Warning Signs

by Stephen White

  Lucy would let you look into her world and its carefully manicured gardens, but she always made it clear that she didn't welcome uninvited visitors.

  I was more than a little surprised when I saw Lucy standing in the open doorway to the master bedroom pantomiming a knuckle rap and saying, "Knock, knock." I'd changed into an old pair of shorts and a white T-shirt. Grace was in a fresh diaper and absolutely nothing else.

  What do you say to an acquaintance who is suspected of murder? I tried, "I'm so sorry about all this you're going through. It must be like taking a holiday in hell."

  "Thanks, Alan. May I come in? Cozy and Lauren are both on the phone. I thought I'd take a little break and was hoping I could sneak another look at the baby. She's wonderful."

  Lucy was wearing a starched white shirt and jeans that fit her like hot wax. No jewelry. Black flats. Very little makeup. Given what she'd been through, I expected she would look tired, but she didn't. She somehow managed to slide her hands into the back pockets of her jeans.

  "Of course. You want to hold her? She has a fresh diaper-so it's a rare opportunity. Take advantage of it while you can."

  She smiled and lifted her arms. "May I?"

  I handed Grace over to her. She took the baby with an awkward motion that spoke of unfamiliarity with infants. She said, "Is she always this good?"

  "In a word, no. But she's still a wonderful baby. We've been very lucky."

  I gestured toward an upholstered chair by the western window. Lucy sat and made a cute face for Grace's benefit. She said, "Sorry to take over your house. It's been hard to find a place to meet that's not surrounded by the media. My place is impossible. Cozy's office, his house…"

  "Don't mention it, Lucy. I'm glad there's a place you can go without being harassed."

  For a moment she focused all her attention on Grace, whose face was beginning to scrunch up into one of her pre-distress configurations. "Am I doing something wrong?" Lucy asked.

  "No, she may be hungry, or she may be cutting a tooth. Those are my current all-purpose explanations for Grace being unhappy. I'm planning to expand the list as necessary as she grows older. But I am hoping those two will suffice at least until her mid-teens."

  Lucy laughed gently. "Were life so simple, huh? I wish those were my only two potential problems."

  "I do, too, Lucy. I do, too."

  Without taking her eyes from the baby, she said, "I told Lauren she could tell you what's been going on. I assume she told you I was there that night? At Royal's house?"

  Grace captured and then started sucking on Lucy's pinky. I reached to the bed behind me, grabbed a bottle, and handed it over to Lucy. Grace started eating. "She was hungry," Lucy said.

  "Yes, she told me you were at the house."

  "The press will probably find out soon."

  "They usually seem to discover these things."

  "I think it was somebody at the department who leaked the fact that I'd been questioned to the media. That still hurts. Sammy picked me up before dawn so nobody would notice."

  "Sam's a sweetheart, Lucy. It could have been somebody at the DA's office who was the leak, couldn't it? It might not have been one of your colleagues."

  "I suppose," she said before she grew quiet for a moment, apparently fascinated by the simple act of an infant eating. I guessed Lucy was thirty-two, thirty-three years old. She was unmarried and childless, certainly vulnerable to the gravitational pull of maternal yearnings.

  I was about to comment about that when she asked, "Alan? You ever do anything…? God… you ever do anything that you're so ashamed of…?" She stared out the window at the lights of the city and the silhouette of the mountains. "So ashamed of that you'd do almost anything to undo it?"

  "I don't know," I replied, in a moment of stark ineloquence. "Maybe." I tried to guess what was coming next, but was drawing a blank.

  "You've probably already figured it out, but I'm talking about the reason I was at Roy Peterson's house."

  Moments like these-when acquaintances or friends begin to open up to me as though we were patient and doctor sitting in my office-are always awkward for me. My practiced instinct was to warn Lucy that she enjoyed no confidentiality here in my bedroom, but a friend wouldn't do that, a friend would just listen.

  "I wondered," I said, recalling that Lucy had told her attorneys that if people knew why she was at Roy's house it would only support the contention that she had a motive to kill him. Now she was telling me that the reason she was there filled her with shame.

