Straw Men

by Martin J. Smith

  “Ahhhh!” Taylor screamed. “Freckles!”

  Christensen slapped his forehead. “Freckles! Oh, geez. Taylor, I’m sorry.”

  The boy rolled onto his back and covered his face with his hands. “Unbelievable! Jiii-im? Little dots on a face?”

  “My fault,” Christensen said, feigning deep remorse. “Should have gotten that. Really.”

  Annie stood up, did a victory dance. “Chicken pox!” she howled. “Skin disease!”

  “All right already,” Christensen said, folding up the board. “I’m a nincompoop.”

  “Warts!” Annie howled, high-fiving Brenna again. She held an index finger aloft, an unabashed in-your-face we’re-number-one signal.

  “What happened to your sportsmanship, Annie? You don’t want us to feel bad, do you?”

  “Girls rule, boys drool!” Annie shouted, swaggering up the stairs. The vanquished Taylor trailed her with his head down, muttering. Brenna picked up the lid to the Pictionary box.

  “Warts?” She shook her head. “Oh, man.”

  Christensen watched the kids march up to the second floor, the ancient wooden stairs creaking with their weight.

  “That worry you at all?” he asked. “How quickly and violently Taylor reacted? That’s not like him at all.”

  Brenna leaned closer, punched him on the shoulder. “Baby,” she said, “lighten up. I mean, skin disease? If you were on my team, I’d have strangled you. I appreciate your concern, but that little mental-health test cost you the game. You know how competitive Taylor is.”

  “So it doesn’t worry you?”

  “He’s doing fine for the morning after his mom got hit by a bullet,” she said.

  “You told him what, exactly?”

  “That it was a fluke. Somebody shot a gun outside, and the bullet went through our window. That’s it. That’s something he can understand. Give him some credit, Jim. Kids are resilient.”

  “He’s still upset, though.”

  “He wasn’t upset, then you could worry,” she said, pointing to the bandage. “I mean, I look like a war casualty.”

  Christensen shrugged and stood up. “What you told him was great. Keeps it real low-key. But I want to keep an eye on him. He was right outside the door last night, listening to it all. That’s probably just as traumatic as seeing, maybe more.”

  Brenna grabbed him from behind as he picked up the game board. He stood with the Pictionary board in one hand and turned toward her, maneuvering the game into an awkward one-handed hug. She kissed him softly. Twice.

  “You’re in a good mood,” he said.

  “I just … you know. I—I love the way you love my son.”

  Her phrasing told Christensen a lot.

  “I’m sorry about this morning, too,” she added. “Teresa Harnett put you in a tough spot, I know, and—”

  The doorbell short-circuited the moment. Christensen held her as she tried to pull away, but she slipped from his arms and headed for the front door. The moment faded into a surge of alarm. The window miniblinds were all shut, but had he remembered the long window in the front door? Christensen charged after her.

  “Don’t go near the door! Let me get it, Bren. Please.”

  “There’s still a patrol car out front,” she called from the hall. “We’ve probably never been safer.”

  The doorbell rang again. Brenna had stopped short of the door. She waved him forward, and he scissored open the blind to peer out. A pair of ice-blue eyes peered back at him. He swallowed hard and mouthed “Dagnolo” to Brenna. “Somebody else, too,” he said. “Can’t see who.”

  She smiled. “Interesting twist.”

  Christensen slid the deadbolt and turned the knob, ushering in a blast of cold air. Brenna stepped into the doorway with him, wrapping her arms around herself as she did. Their visitors stood side by side. Dagnolo was on the right—tall, lean, more than six feet of prime cut in a somber navy-blue overcoat. The man beside him topped out at Dagnolo’s shoulder, all chest and belly, a gritty, 5-foot-8 mound of hamburger wrapped in a standard-issue Pittsburgh Police Department topcoat. The Beelzebub beard along his boxy jaw made his face instantly familiar.

  “Chief Kiger,” Brenna said, ignoring the district attorney.

  The chief nodded. “Heard there was a little excitement last night.”

