He snapped on the light switch to illuminate the concrete stairway. I could hear a steady humming and presumed it came from the snarl of wires and transformers that began at the foot of the stairs and continued along the wall for a dozen feet. Light streamed in through a twenty-four-inch-wide window that was heavily barred.
“This is the west corner?” I said, keeping my voice low.
“I guess,” Kessel said.
“So this is the sixth window,” I said for Estelle’s benefit. She nodded, looking off into the musty darkness behind the boiler with what seemed to me idle curiosity.
I squeezed past what might have been a fuel oil tank and the first boiler. I nodded at the steel door that faced me.
“I don’t know,” Kessel said. The door was locked. “Maybe my master key fits,” he said without much enthusiasm. It did, and the door yawned inward. A question that had kept me awake for many nights was answered as the door opened and the lights were switched on. The room was filled with hundreds of old desks… hundreds. They were stacked neatly to the ceiling girders, their legs interlocked like strange, metallic spiders.
“So this is where they go,” I whispered. I looked at Kessel, who was plainly nervous. “Old desks…you gotta wonder,” I said.
“And that’s number four,” Estelle said. We made our way down an aisle between Type A-2 desks from the fifties and a collection of rare C-24s from the early sixties…the kind with the folding writing wing that hits you squarely in the shins, every time.
Sure enough, the window wasn’t latched. Estelle reached up and pushed it open. It swung on hinges from the top, and its travel was limited to about six inches.
“Well, well,” I said. The lights from the overheads didn’t reach the musty corners and I turned on my flashlight. “Hold still a second,” I said, and Estelle froze near the wall. Coach Kessel didn’t need to be told. I bent down with a grunt.
“What is it?”
“A nacho chip,” I said, holding up the yellow corn chip. I sniffed it and snapped off a corner. “Fresh.” I looked at Estelle. “Congratulations, sharp eyes.”
I swept my flashlight around the room. The next door heading eastward was padlocked. “What’s in there?”
“I don’t know,” Kessel said.
“My guess would be the main electrical service,” Estelle said. “That’s about where the wires hit the building on the outside.”
I swept my light around the room, probing. “So if someone was down here, they’d have to leave the way we came in,” I said. “Unless there’s another hallway or something. Which there might well be.” I was making my way up the aisle with my pulse hammering in my ears. The corner of my flashlight beam had found itself a tennis shoe…just the toe at first.
But as the light touched it, the shoe moved ever so slightly, drawing back like an earthworm from the fisherman’s flashlight. “Someone would have to have a hell of a lot of keys to turn this place into a hotel,” I said, keeping my light away from the shoe.
During some other epoch, several dozen desks had lost their grip and tumbled into a welter of chrome and imitation oak plywood. It created a perfect warren, home to the sneakers and the legs attached to them. With my right hand resting loosely on the butt of my service revolver I swept the light quickly to the left, stabbing the beam full into the cowering youngster’s face.
“Hello, Richard,” I said.
26
“I didn’t do nothin’,” Richard Staples said immediately…the expected litany of the teenager who’s guilty as hell.
“Stand up, son,” I said. “And keep your hands where I can see them.”
He did so, unwinding with some care so that none of the desk mountains were dislodged. “I didn’t do nothin’,” he repeated, and I knew that we weren’t dealing with a rocket scientist. I left my flashlight on, even though there was plenty of light now that Staples wasn’t hiding under the furniture.
He was taller than I was by half a foot and husky to boot. If he decided to make a bulldozer run for the door behind me, I’d be hard-pressed to stop him. “Put your hands on top of your head,” I snapped. “Right now.”
He looked over toward Estelle and Kessel as if to see if they were allies or obstacles. In his best, most reasonable coach’s voice, Elwood Kessel said, “Don’t make it hard on yourself, son. Do what the officer says.”
As Staples’s hands drifted up toward his head, I pushed my advantage. “Now turn around.” Estelle maneuvered through the desks and took my handcuffs out of the belt keeper. In one deft motion she snapped them first on his right wrist, yanked his arm down and around, and then followed with his left.
Different people react in different ways to custody. I’d had grown men piss their pants and grovel when the cuffs clicked, and I’d had elderly women turn into kicking banshees…and every combination in between. Richard Staples turned and glowered first at Estelle and then me.
“I didn’t do nothin’,” he said. His round, acne-pocked face was defiant. He hunched his shoulders, trying the strength of the handcuffs.
“What were you doing down here?”
“None of your business.” He turned to look at Kessel and sneered, the twisted lip making his unattractive face none the better. “There ain’t nothin’ wrong with bein’ here.”
“Is that a fact,” I said. “Trespass is still a crime in New Mexico, as far as I know.”
“I wasn’t trespassin’. This is a school.”
The logic of that escaped me. I took hold of his right arm just above the elbow and exerted some pressure toward the door. “We can talk down at the office.”
“You ain’t got no right to do this,” Staples said and I heard a faint, plaintive quality for the first time.
“You have the right to shut your mouth, son. I don’t know what game you’re playing, but it won’t take long to find out. Estelle, would you go on ahead and call in? Tell whoever is on dispatch that I want Deputy Torrez to meet us at the side door of the gym, ASAP.” She nodded and vanished through the desks toward the boiler room.
I crouched down and swept the flashlight beam around the room, bouncing it off half a million chrome legs. Wherever the kid kept his stash, it wasn’t there.
Richard Staples didn’t say anything else until we were halfway through the first locker room upstairs. “I ain’t done nothin’ wrong,” he said to whoever would listen. I paid no attention.
“Coach, will you do me a favor? Call Glenn Archer and have him meet us down at the sheriff’s office?”
“You want me to do that right now?”
“Right now,” I said. We reached the coaches’ office and Kessel made for the phone. The door to the parking lot opened and Estelle looked inside.
“Torrez will be here in about two minutes, sir.”
“Fine. Son, have a seat.” I pointed at one of the straightbacked chairs. Staples did so, with a expression that said he’d tear me limb from limb if I’d oblige by taking off the handcuffs. He sat on the edge of the chair as if he were painfully constipated.
“Mrs. Archer?” Kessel said into the telephone. “This is Elwood Kessel down at the school. Is Mr. Archer there?” He waited and I could hear the shrill chatter of Dorothy Archer’s voice across the room. “Well, we’ve got a little problem down at the school, and I need to reach him.” Again the chatter, and I waved a hand, gesturing for the receiver.
“Mrs. Archer? This is Undersheriff Bill Gastner. Where can we reach your husband?”
“Well, as I was telling Coach Kessel, Glenn said he was going downtown to buy a new pair of shoes. My goodness, what’s going on?”
“Nothing earthshaking. We just need to see him. The sooner the better. Could you do us a favor, ma’am?”
“What’s that?”
“Would you track him down for us? Tell him I need to speak with him at the sheriff’s office?”
“Well, I…I’ll certainly do my best.”