He said, “Yes, that one.”
“He’s a guy. I know him from work.” I stressed the word work.
Sam nodded but I could see disappointment in his eyes. He recognized that I’d played the confidentiality trump card—work, between us, was my shorthand for privileged information—and he knew from long experience with me that once I chose to play that trump I would play it stubbornly.
“That’s it? A retired wiseguy shows up on your doorstop out of nowhere and you’re going to blow smoke up my ass that he’s a guy from work?”
It was a challenge. Meek on the Sam-challenge meter, but a challenge nonetheless. “What?” I said, playing dumb, or comfortably wearing the costume of someone playing dumb. My short-term goal was the distraction value. Sam, I hoped, would be left to wonder which was true about me. Dumb? Playing dumb?
He would believe either. Sam wasn’t happy about my stance but he had no good options. He dropped the inquiry about Carl. He asked, “You’re doing okay?”
I had an old impulse: to invite him in, to offer him a beer.
I ignored it.
I said, “Good. You?”
TEN MINUTES LATER I was winnowing a list of potential therapists in my head. It was time.
18
SAM AND LUCY
SAM’S CAR WAS IN THE SHOP. Again. Lucy picked him up at the doublewide to get them both to Thirty-Fifth Street to start their shift. The recent string of mid-January days felt stubby and gray. Stock Show weather.
Sam was disappointed she hadn’t stopped to get him coffee first.
“Ophelia made you coffee, Sam. Didn’t she?” Lucy said.
“Yeah? So.”
“Breakfast, too?” He nodded. She said, “I wasted all my time driving up here to get your butt. You can buy me coffee. How’s that?”
Sam slumped down a little bit in his seat. He said, “That’s reasonable.”
“I found time to look at Prado, discreetly. Couple things you should know.”
“Give me the short version. Don’t want to still be talking about this when we get to Starbucks to buy your super-duper extra-whatever foamy soy vanilla latte thing.”
Lucy glared at him. “Hazelnut, not vanilla. I have the high ground here, Sam.”
He knew she was right.
She said, “Doctor Doctor’s roommate was due home late the afternoon of 9/11 but he got caught by the airports shutting down. Didn’t get back for days. The next Saturday to be precise.” Sam grunted to let her know he was listening. “And, get this, Elliot Bellhaven’s name is in the damn file.”
Sam sat up straight. “I don’t remember that. He was the deputy DA who worked Prado after Lauren?”
“No. He’s on a list of contacts of the deceased put together by Mendelson—remember him?—from an address book and a later interview with the roommate.”
“Mendelson did that? Really? Hopeless detective. Worst I ever knew. Any follow-up calls or interviews made to the names on the list?”
“No notes about that in the file,” Lucy said.
“Course not. Mendelson? If he hadn’t moved to Texas he would have gotten the Prado 911 call that we got. Fate’s a bitch. So Bellhaven was living in Boulder when the towers got hit?”
“I knew that already. Didn’t need Mendelson to tell me that.”
“Was he out of the closet?” Sam said. “He wasn’t when he first got here, was he?”
“That matters? You’re asking because Ophelia said the roommates were gay.”
“I don’t know what matters. I don’t like handguns on bungee cords in fireplaces. Until I understand that piece, everything matters.”
“The DA doesn’t know all of what we know, Sam. I was careful.”
“The fact we found the gun is in the file. And the bungee. Bellhaven knows all that.”
“You’re buying me one of those breakfast sandwich things, too.”
“Yeah yeah,” Sam said. “I might get one, too. O may be trimming my calories.”
“You think maybe you should get a new car, Sam? Yours is a little unreliable.”
“I missed the end-of-the-year sales. Maybe during the summer closeouts.”
“Most of the sales go till the end of January. You have a few days yet.”
“I can’t afford a new car. I spend too much of my money buying my partner coffee and breakfast sammies.” He laughed at the word sammies.
19
DOCTOR LILA
ALAN HAD CANCELED the previous week’s appointment. Despite how monumental our last session had seemed to me—and maybe because of how monumental it had seemed to him—he’d left no explanation for the cancellation in his voicemail.
