by G. H. Ephron
“I’m working on it.”
28
I SLEPT badly the night before I was scheduled to testify. I got to bed early enough but I kept waking up. First, I dreamed that I arrived at the courthouse in pajamas, the navy and green plaid ones I wore when I was a kid. Then I dreamed that I was testifying and Kate was cross-examining me. My mother was sitting in the jury box weeping while I tried to explain, “I was in the kitchen. I didn’t know what was happening …”
“Why didn’t you know? Why didn’t you do something to save me?” Kate asked me.
“I didn’t realize … I didn’t hear … I didn’t know … .”
Back and forth we went. Then Kate reached into her pocket and took out a ringing cell phone. She talked into it, flipped it closed, and started all over. “Why didn’t you get home earlier? Why didn’t you come upstairs?”
Again I tried to answer and again, Kate reached into her pocket for the ringing phone.
She looked at me sadly. “It’s about ego, isn’t it. Your ego. Even now, you still can’t stop yourself.”
“Objection, Your Honor,” Chip called from the courtroom door.
I turned to the judge and found myself staring up into the calm, smiling baby face of Ralston Bridges. “Objection overruled,” he sneered.
I woke up with a jolt, drenched in sweat. I got out of bed, threw open the window, and stood there shivering, looking out on the deserted street. It was four in the morning. Another couple of hours and I’d have to get dressed. Why was I doing this again? Was it ego? And why hadn’t I known Kate was in danger?
I’d gone through it in my head hundreds of times. How could I have stood in my kitchen, boiling hot water for tea, unaware that Bridges was already in my house? How could I have been oblivious to him creeping around in my bedroom, then upstairs into Kate’s studio? Why didn’t I go up to see her when I got home? Why didn’t I sense something was wrong? I was there. I could have saved her. Or would both of us be dead? Maybe that would have been preferable to the reality of the past two years.
He never admitted to killing her. Insisted, all the way through the trial and sentencing, that I’d been the one. A suspicious, jealous husband, I’d come home to check up on my wife and found her with him.
He was right about one thing. It was very unusual for me to be home in the middle of the day. But the explanation was simple. I’d spent the morning in Boston, and on my way to the Pearce, stopped at home to surprise Kate with a quick lunch. It was dumb luck that at the same moment, Ralston Bridges had decided to end his stakeout and act. The police theorized that he’d spent days watching us, learning our habits. He knew Kate would be in her studio and he expected me to be at work.
I heard the scuffle, Kate’s scream, then a thud. I raced upstairs, but by then it was already too late. He was shirtless, his pants halfway down. Kate was on the floor in a pool of blood.
I reached out blindly and grabbed a metal rod from Kate’s workbench and swung. I could still feel the sound as the rod cracked against his skull. He went down and lay on his back, whimpering, holding his arms over his face. I went to Kate and held her. She was already gone. There was so much blood. Her throat was slit.
I heard Bridges dragging himself along the floor. He was reaching for the knife. I kicked away his hand and must have kept on kicking — the next thing I remember is “Peter! Stop!” my mother’s scream penetrating the rage. She stood in the open doorway, her hands over her mouth. For the first time I realized I was covered in blood. Kate’s blood. Bridges’s blood. In a few more moments. I’d have killed him.
“Kate?” my mother whispered.
I could only shake my head. She walked over to the body and picked up Kate’s hand and pressed it to her lips.
I turned numb. I went down to my bedroom and called the police. Then I leaned against a wall and closed my eyes. I listened to the sound of emptiness, punctuated only by the sound of my own labored breathing and the muffled sound of the teapot screaming from the kitchen.
It was while we were waiting for the police to arrive that I realized Bridges was wearing my clothes. My pants, my shirt, even a pair of my gloves lay discarded in a corner. The knife was from a drawer in our kitchen. He was going to kill my wife and leave behind evidence that I’d done it.
It had happened so fast. One moment I had everything I could have wanted and I didn’t know it. The next, it was ripped from me. The loss was like a great, empty hole that I tried to pretend wasn’t there. I’d never even had a chance to say goodbye.
