Imposter

by Davis Bunn

  A trio of tourists walked past the house. One halted to take a picture. The doctor shifted his face so that it was hidden behind the late-blooming azalea. When the tourists continued on, Turminian said, “What you ask is in effect a question of identity. How can a personality become fragmented? How can someone arrive at the point of lying even to himself over who or what he is? Would you agree?”

  Matt answered very slowly. “I’m not sure.”

  “You must understand, Mr. Kelly, misleading friends and strangers is part and parcel of most people’s daily life. They feel they must hide some dark stain. For some it is rage, for others a past misdeed, a mistake, a secret lust, a shame, an anguish. Every person is different, every reason unique. But my profession is based upon the precept that each patient is also very much the same. Most people have something that shames or pains them so much they cannot bear to reveal it. Not all, but most. So they lie. The lie takes many forms. But again, simplifying my work, at its core these lies all have certain common traits. A psychiatrist’s task is to help the imposter connect with what he seeks to hide from others and from himself. Do you see?”

  The air was cool and dry. The afternoon was an autumn lullaby. Yet Matt felt caught within his own internal furnace. He licked his lips but could not find any word that fit the moment well enough to utter.

  “The type of person you ask about has taken this to an entirely different level. They lose touch with their identity entirely. So much is suppressed, the true self might as well have died. There becomes a total separation between the internal and the external. They feel a visceral need to deny the internal self’s very existence. They hunger to become someone else. They absorb, they masquerade. They lie so effectively to themselves, Mr. Kelly, that the truth no longer matters. Does that answer your question?”

  Matt drove to Havre de Grace’s outskirts and located a quiet strip mall. He turned behind the buildings, passed the employee parking, and parked between two garbage Dumpsters. He cut the motor and listened. When he was assured of silence, he sat and he practiced. Over and over. Starting first with words he recalled the doctor using. The implied message coming from his own mouth drilled at his gut like well-aimed blows.

  He had always had the mimic’s gift. Only now did he wonder if this was part of living so tightly separated from his own internal state. So dissociated from who he really was he could grab hold of another’s voice and verbal mannerisms, and claim them. For the moment. Claim them and then move on. Back to his stonelike state.

  He dialed the Perryville number and spoke to the base operator. He was passed over to an internal line, which rang and rang. Then the woman he had spoken to that afternoon said, “Records.”

  “This is Alexis.”

  “If I hadn’t forgotten my keys, you’d have missed me.”

  “So sorry to bother you. But I was wondering if you would please pull a file for me before you go.”

  “Not Grimes again.”

  Matt was caught totally off guard. He pulled the list from his pocket. There was no Grimes among the survivors.

  “Hello?”

  He cleared his throat. “Yes. Sorry. Grimes.”

  “The kid got to you, didn’t he.”

  “Yes. Agent Kelly was . . .”

  “Totally different from that other guy.”

  Matt worked his mouth, but no sound came.

  “I’m telling you, that other guy totally freaked me out.”

  Matt managed, “Did he mention a name?”

  “You asked me that before and I told you then. No name.”

  He started to ask when, then decided he could not risk it. “Just leave the Grimes file on my desk. I’ll come by later.”

  “Whatever you say, Doc.” She paused, then asked, “Did you tell him?”

  He gaped again, then reshaped the question as a statement. “Tell young Mr. Kelly.”

  “About what happened with Grimes. What we found out.”

  “No, no. It is strictly confidential.”

  “And I’m telling you it’s bound to come out sooner or later.” But she did not sound certain. “Was I wrong to give him your number?”

  “Not at all. We had a most interesting discussion.”

  “Okay. Well. Good night, Doc.”

  “Good night.”

  Matt cut the connection and sat staring at the mall’s blank rear wall. Wishing the pieces of what he had just heard could somehow be fitted together.

  Matt worked his way through a variety of stores well away from the touristy waterfront. It took him until after dark to collect everything he required. He then ate a leisurely meal. Matt took his time over coffee, wishing the restaurant’s cheery din could somehow erase the doctor’s words from his memory. When it was late enough, Matt took the highway from Havre de Grace back toward Perryville. The bay waters were oily black below the bridge. Perryville’s waterfront was much darker than Havre de Grace. Where the base met the shoreline there was no light at all.

