Knife Music

by David Carnoy

  The general area between San Francisco and San Jose is known as the Midpeninsula, and Menlo Park, twenty-five miles from each city, sits smack-dab in the middle of it. During the 1960s and ‘70s this stretch of suburban sprawl grew at a tempered rate as residents warily guarded open space with an eye toward preserving their views and avoiding traffic jams. But with the rise of Silicon Valley and the dotcom boom—and all the wealth and publicity they brought with them—the Midpeninsula went upscale in a hurry. Property values skyrocketed, few open parcels near residential areas remained off-limits to development, and the once modest Menlo Park, wedged between staid, old-money Atherton to the north and left-leaning, university-tied Palo Alto to the south, took on a bit of both its neighboring towns’ personalities. Maybe that’s why today Madden thinks the slightly snobbish yet remotely down-to-earth residents of Vintage Oaks are perfect representations of their geographical location.

  As he drives onto the block he’s looking for, he sees that a group of kids has gathered in front of a house at the end of the street. They’re decked out in street-hockey gear, but clearly something has distracted them enough to table their game, because he just passed their abandoned goals.

  “Hey, guys,” he calls out through the half-open passenger-side window, pulling up alongside them. “What’s going on?”

  They eye him curiously, squinting in the face of the late afternoon sun.

  “This lady was screaming,” says a boy wearing a teal-colored San Jose Sharks road jersey, an expensive, kid-sized replica of the real thing. He’s the tallest of the bunch but is still probably no more than ten or eleven.

  “It sounded like Mrs. Kroiter,” offers another, this one in Phoenix Coyotes regalia.

  “We think they’re having a domestic dispute,” says the goalie of the group, appropriately short and stocky.

  The way the kid says it, so matter-of-factly, makes Madden smile. His ten-year-old daughter sometimes mimics him, using words reserved for adults, and he can’t help but find it amusing, even if the words she uses are sometimes disconcerting.

  “You a cop, too?” the first boy asks, nodding in the direction of the patrol car that’s parked in front of Pastorini’s unmarked Chevy Impala. “They call for back-up?”

  Madden doesn’t answer. Instead, he says, “Any of you guys know Timmy Gordon?” They shake their heads. “Well, Timmy Gordon was about your age when he got hit by a car three blocks from here and lost his leg. You kids should go play down at the park,” he says, hoping to scare them off.

  They look at him like he’s crazy. He knows what they’re thinking: This is a gated community, and it isn’t a through street—who’s going to drive fast into a cul-de-sac in a gated community in broad daylight?

  “Who are you?” the goalie demands.

  “A concerned citizen,” he says, edging his car forward. “Now, move along.”

  Instead of parking on the sidewalk he turns into the driveway and pulls his unmarked Ford Crown Victoria in behind the less expensive of the two cars parked there, an older Audi A4 sportwagon. Next to it is a big 7-series BMW. Probably the husband’s car, he thinks.

  The home is at the end of a cul-de-sac, a large two-story, ranch-style house with a generous front yard, though nothing that could be described as a “spread.” For that, you have to head north another mile or two to Atherton. That’s where the homes of the truly wealthy begin—and have always begun, dating back to the late 1800s, when rich San Franciscans like Faxon Dean Atherton built estates there (then it was called Fair Oaks) to escape the city’s cold summers. Billings likes to call them “inset homes.” These are homes that you can’t see from the road. They’re set back, hidden from view by tall bushes, cement walls, or both.

  These people have bushes, too: a short row that lines a walkway leading up to the house and cuts through a perfectly manicured lawn. At first, there’s no hint of the commotion the boys alluded to. But in the middle of the walkway, Madden hears something that makes him stop in his tracks. It’s muffled, but there’s no mistaking what it is: a horrible moaning, guttural and anguished, mixed with inconsolable sobbing. And he knows then why Pastorini was looking for him. The domestic dispute, whatever its origins, had ended badly. Very badly indeed.

