Blinded

by Stephen White

  “Whole wheat toasted, please. Low-fat cream cheese, lox, and whatever vegetables you got. Lots of them.”

  Her eyes didn’t frown. Her lips didn’t smile. She made me my breakfast, wrapped it in white paper, and dropped it in a brown-paper bag as though she’d done it a few thousand times before, thrust it over the counter at me, and looked for the next person in line.

  Poppyseed toasted with butter. Smelt on spelt with a schmear. It didn’t make any difference to her.

  With one last glance at the girl with the heavy metal in her brow, I paid for my bagel and crammed a buck into the tip jar.

  The girl didn’t know it, I thought, but she was auditioning to play the role of somebody’s wife after sixteen years of marriage.

  Later, after I picked up a couple of things at Ideal and stopped back for a cup of decaf at Vic’s, I started walking home. I wasn’t ready to go home, really, but I couldn’t think of anything else I could do to avoid it. It was Sunday morning, and I’d gone every place but 7-Eleven that I could think of that was open. Except for church. But I couldn’t do that. Not that the spiritual solace of an hour at church wouldn’t have been welcome. I didn’t go because I didn’t want to see all the familiar faces and hear the litanies of “How’re you feeling?” and “Hey, where’s the family?” And I really, really didn’t want to hear another story about somebody’s relative’s heart attack and how they were dead in a week.

  I didn’t want to hear how, oh, lucky I am.

  I wasn’t feeling too damn lucky.

  The walk wouldn’t take long-it was only a few blocks from North Broadway to the thousand square feet of siding-covered box that we called home-and I could feel the heave-and-ho of my chest as I made the gentle climb. Not chest pain; no pain exploding below my sternum. Not even a little twinge. The heave-ho was just the rise and fall of excess skin and the sway of my fat.

  My man-boobs.

  In sight of my house I stopped and watched a teenage girl shovel her sidewalk. Her outfit was more appropriate for an early summer day at Boulder Reservoir than the first real day of winter. Shorts. Sweatshirt that said-what? I couldn’t read her sweatshirt from thirty yards.

  What was it with kids and clothes? I had to figure that out, had to. Simon was on his way. I had to get there first.

  I made the decision to spend my forced medical leave of absence doing two things. I was going to begin to get rid of my man-boobs, and I was going to go looking for Sterling Storey.

  I stopped and checked my pulse.

  Eighty-four. That was good. Walking up the hill, holding an eighty-four? That was good. My cardiologist would be pleased. Those perfectly svelte physical medicine specialists who ran the rehab program would be pleased.

  Or maybe they wouldn’t be pleased. Their mantra seemed to be “I think you can do better, Sam.” I had the sense that if you told them they’d won Powerball, they’d complain that the jackpot was only thirty million.

  Sherry would like them. She thought I could do better, too.

  What had Alan said to me?“You have plenty of more important things to worry about.”

  He was right. And finding Sterling Storey was going to be my way of worrying about them.

  My man-boobs? I’d never laid eyes on the guy, but I was betting that Sterling Storey didn’t have any.

  THIRTY

  ALAN

  “I’m having some trouble with my leg,” Lauren said.

  I’d deduced that already. The walking stick in her right hand was a dead giveaway. I tried to remember the last time I’d seen the thing emerge from the closet, but I couldn’t. I guessed that it had been years. I purchased it for her at a mountain equipment store in Ouray, on the Western Slope, during another health crisis. Or was it Telluride? I couldn’t remember.

  I did remember that the circumstances were similar to these and that I’d seen the decline coming. It seemed disease exacerbations always arrived after a drumbeat of warning.

  “Come, sit,” I said. I took her by the elbow and led her to a kitchen chair next to Grace’s high chair.

  “It feels like it weighs a ton. I’m just dragging it around.” She was talking about her leg.

  “Yeah.”

  She bowed her head toward Grace and was immediately lost in the vernacular of baby talk that allowed her to reconnect with her daughter and forget about whatever was going on with her myelin sheath. Grace was oblivious to her mother’s malaise, but she was pretty interested in the walking stick. Were she developmentally able to stagger a few steps and simultaneously hold on to an object, I assumed I would see our daughter playing with a toddler-size version of the walking stick before the day was out.

