Straw Men (4 page)

Brenna steered into the neighborhood where Carmen DellaVecchio grew up and for the past twenty hours had lived relatively free. She entered his world beneath the watchful gaze of the weathered doughboy statue that had stood for generations at the point where Penn and Butler split. She sipped her Starbucks latte, but what she tasted at the back of her throat was infinitely less savory, the taste of fear.

Silly,
she thought. Stopping by DellaVecchio's house was just a spur-of-the-moment detour from her regular morning commute, a chance to get some face time with her client the morning after his conditional release. But that was bullshit and she knew it. Something else was bugging her. The cops told her this morning that DellaVecchio had barely made curfew the night before. She'd called his house at about eight-ten as she drove into town, but there was no answer. By the time she had exited the Parkway onto Grant Street, two blocks from her Oxford Centre office, she was running through worst-case scenarios, one of which included a torch-toting mob of irate citizens. She kept driving, past the City-County Building and the courthouse, past the rusted Cor-Ten hulk of the old U.S. Steel Building, past the bus and train stations, and onto Penn Avenue. She tried calling again as she moved toward Lawrenceville, but again the phone rang and rang.

Brenna checked her watch—not quite eight-thirty. He could still be asleep, right? But what were the chances of that after eight years of 7 a.m. prison breakfast calls? Antonio DellaVecchio, Carmen's father, had probably left already for his job at a small scrap-metal reclamation yard along the river. By her reckoning, Carmen should have been home alone.

Where was he?

Brenna absently tilted too much hot coffee into her mouth, snapping her attention back to the moment. Scenes from another time slipped past the Legend's windows. Almost every shop sign needed paint. Migliorino's Barber Shop. Gruppo's Family Restaurant. Lipinski's Roll-O-Mat—a 22-lane “Automatic!” bowling alley—occupied the second floor of a building that someone had apparently tried to pretty up with leftovers from an aluminum-siding sample case. As weird as the building looked outside, Brenna figured it was even weirder inside. Fusaro's Funeral Home was on the ground floor.

At a stoplight, she slid a file folder from her briefcase and checked the 44th Street address again. She'd visited only once, and that was eight years ago. She'd been looking for character witnesses for Carmen who might do more good than harm if she put them on the stand. In the end, Antonio DellaVecchio was the only person she dared call on Carmen's behalf, and that was just so his father could describe the mental and physical scars left by the young man's mother, Rose. She'd died in a Dumpster when Carmen was five. When Brenna asked Antonio to describe the cocktail that eventually killed her, he told the jury in broken English all it needed to know about the mother of his only child: “Halfaquarta antifreeze.”

Brenna turned left onto 44th, suddenly self-conscious driving a Japanese luxury car in a neighborhood filled with salt-rusted GMC Jimmys, Ford Broncos, and ancient bad-ass Lincolns. She pulled to the curb three blocks from the river and parked, scanning the street for a house she was sure she'd recognize. She spotted it on the opposite side four doors away, a three-story bunker of illogical design, half-finished construction, and peeling paint—a house only a remodeler could love.

Brenna could see Antonio DellaVecchio's humble dreams etched on the building's face. The house had been bright red once, but the painted wood had long ago faded to the color of dried blood. He'd tried to remedy that the year Carmen was born by covering the house in champagne-colored siding. That effort ended in a jagged tear just above the halfway point, as if the installer had held tight to that panel as he fell to his death. Antonio had planned decks for each floor, and he got as far as installing the structural supports and doors for each. The first-floor deck door opened onto the building's concrete stoop, but the second-and third-floor doors opened to sheer drops of fifteen and thirty feet, respectively. The unfinished supports were black and rotted after years of exposure.

Shortly after his son's arrest, Brenna asked Antonio if he would ever finish the project. He'd shrugged and waved the idea away with one of his rough hands. All he said was, “Life's too crazy,” and she'd understood him perfectly.

