Steven Gore - Act of Deceit

He made a show of inspecting the weathered wooden windows, the cracked and faded pink stucco, and the two men wearing grimy surplus overcoats that looked like they hadn’t been washed since summer.

“Who do you think all these folks are going to gang up on? You’re damn lucky I got here first.”

Elsa bit her cheek for a moment, and then said, “I sure hope you know what you’re doing.”

D onnally separated the damp pages and hung them on a clothesline in Janie Nguyen’s unfinished basement. Some were moldy. Some were unreadable. Others were only readable against the light. It seemed to Donnally that the file, sent along with Charles Brown from the developmental center, had been stored in Elsa’s often flooded garage for the purpose of letting it dissolve into a past that no one wanted to think about.

He called it Janie’s basement even though he still owned the house and rented it to her for just enough money to cover the mortgage, taxes, and insurance. He came down every few months to make repairs, but otherwise treated the place as hers.

And not out of guilt. Or, at least, not out of guilt in an ordinary sense.

He and Janie were simply permanent features of each other’s landscapes, like California place names weighted with history: Meeting of Two Springs. Creek of Sorrows. Canyon of Hunger. They both knew they wouldn’t grow old without each other, but also not quite together.

The grinding of the garage door opener broke Donnally’s concentration, and a minute later he heard her footfalls on the wooden stairway. He glanced up at her bare calves coming into view and imagined them already wrapped around him. A few more steps and her skirt came into view and he forced his mind to change the subject.

“You find him?” Janie asked, as she took the turn onto the concrete floor.

“He’s in the wind.”

Janie smiled. “More likely the bushes.”

She held her nose when the odor of the moldy pages reached her.

“Jeez, those stink. Why don’t you let some air in?”

She walked over to the workbench and pushed open the window set into the cripple wall between the foundation and the first floor of the two-story house. She turned back and pointed at the hanging sheets.

“What’s that?”

“Charles Brown’s file from the group home.”

“You’re not supposed to have those.” Janie knew the rules. She was a psychiatrist at the VA hospital at Fort Miley, a half mile north. “You didn’t steal it, did you?”

“The owner gave them to me.”

She gave him an up-from-under look.

“It’s true,” Donnally said. “Turns out I was the least of many other evils.”

A gusting Pacific wind that had skimmed the beach a few blocks away, now pushed in through the window and rocked the pages on the line.

Donnally glanced in the direction of the basement door. “You better close that or the house is going to get a dose.”

Janie nodded, then headed toward the stairs. “Are you going to want to have dinner?” She looked back over her shoulder and winked. “Or just dessert?”

D onnally turned back to the file. The smile that Janie left him with died when he read through the fragments of Brown’s diagnosis not obliterated by mold: bipolar… psychotic episodes… homicidal and sexual ideations.

He held the handwritten log up to the overhead fluorescent light. The chronology showed that Brown had been sent first to Atascadero State Hospital, then on to Napa five years later, when he was considered less dangerous. Ten years after that, the doctors got his mental illness under control and sent him to the Stockton Developmental Center, hoping that despite his mental limitations, he could be trained to control his violence. But he started assaulting female patients, so they moved him on to the more secure Fresno center.

Brown’s violent outbursts lessened until he had two consecutive trouble-free years and the Fresno Superior Court released him to a local group home. He stayed there until he got caught fondling a sometimes delusional female resident. The local DA declined to prosecute, arguing that unless the staff could prove she didn’t consent, there wasn’t a crime. He recommended justice-by-bus-ticket and Brown was sent to Elsa’s men-only home in East Oakland.

Donnally squinted at the faded handwriting on the original intake sheet from the late 1980s and made out the name of Brown’s next of kin: Katrisha Brown, but the relationship field was blank. And whoever she was-sister, mother, wife, aunt, or grandmother-over a decade working the San Francisco projects had taught Donnally that she wouldn’t be pleased to find him knocking on her door.

“R etarded, my ass.”

Katrisha Brown sneered as she gripped the paper coffee cup in one hand and an unfiltered Camel cigarette in the other.

“He’s no more retarded than I am.”

Katrisha and Donnally stood side-by-side in front of the blue metal railing facing Fisherman’s Terminal marina along Salmon Bay, just east of Seattle’s Puget Sound. Donnally had found something engaging in the athletic stride that had brought her toward him from the parking lot and in her alert eyes and the braids tied back from her mahogany skin.

Donnally turned away from watching the commercial fishing boats rocking in their slips and flashed Katrisha a playful grin.

She shrugged her shoulders. “So SF State ain’t Harvard, but it’s not Podunk Community College either.”

“Is that where you met Charles?”

“Freshman year, 1981. We got married in ’82.” She took a long drag on her cigarette. “It was the lisp, wasn’t it? That’s what made them think he was retarded.”

“What lisp?”

“He does this lisp thing. It’s brilliant. He started using the gimmick after he got busted for groping a girl on a trolley car.” She tapped the ash off her cigarette; it fragmented, then swirled in the wind. “You know San Francisco?”

Donnally nodded. “Used to live there.”

“It was on the J-Church Metro Line, right along Market Street. That’s where he did it. A couple of months after he dropped out of school. The cops arrested him, but cited him out and gave him a court date. By the time he showed up for his arraignment he almost had the lisp perfected.”

“Are you telling me the whole thing is an act?”

“No, he’s bonkers all right. He had a psychotic break when he was twenty-one, but that never kept him from working the system.”

“What about violence?”

Katrisha glanced around, unzipped her windbreaker, then unbuttoned her blouse. She pulled down the top edge of her bra. Donnally could see a three-inch keloid scar across the top of her left breast.

“Why’d he do that?”

“Fuck if I know.” She rebuttoned her blouse and zipped up her jacket. “I’m not sure he even realized he had a steak knife in his hand when he lost control. He was way out there that night. Way out. Usually he just punched the walls until his hands bled.” She shuddered. “That night he started flailing.”

“He get jail time?”

“He lisped his way through a two-day competency hearing and they sent him to Napa. A couple of years later he showed up on my doorstep. I hardly recognized him. He looked like some homeless veteran begging for spare change. A complete fruitcake and scary as hell. I wasn’t going to risk my neck trying to help him again. I put him in my car, drove him to that old Dead Head tent city on the Berkeley waterfront, then went home and packed up everything I owned and moved up here.”

“But you kept his name.”

“That’s not it. I kept my name. I was born with the name Brown. Coincidence. I think there’s a lesson there. It’s like marrying your first cousin. Nothing good can come of it.”