The Headmaster's Wife(157)

“At the moment you can’t arrest anybody,” Gregor said. “Not for anything. And although I can promise you that you’ll have the evidence to arrest somebody for bank fraud and grand theft, I can’t promise that you’re going to be able to arrest anybody for murder. I miss the FBI sometimes. In spite of all the nonsense you hear on television, what we did in the Bureau was mostly deal with idiots. You see all this stuff about careful investigators tracking clever killers. Clever my foot. These idiots would bash some old woman’s head in and walk around for three days carrying her pocketbook in broad daylight. They’d walk into a convenience store in Kansas, blow everybody away with a shotgun, take the twelve dollars in the cash register, and then hijack the store truck that was painted lime green with a big logo on it and use that to try to make it over the border to Nebraska. It was mind-numbing. That’s why I could never make myself watch that movie Dumb and Dumber, Stupidity isn’t funny; stupidity is lethal.”

“Well, it’s like that on the municipal level, too,” Brian said. “But it’s a good thing, if you know what I mean. If criminals were too intelligent, we probably wouldn’t catch them.”

“Maybe we don’t,” Gregor said. “Maybe there are crimes happening day and night that we know nothing about because the perpetrators are too intelligent to let us know they’ve happened and too intelligent to let us catch them.”

“Do you think that’s true?”

“No,” Gregor said. “I’m not saying there are no intelligent criminals. There must be. But by and large, it’s like Isaac Asimov said, ‘Violence is the last resort of the incompetent.’”

“I like that,” Brian said. “Guy who wrote science fiction. I remember him. Is it really going to be grand theft? Because it sounds nuts to me, picking up the nickels and dimes from kids’ allowances.”

Gregor gave Brian a look. “Do you have kids? Teenagers?”

“They’re grown,” Brian said. “Out of college and on their own. Why?”

“Well, Mark told me, the day I arrived here, that the school recommended that parents give students two hundred dollars a week in allowance, but his mother gave him two fifty because she was convinced that if she didn’t he was going to spend so much on books he wouldn’t have anything left to eat.”

“Two hundred dollars a week?”

“That’s what he said. We could check it out. My guess is that most of the kids in a place like this get more. I’d say many get more than Mark.”

“But two hundred dollars a week,” Brian said. “That’s almost as much as you’d make on the minimum wage, before taxes.”

“You knew they were rich. What did you expect?”

“I don’t know,” Brian said. “Fifty a week? Seventy-five? Sanity?”

“These are people who spend thirty thousand dollars a year to send their kids to high school,” Gregor said, “andthey probably feel guilty about the boarding part of it. I know Liz Toliver does, and it wasn’t even her idea for Mark to go away to school.”

“Jeez,” Brian said. “When I was a kid, okay, not really a kid, you know, in high school, there was the thing with Jackie Kennedy. All the stories in the papers. And I remember it said that at this boarding school she went to, the girls were only allowed to have five dollars a week. That was a rule. So they didn’t get too stuck up about being rich, and the really rich ones couldn’t make the poorer ones feel bad.”

“John F. Kennedy died almost forty years ago,” Gregor said. “His children grew up. He’d be a grandfather if he were alive today. A lot has happened in the meantime.”

“Inflation hasn’t gotten that bad,” Brian said.

“No, it hasn’t,” Gregor said, “but attitudes have changed. People throw money around more now than they used to. If you’ve got it, flaunt it.”

“I thought that was the sixties.”

“It’s a part of the sixties that hasn’t gone away,” Gregor said. “But seriously, think about it. There are, what, about three hundred and fifty students in this school? Some of them will be on scholarship—”

“They must be miserable if all their classmates have two hundred dollars a week.”

“Yes. Well. Some of them will be on scholarship, but most of them won’t be. Let’s say that two hundred students have allowances of two hundred dollars a week or more. If you skimmed off ten dollars a week from every account, that would be two thousand dollars a week, week after week, throughout the school year.”