  She said, "There's an old saying about good intentions. A proverb, or an aphorism. Are they the same thing, proverbs and aphorisms? Do you know it? Something like the road to hell is paved with good intentions."

  I said, "The reason you were at Royal's house-that's still what you're talking about?"

  Did she nod in reply? I wasn't quite certain. Finally, she said, "This one was-paved with good intentions, I mean. Not a whole lot of good judgment maybe, but a whole lot of good intentions."

  She lowered her head and Grace almost disappeared in the cascade of blond hair. "Grace's done with the bottle. Should she have more? How do you know how much to feed her?"

  "We give her what she wants. That seems to work."

  Lucy closed her eyes slowly and left them shut. She said, "It's different for adults, I guess."

  "What do you mean?"

  She opened her eyes and looked up at me. The corners of her mouth turned up in a wry grin. She said, "Giving people what they want, it's more complicated with adults than it is with babies."

  "I'm no expert with babies but my initial impression after six months' experience as a father is that almost everything is more complicated with adults than it is with babies." Grace spit out the nipple and started to squirm on Lucy's lap. "She probably needs to be burped, Lucy. Though she sometimes makes that same face in preparation for fouling another diaper. You want to burp her? Don't be surprised if she releases pressure at both ends simultaneously."

  "Love to." She moved Grace gingerly up toward her shoulder. "Did Sam tell you that I got engaged a couple of weeks ago?"

  "No, Lucy, he didn't. Congratulations. Who's the lucky guy?"

  "He's not a cop," she replied.

  An interesting prologue, I thought.

  "His name is Grant. He's with the Forest Service. I met him last fall when I was out hiking, if you can believe it."

  "That's wonderful. When is-"

  "Who could guess? Everything's up in the air right now. You know, because of… Royal."

  I was about to ask Lucy how she'd come to know Royal Peterson when Cozy's huge frame filled the bedroom doorway. He was carrying our foster poodle, Anvil. Anvil looked content in his arms. Against Cozy's huge frame, the sixteen-pound dog also looked like a hamster.

  Cozy said, "Hello again, Alan. Did you get some dinner? Wonderful stuff. There's a tart in the refrigerator for later, too. Almonds. No, I didn't bake it. Lucy, want to join us? We're just about ready to get started again."

  "Sure." She handed me the baby and said, "Thanks. That was a nice talk. I really appreciate it."

  "No problem," I said.

  From the other room, Lauren called out, "Sweetie, if you left your pager in the kitchen, it just went off."

  I traipsed into the kitchen with Grace in my arms. I didn't recognize the number on my beeper, so I called my office voice mail to see what the emergency page was about. The message was from Naomi Bigg and it was succinct. "Dr. Gregory? There's something more I need to say about what we talked about earlier. Please give me a call."

  I asked Grace if she wanted to hazard a guess about Naomi Bigg's pressing problem.

  She didn't. Grace had wisdom beyond her months.

  I dialed the number off the screen of my pager and heard a smoker's raspy "Hello."

  Although I was pretty sure that the voice was Naomi's, I said, "Naomi Bigg, please."

  "Dr. Gregory? It's me."

  "I'm returning your page." I made certain m
y tone was as level as a freshly plumbed door.

  "You're prompt. Leo always made them wait. He said it was too reinforcing to call right away."

  It was becoming clear to me that maybe Leo Bigg was a jerk in more ways than one. Intentionally keeping cancer patients waiting for return phone calls? While I busied myself closing up the cardboard boxes of Chinese food, I let the ball bounce around on Naomi's side of the net.

  She took a whack at it after a few seconds. "I was thinking about how we left things today, and what you must be thinking."

  "What must I be thinking?"

  "That the wouldn't-it-be-cool game I was describing-the one that the boys play-that it might somehow be, I don't know, related to what happened to the district attorney. I assume that I left you with that impression."

  Naomi was right on. That was certainly on the list of things that I had been thinking.