  I was examining Lauren for indications of other peripheral neuropathy. Her facial muscles were still unable to coordinate her blinks. Beyond that, my unskilled eyes found nothing anomalous.

  “Any other weakness?” I asked. I wanted to hear her talk again, to taste the cadence for evidence of impairment in her speech.

  She shook her head.

  “Is that the same leg as before? You remember, that trip to help Teresa in Utah?”

  “That was the other leg,” she said.

  She sounded okay. “Should I call the neurologist?” Lauren’s neurologist, Larry Arbuthnot, liked to be aggressive with steroid treatment in the face of a fresh exacerbation that threatened serious consequences.

  “I don’t want to start steroids,” she said.

  Yeah, okay.“I know.”

  She actually smiled. “I’m due for interferon today. I’ll take that and see how things develop.”

  Ah, yes, interferon.

  Lauren’s weekly interferon injection was preventive medicine; it was intended to protect her from waking up to mornings like this one. The IM injection that she plunged into her thigh once a week wasn’t intended as a treatment in the event that a morning like this one occurred anyway. Interferon was a toxic prophylaxis against a rare event, akin, I sometimes mused, to lighting particularly noxious incense in an effort to keep elephants out of the living room.

  In the case of interferon, burning the incense usually seemed to be effective, but it was inherently hard to tell. Last time I checked, the living room was devoid of elephants. But then again, it usually was.

  Was it the incense?

  Answering that question was the rub.

  Regardless, interferon wasn’t intended to deal with a rogue elephant that had snuck into our living room anyway. And that’s what we had right now: a rogue elephant in the living room.

  “You sure that’s wise?” I tried hard not to say it in a tone that communicated that I thought her strategy unwise. I probably failed.

  Lauren was almost totally focused on Grace. If it weren’t for the walking stick she had clamped between her knees, I could have convinced myself that it was any other Sunday morning.

  She finally answered me. “No, not at all. I’m not at all sure. Will you bring me half a cup of coffee, please? Maybe some juice.”

  I wanted to scream. I wanted to take the damn disease she had by the throat and tighten my grip on it until it died.

  “Lauren, we’re talking ambulation. It’s a big risk.”

  She snapped back, “Don’t you think I know that? I hate steroids. I want to give it a few hours, okay?”

  I retrieved her coffee and juice. Her request for a few hours was reasonable. But then, so was my alarm.

  Her voice was much, much softer when she said, “Was that Sam before? On the phone?”

  “Yeah, there’s a lot that’s going on.” I filled Lauren in on the events that had taken place outside Albany, Georgia, and Sterling Storey’s ironic demise on the Ochlockonee River.

  “That’s convenient,” she said, almost devoid of sympathy. Death a time zone away was so much easier on the soul.

  “That’s what Sam thinks, too. He said he wants them to render the body.”

  She laughed. “I think you mean renderupthe body. Rendering has something to do with separating out fat,
doesn’t it? It’s a cooking thing, I think. Adrienne does it to chickens sometimes around the Jewish holidays. Is Sam okay?”

  Her laugh warmed my heart. “He’s doing the best he can. He’s so off-balance. The heart attack. His family gone. I don’t think he can really believe that Sherry took Simon away at a time like this.”

  Grace seized the moment to toss her spoon across the table. I caught it before it hit the floor. She thought the whole thing was hilarious. If I gave it back to her, I was sure the game would get repeated. Piaget would have given it back. I kept it.

  Lauren said, “I can’t either.” Panic crossed her violet eyes in a flash, like the reflection of a lightning bolt in a pane of glass at midnight.

  “Nor can I,” I said. I didn’t know if my wife wanted me to say that I wouldn’t leave her, to reassure her that the latest permutation of her illness hadn’t changed a single facet on the surface of my heart, but I feared that the very mention of her vulnerability might make the circumstances too real for her. So all I added was “I can’t believe what’s happened with them.”

  I slid the newspaper across the table to her, pointing at the article about Penn Heller’s arrest for possession of cocaine.

