Damaged (14 page)

“Thanks.” Mary was giving herself a little extra time to do some investigating herself, but Kevin didn't need to know that. She drove down the exit, corkscrewing to the ground level. “On a related point, I don't think I have to invite Machiavelli to our meeting. He has filed a Complaint against my client and the school district in Common Pleas Court, sounding in tort and contract. But the way I see it, there are two separate causes of action on behalf of my client. The first is a special education matter, and that's between my client and you, the school district, over his programming. You have to be present for any meeting on that matter.”

“Agreed, and I won't permit you to talk to school staff without me present.”

“Understood, and the second matter I have would be in Common Pleas Court, against Robertson for assaulting my client and against the school district for negligent supervision of students under its care.” Mary tried not to make it sound hostile. “I'm not saying I'm going to sue the district in Common Pleas Court, I'm just saying that's what the second cause of action would be.”

“I'm following you,” Kevin said, warily.

“My point is, I'm going up to Grayson to talk about the special education matter, which is why I called you. I'm
not
going up to Grayson to talk about the Common Pleas Court matter, because in that event, I'd have to invite Machiavelli.”

“Fine with me. There's no reason for Machiavelli to come. I can't stand the guy.” Kevin harrumphed. “And I would just as soon
not
discuss any Common Pleas Court action with you, yet. It's way premature. I have to get up to speed, and you have to get your ducks in a row.”

“Okay, so I'm not calling Machiavelli.”

“Don't. I'm out of cootie spray.”

“Ha!” Mary smiled. “You've been working with kids too long, Kevin.”

“Ain't that the truth. See you later.”

“Bye now.” Mary hung up the phone as she descended, then reached the ground level, found her monthly pass, and used it to get out of the lot. Traffic was busy on Locust Street, so while she waited, she pressed in Edward's number. She wanted to see how he and Patrick were doing, and she would need Edward's signature on the ten-day letter and on the papers to place Patrick at Fairmount Prep, which she had downloaded and printed this morning.

The phone rang and rang, and while Mary listened, she entered traffic on Locust Street, which was bumper-to-bumper. The phone stopped ringing, and the call went to voicemail, so she left a message, asking Edward to call her, then hung up. She drove through Center City on autopilot, maneuvering around City Hall, the Gothic building with the statue of William Penn on top, then headed north on Broad Street, where traffic freed up.

The phone rang on the passenger seat, and Mary glanced down to see that it was Judy, so she picked up. Otherwise she didn't drive and talk on the phone unless it was absolutely necessary, because she knew it wasn't safe. Plus if she ever died in a car crash because she was on the phone, her father would kill her.

“Girl, what got into you?” Judy asked, concerned. “Are you okay?”

“I'm fine, I just don't like your boy's attitude.”

“He's not my boy.”

“He's your old friend from school, right? That's why you hired him.”

“Well, that and he has a stellar record.”

“Okay, fine.” Mary drove up Broad Street, unhappily. She didn't like fighting with Judy, which had only happened once or twice, both times over cases. “I'm not doubting his stellar record. In fact, that's my problem with him. He's too full of himself.”

“What makes you say that? He was offering to help you.”

“That he was offering to help me, that's exactly what makes me say that.” Mary switched lanes, her crankiness returning. “He just assumes that he can step in and do what I'm doing, and doesn't it just figure?”

“What?”

“Like, men always figure they can just
do things
. They just start
doing things
. But women like me, we never do that. I would never jump into anything unprepared.”

“You might be right, but that's not his fault. That's to his credit, and are you turning into a man-hater? Because if you are, it doesn't bode well for your marriage.”

“It's not that he's a man, it's that he is an arrogant man. And what about that snarky comment about special education law? What a jerk!”

“He was trying to make a joke.”

“I don't joke about that. You don't either. You didn't think it was funny, did you?” Mary switched lanes to go faster, sensing that her heavy foot on the gas had something to do with the conversation.

“No, but I know him and he didn't mean anything by it. He just felt ill at ease.”