  He raps lightly on the front door. The door’s unlocked, so he pushes it open slowly and enters a spacious foyer with a high, vaulted ceiling. A modest but graceful crystal chandelier hangs over an impressively real-looking silk floral arrangement sitting in the middle of a round mahogany table. Peering down a short hallway, he can make out the back of man’s balding head—he’s sitting on a couch in the living room—and Pastorini nearby pacing back and forth, holding a can of Diet Coke in one hand, talking on his cell phone with the other. Somewhere off to the right, a police radio squawks. The officer responds in a hushed tone, and the woman’s wailing, which seems to be coming from the same place, suddenly stops. A moment of eerie silence, then he hears her mutter something: “I told him no police,” he thinks she said. “Godammit, I told him . . .”

  As her voice trails off, Pastorini looks up and sees Madden standing in the foyer. The sergeant flashes a foreboding look, then, finishing his conversation, closes the flip on his cell phone and gestures to someone out of frame to approach. When the uniformed officer appears, Pastorini leans over to the man on the couch and says in a gentle voice, “Excuse me, Mr. Kroiter, one of my detectives is here. I’m going to step away for a minute. Your pastor is on his way.”

  Madden takes a couple steps toward the living room, but before he gets there Pastorini intercepts him. “Come on,” he says, taking him by the arm and turning him around. “Let’s talk outside.”

  Madden’s not used to seeing Pastorini like this, sullen and ominous. He’s a big man, imposing, but usually very neurotic, which takes some of the bite out of him. People say he missed his calling as an opera singer. Rotund and barrel-chested, he has short legs and wears his dark, wavy hair slicked back. Whenever he yells across the office in his booming tenor’s voice, Billings, the resident comedian, responds in an Italian accent and addresses him as “Luciano” or “Maestro,” which amuses everybody but Pastorini. “I’ll Luciano you,” he says, whatever that means.

  He’s forever talking about cutting down on his caffeine. “You think I’m edgy, Hank?” he’ll ask the always calm Madden, whom he considers his right hand. “You think I gotta cut down?”

  He tries, all the time. But his way of cutting down is switching from one form of caffeine to another—from espresso to regular coffee, for instance, or, in this, his latest phase, from iced coffee to Diet Coke. He’ll go from drinking four to five iced coffees a day to eight to ten Diet Cokes. In the end, everything evens out.

  “What’s going on, Pete?” Madden asks when they get outside.

  Pastorini, spotting a small white wrought-iron bench in the entryway, decides to sit. The bench is meant to accommodate two, but the sergeant almost fills it.

  He exhales deeply and says in a low voice: “I’ll tell you what’s going on. A couple of hours ago, I get a call from the DA’s office—from Crowley himself—asking to do him a favor. He says, ‘I know these people, they’re friends of mine, and they say their sixteen-year-old daughter was raped by her doctor back in late February.’”

  He pauses, anticipating a reaction, but Madden, prepared this time, doesn’t let his apprehension show.

  “I heard.”

  “Well, he tells me that a couple of uniforms are going over to their house to make a report and would I mind making sure everything is handled correctly. No big deal, right? But when I show up, this guy, Kroiter, immediately starts giving me the third degree. You know, throwing names around, and telling me about all the experience he’s had with detectives. He’s in the insurance business. Investigates insurance fraud. That’s how he knows Crowley.”

  Madden doesn’t care about the politics. He just wants to know whether they have a body or not. Yet he knows Pastorini well enough to know he’s telling the stor
y the way he is for a reason. He figures the process is somehow therapeutic. So he plays along. He asks: “Why did it take him over a month to report that his daughter had been raped?”

  “I’m getting to that.”

  The sergeant takes a sip of Diet Coke, jiggling the can to rustle the last remaining drops from it.

  “The girl kept a diary,” he says. “Her grades were down, and her mother was poking around her room a few days ago, looking for reasons why, and discovered it.”

  “She wrote about it in her diary but didn’t tell anyone,” Madden says.

  “Not exactly. She wrote about having sex with the doc but nothing about rape.”