  Matt turned off the bridge onto the road leading to the base’s main gates. A half mile farther along, he turned left onto a gravel road he had spotted that afternoon. The road led down to a forest clearing, where a building or a range or something had been started and then abandoned. Matt backed his car behind a stand of loblolly pines and cut the motor. He stood beside the car and listened. The night was as warm as the afternoon. The air smelled of pinesap and earth and the bay.

  He moved to the trunk and changed into the clothes he had purchased— black sweatpants, T-shirt, socks, and running shoes. He fitted the workman’s belt around his middle and snugged it up tight. He loaded the belt with the gear he had acquired and set off.

  He kept the bay’s waters in sight but stayed well back from the shoreline. He had spotted only one patrol car for the entire base. The forest was silent, empty. Matt stopped in the last line of trees and searched.

  The base appeared desolate. A half-dozen night-shift cars were in the lot by the main clinic. There was no movement on the street or the grounds. The Records Building was utterly black.

  Matt left the forest at a trot. He crossed the lawn, moving from tree to tree as much as possible, staying well back from the bay. No need to offer a moving silhouette against the water.

  He was breathing easy when he arrived at the back of Records. He stopped again and listened. Bats flittered overhead, chasing insects and slicing razored fragments from the stars. An owl hooted from the forest. Then nothing.

  The rear porch was identical to the front, two windows deep and framed by slender pillars. At one time the structure had probably housed a proper clinic. Now not even the night could hide its forlorn state. Matt carefully tested the corner post, then climbed the railing and vaulted onto the porch roof.

  More than likely a building long slated for demolition would not have an alarm system above the ground floor. But Matt did not want to take any chance of being wrong. He crossed the roof to the drainpipe and tugged. There was a rattling noise and the pipe came away in his hands. He moved down the roof, hugging the wall. The roof sagged in places and once moaned under his foot. The second drainpipe rose alongside the porch roof’s opposite end. Matt gripped and tugged hard. The pipe held.

  He reached up and took the pipe in a two-fisted hold. He pulled his legs up to his chest and clamped his feet to the pipe. He started climbing.

  Length by length he moved up. He kept his feet well clear of the wall, for fear of pushing outward and dislodging an old bolt.

  His left shoulder and ribs began aching. Paint flaked away with each new hold of his hands and feet. He could hear the patter of rust and old paint striking the porch roof below him.

  Between the third and top floors, he paused and leaned out to study the roof eaves. The overhang looked far greater from this perspective than it had from below. If he went for the roof door as planned, he would have to trust his entire weight to the rain gutter, then flip himself over the edge. He glanced to each side, weighing his options. The pipe ran midway be
tween tall sash windows, about five feet away. He decided to risk the roof.

  He hugged the pipe, reached up, and took a new hold. Then the pipe crumbled below him.

  One moment his feet had been gripping rust-flaked pipe. The next they flailed about the wall for purchase.

  The pipe overhead rattled dangerously. Matt went very still. The pipe groaned and shifted a fraction. He reached down with his right hand and took hold of his hammer. He hung twenty-five feet above the porch by one hand, from a drainpipe that threatened to give way at any moment. The fall would probably not kill him. But it would most likely leave him unable to flee.

  Matt turned the hammer around, hauled back, and slammed the hooked claw into the wooden wall. The force of his blow drove him out. Moving out dislodged the pipe. He flattened his head to the wall, gripped the hammer with both hands, and waited through the rattling rain of dust and old pipe.

  Trying not to shift his body even a fraction, he searched with his toes and found a narrow opening. He jammed his left toe inside. He stretched out with his right hand and found the window ledge. His right foot found another ledge, this time a loose board. He released the hammer and took a two-handed grip on the ledge. The old-fashioned sash windows were deep and framed in oak, old and as hard as stone. He shifted over until he was in the middle of the ledge and hauled himself up.

