I was begging. Grace came back on the line. “Jonas won’t get up. He doesn’t believe me about the police. I have to pee.” She hung up.
God. I searched for Clare’s cell number. I had to get her back to the house with the dogs. I said, “Fifteen minutes, Kirsten? We can be there in fifteen minutes. They can wait that long, right? I’ll cooperate. Please, please. I need to protect my kids.”
Kirsten found a number she wanted in her contact list before I found Clare’s. She lifted her phone to her ear. I heard her say, “Kirsten Lord for Elliot Bellhaven. Urgently.” Pause. “He knows what it’s about.” Pause. “Interrupt him.” Pause. “I don’t care.”
I WAS HANGING UP WITH CLARE as Kirsten lowered her phone. She moved so near that I could taste her breath. She said, “Some good news.” Nothing I could see in her eyes suggested actual good news on the horizon. The good news would be relative. At best it would be a slight tempering of otherwise very bad news.
“Yes,” I said.
“Elliot gave us fifteen minutes to get to your house before they execute the warrants. He expects full cooperation from you. I do, too. Understood?”
“Yes.” Kirsten assumed that my commitment would guarantee my cooperation. Not a bad assumption, but it had a flaw. An unless. Unless Elliot did something to my kids.
My assumption about the relativity of the good news proved correct. Elliot permitting me fifteen minutes to get home wasn’t good news—it was an abeyance that allowed awful news, the search, to be briefly postponed. “Thank you,” I said, trying to sound grateful to Kirsten. “There’s bad news, too? Something else? Isn’t there?”
Of course there was. I tried to imagine how things could get worse. The kids were unhurt. The house wasn’t—yet—on fire. I was certain that the fact I couldn’t presage the precise bad news was an indication that my imagination was failing me.
My attorney’s bright eyes welled with tears. She took both my hands. She said, “You are being investigated for murdering your wife, Alan.”
41
I SAID, “WHAT?”
I said it calmly, the way an innocent man might say it.
I didn’t kill my wife. Diane did. I saw it all happen with my own eyes.
Those eyes didn’t leave Kirsten’s. I waited for her to retract her words. She didn’t. She said, “Elliot Bellhaven just informed me that you are a target, a principal, in the homicide investigation of Lauren’s death.”
A target? I’d been feeling like a target. Just not that kind.
Again I said, “What?”
I said it less calmly the second time.
ON THE WAY TO SPANISH HILLS in Kirsten’s car, the timer on my fifteen-minute probation ticking, I asked her why she’d wanted to meet with me that morning. I was making conversation because it felt like a human thing to do. The only alternatives would have been tense silence or reviewing my current reality. The latter would have crumbled my defenses. My kids were waiting for me. They needed me to be as uncompromised a parent as was possible in the circumstances.
“My plan this morning? I was going to drive you to Denver to introduce you to your new defense attorney. I didn’t trust you would go on your own.”
She spoke without irony. The implications of all my previous procrastination filled the interior of her car like a noxious odor. I had managed to force my friend into the exact professional situation she had been determined to avoid.
“And now look what I’ve done,” I said.
She said, “Yeah.” Her yeah was nothing like, “That’s okay, I understand.” It was the acknowledgment of the acidity of life’s capriciousness from a woman who had learned the hard way that whim often arrived alongside evil, but absent whimsy.
“Get your thoughts together for that meeting with your new attorney. Any reasons that you are on Elliot’s radar for Lauren’s death will be prime topics of discussion.”
We neared Fifty-Fifth Street, heading east, not far from the turn to Spanish Hills. I asked, “Will Elliot be there for the searches?”
She took my hand for a second. I read the gesture as her eagerness to make the transition from attorney to friend. “I doubt it,” she said. “Whether he is or he is not, you have to behave.”
“Will I be arrested?”
She said, “I don’t know. It may depend on what they find. If it comes to that, I hope Elliot allows your new attorney to arrange a surrender.”
Surrender. “Did Elliot tell you what they’re looking for in my house?”
“He did not. Do you know?”
“I don’t.”
