Straw Men (18 page)

“I'll get Taylor if you get everything else,” he said to Annie, cutting the engine. “Deal?”

“Deal.”

He opened his door into the cold afternoon air.

“Dad?”

Christensen waited with one leg out of the car.

“I just want you to be happy.”

He shut the door and turned to his younger daughter.

“Are you?” she asked.

“Mostly. Are you?”

Annie shrugged. “Mostly.”

“Why do you want to know?”

“I've just seen you happier, is all.”

He reached across the seat and squeezed her shoulder. “Mostly's not bad, sport. It's really not. Some people never even get to mostly.”

Another shrug. “Always would be better.”

“Yep. Guess it would.” Christensen brushed popcorn shrapnel off his daughter's face. “Know what? I miss your mom sometimes, too. It's OK to feel that way.”

Annie nodded, then opened her door and climbed out. She gathered an armload of jackets and the empty popcorn bucket as she did. She shut the door with her foot and climbed the steps to the front porch. She was still waiting at the door when Christensen arrived with the dozing Taylor hoisted onto his shoulder.

“It's locked,” she said.

Christensen shifted Taylor to his other arm and fished into his pants pocket for his keys, then unlocked the dead-bolt and pushed into the silent house. He noticed that Brenna's office door was wide open as he keyed in the alarm code.

“Bren?”

He laid Taylor down on the living-room couch and covered the sleeping boy with a quilted comforter. Annie met him in the hall and handed him a yellow Post-it note as she rounded the corner, headed upstairs. “This was on the kitchen table,” she said. “Pretty lame.”

Christensen took the note. Brenna had written the time on top—3:25, just half an hour ago. The note read: “Sorry for the snit. I want to talk, too. Just not today. Better if I stay Downtown till after the hearing. Taking clothes etc. for tomorrow, overnighting at the office. Wish me luck. Tell Tay I'll call later to say good night.”

An apology. An embedded acknowledgment of a problem. Christensen found those things promising. Maybe there was hope. Maybe the day's dark thoughts stemmed from his own wounded ego rather than an organic problem with their relationship. And she was right. There was no sense talking now with DellaVecchio's court appearance bearing down on her like a train.

Something unfamiliar caught his eye—a new answering machine Brenna had bought to replace the one the cops still had. Its tiny red eye winked at him from across the kitchen, and he crossed the room for a closer look. The numeral 1 was illuminated in blinking red on top. A large button in the middle said Play, so he pushed it.

“It's me.”

A woman. Brenna? He leaned closer, feeling the machine's sides for a volume knob.

“Can you . . . please pick up if you're there. Hello?”

Not Brenna. Teresa.

“Shit,” she said. “I'll have to call you back. It may be a while. Don't call me. Just . . . don't. But I need to talk to you, understand? I'll call when I can.”

Christensen played the message again. Teresa's voice, no question, but it was warped and strained. The new answering machine, maybe? He found a Play Greeting button and pressed it. Brenna's outgoing message came through loud and clear, her voice as familiar as if she were standing beside him. So it wasn't the machine. He played Teresa's message a third time and recognized the fine thread of stress that made her voice higher and thinner than normal.

He had her home phone number, but resisted the impulse to call her there. She'd been clear on that, for reasons he could only guess. Uneasy, he went to the front door, opened it, and looked out on a quiet Sunday afternoon in Shadyside. What had he expected to see?

His next impulse was to call Brenna, and he felt a great relief when she picked up her private office line on the second ring.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey.”

“You OK?”

She laughed, but it sounded forced. “Dagnolo's definitely decided to put Teresa on the stand tomorrow, which is fine because it means he hasn't come up with anything stronger. My DNA lab guy's got car trouble; we're trying to figure out how to get him to court. I need to go over some things with Carmen, and he's been out of touch since this morning. The cops all have their underwear in a bunch because his electronic bracelet's on the blink and they think he's screwing with it. Tell the truth, I'll be a lot better tomorrow afternoon.”

“I'll let you go then,” he said. “We still need to talk, but it can wait. I just wanted to touch base.”

“Thanks.”

Christensen waited to see where she might take the conversation.

“Baby, I know I'm deep in the hole with Tay, with everybody. I'll make it up. But right now, this is where I need to be. I can't let this thing fall apart tomorrow, not after how far we've come. Eight years it took me to right this thing. But I promise, this hearing tomorrow is the goal line.”

