The Mississippi had always intrigued Gabriel, ever since he was a kid. Just blocks from the near-North Side neighborhood where he grew up, it had marked the end of his known world, luring him and his pals, who scoured its banks for treasure, played at river pirates, and watched the barges and riverboats ply its swirling brown waters. As teenagers they expanded their horizons, driving across it via the Eads Bridge to East St. Louis for liquor, jazz, and women. Now he used the new bridge to transcend the icechunked channel, heading once again to East St. Louis, Illinois, a city that for him had long ago lost its dark allure.
The streets there hadn’t seen a snowplow, so Gabriel followed scant tracks left by other vehicles. Not much got done here, not much good. It had the highest crime rate in America. One of every thousand citizens was murdered each year. Yet another city official had recently been arrested for soliciting kickbacks. A newspaper investigation found that one out of four cops had a rap sheet.
He found Dadisi’s place—a newer two-story frame town-home on a cul-de-sac amid an urban prairie where redbrick factories and warehouses once stood. Bars covered the windows and front door; the sidewalk and driveway had been shoveled. Snowflakes swirled about as Gabriel made his way from his sedan.
A girl of six or seven cracked the door, stared, and ran off. Dadisi appeared—receding gray Afro now, reading glasses, cable sweater. Gabriel held up his badge and I.D.
Inside, two girls squabbled over schoolwork on a dining-room table to the right. Dadisi took Gabriel’s overcoat and brought two coffee cups on saucers to the living room, which smelled of resin from a lit Christmas tree. As the men sat before a gas-log fire, Dadisi turned to the girls and called:
“Take your books up to your room. We’ve got talking to do.”
The girls left without complaint.
“Grandkids?”
Dadisi rolled his eyes. “Afraid not. Wife number two demanded parity with wife number one.”
Gabriel studied framed posters from Kenya and Botswana on the walls, hand-carved giraffes and elephants on the coffee table. “Very African of you.”
Dadisi smiled. “Very East Side.” Then serious: “What’s with Stone? You said you had questions.”
“This is a confidential inquiry for now. Nothing official.”
“I understand.”
“You know who his wife is. Well, she hasn’t seen him for a few days and the mayor asked me to look into it.”
Dadisi studied Gabriel, chewing his lip. “I don’t know him that well socially, just professionally. We had lunch on occasion but just talked shop.”
“Good enough. What do you know?”
He shrugged. “I know he worked his ass off and still lost his job. Hell, man, he was teaching four sections of writing classes. And for adjunct pay.”
“Which is?”
“Not even three grand per section.”
Gabriel looked to the fireplace and African posters. “You too?”
“No, I’m a full-time instructor. American lit. But what Stone taught—composition mainly—is a grind. Twenty students per section, three or four research papers per student, three or four drafts of each that you have to read. Stone couldn’t find time to work on his dissertation. That’s why he started teaching remedial grammar—just so he wouldn’t have so damn many papers to grade.”
“Remedial grammar?”
“You go to school?”
“Back in the day. Saint Louis U.”
Dadisi shook a finger at Gabriel. “That’s why your name’s familiar: You played for the Billikens.”
“Thirty years and thirty pounds ago.”
“I hear you…. Well, we ain’t a private Catholic school. And times have changed. We get inner city high school grads and junior college transfers who we have to stick in remedial courses. Stone thought teaching grammar would be easy—shorter papers to grade. You’re dealing with writing a good sentence and maybe a logical paragraph instead of essays.”
“You saying it wasn’t easy for him?”
“It really messed with him. He had no idea—real suburban white bread. He went to Mizzou and before that CBC—a prep school boy. Anyway, he came in the second week of classes in shock. He told me he gave them a diagnostic assignment. ‘These kids have gone through twelve years of public school,’ he said, ‘and still can’t write a grammatically correct sentence—something you and I could do in first grade.’
“I told him what was happening in the schools—St. Louis, East St. Louis, Kansas City, where kids keep falling further and further behind. Public school issues weren’t on his radar, and he couldn’t believe it. So he went digging.
“Stone became obsessed with it. The more he uncovered the more he got sucked in. Quit working on his dissertation to research the schools. Not a good career move, I told him. But he wouldn’t listen. And there was something more to it, something else eating at him that he kept close to the vest. Never said anything specific, but something was really driving him.”
Gabriel sipped at his coffee, thinking.
“Were you at the faculty party last Friday?”
“I wouldn’t call coffee and Christmas cookies a party.”
“I heard Stone and Betancourt had an altercation.”
“Both are too soft-spoken for an ‘altercation.’ But they had words.”
“What about?’
“It was odd. Never heard Jonathan go off like that on anyone. But he’d had a few drinks at lunch. And he was stressed out. Called Betancourt a ‘corrupt son of a bitch.’”
“That sounds pretty heated to me. Betancourt says Stone underperformed—that’s why he let him go.”
Dadisi shifted in his chair. “I know nothing about that.”
Gabriel sipped his coffee again and waited. He heard the girls giggling upstairs and sipped some more. Dadisi studied him, looking over his reading glasses. He licked his lips as if about to speak but apparently decided against it.
“What?”
“Like I said, I know nothing. But if you want to get an idea what sort of teacher Stone was, you might check his student evaluations. Talk to Martha Walczyk.”
Gabriel drove back across the Mississippi. The St. Louis skyline, once dominated by early redbrick “skyscrapers” of twelve stories, now glistened with towering steel and glass buildings against the gray sky. The Gateway Arch shimmered on the riverfront. As traffic slowed, Gabriel telephoned Walczyk.
“My man Dadisi alerted me to the existence of ‘student evaluations.’ Would there be some for Professor Stone?”
“There should be a set for each class. On the last day, usually, the instructor distributes the forms and leaves the room so students can give an honest anonymous appraisal. A student then collects them and brings them to my office. The instructor gets copies and the originals go in his personnel file.”
“I was wondering, Martha, if I might have a look at the most recent batch for Jonathan Stone.”
Silence. Ahead on the bridge a car had spun out in the snow and sat sideways, blocking two lanes. Gabriel slowed. Finally Walczyk said:
“I’d like to help you, lieutenant, but personnel files are confidential. I could not give you access on my own authority. However, if some higher authority issued instructions.…”
She paused. Gabriel steered past the stalled car.
“Mrs. Walczyk, as a law enforcement officer serving the citizens of St. Louis, I order you to allow me access to those files as they are vital to my investigation. I take full responsibility.”
“Since you put it that way, I’ll have copies in this afternoon’s mail. You should get them by Thursday.”
“Thursday?”
“No mail delivery Wednesday.”
“Why not?”
“Christmas.”
“Right, right. Let’s do this instead: I’ll send a cab for them tomorrow morning.”
Gabriel hung up and sped away. Christmas. That would throw a wrench into things.