Private Screening

by Richard North Patterson

  “Battalion HQ. He came later, with five choppers for security and a combat photographer.”

  “What did he do?”

  “Had his picture taken with one foot on top of a dead VC.” To Lord the words seemed to come, one at a time, without emphasis or inflection. “By the time he got there, there were flies crawling in the eyes and ears of the VC. Like on Stillman.”

  “Where was Harry?”

  “Next to Stillman, staring at the colonel.” He paused, looking down. “When Bast saw him, his face kind of changed. He told someone to put Stillman in a bag, and went back to his chopper.”

  “What did you do?”

  “We evacuated the hill—went back to the base camp.”

  “And Cook?”

  “He got back three weeks later.”

  “Did you have further contact with Colonel Bast?”

  A nod. “There was another operation—a hill, like before.”

  “What happened?”

  “Nothing—they never came.” He looked past Lord with the inexplicable smile. “One dumb VC stuck his head up and Harry shot it from about two hundred feet. Fell right back in the grass and disappeared, like at a shooting gallery.”

  “Dead?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Bast showed up later, wanting a recon patrol to confirm the dead VC for his body count.” A glance at Carson. “So he picked Harry.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Cook and me—we knew they’d be waiting.…”

  “You went with Harry.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did you count the body?”

  “Uh-huh. There were four live ones next to it.”

  “What happened?”

  “They gut-shot Cook—he was holding in his stomach with both hands.” The monotone was softer. “Harry shot two VC and then I got one. The fourth got me in the knee.”

  “Who shot him?”

  “Harry. When he fell, the VC’s bayonet was sticking in Cook’s brain. It was weird—I don’t think I’d seen him without his glasses before.”

  Lord paused a moment. “How did you get back?”

  “Harry got me in a fireman’s carry and then a sniper hit my arm.” Bramley examined his left wrist. “He was running zigzag— I could feel the pulse in his neck and hear the bullets ping. It seemed like forever till we got to the perimeter.”

  He hadn’t shrugged, Lord noticed. “What happened then?”

  “He went back for Cook.

  “It was crazy, what with him so hung up on Beth. I screamed after him, ‘He’s dead, man.’ Then some other guys laid down covering fire—there were VC bullets all around him, like a movie. Bast just watching.

  “Harry made it back with Cook.

  “With his eyes closed, Cook looked like a baby except for the blood. That was how Harry held him, standing in front of Bast.

  “Nobody said anything, just waited for Harry to catch his breath. When he did, his face was still wild but his voice was real soft. ‘Here’s your body, sir,’ he said, and laid Cook at the colonel’s feet. So gentle, the way he did that.

  “Bast was still staring down at Cook when Harry butt-stroked him in the mouth.…”

  Bramley’s voice didn’t change, just stopped. As Lord waited, tears began running down his face, and then he shrugged.

  “See,” he explained, “I would have killed him.”

  Carson put a thumb and finger to his eyes.

  “Thank you, Mr. Bramley.” Turning, Lord checked the jury.

  Kleist’s pen had frozen above his notepad. “We’ll take a ten-minute recess,” Rainey said.

  “In the last ten years,” DiPalma asked Bramley, “have you held the same job?”

  Composed again, Bramley nodded. “Yes.”

  “Ever shoot at anyone?”

  Bramley seemed to force himself to look down. “No.”

  “Or strike your wife?”

  “No.”

  “Or anyone else?”

  “No.”

  “What did Colonel Bast look like?”

  “Red-faced, sort of squat. Crew-cut brown hair.”

  “Ever see him in sunglasses?”

  “It was always raining.”

  DiPalma folded his arms. “Do you know of any connection whatever between the events you’ve described and the murder of Senator James Kilcannon?”

  Bramley’s eyes slowly raised. “All I know,” he said in a new, taut voice, “is what happened to Harry.”

  DiPalma paused, seeming to frame another question, then think better of it. “I have nothing more.”

