Straw Men

by Martin J. Smith

  “Public record. Come on, help me out here. I just want to know—”

  Suddenly, Christensen was on hold, listening to something Henry Mancini-ish. A full minute passed before Kiger returned. He didn’t explain or apologize, just said, “I’m late for my meetin’. Anything else?”

  “Forget it,” Christensen said. “I’ll do my own research.”

  Kiger sighed into the phone. “Admire your enterprise. When y’all meet next?”

  “Again tomorrow. After hours this time. She has to work these sessions around her husband’s work schedule, which is another reason why he should be in the loop.”

  The conversation ended with a definitive click! Christensen brought down the handset with more force than necessary.

  He checked his watch: four-twenty. He had an hour before he needed to get the kids. He picked up the phone again. “Lynn?”

  “Still here.”

  “I’m clear now, right? No one else coming in?”

  “You were supposed to call the Pitt Counseling Office for a consult with Marie.”

  “Damn. What time?”

  “Thirty minutes ago.”

  “Can it wait?”

  “Already called her. She didn’t seem upset. Just said she’d track you down tomorrow.”

  Christensen wrote “mea culpa!” on his Day Runner in the space under tomorrow’s date, then Marie Frick’s office number. “Take off, then. I’m just tinkering here for a while longer.”

  “You’re at Harmony tomorrow?”

  “Part of the day. I’ll be in here around seven tomorrow evening, though. Go ahead and schedule daytime stuff as usual for the rest of the week. But I’ll probably be here after hours the next few nights. No need to schedule that. I’ll handle it.”

  “Got it. Can I ask you something?”

  “You just had a raise.” Christensen laughed. His secretary didn’t.

  “That woman in here earlier, over lunch,” she said. “Was that Teresa Harnett?”

  Christensen couldn’t lie. “That’s between us, OK?”

  “I know. I’ve just seen so many pictures.”

  “This is extremely private, Lynn. No one’s to know she’s coming here.”

  “But doesn’t Brenna—”

  “No one, Lynn. Understand?”

  She sighed. “Your life sounds complicated enough already. Mum’s the word.”

  “Thanks. See you late tomorrow afternoon.”

  Christensen drained the last of his Coke and tossed the cup in the trash. The Tidwell thing might ring a bell with Brenna. He’d be surprised if it didn’t. Not much going on in criminal justice in Pittsburgh escaped her notice. But he couldn’t very well pick her brain at the same time he was telling her nothing about his conversations with Teresa. She’d want something in return, something he couldn’t give.

  Maybe he could fill in a few blanks on his own. He turned to his computer. A Web search would probably be worthless. But what about the local newspapers? Their archives were online. It was worth a shot. He moved his chair within typing distance and logged on. Ignoring the waiting E-mails, he searched for the Pittsburgh Press Web site. There, he clicked into the archives.

  Now what? He had a name, Tidwell, but he didn’t know the correct spelling. No first name, either. No context. He typed it the way it sounded and waited, expecting nothing.

  “This search has found five stories matching your descriptor.”

  He moved his chair closer to the keyboard. Four of the stories involved a bar on the South Side called Lard’s. Nothing in the headlines suggested a criminal investigation, or why a search for “Tidwell” brought them up, so Christensen called up one of those stories just in case. Lard’s was owned by Reg Tidwell, who’d built his reputation around goofball publicity stunts and a menu featuring unspeakable sandwich combinations—buffalo burgers topped with celery and Tabasco, ostrich steak with purple-cabbage slaw, chipped beef and pineapple chutney. Reg Tidwell was guilty of culinary crimes, but apparently nothing more serious.

  The remaining story looked more promising. Christensen called it up and watched it scroll onto his screen.

  The Pittsburgh Press

  (c) Press Publishing. All rts. reserv.

  079332 EAST LIBERTY SHOOTOUT LEAVES TWO DEAD

  Date: Jan. 1, 1992

  Edition: FIVE STAR

  Section: METRO

  Page: B-4

  Word Count: 148

  TEXT: Two East Liberty men died late last night in what police say was a New Year’s Eve drug transaction gone bad.

  A passing pedestrian noticed the bodies of Alon Fitzgerald, 28, and Vulcan “Velvet” Tidwell, 31, in a secluded alley behind Ruggio’s Bakery just minutes before midnight. Coroner’s investigators say the two men were both dead at the scene, and that both had been dead less than an hour.

  Police found two guns near the bodies and “significant” amounts of cocaine and cash. Although no witnesses have come forward, police say the evidence at the scene suggests that Fitzgerald and Tidwell argued during a drug deal and both drew weapons.

  “They were both pretty good shots,” said East Liberty Station Watch Commander Eugene Popik.

  Popik said Fitzgerald was twice convicted of narcotics trafficking in the 1980s, and that Tidwell was arrested last year on a similar charge. He was awaiting trial.

  Christensen clicked the Print button and his laser printer whirred to life. He reread the story on paper, scanning for any mention of David Harnett. Finding none, he tried another search, this time using the full name—Vulcan Tidwell.

  “This search has found one story matching your descriptor.”

