Trigger Finger (15 page)

20.

Once again, I left
my therapist’s office feeling decidedly worse than I had when I walked in.
 
Fortunately, I had some gears I could shift.

An hour before I
met with Dr. Koenig, the Clerk of Court appointed me as guardian ad litem to an
incompetency proceeding involving the Department of Social Services and a young
man named Brandon Cross.
 
With an interim
hearing only two days away, I had to visit him as soon as possible to advise
him of his rights.
 
I had decided that I
would do this after seeing Dr. Koenig this afternoon, partly for efficiency’s
sake—my shrink’s office stood at the halfway point between my office and
Brandon’s facility—and partly because I needed to see someone more miserable
than Yours Truly.

Because Brandon
Cross was worse off than me.
 
Much, much
worse off.
 
He showed me what crazy
meant, assuring me that I had a ways to go before I ever caught up with him.
 

Brandon
ended up in a lockdown unit at Magnolia Plantation in northeast Burlington.
 
While the name of this place evoked images of
Tara from
Gone
with the Wind
, the reality consisted of something entirely different.
 
Magnolia Plantation was an ugly girl with a pretty
name, a squat, flat-roofed facility of mildewy brick that looked suspiciously
like a converted elementary school.
 
Four
long halls shot out of a central hub that had probably once housed a library,
gymnasium or cafeteria but now contained the administrative and physical
therapy offices.
 
Down the corridors, the
patients lived two to a room in pods that someone had carved from old
classrooms.
 
Industrial tile floors and
cinderblock walls amplified every hoot, holler and footfall to create a
discordant sonic background that made me wonder how any of these guys slept.

And the
smell.
 
I couldn’t figure out which of Magnolia Plantation’s features sucked the
worst; the drab walls and floors, the Department of Corrections-esque
soundtrack or the assaultive bleached air that tried and failed to cover the
scents of mildew, body odor and urine.
 
If insanity had its own scent, this was it: poor moisture controls,
armpits, feet and pee sandwiched in between Clorox and Pine-Sol.
 
Bon
appetit.

I introduced
myself to the duty nurse as Brandon Cross’s court-appointed attorney and she
directed me to Room 408.
 
She buzzed me
into the men’s lockdown wing, where psychiatric patients of all ages wandered a
Linoleum hallway.
 
In the second pod on
the right, I found my client.

I’d read the petition
and the DSS attorney’s packet of medical records out in the parking lot.
 
Respondent
is a 24-year-old male with a history of severe physical and sexual abuse that
led to his foster placement at age 12,
I read.
 
Respondent
suffers moderate mental retardation and disappeared from his Alamance County
foster placement at age 17.
 
On Friday,
October 25, Respondent was found wandering the highway north of Glen Raven
poorly nourished, in a confused and disoriented state, wearing clothes not
appropriate for the weather.
 
Respondent
suffers from memory loss and severe delusions.

But the next
sentence really raised my eyebrows.

Respondent believes he is a Navy fighter
pilot.

I found two young
men—Maverick and Goose from
Top Gun
,
I guess—in Room 408 at Magnolia Plantation.
 
I knocked on the door frame and stood there for a moment trying to
figure out which one of the guys sitting Indian-style on their beds and
watching Dr. Oz was Brandon Cross.
 
Neither one of them looked at me.
 
I waited a minute, then asked them.

Without even
taking his eyes off the television for one second, the man closest to the
window raised his right arm and hand straight out from his body and pointed his
index finger at the other man.
 
Who,
unaware that his roommate had dimed him out, continued to ignore me.

“Thanks,” I
said.
 
I approached Brandon Cross.
 
“Brandon?”

No response.
 
Dr. Oz must have been on fire this afternoon.

“Mr. Cross?
 
Brandon Cross?”

Still no
response.
 
He blinked when I talked,
though, which suggested that he at least perceived my presence but chose to
ignore it.
 
Probably because he was a
fighter pilot, a Navy officer, and I wasn’t addressing him correctly.
 
I stared at his profile, pawing through the
shallow understanding of Navy ranks I’d gained through reading Tom Clancy
novels until I found a word that might fit.
 
