Delusion (15 page)
The door opened and Clay walked in.
“Nell? What are you doing?”
“Just I . . . couldn’t sleep,” she said, turning to him. He wore only a pair of boxers. “Thought I’d catch up on some work.”
“Work?” He came closer, glanced at the screen. “But the museum’s still closed.”
“I know. It’s a chance to rethink a few things.”
He squinted at Courbet’s waterfall, a modest waterfall in a quiet forest dominated by blocks of yellow and green. “Rethink things?”
“Like the Web site,” Nell said, angry with herself for lying, not even sure why she was doing it. And then added another, although the statement itself was true: “And some of the wall labeling needs revision.”
Clay touched her shoulder. “It’s late.”
She shut down the computer, a good reason for lying coming to her at the same time: the truth, that she was rooting around for information on the science of messed-up eyewitness testimony, would only upset him.
They went back to bed. Clay turned off the light. Then his hand was on her breast. She began to say something she’d hardly ever said in their whole marriage, maybe never: “Clay, I’m not—”
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“Sorry,” he said, taking his hand away at once.
“There’s nothing to be . . .” She let the sentence die.
They lay side by side; the house, the whole world, quiet. Somehow the touch of his hand stayed on her breast, like magic, and her body began to change her mind. For a while, she resisted. But why? Just for the sake of consistency? What kind of marriage was that? She reached for him.
He was awake. “But I thought . . .” he said.
“Let’s not think.”
After, as they lay together in a hot, shared dampness, he said,
“What else?”
“What else?” she said.
“I can do. Anything you want.”
“That was more than enough.”
He laughed softly. She fell asleep in seconds.
But in the
morning—Clay gone to work, Norah still asleep—Nell was back at the computer. She found more information about Professor Victor Urbana, including his office phone number. For five or ten minutes, she searched for some way to talk to him without revealing her name or true motivation. The best she could come up with was a silly little scheme in which she played a college student’s mother helping her daughter with a research paper; Nell’s mind didn’t work well in areas like this. So, that was that, no?
She rose, looked out the window, saw a bullfrog sitting by the lap pool. The problem—this horrible possibility, maybe even a prob-ability now, and a certainty in the eyes of the law—that she’d sent an innocent man to jail was not going away. Did that mean this sick feeling would be inside her forever? Nell went back to her office and dialed Professor Urbana’s number.
He answered halfway through the first ring. “Vic Urbana.”
Nell wasn’t ready. “Hello. Um, I read what you said—about eyewitness testimony being like crime scenes.”
“Where was this?”
“In the
Belle Ville Guardian.
”
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“Oh, yes.”
“And, uh, I’ve got some questions.”
She expected a question from him—who she was, her interest.
Instead, he just said, “Like?”
“Well,” she said. And then out popped: “I’ve got a good eye.”
“I’m sorry?”
“My field’s art history,” she said. “I’m trained to spot details, to have a sharp visual memory.”
“Yes?”
“So I don’t think I could make a mistake like that, misidentifying someone.”
Pause. “Were you involved in such a case?” said the professor.
“Yes.”
“Where exonerating evidence of a physical nature disproved your testimony?”
“Something like that.” Nell was not about to give a flat-out yes to
“disproved.”
“And it offends your common sense,” said Professor Urbana.
“Yes.”
“Tell you what,” said the professor. “I’m kind of a proselytizer when it comes to this subject. If you’re ever around, I’ve got a little video I could show you.”
“How’s today?” Nell said.
He laughed. “Eleven-thirty, my office?”
“Perfect.”
“And your name?”
“Nell. Nell Jarreau.”
The name didn’t appear to mean anything to him. “See you then,”
he said.
Nell left a note for Norah, one of those simple family notes, but she went through three versions before getting it right:
Back soon.
There’s a nice sandwich in the fridge. Remember—Dad says no driving till we find out about the new premium. Love, Mom.
Then she drove south to the I–10 interchange and headed for New Orleans.
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. . . .
