Keeping Watch (28 page)

“Third period, Mr. Kluger.”

He cut the connection without thanking his secretary, and said to Allen, “Third period.”

“And what time would that be?”

The confusion returned, and Allen decided that Mr. Kluger was not exactly a hands-on kind of a principal, if he didn't know for certain when the periods began and ended. “After ten. Ten-thirty, might be a good time to catch her.”

It was only eight-forty now, and Allen was not about to sit around chatting with this pompous ass for two hours. He stood. “How about I come back then, if that's okay with you? So as not to waste your time. Say I meet you back here at ten-thirty, you can introduce me to Ms.—Rao, was it?”

The blithe assumption that the school principal had nothing better to do than show a potential student's father around at the drop of a hat might be slightly insulting, but was almost certainly true. Allen shook Kluger's hand and was out the door before the man could open it, and disappeared through the outer office in a flash. He stood in the hallway, patting his pockets as if he'd forgotten something; as soon as he heard the principal's door close, he stuck his head back inside the office to smile at the woman sitting behind the desk. “Ms. Gillespie?”

“Yes,” she said expectantly.

“I'm Mike Ellis, I'm thinking of bringing my son here. Can you tell me, when does third period begin?”

The woman hid her amusement, but Allen could see that she knew quite well that he had asked her boss just that and Kluger hadn't had a clue. “Second period ends at nine-fifty, there's a twenty-minute break, and the bell for third period rings at ten after ten.”

“Thanks a lot,” he told her, and left the school with a spring in his step.

He was back in the building well before ten, asking for Ms. Rao's room when the students came pouring from their rooms at ten to. A series of students directed him to an empty classroom just as the teacher was leaving. One glance, and Allen could only wonder that Jamie's praises hadn't been more effusive. The woman was gorgeous, small, slim, brown-skinned, and sloe-eyed, and he knew without thinking about it that every one of her students who didn't embrace neo-Nazi principles would be madly in love with her.

“Ms. Rao?”

“Yes,” she said. In dress she was pure Californian, khaki pants and a linen shirt with a thin sweater over it against the school's air-conditioning. Her accent seemed to be English, with a faint brush of Indian music that raised the end of her single word.

“I'm Mike Ellis. Mr. Kluger said I could come and talk with you for a minute about your class.”

He could see her thinking that if Kluger gave permission, it had to involve money in some way. “Would you like to talk here, or in the staff room?”

“Actually, it's kind of nice outside, if you have the time for a stroll.”

She dropped the sweater over the back of her chair, and locked the classroom door after her.

When they were well clear of the school, and safe from the threat of having Kluger scurry up behind them, Allen drew his breath, and took the very risky plunge he had decided on. “Ms. Rao, I told your principal that I was here to look at your school with an eye to enrolling my son.”

“Yes?”

“I don't have a son. I came to see you. I had some questions about Jamie O'Connell.”

The young woman stopped dead, her face going taut with dismay. “Has he been found?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Are you with the police?”

“No.”

“I think you had better explain yourself, Mr. Ellis,” she said with an edge to her voice. “If that is your name.”

“It's one of them.” He watched her think about this, and he continued. “I am trusting you, Ms. Rao. Rather more than I had intended before I saw you. I want to ask you about
The Lord of the Rings
.”

She waited for more; when it did not come, she nodded to urge him on. “
The Lord of the Rings.
J. R. R. Tolkien. Yes, many of the children are reading it. When I was growing up, we all read Roald Dahl.”

“Would you tell me please, why did you give Jamie a copy of the trilogy?”

Her face closed; she took a step back. “Mr. Ellis, do you work for James's father?”

“No, I most certainly do not. Although,” he said carefully, “I'd like to know more about him.”

“Why?”

“Ms. Rao, I don't think I can go into that right now. Let's just say it involves Jamie.”

“Then the boy's not dead?”

“As far as I know, he's fine. Safe,” he added, to see what she did with the word. Her face didn't alter, but after a minute her body relaxed minutely. “Did you have reason to believe him dead?”

