The Lesson of Her Death (50 page)

Sayles walked to a patch of dug-up earth like two wide tread marks about twenty feet long. Small green
shoots were rising from precisely placed intervals along the strips.

“Dig here.” He touched a foot to the ground.

Kresge picked up a rusty spade. Corde now felt contempt in the air. Sayles’s eyes were contracted like nipple skin in chill water. The deputy began to dig. A few feet down he uncovered a plastic bag. Kresge dropped the spade on the ground. He pulled the bag out, dusted it off carefully and handed it to Corde. Inside was a length of clothesline.

“That’s the murder weapon,” Sayles said.

Corde said to him, “Do you want to make a statement?”

Sayles said, “This is the proof.”

“Yessir,” Corde said. “Do you wish to waive your right to have an attorney present during questioning?”

“He killed Jennie with it. I saw him. It’ll have his fingerprints on it.”

“You’re saying you didn’t kill her?” Kresge asked.

“No, I didn’t kill her,” Sayles said. He sighed. “Jennie and I had an affair last year.”

“Yessir, we figured as much,” Corde said.

In the open window, the blond woman rested her chin in her hand and listened to his words without visible emotion. The cigarette dangled over the sill and from it rose a leisurely tentacle of smoke.

“I was quite taken by her.” He said to Corde, “You saw her. How could anybody help but be captivated by her?”

Corde remembered the moon, remembered the smell of mint on the dead girl’s mouth, remembered the spice of her perfume. He remembered the dull eyes. He remembered two diamonds and he remembered mud. He had no idea how captivating Jennie Gebben was.

Sayles said, “She went to work for me in the financial aid office.”

“We just came from there. The scrap of paper we found burned behind her dorm matches computer files in
your records. You broke into her dorm and stole her letters and papers. You burned them.”

Sayles laughed shortly, the disarmed sound of someone learning that his secrets are not secret at all. He nodded. “You know the financial condition of the school?”

What was it about educators that made them think their school was exactly the first thing on everyone’s mind?

Sayles continued, “We’ve been in danger of closing since the mid-eighties. Dean Larraby and I came up with an idea two years ago. As dean of financial aid I started giving out loan money to students who were bad risks. Millions of dollars.”

Corde nodded. “You gave them the money and they paid it to the school then they dropped out and defaulted. You kept the money. Who got, uhm, taken in that deal?”

“It was mostly state and federal money,” Sayles said. “It’s a very common practice at small colleges.” A professor, Sayles was giving them information, not apologizing. “Times are extremely bad for educational institutions. Auden is being audited in a week or so by the Department of Education. They’ll find the loan defaults. I’ve tried desperately to get some interim financing to put into the loan accounts to cover the deficit but—”

“And Jennie found out about the scam and you killed her,” Kresge said.

“No sir, I did not.” Corde thought something like a Southern military officer’s drawl crept into the man’s offended voice. “She knew what was going on. But she didn’t care. And I didn’t care if she knew. I just arranged for the job for her so we could see each other privately. She took some work home, administrative things. After she died I went to her dorm and burnt those files and her letters. In case she’d mentioned me in them.”

“That’s why you urged Steve Ribbon to pull me off the case? So this secret of yours didn’t get uncovered?”

“I promised him and Sheriff Ellison they’d have university support in the elections come November.”

Kresge’s face blossomed into a large frown at this first glimpse of law enforcement politics. He’d been on the job less than twenty-four hours.

“But I didn’t kill her. I swear it.” His voice lowered. “Our relationship never went past sex. We were lovers. Once or twice I thought about marrying her. But she told me right up front she was in it for the sex and nothing else. I was happy to accommodate. It didn’t last long. Jennie was bisexual, you know. She finally patched up her relationship with Emily, her roommate, and she and I drifted apart.”

“Emily’s death was a suicide, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, I’m sure it was. She called me the night she died. I went to meet her. She was terribly depressed about Jennie, incoherent. She ran off. I have no doubt she killed herself.”

