our DARE essay winner.”
“No way!” Soave exclaimed, sticking out a hand. “Glad to know you, Ben.”
“Glad to know you, too, sir,” the boy responded in that gurgly voice of his. “My dad’s on the phone in the den-whoa, what a surprise. My mom’s down in the gym. Come on in.”
The Leanses’ living room was a cube-shaped lookout of stone and glass. The living room floor was polished concrete, as was the stairway that led down the hill to the rest of the house. There were no rugs. No adornments anywhere. Only bare walls and windows and clean surfaces. What furniture there was-a grouping of low leather banquettes, a table and chairs of polished blond wood-was spare to the point of sterile. It struck Des as something out of an architectural magazine, not a real place where real people lived.
“Ricky Welmers was bragging that he took a ride in your cruiser,” little Ben said to her as he ushered them in, their footsteps resounding on the polished floor like rim shots on a snare drum. “Is that for real?”
“It is.”
“How come you gave him a ride?”
“He needed one. I’ll be happy to give you one, too. Anytime you want.”
“She’ll even handcuff you,” Soave confided.
“Really!?”
Des heard a set of footsteps coming briskly up the stairs now and Bruce Leanse charged into the room with a broad, manly smile on his face. “Trooper Mitry,” he said brightly, showing her thirty or more of his perfect white teeth. “Really good to see you again. And, hey, you must be Lieutenant Tedone. Welcome to my home-both of you.” Bruce was dressed casually in a gray turtleneck sweater and jeans, and he was working the chummy thing hard. Too hard. Underneath, he seemed edgy and preoccupied. “How may I help you?”
“The lieutenant and I just came from your boat…” Des responded.
“Please don’t tell me somebody broke in. That can’t be. This is Dorset.”
“No, nothing like that, Mr. Leanse,” Soave spoke up. “We wanted to talk to you is all. We tried you there first, but nobody was around.”
“Because he’s been working there much too late these past few weeks,” Babette Leanse said pointedly as she came padding up the stairs to join them, perspiring freely from her workout. She had on a blue leotard and sneakers. A towel was around her neck, and her bushy hair was gathered up in a rubber band atop her head. “I insisted he stay home with his family this evening.”
Des nodded, wondering if Attila the Hen was hip to his thing with Takai. Sounded like it. “The lieutenant and I would like to have a talk with you both.”
“This sounds serious,” Babette said, managing once again, somehow, to look down her nose at Des-who still could not figure out how the woman managed to perform such a physical impossibility. “Do we need a lawyer present?”
“Entirely up to you,” Soave answered grimly.
Babette’s mouth tightened. “Ben, would you please excuse us?”
“No way!” Ben exclaimed. “This is just starting to get good!”
“Ben…”
Glumly, the little boy headed downstairs.
Babette waited until he was gone before she turned to Des with a defiant expression on her face. “Well, do you recommend we phone our lawyer or not?”
“That’s your decision,” Des replied, offering nothing.
The Leanses exchanged a hopelessly bewildered look before Bruce shrugged his shoulders and said, “Come on, let’s sit in the kitchen.”
Their gleaming gourmet kitchen was down one flight of stairs from the living room. It was vast. It was to die for. Commercial Jenn-Air range with built-in grill and two ovens. Sub-zero refrigerator and freezer. Copper pots and pans galore. A center island with stools where the four of them sat. In comparison, Des realized, her own beautiful new kitchen would look like something belonging inside a trailer park in Homestead, Florida. But that was okay by her. Because she would never want to trade places with Babette Leanse.
Not now. Not ever.
“You made a play and you lost, Mrs. Leanse,” Soave began, his voice chilly and authoritative. He played the blustering intimidator well. He loved to stick it to people. Especially rich people. “Your days as head of the Dorset school board are over. You are toast. That’s a given. But if you’re straight with us, we may be able to keep you out of jail.”
Babette’s eyes widened with alarm. “Jail?”
“Whoa, time-out here,” Bruce broke in, staggered. “What are you talking about?”
“Melanie Zide is dead,” Soave fired back. “Maybe you heard the news.”
Babette sat there limply, the color draining from her face. “Dead?” Evidently, she hadn’t.
“Someone shot her,” Des said quietly. “And then tried to make it look like she left town.”
“We now have a positive ID on Cutter,” Soave continued, staying on the offensive. “What we don’t have, Mrs. Leanse, is the real reason why Melanie was pursuing her sexual-harassment claim against the superintendent. What was in it for her? Who put her up to it?”
Babette said nothing in response. Just sat there in tight-lipped silence, her small hand wrapped around a plastic water bottle.
Her husband, however, flew into a panic. “Honey, if you know anything, you’d better tell them!” he said in an agitated voice. “I am trying to build something huge here. If there’s so much as a whiff hanging over me I am roadkill-no planning commission approval, no building permit, nada. They won’t let me build a damned phone booth in this town, get it?”
Des was certainly trying to. Mostly, she found herself wondering if Bruce’s little speech was scripted for their benefit. She found it doubtful that anything this elaborate had been undertaken without his knowledge.
Now he was getting up off his stool. “Do you want me to call Jack?” he asked his wife. “Maybe I’d better call him at home in New York. We’ll put this on speakerphone so he can advise you what to say or what not to say or-”
“No, don’t,” Babette said faintly, putting a hand on his arm. “I want to tell them everything I know. I need to. I’m positively ill about this whole thing.”
“Okay, if that’s what you want…” Bruce settled back down on his stool.
Babette sat there for a long moment in silence, a deeply pained expression on her face. “But first I want you officers to understand that this was all my doing. My husband knew nothing about it. You must believe that. Everyone must believe that. If he had known, he most certainly would have told me not to do it.”
“Fine, whatever,” Soave said impatiently. He wasn’t buying this either.
“A few months ago,” Babette began slowly, “I discovered Melanie was mixed up in a kickback scheme involving our district’s classroom supplies-she’d switched us to a new distributor in exchange for money under the table. I found out about it from our old supplier, who’d refused to ante up. It wasn’t a lot of money-a few hundred here, a thousand there-and it is a fairly common practice among office managers who do institutional ordering. But it’s highly unethical.”
“Grounds for dismissal, too, I’d imagine,” Des said.
“Absolutely,” Babette concurred. “When I confronted Melanie about it she was extremely contrite. And laid this whole sad story on me about her poor sick mother in the nursing home. And then she said, ‘Isn’t there any way we can work this out?’ I said, ‘Melanie, I can’t imagine what you mean.’ And she said, ‘Well, what are our common interests?’ Of course, I knew immediately what she meant. She was well aware that I’d prefer to have a superintendent who backs the new school. Then she said, ‘I have this friend who’s a secretary in the tax collector’s office up in Hartford and she got rid of her boss, a real nasty jerk, by claiming he’d sexually harassed her.’ I said to her, ‘Melanie, has Colin been making improper advances to you?’ Melanie said, ‘No, but he doesn’t even have to.’ All her friend did was buy some gay porn magazines and leave them lying around her boss’s office. Then she filed a complaint against him, claiming that she’d been made to feel sexually harassed by his conduct. The state, which was not anxious to have the story hit the news, immediately offered him a lucrative early retirement package if he’d go quietly. And he did, even though it was a complete fabrication, because he didn’t want to put his wife and family through the embarrassment of having it go public.” Babette paused to drink thirstily from her water bottle. “Melanie knew that Colin was partial to online chat groups,” she continued, her voice low and strained. “Particularly the gay
