Act of Deceit

by Steven Gore

Four steps later, he faced an empty bathroom.

  He heard a muffled sound from down the hallway, then spun back toward the door and ran to the next bedroom. The door was closed.

  He heard a voice from within. Janie’s. “No.”

  At least she was still alive.

  An image of Brown strangling Anna flashed through Donnally’s mind. He was sure Brown was kneeling over Janie. If he shot at Brown and missed, he’d hit her. He slipped the gun back into his holster, wishing he’d brought the board from the basement and imagining the thunk of wood against the back of Brown’s skull.

  Donnally eased his hand around the doorknob and turned it. He heard a soft click of the bolt sliding past the strike plate. He pushed the door inward an inch, then allowed the knob to turn back. He lodged his forearm against the door and set himself to spring across the ten feet between it and the bed, grab Brown by his shoulders, and throw him to the floor.

  He flung the door open, took a step, then froze.

  Brown was curled into a fetal position at the head of the bed. Janie was sitting at the foot, dressed in her robe. They both flinched and looked up at Donnally, Brown in terror, Janie in anger.

  “What are you doing?” she asked, raising her hands in complaint.

  “I should be asking you that.”

  “You said it’s my house. And in my house I can do what I want.”

  Donnally extended his palm toward her. “Don’t put him in the middle of us.” He stepped forward. “Let me do what I brought him here to do.”

  She rose and blocked his path. “No.”

  “No what?”

  “I’ve decided to make him my patient.”

  “And have him do to you what he did to Anna when she took him in?”

  “How do you know he did anything to her?”

  Donnally glanced at the ceiling and rolled his eyes. “You’re as nuts as he is.”

  Janie reached toward the dresser and picked up a plastic pill bottle. She tossed it to Donnally. He looked at the label. Lithium prescribed at the Santa Rita jail.

  “He’s been on that since he first appeared in court. His attorney insisted on it. Perkins wanted him to be competent to stand trial. She wanted to know the truth, too.”

  “The truth? You think he was ever going to tell the truth to her? Or you?”

  “In time.”

  Donnally locked his hands on his waist and glared past her at Brown. “The time is now.” Then back at her. “Ask him why his fingerprints were on the windowsill?”

  “I already know.”

  “How could you know? You haven’t seen the ID tech’s report.”

  “Which way were the fingerprints facing?” Janie asked.

  “The way they’d be if someone let themselves down.”

  “Or pulled himself up to look in?”

  Donnally drew back, feeling himself wrenched around by the change in perspective.

  “What?”

  “He says he pulled himself up to look inside.”

  “More likely he climbed inside to attack her after she locked him out.”

  Janie pointed down toward the dining room. “Get the report.”

  Donnally walked downstairs. His legs were weak. The fixed point toward which he had been marching had tumbled away.

  He gave his head a shake. Not yet. Brown had years to figure out a story that matched the evidence. Surely he had moments of clarity long enough to accomplish that.

  The reports lay in an accordion file on the table. Donnally slipped off the rubber band and flipped through them until he found the crime scene diagram and photographs.

  He dropped into a chair and inspected a photograph of the outside of the house below the window. Scuff marks. Wide at the top. Thin at the bottom. Someone trying to push himself up. His shoes slipping. But none higher than two feet off the ground.

  He then rose and walked to the double-hung window behind him. He imagined himself climbing in. His hands first gripping the sill, then twisting as he pulled himself over and in.

  He turned around and looked down at the photograph. No twist. Just the fingers and palm of each hand facing inward, a little smudge forward and a little smudge back.

  Donnally closed his eyes.

  What had Brown said in front of the Noe Valley Bakery?

  “They told me I killed her. Do you know if I killed her?”

  Then what did he say? Something about Atascadero.

  “They put me in Atascadero. I started to remember.”

  Remember what?

  Donnally felt gravity sucking him down as he forced himself to climb back upstairs, struggling under the weight of his misplaced certainty. He paused on the landing, recalling Saam Ji telling him in the park that Brown gave him the willies because of the way he looked at women.