  “A brief redirect, Your Honor.” Standing, Lord glanced toward Damone, and then faced Bramley. “After he hit Colonel Bast, what did they do with Harry?”

  “Sent him to the Long Binh Jail.”

  “Did you write him?”

  “My letters came back.” Bramley paused. “It was like he disappeared.”

  Turning, Lord saw Cass on the other side of the partition, and nodded. She touched Damone’s shoulder, handing him the envelope.

  “Mr. Lord?”

  Damone looked up from the subpoena, at Lord.

  “No further questions.”

  3

  IMAGES moved across Lord’s television: Bramley crying, Carson looking away, Damone’s intent angular profile, turning from one to the other.

  Seeing him again, Lord had thought the tempered harshness of his face remarkable—the penetrant black eyes, corners etched with premature grooves. As they faced each other, Lord began, “We have to talk first—”

  “You’ve made your choice,” Damone interrupted curtly. “Tomorrow we’ll see how you enjoy it.” So Lord sat roughing out questions for his own key witness, to which he did not know the answers. The cardinal sin.

  His telephone rang.

  A reporter, he thought reflexively—the desk was littered with phone slips. He picked it up.

  “Mr. Lord?”

  Bland yet intimate, a voice imprinted on Lord’s inner ear.

  “Yes?”

  “You’ve read our message.” The voice paused, waiting for Lord to absorb this. “If you continue …”

  A soft, incisive click.

  It changed, somehow, the look of Lord’s office. A dim-lit yellow, starker than it had been, with the window behind him a black rectangle. Replacing the telephone, he drew his blinds.

  It was the intelligence that troubled him, he saw. Careful touches, carefully spaced—Christopher’s name, Lord’s car, the teasing interval without a call. Knowing the worst moment.

  He was not sure how long he had been standing when he heard the echo. Perhaps ten minutes.

  He walked to the reception area, listening. Through the door, an old-fashioned grid of glass pentagons, the hallway was dark. The echo was footsteps, closer now.

  A janitor, Cass returning—they wouldn’t call first. Then the footsteps stopped, too long.

  He flicked on the light.

  A shapeless figure, broken into pentagons. No key, dark hair, holding something. He groped for a heavy object.

  A rap on the glass.

  “Tony?”

  A muffled, woman’s voice. When he opened the door it was Rachel, with a bottle of champagne.

  She was wearing a raincoat, hair curly from fog. “Can I come in?”

  Lord bent his head, put one hand to the bridge of his nose, and started laughing.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “I just had a threatening phone call.” He shook his head, smiling at himself. “I was preparing to die like a fool.”

  She stepped inside, closing the door. “What kind of a call?”

  “Oblique—I’ve had them before.” He looked up at her. “How’d you get past the guard?”

  “Told him I was your wife.” With her tilted smile, she shrugged open the raincoat. “He searched me for weapons.”

  Lord watched her. “You didn’t pick the best night.”

  “I know—I c
hecked your witness list at the clerk’s office. As of yesterday, Damone wasn’t on it.” She paused. “You’re trying to fill in the blanks, aren’t you? You don’t know what he’ll say.”

  Lord smiled faintly. “You’ll go far, Rachel.”

  “What about you?”

  He exhaled, feeling the adrenaline fade. “On a scale of one to ten, it’s the worst night of my career.”

  Walking past him, Rachel set the bottle on the reception desk. “I know,” she said. “That’s why I’m here.”

  When she turned, her eyes were serious. As Lord looked at her, silent, she gave an embarrassed smile, a small movement of her shoulders.

  The telephone rang behind her.

  Lord glanced at it, then Rachel, waiting. The phone kept ringing.

  “Not here,” he said.

  Her apartment had the luxuries of someone living alone—signed prints, a thousand-dollar stereo, a brass bed—luxuries that Lord could no longer afford and had forgotten to care about. Passing the stereo, her fingers grazed it. Everything was neat; the absence of a child seemed strange to Lord. She lit two candles at the side of her bed.

  “The champagne’s getting warm.” She smiled.

