Sympathy Between Humans

by Jodi Compton

  But in the morning, Cheryl Anne and Erin noticed a few shards of glass my clumsy efforts had left behind. They also inspected the kitchen trash and found the broken remains of a champagne flute that had been a keepsake from Erin ’s sister’s wedding. They suggested it was time I found a place of my own.

  I found a vacancy in a three-story rooming house. Kenny’s big truck would have made the move a lot easier, but he and I weren’t speaking much.

  ***

  August brought the hottest days of summer, and the most humid. Everyone who didn’t have air-conditioning was out on the streets. My third-floor room was a very efficient trap for the heat, so when the weekend came around, I also planned to spend as much time away from home as possible. The bar was air-conditioned, and after a certain hour, the bartenders were too busy to notice someone underage in the corner.

  One Sunday morning, I woke up in a holding cell, with a pounding headache. When the jailer came down, it was Kenny.

  “What’d I do?” I asked.

  “If you don’t remember,” he said, “why should I tell you?”

  Half a dozen possibilities ran though my mind, none of them good. I thought of Wayne and his broken nose. I thought of the beautiful deep-gray Nova I’d just bought and told myself I’d never drive drunk. Please God, not a hit-and-run.

  Kenny relented. “You didn’t do much of anything,” he said. “Just drunk and disorderly in public.”

  “Okay,” I said, sitting on the bench with my hands dangling loosely between my knees. “I get a phone call, right?”

  I was thinking I’d have to call a bail bondsman. Who else was there? Silva? The shambling old man across the hall from me at the rooming house, who smelled of layers of cigarette smoke and whose last name I’d never learned? Kenny was my closest friend, and clearly there was no help coming from that quarter.

  “You’d get one phone call if you’d been arrested,” he said. “I didn’t arrest you last night. You’re not officially here.”

  “What?” I said.

  “I brought you in here to sober up and think a little.”

  I should have been grateful, but instead I just got angry. I stood up, and immediately my blood pressure rose, making my head throb. “You think I want favors from you?” I said. I held out my hands as if for handcuffs. “If I did something wrong, arrest me. If I didn’t, then let me out.”

  Kenny shook his head.

  “No, arrest me if you think I deserve it. Then at least I can call someone, make bail, and get out.”

  But Kenny shook his head again. “I don’t want to do that today for the same reason I didn’t last night,” he said. “I don’t want you to have an arrest on your record, because it could hurt your chances.”

  “Chances for what?”

  “For being a cop,” Kenny said.

  I let my hands fall. If he had said, For the space program, I couldn’t have been more surprised. My voice, when I spoke, was faint. “Are you kidding?” I said.

  “You’re too smart to be a miner and too mean to be a college girl,” Kenny told me. “You’ve got a lot of energy and it’s all going nowhere. You need a job you can pour it into.”

  “You’re not serious,” I said. “They don’t need people here, anyway. There probably isn’t even a vacancy in the every-other-weekend citizen’s reserve program that you do.”

  “No, there isn’t,” Kenny said. “But they’re always looking for good people down in the Cities.”

  “You’re serious,” I said.

  “Yes,” Kenny said.

  For a moment I didn’t even feel the ache in my temples. Kenny thought I could be someone like him, and this amazing realization made all my anger drain away. He was wrong, of course.

  “Listen, Kenny,” I said, “thanks, but I’m not cut out for it.”

  “How do you know?” he asked.

  “I just do. You’re reading me all wrong.” After another moment I said, “Really, I’m sorry.”

  When he saw I meant it, Kenny fished for his keys.

  ***

  Weeks passed and September came. Kenny had gone back to his work, patrolling the mines during the week and the streets and jail on the weekend. I went back to what I did best, drinking on the weekend nights.

  Around 3 A.M., after a typical Saturday night, I was in a familiar position: kneeling over the toilet bowl. When you throw up on a fairly regular basis, you lose your distaste for it. Afterward, I wiped the corner of my mouth with my hand, swaying slightly on my knees, feeling the dampness of unhealthy sweat on the nape of my neck, grateful for the cool night air from the open sash window. I’d just brushed my teeth and was splashing water on my face, when outside the window, a woman screamed.

