Straw Men

by Martin J. Smith

  “Intelligence?”

  Christensen sat back. “DellaVecchio’s seems limited, but not strikingly so. He never finished high school, mostly because of behavioral problems.”

  “Vocabulary?”

  Christensen had never had a conversation with DellaVecchio; he knew mostly what Brenna told him and what he’d seen on TV. “It’s hard for me to say, Teresa. My guess, from what I know about him, is that it’s limited, too. He’s got processing problems. People like that tend to keep things simple. No fancy language. They just don’t retain it.”

  Teresa leaned back in her chair and studied the ceiling. A car’s headlights flashed through the office window. Christensen tried to seem nonchalant as he stood up and closed the vertical blinds.

  “This guy who called, he used the word emancipation,” she said, pronouncing each syllable like a separate word.

  “Emancipation,” Christensen repeated. “As in—”

  “Emancipation Proclamation. That’s what he called it.” She looked away. “My pubic hair. Growing it back. That’s what he called it.”

  Christensen tried to imagine those words, that concept, coming from Carmen DellaVecchio’s mouth. He couldn’t. He could tell Teresa was thinking the same thing.

  “If it was DellaVecchio who attacked me, he’d know that I shaved, or used to shave,” she said. “He’d have seen it that night. But he wouldn’t know why. The guy on the phone, he knows the story. He knows why.”

  “But how?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Had you told anyone?”

  “I might have. I don’t remember.”

  “Friends? Women friends? Something that might have come up in the police locker room where other women saw you?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know.”

  “David?”

  “He knew I shaved.”

  “But not that you’d stopped?”

  She shook her head. “I can’t remember.”

  “Who else? You told me you were seeing someone, a married man. Did he know?”

  She was crying as she stood up. She headed for the door, and for a moment Christensen thought she was leaving. But she came back and put her shaking hands on the back of her chair. Her face was normally hard to read, but there was no mistaking her frustration. She looked him dead in the eye, and through clenched teeth, one word at a time, she repeated her answer.

  “I. Can’t. Remember.”

  Chapter 22

  Limbo. The nuns talked about it as if it were a place. Not heaven. Not hell. Not even purgatory. Limbo. The place you go if nobody saves you, the place you go if God can’t decide.

  She’d been there. Stayed maybe two weeks before David’s voice coaxed her back. It was another month before she accepted him as her husband, and only then because he’d told her so. It was a month after that before she accepted as her own the past he described. David had saved her, sprung her from limbo, gave her back her past with his photo albums and mementos and endless stories about the life she had led.

  Who was she to question?

  Teresa slipped from beneath the covers and steadied herself on the edge of their bed. David stirred, grabbed his pillow tighter, then fell back into a deep-breathing sleep. Her feet found her slippers, and when she had them on she stood up. Equilibrium was still a problem, so she waited until the room stopped moving before taking a step. She reached around the bathroom door to lift her robe from the hook there, hoping the door wouldn’t creak. David’s breathing didn’t falter as she crossed the room and stepped into the hall. She felt for the stair rail in the dark.

  She wanted time to think. By herself. She had her own thoughts now, her own memories. They were unexpected but undeniable, bobbing up like mines. They looked real to her. They felt real. But they didn’t fit neatly into the familiar narrative of her reconstructed past. She could feel the danger, especially after her session with Christensen a few hours before.

  The pieces just didn’t fit.

  And so she’d begun to wonder: Which did she trust? The reality presented to her by the dedicated man in her bed? Or the vivid memories that seemed to be rising, with Christensen’s help, from her own black depths?

  She stepped to the left side of the creaky fourth and twelfth steps. At the bottom, she angled into the kitchen. For years, she’d remembered nothing of what happened there. Nothing. She’d accepted the version she was told by David, the version supported by the evidence presented in court. But lately, memories had flickered like strobe flashes in a dark room.

  She flipped on the kitchen light, squeezing her eyes shut tight until they adjusted. She scanned the room—the top-end Sub-Zero refrigerator, the polished marble countertops, the copper-faced Italian espresso machine.

  The place had long ago lost its power over her. It was just her kitchen now, and the waking nightmare she’d lived there was just a story, like a horror movie described to her by friends who had seen it. That wasn’t her half-dead on the floor with her torn panties around one ankle. That wasn’t her gasping for breath in the widening pool of blood beneath that pulpy head, which in places looked like the lump of ground lamb that had landed in a heap where her mixing bowl fell that night. That wasn’t her with the neck of a broken champagne bottle jammed far enough into her uterus that a hysterectomy was the trauma surgeon’s only choice to stop the bleeding. None of that existed for her in a real way. She’d simply accepted it, never questioned it, because the retelling was all she had to go on.

  Now, she felt as if she had license to test it.

  From her years on the force, she remembered the concept of “leftovers,” pieces that didn’t fit anywhere after the puzzle seemed complete. As inconvenient as they were, she knew leftovers sometimes were the most important pieces. They were the building blocks of criminal defense; they raised reasonable doubt. They sometimes hinted at undiscovered truths, and to ignore them was a mistake. Leftovers could haunt you.

