Port Mortuary (2010)

“I’m assuming I supposedly signed whatever you got or you’d have no reason to think it’s from me other than an engraved address, which could be my husband, who unavoidably is in Japan on business, has been since Friday, although it is the most inopportune time to be away. He wouldn’t write such a thing, anyway. Of course he wouldn’t.”

“The letter purports to be from you,” I reply, and I don’t tell her it is signed “Erica” above her name typed in cursive and that the envelope is addressed in an ornate script in the black ink of a fountain pen.

“This is very upsetting. I don’t know why you won’t read it to me. I have a right to know what someone said as if they’re me. I suppose our attorney will have to deal with you after all, the attorney representing Johnny, and I assume it’s about him, this letter that’s a lie, a fraud. Probably the dirty trick of the same ones who are behind all this. He was perfectly fine until he went there, and then he became Mr. Hyde, which is a harsh thing to say about your own child. But that’s the only way I can think to say it so you understand how dramatically he was altered. Drugs. It must be, although the tests are negative, according to our lawyer, and Johnny would never take them. He knows better. He knows what thin ice he already skates on because of his unusualness. I don’t know what else it could be except drugs, that somebody introduced him to something that changed him, that had a terrible effect, to deliberately destroy his life, to set him up….”

She continues to talk without pause, getting increasingly upset, as a knock sounds on my outer door and someone tries the knob, then at the same time Bryce opens our adjoining door and I shake my head no at him. Not now. Then he whispers that Benton is at my door, and can he let him in? And I nod, and he shuts one door and another opens.

I put Mrs. Donahue’s call on speakerphone.

Benton closes the door behind him as I hold up the letter to indicate whom it is I’m talking to. He moves a chair close to me while Mrs. Donahue continues to speak, and I jot a note on a call sheet.

Says didn’t write it—not her driver or Bentley.

“… at that place,” Mrs. Donahue’s voice sounds inside my office as if she is in it.

Benton sits and has no reaction, and his face is pale, drained, and exhausted. He doesn’t look well and smells of wood smoke.

“I’ve never been there because they don’t allow visitors unless they have some special event for staff….” her voice continues.

Benton picks up a pen and writes on the same call sheet Otwahl? But it seems perfunctory when he does it. He doesn’t seem particularly curious.

“And then you have to go through security on a par with the White House, or maybe more extreme than that,” Mrs. Donahue says, “not that I know it for a fact, but according to my son, who was frightened and a wreck the last few months he was there. Certainly since summer.”

“What place are you talking about?” I ask her as I write another note to Benton.

Typewriter missing from her house.

He looks at the note and nods as if he already knew that Erica Donahue’s old Olivetti manual typewriter is gone, possibly stolen, assuming what she’s just told me is true. Or maybe he somehow knows she’s told me this, and then it intrudes upon my thoughts that my office probably is bugged. Lucy’s saying she has swept my office for covert surveillance devices likely means she planted them, and my attention wanders around the room, as if I might find tiny cameras or microphones hidden in books or pens or paperweights or the phone I’m talking on. It’s ridiculous. If Lucy has bugged my office, I’m not going to know. More to the point, Fielding wouldn’t know. I hope I catch him saying things to Captain Avallone, not realizing the two of them were being recorded secretly. I hope I catch both of them in the act of conspiring to ruin me, to run me out of the CFC.

“… where he had his internship. That technology company that makes robots and things nobody is supposed to know about…” Mrs. Donahue is saying.

I watch Benton fold his hands in his lap, lacing his fingers as if he is placid when he’s anything but low-key and relaxed. I know the language of how he sits or moves his eyes and can read his restiveness in what seems the utter stillness of his body and mood. He is stressed-out and worn-out, but there is something else. Something has happened.

“… Johnny had to sign contracts and all these legal agreements promising he wouldn’t talk about Otwahl, not even what its name means. Can you imagine that? Not even something like that, what Otwahl means. But no wonder! What these damn people are up to. Huge secret contracts with the government, and greed. Enormous greed. So are you surprised things might be missing or people are being impersonated, their identities stolen?”

I have no idea what Otwahl means. I assumed it was the name of a person, the one who founded the company. Somebody Otwahl. I look at Benton. He is staring vacantly across the room, listening to Mrs. Donahue.

“… Not about anything, certainly not what goes on, and anything he did there belongs to them and stays there.” She is talking fast, and her voice no longer sounds as though it is coming from her diaphragm but from high up in her throat. “I’m terrified. Who are these people, and what have they done to my son?”

“What makes you think they’ve done something to Johnny?” I ask her as Benton quietly, calmly writes a note on the call sheet, his mouth set in a firm, thin line, the way he looks when he gets like this.

“Because it can’t be coincidental,” she replies, and her voice reminds me of the cursive typeface of her old Olivetti. Something elegant that is deteriorating, fading, less distinct and slightly bleary. “He was fine and then he wasn’t, and now he’s locked up at a psychiatric hospital and confessing to a crime he didn’t commit. And now this,” she says hoarsely, clearing her throat. “A letter on my stationery or what looks like my stationery, and of course it’s not from me and I have no idea who delivered it to you. And my typewriter is gone….”

Benton slides the call sheet to me, and I read what he wrote in his legible hand.

We know about it.

I look at him and frown. I don’t understand.

“… Why would they want him accused of something he didn’t do, and how have they managed to brainwash him into thinking he murdered that child?” Mrs. Donahue then says yet again, “Drugs. I can only assume drugs. Maybe one of them killed that little boy and they need someone as a scapegoat. And there was my poor Johnny, who is gullible, who doesn’t read situations the way others do. What better person to pick on than a teenager with Asperger’s….”

I am staring at Benton’s note. We know about it. As though if I read it more than once I’ll comprehend what it is he knows about or what it is that he and his invisible others, these entities he refers to as “we,” know about. But as I sit here, concentrating on Mrs. Donahue and trying to decipher what she is truly conveying while I cautiously extract information from her, I have the feeling Benton isn’t really listening. He seems barely interested, isn’t his typically keen self. What I detect is he wants me to end the call and leave with him, as if something is over with and it’s just a matter of finishing what has already ended, just a matter of tying up loose ends, of cleaning up. It is the way he used to act when a case had wrung him out for months or years and finally was solved or dropped or the jury reached a verdict, and suddenly everything stopped and he was left harried but spent and depressed.

“You started noticing the difference in your son when?” I’m not going to quit now, no matter what Benton knows or how spent he is.

“July, August. Then by September for sure. He started his internship with Otwahl last May.”

“Mark Bishop was killed January thirtieth.” It is as close as I dare come to pointing out the obvious, that what she continues to claim about her son being framed doesn’t make sense, the timing doesn’t.

If his personality began changing last summer when he was working at Otwahl and yet Mark Bishop wasn’t murdered until January 30, what she’s suggesting would mean someone programmed Johnny to take the blame for a murder that hadn’t happened yet and wouldn’t happen for many months. The Mark Bishop case doesn’t fit with something meticulously planned but as a senseless and sadistic violent attack on a little boy who was at home, playing in his yard, on a weekend late afternoon as it was getting dark and no one was looking. It strikes me as a crime of opportunity, a thrill kill, the evil game of a predator, possibly one with pedophilic proclivities. It wasn’t an assassination. It wasn’t the black-ops takeout of a terrorist. I don’t believe his death was premeditated and executed with a very certain goal in mind, such as national security or political power or money.

“… People who don’t understand Asperger’s assume those who have it are violent, are almost nonhuman, don’t feel the same things the rest of us do or don’t feel anything. People assume all sorts of things because of what I call unusualness, not sickness or derangement but unusual. That’s the