The Lesson of Her Death (19 page)

She stared for a minute then gave a fast burst of a laugh. “Oh, I see what you mean. No. The only reason I asked if it was Tuesday was to, you know, orient myself. Because of Sean. He …” She blinked. Hank’s head turned slowly toward her. Ebbans figured they had debated all evening about keeping their secret. Lisa began
to tremble. Ebbans wondered how loud the discussion between these two would be after he left.

“Sean is … ?” Ebbans asked.

“Our son,” Hank muttered.

Lisa said, “He
was
here on Tuesday. That’s right. I’d forgotten.” She swallowed hard and Ebbans wondered if she was going to cry. “Sean got home from a Rifle Club practice late.”

“What time would that have been?”

She looked at her husband and decided not to lie. “About ten.”

Ebbans asked, “Is Sean here now?”

“Well, he is,” Hank conceded. “But I doubt he can help you.”

Lisa said, “It was pretty dark. I don’t think he saw much.”

“Anything you tell me is confidential. Nobody’ll know he gave us any information.”

Hank walked to the stairs and called his son. A tall boy in jeans and a T-shirt appeared in a minute, looking assured, smiling, staring Ebbans right back in the eyes. Ebbans, who had two daughters and had never for one minute regretted that, thought he would love to have a son like Sean. “You heard about the girl was killed over by the dam.”

“Yessir. We heard the next day.”

“I understand you got home about ten. From the Rifle Club. What kind of gun you shoot?”

“Winchester 75. With a target barrel.”

“That’s a good gun. What’s your rank?”

“Sharpshooter. All positions.”

Ebbans jutted out his jaw, impressed, and asked, “You were outside about ten on Tuesday?”

“After I dumped the garbage bags in the bin I saw this raccoon and I chased him off, down toward the lake. I saw two people sitting on the other side of the dam.”

“What were they doing?”

Lisa said, “Don’t be afraid to say you don’t know, if you don’t.”

“Looked like they had tackle but it might just have been gym bags or something. They weren’t fishing.”

“Can you describe them?”

“Sorry, sir. Not too good.” He nodded vaguely toward where the dam must have been. “It’s a ways. All I could see was their, you know, outlines. Silhouettes.”

Ebbans said, “Could you tell if they were men or women, boys? White or black?”

“Well, I got the feeling they were guys. Kids from school, I mean.” He added formally, “I don’t believe they were African-Americans.”

“What did you see them do?”

“After a couple minutes they stood up and picked up whatever they were carrying and walked to the dam. There was this flash from one of their hands. I thought it was a knife. The way he held it.”

Ebbans said, “Might it have been a bottle or a soda can?”

“Yessir, could’ve been. They sat on the dam for a while then I saw one of them point and they ducked down and ran off into the bushes. I thought they might be hatters so—”

“Hatters?”

“You know, like geeks or something. So I put the bikes in the garage.”

“And you didn’t see them again?”

“Nosir. But I did see someone who walked by close to them. An old guy. He was fishing. He was about sixty, I’d guess. About my grandpa’s age. He was casting spoons but he had a fly fisherman’s hat on. A red one.”

“You haven’t seen him since?”

“Nosir. You want me to keep an eye out for him, I’ll be happy to do that.”

“No, honey,” Lisa said. “I mean, you’ve done plenty.”

With the authoritative voice of a middle manager, Hank said, “That’s not our job, son.”

“You won’t use his name, will you?” Lisa asked. “You won’t talk to reporters?”

“All names are confidential. I promise you that.” Ebbans looked at his watch and said he had to be going and thanked Lisa for the water and Hank for the time. He said to the boy, “I sure appreciate your help. It was a brave thing to do. And I’d appreciate anything else you can do for us.”

At the door, the only hand he shook was Sean’s.

In the dark they talked.

Brian Okun said, “Think about what you’re saying. What you’re calling melancholia was cynicism.”

The young woman considered this then said, “No, I don’t think so.”

“How much of Wallace Stevens have you read?”

They were in Okun’s apartment in downtown New Lebanon, a half mile from the quadrangle. This was the town’s sole urban tenement neighborhood, which consisted of one block of three-story walk-ups, eighty years old.

“Enough to know that he was sad,” Dahlia answered.

“Sad men don’t write poetry like his. Skeptics do. There’s a power about him.”

