Knife Music

by David Carnoy

  As long as it was good, she said it didn’t bother her that much. She said in a way she just wants to get it out of the way. I don’t believe her, though. I mean, technically I have more experience than she does. I took a shower with a guy (she, of course, says it was totally innocent, and it was, but I did it). But the point is she doesn’t have any experience to base her judgments on, so how’s she supposed to know?

  Feb. 11

  You’re not going to believe this, but I totally ran into Dr. Cogan at Stanford Shopping Center this afternoon. Carrie was over at The Gap talking to Gap guy, and it wasn’t as if I even existed, so I told her I was going over to the music store and to meet me there when she was done.

  The store’s really small and I walked up to this listening post where this guy was standing, and when he turned around I realized it was Dr. Cogan. I was so surprised I didn’t know what to say. I don’t think he knew what to say either. He looked just as surprised. And I was like “hey.” And he said hey back only he said it kind of loud cause he had the headphones on. I couldn’t believe it, but he was listening to Maroon 5! I’m not kidding! That’s the first thing I asked him when he took off his headphones. I was like, hey, what are you listening to? And he pointed to the button for Maroon 5, and I was like really, that’s what I was coming over here to listen to. And he was like, it’s decent, better than he thought it would be. And then we got into this whole discussion about bands that had great first albums but couldn’t follow up with good second albums. He was totally knowledgeable. And then he was like, can you recommend anything, I need some new knife music. He plays music while he operates. I thought that was so cool. Knife music. I asked him who his favorite is to operate to. He said it depended on his mood and the type of operation. And sometimes he’d switch in the middle if it wasn’t going the way he wanted it to.

  And then he asked me about my DVD collection! He totally remembered! I was like, I can’t believe you remember. And he said that he remembers everything, which is sort of a problem. And I was like, do you have a photographic memory? And he said, no, he didn’t, he just had a very good memory. He never forgot a face.

  We must have talked for like fifteen minutes. He asked me what colleges I was looking into. I told him my brother was at Dartmouth and that my sister had gone to UCLA, but I hadn’t decided whether I wanted to go east or not. And he was like you seem very smart, if your grades are good, you should consider going to school back east. He said I would definitely fit in there, which kind of surprised me. I was like, why, what makes you think that?

  He said he could just tell that I wanted more from life and that I wanted to expand my horizons. He could tell that I didn’t think California was all that it was cracked up to be, that it somehow made me feel uncomfortable.

  I didn’t know what to say. It was like he was reading my mind. I didn’t tell him that of course. I just said, yeah, I was definitely thinking about the east because I was getting pretty bored here and SoCal didn’t seem like an alternative even though most of my friends wanted to go to UCLA or Santa Barbara. Carrie totally wants to go to UCLA, though I’m not sure she’ll get in. I personally think she’ll end up at San Diego. That’s her second choice. Dr. Cogan went to Yale. I told him I didn’t think I had the grades to get in there, but my grades are pretty good, I’m in the top ten of my class.

  Anyway, I asked him why he was in California if he liked the east coast better. And he was like, there’s a mindset you have to go along with here. He was like everybody’s into this quality of life stuff, it’s first and foremost in everybody’s mind, they’re in such pursuit of it that they forget sometimes to really live. And he was like, I’m into it sometimes and sometimes I’m not. I totally agreed.

  Anyway, Carrie finally showed up and she was in serious shock when she saw who I was talking to. It was pretty funny. After Dr. Cogan left, she gave me a full grilling. And I was like, it was no big deal, he’s a really nice guy (I wonder why he isn’t married!?!). He plays Depeche Mode, Postal Service, and The Killers while he’s operating. I don’t know if I should have told her that, because all of a sudden she forgot about Gap guy and all she could talk about was Dr. Cogan. She was like, did he say anything about me? And I was like, yeah, he asked me where my partner in crime was. And I was like she’s over talking to Gap guy. And she was like, you didn’t. She was totally ready to hit me. And I was like, don’t worry, I just said you were looking at some clothes in a store. As if it would matter!

