Time Release

by Martin J. Smith

  Sonny had been four months old; his brother, David, just past three years. A short childhood for both.

  Reproductive organs should be licensed, Christensen thought, like concealed weapons, only stricter. Assholes carry handguns all the time but only a few actually hurt anybody. When assholes have kids, though, they inflict themselves not only on their children, but on generations they’ll never live to see. “I had no idea you were Aryan,” Molly had said the night he mentioned his licensing idea after a particularly bad day, but she’d never spent much time with the children of monsters, never heard a nine-year-old recount a rape, never watched a child numbly describe a parent’s unstoppable rage.

  The sound of machine-gun fire and the amplified screams of its victims filtered in from the adjoining den, along with Annie’s unrestrained laughter.

  “Annie! What are you watching?” He raised his voice loud enough to be heard, but controlled, calm. “Melissa! Anybody?”

  No response, save for a sudden increase in volume. Melissa had the remote control. He took a deep breath. Then another. One more before he opened the door into inevitable confrontation.

  “Hey, guys. School night. Let’s wrap it up.”

  Sylvester Stallone appeared on the screen, camouflaged, rippling, lethal. He hoisted a gun the size of a Cadillac bumper and put down another charging cadre of screeching VC.

  “Almost over,” Melissa said.

  “Dad, watch this.” Annie sat upright and pointed one of her five-year-old fingers at the screen, across which had bloomed a gory fireball. Bodies everywhere. Close-up of Stallone’s sneering grin.

  “You’ve seen this before?”

  Melissa shrugged with the studied indifference of a fifteen-year-old. “Third time. It’s war movie month on HBO.”

  Christensen heard himself sigh. He usually held back, but not tonight. Damn her right to teenage self-determination. She was baiting him.

  “Turn it off.”

  Melissa glared from beneath a loose curtain of black hair, her mother’s hair. “It’s almost over.”

  “Good night,” he said. He crossed the room and jabbed the TV’s power button with more force than necessary.

  Annie bolted to her feet, hands on her tiny hips. Her shoulders were squared. The blond pigtails that Melissa braided for her that morning were mostly unraveled, Heidi with an attitude. “That’s not appropriate, Dad.”

  Melissa rolled her eyes, collected her ice cream bowl, and padded off toward the kitchen. Christensen stepped to the couch and hugged Annie to his chest.

  “You’re upset, and I understand that. But we’ve talked about how some movies just aren’t suitable for kids your age.”

  “Rambo’s like the Power Rangers, only grown up.”

  “Sorry. Brush your teeth?”

  Annie tightened her thin lips over two gleaming rows of baby teeth, going bug-eyed to enhance the presentation. The telephone rang once, twice as he inspected her mouth.

  “Beautiful. Got Silkie?”

  She held up the remains of Molly’s favorite nightgown.

  “Guess who-oo?” Melissa said as she walked the cordless phone in from the kitchen. She handed it off and headed up the stairs without making eye contact.

  “Hi,” he said. “Can you hang a minute? I’m putting Annie to bed.”

  “Call me back,” Brenna said.

  “No, wait. Please. Ten seconds.”

  Christensen hugged Annie and began their ritual song, loosening her surviving braids as he sang. “Night night. Sleep tight. Please don’t let the bedbugs bite.”

  “If they do, hit ’em with a shoe,” Annie replied, echoing the unfortunate refrain taught her by a former nanny, “till they’re black and blue.”

  Something crossed behind his eyes like a raptor’s shadow, something he’d just read on a decade-old record in Sonny Corbett’s file. An injury report. He pulled his daughter to him and hugged her again until she wriggled away.

  “ ’Night,” he called as she followed her older sister up the creaky wooden stairs. “Ask Melissa to brush your hair out, okay? And tomorrow’s Share Day, so don’t forget to pick out something before you go to bed.”

  He didn’t speak again until his daughters were out of sight, and even then in a whisper until he realized how ridiculous that seemed.