Nell parked on
the Tulane side of St. Charles, walked onto the campus.
Professor Urbana’s office was on the top floor of a stone building on the main quad, door open. He saw her and said, “Come in.” Professor Urbana was about her own age, bearded and chubby. He came out from behind his desk and shook her hand. “I looked you up,” he said. “Hope you don’t mind.”
“No, I guess—”
“Don’t know anything about the actual case,” the professor said.
“The personalities and so on. My interest is scientific, and I assume you’re looking for a quick synopsis in that area.”
“Ye—”
“And I also assume you’d prefer this conversation to remain private.”
“Yes.”
“No problem.”
Through the window, Nell saw a Frisbee soaring by. “You mentioned a video,” she said.
“Good place to start,” said the professor. He sat her in front of a TV, pressed a button.
Night. A car appeared on the screen. It drove into a parking lot, stopped in an empty space. A man got out, stood for a moment under a lamppost. He wore a leather jacket and a baseball cap, hadn’t shaved in two or three days. For a moment, he looked right into the camera.
Then he took a small black box from his pocket, knelt and stuck it up underneath the engine of the next car over. After that he turned his back, got into his own car and drove away. The screen went blank.
Nell turned to the professor. He was writing in a notebook.
“Coffee?” he said, looking up. “I’m having some.” He went to the coffeemaker on the window sill, poured coffee into two mugs with green-wave logos. “Organic Sumatran, plus a hint of chicory.”
“Delicious,” said Nell.
He sat at his desk, motioned her into the visitor’s chair. “Where did you study art history?” he said.
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She told him.
“Any special period?”
“Early Baroque, but lately, before the hurricane, I was getting interested in Southern landscape painting.”
“Early Baroque was when?”
“Beginning of the seventeenth century.”
“Any painters I might have heard of?”
“Caravaggio?”
The professor shook his head. “Don’t know much about art, sorry to say.” He took a folder from his top drawer, slid it across the desk.
“Please open it,” he said.
Nell opened the folder. Inside were six photographs, three-by-five, head-and-shoulder shots, all men.
“Which one planted the car bomb?” said Professor Urbana.
Nell laughed, slightly embarrassed, slightly annoyed. She didn’t like being manipulated; on the other hand, his attempt to distract her had been so crude and transparent, in retrospect. And what he hadn’t factored in was the dual reality of her fine eye for detail and excellent visual memory. This would not be hard.
Nell examined the photos, numbered one through six. She eliminated two and four immediately—a black man and a Hispanic. The car bomber had been white. And also much younger than number one; she pushed him aside. These prominent eyebrows on number six, almost meeting in the middle—she would have remembered a feature like that.
Leaving three and five. Both had weak chins, as the car bomber had, and five also had the same kind of stubbly beard. But stubbly beards could be shaved off, and number five’s lips seemed too thin.
The car bomber’s lips had been puffy, pretty much identical to the lips of the man in photo three. That was the one Nell put her finger on, neatly avoiding the stubbly beard trap.
“Him,” she said.
“The answer,” said the professor, “is none of the above.” He took out a seventh photo: the car bomber. At best, the real car bomber bore a casual resemblance to number three, but no more so than to number five; and an argument could be made that he
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didn’t look at all like either of them. Nell fought the urge to hang her head.
“Don’t worry,” Professor Urbana said. “No one ever gets it—just proves you’re human. The point of all this is we need better police techniques.”
“Such as?”
“We’ll skip over the obvious—out-and-out prompting by the investigator,” the professor said. “First, in photo arrays, the pictures should be shown sequentially, not all at once. Second, in both arrays and live lineups, the witness should be told that the perpetrator or his image might not be there. Third, the distractors, the fillers, should be chosen fairly—to use an extreme example, suppose the witness has already described a light-skinned man, and five of the six in the lineup are dark—not fair.” Professor Urbana put the folder away.
“But the most important reform would be to impose double-blind procedures.”
“Meaning?”
