A Killer's Kiss (20 page)

“You just can’t wander the halls of a high school willy-nilly anymore,” said Mrs. Larrup, vice principal for discipline at John Paul Jones.

When she had discovered me in the hallway on my way to the library without a pass, she hauled me off to her office. It made me feel seventeen again. And with her short gray hair and meaty forearms, Mrs. Larrup had my full attention.

“I don’t care if you are a lawyer,” she said. “In fact, that’s a strike against you in my book.”

“You’ve had a bad experience, I expect.”

“More than one lawyer has tried to tell me how to do my job. Let’s see them handle fifteen hundred teenagers and their dramas.”

“Which is precisely why I’m here. I represent a student.”

She pulled back at that, her lips setting into two sharp lines of discontent.

“A former student,” I said. “One who only has wonderful memories of John Paul Jones High School and the sterling faculty and administration that work here.”

“Really,” she said, brightening considerably.

“Yes. Her name is Julia Denniston, but that’s her married name. As a student she was Julia Crenshaw. She graduated about twelve or thirteen years ago.”

“I remember Ms. Crenshaw,” she said. “How could I forget, after what happened?”

“What are we talking about? What happened, exactly?”

“Oh, I’m sorry, Mr. Carl, I’m not at liberty to disclose these things.”

“That’s all right, I’ll just ask Julia. What I’ve come for, actually, is to find someone else. A classmate, I believe. He was in the school play with her. Do you remember when they performed
Romeo and Juliet
?”

“Oh, yes,” she said, with a heavy sigh. “That was it. A disaster.”

“Really?”

“Sometimes, in the midst of great challenges, our students rise to the occasion. And sometimes, I’m sorry to say, they do not.”

“I’m looking for the student who played Romeo. His name was Terrence, I believe.”

“Terrence Tipton.”

“Yes, that’s it. Terrence Tipton. Do you have any idea where he might be?”

“No. None.”

“Does his family still live around here?”

“I don’t know. He had a brother who went through here before him, but Terry was the last of the Tiptons in this school, which was a relief, actually.”

“Really?”

“Yes. Franklin Tipton was just your basic troublemaker, problems with his studies, fights, drinking, the usual hardhead
who is just putting in time. But Terry was a—” She stopped her reverie, looked at me with the steely gaze one gives to a student about to pick up a week’s detention, or to a lawyer asking one question too many. “I don’t think there is anything more I should say, especially since, by your own admission, you don’t represent Mr. Tipton.”

“You’re right, and you’re being quite prudent. The drama teacher who put on Julia’s play, is she still around?”

“That was Mr. Mayhew’s production. His only one, thankfully. He retired a few years ago.”

“Do you know where he lives?”

“I’m not prepared to disclose that.”

“That’s fine, ma’am. Thank you for your time.”

“You’re going to find him and talk to him anyway.”

“That’s right.”

“I’ll tell him you’re coming. You know, we’re very proud of our alumni. We have state senators, authors. One of our students played for a few years in the NBA. How is Julia doing?”

“Not so well,” I said.

“It was a disaster,” said Jeremiah Mayhew. “I should never have gone ahead with it. I always hated that play. Too tricky.”

“What do you mean, tricky?” I said.

“If I had to do Shakespeare, I would have done
Henry IV, Part One.
The fight at the end, big cheers when Prince Hal rams Hotspur through with his sword. Blood and gore and victory, that’s what the people want. But Mrs. Pincer had already decided on
Romeo and Juliet.
The booklets had been ordered and construction on the scenery begun. And so
Romeo and Juliet
it was.”

“Then what went wrong?”

“Everything,” he said. “Every damn thing. A play like that, with a romance at the core, it all depends on the chemistry. You
got to have chemistry. And you can’t fake it. It’s either there or it’s not. And with those two we had it. But when you get down to it, last thing you want with kids like that is chemistry. What else could you expect but trouble?”

Jeremiah Mayhew was not what I expected of a drama teacher. He was burly and bald, he wore a T-shirt and shorts and sneakers with his sanitary socks pulled high. I was surprised there wasn’t a whistle around his neck, and I suppose he was, too. He had been the football coach at John Paul Jones High School and a health teacher at the time of Julia’s
Romeo and Juliet.
But he’d acted a bit in college, had made that known to the principal, and so when Mrs. Pincer, the regular drama teacher, took ill, he was recruited to take over the spring production.

