Dante's Dilemma (11 page)

“Will you ever forgive me?” Candace said as we were pulling into her garage.

“I might if you don't invite me to any more parties.”

I took a sniff of the air, which reeked of my slacks, shirt and sport coat, now residing in a plastic bag on Candace's backseat. I couldn't fault our hosts for their manners. After I'd been lifted from the sofa, still dripping bits and pieces of vodka-scented smorgasbord, the dean's wife had rushed me to an upstairs room, offering everything from a steam bath to free dry-cleaning. Except for a quick scrub at the sink, a dash of her husband's cologne, and a necessary loan of clothing, I'd declined all her offers, desperate to get out of there as quickly as possible. I was now squeezed into a pair of the dean's flannel trousers, along with a brand-new University of Chicago tee shirt.

“I take full blame. You did ask me not to leave you alone.”

“Being turned into an airsickness bag wasn't one of the hazards I had in mind. Who was that asshole, anyway?”

“Peter Crow? He heads up the Student Counseling Center.”

“I hope he's not counseling anyone about substance abuse.”

“That's what's so odd. I thought he didn't drink. Grew up on a reservation somewhere and hates what alcohol has done to his people. If I had to guess, it was a momentary lapse.”

Which would explain why he'd gotten so sick. “Native American?”

“Mmm-hmm. And looks the movie part, too. All dark eyes and craggy features. Handsome if you like them big.”

“Never been my thing,” I said, testing the waters.

“Nor mine,” Candace replied.

“I suppose I smell like I just crawled out of a sewer.”

“Actually, I was just going to compliment you—or rather the dean—on the cologne. Who would have guessed such a gnomish man would have such provocative taste. I wouldn't mind if a little of it rubbed off on me.”

“His taste or the cologne?”

“I love a man who plays hard to get.”

“There are none ‘so firm that cannot be seduced.'”

“And one who can quote Shakespeare at will. Though perhaps I should mind being compared to corruption in the Roman Senate.”

“I don't know about that. I'm very susceptible to corrupting influences.”

Candace laughed. “Shall we go upstairs and work on it?”

“Only if you'll let me use your shower first.”

TEN

The elder Dante Angelotti was furious with me. I'd mouthed off that afternoon to Father Mullaney, my sophomore theology teacher at Regis High, and my father had to leave work early to bail me out of detention. He and I were now engaged in another battle about my dismal grades, and as usual I was scrambling to mount a defense.

“
Ti sei disonorato! E mi hai fatto vergognare! Di nuovo
,” he thundered at me as soon as we reached home. You've disgraced yourself. And brought shame on me. Again.

“That's all you ever think about,” I shot back in English. “How it affects you. Maybe I'd work harder if you weren't always on my case.”

“Your mother would weep to hear you speak that way,” he said once more in Italian. He quickly crossed himself and added, “Mother Mary pray for her.”

I was supposed to feel guilty. “She'd cry even harder if she knew what kind of parent she left me with.”

His huge hand was on me in a flash, lashing me across the face and then whipping back for a stinging cuff to my ear. I felt tears of humiliation well up in my eyes but quickly blinked them away. I'd be damned if I let him know how much it hurt. I eyed the back door a few feet away, trying to decide just how fast I could get out of there before the beating really got underway.

“That's all you know how to do, isn't it, Dad? Slap your kid around until he's black and blue.”

The rebuke slowed him down momentarily, and his raised arm dropped to his side. “Dante, why must you always be against me?” he said, using the name I despised because it was also his. “You know I want nothing but what is best for you.”

“You don't give a shit about me. Not like
she
would if she were alive.”

“
Caro
, how can you say such evil things?”

“Because they're true.” The pain in his dark, blunt-featured face was almost enough to make me reconsider, but I went on taunting him, relishing the chance to give voice to my seething resentments. “If you loved me, you'd take my side once in a while.”

“I am only trying to teach you—”

“
Vattene all'inferno
.” Go to hell.

