The Headmaster's Wife (38 page)

Michael Feyre's paper was only three and a half pages long, and it, too, was astonishing. It was not the work of a writer but of a savage, and of a savage with a streak of brutality so wide and deep that he should have been locked away for his own safety long before he'd decided to hang himself. James had made the obligatory forays into the red-light districts of half a dozen cities, in the United States and abroad. He had read his share of filthy pulp novels that existed only to prove that it was possible to extend a sex scene written in excremental slang for 181 pages. He had never seen anything like this: raw, nasty, lethal, feral. After the first time he'd read it, he hadn't wanted to touch it with his bare hands. Once he'd made himself get over that, he'd found himself not so much reading it a second time, as counting off the number of times Michael had used the word “cunt.” It was second only to the number of times he used the word “fuck,” and that was due to the fact that the second word could be used in more ways than the first and in more ambiguous circumstances.

But it wasn't only the words. James had had students attempt to shock him with words before. It was the revelation of a mind for whom all human relations had been reduced to rape. You raped or were raped. There were no other choices. There were no other explanations for why two people might spend any time together doing anything. There were no other explanations for why one person might be emotionally committed to another, even a mother to a child.

Everyone at Windsor treated Michael Feyre as a cipher. He was the paradigmatic Poor Boy from a Miserable Background who needed only Love and Attention to bring out his better qualities. Those qualities would include sensitivity and tolerance and a zeal for social justice. James knew for a fact, from the very pages of this very short story, that this fairy tale had had nothing to do with the Michael Feyre who had really existed among them this school year. The real Michael Feyre had not been a misunderstood genius or a juvenile delinquent or even a street thug. The real Michael Feyre had been an out-and-out psychopath.

If James had read this paper before Michael committed suicide, he would have made copies of it and sent them to Peter Makepeace and every member of the Board of Trustees. No school could tolerate this kind of person for long and especially not a boarding school. James was surprised as hell that there hadn't been some kind of incident. Michael wouldn't have felt much compunction about grabbing one of the girls or threatening a teacher. Maybe the affair with Alice had kept all that at bay. Still, it was surprising there hadn't been an incident with Alice, that Michael hadn't beaten her to a pulp one afternoon while they were shacked up during study hall or risking exposure in a faculty bathroom during sports trials on a Saturday afternoon. James was fairly sure that Michael was no stranger to beating people into pulps. That was in this short story, too.

Of course, in the meantime, Michael had died. James had to wonder if psychopaths committed suicide. It seemed to him like a contradiction in terms. Psychopaths didn't want to die; they thought they were the center of the universe. One way or another, though, Michael was dead, and James had responded to this paper only a few days ago by putting it at the bottom of the stack and deciding to forget about it. He hadn't thrown it away because he had wanted to make sure Michael's mother had it. For some reason it had seemed very important to him that Michael Feyre's mother know the kind of human being he was.

That aside, though, there was now another consideration. From what he had heard so far on campus, somebody had tried to murder Mark DeAvecca, unless Mark DeAvecca had been administering arsenic to himself, which was not impossible but highly improbable. That made these two papers interesting in another way, one having nothing to do with their revelations about their writers' personalities. The interesting thing was that these two stories were about the same series of events. They took as their starting point the same set of facts. Everybody on campus thought they knew what those facts were. People like Marta Coelho—who thought she knew everything—believed they knew as much about them as either of the principals.

Any quick reading through these two papers together, though, and it became clear that everybody had been deceived. Mark presented what “everybody” knew, but what Michael presented was a variation on the theme, not the theme itself, and that variation might matter. Nobody would kill Mark DeAvecca for fear that he'd tell the world that his roommate was sleeping with the headmaster's wife. Everybody on campus knew that Michael was sleeping with Alice. Only Alice herself might be deluded enough to think otherwise. If you were going to kill everybody who knew, then you were going to have to turn Windsor into a graveyard. The same was true of Michael's drug selling. Everybody knew, even though they hadn't been able to catch him at it. You didn't murder, or attempt to murder, somebody to hide something that was already generally known.

James ran his hand across the first page of Michael's paper. He'd read the damned thing through twice and never realized that he was reading his own assumptions into it. Then he'd decided that his confusion was the result of Michael's bad writing. Then he'd known better, but he hadn't known what to do about it.

He picked up both papers now and put them into the pocket of his coat. Safety required not keeping secrets, and this was one secret he had every intention of putting into the hands of the first policeman he ran across.

Either that or he was going to give them to that Gregor Demarkian, who might have more than the minimum of sense.

Gregor Demarkian was sure he was not having a change of heart. He was not interested in going back to work. He was not interested in investigating a murder. He was interested in making sure Mark DeAvecca was all right and stayed that way; and although he admitted that that could be done just by convincing Liz to take him out of school immediately and keep him out, it was a matter of principle not to allow Mark's tormentor to go free without so much as an inconvenience. Besides, there was always the old truth that someone who committed murder once was always at risk of committing another. It was the kind of “old truth” Gregor sometimes took exception to. Most people who committed murder didn't so much commit it as fail to commit self-control. They got liquored up or got stuck in the house for days by a storm or shocked into some kind of knowledge they weren't expecting—that ancient scenario, catching his wife in bed with another man—and just blew up. If there hadn't been a gun or a knife or a great big rock available, if they'd been small men instead of large ones with well-developed muscles, they would have pitched a fit and the whole thing would be over in a heartbeat, with no other consequences but the fact that they'd have to look silly every time the outburst was mentioned for the rest of their lives.