  Kiger’s eyes strayed to the side of Brenna’s head. In the chilly silence that followed, Christensen imagined the reasons they were here. The four of them faced off in the doorway, adversaries separated now by only a few feet.

  Finally, Dagnolo forced a smile. “We need to talk.”

  Chapter 17

  Dagnolo clearly intended to run the show. Christensen knew from the way the two men entered the house, the way they arranged themselves in the living room. The D.A. took the mission chair, the largest and most imperial seat in the room, and feigned civility with a tight-lipped and patronizing smile. Brenna settled on the left side of the couch and waited for Christensen to join her. Kiger sat on the only remaining seat, the brick hearth.

  Christensen’s mind reeled. Could he stand another odd chapter in the complicated history between himself and Dagnolo? When they first met, the district attorney wanted to prosecute him for disconnecting Molly’s respirator. Christensen had decided to end his wife’s life—or what was left of it following her car accident and months of what her doctors called a “persistent vegetative state”—to spare their daughters the prolonged agony promised by advanced medical science. He’d barred the intensive care unit door to frantic nurses and let Molly die quietly in his arms at a time when Dagnolo had decided to make mercy killing a noisy election-year issue.

  They’d crossed paths again a year ago when, during art therapy research with second-stage Alzheimer’s patient Floss Underhill, Christensen unraveled a cover-up involving the death of her three-year-old grandchild. The case had confounded Dagnolo for years, and its violent resolution exploded into national headlines because of the Underhill family’s vast wealth and political prominence. Publicly, Dagnolo had acknowledged Christensen’s key role in discovering the tragic truth of Chip Underhill’s death. Privately, Dagnolo had called him a meddling asshole.

  Now this.

  “So,” Christensen said, “I’m guessing you’ve spoken with Teresa.”

  Dagnolo and Kiger traded a quick look.

  “She came to my office this morning, yes,” Dagnolo said. He looked around the room, a vague, leisurely survey, never letting his eyes rest on anything or anyone. “So everyone here knows?”

  Something electric passed from Brenna to Christensen. She then fixed Dagnolo with a glare that could melt steel. “Everyone,” she said.

  Had hearing about Brenna’s phone calls convinced Teresa to confess her doubts to the D.A.? Word of last night’s shooting? What had she told Dagnolo? And why was Kiger involved? Christensen wanted Dagnolo to fill in the gaps, so he waited.

  “This matter obviously is of deep concern to me, to all of us, I think, in law enforcement in this city,” Dagnolo said. “As you might expect, Mr. Christensen—or do you ivory-tower types still prefer Doctor?”

  Christensen could smell Dagnolo’s smug satisfaction. “Four years of college, four years of postgraduate work to get my Ph.D. in clinical psychology, a two-year internship…” He smiled. “Doctor’s fine.”

  Dagnolo’s arrogance faded, but not much. “As you might expect,” he continued, “I have certain questions about how your little get-together with my witness came about. I’d like to hear your version, Doctor Christensen, before we advise Judge Reinhardt about this complica—”

  “Look, J. D., you’re in my house,” Brenna said. “You came to talk, let’s talk. But check your bullshit attitude at the door. And don�
�t you fucking dare talk to Reinhardt without me there.”

  Christensen stood up. He met all three sets of eyes in turn. “Let’s get a handle on this right now.” He had their attention. “Let’s just concede this is awkward as hell. Put yourselves in my shoes, opening that office door two weeks ago and finding her there, wanting to talk. I knew the implications. I knew she was putting this whole thing in jeopardy. But what was I supposed to do? I did what I thought was best for everybody.”

  Brenna turned away from Dagnolo, who shifted so that he faced Kiger. Only the police chief was watching him now, so Christensen appealed to him. He knew from personal experience that Kiger was an honorable man. His reputation for plain-spoken fairness wasn’t just a public image.

