Gibbs and I would talk about sex first.
Then serial murder.
“Okay,” I said to Gibbs.Let’s talk about sex. Swinging, right?“But first I’d like to take a moment to check on your safety. Are you all right, Gibbs?”
“Yes.”
I waited for her to elaborate.
“I am,” she insisted.
“You haven’t told Sterling, though?”
“No. And I don’t plan to until I have to.”
“And the California police haven’t contacted you?”
“No, they haven’t.”
“What if they suddenly show up at your door? And what if Sterling answers?”
“That will change things, won’t it?”
“Are you as cavalier about this as you sound?”
“I’m really not. I’m serious about what I’m doing.”
“Then I strongly recommend you reconsider your decision not to go to Safe House.”
“I understand why you’re concerned about me, but I don’t think I can move out. I’m going to stay at home.” She gazed down at her hands and said, “Now do you think we can we talk about sex?”
Seven-twenty, and Gibbs looked like she’d been up for a couple of hours and had spent the time getting herself prepped for tea with some friends she was trying to impress. Her hair-perfect. Makeup-ditto. Outfit? A little too… something.
“Slutty,” Diane would say, of course. But Gibbs’s ensemble wasn’t really slutty, just a shadow or two sexier than almost any other woman would assemble for an early-morning meeting to discuss her sex life with her therapist.
“Sex,” she said, her voice suddenly crusty in a sultry Peggy Lee kind of way. “It’s not just for procreation anymore.”
Was it ever?Instantly, I was wide awake. Even at that hour I had the presence of mind to know that my sudden vigilance wasn’t entirely a good thing.
“ Sterling and I met in St. Tropez. Did we ever tell you that?”
I thought it was the kind of fact I’d have remembered from the earlier therapy. But I didn’t recall previously musing with Gibbs, or any other patient for that matter, about any of the playgrounds of the privileged in the South of France. It was one of those things that didn’t come up regularly in psychotherapy in Boulder, Colorado.
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“ Sterling was working as crew on some rich guy’s yacht-a big boat-and I was doing a summer-in-France-learn-a-language thing with a girlfriend after my freshman year in college. We all met at this big Saturday morning market in town in St. Tropez-Oh, you should go! The market was so much fun!-and he and his friends invited us onto the boat for a party later that day. It started with everybody swimming in the afternoon. We were anchored within sight of the beach, and Sterling put on this diving exhibition off the bow. He was really good. Flips and pikes and God knows what else he was doing. He was the center of everybody’s attention. I admit that I couldn’t take my eyes off him.
“We hit it off; I mean, I really liked him right from the start. But you know, the party was going to be it as far as seeing him went; the yacht was sailing the next morning to Greece or Yugoslavia or somewhere. When my girlfriend and I left at the end of the evening-actually it was more like the middle of the night-I told Sterling where he could look me up in Palos Verdes if he wanted, but I never thought I’d see him again after that.
“Those summer things, they tug and tug, don’t they? Did you ever have one, Dr. Gregory?”
Gibbs’s breathing seemed to have grown deeper. Recalling her youthful memories had softened her persona just a little. My judgment was that she didn’t really care whether or not I’d ever had a summer thing, but nonetheless my focus wavered for half a heartbeat with lusty reminiscences of an ancient August week with Nancy Lind when our families were both-
“Have you ever been to St. Tropez?” she asked, yanking me back tohersummer thing.
I knew she didn’t really want to know that, either. It was merely a way of stressing thatshehad.
“No,” I said.
“It’s not what you think. As a town, I mean. Well, it is, but then, you know, it isn’t. It’s not just the stereotype.”
I was wondering why it was important what I thought of St. Tropez, a topic about which I never expected to have an opinion, let alone one firm enough to degrade into a stereotype. Asking her why it was important to her what I thought, I decided, would risk interfering with the direction of a journey I knew next to nothing about.
All I knew was that it was, directly or indirectly, about sex.
