The Lesson of Her Death (31 page)

He couldn’t recall the last time he felt so unwelcome.

“Detective, I think it’s pretty clear that you’re dealing with some kind of crazy person. Some psychopath. He is not a student, it is clearly not a professor. Everyone on this faculty has the highest credentials and
the most impeccable background. Your rumormongering is despicable.”

“Yes’m,” Corde said to Dean Catherine Larraby. “I was asking about Leon Gilchrist? You didn’t really answer my question.”

“You’re not suggesting that he had anything to do with the deaths of these two girls?”

“Has he ever been in any trouble with students? Here or at another school?”

The dean whispered, “I’m not even going to dignify that with an answer. Leon Gilchrist is a brilliant scholar. We’re lucky to have him on staff and—”

“I’ve heard from a number of sources that Jennie had relations with at least one professor. One person I interviewed thinks Gilchrist might be him.”

“Professors at Auden are forbidden to date students. Doing so is grounds for dismissal. Who told you?”

“I told her I’d respect her confidence.”

She looked for a way to pry this information out of him. Not finding one she said, “Impossible. It’s a vicious rumor. Leon isn’t well liked—”

“No?” A tiny note went onto a stiff white card.

“Don’t make anything out of that,” she snapped. “Professors can be like children. Leon has an infantile streak in him, which he has trouble controlling. He makes enemies. People as brilliant as he breed rumors. You didn’t answer my question. Is he a suspect?”

“No.”

“He was reading a paper at the Berkeley Poetry Conference at the time of the killings,” she said.

“Did you know that before or afterward?”

“I beg your pardon?” she asked cautiously.

“I’m curious if after Jennie was killed you suspected something about Professor Gilchrist and checked on his whereabouts at that time.”

The eyes went to steel cold. “I have nothing further to say to you, Detective.”

“If you could—”

“She was killed by a psycho!” The dean’s shrill voice
tore through the room. “The same one who vandalized the grade school and churches. The same one who murdered Emily. If you’d taken this psychopath seriously, instead of digging into banal college gossip, Emily would still be alive today.”

“We have to explore all angles, Dean.”

“I’ll guarantee you that Leon did not have relations with Jennie and he didn’t have anything to do with her death or Emily’s. Now if you’ll excuse me I’m in the midst of emergency funding meetings, which by the way are necessary largely because you people haven’t caught this madman.”

When Corde had left the office Dean Larraby snatched up the phone and snapped to her secretary, “Is Gilchrist back from the Coast? When’s he expected? … Who’s his teaching assistant?” Her foot tapped in anger while she waited. “Who, Okun? Give him a call and tell him I want to see him. Tell him it’s urgent.”

Charlie Mahoney was pretty tired of New Lebanon. The incident that had cemented this opinion was a bad meal at Ewell’s Diner—particularly bad meat loaf (gristle), extraordinarily bad mashed potatoes (paste) and moderately bad bourbon (oily). This cuisine was followed by an early evening in the motel room where he was now lounging in front of a small TV that was not hooked up to cable. The exact instant when boredom became loathing occurred during a Channel 7 commercial break—four straight minutes of grating ads for products like hog feed and cultivators and used cars and kerosene.

Who the fuck buys kerosene from a TV ad?

He lay on the sagging bed and looked up at the stucco ceiling. Stucco.
Who invented stucco? And why would anybody put it on a ceiling where you had to look at it all night long because there was nothing else to do? How many college sluts had lain here on this bed with
their legs in the air and stared at this ceiling thinking stucco who the fuck invented stucco Jesus when is this son of bitch going to finish?
…

When Mahoney’s thoughts got tired of Midwest decor they ambled over to Richard Gebben.

Mahoney, not a man with much heart to spare for anyone, least of all an employer, had sat with perplexed but genuine sympathy as he watched Richard Gebben absently drive the toy Christmas truck back and forth on his desk, back in St. Louis.

Gebben Pre-Formed We Fabricate the World
.

“Jennie’s mother, I don’t know when she’s going to come out of it. She may never. She doesn’t cry anymore. She doesn’t do anything but sometimes she has these, I don’t know, bursts of energy, Charlie. She’ll be lying in bed then she leaps up and has to polish the silver. The silver, Charlie. For Christsake, we have a
maid.”