  I froze, completely still except for the water droplets crawling on my face, and then I went to the window.

  “Hey!” I yelled. “Is someone out there?”

  The bathroom window looked out onto a grassy slope, which led up to the railroad tracks. It was dark there, except far to my right, where I could see the signal lights on the tracks.

  “Hey!” I yelled again. There was no response.

  “Goddammit,” I said, fumbling for my towel. I wanted to hear drunken tittering, or a sour voice saying, Yeah, yeah, I’m fine. I wanted to feel irritated. It was preferable to feeling worried about someone in the dark who’d screamed and now wasn’t answering.

  Back in my room, I undressed and pulled back the bedcovers, instructing myself to forget about it. I told myself that animal noises could trick you sometimes. Like bobcats, for example; they sounded a lot like women screaming. Or barred owls.

  It wasn’t any bobcat. It wasn’t any owl.

  If anyone was out there, and really was in trouble, they’d have screamed again. They’d have answered when I called.

  You don’t know that.

  For God’s sake, what help would I be? I was still half drunk. Surely someone else, nearer, had heard it as well. Someone else would look into it.

  You can’t be sure of that. You don’t know that anyone else heard. You only know that you heard.

  “Son of a bitch,” I said tiredly, and started looking for sturdier clothes to wear than the ones I’d worn drinking.

  My only weapon back then was a Maglite, but it was beautiful, four D-cells long with a body of anodized cherry-colored metal. As I went up the slope behind the house, still a little unsteady on my feet, I swung it in arcs, illuminating the brush and shadows. “Is anyone out here?”

  When I’d finished searching behind the house, I doubled back. The scream might have come from the front of the house, a trick of acoustics bouncing the sound waves off the slope and back toward the bathroom window. I retraced my steps down the slope and went out into the street. Walking toward town, I shined my light low onto lawns and into front entryways, careful to avoid the darkened windows beyond which people slept. Then, as I got into town, I found myself looking into alleyways and at the front steps of businesses. Nothing. There was no sign of any trouble, and the streets were quiet as a movie set by night.

  I ended up standing in the town square, completely sober and totally alone in the center of town. The night was nearly gone. Dawn would come in an hour.

  ***

  Kenny was dressed for church, in a coat and tie, with his hair slicked down, when I knocked on his door at seven-thirty in the morning. He took in the sight of me at his door, Maglite still in hand, with a mildly quizzical expression.

  “I think I want to be a cop,” I said.

  28

  “I don’t see a case here,” Kilander said.

  It was the morning after Marlinchen and I had our drinks out by the lake, and I was doing something I’d done a number of times since the morning I’d told Kenny Olson I wanted to be a cop: conferring with a prosecutor over the feasibility of criminal charges.

  It was, though, on an unofficial basis. Kilander and I were spending the lunch hour in his office, eating takeout I’d brought up: a curried chicken salad over lettu
ce, dinner rolls, and iced tea. I’d just told him what I knew about the Hennessys: Hugh’s beatings and Aidan’s exile, the inexplicable animosity Hugh felt toward his eldest son.

  “It’s an ugly story, no question,” Kilander said. “But the purpose of juvenile and family law isn’t to punish, it’s to intervene. No agency would try to prosecute a parent for past child abuse that didn’t result in permanent injury.”

  “I know that,” I said, tearing my previously untouched roll in half and spreading butter on it. More than anything else, I was stalling. What I was about to tell Christian Kilander, I hadn’t even shared with Marlinchen yet. “What I’ve told you is essentially background. That wasn’t the end of the story.”

  “Ah,” Kilander said. “Should I cancel my one o’clock deposition?”

  He was teasing me; I’d known he’d do that. I’d known he’d play devil’s advocate, too. It didn’t bother me. That was partly what I’d come to him for, his sharp and reductive mind.