  She read the headline, gazed up at me, and said, “Really?”

  I could have lied and said,“I don’t know anything more than I just read in the paper.”But I didn’t. I said, “Apparently.”

  She scanned the article quickly. “It sounds like they have him for intent to distribute. That’s not good.”

  “What’s this going to do to Jara’s position on the bench? How damaging is it?”

  She shrugged.

  “Do you know her husband?”

  “A little,” Lauren said. “Just a little.”

  It was apparent that Lauren wasn’t eager to talk about Jara and Penn Heller.

  A few minutes later Lauren hobbled back toward the bedroom with her non-walking stick hand full of the supplies necessary to inject a milliliter of interferon into her thigh. I glanced at the clock. I added two hours. That was when she’d start getting sick from the medicine. I added twenty-four hours more to that. That was when she would stop being sick from the medicine.

  A day, every week, deducted from her life in a valiant effort to repel rogue elephants.

  I waited until Lauren closed the door behind her before I turned to Grace and said, “It’s too late this time, I’m afraid, Gracie. The elephants are already here.”

  Grace tried to say “elephants.” Anyway, I think what she tried to say was “elephants.”

  She pointed at the dogs.

  Close enough.

  I realized that Emily’s paw umbrella needed my attention.

  THIRTY-ONE

  SAM

  The list of people who were going to be pissed at me was longer than usual.

  Alan? Absolutely. Top of the list. My captain? He’d kill me if he got half a chance-save my insurance company a lot of money and my doctor a lot of work. My cardiologist? I think he was coming around to the reality that I wasn’t his normal post-MI patient. Still, he wasn’t going to be happy about my extracurricular activities. I was pretty sure about that. And Carmen Reynoso? Eh, so? It’d just give her another reason to look down her nose at us mountain cops.

  Who else?

  I wondered what Sherry would think, but I finally decided that I couldn’t really guess. I hadn’t thought she was the type of person who could walk out the door with my kid less than a week after I had a heart attack.

  Who am I kidding? Sherry wouldn’t be surprised. When she heard what I was up to, she’d make that noise that I hated that came from someplace far back in her sinuses, but she wouldn’t be surprised.

  The noise was her marital shorthand for “See what an asshole he is.”

  Or maybe it was “What can I do with him?”

  I didn’t know anymore.

  But at that moment I was coming to the conclusion that being on medical leave from the department wasn’t all bad. My check was still coming in. The mortgage was going to get paid. I even liked not carrying my badge. And not having a gun on my hip or strapped below my armpit? It was fine, good even, at least for a while.

  Two phone calls, and I had her address. If I was smarter, I could have figured it out in one, but I used one of the calls to get an answer to Alan’s question about how the cops were tipped about Jara Heller’s husband’s cocaine problems. I admit I frittered away a minute or two trying to figure out why Alan wanted to know, too.

  Gibbs Storey’s house wasn’t that far from mine, geographically speaking. Ten blocks? Twelve? I could have walked over there easily, but I didn’t. Too much slush on the sidewalks, too little motivation to fight the muck on my part. I took the Cherokee and parked half a block down from her place. Why not in front?

  I was on the lookout for media, especially media with cameras.

  The whole connection between current Boulder residents Sterling and Gibbs Storey and the old murder in Laguna Beach hadn’t yet hit the papers, but I knew it would. Any minute, probably.

  And Sterling’s disappearance in Georgia?

  That was prime tabloid bait. The frosting on the cake. When that news hit the wires, we were talking nonstop cable TV chatter and lots of reporters making their first trips ever to southern Georgia so they could do their pompous stand-ups on some obscure bridge over the Ochlockonee River. There’d probably be good footage of gorgeous old bloodhounds on long leashes snuffling along the riverbank and maybe even some shots of gruff rescue guys in wet suits searching eddies. And of course, there’d be plenty of on-camera interviews with fat cops like me saying they’re doing the best they can, ferreting out every lead, examining every possibility.

  So I checked the street in front of the house as carefully as I knew how. I didn’t want to get ambushed by some reporter.