A jet had begun its takeoff run and the tenor roar filled the beige office. The DC-10 was well over Illinois before Gebben spoke again.

“Jennie,” he had said, addressing Mahoney, not the spirit of his daughter.

He had proceeded to speak about
reputation
. About
the media
, about
misunderstandings
. He had spoken about
troubling discoveries
. Then he paused and the truck stopped rolling and as he stared out the window at a tall gray McDonnell Douglas hangar Richard Gebben spoke about his daughter the whore.

To Mahoney—a man who had seen evidence of just about every sexual act humankind could think of—the fact that Jennie slept with women as well as men was unremarkable. What was a little boggling, at least in the age of AIDS, was the sheer volume of both men and women she’d had between her legs.

“Charlie, I don’t care what you have to do. This fellow Corde is going to be taking her life apart. He’s already been looking for diaries and letters. I can’t let that happen, Charlie. You know what happens in investigations like this. They look at every little detail of
somebody’s life. They make up stories about people. The newspapers just love that crap.
You
know, Charlie. It happens all the time. You saw it happen.”

No, Mahoney had never seen it happen. What he saw happen was Ismalah R dissed Devon Jefferies who went home to his crib on South Halsted, picked up his MAC-10 then came a’calling to spray Ismalah R with forty or fifty rounds and the asshole just died where he stood and nobody made up a single fucking thing about him at all.

That was what Mahoney had seen.

And what he saw now was a pathetic Richard Gebben with his pitted face and moist eyes, trying to save what little remained of his daughter.

Well, that was how Gebben had explained Mahoney’s mission to New Lebanon, and ten thousand dollars had bought Mahoney’s unwavering acceptance of it along with a generous number of encouraging nods and mutterings of sympathy thrown in.

But Mahoney knew there was more.

Gebben had taken many business trips to places that had a light market share of the Gebben Pre-Formed steel sheeting business, if any at all. Unnecessary trips. To Acapulco, Aspen, Puerto Vallarta, Palm Beach. And he was always accompanied by a sultry blond secretary or young marketing assistant or steno typist. This was the role model he had been for his daughter. It was a lesson she had learned, and learned well, and maybe it had killed her.

And, who knew? Maybe Gebben himself had even come to visit Jennie late at night, Mommy fast asleep.…

As a cop Mahoney had seen a good deal of emotional pain. He remembered walking up three flights of shit-stinking stairs in a tenement, knocking on the door to deliver some news to a young woman. She listened, nodding vigorously as she held her daughter, who had little plastic toys tied into her hair where pigtails sprouted from her scalp—tiny trains, soda bottles, dogs,
dolls. The woman saying, “I unnerstand, I unnerstand,” and Mahoney thinking,
Understand? You poor bitch. There’s nothing
complicated
here. Your old man just got blown away in a drug deal
.…

But Mahoney knew of course that it
was
complicated.

So complicated she would never
unnerstand
it. As complicated as Gebben’s reasons for wanting his daughter’s secrets to stay hidden forever. Reasons that Charlie Mahoney, lying on a lumpy bed in front of a flickering Ralston Purina commercial, would never completely figure out.

Not that he needed to. He had his ten thousand dollars and he had a specific job.

Which arrived at that moment in the form of Steve Ribbon, who knocked and called, “Hey, Charlie? I’m a little late, sorry. You in there, Charlie?”

“Right with you.”

Mahoney let him wait for a full minute then stretched and stood and opened the door.

Ribbon grinned shyly like a police cadet on graduation day. The sheriff, who had ten years on Mahoney, looked like a youngster and Mahoney thought, Damn if these small towns didn’t preserve you real well.

“Steve,” he said ebulliently, “how you doing?”

They shook hands. Ribbon walked in, saying, “I like that. The way you kept your hand in your jacket when you opened the door.”

“Habit.”

“You looked pretty smooth. Cabrini projects, you were telling me the other night. War zone. Brung a present. You want a drink?”

“Sure.”

Ribbon poured John Begg scotch into squooshy plastic hotel cups. They tapped them together and sipped. Ribbon was in uniform and when Mahoney glanced at the top of the sheriff’s head Ribbon took off his Smokey hat and dropped it down on the dresser.

“You’re not getting tired of our little town, are you?”

