Flesh and bones

12

"What can I do for you, Mr. Lassiter?" she asked.

"You can call me Jake."

"Fine, and you can call me Dr. Santiago." She belted out a hearty laugh. "Actually, you can call me Millie."

Dr. Milagros Santiago was a heavyset woman in her fifties, with glasses perched on top of her forehead. Her office was on the second floor of a three-story stucco building on Coral Way, a crowded street lined with banyan trees and small shops. It was a hot June day, but inside, the air conditioning was booming full blast. A rubber tree sat in one corner of the room, looking forlorn and in need of therapy. The wallpaper was beige grass cloth. A couch and matching chairs were in muted, soothing earth tones.

"Charlie Riggs told me you might help me with a case," I said.

" Mi querido hombre! Are you Charlie's friend?"

"He's like a father to me."

"What a dear man. We worked together on psychological profiles of serial killers when I was with the Behavioral Science Unit."

"Charlie didn't tell me you were an FBI agent."

"I wasn't. I had a fellowship, wrote a bunch of papers nobody read. I spent three years listening to death row inmates describe their sexual fantasies, then opted for a change of venue."

"Private practice," I said.

"Yeah. Now, I listen to housewives tell me how they dream Clint Eastwood will park his pickup truck in front of their house and pick flowers for them."

She slid the glasses down from her forehead and studied me a moment. Then she stood up and walked to a counter where an espresso machine was humming. She turned a lever, and thick black liquid fizzed into two thimble-sized containers. "If I give my patients a full cup," she said, "they talk so fast I can't take notes."

She handed me the steaming rocket fuel, which, for reasons my Cuban friends cannot fathom, I drink without sugar. "I saw a shrink a couple of times," I said.

"Good for you. Some men would never do that, or admit it if they had."

"I'd just been cut by the Dolphins, sacked by a girlfriend, and rejected by three law schools."

"Your life seemed to be at its nadir, and I suspect your self-esteem had taken a tumble."

"You would think so, but I went to the shrink to find out why I didn't seem to care. I spent all my time partying and windsurfing and hanging out. Drinking too much, sleeping too late, and settling into an unmotivated life of unrelenting fun. I was a rebel without a clue, and I needed to find out why."

She seemed to think it over while she sipped at the syrupy drink. "Your indifference may have been a defense mechanism to failure. You really did care, but you couldn't admit to yourself that you did."

"Yep. And once I figured that out, I set some goals and changed my life."

"And you've stayed off the couch ever since."

"No. Once, a few years ago, a woman died. A woman I cared about. I thought I could have saved her, should have saved her, so I had some things to work out."

"Did you?"

"No. I still feel guilty, and I have still have nightmares. So I'm batting five hundred with your profession."

"Better than most. What can I do for you, Jake?"

"Charlie says you've done some research on repressed memory."

" Ay! Don't tell me you have a client who wants to sue a parent for sexual abuse twenty years go."

"I wish she'd taken that route," I said, then sipped at the espresso. I told her everything I knew, starting with the night at the club, Chrissy's gunning down her lather, the recitation of her memories, and Dr. Schein's notes and tape recordings, including the gap I couldn't explain. When I was done, I pulled copies of Schein's file out of my briefcase and gave them to her.

"I'll go through everything," she said, "but I can tell you right now that I'm skeptical."

"About what part of the story?" I asked.

"Everything."

Then she told me why.

"Memory isn't neatly stored away in files waiting to be called up like bytes on a computer disk," she said. "Human memory is labile, dynamic, and…" She searched for the word. "Malleable."

"By therapists, you mean."

"By anyone in a position of control."

"What about recovering repressed memories?"

"Oh, that!" She waved her hand in the air, seeming to dismiss the notion. "We can thank Freud for the theory that all our experiences are stored away somewhere in the brain, just waiting to be recovered by therapy. Of course, even he changed his mind about that. A huge number of his patients seemed to recall terrible memories of childhood incest. Initially, Freud accepted the stories as true. Later, he concluded they were what he called screen memories, fantasies hiding primitive wishes. Others believe they're just false memories."

"So what's the truth?"

She shrugged. "Who knows? But I can tell you that I despise the emotional strip-mining that therapists use to recover so-called repressed memories."

