by Chuck Logan
Ida’s heels. The rings on Keith’s horrible licorice fingers.
Slowly, stunned, he tapped his finger on the table. Dot-dot-dot. Dash. Dash. Dash. Dot-dot-dot. Only the most well-known Morse code signal in the world.
Keith had been sending S-O-S, with their wedding rings.
Help.
46
The plummeting snow drilled straight down, each flake individually aimed. Broker stood in the street next to his Jeep, car keys in hand. Unmoving. A white crown of flakes slowly built on his hair.
Help me.
Help you do what? Asshole.
Lips moving. Crazy man playing statue in the snow, talking to himself. He shook it off. Locked it in its own compartment, checked his wristwatch, dusted the snow off his head and got in the truck. He had to see Dr. Ruth Nelson, Caren’s shrink.
Heavy snow churned the streets of St. Paul to white canals.
Cars floated through turns, slid sideways. Broker dropped the Sport into four-wheel, left the downtown loop, climbed the hill, and passed the cathedral.
Dr. Nelson maintained an office in her home, a shambling white elephant in a herd of Summit Avenue mansions overlooking St. Paul.
She opened the door and asked to see his identification.
Somewhere in the echoing gymnasium of the house, Broker heard preschool-aged children being nannied.
She was about Broker’s age, midforties, with strong features, a large nose, healthy circulation and short black hair.
Her handshake was firm, her brown eyes direct and the calves trim below the hem of her casual denim jumper.
In her second-story office, tall windows looked out on bare oak branches that swam off into white schools of snow. A gas fire jetted discreetly in a small fireplace with artificially sooty bricks. The walls were a barricade of shelved books, and an invasion of blunt Eskimo stone seals and walrus overran the place. Three large photographs of European rooftops, probably Paris, were prominently positioned.
Broker wondered if the patients were supposed to notice there were no people in the pictures.
He had once dated an FBI profiler who had trouble keeping her clip-on holster fastened to her miniskirt. When they broke off, she described him as a fugitive from modern psy-chology.
Broker was leery of therapy. Under the high ceilings of this room, it looked to be a game of let’s pretend to be intimate in an atmosphere of scholarly reserve and quietly paraded affluence.
Two comfortable armchairs were arranged in front of the gas fire, but Dr. Nelson did not invite him to sit down. Instead, she asked, in a challenging tone, “How did you find me?”
“I read your name on a pill bottle.”
“Are you wearing a gun, Mr. Broker?”
Broker smiled. “I hunt Bambi too.” She had him typed: cube of beefcop with a holster for a truss. He had not formed an impression of her, which meant he had more distance than she did going into this situation. Her cliche about guns, given the neighborhood and her title, was a liberal conditioned response, like lighting a cigarette. He ignored it.
“I’d prefer you leave it out in the car, actually.”
“Sorry. This block looks nice, but I hear it has a high burglary rate. But the answer is no, no gun.” He smiled again and looked around the room. “So, this is where it happened?”
“I beg your pardon.”
“Where you met with Caren.”
“Don’t play cop tricks with me, Mr. Broker.” She crossed her arms across her chest. Miffed, looking down her beaky nose. Big eyes and black hairdo. Heckle or Jeckle with a medical degree.
“I mean, you actually sat here and talked. I thought you guys just wrote prescriptions for drugs these days. Fifteen minutes per patient.”
“Does this look like an HMO?” Cool. Expert on defense.
“No, it looks expensive. How’d she pay for it? Police lieutenants don’t make that much.”
Getting a little sanguine around the cheeks, she said, “She had her own money. She did quite well when she sold their last house.”
“Of course.” Broker pointed to one of the chairs. “May I sit down?”
“No.”
“Would you show me your file on Caren?”
“No.”
Broker took his small notebook from his parka pocket.
“When was the last time you saw her?”
Dr. Nelson walked behind her desk and flipped open a thick leather-bound organizer. “December twelfth, ten to eleven A.M. She was always prompt.” She flipped the book shut.
