The Lesson of Her Death

  And that was just for the month of May.

  He didn't have the heart to tally the numbers up for the year and he didn't dare calculate the brood's budget for makeup, burgers, ninja outfits, skateboards, air pump Nikes, gloves, basketballs, piano lessons, potato chips, Apple software, Spike Lee and Bart Simpson T-shirts, Run DMC tapes Ice-T tapes Janet Jackson Paula Abdul The Winnans tapes gummy bears white cheddar popcorn Diet Pepsi and whatever else got sucked into the black hole of childhood capitalism.

  Darla came to the door of his den and told him the plumber had just finished.

  "Oh, good," Kresge said. "How much?" He opened the checkbook and tore off a check. He left it blank and handed it to her.

  "It's a hundred twenty-four, doll."

  "How much?"

  "You can't take a bath in cold water." She was gone.

  He marked down: Check 2025. Amount $124. For SOB, MF'ing Plumber. Why, he wondered, was it that the more you get the more you spend? When he and Darla had first been married they'd lived in a trailer park south of the Business Loop in Columbia, Missouri. He'd been an assistant security director for the university, making nineteen thousand dollars a year. They'd had a savings account. A real savings account that paid you interest--not very much, true, but something. You could look at the long line of entries and feel that you were getting somewhere in life. Now, zip. Now, debt.

  This was too much. Thinking about the bills, about hungry children, about a wife, about his lack of employment, his palms began to sweat and his stomach was doing 180s. He recalled the time he talked a failing student down from the Auden Chancellory Building. Sixty feet above a slate walk. Kresge, calm as could be. No rope. Standing on a ledge fourteen inches wide. Like he was out looking for a couple buddies to shoot pool with. Talking the boy in by inches. Kresge had felt none of the terror that assaulted him now as he lined up the fat white envelopes of bills and pulled toward him his blue-backed plastic checkbook, soon to be emasculated.

  The telephone rang. He answered it. He listened then looked at his watch. Wynton Kresge said, "Well, I don't know." He listened some more. "Well, I guess." He hung up.

  Wynton, come on, get the lead out of your cheeks. You look like a walking tombstone."

  Corde spun the squad car around the corner and pressed the accelerator down. The four-barrel engine, factory-goosed so it could catch 'Vettes and Irocs, pushed both men back in the vinyl seat. Come on Wynton cheer up cheer up cheer up.

  "What you got there?" Kresge looked at the seat under Corde's butt. "What you're sitting on?"

  A backrest of round wooden balls strung together. It looked like a doormat. "Good for the back," Corde said. "It's like it massages you."

  Kresge looked away as if he'd already forgotten he'd asked the question.

  "You like to fish?" Corde asked him.

  "I don't want to today."

  "You don't what?"

  After a moment Kresge resumed the conversation. "Want to go fishing."

  "We're not going fishing," Corde said. "But do you like to?"

  "I like to hunt."

  "I like to fish," Corde said. "Hunting's good too."

  They drove past the pond where Jennie Gebben and Emily Rossiter had died. Corde didn't slow down and neither of them said a word as they sped on toward the Fredericksberg Highway.

  After ten minutes Kresge touched the barrel of the riot gun lock-clamped muzzle-up between them. "What's this loaded with?"

  "Double-ought."

  "I thought maybe it was rock salt or plastic bullets or something."

  "Nope. Lead pellets."

  "You don't have to use steel? I thought with the wetlands and everything you had to use steel."

  Corde said, "It's not like we shoot that much buckshot at people 'round here."

  "Yeah, I guess not. You ever used it?"

  "Drew a target a couple times. Never pulled the trigger, I'm mighty pleased to say. You got a pretty wife."

  "Yep."

  "How many kids you got, all told?"

  "Seven. Where we going?"

  "Fredericksberg."

  "Oh. How come?"

  "Because," Corde said.

  "Oh."

  Twenty minutes later they pulled into a large parking lot and walked into the County Building. They passed the County Sheriff's Department. Corde noticed an empty office being painted. It was T.T.'s old one. There was no name on the plate next to the door. He could picture a nameplate that said S. A. Ribbon. Corde and Kresge continued on, to the office at the end of the hall. Painted in gold on rippled glass a sign read, County Clerk.

