Blinded

by Stephen White

  Traffic was light on the streets of South Bend. Everybody was either watching football or cooking a turkey or taking a nap or playing with nieces or nephews or grandkids that they hadn’t seen in way too long. In a perfect world I wouldn’t be spending my holiday driving through the streets of some strange midwestern town with a California cop who liked disco.

  In a perfect world Simon and I would be cuddled up in front of the TV making fun of the Detroit Lions.

  But in the imperfect world where I spent most of my time, being with Carmen wasn’t the worst of alternatives.

  Carmen seemed to read my thoughts, sort of. “This your first holiday by yourself?”

  “My wife took our kid to see her parents.”

  “Yeah, right, that’s the reason you’re alone. And I left San Jose because I like the beach.”

  It was a good comeback. The traffic light changed to red over the intersection in front of me. I thought of running it-mine was the only car in sight-but I braked instead. I tried to think of something smart to say back to Carmen, but nothing came to mind.

  “It’s mine,” Carmen confessed after we’d been sitting at the light for a while. “My first holiday without my daughter. And it’s not going to be the last, either.”

  I admitted something to her that I hadn’t even admitted to myself. “Probably won’t be my last, either.”

  She touched my knee. A quick little fingertip thing. There, and then gone.

  “It’s easier to be working,” I said.

  “Yes,” she agreed.

  I pulled into the parking lot of a gas station so we could both use the john. As we walked inside, I was thinking that Carmen and I had covered a lot of important emotional ground in that one block of West Angela Boulevard Road in South Bend, Indiana, and we’d done it without using too many words.

  If damn Alan had been in the backseat, he would have made us jaw on and on until we reached the Canadian border and probably wanted to kill each other.

  Until we definitely wanted to kill him.

  I wondered how he was doing with his problems. The office thing. How Lauren was feeling. Whether that thing he’d made for his big dog was still keeping her tongue off her paw.

  I’d call him later on, after I called Simon, probably just about the time they were sitting down to their turkey dinner.

  FIFTY-SEVEN

  ALAN

  Lauren was trying. She was really, really trying. As I cleaned up the kitchen counters and readied Grace for her afternoon nap, I knew that behind my wife’s beautiful closed lips her white teeth were busy biting down on the tip of her soft tongue over my various venial sins of omission or commission in the kitchen or the nursery.

  I could tell that she was grateful for the way I was picking up the domestic load. And I was grateful for her diligent effort at smoothing out the speed bumps that figurative boatloads of Solumedrol had injected into her mood.

  While Grace slept, Lauren and I snuck in a quickie. The urge surprised both of us, I think.

  An embrace became a kiss became hands beneath shirts became a jog to the bedroom.

  It was amazing to me how tentative two married people could be with each other while they were rushing headlong into compressing a familiar, intimate act into an unfamiliar window of time after an extended period of tension. While we were stripping each other naked we were simultaneously sprinting across a field of eggshells. Thankfully, we reached the finish line before the time limit, which, of course, was Grace’s awakening.

  In the naked moments after-naked both literally and figuratively-Lauren said, “You know Dennis, right? He’s one of our paralegals.”

  “Sure.” Dennis Lopes was happily gay, buff enough to be selected Mr. January on a firefighters’ calendar and, as far as I could tell, solely responsible for the fiscal well-being of Ralph Lauren’s clothing empire. In a field that’s replete with professionals who have more agendas than a cut diamond has facets, Dennis was a hell of a nice guy who said what was on his mind.

  Nonetheless, I couldn’t fathom what he was doing making an appearance in our bed at that particular moment.

  While I considered the destination of Lauren’s segue, I couldn’t help but notice that her diet of IV steroids was beginning to turn her usually svelte frame more Rubenesque.

  “He was walking between the Justice Center and the Court House earlier in the week, and he went down Walnut.”

  Dennis was a fitness nut. That he walked, rather than drove, between the two county buildings was no surprise. “He went right past my office,” I said.

