Blinded

by Stephen White

  Lauren’s soup bowl was empty when I completed my exposition. I ladled her some more.

  “So what are you going to do?” she asked me.

  “Exactly what she wants me to do, I guess. As soon as I’m sure she has a safe place to stay, I’ll call the police in the town where she was living and tell them what she told me.”

  “Yeah?”

  “What do you think will happen when I do?” I asked.

  “Depends on whether or not the cops believe you.”

  “And what does that depend on?”

  “On whether she’s given you any information that coincides with what the local cops already know about the crime. If your client knows something that isn’t in the public record, I would predict that they would take you quite seriously.”

  “And then what?”

  “I’m speculating, okay? If they believe her story, they would either ask her to travel back there so they could talk to her, or they would send somebody out here to interview her. Maybe him, too-her husband-if he’s stupid enough to be accommodating. It all depends on what they’ve been able to develop at their end and how it matches up with what she knows. But it’s hard to predict. You know what these cold cases are like. Detectives lose interest. Evidence gets lost. Witnesses die or move away. People forget.”

  “She said she’d testify against him.”

  “Sorry,” Lauren said. “It’s not that simple.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Spousal privilege.”

  “So?”

  “Spousal privilege is a trickier thing than most people realize. Each spouse has a privilege not to disclose marital communications, and-this is the part that people don’t know-they also have a privilege to prevent their spouse from disclosing marital communications.”

  “Really? I thought spousal privilege meant that spouses couldn’t be compelled to testify against each other. Well, she’s willing to testify. Eager even. Her testimony would be voluntary.”

  “Like I said, it’s not that simple. He could assert his privilege and prevent her from testifying. But there are some circumstances that would allow his privilege to be overridden.”

  “Teach me.”

  “There are statutory exceptions to the spousal privilege evidence rules. Every state I’m aware of has a battering and child-abuse exception. If one spouse batters the other or injures a child, the injured spouse is free to testify about that against the batterer. But the case you’re describing is the murder of a third party, not domestic violence. Take Colorado. If the homicide you’re talking about had happened in Colorado, spousal privilege wouldn’t apply at all, because the case that’s in question involves a serious felony and in Colorado all spousal privilege is waived for serious felonies. Other states have different spousal privilege statutes, with different exceptions. Some have felony exceptions, like Colorado, some don’t. Ultimately, a lot is going to depend on what state this homicide of yours happened in.”

  “Please go on.”

  “In many states, including ours, spouses can’t testify against each other without the consent of the other spouse. But in some states there’s no felony exception to that rule. If your client is from one of those states, unless her husband granted his consent-which I think we can agree is unlikely if she’s about to accuse him of murder-she wouldn’t be allowed to testify against him, even for an alleged homicide.”

  Emily walked over, wanting her ears scratched. I obliged. “Do you know how the law works in any other states?”

  “Any one in particular?” Lauren teased.

  “Sorry, I can’t tell you which state this is about. I wish I could. What other ones do you know?”

  “I passed the California bar, remember?”

  Lauren and I were both on our second marriages. Her first had taken her briefly to California. We didn’t talk about our exes much, so her reference to her time in California hung in the air like the scent of burnt garlic.

  “Okay, what’s California ’s spousal privilege statute? Do you remember that kind of detail?”

  “It was a lot of years ago, but my memory is that it’s one of the more conservative laws, or liberal laws, depending, I guess, on whether you’re a prosecutor or a defense attorney. I think there’s a mutual consent rule in California, but I don’t believe that there’s a felony exception.”

  “Which means that, hypothetically, if this old murder took place in California, my client couldn’t testify against her husband without his consent.”

  “If I’m right, that’s exactly what it means.”

  I figured she was right; my experience was that Lauren was usually correct about matters of the law. I thought about the complications that her facts presented and explained, “I was going to run it by Sam today. To see what this would be like from a police point of view-you know, to get a call like the one I’m about to make. But I decided that it wasn’t a good idea.”

  “No, it wouldn’t be a good idea for him. Not now, given his condition. I’m not sure it’s even a good idea for you. You may not want to be in the middle of this, Alan. Think it through carefully.”

  “Why? What do you mean?”

  “Let’s say it turns out that your client is right about… everything that she believes her husband did. If that’s the case, then you know three things about her husband. One, that he’s a killer. Two, that he’s a batterer.”

  She raised her spoon to her mouth.

  “And number three?” I asked.

  Lauren swallowed, sat back, and sipped some Riesling before she answered. “That he’s not going to be happy with you for turning him in to the police.” She reached across the table and took my hand. “And Emily and Grace and I don’t know what we’d do without you.”

  “Anvil too,” I said.

  “Yeah, Anvil too.”

  “Why don’t you rest a little bit? I’ll go wake Grace.”

  Lauren stood up. She probably didn’t know that I was checking her balance when she did. She probably didn’t know that I would be examining her gait as she left the room.

