don’t you?”

  “Yeah. She was a real good friend to me, but that didn’t stop her from going off and not saying good-bye. She’d get real down, you know, depressed, I think you call it, especially when Mr. Classon got to pickin’ on her. I really hate to say this, I sure do, but maybe Mr. Classon got just what he deserved. Maybe it’s a good thing he’s dead and won’t hurt nobody no more.”

  I watched him stuff some fries in his mouth and decided that yessir, that certainly seemed to be the general consensus.

  I said, “Oh yeah, Willie, one more thing. We’ve been told you might be dealing some drugs around here. That true?”

  Bud and I watched his face go about three shades whiter. When he answered, he stuttered, “N . . . n . . . no, no, ma’am. Not me, it ain’t me. It was Mr. Classon who got drugs for the kids who wanted them around here. I swear to God it was him. Who told you that about me? I bet it was Mr. Rowland. I heard that he said that about me sometimes. Well, he’s a lying dog, if he said that.”

  “Then you won’t mind us taking a quick look around your office, right?”

  Of course, we couldn’t do that without a warrant, but Willie didn’t know that. He was innocent of dealing, too, if his next statement was any indication.

  “Sure, come on. You can do it now. It’s right down that hall over there. You can look through anything of mine you want to.”

  We got up and followed him, but he was too eager to show it to us for me to get too excited about finding anything incriminating.

  His office was down the hall beside the food line. He strode off ahead of us, and Bud and I followed him in to a room holding two desks, one on opposite ends of the room. Both had bulletin boards above them. Bud took Willie’s side, and I walked over to the one Wilma Harte had used. Her bulletin board had two movie posters pinned up, along with a schedule for last year’s St. Louis Cardinals’ games and a color photograph stuck in one corner. The bigger poster depicted the movie Hellraiser with a picture of its star, that cutie Pinhead, with all the nails protruding from his head. I prefer men without nails in their head, but to each his own. I’d met up with a few guys I’d like to use a hammer on, though.

  The other poster was for the horror spoof Scream. I had actually seen that film once at Bud’s house, but it paled in comparison to my own personal nightmares, so I wasn’t particularly impressed. I took off the photo and looked at it. Willie and a girl smiling at the camera and leaning on mops together in the cafeteria. The official custodian pose, no doubt.

  “Is this Wilma with you?”

  Willie was standing over in the corner, shoulder against the wall, calmly watching the detectives snoop. Mr. Look-Wherever-You-Want-To-But-You-Won’t-Find-A-Damn- Thing. He said, “Yeah, that was taken at the first of the school year. I wish she was still here. I sure do miss her.”

  I examined Wilma Harte’s face. She looked pretty much dead-on to Maxine Knight’s description. She was kinda stocky and muscular and strong-looking. She had on a hot-pink polo shirt, and her dark-red hair was plaited into pigtails tied with yellow ribbons. She had lots of freckles and was cute in a Pippi Longstocking holding-a-baby-nanny-goat sort of way. Didn’t look particularly Goth-like to me. No black lipstick or devil tattoos in sight. Maybe her Goth look was a seasonal thing.

  I rifled through Wilma’s desk and found the usual paperclips, rubber bands, and empty ink pens and yellow Post-it notes. Bud found pretty much the same in Willie’s desk. Nary a stash of coke or meth or deadly brown recluse in sight. It looked like Willie was going to pass muster, at least until we found reason to serve a search warrant. Then we might pull out the air vents and check behind the ceiling tiles and under the carpet. Willie Vines’s furnace-room office appeared clean, and he bore no track marks on his arms, which he offered up with more innocent enthusiasm, so we thanked him politely and left him to fetch his mop. At least he’d gotten a free cheeseburger out of the ordeal.

  The Angel Gabriel

  For a long time after Freddy was in the ground, Gabriel and Uriel never mentioned him. Uriel’s grandma would bless Freddy and his mother when she had Uriel pray on his knees with her each night, right after she mentioned Uriel’s own family. She always asked the Lord
to let Uriel’s momma and daddy take care of Freddy up in heaven. Uriel didn’t like that prayer. He didn’t like a mean kid like Freddy being with his own nice family. He said his private prayers later and told them not to speak to Freddy in heaven because he’d knocked Uriel into their grave. They’d listen to him; he knew they would.

