The Lesson of Her Death

orchestras and avant-garde theater companies, which they boasted about being able to attend but rarely did. The NCAA was about the only real contact between Auden and the natives, virtually none of whom could afford the seventeen-thousand-dollar tuition, which bought you, times four, just a
liberal arts
degree and what the hell good was that?
    The residents had ambivalent feelings toward the students. The school was a bounty, no denying: thousands of young people with nothing to do but eat out, go to movies and redecorate their dorm rooms, and what’s more there was a new brood of them every year just like hogs and veal calves. And some locals even felt a nebulous pride when Auden University Economics Professor Andrew Schoen appeared on
Meet the Press
or a book by English professor John Stanley Harrod was favorably reviewed in the
New York Times
, to which a grand total of forty-seven New Lebanonites subscribed.
    On the other hand Auden was a burden. These money-shedding young people got drunk and puked and sneered and teepeed trees with toilet paper and broke plate glass. They shamelessly bought Trojans and Ramses in front of grade-school children. They walked around looking important as bankers. They burned effigies of politicians and occasionally a flag. They were gay and lesbian. They were Jewish and Catholic. They were Eastern.
    Bill Corde was not a product of Auden though he was of New Lebanon. Born and reared here, he’d ventured away only for four years of service (standing guard with his M-16 over missiles in West Germany) and a few years in Missouri as a patrolman then detective in the St. Louis Police Department. He returned to New Lebanon and after six months of feed and grain, teaching Sunday school and thinking about starting a contracting business, he applied for a job at the town Sheriff’s Department. His experience made him a godsend to Steve Ribbon, whose closest approximation to police training had been the Air Force (he and
his
rifle had protected B-52s in Kansas). After a year as the department’s oldest rookie Corde was promoted to detective and became the town’s chief felony investigator.
    On the neat wall above his neat desk in the hundred-and-four-year-old town building were some framed documents: a diploma from Southwestern State University and certificates from the ICMA’s Police Business Administration Institute of Training in Chicago as well as one from the Southern Police Institute in Louisville. The proof was absent but he had also taken various FBI training seminars and courses in law and visual investigation analysis. He had just returned from Sacramento and a weeklong session at the California Department of Justice.
    The certificates he had proudly tacked up were simple vouchers of completion; Corde was a bad student. He collected words that described himself. He was
persistent
, he was
industrious
, he had
sticktoitiveness
. ButBill Corde was born C-plus material and that didn’t change whether the subject was one he hated (English, social studies) or loved (criminal psychology or link-analysis-charting techniques). He wrote slowly and produced leaden meat-and-potato reports, and although as detective his official hours were pretty much eight to six he would often stay late into the night muscling through an article in
Forensics Today
or the
Journal of Criminal Justice
, or comparing the profiles of suspects in his cases with those in the NASPD’s
Felony Warrants Outstanding Bulletin
.
    Some people in town—that is to say, the people who worked for him—thought Corde took his job too seriously, New Lebanon being a place where the State Penal Code’s thousand-dollar threshold between petty and grand larceny was not often crossed, and four of last year’s six deaths by gunshot were from failing to open a bolt or breach when climbing over a fallen tree. On the other hand Corde’s arrest-per-felony rate was a pleasure to behold—ninety-four percent—and his conviction-to-arrest ratio was 8.7:10. Corde kept these statistics in a thirdhand IBM XT computer, the department’s major concession to technology.
    He now finished reviewing the coroner’s preliminary report on Jennie Gebben and stood up from his desk. He left the sheriff’s office and strode across the hall to the lunchroom. As he walked a quarter materialized in his hand and he rolled it over the back of one finger to the next and so on, around and around, smooth as a pool-hall hustler. His father had taught