Compound Fractures

by Stephen White

  I said, “Before we go on, would you please put your bag out in the hall?”

  “What?” She looked offended. “Why?”

  I took a deep breath. It wasn’t for show—though if I hadn’t needed the breath for fortification I would have taken the deep breath for show. I said, “I could make something up. I do with other people so I don’t have to explain my anxiety. But I will tell you the truth. I have—”

  “Is this an amend?” she said. She didn’t say it kindly. “You being honest?”

  “Sure,” I said. “If you want, it’s an amend. Since the shooting I have post-traumatic stress. I can’t relax here wondering what people have with them. I become distracted. I don’t attend well. I find I can be present here”—present was a perfect Boulder word to complement my ruse—“only if I ask that coats and bags go out in the hall. I am sorry. It’s all my … stuff.”

  She stood, picked up her bag, and stepped toward the door.

  As she leaned over for her bag I examined her back. My eyes traced the outlines of the straps of her bra as the loops disappeared over her shoulders, and they traced the wider strap of her bra across her back and under her arms. I saw nothing there that shouldn’t be there. No nonstructural wires. No mics. Nor did I spot any lines or lumps below her skirt on her hips or butt that were out of place or unexpected.

  She returned to the office from the hall. In an instant when I felt her eyes averted from mine I examined her upper body. Her chest was smooth where it should be smooth. Round where it should be round. Her bra left the kinds of outlines and bulges that bras tend to leave.

  If Izza were wearing a wire it was taped between her legs or tucked into a boot. I knew nothing about the acoustic properties of the microphones used for surveillance, but neither location seemed to me like an ideal spot to secrete a mic.

  “Better?” she said.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  Izza said, “Did you know the tenant? You didn’t seem upset about her death. I don’t know what to make of that. For a while I thought she might have been an old lover of yours. But now I don’t think so.”

  Izza and I were back in the cottage together. We were talking about J. Winter Brown. Currie to Sam Purdy. Currie was the woman Sam killed. The homicide that he’d made to look like suicide. Izza was in my office to talk about that murder. Not Lauren’s.

  “I did not know her,” I said. It hadn’t crossed my mind to lie. That surprised me.

  “Why did you visit? If it wasn’t about her, then it had to be about her death.”

  Yes, I thought. It was about her dying, and about what it would have meant if she were living. I got lost in the thought. I wanted to say, “She was going to kill my kids.” I felt that Izza would have understood that. I didn’t. I couldn’t risk it.

  Izza said, “Later? I thought you were just a creep. Somebody who visited crime scenes. That’s what I had decided until I saw you on YouTube. With your daughter dancing. At that funeral. At your wife’s funeral.”

  I didn’t have a lie ready for Izza about that. That was novel for me; I seemed to always have a lie on deck for Izza.

  23

  THE DRAWING ELLIOT WANTED from me, the one that Lauren made a special trip to show me that last morning in my office, was done in crayon by Elias Tres Contopo, the then five-year-old eyewitness to the prelude of the murder across the country lane from his home.

  The woman was planning to kill children. Lauren’s and mine. Sam’s.

  The threat to the kids was imminent. And it was real.

  On the night Tres became the unwitting witness to Sam’s arrival in Frederick to commit homicide, he was a not-quite six-year-old boy who was waiting impatiently for his recently deceased father—Elias Jr., whom everyone called “Segundo”—to return from battle in Afghanistan. Elias Tres was sitting upstairs in his grandfather Elias’s house looking for his dad when he saw a white station wagon park on the street not far from his window.

  The murder in the cottage had gone off according to Sam’s plan, well out of the young boy’s sight and hearing. The body wasn’t discovered for a few days. The authorities ultimately made a determination that the death had been the result of suicide—a gunshot wound to the head—exactly as the killer, Sam Purdy, had planned.

  I eventually became Sam’s unknowing and reluctant, but willing, accomplice in the homicide. If he had asked me to assist him with the planning or commission of the actual act, I would have. Our kids’ lives were at risk.