  When one foot was over the ledge, he rose by jamming his hands into opposite sides of the window frame, like he was scaling an open-ended chimney. By the time he stood upright, his entire body trembled from the strain.

  His toes were well set into the frame, but most of his feet hung on air. His face lay planted upon the wall above the window, so tight he could feel the paint flecks scarring his cheek. He did not have time or strength to go for his knife and try to unhinge the window catch. Breaking the window would only add to the clamor and increase his risk of capture. He freed one hand and rammed his palm against the window frame. It creaked but held. Matt gripped the frame, took a breath. One more try. He opened his mouth in a silent roar and hauled. There was a groaning crash from inside, and then the window flew up.

  Matt tumbled inside. He fell over a desk and rolled across the floor. He lay there sweating and breathing hard. Waiting for his heart to stop trying to clamber from his chest.

  He rose to his feet and went back to the window. Out in the distance the lights of Havre de Grace glimmered upon the water. There was not a hint of breeze. The owl hooted again from the forest.

  He closed the window, reached for his flashlight, and went searching for the right office.

  Matt arrived at Maryland General just after eleven that night. Lucas D’Amico’s room was two floors below where Matt had lain after the attack. The memories of the explosion and its aftermath compressed the air. He knocked on Lucas’s door. At a sound from within, he opened it and said, “Mind if I run something by you?”

  Lucas used the remote to cut off the television. “Pull up a chair, give me something to do besides watching the empty screen. You want a drink or something?”

  “I’m good, thanks.” Matt seated himself and relayed first the meeting with the Perryville nurse and the psychiatrist.

  The only time Lucas spoke was when Matt described what he had read in the doctor’s file. “Do I want to know how you got your hands on confidential military data?”

  Matt went quiet.

  Lucas pushed himself up slightly in bed. “Rookies.”

  Matt explained that the file was not in the name of Porter Reeves at all, but rather one Richard Grimes. Grimes had come home in the first wave of POW exchanges. He had previously been listed as KIA. No living relation. He had been captured after a firefight at Phuoc Long. Spent almost a year as a POW. Was among the first POWs released by Hanoi because of his injuries. He spent nine months in Perryville’s medical wing. His doctor there brought in Alexis Turminian because of evident emotional damage that the first doctor could not hope to cure.

  The psychiatrist’s early notes were in his own handwriting, and at times almost took the form of a personal journal. In Richard Grimes’s entire stay at Perryville, no one came to visit. Gradually this young man who had nothing and no one began to trust the doctor.

  It was then that the patient had confided his name was not Richard Grimes at all.

  The admission had been accidental. Then denied. Then spoken of again. As though wanting to test the doctor’s reaction. The truth came out in tiny fragments. It was another eight months before the patient ever spoke his real name.

  Porter Reeves had entered the army because the judge at his first felony conviction had given him a choice. Seventeen years old, facing either conviction as an adult or Vietnam. His mother died while he had been at boot. He had been disowned by his father. His first week in Nam his former girlfriend had broken off their engagement. He had nothing left of his old life.

  Richard Grimes had been Porter Reeves’s best friend. Perhaps his only true friend. They had both been snipers. Grimes was an orphan, another misfit with no past. But by all accounts a very good man. Nine months before Phuoc Long, Richard Grimes had been struck by a mortar round. Porter had never fully accepted the loss of his best friend.

  There was a gap here, something that had happened just prior to the patient’s capture that he refused to speak of. A period that had lasted from the death of his friend to that final battle. The doctor’s records described in detail how Porter Reeves changed whenever the doctor tried to delve into this nine-month period. A certain fluid power began to emanate from the patient, a darkness so strong that the doctor became alert to how alone he was. How vulnerable. The patient declared that he wanted to put that behind him. The doctor agreed with relief.

