The Principal Cause of Death by Mark Richard Zubro Read Free Book Online Page B

pair of tiny diamond earrings but no other jewelry. She sat at one of the three desks in the room. Masses of paper overwhelmed their tops, except for brief spaces in the center where a teacher could grade more tests and add to the clutter.
    She looked up from grading papers and gave me a brief
smile. We exchanged greetings. Then I said, “I understand there was a chess club meeting last night.”
    â€œAnd you’re checking on possible suspects other than yourself.”
    I nodded.
    We hadn’t become friends while working on the committee, but we had been on the same side in most of the disputes, and the final report came close to most of what she or I proposed. A few of the teachers had wanted to move us back to the Stone Age in discipline; a few even came close to the idea of torturing the students for misbehavior. I hoped Fiona Wilson remembered the committee work fondly enough to help me out.
    Without further preliminary she said, “The meeting ended at five-thirty, before the murder took place. I stayed in my classroom. I wanted to work on the computer with a chess problem one of the students brought in. I played with it for an hour and a half. I told this to the police. I have no witnesses that I stayed here all that time, but no one saw me wandering the halls toting a lethal weapon.”
    Somebody totally forthcoming. I could be suspicious about that at my leisure.
    She said, “We’ve all heard you’re the star suspect. Did you kill him?”
    I detected humor in her voice as she talked, but a certain wariness as well. I said, “I didn’t kill Jones,” then asked, “You talk to him much? He have a lot to do with your programs?”
    â€œRarely saw him. If he had anything to do with the science department he saw Andy.” Andrew Buchman, head of the department. Out sick yesterday; I’d checked the list of absent faculty with Georgette earlier. I’d managed to eliminate six out of the 258 faculty members.
    I couldn’t think of a nonthreatening way to ask the next question, so I plunged ahead. “You ever fight with Jones?”
    Her answer was cold and distant. “I’ve been very helpful, but I don’t want to be involved in this. I answered the questions the police asked. I’d rather not go through this
with you, if you don’t mind. No, I never fought with him.” She turned back to her desk, looking at me over her shoulder. “I have papers to grade before eighth hour.”
    That helpful conversation left me with enough time to hunt for Marshall Longfellow, head custodian. Janitors have had strange reputations since the book Up the Down Staircase was published in the mid-sixties, and probably before. Nothing the custodial staff did at Grover Cleveland would change that.
    I tried Longfellow’s office, and the main storage rooms. I found most of the custodial staff clustered in a small lounge on the third floor in the oldest section of the school. One of them saw me and immediately said they were on their afternoon break. The stack of doughnuts on the table looked big enough to last them through the next ice age. Their lethargy led me to the supposition that they’d been sitting there eating them since the last ice age. I asked for Longfellow and got a lot of shrugs. With ten minutes left to go before class started, I gave it up and walked back toward the stairs.
    On the second-floor landing I noticed a door slightly ajar. I pushed it open; it led outside to the roof of the gym. I stepped out and looked around. I heard clangs from a room-sized heating unit twenty feet in front of me. I approached quietly. This had to be the housing for one of the many heating and air-conditioning units scattered throughout the complex. The view was glorious. You could see half the south suburbs of Chicago, with the forest preserves and all the trees in their full autumn glory. I wanted to admire the view longer, but I had to go to class