The Lesson of Her Death (13 page)

“We got ourselves a relatively unperverse community,” Ebbans commented, noting that these numbers—except for the sheep—were considerably lower than the state average per thousand residents.

Corde and Ebbans had just learned that every one of the rapists and the assaulters was accounted for. Ebbans said he’d do an informal check of the exhibitionists and peepers. He was not enthusiastic about the prospect.

“It’ll be a waste, I know,” Corde said. “But we gotta do it.”

Ribbon had come up and was tugging at an earlobe as he looked over the list and chuckled. Lance Miller walked into the office, just returned from the dorm. Corde noticed that he was vastly uncomfortable.

“Whatcha got, Lance?”

The young man plunked his hat onto a rack beside the door and buffed his crewcut with his pink fingers. He walked to the cluster of senior officers. His eyes fished around the office. “Well, Bill, I went over there to that McReynolds place, the dorm, with the Crime Scene fellows. Like you asked.”

Corde motioned impatiently with his hand. “She coming in to be interviewed? Emily?”

“Well, I just talked to her for a minute. She’s real pretty.”

“Who’s that?” Ribbon asked.

Corde said, “Jennie’s roommate.”

“She was damn upset,” Miller continued. “She said it seems somebody broke into the dorm and stole all of Jennie’s letters. She—”

“Well, well, well …” the sheriff said. “That’s interesting.”

“She went to a memorial service they had for Jennie over at one of the churches yesterday and left the door unlocked. When she got back somebody’d stolen this folder with all Jennie’s letters and important papers.”

Corde was nodding.

“I asked around but almost everybody was at the service and nobody had any leads on the break-in.”

“Members of the cult maybe,” Ribbon offered, looking eyebrows-up at Corde.

Miller said, “There’s something else too.” His eyes had fallen to the desk and had focused on the phrase that said in green computer type,
Incidents of forcible sodomy to date
.

“Emily gave me a few things that this guy hadn’t stolen.”

“Good,” said Corde.

“One of them was a calendar from last year.” Miller cleared his throat.

“And?” Ribbon asked.

“A pocket calendar thing? It was in Emily’s desk and that’s why it wasn’t stolen.”

“What about it, Lance?” Corde was growing impatient.

Miller seemed relieved that he could now rely on visual aids. He flipped the battered gray booklet open to the prior year, January. Written in the square for a Saturday night toward the end of the month were the words:
Bill Corde. Nine
P.M.
My place
.

“I
interviewed her.”

“Part of a case?”

“The Biagotti case,” Corde said. His eyes were on the rumpled page of Jennie’s calendar for the last week in January. On Thursday she had to pick up her dry cleaning. On Friday she was going to the drugstore for shampoo, Tampax and Sudafed.

On Saturday she’d seen Bill Corde. Nine
P.M.
Her place.

Neither Ebbans, with his affection for Corde, nor Miller, with his inexperience on the job, wanted any part of this.

Ribbon’s eyes looked into Corde’s, which were two uneasy pools of green.

The sheriff squinted memories back into his thoughts and said, “That was after you got back from the task force, sure. It would’ve been around the end of
January.” He seemed measurelessly relieved at this. “You didn’t know her otherwise?”

“No.”

Then Ribbon’s face clouded again and his eyes fell to the calendar. “She called you Bill. What do you make of that?”

Ebbans wandered away to his temporary desk and sat down to make a phone call, real or imaginary.

Corde said calmly, “When I called Jennie up to see when I could interview her about the Biagotti case, she and I got to talking and it turned out we’d lived near each other in St. Louis. We, you know, chatted for a while about that. By the end of the conversation I called her Jennie. I guess she wrote down Bill.”

“You knew each other in St. Louis?”

“What exactly are you getting at?”

“Nothing, Bill. I’m not suggesting a single damn thing. I just have to keep an eye out for this sort of situation.”

“What sort of situation?”

“I just want everything on the table.”

“Everything is
on
the table.”

“Good. But while your dander’s up I’m just gonna ask one more question and then we’ll say good-bye to it. In the Biagotti file you’ve got a record of that conversation you had with Jennie?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I didn’t write anything down. I stopped by the dorm that Saturday. Nine o’clock. Jennie and I talked about fifteen minutes. She knew the Biagotti girl a little but that was it. Jennie was one of maybe fifty students I talked to about the case.”

“You didn’t talk to fifty of them on Saturday night.”

“But I talked to a lot of them then. And on Sunday morning too. And on Sunday night. And—”

“That’s a good answer.”

“That’s the true answer,” Corde shot back.

“Okay, Bill, don’t get riled. If I don’t ask, somebody else might. Let’s forget the whole thing.”

Ribbon tapped the sex offender printout. “This was a good idea, this sex stuff. I’d also check out, you know, occult bookstores and that sort of thing. I think there’s one of them not far from the campus on Waverly Street or Stinson. They’ve got a bulletin board in the doorway. See if they have announcements for cult … What do cults have? Services or meetings or something?”

“Probably services,” Miller said helpfully. “Being religious, I mean.”

