“Couldn’t wait.”
“Sometimes you need to be patient.”
“Sometimes I need to talk.”
“You sound like a child. I have one too many of those these days.”
People had been treating me with deference since Lauren’s death. Sam was the first friend to call bullshit on that. In the abstract it felt good. But I had actually planned the encounter out in a way that relied on Sam granting me a little deference. I was also wishing our friendship were in a place where I could talk to Sam about Lauren’s betrayal. I needed that. But we weren’t in that place.
My introspection went on too long. Sam said, “What? I’m here. I have better things to do. Much better.”
I almost said like what? but that would have stoked his meme about my childishness. I said, “I heard McClelland had a stroke. In prison. You know about that?”
“What? Heard from whom? Is the warden a friend of yours?”
“Don’t be a detective, just answer me.”
Sam’s eyes went wide. “That WITSEC asshole. The Luppo creep? Jeez. He’s a killer, Alan.”
“Sam. Please.” I was thinking we’re killers but saying it might have risked an increase in the body count. The latest victim, me.
“I hope it’s true. I’ll check, I’ll check. That’s it? Good.” Sam stood.
“Tell me about Elias Contopo,” I said.
Sam sat back down. He was looking straight ahead. Although I tried, I couldn’t see his eyes. His tone of voice unchanged, he said, “Which one? Uno? Dos? Tres?”
It was impossible for me to hear those words without adding a silent cuatro, cinco, seis. I somehow managed not to continue to siete, ocho, nueve but the effort required concentration that distracted me. I refocused. Is Sam really going to play ignorant with me about Big Elias? I said, “Uno,” intentionally mispronouncing the word so that it sounded like “you know.”
Sam’s Spanish wasn’t fluent. He’d been known to use the you-know pronunciation himself non-ironically, but his reply indicated he considered my intentional use to be mocking. “What about him?” was what Sam shot back. “The fat fuck is my problem, remember? Our agreement about Frederick was don’t ask, don’t tell. That means you shouldn’t be asking and I’m not going to be telling. So Elias Contopo the senior”—he made it sound like the Spanish señor—“is my problem.” He shifted his weight again as though he was preparing to stand. He held up a hand. “We done here?”
I was getting his drift. I didn’t care. I said, “No, as a—”
He said, “Look.” I followed his line of sight. A bland gray sedan with tinted windows was parallel parking into a tiny spot along the curb across from our bench. We watched the maneuver develop in painful herky-jerky stop-motion. Sam, I guessed, was suspicious of the sedan because of its blandness and grayness. My impression, on the other hand, was that the driver of the car was not the most accomplished parallel parker in the known universe.
Eventually—it took way too many backs and forths and stops and starts—an elderly couple emerged slowly from the car. They held hands as they entered the perimeter of North Boulder Park. She was relying on him, and on a cane, for support.
They wore matching walking shoes. I found that cute.
“Got to be careful,” Sam said.
“Couldn’t agree more,” I said. “If it wasn’t for the cane, she could be a threat.” I paused. “Elias Contopo. Uno. Grande.” I emphasized the second syllable of grande.
“Does grande mean fat?” Sam asked, mimicking my pronunciation. “Like at Starbucks?”
Sam was smart. But he was smart almost entirely in English. “I think you’re thinking of gordito, or gordo. Like at Taco Bell.” He was fluent in fast food. “People in Frederick call the first Elias ‘Big’ not ‘Fat.’ They might think he’s fat, but since he’s such a bully they’re afraid of him. What they say out loud is ‘big.’ That’s grande, not gordo.”
I was being careful with tense, speaking of Elias in the present, not the past.
Sam didn’t quarrel with my impressions, my Spanish, or my tense. He said, “Well, Grande Gordo Elias is my problem, not yours. Like I said earlier, sometimes you need to be patient. It may take time. I don’t have a plan, but I have a plan to have a plan.”
