Knife Music

by David Carnoy

  DAYTON: I didn’t say it exactly like that. But I certainly indicated that it wasn’t going to be pretty. It’s funny, my friend predicted Dr. Cogan would hire a woman attorney.

  DUPUY: Well, I wouldn’t read too much into it. I’m not sure how calculated a move hiring me was.

  DAYTON: I just mean it’d probably play better to—

  DUPUY: Did you ever ask yourself whether Kristen might be lying?

  Silence on the tape. The abruptness of the question seemed to startle Dayton. After a moment, she said:

  MS. DAYTON: I did. I wasn’t sure why she would, though. She seemed fairly levelheaded. Not like some girls. That’s why I was so shocked when I found out she killed herself.

  MS. DUPUY: But none of Dr. Cogan’s actions during the time you spent with him would indicate that he was interested sexually in Kristen?

  DAYTON: Not to sound conceited, but the impression I got was that he was into me.

  DUPUY: What gave you that idea?

  DAYTON: Well, you know, I just got that vibe.

  DUPUY: Did he come onto you?

  Was Gwen blushing? Damn if he isn’t, just listening.

  DAYTON: Not exactly.

  DUPUY: Then what?

  DAYTON: Well, he asked me for my phone number.

  Carolyn’s turn to give pause.

  DUPUY: Did you give it to him?

  DAYTON: Yeah. I did, actually.

  DUPUY: And did he call you?

  DAYTON: No. No, he didn’t. I did tell him I had a boyfriend, though.

  Madden rewinds the tape and listens to the exchange again, wondering whether it might alter someone’s impression of Cogan. Dupuy can argue that he was more interested in the Dayton girl (and, yes, the moment she takes the stand, the jury will understand why he was interested). But Crowley would come back and say, look, the guy’s a notorious hound dog, he’s going to go after what’s in front of him. The college girl leaves, look who’s left.

  Madden can’t figure how Dupuy’s going to make that little piece of information he’d failed to elicit work to her advantage. Does she regret going at Dayton as hard as she did? he wonders, and just then he hears Burns’s voice behind him.

  “Hey, Hank.”

  Madden swivels his desk chair around.

  “Hey. How’s the action on the other side of the freeway?”

  “Little Ike and Tina,” Burns says. “Wife says the husband stole a bunch of her stuff and raped her. They’ve been separated—or not, depending on who you talk to.”

  “Lovely.”

  “That the Kroiter case?” Burns asks, nodding in the direction of the transcript.

  “Yeah. Dupuy’s interview with that college gal.”

  “I got something for you there.”

  Madden eyes brighten. “Did the travel agent talk?”

  “Sure. Just like the teacher. She admitted they’d had a relationship, but clammed right up when I mentioned the s-word. Refused to get into details, even after I hinted at a potential subpoena.”

  “Damn. Don’t any of these women know it’s healthy to hold a grudge?”

  “There’ll be one. There’s always one. In the meantime, check this out.”

  Burns hands him a sheet of paper. It’s a call report.

  “I got a call a little while ago from the admin I usually speak to at the Planned Parenthood,” Burns says.

  Someone was asking questions down there yesterday, on Sunday, he explains. A guy was inquiring whether a sixteen-year-old girl had been spotted coming through there close to two months ago. He had a printout with pictures of the girl. One of the photos was the same picture of Kristen that Burns had showed the admin last month. The guy was perfectly nice, but after a day of mulling it over, she decided to notify the police as a precaution.

  “Who’s the PI?” Madden asks.

  “Yeah, that’s what I thought, too. But the thing is, the guy said he was a doctor and was checking on a former patient. He showed a Parkview Hospital ID. From the description, he sounded a lot like your boy, so I emailed over a photo and, sure enough, she ID’d him. It’s your boy.”

  Madden stares at the sheet, which cites the administrator’s name, time she called, and notes Burns had taken from the call.

  “What’s he up to?” Madden says, thinking aloud.

  “Maybe he got bored, sitting home pitching tennis balls into his garage all day.”

  “Maybe. You did Planned Parenthood, right? This is Planned Parenthood?”

  “Yeah, you did the free clinic.”

  “Can you do me a favor?”

  “I checked already. No calls from anyone at the clinic.”

  Madden smiles. “You’re a good man.”

  “It’s a curse.”

  He turns to leave, but Madden stops him.

  “Burns?”

  “What?”

  “He’s not my boy.”

  “Figure of speech, man.”

  “He’s not.”

  Now it’s Burns’s turn to smile. “Whatever you say, Hank.”

  27/ THE WRITING EXERCISE

  May 5, 2007 (two days earlier)—3:56 p.m.

  THE FIRST THINGS THAT COME TO MIND WHEN A DEFENDANT SHOWS up at a Planned Parenthood asking questions about his accuser are that he’s a) too cheap to hire a private investigator, or b) got too much time on his hands and thinks he can do a better job than a professional detective, or c) watched too many movies in which the defendant—wrongly accused, of course—manages to solve his own case.

