The Lesson of Her Death (49 page)

Jamie Corde listened to the lyrics chugging out of his Walkman headset. He was lying on his back, staring at the setting sun. He wanted to be able to tell the time by looking at where the sun was. But he didn’t know how. He wanted to be able to tell directions by the way certain trees grew but he couldn’t remember what kind of trees. He wanted to travel into a different dimension. Jamie zipped his jacket up tighter against the cool breeze and slipped down farther in the bowl of short grass to escape from the wind. It was probably close to supper-time but he was not hungry.

He turned the volume up.

Jamie was curious where the tape had come from. He’d returned home this afternoon after ditching wrestling practice and found it sitting on his windowsill. Geiger’s latest cassette—the tiny cover picture showing five skinny German musicians in leather with long hair streaming behind them, the lead guitarist wearing a noose around his tendony neck.

His parents would never have bought it for him. This particular album was totally fresh; it’d been banned in Florida, Atlanta and Dallas, and most of the record stores in Harrison County refused to carry it. Maybe the last time Philip was over he’d left it. One of the group’s songs, from a different, less-controversial album, had been used in
The Lost Dimension
and the two boys had listened to the soundtrack album frequently.

You think they care?

He held the tape player in both hands, lifted it to his face, pressed it against his cheek.

Do yourself, do yourself, do yourself now
.…

He thought about school, about Science Club, which was meeting right at this moment. They’d maybe look around and ask where’s Jamie? And nobody’d know and then somebody might say something about Philip but there wouldn’t be much talk about him because this was the end-of-year party and you were supposed to be having fun, drinking Coke and jamming pretzels into your mouth and talking about the summer not about members of the club who were fat and weird and who’d been shot dead by the police.

And also you weren’t supposed to talk about boys who cut school the evening of the party to sit next to a grave—friends who when they weren’t around you’d joke about being fags so fuck you fuck you fuck you.…

Just do yourself, do yourself, take a razor take a rope you don’t have any hope except to do yourself
.…

Jamie looked at the tombstone and realized he hadn’t known Philip’s middle name was Arthur. He wondered if that was some relative’s name. It seemed weird that his parents would give him a middle name at all because that was something normal parents did and Philip’s parents were total hatters.

Jamie sat back and looked at the freckled granite. But this time he saw:
JAMES WILLIAM CORDE
. Jamie imagined his own funeral and he saw his father
standing next to the grave. His father didn’t seem particularly sad. He was looking off into the distance, thinking about Sarah. Jamie pictured himself sitting alone in front of his own grave tracing the letters of his name. He did not, however, trace his middle name.

They bypassed Supersalesman and walked right into Amos Trout’s office. “Sorry to trouble you again, sir,” Corde said and introduced him to Kresge.

Trout said, “You in need of wall-to-wall, Deputy?”

Kresge said not just now but he’d discuss it with the wife.

Corde said, “I wonder if you could go through this book and tell me if you recognize the man you saw in the road that night.”

“Well, like I was telling you I can’t recall many details about him. That old Buick moves at a pretty good clip—”

“I’ve got an Olds corners like nobody’s business,” Kresge said. “G.M. can put a car together.”

“There you go,” said Trout.

“If you could maybe narrow it down to a few men might resemble the fellow you saw it’d make our job a whole lot easier.” Corde handed him a copy of the Auden University yearbook. Trout began to flip through it quickly.

“Take your time,” Corde said.

Corde’s heart thudded each time Trout tore off a small piece of paper and marked a page. When he was finished he flipped open to the marked pages and pointed out three men. He said. “I don’t think I’d feel right testifying but it could be any one of these fellows.”

Corde took the book and glanced at the names of the men Trout had marked. He looked up at Kresge, who nodded slowly. Corde thanked Trout and with Kresge in tow left the store, not bothering to jot down the names on his index cards.

Kresge—just back from his first official evidence photographing expedition—had taken the better pictures.

At the crime scene below the dam in April, Jim Slocum had forgotten to override the automatic focus of his 35mm camera and in the dark he’d sometimes pointed the infrared rangefinder at a bush or hump of rocks. Many of the pictures were out of focus. Several of them were badly overexposed. Kresge had taken his time with the Polaroid.

Sitting in the den that was really Corde’s fourth bedroom, surrounded by the debris of two double orders of the Marquette Grill’s steam-fried chicken, drinking coffee (Corde) and two-bag Lipton (Kresge) the men leaned close to the photos.

Six eight-by-tens of the footprints by the dam were tacked up on a corkboard next to an ad for a lawn service that guaranteed to make your lawn thick as cat’s fur and we mean purrfect. In the center of the board were Kresge’s small Polaroid squares.

“I think it’s these two,” Kresge said, tapping one of Slocum’s pictures and one of his own.

“Why?” Corde asked. “The tread’s similar but look at the size. The crime scene shoe’s fatter.”

Kresge said, “Well, that ground is wetter. By the dam, I mean. I was reading a book on crime scene forensics, … You know what that word means?”

Corde had forgotten. He thought for a minute, wondering how he could bluff past it and couldn’t think of a way. He said, “What?”

“It means pertaining to criminal or legal proceedings. I used to think it meant medicine, you know. But it doesn’t.”

“Hmmm,” Corde said, at least giving himself credit for not looking too impressed.