  Christensen called up the same story he’d just read. Apparently, nothing in Tidwell’s life had been as newsworthy as his death. He tried one more possibility, typing “Tidwell and Harnett” into the search box.

  “No matches found.”

  Christensen sat for a while, staring at the computer screen, wondering whether this was a waste of time. Even if David Harnett was somehow connected to the incident, it seemed like the kind of thing cops dealt with all the time. Brenna once told him the more cavalier cops described killings involving drug dealers as “pest control.” Harnett fit the mold. What kind of pressure could Harnett possibly feel from an investigation like that?

  Maybe he’d ask Teresa about it tomorrow. Or not. He was walking a fine line. By focusing on specifics like that, he risked skewing their conversations, just as Teresa had done as she worried about telling her husband. That led to a long discussion about their relationship. Was it in any way relevant to the attack eight years ago? Probably not. With DellaVecchio’s hearing less than a week away, there wasn’t much time for detours. Besides, he was a psychologist, not an investigator.

  Christensen looked at his watch. Almost five. He casually checked his Day Runner, saw a forgotten scribble, and panicked. Today was Taylor’s five o’clock chess club meeting. Few things in the boy’s life so delighted him, and Christensen knew nothing would disappoint him more than missing the meeting.

  He ended his online connection and turned off the computer, then swept his Day Runner and the printout into his briefcase. He pulled on his overcoat, locked his office door, and headed for the stairs, hoping Fifth Avenue traffic was light.

  Chapter 21

  Teresa arrived early for their next appointment. She was waiting in her car as Christensen wheeled into the parking spot next to her. The lot outside his Oakland office was dark because the building was deserted after five-thirty most nights. Her car’s engine was running so she could stay warm, but the headlights and interior lights were off. Even as he watched from the parking spot
beside her, Teresa just stared straight ahead.

  “Am I late?” he asked when she finally opened her door.

  Teresa didn’t answer, just nodded toward the elevator. “Let’s get inside.”

  They rode up together, but neither spoke. Christensen felt like a man on the downside of a dam ready to burst. She paced the hall while he worked the key into the lock, then pushed past him as he hung his coat on the rack near Lynn’s empty desk. Teresa kept her coat on. By the time he joined her in his office’s sitting area, she had a G-force grip on the arms of the wing chair.

  “What happened?” Christensen said.

  “He called again.”

  She’d been home alone the night before, drying dishes, her husband at work. Just hours before one of Kiger’s investigators was supposed to run a tap on her home phone, it rang. And she knew.

  “How?”

  “I just did.”

  She’d picked it up on the third ring. Didn’t even say hello; just picked it up and waited. And he’d started talking, rasping and strained. Somehow, she said, he knew she was alone. He’d stopped after a few seconds when her best ceramic baking dish shattered on the kitchen floor. Then he hung up.

  “Like DellaVecchio’s voice,” she said. “Same as during the trial.”

  “You’re sure?”

  She just glared.

  “This guy, did he threaten you?”

  Her whole body shuddered, and she gripped the arms of the chair even tighter. “He said things—” Teresa looked away, as if scanning the corners of the room. She bit her trembling lower lip. “I’m sorry.”

  Christensen felt a numbing dread.

  “Sexual things? Violent things?”

  Teresa waved the words away. “Don’t.”

  Christensen thought of Brenna, of the calls she’d received, and fought his impulse to push. “When you’re ready, Teresa. Just relax.”

  She was crying now, wiping her eyes on the sleeve of her wool jacket. He snatched a tissue from the box on an end table and handed it to her.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. She pounded her thigh with a fist. “That piece of shit. Goddamn him.”

  “I know this is tough. But you’re safe here.”

  She waited, and in the pause she seemed to regain her balance. “You’re worried about her, I know.”

  “Brenna? I’d be lying if I said no. But we’re all in this together now. It’s us against him, whoever he is.”

  Christensen leaned forward. “What was different about this call, Teresa? I’ve seen you handle this stuff before. This one is different, but you’re not telling me why.”

  “Because he knows things,” she said.

  “Personal things?”

  She nodded. “That’s how I know it’s him. Remember yesterday when we were talking about stuff you do when you’re young and stupid? I was younger then, maybe not stupid, but doing things I can’t believe I did. Things that embarrass me now because they’re so, I don’t know, childish. Things you do when you’re—” She crooked her fingers as quotation marks. “—‘in love’ with somebody.”

  “As opposed to ‘loving’ someone,” he said.

  “Exactly.”

  Teresa drew a deep breath and closed her eyes. Christensen could tell she was stepping away from herself, from the damaged woman she probably detested, and cloaking herself in whatever armor she’d created. The armor protected her; the distance gave her perspective.

  “David’s much older, you know,” she said. “Seventeen years.”

  Back to David. Why? “What was the attraction?” he asked.

  “Back then?”

  She waited for the right words to come.

  “He was my mentor in a lot of ways,” she said. “My first partner on street patrol. That covers a lot of ground. You had crushes on high school teachers, didn’t you? There’s no logic to it. It’s just the way we’re wired. We respect the people who play that role in our lives, trust them. Sometimes those things grow into something else, or get confused with something else, and all of a sudden you’re in bed and it sort of goes from there. The next thing I knew he was leaving his wife and kids for me.”

