You think you know me pretty well (an Alex Sedaka thriller)

by David Kessler

“She’s hyperventilating! Call a doctor! Now!”

  23:38 PDT

  Juanita was now finding it harder to match up the shredded strips to the part of the letter that she had already reconstructed. The first strips had been easy because a handful of shredded strips had stayed together at the top of the pile. But others had got separated.

  She reckoned that she had reconstructed at least a third of the letter. She could make out some parts of sentences like “I can conf…” She could also make out fragments of dates on the letter, and she knew it was important to remember that these dates were in the British format.

  But she was making too slow progress. She looked up at the clock and saw that she had only twenty-three minutes. Even if she could finish, what could she do with it? Could she send it to the governor? Would he act on it? What did it say? What did it even prove?

  But there were other questions going through her mind. Like why hadn’t Nat returned? Where was he now?

  And what about Alex? Why didn’t he call in? He had told her what the governor had said and that he was on his way to speak to Mrs. Olsen. But would they let him in to the hospital? And what had Esther Olsen decided? Would she ask the governor for a stay of execution on Burrow? Would the governor grant it?

  Juanita had to find out.

  23:40 PDT

  “Look, if you’ll just call the governor, he’ll explain everything,” said Alex as he was led away in handcuffs by the police.

  They were outside the building and he was being manhandled toward a waiting police car.

  “You can call from the precinct.”

  “No, you don’t understand. I’ve got a client on death row who’s due to be – ”

  “Wait a minute!” asked the female cop. “Are you Clayton Burrow’s lawyer?”

  “Yes. And I’ve got new evidence. I have to speak to the governor.”

  “I don’t think you’re going to speak to the governor at this time.”

  This was the male cop again. But his female colleague was somewhat more sympathetic.

  “Hold on a minute, Jack, I think we should let him.”

  “After he burst into that old lady’s room?”

  Alex knew that he had to say something to swing it his way.

  “The ‘old lady’ is the mother of the victim. The governor told me that he would grant a stay of execution if she asked for it.”

  “So you thought you’d just barge in there and browbeat her – ”

  “You don’t understand! I met her this morning. She asked me to help her. We have new evidence. She helped me to find the evidence.”

  “Sure. And I’m Superman.”

  “Look, why don’t you just take my phone and call the governor yourself?”

  “Yeah, like I’ve got the governor’s number.”

  They had reached the police car now.

  “The number’s in my cell phone. It’s on my quick-call list. You can take the cell phone out of my pocket and call him. Please, just do it!”

  The male cop exchanged glances with his female colleague again. In the end it was the female who took the iPhone from Alex’s pocket and selected the name “governor” from the contacts list.

  “Hi Alex?”

  “Who is this?” asked the female cop.

  “This is the governor – Chuck Dusenbury. And who is this?”

  The female cop introduced herself and told the governor what had happened. This was followed by several seconds of intense shouting in which the governor could be clearly heard to be telling the female officer to release Mr. Sedaka immediately and to put him on the line. The male cop uncuffed Alex and the female officer handed him the phone.

  “Sir, I’ve just spoken to Mrs. Olsen.”

  “And?”

  “I couldn’t ask her, sir. After I found out what I found out, she suffered a relapse. They’ve got her on a respirator. But I’ve learned something else – something I didn’t know before.”

  “What’s that?”

  Alex looked round edgily, wondering how to phrase it. He could hardly tell the cops to back off, under the circumstances. And moving away from them, out of earshot, was equally not an option. He chose his next words carefully.

  “I know about Jimmy and Jonathan … and Edgar.”

  There was an intense silence for a few seconds.

  “She told you?” asked Dusenbury, nervously.

  “Jonathan told me some of it,” said Alex, “and Esther told me the rest. I don’t know if there are any more blanks to fill in, but I think I’ve pretty much got the whole picture.”

  “And what do you intend to do with the information?”

  The governor’s tone was tense.

  “Do with it?” Alex was puzzled. A second or two later he understood. “I’m not a blackmailer if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  “Then what is it you want of me?”

  “I’m trying to say that it’s beginning to look increasingly like my client was right – about Dorothy. And there’s more to it because there’s evidence that my own legal intern has been up to some shenanigans.”

  “What sort of shenanigans?”

  “Well for a start, he had Dorothy’s passport at his home. The passport showed that she entered England but never left. Also, Nat was the one who was so instrumental in getting me to take on the Burrow case. And another thing – inside the passport was a picture of a young Esther Olsen.”

  “What are you talking about, Alex?”

  “I’m talking about the fact that Nat seems to have taken an interest not only in Dorothy, but also in her mother. And another thing: we’ve been chasing up that clinic in London that Dorothy went to, and they sent us a fax. But it’s beginning to look like Nat intercepted it.”

  “So why don’t you get them to send you a new one?”

  “We’ve bust a gut trying. But there’s a problem because of the time difference. We need to speak to an administrator and right now they’re on the graveyard shift.”

  There was a brief pause.