“Ensign?”

Now he looked at
me.
 
“Lieutenant Junior Grade,” he said.

He pronounced it
wootenant juniuh gwade,
unable to
pronounce the “r” or “l” sounds.
 
“I’m
Kevin Swanson,” I said.
 
“I’m your
court-appointed attorney in the incompetency proceeding filed against you by Alamance County.
 
You mind talking to me a bit?”

That was a lot of
information for a patient in a lockdown unit to process at once.
 
He blinked at me for a moment, and I thought,
out to lunch
.
 
His head looked impossibly narrow, like he’d
spent his formative years squished between two bricks. This promised a very
quick, very simple and very shallow interview; if I didn’t want to go back to
my office this afternoon, I’d have to find another excuse.
 
Because an in-depth meeting with a respondent
like Brandon Cross wasn’t going to happen.
 
Mentally, I started formulating my very quick, very simple and very
shallow report to the Court.

And then he asked,
“Go somewhere else?”
 
Go somewhewh ewse?
He jerked his thumb
over his shoulder at his roommate.
 
“Nosy.”

“Uh…sure.
 
Is there somewhere we can sit?”
 
I remembered who he thought he was and added,
“Sir?”

Wownge,
he said and slid himself off the
bed.
 
Walking with a pronounced limp, he
led me down the hall to a little room decorated with motivational posters, a
ficus tree and what looked like dorm furniture or decades-old leftovers from
the principal’s office back when this place used to be a school.
 
Bright sun streamed in through the window,
but the lounge was bereft of patients.
 
Probably because it didn’t have a television.

Still limping,
Brandon dragged a chair up to the coffee table—not as cheap or scarred as the
one in Dr. Koenig’s office but pretty bad in its own right—and motioned for me
to sit down.
 
He took the couch.

I showed him my
copy of the petition and notice of hearing.
 
“Seen these before?
 
Sheriff’s
deputies bring them to you?”

He nodded.

“So you know what
this is about?”

He shook his head
and told me that he couldn’t
wead
.

“How does a man
get through Officer’s Candidate
School and learn to land
an F-14 on an aircraft carrier if he can’t read?”

“F-18.
 
F-14 decommissioned.”

“My bad.
 
How’d you get to be a fighter pilot if you
can’t read?”

He snorted and
shook his head again, a sullen gesture that said
man, this is some bullshit, having to explain this again.
 
He looked out the window, deep in
thought.
 
He took a breath, opening his
mouth like he was about to say something, then thought again and closed it.
 
His brow furrowed.

“What is it?” I
asked.

“This hard,” he
replied.
 
Dis hahd.
 
“I a…retard.”

“Take all the time
you need.”

“I retard,” he
repeated.
 
“Retarded.
 
Can’t think right.
 
Can’t read.”

“That’s okay,” I
said.
 
“Just tell me how a man gets to
fly fighter planes when he can’t read.”

He looked over my
shoulder, and I turned to see a hunched-over old man hobbling past the
lounge.
 
Brandon waited for him to shuffle away, then
leaned forward and hissed, “Not fighter pilot.”

“Really?”
 
I said it like this was a surprise.

“Here,” he continued,
“Retarded.
 
Can’t read.
 
Can’t think.
 
Cloudy
.
”
 
Cwowdy.

“What do you mean
by ‘here?’”

He pointed at the
coffee table.
 
Then he pointed
everywhere.
 
“
Here,
” he said.
 
“Here, here,
here!
 
Retarded!”

“You mean…when
you’re in this place, you’re retarded?”

“This world.”

“When you’re in
this world, you’re retarded.”

He nodded
emphatically, smiling now, pleased that I understood.

“But you’re not
retarded…in another world?”

He drew his lips
into a tight grin and shook his head.

“In another world,
you’re a lieutenant junior grade in the Navy and you fly F-18s.”

At this point, I
felt like I had all the information I needed to make a recommendation to the
court.
 
