The Lesson of Her Death (57 page)

He trotted lethargically toward one large warehouse where he figured he might sit the whole thing out. He pulled up with a stitch in his side, thinking,
Jesus Christ, this fucking aerobic fucking Jane Fonda crap is what they pay fucking SWAT for
.

He leaned against a warehouse wall, listening to the staticky voices of what a buddy had dubbed the Felony Apprehension Response Team (nobody was faster than cops with this sort of acronym). LaPorda called in too, saying that he’d had no sign of the perp but was on his way to the riverfront for further investigation. Then he dug into his jacket pocket for his Camels. He shook one out and put his lips around it.

He was startled when a polite voice next to him said, “Need a match?”

When LaPorda turned he didn’t see who was speaking. All he saw was a rusty pipe, four inches wide and about four feet long, as it whistled square into his face. The
ponk
echoed off the walls nearby. LaPorda collapsed in a large pile and began to bleed heavily. He did not lose consciousness at first and was aware of hands rifling his shirt. The hands were persistent but delicate; the man they belonged to didn’t seem very strong.

Professor’s hands
, he thought then he passed out.

Wynton Kresge caught him lifting the fallen patrolman’s service revolver out of its holster. Kresge wondered if Gilchrist had killed the officer. “Hold it right there.” He turned and their eyes met. The two were alone. There were no footsteps, no crackles of walkie-talkies. The rest of the teams had passed them by. “Don’t move,” Kresge said. He aimed at the darting, dark eyes then remembered the
Deputy’s Procedural Guide
. Rule 34-6.
The chest, not the head, is the preferred target in an arrest situation
.

Kresge said, “Drop the gun.”

The sunlight bounced off a high window and illuminated the men in pale light.

“Drop it.”

“Let’s talk about this.”

Kresge nodded at the man’s gun. “Now!” It was a double-action revolver. All Gilchrist had to do was aim and pull the trigger. No safety, no slides. Rule 34-2.
Identify suspect’s weapon immediately
. “I’m not going to tell you again.”

“Do you want some money? How much do you want? A thousand? No problem.” He nodded toward the cop. “That was an accident. He fell. I was trying to help him. You want two thousand?” He gestured casually toward his suitcase, which moved the muzzle of the revolver closer to Kresge.

He remembered the silhouette targets on the Higgins range. He said, “I’ll count to three.”

“Hey, why don’t you just count to ten and give me a chance to go away? What could be easier than that? Two thousand dollars cash. I’ve got it right there in my suitcase.”

“If you don’t drop the gun immediately,” Kresge said, “I am going to shoot you.”

“Oh, I don’t think so, Officer.”

“H
e moved. He said something.”

“Detective Corde?” the nurse said.

“I don’t know what it was exactly,” he explained.

“Telephone for you, sir.”

Corde said to her, “He moved. He said something.”

The nurse, who knew all about sleep-deprivation hallucinating, glanced down at Jamie’s immobile form. “That’s wonderful.”

“He sat up.”

She had also read Jamie’s chart and she knew that he was as likely to fly loop-de-loops through the room as he was to sit up and utter one syllable. “That’s wonderful.”

“Don’t you want to tell the doctor?”

She said, “It’s a policeman in Fitzberg on the line. He said it’s urgent.”

“Okay.” Corde turned his red eyes to the phone. He walked groggily toward it.

“No, sir, it’s out here. We don’t put calls through to the ICU.”

“Oh.”

Standing at the nurses’ station Corde accepted the phone and said, “Hello?”

He heard Wynton Kresge ask, “How’s your son?”

“He’s asleep now, Wynton. But he sat up and said something to me. I heard him. I don’t know what he said but I heard him.”

“That’s good. Bill, Gilchrist is dead.”

“Uh-huh. You got him?”

“He was trying to get away. He had Sayles’s credit cards in his wallet. Some other people’s too. He’d stolen them or bought them. He was going to cover his tracks real well.”

“What happened?”

“Bill, I wanted to talk to you about it. About what I did. He had a gun. He was waving it around. I shot him. Four times.”

“That’s good, Wynton.”

“I couldn’t stop myself. I kept pulling the trigger. He just fell over and died. I shot him four times.”

“You did fine.”

“But the thing is, Bill, I wasn’t sure, I mean, not
really
sure he was going to use his gun. I just couldn’t tell.”

“Did they give it to the Fitzberg DA? They’re not going to indict you, are they?”

“No. But it’s not the law part I’m talking about. I killed him and he might not have been going to shoot me.

“Wynton, he killed Jennie and he killed Sayles. He was going to draw down on you.”

“But I just don’t
know
he was.”

Corde was looking back into the hospital room. All he could see was a mound under the gray sheet that was his Jamie. “We never really know, Wynton.…”

“I didn’t want to bother you, Bill, but I had to say it, kind of get it off my chest.”

“You get back, you and me’ll go hunting. We can talk about it then.” Corde closed his eyes and leaned wearily against the wall.

“I hope Jamie gets better real soon.”

“He talked to me,” Corde said. “Did I tell you that? He sat up and said something to me. I wish I could remember what.” Corde missed the nurse glancing at him with a sad, straight line of a mouth.

Kresge said, “Tell him I’m thinking of him.”

“I will, Wynton.”

Corde hung up the telephone and walked back into Jamie’s room.

Bill Corde, a tall man now hunched over, with short trimmed hair now mussed, a man in whose heart one grave burden had been eased while another had been accepted. He sat down on a low chair beside his son’s bed.

Corde didn’t know what a fashion plate was but he decided if Dr. Parker was one it was no way an insult. He wished New Lebanon could get a few more of them.