The disrespect had its intended effect. He reared back for another blow, wild with anger now. My father was tall for an Italian, nearly six feet, and being much shorter, I was able to slip under him just as his knuckles were barreling toward my head. I twisted down and away and bolted for the door, barely making my escape as he lunged unsuccessfully for my waistband. “Fuck you!” I shouted as the screen door slapped shut behind me.

The scene abruptly switched to later that night. I was back in our tiny kitchen, holding something wet and slippery in my hand. I held it up to the flickering florescent bulb to see what it was, puzzling over the slender, triangular shape. Outside the house, a wail of sirens was drawing near. My eyes traveled down to the floor, only then seeing what I had done. With horror I registered my father's body, the dark stain spreading from his midsection onto the linoleum. “No,
papà
!” I burbled helplessly. “NO!” I sobbed again as the police broke through the door . . .

I awoke to a racing heart in a clammy tangle of sheets.

As nightmares went, it wasn't as bad as my usual, the never-ending cinematic loop of the night Jack died, his labored breathing coming in the same ragged gasps that I now tried to quell by reaching for the water on my nightstand. My fingers closed clumsily around the glass, slopping water onto my bedclothes. I gulped down what was left of the liquid while the tremors subsided, long enough for me to remember that I hadn't in fact murdered my father. Only my son.

Still shaky, I sat up and checked the time on my phone. Three a.m. Too early to get up and face the day, especially if I wanted to be fresh and alert for my first—and only—meeting with Rachel Lazarus.

Hallie wasn't kidding when she promised to treat me like any other hostile witness, starting with a motion to keep me from meeting Lazarus at all. As she argued, the prosecution's former expert had already been granted full access to her client in interviews totaling more than twenty hours. Further interrogation would only serve to harass Lazarus, whose fragile psychological state was readily apparent from the nature of her defense. The State's new expert—namely me—couldn't claim a reason to
see
Lazarus for himself and could easily gather all the information he needed by listening to the tapes of his predecessor's sessions. If further questions were necessary, they could be posed by written interrogatory and answered under oath, which at this late date was all the prosecution's “hired gun” could reasonably ask for.

Di Marco, of course, had fought back, partially on the basis of arguments I'd supplied him: that the prosecution could not be blamed for the tragic death of Brad Stephens that necessitated the change in witnesses, and that it would be wholly irresponsible for me to render an opinion about the mental state of an individual I'd never met. After listening to both sides in a hearing that bore every resemblance to a World Wrestling Entertainment match, the judge had split the baby down the middle, denying Hallie's bid to shut me out completely, but granting me only two hours with Lazarus.

Thereafter, it had taken what seemed like another full age to get a date fixed. Hallie had made the process as painful as possible, setting up real or imaginary roadblocks at nearly every turn. In the end, she proposed that I meet Lazarus on Christmas Eve, and after getting my permission, Di Marco was all too happy to go along. Hallie probably thought she was punishing me, but the pitiful reality was I had nowhere else to be that day. My plea for a few hours with Louis in Connecticut, delivered in writing by Kay Bergen, had met with stony silence from Annie's lawyers. Josh and his family were off on their annual ski trip in Colorado. Even Candace had deserted me, flying home to Calgary for a weeklong visit with her folks.

I checked my phone again. Three thirty a.m. If I couldn't get back to sleep, I might as well go over my script for the next day.

Ever since its emergence in the late nineteenth century, psychiatry has been criticized as a discipline lacking a scientific basis. Indeed, to some critics, the very concept of mental “illness” is suspect, involving implicit moral judgments about what is “normal” and what is not. Someday, neuroscience may be able to identify a biological cause for most psychiatric ailments, but in the meantime clinicians are stuck with practice guidelines that attempt to divide the sick from the well based on not much more than theory and professional consensus.