Brenna spotted Carmen as she crossed the street. His image appeared as an alarming flash between parked cars, and her stomach clenched. She wasn't sure why, but she better understood the reaction as she stepped up onto the curb. DellaVecchio was holding an open quart bottle of King Cobra, high-test malt liquor. Despite the cold, he was still wearing the thin prison slippers he'd worn the day he was released after the jail's property officer couldn't find his sneakers.

Slumped beside him on the cracked concrete stoop was a disheveled young man in a sweatshirt and greasy coveralls. She recognized him from her visit long ago, one of the neighborhood pals she dared not call to endorse DellaVecchio's character. They both noticed her at the same time.

Brenna raised her Starbucks cup, as if toasting this lovely scene. DellaVecchio raised his bottle with a sloppy grin, oblivious to her sarcasm. She tried to make her disappointment clearer.

“Little early for that, don't you think?”

“Breakfast of champions,” DellaVecchio rasped, raising the bottle again. He reached for a crumpled plastic bag at his feet. “Dorito?”

He smiled, displaying rich deposits of orange residue between his scattered yellow teeth. Brenna thought of the periodontal-disease photos in her dentist's office. How could someone actually look worse in morning's soft light than in a prison's cold fluorescence?

“Thanks, but no,” she said. She stuck her hand out to DellaVecchio's miscreant friend, and he reached up and shook it. His hand was cold and damp from his own bottle. She thought,
Carmen's a fuck-up because he can't help it. What's your excuse?

“I'm Brenna Kennedy,” she said. “I'm sorry, I've forgotten your name.”

“Frank.”

“Popko,” Brenna said, remembering him after all.

“Popcorn!” DellaVecchio said in a spray of Dorito mulch. This cracked them up. Brenna waited as the pair howled and clinked bottles to toast DellaVecchio's sparkling show of wit.

“Carmen, I need to talk to you,” Brenna said.

DellaVecchio took another long draw from the King Cobra, then clawed another handful of chips from the bag. “Frankie Popcorn!” he said, and the two men dissolved into laughter again.

“Inside,” Brenna said, nodding toward the front door behind him.

The two men looked at each other, raising their eyebrows at the same instant. “Ooh la la,” Popko said.

Without taking his eyes off hers, DellaVecchio held his free hand up to his face, spread his index and middle fingers into a V and flicked his tongue between the two fingers. The gesture was so blatant, so crude, that Brenna could only turn away. She was used to DellaVecchio's tastelessness, but her first impulse was to smack him. Instead, she turned back around and glared until he retracted his tongue and lowered his hand. The man wasn't stupid.

“Apologize,” she said.

Popko snickered. DellaVecchio laughed too, but it was a nervous thing that faded fast. Brenna waited. DellaVecchio sipped his beer, looking to his friend for reassurance. Popko studied the King Cobra label, suppressing a smile.

“Give m'self a boner,” DellaVecchio said finally.

Popko was in midswig, and DellaVecchio's confession convulsed him. Malt liquor foamed from his mouth and nose as he laughed, and the fallout sprinkled the toes of Brenna's Joan & Davids.

Enough.

Brenna stepped closer, got right in DellaVecchio's face, close enough to smell the Doritos and beer. His smile disappeared. “Listen, you little shit,” she said. “You're never gonna get closer to heaven than where you're sitting right now.”

DellaVecchio laughed, but he was clearly uncomfortable. Brenna leaned even closer.

“Keep this up, Carmen, and you'll be looking for somebody else to save your sorry ass, as if anybody else would bother. I've got limits, and you're damned close. Am I being clear enough?”

DellaVecchio set his bottle on the stoop and wiped his damp hand on the front of his faded green sweatshirt—more startled than contrite.

“Clear enough?” Brenna repeated.

DellaVecchio nodded.

She stepped back and shook her head, swept an arm across the scene. “What the hell are you thinking? Out drinking on your stoop first thing in the morning? You've got every cop in this city looking for an excuse to haul you back inside. You've got neighbors who'd rather have a child molester on their street than you. And what are you doing? You're out here confirming their worst fears.”

