Flesh and bones

32

The lights were dimmed. New Age music played from Millie's tape recorder. It sounded like tinkling wind chimes, a flute, and waves pounding a rocky shore. Chrissy leaned back in a recliner in front of the jury box, Millie telling her to relax, to let her mind run free, to approach a brilliant white light. Her body was growing heavy, Millie said; it was sinking deeper and deeper into the chair. Then she had Chrissy count backward from fifty, her voice logy.

I didn't know about Chrissy, but I was getting sleepy. I was also watching her cream-colored Emanuel Ungaro skirt creep up her thighs and hoped it neither distracted the men nor pissed off the women sitting in the jury box.

It only took a few moments before Chrissy was in that never-never land between somnolence and wakefulness. "What is your name?" Millie Santiago asked.

"Christina Bernhardt," she said, eyes still closed, "but on my card, it just says Chrissy."

"What card, Chrissy?"

"My composite. I'm a model."

"Are you a good model, Chrissy?"

"When Chrissy's good, she's very good." She chuckled to herself. "And when Chrissy's bad…"

"What do you do, Chrissy?"

"I make scads of money for pouting or cocking a hip or hitting a volleyball on the beach."

"Do you enjoy your work?"

"It's all right." Sounding bored.

"Are you happy?"

No answer.

"Chrissy…"

"Sometimes."

"When?"

"When I dream about being married and being a mother."

I liked that. This wasn't just a spoiled, high-paid party girl. Chrissy Bernhardt had dreams of a ranch house with a white picket fence, just like everybody else. At the prosecution table, Abe Socolow was scowling, or was that his version of a smile?

"What do you want from life?"

"I want to eat hot fudge sundaes and get fat."

The jurors smiled. The answers had the ring of normalcy, of truth.

"You mentioned getting married, becoming a mother. Are those goals, too?"

"Sure. But no one's ever asked me. Ever."

"Maybe you haven't met the right man."

"I've met Mr. Wrong a thousand times." The pain in her voice filled the courtroom. "I'm damaged goods. That's what he said."

"Who?"

No answer.

"Chrissy."

"He said I'd always be his, even if I was grown up, even if I was married and a mommy myself, 'cause he was the first. He told me I belonged to him and every other man would know it."

"Is that true?"

"Yes. Everybody knows."

"What does everybody know, Chrissy?"

She sniffled back a tear but didn't answer. I thought of the song that had been playing just before Chrissy shot her father.

Everybody knows that the dice are loaded. Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed.

"I've fucked a lot of men," she said, and one of the women jurors gasped. "But I've only made love to a few. I fucked men because they bought me dinner. I fucked men because I was bored. I fucked men for no reason at all."

Now Socolow leaned back in chair and truly smiled, if that's what a shark does just before swallowing a grouper. Judge Stanger was glaring at me as if I were the circus elephant with loose bowels. I was afraid his gavel would end our little experiment before it had a chance.

"I had dreams," Chrissy said. "For years, the same dreams, snakes curling up my legs, underneath my skirt, getting inside my panties, and then inside me."

She sobbed and pulled her knees tight up against her chest. There was no sound in the courtroom other than the wheeze of the ancient air conditioning and the scratching of pen on paper in the press row.

"Tell me about the men," Dr. Santiago said.

"So many men. Always laughing."

"Why would they laugh?"

"Not out loud. Not so that I could hear them. But they laughed at me. They knew. I could tell by looking at them that they knew."

"What did they know, Chrissy?"

"They knew I was dirty." She curled into the fetal position. "Who would ever want me?"

"What made you dirty, Chrissy?"

"So long ago. So long… I don't remember." She seemed to drift off.

"Let's go back to that time. Let me help you remember. I've seen your pictures. You had a ponytail and you rode a palomino. How old are you?"

Silence.

"Chrissy."

"Sugarcane."

"What?"

"I'm eleven and my horse's name is Sugarcane." The little girl voice. "She broke a leg and Daddy had to shoot her."

"That must have made you very sad."

Another sob.

"What else makes you sad?"

No answer.

"Does anything frighten you?"

"The sounds."

"What sounds, Chrissy?"

"At night. In my room."

"What's in your room?"

"He is. The door opens, and he comes in. I can hear the floor squeaking even though he walks on tippy-toes. The bed squeaks, too, but I don't make a sound because he tells me not to. His voice is so rough. He sounds like a pig grunting, and he sweats so much, the bed is all wet. I get scared, 'cause I think he's sick or hurt."

I wasn't breathing. Her anguish cut to my heart. And I was getting what I deserved. After I'd discredited Schein for his methods, he still turned out to be right. Harry Bernhardt had been a slime who raped his daughter. All the fancy footwork and we were right back where we started. Chrissy had the motive, but not the lawful excuse, to kill her father.

"I pull the sheet up over my head so I can't see," Chrissy said, "and I think about an island with green cliffs and high waterfalls. I don't really feel anything until morning, when my peepee hurts. I tell him it hurts, but he keeps coming to my room anyway."

"How many times has this happened, Chrissy?"

"I don't know. Lots of times."

"Who does this to you?"

Another sob.

"Chrissy, who comes into your bed at night?"

A sniffle caught in her throat and she coughed.

"Chrissy, is it someone you know?"

"Yes."

"Someone in your family?"

"Yes."

"Is it your father?"

"My father?"

"Is it your father who comes to your bed and hurts you?"

"No, of course not. Daddy would never do that."

What? In the courtroom, time was frozen. No movement except for dust motes floating in the shaft of an overhead spotlight. A moment of crystal clarity, of blinding intensity, a moment carved into the soft metal of my memory with the forged steel blade of the truth.

"Who does it, Chrissy?"

She didn't seem able to answer.

"Who comes to you in the night? Who frightens you? Who hurts you?"

Unconsciously, Chrissy wiped away a tear with the back of a hand. A little girl's gesture. Sweet and innocent and so painful as to sear the soul.

"My brother," Chrissy said. "Guy hurts me. It's always Guy."