The Lesson of Her Death (29 page)

Jano repeated, “The girl at the pond. Emily something. Did you?”

He ate another mouthful. “Nope.”

Jano whispered, “I don’t believe you.”

“I didn’t do it, dude.”

“You wanted to fuck her so you killed her.”

“I did not.” With a pudgy finger Phathar worked a hull out from between an incisor and his gum.

“I am like totally freaked. What are we going to do?”

“Have some popcorn.”

“You are like too much, man. She’s dead too and you’re like—”

“So what? You saw the way the Honons mowed down the Valanies. They just like went in with the xasers and totally mowed them down. The women and the kids, everyone.”

“That’s a movie.”

Phathar repeated patiently, “I didn’t like kill her.”

“Did you find the knife?”

“I might have if I hadn’t been alone.”

“I couldn’t make it. I told you. Maybe you didn’t lose it.”

“I lost it.”

Jano said, “Man, we’ve got to get rid of everything.”

“I told you, I put a destructor on the files. It’s great. Here look.” Phathar walked to a locked metal file cabinet. He unlocked it and pulled a drawer open. Inside were stacks of charts and drawings and files. Resting on top of them was a coil from a space heater. “Look, this is a lock switch that I got from
Popular Mechanics
. It’s great. If you open the cabinet without shutting off the switch …” He reached inside the cabinet and pointed to two pieces of wood wound with wires pressing against each other, like a large clothespin. “… Somebody opens the drawer and it closes the circuit. The coil gets red hot in like seconds and torches everything.”

“Totally excellent,” Jano said with admiration. “What if it burns the house down?”

Phathar did not respond. Through the closed door, they heard Philip’s father singing some old song, “Strangers in the Night.”

Jano looked in the bottom drawer of the file cabinet. “What’s that?” He picked up the brown purse, smeared with mud.

Phathar froze. He was in a delicate position. This was his only friend in high school; he couldn’t do what he wanted to—which was to scream to him to put it back. He said simply, “It’s hers.”

Jano clicked it open. “The girl’s? The second one! You
did
do it!”

Phathar reached out and closed it. “Would you just chill? I saw her but—”

“I don’t see why you’re denying it, man.”

“—I
didn’t
kill her.”

“Why’d you keep it?”

“I don’t know.” Phathar in fact had wondered that a number of times. “It smells nice.”

“You get over with her too?” Jano had stopped looking shocked and was curious.

“Are you deaf? Like are you totally deaf?”

“Come on, Phathar, I tell you everything. What was it like?”

“You’re a fucking hatter. I followed her for a while but then I took off. There was some dude wandering around.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know.”

“They found her in the pond. Yuck. If you did it with her your dick’ll probably fall off, with that water. What’s in the purse?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t open it.” Phathar stood up and took the purse away from his friend. He put it in the file cabinet and laid another heater coil on top of it. He closed the drawer.

“I don’t think that’s a good place for it,” Jano said.

“How come?”

“Even with the destructor it’d take a while for the leather to catch fire.”

Phathar decided this might be true. He retrieved the purse. He held it out to Jano. “You take it. Throw it someplace.”

“No way. I don’t want to get caught with it. Why don’t you burn it?”

“I can’t. My dad’d whack me again. Maybe I’ll hide it under the porch and some night when he’s playing cards I’ll burn it.”

The terrible, glass-splintering crash came from the living room. The boys each stared at the dirt-smeared wall through which the sound had come. Philip dropped the purse into the empty popcorn bag and wadded it, along with some trash, into a green plastic garbage bag, which sat in the corner of his room. They stepped into the hall.

Philip’s mother was on the floor, on all fours, her knees spread out, skirt up to her trim waist. The eyes in her pretty face were nearly closed and her head lolled as the muscles in her smooth arms tried to keep her shoulders from dropping to the ground. Mr. Halpern stood above her, his hands gripping the stained orange blouse, saying desperately, “It’ll be all right, it’ll be all right. No, no, it’ll be all right.”

And she was repeating louder and in a shrill soprano, “Lemmealone, lemmealone!” In her hand was a white wad of cloth. On the stained carpet was a fresher stain of vomit. The smell of sour gin was thick in the air. Philip started to cry.

“Mrs. Halpern,” Jano whispered.

Philip’s father looked up. “Get the fuck out of here, both of you.”

Jano said, “But she’s sick.”

Whimpering, Philip said, “She’s not sick.”

“Get the fuck out!” his father shouted. “Both of you. Out out out!” He stamped his foot as if he were spooking dogs.

Philip said to Jano, “Please.”

“But—”

“Please,” Philip said. His friend fled outside. Staring out the front window Philip heard the scuffling of his mother’s shoes. His father had lifted her into an armchair and was whispering to her. Philip walked past his parents and out the back door then he slipped under the porch.

Philip hid the bag containing the purse under a mound of soft black dirt. He rocked back and forth in the crisp dusty leaves.

Oh, he was tired.

He was tired of so much. His father wore torn T-shirts and made the handy man visit. His mother packed him greasy sandwiches for lunch—when she made his lunch—and forgot to wash his clothes. There were enemies everywhere, everywhere you looked. His sister was a ’ho, he was fat. She was
Halpern
, he was
Philip
, Phil-lip. He got a D in phys ed and a B in biology and, while another glass shattered somewhere in the house above him, a single thought centered in his head—an image of a shy young girl leaning on a lab table and telling him how brave he was while Philip stuck a needle way deep into a frog’s brain then slit its belly open and watched the slick lump of a heart continue to beat on and on and on.

Bill Corde was sitting in infamous Room 121 of the Student Union. He was alone, surrounded by the now familiar scents of fatty meat, bitter paper and burnt coffee.

