The Lesson of Her Death (48 page)

The telephone rang. He answered it. He listened then looked at his watch. Wynton Kresge said, “Well, I don’t know.” He listened some more. “Well, I guess.” He hung up.

W
ynton, come on, get the lead out of your cheeks. You look like a walking tombstone.”

Corde spun the squad car around the corner and pressed the accelerator down. The four-barrel engine, factory-goosed so it could catch ’Vettes and Irocs, pushed both men back in the vinyl seat.
Come on Wynton cheer up cheer up cheer up
.

“What you got there?” Kresge looked at the seat under Corde’s butt. “What you’re sitting on?”

A backrest of round wooden balls strung together. It looked like a doormat. “Good for the back,” Corde said. “It’s like it massages you.”

Kresge looked away as if he’d already forgotten he’d asked the question.

“You like to fish?” Corde asked him.

“I don’t want to today.”

“You don’t what?”

After a moment Kresge resumed the conversation. “Want to go fishing.”

“We’re not going fishing,” Corde said. “But do you like to?”

“I like to hunt.”

“I like to fish,” Corde said. “Hunting’s good too.”

They drove past the pond where Jennie Gebben and Emily Rossiter had died. Corde didn’t slow down and neither of them said a word as they sped on toward the Fredericksberg Highway.

After ten minutes Kresge touched the barrel of the riot gun lock-clamped muzzle-up between them. “What’s this loaded with?”

“Double-ought.”

“I thought maybe it was rock salt or plastic bullets or something.”

“Nope. Lead pellets.”

“You don’t have to use steel? I thought with the wetlands and everything you had to use steel.”

Corde said, “It’s not like we shoot that much buckshot at people ’round here.”

“Yeah, I guess not. You ever used it?”

“Drew a target a couple times. Never pulled the trigger, I’m mighty pleased to say. You got a pretty wife.”

“Yep.”

“How many kids you got, all told?”

“Seven. Where we going?”

“Fredericksberg.”

“Oh. How come?”

“Because,” Corde said.

“Oh.”

Twenty minutes later they pulled into a large parking lot and walked into the County Building. They passed the County Sheriff’s Department. Corde noticed an empty office being painted. It was T.T.’s old one. There was no name on the plate next to the door. He could picture a nameplate that said
S. A. Ribbon
. Corde and Kresge continued on, to the office at the end of the
hall. Painted in gold on rippled glass a sign read,
County Clerk
.

Kresge stopped to study a
Wanted
poster in the hall. He said to Corde, “You got business, Detective, I can wait out here.”

“Naw, naw, come on in.”

Corde walked through a swinging gate and into a dark, woody old office presided over by a dusty oil painting of a judge who looked like he’d spent the entire portrait session thinking up cruel and unusual punishments.

From a desk under the window, a grizzled bald man, wearing a wrinkled white shirt, bow tie and suspenders, waved them over.

“Rest your bones, gentlemen.” The county clerk dug through the stacks of papers on his desk. “What’ve we got here, what’ve we got here.… Okay. Here we go.” He found a couple sheets of paper, dense with tiny type. He set them in front of him. “You’re a crazy son of a bitch, Corde, to pass up that chance.”

Corde said, “I probably am.”

“They were good and pissed, I’ll tell you. Nobody wanted it this way.”

“Uh-huh.”

“In case you hadn’t guessed.”

“I had.”

“What’s he mean?” Kresge asked Corde.

The clerk added loudly, as if he hoped to be overheard, “And nobody here is real happy we inherited you know who.”

Corde supposed he meant Ribbon. “You can’t pin that on me.”

The county clerk grew solemn then spread the papers out in front of him. He flipped through a three-ring binder. He stopped at one page and began speaking rapid-fire toward the book. “Okay raise your right hand by the power vested in me …”

Corde was looking at the sour portrait above their heads. Kresge followed his eyes. The clerk stopped reading
and looked at Kresge. “You gonna raise your hand or what?”

“Me?” Kresge said.

“You’re
the one being deputized.”

