The Lesson of Her Death (35 page)

“What’s your name?”

“I didn’t do anything.”

“I’d just like to talk to you.” The deputy was smiling but Jano’d seen that smile before and didn’t believe it. A lying smile. The same smile his father kept on his face. “I understand you and a friend were fishing here at night about ten days ago.”

Jano couldn’t speak. He found his skin was contracting with terror and he imagined that his bowl of thick hair was vibrating visibly. Other footsteps sounded behind him. He turned.

Lance Miller grinned and said to him, “Hey, how you doing?”

Jano didn’t answer.

The other cop looked at Miller and said, “You know him?”

“Sure, T.T.,” Miller said. “This’s Bill Corde’s son. Didn’t you introduce yourself, Jamie?”

W
ith panic in his voice Randy Sayles said, “I have a lecture.”

“He said it’s now’r never.”

“A LECTURE!”

“Professor,” the departmental secretary said, “I’m only reporting to you what he said.”

“Shit.”

“Professor. There’s no need to be vulgar.”

He sat at his desk at nine o’clock in the morning, gripping the telephone receiver in his hand as if he were trying to squeeze out an answer to the dilemma. Sayles’s last lecture of the year was scheduled to begin in one hour. It was set against the centennial celebrations throughout the U.S. in 1876. The climax was a spellbinding account (his students’, not his, review) of the Custer massacre. For him to miss this particular class was obscene. This fucko fund-raising crap had totally disrupted his teaching and he was torrid with rage.

He said, “Tell him to hold.” He dialed the dean. Her secretary said she was out.

“Shit.”

Yes, no, yes, no? Sayles said into the receiver, “Okay, I’ll see him. Get Darby to take over for me.”

“The students will be disappointed.”

“You’re
the one who told me it was now or never!”

She said, “I was only—”

“Get Darby.” Sayles banged the phone down and ran from his office, hurrying to his car. As he roared out of the professors’ parking lot, he laid down two streaks of simmering rubber as if he were a sixteen-year-old in a stolen ’Vette.

He paced across the gold carpet, staring down at the stain made by the cola Sarah spilled the night Emily was murdered.

“Oh, Bill.”

“It doesn’t mean I’m fired. I still draw pay.”

“What were these letters?”

“Who knows? We found ash. We found scraps.”

He looked up at his wife. Before Diane did something she dreaded, her eyes grew very wide. Astonishingly wide and dark as night. This happened now.

Bill Corde waited a moment, as if taking his temperature. The sense of betrayal never arrived and he said finally, “I didn’t take them.”

“No.”

He couldn’t tell how she meant the word. Was she agreeing? Or disputing him?

She asked, “They don’t know about St. Louis, do they?”

“I never told them.” He did not tell her that Jennie Gebben had known.

She nodded. “I should see about a job.”

“I told you I’m not fired. I—”

“I’m just thinking out loud. This is something—”

“Well, there’s nothing wrong with that.”

“This is something we have to talk about,” she continued.

But they didn’t talk about it. Not then at any rate. Because at that moment a squad car pulled into the driveway.

Corde leaned against the glass. He smelled ammonia. After a long moment the front door of the car opened. “It’s T.T. He’s got somebody with him, in the back. What’s he doing, transporting a prisoner?”

Ebbans climbed out of the squad car and unlocked the back door. Jamie slowly stepped out.

Halbert Strumm, who lived in an unincorporated enclave of Harrison County known as Millfield Creek, had made his fortune in animal by-products, turning bone and organ into house plant supplements, marked up a thousand times. Strumm would say with sincerity and drama that it brightened some stiff gelding’s last walk up the ramp to know he was going to be sprinkled lovingly on a tame philodendron overlooking Park Avenue in New York City. It was comments like this that kept Strumm held in contempt or ridicule by all the people who worked for him and most of the people who knew him.

Although he had not attended Auden University, Strumm and his wife Bettye had embraced the school as their adoptive charity. Their generosity however was largely conditional and they invariably looked for an element of bargain in their giving. Off shot a check for a thousand dollars
if
they got subscription seats to the concert series. Five hundred, a stadium box. Five thousand, a trip to the Sudan on a dig with archeology students made wildly uncomfortable by the couple’s rollicking presence.

Now Randy Sayles, pulling into the Strumms’ driveway, was not sure if the couple was going to like the deal
he was about to propose. Strumm, a huge man, bald and broad, with massive hands, led Sayles into his greenhouse, and there they stood amid a thousand plants that seemed no healthier than those in Sayles’s own backyard garden, which did
not
gobble down the earthly remains of elderly animals. There was an injustice in this that depressed Sayles immensely.

“Hal, we have a problem and we need your help.”

“Money, that’s why you’ve come. It’s why you always come.”

“You’re right.” Sayles leaned hard into the abuse. “I’m not going to deny it, Hal. But you understand what Auden does for this town. We’re in danger of losing the school.”

Strumm frowned and nipped off a tendril of green from a viney plant. “That serious?”

“We’ve already drafted severance letters to the staff.”

“My word.”
Nip
.

“We need some money and we need your help. You’ve always been generous in the past.”

“You know, Professor, I’m in a generous mood today.”

Sayles’s heart beat with a resounding pressure, he heard the hum of blood speeding through his temple.

“I might just be inclined to help you out. Do I assume you’re talking about some serious bucks?”

“I am, that’s true.”

“You know I went to a state school.”

Sayles said, “I didn’t know but that’s okay.”

“Of course it’s fucking okay,” Strumm barked. “We didn’t have a good team. We had a terrible team. I always thought if I had it to do over again I’d go to a school that had a good team.”

“Auden has a pretty good team.”

“It’s got a nice stadium.”

Sayles said it did, that was true. “Modeled on Soldier Field in Chicago.”