  Feb. 15

  I started jogging again. Lately, I’ve been feeling kind of tired and blue in the afternoons, and I thought it might be because I’m not getting enough exercise. Last year I was playing a lot more tennis and swimming sometimes when it was warm. Of course as soon as I told Carrie I was going to start jogging again (I’m totally slow, which is why I call it jogging) she wanted to go with me which I’m not that into because I prefer to run with my iPod on and just kind of zone out. I don’t need her babbling, although sometimes it does make it less painful when you run with someone. She did admit that her ass was getting fat, which I give her props for. She was totally down on herself yesterday. I think Gap guy was supposed to call her but he didn’t. The truth is I kind of like her better when she’s a little down. She’s a little more real. She’s definitely my best friend but sometimes she gets on my nerves.

  Dad said I could stay over at her house this Saturday as long as I got all my chores done and I finished my homework. He seems in a better mood these days because he got some big account which is going to make him a boatload. He definitely hasn’t been as hard on me. But what sucks is he’s talking about going to the Maroon 5 concert with us. I don’t know if he’s joking or not. He knows I have an extra ticket because I put them on the credit card. I was like, are you for real? And he was like, what’s the problem I’ve taken you to a concert before. But that was when I was like fourteen, I said. Well, he said, since I’m paying for the tickets I can go if I want. I didn’t really argue with him because I was more concerned about trying to stay over at Carrie’s because of the party. So I didn’t want to push it. God, it’s one hurdle after another. My life. I swear.

  23/ THE QUADFECTA

  May 1, 2007—2:33 p.m.

  THREE WEEKS AFTER COGAN’S ARREST, MADDEN FINDS HIMSELF at The Dutch Goose in West Menlo Park, sitting in a booth with Pastorini to his left and Dick Crowley, the San Mateo County District Attorney, facing them across the table. It’s about two-thirty, and the lunch crowd is mostly gone, leaving them with the place mostly to themselves. They’ve all already eaten elsewhere, but The Goose, as it’s more commonly known, along with the similarly grubby Oasis Beer Garden on El Camino, are the unofficial conference centers for law-enforcement officials, the place where they like to do their heavy meditation—ideally during happy hour, of course.

  Though not much of a drinker himself, Madden has been a patron of the saloon from its early days. Part of its charm is that little has changed in the nearly forty years since its opening, including its menu, which features deviled eggs, steamed clams, burgers, of course, and pitchers of Anchor Steam beer. With its single pool table, two pinball machines, and jukebox in the back, thick butcher-block dining tables riddled with patrons’ carvings, peanut-shell-covered floors, and long wooden bar in front, the place has a classic hole-in-the-wall ambience that is in many ways the antithesis of the tidy, more pretentious yuppie restaurant/bars like The Blue Chalk Café, Gordon Biersch, and Nola’s, in downtown Palo Alto. And despite attracting the unavoidable assortment of young professionals and preppy college kids (it’s long been a favorite watering hole for the Stanford football squad, with John Elway counted among those booted for disorderly conduct), The Goose draws a strong blue-collar contingent. Many, like Madden, are locals who’ve grown up in the area.

  “What do you think, Hank?” Crowley asks. “She got it?”

  The “it” Crowley is talking about is a combination of poise, gumption, consistency, and vulnerability—his ideal qualities in
any witness involved in a sexual assault case. “The Quadfecta,” he sometimes calls it.

  “You saw her at the grand jury hearing,” Pastorini answers for him. “She was composed. She presented sympathetically.”

  Pastorini and Madden have an understanding. Until Madden has something pertinent to add to the discussion, it’s Pastorini’s ball to drop, which he rarely does because he generally pitches it the moment he gets it.

  “But she wasn’t terribly descriptive. Yeses and noes are OK—to a point. She’s got to tell a story. And is she going to be able to tell it in front of him?”

  “Gut?”

  Crowley nods.

  “Hank?” Pastorini cues him.

  “She’ll do fine on the direct,” he says, “But she’ll need to be coached hard for the cross. She has a little bit of a flair for the dramatic. She should be OK, though.”

