Straw Men

by Martin J. Smith

  “That what you’re looking for?” he asked.

  She smiled, a more cautious reaction. “Fiji would be better.”

  Christensen grabbed two bottles of Avalon water from the small refrigerator and set them on the coffee table between them, then sat in the chair across from her. He folded his hands in his lap. “Tell me why.”

  Teresa’s face turned serious. Or was she pretending to look serious?

  “OK, you got me,” she said. “I hate my father. Wow, you’re fast.”

  Christensen twisted the cap from his bottle. She leaned forward and did the same, struggling a bit, taking a delicate sip when the cap was finally loose. Swallowing for her seemed a deliberate process.

  “Let’s try this, then,” Christensen said. “Tell me what changed your mind about going to Dagnolo.”

  She ran a finger around the bottle’s plastic rim, avoiding his eyes. “What we talked about before, the doubts … I’ve tried everything I can to sort this out on my own. I can’t. And I couldn’t get back up on that stand next week and tell the same story when I know … when I’m not sure. I had no choice but to tell him and Kiger what was going on. Plus, the calls, then the shooting…”

  “And here you are,” Christensen said. “Dagnolo’s more reasonable than I gave him credit for.”

  “Oh no, he went berserk,” she added. “You should understand that. But he knew at that point his case was already in the toilet. He still wants me to testify, but cooperating with you was his only chance, his only choice. Or at least the only choice I gave him.”

  Teresa smoothed her dark hair down over her lower jaw, obscuring the subtle scars there. “I’ll tell you this much right now. If David finds out I’m talking to you, he’s gonna shit major bricks.”

  “Your husband?” Christensen conjured an image of bulk muscle. “He doesn’t know about this?”

  “Chief Kiger asked me not to tell him, to keep a tight lid on the whole thing. I told David I was going to my sister’s in Clairton this afternoon. Had to get her to cover for me. It feels a little weird, to tell the truth.”

  Too weird, Christensen thought. “Any idea why? I mean, we’re here with everybody’s consent. There’s nothing to hide. I’d think the chief would want him on board, as supportive as he’s been all these years.”

  Teresa nodded. Christensen thought he saw a tear pooling in the corner of her right eye, but she blinked and it was gone. “He’s been right there with me, you know, since the beginning. Even when I didn’t know who I was, who he was. He was just some total stranger hanging around the ICU when I came to. For weeks, months. Holding my hand. Talking to me. Always there, talking me back.”

  Christensen nodded his encouragement, but said nothing. She was leading now.

  “Not that I could talk to him with the feeding tube. Couldn’t even move well enough to scribble notes to anybody. But he was there. All the time. So yeah, it feels a little strange going behind his back.”

  “Would it be all right with you if I talked to Kiger about this?” Christensen asked. “I’m not sure I see his logic either, and it makes me a little uncomfortable.”

  “Would you?”

  “I’ll call this afternoon,” he said. “I’d like to clear it up before we meet again. Deal?”

  “Deal.”

  Christensen sipped his water. “Can I ask you about those first few weeks and months after the attack? What you said about not recognizing your husband. I remember that from your testimony, about how hard you worked on some long-term memory problems. Can you tell me more about those, specifically? You didn’t recognize him. What else was affected?”

  “Some things I remembered fine,” she said. “Like my senior prom in 1983. I could tell you every stitch on the dress I wore, the shade of blue of my date’s ruffled tux. But my wedding to David eleven years ago? Zilch. I remembered my first car, but not the one I drove the day before this happened. First Holy Communion? Got it. But I didn’t remember squat about the police academy. It’s like my past was written on a chalkboard, and somebody took an eraser and went over whole big chunks of it. There was no pattern to it, from what we could tell.”

  “But you eventually remembered some of those things, right?”

  “Quite a few. David calls it a million-piece jigsaw puzzle with about half the pieces missing, and it’s true. No matter how much I put together, the picture won’t ever be finished.”

  “You remembered David is your husband. You eventually remembered you attended the police academy, right? And skills. You remembered how to drive, things like that.”

  She nodded. “Lot of that’s because of David. He got me back to where I am now.”

  “How?”

  “With his goddamn photo albums,” she said, smiling. “With those goofy newspaper clippings about me in high school that I’d saved. Wedding pictures. All that. Sometimes all it took was a picture, and everything would come rushing back. Other times it might be something he said, or even the way he said it. A whole memory would just blip back on, like somebody turned on a TV. Other times I just had to listen. And trust. The man knew me better than myself at that point. I had no choice.”

  “Of course not.”

  “He really came through, you know, considering.”

  Christensen checked his impulse to follow up. That final word was a signal. She was opening a door, but he wasn’t about to push her through it. She’d go when she was ready. The silence weighed on them both, but Christensen just nodded.

  “We were splitting,” she said.

  “When?”

  “When it happened. He’d already moved out, him and Buster, a couple weeks before. That’s why the dog wasn’t there that night, why there was no warning. I was the only one home.”