“The newspapers seemed to think it likely.”

“Why did you give him the books?”

“It was his birthday.”

“Do you give all your students expensive sets of books for their birthdays?”

“Just those who need it.”

“Jamie's father is a wealthy man.”

“Most of the students here come from homes with money,” she agreed evenly, evading the unstated question as smoothly as she had all the direct ones. And then she seemed to relent. “Mr. Ellis, are you doing anything for dinner tonight?”

“It sounds as if I may be. Would you like me to pick you up?”

“There is a bookstore on the corner of St. Helena and Main. Park in the lot out in the back of the store, and we can walk to the restaurant. I shall be out in front at seven o'clock.”

“White tie or none?” he asked, smiling.

“What you have on will be fine. And if the dinner goes well, you can take me dancing.”

He grinned. “Isn't that just what we've been doing for the past few minutes?”

Her black eyes sparked to life with mischief, but she merely repeated demurely, “Seven o'clock, Mr. Ellis,” and her slim body swept back the way they had come.

Oh yes, all her students would certainly be in love with her, Allen thought happily.

As he bent to unlock the door of his rental car, his spine exposed to all the world beneath its thin layer of expensive wool, Allen suddenly understood why his shoulders seemed to crave a strenuous workout, what the electrical feeling to the air all morning had been. The hot, dry San Jose air had the same smell as the tropical jungle across the ocean or the rainy night under a Portland overpass, lifetimes ago. It was not the air itself, but the smell of setting out on patrol, stepping into the green, knowing that Charlie waited there.

Pure, unadulterated adrenaline. How could he ever imagine giving this up?

Back at his motel room, Allen turned his new dead bolt, hung his jacket and tie on hangers, and checked for email. He had one message, cleansed into anonymity by Alice's remailing service, and even then it was in the woman's own version of code: a string of nine digits, the final 2 and 5 separated by a slash. This gave the seven-digit phone number where he could reach her, between the hours of two and five. No area code meant simply the Seattle area.

Satisfied, he checked to make sure neither window had been tampered with, then cranked up the air conditioner to full rattle. He arranged his three-hundred-dollar shoes and his silk-looking-like-cotton shirt in the closet with the jacket, and turned on the bathroom tap to splash his face with water as cold as it would give, which wasn't very. He was feeling his pair of sleepless nights, and knew he wouldn't get much rest later, so he stretched out on the slippery flowered chintz of the bedcover. He was asleep in ninety seconds.

His internal clock prodded him after three hours. His eyes opened to the strange room, sun bright around the skimpy curtains; he blinked, and turned quickly over to look at the bedside radio alarm. Just after two. He used the toilet and stuck his head under the cold-water tap again (finding it even warmer than before) before pulling on a pair of shorts, worn sandals, and a T-shirt declaring him an alumnus of Hanover College, Indiana. The car was an oven, its seat scorching the backs of his legs. Half a mile away he spotted a pay phone that wasn't directly on a freeway or ten feet from a noisy gas station; digging a roll of quarters from the glove compartment, Allen stepped up to the booth.

Alice answered on the first ring.

“We may have a problem here,” he told her. “The father looks like he might be involved in an illegal business.”

“You're not talking about a meth lab,” she stated.

“More like a scam, or money laundering,” Allen told her.

Her silence was eloquent.

“I'm not sure how we missed it, and I could be wrong now, but I like to keep you in the picture.”

“We missed it because we were hasty. I rushed you. I should have—”

“Alice,” he interrupted, “it was my decision, too. We missed it. The question is what to do now.”

“What do you need?” she asked, and Allen found himself smiling, just a little. One of the things he'd always liked, working with this otherwise difficult woman, was that she knew how to get over it, and get on with it.

“Information.” Better late than never. “I think you know somebody on one of the papers down here. If they could get me an ID, I'd have an excuse to ask questions.” Bluffing only went so far; sooner or later, you ran up against someone who demanded to see identification. If that someone was a cop, things would go to hell in a hurry. Call it smarts, or short-timer's jitters, but Allen had no wish to spend his retirement in prison.