Now I ran a shower, as hot as I could stand. I stood under the pulsing water, my eyes closed, trying to clear my head. I shaved. Later, I went to my closet to get out a suit. I still had a few of Kate’s things hanging in the back — the smock she wore when she worked, her bathrobe. I reached for the robe and buried my face in it. It still had her smell.
Then I took out clothes for the day, clothes I hadn’t worn since the last time I’d testified as an expert witness. I lined up the pieces on my bed. I put on a freshly laundered shirt, feeling its stiff starchiness scratch my skin. I buttoned the sleeves. I pulled on the gray suit pants. They were looser than I’d remembered. I threaded and fastened a black leather belt. Carefully, I adjusted and knotted a dark red silk tie. The vest buttoned easily across my middle. I shrugged on the jacket.
My reflection in the mirror stared calmly back at me. Satisfied, I went downstairs and checked through my briefcase to be sure I had everything I’d need. As I prepared to leave, there was a shave-and-a-haircut rap at my door. I opened the door.
My mother beamed at me, but I knew she was forcing it. “How handsome you look! I just came over to say good luck.” I hadn’t talked to my mother about the trial, but I knew she’d be anxious about it, glad it was nearly over. “You have a big day ahead of you. You should eat. Here!” She thrust a little bag into my hand.
The bag was warm. I peaked inside. She’d actually driven to Chinatown to get my favorite pork buns, something I know she cannot tolerate even the smell of.
“Oh, Mom,” I said, and gave her a hug and a peck on the cheek. Then I stopped, stepped back, and pulled my mother inside into the light. Her eyes were bloodshot and there were dark circles underneath. “Are you all right?”
“What do you mean, am I all right? Of course I’m all right. Why shouldn’t I be all right?”
“You look like I feel. Exhausted.”
“I’m an old lady. This is how old ladies look.”
“Give me a little credit at least. This is not how this old lady looks. What’s going on?”
She looked at her feet, then at me, tilting her head to one side like some white tufted woodpecker deciding whether to attack an ant. “I didn’t want you to worry.”
“If you don’t tell me what’s wrong, I’ll really worry.”
“I’ve been having trouble sleeping,” she said.
“What kind of trouble?”
“My phone’s been ringing at all hours. I pick it up and there’s no one there. I don’t pick it up and it rings and rings.”
“The other night — when I got beeped. Your phone was keeping you up that night, too?”
My mother pursed her lips and peered up at me. “You thought I was up in the middle of the night for my health?”
That explained the telephones in my nightmares. My bedroom shares a wall with my mother’s bedroom.
“Why didn’t you say something?”
“I didn’t want you to” — we finished the sentence in unison — “worry.”
“If you had an answering machine, you could set it to pick up your calls.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.” It was ridiculous. My mother had a terrible time with everything electronic — the VCR being a major exception to the rule.
“You should unplug the phone,” I said.
“What if someone’s trying to reach me?”
“Who could be trying to reach you in the middle of the night?”
“Your brother. Uncle Milt.”
“Anyone like that who’s trying to reach you will have my number. Anyone else, you don’t want to talk to at three in the morning anyway.”
My mother gave a little shiver. “So, Dr. Smartypants,” she said, pulling her sweater around her shoulders, “go in that courtroom and knock ’em dead. And don’t forget to eat something.” Then she scuttled out.
A little while later, Kwan pulled up in his Saab and beeped the horn. On the way to the Pearce, he said, “I don’t know what it is, but you’ve got something edible on you.”
“Can you believe it, my mother went into Chinatown and picked up some pork buns. She wanted to be sure I ate well before I had to testify.”
“So are we going to eat them or just talk about them?”
I opened the bag and handed Kwan one of the little round pastries stuck to a square of wax paper. He sniffed at it, took a bite, and sighed. “Any time you have these, I’ll be happy to drive you. When do you think you’ll get your car back?”