  Kresge stopped to study a Wanted poster in the hall. He said to Corde, "You got business, Detective, I can wait out here."

  "Naw, naw, come on in."

  Corde walked through a swinging gate and into a dark, woody old office presided over by a dusty oil painting of a judge who looked like he'd spent the entire portrait session thinking up cruel and unusual punishments.

  From a desk under the window, a grizzled bald man, wearing a wrinkled white shirt, bow tie and suspenders, waved them over.

  "Rest your bones, gentlemen." The county clerk dug through the stacks of papers on his desk. "What've we got here, what've we got here.... Okay. Here we go." He found a couple sheets of paper, dense with tiny type. He set them in front of him. "You're a crazy son of a bitch, Corde, to pass up that chance."

  Corde said, "I probably am."

  "They were good and pissed, I'll tell you. Nobody wanted it this way."

  "Uh-huh."

  "In case you hadn't guessed."

  "I had."

  "What's he mean?" Kresge asked Corde.

  The clerk added loudly, as if he hoped to be overheard, "And nobody here is real happy we inherited you know who."

  Corde supposed he meant Ribbon. "You can't pin that on me."

  The county clerk grew solemn then spread the papers out in front of him. He flipped through a three-ring binder. He stopped at one page and began speaking rapid-fire toward the book. "Okay raise your right hand by the power vested in me ..."

  Corde was looking at the sour portrait above their heads. Kresge followed his eyes. The clerk stopped reading and looked at Kresge. "You gonna raise your hand or what?"

  "Me?" Kresge said.

  "You're the one being deputized."

  "Me?" The man's baritone rose nearly to a tenor.

  "Raise your hand, Wynton," Corde said. Kresge did.

  "By the power vested in me by the County of Harrison, you, Wynton Washington Kresge, are hereby appointed as special deputy pursuant to Revised State Code Title 12 Section 131.13. Repeat after me. 'I, Wynton Washington Kresge ...'"

  Kresge cleared his throat, looking with astonishment at Corde. "What is this?"

  Corde said, "Do what the man's telling you."

  "I, Wynton Washington Kresge, do swear to uphold the laws of this state and to tirelessly and faithfully serve and protect the citizens of the County of Harrison and the municipalities located therein...."

  "If you don't want to say 'so help me God,'" the clerk concluded, "you can say, 'upon my solemn oath.'"

  Kresge said, "So help me God."

  Corde shook his hand. The clerk gave him three pieces of paper to sign.

  "You didn't tell me." Kresge whispered this to Corde.

  "I need you, Wynton. I figured if I just drove you here you'd be less inclined to say no and go looking for a cushy office job someplace else."

  "Look, Detective, I'm grateful. I really am. But there's no way I can afford to do this."

  Corde smiled cryptically. "You can't afford not to. Talk to that pretty wife of yours. You'll find some way to work it out."

  The clerk was impatient. "You two talk about this later, will you?" He finished the paperwork and folded a couple sheets like a subpoena. He handed one to Kresge. "Go over to County Central Booking and get fingerprinted on the same form and have a picture ID taken in Personnel. The same building. Bill'll tell you where it is. Have both these c
opies notarized. Lucy can do it if she's not at lunch, and if she is go to Farmer's Bank. Ask for Sally Anne. Bring me back one copy."

  "But I haven't even thought about it."

  "You're a special deputy, which sounds good but don't let it go to your head, it's the lowest rank we've got. You have a pistol permit?"

  "Yes, I do. I did the small-arms course at Higgins. My score--"

  "You have to buy your own weapon but you get reimbursed up to two hundred. Automatics are okay but you can only use accepted loads, the ones on here." He handed Kresge a badly photocopied sheet of paper. "Don't get caught with anything heavier. And if you file the trigger it can't be easier than a nine-pound pull."

  Kresge nodded and Corde noticed that he'd stopped arguing.

  The clerk continued, "Your pay is twenty-nine-five annual, prorated for however long you're with us. You'll be assigned to Bill for whatever he needs you for. Ha, ha, big guess. You folks finish up the Gebben case and get this sicko under, we can find a permanent place for you here at the county if you get certified by the state police academy.

