An Educated Death (11 page)

"What do you mean by 'minimal contacts'?" I asked. He seemed annoyed that I was asking and grudgingly described them as contacts where words were exchanged.

"Are good-mornings sufficient?"

"We're looking for something a little more substantive than that."

I guess I needed to shake him out of his nonchalant attitude because I still didn't quit. "Such as 'How are you?' "

"There isn't any magic formula," he snapped. "It's not something you can define in a manual. It means enough contact to form an impression of the student's state of mind."

Satisfied that I'd finally gotten a reaction, I didn't press further, even though I'd known teenagers you could try to talk to all day and still have no clue about their state of mind, unless surly counted. "Tell me about her dorm parents," I said.

He told me that Laney's resident faculty couple had impeccable credentials. Bill Donahue had gone to Middlesex and Dartmouth and his wife Kathy had gone to Rosemary Hall and Wellesley. In his eyes, I could see, this meant they were above reproach. Not that their pedigrees told me anything about them as people, such as whether they were caring and conscientious, observant, diligent or lazy, but Joanne would have seen to that when she approved his choice. Assuming that credentials were synonymous with character was common in the private school world.

I'm not a prep school product myself, although Suzanne is. I've learned to bite my tongue when confronted with the likes of Warren Winslow. He was the kind of guy who, when I used to meet them at college mixers, always wanted to know where people had prepped. He had the costume—wide-wale cords, Oxford cloth shirt and rugged outdoorsy sweater, the gold-rimmed glasses, and the slightly laconic manner. All in all, it was an unexciting interview, but I wasn't there to be excited.

Winslow didn't take long and then I took a break to, as people euphemistically put it, freshen up. About an hour and a half after my morning coffee, I always need to freshen up. I took a minute at the mirror to return my hair to the confines of a barrette. I have a lot of hair. Not as much as Sonia Braga, but a lot of dark, curly hair, and it has a mind of its own. I am always trying to restrain it and make it look professional, while the hair itself favors a windblown look. We often compromise on the majority in confinement with a few tendrils allowed to escape and curl at will.

I went back to my desk to wait for my next appointment and found a small vase of daffodils. A hastily scribbled note underneath them said, "Something to chase away the winter gloom. Thanks for remembering Marion. Ellie." I began to understand why Dave had said she was in charge of morale. The flowers did wonders for me. My list said I was meeting Genny Oakes, Laney Taggert's roommate. She was late. There were voices out in the hall and then Joanne came in, followed by a girl whose face gave new meaning to the word sulky. She dumped herself into the chair, jammed her hands into her coat pockets, and sat there glaring at me. "Thea, this is Genny," Joanne said, and beat a hasty retreat. Being good with adolescents doesn't mean you can always get along with them. It looked like a saint might find it challenging to get along with this girl.

"You' re Laney Taggert's roommate?"

"I was."

There was something in her tone, just a hint, really, that made me think she didn't entirely regret having lost her roommate. "It was nice of you to be willing to talk to me, Genny. I know this must be very difficult for you. Did anyone tell you what I wanted to talk to you about?"

She gave me a puzzled look. She had lots of good, honey brown hair, much of which hung across her face, forcing her to peer through it, and a big, aggressive body. Born to play field hockey. "No. I assumed it was about Laney. I might as well tell you this, since Mrs. Donahue will tell you anyway. Laney and I were not friends. I had asked them to give me a new roommate."

"Why?"

"Why weren't we friends or why a new roommate?" Her voice was steady and flat but I knew she was waiting to see what I'd do.

"Both."

She shrugged and tossed back her hair. "We weren't friends because we had nothing in common. I wanted a new roommate because of that and because I was sick of living with someone so secretive and sneaky and manipulative. She had no morals."

"In what ways was she sneaky and secretive?"

"Her life was a constant game of trying to beat the system. She had a whole repertoire of illnesses and excuses to get out of tests and papers, to get her teachers to cut her slack. She was always cutting classes. Going off campus without signing out. Borrowing clothes, jewelry, and money, with or without permission. Trying to get me to cover for her when she was going to be absent at bed check. And she wasn't friendly. She was cold. I just got sick of it! I was always afraid I was going to get into trouble because of her. It felt like I was getting an ulcer." She wrapped her arms protectively around her stomach.