“Gimme a break. If it were a racist or a sexist joke, we wouldn't laugh at it. It's no different. If he knew what I was dealing with, if he could see how this little boy I'm representing, Patrick, gets made fun of…” Mary couldn't even finish the sentence, she was so bothered. “That kind of joking is bullying. It ruins kids' lives. We have to stop thinking of it as a joke.”

“Okay, but I don't think he meant it that way. You came down pretty hard on him.” Judy chuckled. “You got class-warfare on his heinie.”

“I don't like how snotty he is.” Mary smiled at the reference, reflecting that no matter how cranky she was, Judy could cheer her up.

“He's not snotty. You never worked with him. I don't think that's what's bothering you anyway. I think it's the wedding, after what happened with your dress. Don't be bridezilla.”

“I'm not bridezilla. I'm lawyerzilla.”

Judy chuckled. “Look, don't get too wrapped up in this special ed case. Be careful. Don't get crazy.”

“I won't,” Mary said, but she already was. “Okay, let me go, I'm driving.”

“You gonna apologize to John?”

“Hell, no.”

Judy snorted. “Drive safe. See you.”

“Bye.” Mary hung up, set the phone aside, and checked her rearview mirror, where William Penn was disappearing into the haze.

 

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Mary reached Grayson Elementary and parked on the street across from the school, cutting the ignition. She scanned the scene reflexively for the brown sedan or a red Passat, but saw neither. The rowhouses in this neighborhood were more run-down than those in Edward's neighborhood, and paint peeled off the front doors. Broken windows remained unrepaired, and some of the houses stood vacant, boarded shut by graffitied plywood. The cars parked along the curb were older, and she realized that hers was the nicest car on the street, which made her feel both guilty and nervous. She grabbed her purse and got out of the car.

She crossed the street to the school, which was situated behind a forbidding fence of pointed black bars and surrounded by asphalt, with no trees or bushes in sight. The playground was an asphalt side yard that had a basketball backboard, but no hoop or net, and nobody could've played basketball anyway, because cars were parked randomly on the court. Worst of all, the school building itself looked run-down and ancient, a fact confirmed by a glance at its keystone, which read, almost unbelievably, 1927.

Mary had known that the Philadelphia city schools were in a sorry state, but she hadn't thought it was this bad. The building's design was vintage, an institutional block of dark brown brick, four stories tall. Its windows were narrow and in a state of disrepair; cracks in some of them had been covered with duct tape, and one window was even boarded up with plywood. She couldn't imagine going to school every day in such a decrepit and grim place, but she realized that most inner-city kids did, every day.

Mary made a beeline for the entrance, marked by a marble plaque engraved with
GRAYSON ELEMENTARY SCHOOL
. It would have been charming but for the fact that it was mounted over two windowless metal doors painted battleship gray, rusting where they'd been dented. An industrial-sized intercom had been retrofitted into the brick wall beside the door, and Mary assumed it connected to the office.

She pressed the buzzer, but nothing happened. She had arrived ahead of Kevin, intentionally early because she wanted to learn and record as much as she could about the layout of the school, to support Patrick's story. She pressed the buzzer again, and finally it crackled to life. Nobody said anything, so she said, “I'm Mary DiNunzio, a lawyer representing Patrick O'Brien, and I have a meeting with Kevin Reynolds, the lawyer from the school district.”

There was silence, and Mary waited, then pressed the button and repeated what she'd said, but still no one spoke and the door didn't click open. She wondered if it was broken and, in the next moment, the door was opened by a heavyset janitor in a hoodie and jeans, coming out of the door dragging a filthy plastic tub of trash, so she held the door open for him and ducked inside, saying, “Thanks so much.”

Mary found herself on a dimly lit stairway landing, with grimy gray stairs that had metal crosshatching and walls with real rose-marble wainscoting. The staircases ran downstairs, to some sort of basement, and upstairs. Offices were usually upstairs, so she climbed the steps. The air smelled dirty and felt stifling; she realized that the age of the building prohibited central air-conditioning and there were no windows in the common areas in which to install a window unit. She didn't know how the teachers stood it, much less the children.

