Straw Men

by Martin J. Smith

  “Not even maybe?”

  “No chance.”

  Christensen took off one of his running gloves and traced an inch-wide line across the gray windshield with his knuckle. Through it, he could see nothing but the park’s bare trees. His tiny window fogged again as soon as he was done.

  “Are you convinced the flowers were from the man who attacked you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “You never rose,” she said. The words she remembered him whispering in her ear that night.

  “But that makes no sense,” Christensen said. “Two different uses of the word rose.”

  Teresa shrugged. “I don’t know. I just—”

  “One’s a flower,” Christensen said, thinking out loud. “The other’s the past tense of—”

  “I just know, damn it,” she snapped. “They were from him. Same way I knew it was a different voice.” She pointed to the center of her chest, breathing hard, as if she’d been the one running. “I feel it right here. I just know.”

  They sat in silence for what seemed like minutes. Finally, Teresa checked her watch. “Shit. I’ve gotta go.”

  “I can still talk,” Christensen said, checking his own watch.

  “I can’t. David’s due back. I’m out when he gets home, he’ll want to know where I was. I can’t keep lying to him.” She waited until Christensen reached for the door handle. “I’m sorry. I have no idea what it means, but I wanted to tell you that.”

  “You’re confident it’s a real memory?”

  “Red and white,” she said. “Definitely.”

  Christensen opened the door. Cold air rushed in, chilling him inside the gray Pitt Panthers sweatshirt that was turning dark with his perspiration. He thought about the hearing, now just forty-eight hours away.

  “What are you going to do, Teresa? The hearing’s in two days. As of now, Dagnolo’s still planning to put you on the stand.”

  “I know.” A tear rolled onto her cheek, and she brushed it away.

  “He’s going to ask if DellaVecchio is the man who attacked you. He’s going to ask if you’re sure.” Christensen let the thought sink in, then prompted her again. “Teresa, what are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He climbed out and then leaned back into the open passenger-side door. “Does David work Sundays? I could meet you at my office if you want to talk again. Just call me at home and I’ll meet you.”

  She nodded. The tears were coming faster now, and this time she let them flow. “Thanks.”

  Christensen started to close the door, but he remembered a loose end he’d meant to tie up when they talked the day before. He leaned back into the car. “Can I ask you to clarify something?”

  Teresa wiped her tears on the sleeve of her jacket. “Sure.”

  “Earlier this week when we talked, you mentioned something. I don’t know if it’s significant, but it’s been bugging me.”

  She faced him with her sad, red eyes.

  “You were talking about the things going on in your life at the time you and David split,” he said. “Job pressures, that sort of stuff. You mentioned an investigation. The Tidwell investigation. Some case David was involved in.”

  She nodded. “I remember,” she said.

  “I tried to track it down, but the only thing I could find was a drug case, a double shooting. Not to be callous, but it seemed like kind of a slam dunk as far as the investigation. But you said there was a lot of pressure on David because of it. I’m not sure I—”

  “Oh my God.”

  Teresa suddenly covered her mouth with her hands, but never took her eyes off him. Christensen whirled around, wondering if maybe someone was standing behind him, but they were alone in the trees. When he turned back, Teresa seemed disoriented, swept up in the rush of a fresh memory.

  “Teresa?”

  “Oh my God,” she said again. “IAD.”

  Christensen climbed back in and slammed the door. “What is it?”

  “Internal affairs,” she said. “Oh God.”

  “I’m not following. I asked about Tidwell.”

  She balled her hand into a fist, then bit the knuckle on her index finger.

  “Tidwell?” he prompted.

  His persistence seemed to annoy her, because she turned away. “Tidwell was just street trash,” she said. “Some crankhead trying to pull his nuts out of the fire. But now I remember. IAD was really going after it.”

  “IAD?”

  “Internal Affairs Division,” she said. “The cops who investigate other cops.”

  “They’d questioned David about the Tidwell case?”

  “Twice,” she said.

  “And the pressure of that was complicating your marriage?”

  She nodded. “It was complicated already. IAD just added another level of stress. But now I remember. We had a big fight, bigger than usual. About IAD. That’s when David moved out.”

  The memory was abrupt and apparently disturbing, but Christensen couldn’t see a direct link to the matter at hand.

  “Do you think it had something to do with the attack?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “Any idea why you reacted so strongly to it?”

  She gestured again to her chest. “I felt it here.”

  “But you have no idea why?”

  Teresa checked her watch again. “I’ve got to go.”

  Christensen opened the door again. “You’re OK?” he asked before stepping out.

  She nodded. “I’ll call you if I can.”

  Christensen closed the door. Teresa started her car and backed away, spraying mud and gravel as she bumped back onto the pavement. He walked through the warm exhaust fumes and stood alone alongside the road, wondering whether she’d just led him down another dead end.

