Blinded

by Stephen White

  “There are other things you can do.” I finished peeling a tangerine and tossed it to him.

  He missed it.

  “You this banal when you’re seeing people in your office, or you save most of your trite shit for your friends?”

  I glanced at my watch. “I need to get back to the office. Come on, I’ll walk you home.”

  “Maybe I’ll stay here for a while.”

  I stood up before I asked, “Things tough with Sherry, Sam?”

  “We’ve been here before. We’ll muddle through.” He stopped for a long pause and picked at some dead grass. Colorado ’s prolonged drought meant that there was a lot of dead grass to choose from. “She feels, I don’t know, unfulfilled with me sometimes. I think I understand, kind of.”

  “It’s not just the heart thing, though?”

  “I don’t know what it is.”

  “How do you feel? About things with Sherry?”

  He didn’t answer. He pulled himself slowly to his feet and walked beside me as I crossed the park. I matched his pace, wondering whether it was his wounded heart, literally, or his wounded heart, figuratively, that was slowing his progress across the wide lawn.

  We spoke little until we got to his door. I went inside with him to use his bathroom before I drove the short way back to my office.

  When I’d finished washing my hands, I stepped into his tiny kitchen to say good-bye. He was slumped over at the counter with his head in his hands.

  “Sam? You okay?”

  He didn’t look up. With his elbow he slid a single sheet of floral paper in my direction. I could see it was covered in a tiny, neat script.

  He said, “It looks like Sherry’s gone. She took Simon to see his grandparents.”

  “For Thanksgiving? In Minnesota?”

  He looked up, finally. His eyes were red. “I guess. I imagine I’ll be alone for the holidays.”

  “What does it say? You guys haven’t talked about this?”

  “Talking’s overrated. I think she’s taking a break from me.”

  “Sherry’s leaving you?”

  He picked up the paper and shoved it into his pocket. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  The shock I felt was seismic. I couldn’t imagine the effect of the quake on Sam’s recovery.

  “She loves me. That’s not it, Alan. I’m not a hundred percent sure what it is, but it isn’t that.”

  “Sam, I-”

  “Go back to work. I think I want to be by myself for a while,” he said.

  My feet were stuck to the linoleum.

  “Go on. I need the practice,” he said.

  He meant practice being by himself.

  NINETEEN

  I don’t work most Fridays. No, that doesn’t mean I do a short week. Even though I pack forty-plus hours into my four-day calendar, Puritan guilt occasionally interferes with my enjoyment of the break that I schedule every week. Still, most Fridays I treasure the extra hours I have to spend with Grace, or to do an uninterrupted bike ride on relatively uncongested roads.

  That Friday wasn’t destined to be one of the days off that I treasured, however.

  I packed up Grace along with all her voluminous paraphernalia-once in college I went to Europe for a month with less stuff than Grace needed to go across town-and together we headed out of the house a few minutes after nine. We were going to do some errands. Not routine errands. Grace and I were skilled professionals at the grocery store and the dry cleaner. Returning videos? Getting gas? No problem. We could have a great time strolling the aisles at McGuckin Hardware or picking out a new pair of miniature tennis shoes at a shoe store. But the errands we had to do that Friday were errands I’d been putting off for weeks because they involved-gulp-public agencies and public utilities.

  If doing errands was purgatory, doing that type of errand was hell.

  Our first stop was the office that issues drivers’ licenses for the state of Colorado. I was due for a renewal. Technically, because I hadn’t been apprehended any of the times that I’d bent Colorado ’s traffic laws, the statute said that all that the renewal required was my right index fingerprint, my digital photograph, a few brief written questions, and fifteen dollars and sixty cents of my money. How long could that take?

  How long?

  Sixty-four minutes. I counted every one of them.

  Next stop: the United States Postal Service. I had to mail a small package to Italy. Once the customs forms were filled out, Grace and I got in line. Maybe twenty people were ahead of us. Three clerks at the counter. I did the math and told Grace, “Fifteen minutes tops, baby.”

  Moments later, one by one, two of the clerks mysteriously closed their windows and disappeared into the back of the building. Someone asked, “What kind of business closes cashiers when they have this many customers?”

  Nobody bothered to answer. The question was not only rhetorical, it was also supremely cynical. All of us in United States Postal Service suspended animation already knew we weren’t in Kansas anymore.

  There were still fifteen people in front of Grace and me in line. And at least that many had piled into the building behind us. Grace asked me how much longer. She did this by squealing and pulling at my ear.

  “Another half hour, Boo,” I explained. She asked again, and again.

  How wrong was I? The total wait at the post office to mail our package turned out to be seventy-seven minutes.

  On to Boulder ’s cable TV franchisee. The remote control to our cable box had died. I was on a simple mission to trade it in for a working model. In the parking lot of the cable company, I told Grace, “This is corporate America. This will be quick. Ten minutes, tops.”

  Times five, maybe. Fifty-three minutes later I had a fresh remote control unit and a splitting headache. Grace’s patience, never exemplary, had evaporated totally.

  My watch said ten minutes after one. Viv-our lovely, indispensable child-care-worker-nanny-person-had been waiting for us at the house since twelve-thirty.