I shifted on the bench to face him. I needed to see his reaction to my next words. But our side-by-side positioning meant I still couldn’t look into his eyes. I stood. I took two steps back. He looked up at me with an expression of unadorned suspicion, as though he feared I was the person—idiot, from Sam’s perspective—about to initiate a flash mob extravaganza he wanted no part of.
I said, “Big Elias is dead.”
Ten seconds later—he spent the time cogitating—he said, “What?”
Sam wasn’t requesting repetition. His what had been a form of “you shittin’ me?”
“Big Elias died last night while he was in Larimer County on horse business.”
More cogitating. Then, “How?”
“Unclear. It involved horses and a horse trailer. And a flat tire.”
Sam’s eyes narrowed. “He rolled his truck?”
His tone was barbed. Provocative. I didn’t reply. Picking up the barbed provocation just to pick it up felt stupid, like poking a skunk to see if it would spray.
“Ah,” he said reaching a conclusion about my intent. “Homicido.”
Homicido isn’t a real word. And even though it was his own made-up word, Sam had managed to mispronounce it. I considered correcting his vocabulary and his pronunciation. It took some self-control but I didn’t.
He lowered the volume to conspiratorial levels. “You’re wondering if I borrowed your car before I drove to Larimer County to kill off Gordo Elias? Or are you waiting for me to offer you an alibi for the time Big Elias was in Larimer County on his last-ever horse business trip.” He opened his eyes wide to emphasize the point he was making. But given the immense size of his forehead they looked no bigger than a couple of grapes on a pale-pink dinner plate.
I didn’t reply. I was gathering information. Not providing it. And I was trying not to be provoked. Sam was feeling provoked, and provocative. That was clear.
He stood and walked past me. If I hadn’t jumped aside he would have bowled me over. He stopped twenty feet down the path. He looked back over his shoulder with animus in his eyes. “How did you hear about this? Your friend Izza?”
I shook my head. His contempt was putting me in a worse mood than I’d been in when I was parked outside his house listening to commercials on my Banda station. And I had been in a terrible frame of mind when I’d parked outside his house. I considered whether or not I should tell him how I knew about the death. Finally I said, “No. Not Izza. Elliot.”
“Elliot?” He snapped the name back at me, disbelieving. He wasn’t pleased at Elliot entering the equation. It was as though he had just seen the Elliot question on the final but he knew damn well it hadn’t been covered in any of the lectures.
He didn’t wait for me to confirm. I thought I heard him mumble a long profanity as he walked away. The sincerity of the profanity was clear, but I wasn’t confident about its length. It could have been multiple repetitions of a compact profanity.
Sam stopped, twirled, and took five or six steps back in my direction. I saw spittle flying before I heard the next words, which came in the form of a screaming whisper. “You do not come to my house right after law enforcement gets in your face.” He made a completely exasperated face of his own. “Understand what I’m saying? That’s when they’re watching. First they come at you, they rile you up. Then they see what you do next. It’s basic shit, Alan. That’s being-a-suspect 101. Action/reaction. Laws of … law, and thermodynamics. Human nature. Mostly? It’s common friggin’ sense. Got any?” He spit. He actually spit. The loogie almost hit his right shoe. “It’s just basic damn shit.” He tapped his skull twice with his index finger. “Use your head.”
I was tempted to defend myself. I didn’t. He spun and
continued away from me. Into the wind, I think he said, “I do this every day. It’s who I am. Leave this to me. Goddamn. Jesus. I can’t believe you …” His voice faded. Another twenty feet down the path, Sam looked over his shoulder again. Loudly, he said, “Elliot?”
“Yeah.”
“He called you about this?”
“Emailed me, but yeah.”
“Why would he tell you about some old guy who died in Larimer County? What am I missing? How does he connect you to Big Elias Contopo. I don’t get it.”
I wondered if Sam was being disingenuous. Sam had to know why Elliot would connect me to Frederick, and to Big Elias. He had to. Tres’s drawing. In case I was wrong I said, “I’m thinking Elliot learned why Lauren came to my office that morning.”
“Do you know that?” Sam got even more terse. “Or are you guessing?”
“He suspects that Lauren coming to my office had to do with the visit Lauren got from Izza and Tres.”
