Knife Music

by David Carnoy

  “What kind of jam?”

  “A personal one.”

  “If it’s health-related,” she warns, “you know we can’t release any information.”

  He knows, he says, but can she just take a quick look, it may be a moot point anyway. Before she can answer affirmatively or negatively, he takes the eight-by-ten sheet out and slides it onto the desk in front of her.

  Kristen looks slightly different in each shot. If you examine them closely, you can tell that in two pictures she’d posed with friends who’d later been cropped out of the picture. The other pair is more paparazzi-style, though in one she’s looking directly into the camera with a haunting, piercing stare.

  Josh took the picture with a zoom lens, standing on a bench at school. Kristen is in a little crowd but the rest of the people all have their backs to the camera; she’s the only one facing the opposite direction, which creates a nice contrast. She’s giving him a very hard look, one of those ambiguous expressions that make you want to guess what she’s thinking. You don’t know whether she likes you or hates you, and when you finally settle on one or the other sentiment, you still don’t trust yourself.

  “It’s the same chick.”

  He blinks.

  “The same as who?”

  “Adetective was in here a few weeks back asking about her.”

  She starts to hand back the sheet but then stops halfway. Something has caught her eye—she’s staring at the picture at the bottom left corner, the only one in the bunch in which Kristen is wearing a hat. It’s a baseball cap with a logo of the Sundance Film Festival on it.

  “What is it?” he asks.

  When she finally looks up at him, she seems both perplexed and alarmed. “What happened to her?”

  “Do you remember her?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Like a strong maybe or a weak maybe?”

  “You work at Parkview?” she asks.

  “Yeah.”

  “We have a doctor who volunteers a couple of times a month from there. Dr. Beckler.”

  A little jolt courses through him, followed by momentary panic.

  “I forget her first name,” she adds. It’s an innocent enough remark, but the way she says it seems a little forced—too deliberate. Discombobulated as he is, though, he has the good sense to realize that she’s trying to test him.

  “Anne.”

  “That’s right, Anne.” She continues to eye him suspiciously, however. “You know her?”

  “Yes. Well,” he says awkwardly, “we’ve had our moments in the OR.”

  “Oh?”

  He’s about to attempt to qualify the statement when he hears the door behind him jar open. Turning around, he sees a tall young woman with dark hair heading toward them. She must have been in her mid- to late twenties. Not a teenager. Instinctively, he takes back the eight-by-ten and slips it into the manila folder.

  The intruder approaches. “Hi,” she says in an irritatingly cheerful voice, compensating perhaps for her anxiousness. “I have an eleven-thirty appointment with Dr. Ghuman.”

  “Hi,” the receptionist chimes back, and directs her to a set of forms. They’re sitting on a counter next to a short rack that is filled with a dozen or so neatly displayed informational pamphlets. It reminds Cogan of the rack in his travel agency filled with brochures advertising various destinations, resorts, and cruises. The only difference here is that most of these brochures are for trips you don’t want to take.

  “She should be right with you,” the receptionist says to the woman. “She’s just finishing up with a patient.” Then, in a much lower voice, almost a whisper, she turns to him and tells him to leave.

  “I’m sorry,” she says. “I can’t help you.”

  Not knowing quite what else to do, he looks at her and smiles.

  “What’s your name?” he asks.

  “Heather. Why?”

  “You drink coffee, Heather?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, I’m going to make a run over to Peet’s for a cappuccino. You want one?”

  “Yes, but that’s beside the point.”

  “I’ll be back in fifteen minutes,” he goes on, undaunted. “I’ll wait outside by my car. If you want it, just peek your head out and I’ll bring it over.”

  “And if I don’t?”

  “I’ll try a different approach.”

  “And what if I call the police?”

  “They’ll have to get their own coffee.”

  May 7, 2007—3:10 p.m.

