Knife Music

by David Carnoy

  Klein raises an eyebrow.

  “Yeah, you end up sleeping with a lot of women—or what your married friends think is a lot. But it’s not something you aspire to do. It just happens. It’s not something you control.”

  “But you tried with Trish’s friend.”

  “Oh, no, I didn’t try. Not hard, anyway. That’s what upset her.”

  “But you didn’t sleep with her.”

  “Not yet.”

  Klein laughs. “After how she reacted, you think she’s going to sleep with you?”

  “This isn’t high school, buddy. I know you and Trish haven’t been single since the Dark Ages, but we’ve all lived long enough to know that some strange shit happens with time. People think. They sit in traffic and mull over their lives. They lie in their designer beds with their designer sheets, and between sitcoms, they ponder their futures. Something that doesn’t seem right one day can seem right the next. No one died here. No one’s been hit by a car. No one’s been diagnosed with cancer. What’s the big fucking deal?”

  Klein is silent. Cogan can see his mind working feverishly to digest, process, and analyze what he’d said. Klein can’t just look at the big picture and leave it at that. He always has to break things down and look at all the parts. Then, inevitably, he pushes everything that isn’t relevant to him aside and seizes on something that is.

  “So,” he says. “Do you call her or do you wait for her to call you?”

  “I can’t really remember how Kristen was dressed,” Jim says in a low voice, leading the detective up the stairs to the third floor. “I just remember it wasn’t as provocative as my sister, but I still wasn’t used to seeing her all dressed up and made up.”

  He vaguely recollects something simple: a black skirt that stopped above her knees and a colored long-sleeve shirt.

  “Could you tell how drunk she was?” the detective asks, also keeping his voice down.

  “She was definitely tipsy,” he answers. “But she wasn’t, like, majorly stumbling or slurring her words.”

  “But she was drunk?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Any idea how much she had to drink?”

  “No. I didn’t think it had been that much, though. I mean, she wasn’t doing shots or anything. You know, I figured she’d had a few cups of punch and maybe a couple of beers.”

  “And that’s not a lot?”

  “Well, not necessarily, over a four-hour period.”

  “And you say you took her to the third floor because there was a line for the bathrooms on the second.”

  “There wasn’t a line. It was just that the stalls were occupied. Or at least she said they were. I didn’t go in.”

  At the top of the stairs the detective stops to glance at his notepad—Jim thinks more to buy a few seconds to catch his breath than anything else—and just then a sleepy-eyed, well-built guy wearing boxers and a T-shirt emerges from the bathroom. It’s Tom Radinsky. “Hey, P-Flam,” he mutters to Jim in a throaty voice, puttering past them, seemingly indifferent to their presence.

  “The guys aren’t exactly early risers on weekends,” Jim remarks, seeing Madden’s frown. It’s nearly three o’clock.

  “P-Flam?”

  Short for Pink Flamingo, he explains. It’s his given R-House name and a pathetic derivative of his family name, Pinklow. During hell week, whenever the pledgemaster called his name, he had to crane his neck and flap his arms and do what was labeled a “flamingo dance” but ended up looking more like a chicken dance.

  “Sometimes, when I was inspired,” he says, pulling open the bathroom door, “I’d give it a River Dance flare.” It always cracked the guys up, earning him dog calls and high fives, the frat’s currency of approval.

  The third-floor bathroom is identical to the one on the second floor. There are two of everything—two shower stalls, two urinals, and two bathroom stalls, most of it seeming to date back a couple of decades.

  The detective looks around the room.

  “Not exactly the Four Seasons, huh?” Jim says.

  “And when you found her here, she was totally out?”

  “I didn’t find her. I told you on the phone, I was standing outside the door, waiting for her. And when she didn’t come out after, like, five minutes, I got worried and asked a girl I knew, Gwen Dayton, to go in and check on her.”

  “You found her in the condition you described her in.”

  “Yes.”

  “Where was she exactly?”

