Tunnel Vision

by Sara Paretsky

  As the light changed I pulled some singles from my pocket and handed them to him. “You ate most of my food. You can have four.”

  He hurried into the intersection after me, grabbing my shoulder. “If you’ve come up with an idea you’d better share it—you owe me something for that routine at the Grand Guignol tonight.”

  “Right now I’m more worried about Emily Messenger. I posted a guard at her room, but Fabian busted it up. Maybe it would be better if Finchley did arrest her: at least that way I’d know she was safe from the real murderer.”

  “You’re taking for granted that she didn’t kill her mother.”

  We had reached the Grand Guignol, where we’d left our cars. I paused with my hand on my door to look him in the eye. “I believe her story, yes. It had a sort of authentic ring to it. If—unlike the cops—you’d try to believe that I’m a reliable judge of what I hear, I’d forgive you all your recent transgressions. I might even give you the other four bucks for my food.”

  The noise of my engine turning over drowned out most of Murray’s sarcastic response. I made a dramatic U, flaring exhaust across him.

  It was almost midnight on my dashboard clock. Conrad would be off duty soon; maybe he could talk Terry into posting a police guard at Emily’s room.

  I didn’t like the possibilities for her, near term. If Terry arrested her it might protect her from the murderer: he might feel his best defense was having someone else stand trial. But the trauma of arrest was something she didn’t need, poor little mouse. And whether they arrested her or not, in a day or two she would be released back to Fabian’s custody.

  I swooped around a double-parked newspaper van and made the turn onto Lake Shore Drive. So even if I could look after her tonight it wouldn’t solve the problem of protecting her from Fabian, which I had promised.

  The thought of that promise reminded me of another I’d made recently—to pick up Mr. Contreras from his daughter’s in Elk Grove Village Thursday morning. As I waited for the light at Lake Shore Drive I punched the steering wheel in irritation. He needed to go in daily for rabies shots. If I brought him home would I have time to look after him?

  I exited at Chicago and found a parking place on the street. Anxiety made me sprint the two blocks to the hospital. Waiting for the elevator I drummed my fingers on a nearby planter. When it came I shared the ride with a mother whose child was having emergency surgery on a heart valve.

  I followed her to a waiting area halfway down the hall where other parents of critically ill children were keeping an anxious vigil. I could just make out the door to Emily’s room from a pay phone on one wall. I called Conrad to explain where I’d been and why I’d be late getting back.

  Conrad couldn’t totally believe that I only met Murray for business, but he roared with laughter at the description of the man in the pink silk jumpsuit propositioning him.

  “Thanks, babe. That did me more good than a beer. How long you think you’ll stay up there?”

  “Until I feel it’s safe to leave. You don’t think you could talk Terry into posting a guard here, do you?”

  “I think I’d rather walk down South Morgan without a vest than get between you and the Finch on this case. I have roll call again at eight, so I’m not going to wait up. You be careful driving down here in those fancy wheels, okay?”

  “Yes, Papa.” I hung up on his exasperated snort.

  I thought about checking in with the nursing staff, but I didn’t want a fight. The halls were empty; I slipped into Emily’s room.

  She seemed to be sleeping. I moved quietly to an armchair in the corner. After a while the stillness of the room and the stresses of the last four days combined to make me doze off.

  I was startled awake at two by a light being switched on: a nurse had come in to check on Emily’s vital signs. When she caught sight of me she beckoned me into the hall to demand who I was.

  “V. I. Warshawski. I was told that she was calling for me earlier tonight. I wanted to stay with her in case she woke up looking for me.”

  “Are you related to her?” the nurse asked.

  I shook my head. “She doesn’t have any female relatives in town that I know of. You know her story, right? She’s been through too much lately for anyone to cope with, let alone a child. I’m here to help her feel safer.”

  Whatever Lila Dantry had told the owl shift about the Streeters and Fabian had apparently not included an interdict on me. Other than telling me to stay in the waiting room, since I wasn’t Emily’s mother, but that they would call me if Emily asked for me, she didn’t try to kick me out.