  “Sarah?” Kilander prompted.

  “I think Aidan shot himself with his father’s gun,” I said, setting the roll down uneaten. “I think Hugh covered it up.”

  For the first time, Kilander smiled. “You come up with the most amazing theories,” he said. “Do tell how you arrived at this one.”

  I told him about Aidan’s missing finger and the explanation Marlinchen had given me for it, the neighbor’s vicious dog that had supposedly bitten the three-year-old boy, causing him to be away from home for what Marlinchen had called “a long time” and to return without a little finger on his left hand.

  “Why don’t you believe it?” Kilander asked.

  “I’ve seen the area they live in,” I said. “They have neighbors, but not immediate ones. It would have been quite a long trek for a three-year-old to make, to put himself in the path of a neighbor’s dog.”

  Kilander said nothing.

  “At that same time, Hugh Hennessy owned some antique pistols. He kept them in his study and showed them to reporters; I’ve seen them in magazine photos. But at some point later, Hennessy developed an aversion to guns. He won’t have them in his home.” I banished an unwelcome thought of Cicero. “Meanwhile,” I went on, “Hugh decided to replace the carpet in his study. He had the money to have it done professionally, and he wasn’t a do-it-yourself type. Yet he did the work himself. Badly. You can see it was done by hand. The kids estimate he did this about fourteen years ago, when the twins would have been three to four years old.

  “At around this time, in her earliest memories, Marlinchen Hennessy has a rather odd recollection. She says lightning struck the house, and that it upset her mother to the point of crying, and that this gave her a fear of storms for years to come. Storms and loud noises,” I added, stressing the last two words.

  “Couldn’t there really have been a lightning strike?” Kilander asked.

  “I’ve seen the house from the outside,” I said. “There’s no damage from it anywhere.”

  “So it was repaired,” Kilander said.

  I shook my head. “That’s what I thought, but Marlinchen Hennessy can’t even point to the spot where the house was hit. How could she have vivid memories of the night it happened, but no memory of seeing the damage, or workmen climbing up to repair it, anything like that?”

  Kilander nodded.

  “Speaking of home repair,” I went on, “in addition to the carpet Hugh replaced himself, there are bleach spots on the carpet in the upstairs hallway, like someone scrubbed out some stains. They’re consistent with Hugh cleaning up bloodstains himself, to the best of his limited ability.”

  Kilander nodded, speculative. “So you think the little boy shot himself with his father’s gun, and the finger wasn’t salvageable.”

  “He was just old enough to be curious like that, and disobedient. He’d probably seen guns on TV,” I said.

  “And Hugh lied about what happened to cover it up,” Kilander went on.

  “It would have been professionally disastrous,” I said. “Imagine what the media would have made of it: ‘Negligent Father Leaves Loaded Gun in Unlocked Desk; Adorable Tot Shoots Self with It.’ Hugh was a bigger name in those days; the press was interested in him. It would have been bad publicity for any writer, but worse for Hugh. He’d written two popular books on family and love and loyalty. Being a family man was his-” How did marketing people put it? “It was his brand.”

  Kilander scraped the rest of the chicken salad onto his plate. He was eating more than his share, but I kept quiet. There was something endearing about his unabashed greed.

  “So Hugh tried to keep it quiet,” I said. “The twins were just young enough to have their memories reprogrammed like that. If your parents tell you something long enough, you believe it,” I said. “But if you talk to the Hennessy twins, their memories don’t line up. Marlinchen remembers lightning striking the house. Aidan doesn’t. Marlinchen says Aidan was in the hospital a long time. Aidan doesn’t think he was. Something’s screwy there.”

  Kilander sipped his coffee, thinking. I got up and walked over to the window, looking out.

  “It explains the abuse,” I went on. “Hugh cleaned up the house as best he could, but Aidan was the one thing Hugh couldn’t sweep under the rug. He was always around, with his maimed hand, and it probably just got under Hugh’s skin. I think things might have been okay if his wife hadn’t died, if he didn’t have a bad back and an ulcer… I think he was just under a little too much stress, and Aidan became the scapegoat. Because of Hugh’s guilt.”