  She said, "I'm not naive, okay? I can add two and two as well as you can. But, see, none of the wouldn't-it-be-cool games with Ramp and Paul ever-ever-involved someone being assaulted the way that Royal Peterson was assaulted. The news reports all say that he was beaten, you know, hit on the head with something."

  I listened as she sucked on a cigarette. She said, "The boys have never joked about doing anything like that-ambushing someone and hitting them on the head, beating them up. You ask me, I think they're too cowardly to do something that confrontational. That's why I don't think they had anything to do with what happened to Peterson."

  The argument she was making wasn't particularly compelling. I concluded that the purpose of her call was to reveal to me the foundation for her rationalization. She was eager for me to sign up to support her psychological defenses; she didn't really expect to convince me that her hypothesis was true.

  Not feeling particularly cooperative, I assaulted the rationalization I was hearing. "Had the wouldn't-it-be-cool games you overheard ever concerned Royal Peterson in any context?"

  "Well, sure. Paul knows the DA's role in the plea-bargain process. Paul and Ramp talked about Peterson all the time. But Roy Peterson was one of ten wouldn't-it-be-cool targets, maybe more. Most of them were people that Ramp was angry at, by the way, not Paul."

  "And since Roy Peterson was beaten and not-what?-you think it's evidence that Paul and Ramp weren't involved?"

  "Bombs. The boys always joked about using a bomb."

  Without any deliberation, I sat down. I had to consciously inhale a breath before I could say, "A bomb? They joked about using a bomb."

  "I don't know whether it was a bomb exactly. I don't know about those things. But an explosive of some kind. It's one of Ramp's little hobbies. He talks about blowing things up all the time. He goes out to some ranch out east somewhere, Limon or someplace, and practices. Paul says that once he went out there with Ramp and they actually blew up an old truck. You know, a wreck.

  "Ramp's the one who says things like, 'Wouldn't it be cool if the district attorney's house just blew up one day?' Or 'Wouldn't it be cool if so-and-so's car blew up one day?' Like that. All of that stuff comes from Ramp. Paul never talks like that when Ramp's not around."

  "Blowing stuff up is a hobby of Ramp's?"

  "I don't know, an outside interest, that kind of hobby."

  Silently, I counted to ten. Fortunately or unfortunately, the delay didn't change what I was going to say. "I want to make sure I'm understanding you correctly. Because Royal Peterson wasn't killed by an explosive of some kind, you would like to believe that Paul and Ramp weren't involved in whatever happened at his house, even though they'd made overt threats against him."

  "They never threatened him. It was just talk about what they wished would happen. When they heard he was dead, it's not like they celebrated or anything."

  How nice. "So there's no chance they followed through on their fantasies?"

  "Exactly. It was like they felt guilty because they were wishing for someone to die and then it happened. You know what that would be like. You'd feel guilty, responsible. Anybody would."

  I considered her argument before I said, "That's a luxurious position for you to have, Naomi."

  "What do you mean?"

  "I'm thinking of the Klebolds and the Harrises. Over the months before that day at the high school, they probably made the same kinds of judgments about their children. Saw two here, and saw two there, but never allowed themselves to believe that the sum added up to four."

  She sputtered as though she couldn't wait to respond to my words. "And, you know what? A thousand other parents-mothers like me-have done the exact same thing. We've seen things and never told the police. And our children never ended up doing a thing wrong. Not a thing. None of them. Two and two never added up. Ever. I thought you would understand."

  "Understand what?"

  "What it's like for parents. Aren't you a parent? Can you believe that your child is evil? Do you know how hard it is to cross that line?"

  I looked down at Grace, asleep in my arms. No, I couldn't believe that my child was evil. Would ever be evil.

  Not a chance.

  "Not necessarily evil," I said, "but what about flawed? Troubled?" I added a bonus rationalization for Naomi's benefit. "Or what if the child is influenced by the wrong people? That happens."

  "Killing someone isn't a flaw, Doctor. It's evil. And evil isn't in the air, you don't just catch it like a virus. It comes from somewhere, some injury deep inside." She paused. "And, although he's certainly been hurt badly by all that's happened, I don't believe my child has ever been to that place. I'd know it if… he had-I'm his mother."