It was as though he didn’t owe me one.
HE SAT DOWN. HE looked at me. He asked, “Do you know Diane Estevez?”
That was how he chose to begin our third session. How our February began.
He didn’t mention the cancellation. I didn’t confront him about it. I had intended to. I knew I should. I told myself I would, later on. But I wouldn’t. Later on.
If he were another patient I might have asked him whether it was important if I knew Diane Estevez. But not Alan Gregory; I had already decided to be specific with him about those kinds of facts. Not that I felt I had much choice.
I was still believing he should have chosen another therapist. Someone who had treated another therapist before. Like, ever. Someone with some gravitas. And some balls. He needed someone with balls. Gender didn’t matter. Balls mattered.
I said, “I met Diane. Once at a conference in Denver a couple of years ago. That was just an introduction. And once at a party at her house up Lee Hill. A big party, an open-house type thing. She and I have never had a conversation that went beyond pleasantries.”
I wondered if Alan recalled that he’d been there, too, at that party. That he and I had met that evening. I had probably introduced myself as Lila Travis, not Delilah. Maybe he did recall, and that’s why he called me Lila. Or perhaps I had made so tiny an impression on him that he had forgotten the two or three minutes we talked at the foot of the stairs, me up on the first tread so that I wouldn’t have to look up at him literally as well as figuratively.
He had probably forgotten. He called me Lila because some colleague of ours did.
“You and Diane are not friends?” he asked.
“Not at all. No professional contact, either. If you’re concerned about that.”
“Her husband, Raoul?”
“I met him at the same party. Spoke with him for less than a minute. He was charming.” Raoul was flirty. You weren’t, Alan.
I wondered if I had been flirty. I’m not always aware.
He stared at my face for at least ten seconds. I thought he was deciding whether he could trust my answers. Or weighing whether my encounters with his friends were too frequent or too intimate. I had thrown in the part about Raoul being charming so that he would trust that answer. I couldn’t imagine that my tangential contact with his friends would disqualify me. I asked, “Are you wondering if you can count on what I say?”
“Yes,” he said. “The stakes are kind of high.”
“They are,” I acknowledged. I didn’t care about the stakes. I did not like not being trusted.
He shook his head. “Not the way you might think. Higher than you can imagine.”
I remembered. Survival. Culpability. Freedom. I felt that chill all over again.
“Why would I break your confidence?” I asked.
“I don’t care why, Lila. Therapists get misguided. Careless. Foolish. Grandiose. Therapists lose sight of their roles. Get cavalier. Misunderstand their responsibilities. Lots of reasons.”
“Have you?” I asked him. “Done those things?”
He looked at me. I suddenly understood the true meaning of the word glower.
“Do you know what’s going on with Diane now? Or do I have to tell you?”
“You have to tell me,” I said. Insisting that he tell me felt mean. Jesus. But I couldn
’t pretend I knew what he needed me to know. I knew the rumors, but I wasn’t that cool therapist who heard all the good rumors. I also knew what was in the news, but I didn’t read the Camera, so I probably did not even know all that was in the news.
“You know we were close? Diane and I.”
“Only from context. Your long association with her. In town, people—other therapists—refer to you as ‘Alan and Diane,’ ‘Diane and Alan.’ You’re linked, like a couple that’s been together forever. You must know that.”
He nodded. “We were friends. Good friends. Partners. We share an office. Shared. Own it together. Still. So close. For years. It would be hard to exaggerate the depth of our friendship.” I didn’t respond. He went on. “The last time I saw Diane she was on a gurney in Community Hospital on the way to get a CT scan to check for a subdural bleed. She had banged her head—hard—when I tackled her to get a gun out of her hand. She wasn’t thinking well. But she hadn’t been thinking clearly even before she hit her head.”
“People are saying she was pregnant, but they did a CT?” I regretted my words the instant they left my mouth. I had spoken as if to a friend, not to a patient.
