Shadow Image

by Martin J. Smith

  Taylor took one step backward. “You’re—” He looked to Christensen, as if for help. “You’re mean.”

  “Work it out, you two. Use your words.”

  Fog rolled out of the freezer as Christensen opened the door. He waited for it to clear, then dug for a package of frozen hot dogs. He put the icy block of Hebrew Nationals on the counter, then wedged a knife point into one of the pink crevasses, separating two hot dogs from the rest. He recognized Taylor’s whimper behind him as he put the greasy packet back in the freezer. When he turned, the boy was clutching his stomach, mouth open in pain and outrage, a strangled cry stuck somewhere just south of his tongue. Annie was five feet away.

  “Annie? What happened?”

  “Nothing.” She held both palms toward the ceiling, exasperated by the need to explain.

  Christensen put his arm around Taylor, who was struggling to stifle his cry, and confronted his daughter. “Hands are for helping, Annie, not for hurting.”

  “I was helping.”

  “Really?”

  “He just doesn’t understand that Flintstones macaroni is better. I was helping him.”

  Christensen pointed to the stairs. “In your room. You know better than that.”

  She sauntered off to do her penance. Christensen stooped to Taylor’s level. “You okay?”

  Taylor sniffed and nodded, his clutching hands marking the spot of some unspoken offense to his belly. “You didn’t hit back,” Christensen said. “I’m proud of you.”

  The boy straightened.

  “If Annie or anybody tries to hurt you like that, you just walk away and tell me or your mom or your teachers. Okay?”

  Taylor nodded again. “Where is my mom?”

  “I’m meeting her at a restaurant for dinner,” he said. “We just needed a little time to talk.”

  Boy, did they. For the parents of young kids, the greatest stressor is not the day-to-day worry of a child falling sick, or even the hectic dinner-bath-homework-bed routine of school nights. It’s the inability to complete a task, thought, or conversation without interruption. Since his conversation with Haygood, Christensen had felt as if they were caught in the powerful undertow of a force he didn’t understand, a force he worried could drag them both under. Things were happening too fast, and they needed to catch a breath. “Wash your hands now,” Christensen said. “Dinner’ll be five minutes.”

  He washed and sliced raw carrots and apples, arranging them on the kids’ plates as the microwave defrosted the hot dogs. When it beeped, he punctured the rubbery skins with a fork and put them back in to cook on high for two minutes. He poured two glasses of milk, then hurried to answer the doorbell.

  Jenny was the only sitter they knew who was willing to drive to their new neighborhood. The first time they’d used her, Annie talked about little else for days. Tonight, Jenny wore an electric-pink bikini top and old jeans hacked off just below her crotch. Christensen focused on her forehead as he greeted her, close enough to her eyes but safely away from the perfect expanse of sixteen-year-old flesh. “I know, I know,” she said. “Bath at eight, bed at nine. What time will you be home?”

  He breathed easier as she passed, noticing as she removed her backpack the tiny butterfly tattoo on her left shoulder. He reacted without thinking. “A tattoo?”

  The girl turned suddenly and winked. “One of them.”

  Christensen looked at his watch. He was supposed to meet Brenna at Fiorello’s in forty-five minutes. No time to make other arrangements.

  “Jen!”

  Annie stampeded down the stairs, preceded by her excited greeting. She practically leaped into the arms of the Manson girl she now worshipped.

  “Annie! Brought you that CD!”

  Taylor hurried from the kitchen and took Jenny by the hand, Annie apparently forgiven. The threesome disappeared into the living room, headed for the stereo, as the microwave announced that dinner was ready.

  “Did you eat, Jenny?” Christensen called.

  “I’m fine, thanks.”

  He put ketchup on the table and broke the safety seal on a new squeeze bottle of mustard. After twisting off the nozzle cap, he sniffed the contents—an old habit. A few baby dills to create the illusion of a green vegetable, and there, another meal done. Tomorrow, he vowed, a real dinner.

