The rest of the dream slipped away then, just as suddenly as it had emerged. I heard something dripping and realized the milk had overflowed the bowl. Perfect, I thought, as I scurried to find a paper towel. It was only after I’d mopped up the mess and could consider the dream’s meaning that I understood both its source and my anxiety. It didn’t require any special psychiatric training. A child could have figured it out.
I hadn’t yet done what my lawyer had asked me to do.
Still in my bathrobe, I turned on the television news. According to Tom Skilling, the Windy City’s cheery messenger of meteorological calamity, the snowstorm that had started the day before wasn’t expected to taper off until midafternoon. In the meantime, conditions were bleak. Schools were closed and all nonessential city, state, and private-sector employees were being urged to stay home. Sadly, nonessential probably applied to me, too. With the Lazarus trial over and my patients still being handled by my colleagues, I no longer had an excuse. If I was going to be snowbound, I might as well put the time to good use.
It was too early to call Yelena to tell her I wouldn’t be in. Breakfast forgotten, I went to my small home office and rooted around in the moving crates for a legal pad and a pencil. I still sometimes doodled, a holdover from my sighted days that helped me think through a problem. I put both down on my desk and sat in the chair. I pushed the pencil down hard against the pad and drew harsh lines back and forth until the first sheet of paper was scored through. I tore it off, tossed it in a ball onto the floor, and started on another. I continued in this way through a few more sheets until the pencil point broke off. Another search through the boxes located my electric sharpener, which needed to be plugged in somewhere. The search for an outlet consumed another five minutes.
I was stalling.
I sat back down with the sharpened pencil and refocused. Like soldiers falling into formation, bits and pieces of that harrowing day began coming back to me.
7:00 a.m. Annie, swollen belly bulging beneath her pajamas, telling me Jack was running a fever . . .
9:00 a.m. Me, stranded in traffic on the Hudson, pulling a journal from my briefcase and flicking on the dashboard light . . .
10:00 a.m. Late to work. Patient meltdown. Rounds, meetings, more patients . . .
Another ball of paper on the floor.
6:45 p.m. Annie calling. Jack’s temperature up, crying constantly. “Annie, I’ve told you over and over. Fevers in young kids, even high ones, are nothing to get upset about.”
7:30 p.m. Dinner.
8:45 p.m. Sex.
10:15 p.m. Waking in confusion . . .
More harsh scribbling. More hurled paper.
10:45 p.m. Dead battery
12:00 a.m. I-95 backed up for miles. Tapping, tapping my fingers on the wheel
12:45 a.m. Home. Annie hysterical.
12:50 a.m. Take the stairs two at a time and . . .
That was as far as I got before I broke down.
Time may dull our sins but it never pardons them.
I had rarely let myself to weep for my lost son, but I did so now, allowing the full weight of my crime to engulf me. Without wanting to, I had been no better than my father, causing irredeemable harm to my own flesh and blood. Perhaps it would have been better if I too had died young, under one of his many beatings. Then Jack wouldn’t be dead and I wouldn’t be here now, blind, impotent, and torn apart by remorse. Would I ever find a measure of peace?
I allowed the tears to come for a long time while the snow, in frigid counterpoint, continued falling outside.
It was only the thought of the living that eventually pulled me out of it. Louis was my son too and might stay that way if I could put aside my grief and think. Feeling hollow and a bit weak, I wiped my eyes on the sleeve of my robe and went back to the kitchen, noting along the way how much progress I’d made in mastering my new living arrangements. Moving from one room to the other was becoming far less treacherous. I filled a teapot and set it on the range, and circled the kitchen island several times while I waited for the water to boil, letting my mind empty of everything except the task at hand. What was it Alison had said to me on Christmas Day? Haven’t you ever thought about what Annie was doing all that time you were gone?
Sleeping was what I’d always imagined. She was eight months pregnant, worn out from dealing with Jack all day. I had come home to her like that many times before: passed out on the family-room sofa, drained to the point of depletion. Usually I didn’t try to rouse her. With the baby pressed up against her diaphragm, deep slumber was hard to come by. I would cover her with an afghan and put a pillow under her head, and she would murmur good night from some faraway place and stay there until morning while I performed guard duty: camped out on the floor of Jack’s room so that I could immediately arrest any sound from his crib. When it came to Jack, Annie was like the princess and the pea. His slightest whimper would instantly wake her.
And that’s when I realized the flaw in my thinking.
Jack couldn’t have rested quietly that night. With the meningitis consuming him, he would have tossed, turned, and at the very least moaned until he fell into the comalike stupor I found him in when I burst through the door. And Annie wasn’t sleeping when I came home either. She was pacing the den, red-eyed and strung-out. What else had Alison said? If it had been me, I would have been screaming for an ambulance long before you returned. Why hadn’t Annie called for help when she couldn’t reach me? A memory flooded in on me then, aided by my precision recall. The state of the room when I found her, everything as usual except . . . except for something. I put the picture before my mind’s eye and scanned it, going from object to object until I saw: the wireless home phone empty of its receiver. Where else had I seen it that night? Damn it, where?