  “Rover’s really gonna hurt somebody someday,” Saam Ji had said.

  But Brown hadn’t. He’d mostly only hurt himself, punching walls and trees and news racks. Even the injury to Katrisha had been the result of a similar kind of blind lashing out.

  Maybe Brown did have delusions about women, about Anna, maybe even now about Janie. Maybe he truly did believe that Anna wanted him to touch her, and it was the delusion alone, and not the evidence, that had made him seem guilty, even to his own lawyers, over all these years.

  Chapter 30

  Donnally, Janie, and Brown sat the kitchen table, their breakfast plates before them.

  “Did you want to take lithium after you were arrested?” Janie asked Brown.

  “They said it would help, but it didn’t. It made me sick. They tied me to the bed, but it gave me diarrhea and they wouldn’t let me go to the toilet. And I kept throwing up, laying on my back. I was choking. I begged them to stop.”

  Janie looked over at Donnally. “They gave him too much at the beginning. In those days, dosing amounts were still a mystery.”

  “And you told your attorney?” Donnally asked him.

  “The judge made them stop.” Brown stared down at his half-eaten scrambled eggs. “Anna told me Dr. Sherwyn was bad, but I thought he wanted to help me.”

  Donnally glanced at Janie, his expression telling her that Brown was delusional, unable to recall the sequence of events that led him to meet Sherwyn only after Anna was dead.

  “Are you sure it was Anna?” Janie asked.

  Brown’s head jerked up and down with such force that his body shook.

  “That was after they argued about Star Wars.”

  Donnally slumped in his chair and exhaled.

  “R2D2. They argued about R2D2 and RT. She said to Dr. Sherwyn, ‘I know who you are. A rabbit.’ She said he was a rabbit. And he called her Alice in Wonderland.”

  Donnally looked into Brown’s eyes, now darting. Obviously hallucinating.

  “Where were they talking?” Janie asked.

  “In Anna’s living room.”

  “Where were you?”

  Brown looked around. “Here.”

  “What do you mean, here?” Donnally asked.

  “The kitchen. I mean her kitchen. I peeked around the door. He looked like a rabbit.”

  Donnally smiled to himself. Despite his delusions, Brown had gotten that right. Even in his mid-sixties and probably thirty pounds heavier than back then, Dr. Sherwyn still had a pointy face and disproportionate ears.

  Brown scrunched up his nose, exposing his upper teeth. “He did that when he was thinking.”

  That was a tic that Donnally had noticed during Sherwyn’s testimony, but he thought it was just a defensive grimace prompted by Blaine’s attacks.

  “Did anyone else hear the conversation?” Donnally asked, hoping that something in Brown’s story had a bit of truth, some kind of starting point from which his stream of consciousness flowed and toward which Donnally could work back.

  “Anna’s mother, Trudy. Trudy was there.” Brown grinned. “She knows R2D2. She told me so.”

  Chapter 31

  Katrisha Brown’s flight from Seattle to San Fra
ncisco arrived an hour late. The fog layer eclipsing the airport had kept incoming planes grounded all over the country under the theory that if there was no place to land, there was no reason to take off.

  She handed her black duffel bag to Donnally, who was waiting by the TSA security checkpoint, then looked past him toward the terminal’s automatic exit doors.

  “I need a cigarette,” she said, “and to have my head examined.”

  Donnally smiled at her. “You’ll be going to the right place.”

  Katrisha had told Donnally over the telephone that she’d never divorced Charles Brown. She’d filed in San Francisco, but her process server couldn’t find him. Then, after Brown was arrested for the murder of Anna Keenan, there was no way she would chance letting him know where she was living, much less appear in court to face him, until Donnally called her.

  The consequence was that since she was a navy veteran and Brown was still her spouse, he was eligible for psych treatment at Fort Miley.

  Janie was waiting just inside the monolithic Mayan Deco entrance to the hospital lobby. Donnally introduced Katrisha, and then Janie guided them toward a waiting room crowded with hobbled veterans and their families. Katrisha paused at the threshold and scanned the faces until she spotted Brown sitting by himself in a corner, head down, face shaven, hands in his lap.