  One time they went to Freddy’s house with his grandma’s famous fudge-swirl cake and sat around and listened to Freddy’s mother cry and say how it was her fault about the hornets and how strange it was. Freddy’s big brother was there, too, and he looked tough and angry and said he’d heard a motorcycle that night. That scared Uriel and he covered his face and pretended to cry so everybody would feel sorry for him and his grandma would take him home.

  That afternoon he met Gabriel in the secret cave and told him what Freddy’s brother said. “Don’t worry about him. He can’t prove nothing. Nobody saw us.”

  After that, they spent a lot of time together in the cave, and Uriel learned more and more about bugs, especially the spiders. He liked to spend every waking minute with Gabriel and was jealous when Gabriel went to basketball and choir practice without him.

  Then one day when Gabriel was off with his other friends, Uriel shuffled through piles of leaves. It was late autumn and most of the red and gold leaves had turned brown and covered the ground. He was on his way to the old lodge when he saw a stray mongrel puppy caught in one of Gabriel’s animal traps. Its little paw was all smashed and bloody inside the steel teeth, and Uriel stared at the little thing twisting and biting at its own foot. It was trying to get free.

  Something moved deep inside Uriel, a kind of thrill that sent goose bumps rippling up and down his arms and legs. He shivered all over like a wet animal, then he knelt down a few yards away and watched the puppy struggle. Blood was spattered all over the dead leaves and the trap and puppy’s snout. It looked real pretty, all scarlet and bright red like a cardinal’s feathers. The dog kept making sad little yelps and whines of pain, and Uriel was fascinated with the way it wriggled and looked so scared and frantic. He could take a big rock and bash it in the head, and it would die and go to heaven. He could send living things up to heaven any time he wanted, like they’d done with Freddy. More shivers shook through him, and he liked the way that felt, liked it a lot, liked it more than anything else he’d ever felt, even Christmas morning when he’d come downstairs and found the presents Santa Claus had left.

  The woods were quiet, except for the puppy’s howls of pain and panic. Gabriel would like it if Uriel killed something for them to dissect. He’d smile and mess up Uriel’s hair and tell him he was a good kid. Uriel stood up and looked around for a big rock. It was so big and heavy that he could barely lift it, but he got it in his hands and carried it over to the frightened little dog. The puppy growled and clawed the ground and tried to get away.

  Uriel decided that he couldn’t hit it with the rock without getting bitten, so he picked up a big stick instead, long enough to keep him safe. He raised it up high over his head and brought it down on the dog’s back. The dog screamed with agony and fought weakly, but Uriel hit it again and again, harder and harder, until it lay still and lifeless. Then he picked up the big rock again and smashed in its head. He felt blood spatter on his hands and face, and it felt warm, almost hot. He liked the way it felt.

  Uriel smiled. The puppy had probably already flown up to heaven. Gabriel said the animals they killed went to heaven, too, and were pets for Uriel’s family.

  “Now, you’re happy, little sweet puppy, now you don’t have to cry and hurt any more. I fixed that for you, and I’m glad I did.” He said a little prayer, then he got the dog out of the trap and carried it back to the cave. Gabriel was still at choir practice, so Uriel dumped its body into a long glass tank where a couple of big brown recluses had their webs.

  When Gabriel came in later with a Pizza Hut sausage-and-extra-cheese pizza, he nodded approvingly and told Uriel that he’d done a good job. He said Uriel was an avenging angel and soon he’d be as good as Gabriel at sending things to heaven. Uriel smiled, very proud.

  TWELVE

  After we marked Willie down as super cooperative, we managed to locate and interview most of the students in Classon’s classes and found them a tiny bit more complimentary to Classon than his esteemed colleagues had been. In fact, the words bastard, devil, horrible, or Lucifer never came up at all. Charlie gave me a call, politely requesting my presence in his office, so I headed downtown and left Bud to wow all the teenage girls with his big white grin and Georgia drawl and good looks. When I got there, I was sorry I’d come.

  Charlie said, “Sit down, Claire, run the case for me.”

  I sat. I told. “Everybody hated his guts. Everybody wanted him dead. Everybody’s a suspect. Ever heard of Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie?”

  Charlie actually smiled. He must’ve seen the movie where everybody on the train takes turns stabbing the victim. Pleased that Charlie appeared to be in a fairly good mood, I waited while he took some time filling his black pipe. He never remembered the building’s rigid no-smoking rules. None of us reminded him, either.