  Chapter 25

  The old Pittsburgh Public Safety Building sat on the cor­ner of First at the south end of Grant Street, just a block from the Allegheny County Courthouse and around the corner from the morgue. Christensen studied the structure from the sidewalk, concluding that its dull aluminum-and-colored-panel design made it the unwanted stepchild of the city’s spanking new Public Safety Complex. That complex featured the modern City Courts Building and jail along the Monongahela River, which one law-and-order city councilman derided as the “Taj Mahal on the Mon.”

  The last time Christensen met Kiger on this turf, the circumstances were far from ideal. He had been detained for questioning just hours after the violent climax of the Primenyl investigation, in which he’d helped untangle the memories of a killer’s twenty-two-year-old son. That time he’d been brought in the building’s back entrance with the killer’s blood still on his shoes, and Kiger had wanted answers. Fast.

  This time, Christensen wandered into the lobby of the building like a lost freshman. “The chief’s office is on seven, right?” he asked the sergeant at the front desk.

  She looked him over. “Name?”

  “Christensen,” he said. “I called about two hours ago. I think he’s expec—”

  The sergeant tossed a visitor’s badge onto the counter. “Sign the book.”

  Christensen signed the visitor’s register, then opened his leather jacket and clipped the badge to his shirt pocket. “Top floor?”

  The sergeant nodded and gestured to an elevator door to the left.

  Christensen couldn’t resist. “Nice talking to you,” he said as he stepped to the elevator doors and pushed the up arrow.

  Kiger’s secretary showed him down a narrow hall and into a conference room that overlooked Station Square to the right and the Liberty Bridge to the l
eft. Across the Mon, the city’s South Side stretched along the frigid river, bracing for a lively Saturday night. In the distance, beyond a thriving row of precious restaurants and micro-breweries and too-hip galleries, the dome of one of the city’s dozen or so Eastern European churches rose like an upside-down onion. It lent an Old World touch to Pittsburgh’s emerging new reality, a relic of the past adding dimension to the present.

  Christensen sat in one of the conference room’s metal-frame chairs and studied the walls. This was not some ceremonial reception area for the chief’s visitors. This was a tactical operations room in Kiger’s much-publicized war on drugs. Directly across from him hung a city map labeled “Locations with 10 or more drug calls, May–April, Hill District area.” Each troublesome address was marked with a red pushpin. To his left, another city map was labeled “Pittsburgh Weed and Seed,” the catchy name for a controversial program that increased penalties for drug violations in designated areas of the city. At the far end of the room hung a faded poster of former Steelers linebacker Greg Lloyd in full pads. Its caption read: “I would never go to work without my equipment, and neither should you. Save your life. Wear your ballistic vest today.”

  Christensen wiped a bead of sweat from his forehead. Was the room hot, or was it him? He waved his hand over the register, relieved to find it blasting hot air into the already stifling room. He turned around and twisted the aluminum handle on one of the windows and pushed it open. When he turned back, Kiger was standing directly across the conference table.

  The chief had the look of a man who liked to startle. “Too hot for y’all?” he said.

  Christensen tried to hide his surprise. “You don’t see a lot of saunas with a conference table this size,” he said.

  Kiger reached across the table and they shook hands. The chief sat down in another of the room’s dozen institutional chairs, rolled his white shirtsleeves above his leg-of-lamb forearms and leaned on the table’s fake-wood top. “Never have got used to this winter weather. It’ll cool down in a sec with the window open.”

  Christensen sat down. “I know this was short notice, so I appreciate you seeing me. You work every Saturday?”

  “Most. So, you got something we need to know about?”

  So much for chit-chat. “I’m not sure. Teresa and I are still talking. We talked this morning, actually. I have some questions.”

  “For me?”

  “About a case that ended up with internal affairs, apparently.” Christensen waited for a reaction. He got nothing but a blank stare. “Happened about eight years ago,” he added. “Involved Teresa’s husband.”

  Still nothing. Finally, the chief leaned forward. “Shoot,” he said.

  “I mentioned it before, the case involving a drug dealer named Tidwell, Vulcan Tidwell. I guess he’s dead now, but he was apparently involved in something back then that triggered some sort of internal review or an investigation or something. And David Harnett may have been involved somehow. Do you remember the case?”

  Kiger ignored the question. “Where y’all going with this, Dr. Christensen?”

  Christensen ignored Kiger’s question. “So do you know what I’m talking about or not?”

  The two men stared across the table. The issue was trust, and they both knew it.

  “Fine,” Christensen said. “We can dance around this and play these cat-and-mouse games, or we can just be honest. That’s what you promised when we started this thing. I’ll start.”

  He paused for effect.

  “Teresa’s struggling. And she’s struggling with things I didn’t expect to be dealing with, things that on the surface don’t have anything to do with what happened the night she was attacked. She’s focusing on stuff that happened in the weeks before, and in the weeks after, and on the role her husband played in helping her remember.”

  “She’s still poking holes in the story she’s been telling about DellaVecchio?”

  “DellaVecchio’s been a non-issue so far.”

  Kiger waited. The man was a sphinx, his face offering no clue about his thoughts.