  “We do ask people to check in at the nurses’ station,” she said. “We try to make our children as comfortable as possible, but we can’t have strangers moving in with them. You do understand that, I hope.”

  I understood it, all right. I hoped that the musketeers, or whoever killed Deirdre, would be similarly circumspect before visiting Emily. The nurse escorted me to the waiting area. By moving a chair to the edge of the enclosure I could just make out Emily’s door. No more dozing on duty now: I’d have to strain to keep an eye on the hall.

  The woman whose child was having valve surgery was sharing a nervous vigil with three other parents of critically ill children. We exchanged anxious, fragmented conversation. At two-thirty one of the men offered to fetch coffee—he was a habitue of the hospital and knew the fast routes to and from the all-night vending stand.

  At three the heart surgeon came to talk to the mother. They stood outside the waiting area, blocking my view of the hall. I got up so I could see around them. After a few minutes they headed for the elevators. It was three-twenty when Anton walked swiftly past the nurses’ station and opened the door to Emily’s room.

  “Call the police,” I said to the man who’d brought coffee. “Someone just went into my kid’s room—a guy I know.” I was down the hall on the run, my hand on my gun, before he could ask any questions.

  Anton was leaning over Emily with a pillow. I brought my gun down on his head. He didn’t fall, but the blow rocked him enough that he lost his hold on the pillow. I kicked him in the small of the back. At that he turned around, aiming a punch for my head. I ducked under his arm and hurled myself against his legs. I shoved hard. The momentum of his punch made him stumble forward over me. Behind me in the bed Emily started to scream.

  Anton righted himself as he fell and grabbed my head. I twisted in his grasp but couldn’t free myself. I bucked as he tried to suffocate me, brought my legs over my head and managed to hook my right toe under his chin. His fingers loosened. I pushed hard against his windpipe.

  In the next instant the room was full of light, of people. Anton let go of me. He knocked a nurse and a security guard out of the way and crashed through the door.

  51

  Droit du Pere

  “I don’t get it. I stopped the guy as he was smothering Emily, and you want to arrest her. Don’t you see—Anton must have killed Deirdre. Emily was hiding under my desk. She only saw his feet, but he thinks she can ID him, because he knows she was in my office—he knows because she brought the bat home. So why in God’s name are you punishing her?”

  I was in a conference room at Eleventh Street with Terry and Officer Neely. And Fabian. And Mortimer Zeitner, M.D. Conrad had traded shifts again when he learned about the meeting, but he was sitting on the far side of the table from me, near Finchley. It was ten-thirty Wednesday morning and I felt like a building that someone was sandblasting.

  After knocking over the nurse and the guard Anton had no trouble leaving the hospital: the security staff were too bewildered to give chase quickly enough. As soon as they’d dragged me away, gotten my story, and conferred with the nurses about whether they could question Emily, they’d called the city cops—but that had not, in fact, been very soon.

  I had staggered into Conrad’s apartment at five, where I’d managed three hours of sleep between giving him my saga and returning downtown for the conference. As far as Terry
knew,Anton was still at large.

  “We talked to Gary Charpentier, as you suggested,” Terry told me. “He says that Anton was after you, not the girl. He couldn’t have known about the bat because we never released that to the press.”

  “Emily!” I snapped, too tired to care about tact. “She is not ”the girl,’ or “the kid.’ She has a name. Please use it. And you must know that Alec Gantner has a pipeline to the investigation—you felt the gusher when he got onto Kajmowicz last week. Of course they know all about the bat.”

  “We’re not going to agree on Alec Gantner being a party to this, Vic. Let’s stick to what we know right now. Gary Charpentier was very helpful and quite upset. He says Anton went berserk over the deportation of the Romanian work crew and felt it was due to your meddling. Charpentier says he didn’t realize Anton was skimming their paychecks—”

  When I started a passionate interjection Terry held up a hand to silence me. “I know, I know—he’s bailing out and leaving his foreman to carry the can. But Charpentier does say he was worried that Anton might be stalking you. He gave us the guy’s address and a couple of leads on where to find him. And, Vic, the gir—Emily saw him attack you. But she doesn’t have any recollection of him attacking her.”

