The Headmaster's Wife(33)

Eventually, he’d made a few phone calls. He didn’t know anybody in the Windsor Police. He hadn’t even known there was a town called Windsor in Massachusetts until Mark called. He did know many people in the Boston Police, and Boston was close enough, the city of which Windsor was a suburb. Everything was Webs these days, cities most of all. He was old enough to remember when the suburbs were an embarrassment that nobody from the city ever wanted to admit to having come from.

The man he finally found in Boston was named Walter Cray. He’d trained for the Bureau once about twenty years ago—Gregor would have been a very new special agent and no longer at Quantico—and then decided it wasn’t for him. He’d come back to Boston and joined the police. He’d kept in touch with two of the members of his training class, and one of those was a good friend of Gregor’s from their days on kidnapping detail.

“Definitely a suicide,” Walter Cray had said, when he’d had a chance to look into the situation and call back. “I’ve had an earful of the forsenics all morning. No chance of anything but suicide—”

“There’s always a chance, though, isn’t there?” Gregor interrupted.

“If you want to think Agatha Christie, yes. If you want to think real life, no. Kid hung himself from one of those sprinkler pipes. In his dorm room at, let’s see, Hayes House. He stood on a drafting stool. You know what those are? Like bar stools, and almost as tall, but a little more sturdy.”

“Yes, I think I do know what those are. The stool was in the room when they found him?”

“Kicked away to the side and in the room,” Walter said. “It was the roommate who found him. My guy in Windsor says the roommate is a mess, drugged to the gills in all likelihood, but of course they can’t go barging in there and accusing him of it. Don’t ever think that money doesn’t matter, even in the drug war. It matters in more ways than you’d think.”

“I know,” Gregor said. “What about the note?”

There was a pause on the other end of the line. “Okay,” Walter said, “that was the peculiar thing. There wasn’t any note.”

“It’s not all that peculiar for there not to be a note, surely,” Gregor said. “Lots of suicides don’t leave notes.”

“True enough,” Walter said, “but then you’ve got to look at the room. It was tossed, no matter what those people say about how messy the boys were.”

“Tossed?”

“Ripped to shreds. And the window was left open.”

“In below-zero temperatures?” Gregor interrupted.

“Right,” Walter said, “and the room was freezing.”

Gregor threw it away. As if someone was trying to disguise a time of death, which doesn’t make sense with a suicide.

“I know,” Walter said, “it’s one of the things the guys in Windsor aren’t happy about. They’re also not happy about the location. You know anything about Windsor Academy?”

“No.” Gregor’s knowledge of upscale private schools was limited to the things he’d heard in the Bureau and from Bennis, and he couldn’t keep them straight in his head for any amount of time longer than necessary to make a polite noise in a conversation that bored him.

“Windsor used to be a girls’ school,” Walter said. “Then, around 1975, it went coed; and when it did it rewrote its mission somewhat. Not that it hadn’t always been sort of liberal, you understand.”

“What do you mean by ‘liberal’? Do you mean the rules were relaxed?”

“Well, that too. No, I mean liberal politically. And not just liberal. You’ve heard all those stories about private schools where the alumni refused to speak to Franklin Roosevelt because he was a traitor to his class. There are schools that make a habit of being a traitor to their class. Windsor was always one of them: in favor of the New Deal; in favor of the welfare state.”

“That’s a positive thing, surely,” Gregor said. “What would you want instead?”

“Not saying I’d want anything,” Walter said. “I’m just trying to put you in the picture. After 1975, Windsor went not just liberal but right out on the limb of limousine radical. Not as radical as some place like Putney, you know, where the kids run a farm and do manual labor because it’s good for them—”

“At thirty thousand dollars a year?”

“Yeah, I know. That’s what I thought. Anyway, not that radical, but radical anyway. They’ve got a Socialist Club at Windsor. They’ve even got a Liberal Club, They don’t have a conservative club, and you’re not going to find anybody admitting to voting Republican. They’re big on ‘diversity’ in the most obvious modern sense of the word. They go out of their way to attract African-American and Hispanic students—”