Knife Music

by David Carnoy

  On Sundays, when it was warm, she would invite him to her house in Lincoln Park to go swimming. It took a bus, a train, and some walking to get there, but he always thought it was worth it. Her friends would come over and they would play games and Mrs. McCumber would interrupt them, bringing them sandwiches and drinks by the pool. The McCumbers’ refrigerator was always full—full of sodas, meats, pickles, and leftovers—and Cogan could take whatever he wanted. Mrs. McCumber encouraged him to. “Please, Teddy, eat this,” she’d say. “It’s just going to go bad otherwise. The girls won’t eat it.”

  The first time he visited the McCumbers, he took the train and bus back home. But when Mrs. McCumber found out he’d taken public transportation across town after dark, the next time she insisted that he stay for dinner and that Mr. McCumber—Bill—would take him home when they were finished eating. Nothing was ever said, but Melissa must have told her parents what his situation was like at home: that his father worked long hours and often came back late (he never talked about dating, but Cogan had heard the rumors), and that he was basically going home to a Swanson frozen dinner. That had to be why Mrs. McCumber always had an extra steak or plenty of chicken for him. “Please, join us, Teddy,” was how she asked. And when he sat down, he looked around the table and said to himself, This is the way it’s supposed to be. This is what I want to have when I get to this stage in my life.

  Bill McCumber was a heavyset man who’d had the lower part of his right leg blown off in the Korean War. He wore a prosthetic and walked with an awkward limp, but it didn’t stop him from playing golf most weekends. Usually, he wasn’t around during the day; he’d come home just before dinner and sit down in the living room, prop his legs up on the coffee table, and have a cocktail and a cigar and read the newspaper. He was jovial and loud, almost the opposite of Cogan’s father. But Cogan admired Bill McCumber, for he felt he was a man who truly knew how to enjoy life and would continue to enjoy it no matter what misfortunes befell him. Cogan saw that as true strength. A real virtue.

  Riding home in Mr. McCumber’s Cadillac, they talked about sports and geography. Cogan had a foreign coin collection and knew something about the countries whose coins he’d acquired and more about the countries he hadn’t, like Mongolia and those African republics that no Americans except the CIA ever visited. Someday, of course, he wanted to go there. He wanted to travel, and traveling was a passion of Mr. McCumber’s. Every year, he’d take the family somewhere new. That year, they were going to Egypt to see the pyramids. The next year, maybe Scandinavia. As he drove, Mr. McCumber described previous trips and planned new ones. Cogan never said much. He nodded a lot or said, “Wow, that’s great,” though secretly he wished Mr. McCumber would take him along on the family’s next trip.

  Whenever they arrived in Cogan’s neighborhood, the conversation would invariably die down. Budlong Woods was Jewish and middle class; it was made up of small houses and drab brick apartment buildings. Every time they pulled into the narrow, single-car driveway that served as his pitching mound, Cogan felt his cheeks flush with embarrassment. He wanted to escape the Cadillac as quickly as possible.

  “Thank you for taking the time out to drive me home,” he’d tell Mr. McCumber. “I appreciate it.” Then he’d step out of the car and dash inside the house. It must have happened seven or eight times before one day Mr. McCumber stopped him.

  “Hold on a second,” he said. “I’ve been meaning to ask you something.”

  Cogan looked at him, a little petrified.

  “Have you considered college at all? Did you have one in mind?”

  Cogan said, no, not exactly. He liked Northwestern a lot. It was good academically and a Big Ten school, which was good for sports. He’d considered going there, but it depended on what money he could get—on whether, really, he could get a scholarship, because, frankly, his father couldn’t afford to send him to a private school. His brother had gone to a state university.

  Mr. McCumber nodded.

  “You and Melissa have become good friends, haven’t you?”

  Cogan didn’t know how to respond. He wasn’t sure what Mr. McCumber was trying to get at. Did he think he had the hots for his daughter?

  “I guess we have,” he answered timidly. “We have similar interests.”

  “She thinks very highly of you. She says you’re a good ball player and quite the student. Near the top of your class.”