  “Yes.” She paused. “He was on the opposite sidewalk, and he saw Jim Zebid park his car and walk into your building. He mentioned it to me yesterday.”

  Instinctively, I pulled the sheet up to my waist. But I didn’t reply.

  She went on, her tone full of caution. “I hope you’re not seeing him for therapy, babe.”

  “You do? Why?”

  From the way she blinked-she held her eyes closed for a split second too long-I could tell that she had been hoping that Jim had been in the building to see Diane, or even to visit the funny Pakistani man who ran his software empire out of our tiny upstairs, and that she no longer had the luxury of that illusion.

  “Jim and I have a history.”

  Reflexively, I teased. “Like Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier?”

  “What?”

  I stopped teasing. “Yes, I know you have a history. I know you’ve beat him up a few times in court. That assault thing at Crossroads comes to mind. The one where his client was claiming self-defense after he threw a hot dog at the counter girl at Orange Julius.”

  “That’s not what I mean,” she said softly.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Lots of things happen at your office that you don’t tell me about. Your work, your patients, right? Confidential things?”

  “Of course.”

  “Me too. There are lots of things that go on at the Justice Center that I don’t tell you. Things I know because of my position that I shouldn’t, or can’t, share with you. You know that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, one of them involves Jim.” She stood and began to pull on some clothes. “I wish you weren’t seeing him.”

  From my earlier reaction, she knew that I was.

  “You sound serious.”

  She opened her purple eyes wide and forced a sick smile. “I am. I wish you knew what I knew.”

  I stood, too, and began to pull on some boxers. While I did, I worked out the choreography to a little two-step that would allow me to tell Lauren something important without telling Lauren anything at all. All I said was “That problem I told you about at my office? With the bug?”

  She was in the process of pulling a camisole over her head. “No?” she said into the silk. “He’s not… Don’t tell me he’s…”

  Ethically, I couldn’t respond to her question. Practically, we both knew I didn’t have to.

  She turned her back to me while she tugged a thick cotton sweater over her head. I admit I was having trouble staying focused on the topic at hand. Steroids or no steroids, I still liked her ass.

  “Alan, you need to call Jon Younger. Today, at home.”

  Jon Younger was an attorney friend. He handled civil matters. Like, say, malpractice.

  I said, “On Thanksgiving?”

  She sat on the edge of the bed and began to slide her legs into some fleece tights. “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I don’t know what Jim might have planned.”

  “Planned?”

  “Look at me,” she said.

  I did.

  “Your first appointment with Jim? Was it after the Fourth of July?”

  I blinked.

  “That’s exactly what I was afraid of.”

  Okay, Jim had come to see me for therapy after some confrontation with Lauren in the DA’s office that occurred around Independence Day.

  “Lauren, your history with Jim? He h
as reason to be… I don’t know… angry at you?”

  “Call Jon. He knows the background. Give him a heads-up. I’ll feel better.”

  From down the hall came the not-so-soothing trill of a tear-laced “Mom Mom Mom.” Grace tended to throw the few words in her repertoire together in unfettered strings, oblivious-or disdainful-of punctuation.

  Emily stood at the sound of Grace’s call, and her paw umbrella immediatelyclack-clackedon the wood floors.

  Lauren said, “I got Grace.”

  I said, “I’ll get some tape. I got Emily.”

  Lauren and I and the two dogs all ran into one another in the doorway on the way out of the bedroom. Lauren hugged me and said, “I’m really sorry.”

  She took off for the nursery.

  The gravitas of Lauren’s alarm about Jim Zebid wasn’t quite registering with me. I didn’t see anything about the mess I was in that couldn’t wait until Monday. Interrupting Jon Younger’s Thanksgiving to warn him that I had a pissed-off patient didn’t make much sense to me at all.

  While Lauren played with Grace, I made a different call, to a different attorney. I called Casey Sparrow.

  Casey was a criminal defense attorney. She was smart, brazen, and fearless. She had a head of red hair that she’d had no more luck taming than most prosecutors had had taming her.

