readingrat | fic: The Kelpie - Part III Chapter 5 (Reply)

Part III: Princeton

Chapter 5: Queer Lodgings

His first reaction to the idea of getting himself legal aid is denial. A handful of narcotics, and papers that are legitimately his - what can they do to him? He may as well sit this out.

But then the reality of his situation kicks in: although he has no memory of his previous misdeeds, the legal system does, and his two previous runs-in with the judiciary do not speak for him. Both times it was in dubio pro reo, in both cases because of the evidence of biased witnesses. And although he was acquitted of attempted manslaughter, he did get sentenced for driving under influence and reckless endangerment. That makes him a repeat offender.

When he is given his phone call, he figures it may be difficult to get a suitable defence lawyer: he doesn't know/remember anyone and his finances won't exactly attract top-notch people. He needs someone who knows the local law scene and who carries a bit of clout, because this time he may actually need decent legal representation to get out of the corner he has painted himself into. It's bloody annoying, since whatever his reasons for masquerading as Peter Barnes, it was not with the intention of perpetrating crimes. His first thought is to call Chase, but Chase is usually wasted two hours after his shift ends. It's no use trying to get hold of Taub - if he isn't doing an extra shift at the hospital, then he's working his second job, or his third job. Or possibly babysitting one of his two daughters. Or (although this is somewhat unlikely, given that he's perpetually tired) he's conceiving daughter #3. Wilson's in Mayfield, so that leaves only one person.

She doesn't pick up the phone, for which he's grateful because he'd rather not talk to her, so he leaves a message on the answer machine: Been arrested in Trenton. Need a lawyer. Send one over to the precinct in the morning. He figures it'll give her a rough idea.

It's midnight when he's brought into the interrogation room again. The officer who interrogated (if one can call it that) him earlier is seated there already as is - Lisa. He stops short at the door, dismayed, only to be pushed in by the cop who escorted him from the detention cell. Lisa has a sleeping Rachel draped across her lap and is looking as pissed as he feels.

"I told you to send me a lawyer," he says to pre-empt whatever diatribe she prepared on the drive down from Philly, "not to come with your cheerleading team. Oops, forgot, kid can't do a toe touch, can she?"

That hits Lisa where it hurts most; she recoils and her protective shell drops, giving him a brief glimpse of destroyed hopes and years of maternal worry.

The detective rises protectively. "Dr Cuddy, you insisted on this meeting - against my advice. You are under no obligation to put up with this."

Lisa's walls are up again. She looks away from him to the detective and shakes her head. "No, it's okay. I'm fine."

"Oh, great! Does that mean I don't have to stay either?" Pete asks, turning ostentatiously towards the door.

"Sit down!" the detective orders. When Pete doesn't comply, he moves swiftly over to him, takes his arm and shoves him onto the chair next to Lisa's. Then he turns back to Lisa. "Dr Cuddy, he's an addict and he's an abuser. People like that don't change. He hasn't changed. Your relationship to him nearly got you killed. Don't, please don't do this to yourself! I've seen too many women carried out of their homes on stretchers, women like you, clever, attractive, with a life over and above what the abuser could offer them, but blinded by their inability to accept that there are people who can't or won't learn."

"Amen," Pete says.

"Shut up!" Lisa snaps. She returns her attention to the detective. "Detective, you've had extensive dealings with him. He's an arrogant ass, he's an idiot, and he has no sense of self-preservation whatsoever. But tell me, was he ever physically aggressive towards you?"

"In case you don't remember," the detective says with relish, "he shoved a thermometer up my rectum. That's assault. "

Intrigued, he asks, "I did?" before he can stop himself. The detective's eyes narrow.

"In case you don't remember, Detective Tritter," Lisa retorts, "you kicked his cane out from under him first."

"Violence against cripples," Pete practically crows, pulling a face at the detective. "On the Richter scale for abuse I'd say that's a ...,"

"Shut up!" Lisa repeats. "Detective, he was picked up with a negligible quantity of narcotics suitable for personal use only. Chances are that he'll be able to present a scrip for them."

The detective's brows rise. "You mean that you'll lie for him. Again."

"Excuse me?" Lisa's brows rise in played incredulity.

"Dr Cuddy, let's not play games. You perjured yourself to keep him out of jail before, and you'll do it again. I was counting on something like that happening - the loyalty that House can command without ever returning the favour never ceases to amaze me - but I didn't think it would be you."

"I didn't ...," Lisa begins, but on seeing Tritter's unbelieving mien she breaks off in mid-sentence. "Never mind."

"You'd do well to examine your motives for helping House, Dr Cuddy. And your priorities." This last with a pointed look at the sleeping child in her arms.

"Your motives, Detective, won't bear a close scrutiny either," Lisa counters. "House has been in the Princeton area for less than a month, where he is arrested by your men in your precinct. And you want me to believe that's a coincidence?"

"I want you to believe that because it is - a coincidence," Tritter says equably. "My men didn't pick him up - I'm in Homicide now. Narcotics got an anonymous tip-off, so they raided that bar. I had no idea he'd been brought in until the head of Narcotics called me to tell me that the fingerprints of their latest detainee matched those of Gregory House." He shrugs. "But just so we're on the same page, it isn't the drugs that are bothering us, it's his false papers."