Sitting at the spotless desk, the good doctor was wearing a hot pink dress cut low enough so Corde could have seen a number of freckles on her chest if he was inclined to look, which he was and he did. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail and she was wearing a thick gold bracelet, which Corde figured he himself might’ve bought her, what with all the fees. She had matching earrings and he imagined that those too were courtesy of him.

“I’m pleased to meet you at last, Officer.”

On the other hand the way she dabbed her eyes over him he believed she was examining him distrustfully. He wondered if Diane had blown some whistles. “Well, I
sure have heard good things about you, Doctor. Sarah’s a whole new girl since she’s been seeing you.”

The Dr. Parker of reputation emerged. She nodded aside the compliment and asked abruptly, “Sarah’s here, isn’t she?”

“She’s in the waiting room.”

“Why didn’t your wife come? She at the hospital?”

“That’s right. Jamie’s been in and out of consciousness. They think he’s going to be all right. He might have some memory problems, they say. Maybe some other things. A neurologist is going to give him some tests. Dr. Weinstein? At Community? Supposed to be the best in the county. That’s what we heard.”

Dr. Parker gazed at Corde passively and said nothing.

“You know what happened was …” Corde’s voice suddenly stopped working.

Dr. Parker continued, “He tried to kill himself. Mrs. Corde told me.”

“I don’t know what it’ll be like when he gets home. I don’t know what happened exactly or why. But if you’d be available …”

“I’d be happy to see both of you,” she said sincerely, but didn’t seem to be looking forward to it.

Both of us?
Corde nodded. “I’d appreciate that.”

The doctor opened her drawer and lifted out a thick handful of papers. Corde had a bad moment thinking they were more bills. She slid them across the desk. He glanced at the first one, dense with single-spaced writing and topped by Sarah’s byline. Without looking up he said, “She wrote these?”

“They’re her most recent tapes. My secretary’s typed them up. She speaks very well, you’ll notice. There are only a few places where the words are garbled. And remarkably few places where she goes back to correct herself or misspeaks.”

Corde flipped through the stack. “There must be a hundred pages here.”

“Close to it.”

He had thought all along that the whole idea was silly. If Sarah was going to do all this work why not make her copy a history book or science book? Something practical? Something that she could use in school. What possible benefit did these stories have? But he kept this to himself. He knew he’d play along with the doctor. She was the expert; besides, Bill Corde was nothing if not a sport.

“Is it really a book?”

“More a collection of short stories with recurrent characters. Like the Winnie the Pooh stories or
Song of the South
. You know, Br’er Fox and Br’er Rabbit.”

“Are they any good?”

“Mr. Corde, for a nine-year-old with her history and her problems they are remarkable.”

“What should I do with them?”

“You? Nothing. Dr. Breck is using these stories in Sarah’s exercises. Her learning will be exponentially increased if she works with words that she herself has created.”

Exponentially
. “Sure. It’s probably a lot of fun too.”

Some blunder here. Dr. Parker was frowning. “It’s
mostly
a great deal of work.”

“Sure. I’ll bet it is.” Corde riffled the pages again and let the breeze scented with typewriter oil and expensive bond paper blow into his face. He rose and started toward the waiting room, where Sarah was waiting. “She did this all by herself? Hell, I get sweaty hands every time I have to write out an incident explanation on an MV-204 form.”

“Maybe your daughter can teach you a few things, Mr. Corde,” Dr. Parker said, and allowed herself an indulgent smile.

Bill Corde doesn’t know what to think.

He sits on a folding chair in his den and flips back and forth through Sarah’s book. He’s read about shape-changing
wizards, about dragons and princesses and talking cars, flying loaves of bread, dancing blackbirds and bobcats that sing opera under full moons.

“Why bobcats?”

“Because that’s what they are,” Sarah explains.

“Why opera?”

“Because,” she answers with such exasperation that Corde, who asked the question solely because he couldn’t think of anything else to say, feels ashamed and therefore doesn’t ask why the full moon, which he’d intended to.

“This is what Dr. Breck and I are doing,” she explains, touching the typed sheets first then a blank piece of paper in front of her. “We move all these words over here like they’re on a magic train.”

“A train. Ah.”

They sit in the den, Corde with his shoes off, stretched back on the couch feeling like a dog in front of a fire. Sarah is at the wobbly desk. Corde had been by the hospital at seven that morning. He is utterly exhausted though much of that fatigue is held at bay by his daughter’s enthusiasm for copying her book. Her leg vibrates with excitement at her task.

It’s a mystery to Corde, all these stories of magic otters and flying eagles and trolls and shining wizards. Corde’s library contains mostly hunting and fishing nonfiction. The animals he reads about are wolves and grizzlies and damn clever trout who elude the most well-placed tufts of fly. They do not wear aviator hats and wetsuits and they do not hold parties in tree trunks or sing any kind of music in the moonlight.

He decides that his daughter would be the kind of film director whose movies he would not go to see.

But he can compliment her on her work, which he does, and watch with fascination as she leans forward, writing with the awkward elegance of a doe on ice.

Corde notices her techniques. With her index finger she writes letters and words on her palm, she traces the letters in a dust of salt on the tabletop, she tears sheets of
paper containing a single word into portions of the word and stares at them. Corde himself forgets what the fragments of words are called.
Syllabus?
No. Then he remembers,
syllables
. Although her spelling still needs much work, her self-confidence is bursting. He has never seen her enjoy herself this way. He looks at the first page of the slim stack of sheets Sarah has printed.

Corde stares at this for a few minutes, wondering if jealousy will surface. It does not.

When she finishes, Corde rises to leave. He watches her for a moment then leans forward and hugs her suddenly and hard. This surprises and pleases her and she hugs back enthusiastically. Corde does not tell his daughter that the complex gratitude he is filled with is only in part for her.