  Jim moves further into the bathroom and points to a spot just to the left of the radiator against the back wall.

  “She was kind of propped up, with her legs on the floor and her back against the wall. She’d thrown up in the sink. It kind of looked like she’d sat down to take a rest.”

  “Then what’d you do?”

  “I tapped her face a few times. I didn’t really slap her—” He shows the detective how hard the blows had been by demonstrating on his own face. “Just kind of like that. Then I tried some water. And when that didn’t do anything I went downstairs to find my sister.”

  He must have told the cop that same story three times, but this is the first time he’s told it at the actual scene. He assumes it’s the guy’s interrogation technique. Ask each question over and over. He’s been consistent, though. He’s offered plenty of details—so many that sometimes he thinks he’s boring the poor guy. He’d talked about Gwen Dayton, and how he had a crush on her. And how she’d introduced him to Kathy Jorgenson. And didn’t it suck when the girl you liked introduced you to a girl who you felt nothing for?

  “Then what happened?”

  “Well, you might say we had an ugly scene on our hands.”

  The fourth time he looks at Trish, he finally catches her attention. Their eyes lock for an instant; she glares at him intensely, then turns away and calls out some instruction to her son, who’s in the children’s pool in front of her.

  Cogan can’t take it anymore. He isn’t upset that Trish is pissed off at him. He doesn’t need her approval. But he wants to hear what her friend had said. His curiosity is killing him.

  “I’ll be back in a minute,” he tells Klein.

  “It’s not worth it, Teddy. She’s just going to give you shit. And I don’t want to be standing on the other side of the net with you in a bad mood.”

  “I’ve got a cup in my trunk. I’ll let you wear it.”

  “That’s not funny.”

  He heads over to the pool. Out of the corner of her eye, Trish sees him coming but pretends not to. It’s incredible how juvenile people can be, Cogan thinks as he marches up and sits down in the reclining beach chair next to her. He sits upright with the chair between his legs and his tennis shoes planted on the smooth gray pavement. For a few seconds, he sits there, watching the same group of kids splashing around in the pool that she is pretending to watch. Then, purposefully, he pulls his chair a little closer to hers so the metal legs make a scraping sound, like he’s clearing his throat.

  “I’m not talking to you, Teddy,” she says in a clipped voice, continuing to stare straight ahead.

  Her looks have always bothered him. Not because she’s unattractive, but because he’s always had a hard time describing her to people. He’d be on a date, for instance, and he’d be talking about Klein and Trish and their idiosyncrasies (for what better topic was there), and his date would ask what they looked like. Klein he could do, no problem. Attractive guy, prematurely gray—he could quickly give a pretty good picture. But Trish was tough. He had never thought she was attractive, but he knew other men who did. So, in an effort to be objective, he was always more generous than he instinctively wanted to be. She was fairly thin, he’d say, about five-foot-four, with dark hair, dark eyes, and a somewhat prominent nose. Then he’d quickly move onto her personality, which he found more interesting anyway.

  Looking at her now, he realizes why some men find her desirable. From certain angles she is. But he’s always felt that her real allure is in the way s
he carries herself. She has a stiff, regal quality to her, which she mixes with a dry, sharp wit. It had taken them a while to warm up to each other, to get beyond first impressions, and see that underneath it all they were both decent, caring people. Once they had, they realized, much to their surprise, they actually enjoyed each other’s company.

  “Don’t take it personally, Trish,” he says, “I wasn’t a shit to you.”

  That gets her attention. She turns and blinks a couple of times, surprised. “At least you admit it.”

  “I didn’t admit anything. I just said I wasn’t a shit to you.”

  It took a second for what he said to sink in. When it did, she let out something that sounded like a snort and called him a jerk.

  “What’s more of a dick maneuver: me telling her the truth or me just going through the motions so I can sleep with her?”

  “That’s beside the point,” she says. “You were cruel. You knew she liked you.”