  Crowley doesn’t respond immediately. Tall and lanky with big features and a full head of sandy brown hair that’s flecked at the temples with gray, he towers over the table. Affable and outgoing, he has large hands that seem made for basketball, and indeed he played college ball for Cal in the late 1970s. By his own admission, he was hardly a gifted player, a walk-on who cracked the starting five his senior year by coming earlier to practice and staying later than anyone. However, the story isn’t as inspiring as one would hope, for the team, hit by a rash of injuries, finished near the bottom of the conference that year. But that hasn’t stopped Crowley from drawing parallels between his athletic career and Madden’s law-enforcement career. “I wasn’t handicapped,” he once remarked with the best of intentions. “But damn if I didn’t feel handicapped.”

  At first glance, he doesn’t appear to be a gifted prosecutor either. He’s not a slick orator and his direct examination is often not the taut, tight line it should be; it meanders from lane to lane like a DUI on 280 late at night. As unpolished as he seems at times, he does bring a certain charm to the delivery that makes it seem deliberate, even overwrought, as if he’s an actor warming up the jury for the real Dick Crowley, who will drop in when it really counts. And he usually does—he always seems to execute beautifully at critical junctures.

  In the ten years they’ve known each other, Madden has observed him enough—and in enough different capacities—to think he has a handle on him. In his estimation, Crowley’s a keen manipulator who’s cultivated a persona that’s unpredictable, contradictory (he’s a part owner of the Country Sun Natural Foods store on California Avenue in Palo Alto, yet he’s regularly spotted at fast-food joints), self-deprecating, and easy to underestimate. “Well, that was lucky,” is a favorite expression, yet almost everybody has figured out that luck has little to do with his triumphs. What Madden finds intriguing—and he can’t help admiring Crowley for it—is that even though most folks claim to have a handle on him, he still manages to keep them off-balance. Madden thinks it’s because they’re always looking in the rearview mirror, trying to anticipate when Crowley’s going to flip the turbo boost, and they fail to concentrate on their own driving.

  All that said, the Kroiter case has made him anxious—mainly, Madden thinks, because he sees too much room for luck, good and bad. Outside of getting a confession, so far most everything has gone their way, which is also making him a little nervous. The high point was three weeks ago, hours before Cogan’s arrest, when tests came back on the three tiny semen stains they found in the crotch area of a pair of light green hospital scrub pants Madden had found tucked in the back of a drawer in Kristen’s bureau. Cogan had given Kristen the scrubs to sleep in that night, and she’d worn them home. The semen’s DNA matched Cogan’s.

  In recent days, however, after Madden suggested that, upon further reflection, “The stains seem a little high in the crotch area, closer to the fly,” Crowley’s buoyancy has eroded a bit. Because of how minute both the semen and the girl’s DNA sample (from a urine specimen), the defense will likely get an expert witness to testify that the discharge could simply have been “leakage” from the defendant and very well could have been present prior to that evening.

  Crowley also doesn’t love that he has a witness who’s admitted to drinking alcohol that night. Though she didn’t drink much, the defense would assuredly argue her memory was compromised. All these “intangibles,” as he refers to anything open to interpretation, are contributing to Crowley’s plaintiveness this afternoon. He stares down at the table, running a finger over the deep groove of the letter N, which someone named Nick B. has carved into the table.

  “Kristen was pretty, right?” he finally asks. “But nothing remarkable?”

  Madden would prefer not to discuss her looks, but he doesn’t like the throwaway tone of Crowley’s remark. He’s underestimating her.

  “I’m not sure about that,” he ventures.

  “Not sure about what?”

  “That she was so unremarkable.”

  “Fair enough,” Crowley says. “But is she the type of girl a jury will take one look at and say, yeah, we understand why this guy took the risk he did? We understand his temptation?”

  Madden pictures a juror sitting in the jurors’ box, studying her photos and the video clips the DA’s office would carefully produce. First, he’s a male juror in the second row, then a female in the front row, center. Then he pictures himself in the box.

