The Lesson of Her Death

dismissal. Who told you?”
    “I told her I’d respect her confidence.”
    She looked for a way to pry this information out of him. Not finding one she said, “Impossible. It’s a vicious rumor. Leon isn’t well liked—”
    “No?” A tiny note went onto a stiff white card.
    “Don’t make anything out of that,” she snapped. “Professors can be like children. Leon has an infantile streak in him, which he has trouble controlling. He makes enemies. People as brilliant as he breed rumors. You didn’t answer my question. Is he a suspect?”
    “No.”
    “He was reading a paper at the Berkeley Poetry Conference at the time of the killings,” she said.
    “Did you know that before or afterward?”
    “I beg your pardon?” she asked cautiously.
    “I’m curious if after Jennie was killed you suspected something about Professor Gilchrist and checked on his whereabouts at that time.”
    The eyes went to steel cold. “I have nothing further to say to you, Detective.”
    “If you could—”
    “She was killed by a psycho!” The dean’s shrill voicetore through the room. “The same one who vandalized the grade school and churches. The same one who murdered Emily. If you’d taken this psychopath seriously, instead of digging into banal college gossip, Emily would still be alive today.”
    “We have to explore all angles, Dean.”
    “I’ll guarantee you that Leon did not have relations with Jennie and he didn’t have anything to do with her death or Emily’s. Now if you’ll excuse me I’m in the midst of emergency funding meetings, which by the way are necessary largely because you people haven’t caught this madman.”
    When Corde had left the office Dean Larraby snatched up the phone and snapped to her secretary, “Is Gilchrist back from the Coast? When’s he expected? … Who’s his teaching assistant?” Her foot tapped in anger while she waited. “Who, Okun? Give him a call and tell him I want to see him. Tell him it’s urgent.”
    Charlie Mahoney was pretty tired of New Lebanon. The incident that had cemented this opinion was a bad meal at Ewell’s Diner—particularly bad meat loaf (gristle), extraordinarily bad mashed potatoes (paste) and moderately bad bourbon (oily). This cuisine was followed by an early evening in the motel room where he was now lounging in front of a small TV that was not hooked up to cable. The exact instant when boredom became loathing occurred during a Channel 7 commercial break—four straight minutes of grating ads for products like hog feed and cultivators and used cars and kerosene.
    Who the fuck buys kerosene from a TV ad?
    He lay on the sagging bed and looked up at the stucco ceiling. Stucco.
Who invented stucco? And why would anybody put it on a ceiling where you had to look at it all night long because there was nothing else to do? How many college sluts had lain here on this bed with
their legs in the air and stared at this ceiling thinking stucco who the fuck invented stucco Jesus when is this son of bitch going to finish?
…
    When Mahoney’s thoughts got tired of Midwest decor they ambled over to Richard Gebben.
    Mahoney, not a man with much heart to spare for anyone, least of all an employer, had sat with perplexed but genuine sympathy as he watched Richard Gebben absently drive the toy Christmas truck back and forth on his desk, back in St. Louis.
    Gebben Pre-Formed We Fabricate the World
.
    “Jennie’s mother, I don’t know when she’s going to come out of it. She may never. She doesn’t cry anymore. She doesn’t do anything but sometimes she has these, I don’t know, bursts of energy, Charlie. She’ll be lying in bed then she leaps up and has to polish the silver. The silver, Charlie. For Christsake, we have a
maid.”
    A jet had begun its takeoff run and the tenor roar filled the beige office. The DC-10 was well over Illinois before Gebben spoke again.
    “Jennie,” he had said, addressing Mahoney, not the spirit of his daughter.
    He had proceeded to speak about
reputation
. About
the media
, about
misunderstandings
. He had spoken about
troubling discoveries
. Then he paused and the truck stopped rolling and as he stared out the window at a tall gray McDonnell Douglas hangar Richard Gebben spoke about his daughter the whore.
    To Mahoney—a man who had seen evidence of just about every sexual act humankind could think of—the fact that Jennie slept with women as well as men was unremarkable. What was a little boggling, at least in the