“Against his will,” said his wife, sitting demurely beside him on the sofa. “But the team didn’t have a very good season that fall.”

“We stunk,” said Mayhew.

“And there was rumbling about maybe getting a new coach.”

“Like Vince Lombardi would have made a difference. We were small but slow. Marshall, Lee-Davis—they all ran right over us.”

“And so when they asked him to take on the play, he thought he had no choice but to step up.”

“I wanted it to be the best damn production Ashland had ever seen,” said Mayhew. “That’s just the way I am. And we had a chance. Right away I saw it. In football one great player can make a team, and it’s the same in the theater. And we had the one great player. The Crenshaw girl. When she was onstage, you couldn’t take your eyes off her. It was just a matter of finding the chemistry. I wanted Sherman, my quarterback, to be Romeo. He was handsome enough, but there wasn’t an ounce of chemistry between our Juliet and Sherman. The truth was, Sherman was an oaf, on and off the field. But we found our chemistry, yes we did. With Tipton.”

“Terrence Tipton,” I said.

“That’s right. I didn’t like him much, one of those sensitive types, you know what I mean. He was too good for the school or the town. Let his hair grow and pouted all the time. Like he knew something the rest of us didn’t. But when he read with her, there were sparks. Undeniable. So I made a mistake and I cast him.”

“In the rehearsals they were quite wonderful,” said Mrs. Mayhew. “The rest of the show, well, they were kids. Do you remember Sherman as Mercutio?”

“It was like the words turned to fudge in his mouth.”

“With the rest you could see the seams. But whenever Romeo and Juliet were onstage, there was magic. It was so touching. Young love.”

“That was the problem,” said Mayhew. “The fools fell in love. And that always screws up everything.”

“Jeremiah.”

He reached out a hand to his wife, gently cupped the back of her neck. “Almost everything,” he said.

“So what went wrong?” I asked again.

“They did.”

“For a while you could see the sparks,” said Mrs. Mayhew. “And then something happened, and they could barely look at each other. Something had gone drastically wrong, and it showed. In every gesture, every word.”

“I took them aside, both of them, and told them to suck it up. To make it work. It’s called acting, I told them. For the good of the play, they had to make it work.”

“They tried,” said Mrs. Mayhew. “Things seemed to get better, until opening night.”

“Worst night of my life,” said Mr. Mayhew.

“Oh, Jeremiah.”

“It was. If I had to do another, it would have killed me. Thankfully, Mrs. Pincer returned in the fall, and I went back to teaching health. But that wasn’t the end of it.”

“He still blames the play,” said Mrs. Mayhew.

“Course I do. First comes the losing season, then that disaster of a play, and next thing you know, they hire a new football coach up from North Carolina and I’m coaching weight football at the junior-high level.”

“Romeo and Juliet,”
said Mrs. Mayhew. “I suppose there’s a reason it’s a tragedy.”

“Left with nothing but to teach string beans how to block. Damn,” said Mr. Mayhew. “I always hated that play.”

“God, it was funny,” said Frankie Tipton. “I didn’t want to go, actually. It was our mom made me, but I’m glad she did. Funniest thing I ever saw. I still wake up in the middle of the night laughing about it.”

Frankie Tipton was a hard-lived thirty-five, sitting on a lawn chair atop a cement slab behind his house. He wore jeans and boots, a black T-shirt, a trucker’s hat with a logo that matched the beer in his right hand. He lifted the can, sucked down half, showed me the label. “You want?”

“No thanks,” I said.

“Too early for your kind, I suppose.” I was sitting on a chair beside him. We were both facing the long weeds in his backyard. He turned his head and eyed my suit. “Where’d you say you was from?”

“I didn’t, but I’m from Philadelphia.”

“Ah, sure you are. What kind of trouble is he in now?”

“I don’t know.”

“That’s convenient, because I don’t care.”

He took a sip of his beer, looked at it, took a longer draft.

“I never liked the son of a bitch,” he said. “Even when he was a baby. He was sick when he was born, the doctors were running back and forth, Mom was crying on and on. He was grabbing all the attention even then. I could tell right there he was trouble. And I was right, wasn’t I? He killed our mother. The worrying about
him after he left, the asking for money. And she always gave it, like a fool. I told her it wouldn’t do no good, but she couldn’t help herself. Every time the phone rang, she was afraid to answer it. Thought it would have been word that he was dead. Too bad it wasn’t.”

