Compound Fractures

by Stephen White

  “No. You do not need to do whatever it is you think you need to do. Stay the fuck here, Alan. Don’t go back over there. Don’t make this worse. They have a warrant. The search is going to happen whether you’re in custody or you’re in this chair pouting. If you give them a reason to choose, they’ll choose custody. Got it?” I stared at him. “Answer me.”

  I nodded.

  “Now look at me. Look at me! I cannot go back over there to help your son until you calm the fuck down. Are you going to let me go over there and help your kid?”

  From inside the trailer I heard a crying voice. “Daddy, Daddy. The police took Jonas. They took him!” Gracie.

  To Sam I said, “Yes, Sam. Please. Go help him.”

  Sam didn’t move his arms. He lowered his voice and leaned his big head forward so it was almost touching my normal size head. “First? I don’t know why you had it or where that damn German gun is now, but I am almost a hundred percent certain it isn’t in your house. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  I said, “What? No. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Don’t fuck with me. The gun? You know what I’m talking about, right?”

  Jesus. “Yes.”

  “They are looking for that gun. They are not going to find that gun during their search of your home, Alan. Just tell me you understand … what I’m saying.”

  I did not get it. But I said, “Yes.”

  “Is it in one of the cars?”

  Sam’s question sounded like a line in a children’s book. Is the Kahr in the cars? As did my answer, “No, there are no guns in the cars.”

  I was pretty sure that was what Sam wanted to hear. I needed Sam to help Jonas. Toward that end, I would have told him that there were no Kahrs on the planet, and that the Second Amendment had been repealed by the Intergalactic Council.

  He said, “I am going to go get Jonas. You will stay right here. You’re not going to yell. Or even speak. You can mutter. But that’s it. Are we good?”

  I was not good. But I nodded my head. I was prepared to wash his freckled feet with my tongue if he would go save my kid. “Please go help Jonas.” Sam jogged away. He was one of those people who was much more graceful on the move than he ever looked while he was still.

  “The German gun?” Does Sam know about the damn Kahr? How the hell does he know where it is? Or where it isn’t?

  44

  THE KIDS STAYED WITH OPHELIA while I began to return the house to some semblance of order.

  I didn’t know where Sam had gone. He’d kept his promise about rescuing Jonas from the back of the sheriff’s vehicle. He delivered Jonas to Ophelia before he’d returned to monitor the search from the front seat of his Jeep. Shortly after the search was completed, he drove away without another word to me.

  I never got to ask him about the Kahr, what he knew, and how he knew it. I wasn’t enamored of any of the suppositions I was making on my own.

  Before she left Spanish Hills to return to her life—a life that was much less complicated when I wasn’t in it—Kirsten told me that the search was limited to firearms, work product from the DA’s office, and certain children’s drawings. She asked me to put together a list of what might have been removed from the house so she could compare it with the not very specific inventory of seized items she would eventually be provided.

  I was still feeling a tad contentious. I explained to her that seeing what was missing from a familiar tableau was not one of my native perceptual abilities. For some reason, in the moment, it actually seemed important that she know that about me.

  She wasn’t at all interested in my perceptual deficit, which served to ground me a bit. “I understand,” was what she said. But I could tell she was prepared to stop me if I displayed an inclination to explain myself further. She added, “One of the items listed on the warrant is a .32 caliber semiautomatic pistol.” She had the warrant. She put her index finger on that line. “The judge authorized them to search for and remove a .32 semiautomatic from your home.”

  The voice she used was pointedly matter-of-fact. She could have said a “nine-inch cast-iron skillet.” But we both knew the .32 wasn’t a matter-of-fact anything.

  I was thinking, The .32 is the Kahr, the German gun that Sam said they wouldn’t find. “Did they find one?” I asked. “During the search? A .32 pistol.”

  “So there is a pistol,” she said.