  The psychiatrist repeatedly wrote of how little he had to offer this man. How could his patient build upon a life that had been so utterly destroyed? Then the patient began showing an interest in developing an existence that had no connection to the past at all. He discovered not just the strength to go forward, but a purpose. He wished to reinvent himself. Of course the doctor helped the patient. How could he not? The psychiatrist helped arrange court documentation for a name change. The old files were sealed; a few were simply made to disappear. The man who was no more simply vanished.

  Matt had no trouble with the silence that followed. He sat and let Lucas script out the data upon the ceiling. For himself, it was good to feel tired. Yet sleep was not welcome. The psychiatrist’s words had branded him. No, it was good to have someone to sit with through the dark and adversarial hours.

  D’Amico finally said, “I don’t see a connection. Not to our case, anyway.”

  “What about Pecard coming to ask about this same guy?”

  “If it was Pecard at all.” D’Amico shrugged. “So Pecard knew some guy was a POW. So what?”

  “We still don’t have a motive for why Pecard would go after my family.”

  D’Amico nodded slow agreement. “That’s been bothering me. And the chief. Bernstein brought Pecard’s file last time she stopped by. Basically what we already know. British army, military intel, long list of decorations. Wounded while doing some classified investigation in Vietnam.” D’Amico shrugged his good shoulder. “Doesn’t help us much.”

  “So you don’t think I should phone Washington with what I’ve found.”

  “Midnight on Saturday?” D’Amico actually smiled. “Oh. I get it. A fed’s idea of a joke. Cute.”

  Matt rose from his chair. “I better let you get some rest.”

  “You mind if I ask a favor?”

  “Sure.”

  “Could you take Katy to church tomorrow?”

  “Today,” Matt corrected, pointing at the clock. It was just after midnight. “No problem.”

  “Sharla can swing by after. Katy’s going over there for lunch anyway. But Sharla sings in her own church’s choir, so it’d be tough for her to make the morning run. Katy really doesn’t like missing her church.”

  “It’s fine, Lucas. I’ll stay fo
r a while and take her to your partner’s home afterward.”

  Matt started for the door. But his feet would not follow through. He found himself trapped within the same old struggle. Only tonight Matt heard the words he wished he was able to say. About the nightmare. And what the nightmares were based upon. The moment he had left his body. The instant he had died. Wishing he could figure out this sense of missing purpose, the reason he had come back. Wanting to figure out why he was so dissatisfied all the time.

  About Connie. About all the past mistakes he wished he could just make go away.

  Lucas asked, “You okay?”

  “No.” Slowly Matt returned to his chair. He stared down at the floor. And forced out the words he had been carrying for a lifetime. “Nothing seems to fit.”

  Lucas just let the words hang there.

  Matt felt clammy from the struggle. “No matter how good the moment, it all stays wrong. And I stay empty.”

  Lucas made sure Matt was done for the time being. Then, “Fill up that cup, will you?”

  Matt plied the pitcher, then refitted the top and straw. All without looking directly at the other man.

  Lucas drank most of the cup. Sighed. Settled back on his pillow. “Year after I made detective, I was chasing this punk. My partner was three years from retiring and I left him in my dust. Took a lot of pleasure in that. Running down this kid in gang-wear and cornrows and flash shoes. Only the punk had a round left in the gun I thought was empty. When I trapped him in the alley, he got off his shot. I took one high in the chest. Punctured a lung. Only reason I’m talking about it today is my partner went back for the car and scouted alleys until he found me.”

  Matt remained unable to lift his gaze. But he listened. And no longer felt such mortal shame over having spoken.

  “I was laid up for three and a half weeks, off active duty for another four months. Being on desk almost killed me. But what was worse was the fear. I dreamed about that punk and his gun for a long time. The dream was always the same. How he walked up and looked down at me lying there gasping for one more breath, and surprise, he had another round. It started having an effect on our marriage. Took me six months to go crawling to my pastor, Ian Reeves. He told me the same thing I’m gonna tell you. The stronger the guy, the harder it is to be weak. But everybody is, Matt. Everybody. Forget death and taxes. The one rule you can take to the bank is this: Everybody is weak at one point or another. And when one weakness is revealed, out come the others. Which makes it a bad time for guys like you and me.”