  I drove home, handed Grace off to Viv, downed an energy bar and a big glass of water, and went to change my clothes for a bike ride.

  I’d finished stripping naked and was fishing in my closet for my cycling clothes when my pager started vibrating on the shelf.

  I checked the screen.

  It read “ 911” beside a Boulder phone number.

  Before I had a chance to return the call, the phone rang. I jogged a few steps to the bedroom and answered. To my surprise, I heard Sam’s voice.

  “The shit came down,” he said.

  I thought he was talking about Sherry. I guessed he’d been served with dissolution papers or something similarly awful.

  “God, I’m sorry, Sam. What happened?”

  “They’re executing a search warrant as we speak. Understand, you didn’t hear it from me.”

  Why would they want a search warrant for Sam’s house? And who else would I hear it from?

  “What for? Who’s searching your house?”

  “Not here, you doofus. Don’t be a jerk. At your client’s house. That detective from California? The old murder? Getting warm yet? Need any more clues?”

  “A search warrant? They haven’t even talked to anyone. I didn’t even know they were in town.”

  “I’m so sorry you didn’t get copied on the memo. I promise to have someone look into that; it’s inexcusable. Anyway, Lucy says Reynoso came into town with another detective, they met with the brass, and in no time they got a warrant from Judge Heller. They sure didn’t waste any time exercising the thing. She said they have their game faces on. This one’s serious, Alan. I gotta go.”

  He hung up.

  My pager began to dance on the shelf again.

  Same message as the previous one: “ 911” and the same local phone number that I didn’t recognize.

  I dialed the number and said, “This is Dr. Gregory returning a page.”

  “Can you come over?” Gibbs begged. “Please? They’re searching our house. They�
�re going through everything. They have our computers. They’re even taking Sterling’sshoes.”

  I was tongue-tied. Partly I was wondering why it was such an affront to Gibbs that the police were taking her husband’s shoes. But mostly I was considering the curious strategy that Detective Carmen Reynoso had adopted for dealing with the accusation against Sterling Storey.

  No talk, just action.

  “Please?” Gibbs repeated.

  “Give me your address, please, Gibbs. I don’t recall where you live.” She gave me directions to a new neighborhood I was almost totally unfamiliar with, somewhere west of Broadway and north of downtown. “Did you ever get in touch with a local lawyer?” I asked.

  “Kind of.”

  Whatever that means,I wondered.

  “Well, I suggest you give that person a call. I’ll be over in a little while, although I’m not sure what I can do given the circumstances.”

  As I pulled on some boxer shorts and gazed longingly at my Lycra, I said aloud to myself, “I don’t know why I’m coming over. But I’m coming over.”

  Sam had said that they “had their game faces on.” That they were “serious.” Which to me meant one thing: Detective Carmen Reynoso believed some aspect of Gibbs’s story.

  Suddenly Diane’s caution about my therapeutic behavior flowed into my head the way water emerges from a cracked pipe: loudly, and with great insistence.

  “What you’re doing for Gibbs you wouldn’t do for a lot of patients.”

  I stopped with one foot hovering above my trousers.

  Diane was right.

  Now what the hell had I gotten myself into?

  TWENTY

  Gibbs and Sterling lived in one of those big faux Victorians that had been all the rage in the build-out of the northwest and eastern expanses of Boulder in the 1980s when developers were finally beginning to believe that the city was serious about growth control. The architects had, I’m sure, been trying to pay respectful homage to the original Victorian heritage of the city’s housing base in the 1880s, but the end result turned out more like Main Street in Disneyland than like Mapleton Hill in Boulder.

  The Storeys’ three-story house had to be five thousand square feet in size. As I approached the home from the corner-it was easy to tell which one it was by the convention of marked and unmarked police department vehicles clustered out front-I wondered what the Storeys did in there by themselves. A two-person game of hide-and-seek could go on for weeks without resolution.

  Gibbs was sitting by herself in the driver’s seat of a monstrous gold-colored SUV, the kind of motoring behemoth that I hated driving behind, next to, in front of, or on the same road with. It wasn’t just that the latest-generation SUVs were big, it was that they tried so hard to be big. It was as though they thrust out their chests and puffed out their cheeks. Gibbs’s colossus was a Cadillac. She was swallowed up behind the steering wheel of the thing like a five-year-old pretending to drive a fire truck. She was startled when I knocked on the passenger-side window, but waved me in after a moment.

  She wasn’t effervescent.

  “Thanks for coming. I don’t even know why I called.”

  I could have admitted that I didn’t, either, but if I had, then I probably would also have had to consider aloud why I had responded by driving across town to be with her, and I wasn’t eager to do that.

  “What’s going on?”

  “They just showed up, shoved some papers in my face, and started rummaging through my house. God knows what they’re doing in there. There are five of them.”

  “Are they from California? The ones I called for you?” I already knew the answer to the question, but I wasn’t going to learn much about Gibbs if I didn’t keep her talking.

  “Yeah, um, yes. At least one of them is. Maybe two. There’s a woman. She’s really tall. She told me she’s from Laguna. She said she was the one you spoke with on the phone.”

  “Detective Reynoso.”