  “Food’s on the table,” he shouted, interrupting the frenzied dance party that had erupted in the living room. The woman’s voice coming from the stereo speakers was angry and passionate and pitched somewhere between a trumpeting elephant and a chain saw, and she did not much like men, or so the lyrics suggested. Annie held up one hand, her thumb and index finger forming an O, then kept dancing.

  Upstairs, Christensen faced his closet. Most of his clothes were finally out of boxes and moving cartons, but most still bore the inevitable wrinkles and dirt smudges of moving. Fiorello’s was New York dressy, not at all his kind of place, but a place he knew Brenna worshipped for the dark anchovies in its Caesar salads and calamari she had already requested as a last meal before execution, should it ever come to that. He pulled out a black-and-white herringbone sports jacket and white shirt, some classic black pants, and what he called his lawyer loafers, their leather buffed and black. He pawed through his slim collection of ties for the one the guy at the store said went well with the rest of it.

  He was knotting his tie in the dresser mirror when he noticed his notepad in the center of their bed, a bright yellow Post-it note stuck to the top page—Simon Bostwick’s phone number. Any other day, the call would have been a priority. Today, it had completely slipped his mind. He checked his watch. Brenna wouldn’t be there for another forty minutes, and Fiorello’s, on top of Mount Washington, was maybe thirty minutes away. He closed the bedroom door to block out the music downstairs and picked up the portable phone.

  The area code was the same as for all of western Pennsylvania, but the exchange was unfamiliar. When the number rang, it sounded distant and rural. The voice that answered sounded gruff and sleepy.

  “Sorry to bother you,” Christensen said. “I’m looking for a Simon Bostwick.” He waited through a long pause.

  “Who is?”

  “I’m Jim Christensen with the University of Pittsburgh, Mr. Bostwick. I’m doing some research on a case involving an accidental death, and I ran across your name in some morgue records. I hope you don’t mind me calling, and I won’t take much of your time now. I was just hoping we could schedule a few minutes in the next day or so to talk. I had some questions about—”

  “You said Christensen?”

  “Right. Jim—”

  “I know who you are.”

  Disoriented, Christensen ran through every conceivable way this total stranger might know him. He came up blank. “Really?” was all he could manage.

  “I knew Grady Downing,” Bostwick said. “Primenyl.”

  Of course. Christensen’s most recent brush with fame had been three years earlier when Downing, a homicide detective, had suckered him into working on the decade-old Primenyl product-tampering case. He’d worked with the killer’s son, plumbing the young man’s mind for memories of the killings that Downing was sure the boy had repressed. Downing was right, more or less, and the killer made Downing pay the ultimate price for his intuition. When it was over, when Christensen had helped end the city’s ten-year-old nightmare in a horrific and haunting flash of violence, the newspapers went looking for a hero. He was the only one left standing.

  “You must have worked with Grady on some of his cases, I guess,” he said.

  Bostwick cleared his throat. “More than I care to count. What can I do you for?”

  Something in the voice bothered Christensen, something thick and deliberate and affected. He thought of his father, how
his voice thickened once the first few drinks of the evening kicked in. But he was glad he and Bostwick had found common ground in Downing. It was the first time he’d found a practical use for the unwanted minor celebrity that followed his role in Primenyl.

  “This was a case you handled about three years ago, when you were doing coroner’s investigations.”

  “I’m out of that now,” Bostwick said.

  “I know. But your name was on the investigation report on a case I’m interested in. You handled the autopsy.”

  “What kind of research? You’re a memory expert or something, if memory serves.”

  This seemed to crack Bostwick up. Christensen laughed along until Bostwick regrouped. “I suppose,” he said finally. “It’s like saying an astronomer is an expert on extraterrestrial life. ‘Expert’ sounds so all-knowing, but there’s more we don’t know than we do know. Right now I’m trying to find out more about how Alzheimer’s affects memory.”