She didn’t wait long to learn what misconceptions I might harbor about St. Tropez. “We didn’t have sex that night,” Gibbs said. “Other people did, almost everybody did. You know, it was that kind of party, but Sterling and I didn’t do anything.”
“Sex. It’s not just for procreation anymore.”
I started thinking that I’d never been to that kind of party. The kind of party where young beautiful people gather on a rich guy’s yacht in St. Tropez and everybody has sex under the stars. A lost opportunity of my youth, perhaps. I didn’t even recall the fork in the road with the sign markedWANTON SEX IN ST. TROPEZ, THIS WAY.
“We wanted to-I did anyway. I was a prude, and I wanted to, so I’m sure he did. For me, it was the most romantic night of my life. And not just romantic, but… erotic, sensual, you know? The Mediterranean, the yacht, the sky, the music, the wine, and these gorgeous people from all over the world. Sex was in the air. When you breathed, you inhaled it. It filled your nose like the flowers at the market that morning. You sipped some wine, and you could taste it. The sex, I mean. It was everywhere. Do you know what I’m talking about?”
Hardly. But I didn’t say anything. I thought she had enough momentum to continue on her own.
“I’d never been to a party like that before. With people so… uninhibited. Brazen. I mean, bold. And with strangers… So many languages… So much…” The final thought drifted away.
I admit that I was curious how her sentence would end, but any words on my part would have been distracting. I waited some more.
When she started up again, it was as though she were answering a question that I had never asked. Silence does that sometimes.
“What was it like to be there? I wanted to fall in love that night. I wanted to fall in love that night, and Sterling was there. He was handsome. He was charming. Oh, Sterling’s not really tall enough to be my dream man, and I’d always fantasized that I’d end up with a guy with darker hair, but… that night he let me be there, but not be there. He let me dip a toe in the water-of, of that world-but he didn’t throw me in the pool. He stayed with me almost the entire night while I tried to find out exactly where I might fit.
“That’s not easy when you’re nineteen and you’re on a yacht in St. Tropez, right? Knowing where you fit?”
She found some affirmation somewhere in my impassive face, and she went on.
“There were other… you know, people for him on the boat. Plenty of them. Prettier than me. More adventurous than me, that’s for sure. But… he didn’t… go with them. He stayed with me. We danced. We kissed a little. Okay, we kissed a lot. And… you know. We watched a… little. But we didn’t… So I guess that’s why he was the one I…”
I was aware of the disconnect I was feeling. Despite the hour, despite my aversion to true sex adventures, the erotic escapade that Gibbs was spinning was actually interesting to me. I pushed myself hard against the cushion of my chair. It was a way of telling myself to take a step back. A way of reminding myself that whatever it was that was happening right then in my office, it was about Gibbs, not about her interlude in St. Tropez with Sterling.
My job was to ignore the fireworks and focus on the night sky.
To use my night vision. Not to be blinded.
“Anyway, he did call,” she went on. “He actually called my parents’ house the following Christmas Eve. I was home from school for the holidays. He came over, and we
stayed out almost that whole night, just talking.”
Instinctively, I guessed what was next.No sex,I thought.He played it cool. It was just like St. Tropez, sans the yacht and the Mediterranean.
“We didn’t have sex then,” she confirmed. “We just talked. But the whole night I felt like I was back on that yacht with him. It was that sensuous, that romantic, you know? I felt an anticipation, a sense of I-can’t-wait, I-can’t-wait, that I hadn’t felt on Christmas Eve since I was eight years old. But of course it was different. And that’s the charge I feel-still feel-when I see Sterling.”
Mental note: She said “feel,” not “felt.”
The slope Gibbs was on suddenly changed. I experienced it as a physical sensation. Her momentum slowed as the gravitational forces eased. She pulled into herself, squeezing her biceps against her upper body. The effect was to force her breasts together, accentuating her previously modest cleavage.
Was that her intent? And was it conscious or unconscious? That was my call to make. It was why I was paid the big bucks.
But I didn’t know.