  “She’s been very nice to me. You and Mrs. McCumber, too.”

  “You know, I tried to send her away to school last year,” Mr. McCumber went on, seeming to ignore his response. “But she didn’t want to go. She’s very close to her mother, and she didn’t want to leave her friends here.”

  There was a short silence. Cogan still didn’t know what he was driving at.

  “I thought with your mother having passed away, and your father—I understand he isn’t around that much. I thought you might be interested in going away to school. To a boarding school.”

  “I don’t know. I don’t really know anything about boarding schools.”

  “Well, I think you’d be a good candidate for a scholarship. I could sponsor you—I could put in a word at my alma mater, the school I went to in Massachusetts. I give them a nice contribution each year. We could put in an application. Would you like to do that?”

  Cogan shrugged. “Sure.”

  Mr. McCumber smiled. “OK, then,” he said, becoming more himself. “We’ll get to work on it. Good man.”

  They shook on it.

  He didn’t think much about Mr. McCumber’s offer until Melissa, a week later, showed up at his baseball practice to angrily and tearfully condemn her father.

  “He says we’re getting too involved,” she said. “That’s why he wants to send you away.”

  Cogan looked at her, dumbfounded.

  “What do you mean, involved?” he asked. “We’re friends.”

  “He doesn’t want us to go out.”

  “But we’re not going out. We’re just friends.”

  “Sure. But you know, Teddy—you know how close we’ve gotten. And you know—I think you do—that I like you more than as a friend.”

  Cogan, standing there behind the backstop on that sunny day suddenly realized he was at the center of some larger drama that was taking place completely in his absence. He’d assumed he was such a tiny part of the McCumber family’s life. Another weekend visitor. Another of Melissa’s many friends. And here he’d somehow become elevated to this exalted status, having to be sent away. Sent away—it seemed far too serious. Sure, she may have liked him. That didn’t shock him. There had always been hints of that, though less than she was trying to make him believe now. But to have to be sent away because of it seemed awfully drastic, especially since her parents seemed to like him. He couldn’t understand that. How could they want to send him away after they’d always welcomed him into their home and said nothing but good things about him?

  “I don’t get it,” he said. “I thought your parents liked me.”

  “They do,” she said.

  “So what do they care whether we’re friends or involved or whatever?”

  Melissa fell silent.

  “What do they care?” he pressed her.

  She couldn’t look him in the eye when she told him.

  “You’re Jewish, Teddy,” she said. “And they don’t want me dating Jewish boys.”

  “But we’re not dating.”

  She fell silent again. Then, after a moment, she said: “They don’t even want me to have feelings for Jewish boys.”

  “Well, stop them, for Christ’s sake.”

  “I can’t.”

  Later, when he got home, he told his father about the incident. He told him about Mr. McCumber’s offer and how it was some strange ruse to keep him from seeing his daughter, whom he didn’t want to see anymore anyway.

  His father took in all his bewilderment without saying a word. Then, after, a moment, he said: “You know, they sent your great u
ncle Adam to die in a concentration camp for a similar offense. The family who was hiding him gave him up to the Gestapo because he became involved with one of the daughters.” He paused, then added: “Things have improved for your generation. Now there is guilt about it. They know what they are doing is wrong, but they want to make it right.”

  His father said the McCumbers liked him.

  “But why didn’t they talk to me?” Cogan asked. “Why didn’t they ask me how I felt?”

  “Because your feelings are irrelevant.”

  That only made him feel worse.

  “Do you like this girl?” his father asked.

  Sure, he liked her. But he didn’t want to date her. And he certainly didn’t want to marry her, which is what her parents probably thought.

  “Well, then maybe you should consider her father’s offer. Is it a good school?”

  Yes, it was. Very good, supposedly.

  “And it won’t cost anything?”

  “Mr. McCumber gives a lot of money to the school. He says he can get me a scholarship.”

  “Then be nice to Melissa. Keep spending time with her.”

  “But her father’s an anti-Semite.”

  “Yes. But he doesn’t want to be. So you may as well take advantage of that.”

  So he did. And that’s how he ended up at Andover. Then Yale.

