Straw Men

by Martin J. Smith

  Same thing Downtown, depending on traffic. Two mornings now he’d watched her there. She wheeled that nice ride of hers into the Oxford Centre parking garage, both times between eight-twenty and eight-thirty.

  Beautiful.

  What was taking her so long? Couldn’t see a thing through the glare on the front window. But she was in there somewhere; he could still see her car’s back bumper sticking out of the alley. She’d be out in a minute with a cup of whatever, then down Fifth through Oakland. Onto the Parkway, off at Grant, into the garage and the deserted corner near the stairwell where she parked every day. Knew her routines as well as he knew his own. Anytime he wanted, she was his.

  But the best place? No question. Right there in her bedroom, one clean shot from the empty roof across the street. One shot to end this bullshit and put everything right. He could almost see the red LaserShot beam dance across her skull, feel the SIG jump in his hands. Just thinking about it made him hard. Better adjust. Don’t want people thinking there’s a tent pole under this peacoat.

  Well, finally. Out the front door and headed for the car, juggling her keys and her cup and a little bag with her muffin. Even so, even with that Columbo coat, she moved nice, like chicks who really know how to strip, the ones who know what drives guys nuts. It’s not bumping and grinding like a paint shaker at the hardware store. It’s those little jukes from side to side, like she’s mixing a martini, makes you see stars. You watch a woman like that move, can’t help but picture her working that magic with you inside.

  Around the corner, into the alley. The alarm chirps. The car door slams. Take her a few seconds to get everything set—cup in the cupholder, key in the hole, maybe a quick bite of muffin before she rolled. Every morning the same. Then, ignition and blast off. The rear bumper disappeared and she was gone, headed for town. Watch said 8:07. Two minutes later than the last time he followed her, but close enough to know she’d be where he wanted when he wanted, if he wanted.

  Bitch might as well wear her schedule on a sandwich board.

  Chapter 12

  “No calls for a few minutes, Liis. I’ll be tied up on something, maybe half an hour. I’ll get back to people this afternoon.”

  Liisa Wyatt looked up from her keyboard. “Good morning to you, too,” she said.

  Brenna tossed her Starbucks cup and a crumpled muffin bag into her secretary’s trash can. “I’m sorry. Good morning. Just take messages for a while, OK?”

  “What’s wrong?”

  Life had seemed so right just after DellaVecchio’s release. Now, a week later, everything seemed wrong. Brenna thought again about the odd phone call she got last night, the third. Just menacing silence on the line. She thought about the lie she had told Jim when he came home from the kids’ basketball practice and caught her pacing like a caged cat. She wanted to tell Liisa what was happening, that someone was scaring holy hell out of her. But when she opened her mouth, “Nothing” came out. She forced a smile as she said it.

  “You sure?”

  “Just some stuff I need to take care of, and I need a chunk of time to do it. I’ll let you know when I’m done.”

  She closed her office door and leaned back against it. Already, a dozen pink message slips were wedged beneath a corner of her desk phone. They’d have to wait. She couldn’t, wouldn’t, put up with this. She wasn’t easily intimidated. Hell, she could intimidate with the best of them. But this guy was calling her at home, three times now if you counted the song recording he’d left on their machine that first time. He always seemed to know when she was alone, when she was the one who’d pick up the phone. As if he’d been watching the house, figuring out their schedules.

  The cops still had her answering machine, so all she got the second time was the weighted hum of an open line. She’d slammed the phone down on instinct, but wised up fast. She’d called the phone company to order Caller ID. It was activated just hours before last night’s call, and it worked like a charm.

  She hung her coat and scarf on the burnished-steel rack in the corner of her office and sat down. She fished the yellow Post-it note from her briefcase and read her scribble—412–358–4491. The number that had flashed onto the LCD readout when last night’s call came in. She’d tell Jim about it eventually, let him know what was going on. But first she wanted some information.

  She reached for the Greater Pittsburgh White Pages. She opened it to the pages marked “Prefix Locations/Area Code 412” and traced her finger down the page. She stopped when her finger hit 358. She ran her finger across the page. It came to rest on a word she never expected—Lawrenceville.

  Her hand shook as she dialed the number. On the fourth ring, a woman answered. “Depth Charge.”

  “I’m sorry?” Brenna said.

  “Depth Charge. Who ya lookin’ for?”

  “Is this 358–4491?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Somebody asked me to call them at this number,” Brenna said. “This is the Depth Charge? What’s that?”

  “I’m busy as hell,” the woman said, and hung up.

  The bar was flanked on one side by a showroom full of granite headstones, and on the other by a narrow, car-choked side street. On the side of a building facing south on Butler, a billboard offered “Caskets Unlimited” to passing motorists.

  Brenna had driven past the Depth Charge four times as she eased the Legend up and down Butler. She’d even circled this block twice before she spotted it. Maybe the odd billboard distracted her, or maybe she hadn’t seen it because the front door was nearly hidden by an ancient refrigerated display case, which someone had left out on the pitted sidewalk for scavengers to haul away.