“Until the retrial,” he said. “Or the next high-profile case.”

“Wrong. This is once in a lifetime.”

“How?”

“Jim, I'm defending an innocent man. Because I didn't do my job right the first time, he's been in prison for eight years. I can't let that happen again. I won't. Please tell me you understand.”

Christensen tried. Brenna was talking about justice, but there was a difference between justice and redemption. Justice was about Carmen DellaVecchio. Redemption was about Brenna. Somewhere along the line, she'd lost sight of who she was doing this for, and who she was hurting in the process. It wasn't the first time, and that selfishness was her tragic flaw. He saw that now more clearly than ever before.

“I understand why this case is important to you.” He winced at Brenna's relieved “Thank you” on the other end of the line. “But that's what we need to talk about when it's over, Bren.”

There was a long pause before she said, “OK.”

“So, where will you sleep?”

“I'll make up the couch in my office and use the showers downstairs at the Centre Club. I'd get home late and have to be back here first thing tomorrow, anyway. This just works out better.”

“I agree. There's a twenty-four-hour security desk in the lobby, right?”

“Rent-a-cops,” she said, “but they're usually awake.”

“Great. Are you sure—”

“I'll be fine. You'll explain everything to the kids?”

“Yep.”

“Jim?”

“Yeah, Bren.”

“I love you.”

The phrase was like a diamond, with countless facets, gradations in clarity, shadings of color. Christensen wished he knew what she meant. The best response that came was the one Brenna used so often: “I know.”

Now the sound again. From the kitchen.
Chirrup-chirrup.
The new telephone?

His shin hit the coffee table and he swore as he lurched toward the kitchen. His left foot was asleep. Still holding some of the file papers, he flipped the light switch with his free hand as he hobbled past. The overheads flooded the kitchen with soft-white light, revealing a table littered with the kids' school books. His evening came rushing back at once: Brenna at her office for the night, the Sunday night homework crush, the usual bedtime battle, Brenna's nine-thirty good-night call. All followed by an unsettling fear, nagging questions, and the eerie pulse of the silent house. Something had been bugging him, and he'd decided to review the notes of his conversations with Teresa.

He found the new phone's Talk button. “Bren?” he said, and heard a ragged breath.

Finally: “No. Teresa.”

Groggy, he repeated the name.

“I'm so sorry,” she said.

Christensen checked the digital clock on the microwave—4:42. Pitch black outside the kitchen window. “What's wrong?”

A sob, followed by a strangled cry.

“Where are you?”

After a long, soggy moment: “Home. I'm OK.”

“Can you talk?”

“David just left.”

“Left? Again?”

“No, no. Not like that. He got a call maybe an hour ago, then he rummaged around in the garage for a while and left. Said it was nothing big, but he had to go. I wanted to tell you something this afternoon, but this is the first chance I've had to call you back.”

“What is it?”

Teresa took her time. “I found something.”

“Tell me.”

She told him about her worry boxes, about the baffling collection and occasional memories she'd found as she sifted their contents. She told him how she'd found the odd-sized 1991 box under the spare bed and realized that David had overlooked it; how she'd reconciled some of the stuff from that box with what she believed were real memories. The Elvis Buddha's head and the fight with David. Saying good-bye to Buster. Suicidal thoughts. Her 1991 New Year's Eve funk. “It's weird,” she says, “all this stuff coming up since we started talking. A few days ago you said something, you know, how bad memories probably wouldn't come back until I was ready? Well, maybe I'm ready. Maybe you've given me permission to remember.”

“Or you finally gave yourself permission,” he said.

He waited.

“I found something else,” she said.

“In the box?”

“No, in a drawer, way in the back. My appointment planner from 1992. I never made a worry box for that year, because of what happened that spring, but I'd started saving 1992 stuff before the attack. I found it today, in the drawer of this old desk, and I was looking through it, and I found something and it's—” Another desperate breath. “Shit. I don't know what it is. Goddamn it. God
damn
it.”

Christensen was fully awake now. “Do you want to come over?”

“David may come back. I can't.”

Christensen stopped himself from pacing back and forth in front of the kitchen sink. “Don't worry about what it means right now, Teresa. Just tell me what you found.”

“It's just a note. An appointment. For the Monday after I was attacked. I don't remember it at all. But it's in my appointment book.”

“Meaning?”

“I live by those things. I had it scheduled, so it's not like I'm remembering. It was scheduled.”