Broker jotted the information. Spoke without looking up.
“Did she look agitated? Mention being in danger?” When he glanced up her eyes burned at him. He raised his eyebrows.
Dr. Nelson recrossed her arms. “The morning of the day she died, he, Keith, called my office, early. He was looking for her. He said they’d had a fight. He thought she’d come here.”
Broker jotted: Keith thinks she needs shrink. Caren thinks she needs me?
He looked up. Dr. Nelson shook her head. “Just routine questions? Taking notes. You were married to her once. She talked about you. She died on her way to see you.”
Broker shifted his weight, leveled his eyes. “Caren and I divorced almost fourteen years ago. I hardly spoke to her in that time. I literally haven’t seen her for five years. I’d love to know exactly why she was coming to see me…”
What the hell?
Broker covered the distance to her desk in two brisk strides.
He spun her appointment book around. Opened it, leafed through the dates on the pages. Verified the name and time written in the doctor’s tidy printing: “Caren. 10 A.M. ”
“Hey,” protested Dr. Nelson.
His voice canceled hers: “Did she leave early?”
Dr. Nelson narrowed her eyes. “No. She always stayed the full hour. Sometimes longer, we’d talk…”
Broker raised his hand, a plea for quiet. Started to take a step, halted, changed direction, another half step, stopped.
“Maybe you should sit down,” said Dr. Nelson.
Broker shook his head, thumbed through his notebook, checked something, looked up at her. “Did the FBI-anybody from the U.S. attorney’s office-contact you about Caren?”
“No.” She hugged herself. Not body language games. Real.
“Why?”
“No one confirmed the time of her last session?”
“No.”
“I would like to sit down,” said Broker. He lowered himself in the nearest chair. He engaged the concern in her eyes for several beats, asked, “What was your professional opinion of Keith?”
“Keith?” She masterfully controlled her distaste. “He killed her, that’s my opinion.”
“I mean, did he come here? Did you observe him?”
She looked at him with this amazed expression. “Twice, at the beginning. His beeper was constantly going off, he kept asking to use the phone.”
“You didn’t like him.”
“We don’t have the luxury of personal preferences.”
“Bullshit. You disliked him.”
“I recognized him for what he was,” she said.
“Which was?”
She spun, took two steps, reached for a hefty maroon book in the bookcase behind her desk. “You want to understand Keith. He’s right here.” She thumbed the pages and thrust the heavy book at Broker.
He took it and read where she tapped her finger. “Obsessive-compulsive personality disorder.” Under the subheading Diagnostic Features, he scanned: “The essential feature of obsessive-compulsive personality disorder is a preoccupation with orderliness, perfectionism and mental and personal control at the expense of openness, flexibility and efficiency.”
“Add anger, mix with booze and you get a witch’s brew,”
she said.
Broker rubbed his chin. “Did you point out, to him, what you just told me-give him a few shots, you know, in the back and forth?”
Back to the folded arms. “I may have told him
he had some classic control issues.”
“Uh-huh.” Broker stared at her.
“I mean-he systematically killed the relationship. When he didn’t get promoted, his obsessiveness went from mild to full-blown. They had put off having a child until he became a captain. When he didn’t get the rank, he privately had a vasectomy. Then the drinking started. And the abuse. Every day he was on her, drip, drip, drip, like weather torture. The belittling, the silent anger. When he finally destroyed her, there wasn’t much left.”
Slowly Broker stood up, carried the book to the desk and set it down. He wrote the title in his notebook: Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Health. Fourth Edition.
“So, basically, her problem was Keith.”
“Her problem was an irrational decision to stay in a destructive situation.”
“She was loyal,” Broker said.
“Don’t play word games,” said Dr. Nelson.
“I’m not,” he said with a flash of rising anger. “She was loyal. She took an oath. She tried to live by it. When Keith violated the oath he lived by, she decided to do the right thing, and it got her killed.”
“That’s morbid.”
