CHIP HAD been calling me every other day since I'd started working on the case. Just checking in, he'd say, and then like a good coach who's afraid that his star player is getting cold feet, he'd start pumping me up. In the week since Sylvia Jackson's collapse, he'd been calling me daily. When he left only the brief message, “Let's huddle to talk about the case,” I knew he was worried. We were experiencing more than the usual bumps in the road.
We met at the Stavros for a late lunch. I got there first and sat down at a table. Jimmy came over beaming. “Back so soon!”
“Hey, Jimmy. I'm meeting some people.”
“Anything I can get for you while you ⦔ He stopped, mouth open. I turned to see what he was gawking at. It was Annie, striding across the room, her hair frizzled in an aura of light and shadow around her face. I realized I wasn't used to noticing what women looked like. She slid into the chair opposite me.
“Jimmy, this is Annie Squires.” She offered him her hand and he took it.
Annie ordered two Diet Cokes and two Greek salads â one
for herself and one for Chip. I ordered an iced tea along with a plate of fried calamari.
Annie gave me a concerned look. “You're looking tired.” I didn't have a ready answer. “Sorry, I hate it when people say that to me.”
“You're right. I haven't been sleeping. Losing my boat. And knowing that there's someone out there. It feels like it's starting all over again.”
Annie was watching me intently, her mouth quivering. “Maybe it would be for the best if you stopped â”
“No,” I said, surprised by the vehemence in my voice. “Before the boat accident, maybe. But not now. Now it's personal.”
“Personal is not necessarily a good thing in this business.”
“Look, I can either lie down and play dead or fight back. If I give up on this case, if I back out now, then whoever is doing this wins. I can't let that happen.” Even to me, the words sounded like hollow bravado, but Annie let it pass. “And I think we have a case. I haven't finished testing Sylvia Jackson yet, but I can tell you this much: what you show her one minute she can't remember the next.”
“Yeah, but being shot in the head isn't some test. You think she could forget that? And if she can't remember, then what is she remembering when she says Stuart shot her?”
“Someone can believe something happened because in some way, it solves a problem for them. Maybe it's just too painful for that thing
not
to have happened. People even turn other people's experiences into their own memories. You know, someone tells you a story about what happened to them, and later, you're telling it as if it happened to you. And you're not even aware that it happened to somebody else.”
“Happened to somebody else,” Annie whispered. Then, without any segue, she said, “Did you know that I have a sister?”
“No, I didn't.” There was a lot about Annie that I didn't know.
“What you're saying reminds me of something that happened
once. My sister was asking me if I remembered a night when my parents were fighting, both of them smashed out of their gourds and my mother broke her arm. My sister had to drive her to the hospital. She could remember all of the details. How frightened she'd been that a cop would stop her and arrest her for driving without a license. How my mother lied to the people at the emergency room, saying she'd fallen down the cellar stairs. How my mother threw up when they gave her the codeine for the pain. But what my sister couldn't figure out was why I didn't drive my mother to the hospital. See, I'm two years older than her.” Annie paused, looking at me intently. “The thing is, all that stuff about driving to the hospital, watching my mother throw up? It happened to me, not her. I was fifteen. I don't know where my sister was that night â maybe sleeping at a friends' house or staying over with a relative â but she wasn't even at home. I must have told her about it later. She's thirty-four now and she really thought it happened to her.”
We sat in silence for a few moments. The memory had made Annie's eyes retreat behind a glaze of tears. I reached for her hand but she had jerked it from the table and straightened in her seat. “Chip, you made it,” she said.
I turned. Chip was standing behind my right shoulder. He was rummaging in his briefcase, trying to look preoccupied. I wondered how long he'd been standing there. Annie took out a tissue and blew her nose. “I ordered you a salad,” she told him.
Chip sat. Once again, we cut the small talk and got down to business. I described Sylvia Jackson's test results so far. “She was only able to identify a few of the items that disappeared. She confused the two sets of pictures. She scored off the scale, way down at the low end.”
“Can we argue that Sylvia Jackson shouldn't be able to remember the night of the murder?” Chip asked.
“Unfortunately, it's never that clear. But what we can say is that stuff just isn't getting into her short- or long-term memory. With her, we're dealing with a kind of double whammy. Head
trauma that creates amnesia and also permanent damage to the structures that mediate memory. We can demonstrate that she's unable to take in new information and recall it, and we know she was unconscious for a long period of time. All the literature and all of our clinical knowledge suggests that it's unlikely that she's going to remember what happened immediately before she got shot.”
“You can't find a stronger word than âsuggests'?” Chip asked.
“Sorry. Psychology is a soft science. What's intriguing is that she makes things up. She knows something is missing but she doesn't know what. So she invents a missing item that was never there. Psychologists call it confabulation. Unconsciously, someone like Syl is aware that she has holes in her memory. She fills those holes with other real experiences borrowed from earlier memories, or with made-up stuff that sounds real. Someone coming out of a coma, in an altered state of consciousness, is going to be very, very suggestible.” It wasn't hard to imagine the relatives, friends, medical personnel, lawyer, and police who might, inadvertently or otherwise, have provided Syl with the stuffing for the holes in her memory.
“Catch-22,” Annie commented. “Stuart Jackson could be found guilty because the jury believes Syl can remember when she really can't. Or he could be found innocent because the jury believes she can't remember when she really can.”
