[Jessie Black 01.0] Burnout

by Larry A Winters

  “How can you ask me to do this? Don’t you care about me at all?”

  “Yeah I care about you.” He leaned toward her lips but she flinched away from him until her back pressed against the armrest of the couch. “Damn it, Amber, I wouldn’t ask you to do this if I didn’t think you were tough enough.”

  She threw another pillow at him. “Is that what you think about me? I’m tough?” She was crying again, the tears making her cheeks shine.

  “The trial won’t last more than a month, two at the most. I’m not asking for that much.”

  “Fuck you.” She jumped off the couch. He pursued her slowly to the apartment’s door, trying to gauge how real her resistance was. Either she was serious or she was trying to act virtuous, make him think of her as marriage material. A girl he’d watched grind on strangers’ laps for thirty dollars a dance.

  She yanked the door open. A gust of cold air from the hallway made her nipples harden against the material of her tank-top, but if she saw him looking, she didn’t care. “Get out.”

  “Amber.” He crossed his arms over his own chest. “Don’t make a big thing out of this.”

  “A big thing?” She gaped at him. “Get the fuck out of my home, you dick.”

  “Close the door, will you?”

  “Are you deaf? Get the fuck—”

  He grabbed her by the throat and shoved her back into the apartment. Slammed the door. Threw the deadbolt. Amber sprawled near the tree and stared up at him. Her mouth hung open. She rubbed her neck.

  “Get out.” Her voice squeaked.

  Woody squatted a foot from where she lay. “His name is Elliot Williams. There’s a bar in Olde City where he likes to go with his friends on Friday nights. That’s where you’ll meet him, make him think you were turned on by his eyes or whatever. He won’t be able to resist you.”

  “I told you I won’t.”

  “You will, Amber, and I’ll tell you why. Because if you don’t, I’m going to drop by Heartbreakers the next few nights and hand out cards with your real name, address, and phone number printed on them.”

  She looked like she wanted to spit at him, but all she did was tremble.

  “I bet you have a lot of fans who would love to know where you live. Some might show up here at random hours with flowers and chocolate hearts. And you know what? I bet there are some others who would just rape you instead, beat the living shit out of you and fuck that pussy and ass you’ve been waving in their faces night after night.”

  “Please, Woody—”

  “Elliot Williams. Friday night. The bar is called Dean’s.”

  She nodded. From the look in her eyes, he knew he’d never get to fuck her again. But that was okay. He had a more important use for her now.

  His knees popped as he rose. He felt her eyes track him as he walked to the kitchenette, but she didn’t move. He took his Christmas gift from the counter and walked to the bedroom, where he quickly dressed. Back in the other room, she’d moved to the couch, where she lay curled in a fetal position. She was sobbing into the only pillow left on the couch, the only one she hadn’t hurtled at him earlier.

  On his way to the door, he stopped by the couch. “Thanks for the chess book.” She didn’t look up from the pillow. He could see the wet fabric near her eyes. “It was a thoughtful gift.” Her back shuddered and she pressed her face harder against the pillow. “Merry Christmas,” he said. “I’ll be in touch.”

  21

  As Christmas passed, then New Year’s, Frank Ramsey was never far from Jessie’s thoughts. She found herself flipping through her old files late at night—her research notes from the first trial, court transcripts, police reports, photographs. During the day, she researched the defense’s expert witness. She found everything she could on Dr. Katherine Moscow, but even after reading the psychologist’s papers and interviews and the transcripts of her testimony at other trials, Jessie still felt unprepared for the pre-trial hearing that was quickly approaching. There was only so much you could learn from papers and books. You didn’t need to be a homicide cop like Leary to know that nothing beat hands-on investigation. The pre-trial hearing at which Spatt would hear Jessie’s arguments for precluding Moscow’s testimony was only days away. She needed to be as persuasive as possible.

  She Googled Moscow’s colleagues at NYU and started making phone calls, posing as a writer researching background information for an article. The first few yielded nothing but canned responses, carefully worded and no more informative than the web pages she’d already read. But her third call, to another psychology professor named Stamer, had been more interesting. In a tight, quiet voice—professional jealousy?—he had said, “If you want an honest look at Kate’s work, you should talk to Monica Chan.”

  “Who is she?” Jessie leaned forward, her fingers tightening around her pen. “Can you give me her number.”

  “I would suggest you visit her in person, if you want the good stuff. She used to be one of Kate’s graduate students.”

  “Used to be?”

  But Stamer would tell her nothing more.

  Later that day, trapped in gridlock, Jessie’s Accord was boxed in on all sides. Traffic into Manhattan was backed up. She could see the tunnel ahead but was powerless to maneuver closer to it. She didn’t know how people commuted every day from New Jersey into New York without exploding with road rage, but, observing people in neighboring cars apparently talking to themselves, she figured cellular technology had probably played a part.

  Jessie merged with her neighbors into the tunnel’s mouth and followed the tiled passageway beneath the Hudson River. When her car emerged from the other end of the tunnel, she reached for her printed directions to the NYU building where Stamer had told her to look for Monica Chan.