"Was she often absent at bed check?"

"Sometimes," Genny said sulkily.

"How often? Once a week, once a month? What?"

"Maybe four or five times since the beginning of the year."

"How did she manage that?"

"I lied for her," Genny said. "I'd say she was in the bathroom, or down the hall, stuff like that."

"If you didn't like her, why did you lie for her?"

She twisted her body around restively. Like anybody, she didn't like being pressed for details. "I just did," she said unhelpfully.

"You 'just did' isn't a very helpful answer. Could you elaborate on that a little?" I used my best authoritative voice, the one Genny was used to after a lifetime of schoolteachers.

"She just had this way of making you want to please her. It wasn't only me. Even though she treated us all like crap, we kept trying to please her." She parted with this information grudgingly, obviously reluctant to admit that Laney had had this power over her. We digressed then to a discussion of bed checks and contacts with the dorm parents. Despite the ease with which Laney had sneaked out, Genny seemed to think they were sufficient.

"Any idea where she went?"

"To meet Josh, I suppose. To crawl under a bush and screw." She eyeballed me quickly to see what I thought of that. "Until the weather got too cold. She hadn't been doing it lately. Skipping out after curfew, I mean. Not that she shared the details of her sex life with me. But I knew."

"Is that what you meant when you said she was secretive? That she had a clandestine sex life?"

"Oh, come on! I wasn't that interested. She was secretive about everything. Like I'd notice she seemed depressed, mopey, you know, and I'd say, 'Hey, you seem depressed.' She'd give me this icy look and just say, 'Oh, really?' I mean, everything was like that. If she got a package from home and I asked what was in it, she'd just say 'Stuff.' " She spread her arms wide. "She was the most closed person I've ever seen. It was impossible to know her."

"Did she know you wanted a new roommate?"

Genny nodded. "I told her. And I told her why, too. I guess that maybe I was hoping she'd change, you know. That maybe if she knew I wasn't happy, she'd come around and be the kind of roommate I wanted. But all she did was shrug. She said, 'Do what you want, I don't care.' That was Laney in a nutshell. She didn't care about anyone but herself."

Getting to know someone through interviews is a lot like painting by numbers. As you add each color, a little more of the picture appears. When you're done, the result is a rather crude approximation of a real picture, the pieces don't quite work together, but you get an idea of how things are supposed to look. All I'd had before was the stuff in the file, reports from her teachers, generally favorable and showing a bright and interesting girl, and Josh's quick psychological assessment—that she was complicated, which meant that she was all screwed up.

"Was there anything you liked about her?"

"She had a wicked sense of humor. She could do an impersonation of any teacher and have them down perfectly. We used to call them her twenty-second masterpieces. She liked to perform. Give her an audience and she came alive. It didn't matter whether it was an audience of two or two hundred." Genny scowled. "She had a twenty-second version of me that she did. I mean, I could see myself instantly. You ever meet her?" I shook my head. "Well, she was slender and dark and graceful but when she did me she became big and horsy and terribly cheerful. The first time I saw it, I was stunned. I felt like I'd been stabbed. I wanted to kill her." As soon as she'd said it, she gasped and put her hands over her mouth. "I didn't mean it like that," she said.

"She knew you'd seen her?"

"Yes."

"Did she say anything about it?"

Genny nodded. "Yeah. She said she knew I didn't like it and she was sorry I'd seen it. She hadn't meant to hurt my feelings."

"That sounds like an apology."

She nodded again. "But it wasn't, don't you see, because she wasn't sorry for doing it—that was the hurtful thing, the way it showed what she thought of me. She was only sorry for getting caught."

"Had Laney been depressed lately?"

"No more than usual. She hadn't been feeling well. She'd been missing a lot of classes. But I didn't bother to ask her about it. I'd given up bothering. She never answered me anyway."

She looked so miserable I hated to press her further, but her information was important. "When did you ask for a roommate change?"

Her head came up angrily and her eyes narrowed. "A week before Thanksgiving. I kept asking Mrs. Donahue about it but she just kept saying these things take time. I finally had to get my mom to call Dean Perlin." She hugged her arms around her body and stared at the floor.