  “I agree,” Kiger said in his sticky Memphis drawl. The words, so understated and soft, seemed to shift the balance of power in the room. “I think we should all just talk straight here. We all got questions about where this is headed now. Quicker we answer ’em the better.” He nodded to Brenna. “We got a situation here. People gettin’ phone calls, both you and Teresa. People gettin’ hurt. Nobody wants that.”

  “Agreed,” Dagnolo said.

  Brenna hesitated, then said, “Fine, but no bullshit.”

  Nodding heads all around. And a giggle. Christensen spotted Annie and Taylor on the stair landing and motioned them back upstairs.

  “Y’all go on then, sir,” Kiger said when the kids were gone. “Tell us what happened.”

  Christensen took the seat beside Brenna again. Kiger and Dagnolo knew about Teresa’s phone calls, so she’d probably confessed her doubts. So he told them everything he could remember about the day she approached him looking for help. He explained, too, how he’d seen Teresa and her husband in the Harmony testing unit, how he’d initiated a conversation then, how David Harnett reacted when he told him about the odd phone message left on their home answering machine.

  When he was done, Kiger nodded. “Same thing Miz Harnett told us. That’s fine. Good to know we’re all workin’ from the same page. Now, you’re saying the Harnetts didn’t know about that phone call you got?”

  “Milsevic never told them,” Christensen said. “That was the impression I got from the husband.”

  “David told you that?” Dagnolo said. “Or that’s the impression you got?”

  Christensen closed his eyes, trying to recall their tense hallway conversation. “He said it was the first he’d heard of it. Now, what happened, why they didn’t get the message, I don’t know.”

  Brenna sat forward, leaning toward Kiger. “You were in San Diego when I got the ‘Tunnel of Love’ call. Your secretary transferred me to Milsevic because he was handling that stuff while you were gone. Believe me, talking to him wasn’t my idea. But we wanted to make sure the Harnetts knew about it.”

  Kiger waved her words away. “Captain Milsevic’s a pro, Ms. Kennedy. He got somebody on it, right? Sent a patrol officer by? I saw the report. Same thing I’da done.”

  Brenna nodded. “The officer took a report. And the answering machine.”

  Kiger made a face, as if he’d smelled something rank. “That was pretty much worthless, far as information. Sounds like he uses pay phones, but that’s no help. So we know there’s a head case out there. We already knew that.”

  “We know of one, for sure,” Dagnolo said. He was looking at his shoes, but everyone knew where the barb was aimed.

  “Oh, eat shit, J. D.,” Brenna said.

  Kiger held up his hands, palms out, the plump fingers like pink baby dills. To Dagnolo: “Yep, sir, DellaVecchio’s loose. We got him on a short leash, but he’s loose.” To Brenna: “The guy you think set your boy up the last time? He’s loose too, if he exists.” To no one in particular: “Some people just like to mess with us, so we could be talkin’ about some piece of dog doo none of us ever heard of. Somebody been readin’ the papers and wanted to get in on the act. But nobody knows who it is just yet, so spare me the insinuatin’. Y’all clear on that?”

  Kiger waited for affirmation, and got it from all three. He turned back to Christensen. “So, Miz Harnett told you she’d had some calls, too?”

  Christensen nodded. “Two at that point, I think she said. I don’t know about since then. We didn’t talk dates.” He repeated what Teresa had told him about the calls she’d received, about the caller once saying, “You never rose.”

  “She tell you what she remembered at that point?” Kiger asked.

  “That the attacker’s voice was different than the voice on the phone. Different than DellaVecchio’s voice.”

  Kiger’s face betrayed nothing.

  “She said the caller sounded like DellaVecchio,” Dagnolo said.

  Christensen slid forward to the edge of the sofa. “But you’re missing the point. For argument’s sake let’s say it was DellaVecchio’s voice on the phone. That’s not what’s got her rattled. What she can’t reconcile is that the voice on the phone, DellaVecchio’s voice—whether it’s him or not—isn’t the same voice she remembers from the attack. It wasn’t DellaVecchio’s voice whispering in her ear that night. That’s what’s significant here. They’re different voices.”