  Not yet.

  Gibbs Storey was home. To my surprise, she answered her door. To my greater surprise, she invited me inside as soon as I told her I was a friend of her psychologist. That’s what got me inside her door: Alan. Whatever. I was grateful to be off the porch; I’d felt like I had a spotlight on me when I was standing outside like some Jehovah’s Witness or some almost-homeless guy walking across lawns going house to house spreading doorspam.

  The entryway of the Storeys’ home was all rose-hued marble tile. Nothing was out of place in the part of the house that I could see from where I was standing. No dust, no dirt. No kids’ shoes. No crappy tennis balls the dog dragged in. If my crazy grandmother had had a ton of money and a totally different sense of what was tasteful-actually the dear old woman didn’t have any sense at all of what was tasteful-this is what her house would have looked like.

  “You’re Dr. Gregory’s detective friend? The one he wanted to talk to about… my situation?”

  That part couldn’t have gone better if I had written her lines myself. I’d never said I was a cop-technically since I was on leave, I wasn’t a functioning cop-but she’d generously gone ahead and granted me detective status. Alan had once told me that status was a simple thing, psychologically speaking. One person assigned it, and as soon as someone else agreed, the status became real. That’s all it took. Well, Gibbs had assigned me detective status. And me?

  I didn’t contradict her. Thus, my status was real.

  “Yeah. I’m Dr. Gregory’s friend. The one he talked to” was all I said.

  “How did you find me? He said he wouldn’t tell you my name.”

  “He didn’t. He kept his word; he’s big on that. But there’s a lot of other stuff going on-you must know that. Things that I’m in a position to hear about without any assistance from him. The search warrant here the other day? The cops visiting from the West Coast? It wasn’t hard to put numbers on the players’ backs, if you know what I mean. I sort of put two and two together on my own.”

  She stared at me as though I were some kind of bizarre math whiz, and she feared I was about to do some jujitsu calculus on her.


  I smiled back at her like a teddy bear. A big teddy bear with man-boobs.

  I was wearing a coat, a nylon parka that had once had enough goose down in it to keep me warm in a blizzard. She wouldn’t know about the man-boobs. Hell, maybe she would. Didn’t matter. I wasn’t planning on taking the coat off in front of her.

  Why? I just wasn’t going to do it.

  Gibbs Storey was gorgeous, okay? I mean make-me-nervous, shift-my-weight, avert-my-eyes kind of gorgeous. The girls-guys-like-me-don’t-even-get-to-talk-to kind of gorgeous.

  Not pretty.

  Gibbs was movie-star stuff.

  If she hadn’t been so pretty, or maybe if I had just been constitutionally more adept at being around someone so pretty, I might not have blurted out what I blurted out next. But she was, and I wasn’t.

  I said, “And of course, I heard about your husband. That’s kind of why I’m here. Well, that is why I’m here.”

  Her face decomposed into tears. For a moment I thought she was going to run into my arms. Fantasy? Maybe. But she didn’t turn to me; she turned and sprinted down the hall.

  I decided that her rapid departure constituted an invitation, so I followed her.

  It took about five minutes before things calmed down again.

  We’d ended up in a long room that faced the greenbelt below the hogbacks on the western edge of town. Right where the Storeys’ carefully manicured backyard stopped, the scrub of the greenbelt began. The previous owners of this place must have had a scary, scary night in July 2002 when the Wonderland Lake fire erupted and looked as though it were planning on turning this particular section of Boulder into raw material for Kingsford.

  A quick calculation told me that the room we were in was almost exactly the size of my house. This family room/breakfast nook/kitchen combo was as spotless as the entryway, but it wasn’t done in marble. This doesn’t-it-look-like-a-ski-lodge? haven was all dark wood floors and wood-beam ceilings and plaid sofas and furniture converted from farm implements and a chandelier made out of a heck of a lot of deer antlers. A moss rock fireplace divided the view of the sharp hogback to the west almost exactly in half. If the fireplace had ever had an actual fire in it, somebody with a serious aversion to ash-I’m talking phobia-had taken on the responsibility of cleaning up after the blaze.