The Lesson of Her Death

sorry.”
    “Well, Dean, I hope this’s all you have to be sorry about,” he said cryptically, and left the office.

C hunk.
    Lying on the bottom bunk, looking up at the xaser coils above his face, he heard the sound.
    Philip Halpern blinked and felt a low punch in his stomach. He recognized the noise instantly. The door of the family’s Chevy station wagon slamming. His palms began sweating. His fingers twitched. He stood up and looked through thick bars and thin glass to see what he knew he’d see: his mother coming to visit. He’d been expecting her—
    NO, NO, NO!
    Oh, God. He’d found it, the plastic Hefty bag with the dead girl’s purse inside! His father, not forty feet away, holding the bag Philip had buried under the back porch.
    The boy stared at his father talking with Sheriff Ribbon, bleak expressions on both their faces. Ribbon pointed back toward the cell. His father stared for a longmoment as if he was trying to decide whether he should visit his son. Then they both turned and walked up the street, away from the jail.
    These two men looked like any good old boys in New Lebanon, sitting at a green Formica booth in the drugstore. Their solid shoulders arching over heavy white coffee cups. The kind of men who would stand up quick when they heard the four-bar intro of the “Star-Spangled Banner.” The kind of men who’d buy a NAPA carburetor at nine A.M. on Saturday and have it seated by ten-thirty. The kind that talked about the price of propane and what poppers the bass were hitting on.
    Right now these two men were talking about murder.
    “My boy’s got his share of problems,” Creth Halpern said. “He’s got more weight than he ought. It’s soft weight. It’s girl weight. I don’t know where he gets it. His mother’s a drinker, you know that. I think maybe that mixed up his chrome zones.”
    Steve Ribbon nodded and kept stirring the coffee he had no taste for. He listened. This was a pain and in spades.
    “Take them pictures.” Halpern was whispering, as if admitting things he’d never in his life spoken out loud. “The pictures you boys found. I’d sometimes find these girlie magazines. Not like
Playboy
. It was just plain smut. Pictures of people, you know, humping. I don’t know where he got them from. I was ascared it was somebody older. Some man. Phil’s a little girlish like I say.” Halpern smiled and looked at a Heinz bottle as he sailed over the second great tragedy of his life. “But the pictures weren’t of queers.”
    Ribbon asked, “What you getting at exactly, Creth?”
    “He’s not the kind of boy would hurt anybody. I don’t want him to go to prison.”
    “You
showed us the shorts. That he tried to burn.”
    “I was mad then. I wanted to whup him. I feel different now.”
    “Why you talking to me? You hired Dennis Brann.”
    “I don’t do well by lawyers. I didn’t take to Brann or him to me.”
    “It doesn’t look real good for Philip, Creth.”
    “He’s not bad. He’s a disappointment is what he is. You know what’d happen to him if he went to jail?” Halpern glanced at Ribbon, who was silent but who knew exactly what would happen to Philip in general population at the state prison in Warwick and probably on his first day there.
    Halpern said, “I can’t say I love the boy. I gave up trying a time ago. But I … I don’t know.”
    “Brann’s an all-right shyster. He’ll give it a good shot.”
    “Well, look here what I found.” Halpern lifted the torn, filthy plastic bag onto the countertop. Crumbs of dirt and popcorn fell into a comma of spilled coffee on the Formica and dissolved. “I found it in this place where Phil played. Like a hiding place. Under the back porch.”
    Ribbon opened up the bag. Inside was a purse, stained with mud. He shook it out on the table. He looked up at Halpern. He whispered harshly, “This’s one of the girls’? Hell, what’re you giving it to me for? It’ll convict him sure, Creth.”
    “No, no.” Halpern shook his head. “There’s something you gotta see.”
    They stood outside the one-story yellow-brick building in Higgins, both bent over a piece of computer printout paper.
    “Well, we gotta do something with it,” Steve Ribbon said. “Damn, this is a wrinkle.”
    Charlie Mahoney handed the printout back to Ribbonthen held up the clear plastic bag with a COC tag attached. He read the handwritten letter that was inside.
    Ribbon waved the printout as if he were drying ink. “It says