“He can’t prove that, can he?”
“Not that I know of. But there are things I don’t know.”
“You think?” Sam was looking for pieces to complete the puzzle in his head. He wasn’t finding them. Insulting me was a way of passing the time while he searched.
I said, “Reading between the lines? I think Elliot thinks, or hopes, I was involved somehow with Big Elias’s … demise. The only possible connection he might have to connect me to it is Izza and that damn drawing.”
Sam shook his head. My explanation wasn’t working for him. “That’s crazy. If Elliot had seen that drawing one of us would be in jail. Maybe both of us. Did you even know the guy? The old Elias?”
I shook my head. I said, “I heard stories. But I had never met him.”
“Stories from whom?”
“My wife. That morning.” I was feeling lost. Nothing about Sam’s reaction to the news of Big Elias’s death was what I’d expected. I was determined to stay silent until the ground steadied. I feared I was making things worse for myself every time I opened my mouth.
His shoulders relaxed a smidge. “Big Elias was crushed? Literally crushed?” I nodded. “How? Under the trailer?”
I couldn’t tell whether or not he already knew the answer. I had assumed I would be able to tell from his expression. People in the movies are always supposing that mental health professionals can magically tell when someone is prevaricating. But I couldn’t tell what Sam was thinking. Damn. I was no better at it than Grace.
Pretending I didn’t know the answer to Sam’s question was also futile. I knew that if Sam really didn’t know he would Google the incident on his phone the second he was out of my sight.
“By a horse or two. Inside the trailer. That part is unclear.”
Sam laughed. Then he resumed storming away. Again, he stopped.
“Why does Elliot hate you? What did you do to him?”
“I wonder the same thing. I have no idea.”
My instincts were screaming that Sam had figured out a way to solve the Frederick problem I had laid at his feet months before. His solution had been to eliminate Big Elias Contopo. I wondered why. I also wondered if he had accomplished the latest homicido without leaving any evidence or witnesses behind.
I realized I had a third question. Is Sam Purdy out of control?
34
ON THE WAY BACK ACROSS TOWN to Spanish Hills I detoured to a convenience store where I had never bought gas. I could barely keep my eyes from gazing up at the surveillance camera behind the register.
I bought a prepaid cell phone with cash. A burner.
The first thing I did after killing the engine in my garage was to text Amy from my regular cell phone, my tracker. Contacting her didn’t require the subterfuge of a burner; it merely required some sober reconsideration of my self-interest.
Second thoughts. Rain check? It was good to hear from you.
I was grateful that texting convention encouraged brevity. If I had emailed her about my ambivalence, I would have felt an obligation to offer an explanation for bailing. I didn’t have an explanation. And I didn’t feel like inventing one to be polite.
I wasted the next twenty minutes trying to rationalize away my determination to continue the spelunking project I had barely started into the almost impenetrable cave of Lauren’s personal papers, both real and digital. But I failed. I knew I had to get to the bottom of those piles, or at least to make a dent in them.
My fresh motivation for the search, and my fresh resistance to the search, both had to do with learning if what Amanda was alleging about Lauren and Raoul was true.
I asked myself what difference it would make to learn more. I asked myself whether I could live with what I knew already. I decided that I wouldn’t know what Amanda’s allegations meant until I learned some facts. I had reached a point where not knowing was no longer an option for me.
I sat on the end of our bed and stared at the scope of the project. Daunting.
My only certain conclusion from the mess on Lauren’s desk—and the associated messes on the desk chair, on the floor nearby, on the cushion of the club chair that we’d mutually identified as “hers”—was that Lauren had not been anticipating her death.
I liked that. I knew that she woke most days wary of the unpredictability of her illness, but I found comfort that she wasn’t waking with a sense of foreboding about her life.
Had she been concerned about her death, I believed I would have seen some evidence of it on her desk. In some resorting of her very uncollected papers. Or in some collation of active accounts that might require immediate attention by someone, like me, who was designated to manage her affairs. After her death. Or in some small sweet note to me, or some personal sign, that said, “Start here, babe, here.”
