I made my way up to the fourth floor. The halls were hushed and ill lit. I found the door and knocked.
A boyish voice said, “Come in.”
Spellman-Rohatyn Professor of Psychology and Social Issues Paul J. Sandek taught in the department’s social-personality track. He hadn’t changed much, either. A few extra veins of white in his beard, a modest pouching around the eyes.
I’d never seen him in anything other than argyle sweaters, or maybe a sweater vest in late spring. The fluttering array of Far Side cartoons still blanketed the wall above his computer. At one point I’d known them all by heart. Cover up a caption and I could recite it.
“Clay.” He hugged me warmly. “It’s good to see you.”
“You too.”
He beamed up at me, inspecting me at arm’s length. In his day, you could be five-ten and play Division I point guard. Granted, in the Ivy League. But still.
He clapped my shoulders. “So good. Sit. You want some coffee?”
“Please.”
He pivoted to a side table set with a pod espresso machine and a stack of demitasses.
“That’s new,” I said.
“Birthday present from Amy.” He pressed a button, and the machine gurgled to life. “I use it way too much. Bad for the heart but I can’t stop.”
“How is Amy?”
“Wonderful, thanks. Finishing up her PhD.”
I remembered Sandek’s daughter as a pale, gangly high schooler, sneaking looks at me over the dinner table while her mother heaped me more mashed potatoes. “Send her my congratulations.”
“Will do. Now comes the hard part: finding a job.”
“I’m sure she’ll be fine.”
“Oh, she will. That’s just me being parental. She’s done some outstanding research, and to my amazement, having Yale on your diploma continues to mean something. It’s a jungle out there, though.” He smiled and handed me my cup. “Like I need to tell you that.”
Prior to getting hurt, I’d never paid attention to academics. No one on the team did. We got “help” with our papers, prep for tests. To say nothing of those who preferred not to take their own tests. It happens everywhere. I had no reason to care. I was going pro.
Even after surgery, I entertained fantasies of a comeback. My first question upon waking in the recovery room was when I could start rehab. Junior year was a slog of stretching, ice, heat, water therapy, resistance bands, balance drills, speed drills, weights. By summertime, I’d been cleared to play. But I was different. I knew. Coach knew.
My first scrimmage back I was sluggish, wooden, ineffective. And—this was the dagger—timid where I once would have been bold. We had a sophomore, a transfer from San Diego State; he ran circles around me. Afterward Coach asked if I didn’t think he showed real promise.
He offered me a spot on the roster, regardless, more as a reward for previous performance than for anything I could contribute going forward.
I turned him down. Soon enough, the same people who had chanted my name were labeling me vain or selfish. Was I too good to come off the bench? Mentor my own replacement? I had obligations, they said, to set an example of leadership, of self-sacrifice and team spirit and loyalty.
Maybe they were right. I only know that my desire to play was gone, utterly, and that any physical pain was dwarfed by the agony of perceiving the chasm between before and after. It was the pain of a phantom limb. Reviewing myself on tape was unbearable, like watching a bird shot down, midflight.
That fall, I almost quit school. My transcript was in shambles. I had no declared major. I might as well have chosen classes by tossing darts at the course catalog. If not for Sandek—a fanatical team booster, but more important a profoundly kind and empathic human being—I doubt I would’ve graduated.
Now, waiting for the machine to finish sputtering his own cup of espresso, he wheeled his chair around from behind the desk. “Theresa sends her love, too.”
“Same to her,” I said before breaking into laughter.
“What,” he said.
I pointed to his kneeling chair. “I forgot you have one of those.”
He laughed. “It’s since been replaced by a newer model.”
“How’s the back?” I asked.
“For shit. How’s the knee?”
“Holding up.”
He took his coffee and knelt. “I look like a supplicant, right? Salùd.”
We drank.
“So,” he said, wiping froth from his mustache. “Pretty mysterious email you sent.”
“I wanted to speak to you in person,” I said. “You were around in ninety-three, right? What can you tell me about Walter Rennert?”
He paused, the cup near his mouth. “There’s a name I haven’t heard in a while.”
“Were you aware he passed away?”
“I wasn’t, no. Shame.”
“How well did you know him?”
“Not very well at all. He was in the developmental track, I think, and I’d only come on board a year or two before. And then of course he got caught up in that sorry situation, so he wasn’t doing a whole lot of fraternizing. I’d call us acquaintances.”
“It’s his study that I’m trying to learn about, actually,” I said.
“Whatever for?”
“It may bear on a case of mine.”
“A current case.”
“Do you recall anything about the research? Or know who would?”
“Not offhand. I’d be surprised if you could get anyone to talk about it. The entire episode remains somewhat of a bugaboo around these parts. Same for Walter. I’m sure that’s why nobody’s mentioned his death. What happened to him?”
“Heart trouble.”
“Ah. Nothing sinister, then.”
“Not really.”
“I take it you’re not going to tell me what’s going on.”
I smiled. “Do you remember anything about the victim, Donna Zhao?”
“Never met her. She was an undergrad, yes? There was also a grad student involved, I think. Walter’s TA?”