  "Now, you get benefits as long as you work more than twenty-five hours a week but you gotta take a physical. And for the family you gotta pay something. You got a wife and kids?"

  "Seven."

  Corde added, "That's the kids. He's only got one wife."

  "Oh, one more thing ..." He tossed Kresge a plastic-wrapped green vinyl notebook about six by nine inches, three hundred or so pages thick. "That's the state penal code and the Deputy's Procedural Guide. Read 'em. Learn 'em."

  "Yessir." Kresge was lit up with modest pride. "Do I salute?"

  "It's all in there." The clerk tapped the Guide.

  Jennie--

  You wanted someone to teach you about love, and all you found was someone to teach you how to die.

  Why did you go that night? You said it was over.

  Do I believe you or not?

  Not knowing is almost as hard as life without you.

  Why, kiddo, why?

  Till we meet soon, Em

  "It was where?"

  "In Emily's purse the night she drowned."

  Wynton Kresge said, "They thought the Halpern boy wrote that? A fifteen-year-old kid?"

  Corde said, "Uhn."

  Sitting in the New Lebanon Sheriff's Department, wearing a uniform as spotless and pressed as Corde's, Kresge dropped Emily's plastic-encased note on Corde's desk while Corde read the report aloud. "'Graphoanalysis of Subject Document. My professional opinion is that there is no more than a 50 percent probability that the handwriting is that of Subject Emily Rossiter. Significant similarities are five-degree backslant and short ascenders and descenders and looped capital letters. Deviation from samples submitted are significant but may be attributable to inebriation, drug use, emotional disturbance or unsteadiness of writing surface.'"

  "Why didn't Philip say anything about it?"

  "Maybe he didn't see it. Maybe he saw it and it didn't mean anything to him." Corde looked at the letter for a long moment then said, "Let's assume it's really Emily's, okay?"

  "Okay."

  "Does it tell us anything?"

  "Well, it says two things. First, it's a suicide note. So it means--"

  "Suggests," Corde corrected.

  "Suggests that Emily killed herself. She wasn't murdered."

  "Okay. What's the second thing?"

  "That the Halpern boy didn't kill Jennie either. I mean, it implies that he didn't."

  "Why?"

  "Because the 'someone' Emily mentions is probably, well, maybe, the killer. Someone Jennie had an affair with, I'd guess. She sure didn't have an affair with Philip Halpern."

  "Because of where she says she thought it was over?"

  "Yeah. Like the affair was over."

  Corde said, "And look at 'go that night.' Tuesday night, she might be talking about." He opened his attache case. The now-tattered picture of Jennie Gebben fresh off the volleyball court stared down at stacks of plump, dog-eared three-by-five cards. He flipped through one pile and extracted a card.

  "That your computer, Bill?"

  "Computer, ha. Here we go. Between about five and six on the night Jennie was killed she and Emily had a serious discussion of some kind. Maybe an argument. And Emily was moody that night. She didn't join her friends for supper."

  "So maybe Jennie was going to see her lover, or former lover, and Emily was ticked off."

  "Could be."

  "Wait," Corde said. He dug through another card. "The girl who told me that Jennie was bisexual also said that she'd had a fight with somebody the Sunday night she was killed. She said, 'I love her, I don't love you.' What if she agreed to meet that man--"

  "Or woman," Kresge added.

  Corde raised an eyebrow, acknowledging the point. "Possibly. But Trout, the carpet guy, said he saw a man.... What if she agreed to meet him one last time, and he killed her?"

  "That's sounding pretty good."

  "But what about the DNA match? It was Philip's semen found at the scene."

  "Damn, that's right." Kresge frowned.

  "Don't agree with me too fast."

  Kresge considered for a minute and said, "Maybe the lover killed her. Then the boy came along and raped her--"

  "Actually, if she was dead first, it wasn't rape. It was violation of human remains. Misdemeanor."

  "Oh." Kresge looked troubled. "I've got a hell of a lot to learn."

  Corde mused, "Well, why didn't Emily come to us and tell us what she knew? Wouldn't she want the killer arrested?"

  "Maybe she didn't know his name. If the girls were lovers then somebody Jennie'd had an affair with'd be a sore point between them. Emily maybe didn't want to hear about him."