  “Different,” Kiger said.

  “Yes,” Christensen said. “Different enough to raise doubts about her memories.”

  “Here we go,” Dagnolo said. “Now we’re leaving solid ground.”

  Christensen smiled. Here was his opening. “You’re dealing with memories here, J. D., traumatic memories. You were never on solid ground.” He looked at each one in turn, including Brenna. “That’s the dirty little secret about what you people do, isn’t it? You all know memories are fragile things. They exist up here”—he pointed to his head—“in this gray blob of chemicals and electrical impulses. They’re like wisps of smoke, but you still treat them like absolute truth. When it suits your needs, you all pretend people don’t shape and reshape memories to make sense of traumas like this. But they do. Everyone does. Acknowledge the reality of it, you’ve got a big problem. The minute you stop treating memories like solid ground, you suspend the law of gravity.”

  Christensen sat back, struck by the uncomfortable silence. Brenna patted him on the thigh. Kiger recrossed his legs. Finally, Dagnolo cleared his throat.

  “Mind if we stick to the issue here?” the D.A. said.

  “Back to Teresa,” Brenna said.

  So much for changing the world. “Fine,” Christensen said. “Forget the bigger issue. We’ll just keep putting out fires.”

  Dagnolo granted absolution with a sovereign nod. “So, what you’re saying is, after all this time, Teresa suddenly heard this guy’s voice? Remember, she’s lying there, her head caved in, probably unconscious. She could have been hearing the voice of God, for all we know. And she, what? Forgets that for eight years?”

  “It does happen.”

  Dagnolo couldn’t stifle his rising exasperation. “And then she remembers it, just like that? It pops right back into her head like a cork and suddenly she’s in your office rethinking the whole story she’s told from the beginning?” The district attorney shook his head. “I’m sorry. I’ve got serious questions about what’s happened here.”

  “I can’t help that. She came to me, remember?”

  Dagnolo shook his head. “This changes nothing.”

  “Maybe,” Christensen said. “Or it changes everything. What’s happened is that Teresa’s got a puzzle piece that suddenly doesn’t fit. It has her confused, she’s trying to figure it out. Listen to her. You owe her that.”

  Brenna stood up suddenly and walked into the kitchen, returning a moment later with a kettle dangling from her index finger. “This may take a while, so I’m putting water on for tea,” she said. “How many?”

  “Thank yo
u, ma’am,” Kiger said. “Please.”

  “Two,” Dagnolo said.

  “Me too,” Christensen said.

  The three men sat in silence, listening to the water spill into the kettle and the snik-snik-snik of the starter on their gas stove. Brenna was back a moment later with an empty cup in her hand.

  “Enough with the inquisition,” she said. “How about you guys give a little?”

  Chapter 18

  Dagnolo looked at the cup in Brenna’s hand. His face couldn’t have registered any more contempt if she’d asked for a urine sample. “Meaning what?” he asked.

  “Meaning you’re pumping Jim about what happened with Teresa, like he somehow needs to apologize for the fact that she came to him. He’s been honest. He did the right thing. Now you give us something.”

  “Let’s get something straight,” the D.A. said. “We don’t owe—”

  “Fair enough,” Kiger interrupted. “Tell me what you wanna know, Miz Kennedy. I’ll answer you if I can.”

  Dagnolo’s mouth hung open until he slowly winched it shut. But he recovered quickly. “I would remind you, Chief, that these investigations regarding the phone calls and the shooting incident are ongoing. We need to be very careful.”

  Kiger offered a patient, condescending smile. “Well, I’ll just be real careful then.” To Brenna: “Miz Kennedy?”

  “I want to know if you’re investigating DellaVecchio as a suspect in either the calls or the shooting.”

  Kiger laced the fingers of his hands together. “We are,” he said.

  Dagnolo shook his head in disgust. Kiger ignored him.

  “If we didn’t take a look at him, we’d be a few bricks shy of a load,” the police chief said.

  “You have reason to suspect him, or you haven’t ruled him out?”