I shifted uncomfortably. “I'm convinced she can't remember. Too bad we don't know what really happened.”
“Peter, guilt is always a possibility,” Chip said gently. “Our job is to defend the accused, guilt or innocence aside.” That's your job. To me, it matters. “So here we have a woman whose brain is this leaky sieve. She loses a lot of what she takes in, and then distorts some of what remains. A credible witness?”
“From the jury's point of view? Definitely,” I insisted. “She's sympathetic and vulnerable. And she believes every word she's saying.”
“You have more tests?” Chip asked.
“I still need to finish up the personality tests.”
“How are personality tests going to tell us anything about whether she can remember what happened to her?”
“If you want to know whether the brain injury has damaged the memory, you need to know what the memory was like before the damage occurred. A piece of that comes from understanding personality, because who you are affects the way you remember things.”
Chip didn't look convinced.
I continued, “Suppose I give someone with a brain injury a picture to remember. She remembers the overall subject matter but not the details. To use the cliché, she
sees
the forest but not the trees. Now here's the problem: how can I tell if this is because of the brain damage, or because that's just who she is? That's what the personality tests tell me.”
Chip still looked doubtful. He said, “Okay. So then we'll have the memory tests. And the personality tests.”
“You're right. So what? I keep thinking about her description of the night of the murder. The version she told me was quite a bit different from the first version she gave to the police. For example, she told the police Tony was in the trunk.”
“And now she knows he wasn't,” Annie said.
“Right. She reads the newspaper. She talks to people. Little by little, she pieces together the story and lines up her memory with the evidence. So we need to focus on the details of her story that
aren't
corroborated by evidence.”
“Then what?” Chip asked.
“Then try to figure out where those details come from. Look for earlier memories that could be getting pulled forward to fill in the details. Cast suspicion on some, and you cast suspicion on the lot.
“If you think about memory as a series of movies, some of which have to do with the past, some of which have to do with our fantasies and dreams, then what she's doing makes sense. It's like she has multiple movie tracks running in her head,
and she's pulling a little from here, a little from there. She doesn't even know which tracks she's pulling from. To convince the jury, you need to make them doubt her ability to tell the difference.”
“But what about the camouflage hat she says Stuart Jackson was wearing when he burst into her bedroom the night of the murder?” Annie asked.
That stopped me. “You're right. The camouflage hat is a problem.”
“What kind of problem?” Chip asked.
Annie explained. “Well, she told the police about the hat
before
the police found one in Stuart's closet.”
“Right,” I agreed. “The evidence corroborated the memory rather than the other way round. So it couldn't have been a case of her molding her memory to incorporate new information.”
“Stuart says that hat isn't his,” Annie said. “Hasn't a clue where it came from. Seemed genuinely flabbergasted that they found it in his apartment.”
“I need to talk to Stuart again,” I said. “About that. And about other things. Maybe he can clue us into where some of the details in her story are coming from.”
“I'll make arrangements,” Chip said.
Then I flagged Jimmy. Chip picked up the tab.
We walked outside. Chip's car was parked at a meter right out front. Before he got in, he said, “I'll let you know as soon as we've made arrangements for you to interview Stuart Jackson again. In the meanwhile, please be careful.”
“I promise to try,” I said.
Annie and I watched Chip drive off. “Beautiful day,” she said, the sun reflecting off her shades.
I felt the warmth on my back and closed my eyes. “Mmm. Feels good,” I said. There was nothing pressing waiting for me back at the Pearce. I wanted to come up with an artful suggestion for prolonging lunchtime, but I was out of practice. The best I could do was, “Guess we should enjoy it while it lasts.”
Annie must have been reading my mind. “I love this neighborhood,” she said. She checked her watch. “There's a great bakery near here. I could use a little chocolate guilt to wash down that virtuous lunch. It's just a block that-a-way.” She pointed down the street.
“I've got a little time before I have to get back,” I said without even checking my watch. “I never pass up a good chocolate dessert.” But it wasn't the chocolate that tempted me.
Annie hooked her arm in mine and we strolled down the block. We checked out the menu of a Turkish restaurant. The smell of sharp cheese and baking bread wafted out the door of an old-fashioned Italian deli. We admired the salamis and provolones hanging in the window. We continued on down the street, lingering in front of a store that had a ratty-looking sign in the window: ANTIQUES.
I shook my head. “Not bloody likely. That sign is probably the oldest thing they've ⦔ The final word caught in my throat. Abandoning Annie, I hurried inside.
A small, round man sat cross-legged in the corner in a wing chair that had seen better days. He looked like a carved wooden Buddha I got when I was a kid. Someone told me rubbing the tummy brought good luck. He glanced at me as the bell over the door jangled. He nodded, then he went back to writing in a ledger.
Beside him, on a card table, was the thing that had stopped me in my tracks.
“Excuse me.” I tried to sound nonchalant. “Could I see that?” I pointed.
He looked distractedly at the items on the table and held up a battered silver teapot. I shook my head. He put it back and lifted a green, gourd-shaped vase.
“Yeah. May I?”
He handed it to me.
I took the piece of pottery as he turned his attention back to his work. I closed my eyes and breathed deeply, opened them
again, and the pot was still there. I turned it over. An unsigned Grueby. I wondered if the dealer knew what he had.