  “It’s actually quarter of eight in the morning in England by my reckoning. Maybe one of the admin staff is an early riser. It’s worth a shot.”

  Alex considered asking Dusenbury to grant a stay in the meantime. That was the reason why he had made this call. But he realized that even with all the evidence they had, the governor was going to do nothing unless he had what he considered to be absolute proof.

  “Okay, but you will be waiting for my call back?”

  “I’m sitting by the phone, Alex. And I’ll be waiting.”

  23:45 PDT

  In the high security block at San Quentin, the witnesses to the execution were filing in to the special room adjoining the execution chamber. These were officials of the courts, the governor’s office, the state legislature and several journalists who were there to witness the event in their capacity as the representatives of the people.

  Although no photography was allowed of an actual execution, there were several press artists at work. At the moment there wasn’t much they could do because the curtain was drawn across the window on the side of the execution chamber itself.

  As the surviving immediate relatives of the victim, Esther and Jonathan Olsen had both been given passes to witness the execution. But even before she had been overtaken by ill health, Esther had decided not to attend. It was not revenge she wanted, it was closure. And closure for her meant not witnessing the execution of her daughter’s murderer, but finding the body so that she could give her daughter a proper burial.

  And this had been denied her.

  Jonathan Olsen, in contrast, had yearned for the day when he would see Clayton Burrow strapped down to a gurney and put to death by lethal injection. But now, when the time had come, he was nowhere to be found.

  The guards at the prison didn’t know what the real Jonathan Olsen looked like, so they had no way of knowing that the man who had obtained entry using Jonathan’s pass was in fact Nathaniel Anderson.

  23:47 PDT />
  “Call them right now, Juanita! Demand to speak to someone in authority and don’t let up. See if you can speak to that nurse again!”

  “Okay, boss! Right away!”

  Alex was driving to the prison. He knew there wasn’t much he could do there unless they could get a stay of execution, but he had a duty to be with his client. Even if he couldn’t save him, even if he couldn’t comfort him, he still had a duty to be with him.

  It was a strange thought. Racing to the prison to comfort a man of whose innocence he was now convinced, in the event that their last-ditch efforts would fail. If there had still been time, he would have petitioned the Federal District Court to grant a stay on the grounds of the passport being found at Nat’s place. But the trouble was that the only evidence he had as to where the passport was found was the word of a career criminal.

  Aside from that, he didn’t have time to get to the District Court now. The truth of the matter was that all he could do now was get to San Quentin and see his client for what might be the last time.

  Clayton Burrow’s fate was in now in the hands of Juanita.

  23:48 PDT

  The building that housed the scanning-tunneling microscope was quiet but not completely deserted. David was now more sensitive and alert to any sound in the background, despite the promise the security staff had made to be extra alert. In truth, now that the attacker had been identified – his father had phoned him and told him – he wasn’t unduly worried about the possibility of a repetition.

  But the survival instinct is linked more closely to the emotions than the cognitive faculty. And so every footstep, creaking door or distant voice disturbed him. But it didn’t undermine his resolve. Indeed, quite the contrary. The violent attack had made him all the more determined to find something that could help to save the life of Clayton Burrow.

  He didn’t know if his father had retrieved the other two platters of the hard disk from Jonathan, but at this stage there was no time to get them. For this reason he had spent the last hour or more scouring recovered files on the one remaining platter. He had looked for word processing files initially, reading just enough text to determine if a file showed any promising signs before moving on to the next.

  But that had proved fruitless. So he had been pleasantly surprised when he found an MP3 file. Because of its size, it was spread over several sectors and it was painstaking work recovering it little by little using the scanning tunneling microscope. But he had persevered.

  The MP3 file itself was simply called “I cannot be.” That was enigmatic enough to have caught his attention, but that alone would not have justified the amount of work that he was putting into recovering this audio file when the clock was ticking so loudly.

  The reason was that every audio file, in addition to the music or speech itself, was also accompanied by a sort of mini-file containing something called “metadata.” Metadata was a set of fixed pieces of information about the audio file, like artist, year, genre, comment. And this one stated in the comment section: “Poem about Daddy.”

  23:49 PDT (07:49 BST)

  The nursing station in the ward at the Finchley Road Medical Centre was coming to life as patients woke up. But the office staff had not yet arrived, so the calls were still being diverted to the nursing station when Juanita rang again. Nurse Michaels answered.

  “Is Susan White there?”

  “Look, I’ve already told you she’s off duty. She finished at two in the morning and she’s probably asleep. I don’t know if you know this but we work bloody hard here.”

  “I know and I’m sorry. But this is really important. I wouldn’t be calling all the way from America if it wasn’t.”

  “All I can do is leave her a message for when she’s next on duty, which’ll probably be in just over two hours.”

  “No, wait! There’s something I need you to do.”

  “What?” asked Nurse Michaels, through gritted teeth.

  “Did Susan White go home?”

  “Yes, a few hours ago.”