  Toward the end of college, when he was trying to decide what he wanted to do with his life, he spoke with his brother, Phil, whom he looked up to, and who, after the war, had become a high school teacher. He told his brother that he liked biology but studying human behavior was what really interested him. He was taking a lot of psychology classes. He was a double major, biology and psychology. And he’d heard some people up at Harvard were looking at the biological basis of mental illness, which he thought might be a good way to combine the two disciplines. He told his brother he was seriously considering getting a doctorate in psychology.

  “Teddy,” his brother said, “there are one hundred and one guys out in the street with PhDs in psychology who are today driving taxis. They can’t get a job. It’s real fun, it’s interesting to watch or to read about human behavior. But big fucking deal. You like psychology, go into psychiatry. You’ll have a job. Make a living. Why don’t you go to school for something that you can make a living at? Do yourself a favor and apply to medical school.”

  He’d thought a little about applying to medical school but had decided against it because a lot of the pre-meds he knew at Yale were real a-holes. They were high-strung tightwads. They wouldn’t share their notes for class. They wouldn’t tell you what books they were reading to prepare for a test. They were real borderline personalities, and he just couldn’t see spending the next four years with them.

  But reflecting on his brother’s advice, it didn’t sound like such a stupid idea. It was the Reagan years, the economy was good for some people, but as things stood, if he went into psychology and got a PhD, he probably would have a hard time getting a job when he got out. So he applied to medical school.

  In his application and in interviews, he talked about how his mother had Alzheimer’s and how he wanted to pursue a course of study in that direction. But once he got to medical school and did a couple of rotations in psych, he realized he was seeing very few Alzheimer’s patients because Alzheimer’s, it turned out, was a neurological condition, not a mental condition. What he ended up with instead was a lot of burnt-out schizophrenics who heard voices, talked to televisions, and were kept heavily medicated on Thorazine and other major tranquilizers.

  The resident he was working for would jack his prescriptions up to the highest “acceptable levels,” then leave the hospital to meet with a married woman. “Best thing for them, best thing for us,” he’d say as he left. At first, Cogan found his philosophy reprehensible, but as the weeks passed he gradually began to see his point. No one seemed to be making any progress.

  He began searching for something else to do. His next stop was clinical medicine. He decided he wanted to be a cardiologist. But he got as far as doing the medicine clerkship when he realized he was seeing a lot of mundane, chronic problems that in the long run were going to bore him to death. Then came a rotation on surgery. And the surgeon—the resident he was involved with—was a cool guy, very bright. He’d done medicine already and hated it. He was fully trained, board certified and everything, and had gone back and trained in surgery, which told Cogan something.

  They hung out together. When he was on call, Cogan would be on call with him. He’d tell Cogan he needed a pack of smokes, and Cogan would go out and get them and get kudos for it. That’s sort of how you got in the club. You fetched cigarettes and did what you were told. Then, one day, you scrubbed on a case, the resident let you do something, he took you under his wing. And all the while he was doing that, he was building you up, making you feel enthusiastic about surgery. Until you began to think, “I like this stuff, I can do this.”

  And that’s how Cogan became a surgeon.

  8/ JENGA

  April 1, 2007—8:09 a.m.

  FROM THE BEGINNING, MADDEN FEELS UNEASY ABOUT THE CASE. And it’s not just because a doctor is involved or that the girl’s father is so certain that the doctor’s actions, not his, led to his daughter’s death. Part of him can’t help but empathize with the Kroiters. He, too, has a daughter. She’s only ten, but he can easily imagine her at Kristen’s age. And he doesn’t doubt he would have reacted just as the Kroiters had if he’d discovered she’d slept with the doctor, a forty-three-year-old man, even if she’d insisted the sex was consensual. He’d want to hammer the guy, too.

  No, what’s bothering him is how delicate the case seems. It reminds him of that game Jenga he plays with his family sometimes. You stack up the blocks and build a nice, stable tower. Then you take turns sliding out a block, hoping the tower doesn’t topple on your turn. Usually, it’s easy to pull blocks in the earlier rounds. But after your sixth or seventh go, things get pretty dicey. Pick the wrong block or fail to slide it out just right and the tower goes down with a loud clatter.

