The Lesson of Her Death (11 page)

He read the brief report from the Harrison County Crime Scene Division. The knife had been found in the flowers beneath where Jennie Gebben had lain, the blade closed. It had not been used on her—there were no
traces of blood or tissue on the blade—though it might have been used to cut the rope the killer strangled her with.

Steve Ribbon had added a handwritten note.
Bill
—
Offering? Sacrifice? More evidence of Cult action. You should follow up
.

“Stupid of us, Lance. Damn stupid, missing something like this. And I went over the site twice. Slocum and I both.” Corde’s skin felt hot from this lapse. He pulled another report from the envelope—about the newspaper clipping and its threatening message. There had been no fingerprints. The red ink, in which were found several marker fibers, was from a Flair pen, sold in millions of stores around the country.

On the Analysis Request form he had filled out to accompany the threat Corde had asked,
What was used to cut the clipping out of the paper?

A technician had replied,
Something sharp
.

Finally the envelope contained the warrant permitting them to search Jennie’s half of the dorm room. He handed it to Miller and told him to get over there with a crime scene unit. As he did so he happened to glance at Miller’s notes and he realized he should have been paying more attention to what the young deputy was doing. “You wrote down the score of the homecoming game she went to.”

“Shouldn’t I’ve?”

“No.”

“Oh. I thought you wanted specifics.”

Corde said, “And you’re supposed to be asking the girls in her dorm when Jennie had her period.”

“You can’t go asking somebody that.”

“Ask.”

Miller turned fire red. “Can’t we look it up somewhere?”

“Ask,” Corde barked.

“Okay, okay.”

Corde read one of Miller’s notes:
Roommate and JG
just before dinner on Tuesday night. They had discussion
—
“Serious” (Fight?) Couldn’t tell what was said. JG unhappy as she left. Roommate: Emily Rossiter
.

Corde tapped it. “That’s interesting. I want to talk to Emily. Get over there now and have her come in.”

B
ill Corde was irritated at the fluorescent tube that flickered frantically above his head and he was exhausted from sifting for hours through the goofy and theatrical attitudes of young people on their own for the first time. He was thinking of closing up for the day and returning to the office when a young man appeared at the door. He was in his mid-twenties. A squat mass of black crinkly hair was tied in a ponytail. His face was very narrow and he had high ridges of cheekbones, under which was a dark beard. He wore blue jeans and a black T-shirt. “You Detective Corde?”

“That’s me. Come on in.”

“I got a message that you wanted to see me.”

“What’s your name? Here, sit down.”

“Brian Okun. Is this about Jennie Gebben?”

“That’s right.” Corde was flipping through his index cards. Slowly, card by card, reviewing his boxy hand-writing.
It took a long time. He looked up. “Now, how exactly did you know her?”

“She was in Professor Gilchrist’s class. Psychology and Literature. He lectures. I teach the discussion section she was in.”

“You’re on the faculty?”

“I’m a graduate student. Ph.D. candidate.”

“And what did you do in your section?”

“They’re discussion groups, as I said.”

“What do you discuss?”

Okun laughed, puzzled. “Do you really care?”

“I’m curious.”

“The question last week was: ‘How would John Crowe Ransom and the school of New Criticism approach the poetry written by someone diagnosed with bipolar depression?’ Do you know what the New Criticism movement was all about, Officer?”

“No, I don’t.” Corde answered. “Do you know if Jennie was going with anybody?”

“‘Going with.’ What does that mean? That’s a vague term.”

“Was she seeing anyone?”

Okun asked in a voice crisp with irony, “‘Seeing anyone’? Do you mean dating?”

It seemed to Corde that the boy wasn’t hostile. He looked genuinely perplexed—as if the detective were asking questions that could not be answered in plain English. “I’d like to know about anyone Jennie may have had more than a passing friendship with.”

Okun’s eyes ricocheted off Corde’s cards. “I suppose you know I took her out a few times.”

Corde, who did not know this, answered, “I was going to ask you about that—do you usually date students?”

“This’s a college town. Who else is there to ask out?” Okun’s eyes met Corde’s.

“Isn’t it unusual for a professor to ask out his students?”

“I’m not a professor. I told you that. I’m a doctoral candidate. Therefore we were both students.”

Corde rubbed his finger across a Styrofoam cup of cold coffee. He shuddered at the squeaky sound. “I’d appreciate you answering my questions in a straightforward way. This is a pretty serious matter. How long were you seeing her?”

“We broke up several months ago. We’d dated for three months off and on.”

“Why did you break up?”

“It’s not your concern.”

“It may be, son.”

“Look, Sheriff, we went out five or six times. I never spent the night with her. She was sweet but she wasn’t my type.”

Corde began to ask a question.

Okun said, “I don’t feel like telling you what my type is.”

“What were the circumstances of you breaking up?”

Okun twitched a shoulder. “You can’t really call it breaking up. There was nothing between us, nothing serious. And neither of us saw any point in going on with it.”

“Do you know who Jennie began seeing after you?”

“I know she went out. I don’t know with whom.”

Corde fanned through his three-by-fives. “That’s interesting. Several of her other friends also told me they aren’t sure who she was dating recently.”

Okun’s eyes narrowed and his tongue touched a stray wire of beard. “So, a mystery man.”

Corde asked, “What kind of student was she?”

“Slightly above average but her heart wasn’t in studying. She didn’t feel passion for literature.”

He pronounced it
lit’rature
. Corde asked, “Was there anybody in class she was particularly close to? Other than you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did you see her personally in the last month?”

Okun blinked.
“Personally?”
he asked the ceiling. “I
suppose I’d have to see her
personally
, wouldn’t you think? How else can one see anyone? Do you mean did I see her
intimately?
Or do you mean
socially?”