She is,
his brain whispered—but that could be stupidity, too, his own, that eternal human tendency to absolve oneself and blame whatever problems might exist on anybody and anything else in the world. Gregor thought there must have been a lot of comfort in primitive religion, where there were gods for even small things like kitchen spills. “Ibdru made me drop the soup all over the floor” had a much better ring to it than, “I was eavesdropping on Lili and Marti and not looking where I was going and tripped over the doorjamb.”

With Mark, impulse was not a consideration. The preliminary tests on his hair had come back from the lab, and it was quite clear that the boy had been given poison for weeks, and maybe longer.

“I understand your concern about the Christmas holidays,” the lab investigator had told him, in one of those infinitely patient voices that meant she found Gregor both importunate and overwrought, “but all I can tell you is what I can tell you. We've got a lot of arsenic here. Best guess at the moment, a minimum of eight weeks.”

Gregor had put it out of his mind to get back to later. If the poisoning had begun before the Christmas break, then either he had been sent home with something that was contaminated, or he should have appeared better over the course of the three weeks at home. Liz and Jimmy kept saying that Mark had not been well over Christmas, but it was impossible to tell if their “not well” was the same as “just like he's been lately,” since they hadn't seen him lately. He had been here in Windsor at boarding school, and they had been back in Connecticut and New York. Gregor had a feeling that was about to change. Liz was making the kind of noises that mothers make when they are willing to brook no arguments.

It might be the custom among the people they knew to send their children to boarding schools, but there were
perfectly good
private schools in New York and he could live at home.

The final issue was to establish some kind of official connection to an official investigation. Gregor really hated those detective novels where the intrepid private eye rushes about the city digging into a murder the police don't want him to touch. In real life that private eye would be arrested for obstruction of justice and stripped of his license. Gregor didn't have a license—his refusal to get one, or to call himself a “private detective,” had brought a note of curiosity to half the articles ever written about him in the press; the other half simply ignored the inconvenient fact of it and called him a private detective—but the rule remained. He needed an official connection. It was fortunate that in this case there would be no difficulty in getting it.

“We've got to get the permission of the mayor,” Brian Sheehy said, “but it's not going to be any problem. Especially not for a dollar. Isn't that what you usually charge?”

Gregor routinely charged ten thousand dollars or more, if he was charging at all. In this case he would have preferred not to charge at all, but he understood the legal problems. Many states and municipalities, like the federal government, had rules against using people on an unpaid volunteer basis. That was why so many of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's men had had to take that dollar a year in order to serve in the Brain Trust. They might have wanted to give their time and talent freely to the country during the Depression, but the law wouldn't allow it. The law wouldn't allow it in Windsor either. Gregor agreed to take his dollar and suppressed the thought that it was going to cost Windsor more than that to process the paperwork and write the check. There were things it made sense to argue about when it came to government, and things it didn't.

“The mayor's a guy named Frank Petrelli,” Brian Sheehy said. “I've been filling him in on and off since you got here. There's nothing he'd like better than to give that place a black eye.”

“Do the people at the school realize just how much they're hated in this town?” Gregor asked. “It seems to me that they couldn't avoid knowing, but if they know I don't understand why they don't do something about it.”

“There's town and there's town,” Brian said. “They're not hated by the people who live here to commute into Boston to work in advertising and publishing and that kind of thing. And I don't think they care much for the rest of us. They probably think we vote Republican.”

“Do you?”

“My name is Sheehy, and I live in Massachusetts,” Brian said. “What do you think? I vote for Kennedys.”

Gregor didn't know if it was being Irish or being Catholic that made that decision for Brian, but he didn't like to ask. Instead he waited at the long table in the Windsor Police Service conference room for the call to come from the mayor's office, and while he did he made notes about what he knew so far. So much of it was hazy. He had done no investigating. Aside from wandering around the campus of Windsor Academy on the night Mark had gone into convulsions, he had had nothing to do with the people who might have reason to want Mark dead. He had interrogated no one. He had viewed no crime scenes or even event scenes. He could hardly call his role in getting Mark to the hospital last night “viewing” anything, since he hadn't been paying attention to what was where or how Hayes House was set up. He'd been trying to get that fool woman to call 911.

Even so, he knew a few things that mattered and one thing that was absolutely crucial. It was truly remarkable how often “solving” a case came down to a few small details, mechanical and precise. Those detective novels wanted the reader to believe that knowledge of personality and closeness to people made all the difference. Gregor supposed it could, but often it didn't matter at all, except in the end, when you needed to hand something to the prosecutor that he could go into court with. Juries like personality and people. They were never comfortable with bare facts. They wanted it all to be clothed in “motive.”

Gregor didn't have a clue as to motive, although he could imagine a few, given what he'd been told about Windsor, and Mark, and Michael Feyre. From what he'd heard so far though, there were more people with motives to kill Michael than to kill Mark; and as far as he knew, nobody had killed Michael.

Brian came in just after six, bustling happily, followed by a tall, thin, angular woman with closely cropped salt-and-pepper hair, wearing no makeup, and dressed for all the world as if she were about to go gardening.

“Frank is delighted to have you aboard,” Brian said. “You could practically hear him gloat. I've got one of the girls to stay late—”

The angular woman cleared her throat, glaring.

“Okay, okay,” Brian said, “one of the women. Excuse me, one of the secretaries. June Morland, to be exact. She's going to stay late and file all your paperwork just so that you're completely legal, no problems from the litigious ones up the street. This is Kay Hanrahan. She's one of our pathologists.”

“A town like this has need for more than one?” Gregor said.

“Drugs,” Kay Hanrahan said. Then she held out her hand to him. “How do you do?”