  After a long pause, Bostwick said, “I’m not following you here. Alzheimer’s isn’t the sort of thing I could have looked for when I opened somebody up.”

  “No, no. You’re right. This is a case where I’m trying to reconcile someone’s memory of an accident with what actually happened, to see how traumatic memories like that evolve over time. And I had a couple of questions about it that I couldn’t answer from the paperwork. You were the only person who could answer—”

  “The coroner’s people are giving out my number?” Bostwick’s voice suddenly had a hostile edge Christensen hadn’t noticed before, an unpredictable shift of mood, a drinker’s conceit.

  “They told me you were living in the mountains. I just called information.”

  “When I left that place, I was done with it. I don’t even come back to testify unless I’m subpoenaed. I just don’t like the idea of them passing out my number.”

  Christensen checked his watch again. They were clearly on difficult terrain, and he didn’t have time to get bogged down in some old grudge between Bostwick and his former employer. He knew how a drinker’s anger can gain unmanageable momentum.

  “Like I said, the morgue didn’t give me your number. I tracked it down on my own, because I have these questions that I don’t think anybody can answer but someone who was—”

  “What was the case?” Bostwick said.

  “The name was Vincent Underhill the third. Happened in—”

  “Doesn’t ring a bell,” Bostwick said.

  Christensen waited. “You don’t seem to want to help me here,” he said finally.

  “I’m perfectly happy to help you,” Bostwick said, stretching the R sound like a piece of taffy. “Grady said you were a helluva guy, a standup guy. Let me tell you something: I trusted Grady Downing like nobody else in this world, sir. And you can take that as gospel.”

  “It didn’t sound like you even thought about the name. It’s a case I think you might rem—”

  “Let me tell you something else,” Bostwick said. “Eleven years I spent with the coroner’s office. Anybody there’ll tell you I was one of the best. Handled a helluva lot of cases in those eleven years, a lot of them kids like that—way too many kids for anybody’s taste, let me tell you. But names? Nuh-uh. That’s just another line on the form. We didn’t deal much in names, except for the paperwork, if you see what I’m saying.”

  “But this name —

  “So you see what I’m saying here? Chances of me remembering a name, it’s just a crapshoot. That one doesn’t ring a bell, though. Vincent?”

  “Vincent Underhill the third. They called him Chip.”

  “Nope. Real sorry.”

  Christensen wasn’t giving up, but this was going nowhere fast. “Would it help if I faxed you the report you wrote? Maybe that would jog your memory.”

  “You’re welcome to do that, and I’ll be happy to look it over. Anything for an old friend of Grady’s. But like I said, there were a lot of cases, and I’m out of it nearly three years now.”

  Christensen took down Bostwick’s fax number and promised to send the autopsy report the following morning. “I’ll check back with you in the afternoon,” he said, ending the conversation.

  The portable phone disconnected with an electronic beep. The music was off downstairs, replaced by the sound of Annie and Taylor arguing over who would squeeze the ketchup onto their plates. The digital alarm clock read 6:27. He had to get going if he was going to make Fiorello’s by seven, but he sat motionless on the edge of their bed, trying to figure out what so bothered him about the conversation. Finally, without too much effort, he narrowed it down to a nagging question: If Bostwick didn’t remember the case, why had he assumed Chip Underhill was a child?

  Chapter 27

  Brenna’s Legend was parked beside a gleaming Cadillac Eldorado two doors down from Fiorello’s front door, in a space the restaurant’s valet parkers reserved for favored regulars with status wheels. In the cramped Mount Washington neighborhood of narrow hill houses and unrivaled city views, Christensen’s Explorer had been relegated to valet limbo, that nebulous place somewhere around a corner two blocks away where he’d watched his car disappear from sight. Five minutes late, he hurried past the hulking Goodfellas extra at the restaurant’s door and into a dim, overpowering world of red banquettes and garlic.