  He opened it, releasing the cork gradually so that none was lost. When they were first dating, he remembered, the trick had impressed Marcia.

  “Not a drop,” Rachel said.

  “It’s all in the wrist.” Part of him felt like someone in a movie he’d seen before.

  Sipping champagne, she watched him over the rim. He could see resolution form in her eyes.

  He had forgotten what it was like to be in a woman’s apartment. Forgotten what this was like.

  He kissed her. Her mouth was full, insistent, a memory.

  Rachel stood back from him. Slowly, she began to undress.

  Her body was full-breasted, compact yet smaller than her energy made it seem. An ankle chain caught her stocking; she began to fumble with it. Suddenly Lord felt selfish.

  “Here.” He knelt, finding the clasp, and unfastened it.

  She kissed his hair, touching the top button of his shirt.

  The sheets were cool and clean-smelling. Only her body was warm.

  “Oh God, Tony.”

  He felt lost again. All he understood was where to touch her. She moaned softly, encouragingly, at what he did. A kind of guide.

  When he was inside her, she pulled him close.

  He moved with her, controlled, as if some part of him could not join the rest. He kissed her neck in apology, closed his eyes. He felt her climax, then again moments later, with him.

  Afterward, they drank champagne.

  “Unbelievable, Tony—you make love like you look.”

  “Scared,” he joked. “Or tired.”

  She smiled. “Beautiful. And aware.”

  He had forgotten this, too—the knowledge he once had, unflaunted and half-thought-of, that he could move a woman. But he felt jangled, out of place.

  “Why so quiet?” she asked. “Postcoital tristesse?”

  And insensitive. “Hardly that,” he said lightly. “Best first time in history.”

  There was a long silence.

  “Where is it with Marcia, Tony?”

  It snapped him back. Why push it, he thought, and then guilt mingled with the sad, second thought that she had asked the wrong question. He turned his face on the pillow. “That’s not for tonight, Rachel. Really.”

  “Please, I’m just trying to understand what makes you tick.”

  Had Marcia wanted to be pregnant, Lord suddenly wondered, to blame him for her dependence? And then he wondered what he was doing here—with Harry Carson’s fate in his hands, a witness to face, a wife and home. Christopher. “It hardly matters,” he answered.

  She watched him. “Do you want to leave?”

  “I think I’d better.”

  She snuffed out the candles. They left, two half-filled champagne glasses on the bed stand.

  “Where do you want to go?” she asked.

  “Just to the car.”

  Driving from Pacific Heights, they talked quietly, about nothing much. Lord could feel her calibrating what she said, to suggest she wanted him without looking for commitment. Experience, he thought—she was not naturally a careful woman.

  When they turned onto Hayes Street, Lord saw the station wagon. A green one, parked by his.

  Lord couldn’t react—read the license plate, he thought dully. Couldn’t speak, as Rachel stopped next to it.

  Through the windows of two cars, Lord and Marcia faced each other.

  As Rachel turned to him, Marcia’s face looked white and pinched. Her mouth was open; Lord thought, perhaps, that she was saying something.

  “Who is that, Tony?”

  “Marcia.”

  Marcia’s head spun. Her car pulled jerkily forward and then sped away, taillights careening around the corner.

  “I’m sorry.” As Lord kept staring, Rachel touched his shoulder. “She had to know sometime.”

  Lord turned to her in disbelief. He saw it mirrored in her eyes, even before he opened the door.

  The hallway was dark; a crack of light came from their bedroom. Passing Christopher’s room, Lord could hear their son breathing deeply, asleep.

  Their door flew open. Wet from the shower, Marcia looked slight and wounded and vengeful. Her hair hung in strands.

  “Don’t come near me, you bastard.”

  He glanced at Christopher’s room. “Not here,” he said in a low voice, and then realized he had said this to Rachel.

  “Fucker.” Her tight voice became a shiver. “I knew there was someone.”

  Part of her wants Christopher to hear, he thought—to hurt me by showing her hurt. Softly, he closed his son’s door.