  Christensen nodded. “David did that? Left his first wife when you two got involved?”

  “Second wife. He was married twice before me. Two kids from the second marriage.”

  “Ages?”

  Teresa thought hard. “Lizzie’s three years younger than me, so she’s about 31 now. That makes Todd 28.”

  Christensen scribbled some notes, hoping her momentum would keep her talking. After a while, he said, “You joked about hating your father yesterday. Anything to that?”

  She smiled. “No. Dad’s great. But what you really want to know is if I subconsciously married my dad, right?”

  “You’ve been reading ahead.”

  “You’re pretty transparent sometimes.”

  “Sorry,” Christensen said. “So?”

  She let go of the chair’s arms. “In some ways, maybe. Dad came up through the Clairton mill, the coke plant. He’s big like David, strong as a plow horse. But Daddy always smelled like coal tar and benzene. I’d never marry somebody like that. And Daddy didn’t lose interest in me when I got to be an old lady of twenty-six.”

  Christensen took the bait. “Let’s turn it around: Do you think David married his daughter?”

  She nodded as if she’d expected the question. “He married young all three times. And the women he was seeing when we split were interns, secretaries, all about his mother’s age when she died if you want to get really weird about it. I think he understands it now. He’s past it. But God, he was such a cliché. He was forty when we got married. Called me his sports-car substitute.”

  “That bother you?”

  “I wasn’t exactly naïve. I’d been through college. I’d been through the academy. We’d been patrol partners for over a year when we got married. It was a joke. I laughed about it, too.”

  “Sometimes people laugh to be part of the joke, so they won’t be the object of it.”

  Teresa’s eyes drifted around the room. Then she closed them for an uncomfortable length of time. When she opened them, Christensen sensed a resolve that wasn’t there before, as if she’d been to a reservoir of it somewhere inside her body.

  “I was ‘in love,’ ” she said. “And when you’re ‘in love’ you do things that seem pretty stupid once you’re not ‘in love’ anymore. So back then, when David asked me to shave my pubic hair, I did it. And kept doing it. He liked it, so what the hell? It was no big deal to me.”

  Christensen scrambled for an appropriate response. He crooked his fingers. “You were ‘in love.’ ”

  “It’s one of the memories I lost. Believe me, I could have lived a full life without it. But now I remember. Everything about it. How it excited David the first time. How it itched like hell if I didn’t shave every couple days. God, it was a pain. But I still did it, and kept doing it for the first three years we were married.”

  Christensen felt for footing. “Do you resent that now?”

  She shook her head. “Not at all. It’s just, you know, one of the stupid things you do when you’re young and ‘in love.’ ”

  “So you don’t see it as unhealthy on David’s part or anything like that?”

  “No.”

  Christensen set down his pen and rested his notebook in his lap. “Then, I’m lost. I know you brought that up for a reason, but I’m trying to relate it to what we were—”

  “He knew,” she said.

  Christensen felt disoriented by the sudden edge in her voice. “David knew?”

  She batted his question away. Then, her l
ower lip trembled again. Her resolve disappeared like a wisp of smoke, and just that quick Christensen understood what she’d been trying to say.

  “The caller knew,” he said. “The voice on the phone.”

  She nodded. “After David left, I stopped shaving. I was angry. I was hurt. I was moving on. That was three weeks before—” Teresa turned her head to one side, apparently embarrassed more by her rising emotion than the subject.

  “You were attacked, Teresa. There’s no shame—”

  She suddenly slammed her fist onto the coffee table. Christensen jumped.

  “Raped!” she shouted. “He knew, goddamn it. This guy on the phone, talking about the stubble. ‘Like sandpaper,’ he said. He whispered it. ‘Pussy like sandpaper.’ And it seemed like he knew why I was growing it back. He knew why. That’s when I dropped the dish. That memory, the whole history, just blinked back on, all of it. In one second. And in that second, I knew I was talking to the one who did this.”

  Christensen felt sick. Before, when she first came to him, Teresa was confused by a voice from her muddled past. What was she to make of the different voice she remembered whispering in her ear as she lay near death? You never rose. That wasn’t DellaVecchio’s voice. Now, a new horror. The voice on the phone, DellaVecchio’s voice, whispering something about her that even she’d forgotten, something intimate and grotesque.

  Christensen passed another tissue, and Teresa crumbled it into a ball.

  “And he sounds like DellaVecchio?” Christensen asked.

  She nodded. “But somebody could fake that over the phone. It’s either him or someone trying to sound like him.”

  “Why aren’t you sure?” Christensen leaned forward. “Something’s confusing you about it.”

  She shrugged. “It’s not like I know the guy.”

  “DellaVecchio? If you have a question about him I’ll try to answer it.”

  Teresa took a deep, ragged breath. “This fetal alcohol syndrome. What’s it do to the brain?”

  “Depends,” Christensen said. “In his case, it affected the centers that control aggression and impulse. Other than that—”