  In my head I replayed our earlier discussion about the handgun. Although I had gotten close to an explanation during the drive to Spanish Hills, Kirsten and I had not edged around to discussing the Kahr. If she was about to hand me off to a new defense attorney—and it was abundantly clear she was determined to do so at her first opportunity—I thought it might be better to leave things ambiguous with her about the missing Kahr.

  I said, “Lauren has a Glock, a 9mm. It was inside. Before the search. Maybe someone was confused about the caliber of the gun they were after.” I gestured toward the inventory Kirsten was holding. “Did the investigators find the pistol they were looking for during the search?”

  “We’ll see.” She narrowed her eyes. “You don’t know guns, do you? A 9mm is not a .32. And vice versa. Different-different, not same-same.”

  “Okay,” I said. I was being tested, and I knew it.

  “Lauren was shot with a .32, Alan. The police are looking for that weapon.”

  She didn’t use the cast-iron-skillet voice for that declaration. “Yes,” I said.

  I was, too, I thought. I was shot with a .32. Through and through. And it’s possible the same damn .32 will bring me down a second time. No flesh wound the second time.

  I walked her to her car. I thanked her profusely for her help. I apologized profusely for dragging her into my mess. She told me to stop apologizing. I gave her a hug. She allowed it, but she didn’t return it.

  She lowered the window after she settled onto the driver’s seat. She looked at me with a mix of disdain and something else.

  Oh, pity.

  Her pity almost floored me.

  THE FIRST THING I did once I had the house to myself was to go to the highboy in the master bedroom and look for the two handguns that had been hidden in the hollow on top. All the items that I’d left in place to disguise the hiding place had been removed—I saw those items on the floor—but the guns weren’t where they had been.

  I didn’t know whether or not the searchers had found the guns. Sam had promised me that the Kahr wouldn’t be there. But the Glock? Sam had not mentioned the Glock.

  I was facing a multihour job of trying to undo the mess the searchers had left behind. They had not been careful as they rifled through our stuff. Neither had they been wanton. The chaos they’d created was middling. The damage? Minor.

  They had chosen to pile a lot of our stuff on Lauren’s pool table. Seeing how the heavier items had crushed the felt on the table would have caused her to go ballistic.

  My sympathy was absent.

  “Don’t worry, Dad,” Jonas said, startling me. I assumed he had sneaked away from Ophelia. Jonas could be sneaky. In life he was often not where I expected him to be, or doing what I expected him to be doing. I blamed it on Adrienne’s genes.

  “Hey,” I said, taking him in my arms. “I didn’t want you to have to see this. I didn’t want you to have to go through … this. I am so sorry for today. You must have been so scared when the—”

  “Don’t worry, Dad.” Shut up, Dad.

  “Okay,” I said, trying to be the grownup so that he did not have to be. “You and your sister have been through too much already. I do worry, you know that.”

  He wriggled away from me. “Don’t worry,” he said again, his eyes wide, a measure of unfamiliar determination in his voice.

  I finally heard that he wasn’t trying to assuage me; he was trying to tell me something. I said, “Why shouldn’t I worry, Jonas?”

  “Because I have the …” He lowered his voice. “I have the guns. Both of them. The police didn’
t find them.”

  A fresh adrenaline ejaculation shot through my circulatory system. How unnecessary was the bolus of hormone? If a bear walked into the house right then, I would have tried to wrestle it to the floor. I reminded myself that I was with my adolescent son. I had responsibilities—I couldn’t get lost in hormone-induced reveries about wrestling matches with bears. Instead I had to deal with the reality that just about everybody I was speaking with seemed to have an opinion about the guns that I thought were so masterfully hidden in the highboy.

  I cleared my head. The only thought left was what the fuck? I almost said, “What guns?” to Jonas but I realized that any latitude I had for prevarication with my son had already been squandered. What I said to Jonas was, “You have the guns?”

  “I do.”

  “The ones from the bedroom? In that little hollowed-out section sort of below the crown trim on top of the highboy?”

  He nodded. I nodded back. “Don’t be mad,” Jonas said.

  “I’m not mad.” Technically that was true. I wasn’t mad. Though I had moved beyond any desire to wrestle, I found myself stifling an urge to slaughter a wild animal.