If he's hoping that his revelation comes as a surprise, he is disappointed. "His papers?" Lisa says and laughs. "You can forget that."

"Really?" the detective says. "Dr Cuddy, why don't you stick to medicine and let the police deal with identity fraud?"

"This," Lisa says with a hint of triumph, "is not what it seems. Dr House is in the process of having his identity proven and returned to him, as you will see when you check with the Princeton Township Health Department. Until then ...,"

Pete has been shifting uneasily in his chair. Tritter, observing this, says mildly, "I think House has something to say on that issue?"

Lisa twists somewhat awkwardly in her chair to face him, hampered by the child hanging in her arms like a sack of potatoes. "You have initiated proceedings to have yourself identified, haven't you? Foreman said, ... You idiot! Why the hell haven't you got your ass to the Township and filed your papers?"

"I - don't know," he says somewhat helplessly, but truthfully. So Foreman's been gossiping with her. He shouldn't be surprised; Foreman isn't likely to drop as useful a connection as the future Dean of Philadelphia City Hospital.

Lisa huffs, and then she speaks to Tritter. "Can I have a few moments alone with him?"

Detective Tritter purses his lips, but then he gets up and leaves the room.

As soon as the door closes behind Tritter, Pete can sense the full force of Lisa's emotions, pent up till now behind the dam that her public persona provides.

"Oxycodone?" she says dangerously. "Are you mad?"

"The last weeks have been stressful," he says evasively.

"Stressful?" She chokes back a hysterical laugh. "Pete, do you have any idea what your life as an addict was like? You were miserable, totally miserable!" Her voice has risen; Rachel stirs in her arms and gives a moan of protest. Lisa re-settles the child, lowering the volume but not the intensity of her voice when she returns to berating him. "You went through that - that insane procedure to escape from all this: the addiction, the misery, the guilt. Why would you want to return to the worst part of your previous life?"

"Who says I can separate my life into neat little drawers where I get to choose which ones I open and which ones stay closed? The amnesia doesn't change the fact that I'm an addict," he growls.

"No, but it changes ... should have changed your perspective on yourself." She leans her forehead on Rachel's hair, so that her voice is muffled. "I thought that was kind of the idea of the whole procedure." She raises her head again and, seemingly having tanked energy from her daughter's pheromones, changes tack. "Okay, let's concentrate on getting you out of here."

"Told you to get me a lawyer. I can survive here till tomorrow - it isn't the first time, or so I've heard, that I'll have to spend a night in the slammer."

She raises her face and says bitingly, "This isn't the kind of situation that can be settled by a lawyer alone. You do realise what this looks like? You're claiming to have come by Peter Barnes's identity thanks to total retrograde amnesia. But despite your amnesia, of all the millions of places you could have gone to you just happen to have landed in exactly the same place you were living in before. There's no way Tritter, or whichever of his colleagues is responsible for you, is ever going to buy that."

"Well, I haven't told them about the amnesia," he interjects.

"You haven't ... What have you told them?"

"Nothing. Thought it might be a good idea to wait for my lawyer before I shoot off my mouth," he improvises.

She looks at him with disbelief. "'Good ideas' are generally wasted on you. You didn't want to tell them, like you never told me. Fine; I understand. It's your private, private life, and you don't want other people nosing around in it. But you blew that when you got caught with a pocketful of oxy."

Tritter re-enters the room and looks down at them, his brows slightly raised. "Well, Dr Cuddy? Shall we call it a night?"

"I'd like to take him with me," Lisa says politely, but firmly.

Tritter smiles thinly. "We'd all like a lot of things, ..."

"Detective, you don't have a case. Not regarding the papers," Lisa interrupts. "House has retrograde amnesia."

"Dr Cuddy, I may be a humble detective, but I do know a thing or two about amnesia - it's a popular ploy. The amnesia House was suffering from after crashing his car only affected ...,"

"I'm not talking about that. He did this to himself. On purpose. And being House, he did a thorough job. The point here is that after he came to in strange surroundings without his real papers, he had no chance anymore of rectifying the error in his identity, not until he came here and ran into people who recognised him. Now, you can drag him to court and try to get a conviction for the original crime of fraudulently planning to gain a new identity, but I doubt you'll have a case there, since the damaged party isn't the American government, but the British one. Besides, I'm pretty sure he now counts as mentally compromised and is therefore not culpable."

Tritter looks at him speculatively. He scowls back and fidgets.

"Total retrograde amnesia?" the detective asks with deceptive softness.

"Yes," Lisa affirms staunchly.

"Can you prove that?"

"Yes, of course!"

"Okay," Tritter says unexpectedly. "He can go. His papers stay."

"Sorry?" Lisa says.

"He can go," Tritter repeats, his expression blandly innocent. "There'll be a hearing, at which I strongly advise that he appear, with a lawyer if he knows what's good for him."

Lisa is totally flummoxed by this unexpected windfall.