More students, more three-by-five cards. Today’s questions were similar to last week’s but they were not identical.

Today he was asking about
two
victims.

Corde took notes, jotting down the boxy oriental letters, but the hours were unproductive; he heard variations on what he had already learned or pointless, obscure
details. “Emily wore this yoked dress a lot then one day it got stolen from the laundry room. That was
just
before she was killed. I mean, like the
day
before.” Corde nodded and recorded this fact, unsure what it might mean or what he would ever do with it but afraid to let the item get away. He had this feeling often.

Many thoughts intruded on the interviews, not the least of which was a vague disquiet about Charlie Mahoney, the mysterious consultant. Ribbon had introduced them but the man had said little to Corde and been in a hurry to leave the office. Corde had not seen him since.

When Corde asked Ribbon what “real helpful insights” Mahoney had provided, picking up the sheriff’s phrase from the
Register
, he’d been as elusive as Corde expected. “Mahoney’s here as an observer is all. What I said was mostly for public relations. Trying to calm people down a little.”

Well, who the hell got ’em un-calm in the first place, with all this talk of a Moon Killer?

“I don’t want a civilian working on this case,” Corde said.

“I know
you
don’t,” Ribbon had answered cryptically and returned to his office.

Now, in Room 121, Corde looked at his watch. Four
P.M.
He wandered out to the cafeteria and bought an iced coffee. He finished it in three swallows. He was eager to go home. He nearly did so but his resolve broke—or discipline won—and he stepped to the door and waved a final student inside then told the others to come back tomorrow.

It was just as well that he did not leave. This last student was the one who told him Jennie Gebben’s secret.

She was round and had thick wrists and was worried about a double chin because she kept her head high throughout the interview. With that posture and the expensive flowered dress she seemed like an indulged East Coast princess.

The lazy Southern drawl disposed of that impression
quickly. “I do hope I can help you, officer. It’s a terrible thing that happened.”

Did she know either of the murdered girls? Just Jennie. How long had she known her? Two years. Yes, they shared some classes. No, they had never double-dated.

“Do you know either Professor Sayles or Brian Okun?”

“Sorry.”

“Do you know who Jennie might have been going out with?”

The fleshy neck was touched.

It reminded him compellingly of Jennie’s throat. Corde looked from the white flesh back to the paler white of his three-by-five cards.

“Well, would you be speaking of men she went out with?”

“Students, professors, anyone.”

“… or girls?”

The tip of Corde’s pen lowered to a card.

“Please go on.”

The girl played tensely with the elaborate lace tulle on the cuff of her dress. “Well, you know ’bout Jennie’s affair with that girl, don’tcha?”

After a pause he wrote “Bisexual?” in precise boxy letters and asked her to continue.

The girl touched her round pink lip with her tongue and made a circuit of Corde’s face. “Just rumors. Y’all know how it is.” The plump mouth closed.

“Please.”

Finally she said, “One time, the story goes, some girls were in a dorm across campus and saw Jennie in bed with another girl.”

The flesh was no longer pale but glowed with fire.

“Who was this other girl?”

“I was led to believe their … position in bed made it a little difficult to see her. If you understand what I’m saying.”

“Who were these girls who saw it?”

“I don’t know. I assumed you knew all about this.”
The frown produced not a single wrinkle in her perfect skin. “You know of course about the fight she had?”

“Tell me.”

“The Sunday before she died. Jennie was on the phone for a long time. It was late and she was whispering a lot but I got the impression she was talking to somebody she’d dumped. You know that tone? Like where you have to get meaner than you want to because they’re not taking no for an answer. They all were carrying on and my room is right near the phone and I was going to go out and tell her to hush when I heard her say, ‘Well, I love her and I don’t love you and that’s all there is to it.’ Then crash bang she hung up.”

“Loved ‘her’?”

“Right. I’m sure about that.”

“The call, did she make it or receive it?”

“She received it.”

No way to trace
. “Man or woman?”

“She sounded like she was talking to a man but maybe I’m projecting my own values. With her, I guess it could’ve been either. That’s all I know.”

“Nobody else has said anything about it.”

She shrugged. “Well, did y’all ask?”

“No.”

“Then that pretty much explains it, would’n you say?”

When she had gone Corde bundled his cards together and tossed them into his briefcase. He noticed that the phone booth up the hall was free and he walked quickly to it. As he stood waiting for someone to answer his call, two young men walked past lost in loud debate. “You’re not listening to me. I’m saying there’s perception and there’s reality. They’re
both
valid. I’ll prove it to you. Like, see that cop over there? …” But at that moment T.T. Ebbans said hello and Corde never heard the end of the discussion.

He lusted for her.

What a phenomenon! He was actually salivating, his nostrils flaring as if he could smell her and he wanted more than anything to pull open her white blouse and slip a high-rider breast into his mouth.

Brian Okun said to Victoria Feinstein, “I’m thinking of doing a seminar on gender identity in the Romantic era. Would you be interested in being on the panel?”

“Interesting idea,” she said, and crossed legs encased in tight black jeans.

They were sitting in the Arts and Sciences cafeteria, coffee before them. Victoria was Okun’s most brilliant student. She had stormed onto campus from Central Park West and Seventy-second Street. He had read her first paper of the semester, “Gynocriticism and the Old New Left,” and bolstered by her self-rising breasts and hard buttocks decided she was everything that Jennie Gebben was and considerably more.

Alas this proved too literally true however and he found with bitterness that certain aspects of her knowledge—semiotics, for instance, and South American writers (currently chic topics in the MLA)—vastly outweighed his, a discrepancy she gleefully flaunted. Okun’s hampered hope vaporized one day when he saw Victoria Feinstein kiss a woman on the lips outside his classroom. Still Okun admired her immensely and spoke to her often.