  Jessie stepped into the hushed silence of a dimly lit lab. Across the room, an Asian girl stood hunched over a counter. She appeared to be sniffing a petri dish. “Excuse me? Monica?”

  The girl—dressed for the cold weather in jeans and a baggy sweater, over which she wore a lab coat—looked up from the dish. She had pulled her fine black hair back in a ponytail. “Do I know you?”

  “Professor Stamer told me you were one of Katherine Moscow’s graduate students.”

  “I used to be.”

  Jessie shook the girl’s hand. “My name is Jessica. I’m doing some research about Dr. Moscow.”

  A sardonic smile spread across the girl’s features, and she put a hand on her hip. “Stamer hates Kate’s guts. If he sent you, you can’t be good news for her.”

  On instinct, based on Monica’s words and body language, Jessie decided to be honest. “I’m a prosecutor with the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office. Dr. Moscow is scheduled to testify as an expert witness for the defense at an upcoming trial. Why does Stamer hate her? Professional jealousy?”

  Monica snorted. “She turned him down when he asked her on a date. Guys are always coming on to Kate. You know she was in beauty pageants when she was a teenager?”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “Stamer never forgave her for rejecting him.”

  “I did sense some anger.” Jessie recalled the tight, quiet voice on the phone. But she did not want to get sidetracked into talking about Stamer. “What are you working on?” she said, indicating the petri dish. “It looked like you were smelling something.”

  “I’m researching the link between scent and memory. Did you know that odors are the strongest memory triggers experienced by humans?”

  Jessie had read a few articles about the subject, but she shook her head, hoping to keep the girl talking. “I didn’t know that.”

  It worked. Monica’s eyes lit up and she leaned forward with the petri dish. “Smell this.” Feeling slightly silly, Jessie sniffed. The strong odor of leather filled her nostrils.

  Monica watched her closely. “What are you thinking about?”

  “My first boyfriend,” Jessie said. It was true. “He had a leather jacket he loved. Wore it every day.
He always smelled like this.”

  Monica took the dish back from her, fitted a cap over it, and placed it near a spiral notebook on the table. “You probably already know everything I could tell you about Kate. I mean, do a Google search and you’ll find hundreds of articles about her.”

  “You didn’t get along?”

  Monica looked at her a little more guardedly. “Did Dr. Stamer tell you that?”

  “No. Just a guess.”

  “Kate doesn’t like people who question her methods.”

  “Her methods?”

  “Research methods. In the last few years, she’s conducted some unorthodox experiments.”

  “Give me an example.”

  “You know that she testifies in court as an expert witness. Well, apparently, a few years ago another expert challenged her. He said that her conclusions about eyewitness identifications were faulty because they were based on experimental data gathered in an artificial environment that was too different from a real occurrence of violence.”

  Jessie smiled and held up a hand. “You’re going to have to slow down. They don’t teach us about this stuff at law school. What do you mean by faulty?”

  “I’ll give you an example. Kate used to base a lot of her theories on an experiment she called ‘the enthusiastic questioner.’ In that experiment, she gathered volunteers from the campus and put them in a classroom where she lectured to them. Meanwhile, behind her, a guy would enter the room, empty the garbage can, and leave. Then she split up the volunteers and her graduate students questioned them individually. They showed each of the volunteers a sheet containing six photographs. One was of the man who had emptied the garbage can. The volunteers were asked to identify him.

  “She called the experiment ‘the enthusiastic questioner’ because its purpose was to gauge the influence of the questioner’s demeanor on the volunteer. So, for example, if the volunteer pointed to the wrong photo, the questioner, sounding disappointed and impatient, would respond with a question like, ‘Are you sure? Do you want to take a little more time to think about it?’ If the volunteer pointed to the correct photo and said something like, ‘This might be the guy, but I’m not sure,’ the questioner would become excited and say, ‘You recognize that man as the man who emptied the garbage? Would you say that you’re confident about that identification?’ And so on until the volunteer positively identified the correct man.

  “The problem, according to the other expert, was that the experiment involved college kids looking to make some extra spending money. Kids with no emotional investment in the experiment. So when Kate returned from that trial, she decided to construct a more realistic experiment.”

  “You disagreed with that idea?”

  Monica leaned a hip against the lab counter and flicked a strand of hair away from her cheek. “Not in concept, but what Kate came up with.... A volunteer, believing he was participating in a survey about study habits, arrives at the designated building. Before he can enter, two paid actors run around the side of the building. One punches the other. A few seconds later, campus security arrives and takes both actors away. The volunteer is then taken inside the building and questioned by a security officer.”

  “But the security officer is really one of Dr. Moscow’s graduate students?”

  “Right. But at that point, the volunteer doesn’t even know the experiment started. I refused to participate. I told her that I didn’t think it was ethical to deceive the volunteers to that extent. I proposed that we modify the experiment. That was the end of my relationship with Kate Moscow.”

  “What were the results of the new experiment?”

  “They corresponded almost perfectly with the enthusiastic questioner experiment. So she proved that she was right. No surprise there. If you talk to all the people who work with her, you’ll see they all agree on two things about Kate Moscow. One, she’s a total bitch. And two, she’s a genius. She’s brilliant. She’s always right.”