"Unless you'd prefer for him to stay here after all," Tritter adds malevolently.

"I may have amnesia, but I'm not a vegetable. You can talk to me directly," Pete interposes.

"Okay," Tritter says. "I can't keep you for much longer without a warrant, which will be difficult to obtain if Dr Cuddy starts pulling strings. I'm keeping your papers - your British papers - instead. You won't be able to leave the country. If your tale of amnesia doesn't hold, you're looking at about ten years. If it does, ..." He pauses.

"... then you're going to come out of this looking like an idiot," Pete completes for him.

"Oh, please shut up!" Lisa says tiredly. "If you want to stay here, just say so."

"I don't think I'll be the one to shed a few feathers," Tritter says with a superior smile. "Goodnight, Dr Cuddy, House." He nods and leaves the room.

Half an hour later Lisa's car pulls away from the precinct. After a short altercation about their destination, which he wins, Lisa makes for his apartment, her Satnav guiding her through the dreary lanes. Rachel, who woke out of her slumbers when Lisa strapped her into her booster seat, is crying in the back seat, not a full-fledged deluge, but the incessant moans of an overtired child whose seat belt prevents her from finding a comfortable sleeping position.

Lisa catches his irritated glance in the back mirror. "My neighbour was out. Call a taxi if it bothers you!"

He would, not because of Rachel, but because he doesn't want to be beholden to Lisa. Unfortunately, his finances are beginning to look bleak; he hasn't been working regularly since returning to Princeton, the legal hassle he's gotten himself into will cost some (and then some again), the paperwork for his new/old ID some more. A taxi may seem a negligible expense, but he has to start economising somewhere.

"There must be some assets left from your time in Princeton," Lisa remarks out of nowhere. "You didn't have any major expenditures other than sinfully expensive scotch, so there must be money sitting in some bank account. You should ask ...,"

"Wilson," he completes her sentence.

"Yes. I'll write down the names of some lawyers for you. The one who defended you after the crash is still practicing, I think, but he wasn't all that brilliant."

They relapse into broody silence until they reach his place.

"Are you sure you don't want to come back to Philly with us?" Lisa asks as he unstraps himself. "I don't think you should be alone just now."

He swings his legs out of the door. "I'm fine!" he says more forcefully than is necessary or convincing.

She rolls her eyes. "If you change your mind, call me and I'll pick you up."

They both know it won't happen, if only because of Rachel. He can't expect her to drag the kid out of bed again to come chasing him. He stumps up the few steps to the front door and lets himself in without looking back. His apartment is on the second floor and there's no elevator, but his balance has improved a lot since he started running, so that one flight is no problem anymore.

The Actual Problem surfaces when he approaches the door to his apartment, although 'wafts his way' probably describes its first manifestation more accurately. The odour stops him short in his tracks, as does the sight of a sliver of light under his door. He's reasonably sure that he turned his lights off before he left, and he's absolutely sure that he has nothing that could cause a smell like that. Opening the door slowly, he sticks his head around to peer inside and recoils, hit by an unbelievable stench that makes the tainted air in the corridor outside seem balmy like a summer breeze.

Cat, he decides, cat's faeces. Taking a deep breath he goes in, watching his steps. It's all over the place - on the rug, smeared across the walls and distributed over his bed. There's no way he can spend the night here. And there's no way a cat could have climbed vertically up a straight wall and smeared its faeces there.

He dashes into the bedroom, throws a few items of clothing into his backpack, filches his toothbrush and shaver from the bathroom and ... sees his Ossur blade in a corner. What's left of his Ossur blade. Suddenly impervious to the stench, he walks over to it slowly and picks it up. The blade itself is intact, although one can see traces of violence on it too, but the shaft is bent in two places and the straps have been ripped off the socket. Even though it looks as though one might be able to bend it into shape, he knows that it can't be salvaged; the forces acting on every inch of the prosthetic during running make it far too likely to break due to material fatigue.

He's standing there holding it when he hears a muted exclamation from the living room, startling him out of his reverie. He drops the prosthetic, picks up his backpack again and goes to investigate. Lisa is standing in the middle of the room, staring around with a WTF-look on her face.

"Where'd you come from?" he barks in an effort to cover up the emotions the ruined leg awakened in him.

"Downstairs. I hadn't left yet. I was waiting for a light to go on in some apartment, but nothing happened, so I got worried."

Of course nothing happened, because her PI left his on after his rampage through the apartment.

Lisa looks around the apartment, shock plastered all over her face. He takes her arm and drags her out, hoping that she hasn't had the time to take in the exact nature of the desecration.

"Phew!" she says.

"I'm with you there. The neighbour's cat must have gotten in while I was away. Did you leave the squirt in the car?"

That distracts her. "Oh goodness, yes! Let's go!" She more or less sprints back to the car.

They're out on the freeway to Philadelphia before she finally comments on what she saw. "That cat of your neighbour's must be quite something."

"Vile beast. It's going to end up in the river someday."

"I meant anatomically. I've never seen a cat with opposable thumbs."

End of Part III