  I was also willing to argue that was different from mad.

  Jonas wasn’t so sanguine about my mood. He said, “You don’t look not mad.”

  His appraisal was reasonable. Not not-mad just about covered my affective state. I made a conscious decision to go back in time to the cast-iron-skillet voice. “So, you have the guns. Can you tell me how that happened?”

  “You haven’t been in a good place lately,” my son said, his voice somehow not betraying the extent of his understatement. “I took the guns for safekeeping.”

  I could see no margin in mounting a protest against Jonas’s assessment of my recent mental state. I said, “It has been a tough period for me.”

  Jonas nodded enthusiastically, relieved that we were on the same page. “After that night you woke me up? The night that you were naked and tearing apart shoe boxes and throwing Mom’s shoes around, I didn’t think I could trust you around them any longer. At least for a while.”

  Jonas had interrupted the cyclonic tantrum I’d had in the master closet with Lauren’s boxed right shoes. But my face must have continued to betray some of my general befuddlement about what he’d done with the guns.

  He explained, “I mean trust you around the guns. Not the shoes.”

  Jonas was too young to understand how the shoes felt as destructive to me as the guns. Or maybe he wasn’t. I wondered then if he knew about his mom and Raoul. God, I hoped not.

  “You knew the guns were there?” I had thought Lauren’s contrived handgun-cubby hiding place—one I’d inherited from her—was genius.

  “I knew Mom’s was there. The other gun surprised me.”

  “How did you know about Mom’s gun?”

  “She showed me.”

  “She showed you?”

  “After she started leaving me here alone with Grace she taught me how to shoot her Glock. She thought I should know how to use it. You know, just in case. We went to the firing range sometimes when you were at work. I can clean it, too.”

  She taught you how to shoot her Glock. I had just identified another important parenting conversation I would never get a chance to have with Lauren. I was thinking that I would need to begin a list of those.

  “I was not supposed to tell you about it. She didn’t think you would …”

  Jonas stalled. I suggested, “Approve?” He nodded. “Are you a good shot?” I said.

  “Better than her. My mother was a surgeon. My father was a woodcarver. I have steady hands.” He held them out for me to see.

  He did. “You’re right. You have steady hands. Guns are a big responsibility. Knowing how to shoot one is different from knowing when to shoot one.”

  He rolled his eyes. The eye roll was intended to inform me that the present moment was not prime time for a sincere parenting interlude. Jonas’s instincts about such things were reliable.

  I said, “Where are the guns now?”

  “Can I show you? It would be easier.”

  “Sounds like a plan.”

  I followed him from the room. “They’re outside,” he said. I guessed in his father’s old workshop someplace. He added, “I didn’t think anyone would search a police detective’s girlfriend’s place for them.”

  “Ophelia has the guns?”

  “No. I hid them above one of the axles on the doublewide. There is too much metal there for a metal detector to pick up a couple of guns.”

  He showed me where he had removed a section of skirting from around the trailer. We crawled in near the front axle. He pointed to the guns. He told me they weren’t loaded; the chambers were empty and the clips were in the drawer in the base of his father Peter’s joiner in the old barn.

  We agreed to leave the guns where they were below the doublewide.

  Jonas helped me get the house back together. I was grateful for his assistance, and for his company.

  45

  AMANDA AND I MET at Locale late the next afternoon. I had requested the rendezvous because I needed to see her face as I spoke with her.

  I used my burner to set up the meeting. I was beginning to like my burner.

  Amanda initially suggested we use the incall again. As we talked she texted me instructions to find the hiding place of the key. I hadn’t recovered from almost having the opportunity to meet Paul and Sasha the first time I’d been at the incall, so I asked her to suggest an alternative location. Locale was her fallback option.

  Amanda had staked out the two seats where the sinewy bar of the pizzeria abutted the big rolling window adjacent to the Pearl Street sidewalk. Boulder’s interlude of springtime weather was continuing. Despite the late hour the window behind the bar was open. We ordered drinks. Hers was an icy cocktail made with prosecco and an orange-hued aperitif I didn’t recognize. Mine wasn’t.