“Will they find anything problematic? I’ve been assuming that they won’t. Alan?”
That’s when I remembered the damn gun. Aloud, I said, “Oh, fuck, the Kahr.”
Kirsten blurted, “What car?” Her eyes darted left and right on the road. She tapped the brakes. She checked all her mirrors.
“Not that kind of car,” I said. “Not on the road.”
She turned toward me, her eyes narrowing with exasperation. The car started to drift toward an oncoming delivery truck. In a calm voice I said, “Truck. That kind of truck.”
She corrected back into her lane with a jerk of the wheel. The last half hour had depleted my adrenaline. I felt no new alarm at the almost collision with the truck.
I said, “I need to find someone to take care of the kids. God.” As soon as I said it I realized I was excluding Sam from the list of potential caretakers.
So much for the whole clean hands solution.
Kirsten switched into the right lane, preparing to turn into Spanish Hills. “What’s the car thing? Are they going to find evidence in your vehicles? Is there something we need to talk about before we get there?”
I hadn’t explained the difference between Kahr and car to Kirsten.
I decided that I would save the distinction for my next attorney.
THE MIDDLE OF THE night after Lauren was shot, Diane, Amanda, Raoul, and Kevin—Kevin was Diane’s real estate agent with, dear God, benefits—and I had all ended up in an expensive, tacky condo near the east end of the Mall on one of the teen numbered streets not far from Frasca. Diane had arrived late to that impromptu gathering wearing the apparently de rigueur Christian Louboutins—Diane’s were silver metallic pumps—along with a throwback strappy purple organza cocktail dress.
In those halcyon days I’d been blissfully ignorant about women’s fashion footwear. On that night I had mistaken Diane’s Louboutins for Jimmy Choos.
The most unusual accessory to Diane’s outfit wasn’t her shoes, it was the compact Kahr semiautomatic that she had used to shoot my wife in the back. The gun fit Diane’s palm as though it had been custom forged for her glove size.
The middle of the night denouement began with Diane’s real estate friend, Kevin—adhesive allergies had left his face looking like an unflattering cross between Homer Simpson’s mug and a baboon’s butt—firing a double-barrel shotgun in the general direction of the condo’s unfortunately tiled ceiling. Tile shards and buckshot rained down, Diane suffered a closed head injury, and I ended up pocketing the Kahr.
I took possession of the gun to keep it away from Diane and from anyone else in the room that night. By then my trust for everyone in attendance was nearly zero.
We all left the condo before the police arrived, most of us headed toward the hospital. I drove with Raoul, who was going to the emergency department at Community to check on Diane, who was the first to be rushed away, by ambulance.
My solitary goal was to resume my vigil at Lauren’s bedside in the ICU.
I may have made a conscious decision to hold on to the Kahr. But I don’t remember it. I may have intended to hand it to the first cop I saw. I don’t recall that. I do recall a lucid moment of appreciation about its dense mass against my lower back—some sense that the square block of steel might provide odd security on a night that I felt a pressing need for odd security.
My appreciation for the weapon was transitory. Once I was back by Lauren’s bedsid
e in the ICU, my need for whatever ephemeral security the Kahr represented vanished. Before the kids arrived to see their mother, I stuffed the pistol into the bottom of a plastic bag full of bloody clothing that had been collected earlier in the ER.
And then I forgot about it. Sometime the next day, or the day after, I re-remembered the Kahr and went through a series of rationalizations about what I should do with it. My problem solving was neither rigorous nor consistent. I went back and forth between convincing myself having the gun didn’t matter and convincing myself that having it might matter too much.
That multiple days had passed since Diane shot Lauren with the Kahr was, I knew, becoming a real problem. But it was one of a few real problems. Lauren was near death. The kids were freaking out. I didn’t know which way was up. I recalled that I considered giving the weapon to Sam, as police detective. Then I considered giving it to Sam, as friend. I rejected both options.
I later considered discarding it, throwing it away. I became fixated on Gross Reservoir as a good place to toss a gun. The errand almost became a plan. But some crisis ensued, and by the end of one of the first of many exquisitely stressful days after that morning, the Kahr became one more thing that was too much for me to deal with.
