False Allegations b-9

by Andrew Vachss

  "Yeah I do," I told her. Stone truth that time.

  "I started pulling again," she said. "All the time. Even in public. I never did that before—I never went so far. Then I realized I couldn't even stop that. And I knew I had stopped it once. So I would never get better. I had no friends. No real friends. Nobody to talk to. I started to cut myself. Not to die, so I could feel something. See?" She pulled up the sleeve of her blouse, showing me the perfectly parallel cuts on her left forearm, as neat as tribal markings. "I have them on my legs too. It always made me feel better…I can't explain it."

  "Do you ever poke yourself?" I asked her "Like with the tip of the knife, or a pin or anything?"

  "Yes. I did that too. I did everything to myself. And one day, I cut myself and I didn't feel anything. Nothing at all. I watched the blood run down my leg and I didn't feel anything. I was going to cut my throat. The artery—I know where it is. But I…couldn't. So I found a vein."

  "Did you leave a note?"

  "Who would I leave a note to? There was nobody."

  "How did—?

  "I failed at that too," she said quietly. "I passed out, but I didn't die. I was supposed to pay the rent that afternoon. The landlady always came by to get it—she wouldn't take checks, it always had to be cash. When I didn't answer the door, she just opened it up. She had a key. She called the paramedics, and I woke up in the hospital."

  "A psychiatric hospital?"

  "No, a regular one. Later, I went to a…home, I guess it was. It didn't have bars on the windows or anything, and it wasn't a hospital. I don't know what to call it."

  I could feel Heather's eyes, but not Kite's—like he wasn't giving off any heat, just a piece of furniture. When I looked past the woman, Heather had turned her back to me. She was looking at the hologram, standing hip–shot, one hand under her chin, like she was studying a painting. I looked where her eyes were trained. The child's kite was gone. Now there was a bird, hovering high, face to the wind. A hawk, maybe, watching the ground. I couldn't see where the hawk was looking—Heather's hips blocked that part.

  "All that time," I asked Jennifer, "you never—"

  "All what time?"

  "From when you walked out of Brother Jacob's house in Buffalo to when you tried to kill yourself. How long was that?"

  "Nine, ten years."

  "You never thought about what happened? Never thought about Brother Jacob?"

  "No. If I had, I would have gone to a judge."

  "Sued him?"

  "No, the church has a judge. Every congregation has a judge. Any neighbor can file a complaint against any other neighbor, even a minister. Judges have to investigate the complaints, and then they report to the Council."

  "That's still in the church."

  "Yes. The Council is always seven: three judges, two deacons, and two neighbors. They're elected. If the judge files a report, the Council decides if there's guilt. And if there's guilt, the Council decides on the punishment."

  "Which can be what?"

  "You can be fined. Or suspended. Even banned from the church, depending on what you did."

  "But you never—"

  "No. I never thought about it. Not about going to the judge. I mean, about…it."

  "You never called Brother Jacob, or wrote a letter?"

  "No. I mean, not after that time when I found out—"

  "And he never contacted you."

  "No. I just went into a void, I guess. I don't really know—I don't understand that part so well."

  "So how did you—?"

  "When I started the counseling, I just told them the truth. I failed at everything, and I didn't know why. After a while, they said there were…gaps, like. That's when I went for hypnosis."

  I could feel Kite stiffen next to me, but he didn't make a sound. "By yourself?" I asked her.

  "Yes. Oh! You mean…no, I mean, it wasn't my idea. They found the therapist for me. The hypnosis, that was just part of it, not the whole thing. And it was a doctor. A real one, I mean. Not a Ph.D. doctor, like I have for my regular therapy."

  "How long were you in—"

  "I still am," she said, cutting into my question. "I guess I will be for a long time. It was…months before I even started to remember."

  "But then it all came out?"

  "I don't know if it's all out," she said, her voice resigned. "I don't know…yet. I remember stuff more and more all the time. But what I told you, that much I know is true."