“Tired?” Mahoney grunted. “It’s heaven on earth.” He slipped off his jacket. He hung it up and poured more sour scotch.

Ribbon’s eyes slipped to the large dark gray automatic pistol riding high on Mahoney’s right hip.

“Steve, I happened to have a talk with Deputy Ebbans, Jim Slocum and some of the other boys on the case today. I sounded them out about how the investigation’s going.” Mahoney’s eyes tunneled into Ribbon’s, which danced a little, looked briefly back then danced away again. This was fun. It was the way Mahoney used to look at perps and he missed doing it. “There’re a couple things I’ve got to talk to you about.”

Ribbon responded exactly the same way the perps had—fiercely studying the scenery behind Mahoney as if memorizing the wall or window or front door.

“But first off. Good news. I just talked to Mr. Gebben.”

“Did you now?”

“And you know that reward I was talking about?”

“Reward?” Ribbon frowned. Then he nodded. “Right, yeah, I recall you mentioning that.”

“Well, he’s authorized me to release some of it now.”

“We haven’t caught anybody yet, Charlie.” Ribbon snorted a laugh.

“Well, I’ve told him you’re doing a good job and he wants to show his support.”

“That’s real kind of him, Charlie.”

“He’s a generous man. But I’m afraid we’ve got to talk about something. Kind of an unpleasant situation.”

“Unpleasant.”

Ribbon licked the rim of his cup and Mahoney let him fret for a delectable minute before he said, “Again, I don’t want to be imposing myself. You’re the boss here, Steve.”

“I value your opinion. You’re surely more of an expert
than any of us.” Ribbon seemed at sea and took refuge in the scotch. He drank long and busied himself with pouring another glass.

“I hate to say anything.”

“Naw, go ahead, Charlie.”

“Well, it’s about this Bill Corde.”

Corde pulled into the Town Hall driveway and saw three deputies standing in front of a new Nissan Pathfinder 4×4. It was a beauty. Corde admired it. He saw nothing wrong with buying foreign as long as the quality was better than American. He had a little problem
paying
foreign, having test-driven a Pathfinder himself; he knew he was looking at over twenty thousand dollars worth of transport.

Corde turned his attention away from the truck and back to the lardy figure of Dodd Humphries he was helping out of the squad car and through the parking lot. As he passed the truck Corde said to the men, “Who’s the proud father?”

“Steve bought her.”

Corde laughed in genuine surprise. “Steve Ribbon?”

“Surely did. Walked right into the dealership and drove out this morning.”

“Hell you say. He was gonna drive that Dodge till it dropped.” Corde looked at the shimmering chrome and metallic-flecked burgundy paint and he said to Lance Miller, “He’s gone and set a bad precedent. Now everybody’s gonna want their trucks with all cylinders running.”

They entered the Sheriff’s Department wing. Half the complement was out inspecting the sheriff’s new wheels. Jim Slocum was looking at a handful of letters. Corde assumed they were more of the worthless confessions and tip letters that accompany any publicized investigation.

“Dodd, you can’t keep doing this,” Corde said to his prisoner.

“Doing what?” the man asked drowsily.

The man’s Toyota pickup had sheared a leg off the Purina feed billboard on 116 and dropped a painted sixty-foot Hereford on her black-and-white rump. Miller took him into the lockup in the back of the office. When he returned Corde looked up from the arrest report. “Two point four. He’s more than legally drunk. I do believe he’s legally dead.”

Miller said, “Well, he’s legally barfing and he’s got bits of windshield falling out of his skivvies. It’s all over the floor.”

Corde said, “Give him some paper towels and make him clean it up. Nobody should be drinking like that on a weekday morning.”

“He’ll lose his license this time,” Miller said.

“Hardly matters,” Corde answered. “That was his last truck.”

Steve Ribbon appeared in the doorway and looked at Corde. “Talk to you for a minute, Bill.”

Corde followed him into his office and the sheriff shut the door. Ribbon sat down and expanded his cheeks like a blowfish’s body and started to bounce a Ticonderoga number two off the drum of his skin. Corde decided it might be a long conversation and sat down in the chair opposite the sheriff’s desk.

“Bill …” The pencil stopped being a drumstick and became a Flash Gordon rocket crash-landing on the desk. “Damn this bureaucracy, Bill.”

Corde waited.

“County and state and everybody.”