My wife had tended to approach journeys of all kinds with a burst of organization. Trips were arranged from detailed lists. Suitcases were judged for appropriate size with practice packings, sometimes repeated practice packings. I found no sign that she had done any preorganizing for this, the most extended of all departures. If there were a journey that required anticipation and planning, this was that one. I saw no evidence of it.
I had previously peeked into the hills of paper. My initial scans had been tenuous and ambivalent; I’d looked around the way I searched for a mouse after spotting droppings. It was an effort to appear serious about looking for a problem and simultaneously being careless enough with my search that I minimized the odds that I would find what I was hoping wasn’t there.
On two separate occasions I had dived in to find specific pieces of paper that others—one lawyer, one accountant—told me couldn’t wait to be found. Those searches had been unsuccessful; I’d found neither of the essential papers.
The sky didn’t fall without the essential papers. I took comfort in that, too.
Lauren’s desk was more repository than workspace, always had been. The desk chair was just another surface on which she balanced stuff for later attention. If she had writing to do—MS had robbed her of any pleasure from longhand correspondence—and the writing involved something more drawn out than filling out a check, or scribbling a reminder in one of her Field Notes books, she did the work on her diminutive laptop.
And she did it elsewhere. Most often she carried the laptop to the bed. Or she pulled an odd little chair/high stool thing up to the pool table in the dining room. On relaxed, lazy days she might stretch out on the chaise she loved in the family room.
Lauren was an organized person in the sense that her tendency toward order was greater than her tolerance of disorder. But the organizing inclinations had lacunae. Her bedside table? Impeccably neat. House Beautiful, find-things-in-the-dark neat. Her designated cabinetry in the bathroom? Surgical-nurse precision for cosmetics and things. Her car? The front seat was showroom quality. The backseat she abdicated to the kids.
The kitchen? A serious lacuna. At work? I’d been told that her litigation files were works of organizational art.
But
my wife’s inclination for order had never applied in the domestic paperwork terrain she considered her own. No signs of obsession or compulsion were enforced on her tranche of our home paperwork, regardless of category.
The desk was a conflagration of what I had teasingly called her “piles and files.” The mess, I knew, was less random than it appeared. I recalled many instances when I had asked Lauren for some specific something I needed. Lauren could reliably retrieve the requested document within double-digit seconds. She knew the wilderness on top of her desk the way a tracker knows the backcountry. I hoped, as I anticipated diving in, that the terrain appeared to me as wilderness only because I wasn’t yet as familiar as Lauren with her peculiar chunk of backcountry.
I had to end my procrastination. I had legal responsibilities to perform. Death notices to send. Accounts to cancel. Taxes to preorganize. Accountants’ questions to respond to. A life to begin living.
After my evening with Amanda in her friend’s incall, I also had an affair of the heart, and of the flesh, to confirm. To rage at. And to grieve. So I dived into Lauren’s piles and files. To the place where I might discover evidence that my wife and my friend were fucking.
That Lauren was dead? My heart still seeped from that wound. That grief would endure until it ended. That she had been having an affair? Since her tryst or almost tryst with Joost, I was not in denial about Lauren’s fidelity. In a vacuum I was certain I could have found context for a new betrayal.
But that her love affair was with my friend? That was no vacuum. That hurt me so much it cleaved my already wounded heart in two. The pain from that injury felt impossible to me.
I was suffering a compound fracture of my heart.
I BEGAN BY TAKING PHOTOS. I used my digital camera, with the flash, to record how Lauren had left her home office behind the morning of the Dome Fire. I was thinking that the organization she left behind, such as it was, might prove important later, after my digging around rendered the original disorder impossible to duplicate.
Then I dug in. After an hour and a half of what I knew was but an initial round of sorting and resorting, I realized that there was a chance that Lauren’s strategy in regard to her papers might have an underlying elegance to it. But I also had the humbling realization that in these circumstances I was neither Lewis nor Clark.
Compound Fractures Page 19
