Lassiter 07 - Flesh and Bones (31 page)

"Right," Kip chimed in, twisting his angel-hair pasta around his fork. "Like Mandy Patinkin in
The Princess Bride
, when he catches up with the bad guy and says, 'My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.' "

"Because Schein's a coward," I said, "who might never have done anything if Guy Bernhardt hadn't egged him on."

"Many theories," Charlie said, attacking a piece of chicken piccata. "Little proof."

"I got a little proof this morning before court."

"Socolow give you what you wanted?"

"Yeah. I didn't specify what I was looking for, just asked for the entire contents of Harry's desk, and there it was."

"So Socolow doesn't really know what you want?"

"Doesn't have a clue."

The old buzzard sliced his chicken, then said, "You're quite caught up in this trial."

"It's what I do, Charlie."

"But are you prepared to lose?"

"What does that mean?"

"Emotionally, are you prepared to go on with your life when . . . if you lose?"

He had that father-to-son look of worry I get only from Charlie. "Okay," I said. "I'm living and breathing this one. It's the most important thing in the world to me."

Charlie sighed and neatly lined up his knife and fork on his plate. "Jake, did you know that at this very minute, the Swift-Tuttle comet, a chunk of rock six miles in diameter, is hurtling through space on a collision course with the earth? On its present course, traveling at sixteen miles per second, it will crash into our insignificant little planet on August 14, 2126."

"Most of Uncle Jake's clients will still be in prison," Kip said.

"What's the point, Charlie?" I asked.

"It's a doomsday rock!" he thundered. "The explosion will be a billion times greater than the Hiroshima bomb. It will create a cloud of dust that will encircle the earth for decades, cutting off all sunlight, killing all crops, destroying the global climate, causing worldwide famine and perhaps the extinction of the human race."

"Holy
Star Wars
!" Kip said.

I polished off the beer. "I get it, but I don't buy it. You're telling me that in the scope of things, what happens in our day-to-day lives doesn't matter. As individuals, we are nothing, and as a species—"

"We're doomed," Charlie said with finality.

"Then why do anything?" I asked. "Why not just hang out at the beach and windsurf and fish and chase women?"

"I like the fishing part," Kip said, his mouth painted with marinara sauce.

"As I recall, you tried that," Charlie said, "and found it unfulfilling. There has to be a balance. You have to find fulfilling work, what Mortimer Adler called play, or what Joseph Campbell called finding your bliss. At the same time, you cannot wager your entire worth, your self-esteem, on something so fleeting as the whims of a judge or jury, not when everything we call civilization can be extinguished in—"

"One swell foop," Kip said.

After lunch, Dr. Lawrence Schein told the jurors that each of us has a secret compartment in which traumatic memories are locked away. "My job is to unlock that compartment, open the gateway to the mind, and release the memories. Only by remembering can we heal."

I kept the questions open and easy and let him talk. I wanted him relaxed and confident. It would make the contrast even greater when I broke him.
If
I broke him.

"All memories are stored somewhere in the brain," he said. "Some are accessible, ready to be called up at any time. Others are frozen, as if in a glacier. I use my training to warm up that glacier, to melt the ice, to let the memories run free as a river in the pristine woods."

He was up to his ass in picturesque wordplay, but I let him continue the spiel. Like a fish on a line, he would run a while before I set the hook. He told the jury about hypnosis, imagistic recall, psychodrama, free association, age regression, and gestalt therapy. He talked about patients in denial and the sensory flashbacks of abuse survivors. The words "remember" and "heal" came up repeatedly, as did the initials PTSD.

"Posttraumatic stress disorder—you may be familiar with the term," Schein said, with just a touch of condescension, turning toward the jury. "We called it Vietnam syndrome when our soldiers suffered it. Whatever term we use, it means the patient has sublimated the horrors of the past."

He talked about Chrissy Bernhardt's history. The eating disorders, drug and alcohol abuse, destructive relationships with men, the blocks of missing memories from childhood, the feeling of being out of control. He described the differences between traumatic experiences that are remembered in intricate detail and those we cannot remember at all.

"A Type I trauma is a short incident that leads to a brilliant, indelible memory," he explained. "A Type II trauma is caused by multiple, repetitious acts and may not be remembered. The mind anticipates the abuse—physical, sexual, or emotional—and represses the memory as a way of continuing to function. Of course, this defense mechanism does as much harm as good. The victim is not spared the agony of the abuse. She only feels it in different, self-destructive ways. Chrissy suffered Type II trauma and hence could not remember it until I unlocked the gate and the healing process began."

"She had no memories of the alleged abuse until you told her she was abused, is that correct?"

"No, not at all. I didn't
tell
her anything." Indignant and better prepared now that he knew where I was going. He gave the jury a little smile that said he was in control of this wily shyster.

"You suggested that her father abused her?" I said.

"No, I helped her remember what had happened so that she could heal. This is a little girl who had been raped, time and time again." He hit the word "rape" hard. An ugly word, and one of the woman jurors seemed to cringe. "To combat the pain and the shame, she had put herself into a trancelike state each time she was abused. Afterward, she told no one. Not her mother, not her teachers, not even herself. She didn't remember because she wouldn't let herself remember."

He was assured and convincing. He was either a brilliant practitioner of the latest advances in psychotherapy or a complete bullshit artist. I thought I knew which, but could I prove it? Then I played the tapes.