By the time that hours passed and became days that piled up to equal a week, and then two, the Kahr simply became too complicated a puzzle for me to solve. I must have decided that I could no longer turn the pistol in to the police. I must also have recognized that admitting that I had been in the possession of a murder weapon for most of the time since Lauren’s shooting might be misinterpreted. And not necessarily in my favor.
I could not provide a good rationale as to why I’d held on to the gun for so long. Kirsten wouldn’t believe my story. Sengupta wouldn’t believe my story. I did console myself that the gun would prove superfluous to his investigation, that once the detectives were done dotting i’s and crossing t’s—whenever that was—Diane would be arrested for shooting Lauren.
My rationalizing logic was compelling. After all, I was a great eyewitness. I had seen it all. For the police, that was the sundae. Having the murder weapon would be a mere cherry on top.
Sometime around Lauren’s death—blame it on stress, I did—I stopped thinking about the Kahr. To hide it from the kids, I hid the handgun in the master bedroom beside Lauren’s Glock in a peculiar hollow on top of an old wardrobe, a crevice always covered by a lacy quilt from Lauren’s grandmother.
Lauren had a carry permit for her Glock. I didn’t have one for the Kahr.
Sitting in Kirsten’s front seat on the way to my home, I began to suspect that sometime shortly after the search warrant was executed Elliot would be delighted to stress the importance of that last fact to me.
“MAYBE,” I SAID TO KIRSTEN.
The interlude of silence between us had extended too long. She said, “Maybe they’ll find something? Or maybe there’s something we need to talk about?”
“Yes,” I said. “Yes. Both.” I wasn’t trying to be coy. My brain was overloaded with the potential consequences of my earlier rationalizing, my earlier procrastinating, and my earlier idiocy. I was acutely aware of the distinction between being innocent—I was that—and being not guilty.
Having the Kahr in my possession would cause me to appear to be not not-guilty.
“Alan?” Kirsten could tell that my mental acuity was becoming an issue.
I was having trouble breathing. The consequences I was imagining were weighing me down like winter clothes in icy water.
“There could be a problem,” I said. “With the search.”
“What kind of problem?” Her words were mild, but they were the kind of mild that parents learn how to force into their words to keep from spreading alarm to their offspring. I knew the trick. I could hear what was in the fissures that fell between the sounds Kirsten was using to form the mild words.
In those fissures she was saying, Oh shit oh shit oh shit oh shit.
“I screwed up. I didn’t shoot Lauren. Later, though, I screwed up. The police might find something that I never thought anyone would find.”
“Do you want to tell me what it is?”
I thought she had figured it out. “Something I shouldn’t have.”
“Do you want to tell me what it is?”
She asked the question more slowly the second time. She wanted me to understand her words, not merely respond to them. I said, “Should I? Want to tell you?”
She didn’t answer. I took that to be a no.
“Do you have someone in mind? To watch your kids?”
That was not a reassuring question to hear from my defense attorney. I would have preferred something along the lines of Don’t worry. We have legal options for this kind of situation.
“I had a plan,” I said. I did not have time to walk Kirsten through the whole clean-hands progression. “But I don’t think it’s going to work out.”
“Okay.” Her attempts to make her voice reassuring weren’t having a salutary impact. I kept hearing the oh shit oh shit oh shit oh shit tucked into the fissures between her words. “Do you have a … plan B?”
“Not really.”
She passed our mailbox as she made the final turn onto the dirt lane. I had less than a minute to conjure some magic. But I couldn’t see beyond the kids, and what my past actions to protect them would do to jeopardize their futures.
Kirsten asked me how therapy was going.
I almost laughed. Instead I lied. I said it was good.
Getting the lie out of my mouth proved a huge chore. My failure as a parent was threatening to paralyze me.
42
RAGE SOLVED THE SHORT-TERM paralysis problem.
