You Think You Know Me Pretty Well

by David Kessler

  It was too strong a coincidence to dismiss.

  “Is anything wrong, dear?” his wife asked, entering the room.

  “Nothing,” he replied. But he knew that his tone was unconvincing.

  Elizabeth sidled up to him and put a comforting arm round him.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked gently.

  He couldn’t tell her – not yet at any rate. Maybe when he was sure. But not yet.

  “Just a bit of trouble at the clinic.”

  “Complications?”

  She meant medical complications. The worst thing that could happen to any private clinic was medical complications leading to death or serious injury. Even if it was covered by the insurance, a successful claim could massively push up the insurance premiums, as well as damaging the reputation of the clinic and decimating its future client base.

  “Not that sort. Just a bit of personnel wrangling.”

  It was an intentional red herring but he regretted having said it. Firstly, he regretted lying to his wife, on principle. Secondly, he could imagine her now having visions of a cat fight between the nurses.

  He went back to the kitchen to finish his coq au vin, warming it up in the microwave. But he ate quickly, not savoring it as he had before. And as soon as he had finished, he went to the living room – a quasi space-age environment of white leather, glass and chrome. Flopping down on the couch, he switched on the 50-inch LCD TV using the remote and flipped through several news channels. At first he clicked on CNN, but then remembered that Susan White had said it was Fox News.

  His wife wasn’t a great one for TV and was quite happy to read a book while he surfed the channels. But his odd behavior could hardly be expected to pass without comment.

  “Why the sudden interest in American news?” she asked.

  Stuart kept his eyes glued to the screen.

  “I just need to check up on something.”

  Then he sat there watching a report about basketball. This was rolling news. If what Nurse White had said was correct, it would come round again.

  He had to see for himself.

  11:55 PDT

  “No, Mr. Governor, I swear I didn’t leak anything to the press … I don’t know … No, sir, I’m sure it wasn’t anyone in my office … There was a guard outside the cell, but he couldn’t have heard anyth … Well yes, I suppose he might have told the guard … Okay, I’ll ask him … Yes, sir, I will get back to you.”

  After hearing of Martine’s report, Alex had expected the governor to give him hell. But even he hadn’t realized just how forceful Dusenbury could be. Crucially, though, the governor had not withdrawn the clemency offer.

  Alex wondered who the source of the leak was. It could have been anyone. The governor was right. A careless word from Burrow to the cell guard. A bit of gossip through the prison grapevine … and then someone decided to put in a call to the TV station.

  Alex tried to put it aside. He had to focus. Nat was in his office going through the school yearbooks and checking up online to see if he could find out any more about the conflict between Dorothy and Clayton Burrow. Alex had remained with Juanita to discuss the DNA evidence further. All the while, a thought had been nagging away at him.

  “Juanita, there was something you said earlier…”

  “Yes?”

  “About the freezer where they found the breast tissue.”

  “What about it?”

  “You said ‘technically it was his mother’s freezer.’”

  “Well he still lived with his mother.”

  “Were his parents divorced?”

  “They were never married. I don’t think they even lived together.”

  “So it couldn’t have been his father who killed Dorothy?”

  “Not unless he suddenly came back into their lives, just long enough to murder a girl that his son bullied in school.”

  She was smiling to soften the blow. But he could see how silly she thought his idea and realized himself that it was he, rather than his client, who was clutching at straws.

  “What about his mother?”

  “What you mean, like No orchids for Miss Blandish?”

  Before Alex could reply, the intercom buzzer sounded.

  “Yes?” Juanita answered.

  “UPS. We have a special delivery from Sunnyvale.”

  Juanita looked up.

  “Dorothy’s laptop,” she said. Alex nodded. “Bring it up,” she said into the intercom, pressing the buzzer to open the door.

  Five minutes later Juanita was looking through the folders and files on the laptop, while Alex was in the other room with Nat.

  “Listen, I was talking to Juanita about Clayton’s mother. I think we should check her out. Clayton lived in the apartment with her and she had access to everything that he had access to.”

  “Like what?” asked Nat.

  “The knife he kept under his pillow, the floorboards, the freezer.”

  “Yes, but she wouldn’t have had access to Dorothy. She’d’ve had to find her and either kill her and dispose of the body, or force her to some location and then kill her.”

  “Well maybe she did. I mean, we don’t know when or where Dorothy was killed. Or how.”

  “Not to mention the small matter of motive.”

  Alex felt like he was facing a wall of resistance on all fronts.

  “The point is, we don’t know enough to rule his mother out a hundred percent! And right now it’s all we’ve got!”

  Nat backed off from Alex’s display of frustration.

  “Okay, so how do you want to play it?”

  “I want you to go over there and talk to her.”

  “Where does she live?”

  “San Pablo. The Circle S Mobile Home Park.”

  “The one they’re closing down?”

  “Right.”

  “You sure she hasn’t moved on already?”

  “There’s only one way to find out.”

  “I’ll get right on it.”