  Madden will rack his brain over what took Cogan from point A to point B. He thinks back to the elderly couple who, about a week after his arrest, had called 911 to complain that there was a constant banging sound coming from the house across the street—the house “where that doctor lives who had sex with that dead girl.”

  It turned out the banging wasn’t some sort of construction project but the sound of a tennis ball hitting a backstop. When the officers showed up, they found Cogan standing at the end of his driveway with a baseball glove in his hand. He had apparently been pitching tennis balls into his garage for hours on end. They were impressed with the backstop: He’d fashioned it out of an old set of drawers that he’d flipped around, the handles facing away. A black square was painted on its flat back to mark the strike zone.

  After the neighbors complained, Cogan went out and got a couple of pieces of thick Styrofoam and either stapled or nailed them to the backstop, effectively muffling the impact of the ball. According to the officer who patrols the neighborhood, he’s still out there almost every day, pitching. Cogan always waves to him when he drives past.

  “He was very apologetic about the noise,” the officer reported to Madden. He said he was just trying to kill some time and this was what he did as a kid to make himself feel better when his mother was sick. After the cop talked to the elderly couple, they seemed embarrassed to have involved the police.

  “I’ll tell you, Hank,” the officer said, “people are funny. These folks were actually on good terms with this guy. The woman later told me she’d consulted him about a medical condition she had. But as soon as he gets arrested, they’re afraid to talk to him, they gotta dial 911 to ask him to turn it down a notch.”

  Madden hasn’t gone out of his way to keep tabs on Cogan, yet the snippets of info he gets give him enough material to sketch out a distinct portrait. This is a guy who rarely leaves his home now. But the odd thing is that while he seems withdrawn, he’s friendly, even voluble whenever someone stops to speak with him. “Whenever I’ve talked with him,” the officer remarked, “he’s totally chill. He’s a big fan of Tom Seaver, did you know that?”

  Burns’s explanation for why Cogan went to the Planned Parenthood seems the most logical. Guy becomes impatient sitting all day waiting for his case to progress and decides, Why not poke around a little, see what I can dig up? But the more Madden thinks about it, the less sense it makes. Because if Cogan hadn’t slept with the girl, why would he think she’d gone to the Planned Parent
hood? And if he had slept with her, why would he want to find out and potentially risk drawing attention to the fact that she had?

  Through all his deliberations, what never crosses his mind is that Kristen herself would be the impetus for the visit, that in going from point A to point B Cogan actually had made a very big stop at Point C.

  He never imagines that what happened that Saturday, like the previous Saturday, was Cogan standing at the end of his driveway, toeing an imaginary rubber, looking for an imaginary sign from an imaginary catcher. It’s the middle of the fourth inning. There’s one out, runners on second and third, and the count’s three -and two. The imaginary announcer announces, “A crucial moment in the game, folks. A hit breaks open this scoreless tie. The crowd rises with anticipation. The pitcher gets set, and—”

  The pitcher does get set, but just as Cogan is about to go into his wind-up, the ump calls time. The phone is ringing. And it’s not the bullpen phone. It’s the actual phone inside his house, and since he’s hoping Carolyn is calling with news—any news—he dashes inside to pick up before she gets the answering machine.

  But instead of Carolyn’s voice, he hears Josh’s.

  “Hey, what’s up, kid?” he says, trying to catch his breath.

  “Me and Steve, we’re downtown. On University Ave.”

  “Are we playing later?”

  He thinks Josh is calling to let him know what time they’re gathering online for their nearly daily Gears of War session. Gears of War is a popular multiplayer video game for the Xbox 360, and shortly after Cogan’s suspension from the hospital, Josh and Steve graciously had invited him to join their clan to help him kill time and allow his mind to take a break from the case. The boys, who claimed to have known Kristen (and Carrie) as well as anybody, are among the few people who believe he didn’t sleep with her. After discovering the real reason behind her visits to Josh’s home, they consider Carrie “intensely manipulative” and think she’s lying about witnessing the sex to deflect attention from her role in causing Kristen’s suicide.

  Josh isn’t calling about a game time, though.

  “I thought you’d like to know your friend’s here. Getting her hair cut,” he says.

  “What friend?”

  “CP.”

  It takes a moment for Cogan to decipher the initials.

  “Oh,” he says.

  “I just thought you’d like to know. You know, just in case you might want to accidentally run into her.”

  He’s silent, not sure how to react to the information. He’d told Josh the court had imposed a full stay-away order. Josh knew Cogan wasn’t supposed to go near her.

  “You there, Ted?”

  “Yeah, I’m here. Where is she?”

  “In that fancy Yosh place. I bet she’s going to be on TV. I can see her through the window. You want us to keep an eye on her?”

  He hesitates. Part of him is angry with Josh for tempting him. But part of him appreciates the gesture.

  “Do you have my cell number?”

  “It’s in my phone.”

  “Well, keep an eye on her and call me in five.”

  “You coming?” Josh asks.

  “I don’t know. I gotta think a minute.”

  “Well, don’t think too long. I think they’re almost finished.”

  “Call me in five.”