“Well, Professor, who do you think is the killer?”

“About four months after Jennie and I broke up she said she’d started seeing someone else. We were still close and she told me a few things about her lover. It sounded like a very destructive relationship. Finally she broke it off but the lover was furious. On the day she was killed, after class, Jennie told me she’d agreed to meet for one last time, to say it was over, to leave her alone. I tried to talk her out of it. But that was one thing you just couldn’t do with Jennie. You couldn’t protect her. She wouldn’t stand for it, she wouldn’t depend on anybody. I worried about her all evening. Finally, I drove out to the pond, where she’d told me they were going to meet. I found Jennie. With a rope around her neck. That rope. She was dead.”

“She hadn’t been raped?” Corde asked.

“No, that must’ve happened later. The boy that got shot.”

“Why,” Kresge asked, “did you take the rope?”

“I was going to destroy it. But then I thought for my own sake I should save it—to prove that his fingerprints
were on the murder weapon. I wrapped it up in a scrap of plastic and buried it here.”

Kresge was exasperated. “Destroy the rope? You were trying to cover up the murder? Why?”

“Don’t you realize what would happen if word were to get out that a professor murdered one of his students? It would destroy Auden. Enrollment would plummet. It would be the end of the school. Oh, it was hard for me.… Oh, poor Jennie. But I had to think of the school first.”

“A professor?” Corde asked. “Who is it?”

“I assume you talked to him when you were interviewing people,” Sayles said. “His name is Leon Gilchrist.”

Jim Slocum, Lance Miller and a county deputy met them at the university, in an alleyway behind Jesse Hall.

Corde said, “He claims it’s Gilchrist, one of Jennie’s professors.”

Miller said, “He was in San Francisco at the time of the killing, I thought.”

Corde said to Kresge, “I checked the flights. Gilchrist flew out on the weekend before the killing. His secretary said he just got back a few days ago.”

Sayles said, “I swear it, Officer. He was back the Tuesday she was killed.”

Kresge said, “Maybe if he was planning to kill her he used a different name on the flight.”

Corde nodded then handed Sayles over to Slocum. “Take him to a cell. Book him for murder one, manslaughter and felony obstruction.”

Corde and Kresge left Sayles’s protests behind and walked through the elaborate towering arch, like the doorway in a medieval hall. The sounds of their footsteps resounded off the high concrete walls.

They suddenly heard running water.

“What’s that?” Kresge whispered.

As they got closer to the lecture hall they could tell the sound was of applause, which rose in volume and was soon joined by whistles. The noise filled the old stern Gothic corridors. An image came to Corde’s mind: gladiatorial battles from an ancient movie.

Doors opened and the halls filled with students in shorts, jeans, sweats, T-shirts. Corde walked into the lecture hall. It did indeed resemble the Colosseum. Steep rows of seats rising from a small semicircular platform, empty except for a chipped lectern. The ceiling of the auditorium was high, hueless, murky with years of grime. The walls were dark oak. The gooseneck lamp on the lectern still burned and in the dimness of the hall cast a pale shadow on the stage.

Corde stopped a crew-cut student. “Excuse me, this Professor Gilchrist’s class?”

“Yessir.”

“Do you know where he is?”

The boy looked around, saw someone and grinned. He continued his scan of the auditorium. “Nope. Guess he’s gone.”

“Was he away from town for a while?”

“Yeah. He was in San Francisco until a few days ago I heard. He came back to give his last lecture.”

“What was the applause about?”

“If you ever heard him you’d know. He’s totally, you know, intense.”

Corde and Kresge continued down the corridor until they found Gilchrist’s office. The professor was not here and the departmental secretary was gone. Kresge motioned toward her Rolodex, which was turned to the G’s. Gilchrist’s home address card was gone. The desk drawers were open and although Corde found files on other professors there was none for Gilchrist.

On the way out of the hall they passed the auditorium again.

The lectern light was dark.