“That a fact? I’ve had a dream in my life,” Strumm
said. “A man gets older and he starts to think about his dreams more and more.”

“Happens to all of us.”

“One of my dreams has been to make a lot of money.”

Well, you certifiably crazy old cocksucker, you sure have done that
.

“Another’s to give some of it to a school like Auden.…”

Are you playing with me or is this for real?

“And in exchange …”

Spit it out
.

“… they’d build a football stadium in my honor. You see, I had my chance and I didn’t seize it. So the next best thing would be to have a stadium named after me.

“Well, Hal, we have the stadium already.”

“Named after Barnes. Who was he?”

“One of our graduates in the 1920s. A philanthropist. He set up an endowment that’s still in effect.”

“So that means you’re not inclined to change the name of the stadium?”

“It’s in the terms of the endowment. There’s nothing we can do about it.”

Strumm studied a sickly plant and sprinkled on its leaves something out of a package labeled “Strumm’s Extra.”
Extra what?
Sayles wondered. The businessman said, “Well, enough said of that. I’ve had another dream. I’ve always wanted a reactor named after me.”

“A nuclear reactor?”

“At Champaign-Urbana I think it is, they’ve got a research reactor named after somebody. I thought that would be almost as good as a stadium.”

“Hal, we don’t need a reactor. We don’t have a science department to speak of. We’re mostly liberal arts.”

What was in the white-and-yellow packages? Old horses? Old pigs? Strumm shit?

“I’d write you boys a check for two hundred thousand
dollars if you built a reactor and named it after me.”

Sayles said quietly, “Hal, we need three and a half million.”

Nip
.

“That much, hum? I couldn’t come close to that. Been a bad year for the company. Economy’s down, people get rid of plants. First thing to go. I’m not recessionproof like everybody says.”

“Auden’s going to close.”

“Even if I had a stadium and a reactor both I couldn’t come up with much more than a quarter million.”

“We can name a chair after you. A building. We’ve got a couple buildings. You could have your pick.”

“Three hundred’s the top. Maybe for a vet school I could go up to three-fifty but that’d be the end of it.”

“We don’t want a vet school, Hal.”

“Well, there you have it.”

Nip
.

Sayles drove at seventy miles an hour all the way back to the campus. His car came to rest partially over the curb of the parking lot. He ran through the corridors of the Arts and Sciences Building and stopped in front of the door to his lecture hall, composing himself and listening to Glenn Darby’s voice explain about Sayles’s absence.

He caught his breath then pushed the doors open and strode confidently down the long aisle to the podium. He was halfway there when the class realized he had returned and broke into applause, which grew ever louder, rolling and rolling, then was joined by whistles and shouts. By the time he was on the podium, clipping on his lavaliere mike, the applause had become a standing ovation and it was five minutes before he was able to quiet the students.

Then—barely holding back tears—Randy Sayles began to speak, resonantly and impassioned, delivering
what might very well be his last lecture at Auden. Or, for that matter, his last lecture at any university.

Corde was no longer pacing. He sat on the couch, slouched down and grim, and Diane was sitting in a straight-backed chair nearby. She held her hands in her lap. Jamie Corde sat between his mother and father. He looked shrunken. “Son, this is pretty serious. I don’t need to tell you that.”

“I didn’t do anything.”

“T.T. said you told him you were at the pond by yourself the night the Gebben girl was killed.”

“I was. I was just fishing by myself is all.”

Diane said, “Honey, please.”

Her eyes were on a studded milk-glass candy dish and it was impossible to tell if she was speaking to father or son.

“Jamie, we
want
to believe you. It’s just that T.T. talked to a couple of people say they saw
two
boys and you fit the description of one of them.”

“So you don’t believe me. You think I’m lying.” This was a matter-of-fact announcement. He wouldn’t hold Corde’s eyes, which was okay with Corde because he would sure have trouble looking back into his boy’s.

“Son, we need to know what happened. I don’t remember where you were that night, I—”

Jamie leaned forward. “How would you know where I was
any
night?”

Diane said sternly, “Don’t talk to your—”

He continued, “Where was I
last
night? Two nights ago? How the hell would you have any idea?”

His mother rebuked, “Young man.” But there was no edge to her words.

The boy was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “I went fishing. I was there by myself.”

A felony investigator, Corde had a dozen tricks he could try to drag the real story out of the boy. Bluffs and
traps and intimidations. He’d learned them from his journals and seminars and bulletins. He’d practiced them in his continuing education courses. He’d tried them out on car thieves and burglars. He couldn’t bring himself to use them now; he was crying out for the truth but he wanted it only one way.

“Were you fishing by the dam?”

“Not so close to the dam. Up a ways, in somebody’s yard.”

“I’ve told you you’re not to trespass there.”

Jamie didn’t answer.

Corde asked, “Did you see the girl or anyone else that you hadn’t recognized before?”

“No. I just fished then I came home.”

“Why didn’t you tell me any of this before? You knew I was on the case.”

“Because I was there alone and I didn’t see anything. What was there to say?”

“Jamie, please.”

The boy looked away. “I’m going to my room.”

“Jamie.…” Corde scooted forward on the couch and touched his son’s knee. The boy remained unresponsive. Corde asked the question he’d been putting off. “The other night, Wednesday, you weren’t home either, were you?”

Diane said, “Bill, what are you asking?”

Jamie kept his eyes on his father. “He wants to know my
whereabouts
the night the second girl was killed. That’s what he’s asking.”

Corde said, “Wait a minute, son. You can’t treat this so light. T.T. and Steve are going to want to talk to you.…” Jamie walked casually out of the living room. Corde’s face went bright red with fury and he stood. Then he sat slowly on the couch again.