“Was this your mom’s house?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s nice.”

“It’s a shithole, but I’ve been fixing it up some, when I can. Putting in a new bathroom upstairs. The kitchen needs something, too.”

“You might want to mow the lawn.”

“Yeah, as soon as I fix the mower, which I got to tell you is not next on my list.”

“So tell me about the play.”

“Well, it all come about because he was in love, he said. Love. It was that skinny little dark-haired girl in the play he was all mooning over. Writing poetry, singing sad songs with that guitar. Love. Like that was ever going anywhere, the way he was. But first things was working out and then they wasn’t. He never said what had happened, but it wasn’t no mystery. And the story was out about the girl and that quarterback and what they was doing backstage.”

“Sherman?”

“That’s the one. Hell, it wasn’t going be the last time he lost a girl, I tell you that. But still, the sadness, it was coming off him in waves. Far as I was concerned, she didn’t have tits enough to get so cut up over, but that might have been the thing he liked, the way he was.”

“You said that twice,” I said.

“What?”

“‘The way he was.’ What do you mean, the way he was?”

He eyed me a bit. “That’s family business, isn’t it? And no damn business of yours.”

“Okay. You were telling about the funny play.”

“Right. So the day of the play, he comes to me and tells me he can’t do it. I didn’t think nothing of it, you know, it was just a stupid play, but Mom was so looking forward to it. So I told him, hell, just drink a few beers and it won’t be no problem. I set him up with a couple six-packs and that was that. I done my brotherly duty.

“So it’s showtime, right, and I’m sitting there next to my mom, and he comes on, and there’s all this applause, and he starts talking this nonsense, and I got to tell you, he didn’t look so good. He didn’t look so good at all. Like they had put green makeup on him. And then, not too far in, there’s the dark-haired girl on this balcony. She’s in this pretty blue dress, and there’s a ladder leading to it. So she’s talking to, like, no one, and he’s talking from behind this bush, and then he starts climbing the ladder. But not so good. Halfway up, his foot slips, and he bangs his head, and everyone starts laughing. Like it’s part of the play. Though it’s not, I can tell. But he keeps climbing. And she says something, something about stumbling, and everyone laughs again. And he says something about love and wings or something stupid like that, and they lean forward to kiss. And they do. And then he stops. And pulls back and wavers. Like a thin stalk in the wind. And then he leans forward over the balcony, and the son of a bitch, he throws up, on her, yes he does, pukes right onto her fancy blue dress.”

“Jesus.”

“Yeah, I told you it was funny. Best play I ever saw. And she can’t help herself—what’s she going to do—she pushes him away. And he loses his balance, and his arms are swinging in these crazy big circles, and next thing you know, he’s falling backward. In the air. Falling, falling with a thud right onto that fake bush.

“Everyone is just stunned for a bit, and then they all start laughing again. And I’m laughing, laughing so hard the tears are coming. And next thing you know, he’s up and jumping off the stage and running right down the middle and out of the au
ditorium. And then the curtain, it just drops, right on top of some people who come out onstage to make sure he’s all right. And that was the play.”

“Did they stop it?”

“No, they finished it, with that stupid football coach reading out of the book with his shiny bald head while the Juliet said her lines with a T-shirt over her dress. From what I hear, first there was laughter, then silence, and then the place emptied out. But I didn’t see it, because when Terry left, I went out with my mom to try to find him.”

“Did you?”

“Sure. Right here. Sitting outside, staring. Like a zombie. He wouldn’t say a thing. Mom tried to talk to him and gave up, went inside. I just laughed and told him to forget about it, that it was nothing to get shook about. And then I lit up a bone and handed it to him.”

“He take it?”

“What do you think?”

“What happened afterward?”

“Nothing, really, he just kept smoking. And not only that night. It was every night. But he was mainly stealing from my stash, so I had to cut him off. Told him to buy his own, which he did. I even set him up with Rupert, who’d been selling to me. So he was taken care of. And he actually got back together with that girl for a while, believe it or not. But it didn’t stop him smoking, or from drifting away. He would disappear for a few days, and then a few weeks, and then he disappeared altogether. Just up and left. Never did finish school. A little later the calls started coming, from all over, California, Arizona, all the time hitting Mom up for money.”