  The city skyline loomed just ahead, through a wall of floor-to-ceiling windows designed to showcase every possible inch of the Golden Triangle below—the confluence of the three rivers, the stadium on the North Side, Downtown, Point State Park. It was the same view that brought tourists in droves to the dozen other restaurants clinging to the edge of Mount Washington. Fiorello’s, though, was strictly for locals of a particular social caste, that being, according to Brenna, the friends and family of numbers king Dominic Coniglio, for whom the restaurant provided a legitimate cover. Brenna’s client roster had at various times included several of Coniglio’s top lieutenants.

  Christensen found her in the bar, her back to him, in animated conversation with a dwarfish man whose thick, black chest hair spilled over the tie knot and cinched collar of his white silk shirt. From TV news footage and newspaper photographs, Christensen recognized the tinted glasses and red rosebud on the lapel of his shiny suit jacket as the trademarks of Salvatore “One Nut” Gianni. Brenna had represented him two years earlier when his stewardship of Coniglio’s East Liberty operations had been briefly interrupted by an ill-conceived sting operation. Christensen still marveled at how easily Brenna adapted to the diverse and dangerous worlds into which her professional life often thrust her.

  Gianni stiffened as Christensen approached. Brenna turned and smiled, kissing him on the cheek.

  “Jim, I’d like you to meet Sal,” she said.

  Christensen extended his right hand. Gianni removed his right hand from inside his suit jacket, where it apparently moved reflexively when a stranger approached, and offered a wary shake of his multiringed fingers.

  Brenna winked, but with the eye Gianni couldn’t see. “Sal here was just offering generous campaign support if I decide to go for the council spot. He said I was the only Irish lawyer he’d ever trusted.”

  Gianni shrugged. “We like Jews, lawyer-wise, but she done me a real favor. I return favors.”

  Brenna stood up. “I’m starving. Everything okay at home?”

  “Fine. Sorry I’m a little late.”

  Brenna shook Gianni’s hand. “Thanks for the drink, Sal. Stay out of trouble.”

  “You’ll hear from me if I don’t,” he said.

  Christensen followed her to a table with a view of forever. Her perfume trail mingled with the aroma rising from tables covered by plates of warm pasta and chilled romaine, an intoxicating combination. Waiters swarmed as soon as they sat down, plucking the Rese
rved card from the table’s center, depositing a basket of warm focaccia, upending their wineglasses, pouring olive oil and balsamic vinegar into a wide saucer with ceremonial grace. The attention seemed ridiculously overdone, like the decor.

  “You’re pretty venerated around here,” he said.

  “They take care of their lawyers.”

  “A business expense, I suppose.” He shook his head.

  “What?”

  “I just don’t get to see you in your element that often,” he said. “You run with a pretty rough crowd sometimes.”

  “These guys?” Brenna waved him off. “I’ll take them any day over the snakes on Grant Street.”

  Christensen used a piece of focaccia to sop up some vinegar and oil. A waiter brought wine, one of Brenna’s favorite black-roostered Chiantis, and set to work on the cork. He poured a taste in Brenna’s glass and waited, apparently thrilled by her smiling nod.

  “Do you ever worry about it?”

  Brenna cocked her head.

  “Working with people like Gianni, I mean. You must know a lot of secrets.”

  “Defense lawyers always do.” She turned an imaginary key, locking her lips. “We get paid to keep them.”

  The comment weighed heavier than Christensen expected. Brenna’s eyes drifted to the windows, to the city below, but once they shifted they never seemed to focus. The wineglass rested against her lips, still awaiting her second taste. The crowd of waiters around their table had thinned, the last one depositing a single-page menu in front of each of them before leaving with a bow.

  “Nothing from the morgue yet,” she said. “No IDs.”

  “What if it is the Chembergos, Bren?”

  She shook her head. “They’re not the only Hispanics in Pittsburgh. They’re not even still in the country, supposedly.”

  “Then why are you so worried?”