  Christensen remembered their separation as an inconsequential part of Teresa’s testimony during the DellaVecchio trial. David Harnett had a rock-solid alibi for the night Teresa was attacked: He was with his friend, Brian Milsevic, who ultimately headed the investigation. Christensen waited. Was she done?

  “What changed?” he asked, giving her another opening.

  “He did.”

  “That happens sometimes. Not very often, though.”

  “I know that.”

  “Any idea why?”

  “Guilt.”

  Teresa winked and smiled. The gesture startled Christensen, and he found it refreshing.

  “He’d been acting like a shit. That I remember. Drinking. Other women. He’s older, you know. Seventeen years’ difference is a lot.”

  “So you just got to the point where you’d had enough?”

  She nodded. “It was … there was just a lot of pressure at the time. Outside pressure along with everything else going on. We’d decided to split, at least for a while. It was only getting worse the longer we fought it. So it was mutual.”

  “And that was how long before the attack?”

  “Few weeks. Then this happened, and suddenly he’s married to Supervictim. I’m half-dead in the ICU. People clamoring for an arrest. Every reporter in town trying to canonize me; you know how they are.”

  “Black and white,” Christensen said. “Victims are always one-dimensional.”

  “I’ve read the stories they wrote right after it happened. Made me sound like the Virgin Mary. Which I wasn’t.”

  “No?”

  “I was angry. I wanted to hurt him, and…” Teresa checked herself. “Don’t ask.”

  “You don’t trust me that much.”

  “Not a chance. You were young and stupid once too, right?”

  “I’ll pass on that. So, then what?”

  “What was the poor guy supposed to do? He could either do the right thing,
or be a heartless fuck in front of the world. ‘That’s the guy who walked out on Supervictim when she needed him most.’ Who’d want that rap?”

  Time to take a chance. “Do you think his concern and dedication to you since then is sincere?” Christensen asked.

  She nodded without hesitation. “The only people who rode this out with me were the people who cared. Christ, I lost track of all the friends who stopped coming around. Family, too. Some people maybe came once or twice, early on, but months dragged into years. People found excuses to avoid us. Nobody likes to watch suffering, Jim.” She paused. “You mind if I call you that?”

  “Jim’s fine.”

  “David suffered with me. I know that. You asked why he came back. What I’m telling you is that good old-fashioned guilt brought him back, plain and simple. He felt guilty as hell for not being there, for treating me the way he did.”

  “He’s told you this?”

  “He didn’t have to. But he’s been there ever since, eight years now. That’s what matters to me. Why are you smiling?”

  Christensen shook his head. “First impressions are so, I don’t know. Used to think I was a pretty good judge of relationships. But once you get beyond the obvious, you realize how complicated they are, and how wrong your first take can be. People are always trying to figure out my relationship with Brenna, but not many ever get it right. I think I did the same with you and David.”

  “You got it wrong?”

  “I think I got it wrong.”

  She seemed to relax. He’d found common ground, and she was starting to trust. “It’s solid,” she said. “Now, anyway.”

  “Can I go back to something you said before? About the pressure? What else was going on at the time?”

  She sipped her water. “With us?”

  “Whatever.”

  Teresa sipped again. “What wasn’t going on, is more like it. Things were a mess.” She kept her eyes down. “The Tidwell investigation was heating up, and David was all caught up in that. Things weren’t all that swell for me at work, either. It was just, everything was piling up on itself.”

  Christensen scribbled a few notes and waited. Only trust would move her from vagaries to specifics. He couldn’t rush that.

  “Young and stupid, like I said.”

  “We all were once.”

  Her lips stretched into a thin, difficult smile. “I’d had this, this thing. I won’t even call it an affair. Just this angry, desperate thing with somebody at work. He was married at the time, too. I understand it now. Hell, I un­derstood it then. It was payback for what David was putting me through. Cops are the worst gossips. I figured he’d find out. I wanted him to.”

  “Did he?”

  She nodded. “That’s when he moved out. It was what he needed to justify it to himself, but we both knew it was already over by then.” She paused. “This is sort of ancient history, isn’t it?”

  “Maybe,” Christensen said. “Some people say the past is prologue.”

  “Maybe,” she said. “Except people can change. David did. You’d have to live through what I did to appreciate that. But he loves me. I know that now. He’s shown it a million ways in the last eight years.”

  By elaborate arrangement, she’d come here to talk about the night she was attacked. That was the dark core of it, the memory that mattered. But for fifteen minutes now she’d been talking about her marriage. Christensen jotted a note to himself. The mind is a labyrinth, and he expected Teresa’s journey back to that trauma to be long and difficult. But these were her first steps on that journey, and he wondered if maybe they were significant.

  Chapter 20

  Christensen took a bite of his hot dog and covered the phone’s mouthpiece while he chewed. His next appointment was due, and Brenna was holding on line two, but he hoped to catch Kiger while he had a moment. He glanced again at the pager number on Kiger’s card, wondering if this was urgent enough to page him. No, he decided. But he did want to know why Kiger was keeping David Harnett in the dark. It obviously bothered Teresa, and the last thing she needed was another roadblock.