I didn’t need to sit here on the
state’s dime talking to a guy so obviously incompetent to handle his own
affairs that I could have figured it out if he spoke only Chinese.
 
Professional pride, though—and a desire to
not return to the office any sooner than necessary—kept me in my seat.
 
Brandon Cross may have been a mental
incompetent, but the nurses and orderlies weren’t.
 
When they saw his lawyer jetting out the door
five minutes after he signed in, they’d say,
that’s a court-appointed piece of shit right there.
 
Didn’t hardly spend any time at all with the
man.

“Why don’t you
tell me how that works?”
 
I asked.
 
“Living in two worlds, I mean.
 
Do you just jump back and forth between
realities whenever you feel like it, or is it more of a surprise, like you’re
sitting on the john on an aircraft carrier one minute and suddenly whoa, you’re
in a mental hospital?”

He shook his head
energetically.
 
The grin had disappeared.

“No?
 
No what?
 
No, you can’t control it, or no, it isn’t a surprise?”

He closed his eyes
and took a deep breath.
 
Behind him,
clouds obscured the sun on their way across the sky and the window turned from
yellow to gray.

“No two
realities,” he said, pronouncing it
weeawitties.

He opened his
eyes.

“That real,” he
said.
 
“This a nightmare.
 
And I
stuck
.”

21.

Brandon’s DSS file waited in my email inbox
when I got back to the office.
 
They’d
pulled him out of his mother’s home at age twelve, when her boyfriend had taken
a shine to him.
 
His special education
teacher noticed him walking funny at school one morning and when she asked him
why, he said that when he walked like that, his butt didn’t hurt as bad.
 
Mama and Boyfriend went to jail, Brandon went into the
foster care system.
 
He spent the next
five years shuffling from placement to placement until he ran away at
seventeen.
 
Nobody saw him again until
they found him on the highway up there in Glen Raven.

For the first time
in forever, I went more than five minutes without wallowing in my
problems.
 
I felt pretty good until I
looked on my things-to-do list and saw the notation:

Find neurologist

 
Right.
 
Because a baseball bat had connected squarely
with my skull.
 
Shortly thereafter, I’d
popped back up and shot the batter.
 
Yet
another miracle.
 
Or not.
 
Neither I—nor Dr. Koenig, for that matter,
being a psychologist—knew diddly squat about head injuries.
 
Was that particular aspect of the shooting so
miraculous?
 
I didn’t know.
 
But, I’d been thinking, a neurologist
probably would.

My father still
had a few colleagues practicing at Catawba Memorial, and I decided I would seek
advice from one of them.
 
I buzzed
Kristin, my secretary, to have her go online and find me somebody, but when the
intercom returned only dead air, I looked at the clock and realized it was six
P.M. and everybody but the lawyers had left.
 
I could go online myself—maybe I couldn’t type very well, but I could
surf the web with the best of the best—but nobody’s office would be answering
phones at this hour.
 
So I wouldn’t get
this question answered tonight.

I set the receiver
back in its cradle and sat back in my chair.
 
On my desk, the folder Craig had brought me from the Burlington Police
Department sat beside a stack of credit card statements received from opposing
counsel in one of the dozens of marital Vietnams in which I stayed involved
all the time.
 
I picked up the folder,
opened it.
 
I flipped slowly through the
useless sheets of paper until I came to the photocopy of the first video store
card.

Ryan’s News and Video
.
 
It made sense that Pinnix and Ramseur would
not only frequent a pornographic video store, but hold membership cards.
 
They had probably been going there for years,
seeking porn that got sicker and sicker as time went on and they became harder
and harder to impress.
 
At some point,
watching actresses cry out in fake pain during fake rapes didn’t cut it for them
anymore.
 
And they’d taken things to the
next level.

Note to self,
I thought.
 
Check
and see if golems like porn.

Given what they’d
tried to do, they probably liked it a lot.
 
Which meant that they probably stopped by Ryan’s News and Video
frequently.
 
Which in turn meant that the
clerk there could probably tell me something about them if I caught him at the
right time.
 
I could put my Alamance
County Courthouse ID around my neck to make me look official, make him think he
had to answer my questions.
 