  Gibbs shrugged.

  “Any detectives from Boulder?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you get a name?”

  “I’ve forgotten it already.”

  “ Sterling? Is he here?”

  “He left yesterday for Florida. The Seminoles, the Gators, the Hurricanes-I don’t know. He’s doing some game, a Florida team against some team not from Florida. Georgia, maybe. Or Alabama. Auburn? Where’s Auburn? I’m sorry. I’ve tried and tried and tried, and I can’t tell them all apart. I know it’s important to some people, but for the life of me I can’t tell them apart.”

  She actually seemed ready to break into tears over her college football dyslexia. In a more conventional psychotherapy, I would have figured that the marital repercussions of her gridiron ignorance-and her feelings about the same-were a topic we would get around to talking about in some more detail.

  But now wasn’t the time. “What city is he in?”

  “ Tallahassee.”

  “Have you tried to reach him?” I was aware that I was asking a lot of questions, not typical for me in psychotherapy and usually not a sign that things were going well. My database of therapy sessions in the front seats of Cadillac Escalades was, however, limited.

  Gibbs lifted a cell phone from her lap. “He’s not answering. He’s always busy when he’s setting up these broadcasts. Deadlines, deadlines. I left him a message.”

  “And your attorney?”

  “There really isn’t one.”

  “And you implied that there was one because…”

  I allowed the thought to settle close by her like an unfriendly dog to see if she’d respond to it. I thought I noticed her jaw clenching, but that was the only reaction she displayed.

  I finished my own sentence. “… because you thought I’d be angry or disappointed if you didn’t have a lawyer.”

  She nodded. She wasn’t looking at me. She was watching a very blond, very strong police officer carry an iMac out of her house. “That’s not even Sterling ’s, it’s mine. He hates Macs.”

  The strong blond officer placed the computer in the back of a gray Chevy Suburban.

  “You didn’t want to-what? Make me angry?”

  She huffed. Just a little huff, but a huff nonetheless. “I don’t like expectations in relationships.”

  Noted. “And you think that I had an expectation about you having a lawyer?”

  Her nostrils flared. “From the beginning you’ve had an expectation about my doing this your way.”

  I reminded myself that my relationship with Gibbs was psychotherapy, a form of human interaction that often appears to have little in common with reality.

  “My way?” is all I said, and I managed to say it in a measured voice, as though I were curious and not incredulous. I knew I could have pounced. Fortunately, I was also aware at some level that I wanted to pounce.

  My way would have included Gibbs staying in Safe House, not sharing a bed with the man she was accusing of murder. My way would have included Gibbs calling the Laguna Beach Police Department on her own, not having me do it in her stead. My way would not ever, ever have included my sitting in the front seat of a Cadillac Escalade while a search warrant was being carried out.

  But Gibbs wasn’t talking about reality, she was talking about reality as she experienced it. Her real world. Notthereal world. She was talking, especially, about the role that men assumed in her real world. My job was to help her make some sense out of that experience and perhaps ultimately help her see the extent of the divergence that existed between her real world and the place where most of us hung out, that universal theme park called “reality.”

  Just then a parade of three peace officers marched out the garage door of Gibbs’s home. Each of the cops was carrying two large brown-paper bags that were folded once at the top. A tag was stapled at the fold of each bag.

  Gibbs said, “I wonder what they’re stealing. I have some nice things.”

  A little reality testing was in order. “I think they’re trying to
solve a murder, Gibbs. Your friend Louise? You called them, right? That’s why they’re here, isn’t it?”

  “I know,” she said.

  But she was much more annoyed than sympathetic.

  “That’s her,” Gibbs said.

  Carmen Reynosowastall. From the distance where we were sitting, I guessed six feet tall. Like many visitors to our fine state, she was also unaccustomed to the vagaries of Colorado weather. The calendar said November, and many if not most outsiders figure that means blizzards followed by subzero temperatures followed by snowplows followed by commuters getting to work on cross-country skis until the mud season starts in May.

  Reynoso was dressed perfectly according to the common lore. She was decked out in good leather boots, wool pants, and a thick turtleneck sweater that would have left me begging for a place to change into something more temperate. She carried a heavy navy jacket draped over her left arm.

  The tail end of a little cold front had come through overnight, clipping the Front Range and dropping us from the high seventies into the mid-sixties. The sun was sharp, though-its rays filtered only by the thinnest ribbons of high clouds-and I thought I was a bit overdressed in cords and a cotton sweater.

  “Nice boots,” Gibbs said. “Though I wouldn’t wear them with that coat. Nope.”

  Nice boots?

  Detective Reynoso took two long strides down the serpentine herringbone brick walkway before she pirouetted to the sound of her name being called from inside the house and returned to the shadows.

  “Did Detective Reynoso say anything to you about when she’d like to speak with you?” I asked.

  “She asked me to stick around during the search. I assumed that meant she wanted to see me after.”

  “You should have an attorney present, Gibbs. For your protection.” My wife had drilled into me that I should have an attorney present whenever anybody from law enforcement wanted to talk to me about anything. Yes, she would admit that there were exceptions, but she would insist that I first run them past my attorney.