Broker looked around the posh office. “She came here because if she went to the HMO, people she knew would see her. You gave her privacy, and drugs, for a price. If I’m morbid, what’s that make you?”
“I don’t have to listen to this.”
Broker pressed on, “Did you try to warn her?”
“Of course,” Dr. Nelson stated in an icy tone. “She said the one thing she knew about Keith was that he’d never lose control. But she was wrong. He did lose control. First he hit her and then he killed her.”
Broker shook his head, said slowly, “Keith Angland never did anything spontaneous in his life. He always has a reason.”
“Amazing. You’re protecting him. He killed a woman that was once your wife, and you’re making excuses for him.
What a bunch of sexist crap. Next you’ll tell me she asked for it.”
Broker smiled. “May I use your phone?”
“You may not. Now, if you’re through, I have a patient coming in a few minutes.”
Broker wheeled through the storm, looking for the nearest phone booth. Mental note. End his rustic Luddite phase. Buy a cell phone.
The first booth he found was glyphed with gang symbols.
When he got to it, he found the receiver cord cut. Turning, he noticed the grayish brown Ford Ranger pickup, black tinted windows, parked across the street, trailing a plume of exhaust. Did he see it in front of Dr. Nelson’s home?
Broker had to drive a block over, to Grand Avenue, to find a phone outside a 7-Eleven. As he dropped in a quarter, he saw the butternut-colored truck drive by and turn the next corner.
Madge in Grand Marais accepted charges. “Jeff’s got my house key in his office. Have whoever is patrolling north of town stop by my place. There’s a crumpled copy of a phone bill pinned to my bulletin board in the kitchen over the phone. Can’t miss it. Has strawberry jam on it. Have them call me at my motel. I’ll be there for the rest of the day.”
Madge had the motel number. He thanked her and hung up. Then he called J.T. Merryweather. Two minutes later, he stepped from the booth and made the truck, idling half a block down the street, reflecting the confetti swirl of the stormy sky in its opaque windshield.
47
Who was he? Was he Danny yet?
He was in the program, they said; but for a week his jubilee was put on hold. The Marshals Service was skeleton-staffed for Christmas and New Year’s. He had once written a story on Tibetan Buddhists that required some research into the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Tibetans believed that souls lan-guished in a void known as the Bardo zone between incarn-ations. The description fit his current status, somewhere after Tom and before Danny, spending Christmas sequestered in a room in a Ramada Inn, in a bombed-out blue-collar neighborhood in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
His window overlooked the empty parking lot of a defunct beer factory, the dingy, red brick housing of the departed workforce and the dreary Lake Michigan sky.
His guards changed daily, sometimes twice a day. He started demanding that they show their ID. The phone connected to room service but not to the outside.
“It’s the holidays,” a marshal explained. To compensate, they plied him with all the food and drink he desired. And VCR videos.
On Christmas day, he ordered a porterhouse steak, a fifth of Chivas Regal, and chose three movies. The films were calculated to indulge his current predicament- stories about Witness Protection, or about people who changed their identity.
Eraser with Arnold Schwarzenegger was a hoot-WITSEC on steroids for the popular culture, which was to say, teen-agers. Tom laughed, drank, turned down the volume on all the gunfire and explosions.
The second movie was appropriate. The Passenger with Jack Nicholson was somber and European. Nicholson played a reporter who escaped his life of quiet desperation by im-pulsively switching identities with a dead gunrunner. But Jack got in over his head and wound up murdered. Bummer, because old Jack hadn’t thought it through, like he-Tom, almost Danny-had. Which figured, Jack’s character was a TV reporter, therefore light in the ass. But the chick, Maria Schneider-the one Brando stuck the butter to, in Last Tango in Paris-looked great in a cotton dress against the background of the African desert.
Lascivious on Scotch, he saved the best for last. One of his all-time favorite movies: Apartment Zero. Another foreign film, natch-had to be, it had character development. This time the protagonist, a mild Buenos Aires landlord, Colin Firth, rented a room to a psychopathic killer-mercenary.