  “All right, let’s try this another way,” Christensen said. “Tell me how this internal affairs division works. Generally. I know it’s cops who investigate allegations against officers in the department, but beyond that I’m not sure.”

  “Awright. Fire away.”

  “How does an IAD investigation start?”

  Kiger smiled. “Somebody usually gets pissed off. ‘Officer so-and-so called me a faggot,’ or ‘Officer such-and-such threw me in the back of his car and I broke a fingernail.’ Mostly that kinda boo-hoo crap. But we try to follow up.”

  “You don’t put much stock in it?”

  The chief shrugged. “It’s mostly the police-brutality crowd. But when there’s something to it, it’s not just whining, then IAD ends up with it.”

  “For a full investigation?”

  “IAD does fact-finding. Investigators talk to witnesses, track down everything they can. Then they talk to whoever was naughty, get his or her side of things. Then they write up a report and send it to me.”

  “And you decide if there’s anything to it and discipline the officer?”

  Kiger nodded. “If I have to, but just in administrative cases. The little stuff. It’s a criminal case, we got a special-operations squad that kicks in to do the investigatin’. They go after it like any other criminal case—surveillance, wires, whatever. They find something, it goes right to the D.A., just like anybody else.”

  Christensen drummed his fingers on the table. “And you’re comfortable having cops investigating other cops?”

  Kiger’s smile was patient, but his searing eyes made clear he understood Christensen’s implication. “We tried havin’ the dogcatcher do the investigatin’, but he just didn’t get it,” he said. “You got a better idea?”

  “Seems like a conflict, that’s all.”

  “That’s why we bust hump to make sure it’s fair, sir, so nobody comes back with any conspiracy crap,” Kiger said. “Way I set it up, IAD’s a plum job for any officer wants to get ahead. Anybody wants a promotion has to put in two years with IAD, see what it’s like on that side of things. Going in they know the deal: They cook facts to save a bad cop, it’s their ass out the door.”

  Kiger jabbed a finger into the tabletop, punctuating the thought. “The system works. Ain’t perfect, but it works.”

  Christensen saw no need to belabor the point. And yet, they were back where they’d started. The trust issue. He needed specifics.

  “And you won’t talk about any one case?” Christensen asked. “Because unless you do, I can’t know whether these memories of Teresa’s are relevant or not. But I’ll be honest with you, I suspect they are. Ever since we started, she’s been coming back to the same things: David. Their marriage. The tension in their lives just before all this happened. There’s got to be a reason.”

  Kiger stood suddenly and closed the conference room door, then eased himself back into the chair. He folded his hands in front of him.

  “That investigation’s unresolved,” he said. “I’ll tell you what I can, though. So ask.”

  “Thank you,” Christensen said. “Can you start with the background? How did it begin?”

  “Started with Tidwell.”

  “Broken fingernail?”

  Kiger shook his head. “ ’Bout six months before he started talking to us, we’d popped him for dealing. Street stuff, crack, meth. He was midlevel, but he knew some of the big boys. They knew him, too. He’s one of those guys we coulda nailed for a whole lot more, but we decided to work him a little, see what happened.”

  “Work him?”

  “See if he’d flip for us, lead us to some of the folks higher up the food cha
in. We had a lot of ways to go with him. Coulda made it real hard on him, or real easy, depending on how we wanted to go, how cooperative he wanted to be. He didn’t help us, he was looking at some serious time.”

  “And if he did?”

  The police chief winked. “We’da worked something out. Wouldna walked, but he’da walked a lot sooner. But he knew he was facing worse than Western Pen if he snitched out the people he was dealing with. They’d have made him pay big time. So he came up with something else.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  Kiger’s face turned serious. “Sumbitch floated something from out in left field, something bigger’n any of us expected.”

  Christensen sat forward, leaning across the table. Kiger leaned forward too, close enough that Christensen could smell the sour coffee on his hot breath.

  “Something you gotta understand about these people,” Kiger said, dropping the volume of his voice. “They’re cons, every one of ’em. Truth’s something they’ll tell when they run out of lies, but ain’t ever seen one run outta lies yet. Blow smoke like goddamn Bessemers, most of ’em. Most of what they’ll tell you is like tits on a bull, useless.”

  Christensen nodded. “But?”

  Kiger looked around the room. “ ’Tween us. You clear on that?”

  “Crystal.”

  The look that crossed Kiger’s face then was an odd mix of emotions. If Christensen read it right, he saw heavy doses of sadness and embarrassment.

  “Drugs are pretty serious with me,” Kiger said. “Lost a daughter to heroin, my oldest, twelve years ago this month. So it’s a priority, understand?”

  Christensen nodded.

  “So here comes this Tidwell sayin’ he knows about a protection racket being run out of the East Liberty station. Says some of my own cops are involved, says it’s been goin’ on for years.” Kiger looked away in disgust. “That’s something I’m gonna take real serious.”

  “And you don’t think he was just blowing smoke?”

  Kiger weighed his words. “Let’s say he had enough information to make it credible. Credible enough for IAD to look into it.”