  If Madden and Burns had left the tape running for another fifteen minutes, they would have noticed Cogan’s car pulling back into the clinic’s lot. The parking lot security camera captured him standing next to his car, reading—or pretending to read—a newspaper for a little over ten minutes. Next, it recorded Heather leaving through the clinic’s back door and approaching him from behind. Though the image on the screen wasn’t terribly sharp, you could tell that he was startled; he jumped a little. “Are you her father?”

  “That’s what I asked him,” Heather says. “Whether he was her father. And he said something like, ‘Christ, you scared me.’”

  Madden looks at Burns and Burns looks at Madden.

  “Why’d you decide to go out and meet him?” Madden asks.

  “I don’t know. I guess I was bored.”

  “What happened next?”

  “Well, when he said he wasn’t her father, I thought he might be working for her father, and we talked about that. And then we started chatting, and he told me the story of what had happened. And I just got an OK vibe. You know, people think just because I dress and look like this—and I work at the free clinic—that I’m some butch lesbian who hates guys. But that’s not what I’m about.”

  They wait for her to tell them what she is about, but she leaves it at that.

  “So you chatted,” Madden says.

  “Yeah, we chatted, and at some point I figured it would be OK to tell him.”

  “Tell him what?”

  “That I remembered seeing the girl. Or at least I thought I did.”

  Another exchange of sideways glances between the detectives.

  “Really, it was the hat,” she says. “The Sundance Film Festival logo. That’s what I remembered. He had a picture of her wearing it.”

  The girl came in around four p.m. on February 18, she says, suddenly more specific. Like many of the girls that come in, she may have called earlier to make sure the clinic was open and ask whether someone could see her. Or she may not have.

  Physically speaking, she remembers little about her beyond the fact that she had light hair and was wearing the baseball cap. The girl may have looked a little tired, but she showed no visible marks—bruises or scratches—that would indicate that she’d been physically abused. If she had, she would have noted it in her journal. Instead, she’d only written: 4 p.m. Blonde girl. Has that maybe-I-did-something-I-shouldn’t-have look. Worried contraception failed. Says she had intercourse previous PM.

  “Before I went outside to talk to him, I looked it up.”

  The girl gave her name as Chris Ray—she spelled it with a C—and said she was almost seventeen.

  “Not terribly creative,” Madden says under his breath to Burns. “Ray’s her middle name.”

  “Chris for Kristen,” Burns offers back.

  “Whatever,” Heather says. The only reason she remembered the name was because she was a fan of King Kong.

  “She didn’t say she was sixteen. She said ‘almost’ seventeen, like that song. And I said something like, ‘Don’t worry, honey, it doesn’t matter how old you are.’ And then I told her that her name reminded me of King Kong. You know, Fay Wray, the original Kong, not the new one—or the one with what’s-her-name, Jessica Lange. And we talked about that for a couple a minutes while we waited for Dr. Ghuman. She liked Jeff Bridges.”

  It was Sunday, she confirms—one of the clinic’s busiest days, though you wouldn’t know it by the parking lot, which only h
ad a handful of cars parked in it at a given time, three of which belonged to the clinic’s workers. Last year there’d been an overly publicized incident of vandalism. A couple of teenagers had been caught by security cameras spray painting and keying cars in the clinic’s lot. But according to Heather, the main reason visitors—particularly the high school kids—parked down the street was to protect their reputations.

  “They think that if they aren’t actually parked in the lot, it doesn’t really count,” she comments. “If they run into someone they know, they can say they were on their way somewhere else and just stopped in to ask about birth control.”

  She has no idea whether Chris Ray had parked in the lot that afternoon or not. And she doesn’t know what the result of her examination had been. And even if she did, she wouldn’t say.

  She’d said something similar to Cogan.

  “Let me see the picture again,” she’d said to Cogan. After she looked at it one more time, she remarked, “I’m pretty certain it was her. That’s all I’m willing to say. But you didn’t hear it from me. I never told you that, OK?”