She jabbed her index finger at his temple, just above his misshapen left ear. She did it hard enough to hurt. “Carmen, think! I know you can.”

Brenna knew she'd connected, but immediately regretted her tone. Sometimes it was hard to remember his history, that he was born with a brain marinated in alcohol. Brenna could see that his eyes registered real pain. DellaVecchio glanced at his friend, but found no solace there. Popko was getting unsteadily to his feet, and as he rose he slid his beer bottle into a pocket of his coveralls.

“Call you later, C. D.,” Popko said, and walked down the shattered sidewalk toward the river.

DellaVecchio watched him go. “He's my friend,” he said after a while.

“I know that, Carmen.”

“You pissed him off.”

“I'm sorry about that. Really. He's the only one besides your dad who came to see you in jail, I know. But he needs to understand what's happening. You can do yourself a lot of harm pulling shit like this. He needs to know that.”

Popko turned a corner, but DellaVecchio kept watching the spot where he'd been.

“You've got a chance at a new life, Carmen.”

DellaVecchio's head swiveled back to her, an almost mechanical movement that betrayed nothing, not anger, not fear, not even comprehension.

Brenna seized the moment, hoping she had his full attention. “Don't screw it up, is all I'm saying, for you or me. We've got a chance to change the diminished-capacity laws of this state, to give people like you a fairer shot. We've got a chance to clear you completely, to show everyone how shoddy this investigation really was and maybe make some meaningful changes on that level, too. Don't screw that up. I've got just as much at stake as you do.”

He stood. They were about the same height, but DellaVecchio was standing on the house's stoop. He looked down on her, and for the first time Brenna felt the same dread menace that others saw in him. This was not the damaged young man to whose side she rallied eight years ago; here was the Scarecrow, unpredictable, capable of anything.

He turned and pushed his way inside. The house's dim interior was lit blue by a chattering television. Brenna could hear the bright banter of Channel 2's regular morning news team as DellaVecchio turned toward her.

“Carmen?” she said, but his toxic smile disappeared behind the slowly closing door.

“There's just something about a girl with a death wish, eh?”

Burke Padgett held a copy of the morning
Press
as he stood in the door frame of Christensen's university office. A three-column photo of Brenna and DellaVecchio ran across the top of the front page. The photographer had caught DellaVecchio at his most demented, both arms up-thrust in triumph, mouth curled into a sneer. Christensen could almost hear the blustery “Fuck-an-A!” that had briefly derailed Brenna's courthouse news conference.

“I was going to apologize for being rude yesterday,” Christensen said, “but never mind.”

“This a good time?”

“I'm busy.”

The pompous little gremlin stepped forward and laid the newspaper on the desk, covering the galley copy of the
Journal of American Psychology
article Christensen was proofing.

“Got the feeling yesterday wasn't the best time to talk,” he said.

Christensen moved the newspaper aside and continued making final changes to the article he'd been researching for more than two years. “What was the tip-off, Burke?”

Padgett cleared his throat. “I'm gonna say my piece here, Jim, and you can listen or not. But I'm gonna say it anyway. I'd appreciate you hearing me out.”

Christensen looked up, pulled by something unfamiliar in Padgett's voice—sincerity. The two men glared across the desk. Padgett spoke first.

“You already know my concerns about DellaVecchio. Well, I thought of one more.”

“Why am I not surprised?”

“It's your friend, this Kennedy woman. Did you ever wonder if maybe DellaVecchio might go after her?”

Padgett's green eyes didn't waver. His concern seemed genuine, a startling departure for a man usually focused on his own macabre celebrity.

“Sit down,” Christensen said.

They sat stiffly, silent except for the scuffing of Padgett's chair across the linoleum. Christensen studied him as Padgett eased himself onto the seat, then sat down in his department-issued desk chair and waited.

