Diane Davidson - The Cereal Murders

I said, “Let me – “

“No, not yet. I’ll take you back in just a couple of minutes. We need to talk before the investigative team is all over this place.” Schulz paused, then gestured for me to sit on one of the old-fashioned wooden stools. I obeyed. After looking around the kitchen, he sat on another stool and pulled out a notebook. He tapped his mouth with a mechanical pencil. “Start with when you had me paged and work backward.”

I did. Keith’s body. Before that, the cleanup, the after-dinner talks, the dinner itself. The blackout.

Schulz raised one thick eyebrow. “You’re sure it was a fuse?” I said I’d just assumed so. “Who fixed it, do you know?”

I shook my head. “Oh, and one of my coffeepots was in the front hall closet. I didn’t put it there.”

Schulz made a note. “You have a guest list?”

“The headmaster would. Thirty seniors, plus most of the parents. About eighty people altogether.

“You see anybody you know wasn’t invited, seemed out of place, whatever?” I didn’t know who had been invited and who hadn’t. No one seemed out of place, I told him, but the senior-year anxiety had been palpable. “Anything else palpable?” he wanted to know.

I stared at him. He was all business. Anything else you could touch? He gave me just the slightest flicker of a smile. John Richard Korman always said I expected him to read my mind; Tom Schulz actually could. I wished for the two of us to be somewhere else, doing anything but this.

Reading my thoughts again, Schulz said, “We’re almost done.” Then he tilted his head back and drummed the fingers of one hand on his chin. “Okay,” he went on, “anybody who was not here who should have been?”

I didn’t know that either, and said so.

He looked me straight in the eye. “Tell me why somebody would kill this boy.”

Blood jack-hammered in my ears. “I don’t know. He seemed innocuous enough, .really more like a nerd… .”

Silence fell around us In the old kItchen.

Schulz said, “Julian fit into this scenario at all? Or the headmaster’s son? Or the headmaster?”

Miserably, I looked at the big old aluminum canisters in the kitchen, the wooden cabinets painted a buttery yellow, before replying. “I don’t know much about what was going on in the senior class, or in the school as a whole, for that matter. Julian and Macguire went back out to check for a pulse when I was on the phone with the 911 operator. I don’t know if Julian, Macguire, Keith, anybody, were friends.”

“Know if they were enemies?”

“Well.” I involuntarily thought of Julian’s recitation of the class rank. He hadn’t talked about any nastiness to the competition. I refused to speculate. “I don’t know,” I said firmly.”

The deputy stalked into the kitchen. Snow clung to his boots and clothing. Ignoring me, he said to Schulz, “We got drag marks to the gatehouse, where whoever it was got the sled. They haven’t finished with the photos, but it’s going to be a couple hours. You got a kid having a hard time down the hall.”

Schulz nodded just perceptibly and the deputy withdrew.

“Goldy,” Schulz said, “I want to talk to Julian with you there. Then I’ll deal with Macguire Perkins. Tell me if this headmaster is as much of a moron as he looks.”

“More so.”

“Great.”

Julian was sitting in the front room. His eyes were closed, his head bent back against the sofa cushions. With his Adam’s apple pointed at the ceiling, he had a look of extraordinary vulnerability. When we entered, he coughed and rubbed his eyes. His face was still gray; his spiky blond hair gave him an unearthly look. He had found a knit throw that he had pulled tightly around his compact body. Schulz motioned for me to go on over by him.

I moved quietly to a chair beside the couch, then reached out to pat Julian’s arm. He turned and gave me a morose look.

“Tell me what happened,” Schulz began without preamble.

Wearily, Julian recounted how the dinner had ended. Everyone had been putting on their coats and talking. He had stayed afterward to see if a girl he knew, who sort of interested him, he said with lowered eyes, would like a ride home. She had airily replied that she was going home with Keith.

“I said, ‘Oh, moving up in the world, are we?’ but she wasn’t listening.” Julian’s nose wrinkled. “Ever since I told her I’d rather be a chef than a neurosurgeon, she’s acted like I’m a leper.”

Schulz asked mildly, “Keith was going to be a neurosurgeon?”

“Oh, no,” said Julian. “Did I say that? I must have been confused… .”

We waited while Julian coughed and shook his head quickly, like a dog shaking off water.

“Do you want to do this later, Julian?” asked Schulz. “Although it’d be helpful if you could reconstruct the events’ for me now.”

“No, that’s okay.” Julian’s voice was so low, I had to lean forward to hear it.

Schulz pulled out his notebook. “Let’s go back. Before the girl. We have a dinner party for eighty people and a kid ends up dead. Goldy said the party was about college or something. How’s that?”

Julian shrugged. “I think it’s supposed to help people feel okay about going to college.”

“In what way?”

“Oh, you know, like everybody’s going through the same process. Have to figure out what you want, have to look around for the right place, have to get all your papers and stuff together. Pressure, pressure, pressure. Have to write your essays. Be tested.” He groaned. “SATs are Saturday. We had ‘em last year, but this is the big one. These are the scores the colleges look at. The teachers always say it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter, which makes you know that it matters. It matters, man.” There was a savagery in his voice I had never heard before.

“Was Keith Andrews nervous about all this? First big step to becoming a neurosurgeon?”

Julian shook his head. “Nah.” He paused. “At least he didn’t seem to be. We called him Saint Andrews.”

“Saint Andrews? Why?”

A hint of frown wrinkled Julian’s cheek. “Well. Keith didn’t really want to be a doctor. He wanted to grow up and be Bob Woodward. He wanted to be such a famous investigative reporter that whenever there was a scandal, they’d say, ‘Better give Andrews a call.’ Like he was the Red Adair of the world of journalism or something.”

Schulz pursed his lips. “Know anybody he was investigating? Anybody he offended?”

Julian shrugged, avoiding Schulz’s eyes. “I heard some stuff. But it was just gossip.”

“Care to share that? It might help.”

“Nah. It was just… stuff.”

“Big J. We’re talking about a death here.”

Julian sighed bleakly, “I think he was having his share of problems. Like everybody.”

“His share of problems with whom?”

“I don’t know. Everybody, nobody.”

Schulz made another note. “I need some specifics on that. You tell me, I won’t tell anybody. Sometimes gossip can help a lot, You’d be surprised.” He waited a beat, then clicked the pencil and tucked it in his pocket. “So the lights came back on, the girl said no to you. Then what?”

“I don’t know, I guess I like, talked to some people – “

“Who?”

“Well, jeez, I don’t remember – “

“Keith?”

Julian reflected, then said, “I don’t remember seeing Keith around. You know, everyone was talking about the lights, and saying, see you Monday, and stuff like that. Then I came out to check if Goldy needed help.”

“Time, Miss G?”

I looked at my watch: eleven o’clock. Schulz cocked his thumb over his shoulder. When had Julian come out to the kitchen? I said, “I don’t know. Nine-thirtyish.”