Sympathy Between Humans

28

“I don’t see a case here,” Kilander said.

It was the morning after Marlinchen and I had our drinks out by the lake, and I was doing something I’d done a number of times since the morning I’d told Kenny Olson I wanted to be a cop: conferring with a prosecutor over the feasibility of criminal charges.

It was, though, on an unofficial basis. Kilander and I were spending the lunch hour in his office, eating takeout I’d brought up: a curried chicken salad over lettuce, dinner rolls, and iced tea. I’d just told him what I knew about the Hennessys: Hugh’s beatings and Aidan’s exile, the inexplicable animosity Hugh felt toward his eldest son.

“It’s an ugly story, no question,” Kilander said. “But the purpose of juvenile and family law isn’t to punish, it’s to intervene. No agency would try to prosecute a parent for past child abuse that didn’t result in permanent injury.”

“I know that,” I said, tearing my previously untouched roll in half and spreading butter on it. More than anything else, I was stalling. What I was about to tell Christian Kilander, I hadn’t even shared with Marlinchen yet. “What I’ve told you is essentially background. That wasn’t the end of the story.”

“Ah,” Kilander said. “Should I cancel my one o’clock deposition?”

He was teasing me; I’d known he’d do that. I’d known he’d play devil’s advocate, too. It didn’t bother me. That was partly what I’d come to him for, his sharp and reductive mind.

“Sarah?” Kilander prompted.

“I think Aidan shot himself with his father’s gun,” I said, setting the roll down uneaten. “I think Hugh covered it up.”

For the first time, Kilander smiled. “You come up with the most amazing theories,” he said. “Do tell how you arrived at this one.”

I told him about Aidan’s missing finger and the explanation Marlinchen had given me for it, the neighbor’s vicious dog that had supposedly bitten the three-year-old boy, causing him to be away from home for what Marlinchen had called “a long time” and to return without a little finger on his left hand.

“Why don’t you believe it?” Kilander asked.

“I’ve seen the area they live in,” I said. “They have neighbors, but not immediate ones. It would have been quite a long trek for a three-year-old to make, to put himself in the path of a neighbor’s dog.”

Kilander said nothing.

“At that same time, Hugh Hennessy owned some antique pistols. He kept them in his study and showed them to reporters; I’ve seen them in magazine photos. But at some point later, Hennessy developed an aversion to guns. He won’t have them in his home.” I banished an unwelcome thought of Cicero. “Meanwhile,” I went on, “Hugh decided to replace the carpet in his study. He had the money to have it done professionally, and he wasn’t a do-it-yourself type. Yet he did the work himself. Badly. You can see it was done by hand. The kids estimate he did this about fourteen years ago, when the twins would have been three to four years old.

“At around this time, in her earliest memories, Marlinchen Hennessy has a rather odd recollection. She says lightning struck the house, and that it upset her mother to the point of crying, and that this gave her a fear of storms for years to come. Storms and loud noises,” I added, stressing the last two words.

“Couldn’t there really have been a lightning strike?” Kilander asked.

“I’ve seen the house from the outside,” I said. “There’s no damage from it anywhere.”

“So it was repaired,” Kilander said.

I shook my head. “That’s what I thought, but Marlinchen Hennessy can’t even point to the spot where the house was hit. How could she have vivid memories of the night it happened, but no memory of seeing the damage, or workmen climbing up to repair it, anything like that?”

Kilander nodded.

“Speaking of home repair,” I went on, “in addition to the carpet Hugh replaced himself, there are bleach spots on the carpet in the upstairs hallway, like someone scrubbed out some stains. They’re consistent with Hugh cleaning up bloodstains himself, to the best of his limited ability.”

Kilander nodded, speculative. “So you think the little boy shot himself with his father’s gun, and the finger wasn’t salvageable.”

“He was just old enough to be curious like that, and disobedient. He’d probably seen guns on TV,” I said.

“And Hugh lied about what happened to cover it up,” Kilander went on.

“It would have been professionally disastrous,” I said. “Imagine what the media would have made of it: ‘Negligent Father Leaves Loaded Gun in Unlocked Desk; Adorable Tot Shoots Self with It.’ Hugh was a bigger name in those days; the press was interested in him. It would have been bad publicity for any writer, but worse for Hugh. He’d written two popular books on family and love and loyalty. Being a family man was his-” How did marketing people put it? “It was his brand.”

Kilander scraped the rest of the chicken salad onto his plate. He was eating more than his share, but I kept quiet. There was something endearing about his unabashed greed.

“So Hugh tried to keep it quiet,” I said. “The twins were just young enough to have their memories reprogrammed like that. If your parents tell you something long enough, you believe it,” I said. “But if you talk to the Hennessy twins, their memories don’t line up. Marlinchen remembers lightning striking the house. Aidan doesn’t. Marlinchen says Aidan was in the hospital a long time. Aidan doesn’t think he was. Something’s screwy there.”