  Katrisha jutted her chin toward him. “You clean him up for the occasion?”

  Donnally glanced over at Janie and smiled. “It was a joint effort. You want to talk to him?”

  “Let’s just get the paperwork over with.” Katrisha jerked her thumb over her shoulder. “There’s a bar stool a couple of blocks down with my name on it.”

  Brown rose and walked toward them.

  “Shit. If that asshole touches me,” Katrisha said, “I’ll break his neck.”

  Donnally intercepted Brown a few steps away, then put his arm around his shoulders and whispered, “Just do what we agreed, nothing more. Okay?”

  Brown nodded, but Donnally could see in his eyes that his mind was racing, on the edge of a manic episode.

  Janie walked over and took hold of Brown’s hand, now trembling like he had Parkinson’s, a side effect of the new drugs she’d put him on. Finding medications he could live with had been one of the things Janie hoped to accomplish once he was admitted.

  They approached Katrisha. Brown pulled his arm free of Donnally. Katrisha half turned and raised her palms in defense, but Brown simply extended his hand and looked at her, his face wide and innocent with an expression of hesitant expectation.

  Katrisha accepted his hand.

  Brown looked at Donnally, then back at her and said, “Thank you, Katrisha. I’ll try my best.”

  Her eyes welled up as if she had just glimpsed the twenty-year-old she’d married concealed inside the wreck he’d since become. She let go of his hand and wiped away her tears with the cuff of her jacket.

  “I know you will, Charles.”

  An hour later, Katrisha was perched next to Donnally on the bar stool she had coveted. She took a sip of her beer, then flipped the bird at the “No Smoking” sign hanging by the tavern door.

  “You know how many times I’ve heard him say he’d try?” Katrisha said, spinning her cigarette pack on the bar in front of her. “Dozens. You know how many psych wards I went trekking to, getting him committed? How many court appearances I made begging them to keep him locked up?”

  Donnally nodded. “I know it was a struggle.”

  She looked over at Donnally.

  “It’s not going to work,” Katrisha said. “He’ll be off his meds and back on the street in no time. That’s just the way he is.”

  Chapter 32

  Sonny Goldstine grinned when he saw Donnally walking toward where he sat on his porch in West Berkeley. The yard was as overgrown as when Donnally last saw it.

  “I saw you on television a while back,” Sonny said. “Man you looked pissed.”

  “I still am.”

  “I figured. I went the no-contest route myself a couple of times. Practically made me feel innocent. Kind of like a purification ceremony.” Sonny looked up at the noon sun, then rose to his feet. “You want a beer?”

  Donnally nodded as he climbed the three steps. Sonny pointed at a second rocking chair, then walked inside the house. He returned a few minutes later with two cans of Coors and handed one to Donnally.

  Donnally held his up and inspected it. “I didn’t think you sixties types drank Coors. Something about their right wing politics. Heritage Foundation and all that anti-farmworker stuff.”

  “I draw the political line at beer.” Sonny took a long drink, smacked his lips, and said, “I got … to have … my beer.” He dropped into the chair next to Donnally. “What brings you back to Shady Acres?”

  “I need to talk to Trudy.”

  Sonny smirked. “You and everybody else. It ain’t gonna happen.”

  “Yes it is.”

  “How do you figure?”

  “You’re going to take me.”

  “Not a chance.”

  “Either that or I’ll start tearing things up.”

  “The cops have tried that already.”

  “I can do things they can’t.”

  “What? Kidnap me and make me take you to her?”

  Donnally looked over. “It’ll be my second one this week.”

  Sonny’s head snapped toward Donnally, who shrugged, as if to say, Don’t ask. I’m not telling.

  Sonny gazed toward the street for a few moments, then took a sip of his beer.

  “I’m too old to hide out,” Sonny said. “I’ll call somebody who’ll call somebody who’ll call somebody. I’ll let Trudy be the one who decides whether or not she wants to talk to you.”