“Got your attention, eh?” Padgett said, raising one white eyebrow.

“Don't play games.”

Padgett sat forward to rest a forearm on Christensen's desk, but couldn't quite reach. He slid to the edge of his seat and tried again, trying to appear casual. “I've made no secret of this; you know I believe he attacked this Harnett woman, DNA or no DNA. But I never much agreed with Dagnolo's theory about why.”

Common ground,
Christensen thought. “So we can stipulate that Dagnolo's stalking scenario is fantasy?”

Padgett shrugged. “Miss Kennedy raised some valid points. The mayhem at the crime scene in some ways obscured the fact that this was an extremely organized attack.”

“Which, from a psychological perspective, rules out DellaVecchio.”

“Not necessarily,” Padgett said. “He's not as dumb as he looks—bright enough, I think, to understand the idea of revenge. I think that's the story here.”

Christensen stared. “You've got another book contract, don't you, Burke?”

Padgett cackled. “Haven't pitched it to my agent, but now that you mention it…” The little man stroked his beard as if contemplating the possibilities, then laughed out loud. “Kidding! Really!”

Christensen shook his head. “Tell me your revenge theory.”

“OK, it's like this.” The man actually rubbed his little hands together. “I didn't see it at first, but I started thinking about it as the case went along. The one thing no one ever questioned here was DellaVecchio's capacity for sexual infatuation. You know the history there.”

Christensen nodded. “The harassment cases. A possible attempted rape.”

“Exactly. But nothing on the order of this, violence-wise. Those were basically gropings, right? Your boy acting like a dog in heat, humping-on-the-bus stuff. True, it was escalating, and that's not unusual. But this attack was a leap. Damned vicious stuff. So I'm saying there was some other component here that pushed him further.
Something
that made this woman different than the others.”

Christensen was lost. “Burke, they'd never even met. Why would he want revenge on someone he'd never met?”

Padgett smiled, having arrived finally at the crux of it. “Not her,” he said. “Her husband.”

“David?”

“Yes, David. David Harnett. He got little mention at the trial, but I've done a little homework. Did you know that all three times DellaVecchio was arrested before this, David Harnett was involved?”

Christensen feigned a yawn. “Old news. Brenna looked into it and didn't even think it was worth bringing up. Didn't fly then or now. Yes, David Harnett was involved in those arrests, either directly or peripherally. So what? He worked sex crimes at the time. The idea that DellaVecchio attacked Harnett's wife as a payback is a big stretch. Ludicrous, even.”

Padgett wouldn't be denied. “Explains a lot, Jim. This was more than just a sex fantasy. The violence was just too over-the-top. The crime scene, the wine bottle rape, that reads like punishment, pure and simple. Trying to kill her wasn't enough. This guy wanted to humiliate her.”

Padgett sat back, inviting a response.

“Excellent work, inspector,” Christensen said. “But you're forgetting one annoying little detail.”

“The DNA.”

“Right. DellaVecchio didn't do it. Somebody else did and then set him up.”

Padgett dismissed the idea with an elfin wave. “You could argue that, Jim, but whether he did or didn't almost doesn't matter. What I'm saying is DellaVecchio is
capable
of that kind of violence. I think he's capable of worse. That's all I'm saying. This guy's a constant threat to anybody who gets too close.”

“So, it's OK to lock away somebody who's
capable
of a crime? Isn't prison supposed to be for people who make bad moral choices? You said yourself DellaVecchio's not capable of that. You said—”

“Look, I'll just say this flat-out: Somebody else is gonna get hurt. That's my concern.”

Christensen studied Padgett's face, wondering where this was going.

“Based on what I know—” Padgett weighed his words for a moment. “Based on what I think really happened eight years ago, and what's happened since, I'd say the person at risk right now is your friend, Miss Kennedy. She's been closer to him than anyone else for eight years.”