Kilander sipped his coffee, thinking. I got up and walked over to the window, looking out.

“It explains the abuse,” I went on. “Hugh cleaned up the house as best he could, but Aidan was the one thing Hugh couldn’t sweep under the rug. He was always around, with his maimed hand, and it probably just got under Hugh’s skin. I think things might have been okay if his wife hadn’t died, if he didn’t have a bad back and an ulcer… I think he was just under a little too much stress, and Aidan became the scapegoat. Because of Hugh’s guilt.”

“Do you have any physical evidence for this?”

“No,” I said. “Not yet.”

“What about ER records?” Kilander said. “Sounds like the kid got some kind of treatment, if the finger was removed neatly.”

I shook my head. “Medical records from fourteen years ago? I’m sure they’re in a box, in a warehouse, somewhere. But I’d need a subpoena to get at them, and that’s not going to happen with the evidence I have.” I paused. “That’s why I haven’t told either of the twins about this. I don’t want to shake them up, not until I have some proof.”

“When will that be, exactly?” Kilander asked.

Touché.

“Right,” Kilander said. “And here’s the million-dollar question: So what?” He didn’t wait for me to answer. “Even if you found incontrovertible evidence in support of your theory about the gun, it was still an accident. If Hugh lied to his children, that’s not a crime. And that’s just the grounds part of it.”

“What’s the other part?” I asked.

“You said this guy has aphasia, from the stroke?”

I nodded.

“That’s probably the worst possible handicap he could have sustained, from a legal standpoint. If he can’t communicate, he can’t participate fully in his own defense. Even the most hard-core of judges would throw the case out so hard it’d bounce.”

“I wasn’t talking about a prosecution this month, or even this year,” I said. “He’s recovering. He could recover completely.”

“Or he might not,” Kilander said. He put his plate and napkin into the plastic bag the food had come in. It was time for his one o’clock deposition. I put my plate in, too, and tied the top of the bag shut, planning to drop it into a trash can in the outer office.

“You make a hell of a case for it, Pribek,” Kilander said. “If it makes you feel any better, I believe you when you say something’s screwy out there. But even if you’re correct on every single point, I just don’t see a courtroom in this family’s future.”

That afternoon, my onetime partner John Vang called me. He was investigating a rape case, but the 16-year-old victim had been nearly monosyllabic in front of a male detective. Vang thought follow-up questioning by a female investigator would help. Was I available?

It took me nearly thirty minutes to break down the wall the girl showed to Vang. Later, I almost wished I hadn’t. Three assailants, all known to her, in an apartment-complex laundry room. Five separate assaults, three vaginal, two rectal. I left feeling numb in the bright sunlight of midafternoon.

My conversation with Kilander, too, still weighed on my mind. I knew he was right, but it was at times like these that the system truly baffled me. I wasn’t sure what anyone could have done differently, yet the world had pretty clearly failed Aidan. I knew there were plenty of child and family programs that put a great deal of money and time into their efforts to protect the young, but sometimes it seemed like rain falling directly onto the ocean, nothing getting where it needed to go.

My cell phone rang. I picked it up, one hand on the wheel.

“Detective Pribek? This is Lou Vignale at the First Precinct.”

“Hey, Lou,” I said. “What can I do for you?”

“I’ve got a girl here who says she’s one of your informants. Her name’s Ghislaine Morris.”

“Ghislaine?” It wasn’t a name that had been on my mind for a while. “Yeah, I know her. What’s the arrest for?”

Vignale hadn’t specifically said she’d been arrested, but I’d had a premonition. Nothing else that had happened today was wholesome or inspiring.

“Shoplifting,” Vignale said. “She was at Marshall Field’s, jamming stuff under the blankets in her baby stroller. But she says she’s helping you on something, and you’d want her released.”

“She said what?” I ran my free hand through my hair. This, on top of everything else… Maybe Shiloh was right, and I shouldn’t even have kept her phone number.

“Ghislaine is confused,” I said. “She is not helping me at the current time on anything.”

“She said you might say that,” Vignale said. “And she said to remind you about the guy in the Third Precinct. Some kind of doctor?”

I opened my mouth to speak and then closed it again, thinking, Oh, hell. Ghislaine was manipulative, but she wasn’t stupid. Now I had my work cut out for me.

“Field’s caught her in the store, right?” I asked. “So they got all the items back undamaged?”

“Right, but they want to press charges.”

That was fairly common procedure- department stores always like to discourage shoplifters- and trying to dissuade the manager from pressing charges probably wouldn’t be easy, but it would have to be done.

“I’ll be down to get Ghislaine as soon as I talk to the store manager,” I said. “Tell her to sit tight, okay?”