  "Good point, Wynton. But she could still come in and tell us that somebody Jennie had an affair with had killed her."

  Kresge had to agree with that.

  Then Corde said, "Of course look what happened. Emily killed herself. She was pretty crazy with grief, I suppose. She wouldn't be thinking about police. All she knew was her lover was dead."

  Kresge nodded. "That's good. Yeah, I'll buy that."

  "We got our work cut out for us." He selected one stack of cards and tossed it to Kresge. "What we know about Jennie, there're a lot of people who might've had affairs with her."

  "Well, there can't be that many who're professors."

  "Professors?"

  Kresge tapped the plastic. "Well, she's talking about a professor, isn't she?"

  Corde stared for the answer in the note. He looked up and shook his head. "Why do you say that?"

  "Well," Kresge said, "it says 'teach.' I just assumed she was talking about one of her professors."

  "Well, Emily could've meant that like in a general sense."

  "Could be," Kresge conceded. "But maybe we could save ourselves a lot of time by checking out the professors first."

  Corde picked up the cards and replaced them in his briefcase. He said, "This time we get to use the siren, Wynton. And the lights."

  You think they care? Oh, you'll learn soon.

  You think they want you,

  but the way they want you is cold as mother moon....

  Jamie Corde listened to the lyrics chugging out of his Walkman headset. He was lying on his back, staring at the setting sun. He wanted to be able to tell the time by looking at where the sun was. But he didn't know how. He wanted to be able to tell directions by the way certain trees grew but he couldn't remember what kind of trees. He wanted to travel into a different dimension. Jamie zipped his jacket up tighter against the cool breeze and slipped down farther in the bowl of short grass to escape from the wind. It was probably close to supper-time but he was not hungry.

  He turned the volume up.

  So just do yourself, do yourself,

  do yourself a favor and do yourself ...

  Jamie was curious where the tape had come from. He'd returned home this afternoon after ditching wrestling practice and found it sitti
ng on his windowsill. Geiger's latest cassette--the tiny cover picture showing five skinny German musicians in leather with long hair streaming behind them, the lead guitarist wearing a noose around his tendony neck.

  His parents would never have bought it for him. This particular album was totally fresh; it'd been banned in Florida, Atlanta and Dallas, and most of the record stores in Harrison County refused to carry it. Maybe the last time Philip was over he'd left it. One of the group's songs, from a different, less-controversial album, had been used in The Lost Dimension and the two boys had listened to the soundtrack album frequently.

  You think they care?

  He held the tape player in both hands, lifted it to his face, pressed it against his cheek.

  Do yourself, do yourself, do yourself now....

  He thought about school, about Science Club, which was meeting right at this moment. They'd maybe look around and ask where's Jamie? And nobody'd know and then somebody might say something about Philip but there wouldn't be much talk about him because this was the end-of-year party and you were supposed to be having fun, drinking Coke and jamming pretzels into your mouth and talking about the summer not about members of the club who were fat and weird and who'd been shot dead by the police.

  And also you weren't supposed to talk about boys who cut school the evening of the party to sit next to a grave--friends who when they weren't around you'd joke about being fags so fuck you fuck you fuck you....

  Just do yourself, do yourself, take a razor take a rope you don't have any hope except to do yourself....

  Jamie looked at the tombstone and realized he hadn't known Philip's middle name was Arthur. He wondered if that was some relative's name. It seemed weird that his parents would give him a middle name at all because that was something normal parents did and Philip's parents were total hatters.

  Jamie sat back and looked at the freckled granite. But this time he saw: JAMES WILLIAM CORDE. Jamie imagined his own funeral and he saw his father standing next to the grave. His father didn't seem particularly sad. He was looking off into the distance, thinking about Sarah. Jamie pictured himself sitting alone in front of his own grave tracing the letters of his name. He did not, however, trace his middle name.

  They bypassed Supersalesman and walked right into Amos Trout's office. "Sorry to trouble you again, sir," Corde said and introduced him to Kresge.

  Trout said, "You in need of wall-to-wall, Deputy?"

  Kresge said not just now but he'd discuss it with the wife.