“What about ‘Sunday Morning’?” she asked. “You call that power? The woman has no energy. She’s almost paralyzed at the thought that there’s no God.”

“‘Sunday Morning’ is his most …” Okun found a word that conveyed contempt. “… accessible poem. It doesn’t count. But since you’ve brought it up I maintain that only a cynic would create that imagery in the first place.”

Dahlia was from Wichita but was of Eastern Indian ancestry. She was short and voluptuous (Okun called her “plump”—another nod to Dickens). He wished she knew more about the Modern poets. He said, “You forget
Stevens was a lawyer for an insurance company. A businessman. Wait! Wait …”

Okun, who was lying naked between Dahlia’s dark smooth thighs, tensed for a moment, slipped his penis out of her and came generously on her black fur of pubic hair. He squeezed against her and lay still for a moment.

He kissed her breast and said, “Are you okay?”

By which he meant did she have an orgasm. When she said a hesitant “I’m fine,” he rolled off her and began reciting from memory the Stevens poem “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction.”

They had been dating off and on for a year when Okun fell in love with Jennie Gebben. After the breakup with Jennie, Okun and Dahlia continued to see each other on occasion and more rarely to have lethargic sex. Not a word was ever spoken about marriage, monogamy or even vaguer commitments.

Although he was more frank with her than with anyone else at Auden, tonight she was unknowingly taking part in an experiment Okun was just about to commence.

He turned on the overhead light and lit a cigarette. He stared at a flap of paint on the ceiling, a flap that for some reason always made him think of the severed portion of Vincent van Gogh’s ear. “I was in Leon Gilchrist’s office today.”

“He’s off someplace, isn’t he?”

“San Francisco. Poetry conference at Berkeley.”

“He doesn’t seem like the UCB sort.”

“I have no idea what sort he is. The strange sort.”

Dahlia said, “He’s brilliant.”

“Stating the obvious diminishes you,” Okun said, a homemade aphorism he used often.

“He’s cute,” she said.

“Cute? Bullshit.”

“Well, I don’t know. Maybe not. He’s intense. I have trouble picturing him. He’s nondescript.”

“Oxymoron. How can he be intense and nondescript at the same time?”

She blotted her sable groin with his sheet. “I don’t know.”

“He had a draft of my evaluation for the faculty committee in his desk.”

“You went through his desk?”

“Do you know what he wrote in it?”

She asked, “How could you burgle his desk?”

“He said he did not want to work with me next semester. And he recommended that my advisor look long and hard at my dissertation.”

She was shocked. “He
what?”

“He said I was arrogant and lacked sufficient depth to be a talented professor. He said if the school insisted on hiring me after conferring the degree, it should be as a librarian.”

This was all true. When Okun had first read the words on Gilchrist’s evaluation form he had felt physically ill. He now had some distance, but reciting the professor’s scathing critique made his hands quiver with rage.

“Brian! Why did he say that?”

“He’s a vengeful prick is why. I’m as smart as he, I have more social skills and I want his job. He’s figured that out.”

“Why were you going through his desk?”

Okun barked, “I’m his graduate assistant. If I can’t have access to his desk, who can?” He then added coyly, “Can you keep a secret?”

“Brian.”

“It’s something I’ve been wrestling with. I’ve got to confide in somebody. It’s about him. Gilchrist.”

“You’re dying to tell me.”

“I shouldn’t.”

“Tell me.”

“Did you know that he and Jennie Gebben had an affair?”

“The girl who was killed? Ohmagod!”

“From almost the first week in September.”

“No!”

“He’s into S and M.”

“I knew that,” Dahlia said, surprising Okun, who had fabricated this detail—as he had the fact of the affair itself. He asked where she’d heard this. She shook her head. “Don’t know.”

Okun continued, “He used to tie her up and whip her tits. Oh and he’d piss on her. I think she pissed on him too.”

“God.”

Her wide-eyed expression of shock was delicious. Okun smiled then chuckled silently. Dahlia frowned across the pillow at him then grimaced and slapped his arm. “You’re making this up, you fuck.”

He laughed hard. “I doubt Gilchrist knew Jennie from, excuse the expression, a hole in the wall. But you swallowed it raw.”

“Prick. So you going to start a rumor, are you?”

Okun said, “He’s not going to crater me with a bad evaluation. He’s dumped on the wrong person.”

“But he could be arrested!”