If he wanted
to get cute, if he wanted to pull customer privacy on me, I could threaten to
subpoena him to a deposition.
 
Tell him I
could make him produce all his business records, all his security tapes,
everything.
 
I couldn’t do this—not
without filing a bona fide lawsuit first—but he didn’t know that.
 
He would understand, though, that his
business depended largely upon discretion.
 
And that if I shined the light on his little store, the cockroaches
would stop coming.

The sun was on its
way down by the time I stepped out of the building and into the parking lot,
but it had dropped entirely by the time I merged onto the Durham Freeway from
the interstate.
 
Electric light and the
headlamps of a thousand cars beat the night back to the edges of the highway, where
it pressed against the guardrails in an effort to collapse the whole
works.
 
When I got off the freeway, it
suddenly hit me that Ryan’s News and Video probably didn’t rent commercial
space in the best part of Durham, and I was going there at night.
 
Evidently, since Pinnix and Ramseur screwed
up their chance to kill me, I wanted to give their neighbors a crack at it,
too.

This is some stupid shit, Swanson,
Bobby
warned me.
 
You need to turn your ass around.

“Fuck it,” I
growled.
 
I turned onto

Ryan’s News and
Video looked exactly as I’d pictured it: an adult bookstore set up in an old
gas station.
 
The owner had painted over
the windows and bricked in the service door.
 
A single island standing before the building hadn’t sheltered gas pumps
in many years, but the overhead lights still worked and these threw a sickly
yellow light over the storefront.
 
It
provided enough illumination by which to see and avoid tripping over the many
places where the ancient asphalt had buckled, but not so much that the casual
observer could ascertain one’s identity.
 
Five or six cars and pickup trucks stood parked outside, all but
one—probably the clerk’s car—backed into their spaces.
 
Despite the poverty of the surrounding area,
none of the vehicles looked more than five years old, and when I backed the BMW
into the last remaining space, it didn’t look out of place.
 
The business attracted a certain clientele
from outside the neighborhood.

“Here we go,” I
muttered to no one.
 
I got out.
 
The headlights blinked and the horn
hiccupped, the locks clicked shut and I walked into the store.

If I expected the
inside to dovetail with the seedy exterior, a shock awaited me upon entry.
 
Bright fluorescents lit row after row of
neatly arranged erotica, a surprisingly professional cornucopia of pornographic
videos, magazines and adult toys.
 
The
linoleum tile floor showed signs of age but also glowed from the recent
attention of a mop.
 
I had anticipated
the scent of cigarettes and old motor oil but my nose detected neither of
these; a man could have spent hours in here and walked out with no telltale
smells clinging to his clothes, nothing to raise concern in the sensitive
olfactory receptors of a wife or girlfriend.
 
What sounded like the Top 40 station out of Raleigh drifted from speakers set into the
acoustic tile overhead.
 
It could have
been any Blockbuster Video store in the country.

But for the
inventory.
 
When the door closed behind
me, I found myself looking at a stack of small boxes with a photo of a strange
lump of plastic and a young blond woman licking cherry red lips.

LARA LOVITT
FUCKABLE VAGINA, the box proclaimed.
 
The
lip licker, I presumed, being Lara.
 
REALISTIC FEEL!
 
E-Z CLEANING!

“Welcome to
Ryan’s,” called a young man seated behind a cash register on the far end of the
store, reading a magazine.
 
He didn’t
look up.
 
“Holler if you need help.”

“I will,” I said,
clearing my throat.
 
“Thanks.”

I moved past the
adult toy aisle and through a section marked
ASIAN
, which offered a plethora of DVDs with covers showing small
women of Asian descent finding creative ways to get boned.
 
There stood another section marked
INTERRACIAL,
another for
GAY/LESBIAN/TRANSSEXUAL,
another for
S&M
and yet another labeled
HETEROANAL.
 
The last section before the register promised
ALTERNATIVE.
 
Apparently, all the other material was just
too mainstream for some people.

“Help you find
something?”
 
Asked the young man.