“Me?” The man’s baritone rose nearly to a tenor.

“Raise your hand, Wynton,” Corde said. Kresge did.

“By the power vested in me by the County of Harrison, you, Wynton Washington Kresge, are hereby appointed as special deputy pursuant to Revised State Code Title 12 Section 131.13. Repeat after me. ‘I, Wynton Washington Kresge …’”

Kresge cleared his throat, looking with astonishment at Corde. “What is this?”

Corde said, “Do what the man’s telling you.”

“I, Wynton Washington Kresge, do swear to uphold the laws of this state and to tirelessly and faithfully serve and protect the citizens of the County of Harrison and the municipalities located therein
.…”

“If you don’t want to say ‘so help me God,’” the clerk concluded, “you can say, ‘upon my solemn oath.’”

Kresge said, “So help me God.”

Corde shook his hand. The clerk gave him three pieces of paper to sign.

“You didn’t tell me.” Kresge whispered this to Corde.

“I need you, Wynton. I figured if I just drove you here you’d be less inclined to say no and go looking for a cushy office job someplace else.”

“Look, Detective, I’m grateful. I really am. But there’s no way I can afford to do this.”

Corde smiled cryptically. “You can’t afford not to. Talk to that pretty wife of yours. You’ll find some way to work it out.”

The clerk was impatient. “You two talk about this later, will you?” He finished the paperwork and folded a couple sheets like a subpoena. He handed one to Kresge. “Go over to County Central Booking and get fingerprinted on the same form and have a picture ID taken in Personnel. The same building. Bill’ll tell you where it is.
Have both these copies notarized. Lucy can do it if she’s not at lunch, and if she is go to Farmer’s Bank. Ask for Sally Anne. Bring me back one copy.”

“But I haven’t even thought about it.”

“You’re a special deputy, which sounds good but don’t let it go to your head, it’s the lowest rank we’ve got. You have a pistol permit?”

“Yes, I do. I did the small-arms course at Higgins. My score—”

“You have to buy your own weapon but you get reimbursed up to two hundred. Automatics are okay but you can only use accepted loads, the ones on here.” He handed Kresge a badly photocopied sheet of paper. “Don’t get caught with anything heavier. And if you file the trigger it can’t be easier than a nine-pound pull.”

Kresge nodded and Corde noticed that he’d stopped arguing.

The clerk continued, “Your pay is twenty-nine-five annual, prorated for however long you’re with us. You’ll be assigned to Bill for whatever he needs you for. Ha, ha, big guess. You folks finish up the Gebben case and get this sicko under, we can find a permanent place for you here at the county if you get certified by the state police academy.

“Now, you get benefits as long as you work more than twenty-five hours a week but you gotta take a physical. And for the family you gotta pay something. You got a wife and kids?”

“Seven.”

Corde added, “That’s the kids. He’s only got one wife.”

“Oh, one more thing …” He tossed Kresge a plastic-wrapped green vinyl notebook about six by nine inches, three hundred or so pages thick. “That’s the state penal code and the
Deputy’s Procedural Guide
. Read ’em. Learn ’em.”

“Yessir.” Kresge was lit up with modest pride. “Do I salute?”

“It’s all in there.” The clerk tapped the
Guide
.

Jennie—

You wanted someone to teach you about love, and all you found was someone to teach you how to die.

Why did you go that night? You said it was over.

Do I believe you or not?

Not knowing is almost as hard as life without you.

Why, kiddo, why?

Till we meet soon, Em

“It was where?”

“In Emily’s purse the night she drowned.”

Wynton Kresge said, “They thought the Halpern boy wrote that? A fifteen-year-old kid?”

Corde said, “Uhn.”

Sitting in the New Lebanon Sheriff’s Department, wearing a uniform as spotless and pressed as Corde’s, Kresge dropped Emily’s plastic-encased note on Corde’s desk while Corde read the report aloud. “‘Graphoanalysis of Subject Document. My professional opinion is that there is no more than a 50 percent probability that the handwriting is that of Subject Emily Rossiter. Significant similarities are five-degree backslant and short ascenders and descenders and looped capital letters. Deviation from samples submitted are significant but may be attributable to inebriation, drug use, emotional disturbance or unsteadiness of writing surface.’”