  "We've been doing this for a while," I said, glancing at my watch. "I need some time to absorb everything before we talk again, all right?"

  "Yes," she said. Her eyes confronted mine. "Do you believe me?" she asked, her voice so thickly veined it vibrated a little.

  "I don't think you're lying," I said carefully.

  "Heather will show you out," Kite said to her, suddenly coming alive. "And I'll call you as soon as we have another appointment."

  "All right," she said quietly, getting to her feet. Heather was at her side instantly, a pudgy hand on the woman's forearm. I heard Heather's heels moving away on the hardwood floor. Closed my eyes.

  I heard a faint rustle from Kite's direction—he was getting to his feet. He moved away, soundlessly. I kept my eyes closed.

  The tap of Heather's heels, coming close. Blood–orchid perfume. Sharp intake of breath.

  "Are you okay?" she asked.

  I could feel her voice on my face. I didn't open my eyes. "Yeah," I told her. "Just…processing it all."

  "He's an evil man," she said.

  "Brother Jacob?"

  "Yes. An evil man. A liar. That's the worst thing you can be."

  "The worst thing?"

  "Lying is the root. Every time. But he wasn't just lying for himself, was he? He made her a liar too. He changed the truth for her."

  "Heather, have you ever talked to her?"

  "Well…sure."

  "I don't mean here. Anyplace else? Just you and her, alone?"

  "No. I mean…when would I?"

  "I don't know. I was just asking."

  "I'd tell you if I had. I'll tell you everything, if you want to know."

  "When?"

  "Someday," she whispered, leaning so close her lips were against me. I felt the kiss on my face. Right under my cheekbone, next to the bruise. Then I heard her heels tap away until she was standing behind me, waiting for Kite.

  When I opened my eyes, they were on Kite's reposed face. He'd slipped back into his chair as quietly as a bird landing on a branch.

  "It bothers me too," he said. "The whole hypnosis thing. You know about the so–called 'false memory' controversy?"

  "I heard about it," I said, neutral.

  "The water is very murky. There is no question but that the recovery of repressed memory is a documented, scientific fact. Repression? Of course it exists."

  I listened to him. Wishing some of my memories were repressed. Maybe there wouldn't have been that dead kid in that basement in the Bronx…

  "You can't 'remember' pain," Kite went on. "You'd go stark raving mad if you could. Not physical pain, anyway. But some memories certainly can be repressed…and then surface without warning. Take the 'Vietnam Vet' syndrome. I actually provided some help to the defense in one such case—a man who committed a series of rapes while reexperiencing combat in Vietnam. Flashbacks caused him to—"

  "That guy was convicted, right?" I said. I remembered the case. One of Wolfe's, before she got fired. The perp said he'd been flashbacking, believed he was back in Vietnam when he committed the rapes. But he'd robbed the women after he was through with them every time—and he came unglued when Wolfe asked him how many gold chains he'd snatched in Vietnam.

  "Society is not always alert to scientific advances," Kite replied, undisturbed. His face shifted into harsh lines, and his voice tightened. "But that does not change the truth. We will never succeed as professional debunkers, we will never be able to testify credibly in a court of law, we will never be able to make a real contributio
n to society…to the world…if we persist in the overheated rhetoric that none of those with recovered memories are telling the truth!"

  I heard the tap of Heather's heels behind me, but she wasn't moving, just shifting her weight, caught up in Kite's jury–summation voice.

  "I realize I may be dismissed from the movement for this," he said, letting a deeper organ–stop into his voice, as though he realized it was getting shrill. "But I will not be humiliated in court the way I have seen it happen to my colleagues. 'Have all the cases you've investigated turned out to be false allegations, Mr. Kite?' he said in a sarcastic imitation of a high–pitched woman's voice. 'And if you ever found out an allegation was true, you'd go right to the police, wouldn't you, Mr. Kite? I will never go through such an experience. I need one victim, one real victim, one whose memories are just resurfacing. And now, I've found one. At least, I believe I have…"

  "A legit—?"