“We had sex the first time a week later, on New Year’s Eve,” she said. “We were at a party, at a high-rise apartment on Wilshire Boulevard. You know, in L.A.? Some friends of his lived there. We ended up doing it on the balcony. The night wasn’t that different from the party in St. Tropez. People were having sex all over the place. I could see another couple going at it in the bedroom next door while we were doing it outside.”
She flicked a glance at me. If she could have read my mind, she would have known that I was musing that she and I had certainly spent our youths being invited to different parties.
What was she hoping? That I’d find her tale titillating? Scandalous? Mundane? I couldn’t guess. I didn’t like that I couldn’t guess.
“That was the first time he said ‘catch me.’ ”
“ ‘Catch me’?” I said.
“Yes,” she said. “ ‘Catch me.’ He said it again last night. It brought me back, reminded me.”
I adopted a studied silence, waiting, wondering where Gibbs was going to go with her story of erotic adventure. It was clear that she wanted me to know that she’d made love to her husband the night before.
Was that it? Was that all?
What did thecatch mestory mean?
She matched my quiet. I set my sensors for defiance but wasn’t sure exactly what I was detecting.
During the ensuing interim of silence I had a revelation-a slap-across-the-face kind of revelation.
My insight permitted me-hell, it compelled me-to finally ask the question I should have asked three days before, when Gibbs had first waltzed into my office and revealed that she believed her husband, Sterling, was a killer.
“Why did you come to see me, Gibbs?”
“What do you mean? We had an appointment.”
My question had ambushed her, and her reply was more concrete than an interstate highway.
“Not this morning. I’m wondering why you came back into therapy with me.”
She blinked twice in rapid succession. She parted her lips. But she didn’t respond.
Finally I felt I knew something. Suddenly the therapy wasn’t as amorphous as it had been.
What is it that I know?
I knew I had asked the right question. It wasn’t much, but at that moment it felt pretty darn good.
So why had she come to see me?
SEVENTEEN
Twenty long seconds passed.
“I don’t know what you mean. Why did I come to see you? I need your help to… get the situation with Sterling taken care of.”
“Really?” I said. Her defenses had stiffened and become awkward as she tried to parry my thrust. My compassion for her swelled. With my simple question I was trying to sound dubious. It wasn’t too difficult.
She dissembled. “What else could it be?” Gibbs asked. “I can’t live with-what he’s done. What else could it be?”
A tough question, one I was not prepared to answer.
I knew she wasn’t, either.
I asked myself another tough question:Well, Doctor, if this isn’t all about sex and murder, what is it about?
Something else.
Deep in my gut I believed that Gibbs Storey was distracting me. First with her tale of murder. Then with the suggestion of serial murder. And now with sex in St. Tropez. I had to give her credit. As distractions, those were good hooks. Major league hooks. And yet I’d taken the bait for only three days.
Not too bad. For me, anyway. Skilled sociopaths had been known to suck me in and drag me along in their off-Broadway dramatics for months at a time. Diane liked to say that when sociopaths had me for lunch, they didn’t spit out the bones until bedtime.
Diagnostically I didn’t think Gibbs was a sociopath, but her diversion ammunition was as high quality as anything I’d run across recently.
The fact that I thought Gibbs was setting up psychological screens with me didn’t mean I no longer believed her contention that Sterling was a murderer. And it didn’t mean I no longer believed her tale about the summer thing on the yacht in St. Tropez. Nor did it mean I felt her efforts to dissemble were consciously driven.
My conclusion about her psychological deke-that’s one of Sam’s hockey words-wasn’t even a hundred percent firm. From a therapy perspective, I wasn’t prepared to put it to her in the form of an interpretation, or a confrontation. But it was my new working hypothesis: Gibbs was talking about murder and sex as a way of distracting me-and yes, possibly herself-from something that felt even more psychologically dangerous to her.
So what was more dangerous than extramarital sex and a husband who was a murderer?
