The Lesson of Her Death (41 page)

PH: No. Did Jamie tell you that?

DBB: Nobody told me. The prosecutor thinks you were there.

PH: Well, I wasn’t.

DBB: You weren’t there at the pond?

PH: I don’t know. I don’t remember.

DBB: The deputies found some bootmarks near where the Rossiter girl was killed. They seem to match boots you had in your garage.

PH: Well … (long pause). I think they planted those boots there.

DBB: Philip, I’m on your side. You have to be honest with me. I know you’re scared and a lot is happening to you. But you have to tell me the truth.

PH: I don’t know what happened.

DBB: Did you threaten Detective Corde or his family?

PH: No. I never did. Who said I did?

DBB: Calm down, Philip. Is there anything you can tell me that might prove you didn’t kill the Rossiter girl?

PH: I don’t know.

The dean was on the phone when he walked in. She looked at Wynton Kresge and motioned him inside then hung up.

“You wanted to see me?” he asked.

The dean stood up and walked across her office. It was a lot plusher than Kresge’s but he didn’t care for it. Too many scrolly twists of wood and ceramic vases and immense nineteenth-century portraits. She closed the door and returned to her seat.

Kresge was tired so he sat too.

“Wynton,” she began, “I’d like to talk to you about the incidents.”

“Incidents?”

“The girls’ deaths.”

“Right. Sure.”

“I mentioned that it was important for the school not to be too involved. I can’t tell you the fallout we’ve had because of the investigation that Detective Corde was doing. Several of our lenders told Professor Sayles point-blank that they would not refinance their loans to us because they’d heard about lesbian orgies in the dorms. Thank God they’ve caught that young man.”

“I’m sure Bill didn’t say anything about orgies.”

“Well, this is just background, Wynton,” the dean said. “The reason I called you here is that I’m afraid I’ll have to let you go.”

“Go?”

“I’ve gotten a report from the Finance Committee. Did you authorize the placement of some advertising in the
Register?”

Ads. The ads that Bill Corde couldn’t pay for. “That’s right, I did.”

“You have no authority to approve nonsecurity expenses.”

“I’d say it was pretty much a security expense. It was to find the killer of two of our students.”

“Wynton, you made an unauthorized expense. It’s the same as embezzlement.”

“That’s slander, Dean,” said Wynton Kresge, who owned more law books than hunting books.

“It’s a serious breach of procedures. The Personnel Department will be contacting you about the severance package, which is extremely generous under the circumstances.”

She didn’t say anything more. She hunkered down in her chair and waited for the onslaught.

Kresge let her flash through a few EEOC nightmares
for a long moment then said calmly, “That’d be effective today?”

“Yes, Wynton. And I’m sorry.”

“Well, Dean, I hope this’s all you have to be sorry about,” he said cryptically, and left the office.

C
hunk.

Lying on the bottom bunk, looking up at the xaser coils above his face, he heard the sound.

Philip Halpern blinked and felt a low punch in his stomach. He recognized the noise instantly. The door of the family’s Chevy station wagon slamming. His palms began sweating. His fingers twitched. He stood up and looked through thick bars and thin glass to see what he knew he’d see: his mother coming to visit. He’d been expecting her—

NO, NO, NO!

Oh, God. He’d found it, the plastic Hefty bag with the dead girl’s purse inside! His father, not forty feet away, holding the bag Philip had buried under the back porch.

The boy stared at his father talking with Sheriff Ribbon, bleak expressions on both their faces. Ribbon pointed back toward the cell. His father stared for a long
moment as if he was trying to decide whether he should visit his son. Then they both turned and walked up the street, away from the jail.

These two men looked like any good old boys in New Lebanon, sitting at a green Formica booth in the drugstore. Their solid shoulders arching over heavy white coffee cups. The kind of men who would stand up quick when they heard the four-bar intro of the “Star-Spangled Banner.” The kind of men who’d buy a NAPA carburetor at nine
A.M.
on Saturday and have it seated by ten-thirty. The kind that talked about the price of propane and what poppers the bass were hitting on.

Right now these two men were talking about murder.