  "Trauma is scar tissue over memory," he said, his voice changing to a reasonable tone. "There have been cases of violent bank robberies, for example. A woman teller is terrified, goes into traumatic shock. She can't identify the robbers, not even their age or race or height. She undergoes clinical hypnosis at the hands of an experienced, trained professional. And she recovers her memory to the point where she can describe the robbers perfectly. The defense says that you can't trust memories like that—too many other factors might have interfered with the 'picture' the woman's getting. But the videotape from the bank surveillance camera shows her description of the robbers was dead accurate. So we know it can happen. But…"

  "You don't always have videotapes."

  "No. And there seems to be no question but that charlatans with agendas of their own can implant memories. Especially when the subject is in a highly confused state. Or drug–impaired. Or suffering from a delusional disorder. With certain disorders, there is an enormous need to confabulate. Do you know what that—?"

  "Fill in the blanks," I said. "Some people lose time. They can't account for whole blocks of it, sometimes even weeks. It's scary to them."

  "Multiple personalities especially," Kite said, an intensity to his voice. "But they test perfectly. A multiple would survive any conventional psychological screen. The MMPI, for example. That could explain accounts of alien abductions."

  "Multiples who need to fill in the missing time?"

  "It could be; that's all I can commit to at this time. But it remains a possibility, one that cannot be discounted."

  "You think she could be a—?"

  "No. She's been tested. And there's other evidence."

  "Such as?"

  "We took her down the same road."

  "Hypnosis?"

  "Sodium amytal. She went right back to it. We had her in the room. Brother Jacob's room. When she was a little girl. She even remembered his cologne."

  "A twelve–year–old girl knew his—?"

  "Not the name," Kite said, anticipating, "the smell. She described it. And the next time, we brought samples, a whole variety. She picked it right out."

  "It happened a long time ago," I said. "Can you—?"

  "We know we have a statute problem," Kite interrupted, answering the question he thought I was going to ask. "New York has been a strict jurisdiction, very hostile to delayed discovery."

  "What's delayed discovery?"

  "Ah," he said, changing tone, finally on ground where I didn't know the way. "The analogy is to medical malpractice. An operation is performed and a surgical instrument is left inside the patient. She doesn't discover the error until a long time later. Perhaps when she has other medical problems as a result. The statute of limitations doesn't begin to run until she actually knows malpractice was committed."

  "But Jennifer did know…"

  "She knew it when it was happening, yes. But the perpetrator's own conduct—the shock of the sudden knowledge that she was a victim—literally drove it out of her mind. She was in a psychiatric coma. She didn't discover it until later. And that's another doctrine we plan to utilize: equitable estoppel. It simply means a wrongdoer cannot profit from his own bad acts. Do you understand?"

  "I hit someone in the head with a tire iron. He goes into a coma. Years pass, he's still in a coma. The statute of limitations runs out. He wakes up. Remembers it was me who did it. It was me who took his memory, so I don't get a free pass for doing it."

  "Yes! Not the most graceful explanation, but certainly a cogent one."

  "But that was physical," I said. "This was…"

  "Emotional. Of course. The hardest thing to prove in law is the so–called soft–tissue injury. Any lawyer representing a car accident victim would rather have a broken finger than the worst whiplash. And the human heart is the softest tissue of all," Kite intoned in that jury–summation voice.

  "So how are you going to…?"

  "Laws change," he said. "Some cases actually make law. I have never heard of a better case to prove the viability of the 'delayed discovery' doctrine than this one. And times are changing. Many states recognize that a child may not have the internal resources to come forward in a case of sexual abuse, especially when the perpetrator is a powerful figure in the child's life. Connecticut has already extended the statute. So has Vermont. And California. I don't fear the odds. In fact, I look forward to the opportunity."

  "Okay. You said there was other proof. Could I—?"

