The Lesson of Her Death (44 page)

Therefore, THIS BOARD OF INQUIRY CONCLUDES that

1. The death of Philip Arthur Halpern was justifiable.
   

2. The death shall not be presented for inquest to the Grand Jury of the County of Harrison.
   

3. No grounds exist to dismiss, suspend, fine or in any way reprimand Sheriff Bradford Ellison or Deputy Thomas T. Ebbans on the basis of the events occurring in the house of Creth A. Halpern on May 8.
   

H
ere is Bill Corde.

He writes three parking violations—after turning the thick handles of the meters to make sure that the perpetrators are in fact out of time and didn’t just forget
to crank in their coins. This is not generosity on Corde’s part; nobody argues with cops more vehemently than parking violators.

He stops Trudy Parson’s ’74 Gremlin to tell her that the blinker in her right turn signal is on the fritz and the left rear is low too.

He tanks up a Plymouth and sits in a speed trap for half the day, catching himself nothing but one salesman from Chicago. He gives the man a ticket—not a warning—because the driver is wearing a fish gray silk suit and a pinkie ring and has a dark tan and here it is just mid May.

Howdy, fellas, that wouldn’t be a beer you got in there, would it, reason I ask is neither of you look like you’re eighteen, so if it is I sure hope you’re going to tell me that you just found those cans in the street and are about to dump them out and take them to A&P for the nickel, is that right?

Corde has requested a hearing on the charge of destroying Jennie Gebben’s letters. Because he has been reinstated and the inquest has been canceled the district attorney tells him a hearing would be moot. Corde looks up the word “moot,” then he debates for a time and files another notice seeking the hearing. A day later he receives a call from the judge’s clerk telling him that the application was rejected and they will be sending him a notice to that effect by registered mail return receipt requested.

Corde receives another official communication. This one is from the Missouri attorney general’s office. It thanks him for his letter and says that someone from the office will be checking on the propriety of private investigation and firearm licenses issued to one Charles Mahoney, a resident of St. Louis.

The County Sheriff’s Department officially closes both the Gebben and the Rossiter cases. When Corde asks to see this note or whatever it is that Creth Halpern gave to Ribbon, Hammerback Ellison himself calls up Corde at home and reminds him that the cases have been
disposed of. He uses those words.
Disposed of
. Corde says he understands but could he still see the note? Ellison says sorry it’s been sent to the archive files.

Corde goes to one of Jamie’s wrestling matches and watches the boy lose bad. The family was planning to eat out afterward but nobody is in the mood after the loss. Jamie says he’s going out with some teammates and Corde and Diane and Sarah drive home for French toast.

Corde forms mixed feelings about Dr. Parker, who has just depleted exactly three-fifths of the Cordes’ savings account and has turned Sarah into a story-telling fiend. The girl has used up four tape cassettes with her book. When Corde asks her how long the book will be, she tells him a million jillion pages, and Corde says that’s pretty long, how long will it take to read? She answers forever. One day Corde finds her looking out over the backyard, long-faced. He asks her what’s wrong, thinking her studies are troubling her. She says she’s afraid that the Sunshine Man her wizard is gone for good. She hasn’t seen him for a long time. Corde would like to console her but he does not know what to say. He tells her to get washed up, it’s time for dinner, and she sadly complies.

Diane is glad that Sarah is off the Ritalin since she’s just joined the Drug-Free America task force of the Sesquicentennial Celebration Committee and will be personally responsible for the Fourth of July
Just Say No!
float. One morning in their bedroom Diane paints on make-your-man-crazy red nail polish and Corde watches the color go on but what he thinks of is the smell, which reminds him of the dope he brushed on the balsa wood airplanes as a boy to stiffen the paper wings. This in turn makes him think of Philip Halpern. He doesn’t tell his wife this thought but just says my you look nice, oh, yes.…

Diane is also his source of information about Sarah’s tutor, Ben Breck. Corde still hasn’t met him though he’d like to. Sarah has improved remarkably since they’ve been working together. Sarah talks about
Breck often but Corde doesn’t feel jealous of this displaced attention though he thinks of the months and months of agony he himself has been through as he worked with her and here this fellow turns her around in a couple of weeks. What can you do?