To an observer my behavior must have appeared wildly unfocused, a conflagration of all the anger I hadn’t allowed myself to feel since the morning of the Dome Fire. The precipitant? From a hundred yards down the lane I could see my screaming, struggling son—he was all head and arms and legs—being half pushed, half carried to the open backseat of a Boulder sheriff’s SUV.
Jonas was barefoot. He was wearing the worn plaid cotton pajama bottoms that he slept in. He was wearing no shirt. My kid was scrawnier than twine. He was all sinew and taut muscle like his birth father. His hands were cuffed behind his back.
He was screaming. Mostly “Let me go! Let me go!” But I also heard “You fuckers!” a couple of times. He had a lot of Adrienne in him.
His rage became mine. It focused me. I became trigger and bullet. Bow and arrow. I wanted to kill. I hadn’t chosen a victim. The target would be instinctive. Absent Elliot, or Raoul, or Diane, I would go after somebody in blue manhandling my innocent but profane son.
I screamed out the window of the car, “Jonas! Jonas! I’m here.”
I heard, “Daaaaaaaaad! Help meeeeee!”
Kirsten said, “No! Alan!”
“Goddamn it!” I pounded the dash of Kirsten’s car. “Hurry.”
“You promised to behave.”
Yeah well. Unless. “And Elliot promised to wait. The fucker. Hurry.”
Kirsten touched my leg. “Alan, this is awful. Don’t make it worse.”
The front door of my house was wide-open. I could see people—cop people—walking into my home. Strangers. In my house. Going through my things.
I couldn’t see Grace. Or Clare. Or the dogs. I saw my terrified, struggling son. The violation of my home. A future without my family. My kids without their parents.
At that moment, I also felt a clarifying rage at my dead wife.
I thought, This is your fault. Yours. Fuck … you … Lauren.
Fuck you.
43
I JUMPED OUT OF KIRSTEN’S CAR before she pulled to a stop. In the process I learned that the long list of things in life at which I did not excel included exiting a moving vehicle with anything resembling aplomb.
I remained vertical for less than a complete second. I then rolled heels-over-head twice before I popped back up on my feet with ag
ility I usually lacked. My hands were balled into fists. I was prepared to take on the cops. Though I was facing the wrong direction. And bleeding profusely from one elbow.
The next couple of minutes weren’t pretty. I did a lot of screaming. I made multiple threats while I was restrained on my knees by two deputies.
Kirsten was playing defense, dancing to stay between me and everybody else. She was also simultaneously on her cell phone with someone while she examined the warrants that authorized the searches. At some level I think I recognized that she was doing her damned best to try to keep me out of custody. I knew I wasn’t helping.
I was so focused on Jonas’s plight—he was confined in the backseat of the SUV, his hands cuffed behind his back—that I didn’t see Sam Purdy’s Cherokee coming down the lane. I didn’t see him get out of his car and run toward me.
I did hear him hiss, “Quiet shut the fuck up you goddamn asshole,” into my ear as he wrapped me in a bear hug from behind, pinning my arms to my sides. To everyone else nearby he said, in a clear voice, “Detective Sam Purdy. Boulder Police. I got this one, I got him.”
He had me. He’d lifted me off the ground as though I were a child the size of my daughter. He then carried me across the lane to the cedar deck that was attached to Ophelia’s doublewide. I heard Emily barking fiercely from inside.
He tossed me onto one of the flimsy plastic chairs and he twisted my body until my posture resembled that of a sitting person. He straddled my legs with his own. Each of his legs was the size of both of mine. His weren’t wrapped in skin-tight Lycra.
He said, “Shut up. Stop fighting me.” He leaned forward and locked one of his big hands on each of the chair’s armrests, imprisoning me.
“Let me go, Sam. Let me go.” I recognized the futility of my protest.
“What? You got a plan?” In a stern tone absent any vitriol he said, “Don’t make this worse. You can still make it worse. Those cops are dying for an excuse to throw you around. You understand me?”
“They have Jonas in the back of—”
“I’m on that. You stay here, shut up. I will take care of Jonas. You need to—”
“I have to—”
Compound Fractures Page 23