  I stopped her before she cleared the doorway. “Does spousal privilege restrict the police in any way? Does the mutual consent part of the spousal privilege law apply to their investigation? If she tells the police things now without her husband’s consent, could it taint future evidence?”

  “Why would you think that’s a problem?”

  “Fruit from a poisonous tree?”

  “Doesn’t apply. Spousal privilege is limited to testimony in court. During the investigation, the police can find out whatever they can find out. They can talk to either spouse about the other. But… keep in mind that I haven’t reviewed the case law or the precedents recently. You might want to talk to a defense attorney-someone like Cozy or Casey-before you decide what to do next.”

  Cozy Maitlin and Casey Sparrow were criminal defense attorneys whom Lauren and I knew well. Professionally speaking, too well.

  “I thought I just did talk with an attorney.”

  “I told you the legal issues involved, Alan. I didn’t give you any advice.”

  “Well, may I have some advice?”

  She thrust out a hip. The move was erotically provocative, all in all very unlawyerlike. “A little more salt in the soup next time. But the Riesling”-she blew me a kiss-“was perfect.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  Lauren smiled warmly. “This all happened in California, didn’t it?”

  I smiled back. My smile was kind of sick.

  As if on cue, our daughter’s throaty wail pierced the quiet.

  Lauren was right in her prediction. Neither of us got much sleep that night.

  TEN

  The whole country had seen a single, grainy, black-and-white security photograph of my Tuesday eight o’clock. Her likeness had been on TV, in the newspapers, in magazines, on the Internet-anywhere a picture could be plastered. But as far as I knew, I was the only person who could actually put a name to the infamous photo.
/>
  Who was she? My first patient was an overstressed sales executive named Sharon Lewis who worked out the Diagonal at a company called Micro Motion. A fortnight plus one day before, at almost the exact same hour when she and I were sitting down for her second psychotherapy session, Sharon had been hustling to recover from a blown tire on the Boulder Turnpike that had caused her to arrive much too late for her flight at Denver International Airport. Her tardy arrival meant that she had exactly thirty-three minutes to get from her car in the parking garage to the B Concourse to catch her plane to Houston for a sales meeting that she absolutely couldn’t miss.

  Denver ’s airport was always a mob scene on Monday mornings, and Sharon jogged into the terminal to discover that the post-9/11 security station was already jammed with an army of impatient briefcase warriors charging out on their weekly business patrols.

  Sharon was schlepping her rolling suitcase on board the plane and wasn’t surprised that she was immediately jostled by federal security personnel into a cutback queue that was moving like the blood of a glutton after a meal at Morton’s.

  When she finally arrived at the front of that line, she was directed toward a shorter line at an X-ray machine, where she was once again forced to cool her heels. She found herself behind a family of six who were behaving as though they’d never confronted a magnetometer in their entire lives. Each of them had more metal secreted on their bodies than Edward Scissorhands at a piercing convention.

  After a lifetime’s worth of sighs and rolled eyes, Sharon finally cleared herself through the metal detector where she was-no surprise-selected for a secondary security screening by a large, taciturn woman armed with an electronic wand and an attitude.

  By her own admission Sharon Lewis was the type of person who tailgated mercilessly, who counted items in the baskets of those in front of her in the supermarket express lane, and whose idea of a vacation was an uninterrupted bath. Her friends-and there were precious few of those-would call her intolerant.

  While waiting impatiently for her turn to be wanded by the uniformed woman she was certain was an ex-Marine, Sharon saw from a fleeting glance at her watch that she had nine minutes remaining to get to her gate to catch her flight to Houston. That meant she had only nine minutes to accomplish all of the following: to get past this grizzly bear of a security officer, to hustle downstairs to board the train, to make it down the track two stops to B Concourse, and then to run like hell all the way to Gate 19, which, of course, was almost the farthest possible gate location from the concourse train station.

  It was then-at the crucial moment of her morning endurance trial when she looked at her watch and did the calculations-that Sharon Lewis made a memorably bad decision.

  The infamous photograph of her-that grainy one that just about everyone had seen and that anyone who had ever been inconvenienced at any airport anywhere in the world had cursed-had run in that week’sTimemagazine with the telling caption:THE MOST SELFISH WOMAN IN AMERICA.

  How had Sharon earned the title?

  Sharon had gazed around the bustling security area and concluded that no one was paying any particular attention to her, especially not the gruff woman with the wand, who at that moment was busy assisting an elderly Asian gentleman with an aluminum cane remove his wingtips. The fact that Sharon was being totally ignored not only infuriated her but also permitted her an odd sense of freedom. She was tired of waiting for her turn to be wanded. She was tired of things going wrong that morning. She was, as she put it to me later, “tired of counting idiots.”

  Her flight to Houston was minutes away from leaving Denver without her.

  What did Sharon do? She took things into her own hands. She proceeded to lift the black nylon band from the security corral in which she was penned, casually slipped through to the other side, replaced the band into its track, grabbed her rolling suitcase off the stainless steel table where it awaited her post-X ray, and strutted-unimpeded-toward the escalators.