  The snow began to fall as Jessie trekked back to her car. The trip to New York had been enlightening, and might help her raise some doubts about Moscow if she made it to the trial, but it would not be particularly helpful at the pretrial hearing.

  At least Jessie had formed a pretty clear picture of the woman. Beautiful, brilliant, and ruthless, a tenured femme fatale. Even the people who disliked her could not help but speak of her in reverent tones.

  If Kate Moscow made it to the stand, she would be a hell of a tough nut to crack.

  22

  Elliot hadn’t missed a Friday night gathering at Dean’s in years, even though he had long ago stopped thinking they were fun. They were his only hope of crawling out of the purgatory that was the Philly DA’s office. Wasting money on overpriced drinks while listening to his law school friends boast about their year-end bonuses—some of which exceeded Elliot’s entire salary—was hardly something he looked forward to. But these former classmates worked at the best firms in Philadelphia. If he maintained these tenuous, inebriated connections, while simultaneously racking up trial experience, in a few years he might be able to transition to a six-figure salary in the litigation department of a respectable firm, and leave his government job behind. So, once again, he forced himself to throw on a nice sweater and head out into the snow.

  He caught a taxi on Chestnut and headed for the Olde City section of Philadelphia, where college students and young professionals milled along the sidewalks, and trendy bars like Dean’s were lined up side-by-side. Elliot paid the driver and got out of the cab, then hurried through the falling flurries to the entrance to Dean’s.

  The heat of too many people and the smell of beer assaulted him the moment he stepped through the door. He pushed through the crowd, headed directly to the stairs and climbed them to the second floor. It was generally less crowded up here. He spotted his friends at a table near the windows. Jason McKinney, who’d been rich before landing his big firm job, waved him over with a half-finished martini.

  “Happy New Year, Elliot.”

  “You, too.” He forced a smile as he shrugged out of his coat. His hair—which had always been a bitch to control, ever since middle school—had soaked up the snowflakes outside and now dripped icy water down the back of his shirt collar. A barmaid materialized at his side and he ordered a vodka tonic. He turned to Linda Pierce, who looked as beautiful as ever in a cashmere sweater. “Did you enjoy the holiday?”

  “I loved it. Sean and I spent Christmas in Rome.”

  “Sounds great.”

  “It was. We visited all the ancient sites. Of course, I’ve seen them before, but I was too young to appreciate them then.”

  Elliot tried not to think about his own depressing Christmas and New Year’s with his parents at the Williams household, where the closest thing to Roman history was his father’s DVD of Spartacus.

  “Bust any bad guys lately?” Jason McKinney said. He pulled the toothpick from his martini and sucked an olive into his mouth with a grin.

  “I’m still working in the Appeals Unit. But I’ve had a few good experiences arguing before the appellate judges.” He didn’t mention the fiasco in Judge Spatt’s courtroom, where Jessie Black had made a fool of him.

  “I did a criminal appeal pro bono,” Jason McKinney said. “It was an interesting break from my other work. I wouldn’t want to do it full-time though.” He shuddered.

  “So,” Chris Murphy said, studying McKinney over the rim of his wine glass, “did you get your bonus?”

  Elliot settled in and waited, longingly, for his drink.

  An hour later, buzzed but not even close to drunk enough to tolerate his friends’ banter, Elliot excused himself and shouldered his way through the thickening crowd to the men’s room. Before he reached the door, a woman stepped in front of him and blocked his path.

  He murmured an apology and attempted to sidle past her. She put her hand on his arm. That stopped him.

  Hitting on women at bars—women who typically arrived in intimidating groups and nev
er regarded his presence with anything but boredom—was an activity he’d dismissed as futile years ago. His surrender to hopelessness had become so complete that he barely noticed women now when he went out. He had trained himself not to see them. So when this stunning blonde touched her crimson fingernails to his sweater sleeve, he assumed she was about to push him out of her way.

  But she didn’t.

  “I hope you don’t mind my eavesdropping. I thought I heard you say you work for the DA’s office.” As it was every Friday night, Dean’s was crowded and loud. The girl leaned closer to him to make herself heard. With difficulty, Elliot restrained himself from peeking down her plunging neckline. “I think that’s really exciting. My name is Amber.”

  He swallowed. Took her hand. “Elliot.”

  “Is it really like on TV?”

  “No, it’s not as exciting in real life. Trust me.”

  “What’s it like in real life?”

  He realized with dream-like unbelief that she was guiding him toward the wall, that she wanted to have an actual conversation with him. Looking at her eyes, her lips, her perfect white teeth, he could barely concentrate on her words. She didn’t seem to mind. She smiled at his blurted responses as if he were reciting poetry to her.

  Was she drunk? High? She looked and sounded sober. His mind sought a rational explanation, but found none.

  “Let’s grab those seats.” A man and a woman had vacated two stools at a small table in the corner. Before anyone else could take their seats, Amber skipped toward the table and claimed them. He hurried after her.

  When she pulled herself up onto one of the stools, her skirt rose three inches up her thigh. Elliot’s heart jumped into his throat and nearly strangled him.

  He sat down across from her. “Do you— Can I buy you a drink?”