“I don’t know,” I
said.
 
“Maybe.
 
Are you Ryan?”

“I’m Cory.”

He was younger
than me, twenty-eight or twenty-nine, but taller, broader in the
shoulders.
 
He wore a hooded sweatshirt
with HOLLISTER printed on the chest, but the long sleeves didn’t quite disguise
the flames tattooed on the undersides of his arms.
 
Another look and I saw more tattoos on the
topsides; with his shirt off, this guy would have resembled a New York City subway car.
 
He had shaved his head, like Dr. Koenig.
 
He had a gold tooth, unlike Dr. Koenig.

Behind him, a red
curtain covered the doorway to another room in the building.
 
A dim light turned red by the gauzy material
glowed inside it, and I felt suddenly certain that I was looking at the
entrance to the VIP section.
 
Just in
case the stuff in the
ALTERNATIVE
section wasn’t donkeyshow weird enough for some patrons.

I reached inside
my London Fog overcoat and pulled out a sheet of paper—a photocopy of the
membership card to Ryan’s—which I unfolded and displayed for the clerk.
 
“You guys issue cards like this?”

“Yeah.
 
That’s…who are you?”

“I’m Kevin
Swanson,” I said.
 
“I’m an attorney from Alamance County.”
 
Seeing his face tighten up, I quickly added, “Nobody’s in trouble.
 
I’m just looking for information on two guys
who might have a connection to this card right here.”

“What two guys?”

“Leon Pinnix and
Trayshaun Ramseur.
 
Ring a bell?”

Cory shook his
head.

“There’s two of
them,” I said. “Cards, I mean.
 
One for
Pinnix and one for Ramseur.
 
You mind
checking your records and seeing if you have an address?”

“We don’t keep
records,” he said.
 
“People that come
here don’t necessarily want a paper trail, you know?
 
And even if we had records, I probably
couldn’t show them to you.
 
Privacy
laws.
 
Know what I’m saying?”

“I do,” I
said.
 
My face remained impassive, but
inside I felt myself flailing.
 
This was
my one and only lead.
 
This was the part
of the show where I threatened to subpoena him to a deposition and threatened
to force him to produce business records.
 
But it had become very obvious to me—since I wasn’t dealing with Ryan
himself here, or anybody else with skin in the game—that Cory wouldn’t give a
rat’s ass if I subpoenaed the entire world.
 
In fact, he might enjoy collecting his eight dollars an hour to come sit
at a deposition.

“If you don’t mind
me asking, what’d they do?
 
I mean,
what’s a lawyer from Alamance doing sniffing around a porn store?”

I folded the paper
and slipped it back into my coat along with my hands.

“Last year, they
tried to break into my house,” I said, maintaining my expression.
 
“They tried to kill me but didn’t do a great
job.
 
So I shot and killed them.”

Cory’s thick
eyebrows raised and brought the corners of his mouth up with them in a slight
smile. “I thought you looked familiar.
 
I
saw you on the news, dude.”

“They didn’t have
any ID,” I continued.
 
“In fact, but for
these cards to your store I don’t think the cops would have even known their
names.
 
I’m just trying to get more
information.
 
So I can get some…closure.”

“Closure,” he
echoed.

“Closure,” I repeated.

His eyes moved
over my overcoat, the suit visible beneath it.
 
White shirt, dark tie.
 
I read his
mind;
this guy killed somebody?
 
You got to be fucking kidding me.

“The nature of the
attack,” I said, “suggests that if they held memberships to a place like
this—no offense—they would have come here a lot.
 
They’d be regulars.”

“We have a lot of
regulars.”

“Two black males,
early to mid thirties.”

“Dude, this is Durham.
 
You’re going to need more than that.”

“They would have
been into alternative.”

Up climbed the
eyebrows, slight but noticeable.
 
“How
alternative?”

“The cops found
handcuffs and duct tape.
 
Theory is,
these guys were getting ready to act something out.”

Cory’s mouth
transformed into an O and his eyebrows raised all the way.
 
He whistled.
 
“I see.
 
That’s pretty
alternative.”