  “Jim Christensen calling, Chief,” he said into Kiger’s voice mailbox. “Please call me when you get a chance. I’m at my private office for the rest of the afternoon.”

  He poked at line two. “Hey,” he said.

  “So, how’d it go?” Brenna asked.

  Christensen sipped from his Coke. He needed to draw a very clear line. “Bren, don’t start, OK? You know the deal. What goes on here stays between me and Teresa.”

  “Fine,” she said. “Gotta go.”

  “Don’t be like this, please.”

  “I understand.”

  “You’re mad. I can tell. Please don’t put me in that position.”

  “You’re getting the kids?”

  “Bren—”

  “See you at home, then. I’ll be late.”

  Christensen lifted the last bite of hot dog to his mouth and listened to the dial tone. Lynn’s voice broke in the second he hung up.

  “Jim, Mrs. Donegan’s been waiting.”

  Colleen Donegan, blond and buff, was dressed as usual in the workout clothes of a high-maintenance trophy wife. Even that wasn’t enough to keep Christensen’s mind on his work. The more his interest in post-traumatic memory deepened, the more his interest waned in the lucrative part-time counseling practice he’d worked so hard to build. Compared to his research work, which allowed him to explore the maze of human memory, the idea of straight-ahead counseling was fast losing its appeal. Many of his clients were simply self-absorbed and bored, he’d decided, but the last thing they want is a psychologist who says, “Just deal with it.”

  So he tried to follow the ongoing saga of Donegan’s life, nodding without judgment as she recounted, again, the sexual inattention of her husband, the parking-garage magnate. Christensen was briefly engaged when she announced her plan to “audition” new partners, including her regular masseur at the Fox Chapel Sporting Club and maybe the general contractor who’d been overseeing the work on her new deck. But mostly Christensen’s thoughts were elsewhere, so much so that he asked her to repeat her question when she casually gauged his interest in an audition, then and there.

  “Do you think any of that would make you happier?” he asked, quickly changing the subject.

  “I wouldn’t be half as cranky,” she answered.

  He didn’t have a ready comeback for that, so he cut the session short and asked Donegan to think about healthier forms of affirmation. She was barely out the door when he was back on the phone to Kiger, who’d returned the call while he was in session.

  “Got my reasons,” the chief said. “I’m keeping this on a need-to-know basis, even with the D.A. This is a new investigation, my investigation, with a fresh witness. She comes up with somethin’, that’s when we take it to Dagnolo. ’Til then, the lid’s on, understand?”

  Agitated, Christensen began flipping absently through the notes he’d taken during his conversation with Teresa. “I think her husband needs to know I’m involved.”

  “It’s my decision, sir. I assume you’ll respect that.”

  Christensen’s eyes fell to something he’d written, but he postponed the thought.

  “You could’ve at least told me you were keeping him out of the loop. She seemed confused by it, and I looked like an ass because I didn’t have an answer. We’re dealing with a very strong and bright woman here, but we’re also dealing with something incredibly delicate. Trust is the key. She feels there’s some agenda other than helping her sort out what happened, I think she’ll balk. She does that, it’s over. You lose. She loses. We all lose, because then we may never know.”

  “It’s my decision,” Kiger said. “You ca
n tell her that.”

  “We’re in this together now, supposedly. She mistrusts you, she mistrusts me.”

  “I’ll take that chance.”

  “It stinks.”

  “So noted. Anything else? I’m late for a meetin’.”

  Christensen glanced at his notes, then underlined a reference on the second page. “She mentioned something today, just in passing. We were talking about things going on in her life just before she was attacked. Pressures. She referred to something, a ‘Tidwell investigation.’ Know anything about that?”

  The silence was long enough that Christensen sat forward. “Hello?” he said.

  “I’m here.”

  “Something wrong?”

  “Not at all. There’s just no easy way to answer your question. It was a personnel matter, and you know’s well as me that stuff’s not public record.”

  “Is it relevant to any of this? That’s all I’m asking.”

  “You tell me, sir. What was the context?”

  He checked his notes. “We were talking about pressures at the time.”

  “On her?”

  “Her. Her husband. Their relationship. She was dealing with certain things. She said the Tidwell thing was something David was dealing with at the time. But then the conversation moved on and it didn’t come up again, which makes me think it wasn’t all that significant. I want to follow up, but I’d rather not take that detour if—”

  “This something she wanted to talk about? Or something you pulled out of her?”

  Interesting reaction. Christensen sat back. “I’m not a dentist, Chief. I don’t do extractions. I let people talk and try to understand what they’re saying beyond their words. Sometimes the things they choose to talk about, and when they choose to talk about them, are more important than what they actually say.”

  “So she brought this up on her own?”

  “Yes.”

  “Interestin’.”

  “So you think it’s relevant?”

  “Didn’t say that. As y’all know, personnel matters are not—”