  Nat grabbed his keys and jacket and was out the door within five seconds. Alex returned to the reception area to find Juanita pounding at the laptop with an unusual amount of aggression, while peering at the screen with a look of intensity that he didn’t often see in her.

  “Has that computer disrespected your family?” he asked, putting on his croakiest Brando/Don Corleone accent.

  She looked round, her expression a mixture of confusion and anger, to see a puerile grin on his face.

  “Ha fuckin’ ha.”

  Alex walked up to see what was going on.

  “There’s something strange about this computer.”

  “Strange?” he echoed.

  “The hard disk has been wiped.”

  Alex looked at the screen. Juanita was using Norton Utilities to inspect the disk content at a raw-data and deleted-file level.

  “So how come it’s still working?”

  “I don’t mean they reformatted it. I mean that all the deleted files have been overwritten. Normally the deleted files remain on the hard drive until the space is needed. It just deletes the directory entry and tells the directory that the space is available. But there are programs that overwrite the deleted files completely – sometimes making several passes with the erase head just to make sure.”

  “And why would anyone do that?”

  “What kind of a chicken-shit question is that?” She sounded cute when she was angry. “To delete any trace of the files and stop them from being recovered!”

  “That implies there was something in them worth deleting.”

  “No shit, Sherlock.”

  Alex leaned forward, peering at the screen with growing excitement.

  “Making it all the more important that we recover their contents.”

  “Which would be very nice, except there’s no way we can do that.”

  “Maybe there is.” The phone was already in his hand by the time he said it. “Let’s call my son.”

  “The one at Berkeley
?”

  Alex’s son David was a theoretical physicist.

  “I only have one son.”

  “How do you know?” she asked with a cheeky grin. Alex sensed that there was more to Juanita’s displays of impertinence than mere mockery. Melody had been just like that. It was her way of flirting with him. He wondered if it was the same with Juanita. She had certainly given him a few hints. He wondered how much of it was real and how much was just his imagination.

  The lawyer in him knew that office romance was a dangerous game at the best of times – especially with a subordinate. If he did decide to go down that road, he’d have to tread carefully. But in any case it was a bit too early: the pain of losing Melody was still too raw … and today was hardly a day to be thinking about that sort of thing.

  Juanita pressed the speed dial button and then handed Alex the phone.

  “Hi, Dave … Yes, I am, but I need your help ... We have a computer with a hard disk that’s been wiped … No, I don’t mean reformatted, just the deleted files have been overwritten … How many passes?”

  Alex looked inquiringly at Juanita. She shook her head.

  “We don’t know. But what I want to know is … it is? Scanning tunneling…”

  Juanita mouthed the word “microscope” to show that she understood.

  “You mean only if she just wiped it once? Oh I see. Okay, I’m sure you know what you’re doing. I’ll courier it over.”

  And with that he put the phone down.

  “He can recover the data,” said Juanita.

  “How d’you know?”

  “When I hear one side of a phone conversation, I can usually figure out the other. Read Godel, Escher, Bach.” She started walking away.

  “I tried. I couldn’t get beyond the dialogue between Achilles and the Turtle.”

  “Besides - you’re smiling.”

  12:20 PDT

  “Mrs. Burrow?” Nat called out nervously through the closed door of the mobile home. No answer. “Anyone home?” Still no answer.

  Nat opened the door, tentatively, and gingerly stepped inside. Technically it was trespassing, but the door was unlocked and time was of the essence. He looked round nervously. The living room was a mess. Surveying the ashtrays and half-empty plates with three-day-old, dried-out food encrusted on them, the words “trailer trash” came to mind.

  He was about to start looking round when he was shocked to hear the sound of a flushing cistern – and he realized that he was not alone after all. For a few seconds, he waited with some degree of trepidation, looking in the direction of the bathroom and wondering if he was going to be confronted by a Stanley Kowalski type in a wifebeater.

  To his relief, the figure that emerged was female, albeit the female equivalent of Stanley Kowalski. Sour-faced and borderline angry, she was closer to her mid-century than her youth. Under her eyes, the bags were noticeable, and although she wasn’t currently smoking, she looked as if she ought to have a cheap cigarette dangling from her lips.

  “Who are you?” she sneered.

  “My name is Nathaniel Anderson.”

  He held out his business card. Her eyes dropped to his outstretched hand, but she made no effort to take the proffered card, or even gave any indication that she was interested in looking at it. He put it away in his breast pocket.

  “Are you Sally Burrow?”

  “Who wants to know?”

  He realized that she was just being melodramatic, but a little clarification was called for.

  “I work for a lawyer called Alex Sedaka.”

  “I don’t like lawyers,” she snarled.

  “Neither do I,” he replied, trying to sound chummy. “But a man’s got to earn a living.”

  Her face remained as sour as ever. He debated making a second attempt to break the ice, but rejected the idea on the grounds that the humor would probably go over her head.

  “So, are you Sally Burrow?”

  “Last time I checked,” she said.

  “Mr. Sedaka – the man I work for – is representing your son.”

  “Who?”