"Millie, you're losing me. Is it the method you object to or is it the underlying concept of repressed memory?"

"Oh, memories may be repressed and then recovered, but does that make them true? I'm sure you remember many events in your life that are absolutely false."

"I don't get it. If I remember them, they're true."

"Not necessarily. You may try to store memories like a librarian shelving books. But each of us constructs a personal myth about what we think is true. We may exaggerate. Good times in the past become even better, hard times even worse. Individuals who were bad become outright demons. And some of our memories might simply be dreams that never took place at all."

My face must have given it away. Millie asked, "What's wrong?"

"I was just thinking how much Abe Socolow would love to have you on his witness list."

"But he can't."

"No, not after I retained you."

"Look, Jake, I don't want to kill your case, but you should know the truth."

"That's why I came here."

"Good. Then I'll tell you."

She told me how memory resembled a blackboard with lots of chalk and lots of erasers. Whatever was written last tended to stick. A witness to a crime would remember it differently-erroneously-after reading an inaccurate account in the newspaper. She told me there were two kinds of truth. "Historical truth really happened. Narrative truth is what we remember. There are true memories with false details, and false memories with true details."

I followed most of what she said, my mind zooming along on two cups of Cuban coffee. I'm always encountering new disciplines in my practice-DNA testing, blood-splatter evidence, voiceprinting-and I always reach the same conclusion. At first, a new field seems simple enough, but the more you learn, the more complicated it becomes. The more rules, the more exceptions. The more experts, the more debates.

I know my own limitations. "Brilliant" is not an adjective usually associated with my name. "Dogged," perhaps. Same as in football. I was never a fancy high-stepper like Rusty MacLean, who could hip-fake a tackier and wink at a cheerleader at the same time, I was never called "flashy" or "spectacular," not even in high school, where I was a fullback who wrapped two hands around the ball, lowered my head, and ran north and south. In college, I was a bread-and-butter linebacker who liked to take on the tight end, and as a pro, I was second string. I don't miss the glory, because you can't miss what you never had.

So here I was trying to figure out whether Lawrence Schein had handed me a sophisticated scientific defense or a smoke-and-mirrors sham that Abe Socolow would destroy in front of a jury. Another thought, too. What if it was a sham, but Socolow didn't know it? What if I could win with it? Would I?

After a moment, I said, "Dr. Schein told me that psychological trauma is like a karate chop to the brain that interrupts the normal process of memory encoding."

"How colorful," Millie Santiago said, shaking her head.

"He told me Chrissy could have put herself into a trance when the abuse was going on, so that the images of what happened were recorded, but without the whole story, in far-flung parts of the brain. The images never got transferred to the part of the brain where stories dwell. All he had to do was open the gateway to the parts where the images were stored, and they could re-create the memories."

"Re-create or create?" she asked, standing up and walking to the shaded window. Outside, horns honked as rush hour traffic crawled west toward Coral Gables and Westchester. "I'm sure neurologists would be fascinated. We know damn little about thought processes. We know the nerve cells of the brain, the neurons, transmit information by electrical impulses. We know the cells release chemicals called neurotransmitters into synapses, gaps between the neurons. But we don't know where memories are stored and how they're recalled. Your Dr. Schein is part of the recovered-memory movement, which relies on feelings and images and theories that can neither be proved nor disproved. If it feels real, it must be real. The memories must be there if we can only dig them up. But doesn't it make more sense that traumatic memories are clearer, more detailed, and longer-lasting than any others?"

"Yeah, I would have thought so, but I'm not a doctor."

She came back to her desk and sat down. "How long did it take Schein to uncover these alleged memories?"

I smiled ruefully as I imagined Abe Socolow asking the same question. "Several months. He wasn't getting anywhere until he started the hypnosis."

She slammed a hand onto her desk. "Of course. Hypnosis simply enhanced her suggestibility. In fact, the more easily someone is hypnotized, the more amenable to suggestion and manipulation they are." The doctor thumbed through Schein's medical records. "Did he have her on any medication?"

"Yeah. Chrissy was ingesting enough drugs to make Cheech think he was Chong."

She came to a page and stopped. "Here it is. Xanax, Ativan, Mellaril, Prozac, Desyrel, Restoril, Darvocet, and lithium. Anything on her own? Was she smoking pot, dropping acid?"