  “Got your paperwork done yet?”

  I shifted in my chair. “I just got here, Sheriff.”

  “Let me have them the minute you do. I’m not rushing you, though.”

  Yeah, like hell. “I’ll try to get the reports in today.”

  “How’s Nick?”

  I frowned. “Okay, I guess. He’s in Paris on business.”

  “So you’re still with him.”

  That was rather personal but everybody seemed to consider our relationship their very own Days of Our Lives, so I decided not to take umbrage.

  “We see each other when he’s in town.”

  “He’s a good guy.”

  Part of his recommendation was due to the fact that Black was his biggest campaign contributor and they’d known each other for years. Then again, Black was a good guy, so I said nothing, just gave my best perfunctory nod.

  “I’ve got a new assignment for you, Claire, and I don’t want any argument about it.”

  Uh-oh. That cut any objections right off at the knees. How could I argue with that? I said nothing again.

  He swiveled in his chair and pulled a file out of his desk drawer. I found my tongue. “I’m right in the middle of the Classon case, sir. It’s a big one that’s going to take a lot of my time.”

  “I know that, detective. This is part of that case. Don’t get so dadgummed wadded up.”

  Okay. Told you he had dumb sayings. I went on saying nothing. I was getting good at saying it, too, but it paid when dealing with your boss and superior who was devolving rapidly into a foul mood.

  “I don’t like this business with fuckin’ spiders and garbage bags. Don’t like it one fuckin’ bit.”

  Charlie was fond of the F bomb, used it often, enjoyed himself with it, did it awfully well, actually.

  “I want that fuckin’ lunatic locked up.”

  I finally thought of something pertinent to say. “Me too, sir.”

  Charlie stuck his pipe in his mouth and held it with his teeth as he flipped open the file. He gazed at me. Was it, could it be, sheepishly? I tensed. Charlie was not your run-of-the-mill, sheepish kinda guy.

  “Okay, thing is, I got this letter.” He held up a sheet of paper torn from a yellow legal pad. I nodded as if it meant something to me. “It’s from this guy named Joe McKay. Says he’s helped out the police before. I checked him out and found out he’s on the up-and-up.”

  “What do you mean helped out the police?”

  “Helped them solve cases they weren’t getting anywhere with.”

  “How’d he do that, sir?” I was deathly afraid of where this was going, and my instincts were right on target.

  “He’s an honest-to-God psychic, that’s how.”

  My stare could be described as dumbfounded. I tried for calm, didn’t make it. “Sheriff, please, you don’t believe in that crap, do y
ou?”

  Charlie puffed on his pipe. The smell was barely bearable. “Hell, no, but a couple of my old friends in the Corps do. They verified what he said, said he knew what he was talking about, had helped them.”

  I waited, all sick to my stomach and wary, like he was going to sucker punch me in the gut. He did.

  “Like I said, I got this letter from this guy and he says right here that a man was going to get killed in our jurisdiction. He said he saw a black trash bag and spiderwebs.”

  “Lucky guess,” I suggested.

  Charlie ignored my black humor, but he never had found me very amusing. “The postmark on this envelope dates back to last summer, Detective. I kept it because he mentioned some references, and as I said, they’re people I know and respect.”

  “And how does this affect my investigation?”

  Charlie didn’t mince words, didn’t ask my opinion. “I want you to let this guy work with you and Bud. Show him the crime scene, let him read your reports, do whatever you need to do to get this fuckin’ perp behind bars.”

  “Oh, Charlie, no, don’t make me do this.”

  Sometimes when under stress or wigged out by particularly horrible commands, I revert to his given name. That was a mistake today.

  He took his pipe out of his mouth so he could glower at me better. “That’s an order, Detective. Give the guy a chance. You might be surprised at what he can do.”

  Hocus-pocus suddenly came to mind, that, and charlatan, quack, phony, nut, and crackpot.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I want you to meet him, talk to him, see if he gets any of his vibes or visions or whatever the fuckin’ hell he calls them.”

  “Yes, sir. I should have some time next week to get together with him.”

  “That’s good because he’ll be here any minute.”

  Shit, to put it in a nutshell. “Now?”

  “That’s right. Surprisingly enough, he lives around here. I’m amazed you’ve never heard of him before.”