The Lesson of Her Death

  Corde continued, "It's your county, Stan, so we need your okay."

  "Never heard of a professor killing anybody before," said Assistant Sheriff Dudley Franks, who was lean and unsmiling and reminded Corde of T.T. Ebbans. "You'd think they'd be above that or something."

  Willars said wryly, "So's Hammerback's providing all the firepower?"

  Corde grinned. "Okay, we'd like some backup too."

  "Uck."

  Corde added, "Fact of life, Stan."

  Willars said, "You boys want more rings?" Corde said sure quickly. Willars ordered. He was laughing as he looked out the window at Corde's squad car. "Look at that Dodge. It brand new?"

  Corde said, "We got 'em this year."

  "You got that damn university down in Harrison. No wonder you got new wheels." He turned to Franks. "What year're we driving?"

  "Eighty-sevens."

  Kresge said, "That's pretty old."

  "That damn university," Willars said. "Remember those old Grand Furies? The Police Interceptors."

  "That was quite a car," Corde said.

  "Had a four-forty in them, I believe," Franks offered.

  Willars said, "What I wish is we had one of those emergency services trucks. You should see the wrecks we get along 607."

  Franks said, "Sedge Billings near to cut his little finger off with his chain saw trying to get somebody out of a Caprice that went upside down. There aren't but one Jaws of Life in the whole area. Sedge had to use his own Black and Decker."

  The waitress brought the onion rings.

  "No," Willars corrected, "that wasn't a Chevy, was a Taurus."

  "You're right," Franks said.

  Corde said, "I don't think Ellison'd have it in his heart or his budget to buy you boys one of those vans. The one they got in Harrison is secondhand. I know we don't have the money in New Lebanon." There was silence as they dug into their rings.

  Willars said, "It's just a shame you couldn't loan it to us from time to time. Like a week we've got it, three weeks you've got it."

  Corde said, "I don't know the citizens of Harrison'd be too happy to see that. They're the one's paying."

  "True," Willars said pleasantly, "but I don't know the citizens of Harrison're real happy about what this Gilchrist fella's done." With cheer in his voice he added, "And the fact he's still at large."

  Franks said, "And the fact that it's election time come November."

  "I'd guess," Corde said slowly, "Hammerback'd be willing to work out a sharing arrangement. But only if you're talking a limited period of time. And I've gotta clear it with him."

  Willars said, "I think of the families of some kid rolls his car off that bend on 607. You ever seen that happen?"

  "It's pretty bad?" Kresge asked. "How come you don't put up guard rails?"

  Willars looked mournful. "Fact is we're a poor county."

  Corde said, "I think we could work something out."

  Sheriff Willars said, "That's good enough for me. Let's pick us up a couple M-16s and go catch ourselves a dangerous professor."

  Warning. No trespassing.

  Bill Corde and Wynton Kresge stepped out of a stand of trees and found themselves looking at the summer house Leon Gilchrist had rented in his latest victim's name. A dilapidated two-story frame home on whose south side paint was peeling like colonial-red snake scales. The whole place was settling bad and only the portion near the chimney had good posture. The screen door on the porch was torn and every second window was cracked. A typical vacation house in the lake district of Lewisboro--not a two-week dream rental but a badly built clapboard that had been foreclosed on.

  Up next to them walked Willars, Franks and a crew-cut local deputy, a young man bowlegged with muscles. Corde and Kresge had their service pistols drawn and the Lewisboro lawmen held battered dark gray military rifles, muzzle up.

  Kresge looked at the machine guns and said, "Well, well."

  "Peace," whispered Willars, "through superior firepower. Your show, Bill. Whatcha wanta do?"

  "I'll go in with Wynton and somebody else. I'd like somebody on the front door and the back just in case."

  Willars sent the stocky deputy out back and he took the front door. He said to Franks, "You be so kind as to accompany our cousins here?"

  "Look," Corde whispered. A light was flashing in an upstairs window. "He's there...." The men crouched down.

  Kresge said, "No, look. It's just the sunlight. A reflection."

  "No, I don't think so," Franks said with a taut voice. "I think it's a light."