  “There really wasn’t,” he tried. “Not before tonight. I know you feel betrayed.…”

  “You’re an emotionless, cold-blooded liar—you couldn’t know.”

  Say something else, he thought, anything different. “Why did you go there?”

  “Someone called, a man.” She raised her head. “When I called, you were gone. He told me who you’d left with and where I could see her.”

  He felt sick. “It’s so hard to explain, Marsh. I’m not sure it’s good to try yet.…”

  “Then go fuck her. But I don’t ever want you to touch me.”

  She was still, arms folded. “I already knew that,” he answered.

  “If that’s your excuse.…”

  “It isn’t. Please, not here.…”

  “Then get out.”

  “Not with Christopher sleeping.”

  “Then tell him—right now. Or I will.”

  The hard, rasping demand had a rehearsed sound, as if she were possessed by the drama of her anger.

  “I can’t do that.…”

  She took one step toward him. “That’s all you care about. Him.…”

  “Don’t use him, Marsh. Don’t try.…”

  She fled into their room. In two convulsive jerks she spun again and threw the alarm clock at his head. It shattered on Christopher’s door.

  “That’s it,” Lord snapped. “Get the hell back from here.”

  The door opened behind him. Frightened, Christopher was trying to smile, to make it a joke, looking from one to the other. Lord scooped him up. “It’s back to bed, mugwump.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  Over his son’s shoulder, Lord looked at Marcia. She had not moved; he knew she would not move now. “My fault,” he murmured to him. “I hurt Mommy’s feelings, and made her mad. But not at you.”

  She seemed to hesitate. As he quickly turned and carried Christopher inside, her door clicked behind them. Christopher sat on the bed, rubbing his eyes.

  “I’ve got a problem,” Lord said gently. “Where do I sleep?”

  His son patted the bed. “Here,” he managed, and rolled to one side, so that his father could hold him.

  Lord could feel his son’s heartbeat, the ris
e and fall of his breathing. How much more frightening for a child, he thought, when the people you depend on are so angry and so lost.

  “I love you,” he promised. “I’ll make things okay.”

  At last, Christopher fell asleep. Lord never did.

  While it was dark, and Christopher slept, Lord showered in the second bathroom. Shaved for court.

  The house was eerily quiet. Except for glass in the hallway, Lord felt what had happened as the vestige of a bad dream.

  In the kitchen, Marcia was drinking coffee in jeans and a crew-neck sweater. The sun through their window had a pitiless quality.

  “I want you gone,” she said. “Today.”

  It still sounded like a script, unreal except for his son. “Not without Christopher.”

  Her eyes blazed. “What do you know about taking care of him?”

  “I love him. The rest I can learn.…”

  “That is all you care about.”

  “No.” He hesitated, fumbling. “It was just, standing in the hallway, I could remember so many things. But I couldn’t imagine the future—couldn’t find a vision of the life that I’d be pleading for, anywhere.”

  “Except for Christopher.”

  “I can’t leave him here. Not after last night.”

  She set down the coffee. “I’m sorry, Tony. You’re not getting him.”

  He couldn’t think, only react. “That’s not for you to say.”

  “Isn’t it?” She stood with sudden, angry confidence. “I raised him, while you tried cases and fucked other women. If you even try for custody, he’ll be dragged into court with both of you. And you know better than anyone what that’s like, don’t you?”

  Lord faced her with a cold, returning anger. “Last night,” he said quietly. “I couldn’t believe what I’d done. Now I can.”

  She turned from him.

  Kissing his son, Lord told him to have a good day, and went to court before Christopher could see his face.

  4

  DON’T think of that now, Lord told himself. Tonight, something will come to you.

  Next to him, Carson met Damone’s stare with a furtive, anxious look. Touching his client’s shoulder, Lord stood.

  “Would you state your full name, please.”

  “John Anthony Damone.”

  A deep voice, soft with latent power, a street kid’s inflection. “Are you a veteran of Vietnam?”

  “Yes.”

  “What is your current occupation?”