  "Take this with you," he said, handing me a pile of paper. And a bunch of letters, neatly tied in a black ribbon. I put them into the aluminum case.

  At the grille, Heather said goodbye in a soft voice. When I turned toward her, she put her forehead against my chest, whispered, "Could I have another chance?"

  "Who knows?" I lied.

  I didn't want to use my Arnold Haines ID for a plane ticket, in case something went wrong out of town. And I knew better than to pay cash. Michelle booked me a round–trip on USAir through a travel agent she knows. Now that the federales finally figured out that any crew of drooling dimwits with a rental van and enough money to buy a few tons of fertilizer can level an entire office building, they want photo ID at airports. What they haven't figured out is that anyone with the coin and the contacts can score a complete set of papers in a couple of days. When I showed the uniformed woman at the ticket counter a driver's license that matched the Stanley Weber name on my first–class ticket, she didn't give it a second glance.

  I couldn't contract the job out, not in Buffalo. In a few cities, you still have old–time thieves working. Guys who'll do a house as fine as pouring it through a strainer and turn over whatever they find—never even look at what they lift, much less make copies. The old–timers have a professional's pride: "If I take a fall, I take it all," the Prof used to say—no rats allowed in that exclusive club.

  But those kind of burglars are a dying breed. Hell, burglary itself is a dying art. Today, it's mostly smash–and–snatch punks, junkies and fools, amateurs who think a fence is what you climb over to get to the windows…which you break with a brick. They don't know how to bypass an alarm, don't even know enough to start at the bottom with a chest of drawers. They leave their trail like it was blazed in neon, counting on the cops' being too busy to do anything but give you a complaint number for your insurance report. And if they ever run into a dog, all they're going to get is bit.

  There're no standards now, the way there used to be. I remember a guy who wanted to join our crew years ago, when we were stealing all the time. Hercules, we'd called him in prison, a big, handsome kid, strong as the stench from a two–day–old corpse. He had a deep weakness for the ladies, but he was stand–up—if he got popped, he'd go down by himself, the way you were supposed to. Still, the Prof had nixed him off. "He's a stone amateur, bro—gets his nose open like a subway tunnel. Never keeps his mind on business. Old Herc, he's a hopeless pussy–hound. The boy can't run with us—he's a rooster, not a booster."

  So I was never tempted, always stayed with a true–pro crew even if I had to pass up som
ething that looked luscious. And I can still get it done in a few cities. Chicago has one of the best thieves I've ever known, almost in the Prof's class. There's a real slick guy who works San Francisco, one of those small, compact boys who can move like smoke. And in New Orleans, there's a double–jointed woman who could find a diamond in a vat of zircons with her nose. But they're few and far between, an aging class. And every prison jolt thins the ranks.

  In Buffalo, I didn't know a soul. I wasn't going to trust some secondhand recommendation—and without a local bondsman and a good lawyer already lined up, it's not righteous to ask your own people to take a risk.

  Besides, whatever Brother Jacob had lying around that might help me was probably in his head, not in some desk drawer. I decided this was a one–thief job.

  The flight took under ninety minutes, nonstop. I fly first class because it's more anonymous. The seats are separated—the whole setup doesn't encourage the guy next to you to get into a conversation. And you can board the plane after everyone else but still be first off when you land. If you don't check luggage, you can slip on and off the plane like it was a taxicab.

  I ate a little bit of the blah food they served, watching the letters Brother Jacob had written to Jennifer Dalton come up on the screen in my head. They were all fun–house mirrors, tricky reflections, bending your vision. The handwriting was strong, with a confident right–hand slant. On heavy, cream–colored, watermarked paper, each letter only one sheet, one side. No return address, no monogram. Expensively anonymous.

  Dear One,

  I know it's hard for you, Jennifer. It's hard for me as well. But there is a right way to do everything, even the most difficult tasks. Patience doesn't come easily to someone your age, but the greatest joys in life are always worth the investment.