  I almost screamed. “She was asleep. Are you saying that in the absence of a witness you’ll believe I made up seeing him smother her?”

  “I’m saying Charpentier told a plausible story. Until we can find Anton we don’t have any way to question it. Dr. Zeitner here is convinced that Emily is suffering from hysterical amnesia that is causing her to block out killing her mother. There’s evidence to support that, which you cannot ignore. The murder weapon was in Emily’s room. With her prints on it.”

  “Terry, I’ve told you what Emily says about that. She was convinced her father had killed her mother. She was hiding the evidence.”

  Fabian winced—the thoughtful, worried father in anguish over his daughter’s emotional instability. He then treated us to his own version of events the night Deirdre was murdered: hard at work on an important lecture; believing he must have forgotten his wife mentioning she had a meeting downtown; glad that Emily stepped in to help with her brothers; not surprised when Deirdre didn’t come home—she did a lot of volunteer work that often kept her out late, especially when it involved homeless shelters; totally unaware of Emily leaving the house in the middle of the night.

  The three men listened sympathetically. I was so tired I had trouble sitting up, let alone responding on the level of make-believe all us grown-ups were playing.

  “Vic, you can’t imagine how grateful I am to you for finding my children,” Fabian concluded. “I wish you’d never given Emily encouragement to come looking for you—it’s what put the idea into her head of running away to your office—but I know your intentions were a sincere effort to help a troubled child. And I wish I’d been more alert the night Deirdre ... died ... to how upset Emily was.”

  He glanced ruefully at Terry. “When your own little girl becomes a teenager you’ll appreciate that adolescent storms are a part of daily life. You don’t pay as much attention to the individual gales as you probably should.”

  Before we began Fabian had established that he and Terry were the only ones in the group with children. His smile now established a special communication with Finchley. Terry, not immune to Fabian’s public charm, gave him back a small, intimate smile of his own.

  “Why do you think Emily was especially upset that night, Fabian?” I broke into their communion.

  “In retrospect we—her mother and I—may have put too much responsibility on her shoulders. Emily always seemed so mature for her years that we forgot she was a teenager. When Deirdre had that unexpected meeting I asked Emily to step in so I could concentrate on my lecture.” He grimaced. “At the time my work took on perhaps an excessive importance. Perhaps Emily felt I was unjust. I can’t ask her, because she won’t talk to me.”

  He made a deprecatory gesture. “She’s blocking out some painful memories that the sight of me may well rouse. At least, Dr. Zeitner, I don’t want to put words into your mouth, but isn’t that your impression?”

  Zeitner cleared his throat. “Emily is an imaginative child, very sensitive, and lonely. We all know that her mother had ... certain problems. It’s understandable that Emily began to imagine herself supplanting the mother in all ways, sexual as well as otherwise. We can’t be certain what made her snap that particular night—she is finding it hard to talk about it right now. But I’m convinced when she’s in an appropriate setting and has the right kind of support she’ll recover enough to be able to speak.”

  “Why do you think she went downtown, alone, in the middle of the night?” I asked. “Don’t you think it took some major impetus to drive her into a dangerous city in the dark?”

  Zeitner said, “We’ll know that better when Emily starts trusting us enough to speak.”

  “Maybe if you trusted her enough to listen to her she would trust you enough to talk to you,” I said.

  Zeitner raised his eyebrows in a way that managed to convey polite contempt. I wanted to strangle him. Instead I turned to Fabian.

  “Emily has told me how you like to come into her room after she’s gone to bed, and that you did so the night Deirdre was killed. Do you remember what you said, and what you did, that night?”

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw Officer Neely flinch and shift uneasily in her chair. Zeitner smiled smugly, as though I’d just confirmed his diagnosis.

