Diane Davidson - The Cereal Murders

“Yes, they scared you off.” I hesitated. “And then Miss Ferrell. She wouldn’t give Greer an A in French, but you figured you could go to Perkins about that. After all, it had been done before at that school.”

“Don’t I know. Now, I told you to shut up.” I stopped by the magazines. “Why did you have to kill Miss Ferrell?” I persisted.

“I didn’t pay over a hundred thousand dollars for Greer to go to that school so she could end up at some podunk place in the Midwest. Now, quit talking and move.” Some podunk place in the Midwest? You went to a school in the Midwest, didn’t you? Only, as Stan Marensky had pointed out so cruelly, you flunked out of Michigan before you could ever end up anywhere, Hank. Macguire’s words haunted me: I’m nobody. And who was nobody most of all in his own eyes? A flunk-out with a restaurant whose two pastimes in life were lifting weights and expressing his violent hostilities on Sunday afternoons in front of a televised playing field. But he was a nobody who would become somebody if his offspring went to PrInceton. I should have known.

One last section of magazines loomed before we got to the window displays. I tried to think of how I would shove him into the door, try to knock him out the way I had before with the wire display.

He poked my shoulder hard. “Where is this damn grade book?”

“It’s less than twenty feet away. If you don’t let me get it, all your plans will fall through… .”

Apparently satisfied, Hank poked me again. “Go get it.”

Actually, I wanted to tell him, you don’t need it anymore. In that streetfront display, no one would find it for weeks. Even then, it probably would be discarded. To bookstore workers, who was Suzanne Ferrell? How could she have had anything to do with Goldy the caterer and her assistant, Julian Teller, found murdered in their bookstore?

Stop thinking like this

“We have to squeeze into a display,” I warned Hank.

“If you are lying, I’ll kill you right now, I swear it.”

“We’re close. Good old Hank,” I said grimly, “it’s like your final goal line, isn’t it? My one Bronco buddy, turned on me.”

“Shut up.”

I played my flashlight over the last shelf of magazines. I couldn’t hear a thing from Julian. There were no sirens or flashing lights. Desperation gripped me. We arrived at the narrow entrance to the platform.

“Now what?” demanded Hank.

“It’s in here. Underneath a pile of cookbooks.”

“Is this a joke?” he demanded. “Get in there and get it for me. No, wait. I don’t want you going out some door on the other side. Get in there, then you tell me where it is.”

“All right, all right,” I said. I put down my flashlight.

“Flash your beam over on this pile.” I motioned to the small table between the window and where I stood. “It’s right under the first book.”

In my mind’s eye I saw Arch. Adrenaline surged through my body as I moved laboriously across the platform.

“Move over,” Hank ordered impatiently. Obediently, I moved a few inches to my right and spread my feet to steady myself. There was about a foot of space between Hank and me, and then another eighteen inches between him and the window. He tucked his gun in his pants and reached greedily for the pile of cookbooks. One chance.

I bent over and shoved into Hank Dawson with all my might. I heard a startled oomph! as my head sank into his belly. He hurtled into the glass with an explosive crack. I felt the plate glass breaking. The window broke into monstrous falling shards. I pulled back. Hank Dawson screamed wildly as his body crashed through the shattered glass. The heavy blades fell like a guillotine.

“Agh! Agh!” he screamed. He writhed on the pavement, howling.

Shaking uncontrollably, I crept to the broken window. Beneath me, Hank Dawson lay sprawled on the snowy sidewalk. His face stared up at mine.

“Agh … argh …” He was reaching desperately for words.

I started to say, “I’m sorry – “

“Listen,” he rasped. “Listen… she… she could read when… she was… only four… .”

Then he died.

22

“I swear, Goldy,” said Tom Schulz an hour later, shaking his head, “you get into more damned trouble.”

The ambulance carrying Julian pulled away from the curb. He had been shot in the calf, but would be all right. I had several bumps, none of which were life-threatening, according to the paramedics. ‘”I swear also,” Schulz went on grimly, “that’s the last time I leave you or Julian in a potentially dangerous situation.”

I looked around at the police cars and fire engines. Clouds had moved in again, and snow was falling in a gauzy, unhurried way from a sky tinted pink by urban streetlights. Audrey had shown me some of the Tattered Cover’s charms. But it was great to be out of the bookstore and into the sweet, cold air, especially at one o’clock in the morning.

“You didn’t know. And I did try to call you,” I told him.

Tom Schulz grunted.

The Denver police officers who had answered my 911 call had questioned me repeatedly: the same story over and over. “For college?” they said, bewildered and disbelieving. “Because of class rank?”

Indeed. I wondered vaguely if Headmaster Perkins would face any charges. Altering grades was probably not illegal, even if you had the damning evidence of a teacher’s grade book. The only crimes I knew of besides Hank’s had been Macguire Perkins’ drug use and Brad Marensky’s thefts. I was hardly going to turn the boys in. Sadly, both teens had merely followed the example, both implicit and explicit, of their purported mentors – their parents

“This was over who was first in the class?” a bewildered Denver sergeant had asked me at least six times.

Yep. With Keith Andrews gone, with an A in French and an uncooperative college counselor out of the way, with Julian incapacitated or dead, Greer Dawson would have passed Heather, been at the top of her class and on her way to the Ivy League, to all the things Hank coveted for his daughter – and for himself.

But this was not really over who headed the class. It was – heartbreakingly – about trying to make your child the kind of success you never were yourself. I felt a terrible pity for Greer Dawson. I knew she would never be able to measure up.

“How can you buy grades?” the cop kept asking.

“Same way you buy drugs,” I answered.

“Huh,” Schulz grunted under his breath. “Cynical, Miss G.”

I asked the Denver police officer to phone Elk Park Prep, to alert the headmaster to some strange inquiries he might get from parents who might have been worried by Heather Coopersmith’s calls. How Alfred Perkins would react to this last event in the saga of collegial competition I could not imagine. Nor did I really care.

Now the picture takers were done. Hank Dawson’s corpse was being removed. I did not look. The sergeant said I could go.

Schulz suggested that we exit through the brick walkway between the Tattered Cover and the Janus Building. His car, he told me, was on Second Avenue. He took my hand. His was warm and rough, entirely welcome.

“You were brave,” he said. “Damn.” The memory of Hank Dawson, sprawled bloody and dead on the pavement, made my legs wobble. I stopped and tilted my head back to catch a few icy snowflakes in my mouth. The air was cool, fresh, sharp. Sweet. I drew it deep into my lungs.

“There’s just one thing I never figured out,” I said. We were standing on the pink-lit brick breezeway between the two buildings. Several late-night passersby had been halted by the police activity. I could hear their engines humming; music lilted from a car radio.

“One thing you haven’t figured out,” repeated, Schulz. “Like how to get on with your life.”