  “Rough night,” he said.

  “So I gathered,” Brenna said. Hearing her voice made him lonely.

  “Cramming for the Cheverton trial?”

  “Nope. I needed a break. Got Taylor to sleep by nine, took a long bath, and brought a glass of wine to bed.”

  Loneliness transformed briefly into lust, then receded as he checked his watch. Lust was out of the question. But he let his mind linger on the thought of her between the sheets, scented by bath oil and smoothed by lotion, her white cotton nightshirt clinging to the gentle curve of her still-damp breasts.

  He picked up Annie’s Garfield slippers and put them on the end of the banister. “Spent the night working on my ‘Daddy Dearest’ routine.”

  “We all play hardball sometimes, Jim. Don’t be too tough on yourself.”

  “I got tied up reading a file tonight, and didn’t realize until too late that they were watching some bloodfeast on TV. Annie too. Now I’m a dictator for making them shut it off.”

  “It’s your job,” she said. “What file?”

  Sometimes she was more prosecutor than defense attor­ney. “Don’t start,” he said. “You know what file.”

  “The one you’re not supposed to have?”

  Long silence. “Look, it’s late,” he said. “Why don’t we try this again tomorrow.”

  “Oh, lighten up.”

  “Sorry. This whole thing has me a little on edge.”

  “The Primenyl case did that to people, I hear. How is Detective Downing, anyway?”

  Christensen ignored the jab. Some sort of grunge nihil-rock suddenly issued from the stereo in Melissa’s upstairs bedroom, at a volume clearly intended to provoke. He backed into his office and closed the door.

  “I think his instincts are damned good,” he said, thinking: That should shift the conversation a bit. “I can’t imagine a better crucible for memory repression than 154 Jancey Street.”

  “Where?”

  “Casa Corbett. The Irondale house the family lived in for a while.”

  “In 1986?”

  “For two years before the killings and for a few weeks afterward. As twisted as the family was before then, that’s where it all seemed to disintegrate. For everybody in the house except Sonny.”

  “So?”

  “So what’s wrong with this picture? You’ve got three people in the family who crash and burn, psychologically speaking, but the fourth, the youngest, walks away without a scratch?”

  “It happens,” she said. “There was that study on resilient personalities. People with totally screwed-up backgrounds who survive and succeed. Maybe Sonny’s that type.”

  Christensen shook his head. “Irrelevant, counselor. There’s a big difference between resilience and repression. A resilient person acknowledges the past, deals with it, and moves on. Someone who’s repressing never gets past step one. And I think there may be a lot Sonny never even confronted. Hold on, I want to read you something.”

  Christensen circled his desk and opened the file again, flipping to a 1988 foster care placement report. He picked up his desk telephone from its cradle and hung up the cordless, trying at least to eliminate the cordless’s annoying static from the rest of the aural assault.

  “Sonny was in and out of half a dozen foster homes, right? And each time he was placed, they sat him down with a therapist. Once in late 1986. Twice in 1987. Sonny never talked about his family in those three sessions, and appar­ently no one pushed him to do so. But i
n February 1988—this is two years after his mother went to Borman, his father abandoned him, and his big brother committed suicide—Chaytor Perriman had a session with him. His notes are in the file. Interesting stuff.”

  “Chaytor’s a good guy,” Brenna said. “Not that I want to encourage you in any way.”

  “It says, and I’m reading from Chaytor’s notes: ‘Sonny initiated an extended discussion about his brother. Described in some detail the car accident in which his brother died and his recent progress coming to terms with brother’s death.’”

  Christensen counted four beats before Brenna spoke. “Wait,” she said. “You said it was suicide.”

  Gotcha. “It was. They shared a bedroom. Sonny found the body.”

  “Chaytor noted all that?”

  “He did. Plus, there’s a coroner’s report in the file. In his summary, Chaytor wrote something pretty intriguing: ‘Sonny’s recollections about his family seem scoured of the instability reflected in police reports and court records.’”