“Sometime in the middle of next week, or so they say.”
“How is your mother these days, anyway?”
“Fine. Usually. Actually, this morning she looked like death warmed over.”
Kwan gave me a sidelong look. “Actually, you don’t look so great yourself.”
I ignored it. “What kind of person gets his kicks making voiceless phone calls to an old woman in the middle of the night?”
“Probably just kids with nothing better to do. She should take her phone off the hook.”
“That’s what I told her. But she’s a person who anticipates disaster around every corner. She might miss one if she didn’t get her after-midnight calls. As if she could do anything if she got bad news in the middle of the night instead of in the morning.”
“It’s not rational, but when life feels out of control, disconnecting the phone can make you feel even more adrift.”
It was true enough. And bad news did tend to come at odd times. My father had died an hour before dawn. It was a fact that haunted my mother. Not that he died. But that he died alone.
Then something occurred to me. After my father’s death, my mother couldn’t stand seeing his name riding in, over and over again, on the incoming mail. It was one more reminder in days filled with reminders of her loss. She made a big deal about changing all their subscriptions, charge cards, and accounts to her own name. That’s when she changed their phone listing to P. Zak. My phone number is unlisted, so, occasionally, someone trying to find me ends up calling my mother. It seemed a whole lot more likely that the late-night caller was trying to disrupt my sleep, not my mother’s. And on the night before I was scheduled to testify in a murder trial.
29
IT TURNED into a crazy morning. Four new patients had been admitted. Two keep us busy. Three is a stretch. My leaving for court that afternoon didn’t help. Thank goodness Gloria was back.
Twice that morning, I noticed Maria Whitson. Once, she was pacing the hall. When she saw me, she ducked into her room. A second time, she was standing in front of the nurses’ station. I’d meant to ask her why she wasn’t participating in any of the morning activities, but Mr. Kootz picked just that moment to start head banging — his own this time — so I got distracted.
Later that day, Kwan dropped me at the subway so I could get to the courthouse. I arrived just after the lunch break. I got myself a large cup of coffee and rode up in the elevator. I wrote off the waves of nausea to insufficient sleep.
I got off the elevator and sank down on a bench in the hall outside the courtroom. My hand shook as I folded back the coffee lid and a squirt of scalding liquid ended up on my pants. I took a sip. It tasted vile.
I peeled my shirt off my back and wiped a slick of sweat from my forehead. I stared at the wood grain of the bench, the stains on the gray-speckled linoleum. One of the double doors to the courtroom opened and Annie slid out into the waiting area. I tried to get up and found that I couldn’t.
She looked at me, concerned. “You look pooped.”
“I didn’t sleep very well.”
“You need help getting pumped?”
Pumped. That was what I might have needed in the old days. Now, I needed a whole lot more than pumped. I was afraid that when I tried to walk, I’d lose traction.
“Thanks, no. I’ll be fine, once I get going. How long before … ?”
“Shouldn’t be long now. Fifteen minutes, max.” She turned to go and paused. “Can I get you some water?”
It was such a simple question and I didn’t know the answer.
She looked at me hard. “You’re not okay, are you?”
I closed my eyes and opened them. “Not at this very moment. But I will be. There’s nothing you can do, Annie. This is something I have to do for myself.”
Annie went back, and I set the coffee aside. I took off my jacket and lay it on the bench. I folded my hands loosely in my lap, centered myself, closed my eyes, and focused. I imagined daybreak, the sun rising on the river. I tried to feel the coolness of the air, see the smoothness of the water’s surface, feel my feet locked in place, my body pulling, pulling as the boat cut through the water. I imagined gliding by the Esplanade where a parade of willows reach down to touch the water’s edge. Slowly, the river faded. Concentrating on a spot between my eyes, I breathed slowly, in through the nose and out through the mouth.
When an officer came out and called my name, I had it together. I stood, put on my jacket, and strode purposefully into the courtroom.