“Divorce yourself from simplicity, darling.… He was in San Francisco when she was killed. They’ll find that out soon enough. I don’t want him to go to jail. I just want to make him sweat.”

“You know what I think?”

“I’m vindictive and petty?” he asked, curious.

“I think you should cut out the part about getting pissed on. That’s too sick for words. Nobody around here’d buy that.”

“Good point,” Okun said, always willing to take good advice. “A little paraphilia goes a long way. Kiss me.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because you scare me, Brian.”

“Me?”

“Yes, you.”

“Kiss me.”

“No.”

“Yes,” he commanded. And she did.

The security guard led Corde and Ebbans through the garbage room of Jennie’s dorm to an emergency exit.

It was early the next morning and the air was humid and filled with smell of lilac, dogwoods and hot tar from roofers forty feet above their heads.

Corde and Ebbans had returned to the dorm to see if they could find Emily. Corde thought they might catch her before she left the dorm. She wasn’t here although her bed had been slept in and the bar of Camay in the cream-color soap dish was wet. The detectives had waited in her room for nearly twenty minutes but she never returned. Just as the antsy guard seemed about to complain, Corde glanced out the window into the parking lot.

“Huhn.”

He’d written a note to Emily on one of his business cards and had left it on her desk. He then had said to Ebbans, “Follow me.”

Ebbans did, trailed by the guard, a man with a huge swelling of latticed nose, who hadn’t smiled at the men all morning.

Bill Corde pushed the stained bar on the gray fire door and stepped into the parking lot behind the dorm. The three men walked along a small grassy strip that separated the building from the parking lot. Grass and weeds. And oil drums painted green and white. Corde asked the guard, “Are those the school colors?”

“Nope. They’d be black and gold.”

“Ugly,” Ebbans said.

“You salute it, you don’t wear it,” the guard grumbled. “Least, I don’t.”

They saw however that not all the oil drums were green and white.

One was black.

“Fire?” Corde asked now as he walked up to the drum.

“Pranks.” The guard rubbed his great crosshatched nose and muttered, “That the way they be. Think they own the world, the students, you know what I’m saying? Be spoiling stuff for everybody.”

Corde peered into the drum.

“Let’s get it over. But slow.”

Together they eased the heavy drum to the ground. A small avalanche of ash puffed up a gray cloud. Corde and Ebbans went onto their knees and probed carefully, trying not to shatter the thin pieces of ash. There were two blackened wire spirals that had been the spines of notebooks. The rest was a mostly unrecognizable mound of ash and wads of melted plastic.

Corde found several fragments of unburnt white paper. There was no writing on them. He eased them aside. He then found half a scrap of green accounting printout paper filled with numbers.

“What’s this?”

Ebbans shrugged. “I don’t do brainy crimes.”

Corde put the scrap in a plastic bag.

Ebbans plucked a small pair of tweezers from the butt of a Swiss Army knife and reached forward. He gently lifted a bit of crinkly purple paper. All that remained was the upper lefthand corner.

“Her letters,” Ebbans said. There was triumph in his voice. “There you go, Bill.”

“A pile of ash is all they are.”

Ebbans often worked like a dog on scent. “Maybe, maybe not. Let’s keep going and see what we can find.”

Together the men crouched down and began their
search again. When they finished, an hour later, they had nothing to show for their effort but the scraps of paper they had found right off, and two uniforms filthied, it seemed, beyond saving.

Even from the distance he sees fear in their eyes, in their posture, in their cautious gait.

Driving along Cress Street, a shortcut to the Sheriff’s Department, Bill Corde watches people on the sidewalks of New Lebanon. Shades are drawn. More than the usual number of stores have not yet opened this morning although it is a glorious spring day in a town that has wakened early for a hundred and fifty years.

The people are skittish.
Like cattle in thunder
. Corde drums the steering wheel and wishes he hadn’t compared his good citizens to fed-out slaughter animals.

Ace Hardware, Lamston’s, Long’s Variety, Webb’s Lingerie and Foundations.… Stores or the descendants of stores identical to them that have been here forever. Stores he has walked past for years, stores he has shopped in and answered 911 calls at, stores whose owners he sees at PTA meetings. But today, as he cruises slowly in and out of elongated morning shadows, Corde hardly recognizes the street and its occupants. He feels what a soldier feels in an occupied foreign city. He thinks of his own time in uniform—when he once got lost in an old quarter of Berlin.