  “‘Scoured’?” Brenna said.

  Christensen took a deep breath. He wanted Brenna to feel at least some of the chill that passed through him when he first read the therapist’s report. “Sonny doesn’t talk about his brother at all for two years, then when he does, he puts the death into a fantasy scenario so he can deal with it. Very telling.”

  “A form of repression.” She said it without emotion. “Anything else?”

  “Something very weird. Got no idea what to make of it. The file’s full of old police reports, mostly domestic calls to the Jancey Street home in ’84, ’85, ’86. A few incident reports about the brother, just vandalism and stuff. Not the most stable kid, apparently. But there’s one about Sonny, from 1989.”

  Brenna sipped her wine again. “So he was, what? Fifteen? Sixteen?”

  “Something happened at his mother’s apartment. She was out of Borman, living on her own, and caseworkers dropped Sonny off every couple weeks for a visit, just a couple hours at a time. But there was an incident, and it’s not clear.”

  “Something Sonny did?”

  “That’s what the report said. His mom apparently watched a neighbor’s kid in the afternoons to earn a little money. Well, when the caseworker comes back to pick up Sonny, there’s a patrol car outside. Neighbors heard this commotion. Turns out Sonny was playing with the neighbor kid, two years old, I think, when the kid almost drowned in the apartment’s bathtub.”

  He waited. Finally, Brenna asked: “Why would Sonny have him in a tub?”

  “No idea. Both of them were soaking wet. The kid wasn’t hurt, more scared than anything, but Sonny never said a word to the police about it. His mom apparently was in another room at the time, so she wasn’t much help either.”

  “So?”

  “I don’t know. Really, I don’t. Peculiar, though, don’t you think?”

  The music upstairs stopped as suddenly as it had started. He knew it would if Melissa didn’t get an immediate reaction, but it left him waiting through a long, uncomfortable silence for Brenna to continue. His eyes strayed to the right corner of his desk, to the wood-framed portrait of Molly and the girls, taken for him just two weeks before the accident. It arrived with the photographer’s invoice on the day of Molly’s funeral.

  “So when will you see Sonny?”

  Her voice made him jump, but he wasn’t sure why. “Tomorrow. Downing talked to him yesterday, said Sonny could call any day to set up a get-to-know-you session. Mostly I want to test his suggestibility. There are a couple ways to do that.”

  He stopped. The tonelessness of her voice made him recall the chilly discussion they’d had on the day Downing first approached him about the case.

  “Look, Brenna, are you okay with this? I’m not committed to anything. And I wouldn’t do it if there was any risk.”

  “Reality isn’t really your thing, is it?” she said. He was at least grateful for the sudden life in her voice. “I know you better than that. You wouldn’t walk away now even if I could convince you Downing’s a flake.”

  He laughed. “But really, aren’t you curious now?”

  She didn’t answer. “Just be careful, all right? Don’t let Downing drag you into the quicksand.”

  Except for the ticking of the ancient radiators, the house was quiet after they hung up. It was the same healing tranquility he sought at the end of every hectic day, and he leaned back in his desk chair to enjoy it. But when his eyes fell again on Sonny’s file, the familiar silence suddenly made him edgy. He snapped off his lamp and left the room, closing the door behind him.

  Chapter 7

  Cold rain soaked Downing’s face, like he’d opened his door halfway through a car wash. He struggled from behind the Ford’s steering wheel and stepped into the early evening gloom. A cutting wind swept the left side of his raincoat behind him like a cape and bent the stem of the red rose in his hand. He tucked the broken flower inside his sports coat, right next to the Glock nine, then cinched the raincoat’s belt.

  St. Michael’s Cemetery was old Pittsburgh, the Pittsburgh he knew best. Carved into Mount Washington high above the South Side, it could have been a three-acre model for the city itself. Poles and Slovaks over here, Italians over there, just past the Irish and the Greeks. Like the city, the European working stock remained segregated into tidy little ghettos, even in death. The Jews and blacks were with their own, of course, somewhere else.