The jurors sat transfixed, listening to that childlike voice.

I pushed the Stop button. "Now, Dr. Schein, correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't Chrissy just deny having been abused by her father?"

"Yes."

"After many hours of preliminary questioning?"

"Yes."

"Under hypnosis?"

"Yes."

"Injected with sodium amytal to enhance memory?"

Sure, I knew Millie Santiago thought it didn't work, but I'm a lawyer. I can go the other way if it helps the case, and Schein could hardly disagree after he had used it.

"Yes, I'd given her sodium amytal."

"But despite all of that—the questioning, the hypnosis, the truth serum—you wouldn't take no for an answer."

"I wouldn't accept at face value answers that clearly came from the surface of Christina's consciousness."

"The surface of her consciousness?" I mused, arching my eyebrows. "And where is that located, the cerebellum, the cerebrum, the isthmus of Panama?"

When I've exhausted logic and inductive reasoning, I resort to mockery and ridicule.

" 'Surface' is just an expression," he said through narrowed lips, "but if you must know, the regulator of explicit memory is the hippocampus. Studies show that survivors of childhood abuse often have a smaller hippocampus than normal. The belief is that these memories are stored implicitly in the amygdala, completely independent of the hippocampus."

"Can you prove that? Can we look into Chrissy Bernhardt's brain and find these memories in her—what'd you call it—her hippopotamus?"

One juror snickered. Good.

"Of course not," he bristled. "These are scientific theories about the workings of the brain."

"Theories," I repeated. "The earth is flat. That was a theory, too."

"Objection," Socolow said. "Argumentative and . . . archaic."

"Sustained," the judge said. "Let's get back on track, Mr. Lassiter."

"Wherever these events might have resided in her brain, Chrissy couldn't remember them, correct, Doctor?"

"Yes, but it would have been negligent for me to stop there. Remember, I had tested her. I knew her symptoms, the difficulty she had in relationships and knowing what she wanted, the fear of new experiences, the promiscuity, the sleeping and eating disorders, and several other classic symptoms."

"And these proved to you that she was the victim of sex abuse?"

"They were consistent with childhood sexual abuse. Indeed, they were extremely strong indications of such abuse."

"But why her father? Even if you're right, why not an uncle, a teacher, the gardener?"

He didn't have a ready answer, but he covered up by appearing to weigh the question with utter seriousness rather than terror. He was a good witness, and I hated him. After a moment, he said, "The father is a prime abuser in our society. Parental incest is rampant."

"So, you relied on statistics?"

"Not entirely. I relied on my experience and training."

"And the fact that you knew Harry Bernhardt?"

He nodded before answering. "Yes. I knew Harry. It added a dimension not usually available to a therapist."

"Let's explore that. At the time Chrissy was eleven years old, you were visiting her mother four or five times a week in her home, isn't that correct?"

"Yes."

"And Chrissy was there during those visits?"

"Yes."

"And her father was there, too?"

"Yes."

"Did she run away from her father or seem frightened of him?"

"No."

"Did Harry ever touch his daughter in an inappropriate manner?"

The jurors were all looking at Schein. He had to answer no. If it had been yes, he wouldn't have needed the great, climactic hypnotic therapy to solve the mystery of Chrissy's misspent life.

"No. He was affectionate to his daughter, but there were no overt manifestations of incest."

"Did Chrissy ever display any of the signs of sexual abuse when she was eleven or twelve years old?"

He thought before answering, and I could read his thoughts. That happens sometimes on cross-examination. You know where you're going, and so does a smart witness. Again, Schein was in a bind. If he answered yes, I'd ask what he'd done about the suspected abuse. The answer, of course, would be nothing, and then I'd question both his competence and his credibility. Cross-examination is like chess. You're always thinking three moves in advance.

"No, not that I noticed."

"But this extra dimension of knowing Harry Bernhardt somehow led you to conclude that he had raped his daughter?"

"It was just one factor," he said quickly.

"What else did you rely on, Dr. Schein—the factor that you hated him?"

He ran a hand over his shaved head, then crossed his legs, knee over knee. He turned his body away from the jury box at a forty-five-degree angle.

Body language.

Dr. Les Weiner had taught me all about it for three hundred bucks an hour. The jurors had never taken any lessons, but they knew. Unconsciously, we all notice the signs. Preening, clenched fists, tightly crossed legs, unnatural gestures are all products of tension. A jerky motion with the hand reveals that the person is trying not to extend too far, and rapid hand movement may mean that the witness is trying to make a point and get it out of the way. Covering the mouth with a hand—psychologically covering up the words—is a giveaway, too.

In the nearly silent courtroom, I heard Schein's feet shuffle. The witness stand was closed in the front, so I couldn't see inside, but I'd give you two to one that he crossed his feet at the ankles beneath, not in front of, his chair. It's a sign of closing down, and I hoped the jurors noticed through the open side of the witness stand.

"No," Schein said finally. "As I told you earlier, I didn't hate him."

"Forgive me. At first you said you were Harry's 'friend,' but no, you then said you misspoke about that. You admit being in love with Harry's wife, writing her romantic poetry, and spending several days a week by her side. You blame Harry for her early death, and now you conclude fifteen years later that he must have sexually abused his daughter, because she was a skinny, unhappy model who slept with a lot of men in Paris and Milan. Is that about it?"