Drawn in by the killer’s dark charm, Firth finally overcame his wimp personality by murdering the psycho and absorbing his scary persona.
That was more like it.
Tipsy, he hit rewind and played the last scene over. Colin Firth, transformed, walked out of the art film cinema he owned, which was showing a James Dean retrospect-ive-James Dean see, a subtle cue there in the background, brooding from the movie posters. Now Firth had exchanged his conservative suit for a leather jacket. Smoked a cigarette.
New hair. Rugged, ballsy, a killer who got away with it. And, yeah-cultivating the look of James Dean.
You know, Tom thought. If you took away the glasses…
He stood, weaving slightly in front of the mirror over the dresser. Took off his glasses, experimented with combing his hair straight back, no part. Danny Storey could look like James Dean. Get contacts, some muscles. Put a dab of gel in his hair.
He poured another drink, rewound the movie, and watched it again.
The holidays ended and Tom checked out of the Bardo Motel. Another blacked-out van was waiting. This one opened in front of the Northwest baggage handlers at the curb of the Milwaukee airport. Two new marshals, in the young, taut, military mold, met him. They introduced themselves as Dennis and Larry. Their job was to escort him to “orientation.”
Dennis and Larry were correct but uncommunicative traveling companions. They said about five words apiece all the way to Richmond, Virginia.
Another hearse was waiting in short-term parking. Tom guessed that his destination was Washington, D.C. In keeping with WITSEC’s clandestine nature, the marshals never flew point to point, they always traveled at a remove.
Tom spent three hours in comfortable isolation. They stopped once at a Holiday station on an interstate exit, to use the bathroom. The marshals parked the van literally three feet from the bathroom door. Tom was out and back in, not seeing more than a slice of bare trees. Cloudy sky. The air was cold, wet, damp. But still some trace of green lingered to the exhausted grass. No snow.
The ride ended in another parking garage. Tom went up another elevator and was admitted to another quiet floor of an office building with unmarked doors and thick carpets.
His escorts unlocked a door and told him to go in and wait. Tom carried his bag into an efficiency apartment appointed with
clean, plain furnishings. A sliding door led to a small balcony that faced brick walls on three sides. He heard voices, Spanish vowels slid off Asian tones. Cooking smells hung on the stale enclosed air. People were living all around him. A child yelled, then another.
He was in a warehouse of protected witnesses and their families.
There was a knock on the door. Tom opened it and faced a tall slender prematurely gray man in dark slacks and a light blue button-down shirt. No tie, black loafers. He looked less military than the escorts. He looked tired.
“Tom, my name is John, and I’ll be handling your processing.” He pointed to the telephone next to the bed. “That’s an internal line that rings in my office.”
“So we’re self-contained?” asked Tom.
“Completely. You won’t even see other people going through the process.”
“How long will it take?” asked Tom.
“Not that long for you. In fact, very fast.” John handed Tom a manila folder containing a menu and schedule of daily activities. Most of the regular schedule had been Magic-Markered out on his copy.
“All the testing except routine physical and dental has been waived. And your file is green lighted-which means you’re being processed quicker than anyone I can remember.”
John rubbed his eyes. “Actually, while you were in transit, we came up with a workable plan to reestablish you. Basically, we’re waiting on minimal redocumentation.”
Tom grimaced. “I’ve read about people going years before they get new Social Security cards and birth certificates.”
John wrinkled his nose. “They didn’t deliver Tony Sporta.”
“So how long?”
“Just weeks. Less.”
The last item in the folder whipped Tom’s pulse. A map of northern California. Tom grinned. “I wanted warm.”
“San Francisco and the immediate Bay Area are full. But we have an inspector-handler on the coast, south of San Francisco who has a ready-made situation that is perfect for you.” He pointed to the map, below San Francisco.
Tom scanned the map. California. Hollywood. Earthquakes. El Nino.
And Charles Manson.