For a while, Pinky’s interactions with the cops seemed to have had a beneficial effect. Like many young people who have their scuffles with the justice system, she later decided she wanted to enter law enforcement. It took her nearly six years to get her college degree in police science; then she shocked everyone, except Helen, by acing the entrance exam for the KCUPF, the Kindle County Unified Police Force. But days before she was to start, Pinky lost her place in the academy. It was not her prior arrest record, as Stern at first suspected, since juvenile offenses weren’t considered. Instead she had tested positive for Ecstacy and cannabis. To her grandfather, she expressed amazement that the surefire steps she’d read about on the Internet to thwart drug testing had failed. Abstinence, apparently, had never been a serious option.
“Which reminds me,” she says. “I brought a letter home from the office for you.” She goes to her pocketbook on the kitchen counter and returns with a business-size envelope, folded in quarters. “Read it,” she says. “It’s kind of interesting.”
The letterhead and logo at the top of the page belong to an outfit called Elstner Labs, a respected firm in the realm of forensic chemistry and engineering. Elstner has performed a chemical analysis on something called ‘the reference specimen.’ Two dense paragraphs follow, full of words that are beyond him: ‘X-ray powder diffractometry’; ‘Fourier transform infrared spectrometry and pyrolysis.’ Eventually, he understands that Elstner analyzed a paint sample. One testing track confirmed the major crystalline components of the paint, the other characterized its organic makeup. In the letter’s second to last paragraph, Elstner concludes that there is a high degree of likelihood that the source of the paint was a 2017 Chevy Malibu of a color called Vanilla White.
Although Stern would prefer not to admit it to Marta, there are moments when he is entirely befuddled, when his brain seems to be grinding without establishing a connection to the world beyond. Usually, the phenomenon is over in a few seconds, but not this time. Stern has placed the letter on the quartz countertop and stares at it with his fingertips laid against his forehead, as if his hand were an antenna that will finally receive a signal. But it is futile.
“Pinky, I am sorry, but I do not understand what this has to do with Kiril’s case.”
“Kiril? It’s about your accident.”
“In March?”
“Right. I got that paint from your car.”
He stares. “Pinky, my car was gray.” Or is that his new car? For an instant, he feels a stark fear about what he has again revealed. But no. No. Both are gray, the new Cadillac and the old Cadillac, just different shades.
“Pops, it’s from the car that hit you.”
“Ah,” he says with relief, now that he understands. The driver who’d smashed into Stern’s front end at ninety miles an hour never stopped. Only one witness remained on the scene to speak to the Sheriff’s Police, and she, bless her, was far more concerned about Stern’s life than recalling the offending vehicle. Her account confirmed that the collision was not Stern’s fault, but she was not someone who could tell you make and model, even if that car was sitting right in front of her. Light-colored, she’d told the police.
That was no surprise to Stern. He had one memory of the wreck, which he dwelled on in the hospital. He recalled seeing a white sedan with the cream-colored parking decal of PT in the lower right corner of the rear window. He’d demanded that the police investigate and, with his brain healing, perseverated, requesting at least once every hour that he be allowed to communicate this information to a detective. Finally, when he was more collected, a Greenwood County Sheriff’s Police investigator stopped by in the company of a neurosurgical resident. Both were women in their thirties, and together they patiently explained the fallacies of his recollection.
His last clear memories were of exiting the parking lot at PT’s low-slung white suburban facility in Greenwood County. As he’d left there, the resident said, he’d undoubtedly seen a car in front of him with the oval PT sticker.
‘When a brain has absorbed this kind of insult,’ Dr. Seau explained, ‘memories get stuck together in peculiar ways. It’s a bit like dreams. I know it’s what you recall—’
‘Quite vividly,’ Stern answered.
‘Yes,’ said the cop, now intervening, ‘but that’s not possible. The front end of that car hit you right near your driver’s side door. You never could have seen the rear window. You were already skidding at a forty-five-degree angle toward the culvert.’ Largely as a courtesy to Stern, the cops had gone to the parking lot at PT a few days after the accident, but, as they would have predicted, there was no vehicle there that showed front-end damage.
Stern had recovered his reason by the time the detective and resident visited him together. He understood. But he felt like Galileo after being told that he had to accept that the sun circled the earth. He knew what he knew. And there was white paint left on his car.
‘That’s what I saw,’ he told Pinky, who in that period visited him every day.
‘And the cops won’t investigate?’
Stern explained. Pinky nodded in her millennial way several times before saying, ‘Okay, so I’ll follow up.’
Brain-injured or not, Stern knew this was implausible. Whatever Pinky’s education, she had neither the resources nor the attention span to duplicate a police investigation. But that she took her grandfather seriously, when everyone else dismissed what he was saying, touched him.
To the best of his memory, Pinky’s announcement that she would look into things was the end of that effort. With Pinky, follow-through was a term best expressed with an acre of white space between the words. But she had apparently gone to the salvage yard where the Cadillac was waiting for the insurance adjuster to declare it a total loss. There she scraped off the remnants of the long streaks of white paint, which had been deposited by the offending vehicle on the crushed front end of Stern’s Cadillac, and sent them to Elstner Labs.
He again looks at the correspondence.
“This letter is dated in July, Pinky.”
“Yeah, right.” The expression familiar to everyone who knows Pinky well enters her soft face, the ‘I messed up’ look, as her nice green eyes dart to the floor. “But you know, like, I never get mail in the office.”
“I see,” says Stern. “The letter was on your desk?”
“That’s what Vondra says. She found it the other day, because we got a past-due notice about Elstner’s bill.”
“I see. Those are expensive tests, Pinky.”
“You told me in the hospital I could spend a thousand.”
No chance he’d remember that. Things were a scramble.
“A thousand would be a very good price for such tests, Pinky.”
“Yeah,” she says, “it was more.”
No point in asking how much more. It is already done, and Stern’s native frugality has always ended with his grandchildren. Marta, who rarely allows Pinky’s missteps to pass, will show him the bill eventually, in any case.
“And have you given any thought to the next move, now that you have this information?” Stern asks her.
“I’m going to go back to the Greenwood cop and see if she can look through the DMV records and scope out how many white 2017 Chevy Malibus are registered around there.”