  Not that it was a bad place. Of the city’s million or so cemeteries, St. Michael’s, with its big-screen view of the Downtown skyline, was one of the best kept. Even now, with the brutal late November rain and the trees nearly bare, it had the feel of a high-end headstone showroom. Even so, Downing hated graveyards. Strictly a professional opinion: The colder the body, the less use a homicide cop has for it.

  Carole was Italian, one of a couple Marinos among the Borellis and Cippolas and Tambellinis spread across a slope on the east side. Time blurs everything, even this, he thought. Could he find her again? He did, and stooped in the dim reflection of his headlights to brush leaves from the flat granite marker.

  Carole Marino Carver. She’d kept her married name for the options it gave her in a town obsessed with ethnicity. But with her waist-length hair the color of Kona coffee, not to mention Italo-short fuses on her temper and her passion, Carole didn’t fool anybody.

  “How you been, baby?” Downing said.

  He closed his eyes. He’d stopped praying ten years ago, but he always tried to remember the dead as they were premortem. And what came to mind first were Carole’s panted whispers as she moved beneath him that last time, arching her back and stretching her arms through the spindles of her cherry-wood headboard. Only woman he ever knew who did that, and she’d done it even when they were in college.

  Then he thought of the first time they met. He was eighteen, maybe nineteen, at a party. Bunch of kids just drinking and trying to get laid. She came in, and he heard himself sigh when he saw her. More of a moan. The air just left his chest, involuntarily. She told him she’d had nearly the same reaction. Within a week they started a relationship that lasted four years, off and on, until they graduated. Four years of blowout fights followed by the kind of sex he’d fantasized about ever since. Fight, fuck. Fight, fuck. When they got tired of the roller coaster, they’d talked themselves into separate lives, knowing it was the best thing. He remembered what she said on her way out the door: “We’re two live wires, Grady. We both need grounds.”

  He saw her under the Kaufmann’s clock one morning thirty-four years later, standing there like she was waiting for him. They had lunch and laughed about the disaster that might have been their marriage, agreeing that both had found their grounds: Trix for him, CPA Gerald Carver for her, at least for the ten years their marriage lasted. Then they rocked Hilton room 663 all afternoon, breaking only to nibble fruit and
sip cold duck from a room-service tray.

  Downing tried to enjoy the memory, but a videotape began replaying in his head. It showed them sitting in his car, talking, kissing, vulnerable to the stalker behind the viewfinder. Then, like static interference, something else crackled into his mind. A high-pitched whine, like a dentist’s drill, only coarser. The Stryker bone saw. And an image: a scalpel tracing a Y incision from the clavicle to the mons veneris. And another: that outrageous hair dangling to the floor, trampled and crusted with blood.

  Downing willed the thoughts away.

  “Told you I’d be back when I had some news,” he said.

  A trickle of rain scored his spine, channeled along the deep gorge that divided his back into two muscular halves. Shivering, he felt his stomach tighten, reminding him of the slight cop gut he’d been able to avoid until the past few years. Rain made his right shoulder ache where a bullet entered years ago, but he’d learned to live with the occasional twinge.

  Downing stood up, pulled his raincoat collar tight around his thick neck, and licked the raindrops from his mustache.

  “Still don’t know why, or what sets him off,” he said. “But Corbett’s killing again.”

  He’d got the word from some young Waynesburg detec­tive who called to pick his brain two days after the latest killing. They had a product-tampering case, he’d said, a poisoning, as if Downing didn’t read the papers. “You’re the guy that did the Primenyl case, right?” the cop asked. Downing had winced at the word, then set aside the Texas Ruby Red grapefruit he’d been peeling. The cop told a story Downing had heard six times already, but with a twist.

  “Still holding the yogurt container when the paramedics found her on the kitchen floor,” the kid cop said. “We won’t have final results for a few days, but tox is pretty sure it’s potassium cyanide.”