  “Do you have any physical evidence for this?”

  “No,” I said. “Not yet.”

  “What about ER records?” Kilander said. “Sounds like the kid got some kind of treatment, if the finger was removed neatly.”

  I shook my head. “Medical records from fourteen years ago? I’m sure they’re in a box, in a warehouse, somewhere. But I’d need a subpoena to get at them, and that’s not going to happen with the evidence I have.” I paused. “That’s why I haven’t told either of the twins about this. I don’t want to shake them up, not until I have some proof.”

  “When will that be, exactly?” Kilander asked.

  Touché.

  “Right,” Kilander said. “And here’s the million-dollar question: So what?” He didn’t wait for me to answer. “Even if you found incontrovertible evidence in support of your theory about the gun, it was still an accident. If Hugh lied to his children, that’s not a crime. And that’s just the grounds part of it.”

  “What’s the other part?” I asked.

  “You said this guy has aphasia, from the stroke?”

  I nodded.

  “That’s probably the worst possible handicap he could have sustained, from a legal standpoint. If he can’t communicate, he can’t participate fully in his own defense. Even the most hard-core of judges would throw the case out so hard it’d bounce.”

  “I wasn’t talking about a prosecution this month, or even this year,” I said. “He’s recovering. He could recover completely.”

  “Or he might not,” Kilander said. He put his plate and napkin into the plastic bag the food had come in. It was time for his one o’clock deposition. I put my plate in, too, and tied the top of the bag shut, planning to drop it into a trash can in the outer office.

  “You make a hell of a case for it, Pribek,” Kilander said. “If it makes you feel any better, I believe you when you say something’s screwy out there. But even if you’re correct on every single point, I just don’t see a courtroom in this family’s future.”

  ***

  That afternoon, my onetime partner John Vang called me. He was investigating a rape case, but the 16-year-old victim had been nearly monosyllabic in front of a male detective. Vang thought follow-up questioning by a female investigator would help. Was I available?

  It took me nearly thirty minutes to break down the wall the girl showed to Vang. Later, I almost wished I hadn’t. Three assailants, all known to her, in an apartmen
t-complex laundry room. Five separate assaults, three vaginal, two rectal. I left feeling numb in the bright sunlight of midafternoon.

  My conversation with Kilander, too, still weighed on my mind. I knew he was right, but it was at times like these that the system truly baffled me. I wasn’t sure what anyone could have done differently, yet the world had pretty clearly failed Aidan. I knew there were plenty of child and family programs that put a great deal of money and time into their efforts to protect the young, but sometimes it seemed like rain falling directly onto the ocean, nothing getting where it needed to go.

  My cell phone rang. I picked it up, one hand on the wheel.

  “Detective Pribek? This is Lou Vignale at the First Precinct.”

  “Hey, Lou,” I said. “What can I do for you?”

  “I’ve got a girl here who says she’s one of your informants. Her name’s Ghislaine Morris.”

  “Ghislaine?” It wasn’t a name that had been on my mind for a while. “Yeah, I know her. What’s the arrest for?”

  Vignale hadn’t specifically said she’d been arrested, but I’d had a premonition. Nothing else that had happened today was wholesome or inspiring.

  “Shoplifting,” Vignale said. “She was at Marshall Field’s, jamming stuff under the blankets in her baby stroller. But she says she’s helping you on something, and you’d want her released.”

  “She said what?” I ran my free hand through my hair. This, on top of everything else… Maybe Shiloh was right, and I shouldn’t even have kept her phone number.

  “Ghislaine is confused,” I said. “She is not helping me at the current time on anything.”

  “She said you might say that,” Vignale said. “And she said to remind you about the guy in the Third Precinct. Some kind of doctor?”

  I opened my mouth to speak and then closed it again, thinking, Oh, hell. Ghislaine was manipulative, but she wasn’t stupid. Now I had my work cut out for me.