Corde goes fishing with Jamie. They get into their aluminum canoe and push off into the deep reservoir. Their permits are in order and Corde has with him a knotted length of string to make sure that the bass they take are legal. Corde hopes a big needle-nosed pike or musky has come south; he would like to trophy it for Jamie’s wall. The boy continues to be morose and uncommunicative. Corde hashes it over with himself then finally asks bluntly if he wants to talk about Philip and Jamie says no he doesn’t. Five minutes later though, out of the blue, the boy says he sort of thinks that Philip thought Jamie’d turned him in.

They beach the canoe and sit together on a slab of steel-color rock. Corde explains that he told Philip before he was shot that Jamie didn’t turn him in at all, that Jamie got tricked. Philip understood and believed that. Corde puts thirty-nine years of sincerity into this speech. Jamie’s expression doesn’t change and they silently return to fishing. Five minutes later Jamie asks if Corde will be at the final wrestling match in two weeks and Corde says that nothing—hell or high water or a sale at Sears—will keep him away. The boy’s face comes close to a smile and with the nod he gives his father Corde knows they’re back on track.

Corde calls Wynton Kresge at his office and is shocked to hear the secretary say that he’s no longer with the school. Does that mean he’s quit, Corde asks, or been fired? She says it means he’s no longer with the school. He calls Kresge at home but he isn’t there or he’s told his wife to say he isn’t. Corde leaves a message.

Here is Bill Corde, driving out to dark Blackfoot Pond the dark dam the dark trees the gray-green mud, getting out of the cruiser, walking through the tangled brush. There’s nothing much to see thanks to the sightseers,
the fishermen, two power-out rainstorms and one tornado that vaulted over New Lebanon the other day, spraying branches and a million just-born leaves all over the murder scene.

Here is Bill Corde, flipping a dull quarter over his fingers as he walks through the site of paired deaths over ground that for him fairly trembles beneath his feet.

The case is closed but here he walks, here he bends to the ground and kicks at twigs and leaves and the flattened disks of beer cans, here he pauses at times and squints into the deeper forest then moves on.

Here is Bill Corde.

“You know the one I mean?” the man was asking. He was lean, bald and wore a blue suit whose polyester fibers glistened like mica. Down the front of his white shirt a red-and-black striped tie hung stiff as a paint stirrer. “The plant out on 117?”

“Walt.”

“I want to explain. Let me explain.”

Professor Randy Sayles wasn’t feeling well. Although he was tearfully relieved that the Gebben investigation was over and the Halpern boy was buried, he had learned that the financial situation of the university was worse than Dean Larraby had at first let on. She had called the day before to tell him an additional million was needed. To the man in whose office he now sat Sayles said patiently, “Go ahead. Explain.”

“She was valued at nine, we loaned seven and when we foreclosed the marketed turned and it was worth five. That’s a two-hundred-thousand bad loan and we ate up our reserve by February because of a dozen just like her. No, a dozen and a half.”

The office did not much look like a bank president’s. It was closer to a Tru-Value manager’s. There was some blotchy modern litho up on the wall but Sayles saw a sticker on the side of the frame and knew he wasn’t
looking at the real article; you don’t generally get much in the way of investment art at Walgreen’s especially at a two-for-one sale.

Sayles pulled a packet of papers out of his briefcase. “I wouldn’t be here hat in hand if it weren’t serious, Walt. We’re looking at a shortfall of close to thirteen million this year.”

“Things’re tough all over.”

Sayles tried not to sound desperate. He pictured himself up in front of his class. Assured, smiling, humorous. Everything he’d learned in twenty years of teaching he brought to bear on this man. “We’ve got benefactor commitments of about seven. We’re talking to—”

The banker too was used to theatrics. “Look out that window, what do you see?”

Sayles counterattacked. “I see a city that’ll suffer to its very heart if Auden University closes.”

Nice try
. The banker smiled and shook his head. “I’m talking about that building not fifty yards up the street. Plainsman’s S&L. The RTC’s moved in and she’s in conservatorship. They’re going to sell it off. We’re more solid but not a lot. The loan committee, no way’ll it approve Auden a penny.” The banker’s voice remained a low calm monotone as he twisted his curly eyebrow with his thumb and ring finger. He dressed in pastel plastic cloth, he had yellow teeth and glistening see-through hair and under the veneer desk he kept a casual beat with crinkly black Monkey Ward shoes. Sayles knew however that Wall Street had nothing on this guy.