Corde thought of the time he managed to cuff and hogtie George Kallowoski after the man had spent ten minutes swinging a four-by-four, trying in his drunken haze to cave in Corde’s skull. He thought a lot better of Kallowoski than he did of this boy. “Outside of class, I meant.”

“I hadn’t seen her socially for a month. I assume you remember that I told you I didn’t see her intimately at all.”

“Do you know if there was anybody who had a gripe with her? Anybody she’d fought with recently?”

“No.”

“Did she get along well with her roommate?”

“I guess. I don’t know Emily that well.”

“But you knew Jennie well enough to know that Emily was her roommate.”

Okun smiled. “Ah, ratiocination! Does this mean you’ve trapped me?”

Corde fanned his cards like a Las Vegas blackjack player. “Now, Emily …” He looked up, frowning. “I thought you told me you never stayed overnight in Jennie’s room?”

Okun, observing the interrogation from a different plane, sighed. He descended to say, “Emily has a big mouth.… I was being euphemistic when I mentioned spending the night.”

“Euphemistic?”

Okun said, “It means I was not being literal. I was being metaphoric.”

“I know what euphemistic means,” said Corde, who did not.

“I meant I didn’t have sexual relations with her. We stayed up late discussing literature. That was all. Officer, it seems to me like this is some kind of personal vendetta.”

“I don’t believe you’re right about that.”

Okun looked out of the small window as if he were stargazing then said, “I don’t know whether you went to college or not but I imagine you don’t have a lot of respect for what I do.”

Corde didn’t say anything.

“I may look like a, what would you call it? Hippie? That’s your era. I may look like a hippie. But it’s people like me who teach half this illiterate world to communicate. I think that’s a rather important thing to do. So I resent being treated like one of your local felons.”

Corde asked, “Will you submit a blood sample?”

“Blood?”

“For a genetic marker test. To compare with the semen found in Jennie Gebben’s body?”

Brian Okun said, “Fuck you.” Then he stood up and walked out of the room.

Do You Drive Your Man Crazy?

Diane Corde sat in the paneled office and flipped through a
Redbook
.

Question 1. What is the wildest thing you and your mate are capable of doing?

A. Taking skydiving lessons together
.

B. Making love outdoors
.

C. Going skinny-dipping
.

D. Taking ballroom dancing classes
.

Diane didn’t like the place. It reminded her too much of the office of the vet who spayed their puppies and dispensed worm drops. It was nothing but a cheap paneled waiting room and a sliding glass window, behind which was a gum-chewing receptionist, who seemed about to ask, “Time for Fluffy’s distemper shot, is it?”

Diane swallowed, dry-mouthed, and returned to the magazine.

Question 7. How surprised would your mate be if you called him up one afternoon and told him to meet
you after work in a ritzy hotel room, where you would have champagne and caviar waiting for him?

A. Not surprised at all
.

B. Somewhat surprised
.

C. Very surprised
.

D. Astonished
.

Corde and Diane had met at a Methodist church singles supper sixteen years before, held in the boathouse on Seever Lake. Corde had shown up with only bags of potato chips, getting mileage out of a bad joke (“Sure I know it’s a pot luck supper—y’all’re lucky I didn’t bring a pot”). Corde then spotted Diane Claudia Willmot arranging pickles in a Tupperware bowl and asked her if she’d like to go for a walk. She said she would, only wait a minute she wanted to get her purse, which she did, and they wandered around in the park until, thank you Lord, a roaring cloudburst forced them into a little shack and while the other pot-luckers were eating beans and franks and making forty-days-and-forty-nights jokes, Corde and Diane kissed, wet and hot, and she decided she was going to marry him.

She was four years older than Corde, which is a big difference between people at only one age—their mid-twenties, which is where the two of them happened to be. Crying, Diane asked him, “What are you going to do when I turn thirty? You’ll still be young.” And Bill Corde, who was in fact worried about the age difference (but because he thought
she
might leave him for an older man), told her something that turned out to be completely true: that he didn’t think she’d go too ripe before he himself went gray.

One problem he hadn’t counted on, though. Diane was divorced, married two years to a salesman up in Fredericksberg. They’d split up before Corde met her and when she’d confessed the marriage, nervous about the response, he’d smeared on the nonchalance real thick. But later he got to thinking about Diane and Stuart together and he claimed it turned his stomach into a cloverleaf. Diane was tolerant at first but then Corde’s
insecurity began to wear on her. She didn’t know how to placate him. It didn’t even seem to make him feel better when she repeated over and over the partial truth that she and Stu hadn’t had a good sex life. Although she didn’t dwell on it she assumed that Corde had had his share of women and hoped it was true so that he had sowed all the wild grains he had in him. But it wasn’t the sex that tormented Corde; it was something trickier—jealousy that the woman he wanted to marry had confessed secrets to another man, that she had cried in front of him, that she had comforted him. Corde could not be allayed, looking sheepish and sorrowful at this retroactive betrayal. “But it was before I even
knew
you,” Diane snapped, and he got a look at her spirited side, as she’d intended. Corde brooded plenty and finally Diane called the bluff. “You gonna mope like that, go find yourself a virgin you think is worth all this heartache you’re making for yourself.”

Their wedding, the following month, was appropriately punctuated by an inundation to match that of the day they’d met. They both took this as a good omen, which had proved to be pretty accurate. Sixteen years of marriage and when they called each other darling, they more often than not meant it. Diane said the secret to their success was that they had faulty memory circuits and tended to forget rather than forgive the transgressions. The closest either of them had come to an affair were unpure thoughts—along the lines of those about Susan Sarandon and Kevin Costner when Corde and Diane made love the night they’d rented
Bull Durham
.