Time Release

by Martin J. Smith

  Still, Sodium amobarbital simply wasn’t an option, and not just because Christensen wasn’t licensed to conduct drug therapy. From what he’d read, the drug was especially risky for someone like Sonny, whose medical records noted an irregular heartbeat.

  Christensen set the message slips aside, careful to place them well out of sight. He’d intended to call Downing, if only to ask him to back off. But that could wait. He crossed the room and opened the door into the waiting room. His secretary was already gone. Sonny looked up from his magazine, his eyes somewhere in the shadow of his baseball cap’s bill.

  “I’m early,” he said. “Sorry.”

  “It’s fine. I’m clear until six anyway. I was just catching up on some stuff and—”

  Sonny brushed past him and into his office, taking his usual chair in the sitting area without taking off the cap. He sat forward, head up, forearms on his knees, a posture very different from the casual, almost indifferent, way Christensen was used to seeing him. Something was on his mind.

  “Everything okay?”

  “Not sure,” Sonny said.

  Sonny’s body language suggested a level of agitation that Christensen hadn’t seen in him before, and his face was drained of the confidence that had so struck the psychologist during their initial meeting. Christensen picked up a notepad from his desk and sat down in the wing chair.

  “Nice hat,” he said, smiling.

  Sonny took it off. The comment seemed to divert him, as Christensen hoped it would.

  “My dad’s,” Sonny said. “He was this big stud player. Third base.” Sonny examined the cap’s interlocking C and A emblem, which Christensen recognized as the trademark of major-league baseball’s California Angels.

  “Clairmont Affiliated,” Sonny said. “Lettered all four years.”

  Christensen stole another glance at the emblem. “The college in West Virginia?”

  Sonny nodded. “Got invited to try out with the Pirates’ Columbus farm team his senior year, but he broke his leg. That was that.”

  Christensen wrote “Clairmont Affiliated?” on his notepad. “It happens,” he said. “So what’s on your mind?”

  Sonny looked around, saying nothing. Slowly, apparently without realizing it, he started rocking back and forth, his tempo picking up as the awkward silence continued. “Had this dream,” he said finally. “Had it a couple times in the last two weeks. Switching to a daytime work schedule screws up my sleeping pattern, so maybe that’s why.”

  A thousand questions ran through Christensen’s mind. “Want to talk about it?”

  “I’m here, aren’t I?” Sonny snapped.

  “I’m glad you came,” he said, absorbing Sonny’s glare like a body punch. “I’d like to hear about it.”

  Sonny waited. The rocking started again. “It’s about water. I’m on my back, but my head’s underwater. And it’s a really weird feeling. It’s like I know something’s wrong, but I’m, like, helpless.”

  Christensen tried to imagine Sonny in full backstroke, but with his head beneath the surface. “I don’t think anybody could swim like that for very long. Could they? I mean, it seems like an awkward position.”

  “That’s the thing,” Sonny said. “It’s not like I’m swimming. I’m just a kid, maybe twelve or thirteen. I didn’t start swimming until later. I’m just on my back and there’s this light above me, kind of a square light, and it’s not like I’m floating. More like I’m lying on something hard, and I’m on my back, and I can’t breathe. And I’m really cold. And I try to pull my head up out of the water but I can’t.”

  He stopped rocking and sat forward. Christensen watched the rise and fall of Sonny’s chest and wrote “Respiration up” on his notepad, careful to maintain eye contact.

  “You can’t pull your head out of the water?” he asked.

  Sonny nodded.

  “Then what?”

  “I wake up,” Sonny said. “It’s pretty ugly. Usually I don’t get back to sleep.”

  He was breathing even harder now, and his face had changed. Christensen wasn’t just seeing shaken confidence; Sonny was scared.

  “I don’t get it,” he said. “Why can’t you pull your head up?”

  Sonny closed his eyes. “I try, but I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Is anyone with you?”

  Sonny looked away. “I don’t know. My brother’s there. He helps me.”

  “What kind of place are you in?”

  “I don’t know. Dark.”

  “But with a square light above you? Are you inside or outside?”

  Sonny closed his eyes again, apparently trying to make sense of what was replaying in his head. “It doesn’t seem like outside.”

  “How’d you get there?”

  “I don’t know,” Sonny said. “Down some steps maybe? It’s a dream. Not everything makes sense.”

  Christensen laid the notepad on the table. “I wonder why this dream upsets you, though.”

  “I’m drowning.”

  “But you’re a strong swimmer.”

  “I’m not swimming, I told you. It wouldn’t be like that if I was swimming.”

  The phone chirped once. Christensen ignored it. The answering machine in the outer office picked up after the second ring.

  “Why do you think your brother is there?” Christensen said.

  Sonny shifted in his chair, rocking, crossing and recrossing his legs. “I don’t know.”

  “But he helps you?”

  “Yeah, I think.”

  “Do you dream about him much, Sonny? Since he died, I mean.”

  “Sometimes.”

  Christensen waited. Sonny crossed his legs again.

