Act of Deceit

Chapter 7

D onnally separated the damp pages and hung them on a clothesline in Janie Nguyen’s unfinished basement. Some were moldy. Some were unreadable. Others were only readable against the light. It seemed to Donnally that the file, sent along with Charles Brown from the developmental center, had been stored in Elsa’s often flooded garage for the purpose of letting it dissolve into a past that no one wanted to think about.

He called it Janie’s basement even though he still owned the house and rented it to her for just enough money to cover the mortgage, taxes, and insurance. He came down every few months to make repairs, but otherwise treated the place as hers.

And not out of guilt. Or, at least, not out of guilt in an ordinary sense.

He and Janie were simply permanent features of each other’s landscapes, like California place names weighted with history: Meeting of Two Springs. Creek of Sorrows. Canyon of Hunger. They both knew they wouldn’t grow old without each other, but also not quite together.

The grinding of the garage door opener broke Donnally’s concentration, and a minute later he heard her footfalls on the wooden stairway. He glanced up at her bare calves coming into view and imagined them already wrapped around him. A few more steps and her skirt came into view and he forced his mind to change the subject.

“You find him?” Janie asked, as she took the turn onto the concrete floor.

“He’s in the wind.”

Janie smiled. “More likely the bushes.”

She held her nose when the odor of the moldy pages reached her.

“Jeez, those stink. Why don’t you let some air in?”

She walked over to the workbench and pushed open the window set into the cripple wall between the foundation and the first floor of the two-story house. She turned back and pointed at the hanging sheets.

“What’s that?”

“Charles Brown’s file from the group home.”

“You’re not supposed to have those.” Janie knew the rules. She was a psychiatrist at the VA hospital at Fort Miley, a half mile north. “You didn’t steal it, did you?”

“The owner gave them to me.”

She gave him an up-from-under look.

“It’s true,” Donnally said. “Turns out I was the least of many other evils.”

A gusting Pacific wind that had skimmed the beach a few blocks away, now pushed in through the window and rocked the pages on the line.

Donnally glanced in the direction of the basement door. “You better close that or the house is going to get a dose.”

Janie nodded, then headed toward the stairs. “Are you going to want to have dinner?” She looked back over her shoulder and winked. “Or just dessert?”

D onnally turned back to the file. The smile that Janie left him with died when he read through the fragments of Brown’s diagnosis not obliterated by mold: bipolar… psychotic episodes… homicidal and sexual ideations.

He held the handwritten log up to the overhead fluorescent light. The chronology showed that Brown had been sent first to Atascadero State Hospital, then on to Napa five years later, when he was considered less dangerous. Ten years after that, the doctors got his mental illness under control and sent him to the Stockton Developmental Center, hoping that despite his mental limitations, he could be trained to control his violence. But he started assaulting female patients, so they moved him on to the more secure Fresno center.

Brown’s violent outbursts lessened until he had two consecutive trouble-free years and the Fresno Superior Court released him to a local group home. He stayed there until he got caught fondling a sometimes delusional female resident. The local DA declined to prosecute, arguing that unless the staff could prove she didn’t consent, there wasn’t a crime. He recommended justice-by-bus-ticket and Brown was sent to Elsa’s men-only home in East Oakland.

Donnally squinted at the faded handwriting on the original intake sheet from the late 1980s and made out the name of Brown’s next of kin: Katrisha Brown, but the relationship field was blank. And whoever she was-sister, mother, wife, aunt, or grandmother-over a decade working the San Francisco projects had taught Donnally that she wouldn’t be pleased to find him knocking on her door.