“Auden closes,” Sayles said, “it’ll be a tragedy.”

“It’ll be a tragedy but it’ll be more of a tragedy if I write a bad loan and the U.S. attorney up in Higgins indicts me.”

“Oh, come on, Walt, it’s not like you’re buying yourself a Porsche. They’re not going to arrest you for loaning money to a university.”

The banker looked at Sayles and seemed to be taking his pulse. Sayles thought:
I’m just like the farmers he
disbursed loans to, loans written on the strength of bad collateral and their desperation facing the loss of two hundred years’ worth of family land
. Randy Sayles, associate dean of financial aid, knew that you never saw a person as clearly as when you hand him a large check.

The professor said, “What if we gave you a piece of the new dorm? It cost twenty-three million.”

“Cost ain’t worth. And if we foreclosed it’d be because the school went under. And what good’s a dorm without a school to go with it?”

“Land alone’d be worth three million.”

“Not with an empty dorm sitting on it.”

“You got the parking lot right on the highway.”

“I’m sorry.”

These two words lanced Sayles’s heart. He stood up and said with a despair that made both men extremely uncomfortable, “You were my last chance.” Neither said a word for a moment. Sayles picked up his financials and put them into his battered briefcase.

He started out the door.

“Hold up, Professor.…”

Sayles turned and saw in the man’s face a debate. The banker arrived at a disagreeable conclusion. Writing a name and number on a piece of paper, he said, “I’m not doing this. You didn’t get this from me. You don’t know me.”

Sayles looked at the scrawl.
Fred Barrett
. Next to the name was a phone number. Area code 312. Chicago.

“Who is he?”

After a pause the banker said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

He found it completely by accident.

Because Brian Okun had made up the rumor that Jennie Gebben and Leon Gilchrist were lovers, he had not bothered to do what he had promised the dean—look through the professor’s office for evidence. He
would have been content to tell her that he had made a futile search and let it go at that. Then when Gilchrist turned in Okun’s scathing evaluation Okun would claim that Gilchrist was seeking retribution for his espionage.

A delightful symmetry to the whole matter.

The whole
affair,
you might say
.

This was a good plan but he thought of a much better one when, placing a sheet of student grades on Gilchrist’s desk, he noticed an envelope addressed in flowery script to the professor. The writer was a young woman student. Okun lifted the crinkly envelope and found to his huge amusement the paper was perfumed. Gilchrist, finally back from San Francisco, was at the moment lecturing his class, and the graduate assistant immediately sat down in the professor’s chair and opened the unsealed envelope.

The poem scanned very badly, thought Okun the critic.

When the memory of you/swallows me the way I took/your lovely cock into my mouth
…

He decided he would have given it a D for form and a C minus for content (“Your thinking is unoriginal, your meter too unvaried and honey is a hopelessly trite metaphor for semen”). This didn’t matter however because he believed the poem would have at least one ardent reader.

Okun now sat in Dean Larraby’s office, watching her flick the poem with a tough, wrinkled index finger. “You didn’t …” She hesitated. “You didn’t get it out of his mailbox?”

It wasn’t stamped or postmarked, you stupid fool, how could it have been mailed?
Okun said mildly, “I’d never do anything illegal. It was lying out on his desk.”

“Who’s the girl? Doris Cutting?”

“Student of his. I don’t know anything about her.”

“Do you know if he took her to San Francisco with him?”

I just said I don’t know her. Senile already?
Okun frowned. “I wonder.”

“This is enough for me.”

“It’s hard for me to speak against him,” Okun said. “He’s taught me so much. But to sleep with a student.… It’s a very vulnerable time for young people. I used to respect him.” His mouth tightened into a little bundle of disappointment.

“We’ll fire him. We have no choice. It’s got to be done. We’ll wait till the semester’s over. His last lecture’s when?”

“Two days.”

“I’ll tell him afterward, after the students have gone. We’ll want to minimize publicity. You’ll keep this quiet until then?”