“Nicholas Linstad.”
“That’s the one. Big blond fellow.”
“Him you remember.”
“Only because I didn’t much care for him. It’s strange, given how little interaction we had. But there you have it.”
“What about him didn’t you like?”
Sandek scratched his beard. “I suppose I found him…superficial? He sounded like what an Ikea chair would sound like if it could talk. He ended up leaving the program.”
“When was that?”
“Right around the time Walter did. Not a happy parting for either of them. Extremely messy.”
“How so?”
Sandek finished his coffee. “The department did what it always does when something goes wrong—and this was way beyond wrong. They established a review committee. If memory serves, the report put the blame partly on Linstad.”
“What for?”
He shook his head. “I never read it. It wasn’t made public. Everything I’m telling you is just scuttlebutt. Whatever the case may be, the buck stopped with Walter. It was his lab, so he ended up taking the brunt. I have no idea what became of Linstad after he left.”
“He’s dead, too,” I said.
“Holy Toledo. That is one cursed study.”
“I’d like to know more about it,” I said.
“Honestly, Clay, I’m not sure there’s anything to know. I don’t think they’d finished collecting data before everything fell apart.”
“The design had to be submitted to IRB for approval.”
“Yes.”
“So that might be on file somewhere.”
A slow nod. “It might.”
“The review committee’s report, too,” I said. “I’d like to get a copy of that.”
Sandek put his cup down. “You know, my boy, I’m not some crime-solving whiz like you. I’m not sure what you think I can do.”
“Try to get the reports?”
He slapped his thighs. “For you, I will.”
“Thanks.”
“Don’t thank me yet,” he said, swiveling to the coffee machine. As he racked in a fresh pod, he said, “You get a chance to play much these days?”
“Here and there.”
“I’m good for HORSE,” he said. “Just don’t ask me to run.”
“Is there money involved?”
“If you like.”
“I don’t,” I said.
“Scared, are we?”
“Compassionate. You’re on a teacher’s salary.”
He laughed. “Out of my office.”
—
THE RAIN HAD let up, and I stood beyond the breezeway, filling my lungs with the scent of damp mulch. Tolman Hall was shaped like a squat H, two blocky legs and a low-slung bridge connecting them. Windows scaled its exterior, a move intended to soften the design’s brutalism. Over time, the frames had rusted from the inside out, leaking streaky brown pennants down the raw concrete, so that the building appeared to be weeping, or bleeding, from a thousand eyes.
It struck me that the entire Greek tragedy—all its significant locales, spread out over twenty-plus years—fell within a five-mile radius. The poles were Edwina Triplett’s apartment and Walter Rennert’s house, lying at opposite corners of the city, a distance befitting the class disparity. The other places that mattered were bunched closer together. From where I stood, Donna Zhao’s apartment was a fifteen-minute walk south. The spot where Nicholas Linstad had died was even closer—virtually across the street, up the hill on Le Conte.
Considering the circumstances of his departure from the university, I found it peculiar that he’d chosen to set up shop so close by.
I headed there to have a look.
Most of the block consisted of multi-unit dwellings catering to students. Halloween had recently come and gone, and the insides of some windows were still lined with paper jack-o’-lanterns and nylon cobwebs.
Twenty-four Halloweens since Donna Zhao died. The party never ended.
Nicholas Linstad’s former residence, a skinny brown duplex, was set back from the sidewalk, cowed by a larger building of more recent provenance.
I knocked first at the downstairs unit, where he had worked. Receiving no answer, I went down the driveway to the exterior staircase, climbed up slowly. Sure enough, I spotted a series of waist-high grooves in the shingling, scrubbed down by a decade of weather but visible nonetheless. I remembered the pathologist’s note that one of Linstad’s nails had torn partway off in the fall. He really didn’t want to die.
I reached the landing. The wobbly banister in Ming’s report had since been repaired, a large nailhead driven into the base of the post.
My knock again met silence. I stuffed my hands in my jacket pockets and turned, scanning for sight lines. Steep, wavy terrain put the surrounding homes at relatively different heights. None had a perfectly unobstructed view of the landing. I saw, mostly, power lines and trees. Nearest was a majestic redwood, wide and woolly, rooted in the rear yard of the adjacent multi-unit, on the other side of a rough picket fence.
“Can I help you?”
Below, a woman in a flowing turquoise dress and matching chunky necklace was walking a ten-speed up the driveway. Long white hair cascaded from beneath her helmet.
“Admiring the tree,” I said, clomping down the stairs. “Are you the upstairs tenant?”
“May I ask why you’re interested?”
I showed her my badge. “I’d like to take a look around inside, if you don’t mind.”
“I’m afraid I do,” she said. “I object to all manifestations of the fascist state.”
“It’s for an old case,” I said.
She smiled pleasantly and flipped me off. “Go fuck yourself.”
CHAPTER 22
Julian Triplett’s sister now went by the name of Kara Drummond. I phoned her at her place of employment, the Macdonald Avenue branch of Wells Fargo in Richmond, where she was an assistant manager. She agreed to speak to me during her lunch break.