“What was scheduled, Teresa?”

“IAD,” she said. “For that Monday, it says ‘IAD, 10:30 a.m. Two hours.' ”

Christensen was lost. “The internal affairs investigation? The one involving David?”

“They must have called me to appear,” she said. “From this, it looks like maybe I was supposed to talk to somebody from IAD that day. I'd blocked off two hours.”

“Do you remember what it was about?”

“The Tidwell thing, I'm sure. That's the only reason they would have called me.”

Tidwell again. David. What was the link? “Do you remember what you said?”

“That's the thing. It was scheduled for Monday. I never made it. The attack was on Saturday, remember, two days before. I was in Mount Mercy, half dead, so I never made it to the IAD appointment.”

Christensen couldn't say why, but this felt like a breakthrough. He could feel it in the raised hair on his arms and the sudden, prickling knot at the back of his skull.

“And you think there's a connection?” he asked.

“I don't know.”

“But you find it upsetting. Do you know why?”

“No.”

“Teresa—” Christensen checked his frustration. For the first time, he sensed they were getting closer. When Teresa started down this path, Christensen could see no possible connection between an internal police investigation into a drug shoot-out and the vicious sexual attack on Teresa several months later. Now, at least, Teresa had found common ground. She'd been scheduled to talk with the IAD investigators about the Tidwell matter only two days after she was attacked.

“I was just thinking,” he said, “that's really the first time you've put those two things together in the same time frame.”

“I know.”

“Any idea what it means?” He waited. Five seconds. Ten. An eternity, it seemed. He laid the file papers on the kitchen counter, determined to let Teresa lead, but the paper on top caught his eye. It was the printout of the
Press
story reporting the death of Tidwell and a rival drug dealer in an East Liberty alley. He scanned it again, focusing on the phrase “a New Year's Eve drug transaction gone bad.” Both Tidwell and Fitzgerald dead at the scene, apparently for less than an hour. A pedestrian found them around midnight.

New Year's Eve? Christensen couldn't shake a feeling. The thought ricocheted from Teresa to the news story to the unfolded transcript page that lay beneath some of the other papers on the kitchen counter. Christensen tugged it out and ran his finger down the page until he found the phrase “New Year's Eve, 1991.”

“Wait,” he said. “You said something a minute ago about New Year's Eve. You were depressed.”

“It's weird the things that come back,” she said.

“Teresa, what brought it back? Do you remember?”

“The Elvis Buddha, remember. I told you. It was in the box, the broken head of this little ceramic—”

“Tell me everything you remember.”

“About that New Year's Eve?”

“Is that when you had the fight with David?”

“I don't think so. It was maybe a couple days before. He left and took Buster, our puppy. I remembered all that, because I found the little head in the box and it all came back. But David came back, too. Later. Then he left again a few weeks before the attack, and that was the one I think really was the end, or at least that's how I—”

“Teresa,” he said. “Focus on that night. New Year's Eve. What do you remember?”

“Just that night?”

“Exactly.”

“Why?”

Christensen could see it now. He had more puzzle pieces than she did, and he pressed this latest one into place. The picture taking shape was repulsive. The urge to tell her was powerful, but he resisted.

“Don't worry about why. Just tell me what you remember. What happened that night?”

“Nothing much.”

“Do better,” he said. “Tell me what
did
happen.”

“It sucked. I drank myself to sleep. I got sick. That's about it.”

“Because you were depressed. Do you remember why?”

“David.”

“Because you'd had a fight?”

“Yes. There was something else in my worry box, too. A newspaper story.”

“About the Tidwell thing?”

“No. About these two cops who died in Bloomfield.”

“Not the Tidwell thing?”

“Completely different. They were classmates of mine at the academy, apparently, and I saved the story in my 1991 worry box. They were ambushed.”

“I remember that,” Christensen said. “They never found out who did it, did they?”

“I
don't
remember,” she said. “But it must have been a hell of a way to end the year. So between the thing with David, and that, it was … what I remember is locking my gun away and taking the key over to Carol's house. She's a neighbor.”

“She knew you were depressed?”

“We talked a lot. She'd invited me to go along with her and Alec to some restaurant. But I just wasn't in the mood. We joked about it, how pathetic I was. I said, ‘I think I'll just stay home and clean my gun or something.' And we laughed. But later I put the gun in our lock box and took the key over to Carol's. Didn't even tell her what the key was to, just asked her to hold it for me. I was just gonna stay home and get drunk as a skunk, and I just, you know, I didn't want to do anything stupid. I remember handing the key to her on her back porch.”