“Why didn’t Philip say anything about it?”

“Maybe he didn’t see it. Maybe he saw it and it didn’t mean anything to him.” Corde looked at the letter for a long moment then said, “Let’s assume it’s really Emily’s, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Does it tell us anything?”

“Well, it says two things. First, it’s a suicide note. So it means—”

“Suggests,” Corde corrected.

“Suggests
that Emily killed herself. She wasn’t murdered.”

“Okay. What’s the second thing?”

“That the Halpern boy didn’t kill Jennie either. I mean, it
implies
that he didn’t.”

“Why?”

“Because the ‘someone’ Emily mentions is probably, well, maybe, the killer. Someone Jennie had an affair with, I’d guess. She sure didn’t have an affair with Philip Halpern.”

“Because of where she says she thought it was over?”

“Yeah. Like the affair was over.”

Corde said, “And look at ‘go that night.’ Tuesday night, she might be talking about.” He opened his attache case. The now-tattered picture of Jennie Gebben fresh off the volleyball court stared down at stacks of plump, dog-eared three-by-five cards. He flipped through one pile and extracted a card.

“That your computer, Bill?”

“Computer, ha. Here we go. Between about five and six on the night Jennie was killed she and Emily had a serious discussion of some kind. Maybe an argument. And Emily was moody that night. She didn’t join her friends for supper.”

“So maybe Jennie was going to see her lover, or former lover, and Emily was ticked off.”

“Could be.”

“Wait,” Corde said. He dug through another card. “The girl who told me that Jennie was bisexual also said that she’d had a fight with somebody the Sunday night she was killed. She said, ‘I love her, I don’t love you.’ What if she agreed to
meet
that man—”

“Or woman,” Kresge added.

Corde raised an eyebrow, acknowledging the point. “Possibly. But Trout, the carpet guy, said he saw a man.… What if she agreed to meet him one last time, and he killed her?”

“That’s sounding pretty good.”

“But what about the DNA match? It was Philip’s semen found at the scene.”

“Damn, that’s right.” Kresge frowned.

“Don’t agree with me too fast.”

Kresge considered for a minute and said, “Maybe the lover killed her. Then the boy came along and raped her—”

“Actually, if she was dead first, it wasn’t rape. It was violation of human remains. Misdemeanor.”

“Oh.” Kresge looked troubled. “I’ve got a hell of a lot to learn.”

Corde mused, “Well, why didn’t Emily come to us and tell us what she knew? Wouldn’t she want the killer arrested?”

“Maybe she didn’t know his name. If the girls were lovers then somebody Jennie’d had an affair with’d be a sore point between them. Emily maybe didn’t want to hear about him.”

“Good point, Wynton. But she could still come in and tell us that
somebody
Jennie had an affair with had killed her.”

Kresge had to agree with that.

Then Corde said, “Of course look what happened. Emily killed herself. She was pretty crazy with grief, I suppose. She wouldn’t be thinking about police. All she knew was her lover was dead.”

Kresge nodded. “That’s good. Yeah, I’ll buy that.”

“We got our work cut out for us.” He selected one stack of cards and tossed it to Kresge. “What we know about Jennie, there’re a lot of people who might’ve had affairs with her.”

“Well, there can’t be that many who’re professors.”

“Professors?”

Kresge tapped the plastic. “Well, she’s talking about a professor, isn’t she?”

Corde stared for the answer in the note. He looked up and shook his head. “Why do you say that?”

“Well,” Kresge said, “it says ‘teach.’ I just assumed she was talking about one of her professors.”

“Well, Emily could’ve meant that like in a general sense.”

“Could be,” Kresge conceded. “But maybe we could save ourselves a lot of time by checking out the professors first.”

Corde picked up the cards and replaced them in his briefcase. He said,
“This
time we get to use the siren, Wynton.
And
the lights.”