“Anyway, I was reading this book and it said that prints in mud change shape depending on how close they are to the water source and whether the print would get
drier or muddier with time. That dam’s got a runoff nearby and it’s uphill of where she was found—”

“How’d you know that?”

“I went there and looked.”

“So the print spread. Okay, but how come in the crime scene photo the feet don’t point out like in the one you took?”

“I think they do,” Kresge said. “We just don’t have him standing in one place. Look, the heavier indentation’s on the right of his right foot and in this one it’s on the left of his left. Means the man walks like a penguin.”

“Yessir,” Corde said. “It sure does.”

“So, I think they’re one and the same.”

“I do too, Wynton.” Corde pondered this information. “I think we’re real close to probable cause. But damn I’d love a motive. What else’ve we got?” He flipped through his cards then lifted out two and read them slowly. He said, “You remember that scrap of computer paper I showed you, the one I found behind Jennie’s dorm? Mostly burned up.”

“I couldn’t find out anything about it before I got laid off.”

“Well, in the morning I’d like to check on where it came from.”

Kresge winced. “Bill, the school’s hardly going to let me do that. I got fired. Remember?”

“Wynton, it’s not a question of
letting
you. We’ll get a search warrant. You’ve got to start thinking like a cop.”

Kresge nodded, flustered. “I haven’t been on the job too long, you know.”

“That’s not an excuse.”

At ten the next morning the men walked up the steps of the dark-brick house and rang the bell.

Wynton Kresge noticed the way Corde stood away from the front of the door as if somebody might shoot
through the oak. He doubted anybody was going to do that but he mimicked the detective.

A blond woman in her forties opened the door. Narrow shoulders in a white blouse widening to a dark plaid pleated skirt. She listed to her right under the weight of a large briefcase. She set it down.

Corde looked expectantly at Kresge, who cleared his throat and said, “Morning, ma’am, would your husband be home?”

She examined them uneasily. “What would this be about?”

Corde said, “Is he home, please?”

Kresge decided he wouldn’t have said that. He’d have answered her question.

She let them in. “In his study in the back of the house.”

The men walked past her. She smiled, curious. The motion spread the red lipstick slightly past the boundaries of her lips. “There.” She pointed to the room then left them. Corde’s hand went to the butt of his pistol. Kresge’s did too. They knocked on the door and walked in before there was an answer.

The man swiveled slowly in a shabby office chair, bleeding upholstery stuffing. Kresge wondered if he’d found the chair on the street in his poor graduate student days and kept it for sentiment. Kresge’s nostrils flared against the old-carpet smell, basement water in wool. He had a strong urge to walk directly to the nearest window and fling it wide open. The papers and books filling every available space added to the stifling closeness as did the jumble of old-time photos stacked against the wall. Everything was covered with thin films of dust.

Randy Sayles put a pencil tic next to his place in the massive volume he was reading, slipped a paperclip between the pages and closed the book.

A jay landed on a bush outside the window and picked at a small blond mulberry.

Bill Corde said, “Professor Sayles, we’re here to arrest you for the murder of Jennifer Gebben.”

S
ayles leaned back in the ancient chair. Sorrow was in his face but it seemed a manageable sorrow like that in the eyes of a distant relative at a funeral.

He listened to Corde recite the Miranda rights. Corde unceremoniously took his handcuffs out of the leather case on his belt. Sayles said a single word softly. Corde believed it was “No.” The professor’s tongue caressed his lips. One circuit. Two. He lifted his hands and rested them on his knees; they looked dirty because of the fine dark hairs coating his skin. Corde noticed that his feet pointed outward. He said, “Will you hold your wrists out, please?”

“Why do you think it’s me?” He asked this with unfeigned curiosity. He did not offer his wrists.

“A witness came forward and identified your picture in the yearbook. He saw you by the dam that night. Your hands?”

Sayles nodded and said, “The man in the car. He almost ran me over.”

Kresge said, “And your bootprint matches one found at the scene of the killing.” He looked at Corde to see if it was all right to volunteer this kind of information.

“My bootprint?” Sayles looked involuntarily at a muddy corner of the study where presumably a pair of boots had recently lain. “You took prints of mine from the yard?”

“Yessir,” Kresge said. “Shot pictures, actually.”

Sayles fidgeted with his hands, his face laced with the regret of a marathoner pulling up cramped a half mile shy of the finish. “Will you come with me?” Sayles stood up.

“For what?” Corde asked.

“I didn’t kill her.” Sayles seemed stricken with apathy.

“You’ll have your day in court, sir.”

“I can prove it right now.”

Corde looked at the eyes and what he saw was a load of disappointment—much more than desperation. He motioned with his head toward the door. “Five minutes. But you wear the cuffs.” He put them on.

As they left the house Kresge whispered, “So, okay, let me get this straight. If they say they didn’t do it we give them a chance to show us some new evidence? I just want to know the rules.”

“Wynton,” Corde said patiently, “there are no rules.”

The two men followed Sayles outside. They walked to the back of the house—ten feet from the place where Kresge had taken photos of Sayles’s footprints. Corde recognized the ruddy box elder root from the Polaroids. Corde glanced toward the front of the house. He believed he smelled cigarette smoke. Corde saw Sayles’s wife standing in the kitchen thirty feet away.