“The officer conducting the lineup would have no knowledge of the identity of the suspect. This would eliminate all possibility of suggestion, blatant, subtle, or even unconscious. I happen to be working on a paper right now on the subject of subtle signals—changes in posture like a leaning forward or a relaxation of the shoulders, changes in tone, sidelong glances, throat clearing, the well-timed sniff.” The Frisbee went by again, behind the professor’s back. He glanced at his watch. “Class time, I’m afraid. Any questions?”
Nell had many, but not for him.
She headed for
the freeway. Her route, west on St. Charles, took her past the house Johnny had grown up in, a beautiful Uptown mansion. Contact with his parents, whom she’d hardly known and had never really warmed to, had ended not long after the funeral, except for a gift when Norah was born, and cards for a few Christmases.
Nell had caught Johnny’s mother’s obituary eight or nine years later.
Was it possible his father still lived in the house? Nell slowed down as she passed it. She remembered the house being white with black
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trim; now it was cream-colored with green. And a fence had been added, one of those tall, spear-tipped wrought-iron fences. A paper-boy stood by it. On the other side, an old man in a straw hat—yes, Johnny’s father, shrunken and stooped—was making angry gestures at him. Nell kept going.
Pirate unlocked the minibar. “Just lookin’,” he said aloud. Nice to be able to say things out loud, do what he felt like, no one to see, no one to tell him no. Lots of cool shit in the minibar—
peanuts, Twizzlers, Mars bar, Jujubes, Coke, OJ, beer, wine, whiskey, vodka, gin, Kahlúa. First minibar in his life.
The Lord gave Job twice
as much as he had before.
Pirate didn’t know where to begin. Was he hungry or thirsty? Both. A lot of both. Lots and lots of both.
He started with the peanuts. Then he polished off the Twizzlers, Mars bar and Jujubes, washing them down with Coke, and when the Coke was gone, OJ. It all went down good, real good. He felt refreshed, like a new man.
Knock knock.
Pirate went to the door, had a little trouble with all the locks, bolts, chains; and opened up. Susannah, and behind her a man in one of those pastor collars.
“Hey, Susannah.”
“Hi, Alvin. Bet that juice tastes good.”
“Juice?”
She glanced at the Tropicana carton in his hand.
“Oh, yeah, real good.”
“This is Reverend Proctor of the Chessman Society,” Susannah said.
“What’s that?” Pirate didn’t like pastors, reverends, priests, didn’t need them for his religion.
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Reverend whatever-his-name-was cleared his throat, spoke in a mellow reverend voice. “We help reintegrate former inmates into the community.”
“Yeah?” Reintegrate? Was this guy trying to get him to move to the ghetto? How was that going to work?
“May we come in?” Susannah said.
“Be my guest,” Pirate said. That gave him such a kick he said it again.
They sat in the living room of Pirate’s suite. A suite, not bad. He’d stayed in a couple Motel 6’s back in his bar-band days, but they didn’t have suites.
“I’m leaving town soon,” Susannah said, “so Reverend Proctor will be your contact.”
“Where you going?” Pirate said.
“Back to Chicago.”
“That’s where you live?”
After a moment of hesitation—maybe Susannah hadn’t quite heard him—she said, “Yes.” Her skin was particularly lovely today.
“The Windy City,” Pirate said. “Never been, myself.”
“You’d probably find it too cold,” Susannah said.
“Might make a nice change.” He smiled at her in a friendly way.
Her smile back was a little weak—Susannah didn’t seem her normal self today. Pirate understood: she was riding one of those downs that follow a big effort. He knew the feeling from his one audition for a real producer, up in Atlanta; didn’t remember the name of the producer, just the down feeling after the audition, even though he’d played great and the producer’s assistant said they’d be in touch.
“Want to thank you,” Pirate said. “For everything you, uh . . .”
“Seeing you free is thanks enough,” Susannah said.
“Yeah,” Pirate said. “I’m free. Anyone want a drink or something?”
He found he still had the Tropicana carton, held it up.
“No tha—” said Susannah.
“That might be—” said the reverend.