  The problem with this case, Madden thinks, is that he already feels like he’s on round seven. It’s just after eight in the morning, and he’s seated at his desk in his home office, his notes spread out on the desk in front of him. Yesterday, after they’d removed the girl’s body, he’d spent another two hours at the house, searching her room for evidence and skimming the contents of her Mac before it was taken away for a computer forensic specialist to examine. He’d also spoken with her parents, which was easily the most painful part of the evening. They talked about their other children—an older daughter in law school at UCLA, and a son, a senior at Dartmouth, and how Kristen, their youngest, had expressed some interest in going back east for college. They showed him pictures: last year’s family Christmas gathering, Kristen in a hospital bed recovering from her car accident, Kristen, much younger, on the beach at Half Moon Bay.

  From the pictures, the girl looked more like her mother, a trim and proper woman with a streak of tomboy that made you think late thirties rather than early forties. She worked as a substitute French teacher and dabbled in interior design. Dressed simply and elegantly in silk khaki pants and a navy blue silk blouse, a string of pearls around her neck, her short hair neatly coifed, Elise Kroiter sat there silently at first, staring at the coffee table, reminding him of a stroke or advanced Alzheimer’s victim whom the nursing home staff had dressed up for a Sunday family visit. But when her husband began to recount the events leading up to that crushing afternoon, she broke from her shell and let her impressions be known. As she spoke, Madden detected a sense of challenge in her eyes; they were aimed squarely at her husband, and they seemed to say, This is one conversation you won’t monopolize. In fact, you will never monopolize a conversation again.

  No, Kristen hadn’t seemed depressed, she said. Moody, yes—“like all teenage girls”—and maybe a little complacent. But the thing that had concerned them was that her gr
ades had been suffering at school. Two teachers had alerted them that she’d nearly flunked two exams and failed to turn in several assignments on time. She wasn’t her usual self, they said. Which is why Elise Kroiter took it upon herself to go poking around her daughter’s room. She thought she might be on drugs or something. She found the diary instead.

  And Madden’s search? Had it turned up anything? Well, he told them, aside from the CD-R and the calls she’d made, he’d discovered a nearly empty bottle of Percoset with Cogan as the prescribing physician, as well as a more promising piece of evidence linking her to the doctor: a pair of scrub pants with a Parkview Hospital logo stamped on them. They were buried in a drawer and appeared to have a small stain with dried seminal fluid in the crotch area. Encouraging as that sounded, he didn’t want to raise their expectations. Even if it came back positive for Dr. Cogan’s DNA, he said, it didn’t prove anything. They needed more.

  It was then that the father said, “Please let us know how we can help, Detective. We’re devastated, but we still want to see that son of a bitch brought to justice. He killed her.”

  The way he said it, so flatly and unemotionally but with utter conviction, disturbed Madden. He wasn’t surprised that Kroiter believed Cogan was somehow responsible for Kristen’s death (the alternative was too ghastly), but his tone just struck him as too assured.

  “Well, Mr. Kroiter,” he felt obligated to clarify, “we haven’t determined that your daughter’s death was a homicide.”

  “You will,” he said.

  Sitting at his desk now, Madden sighs deeply, takes off his glasses, and rubs his eyes. He’s been up for two hours, working on the report. His children call the small spare bedroom that doubles as his office “the computer room” because he’d set up a pretty fancy computer, his one real toy, on the desk, along with a color printer and a scanner. There’s little else in the room: A fold-out couch, one large bookshelf filled with mostly non-fiction books (Madden doesn’t care much for novels and only goes to movies for his children’s sake), and a line of family photos on the window sill. On the wall, there’s a framed picture of him with the three other detectives from the general crimes unit, Billings, Burns, and Fernandez, as well as various diplomas and award plaques. Though there’s space for it, a feature from the San Jose Mercury News that his wife, Maria, had framed for his birthday, sits on the floor, propped against the bookshelf, mostly hidden from view.