  “There’s one other thing in the dream. Maybe it’s later, or a different dream. I’m in this room, and there’s a dog. On this sort of checkerboard floor.”

  “And then what?”

  “That’s all.”

  Christensen thought of the packet of coroner’s photographs in Sonny’s juvenile records file. What had led Sonny to David’s body in the upstairs bedroom the day David shot himself were the bloody paw prints that one of the boys’ frantic dogs left on the kitchen floor. The packet contained several shots of the grisly path across a distinctive checkered linoleum-tile floor, as well as a photograph of the dog.

  “Is David there?”

  “No. Somebody else.”

  “Besides the dog? Who?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I said I don’t know.” With the back of his hand, Sonny swatted the inflatable Wham-It off the coffee table that sat between them, then stood up. “Can I get a drink of water?”

  Sonny had led them to a door, but didn’t want to open it. Christensen pointed to the compact refrigerator across the room. “In the fridge. Help yourself.”

  Sonny twisted the cap from a bottle of Evian. “Sorry,” he said as he sat down. “Unreal, isn’t it?”

  “Is it?” Christensen said.

  “Meaning?”

  Time to take a chance. Christensen retrieved his own bottle of water. He wasn’t thirsty, but he needed time to frame his thoughts. Nudge him, but ever so gently.

  “It sounded pretty real to me, at least parts of it.”

  “Like the dog,” Sonny said. “I guess that was Izzy.”

  “Izzy?”

  “Izzy Vicious. One of our dogs. We had two until Trooper ran away.”

  “That must have been hard on you.”

  “We used to travel a lot. Three, four weeks at a time. So neighbors would keep both of them for us. And one time Trooper just took off. Never found him.”

  Christensen wasn’t interested
in the dog. “Those are long trips. Where’d you go?”

  Sonny’s eyes roamed the floor. “All over. Europe. North Africa once. Spent my tenth birthday in Algiers. Anyway, Trooper ran off right before I went into foster care. And when I did, I had to give Izzy away.”

  Christensen wrote “Birthday, Algiers?” on the notepad, then spoke slowly, trying to add weight to his words. “Sometimes things that upset us never really go away. Maybe that’s why Izzy’s in the dream.”

  “The house seemed like this place we used to live in Irondale, on Jancey Street. But I can’t make any sense of it.”

  Christensen opened his water. “Dreams are funny things,” he said. “Why do you think that one bothered you so much?”

  “It’s just so weird.”

  “But you never had that dream before, right?” Chris­tensen let the question hang.

  “Not that I can remember,” Sonny said.

  “Why do you think you had it now?”

  Sonny shrugged.

  “I ask because we’ve been talking a lot these last few weeks about when you were a kid. And now here you are having dreams about when you were a kid, with your dogs and maybe your old house and everything. Maybe talking about that period of your life planted the seeds that grew into dreams. That happens. Or maybe something else is going on there.”

  “Like what?”

  “Ever hear the song ‘Dream Weaver’?” Christensen said.

  Sonny’s face was blank.

  “Before your time. Never mind. Anyway, dreams really are woven from a lot of things. Fantasies. Fears. Bits of memory. Things that happened to us that day or things that happened years ago. When we sleep our brains mix all that together and come up with a story. The hard part is figuring out which parts of the story are fantasies and which ones are fears, or memories, or experiences. It’s tricky business.”

  Sonny walked to the window and stared into the darkness. An inch of fresh snow lay on the sill, and the bitter cold outside had left frost on the inside corners of the single-pane window. It reminded Christensen that Christmas was less than a week off, and of how little time he’d had to shop for the girls.

  “Trooper didn’t really run away,” Sonny said.

  “The dog?”

  Sonny laid one of his palms on the window, then the other. He pressed his cheek against the pane. For half a minute, maybe more, Christensen watched Sonny frozen in tableau, as if seeking the cold. When he finally pulled away, his palm prints were melted into the window frost and his cheek was bright red.

  “I want to talk again tomorrow,” he said.

  “Tomorrow?” Christensen returned to his desk and checked his calendar. “Friday night is bad for me. High school football, and my older daughter plays in the band. Could you come during the day?”

  Sonny shook his head. “I swim in the morning and work noon to eight now,” he said. “It’s okay. I understand.”

  “How about if we get together two nights next week instead of one?” Christensen said. “I can plan around that for as long as you want. How about if we meet at six next Tuesday along with our regular Thursday meeting?”

  “I just—”

  “Sonny, it’s fine.”

  “But you have family. And the holidays and all.”

  Christensen pretended to scribble on his calendar, but wrote “Sensitivity to my family commitments” on his notepad. “They’ll understand,” he said.

  From his office window a few minutes later, Christensen watched Sonny’s solitary form cross a snow-covered parking lot lit only by neon signs and the garish twinkle of Christmas lights from nearby stores. The single trail of footprints across the virgin snow disappeared down one of Oakland’s countless side streets, and only then did Christensen wonder if Sonny was spending the holidays alone.