  "Whatever it is," Corde said, "let's go in."

  To his men Willars said, "Check your pieces. Load and lock. Semiauto fire." The sharp clicks and snaps of machined metal falling into place filled the clearing then there was silence again. They started forward. A large grackle fluttered past them and a jay screamed. Once out of the brush they ran, crouching, to the front porch and walked up the stairs, keeping low to the steps, smelling old wet wood and decaying paint.

  They stood on either side of the door, backs to the house. Near Kresge's head was a sign: Beware of Dog. Kresge tested the door. It was locked.

  Franks whispered, "What about the dog?"

  "There was one, he'd be barking by now," Corde said.

  Kresge said, "We knock, or not?"

  Corde thought of the Polaroid of the girl possibly his daughter. He said, "No."

  Kresge grunted his agreement like a veteran SWAT team cop and pulled open the screen door for Franks to hold.

  "Pit bulls don't bark," Franks said. "I saw that on Current Affair or something." He flicked the trigger guard of his rifle with a nervous finger.

  Kresge stepped back but Corde touched him by the arm and shook his head then stepped into his place. "I've got fifteen years' experience on you. Just stay close behind."

  "But I got sixty pounds' weight on you, Detective," Kresge said and lowered his shoulder and charged into the door. It blew inward, the jamb shattering under his momentum. He slipped on the carpet and went down on his hip as Corde then Franks leapt into the living room after him.

  A half dozen mangy pieces of sour overstuffed furniture and a hundred books stared silently back at them.

  Franks kept his M-16 up, swiveling from door to door nervously with his head cocked, listening for malevolent growling.

  The sunlight was fading fast and throughout the house the colors of rugs and paintings and wallpaper were vanishing. The men walked like soldiers through this monotone. Corde listened for Gilchrist and heard only old boards moaning beneath their feet, the tapping and surges of tiny household motors and valves.

  Franks stayed downstairs while Corde and Kresge climbed up to where they had seen the light. They paused at the landing then continued to the second floor. Corde was suddenly aware of the smells: lemon furniture polish, musty cloth, after-shave or perfume.

  They swung open the door to the master bedroom. It was empty. Corde smelled the dry after-shave stronger here and he wondered if it was Gilchrist's. It seemed similar to a cologne that he himself had worn, something Sarah had bought him for his birthday. This thought deeply upset him. The sun was low at the horizon, shining into his face. Maybe that was the light he'd seen, its reflection in the window. The sun dipped below the trees, and the light grew murkier. Corde reached toward the bedside lamp to pull the switch.

  "Damn!"

  The bulb was hot.

  He told this to Kresge. The two men looked at each other, put their backs together, squinting through the gloom at the half dozen menacing near-human shapes they knew were a coat rack, an armoire, a shadow, a thick pink drape, yet at which each man drew an equivocal target with his pistol.

  Kresge reached for the light switch. He laughed nervously. "Wall's hot too. I think it was the sun. It was falling on the lamp and the wall here."

  Corde didn't respond. He opened his mouth wide and began to take slow breaths. He listened. No footsteps, no motion, no creaks. Walking around the edge of the room where the noise
from sprung floorboards would be less, Corde looked in both closets. They were empty. He stepped into the hall and examined the other bedrooms and their closets, filled with musty coats and jackets, faded floral blouses, blankets stinking of camphor.

  Kresge said, "The attic?"

  Hell. Going up through a trapdoor into an attic that was surely packed with furniture and boxes--perfect cover for a gunman ...

  But they were spared that agony. Corde found the trapdoor in the ceiling of the hall. It was padlocked from the bottom.

  He exhaled in relief.

  On the ground floor again, they moved through the dining room and living room.

  Corde thought: Hell's bells the basement, just like the attic only it's not going to be padlocked at all and that's where Gilchrist is going to be. Has to be. No question.

  "How about the basement?"

  "Isn't one," Franks said.

  Thanks, Lord, may be time to reconsider this church business, yessir....