On the nightstand beside Jack’s crib.
It didn’t necessarily mean anything. I knew that Annie had tried several times to reach me. Later, I could see the calls lined up on my pager like the articles of an indictment. It was only because I had turned it off while sleeping with another woman—and then forgotten to turn it back on—that I failed to heed her frantic summonses. But thinking back on it now, all of her calls to me were before 9:30, a good three hours before I got home. Something had caused her to stop trying. Something—or was it someone else she had spoken to?
There was a simple way to find out. In theory, anyway, depending on how long the phone company kept records. It was only a few years ago. If I was lucky, they still had them. Whatever the answer, it paid to give them a call. I had written checks to New England Bell often enough, and the 800 number atop the service invoices came back to me easily. I could dial it right now.
If I had the stomach for it.
In a sudden flash of self-recognition, I realized why I had never asked these questions before. It wasn’t merely because I was too ashamed of my role in Jack’s death. It was also because I couldn’t bear to think that Annie—beautiful, bland, and essentially guileless Annie—had kept the truth from me out of spite. If so, it implied a failure of our marriage much worse than I had ever imagined. If she had hated me that much.
But once I had started asking, there was no going back. It took a solid half hour of waiting on hold and the robotic announcement, “Your call may be monitored for quality-control assurance,” repeated over and over before a live human being came on the line.
“Hello. My name is Megan. How can I assist you today?”
“You’re talking about CDRs,” she said after I’d explained what I was looking for.
“CDRs?”
“Call Detail Records. Yes, we keep them for five years.”
“If I give you a date, can I get them sent to me?”
“Yes. What is the account number?”
I waited anxiously while she inputted the data into her terminal. It had just occurred to me that Annie might have changed the name on the account after I left.
“Yes,” she said finally. “We have a current account with that numb
er, billed to a D. Mark Angelotti.”
“That’s me,” I said, silently thanking my luck.
“I’ll need your passcode to activate the request.”
Shit, I thought. My memory was good, but not that good.
“Or a Social Security number,” she added helpfully.
I listened restlessly while she explained that it would take seven to ten business days for my request to be acted on. “Shall I have the records sent to the address at 850 Maple Lane in Cos Cob, Connecticut?”
Another potential hitch. “Er, would it be possible to forward them to me elsewhere? I’m temporarily based in Chicago.”
“Certainly. I’ll just need that address.”
She took it down and informed me that a ten-dollar processing fee would be billed automatically to my account and appear on my next statement. I decided it would be pushing things to offer to pay it by credit card.
“Is there anything else I can help you with today?” Megan asked.
“No, you’ve been more than helpful.”
I was taking a deep breath to steady myself when my phone started sounding again, to the tune of Jim Croce’s “Operator.” Thinking it was Megan calling back to say I had just been discovered in a fraud, I nervously punched the answer button.
But it wasn’t the phone company.
It was Michelle Rogers.
NINETEEN
“What was so important that we needed to talk about it here?” I said to Michelle.
“Please. I’ll tell you, but we have to keep it down.”
We were in a tavern on West North Avenue appropriately called the Outpost. To get there, I’d had to take the ‘L’ to the Loop and the Blue Line to a stop on North Damen, a mere half a mile away from the place Michelle said she wanted to meet. In all, the trip had taken me two hours, not counting the number of times I had to detour around the lawn chairs staking a claim to parking spaces on the street.
I looked around the room—metaphorically speaking. The place was so dark, it could have been a coal mine. That is, if coal mines exuded the odors of perspiration, beer suds, and lard. Scuttling sounds near my feet told me all I needed to know about the booth we were seated in, along with the stuffing jutting out at angles from the Naugahyde bench. If I had to guess, there was more than one video gambling machine on the premises.
“I don’t think there’s much risk of us being overheard,” I said. Besides the bartender clinking glasses on the opposite side of the room, the only other indication of human life was someone snoring loudly in a corner. “You couldn’t have picked a nicer location? Like one of the restrooms at Union Station?”
“Please don’t be mad at me,” Michelle said. She sounded as upset as when I’d answered her call that morning, though I couldn’t imagine it was because of anything serious. In my experience, lawyers were prone to hand-wringing and overdramatization. Even levelheaded Hallie tended to view whatever case she was working on as an epic clash between the forces of good and evil, and to be cast into a pit of despair when she found herself on the losing side. No doubt Michelle ascribed similar feelings to me and was concerned I might be taking the Lazarus defeat too hard.
The bartender appeared with our drinks, an on-tap lager some sales whiz had christened the “House Special.” Against my better judgment, I took a sip. It tasted like it had been brewed in a Palmolive factory.
The bartender must have caught my expression. “Don’t blame me,” he said. “I don’t do the buying around here. Can I get you guys a bite to eat?
“A burger would really hit the spot,” I said. “Considering I’m going to be sick anyway.”
He laughed. “They’re salmonella-free. I eat them myself.”