  Her story, or the story she’d been told was hers, had too many leftovers, things that existed outside the strobe flashes she’d been seeing lately. Inconsistencies she’d left too long unexplored. Little leaps of logic that she’d never questioned. Actions and reactions attributed to her that just didn’t seem like the way she would behave. When Brenna Kennedy brought them up during DellaVecchio’s trial, she’d dismissed them as a last-ditch effort to defend the indefensible. Now she wondered.

  Like the windows. They arced around the kitchen sink, offering a view of her side-yard garden. They were the reason she liked the house, the reason they bought it the year after she and David were married. Along with the atrium to the left of the big window and the glass panel in the door to the right, they offered in daylight a nearly panoramic view of that side of their property. If she was working in the kitchen after dark, like the night it happened, the yard outside would have been lit by the spotlight on that side of the house. It came on automatically for a couple hours at dusk, then any time it detected motion in the yard. It was sensitive enough that a stalking cat could set it off.

  She’d been standing at the sink, making cabbage rolls. She remembered none of it, but she was sure of that much. The crime scene photographer had caught it all. The water pot was still on the stove when he arrived, although the first officer on the scene had turned off the burner. She’d separated the cabbage leaves and had them stacked beside the bubbling pot, ready to blanch them. She would have dunked them using the tongs, which were propped in the spoon holder beside the leaves. The lamb-and-rice stuffing was mixed and probably sat in one of her stainless steel bowls on the sideboard until she picked it up. She apparently had done just that when he’d swung the heavy bottle for the first time. If the metal bowl hadn’t clattered to the floor, her neighbor Carol wouldn’t have heard. No one would have called 911. Sh
e would be dead.

  But that’s how it happened. She was sure of that.

  What bothered her now were the windows. Making cabbage rolls her mother’s way was an intensive process of separating and washing leaves, chopping ingredients, mixing meat and cooked rice and spices. Getting to that point, where she was ready to blanch and roll the leaves, would have taken her at least an hour. At that sink. Overlooking the side-yard garden.

  He’d hit her from behind with the bottle, a mighty swing that landed solid on the left side of her head. It knocked her instantly unconscious. Her blood spattered up and to the right, leaving a trail across the ceramic plate that hung there, peppering the plate’s painted slogan: “Live long. Laugh often. Love much.”

  They said he’d somehow slipped in the side door while she wasn’t looking. It was spring. If it was warm, the door would have been open wide to the evening and the garden smells outside. They said he’d eased the screen door open while she worked at the stove, slid along the row of cupboards where the wine rack sat, grabbed a bottle and silently moved up behind her. Or so the story went. All the pieces fit.

  Except.

  She went to the sink. Except for brief turns to get ingredients from the refrigerator at her back, that’s where she would have been for at least an hour before he hit her. But as she stood there now, she wondered about the pieces that didn’t fit. Straight ahead, through the banked bay windows, she had a 180-degree view of practically the whole side yard. She moved back three steps toward the refrigerator. From there, she could see farther toward the front and back of the house through the window-box atrium and the door’s glass panel. True, she was working, focused on the sink and cutting boards that flanked the sink. But that time of day, the yard lights should have been on. Even if they weren’t, how could someone cross that expanse without tripping the motion detector? How could he have opened the aluminum screen door without pressing the noisy release button on the handle?

  “Somehow” wasn’t working for her anymore.

  If the investigators were wrong, that meant he either would have come in through the house’s front door, or else had been hiding somewhere in the house, for at least an hour, before he struck.

  She’d read the crime scene report. The front door was locked. If he’d come in that way, he’d have needed a key. If he’d left that way, hurrying and still high from the savagery, would he really have taken the time to lock it again? If he was hiding in the house, where could he have been that she wouldn’t have noticed him? Upstairs, maybe, but the only way down was by taking the creaky wooden stairs that ended at the kitchen’s right rear corner. They knew from the bloody print of DellaVecchio’s sneaker on her kitchen floor that that’s what the attacker wore. But even so, there’d have been some noise as he came down the stairs.

  So how did he get in?

  “Terese?”

  She whirled around, suddenly off balance, a flush of adrenaline jolting her body. David was standing bare-chested, nearly filling the doorway to the stairs. As she started to fall, she grabbed for and missed the edge of the counter. Her husband crossed the kitchen floor in what seemed like a single stride and gathered her in his arms. She dug her fingernails into his rough skin, knowing she was hurting him, but battling a dizziness that left her unable to stand.

  “I’ve got you, baby,” he soothed. “I’ve got you.”

  He held her tight against him until she was steady and her breathing slowed. She felt safe in his arms. After a while, he kissed her on the top of her head.

  “Didn’t mean to scare you, hon.”

  “It’s OK,” she said, pushing herself away. “I just didn’t hear you.”

  Chapter 23

  Chaytor Perriman’s house was typical Squirrel Hill, a three-story brick-and-timber thing with gables and leaded windows and a front yard like a cliff. Three flights of concrete stairs rose like a ladder from street level, and Christensen, looking up from the Explorer parked at the curb, imagined the knotty calves that Perriman’s letter carrier must have developed during the daily trek to the front porch mailbox.