  “I feel badly about how I ended up telling you about them,” she said.

  “Them” wasn’t the Louboutins. “Them” was the erotic threesome: Raoul, Lauren, and the Louboutins.

  “I needed to know,” I said. “I’m grateful.” I felt no need for social pleasantries. I was terse but I was trying not to be impolite. My sense was that Amanda understood.

  I waited for the bartender to move away. He did, parking himself within arm’s reach of a young woman who was slicing cured pork on a gorgeous machine that looked completely over-engineered for the task. Cutting prosciutto with that apparatus was like using a smartphone to make a local telephone call.

  It didn’t take a genius to recognize that the bartender was much more interested in the young woman than he was in the sliced meat. I was grateful that he was distracted.

  I lowered my voice to a whisper as I said, “Diane intended to shoot Lauren?”

  Amanda’s eyes grew wide for a second. She said, “Oooh. Just like that? No foreplay? You walk in all hard and ready?”

  The crudeness was unlike her. I had been getting her attention by being blunt. She was getting mine the same way. “I did buy you a drink first,” I said.

  She laughed. She said, “I need to eat something.”

  “Please,” I said, sliding the menu her way.

  “Want to share?” she asked. I declined. I had left my appetite somewhere in the previous calendar year.

  The young woman departed toward the kitchen with her sliced prosciutto. The bartender took Amanda’s order for a pizza topped with fresh arugula. I didn’t consider it an epiphany that Amanda and I didn’t have the same taste in pizza toppings.

  Using the almost whisper I’d used earlier, I returned to the original question. “That morning? Diane intended to shoot Lauren? That was her plan all along?”

  Amanda rotated ninety degrees to face me. Her kneecaps came to rest against my thigh. I decided that the contact was happenstance. It distracted me, but it didn’t distract her at all. She said, “You’re not convinced? About Raoul and your w
ife? Are the Louboutins not enough?” When I hesitated, she added, “There are shoes that women like, that other women think are cute, and there are shoes that men like, that they like to see women wear. Sometimes they’re similar. Sometimes not.”

  “I will keep that in mind.” I wasn’t trying to be a jerk, but I was aware that it was taking more effort than it should.

  “Women know the difference. Raoul does, too.” She looked away as she sipped her drink. “He’s good at choosing shoes in the sweet spot.”

  I fortified myself to go on. I wasn’t eager to learn any more of Raoul’s strengths with women. I said, “The work I do? The life I had with my wife? I have a resistance to believing certain things. Maybe it’s denial; I don’t want to believe things that I don’t wish to be true. Anyway, I’m ninety-nine percent convinced about the shoes. Is that enough?”

  “If you choose to chase that doubt away? Raoul has some Bogart in him. Among your wife’s things there will also be stockings, likely real silk. The ones for him will have back seams. She’ll have garter belts for them, too. One of those will be black.”

  “That’s not Lauren’s style.”

  She rolled her lips inward before she said, “It’s his style. Raoul’s.”

  I so much don’t need to know that.

  Amanda could tell she had wounded me. She also knew I was the one insisting that she twist the knife. The roles we were playing were probably not unfamiliar to her. She said, “Your question? About whether Diane intended to shoot your wife? That answer is yes.”

  “You know that?”

  “I do.”

  “How? I have to know. Without a doubt.”

  “You do know. Find the back-seam stockings. Your doubt will go away.”

  I didn’t believe that the last drop of doubt would ever evaporate. “Not you? Diane didn’t think it was you in the chair that morning? There was no mistaken identity? No confusion?”

  I was challenging Amanda but nothing in her voice betrayed any animus in return. Her reply was as tender as she could make it. “For Diane, I was a solution. For Diane, Lauren was a problem. Lauren threatened everything that was important to Diane. I didn’t. Diane knew exactly whom she was shooting that day. It was not a case of mistaken identity.”