  As I punched in the long string of numbers, I knew that an even longer rope of electron activity would be carrying my voice up thirty-five hundred feet of the Front Range to Casey’s rustic home on the Peak-to-Peak Highway below the Continental Divide.

  “Casey? It’s Alan Gregory.”

  “Oh, no. Not tonight. Who is it this time? You or Lauren?” Casey had once defended Lauren against murder charges. That chain of events had started with an after-hours call not too unlike this one.

  “Don’t worry, neither of us has been arrested. Listen, I’m sorry to call on Thanksgiving, Casey.”

  “But?”

  “Do you have a minute to gossip with me?”

  “Gossip?” Her voice went suddenly girly. I imagined that she curled her legs beneath her and stripped an earring from her ear to get more comfortable with the telephone.

  I stepped out onto the deck and closed the door behind me. “Yes.”

  “My partner’s family is due for dinner any minute. You can have me until they arrive. After that I’m going to be the best damn hostess in the high country.”

  I didn’t waste any time. “You know Jim Zebid?”

  Hesitation. Then, “Yes.” The yes wasn’t the least bit girly. The yes was almost totally “oh shit.”

  “Something happened with him and Lauren last summer.”

  “We’re gossiping, right?” she asked.

  “That’s right. That’s all this is, just gossip.”

  “Lauren won’t tell you, right?”

  “Right.”

  “I shouldn’t, either.”

  I knew she probably shouldn’t, but I shut my mouth while she did whatever carnival act she felt she needed to do to juggle the moral aspects of her dilemma. Given her role with the defense bar, I figured whatever Casey knew about Jim and Lauren she knew because of courthouse gossip. Thus, her hands weren’t tied with the same ethical twine that bound Lauren’s.

  Gossip is gossip.

  Casey said, “Okay. I heard… I heard she turned him in to the Supreme Court last summer for disciplinary action.”

  “For?”

  “Serious stuff.”

  I said, “He’s still practicing law.”

  “These things take time.”

  “What did he do?”

  “Do I have to?” Just a little girly.

  “Unfortunately.”

  “He had a client who was accused of forgery, a petty thing. I don’t know the details, but I don’t think the facts are important. Lauren was prosecuting.”

  “Yes.”

  “Leave me out of this, Alan.”

  “You know I will, Casey.”

  “The rumor is that… hell. In lieu of legal fees, Jim wasschtuppingthe guy’s wife.”

  I was speechless.

  I heard a doorbell ring in the background. Casey said, “Oops, got to go pull on my hostess’s apron. Jim’s defense, by the way, is that it was her idea. His client’s wife’s. She proposed the bargain. Have a good Thanksgiving. Best to Lauren.”

  “Casey?”

  “Yes.”

  “Thanks, and good luck with Brenda’s parents.”

  She laughed. “I’ll need it. Domestic, I’m not.”

  I clicked the phone off and stared out toward the mountains south of town. The sky that enveloped the mountains near Eldorado was the color of an old quarter. The wondrous rich colors of autumn were almost gone; the beiges and grays and blacks and whites of winter filled the entire landscape from mountains to plains.

  Jim Zebid’s first appointment with me had taken place during the beginning of August. In the intervening weeks he’d never mentioned anything about an investigation into his conduct. He’d certainly never mentioned a conflict with my wife.

  Why had he come to see me? I hadn’t been sure before, but I’d been working under a clinical assumption that it was because his chronic anxiety was becoming increasingly dysphoric.

  That old assumption was mutating into something new. I was guessing that Jim had been hoping to trap me into doing something that could be construed as malpractice so he could get even with Lauren.

  Now he had me by the balls. And I didn’t see a way to free them from his grasp.

  FIFTY-EIGHT

  SAM

  “Somebody’s going to see us sitting here and call the cops.”