  Now Madden’s really confused.

  “Thing is, she was drunk,” Pastorini goes on. “The parents think this guy took advantage of her. Maybe, maybe not. Either way, I tell them, we’re looking at it as a rape case.”

  In California, statutory rape doesn’t exist. If an adult has sex with a minor, it’s prosecuted as a rape case. That’s all Pastorini meant.

  “Was she sexually active prior?”

  “Virgin. And the parents had a doctor confirm she ain’t anymore.”

  “Wonderful. And the incident took place in the hospital?”

  “No, the guy’s home.”

  Pastorini draws the can of soda to his mouth again—even though it’s empty.

  “Anyway,” he continues, “we finally get done with the parents and it comes time to talk to the girl and confirm all this, right? So the father goes upstairs to get her. But she won’t come out of her room.”

  At first, Kroiter—Bill is his first name—tried to sweet-talk his daughter into opening the door. Come on down, honey, and talk to the nice officers. That sort of thing. But when she didn’t respond, he started to get angry. Went right to: “OK, I’ve had enough of this crap, shut off the music, and come out right now!” When his voice hit a certain octave, Pastorini decided he’d better go up and try to coax her out. He was pretty good at that type of negotiation, having two teenage daughters himself. But when he didn’t get anywhere, he got a bad feeling something was wrong. He told one of the uniforms to break the lock.

  The room was empty. There was some music playing over her computer’s speakers, but no sign of the girl. They figured she flew the coop, slipped out the window or something. But then one of the uniforms looked in the bathroom attached to the room.

  “When I heard him say ‘Holy Christ,’ I knew it was bad,” Pastorini says.

  “How bad?”

  “She hung herself from the showerhead, Hank.”

  “Jesus.”

  The sergeant shakes his head slowly, staring blankly ahead.

  “Turned seventeen a couple of weeks ago,” he says, and takes another phantom sip of Diet Coke from the empty can. Madden notices then that the street-hockey gang is looking at them. They’re not on the sidewalk in front of the house anymore, but they’re milling around in the street, doing a bad job of pretending they’re not interested.

  “Pete?”

  “What?”

  “Tell me she left a nice note explaining everything.”

  Pastorini nods, only half-hearing what he said. “On the desk. I saw something. A poem, I think.”

  “A poem?”

  “Yeah, it was typed out. Computer printout. But something was written on the bottom. Something odd.”

  “What’d it say?”

  Pastorini looks up at him, his mouth slowly breaking into an ironical smile.

  “You’re going to love this,” he says.

  “What?”

  “It said, ‘I will not be a victim.’”

  5/ KEANU REEVES’S AURA

  November 10, 2006—5:45 a.m.

  MORNING CAME NOT WITH LIGHT BUT WITH THE RING OF THE telephone. Sometimes, because the room was dark, he didn’t know whether it was night or day or whether he’d slept fifteen minutes or three hours. So he answered the phone like this:

  “What time is it?”

  “5:45 in the a.m. Rise and shine, big boy.”

  It was Julie, thank God, and not the triage nurse downstairs.

  “Gimme a minute,” he said, his eyes still closed.

  “I’m telling you, Cogan, you should think about that spa.”

  “Find me one where they submerge you in a vat of coffee and I’m there.”

  “I’m perking as we speak.”

  “I’m glad one of us is.”

  “Get up. I let you sleep fifteen minutes extra.”

  “How kind.”

  After he hung up, he willed himself out of bed and went to the window and drew the shades. It was just getting light out. A dull gray day. But you never knew with northern California weather. Things had a way of burning off. By noon it could be sunny and seventy.

  “Beckler’s looking for you,” Julie said when he walked into the OR twenty minutes later, clean-shaven and showered.

  “What does she want?”

  “She didn’t say. Hey, Cogan, have you ever heard of a comb?”

  “Is that a new surgical instrument?”

  “The latest. Makes you look pretty, with no side effects.”

  “Sounds promising. I’ll be back. I’m just going to check on the girl.”