He looked at me perplexed. I had not only interrupted him, but I had also questioned his reality. I’d screwed up.
He said, “Let’s assume they shielded her abdomen. May I go on?”
I had questions about other facts, too. The gun. Particularly where it might have been pointed while Diane held it. I decided to wait to see if he got there on his own.
“What kind of not thinking well? Decompensating?” I asked.
“Possibly. She was tangential. Her grasp on reality was tenuous. I didn’t do a mental status exam. But she might have done poorly. Would have.”
“Earlier that day she had shot your wife in the back.” I felt a need to keep that fact in the room. One of us had to say it.
“Before I knocked her down she had been cradling her shoes like they were precious. I’d thought she had told me they were Jimmy Choos, but a nurse in the hospital told me that the shoes Diane wouldn’t give up were a pair of Christian something. Christian … Louboutins.” Alan Gregory shrugged. “Expensive, I guess. Doesn’t matter. She was more concerned about the damn shoes than she was about the pistol.”
Or about your wife, I was thinking. Your dying wife. I was breathless while I listened. He wasn’t breathless. To me that said we hadn’t yet approached the ripe part. I knew his rhythm by then. There had to be a ripe part.
“The shoes had red soles,” he said.
I heard the words as red souls and began to ponder shoes with tinted souls, allowing myself to become distracted by the notion that doing psychotherapy with Alan Gregory was turning out to involve a whole mess of metaphor.
“They all have red soles,” he continued, “regardless of the color of the shoe. It’s distinctive to the designer, or brand, or …”
I didn’t know fancy shoes. So not my thing. My most expensive shoes were ski boots. After that? Rock climbing shoes. In my brain I changed all previous references from red souls to red soles.
“Diane didn’t have a bleed,” Alan said. “But the scan showed she had a lesion.”
I knew that from the rumors. It was part of the harmonies of “Did you hear?” and “Can you believe it?” that ricocheted around town in the days right after. The harmonies led to the chorus everyone was soon singing: “Diane might actually get off.”
Diane hadn’t yet been arrested. I was one of many people who didn’t understand why not. All the public facts pointed toward Diane as the only suspect.
The harmonies about Diane getting away with it did fade with time. The scope of the tragedy became so great after Alan’s wife’s death that decorum drowned out the allure of good gossip. The little girl dancing at her mother’s funeral had a lot to do with that. That poignant dance changed the conversation in town, for sure.
“The lesion was a few centimeters. An anaplastic astrocytoma,” Alan said. He looked at me. I wasn’t trying to disguise my ignorance. “Brain lesions aren’t good. Grade III gliomas are particularly not good.”
I’d heard that Diane had a lesion, but I knew nothing about brain tumors. The words glioma and astrocytoma did not sound good. They also sounded more like cosmology than medicine.
“I don’t know if this part is out there, but Diane is at Mayo Clinic. The one in Arizona, not in Minnesota. The court approved it. Her leaving the state, going there. A mutual friend told me that there was a complication with her initial treatment in Denver.” He shrugged. “I don’t believe it. I think that Raoul and her lawyer—he was a friend of mine, too—wanted her out of town for strategic reasons. The lawyer is Cozier Maitlin.” He narrowed his eyes. “Do you know him?”
I shook my head. I had never heard of him.
“They, Raoul and Cozy Maitlin, wanted her out of Colorado. She could have been treated here. Radiation? Surgery? Both? I don’t know what they’re doing. The doctors and hospitals here could do it, whatever she needed. I think it’s all part of a legal strategy to postpone her prosecution.” Suddenly less assured, he said, “If you hear anything about that, would you tell me?”
“I’m not comfortable saying I would,” I replied. “I have to give it some thought.” This is therapy, was what I was thinking, not Reuters, but I didn’t say that. Thank God.
He said, “Although I might ask you for things that are not part of a typical psychotherapy, Lila, I won’t ask you for things that are not important.”
“I will consider each request you make,” I told him. “But I have to trust my instincts. If you insist I set those aside, we should stop this now. You should find someone else to treat you.” I felt proud saying that. I also felt a little mean. I did a dipstick check of my countertransference. Do I feel proud because I was a little mean? I couldn’t decide. My friends tell me I can get mean. But in therapy? Not good.