  I cushioned my voice, foaming the runway with my next words, trying to give her a soft place to land. "But you're not entirely sure, are you, Naomi? That's why we're talking."

  She didn't want to come down gently. She said, "Maybe I shouldn't have called you after all. I'll see you on Friday-if I don't reconsider this whole thing."

  Hurriedly, I interjected, "The reason you called tonight? Why is it important that I not misinterpret what you said today during our session? It's my impression that you're angry that I'm still able to see both sides of the coin."

  "I don't want you to do anything stupid."

  "I don't understand."

  "I didn't want you to run off and tell anyone what I said. Send the bomb squad to my house or something. That's all."

  "I couldn't reveal our conversation to anyone, Naomi. Not without your permission."

  "I bet you could find a way around that."

  "Are we talking about trust now?"

  "I have no damn idea what we're talking about." She hung up as I was trying to figure out a discreet way to inquire about the other nine or so wouldn't-it-be-cool targets that Ramp and Paul had mentioned.

  As the line went dead in my ear, I said, "Is my wife on that list, Naomi?"

  CHAPTER 13

  I went to bed knowing that I needed help. And I woke up the next morning knowing that I needed help.

  Although I would've loved to have discussed the whole Naomi Bigg situation with Lauren, and would have welcomed her reasoned counsel, confidentiality concerns and peculiar circumstances made that impossible.

  The peculiar circumstance, of course, was the possibility that Lauren was one of the potential targets of Paul and Ramp's wouldn't-it-be-cool games. And the very real possibility that the game was really only a mind game.

  The way I looked at it was that my position was simple. I couldn't risk saying anything and I couldn't risk not saying anything.

  W hat I'd decided I needed was what psychotherapists call supervision. In another profession, I suppose the same thing might be called consultation. Basically, supervision means that one psychotherapist invites another, hopefully more objective, usually more experienced professional to review and comment upon his or her work.

  On those occasions when I decided I needed some objectivity with my practice, I relied on one of three different people, depending on the specifics of the case. When the issues in the case i
nvolved ethics, as this one did, my first choice was almost invariably Raymond Farley, Ph.D. Raymond's capacity to detect prevarication and rationalization was finely honed, and I knew I could count on him to help show me which side of the trees the moss was growing on in the forest where I was lost.

  I called his home at seven-fifteen on Thursday morning. His youngest daughter was a junior in high school, so I figured the Farley household would already be humming along.

  Raymond's wife answered.

  "Cyn? It's Alan Gregory, how are you?"

  "Alan, hello. How am I? Not quite as awake as you are. You want my sugar, right? I'm trying to get my daughter out the door. Let me find him. Raymond? It's for you."

  A moment later I heard Raymond's baritone. "Alan. Long time. How's your new baby?"

  "Grace is great, Raymond. How're your kids?"

  He answered me at great length and with great patience. There was little hurry in the blood that coursed through Raymond Farley's veins. No one ever, ever took more care while finishing a story, and no one ever finished a meal after Raymond Farley finished his. "You didn't call to get an update on my kids, though, did you? What can I do for you?"

  "I've got a case I would love to run by you. It's urgent, unfortunately. I see this woman again tomorrow evening and I should probably talk to you before her next appointment."

  "Outpatient?"

  "Yes."

  "What's the urgency?"

  "Columbine issues, Raymond."

  "It's that time of year, I guess. What are we talking, grief? Anniversary reaction? Post-traumatic stress?"

  "I'm not referring to the last Columbine, Raymond. I'm referring to concerns about the next Columbine."

  "Oh," he said. "Oh."

  "Can you squeeze me in?"

  "I'm going to be at CU in Boulder doing a seminar on suicidal tendencies from one to three today. Meet me outside of Wardenburg-the student health center-at three. If the weather holds we'll find someplace pretty to sit, and we'll talk."

  I rescheduled my two forty-five patient, picked up sandwiches and drinks at Alfalfa's on Arapahoe, and started to wait for Ray on the University of Colorado campus.