  Perriman’s first-floor study light was still on, a good sign. Christensen needed to talk to his longtime mentor, and it couldn’t wait. The kids already were asleep at home by the time Teresa Harnett left his office, so he found himself cruising Squirrel Hill after their latest private session, thinking, doubting, gravitating as he often did to this house, this man.

  He felt for the cold iron railing and started up the steps, remembering the many times he’d made the same trip years ago as a graduate student under Perriman’s direction. The rule then was the same as now: If the study light was on, Perriman was up and available. If not, go away. Following that rule, Christensen had come calling as late as midnight without rebuke.

  He was breathing hard as he mounted the last set of stairs and stepped onto the wooden porch. How spent would he be if he didn’t run three times a week? The doorbell echoed in the cavernous house, and Christensen peeked through the chintz curtains, a sad reminder of Perriman’s effervescent late wife, Pearl. Since her death a decade ago, Perriman had become stooped by age and the weight of his loneliness. Still, he was a brilliant man. Perriman’s lifelong study of the human mind was never swayed by academic fashion or a philosophical agenda; common sense was never sacrificed to ego or the unreasonable demands of grant committees. What Christensen needed after his most recent sessions with Teresa Harnett was a reliable sounding board who would keep their conversation strictly private.

  Perriman moved slowly toward the front door, a ghostly figure in a cardigan sweater squinting through his bifocals into the darkness outside. They talked often by phone, but it had been at least a year since Christensen saw him. He seemed smaller, more brittle. When Perriman reached for the switch for the porch light, his bony hand shook. But he recognized Christensen immediately.

  “I’ll be damned,” he said, tugging open the door. “Just like old times.”

  Christensen reached across the threshold to shake his hand, startled by the coolness of the old man’s touch. His circulation wasn’t good. “I used to climb these steps a lot, Chaytor, but I was younger then,” he said. “How the hell do you get up and down them?”

  Perriman stepped aside and pulled Christensen in. The place was overheated, maybe eighty degrees, and smelled to Christensen the same as his grandmother’s house did when he used to visit as a child.

  “I don’t go out much,” Perriman said, “and I take the Checker when I do.” He paused as if thinking hard. “I honestly can’t remember the last time I walked up.”

  Perriman’s phrasing gave Christensen pause. He’d spent too much time around Alzheimer’s patients to ignore it. He shrugged out of his coat and laid it on a bench in the front hall. The old man’s devotion to his lumbering Checker Marathon, a converted taxi, was among Christensen’s fondest memories of Perriman. It was the world’s ugliest car, the kind of car that looked unnatural in anything but yellow. Perriman had had his painted black when he bought it, but it was a discount job that over the years faded to the color of an eggplant.

  “The Beast is still running?” he asked.

  Perriman straightened up. “Two hundred thirty thousand miles and change, thank you very much. She’ll outlive me.”

  Still sharp, Christensen thought. Still, he felt a sudden sadness. Perriman’s car probably would outlive him.

  He followed the old man into his study, where he’d apparently been working at his battered Royal typewriter. The academic journals that published his papers had nagged him for years to get a computer, or at least send his articles to a transcription service that could convert them into a computer-readable form. Perriman enjoyed tweaking the editors. “A Luddite’s last stand,” he called it.

  The room hadn’t changed in more than twenty years, from what Christens
en could tell. It was the classic lair of a lifelong academic, a dusty, musty repository of knowledge and accumulated wisdom. Perriman never allowed his cleaning lady past the door.

  “So, here you are,” Perriman said, nonchalantly checking the wall clock. Was it really a quarter past eleven?

  “Oh, geez, I knew it was late, but … I’m sorry, Chaytor. The session I had tonight went longer than I thought.”

  “The light was on, Jim. It’s fine.”

  Christensen nodded his thanks. “I’ve got a situation. I need to kick some things around, just to make sure I’m not off base. I need somebody’s viewpoint other than my own, and there’s really no one I can talk to about this. You’ve always been my Yoda.”

  Blank stare.

  “My teacher,” Christensen said. “But this one’s touchy. Has to stay between us.”

  The clock read eleven-forty by the time Christensen finished his update. Perriman had followed the DellaVecchio case, and they’d conferred years ago when Christensen first questioned the apparent changes in Teresa Harnett’s memories after the attack. Perriman had been the one who encouraged Christensen to focus his research on the evolution of post-traumatic memory, and he listened with apparent pride as his student told him about Teresa’s gradual recovery of contradictory memories.

  “Feels good to be right, doesn’t it?”

  Christensen allowed himself a smile. “It’s a little more complicated than that.”

  He explained about DellaVecchio’s release and Burke Padgett’s dark warning about his unpredictability; about the phone calls to Brenna and Teresa and the sniper’s shot at Brenna. “All within the last two-and-a-half weeks,” Christensen said. “You can guess what happened next.”

  “She started remembering.”

  “Chaytor, it’s like she was a pot of hot water on a stove, and somebody suddenly turned up the gas. Everything started to boil. It’s happening fast, out of control. It’s scary. Then tonight—”