“My boy’s got his share of problems,” Creth Halpern said. “He’s got more weight than he ought. It’s soft weight. It’s girl weight. I don’t know where he gets it. His mother’s a drinker, you know that. I think maybe that mixed up his chrome zones.”

Steve Ribbon nodded and kept stirring the coffee he had no taste for. He listened. This was a pain and in spades.

“Take them pictures.” Halpern was whispering, as if admitting things he’d never in his life spoken out loud. “The pictures you boys found. I’d sometimes find these girlie magazines. Not like
Playboy
. It was just plain smut. Pictures of people, you know, humping. I don’t know where he got them from. I was ascared it was somebody older. Some man. Phil’s a little girlish like I say.” Halpern smiled and looked at a Heinz bottle as he sailed over the second great tragedy of his life. “But the pictures weren’t of queers.”

Ribbon asked, “What you getting at exactly, Creth?”

“He’s not the kind of boy would hurt anybody. I don’t want him to go to prison.”

“You
showed us the shorts. That he tried to burn.”

“I was mad then. I wanted to whup him. I feel different now.”

“Why you talking to me? You hired Dennis Brann.”

“I don’t do well by lawyers. I didn’t take to Brann or him to me.”

“It doesn’t look real good for Philip, Creth.”

“He’s not bad. He’s a disappointment is what he is. You know what’d happen to him if he went to jail?” Halpern glanced at Ribbon, who was silent but who knew exactly what would happen to Philip in general population at the state prison in Warwick and probably on his first day there.

Halpern said, “I can’t say I love the boy. I gave up trying a time ago. But I … I don’t know.”

“Brann’s an all-right shyster. He’ll give it a good shot.”

“Well, look here what I found.” Halpern lifted the torn, filthy plastic bag onto the countertop. Crumbs of dirt and popcorn fell into a comma of spilled coffee on the Formica and dissolved. “I found it in this place where Phil played. Like a hiding place. Under the back porch.”

Ribbon opened up the bag. Inside was a purse, stained with mud. He shook it out on the table. He looked up at Halpern. He whispered harshly, “This’s one of the girls’? Hell, what’re you giving it to me for? It’ll convict him sure, Creth.”

“No, no.” Halpern shook his head. “There’s something you gotta see.”

They stood outside the one-story yellow-brick building in Higgins, both bent over a piece of computer printout paper.

“Well, we gotta do something with it,” Steve Ribbon said. “Damn, this is a wrinkle.”

Charlie Mahoney handed the printout back to Ribbon
then held up the clear plastic bag with a COC tag attached. He read the handwritten letter that was inside.

Ribbon waved the printout as if he were drying ink. “It says it’s a fifty-fifty chance. I don’t think we can ignore it.”

“I don’t think so either. Who is he? What’re his credentials?”

“A graphoanalyst. Works for the state. It’s admissible, Charlie. When Brann gets his hand on it, it’ll be back to square one and that’s gonna be a son of a bitch for all of us.”

“For all of us,” Mahoney repeated slowly. He glanced at Ribbon with a smile that meant if anything:
Why you fat shitfaced rube
.

Ribbon continued, “The case goes public again, they’ll start talking about Jennie and her girlfriend. And the school. I mean, this’ll fuck us both.” He glanced at the paper.

Mahoney said, “I’ll bet his father wrote it to get the kid off.”

“Nup, not the father. You don’t know him. He wouldn’t help his boy that way. But the kid himself might’ve written it and hid it knowing we’d find it.”

“Any chance at all it’s real we gotta give it to Brann. That’s the law,” Mahoney stuck a solid finger at Ribbon. “And say what you like,
you
had the investigation for two weeks before the county and everybody knows it. Your dick’s in the ringer just’s far as
all of ours
.…” He drew out the last words melodically.

Ribbon avoided the man’s relentless eyes. “This don’t disprove the case against the boy for the Gebben girl’s murder.”

“Damnit, Ribbon, you been harping on this cult serial killing shit since the case started. If the boy didn’t kill the second girl then where’s that theory of yours go?

Ribbon said, “You’ve seen the kid. All those magazines, the pictures, the porn, all that cult crapola. The knife. He guilty or not?”