“You didn't trust yourself with the gun?”

“Must not have. You think back, and you wonder how you could have got that way. But everything was just so shitty right then, and me all alone. Throw in a gun and a little booze and—”

“Wait, go back a sec,” he said. “You planned to be alone that night?”

A confused pause. “That's what I said. David was gone. I was just planning to stay home and numb the pain.”

“All night?”

“You mean was I alone the whole night? Yeah.”

Christensen closed his eyes and braced himself on the edge of the kitchen counter. “You're sure?”

“Why?”

“Teresa, you're
sure.
”

“Jesus, I'm sure. Calm down.”

Christensen bit his tongue. Literally. He tasted iron, his own blood. Another puzzle piece fell into place.

“No one came to visit you that night?”

“No.”

“Not David?”

“No.”

“Do you know where he was that night?”

“No. He'd left a couple days before. I don't remember when he moved back in, but it was later. After the New Year. Then he moved out again a few weeks before I was attacked, but I remember that one night pretty clear.”

“And you were alone the whole night?”

“Yes.”

Christensen felt as if she'd handed him a ticking bomb. Whoever had faxed him that transcript page must have known that David Harnett had a serious problem. Teresa was telling him in no uncertain terms that she was alone on New Year's Eve 1991, the whole night. What stared Christensen in the face now was a clear and troubling probability: Her husband had told an IAD investigator he was with his estranged wife the night his accuser, Tidwell, was shot to death in an East Liberty alley. David had used Teresa as his alibi.

“There's no question in your mind that you were alone that whole night?” Christensen asked.

“No question at all. Why?”

Christensen's mind raced ahead. David Harnett had committed himself. He was with his wife that night, he told the investigator. They were mending wounds from their latest marital blowup. But the IAD investigation hadn't stopped there. The investigators summoned Teresa to confirm her husband's story. If she'd told them the same story she just told him, she would have completely undercut David's alibi for the night Tidwell died. Even if he had nothing to hide, they'd want to know why David lied.

Following that thread brought Christensen back to the most troubling fact of all, and it made him dizzy: Teresa was attacked two days before she was scheduled to meet with IAD investigators.

“Teresa, do you remember
why
the IAD investigators wanted to meet with you?”

“The Tidwell thing. I told you that.”

“But what about it?”

“That I don't remember.”

“Nothing? You don't remember the grapevine gossip about what was happening with that case?”

“Oh yeah. But it was so … typical. Those drug guys are vermin. First thing they do when their ship starts to go down is see who they can drag down with them.”

“What had you heard? About Tidwell, I mean?”

“Rumors. The usual crap. He was talking to the D.A., trying to cut some deal. Nobody knew what it was about; they just knew IAD was looking into it. They'd talked to a bunch of people, mostly at the East Liberty station.”

Time to push a little. Christensen leaned back against the kitchen counter. “Sounds to me like they were taking what Tidwell told them pretty seriously. You said they'd talked to David a couple times. They'd talked to other people. They wanted to talk to you.”

“What are you getting at?” she snapped.

Christensen could feel it, something undeniable. Maybe Teresa felt it, too, but he wouldn't nudge her closer to it. If she knew what it was, the decision to confront it had to be hers alone.

“I'm just trying to make sense of what you're telling me, Teresa. The clear memories and the things you think you remember, the things David told you about your past and the things we know happened for sure. Sometimes they match up, and sometimes they don't. That's all. And I'm trying to sort all that out, just like you asked me to. Because somewhere in that fog, I think, is the answer to the question we started with.”

“About who attacked me?”

“Yes,” he said.

On the other end of the line, Teresa's voice took on a sharp edge. “It wasn't David,” she said. “I know that.”

Christensen wanted to lay out his suspicions. He wanted to tell her what he knew about New Year's Eve and the IAD transcript and the conflict with her emerging memories. He wanted to ask Teresa why her husband would lie about his whereabouts that New Year's Eve, and if she saw any coincidence in the fact that she ended up nearly dead two days before she might have contradicted his story. What Christensen did, though, was repeat the testimony that David Harnett gave during DellaVecchio's original trial. “David was with Brian Milsevic the night you were attacked, wasn't he?”