Alice said, “I think I can get something better than that. You need it immediately?”

“I'm okay tonight, I have a date with the kid's teacher.” No reaction from Alice, not that he expected one. “Business, in case you're concerned. And later . . . well, I thought of some other things.” Illegal things, and he wasn't about to go into details on a phone line.

“I'll have something for you by this evening. And, take care,” Alice said, which didn't sound like her. Then she added sternly, “It would be very difficult to bail you out,” which did.

Chapter 25

Allen went into a men's store that he had spotted while driving to the telephone, and bought two new shirts and a pair of slightly more extreme trousers than he usually wore. When he came around the corner of the assigned bookstore that evening, he saw Ms. Rao's eyes sweep over him and return to his face with approval. He came to a stop before her and bowed slightly.

“My lady.”

“Sushi or pizza?” she greeted him.

“I like anything. You choose.”

Somewhat to his surprise, she chose the pizza.

It was no chain pizza joint, though. The men in the kitchen greeted her as a friend, and the waitress showed them to a table at the back, next to a window. He ordered beer, she ordered red wine, and when they had their drinks, he raised his and said, “Mike.”

“Sorry?”

“You can't keep calling me Mr. Ellis. I'm Mike.”

“And I'm Karin, with an ‘i.' Cheers.”

“Kluger said you were at the University of London,” Allen opened, and the conversation was launched, back and forth with history and interests. Little flirtation, he was relieved to see: a complication he could do without. Karin seemed to feel the same way. The pizza was excellent, the talk easy, and he waited for a sign that she was willing to move on to the next stage, the reason she'd asked him out for dinner. When no sign came, he gave the conversation a nudge.

“Tell me about Jamie O'Connell.”

“I call him James. ‘Jameson' seemed too big for him.”

“He's a nice kid.”

“Bright, quiet,” she said, not quite an agreement.

“Many friends?”

“Almost none. There are a couple of other outsiders he talks to from time to time, but it's always a problem, kids who move schools a lot. It's hard to work your way into a group that's been together for some time.”

Outsiders,
Allen noted. “Is he bullied?”

“We don't permit bullying at the school,” Karin said quickly.

“But at a different school, he would be?”

“At a different school, different conditions would apply. Who knows?”

“I'll take that as a yes.”

“Not necessarily. Bullying depends on a lot of factors. As far as I can see, it's as much a matter of chemistry as anything else. Someone becomes a victim with as much random chance as falling in love. All I can say is, here, no one person or group picked on the boy. If anything,” she added, almost reluctantly, “James picked on some of them. He tripped one of the kindergartners and broke his wrist—although that may have been an accident. I saw him pinch a second-grade girl.”

The chemistry of bullying, Allen thought, and wrenched his mind away from the image of shiny black glasses. “Did you talk to the boy's father about it?”

But instead of answering, she asked, “You don't need any dessert, do you? What do you think about dancing?”

“In the abstract, or the particular?”

“Would you like to go dancing with me? Not here,” she explained. “There's a place a few doors down that has ballroom dancing on Thursday nights. My husband and I go sometimes, but he's on the East Coast just now.”

“If you don't mind my size tens landing regularly on your toes, I'd be willing to make an effort.”

Ballroom dancing was a skill Allen had left behind with his high school graduation, but he managed not to step on her feet too seriously. Because he was so rusty, it took him a while to realize that in the process of guiding him around the floor, the woman's hands were covering rather more ground than was really necessary: By the end of the first song, she had managed to feel her way around most of his belt line and up both armpits. When the song ended, he leaned close to her ear to murmur, “How about we sit this one out, and you tell me why you're patting me down?”

Her blush was delectable, but she did not protest the accusation. Back at the table, he took the chair beside her, so they could talk without raising their voices.

“So, Ms. Karin Rao, why do you imagine I might be wearing a gun?”

“You said you weren't working for Mark O'Connell. I wasn't sure if I believed you, and if I did, I wanted to know if maybe you were like him, just not with him.”