By far the most important of these guidelines is the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
published by the American Psychiatric Association. Often called the Bible of the profession, it is used by practitioners, researchers, regulatory agencies, health insurers, pharmaceutical companies, and the legal system practically to the exclusion of everything else. Then in its fifth edition, the
DSM
had been subject to a barrage of criticism—I'd been known to take shots at it myself—but any psychiatric expert who didn't want to be laughed out of court had better be familiar with its requirements. In Lazarus's case, this meant structuring my inquiry around the six PTSD criteria listed in the
DSM-V
.

First, I had to find that Lazarus had been exposed—either by experiencing it herself or seeing it in person—to a traumatic event, or “stressor,” consisting of death, threatened death, actual or threatened serious injury, or actual or threatened sexual violence. Then I had to find that she was persistently reexperiencing it in one of several ways, such as through recurrent, intrusive memories, nightmares, or “dissociative reactions”—the psychiatric term for flashbacks. Lazarus also had to be exhibiting avoidance behavior, alterations in cognition and mood, and changes in “arousal and reactivity,” a fancy way of saying that her nervous system was on constant red alert. Finally, all of these symptoms had to have lasted for at least a month and not be the result of medication, substance abuse, or other illness.

The further gloss was that Westlake's murder was now more than six months old. For purposes of my testimony, it wouldn't be enough to decide whether Lazarus was suffering from PTSD today. I had to go back and reconstruct what her thinking may have been on the night she killed her husband. And since all of this depended on Lazarus's self-report, I had to be comfortable that she wasn't malingering—faking symptoms in order to mislead me.

It would have been a tall order even if the court had given me more than two hours with her.

Fortunately, as Hallie had been quick to point out, I was able to listen to all of Brad Stephens's recorded sessions before our meeting. And just as well—or not, depending on your point of view—what I had heard left me with little doubt about what I would find.

ELEVEN

Cook County Jail is the largest correctional facility in the United States. It is also the country's largest mental-healthcare provider. Fully a third of its prisoners are mentally ill. Their medical treatment consists mainly of triage: ensuring inmates are stabilized and back on their meds before returning them to the streets. Since most of them can't afford their prescriptions—let alone a roof over their heads—they're soon back to committing the petty crimes that landed them there in the first place. It's a cruel system that often has me thinking more charitably about the state-run bedlams it replaced. Whatever you may think of involuntary commitment, it has to be better than sleeping in a cardboard box or foraging in a trash can for your next meal.

According to Boris, Division IV of the jail, which houses all of its female prisoners, was a windowless brick structure surrounded by a sixteen-foot razor-wire fence. Boris pulled up to the visitor's entrance on South Sacramento and idled the town car while we waited for Hallie's associate to show up. Under the court order, I was not entitled to meet with Lazarus alone, a courtesy extended to Brad Stephens before Hallie assumed command of the case. The only good news was that Hallie wouldn't be making an appearance. If I had to bet, she was already at her parent's place, helping to prepare mouthwatering dishes for the family's Christmas feast, a bitter contrast to the takeout I planned on ordering for myself.

So it was a shock when Boris informed me a few minutes later that the person exiting the cab pulled up behind us was a diminutive woman wrapped in an ankle-length fur coat.

“You sure?” I said to him, feeling my insides clench. I remembered just such a coat, bought on a fall shopping expedition to the Water Tower when Hallie and I were still on good terms. “What else can you see?”

“Like Yelena when she is mad.”

A moment later, Hallie rapped harshly on the curbside window and told me to get out.

I hopped like a coolie to her summons, completely forgetting about the season. Two steps out the car door, my heel slipped on a slick sheet of ice. Before I knew it, I was sprawled on the ground face up with my backpack still attached to my shoulders and my cane rolling off in another direction. Probably because she knew how much I hated being helped, Hallie watched without comment while I attempted to right myself, offering assistance only when my slapstick efforts appeared to be going nowhere.

“C'mon, Yertle,” she said, taking me by the arm and yanking me back to my feet. “Don't you know better than to wear loafers in this weather?”

I was too embarrassed to tell her about the missing shoes. “Thanks for rushing to my aid. Why are you here? I thought Carter would be doing the babysitting this morning.”