  But Sam had not asked for my help with the murder in advance. In fact, with his choice of timing for the homicide—I was in New Mexico with Jonas—and the secrecy with which he carried it out, Sam made certain that I had an excellent alibi for the night of the crime.

  But my personal reality, and my legal reality, was that I was as responsible as Sam was for Justine Brown’s death. Even though I was ignorant, I was willing. Even though I never had to fire a bullet or lift a gun, I was willing. Even though I had an alibi, I was present.

  Legally, I shared culpability with Sam Purdy.

  In my mind, I was guilty. Guilty as in not innocent.

  But guilty as in remorseful? Not for a day since. Replay the circumstances, and I would again sign on as accessory after the fact. Or I would load and fire the gun myself.

  Initially I spent some time worrying about what that said about me as a person. But even that narrow version of remorse had diminished over the three years plus since the murder.

  By then the five-year-old witness had grown into an almost nine-year-old boy.

  The drawing he had made years before was artistically immature. The kid might have been a mensch, as people who knew him maintained, even a savant, as some boasted, but he was no Leonardo-in-waiting. His lack of artistic talent didn’t diminish the impact of his drawing. Alongside his story of what he saw that night, the picture he made of our car was a damning piece of evidence.

  I was hyperaware of an odd piece of eyewitness reality recorded in that drawing. That twist was that the drawing itself implicated me—it was my car—more than it implicated Sam. The drawing became damning to Sam only when it was combined with the story the boy related to Lauren the morning she was given the drawing. Only together did the drawing and the boy’s recollections implicate Sam Purdy.

  By itself, though, the drawing pointed at me.

  Lauren was sharp. Despite her ignorance about the details of the murder, she saw immediately what the drawing and the boy’s memories said about culpability for the crime. She concluded, accurately, that Sam Purdy was in Frederick that night. And that I wasn’t.

  Lauren came to my office to offer me advance notice that Sam would be picked up for investigation of the murder in Frederick. But she came to see me unaware that I knew details she didn’t know. I knew Sam’s motive. Lauren didn’t know that. I knew Sam had an accomplice after the fact. Me. Lauren did not know that.

  While a wildfire was storming to life only blocks from my office in parallel canyons that spilled smack into Boulder, I shared those damning facts with my wife.

  I described Sam’s motive—the risk to our children—and I admitted my role and my culpability. My confession to her was, almost, the last thing Lauren and I ever discussed. The very last thing we discussed? It was trust. Trust between parents. Between lovers. Between husbands and wives.

  She was defiant that I had erred. “You should have trusted me,” she scolded.

  She was arguing to me that trust—between us—demanded that I should have revealed to her what Sam and I had done back when we had done it.

  I admitted that I had failed to do that. I also shared my rationalization with her, explaining that if things went south—as they were heading due south that very day—one of our children’s parents, either Lauren or me, needed to have clean hands about the crime. Deniability about the crime.

  Simply, one of us had to be able to stay out of prison to raise our children.

  Once I became Sam’s accomplice it was too late for me
to keep my hands clean, so by default I had chosen Lauren for the clean-hands role. To keep her hands clean, I explained, I couldn’t tell her what I knew about the murder that night in Frederick.

  Trusting her with my truth, and with Sam’s, would have soiled her hands. And that would have endangered our children’s future.

  Not a day had gone by since that morning that I had failed to think about Lauren’s admonishment about my failure to trust. And about the continuing necessity of having someone being around to take care of our children.

  Someone with clean hands.

  THE IRONY THAT WEIGHED so heavily on me in the wake of Elliot’s visit, and of Izza Kane’s fake intake, was that the drawing—in the absence of Elias Tres’s memories—implicated me, not Sam, in that old murder in Frederick.

  Elliot had walked away from my office that morning without revealing even a hint of an innuendo that he was aware of my friend Sam Purdy’s involvement in the events in Frederick. I could conjure only two possibilities to explain that.