  She eased the car to the curb and set the parking brake. Even at 10 a.m., even in the day’s bright sun, Lawrenceville had a gloomy, claustrophobic feel. She’d gotten over the initial shock of finding that the latest call came from somewhere in DellaVecchio’s neighborhood. But by the time she canceled her morning appointments and drove out of the Oxford Centre parking garage, her heart was pounding.

  Brenna hesitated before opening the car door, trying to calculate the odds. Even if this was the phone the caller used, wouldn’t that make sense? Whoever set DellaVecchio up the first time was smart. He made sure back then that the most obvious clues pointed to his straw man. If he was setting DellaVecchio up again, why wouldn’t he use a phone from somewhere down here?

  She opened the car door and stepped out. The only noise came from the steady hum of traffic along Butler. The sidewalks were deserted except for a stoop sitter, an old woman dressed in black, more than a block away. Brenna thought the click-click-click of her low heels on the concrete seemed obnoxiously loud as she walked toward the front door. She stepped into the dim tavern, ignoring the half-dozen regulars who turned to look at her as they sipped beer for breakfast. The pay phone was on the wall just inside the front door, so she picked up the sticky handset, pretending to make a call. Leaning back, she read the numbers on the tiny white stripe underneath the touch-tone keypad: 358–4491.

  Brenna checked the Post-it note again, swallowed hard, and hung up the phone. Back in bright daylight, she noticed a sign for 44th Street at the nearest intersection. She realized then she was less than a block from DellaVecchio’s house.

  Chapter 13

  The morning calamities were worse than usual. Christensen had the stains to prove it, and he reviewed them as he pushed through the front entrance of the Harmony Brain Research Center. A falling glob of boysenberry jam had left a tear-shaped indigo spot just beneath the pocket of his white cotton shirt, the result of a PBJ catastrophe while making the kids’ lunches. He’d noticed it only after dropping them at school, when it was too late to change. Wouldn’t have mattered anyway. Only moments before, he discovered his commuter mug was dripping French roast onto his chest every time h
e took a sip. When would he learn to get the lid on right? His shirt looked like a Jackson Pollock masterpiece, and the work day had just started.

  “Big explosion at Denny’s?”

  Christensen looked up. Harmony’s acerbic lobby receptionist, Petra Smanko, was shaking her head, one of the few body parts her bullet-scarred brain could still control. She was sitting behind her futuristic telephone control panel, strapped in her wheelchair, wearing a cordless headset. She looked like a space shuttle pilot. More remarkably, her easy smile was undimmed by the wreckage of her life and the devastation in her head. Christensen found endless inspiration in Smanko’s unshakable good humor.

  “It’s really bad today, isn’t it?” he said.

  “Worse than usual. Putting your dry cleaner’s kid through college?”

  He laughed. “Oh, you know, I let the kids sleep in and—”

  “You were late getting out. I know the story. Hold it a sec.” She poked at her console with the eraser end of a pencil clamped in her left hand, which still had some function. “Harmony Brain Research Center. Good morning.” Then, “I’ll transfer you.” She poked at the console again and looked back at him, nodding at the purple stain. “Grape jam?”

  “Something like that.”

  At the brown streaks down his chest. “Coffee?”

  “Yep.” He started down the hall, toward the small research office he kept at the center. “Thanks for the damage report.”

  “Add some eggs and bacon, make a nice Grand Slam,” she said.

  Twice a week for the past three years, Christensen had come to this futuristic facility in the hills of O’Hara township, just northeast of the city, to work on one memory project or another. He’d spent two years in the Alzheimer’s wing trying to understand how art therapy helps patients in the later stages of the disease reconnect with memories that once seemed lost forever. Colleagues had hailed the resulting paper as a breakthrough when he’d delivered it a year earlier at a conference in Houston, but by then he’d shifted his attention to the malleability of post-traumatic memories—a project inspired by Teresa Harnett’s evolving account of the night she was attacked.

  Harmony was not only a state-of-the-art neurological treatment facility, but a deep well of potential study subjects in various stages of neural disrepair. Some of their brains were reshaped by disease; others struggled with coordination, function, memory, and psychological scars in the aftermath of an accident or assault. Sometimes their stories hinted at the worst in human nature, sometimes the best. And sometimes the stories were a bit of both, as in the remarkable journey of Petra Smanko, whose ex-boyfriend had left a 9mm slug in her cerebral cortex four years ago. When Christensen first met her, she was just learning how to talk again. Now she was the center’s full-time chatterbox, talking as if, any second, she might go mute.

  He moved down the smooth concrete hallway, navigating past a young man in a motorized wheelchair. Christensen recognized him from the elaborate gang tattoo on his left forearm.

  “How’s your game, DeeCee?” Christensen slowed to the chair’s pace and looked down. “I’ll whip your butt whenever you’re ready.”

  DeeCee laughed. “I’m hittin’ the board now at least. Gimme another week, but man, I hate those Velcro darts. Pussy darts. Want the spiky ones, man.”

  “You bounced one of the soft ones off my forehead last week. Your therapist gives you real darts, I’m not even coming in the room with you.”

  “Gimme a week, home. Be kickin’ your ass.”

