the garden plot where the students learned to plant and grow radishes. Mr. Glenn, who had majored in botanic biology at UCLA, gave his lectures in a glass-encased room that smelled of earth. There were no desks in the classroom, because the students were graded on a verbal quiz, given one-on-one, and on the health of their seedlings. The only furniture in the room, other than Mr. Glenn’s high metal desk, was four long benches where the students met for roll call before rushing out to the soil.
Miss Eng was sitting, head bowed and alone, on one of those benches. She was crying and holding one finger at the center of her forehead, her eyes still seeing that well-dressed corpse.
Jorge sat down and put his arm around her shoulders. He whispered something, and she rose. She looked at me and smiled, but there was no mirth in her heart.
“I never saw a dead man before,” she said.
“I better take her home, Mr. Rawlins. I don’t think she should drive.” Jorge was looking a little green himself.
“All right. We’re not gonna get much work done around here today anyway. You take care of yourself, Simona, you hear?”
She smiled again and let Jorge lead her away. I lingered for a moment after they were gone. The empty room felt safe. I didn’t want to go back out to the police and that corpse; I was anxious but I had no reason to be. Still, I hung back, checking to see that the floor had been properly swept and that the trash cans were empty.
Then I took a deep breath and went out to Mr. Glenn and the cops.
I went with them around the compound while Sanchez asked questions.
“You get many break-ins?”
“Not too many. Lately somebody got into the music room and took about a thousand dollars’ worth of horns.”
“I mean in the gardening compound,” he said.
“Oh, yeah.” I was offhanded. “The boys like to prove that they could climb a twelve-foot wire gate now and then. Once they get in they like to look around a little.”
“Why don’t you put barbed wire up top?”
“Why should I? They hardly ever break anything and the only thing they could steal is some vegetables.” I was bothered by the murder but all I wanted was for the sergeant to take the body away so that I could get back to work.
“How do you explain this?” he asked.
We’d come upon a slender toolshed that was used by the children to house the spades, hoes, and pitchforks when they were hand-weeding or harvesting.
There was a yard-deep hole dug near the shed. Next to the excavation was a small traveling chest that was caked with dirt. There was a canvas sack in the chest that seemed to be full but I couldn’t guess at what it held.
“I don’t know,” I said, answering the sergeant’s question.
“Looks like a hole,” one of the cops surmised.
“You don’t know anything about this?” Sanchez asked both me and Glenn.
A plainclothes cop was squatting by a shovel that lay near the mound of mud next to the hole. There was a deep dent in the scoop.
“I sure don’t know,” Mr. Glenn said.
I suppressed the “Me neither” that was in my mouth.
“Don’t you think you should?” Sanchez asked me just as if I had uttered my denial.
I didn’t have an answer for him.
“Do you have keys to the garden gate?” he asked us both.
“Of course I do,” said Mr. Glenn. In his brown suit and vest he resembled a limp football, with a hard dome of a forehead under a thatch of unruly brown hair.
“What do you mean?” I asked Sanchez.
“Do you have a key to the garden gate?” He spoke slowly, as if to a small child or an idiot.
“Naw, man,” I said. “I mean, why would you think that the killer had a key?”
I sounded smart—too smart. I showed that I knew what the cop was thinking. It was a mistake that I’d never made in the street.
Sanchez gave me a hard look and then said, “The gate was locked when your janitors got here, and there’s not a scuff on those fancy shoes. Somebody had a key.”
“Lots of people do,” I said. “The principal, my janitors, I do, Mr. Glenn does. There’s a set of master keys hanging up in my hopper room down in the maintenance office. Even the district gardeners have a set for when they drop by.”
Sanchez had his eyes on me.
“Anybody here last night?” he asked. “About four or five in the morning?”
“Not s’posed t’be. Nobody works on Sunday, and nobody works that late anyway.” Idabell Turner flitted across my mind but I turned my thoughts back to Sanchez’s questions.
“Where were you when the body was found, Mr. Rawlins?”