  Kresge said, "I'm pretty surely tense in here." He said it as if he were surprised and Corde and Franks laughed. In the kitchen Corde saw colorful labels that said Heinz and Goya and Campbell's, dented aluminum pans, bottles and chipped canisters, refrigerator magnets of barnyard animals, which had turned dark with years of cooking grime.

  Corde said to Kresge, "Let's keep at it." He held his pistol with cramping pressure, his finger caressing the ribbed trigger inside the guard where he had told Kresge it should not be. "I saw something I want to check."

  Franks said, "There's a room in the back, I listened at it and didn't hear anything. But it's locked from the inside." He poked a stained yellow drape with the slotted muzzle of his soldier gun.

  "Just a second we'll go with you," Corde called from the living room. He was looking at a pile of ash in the fireplace. He crouched down and sifted through the gray dust. Kresge stood guard over him. In the midst of a pyramid of ash Corde found the scorched cover of a photo album. His hands shook with the excitement of being close to a picture of Gilchrist. But there were none. Almost everything was burnt and the ash dissolved.

  But one remained. A Polaroid had fallen through the log rack. Though it was badly blistered from the heat it hadn't burnt completely. The square showed a street in a city, a line of faded row houses, with a few trees in front. Breaking through the Maginot Line of the tops of the residences was a shiny office building five or six stories high.

  On the back was written: Leon, come visit sometime. Love

  Corde wrapped the photo in his handkerchief and put it in his pocket then stood, the familiar pop of his knee resounding through the dark room.

  The pop was loud. But not loud enough to cover the crack of Assistant Sheriff Franks breaking through the doorway of the locked room and the thunderclap of the shotgun blast that took off much of his shoulder.

  Corde spun fast, dropping into a crouch. Kresge grabbed the convulsing deputy by his leg and dragged him toward the kitchen, along a wall now covered by a constellation of slick blood.

  "Okay, okay, okay!" Corde shouted to no one and he rolled forward into the doorway, prone position.

  His elbow landed on a bit of sharp bone from the deputy's shoulder. Corde ignored the pain as he fired five staccato shots at the figure inside. Three missed and slammed into the armchair to which was taped the double-barrel Remington wired to the doorknob. Two of Corde's slugs though were aimed perfectly and found their target.

  Which wasn't however Professor Leon David Gilchrist but a four-foot-high ceramic owl, which in the dim light resembled not a bird but a laughing man and which under the impact of the unjacketed rounds exploded into a thousand shards of brown and gold porcelain.

  Bill Corde sat in the Auden University Library.

  This was a musty Victorian building, latticed with oak dense as metal and wrought-iron railings that coiled through the balconies and stacks like ivy boughs. The structure might have been imported brick by brick from sooty London and reassembled on this grassy quad within sight of thousands of acres of stalky fields growing a green pelt of corn shoots.

  This was the library of a university that Bill Corde would not be admitted to and whose tuition he could not have afforded if he had been.

  He had just gotten off the phone with Sheriff Willars in Lewisboro and learned that Dudley Franks was in critical but stable condition. Whatever that meant. Willars had said, "I'm not a happy camper, Bill, no sir," and Corde knew there'd be some hefty reparation payments between the two counties.

  Gloom had settled on the New Lebanon Sheriff's Department after the shooting. The manhunt that seemed so like a game several days ago had now turned rooty and mean. Gilchrist was both far crazier and far more savage than any of them had guessed and though those two adjectives were rarely if ever found in the vocabulary of modern law enforcement, Corde now felt the full pressure of their meaning.

  Gilchrist, Leon David, b. 1951, Cleary, New York. B.A. summa cum laude, M.A., Northwestern University; Ph.D. English literature, Harvard University; Ph.D. psychology, Harvard University. Assistant Professor and Fellow, Department of English, School of Arts & Sciences, Harvard University. Tenured Professor, Department of English, School of Arts & Sciences, Auden University. Lecturing Professor, Department of Special Education, School of Education, Auden University. Visiting Professor, Vanderbilt University, University of Naples, Le Sorbonne Universite, College of William & Mary....

  There were two more full paragraphs.