The apartment wasn’t university property. It was three miles outside of town in a complex of two-story brick buildings, with the doorways on the second floor opening onto a narrow balcony that ran the length of the building. Gilchrist lived in apartment 2D. The complex was surrounded by thick foliage and mature trees. Corde noticed it was only one mile from his own house through the forest. Another brick of evidence for the district attorney—it would have cost Gilchrist merely a pleasant twenty minute walk to get to Corde’s house and leave the threatening pictures of Sarah.

Corde drove the cruiser past the entrance to the apartment complex then parked in a clump of hemlock out of sight of the building. Corde unlocked the shotgun and motioned to Kresge to take it. “You hunt, you told me?”

“Yup.” Kresge took the riot gun and Corde got a moment’s pleasure watching the man’s thick hands load and lock the gun as if he’d been doing it since he was five. They climbed out and started along the path.

Kresge said, “I hear something in the woods. Over there.”

Corde looked, squinting through the low light that shattered in the dense woods. “You see anything?”

“Can’t tell. Too much glare.”

“What’d you hear?”

“Footsteps. A dog maybe. Don’t hear it anymore.”

“Keep an eye on our backs,” Corde said.

“He’s just a professor.”

“Our backs,” Core repeated.

Crouching, the men walked side by side to the complex’s directory. Corde found the super’s apartment and rang the bell. No response. He motioned with his head toward the upper balcony. Together they went up the stairs.

Corde whispered, “You never done this before so we’re going in the front door together.”

“Okay with me,” Kresge said sincerely, the last of his words swallowed in a hugely dry throat.

“Let’s go.”

Beneath them a horn blared.

Corde and Kresge spun around. Jim Slocum’s cruiser—with Randy Sayles handcuffed in the backseat—pulled leisurely into the parking lot. Slocum honked again and waved. “Hey, Bill,” he called, “thought you might need some backup.”

“Jesus Lord,” Corde whispered harshly. “Jim, what’re you doing? He’s gonna see you.”

Slocum got out of the car and looked around. He shouted, “What say?”

Corde jumped out of his crouch and ran for the front door of Gilchrist’s apartment, shouting to Slocum, “Watch the back, behind the building! Watch the back.”

Corde and Kresge stood on either side of the door. Kresge said, “If he’s in there he knows he’s got company.”

“I hate this,” Corde said.

Kresge said, “You ever do this before?”

Corde hesitated. “Not exactly, no.” He knocked on the door. “Professor Gilchrist. Sheriff’s Department. Open the door.”

No response.

“Let me try.” Kresge pounded on the split veneer of the door. “Police, Professor. I mean, Sheriff’s Department. Open the door!”

Nothing.

Corde reached for the doorknob. Both men lifted their guns toward the sky. Corde turned the knob and shouldered it open. They leapt inside.

Jim Slocum turned toward the backseat of the cruiser. He said to Sayles by way of explanation, “I figured they needed some backup.” And he drove around to the back of the apartment complex.

“Look,” Sayles said, “I’m not real comfortable here.”

“Minute,” Slocum said, and got out of the car. He unholstered his service revolver and looked around the unkempt yellow lawn.

“You can’t leave me here. I’m innocent.”

“Quiet.”

“You can’t keep me here!”

“Please, sir, I’d appreciate it if you’d just shut up.”

“Get the goddamn rope fingerprinted. Are you listening to me? Are you listening to me?”

Jim Slocum had been—all the way from the Auden campus—and he was pretty tired of it. He leaned forward. “Shut … your … mouth. Got it?”

“You can’t keep me here.”

Slocum wandered off to the apartment building’s detached workshed. He went up on tiptoes, looked through the window and noted that there was no one inside then he stepped behind it to take a leak.

Breathing stale air Corde and Kresge moved farther into the apartment. On the floor next to them was a wooden coat rack and umbrella stand carved with the bas relief of a hound treeing a bear. Corde glanced at the bear’s black glistening mahogany teeth and walked past it.