With time to kill, I hung around in the parking lot, seeing ghosts. It was a neighborhood with a high body count. The year before I’d worked a shooting outside Target, two people dead, spillover of an argument that began with a dinged car door. More recently, I’d read that the city had begun paying high-risk kids a stipend for not getting arrested, a policy that kicked up controversy, folks arguing over whether it represented a new standard for creativity or a new low for desperation.
Noon thirty, a woman I knew from her DMV photo emerged, blinking against the cold bright sun. We headed into Starbucks. She declined my offer of a drink and we took a booth.
Kara Drummond was eight years younger than her brother, pretty, with good skin and quick, wide eyes. Heavy bone structure lurked beneath her surface; she’d put work into staying trim. She wore gray slacks, a white crepe blouse, black heels. No ring, leading me to wonder if she’d changed her surname in order to escape its notoriety. Could be divorced; a different father. She spoke with a polish that belied her age and origins. A pair of earrings, tiny dangling sunflowers, swung as she shook her head at me.
She said, “I don’t have contact with either of them. Edwina’s toxic. God knows where he is.”
I asked when she’d seen Julian last.
“A long time ago. After he got out,” she said. “I went over there to get him away from her. I didn’t want him picking up her habits. I told him he could move in with me but he wouldn’t budge.” She made a disgusted face. “I was about ready to slap him. All that time he was inside, she never went once to see him. She wouldn’t even pay for my bus tickets. You believe that? How cheap can you get?”
“Where’d they keep him?”
“Atascadero,” she said. Unconsciously she reached across the table and picked up my napkin, began twisting it. “It took me all day to get down there. They never wanted to let me in, cause I didn’t have ID. I was too young. I had to argue my way in.”
Her devotion impressed me. The youth camp was in San Luis Obispo, over two hundred miles to the south. “You went by yourself?”
“Who else’s going to take me?”
“Reverend Willamette?”
“I don’t do church,” she said. “Only thing I believe in is me.”
I decided I’d misread her reasons for changing her name.
She said, “Have you ever seen a juvenile facility?”
I nodded. I had. Far more often than I’d ever wanted to.
“Those kids,” she said. “They’re not kids. They look like kids, but that’s not what they are. They ate my brother alive. First time I show up, I haven’t seen him in two years. He’s got cuts all over his face. I’m twelve and he’s crying to me like I’m the big sister instead of the other way around. ‘You gotta help me, I can’t take it no more.’ I told him, ‘Julian, you fight back. They come for you, you hit them first. Hit them as hard you can.’ He couldn’t do it. The next time I come he’s got his arm in a cast.” The napkin was by now reduced to pieces. “They broke his arm with a fencepost.”
She paused to compose herself. “Once he got out, the last thing he needs is to end up back inside on account of Edwina doing something stupid. She’s not the kind of person who can handle her own business, let alone someone else’s. Let alone someone like him.”
Despite her efforts to the contrary, she was starting to get worked up again. “I’m the one petitioning to seal his records,” she said. “I’m the one filling out job applications. I’m not trying to sound selfish, but it’s not like I don’t have my own life.”
“It’s not selfish,” I said.
“How’m I supposed to manage it when she’s whispering in his ear the whole time?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know. I couldn’t.”
She sat back, drained but restless, her hands active, searching for something new to destroy.
“Did Julian use?” I asked.
“I never saw him do
it. But I don’t know what he learned inside.”
“I’m asking cause I understand he suffers from mental health issues, and it’s common to have substance abuse problems on top of that.”
“As long as he gets his meds, he’s fine. That’s another reason I couldn’t have him living with her. She’d forget to give him his pills and next thing I know he’s calling me up, talking crazy. I have to drop what I’m doing and run over there.”
“She seems to think it was the experiment that kicked off his problems.”
“That’s because she was too high to notice,” Kara said. “He’s always been like that. Not dangerous. Just…” She bit her lip. “Himself.”
“Does he have—did he have, at some point, before or after his release—someone monitoring him? Social worker? Anyone like that?”
That earned me an eye-roll. For an instant she looked just like her mother.
I asked where Julian had gotten his meds.
“Clinic, I think.”
Staff might have a bead on him. But I doubted they’d speak to me: confidentiality.
“What about old friends?” I said. “Can you give me some names?”
She shook her head despondently. She said, “All the other kids did was tease him.”
Her voice had fallen.
“They called him Grimace. Like the McDonald’s character. The purple one? Big, dumb Julian. Ma—Edwina, she wanted him to play football. She saw a meal ticket. When he got into high school, she made him go out for the team. But he couldn’t follow instructions, he’d wander around in circles. He didn’t like to get hit, or to hit anybody else. He never could hurt another person, no matter what they did to him. Never.”
She was sticking up for him, and I felt for her, more deeply than she could imagine.
Kara stirred the remains of the napkin with a long, lacquered fingernail. “So what do you think he’s done this time?”
“Nothing. As I told your mother, I need to talk to him to make sure he’s okay.”
“So you can arrest him.”
“I have no cause to do that.”
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