  “One look, maybe not,” he answers. “But eventually, yeah.” He pauses a moment, then permits himself to add: “There’s something very alluring about her. It’s subtle. Do you remember that girl in your school who was pretty but hadn’t been corrupted by popularity yet?”

  Crowley smiles. “We called them catch-them-while-you-cans.”

  The comment is punctuated by a loud gurgling sound—Pastorini, sucking hard on a straw, is trying to bring up the last vestiges of Diet Coke from a bed of ice in a pint glass. Crowley shoots him a glance, cutting the quest short, but the dissonance is enough to throw him from his train of thought.

  “What was I saying?” he asks.

  “Catch them while you can,” Pastorini parrots back, eager to redeem himself.

  “Cans. Plural. I can live with that. But get me an ex-girlfriend, a one-night stand, his ex-wife—I don’t care—to confirm what the girl said in that diary about the man’s sexual proclivity.”

  “We’re working on it,” Pastorini assures him.

  “I need it, boys.”

  “And Ms. Dupuy?” Madden asks, curious to know what lengths Crowley is willing to go to win.

  “Ah yes, Ms. Dupuy. Our very hands-on defense attorney.”

  “Technically, she’s on the list.”

  “I know,” Crowley says. “How long did they date?”

  “About five months. Going back a couple of years ago.”

  The DA shakes his head. Madden reads like he’s talking about a promising pupil who’s inexplicably fallen in with the wrong crowd and he’s not quite sure what to do about it.

  “Well, let’s see how she behaves.”

  “You ever encounter something like this?” Pastorini asks.

  “Like what?”

  “Like an ex-girlfriend defending a guy in a rape case.”

  “Not that I’m aware of.”

  “Us neither. We were discussing it the other day, Hank and I. If you were him, would you have her defend you?”

  Crowley thinks about it.

  “You’re asking the wrong question, Pete. The question is, would I have taken the case if I were her?”

  “Well, both ways, I guess.”

  “She’s a good lawyer,” he says, as if that should explain not only her but also Cogan’s choice. “I bet she’s out there right now doing her best to dismantle all Hank’s fine work.”

  “She’s over at the university, conducting interviews,” confirms Madden while contemplating the sturdiness—and trustworthiness— of his structure of the case. It’s a building designed to look good from the outside, he thinks. Will anybody notice that the foundation’s shoddy, the materials se
cond-rate?

  “We got a good head start,” Crowley continues, “but the gap is going to quickly close. Perkins isn’t going to give them everything, but she’s going to give them something.”

  Joyce Perkins is the judge, and while she’s generally a moderate with a slight liberal bent, she’s been less protective of defendants’ rights in rape cases. She’s handled the diary cautiously, deferring to Crowley’s request—i.e., delay tactic—to keep it sealed and out of the defense’s hands until she’s permitted herself enough time to thoroughly analyze its contents.

  Crowley believes she’ll allow certain passages to be admitted, which would seem to bolster their case. However, he’s justifiably worried that contradictions will arise when everybody starts to compare passages in the diary with deposition and live testimony.

  Sitting there, his eye drifting down to a “Go Niners” carving in the table, Madden knows Crowley would like to have the most relevant and damaging passages read aloud in court.

  “I wasn’t sure what I should be doing,” he envisages one of the young ADA’s, or maybe even Carrie, reading from the diary, speaking softly so that everybody in the courtroom has to lean forward in their seats to catch everything she’s saying. “So I said, ‘Fuck me. Fuck me like you mean it,’ because I’d once seen a woman do that in a movie.”

  “What is it, Hank?”

  He looks up and sees Crowley, a look of concern on his face, staring at him.

  “Nothing,” he says. “Nothing important.”

  24/ LIKE LIKE HER

  May 1, 2007—2:46 p.m.

  “SO YOU’RE STANDING OUTSIDE THE BATHROOM ON THE THIRD floor,” the lawyer asks. “Let’s go back a minute.”

  “OK,” Jim says.

  “How long were you waiting for Kristen to come out?”