“Uh-huh,” Vignale said. There was more than a little wry disapproval in his voice, but he said no more, except “I’ll tell her.”

Forty-five minutes later, I was waiting at a side door while Officer Vignale went back to retrieve Ghislaine.

The heavy door swung open and Ghislaine came out. Despite her everyday clothes- a T-shirt and cutoffs and bright plastic flats- she smelled of an only-for-evening scent; she’d been sampling at the perfume counter.

“Bye!” she said brightly to Vignale, who did not respond. Ghislaine turned to me. “Thanks for coming down so fast, Sarah.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said pleasantly. “Where’s Shadrick?” All Ghislaine had with her was a bag from Sam Goody.

“Oh,” she said. “My friend Flora lives near here. I got her to pick him up for me and take him home.”

“Did you take the bus down here?”

“Yeah,” she said.

“You need a ride home, then?”

Ghislaine gave me a slanted look. She sensed that my generosity was out of place, given the circumstances. “Really?” she asked.

“I’m going that way anyhow,” I lied.

“That’d be great,” she said, her good humor bubbling up again.

As we headed out of the station, she hefted the Sam Goody bag at her side, and said, “Don’t worry, this stuff’s legit.”

“I know,” I said. “Generally, shoplifters don’t bother to steal the bag.”

“Oh, listen to you,” she mocked, opening the car door to slide inside. “The stuff at Field’s was, like, chickenshit, not even a hundred dollars’ worth of stuff. Otherwise you wouldn’t have been able to fix it.”

We pulled out into the street and began to navigate the one-way interchanges of downtown Minneapolis. I headed toward Ghislaine’s neighborhood- Cicero’s, too- but I took us down several side streets, moving away from the city’s center and from streets on which the buses ran.

“This isn’t the fastest way to my place,” Ghislaine said, flipping down the sun visor to look for a mirror.

“I know,” I said. “I thought we could use an extra couple of minutes to talk.” I damped down the noise from the radio.

She glanced over at me. “About what?” she asked, shifting in her seat.

“We need to talk about what you told Officer Vignale, about you being my informant and helping me with the ‘doctor’ in the Third Precinct.”

“Well, that was true,” she said.

“Right. I asked you about him, you told me what you knew, I compensated you. That was the extent of your help. You’re not assisting me on an ongoing basis.”

Ghislaine looked ahead, as if the traffic were fascinating.

“So unless I’m mistaken, when you told Officer Vignale to ‘remind’ me of it, you were threatening to give up Cisco unless I came down and bailed you out.”

Mixed feelings flickered in her eyes; insecurity turned to a determination to counterattack. “Well, I just thought it was interesting,” Ghislaine said, her voice rising in imitation of harmless surmise, “that I never heard anything about him getting arrested. I was like, ‘I told Sarah about him, I wonder what happened.’ So I thought maybe I should tell someone else.” Ghislaine smiled, all innocence. “I mean, what better place for an agoraphobic guy than prison? He wouldn’t have to go outside for years.”

“ Cicero ’s not agoraphobic,” I said.

“ Cicero?” Ghislaine repeated, and there was a world of speculation in the one word. Oh, hell, I thought. I hadn’t meant to use his real name.

“What is this guy,” she went on, her tone brightly insinuating, “your new best friend?”

Ghislaine had seen me around the neighborhood; I knew that from our encounter on the bus. And she heard things, which was what made her a good informant. I wondered how much she really knew about my repeated visits to the towers. Obviously she knew enough. She’d guessed that threatening Cicero would get her what she wanted, and I’d unwillingly confirmed it by fixing her shoplifting bust.

I pulled to the curb.

“What are you doing?” she asked, looking around at the side street we were on, brown brick apartment buildings on each side.

“This is where you get out,” I said.

“But we’re a mile from where I live!” Ghislaine protested.

“Yeah, I know,” I said. I turned in my seat, one elbow resting on the steering wheel. “You could use the walk, Ghislaine. You need some time alone to get your head straight and think about how smart it is for you to try to jerk me around.”

Her coral lips opened slightly, in shock.

“I’m going to say this real loud and clear for the cheap seats: I don’t explain to you how I do my job, and you don’t ask,” I said. “You don’t drop my name to get out of petty-theft busts, and you’re never going to mention Cicero Ruiz again, not even to a meter reader. You forget that, and I’m going to make sure you end up in an agoraphobe’s paradise.” I put my hand on the gearshift. “Now get out.”

Ghislaine’s lips tightened, but she climbed out of the car, her plastic bag rustling. She didn’t close the door right away.

“I didn’t know you were so hard up, Detective Pribek,” she said bitterly.

I reached over and pulled the door shut, put the car in gear. She yelled after me.

“If you dig crippled guys, Sarah, the Cities are full of white ones! Why don’t you just go down to the VA Hospital and pick yourself one out!”