  One, Elliot was holding his cards close to his chest. That was the simplest and most likely explanation. Or two? Elliot hadn’t heard, or didn’t recognize, the subtle clues in Elias Tres’s memory that led directly to Sam Purdy, and that exonerated me.

  Over the years since the murder I had been worried that Sam would get caught, somehow, and I would eventually be fingered as his accessory after the fact.

  Suddenly—and not because of his knowledge of what was in the drawing, but rather because of his ignorance about the contents of Elias Tres’s memory—it seemed possible that Elliot Bellhaven was looking at me as the principal offender for the crime.

  That meant that Sam Purdy might end up being the one with the clean hands.

  Our plan all along was that, worst case, only one of us would go down for the crime.

  I had always felt that the clean hands should, and would, be mine.

  Sam had, after all, pulled the trigger.

  I was foolish enough to believe that should count for something.

  24

  THE SESSION WITH IZZA ended in a predictable stalemate. She wanted information from me that I wouldn’t provide. She left my office angry. She didn’t try to disguise it. I didn’t see another way it could have ended.

  My next move was impulsive. I made a call to Kirsten Lord.

  “You’re home? I thought I’d get your voicemail.”

  “I come home for lunch when I can.”

  “May I stop by? Briefly.” More impulse.

  “Uh yeah, I guess. Now?”

  “Now would be great.” My ego had left my body. I was all id. And all in.

  “Is this personal or legal, Alan?”

  What? I suddenly recalled that it was Valentine’s Day. Shit. “I haven’t—I don’t—I need to see you, Kirsten. It’s important. Urgent even.”

  I had no doubt that she could hear the anxiety in my voice. The pressure. In the wake of Lauren’s death, people were still granting me latitude for my lability.

  “I don’t have much time. I have a thing right after lunch. Keep it short?”

  “It won’t take long,” I said. Considering that I had no idea what I planned to talk with Kirsten about, I offered that assurance with remarkable confidence.

  KIRSTEN LORD. HOW TO START? We met around the same time I’d met Carl Luppo. She, like he, had been my patient while I was doing my consultant gig for the Witness Security Program of the U.S. Marshals Service, WITSEC. Kirsten was a newly enrolled protectee of the marshals, a prosecutor from New Orleans, who had been relocated by WITSEC along with her daughter to try to safeguard them from organized crime thugs who were dedicated to ending their lives. By the time WITSEC whisked her and her daughter away from southern Louisiana to the anonymous safety of Boulder County, Kirsten’s enemies had already gunned down and killed her husband.

  I continued to wonder if she had heard from Carl Luppo when he was in town over New Year’s. I knew their contact wouldn’t have been cordial. Kirsten would never invite Carl into her home. If they met face-to-face in Boulder, perhaps they recreated their first-time meeting across a table at the Dushanbe Teahouse.

  Did I believe Kirsten would enlist Carl’s help on my behalf?

  No, I did not. But things I never believed could happen were coming true in my life with troubling frequency.

  Years before, Kirsten had transitioned from initial hatred of Carl Luppo to having conflicted feelings about him, but she never displayed any conflicted feelings about what he had done with his life. To Kirsten he was, and he always would be, an amoral killer no better than the one who had shot her husband to death on the sidewalk outside Galatoire’s in the French Quarter in New Orleans.

  To Kirsten, Carl’s choice to live that life had been an unforgivable sin.

  My clinical treatment of Kirsten back then was uncomplicated. She was suffering from a completely understandable reactive disorder. The treatment was also truncated; it ended in a chaotic night of mayhem, with me trapped beneath the rubble of the entryway of my collapsed house as assassins closed in on her and on my family. I had somehow ended up saving lives that night, including hers, with one ever-so-fortunate eyes-closed shot of a silenced .22 handgun.

  In the ensuing months Kirsten had voluntarily exited WITSEC and had become friends with my wife. They had a lot in common as prosecutors. But that friendship ended abruptly after about a year. Kirsten’s choice.