  “Heather,” Madden says, unable to completely hide his exasperation, “Can I ask you one last question?”

  “I don’t know if I’ll answer, but go ahead.”

  “When I talked to you before, when I came here last month, why didn’t you check your journal then?”

  “I didn’t recognize her. You showed me a picture and I didn’t recognize her. What do you want me to say? I’m not even supposed to be talking to you guys.”

  May 7, 2007—3:36 p.m.

  When he and Burns had originally canvassed the nearby free clinics, Madden had prided himself on being thorough, making sure to cross all the t’s and dot all the i’s. But walking back to his car now, he finds himself swearing under his breath, admonishing himself for being too perfunctory.

  The diary. The damned diary. If he’s made mistakes, they can be traced back to that confounded document. In hindsight, he wishes that when he’d received it, no one had apprised him of how it had been discovered or of Kristen’s initial claims that her account was fabricated. He wishes someone had just handed it to him and said, “Do you think this is fact or fiction?”

  He isn’t sure what his answer would have been, but at least he could have read it with a more objective eye and not one that had been clouded by the thought that the author had tried to cover up the truth by turning it into a lie.

  Fact: Kristen never wrote about visiting a clinic. Her narrative moved from her having sex with the doctor to her waking up in the morning with him sitting beside her on the bed, to her speaking to Carrie later that day.

  I didn’t tell her right away. While driving home that morning all we talked about was what a wreck I’d been and how freaked she was by it. She started getting on my case because of all the trouble I could’ve gotten her brother into. It was like, if I died, her brother would have been in deep shit. I had to alert her to the fact that wasn’t it more important that I wasn’t dead? Couldn’t we focus on the positive?

  The real drama in the ensuing hours and days just following the incident seemed to revolve around the petty competition between two friends. One had slept with the other’s fantasy boyfriend, and in the process, both had ended up with bruised egos for different reasons. What was interesting—and indeed what gave the journal an authentic tone—was that the irony of the situation hadn’t been lost on Kristen.

  Observation: To live someone else’s fantasy is perhaps the cruelest punishment you can inflict on someone. It’s the ultimate theft, even if the prize isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be. The thing is, I’m the one she should hate. But she’s got too much pride, so she pretends to hate him instead. She keeps telling me to go see him and tell him to his face what a bastard he is.

  Madden chastises himself for being seduced by mere words, even as he tries to comfort himself with the rationalization that Carrie and other witnesses had corroborated virtually everything in the document.

  “What do you think, Hank?” Burns asks.

  They’re both sitting in the car, strapped in with their seat belts, but Madden hasn’t started the engine yet.

  “I think we’ve got a problem,” he says.

  “You asked her parents whether she’d been to the clinic, didn’t you?”

  He thinks about the exact wording of his questions.

  “I asked them if she’d seen a doctor after the incident.”

  “And they said she had?”

  “Her father sent her to a doctor. To check whether she was a virgin.”

  They sit there staring out the windshield. The car is parked in the shade, under a eucalyptus tree, which has scattered its seeds and leaves over that corner of the lot. Madden notices that some leaves and seeds have fallen on the hood.

  “I know this sounds weird,” Burns says after a moment, “but what if she was trying to protect the doc?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What if she was examined the day after the incident by these folks here and the exam report shows she indeed had sex within hours of the exam. That would implicate him, would it not?”

  He’s thankful Burns is there. He’s more optimistic, a glass-half-full guy. He, on the other hand, always manages to read the worst into everything.

  “It’s possible,” he says. “But what’s he doing here, then?”

  “True.”

  They sit in silence again.

  “We could tail him,” Madden says.

  “We could.”

  “For a few days. See what he’s up to.”

  “He may screw up.”

  “He may.”

  “You going to tell Pete?” Burns asks.

  “Maybe not just yet.”

  “When?”

  “When we know for sure.”

  “Know for sure what?”