  “A couple of months down the road, I say, ‘You know, the chemistry’s just not quite right, I think we should move on.’ What’s worse?”

  “It’s the way you tell the truth, Ted.”

  “It’s a gift.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “Well, usually I’m better at it. She just caught me at a bad moment. It touched a nerve or something, the way she said it.”

  “The way she said what?”

  He sighs. He remembers her eyes the most, and the way they bore in on him but somehow stopped at the surface. It was as if someone had told her to look him directly in the eyes when she spoke but forgot to tell her to look for something. To really look. It all seemed like such a charade. She could have been reading from a script or a manual.

  “‘All I want from you is to be honest with me,’” he quotes to Trish. “‘That’s all I really want.’” It embarrasses him to repeat it because he can’t understand how someone can say it and not feel embarrassed.

  “What’s wrong with her saying that?” Trish asks.

  “She didn’t want me to be honest. She just didn’t want me to deceive her.”

  “So you were honest.”

  “Very.”

  “And when you said you’d be willing to sleep with her—”

  “I didn’t say willing. I said I found her attractive and wanted to sleep with her, but I didn’t foresee a relationship. Those were my words.”

  “And you didn’t think she’d find that insulting?”

  “I had a hunch she would. But I was kind of hoping she’d surprise me and show me a side that would make me want to have a relationship with her. I was kind of hoping she’d look me in the eyes and say very cooly, ‘Let’s get outta here,’ and take me home and fuck me silly.”

  “That’s what you’re looking for? Really? I don’t believe that, Ted. I think what she said touched another nerve.”

  He smiles. “And what nerve would that be?”

  She hesitates a moment, seeming to decide whether to say what she wants to say—or how to say it. But then he watches her courage build as her expression turns angry. “I think it reminded you of your ex-wife,” she declares resolutely, as if she’d been harboring the theory for a long time and was just waiting for the right moment to spring it on him.

  He laughs. “Come on, Trish, you’re reaching.”

  “I’m not saying it was totally conscious. But it triggered something.”

  “You can think what you want, if it’ll make you feel better. But this has nothing to do with that. This was about going through the motions. About trying to make something out of nothing. It just wasn’t real, and I wanted it to get real. I’ve got to make some changes, Trish. I can’t keep dialing it in like this.”

  “What kind of changes?”

  He badly wants to tell her what’s really going on in his head, that he’s seriously considering leaving his job. But he knows it’s better that he doesn’t. He doesn’t need her or Klein debating his future, particularly when they both have big mouths. Still, he’s tempted to give her a hint, and in doing so he almost replies, too aggressively, “Big changes.” But he stops himself and says instead, calmly, “Real changes, Trish.”

  “Well, it’s not going to get real unless you give people more of a chance.”

  “I give people plenty of chances.”

  “Two dates,” she scoffs. “You call that a chance?” She says something else, a slew of words he vaguely senses is the rumblings of a lecture. But he doesn’t hear them because for some reason he finds himself thinking about a letter he’d received earlier in the week. Maybe it’s the cries of the children splashing around in the pool that remind him of it. Or what he’d said about chances. But suddenly and briefly, he’s somewhere else.

  The letter was from a woman in Connecticut he’d slept with a couple of years ago and basically forgotten. A blonde with thin, damaged hair who had a good body. “Hope all is going well for you,” the letter read. “I seem to remember your birthday being around this time. Just wanted to wish you a happy birthday and let you know I’m thinking about you. I hope I’ll get back there sometime soon and look you up.”

  The woman had two children, but she hadn’t told him about them until later, after she’d returned to Connecticut. He remembered that she’d made a big deal about it—she’d called him at the hospital and asked him if she could talk to him about “something important” when he got home from work. He spent the morning worrying about it. Then, later, when she told him about having children, he was stunned and relieved. It was the last thing he’d expected her to say.

  She told him she’d had such a difficult time with her divorce the past year, she just wanted to get away from her life. She said, “I wanted to get away from myself. That’s why I didn’t say anything. Do you think any less of me?”