He reared back in surprise. “Are you telling me that Jamie's father wears a gun?”

“My stepfather's a police detective. American. I know what a gun worn under clothes looks like.”

Oh shit,
Allen thought as the first half of her statement sank in.
A cop's daughter, just what I need, oh shit.

“Why are you asking questions about the boy?” she was saying.

“I'm asking questions about the father.”
Did she set me up? She had hours to do it.

“Is that because you already know where the boy is?”

Allen sat back sharply.
Get up and go, now, before her reinforcements storm in.
She must have seen something of the apprehension in his face, because suddenly she smiled, and moved in so close that an onlooker might have thought they were about to kiss. She said to him in a low, firm voice, “He's a troubled boy, is James, but it's hardly surprising, with a father like that. Anything I can do to help you keep that man away from his son, just let me know.”

Allen laughed in relief and delight, and her smile deepened.

“You can begin,” he suggested, “by telling me what you know of the man.”

“Have you met him?”

“No.” Just spent a week and a half listening to his voice and watching him torment his son.

“I only met him once,” Karin told him. “At Back-to-School night in October. Really nice man, enthusiastic about the boy, good questions, sympathetic. And very attractive—he has these sparkling blue eyes and a little dimple in his chin. But then there was the gun—this was before our metal detectors went in. A gun seemed a little extreme for an investment counselor. And when I talked with him on the phone a month or so later, I began to wonder. It was . . . It's hard to explain. It was almost as if, on the phone, without the physical charm, I was talking to a different person. As if he wasn't working so hard to be a great guy, when I wasn't there in front of him. Face-to-face, he seemed to hang on my every word; on the phone, he didn't seem at all interested in what I had to say. He seemed, in fact, on the point of hanging up in boredom. I'm sure that doesn't make much sense to you, especially since you've never met him, but the result was that although after our parent-teacher conference I'd been thinking of Mark O'Connell as a great guy who'd been through a lot—lost his wife, trying to do his best by his problem kid—after talking with him on the phone, I started to reevaluate. Anyway, that was our first phone conversation.”

“And the second?” Allen asked.

“The second one was, frankly, scary.” She shot him a glance to see how he was taking the statement, and seemed reassured at his reaction. “I even told Kluger about it, but he just climbed on his sexist high horse and all but patted me on the head. It wasn't my imagination,” she insisted.

“I'm not arguing with you,” Allen told her. “Why'd you call him in the first place, if I may ask? Do you call all the parents?”

“I try to contact each parent every two or three months, not only when there's a problem, but when their child has done a particularly good job, or if something happened I think they should know about. The classes are small enough, it's not difficult to do. And it helps a lot, to keep the parents involved.”

“But not Mark O'Connell?”

“I know, I'm driveling. It was so awkward, it makes me uncomfortable to talk about it. But what happened, the second call I mean, came out of something James had written in one of his essays that rather alarmed me. The assignment was to describe a scene in a kitchen, using all one's senses, and employing metaphor and simile to explore nuances without making obvious parallels—although of course I didn't put the assignment in those words for the class. In his story, James was describing a woman dropping a plate of food onto the floor, and he wrote something along the lines of, ‘The meat hit the linoleum dead flat, with a crack like a wide leather belt hitting naked skin.' You can see why it caught my attention.”

“I sure can.”

“Anyway, I might have thought it was just some flight of imagination, or something he'd picked up somewhere, but for the way he reacted when I asked him if he'd ever been hit like that.”

“He denied it.”

“Absolutely and strenuously. And laid me a nice side trail to lead me away from a phone call. Which I probably should have followed.”

“What happened?”