Mahoney shrugged. “Probably.”

“What if we was to get a confession outa him?” Ribbon said, and to Mahoney’s relief touched away a web of spit that had formed in the corner of his mouth.

“Confession. Uhm.”

“Could you do that?” Ribbon asked. “You’ve gotten confessions before?”

Mahoney snorted.

“It sounds like something you’d be good at, getting confessions.”

“Yeah,” Mahoney said, both pleased by the stroking and feeling utter contempt at Ribbon for resorting to it.

“He’s in the lockup right now.”

Mahoney looked at his watch.

Ribbon said, “I think sooner rather than later’d be best, don’t you?”

“What about the other deputies?”

“I can arrange for you to be alone with him.”

“Now?”

“Completely alone.”

He didn’t have a fifty-thousand-joule xaser gun.

He didn’t even have his father’s Ruger .22.

But Philip Halpern had one weapon.

He turned back to his cell and stripped the sheet off his bunk. Philip lifted it to his wet mouth and with his teeth tore four notches in the cheap cloth. He ripped the sheet into strips and tied them together. He pushed the table into the exact center of the room and after a struggle climbed up on top of it. He took hold of the metal overhead lamp shade. A wispy avalanche of dust fell. He breathed it in, coughing and blinking. He smelled the pungent odor of his sweat mixed with pine-scented Lysol. Philip wrapped the sheet-rope around his neck and then looped it around the electric cord.

He stared up.
Penny-Saver Soft Light Registered Trademark Sixty Watts Made in USA
. The nearness of
the cheap bulb began to erode his vision. The words faded, the flecks of dust and the corpses of fried bugs on the metal shade grew indistinct. The room became bright as heaven. Philip Halpern lowered his arms.

They heard the boy’s loud moan.

Lance Miller cocked his head and said, “Sounds like he’s not feeling good. Maybe we ought to get him something.”

“Shore,” the county deputy said. “How ’bout a ice-cold girl.”

Lance Miller looked up from
USA Today
. “Already had hisself two of them.” He returned to an article about Jay Leno.

“Can you get a dose from a corpse?” the county deputy mused.

“That’s disgusting,” Miller told him.

Another moan, loud and eerie.

“Should we check on him?”

“You see the pictures of his sister’s boobs?” Miller asked.

“Missed ’em.”

“He tried to burn them.”

“Her boobs?”

“No, the pictures,” Miller said.

“What were they like?”

“Close-ups, you know. Polaroids.”

“No, her boobs,” the deputy said.

“Not real big. The picture was dark. He didn’t use a flash.”

They heard the moan again and looked at each other. “He’s beating off in there,” the deputy said.

“What if he’s really sick?”

“I dunno. How ’bout you look now. I’ll look later.”

“If he’s puking I’m not cleaning it up.”

“We’ll draw straws.”

Lance Miller walked into the lockup area, closed the door and continued down the corridor to Philip’s cell.

He saw: the boy, the sheet-rope, the table.

“Oh shit. Oh shit.” He fumbled with his key and swung open the door to the cell and leapt up on the table, reaching for the boy’s shoulders.

Which is when Philip started to fall.

Behind him trailed the strip of sheet, which he hadn’t tied to the lamp, or to anything at all. It streamed behind him like a tail of Dimensional cloak. Firing his secret weapon at Miller—not fifty-thousand joules, not a xaser, not a Honon whip but his two hundred plus pounds of weight. The deputy, struggling to get his balance, slipped onto the concrete floor and landed on his back. Philip continued downward and landed directly on him. There was a huge snap. Lance Miller groaned once then passed out.

Philip grabbed Miller’s keys and his Smith & Wesson and walked out of the cell. He unlatched the back door of the lockup, then slipped into Town Hall and out the back door. Once outside he sprinted away from the town building then out of downtown, his lungs sucking air. As the pain in his chest grew, a momentary thought occurred to him—he felt grateful, ebullient even, that he had been in jail and had missed the anguish of the long-distance run in PE class. Now he put his head down and ran faster than he ever had in school. Faster than he’d ever run in his life. Philip ran, he ran, he ran.