  Kirsten admitted to me years later the reason the friendship ended. She had, she explained, fallen in love with her therapist. Me. From the day she made that admission—years had passed in the interim—she and I hadn’t spoken much. She eventually returned to practicing law.

  On the short walk to her house from my office, my id decided that sufficient time had passed that I could ethically seek her help. Was it true? Probably. Was I rationalizing? Of course. My id, like everyone else’s, specialized in the black side of black-and-white constructs. It had no flair for ambiguity.

  She lived on Fourth Street in one of the city’s earliest residential areas in a Lilliputian old stone cottage that she’d renovated with modern comforts. The warren of small lots from Boulder’s pioneer past that included hers was nestled in a rise of gentle hills just north and west of the heart of Pearl Street below the sharp vault of the foothills of the Rockies.

  I had been to her house once before—on the day she revealed her love for me.

  After Lauren was shot, Kirsten was one of many who reached out with condolences and offers of help. Hers was one of the familiar faces I recalled seeing that day at the cemetery, which meant that she was one of the witnesses to Grace’s dance performance. We spoke only briefly at the memorial service—“I’m so sorry,” she’d said, “that we have something new, and awful, in common.”

  The new thing we shared was that we’d both witnessed a spouse’s murder.

  WHEN SHE OPENED THE DOOR, I said, “I am sorry about intruding.”

  “Not at all,” she replied, but her greeting was restrained. I suspected she was wary of a completely inappropriate Saint Valentine’s Day ambush from me. We shook hands—the handshake felt odd—before she led me toward the same small sofa we’d sat on the day she confided she loved me. She had kissed me then. It had not been a passionate kiss, nor was it chaste. It was a kiss about what might have been but wasn’t, and wouldn’t.

  I sat opposite the fireplace. She chose a nearby chair. She tapped her watch. “I have ten minutes, Alan. No more. I wish I could stay but—”

  “I understand. This was inconsiderate of me. I shouldn’t have come.”

  “Talk. Don’t apologize.”

  I felt innuendo. I couldn’t afford to be distracted, so I ignored the innuendo. I took a deep breath before I opened my mouth but I couldn’t find a second word. The first word—I—I repeated twice more. I exhaled, emptying my lungs, hoping to get past the pronoun.

  Kirsten leaned forward far enough that she could place three fingertips on my wrist. “Slow,” she said.
Then she smiled and added, “But not too slow.”

  “I need your advice.”

  She gave me a second or two to continue. Then she said, “Not my favorite headline. Additional details might make me feel better. Or not.”

  Her accompanying smile felt kind. I said, “What’s going on could cost me everything I haven’t already lost.”

  Her shoulders slumped slightly. “Personal mess? Legal mess?”

  “Yes. Both.”

  “Pick one to start. But start.” She glanced again at her watch.

  I hesitated. I said, “Legal first.”

  She frowned as though I’d picked the wrong one. She said, “I was under the impression that Casey Sparrow was representing you.”

  Casey was a criminal defense attorney I’d known forever. I said, “Casey helped me with issues around the search of my office. That morning.”

  “Are you looking for someone with expertise beyond Casey’s? I’m not sure who that would be. She’s good, Alan.”

  “Between you and me? Casey’s up for a district court appointment. She’s being vetted. This wouldn’t be a good time to involve her with my problems.”

  “That explains things.” She made a go-on, go-on motion with her hand.

  “Elliot Bellhaven cornered me in my waiting room this morning. The conversation we had was complicated, but he was insinuating that I might be the target of an investigation into possible evidence tampering he thinks took place the morning of Lauren’s shooting. In my office.”

  The tip of her tongue found a small opening between her upper and lower teeth. “Mr. Bellhaven was alone?”

  “Yes.”

  “He arrived without an appointment?”

  “He came under the guise of a social call, but it felt to me like an ambush. He has been trying to reach me. He’d called about Lauren. Condolences. I didn’t take his calls. Didn’t return any of the messages. You know some of my history with Elliot. There is not much affection or trust between us.”