The Lesson of Her Death

soft
white
university, where you had to keep your temper and give reasons and all the suspects were good students and were trying hard and were just out for some fooling ’round.
    He sat on the windowsill, his huge shoulders slumped.
    Thinking of his ancestor (perhaps because Walker had ultimately gotten
his
freedom) had put Wynton Kresge in mind of his essential problem—he was not what he wanted to be.
    Which was a cop.
    He would be a cop in Des Moines. He would be a cop in Cape Girardeau, Missouri. In Sandwich, Illinois. He’d be a cop taking tolls on the interstate if they also let him spend a good portion of the time cruising around in a souped-up four-barrel Dodge, tagging speeders and hunting down child molesters and stopping DUIs.
    What was ironic—no, what was bitterly mean—was that every day Kresge got résumés from cops all over the country. From real COPS! They wanted to work for him.
Dear Sir: As a law enforcement officer of ten years standing, I am seeking a position in private security services and would like to be considered for any positions you might have open
.…
    Knock me upside the head. I mean, this is too much!
    Kresge would have dropped down on his massive, linebacker knees to kiss the police academy graduation ring of any one of those applicants and trade jobs in a minute. Gold shields, GLA supervisors, Ops-Coordinators, portable patrolmen, CS technicians. They allwanted to sit in Kresge’s cracked leather chair and swivel back and forth and spend the three hours between start of business and lunch deciding how to allocate guards for the homecoming game.
    And what did Wynton Kresge want to do but walk a beat?
    He wanted to drive an RMP (remote mobile patrol, a squad car to everybody else; Kresge had learned this), he wanted to kick in doors of murder suspects, he wanted to pin drug dealers up against jagged brick walls and scream at them:
WHERE’S THE STASH?
(Was that what they called it? He’d learned a lot but there was much he had not learned.)
    He had a very real problem however. Wynton Kresge’s first goal in life was to be a cop. But his other goal was to make sure his salary exceeded his age. He now made fifty-three thousand dollars a year (being forty-two he was proud of this accomplishment). He was therefore in the Loop. Hooked. Hung up. Wynton Kresge received a salary not unattainable by senior detectives or police administrators in large cities but a complete rainbow for a rookie. It’d be back to school at no pay then a grunt pulling twenty, twenty-five even with overtime. Kresge alone would be able to cope with a career change of that magnitude. Kresge married might be able to.
    But not Wynton Kresge father of seven. He loved cops but he also loved being a good father. He thought about reeducating them. He thought about having a family conference and telling them they were going to have to buckle down. Dad was about to take a fifty percent cut in salary and become a cop. (Man, he could
taste
the silence in the living room after dropping that news.)
    So he watched
Miami Vice
reruns and led his men in drills for dealing with students who’d gone ED (the cop word for emotionally disturbed) and with demonstrators who might try to burn down the stadium (none so far) and he kept his thirteen-shot 9mm automatic loaded andready on his hip waiting for the chance to draw down on a crazed assault-rifle-wielding sniper (none of them either), picking him off from fifty yards on the knoll of the quad.
    This was all Wynton Kresge had for police work.
    This, and thinking a lot about the murders of Jennie Gebben and Emily Rossiter, which is what he had been doing most of this hot afternoon. He now walked to his desk and balanced a book on his hand then flipped it lightly in the air as if he were tossing a coin to help him make a choice. That was in fact exactly what he was doing and when he caught the book, cover up, Kresge walked abruptly out of his office.
    She died two weeks ago tonight. It took me all of fourteen days to lose the case
.
    Corde spent five minutes looking for change in front of the vending machines, waiting for the jolts of anger that never came. He dropped in thirty-five cents and pushed
coffee milk and sugar
. The steaming liquid poured in a loud stream into a fragile cardboard cup. It sounded exactly like a man taking a leak.
    T.T. Ebbans walked up next to him, digging in his pockets. Corde held out a handful of change. Ebbans picked out some and bought himself