  Two days later, Donnally sat in the passenger seat of Sonny’s 1955 Willys Wagon. The springs in the seats creaked as Sonny backed into the street, and the gears ground as he shifted into first and headed toward the freeway.

  “You sure this thing is going to make it?” Donnally asked.

  Sonny grinned as if to say that he knew Donnally didn’t have a clue where Trudy was living.

  “Just how far do you think it has to go?” Sonny asked.

  “Nineteen seventy-five.”

  Sonny skirted north around San Francisco Bay, dropped off the freeway at San Rafael, headed though the rolling hills of Marin County, then along the coast. The gusting ocean wind buffeting off the rattling Willys made it sound like an airplane taking off.

  They pulled into a parking lot in Fort Bragg just after sunset and entered the Dead End Café. Sonny pointed at a table along the window facing the commercial fishing harbor, then walked through the swinging double doors into the kitchen.

  Donnally wondered whether Trudy Keenan would follow Sonny back out.

  He got his answer two minutes later.

  Sonny returned alone.

  “What was that about?” Donnally asked, after Sonny sat down across from him.

  “Just checking to make sure nobody followed us up here.”

  “How would they know?”

  Sonny tilted his head toward the freeway they’d traveled. “The hills have eyes.”

  “And what did they see?”

  “Two guys in a Ford Expedition were on our tail as far as San Rafael, but they got trapped in city traffic.”

  “Trapped?”

  “Let just say that somebody who used to live with us at New Sky still hasn’t learned to parallel park.”

  A waitress in a tie-dyed shift walked up and took their orders. She was old enough to have been at the commune in the seventies, but Donnally couldn’t detect any sign that she was Sonny’s contact at the café.

  Sonny grinned at Donnally as she walked away. “Nice try, pal, but it’s not her. She’s a divorcee from Boston just arrived to pursue the new age dream.”

  “I thought metaphysics was all in your head and you could do it anyplace, even while serving clam chowder at Fenway Park.”

 
“Some people need the scenery.”

  “Is that why Trudy is up here?”

  “No. She’s so trapped inside herself. It doesn’t make any difference where she is.”

  “Then why Mendocino County?”

  Sonny glanced toward the waitress, who was handing the order form to the cook.

  “She blends in.”

  After dinner, Sonny led Donnally across the dark parking lot to the back of the Willys and lowered the rear gate.

  “Let me see your cell phone,” Sonny said. “I need to make sure your GPS isn’t activated.”

  Donnally removed it from his jeans pocket, punched his way through three levels of the menu, then showed the screen to Sonny.

  Sonny nodded, then pointed back and forth between Donnally and the interior and said, “You’ll be riding back here.” He glanced around to see if anyone was watching them, and then reached inside and withdrew a ski mask with the eyeholes sewn closed.

  “If you trust me to get you to Trudy,” Sonny said. “I’ll trust you to keep your head down and this covering it.”

  Donnally lay down on the sleeping bag–covered bed and slipped on the mask. Moments after Sonny closed him in, he pulled out his gun and checked the safety. He was able to keep track of Sonny’s first few turns, then he was lost. He could tell the kind of roads they were on by the vibrations and the jolting, but not the direction or the distance.

  Gravel ticking up from below and rattling against the undercarriage an hour later told Donnally that Sonny had turned off the pavement. The wagon bucked, bumped him into the air, and then slammed him down.

  “Sorry, man,” Sonny said. “I didn’t see that one coming.”

  A half hour of bouncing and jostling later, Sonny stopped. The abrupt end to the chaos of squeaking springs and shuddering metal made the silence seem hollow.

  “You can take off the mask,” Sonny said, opening his door.

  Donnally lowered the tailgate and climbed out into the night, grateful to be breathing mountain air instead of the Willys’s exhaust. He flinched at the light emerging from the first floor of the two-story log cabin, then heard footsteps behind him. He turned toward the soft crunch of boots on pine needles. The bearded man ignored Donnally and walked up to Sonny.