He roused Warden, Carella, and Farnham. “Let’s get these boys onto their dorms and out of the cold,” he said. They looked at him stupidly.
“Right now,” he said. “It’s not safe for them to be out here.”
The men started to direct pedestrian traffic—all but Daniel Farnham, who stood silently and stared at the gym.
SCENE 34
Inside the gym Katrina Olson fought off hysteria.
She had silky blond hair, the color of imported mustard. Her eyes were blue and just a fraction too close together, and her nose rose at a slope distinctively beautiful. She wore a gray Montpelier School sweatshirt over her white blouse and the top half of her navy blue skirt. Her legs were bare down to her wet lace-up moccasins.
She sat on the beige corduroy sofa in Patrick McPhee’s apartment. Cynthia Warden was next to her. McPhee himself sat in a wing chair to the left of the sofa. Felix Grayson sat in an easy chair to the right.
It was 10:15. Carol Scott, the police investigator, sat directly in front of Katrina Olson in a straight-backed chair borrowed from McPhee’s dining room.
“We had come here to the gym to talk,” Katrina Olson said through tears. She held the handkerchief she had borrowed from Cynthia and wept into it like an actress.
“Take your time,” said Carol Scott. “How did you get into the building?”
“Around the back,” she said. “There was a door propped open with a little pebble. Robert said he’d arranged it all earlier in the day.”
“Why?”
Cynthia Warden thought the investigator in charge was too striking to be on the police force. This Carol Scott was clearly under thirty years old and under six feet tall, though barely in both cases. She wore her dark hair in a pageboy with a gold pin on one side, and she had on one thin bracelet, a gray woolen suit, black nylons, and low-heeled shoes. She had removed her plain blue cloth overcoat and her fake-fur Russian hat. Cynthia had seen her in town a few times at the dry cleaner’s, but she had not known the woman was a cop.
“Robert told me he knew of a quiet place where we could be alone out of the rain,” said Katrina Olson. “Mixers are so noisy, you know?”
No one answered. Cynthia knew that what they were about to hear would be close to the truth but not the truth, that the truth would not emerge in this first telling of the story, and that if it emerged at all, they would hear it because they had first persuaded Katrina Olson to stop concealing whatever it was that she and Robert Staines were doing in the gym. Smoking pot, making love—whatever it was didn’t matter as much as finding out how Robert Staines ended up with his neck twisted so that he appeared to be looking backwards.
Katrina Olson coughed out more sobs, as though she were coming to the end of her supply. She did not want to tell them the next part of her narrative. She spread Cynthia’s handkerchief on her lap.
“Pretty monogram,” she said. “What does the middle C stand for?”
Cynthia said her maiden name was Cunningham. The girl was stalling.
“What happened next?” asked Carol Scott.
“He took me upstairs to the wrestling room,” she said. “It was dark, but you could still see once your eyes adjusted because of the light coming in through the windows. It was strange to be the only people in the whole building. At least I thought we were.” She was on the verge of breaking down again.
“What time was this?” asked Felix Grayson. He was still in his raincoat and floppy rain hat, even though it was warm in Patrick McPhee’s apartment.
“About 9:00, 9:15,” she said. “We went to the wrestling room for about half an hour. All we did was talk.”
All knew she was editing her story.
“I had to go to the bathroom,” she said. “I wanted Robert to go with me, you know, because it was so scary and dark, but he was tired and wanted to rest on the mats on the floor.”
It was sex then, thought Cynthia. Though it might have been drugs, too. She couldn’t smell any alcohol or smoke on Katrina Olson, but of course they could have been doing pills.
“He told me where the ladies’ room was in the lobby. I found it okay, and then when I came back up the stairs, I could see him sprawled out on the floor. I could tell there was something wrong just from the way he was lying, but then I turned on the light and saw the way his neck . . . I must have screamed a thousand times.”
Carol Scott took notes. She also had a small tape recorder, the size of a transistor radio, on the coffee table to her right.
“I heard her from in here,” said McPhee. “I was asleep in that easy chair and then I heard a girl screaming outside my door. I thought it was a nightmare.”
They had covered this part already. McPhee had rushed outside through one of his interior doors to the gym, had found Katrina Olson and Robert Staines, had determined that Staines was dead, and had brought the girl down to his apartment. He had called Grayson first, and then he had called the police. Grayson had just talked to the headmaster in Philadelphia.
Carol Scott turned to Cynthia. “You say you were here earlier,” she said.
“Yes. Around 8:45.”
“You patrolled the entire building?” said Carol Scott.
“I didn’t rattle every doorknob,” said Cynthia, “but I checked the place thoroughly.”
“Are you the one who unlocked the wrestling and the weight rooms?” asked Carol Scott.
Cynthia said the wrestling room was already unlocked. The weight room had been padlocked.
“You didn’t unlock the weight room next door to the wrestling room?” Carol Scott said again.
“No,” said Cynthia. “I didn’t have a key.”
Carol Scott said somebody did, because the weight room was unlocked when the police