  “Does she live nearby?”

  “Yes.”

  There was a heavy sigh at the other end of the phone.

  “Okay, now listen, I wouldn’t normally ask you to do this, but, like I explained before, we have a client who’s going to be executed in just over ten minutes unless we can save him. From the information she’s given us, we think we may be able to save him. We just need some urgent paperwork. And she seems to be the person who knows where it is.”

  “But like I said, she’s not here.”

  “I know, and what I want you to do is call her. I wouldn’t ask you to do this if it wasn’t a matter of life and death. Get someone else to cover your post if necessary.”

  “Leaving my post isn’t the problem! I can’t just wake her up because someone calls up from America and tells me about someone on death row.”

  “She’d want you to do it!”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She tried to help us before. I think she even sent us something. But we have a problem with our fax machine. We need it to be sent again.”

  “I thought you said last time you called that it was the Chief Administrator who sent it?”

  “Well he must have authorized it. But I think she was the one who actually sent it. The point is she’d want to help us. She was trying to help us. She probably doesn’t even know that we had a problem with our fax machine. If she knew, she’d probably be over in a flash.”

  “Look … how do I know that you’re not just bullshitting me?”

  “I can’t prove it. I mean, if you turn on your TV to CNN or Eyewitness News you’ll see about the impending execution. Either you take my word or you don’t. But we have client whose life depends on your decision.”

  The nurse thought about it – but only for a moment.

  23:51 PDT

  Jonathan Olsen was sitting in front of the TV screen glued to the report about the impending execution. He was beginning to wonder if he had done the right thing, giving Nat the pass to witness the execution. He had waited years for the chance to see the look on Clayton’s Burrow’s face as he breathed his last breath. It was poetic justice – the bully who had beaten him up when he was younger and had subjected his sister to years of mental torture, finally getting what he deserved.

  In a way it eased his conscience about his father. He hadn’t intended to kill him. But in retrospect, that was poetic justice too. His father had also been an abuser, even if his abuse had been borne of his own guilt and suffering.

  He wondered what Alex would do with the knowledge. It wasn’t directly relevant to Dorothy’s fate, but, now that Alex knew, the knowledge was out there. Of course they couldn’t prove anything. Whoever had set things up to make it look like suicide had done too good a job for that. The authorities could hardly re-open the case now.

  The thing that troubled Jonathan more was that he had been too close to Dorothy. She had blamed her mother for turning a blind eye to Edgar’s abusive behavior and, after that day with the mirror, had never spoken to her again.

  But was she being fair?

  Certainly their mother should have done more to rein in her husband’s excesses. She wasn’t some old-fashioned 1950’s housewife who greeted her husband with a hot dinner as soon as he came home from work. She had a duty to protect her daughter.

  But looking back on it now, it was never quite so clear-cut. Edgar Olsen had been an extremely forceful personality and he could be a holy terror when roused. Esther had tried to encourage Dorothy to act in a way that would placate Edgar. And when that failed, she tried to persuade Dorothy to stop. But Dorothy had a mind of her own. And their mother was definitely a junior partner in the practice. She was also constantly being put on the defensive because of her infidelity. Although technically it wasn’t infidelity. The one-night stand that had brought Dorothy into the world had taken place before the marriage.

  But that hadn’t prevented Edgar Olsen from using it as a bludgeon agains
t both Esther and Dorothy. When it was Esther he was angry with, “whore” was the epithet that he threw. And when Dorothy crossed him, he called her a “little mamzer” - the Jewish word for a bastard. Edgar Olsen loved to lash out verbally and cause pain to others to numb himself to the pain of guilt that he felt over the death of his three-year-old son.

  But Jonathan now felt guilty about his unquestioning alliance with Dorothy.

  Was it right to punish his mother? Was it right to snub her?

  Unlike Dorothy, he had continued to speak to Esther after the incident with the mirror, but always coldly and without emotion.

  The phone rang. It jolted him. He sensed that this was no ordinary call. It was something special. Perhaps it was the time that alerted him. No one would call him at this time in the ordinary course events. And yet it was too early for the execution.

  “Hallo?”

  “Hi is that Jonathan Olsen?” asked a man’s voice.

  “Yes, it is,” he said nervously.

  “My name is Rodrigo Alvarez. I’m calling from the Idylwood Care Center.”

  23:52 PDT (07:52 BST)

  Susan White opened her eyes and tried to adjust to the light that was streaming into the room, even with the blinds half closed. The phone … that infernal noise … it wouldn’t stop.

  Her hand groped for the phone, eventually finding it. She managed to pick up the handset without knocking over everything on the bedside cabinet.

  “Yes!” she practically shouted.

  “Susan … Susan!”

  “Wha … what is it?”

  “Sorry to wake you. Listen. It’s important.”

  “Danielle?” said Susan, recognizing the voice. “What is it?”

  “We had another phone call from that woman.”

  “What woman?”

  “In America. At that law firm.”

  “Juanita?”

  “I think so.”