  He walked over to the recovery room, which was just across the hall from the OR. It had been a slow night. There were five patients in the room, including the fat woman, who was three times as big as Cogan’s patient. They were lying directly across from each other, in separate curtained-off spaces.

  Both the fat lady and the girl were asleep. Cogan picked up the girl’s chart. He was mainly interested in her vitals. Her blood pressure was running 110 over 60. Her heart rate was in the 80s. And her urine output near 100cc per hour. Everything was good.

  “Hey, Ted.”

  “Morning, Josie.”

  This was the recovery nurse, Josie Ling. Asian-American. Short and serious. Very dry sense of humor.

  “They let you off pretty easy, huh? Only one vic.”

  One victim too many, as far as he was concerned. “What are her post-op labs?” he asked.

  “Post-op hemoglobin 13 and most recent 13.6.”

  “Good.”

  He reached down and gently pulled down the blanket that was covering the girl. It wasn’t gentle enough, however, because she stirred.

  “Hi, Kristen,” he said quietly. “It’s Dr. Cogan again. How are you doing? Are you feeling any pain?”

  She opened and closed her eyes. She was very groggy.

  “You’re not in any pain, are you, Kristen?”

  “Not really,” she said.

  “Are you aware of what happened? Do you know where you are?”

  “I was in a car accident,” she answered. “I’m in the hospital.”

  “Do you remember the accident?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What happened?”

  “Someone turned in front of me.”

  “Someone cut you off?”

  She nodded. She was fully awake now. Drowsy but awake. He explained to her that she’d had an operation. She’d been bleeding internally, which was very dangerous. The impact of the accident had ruptured her spleen, so they had to take it out.

  She wanted to know whether that was bad.

  “Well, there are much worse things that could have happened to you,” he said. “But it’s still an operation, and we have to watch you very carefully for the next few days. That’s why my friend Josie is here. She’s here to monitor you for the next few hours before we send you to a room.”

  The girl’s eyes took in the nurse briefly then fell back on Cogan.

  “Your parents were here earlier,” he said. “They saw you right after the operation. But I suggested they go home because I knew you’d be sleeping for a while.”

  “Were they mad?”

  “No. Upset but not mad.”

  She looked away, distraught. “They’ll never let me get a car now,” she murmured.

  “I wouldn’t worry
about that right now.”

  “You don’t know my Dad.”

  “I’m just going to check your dressing,” he said, trying to take her mind off the car. “Then I’ll let you go back to sleep.”

  “OK.”

  He lowered the blanket a little more, so it was just below her waist, then lifted her pajamas until her bandage was exposed. The bandage was clean, dry, and intact. It seemed fine. Next, he felt her stomach, pressing lightly, making sure it wasn’t excessively firm. Then, covering her up, he said, “Everything looks good.”

  “Is it going to be a big scar?”

  “No, not too big. Just about this long.” He spread his fingers apart about four inches. “And very thin. You know Keanu Reeves?”

  “Not personally.”

  Cogan smiled. “You like him?”

  “He’s OK.”

  “Well, he was in a motorcycle accident and they had to remove his spleen. Same as you, and he looks pretty good in a bikini, right?”

  “I guess.” She paused, closing her eyes. Then, opening them again, she said, “But he’s a movie star. He has an aura. He could have five scars and it wouldn’t matter.”

  Cogan laughed.

  “Well, maybe you have an aura, too, and you just don’t know it.”

  “I better,” she said. “Because I’m not going to have a car.”

  6/ A MOMENT OF FATAL IMPULSIVENESS

  March 31, 2007—4:57 p.m.

  They’d found the girl facing forward, a leather belt around her neck, suspended with her back to the wall of the shower stall. What struck Pastorini was how close her feet had been to touching the floor. They were no more than a couple of inches above the tiles. She’d worn a pair of platform sandals into the shower and kicked them off. One sandal was in one corner of the shower, the other just in front of her. They must have had four-inch heels. Orange, decorated in a retro flower-power design.