“Well, I’d check that out. Absolutely.” Ribbon returned to his office. The floor wheezed under his solid footsteps.

Corde found Ebbans and Miller staring at him. Ebbans punched a number into the phone. Corde handed Jennie’s calendar to Miller. “Log that into evidence, Deputy. And let’s get back to work.”

For a time after he’d met with Dean Larraby he felt like General George Thomas who in 1863 earned his nickname the Rock of Chickamauga by preventing Braxton Bragg’s counterattack from becoming a total rout of the Union forces. Faced with overwhelming odds and bowed under losses but infinitely confident and strong.

By now though Professor and Associate Dean Randolph Rutherford Sayles is pierced with a despair as sharp as any triangular musket bayonet. He sits where he has sat for the past three hours, smoking his thirteenth cigarette of the afternoon, in the Holiday Inn on the Business Loop with four Auden University trustees from the East Coast. Their transcripts he is not familiar with, but this he has finally concluded about them: They are men who view Auden as a trade school. Two are lawyers, one is the director of a large nonprofit philanthropic organization and one is a doctor. Their interest
in the school derives from the Poli Sci Department, the business school, the Biology Department.

They never glean of course that Sayles holds them in patient contempt for their philistine perspective on education. He can’t afford for them to catch on; either personally or through their fund-raising efforts these four are responsible for close to eleven million dollars a year of funding for the school. Sayles the history professor thinks they are rich fools; Sayles the associate dean of financial aid, immersed presently in hot fucking water, charms them effusively as they indulge in dishes of bad fruit salad in the Riverside dining room.

Occasionally they seem to grow tired of Professor Sayles and their eyes dip toward a five-page document, which the professor prepared earlier in the day and which he views the way FAA inspectors might study the jagged remains of a 747.

“Gentlemen, Auden University is a qualifying not-for-profit corporation, which exempts the institution under the Internal Revenue Code Section 503(c) from paying federal income tax and from a parallel section in the state revenue code from paying state tax. Being a not-for-profit corporation, however, does not mean that it can lose money with impunity.” Ha ha ha. He catches each of their eyes seriatim. “So while the terms red and black don’t have the same meaning they might for, say, G.M., or IBM, we are seriously considering changing the school’s colors from black and gold to crimson.…”

He is passionate and funny, teasing his audience in the manner of a toastmaster, a serendipitous skill he has learned from years of lecturing to twenty-year-olds with attitudes. Yet these Easterners are immune and actually seem embarrassed for Sayles. One says, “We’ve got to start thinking more global on this. Let’s start a law school or hang some balls on the M.B.A. program. Move up into the Wharton frame of mind.”

“Hmm. High capital expense for that,” Sayles offers.
Try fifty million minimum
.

“Maybe a noncredit continuing education program?”

Sayles nods gravely, considering.
You stupid prick. Farmers and Kmart checkers aren’t going to pay good money to study Heidegger at night
. “Hmm. Small market for that,” he says.

One trustee, a trim, golf-playing lawyer, who turned down even the fruit cup as too caloric, says, “I don’t think we should be too fast to give up on Section 42(f) aid.” Under the state education law private colleges can qualify for grants if they admit a large number of minority students, regardless of their academic record.

The others gaze at him in puzzlement. At least here Sayles has allies. The lawyer says, “It was just a thought.”

“Three point six million,” Sayles says slowly, and the discussion goes round and round again. Sayles begins to understand something. These men court clients and patients and chief executive officers who routinely write them checks of ten twenty a hundred thousand dollars. They live with streaked-haired, face-lifted wives and are limoed to art museums and restaurants and offices. Aside from semiyearly meetings at Auden, Palm Springs and Aspen, they are never seen west of Amish country. He decides their interest in their alma mater is just that—an
interest
, nothing more. He is sickened by their suggestions, which are paltry and, worse, obvious; they are student responses to the assignment “How to Save Auden University.”

By the time the last dots of syrup have been sucked out of the fruit cups, Randy Sayles senses with a feeling of terrible waste that he is alone in this struggle to keep the school afloat. The school. And his own career. And perhaps his freedom.

The Easterners promise to keep their thinking caps on. They promise to increase their personal pledges. They promise to mount a campaign among their peers in the East. Then they shake Sayles’s hand and climb into
the limo (university-financed, fifty-six dollars an hour) for the ride to Harrison County Airport.

Sayles is in terrible despair. He returns to his office and, with the help of one of the school’s lawyers, fills out a Section 34 form requesting emergency state aid for private educational institutions. Too little. At best, Auden might receive six hundred thousand. But Sayles urges the lawyer to file the application anyway and to do so by fax. In a daze he watches the gray-suited lawyer leave his office and he has a vivid image from one of his own lectures—not of George H. Thomas rallying his troops to a bloody defiant stand but rather of Union General Irvin McDowell at Manassas Junction, watching in confused despair the spirits of his many men fly to heaven under the shocking clatter of Jackson’s guns.

“This is getting out of hand,” Bill Corde said.

Steve Ribbon brushed the newspaper delicately. He seemed to decide not to reply to Corde’s tight-lipped comment. The sheriff instead asked, “A goat?”