Steven Gore - Act of Deceit

“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.

D onnally, 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.”

K atrisha Brown’s flight from Seattle to San Francisco 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.

J anie 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.