She reached the top of the stairwell, where a poster put up by the school district read in bold letters:
WEAPONS ARE PROHIBITED
, and underneath,
PENNSYLVANIA LAW REQUIRES THAT ANY STUDENTS, REGARDLESS OF AGE OR GRADE LEVEL, FOUND TO POSSESS A WEAPON ON SCHOOL PREMISES OR AT EVENTS, OR WHILE TRAVELING TO AND FROM A SCHOOL OR SCHOOL PROGRAM OR EVENT (INCLUDING SCHOOL BUSES AND PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION) BE ARRESTED AND EXPELLED FROM THE SCHOOL DISTRICT FOR AT LEAST ONE YEAR. THE LAW DEFINES A WEAPON AS “ANY KNIFE, CUTTING INSTRUMENT, CUTTING TOOL, FIREARM, SHOTGUN
…”

Mary knew this was the school rule that Patrick was supposed to have broken by supposedly attacking Robertson with the scissors. She knew that city schools had no tolerance for weapons of any kind, and she'd been in schools much worse than Grayson, where she'd had to go through a metal detector to enter. She kept going, through an old-fashioned set of French doors with varnish peeling off the dark wood, and found herself in a short hallway with a floor of polished concrete.

At the beginning of the hallway was an old wooden desk, staffed by an older woman with a sign-in log in front of her, a spiral-bound notebook, and she looked up at Mary pleasantly, from behind thick glasses. “May I help you?”

“Yes, I have a meeting with a lawyer from the school district.”

“If you'll show me your identification and sign in here, the office is down the hall to the right.”

“Thank you.” Mary extracted her wallet from her purse, showed her ID, then signed in. “Is there a ladies' room on this floor?”

“Yes, near the office.”

Mary had figured as much. “By the way, does this school have an auditorium?”

“Yes, it's after the office. If you take a right out of the office, you'll see it at the end of the hall. Have a good day.”

“Thanks.” Mary walked down the hall, sliding her phone from her pocket to take photos. She walked down the hallway, taking photos of the classrooms on both sides. She could see kids through the windows in the old wooden doors, and she assumed that Patrick's classroom wasn't on this floor because kids looked younger, like first- and second-graders. Still she took a few pictures, noticing there were no surveillance cameras, then she passed another poster put up by the school district:
BULLYING POLICY
, it read at the top and underneath:
WHAT IS BULLYING? BULLYING IS CHARACTERIZED BY THE FOLLOWING THREE (3) CRITERIA: IT IS AGGRESSIVE BEHAVIOR OR INTENTIONAL HARM-DOING, IT IS CARRIED OUT REPEATEDLY OVER TIME, AND IT OCCURS WITHIN AN INTERPERSONAL RELATIONSHIP WHERE THERE IS AN IMBALANCE OF POWER
…”

She resumed going down the hallway, cheered by a bulletin board decorated with multicolored happy faces drawn by the students, under a poster-painted banner
CELEBRATE UNIQUENESS, NO PLACE FOR HATE.
The board was filled with yellow construction paper on which each student had inked his thumbprint; it looked as if every classroom in the school was included, and penciled beside each thumbprint was the student's name.

Mary scanned the classroom names—
Ms. Sandoval 201, Ms. Swanson 405, Ms. Chickowski 106
—then spotted Patrick's classroom teacher,
Ms. Krantz 504
. Mary counted thirty-one thumbprints on the construction paper, so the class was very large, and she found Patrick's thumbprint easily, because his lettering was poor. She felt a pang and found herself putting her thumb over his thumbprint. She hoped he was okay at home, but Edward still hadn't called her back. She'd follow up later.

She turned right down another hallway and noticed instantly that the classrooms had disappeared, replaced by a row of old wooden doors that no longer had any windows, though they were all closed and their purpose wasn't clear. It was apparently a series of administrative offices and closets because in the middle on the right was the school office, denoted by an Art Deco sign above another set of French doors, which sat propped open.

Mary walked forward, taking pictures surreptitiously in case there were any surveillance cameras she hadn't detected. She reached the office, but didn't go in. Instead, she glanced in on the fly, finding that it looked much as she had expected, but even older; it actually had wooden floorboards and a paneled counter that had been retrofitted to accommodate a printer and computer, and behind the counter, a young woman looked up curiously.