  Carmen and I had pushed the seats all the way back on the Cherokee. We were parked on the same block as the night before, diagonally across from Holly Malone’s house. But this time we were a couple of houses farther away. It wasn’t a neighborhood where people sat in cars parked on the street. Inconspicuous we weren’t.

  “That’s always a risk on this kind of stakeout, Sam.”

  “This is different, though. Usually you and me, we’re the cops. Here we’re persona non grata.”

  “Okay, you’re a Craftsman-style expert, and you speak Latin. What do I have on my hands here?”

  I went through the list in my head: Fat-ass cop. Iron Ranger with man-boobs. Schlub whose family dumped him for the holidays. Post-MI jerkface who’s running around the country like he has the heart of a teenager.

  Don’t know why, but right then I reminded myself that Gibbs liked me. It helped a little, as sad as that fact was.

  “I am what I am.” Until the words were out of my mouth, I didn’t realize I was quoting Popeye.

  Carmen tried hard to swallow a laugh.

  I laughed first. She followed immediately. “Go ahead,” I said. “Say I’m a complete idiot.”

  “A cop who’s a Renaissance man. Quick as a wink from Frank Lloyd Wright to Popeye-I’m impressed.”

  “You done?”

  She was wiping tears from her eyes. “Yeah, I’m done. Almost. So what are we looking for exactly?”

  My neck was as far out as I was planning on sticking it. “This was your idea, Carmen. Remember?”

  She reached into her bag and took a reprinted five-by-seven from her purse and stuck it to the center of my dashboard with some gum I didn’t even realize she was chewing.

  The photo was of Sterling. He and his buddy Brian looked like a couple of male models.

  “Who names her kid Sterling?” Carmen mused.

  I didn’t know the answer to that question. “He’s pretty, right?” I asked. “Holly called him pretty.”

  Carmen gazed at the picture as though she’d never really looked at it before. “Yeah. He’s pretty-boy pretty.”

  “Not your type?”

  “No, unfortunately, he is my type. My type-historically speaking-could best be described as ‘assholes.’ And from everything I hear about his life until the moment his rental car crossed that bridge ove
r the Ochlockonee River, Sterling Storey was an asshole. Is an asshole.”

  “Assholes?” It wasn’t much of a response, but it was the best I could do.

  “Sad as it sounds, that about covers it. If I’m into a guy, he’s going to turn out to be a bona fide asshole.”

  “Assholes have bona fides? Like diplomats?”

  She found that pretty funny. “The ones I fall for do. I only take them in if they’re credentialed.” Her laughter stopped as fast as it started. “That’s what happened in San Jose. My asshole that time was a judge. He had credentials up his wazoo.”

  Carmen had pushed open the front door. I walked in. “Yeah? What did he do to you?”

  “My daughter and I had just moved in with him, were just getting settled in his house. I was in love.” She spread out the lone syllable of “love” so that it sounded like a crowd. “She called me from school, said she’d forgotten her calculator-it was one of those fancy ones with all those buttons, you know? I gave her a hard time about her irresponsibility and then I went home to get it for her. I’m a softy.”

  “He was there?” I asked. The fact that he was there was necessary to the story, but it wasn’t sufficient to explain walking away from a pension. I knew there would be more.

  “With my daughter’s best friend’s mother. I’d introduced the two of them at a volleyball game a couple weeks before.”

  Nasty situation. But it still wasn’t sufficient.

  “On the stairs of all places,” she added. “He was doing her from behind.”

  Interesting detail, though it didn’t compare with what I’d heard about Holly and the basilica. But that wasn’t it, either. “It got ugly?” I asked.

  “You could say that. I went berserk-I could take what he was doing to me, but what he was doing to my daughter and her friend? Shit! I screamed the woman’s naked ass right out of the house, but that was just a warm-up for what I wanted to lay on him. I started yelling and cursing-did I tell you I have a temper? Well, I do. And he took one step forward and… the asshole hit me. A hard slap right across the face. It was such a shock, it took me a second to recover, but then I started up again, and he slapped me again, harder still. I couldn’t fucking believe it.”