  “Know for sure one way or another.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “You’re a good man, Burns.”

  “Today, Hank. But you know that if anything goes down on this, you’re taking the heat. He’s your boy, not mine, and you’re locked into something fierce. But if you think that taking him down is going to somehow open the sky up and make the birds chirp in melodious fashion, you are sadly mistaken. Even if he is guilty, he’s not your doctor. And no one ever will be.”

  “I know.”

  “Then let him go.”

  “I can’t. Not yet.”

  “Then start the car, man.”

  30/ COOKING WITH MSG

  March 1, 2007—1:45 p.m.

  WATKINS WOULD HAVE KILLED HIM IF HE KNEW, BUT TWO WEEKS after the party he’d called Kristen from a pay phone on campus. Jim had lifted her cell number from his sister’s phone a few days earlier but didn’t work up the courage to call her until Sunday, when he felt more certain the coast was clear. Even then, he had trouble dialing. He’d get to the last digit, hesitate, then put the receiver back on its hook and stop to question his judgment. Four times he hung up before finally letting the call go through. And he probably would have hung up again if she hadn’t answered after the first ring.

  “Hello.”

  “Hello, Kristen?”

  “Hey. Who’s this?”

  “Jim. Carrie’s brother.”

  “Hey.”

  As heys went, it was neither positive (hey, I’m totally psyched to hear from you) nor negative (ugh, it’s you). Her tone seemed completely indifferent, which only made him more nervous.

  “I just wanted to check and see how you were,” he went on, his voice quavering slightly. “Carrie said you were OK, but I just wanted to make sure.”

  “I had a splitting headache for a couple of days,” came her reply, “but I’m all right now. Listen, I’m sorry about what happened. I heard you got in trouble with your frat.”

  The apology surprised him. It was the last thing he expected. Damn, he thought, was Watkins right?

  “No, I should be the one apologizing,” he said, re
laxing a little. “I never should have let you drink that much.”

  “I guess it could’ve been worse. At least they didn’t have to pump my stomach.”

  He laughed. “Yeah, I guess.” It blew him away that she could have a sense of humor about the whole thing. “It was lucky you guys knew that doctor.”

  “Dr. Cogan. Yeah, he’s cool.”

  They talked like that for another minute or so. First he apologized, then she did. Then he said, “Hey, I gotta bounce. I’m about to be late for a meeting with my history TA. But could I call you again? You know, to check up on you?”

  Silence. His throat tightened, his heart pounded hard in his chest.

  “Yeah, sure,” she finally said. “Just no more parties. Not this year, anyway.”

  “No, don’t worry. No more parties.”

  A couple of days later he called her again. This time her hey was more friendly—friendly enough, anyway, for him to think she might actually be glad he was calling. So after a minute or so of small talk, he asked her to the movies that coming Sunday.

  He said, “Hey, I’m thinking about hitting a movie Sunday. A couple of good ones just came out. Wanna join me?”

  At first, he thought she was going to turn him down. She said she’d already seen the first movie he mentioned. And when she began to offer her assessment of it, he thought it was her way of easing into a brush-off. But then, out of the blue, she said, “What time?”

  “What time what?”

  “What time are you thinking of going?”

  He met her at the theater at five-thirty, twenty-five minutes before the movie was supposed to begin. He picked the twilight show for a couple of reasons: not only did it play into his low-key, this-may-or-may-not-be-a-date approach, but it also afforded him the time to take her somewhere after the movie.

  The place he had in mind was The Blue Chalk Café, off of University Avenue in downtown Palo Alto. Blue Chalk was a full-scale restaurant, with a large bar upstairs and a gaming area, off to the right when you first walked in, that was home to four blood-red pool tables and a long, solitary shuffleboard table. Though the place generally attracted an older, professional crowd, there was always a small contingent from the U., and he and a couple buddies from school sometimes went there during the week to play shuffleboard.