Jeffery Deaver - The Lesson of Her Death

"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 US 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?"

He nodded gravely. "Whatever you'd like, Dean." Okun stood and started for the door.

"Oh, Brian?" As he turned she said, "I just wanted to say, I'm sorry. I know this was difficult for you. To put the school above your personal loyalty. I won't forget it."

"Sometimes," Okun said, "as Immanuel Kant tells us, sacrifices must be made for a higher good."

"You said you'd polish them."

"I'll polish them."

"You said today."

"I'll polish them today," Amos Trout said, slouching in his lopsided green Naugahyde easy chair. He scooped up the remote control and turned the volume up.

His lean, wattle-skinned wife poured the Swan's Down cake mix into a Pyrex bowl and decided he wasn't going to get away with it. She set down the egg and said, "When I was to church Ada Kemple looked right down at my feet, there was nothing else for yards around, had to've been my feet, and if that woman didn't have a gleam in her eye when she surfaced I don't know what. I liked to die of embarrassment."

"I said I'd polish them."

"Here." She handed him the navy blue pumps as if she were offering him dueling pistols.

Trout took them then looked at the TV screen. It wouldn't've been so bad if Chicago wasn't playing New York and it wasn't the bottom of the sixth and the score wasn't tied with Mets go-ahead on third and only one out.

But She had spoken. And so Amos Trout turned the sound up again and carried the shoes down to the basement. (Don't seem so scuffed that the toothless bitch Ada Kemple has anything to snicker about through her smear of cheap pasty makeup.)

"… a grounder to left… snagged by the shortstop, backhand! What a catch! There'll be a play at home… The runner -"

CLICK. The TV went silent. His wife's footsteps sounded above him on their way back to the kitchen.

Ah, it hurts. Sometimes it hurts.

Trout grimaced then snatched a newspaper from the huge stack that had accumulated while they'd been on vacation in Minnesota. He spread it out on the mottled brown linoleum. He stood slowly and got the paraphernalia – the blue polish, the brush, the buffing cloth – and set it all out in front of him. He picked up each shoe and examined the amount of work. He turned one upside down. A broken toenail like a chip of fogged ice fell out. He set the shoe down on the newspaper and as he applied polish he focused past the shoes to the paper itself.

Trout read for a moment then stood up. He tossed the shoes on top of the clothes dryer. One left a long blue streak on the enameled metal. He carried the newspaper into the kitchen where his wife sat cross-legged, chatting on the phone.

"The game was too loud," she said to him. "I shut it off." Then returned to the phone.

He said, "Hang up."

Her neck skin quivered at the command. She blinked at him. "I'm talking to my mother."

"Hang up."

She looked at the yellowed rotary dial for an explanation of this madness. "I'll call you back, Mom."

He took the receiver from her and pressed the button down to clear the line.

"What are you doing?"

"Making a phone call."

"Aren't you going to polish my shoes?"

"No," he said, "I'm not." And began to dial.

The Oakwood Mall. How Bill Corde hated malls.

Oh, the stores were clean, the prices reasonable. Sears guaranteed satisfaction and where in the whole of the world did you get that nowadays without more strings attached than you could count? Here you could buy hot egg rolls and tacos and Mrs. Field's dense cookies and frozen yogurt. You could slip your arm around your wife, walk her into Victoria's Secret and park her in front of a mannequin wearing red silk panties and bra and a black garter belt then kiss her neck while she squirmed and blushed and let you buy her, well, not that outfit but a nice sexy nightgown.