Her final words of the session surprised me. She said, “It’s as though you can read my mind.”
I left her thought there, hanging. The truth was, I couldn’t read minds.
On good days I could see a short ways into the dark, but that’s as far as it ever went.
EIGHTEEN
I should have predicted it, of course, but I wasn’t prepared for Sam’s vulnerability. He had always been the tough guy. But that day, despite his size, he seemed frail and more than a little frightened.
A few hours after my appointment with Gibbs, Sam and I walked from his home near Community Hospital over to North Boulder Park. He met me outside by the curb. He was carrying a pedometer that he didn’t understand how to use, and he futzed with it continually for a couple of blocks before he cursed at it and stuck it into the pocket of his sweatpants. It was apparent that he had about as much faith in the operation of the thing as he did in the diameter of the opening of his coronary arteries.
I was lugging lunch in a shopping bag that had originally been used to cart home a toaster from Peppercorn on the Mall. Lauren had packed hummus and roasted vegetable sandwiches on flatbread for Sam and me. Dessert was first-of-the-season Clementine tangerines. The beverage was caffeine-free green tea. I considered the homemade meal a special treat. Sam, I was afraid, would consider it evidence of all that was wrong with Boulder.
We did a lap around the park before we chose a place to sit and eat. Boulder was getting one of the latest extended Indian summer sojourns I could recall. The day was glorious.
Once we were seated, Sam didn’t jump to unwrap his sandwich. He had two fingers on the underside of his wrist and his eyes on his wristwatch. “I think I’m okay,” he said.
“That was convincing.”
He chuckled, just a little. What was more interesting to me was that he started downing the hummus and vegetables without complaining about the absence of animal flesh in his meal.
“That Laguna Beach detective has been in touch with the department,” he said between bites.
“What?”
“You know, that Carmen… something. The one you talked to. She reached out to us.”
“And?”
“And nothing. I asked Lucy if any of the detectives had heard anything, she told me somebody had
gotten the call. Maybe Danny, she thought. But that’s all I know. I’m a little out of the loop.”
Lucy was Sam’s partner. I didn’t know any detectives named Danny.
“So you don’t know the next step for Detective Reynoso? If she’s coming out here?”
“I don’t know anything. I know less than nothing.” He took another bite of his sandwich. “You make this? It’s pretty good. There’s no cheese in it, right? I’m trying to cut back on cheese. I used to eat a lot of cheese. The French eat a lot of cheese; they’re not fat. I eat a lot of cheese, and I’m fat. I don’t get it. One of life’s mysteries, I guess. And how come so many of life’s mysteries involve the French? Why is that?”
I didn’t have an answer for his French puzzle. “You can thank Lauren for lunch. And no, no cheese. You want to know what’s in it?” He didn’t answer. I started to tell him anyway. “Garbanzo beans, tahini, a lot of garlic-”
“Did I tell you yes? Did I? I don’t want to know what’s in it. It tastes okay, that’s all I care about right now. Tahini? Jeez. I can’t believe I’m eating something called tahini.”
“I’ll tell Lauren you liked it.”
“I’m ready to go back to work,” he proclaimed.
“Yeah?”
“It’s going to be a long time until January. I’m going to go stir-crazy. You know, I won’t even be done with this stupid rehab program until Christmas. I only go for a couple of hours three times a week. Why don’t they just let me go straight through for a couple of days, and then I’ll be done with it? Wouldn’t that be more efficient, less stressful? Isn’t that the whole idea, to reduce my stress?”
“They give you any handouts on type A personality, Sam? If they did, you might want to take a minute and read them.”
He grumbled.
I went on. “Attitude is half the battle. Give rehab a chance. And you can use your free time to get into the holidays this year. Make it fun. Decorate the house. Sing Christmas carols.”
“Holidays mean food. Ham and prime rib and pumpkin pie and Christmas cookies and all sorts of stuff I’m not supposed to eat anymore. I can’t even sit around and watch Bowl games and eat crap in front of the TV.”
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