  He poked the answering machine’s playback button as he shrugged into his coat. “If you’re there, Jim, pick up,” the message began. “We got a positive for hydrogen cyanide on the Squeezie Pop, but sucking it frozen just delivers a sublethal dose. Not one of Corbett’s better ideas. The sugar on the cereal was probably cyanide powder blown in through the bottom of the box and a hole in the wax-paper liner. Add enough and shake it up good: boom, boom—the morgue gets two more. Final tox is due back on all those other free samples in a couple days…”

  Downing’s tiny voice, full of muted panic, sounded like a trapped bumblebee as Christensen locked the office door.

  Chapter 16

  What a depressing goddamned shithole. Downing had been in some pretty grim places in twenty-eight years of police work, but Ridgeville was one seriously decaying little burg. He turned left into the gravel drive of Lakeview Pointe Estates and hoped the Ford’s snow tires would get him up the steep rise.

  He had no idea what to expect. Sandra Corbett lost it after her husband split in 1986, that much he knew. She already was losing it when he first interviewed her at their house during the initial investigation. Once he read the incident reports from all the domestic calls to the house, he knew why. Then, a couple months later when he tried to talk to her at Borman, she was worthless. What an unforgettable fucking scene. She smoked as they talked. Actually, she smoked while he talked, since she spent the whole time staring like a zombie at Borman’s sticky gray floor. Downing watched the cigarette burn slowly toward the soft flesh between her index and middle fingers, and then keep burning until it broke the blisters from her last cigarette. Then it went out. She never even flinched.

  Never said a word, either. But besides Sonny, she was the only other person still alive who was in the Jancey Street house in 1986, the only other person who might have seen Ron Corbett pull it off. It was worth a shot. He heard she’d come around in the last couple years, even loosened up enough to hang occasionally at Tramp’s, Ridgeville’s only real meet-and-mate bar. He hadn’t talked to the regulars there to see if she’d ever talked about Ron. Maybe he should. But he took her going out again as a sign that she’d finally figured out what a shitbag her husband was. Maybe she’d talk now.

  Before he knocked, he took in the view from the second-floor balcony. Lakeview Pointe Estates. Christ. He held his shield up to the window when the curtains parted a crack, then counted at least three pieces of heavy hardware as she unfastened the dead bolts.

  “Mrs. Corbett?”

  She opened the door until the chain lock caught, then peeked out. This was not a healthy person. She was as pretty as he remembered, slender even in that getup, but obviously not all there. He’d caught her by surprise on a Saturday morning, but who wears a heavy peacoat and a wool-knit watch cap indoors?

  “I remember you,” she said, looking away.

  “Detective Downing of the Pittsburgh Police Department, Mrs. Corbett.” He poked one of his business cards through the opening, and she took it. “May I come in?”

  “I can’t … no. It’s not a good day. What’s your name again?” She wouldn’t look him in the eye.

  “Grady Downing, Mrs. Corbett. We met back in 1986, and we talked once in 1987 when you were in the hospital over there.”

  She unfastened the chain and disappeared into the apartment. Downing gently pushed through and into a wall of warm air. Where’d she go? He followed the Looney Tunes theme song into another room, where she was sitting on a folding metal chair in front of a small TV. This didn’t look promising. Even if she told him the whole story, he tried to imagine her in front of a grand jury or on a courtroom witness stand. He couldn’t. If she was as nuts as she seemed, no prosecutor would dare.

  “I don’t much like cats,” she said, gesturing toward the small screen. Tweety was setting a trap using a vacuum cleaner and a rope. “That Sylvester, he’s always trying to eat him.”

  Downing groped for a suitable response. Or did it matter? “I’m not a cat person either,” he said. “Always had dogs.”r />
  She turned and faced him for the first time. “We had dogs once,” she said. “What kind?”

  “Beg pardon?”

  “Your dog. What kind?”

  “Basset hound. A sad thing with a swayback and epilepsy and kidney problems. Only three years old and he’s already half blind. But a pleasant sort if you can stand the smell.”

  “What’s his name?” she said.

  “Rodney King.”

  “I’ve heard of him,” she said. She stood up and walked toward the kitchen. Downing followed, watching as she bent toward a low shelf of the refrigerator. Bonkers or not, peacoat or not, she had a great butt.

  “You want an apple? I have some apples,” she said. “If I don’t eat on time I get the diabetes.”

  “No, but thanks.”

  “Good oranges, too. Can I get you one?”

  “No thanks.”

  Her eyes wandered for a moment and settled, apparently, on the kitchen sink faucet. “Grapefruit?”

  “No,” he said, then reconsidered. “What kind?”

  “The red kind,” she said. “They’re so good this year.”

  A woman after his heart. Texas Ruby Reds.

  “Best year I can remember,” he said. “Sweet as sugar, but no thanks. Just had one in the car on the way over. I probably eat a half-dozen a day when the winter crop comes in. I’d like to ask you a few questions, Mrs. Corbett, if you don’t mind.”

  She closed the refrigerator and rinsed an apple in the sink, which looked like it held every dish in the place, all dirty.

  Downing cleared his throat. “I was wondering if you keep in touch with Mr. Corbett.”