Christensen shook his head. “Why would he hurt someone who's worked her ass off to set him free, someone who hasn't charged him a penny since this whole thing started?”

“You're thinking logically, that's your problem; DellaVecchio thinks like a runaway truck. The guy's got no brakes on his impulses. For one thing, your girlfriend's probably the only woman he's had any contact with since he went in. I'm guessing she's got more than a cameo role in his fantasies at this point.”

There was no need for Padgett to elaborate. Anyone with a basic understanding of DellaVecchio's psychological makeup would come to the same conclusion.

“Consider his take on this whole thing,” Padgett said. “You can bet he remembers all the talk afterwards about Miss Kennedy's ‘tactical mistake' during his trial. That's code and he knows it. If she'd pleaded him down to aggravated assault instead of trying to prove Dagnolo wrong, he'd have been out in three years. But she didn't. For him that translates: It's her fault he was in prison five years longer than he had to be. Plus, he knows the whole Scarecrow nickname started with her ‘straw man' theory during trial. He's smart enough to understand all that, and resent it.”

“It's not like we've ignored the possibilities, Burke. We know what we're dealing with here. And I think you're underestimating Brenna. Defense attorneys aren't exactly delicate.”

“Can she defend herself?”

“Burke, why are you doing this?”

“Because DellaVecchio's different.”

“Because of fetal alcohol syndrome, Burke. Diminished capacity. That's been Brenna's point from the start. The law shouldn't ignore the truth, and she's trying to make sure it doesn't. Especially since, as it turns out, DellaVecchio's not guilty.”

“You're still dealing with a malevolent force here.”

“Oh Christ, Burke.” Christensen stood up. “Thank you for your concern. Really. But what about the other psychological aspect of this case? It's not just a sideshow here. Let's not let the bigger issue get lost in all the Scarecrow hysterics.”

“The memory stuff?”

Christensen picked up the galley proof of his
Journal
article and shook it. “None of this would've happened if the investigators hadn't led Teresa on. I examined every stage of the identification process in this case to show how it skewed everything,
everything,
from that point forward. This was a classic case of memory manipulation, and here we are eight years later cleaning up the mess.”

Christensen sat down again. “They walked Teresa Harnett through a couple dozen photo six-packs, and when she finally pointed to DellaVecchio's mug shot and said there was something familiar about him, do you know what Milsevic said? ‘We
thought
that might be the guy.' ”

Padgett nodded. “Reinforcement.”

“And the next stage, the lineup. Brenna dug out the videotape of that session, and I'm telling you, it's an indictment. They walk DellaVecchio in with five others. Before she says a word, Milsevic points to DellaVecchio and says ‘Guy's got a record a mile long.' ”

“All of a sudden, she's pretty sure DellaVecchio's the one,” Padgett said, nodding.

“So by the time Harnett gets to court, she remembers every disgusting thing that bastard did to her, in living color, with full orchestration. Her original statement had none of that. I mean, where are all the people demanding to know how we got here from there?”

Padgett picked up his briefcase. “You're right, Jim. Absolutely right. And none of that changes anything I've said. Guilty or not, the young man Miss Kennedy's just put back into this community is dangerous. There's no other word for it. And based on what I know about him—one man's opinion, mind you—I believe he's a young man with a score to settle. That's all I'm saying. You want to be real careful of that.”

If Padgett had turned and left, if he'd tried to infuse the moment with the drama of an exit, Christensen would have had the excuse he needed to dismiss the whole conversation as a staged moment in an increasingly public career. But the psychiatrist remained, fixing his eyes on Christensen, not smiling, like a man delivering a message he considered urgent. That was utterly disconcerting.

“You're serious.”

“As a heart attack,” Padgett said. “One man's opinion, for whatever it's worth.”

“So noted, Burke.”

Padgett turned finally to go.

“Burke?” he said.

Padgett looked over his shoulder. Christensen scanned his face for signs of smug satisfaction, but found none.

“Thanks.”