"She says not. Charlie had a drug screen done and it didn't turn up anything."

"Let me see it."

I found the report and handed it to her.

"She had traces of barbiturates."

"I know. The lab says they're from the sedatives."

"Not this mix. She's got 3-hydroxyamobarbital, N-glucosylamobarbital, and 3-carboxyamobarbital."

"Yeah, so what?"

"It all adds up to sodium amytal. It releases inhibitions, makes people more voluble. It's often used in hypnosis therapy. Schein would probably tell you it's a truth serum. I think it's just as likely to warp memory."

"Why didn't Schein put it in his records?" I asked.

She threw up her hands. "You're the lawyer. You figure it out."

"So, Millie, what are you saying? Schein secretly drugged Chrissy, then implanted memories of abuse that never happened?"

"Are you asking what I can testify to under oath?"

"Use the legal standard. What can you say to a reasonable degree of medical certainty?"

She shrugged. "Who the hell knows? Should I tell you what I suspect?"

"I think I know that, Millie."

"Look, memory fades with time, making it more susceptible to postevent information."

"Like a therapist's suggestions."

"Exactly." She sat down on a corner of the desk. "How will you deal with the tapes in court?"

"I don't know. Schein's questions weren't so much leading as 'pushing.' Chrissy denied being raped. Then the recorder was turned off. When it came back on, she remembered."

Millie Santiago was shaking her head.

I kept talking. "We'll have to produce the tapes, and Socolow will have a field day. He'll probably move to strike all the testimony about the abuse, and if that fails, he'll be happy to get the tapes in front of the jury."

"Heads you lose, tails you lose. Dr. Schein hurts you as much as he helps you."

Now it was my turn to stand and pace. "The problem is, I need Schein. I have no defense to a murder one charge except what he gave me."

"I'm sorry," Dr. Santiago said. "I didn't mean to clobber you like this."

"No. That's all right. I have to know the truth."

"Maybe another therapist would agree with Schein. I could recommend a couple if you want to try them."

"You mean someone who'll say what I want?"

"That's the way the game is played, isn't it?"

"I guess. I had a blood-spatter expert on the stand in a case not long ago. The state attorney is cross-examining, trying to be tough. He asks, 'Did Mr. Lassiter pay you to lie for him?' And the witness says, 'No, he doesn't have that kind of money.' "

"A little cynical, are we, Jake?"

"Yeah. You know the acronym for an expert?"

"Tell me."

" W itness H aving O ther R easonable E xplanation."

"Don't get hostile, Jake, or I'll have to suggest therapy."

"Sorry. It happens whenever I have a woman about to take a fall."

"A woman?"

"Did I say 'woman'? I meant 'client.' "

Her eyes twinkled at me. "Uh-huh."

"Hey, Millie, cut me a break."

"You left something out of the story, didn't you, Jake?"

The drone of the air conditioning was the only sound in the room. "Yeah, I left something out."

"You want some free advice?"

"Sure."

"Pull back. Don't get emotionally involved. There's only pain where you're headed."

"I know. I've been there before."

She cocked her head and studied me. "You want to talk about it? No charge."

An image flashed by, Susan Corrigan facedown in a swimming pool. "I've let someone down before."

"Someone?"

"A woman. I thought I could help her, but I botched it." Another image, Lila Summers looking out to sea, then the flash of an explosion, the boat tearing itself apart. "Maybe we can talk sometime."

"Anytime you say. If you're Doc Riggs's friend, mi casa es su casa."

I gathered my briefcase and stood up. "Thanks, Millie. Send me a bill."

"Don't worry. I will." She walked me to the door. "Oh, Jake, one more thing."

I turned around. "Yeah?"

"I'm not saying that memories can't be repressed and then later recovered. I can't say it's impossible. But suggestions can implant phantom memories that look like they're repressed, or they can shape real memories into something else."

"Dammit, Millie! What are you saying? What did Schein do?"

Her look was filled with regret, as if she'd like to help me but didn't know how. "Maybe Schein implanted your client's memories of abuse."

"Yeah, I already figured that out."

"But maybe he didn't."

"Meaning what?"

"Maybe she did it, Jake. Maybe she concocted these memories to fool her shrink. And to fool you, too."