  “Mr. Sedaka … Alex Sedaka.”

  “No, I mean, who d’you say he’s representing?”

  “Your son.”

  “I don’t have no son.”

  “Clayton. Your son Clayton.”

  “He ain’t no son of mine!” she shouted, flopping into a chair. “Not anymore.”

  Nat looked at her, trying to assess the situation, unsure of how to proceed. He decided to sit down too, taking the fact that she was seated as tacit permission to do likewise.

  “I presume you disowned him after he murd— after he killed Dorothy Olsen.”

  “You can call it murder if you like,” she said, finally taking out and lighting the cigarette that ought to have been in her mouth all along. “I believe in calling a spade a spade.”

  Nat realized that Sally Burrow was a lot more astute than he had given her credit for. The fact that she had picked up on his reluctance to use the word “murder” proved that. He realized that he would have to tread carefully and not underestimate her intelligence, or at least her cunning.

  “And that was when you disowned him?”

  “Not immediately.”

  “But that was why you disowned him.”

  “Right.”

  “When did you decide he was guilty?”

  “I don’t really remember. I guess it happened … kind of gradually.”

  “Well what did you think when he was arrested?”

  “I didn’t know what to think.”

  “Did you stand by him during the trial?”

  “I didn’t go to the trial.”

  “So you already thought he was guilty by then.”

  “What else was I supposed to think? With her panties under the floorboards in his bedroom and her blood on them? And his jizz!”

  “You don’t think it could’ve been planted?”

  “Gimme a break!”

  “Okay, so let’s say he’s guilty. That still doesn’t explain why you didn’t stand by him.”

  “Why the fuck should I?”

  “I mean … he is your son.”

  “I already told you. I ain’t got no son.”

  “Did you have one before the murder?”

  Sally Burrow’s eyes narrowed suspiciously.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I was wondering if maybe you saw the signs of the way your son was going before he killed Dorothy Olsen.”

  “Are you tryin’ to make out that I … knew what he was gonna do? Like I’m some kind of a … accessory to what he done?”

  “No, I’m not suggesting that you knew he was going to kill Dorothy. I was just wondering if there were any early signs of Clayton turning into the sort of person that he eventually turned into … if you see what I mean.”

  “We didn’t talk much. He had his life and I had mine.”

  Nat seemed to be having trouble digesting this.

  “Didn’t talk?” he echoed.

  “Didn’t talk,” she confirmed, drawing on her cigarette.

  What he said next surprised even him.

  “Has it occurred to you that if you’d given him more attention and affection he might not have become what he became?”

  He didn’t know afterward what had possessed him to say it. But in some strange, indefinable way, he was glad that he had.

  Sally Burrow looked as if she’d just been pole axed. Her lower jaw dropped open and the cigarette fell to the floor.

  “You’ve got a fuckin’ nerve comin’ into my home and talking to me like that!”

  “All I meant was—”

  “I don’t need you preachin’ to me! Get the fuck out of here!”

  She was on her feet now, lurching toward him, and he noticed that she was not a small woman by any stretch of the imagination. He twisted sideways like a corkscrew as he rose from the seat to avoid her menacing onslaught and sprinted the few steps to the doorway.

&
nbsp; She was still chasing him out in the yard when he had opened up a distance of twenty yards between them. Puffing through her smoker’s lungs, to be sure, but still chasing.

  He was just glad she didn’t have a gun.

  12:31 PDT

  The young man sat cross-legged on the floor before the shrine in his apartment in Daly City, his eyes closed. He was trying to remember Dorothy, remembering her kindness toward him even when he was at his lowest ebb. He remembered one time when she had faced particular brutality. He had watched from a safe distance but had been too frightened to say a word. Afterward he had run into her arms crying and it had been she who had comforted him. There were tears in his eyes now as he opened them.

  He looked at the clock on the wall. It wouldn’t be long now. Soon he would have closure. In his pocket he had a piece of paper that was most precious to him. It was a spectator’s pass that allowed him to go to San Quentin and witness the execution.

  The TV was on in the background. But the sound was turned down. He wanted to be left alone with his thoughts until it was time to go to San Quentin. But at the same time, he wanted to stay in touch, to hear about further developments on the case.

  Clayton Burrow had a very savvy and tenacious lawyer, he had heard. And a smart and savvy lawyer wasn’t going to give in until the fat lady sang. He wondered how Burrow was feeling as he awaited execution. What was going through his mind? Was he afraid? Terrified? Or maybe he was just resigned to it. Maybe he just didn’t care. Just like he didn’t care about others or how much pain he had caused them.

  Stop it! He ordered himself.

  But he couldn’t stop it. It had been in the news so much these last few days that it was hard to think about anything else.

  On the rolling TV news, Dorothy’s face appeared for the umpteenth time. It gave way a few seconds later to that of Martine Yin, with the governor’s San Francisco office as her backdrop. Jonathan would have ignored it, but the words “breaking news follow-up” flashed up, causing him to grab for the remote control. In haste he pressed the button to turn the sound up.