  Corde finished his notes then closed the Directory of Liberal Arts Professors. It contained no picture of Gilchrist--the main purpose of his visit here. Neither did the three books written by Gilchrist in the library's permanent collection. They were books without author photos, books without jackets, smart-person books. Corde jotted a note on a three-by-five card to call the sheriff in Cleary, New York, to see if there were any Gilchrists still in the area.

  He flipped quickly through the Index to Periodicals. He was about to close the book when his eye caught the title of an article. He walked to the Periodicals desk and requested the journal the article had been published in. The clerk vanished for a moment and returned with the bound volume of Psyche: The Journal of Psychology and Literature.

  Corde sat at his place again, read the first paragraph of "The Poet and the Violent Id" by Leon D. Gilchrist, Ph.D. He returned to the counter and borrowed a dictionary.

  He tried again.

  The poet, by which expansive term I am taking the liberty of referring to anyone who creates fictional modes with words, is himself a creation of the society in which he lives. Indeed, it is the obligation of the poet to deliquesce ...

  "Deliquesce."

  Corde marked his place in the journal with his elbow and thumbed through the dictionary. The "levitate""licentious" page fell out. He stuffed it back between "repudiate""resident" and "residual"/"response."

  "Deliquesce, v. To melt by absorbing moisture or humidity contained in the air."

  Okay. Good.

  ... obligation of the poet to deliquesce so that he might permeate all aspects of society....

  "Permeate."

  Corde lifted the dictionary again.

  For ten minutes he fought through the article, his sweaty hands leaving splendid fingerprints on the torn jacket of the dictionary, his stomach wound into a knot--not by what he learned about Gilchrist (which was hardly anything) but by the slippery obscurity of meaning. For the first time Corde truly understood his daughter's predicament.

  He paused, saturated by frustration. He breathed slowly several times and resumed.

  ... does not the id of a pulp thriller writer encompass a lust to travel the countryside, strangling women....

  Words....

  What did these words say about where Gilchrist was? What state he would flee to, what country? How he would try to escape? What kind of weapon he might use?

  Letters syllables words sentences....

  What do they say about a beautiful young girl lying dead in a bed of hya
cinths, swabbed with cold mud? What do they say about the man who closed his hands around her neck, felt her breasts shaking under his elbows, felt the slow, bloody give of her throat, felt the last shiver of her breath on his wrists as she lay down like a struggling lover and saw for one short moment the darkening glow of the half-moon?

  ... the metaphors of violence abound....

  Corde reached forward and ran a finger along metaphors of violence and seemed to feel heat coming off the ink.

  "Metaphor, n. A figure of speech in which an object, idea or symbol is described by analogy...."

  WHAT ...

  "Analogy, n. Correspondence between objects generally thought to be dissimilar ..."

  ... IS HE TALKING ...

  "Correspondence, n. A similarity ..."

  ... ABOUT?

  Corde leaned forward and pressed his eye sockets into his palms, hearing tiny pops of pressure.

  The motives of the poet are the motives of us all. The mind of the poet is the collective mind. But it is the poet--whether his psyche be that of saint or murderer--who perceives the world by the illumination of pure understanding, while others see only in reflected light.

  Bill Corde turned to the last page of the article.

  Oh Lord ...

  He stopped as if he'd been struck, feeling the throbbing as the blood pumped furiously through his neck. He reached forward and lifted the Polaroid from the binding of the journal.

  The snapshot had been taken recently, perhaps when the family had cooked supper outside just two evenings ago. He noticed the garbage can had not been righted after a storm last week. Sarah and Jamie stood around the barbecue looking down at the glowing coals. The picture had been taken from somewhere on the other side of the cow pasture in the forest. Almost the exact spot where Corde believed he had seen someone that night he'd kept his long vigil, shotgun-armed and shivering.

  Written across the surface of the photo in smeared red ink were the words: SAY GOOD-BYE, DETECTIVE.

  Diane Corde, feeling suddenly sheepish, told Ben Breck that she and the children were going to Wisconsin for several weeks.

  "What?" Breck asked, frowning.

  Diane lifted her hands to her eyes. Her burgundy nail polish was unchipped and her fingers, often red and leathery from the housework, were soft and fragrant with almond-scented lotion. "It's the damn case again."