I wondered about the school's inaction. Making Genny stay with a roommate she detested for a month after the desire to change was announced seemed extremely cruel and unfair. I'd have to ask Joanne what had happened. "Let's talk about last Friday. Did you know she was planning to spend the weekend with Merri Naigler?" She nodded. "When was the last time you saw her?"

"I don't know. I mean, people keep asking me that question and I don't have an answer. I saw her back in the room around one. She was putting some stuff in a bag and when I asked where she was going, she said to Merri's. Then I thought I saw her going off across the circle later, carrying the bag, so I assumed she was going to meet Merri, but when I got back to the room, Merri came up looking for her. I said I thought I'd seen her out on the circle with her bag, but Merri said she'd never shown up. So I don't know. When I saw her at the circle it looked like she was waving to someone. I couldn't see who it was. Maybe it wasn't even Laney. I can't say. Whoever it was was wearing my new pink jacket, though. And I haven't seen it since." She looked very pointedly at her watch. "Can I go? I've got a class."

"Of course. Thank you for talking to me, Genny." She got up and rushed to the door. As she opened it, we could hear angry voices coming down the hall.

A man's high-pitched voice was protesting loudly. "Take your hands off me, you militaristic thug," followed by a scuffle of feet and another protest. "I said cut that out! It is completely unnecessary. I said I was going to cooperate."

Genny turned back toward me, her eyes bright. "Looks like Rambo Sawyer and his sidekick, Lennie, have nabbed ace reporter Chip Barrett again. This ought to be good." She threw the door open so I could see what was happening. Curt Sawyer, his face tight and angry, was coming down the hall, his hand firmly on the arm of a smaller man who looked like a grownup Beaver Cleaver. The Beave's other arm was in the clutches of a slightly Neanderthal-looking fellow in a maintenance uniform who dwarfed both the reporter and Sawyer. I joined Genny at the door and watched the strange procession go by. Ellie Drucker was in her doorway, too.

Barrett was obviously not one to be deterred by circumstances. As the trio drew abreast of us, he stopped, nodded to Genny, fixed his greedy little eyes on me and said, "You must be the detective. I need to talk to you. I've got some very interesting questions for you about this whole Laney Taggert business."

"Come on. Move it," Sawyer growled, dragging ungently at his arm. His hulking companion, the one Genny had called Lenny but who had Chris stitched above his pocket, dragged on the other arm, and the resisting Barrett was hauled away.

He turned and called back over his shoulder, "Hey, detective, anyone find Laney's overnight bag yet?" as they disappeared into Dorrie's office.

"Maybe you and Chip should get together," Genny suggested. "I hear he's got some interesting theories." She hesitated. "You did get the Lennie reference, didn't you?"

"I'm sorry, Genny, I'm afraid I didn't."

"
0f Mice and Men,
" she said scornfully, slinging her bag onto her shoulder. "And they say
my
generation isn't educated."

There's nothing like confrontation and confusion to stimulate the appetite. After my cheerful morning's work, I was starving. I was supposed to be having lunch with Dorrie and hoped she wasn't going to be tied up too long with Sawyer and his prisoner. While I waited, I attached a sheet to each person's interview notes recording their version of Laney Taggert's last day. According to my schedule, after lunch I was seeing Laney's friend Merri Naigler, her advisor, Chas Drucker, and last but certainly not least, Curt Sawyer.

I wasn't looking forward to that. Even when Curt and I want to work together, we have these naturally antagonistic personalities that set us at each other's throats. It takes all my maturity and self-control to stay civil, and Curt has less of each of those attributes than I so he can't stay civil. Dorrie or Dave, whoever made up the list, should have known better than to throw us together at the end of the day.

As it turned out, I didn't have to meet with Curt at the end of the day. The commotion caused by the capture of Chip Barrett, who, at the moment of his seizure, was trying to steal records from the school files, was eclipsed by a shriek worthy of a diva, followed by the broadcast, in the loudest possible voice, of a piece of information Dorrie had very much wanted to keep secret. "Pregnant! Jesus, God, William, Henry! What do you mean she was pregnant? How could you have let that happen?"