  Fabian leaned forward across the conference table in his earnestness. “Vic, to be honest with you, so much has happened since then that I can’t recall that specific incident. If you’d ever had children of your own you’d know that you do often go into their rooms at night to check up on them. I may have wanted to make sure Emily wasn’t too angry—with Deirdre’s leaving her in the lurch—to be able to sleep, but I honestly can’t recall.”

  “So you don’t remember having sex with her that night.” I forced myself to look at him, at his gray eyes almost black with sincerity, a tiny pucker between his brows betokening nothing more than gracious attention.

  He put his hand to his brow, as though unable to bear the thought of so disturbed a child. He turned to Zeitner, who patted his arm consolingly.

  “If Emily is claiming that, then it’s clear corroboration of what I’ve been saying,” the psychiatrist said. “Except that her fantasies are more pronounced than I realized. That information will be helpful, though, in the recommendations we make to the court.”

  He looked at me over the edges of his glasses, his eyes stern. “And Ms. Warchassi, you may be well-intentioned, but I must urge, in the strongest language possible, that you not go near Emily again. You have a very disturbing effect on her. The setback she sustained after last night’s events, for instance—your kind of rough work does not belong in a pediatric ward.”

  “Dr. Zit, without my rough work Emily Messenger would be dead. I would be very grateful if everyone in this room could abandon their fantasies about Emily’s fantasies and pay serious attention to what she said. She is not crazy, nor hysterical, nor amnesiac. She has a clear and most painful memory of the events around her mother’s death.”

  “And you are a trained psychiatrist, Ms. ... uh?” Dr. Zeitner demanded.

  “I’m a trained observer. I hear a lot of stories. I know how to sift the authentic from the imaginary.”

  He shook his head. “You are a feminist, right? And you probably subscribe to the current feminist dogma that many girls are sexually abused. In your sympathy and the ardency of your beliefs you could easily have given Emily unconscious cues that made her believe a story of incest would be acceptable to you. I’m not saying you deliberately encouraged her to imagine that her father raped her, but that in ways you wouldn’t consciously be aware of, you encouraged her to present that version of events.

  “After killing her mother and then spending a week almost starving underground, Emily w
ould be disoriented enough to imagine anything. We need to get her properly medicated and ready to reclaim her own memories. She needs professional support for that, not amateur—however well-meaning the amateur is.”

  Fabian nodded. “Vic, I can only endorse what Dr. Zeitner said. As Emily’s father I must insist that you stay away from her from now on. I’ve left strict orders with the hospital that they cannot allow you in her room. Or your friends—those no doubt well-intentioned thugs I found around her yesterday. Detective Finchley, you can understand I have a lot to do right now. If there’s nothing further ...?”

  “I do have one question, Mr. Messenger.” That was Conrad. “When was the last time you remember seeing your Nellie Fox bat in the front hallway?”

  Fabian’s graciousness became tinged with hauteur. “Under the circumstances most courts would forgive me for not remembering that detail, Sergeant. I hope you’ll keep me posted on your progress, Detective Finchley.”

  He and Zeitner left. Finchley leaned over and switched off the recorder.

  “They’re very plausible, Vic.”

  “I know, Terry. A doctor and a lawyer—what a reputable double whammy. Emily was very plausible too. I hope you’ll talk to Nurse Higgins before you do anything scary, like charge Emily.”

  Terry tightened his lips in a thin line. “Get out of your seventies cop-equals-pig mentality, Vic. It’s wearing thin with me.”

  “Why is it that we give the man’s story four times the weight we do the daughter’s?” Officer Neely burst out. “Is it because he’s a male and she’s a female? Or he’s an adult who makes a lot of money? If this was a black family on welfare would you two guys pay more attention to Emily or less?”

  We all jumped at her voice. She’d been so quiet throughout the meeting we’d forgotten her as a presence.

  “There’s been an awful lot written these days about how easy it is to manipulate children’s memories of abuse,” Terry said to her. “I’ve been reading up on it the last few days. Emily Messenger spent a week underground with a woman who herself claims to be fleeing a domestic abuse situation. Emily could easily have had her mind affected by this.”