It was much smaller than I’d remembered. The judge was at the far end, his desk on a raised platform. I sat in the witness box to the judge’s left and was sworn in. Chip and Annie conferred briefly before Chip stood and approached me.
He took me slowly through my credentials, point by point, encouraging and coaxing me along. He drew out into minutes a procedure that normally takes about thirty seconds. I knew the kid glove treatment was a stalling tactic designed to help me relax. And it worked. Any hesitation there might have been in my voice vanished after the first few questions. I settled back and felt my adrenaline kick in. Each question and answer was like another stroke on the river.
As we went through my areas of expertise, I surveyed the room. The jurors were lined up in two rows along one wall. Facing me, Annie sat at a table. Montrose Sherman and another lawyer sat at a matching table. I was only dimly aware of the spectators sitting in two rows of pews at the back of the room.
I almost didn’t notice Stuart Jackson at Annie’s side. Long strands of thinning brown hair were combed artfully over the top of his head. The skin hung from his face like a deflated balloon. He sat forward in his seat, listening intently. I hoped I wouldn’t let him down.
“Remember,” Chip had warned me, “you’re talking to people, not shrinks. Keep it simple. Your job is to teach them about memory.” So when he asked me to describe the tests I’d administered and how Syl had performed, I stuck to the basics.
As I explained each test, a middle-aged woman with short salt-and-pepper hair in the second row of the jury box sat in rapt attention. I tried to talk to her and ignore the balding older man sitting directly in front of her. He had his arms folded, torso turned away at an angle, one leg crossed over the other. The body language spoke volumes. The more I talked, the more his face solidified into an unpleasant frown. By the time I finished, the lady in the second row was still wide-eyed while the gentleman in the first row was slack-jawed, catching flies.
The judge called for a ten-minute break.
I met Chip and Annie in the hall. Really seeing Annie for the first time that day, I did a double take. She wore a dark blue suit and high heels. Her wild hair was done up in a knot. The short skirt confirmed something I’d suspected. She had great legs. I must have been staring because she shifted uncomfortably under my gaze.
“Sorry,” I apologized, “it’s just that you look so different.”
She flushed and grinned. “You noticed. That’s something. You must be feeling bet
ter.”
“Let’s take a stroll,” Chip suggested. We walked in silence to the far end of the hall.
Annie’s assessment was encouraging. “You did very well,” she said. “I thought the jury was with you.”
“That’s a relief. I honestly wasn’t sure what was coming across. It’s been awhile. That guy in the front row was driving me nuts. In a minute he’d have been snoring.”
“That’s our retired plumber,” Chip said. “Has two grown daughters. I don’t think we’re going to win any points with him.”
As we turned at the end of the hall and started to walk back, Chip commented, “Now, to face the lion.”
“I hope he had a hearty lunch,” I said.
“You’re it,” Annie whispered.
30
MONTROSE SHERMAN was a compact, pale man with sharp gray eyes who held himself as if he had a broomstick up his ass. Everything about him was stiff and straight-arrow, from the razor creases in his dark pin-striped suit to the starch in his button-down collar. If he had any ethnicity, it had long since bleached out. If there were any laugh lines in his forty-year-old face, I couldn’t find them.
While I waited on the stand, Sherman took his time. He straightened several thick file folders on the table in front of him, leaned over to whisper a comment to his colleague, took a sip from a glass of water. Then he picked up a densely scribbled pad of yellow paper, stood up, and strode to a spot directly between me and the jury. He held up the pad, creating a wall above which I could just see the deep vertical grooves that ran from the inside corner of each bushy eyebrow to his hairline. He peered at me over the top of the pad. I waited, squelching the urge to shift in my chair. He took a silver pen from his pocket and clicked it open.
It started innocuously enough. He said good afternoon. Then he asked me to describe my expertise in head injury.
“At the hospital, we’re involved with a lot of head trauma cases. What I’m primarily interested in is the borderline between organic and functional illness. In other words, looking at an individual’s illness and teasing apart the organic factors from the emotional factors.”