  Christensen shot him a thumbs-up and moved on, turning right into a corridor marked “Skills Testing.” In small rooms on both sides of the hall, patients were struggling with tasks they once took for granted. A petite blond woman to Christensen’s left was pouring water from a pitcher, soaking the table beneath the cup for which she’d been aiming. In a room to the right, Christensen recognized the back of an old man’s bald head as that of former Mellon Bank executive Dwayne Laughlin. He was in his mid-80s but looked older; less charitable staff members called him the White Raisin. He was staring hard at a flash card of a horse, which his therapist across the table was holding up for him to see. “Spoon?” Laughlin asked.

  Christensen turned the key on his office door, shoved it open with his foot, and flipped on the overheads. Everything was as he left it, a wreck. At times the place more resembled a landfill than an office, but his papers were deceptively organized. His filing system was drawn from the principle of geologic layering—the oldest stuff on the bottom, the more recent deposits on top. He understood the system and it served him well, though few shared his confidence in it.

  He shrugged off his coat and sat down, then looked up when he heard footsteps in the hall outside, slow and measured. A moment later, the incredible hulk of David Harnett moved slowly past the office door. Harnett walked toward the vending area, apparently lost in thought, sipping from one of the small foam cups dispensed by the testing unit’s coin-operated coffee vending machine at the end of the hall. The cup nearly disappeared in his huge hand.

  Christensen froze, trying to make sense of what he’d just seen. Had that really happened?

  On one hand, a chance encounter at Harmony was probably overdue. Teresa had been a physical rehab patient here since shortly after the attack. By the time Christensen began his work at Harmony, Teresa already was a role model for other rehab patients who faced a long and difficult road after their traumatic head injuries. Her skull had been smashed into four pieces by an attacker who swung a thick glass wine bottle against it no fewer than thirteen times. The assault had sent her brain crashing around the inside of her cranium with the same force as if she’d driven a car into a bridge abutment at seventy miles per hour.

  But in all those years, her one-day-a-week therapy schedule and Christensen’s irregular Harmony research schedule had seldom coincided. Now, a week after DellaVecchio’s release and Teresa’s troubling visit to his Pitt office, her husband strolled casually past an office hardly anyone knew Christensen kept.

  This was weird. Teresa was years past having to be driven in for therapy; Christensen knew he’d seen her alone with car keys in the Harmony parking lot. So why was her husband here, pacing the halls?

  Christensen closed his door, peeking down the hall before he did. He felt a tightness in his chest and a buzz in his head as he watched David Harnett feed coins into a candy machine. What the hell was going on? At his desk, Christensen opened a drawer, then closed it. He moved his stapler from one side of his desk to the other. He spun his chair toward the window, wondering how Teresa had reacted to the news that Brenna, too, had received a threatening phone call. Suddenly he was in the hall, pretending to mosey down to the vending area for a midmorning snack.

  From the back, Harnett was roughly the size and shape of the vending machine in front of him. He was older than his wife, maybe by twenty years, and it showed mostly in the thinning hair at the crown of his head and the fleshy strain on his belt, which separated his khaki slacks from a polo shirt stretched over his broad shoulders.

  Christensen acted surprised and appropriately uncomfortable as Harnett turned his head. For an instant, the man seemed happy to see a familiar face. But with recognition came contempt, and it registered both in Harnett’s eyes and in the sudden and wordless whack! he delivered to the side of the vending machine.

  “Sorry,” Christensen said. “I was just, ah, sorry. Didn’t know you were here.”

  Harnett focused on the machine, saying nothing.

  “I’ll come back later,” Christensen said.

  Whack! Harnett grumbled, then gently bumped the machine with his shoulder. Behind the window, a Three Musketeers bar in space G3 shifted but didn’t fall from its uncertain perch. Harnett pressed the coin return button, but got nothing. Christensen seized the opening.

 
“Does that all the time,” he said. “Pushes it out to the very edge, but the thing doesn’t fall.”

  Harnett shook his head, but he seemed just as relieved as Christensen that they’d found safe ground. “Then you’re supposed to write off to Buttsniff, Ohio, or someplace,” he said. “Spend 33 cents postage to get your 75 cents back.”

  “There’s a trick,” Christensen said, then waited. “Mind?”

  Harnett stepped back and waved one of his giant hands toward the machine. He wasn’t smiling, but he didn’t seem as hostile as Christensen expected. Christensen thought twice about turning his back on Harnett, but he held his breath and stepped forward. He reached up and put his hands on the top front edges of the machine and pushed, rocking it back on its hind legs, then let it drop. The front legs were maybe an inch off the ground when he let go. The hulk shuddered as it hit, and the Three Musketeers bar dropped into the delivery well with a satisfying thud. Christensen turned, triumphant, and took a modest bow. Harnett nodded his appreciation, but all he said was, “Nice fucking shirt.”

  Christensen stepped aside as Harnett reached in for the candy bar.

  “Rough morning, is all. I should just get a bib.”

  Harnett pulled the chocolate bar out in a fist the size of a boxing glove, then opened his hand to show the treasure in his palm. “Thanks,” he said.

  “No problem.”

  The two men faced each other in awkward silence, alone together in a room no larger than a walk-in closet.