“I’ll have one of those, then. Well-done, please. Michelle?”
“I’m not hungry, thank you.”
“So,” I said to Michelle when he’d taken himself off, “what is it you wanted to tell me about—so far away from organized civilization?”
“I . . . I just needed to know you’re OK.”
Exactly as I suspected. I hastened to reassure her that the patient would live. “My ego has known better days, but that’s nothing compared to what Rachel Lazarus must be feeling right now. I heard she decided not to appeal.”
“I know. That’s why I decided we had to talk. Before the judgment becomes final.”
“It’s not final already?”
“Not until she’s sentenced. Until then, it can be reopened. Well, afterward too, but it’s much harder under the law.”
It seemed like a forlorn hope. “You think there’s any chance of that?”
“I don’t know. I wish . . .” She sounded close to tears.
I’d always suspected that Michelle’s sympathies lay with the woman she was supposed to be prosecuting, but the emotion in her voice confirmed it. Michelle hadn’t reached out simply to comfort me.
“You can’t blame yourself for her conviction,” I said, thinking I knew how to handle this. “You had a job to do. And it wasn’t you calling the shots.”
“I was just following orders, is that what you mean?” she challenged bitterly.
I shook my head. “Look, you said to me you weren’t comfortable in the job you’re in. Maybe it’s time to look for something else. Not everyone is cut out to be a prosecutor. I hate the result as much as you do, but Rachel got a fair trial.”
“You really think so?”
I backtracked. “Well, as fair as you can get under our system. The jury didn’t buy my—I mean, her excuse. Partly because I screwed up. I accept that. I should have quit and let someone else take over. But that doesn’t mean the verdict was flawed. The jury tried. Hallie, I . . . we all tried. But in the end it wasn’t enough.” I wondered exactly who I was trying to convince.
Michelle interrupted my lofty sentiments. “That’s honestly the way you see it?”
At least we had gotten over the troublesome syntax. “I see a young woman who has doubts about her role in sending a battered woman to prison—”
Michelle put a hand on my arm to stop me. “You were set up.”
“I know that. But—”
“No,” Michelle hissed. “I mean really set up.” Michelle removed her hand from my arm and sat back, as if waiting for me to catch on.
I took a swallow of the loathsome beer. “How, besides having intimate details of my childhood opened up for public inspection?”
Michelle didn’t say anything.
“Michelle,” I said in my most disarmingly threatening tone. “I hope you didn’t drag me halfway across the city—and through a raging blizzard—just to drop hints. What are you trying to say?”
“If I tell you, no one can know you heard it from me. All right?”
“Will ‘cross my heart and hope to die’ be adequate?”
“You’re not taking this seriously enough. You could be in danger.”
“The only danger I’m worried about right now is contracting an infection from being in this joint.”
“I mean it. There’s a lot you don’t know.”
“Well, my ears are wide open.”
More silence.
This was becoming maddening. “Dammit, Michelle. Just tell me.”
Evidently she came to some sort of decision, because she said in a rush, “Tony rewrote Dr. Stephens report to say the things it did—about Rachel lying. Dr. Stephens agreed with you about the PTSD.”
I should have been shocked, but I wasn’t. And as much as I thought Di Marco capable of it, I didn’t want to admit I’d been so easily duped. “How did he get to the report? I thought you said it stayed sealed—locked up in your desk.”
“I thought it did, too. But I was wrong. Tony must have gotten to it.”
“‘Must have’?”
“I can’t say exactly how, but he must have forced the lock on my desk. All of the furniture at the office is government-issue—cheap stuff. It would have been easy. You could probably do it with a paper clip.”
I was still
resistant. “That doesn’t prove anything. How do you know the report was altered?”
“Because Dr. Stephens told me what he intended to say. Before he died. While I was helping him get ready.”
I nearly exploded. “That’s not what you told me before the trial. When I asked, you said you were as in the dark as everyone else.”
“I thought I had to. To keep you on the case. I thought you were Rachel’s only hope.”
She was right about one thing: if I’d had so much as a hint, I would have quit at once.
Michelle had commenced sobbing. I pulled my handkerchief from my pocket and gave it to her. “Michelle, tell me exactly what Brad said to you, in as close as possible to the words he used.”
“I really don’t remember. It was all so technical. All I remember is that he agreed with what you said at the trial about her having a flashback and not really knowing what she was doing.”
“Did you make notes of the conversation—write it down anywhere?”
“No.”
“So there’s no way to prove what he said to you.”
“Uh-uh.”
Just then, the bartender appeared with my burger, but I waved him away.
“Suit yourself,” he said. “But I’ll have to charge you for it.”
I pulled out my wallet and handed him a couple of twenties. “Is that enough to buy us some time alone?”
“You bet,” he said. I could almost hear the wink.
I turned back to Michelle. “All right. But what makes you so sure it was Tony who rewrote the report—aside from the high esteem in which we both hold him?”
“There’s other missing evidence.”
“Go on.”
Dante's Dilemma Page 16