“Justice is a funny thing. You know Diane hasn’t been arrested? For shooting my wife in the back? No arrest. Lauren used to tell me to be patient with the system. Time. That these things take time. Prosecutions take time. Cases get built an interview at a time. A report at a time. A motion at a time. A witness at a time. A deposition at a time. Time.
“I have a friend who is a Boulder police detective. He says that the fact that Diane is in treatment for a brain tumor removes any time pressure the DA might feel to arrest her. That’s crap. He’s stalling.”
“You are unhappy at the progress? The lack of progress.”
“Damn right,” he said.
“Those things you said about time? Those are things you feel that Lauren would be saying if she were still alive,” I said to him. I was determined to keep her death in the room. “If your once-dear friend hadn’t shot her.”
That mass of silence settled on us, as though it had been hovering awaiting a tug that would cause it to blanket us again. My words provided the tug. I said, “I would prefer to make it through this session without asking you this kind of question, but I can’t see a way around it. How do you feel about the glioma, the astrocytoma? About Diane still being free, about her being in Arizona for care at Mayo? You are angry. What else?”
He slid his lower jaw from side to side. His eyes were quiet, focused on something that registered as nothing. An unadorned wall behind me, to the right.
“I don’t think the glioma had anything to do with it.”
“With what?”
“With anything. That morning. That night. The shooting. The murder. Diane’s decompensation. The fact she’s still free.” He opened his mouth, closed it. He said, “The red soles. The little Kahr. Mary-Louise Parker.”
“The actress?” What? “How is she part of this?”
He shook his head. “Sorry. Not important.”
“Diane was driving a little car? I don’t know about that either.”
“No, no car. I’m sorry. Kahr with a K. K-a-h-r. It’s the gun Diane had that night. She called it her ‘little Kahr.’�
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Almost from the first moment I’d felt that he should provide me with a glossary for this therapy. A cheat sheet. I said, “That’s the pistol you took from her?” He nodded. I said, “Go on.” I almost asked him what he did with the Kahr. I should have asked him that. He would have asked his patient that. I made a mental note to go back to it.
“The lesion is too convenient,” he said. His tone of voice told me that he was aware that his conclusion about the lesion, too, was convenient. “Cozy, her lawyer, will blame everything on the glioma. But it’s ancillary. It’s not what this was about.”
“How do you know? What was it about?” I asked. He took a deep breath and I actually convinced myself he was about to tell me. I was wrong, of course.
“I’m not sure,” he said. “I had a patient who was injured in a car wreck. They did an MRI of her spine while she was in the ED. Small fracture of a vertebra. But the MRI also revealed a mass on her ovary. The ovarian cyst didn’t cause the car wreck. And the car wreck didn’t cause the ovarian cyst. Nor did the fractured vertebra cause the cyst.”
I assumed he had a point. I said, “Okay.” I was hoping to discover his point.
Alan shook his head in a way that left me feeling dismissed. My okay wasn’t okay with him. At another moment, if he were another patient, I would have confronted him about our process. It wasn’t another moment. He wasn’t another patient. With him, I would come back to it. That list grew and grew.
He said, “The car wreck was caused by her distraction because she was screaming at her husband on her cell about an affair he was having. No one knew that part but me.”
One of my known flaws as a therapist? I tend to debate inconsequential facts. I said, “Her husband had to know. Right? She was screaming at him.” I think I wanted to say something unassailable to Alan. Something correct.
Alan laughed an ironic laugh. “No. Her husband had already hung up on her. He thought the accident was his fault because he had upset her by hanging up on her.”
Shit. Got that wrong, too. But I thought I saw his point. I said, “They found Diane’s glioma because they were looking for a subdural caused by the fact that you knocked her down to get the gun from her. The Kahr. It doesn’t mean the glioma caused the behavior that led to the subdural in the first place.”
Compound Fractures Page 10