  Walking into the Borders Books, Cogan takes a quick look around, scanning the aisles, but he doesn’t see Carrie. Josh and Steve had tracked her from the hair salon to the Apple store to her present location, the Borders store at the New Varsity Theater. Because the store inhabits what was once a classic mission-revival movie palace (done in by economics), it has more the feel of an independent bookstore than a chain, but it does have spacious dimensions, with multiple floors and an outdoor café, which makes the girl hard to locate.

  He stops by the new fiction section and peruses a few titles, not sure whether to continue forward or position himself near the front of the store and wait for her. He then wanders off to the right, in the direction of where the old movie screen used to be.

  “How’re you doing today?”

  He looks up. A young guy with a goatee and a friendly smile is standing in the next aisle over. His nametag reads J. D.

  “Good, thanks.”

  “Need any help finding a DVD?”

  “I’m OK for now.”

  “Well, picture and sound quality, I’m your man. I haven’t watched all this shit, but I’ve watched most of it. Plot’s your problem. That’s a taste thing. But I’ll tell you whether the thing looks and sounds good, and whether it’s got any extras that’ll give you a hard-on.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Don’t mention it.”

  He watches J. D. head down the aisle, where he stops to talk to an older woman who seems more willing to enlist his opinions. He wonders whether the guy will employ such colorful language with her. He somehow doubts it. He’s so caught up in the thought that he doesn’t immediately notice a figure standing in his peripheral vision. Because his mind is elsewhere, when he finally turns to look, the weight of the girl being there doesn’t register. She’s standing a few feet away, in the same aisle, staring at him as if he were her favorite movie star, her mouth slightly ajar.

  Oh, there’s Carrie, he says to himself. Then his back goes rigid, his heart races, and he thinks, Oh, shit.

  “Hi,” she says a little breathlessly.

  “Hi.”

  “How are you?”

  “Could be better. You?”

  “Could be better.”

  “How’s school?”

  “School?” She seems a little surprised by the neutrality of the question. “I can’t wait for summer.”

  “You think you’re going to work or just hang out?”

  She holds up a folded piece of paper. “I’ve been picking up job applications. But who knows. It’s not as easy as it used to be to get a summer job.”

  “That’s what I hear.”

  She looks down, and when she does, he takes the opportunity to scrutinize her more closely. She has a sort of a faux-boho 1970s look going, with slightly flared jeans, sandals and a tight green top that leaves an inch or so of her midriff exposed. Slung diagonally across her front and hanging on her hip is a small leather bag with south-of-the-border roots. She seems thinner than he remembered. She wears the look well.

  “I heard you were suspended,” she says, still staring at the ground. “I’m sorry.”

  The ice broken, he takes a step forward. He could have come even closer, but he decides to keep his distance. Though he’s easily old enough to be her father, he knows that’s the last thing an observer would think he is. It doesn’t help that he’s dressed young—in jeans, a T-shirt, and running shoes.

  “I’m not supposed to talk to you,” he says.

  She raises her eyes to meet his.

  “I know.”

  “You’re not afraid of me?”

  “Should I be?”

  “I’m pretty angry, Carrie.”

  “You don’t seem angry.”

  She’s right. He doesn’t.

  “Well, maybe not right this second. But I’ve been angry the past few weeks.”

  “So have I. My best friend’s dead. And people think I’m partially responsible.”

  He smiles. “You? I thought I held that distinction.”

  “I was the last one to speak to her. I took her to your house. I’m dealing with a lot of what-ifs, you know.”

  He manages to keep the smile up, but it’s forced now, its charm gone. Part of him had hoped for a more passive response, that she’d just stand there and quietly listen to his condensed tale of woe and feel not exactly guilt, but some kindred emotion that would make her reconsider the path she was taking. But clearly she’s more concerned with her predicament.

  “Is that why you told the police you saw me having sex with Kristen?” he continues in a calm voice, doing his best not to sound too antagonistic. “To deflect the
blame?”

  “No, I told them because it’s the truth.”

  “I see. The truth. You’re sure?”

  “Of that, yeah.”

  “You’re positive you’re not just imagining something Kristen described to you at some point—something that maybe didn’t really happen?”

  “Don’t be silly,” she says.

  The mocking tone of her response throws him. He starts to formulate an answer, but before he can get it out, she’s already moved on.

  She says, “Look, Kristen didn’t want this. She didn’t want you to get in trouble. All you had to do was talk to her.”

  “I couldn’t.”

  “Well, you should have,” she says.

  “I agree. But that’s easy to say now. At the time, I had an important call on the other line.”

  “What, some woman? Some hot date?”

  Again, the mocking, he thinks. “No, a doctor. A specialist in Minnesota I was consulting about a patient.”

  “Well, she tried to talk to you before,” she says, not allowing him the excuse. “Two months earlier. Or whenever it was when she left the CD. Remember that? She said she wrote you a note. There was something she needed to tell you. And you blew her off that time, too.”

  She had left a note. It was true. He’d come home one day and there was a small package lying on his welcome mat with a note attached.

  Dear Doctor Cogan:

  Thanks for all your help. I don’t know how to thank you (again) but I thought you’d like this music mix I made. You can listen to it while you’re operating on people. I hope it inspires you.