  Less than a minute later she pushed her way in front of yet another old man-this one was in a wheelchair-to squeeze onto a departing train that carried passengers from the terminal to the distant concourses.

  News reports revealed that eight minutes passed after Sharon removed herself from the secondary screening queue before the security force in the terminal-tipped off by a passenger who had been waiting behind Sharon-ascertained that their security perimeter had been intentionally breached. Within two minutes all the airport’s security checkpoints were closed. Four minutes after that the trains to the concourses were shut down. And a couple of minutes after that, planes at the gates were directed to stop boarding, planes that were taxiing were ordered to return to their gates, and procedures were initiated to sanitize the concourses and return everyone to the main terminal to once again pass through the interminable maze of security.

  Later, when supervisors reviewed the security tape of the incident, the authorities were able to isolate a terribly grainy picture of Sharon Lewis strolling unhindered around the boundary of the secondary security screening area, her suitcase trailing behind her.

  But the security personnel didn’t know it was Sharon Lewis who had caused the entire system to grind to a halt. They didn’t know that the person who was responsible for costing tens of thousands of passengers precious hours and the airline industry millions of dollars in delayed and canceled flights all across the nation was a Boulder business executive. All they knew was that the culprit was a thin woman with dirty blond hair, about five six or five seven, wearing a black suit with a white blouse and tugging a rolling suitcase.

  Sharon? She didn’t know what the fuss was all about because by the time DIA was shut down, her United Airlines flight to Houston had just gone nose up. She only learned about the repercussions of the incident later that day. The buyer from the company she was visiting in Texas told her the entire story, describing the woman who had skirted security as “that self-centered bitch who shut down DIA.”

  She’d smiled wanly at him through her nausea. But, she assured me later, she’d closed the sale.

  For the two weeks since the breach at DIA federal law enforcement authorities had been searching desperately for the woman in the grainy security photograph. They wanted to arrest her, convict her, fine her, and imprison her, though not necessarily in that order. From the tone of the public discourse that followed the incident, drawing and quartering didn’t seem to have been totally ruled out as a punitive option, either.

  But no one knew who she was, or where she was.

  Except for me. And my lips were sealed.

  ELEVEN

  After Sharon ’s visit at eight o’clock I had another patient at eight forty-five. And another at nine-thirty. Yet another at ten-fifteen. A scheduled break at eleven o’clock to catch my breath-and cram in a visit to the toilet-was sacrificed for a follow-up session with Gibbs. My bladder wasn’t happy.

  “ Sterling thinks I’m at that mall in Broomfield. He thinks all I do is shop,” she announced as she settled onto the sofa.

  I waited for her to go on. With that opening, all she had told me was that she considered me to be her coconspirator. But I already knew that. Apparently, I’d volunteered for the role during the previous morning’s session.

  Admittedly, I was having second thoughts about how quickly I’d raised my hand to enlist.

  “If he knew I was here talking to you, he’d kill me.”

  “Kill you?”

  “You know.”

  “No, I don’t know.”

  “He wouldn’t be happy. Let’s leave it at that.”

  Right, I’ll leave it at that. That sounds like a great idea.

  The high-pressure ridge responsible for the warm air that had enveloped the Front Range since the morning of Sam’s heart attack remained firmly in place, and this mid-November day had broken from the gate fair and mild. I’d led Gibbs from the waiting room at one minute past eleven o’clock, and a glance out the window suggested that a day that had started gl
oriously had only gotten better. A month-plus before Christmas, a mile high, and eighty degrees wasn’t out of the question.

  Gibbs was dressed as though she had stayed up the night before in order to catch the late weather report and plan her outfit accordingly. She wore capris that were almost too pink and that hugged her slender legs almost too snugly. Almost. Her shoes, as always, looked fresh from the box. Actually, my shoes never looked that good, even straight from the box. Her champagne sweater set-I was guessing silk but allowing for cashmere-displayed a wide swath of her smooth chest but only the barest hint of cleavage. I tried to conjure the image of another one of my female patients who would have dressed the same way Gibbs was dressed for a similar morning session. I couldn’t.

  But on Gibbs the look worked.

  Diane, I figured, would have argued that Gibbs looked slutty.

  Über-popular alpha bitchslutty.

  As far as nicknames went, I’d already decided that I preferred “the Dancing Queen.”

  My impression of Gibbs during the earlier treatment had always been that she liked to live her life near the line where classic style and fashionable trends collide, but that she rarely wandered across it. Her outfit was a good metaphor for all that.

  Accusing her husband of murder, though-that had definitely taken her across the line.

  “Did you talk to those people you were going to talk to?” she asked.

  “Yes, I did. I spoke with Dr. Estevez, and then she and I met with the director of Safe House on your behalf. The admissions people at Safe House are waiting for your phone call. They are more than happy to provide you with a safe place to stay. As soon as you’re ready, they will send somebody over here to pick you up. They want to be certain that you’re not followed on your way to the residence.”