The Angel & the Brown-eyed Boy by Sandy Nathan

hands on your head.” She flashed her badge and gun at the same time. The kid hit the floor.
    “Where did the crime occur?” She spoke to the boy, but someone came out of an office marked Director.
    “They’re down by the practice room doors, in the hallway. I thought I should wait until you got here before opening the studio where the... corpse is. I went into the room and checked. The girl is dead.”
    “Show me.” Val took off, walking twice as fast as the director. She barked into her mike, “Secure the building. Have the police establish a five-block perimeter around the school.”
    The director led them down to the practice studio. A bunch of tear-streaked girls in ballet outfits huddled in the corridor. A smallish, middle-aged woman with black hair and the straightest posture Val had ever seen stood to the side, surrounded by the school’s paunchy security guards.
    Val walked up and took control. “OK, what happened here?” The ballerinas sobbed, “She killed her.” They pointed to Ms. Backbone. “Madame Mercier killed her.”
    The teacher stood with her hands loosely at her sides. She seemed utterly composed. Val looked at the suspect carefully. The cops and officers crowded behind her.
    “Shouldn’t we go in?” said the sergeant.
    “You go in when I say you go in,” Val snapped. “I want to find out what happened.”
    She addressed the teacher. “Who did you kill?”
    “The new girl, the Russian.” The dark-haired woman spoke with absolute calmness, enunciating each word carefully. “I was correcting her lack of discipline. She died.”
    “You’re sure that she’s dead?”
    “She doesn’t have a pulse or a heartbeat. She turned white. She’s dead.”
    “What did she do that you beat her to death?”
    “She came into my class, a stranger here by my kindness. She took over the class with flagrant disobedience. All of them joined her mutiny.” She waved at the girls, who shuddered and moaned.
    “Shut up!” Val barked at them. “Did you disobey your teacher?”
    Nods from the circle of girls.
    “And what did your teacher do?”
    “She beat the new girl with a... riding crop.”
    “She does it to all of us... she hits us all the time.”
    “She said we had to obey her and we couldn’t tell anyone what she did.”
    Where Val was from, everyone got fucked over. Being beaten was nothing.
    But, in the outside world, it was a crime.
    “OK. The police will deal with that.” She spun to the teacher, who looked at her without flinching. “I’m a federal agent. We are here for a different complaint. Is there any other way out of that room besides those doors? A back exit?”
    “No. There is a door that leads to a corridor with offices and storage rooms. The corridor is a dead end. There’s no other way out of the building.”
    The director of the school finally found her voice. “That’s right. There’s no way out except those doors, and the windows in the studio.”
    “The windows?”
    “The windows in the practice room look over the driveway, which goes up to the street,” the ballet teacher replied. “Your men are already covering that, I am sure. The windows are too high and they are locked.” Her demeanor gave Val the respect due her, but she did not fawn. “None of the offices or storage rooms along the hallway has windows.”
    Val nodded. Something about this woman intrigued her. She decided to play one of her famous hunches and told one of the officers, “Take the girls upstairs and have them give statements to the police. I’m going to debrief—” She indicated the teacher with a jerk of her head.
    “Madame Madeleine Mercier.”
    “Bring us a table and chairs,” Val ordered, “and give us some privacy. Will, I want a recorder. And then I want you to go. I’ll find out what’s going on.” Will nodded and went upstairs.
    Once they were set up, Val asked the other woman, “Where are you from? You’re not French.”
    Madame Mercier smiled. “No. The people