“I have no idea. I mean, I called the father, and found him home even though James had said he was out of town. I asked him—very gently, I thought—if he was having any difficulties with James at home. You know, not accusing him or anything, just suggesting that boys of that age, particularly those who had lost a mother, often acted out and went through a period of misbehavior. I suppose it was too ham-fisted, because instead of admitting that yes, he did find James a handful sometimes and needed to discipline him strongly, in about two minutes flat he somehow managed to turn the conversation around and was soon quizzing me in this quiet voice about the boy's misbehavior at school, saying that he'd hoped all would go well here, that James had seemed to respond so well to the sterner structure—his words—and how disappointed he was that James had given me problems. It took me aback, how smoothly the man turned things completely over on me, and then before I could do more than protest that it wasn't at all what I'd meant, he thanked me and hung up. When I tried to ring him back, the line was busy, and stayed that way until after ten o'clock. I didn't know what to do. My husband even offered to go with me to James's house and check that things were okay, but I couldn't help thinking that was a bit extreme. And I couldn't very well call the police over a creepy conversation with a parent—a wealthy, upstanding, involved parent who would then yank his kid out of school and probably threaten to sue over being accused of beating his kid.”

“And did he?”

“Beat James? That's why I said I had no idea what happened that night. James came to school the next morning, and he was fine physically—no bruises I could see, no limp, no indication of soreness or distress, but I have to say, he certainly acted like a beaten child—the startled eyes, the jumpiness . . . He even raised an arm as if to fend me off when I appeared beside him without warning.”

“Abuse isn't always physical,” Allen noted; she was on it in a flash.

“You
do
have James hidden away!”

“Me? Nope. Like I told you, I'm interested in the father. But I have seen men like him before. You say he carried a gun? Even to a parent-teacher conference?”

“I also saw him one time with a group of other men, maybe three or four, coming out of a restaurant when I happened to be driving by. One of them, I'm quite sure, was armed. They all looked like crooks. And I overheard James talking about guns one time, he seemed remarkably knowledgeable.”

To an Englishwoman, he reflected, any knowledge about guns might appear extreme. “When you say the men looked like crooks, what do you mean?”

She thought for a moment, her eyes slowly coming to focus on a clot of high-spirited young professionals near the busy bar. “You see those three men in the suits over there? When you have a group like that, they're interacting—even if they're all business, they bounce off each other. Each of them is always aware of himself through the eyes of the others. Well, men like those I saw with Mark O'Connell don't do that. They're only aware of others as either people they can take advantage of, or people to watch out for. Victims or threat. You can see it in their body language,” she elaborated, and the precision of her pronunciation made Allen wonder if his companion was accustomed to the amount of wine she'd put away.

“You're talking about sharks,” he told her.

“Yeah, human sharks.” She nodded, and Allen hid his disappointment. To Karin Rao, the word “crook” described any sort of ruthless businessman. She hadn't been all that much help, after all.

“Well, Karin,” he said, “you've got to be up in the morning, and I have to go see someone tonight. The pizza was great, and I'm sorry I'm not a better dancer.”

Obediently, she stood up and gathered her coat around her, swaying slightly as if to the music. He handed her the purse she'd left on the back of the chair and followed her out of the dance hall, a solicitous hand hovering near one elbow.

Outside on the street, she blinked owlishly around her. Allen asked, “Did you drive?” There was no way he was letting this woman behind a wheel, but she shook her head.

“No, I live just around the corner. The walk will do me good.”

“I'll go with you, I could use some air, too.”

It was four blocks, into the world of condos and duplexes that lay behind the main road. The Rao home was in a ten-year-old condo, through a courtyard with a fountain and security gate and up a set of external stairs. He shook her hand formally, and thanked her again.

“I hope you can help James,” she told him, sober again.

“Look, I know you like Jamie, but really I have nothing to do—”

“Did I say I liked him?” she interrupted. “I don't remember saying that.”

He gaped at her. “Well, surely . . . I mean, you gave him the books for his birthday, you seem very concerned as to his welfare—”

“I'm a teacher, he is one of my students. Or he was, until he disappeared. Certainly I felt sorry for the boy, since there was obviously something terribly dysfunctional about his relationship with his father, and I felt—still feel, clearly—some degree of responsibility to intervene if I can, but no, I wouldn't say I liked the boy. He struck me as secretive and manipulative, and I tried never to take my eyes off him.”