  The truth was he thought more of her. The idea of her taking a vacation from her life intrigued him. He understood that. So they kept talking for a few months until she stopped calling. Was it because he’d stopped calling? Or had she met someone? He can’t remember.

  A loud voice. Trish’s. “Are you listening to me?”

  He slowly turns his head to meet her gaze, squinting slightly behind his sunglasses as the sun peeks out from behind her head and shines directly in his eyes. “You know, I’m going to be forty-four this year.”

  “So?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What’s wrong, Teddy?”

  The children. The letter. He felt like another Calistoga.

  “I guess I just didn’t think it would be like this.”

  “What’s so bad about this?” she says, glancing around.

  “Nothing,” he says. “Nothing at all.”

  “Do you know how many people would kill for your life, Teddy? To be you?” Trish says.

  “Well, if you know anybody who wants to trade, tell them I’m willing to part with everything but the car. And the fish tank. The car and the fish I’m keeping.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “So am I.”

  A shadow over them. Reinhart.

  “Hey, what’s going on?” he says, Evian in hand, a little red in the face from the drink—or probably drinks—he’d had. “Are we playing or what?”

  “Yeah, sure,” Cogan says. Then, standing up, to Trish, “I’ll call Deborah when I get home. I’ll make it better. I promise. She’ll be good as new. Like it never happened.”

  “She’s expecting it.”

  Cogan blinks. “Excuse me?”

  Trish smiles. “You’re so predictable. You think you aren’t, but you are. Now go play tennis and do me a favor.” She picks up a bottle of sunscreen and tosses it to him. “Tell Bob to put some of this on. That’s the last thing I need, having him complain about a sunburn.”

  17/ OPEN WIDE

  April 1, 2007—6:22 p.m.

  MADDEN SITS AT THE TABLE IN THE OFFICE LUNCHROOM, STARING AT a diagram he’s made on a pad of yellow legal paper, a plateful of half-eaten General Tso’s chicken from
Su Hong To Go and a can of Dr. Pepper nearby. The diagram, drawn horizontally across the page, is a flow chart with names and short descriptions of the various “players” involved in the alleged crime. Across the top, there’s a time line that goes from the time Kristen and Carrie arrived at the party—4:30 p.m.—to the time Jim picked up Kristen and Carrie at Cogan’s home the next day—8:15 a.m.

  “You want anything?” asks Pastorini.

  “No, thanks.”

  A few feet away, the sergeant is standing in front of the vending machine, scanning its contents. There’s a beep, then a thud as his selection drops into the bin. They refer to the small room as the lunchroom because it has a table, some chairs, and a couple of vending machines. But rarely does anybody actually eat their lunch in the room. During the day, most people go outside or eat at their desks. However, on Sunday nights, when they’re working overtime like they are now, and there’s practically no one in the office, the area becomes their conference room.

  The general crimes detectives work out of an office in the Menlo Park police department, which is located in the basement of City Hall at 701 Laurel Street. They work in an open office area, with no cubicles. Adjacent to their office area is an interview room, Pastorini’s office, and the commander’s office. The narcotics detectives, on the other hand, work out of an office in a police substation on Willow Road in East Menlo Park. It’s in an area called Belle Haven, their little pocket of inner city, gangs and all, on the other side of the Bayshore freeway that’s home to a significant number of Hispanics and Tongans. Like neighboring East Palo Alto, which in 1992 had the highest per capita murder rate in the nation with forty-two homicides, Belle Haven, also hard-hit by the crack epidemic of the early 1990s, has seen its lot improve in recent years. While the real-estate boom has been much slower to touch these areas, a gradual and sometimes dramatic gentrification is underway. East Palo now has an IKEA, and a Four Seasons Hotel is under construction next to the freeway. Despite the upswing, however, trouble spots remain—and plenty of them.

  “So the friend saw them having sex?” Pastorini says. “The whole thing? That’s beautiful.”