Blinded (13 page)

Lauren and Grace arrived home less than ten minutes after Detective Reynoso departed.

Their arrival wasn’t a pretty sight. They had both left the house dressed for a warm fall day, and both were wet from the storm and chilled to the bone. Lauren’s violet eyes had taken on the gray-purple pall of extreme fatigue; whatever she and Grace had been doing since I’d left to meet Sam that morning had worn her beyond whatever limits she possessed that day.

How guilty was I feeling?

With Grace in my arms, I cranked up the heat in the master bathroom and began running a bath for Lauren. Then I took Grace into her room, and got her dry and clean and into fresh warm clothes. My daughter, sometimes a tough kid to put down for a nap, found the sanctuary of sleep moments after her head hit the mattress in her crib. I promised her, silently, that because of her compliance during this crucial moment in our lives, I would overlook at least one moderate-to-severe teenage indiscretion that was certain to occur in her future. She seemed to smile back at me from her sleep, as though she were already planning whatever it was I would need to forgive her for.

I shuddered at the thought.

When I got back to the bathroom with a steaming mug of tea, I found Lauren in the tub.

“No caffeine?” she asked.

“Mint. No caffeine. I’m sorry, I screwed up today.”

“I know you’re sorry.”

“Sam-”

She shook her head, just a little, and asked, “He’s okay?”

I nodded. She forced a smile in reply.

“You didn’t look too good when you came in,” I said.

She lowered herself farther into the soapy water. She was covered all the way to her chin. Her toes and colored toenails, painted a shade of coral that I was sure Grace had selected, popped out of the water at the far end of the tub. “Something’s cooking, Alan. I have brain mud. I’m more tired than Bill Gates is rich, and in case you haven’t noticed, my eyelids aren’t blinking at the same time.”

I tried hard to look her in the eyes but not stare at her eyelids. “So what can I do?”

“Let’s give it a few hours, see what develops. The pin is definitely out of the grenade. We’ll see what’s going to blow up.”

“Maybe it’s a dud. Can I get you something to eat?”

“No, I’m not hungry. Some quiet, okay? Take the dogs, and don’t let me sleep past five. I love you.”

Multiple sclerosis roughly translates as “many scars.”

When a new wound forms on the protective covering of a nerve in the brain or spinal column-apparently caused by the body mistaking its own neural insulation for a gremlin of some kind-symptoms develop. What symptoms? It depends on what nerve is involved. As the wound heals and scar tissue grows to replace nature’s myelin, the symptoms either disappear totally, or they don’t diminish at all, or-and this is most likely-something happens in between.

It’s a total crapshoot.

Lauren and I didn’t often use the word “exacerbation.” To use it had the ugliness of a profanity. But as I left her toweling off after her quick bath-I stayed until then because I feared sleep would take her right there in the bathtub-we both knew that an exacerbation, a fresh wound on some previously unaffected nerve, was what we feared was happening.

If we were right? I didn’t want to think about it. But I knew the list of potential consequences was as long as the list of the body’s miraculous capabilities. Numbness, blindness, paralysis, weakness, bladder problems, GI problems-I stopped myself before the list grew any longer. And it could have grown much longer.

But repeating the litany of potential disabilities wasn’t helpful.

Did I cause Lauren to have an exacerbation by not taking my daughter to her friend’s birthday party?

No. Of course not.

I didn’t. Really.

Really.

Sunday was full of surprises. None of them good.

Lauren never really woke up from her Saturday “nap.” She opened her eyes for a while, but whatever was going on with her neurologically and immunologically was consuming enough of her energy that she didn’t venture farther from the bed than the bathroom.

She declined dinner. Grace and I ate alone.

As was typical, I was the first in the family out of bed on Sunday morning. Instead of pulling on Lycra and Gore-Tex and heading to my bicycle-the pre-Thanksgiving snowstorm made my typical weekend morning ride impractical-I tugged on some fleece sweats and thick socks and carried the local paper and a cup of coffee to the living room.

The sky above the Front Range of the Rockies was the color of deep tropical water, the soaring granite slabs of the Flatirons were bearded with snow, and the earth was carpeted white as far as my eyes could see.

It was absolutely enchanting. I hoped Carmen Reynoso was someplace she could enjoy this view.

I listened for the sound of Adrienne mangling Christmas carols or the rumble of her John Deere. Nothing. Lauren had left some Debussy in the CD changer. I flicked it on, turned down the volume, and lifted the hefty Sunday paper to my lap, fearing that the tale of Sterling and Gibbs Storey might have finally made it from the police files to the newspaper.

Below the fold, bottom right, some bold type caught my eye. But it wasn’t an exposé about the Storeys. The headline read,JUDGE’S SPOUSE ARRESTED FOR POSSESSION OF COCAINE.

Huh,
I thought,
I know about that.

Jim Zebid had told me about it. I hadn’t given his revelations about Jara Heller’s husband’s criminal activities a moment’s thought since I’d heard them during Jim’s regular session the previous Tuesday.

What was Judge Heller’s husband’s name?

I started to read the article. Jara Heller’s husband’s name, it turned out, was Penn Heller. I allowed myself to be distracted for a moment trying to figure out how someone ended up with the name Penn. Pennington? Pennsylvania? Penncroft? Couldn’t. Nor did I recall any legal cocktail party chatter with a male spouse named Penn.

The article didn’t have much information. Police, acting on a tip, arrested Mr. Heller, an investment banker with some firm I’d never heard of, early Saturday evening in a brewpub downtown, and they’d confiscated a “significant quantity” of white powder and an unspecified quantity of cash. The reporter apparently attempted to reach Judge Heller for a comment, but his calls were not returned by press time.

Huh.

I felt a pang of sympathy for Jara Heller. She had a decent reputation on the bench and was known as a hard worker who knew the law and played fair. I’d always thought she was personable and that she couched her ambition better than many of her colleagues did. Whatever her husband was involved in wasn’t going to do much for her reputation. I wasn’t smart enough to know what it would do to her future on the bench. I’d ask Lauren when she got up.

A distant humming sound intruded on my reverie about the Hellers. Within seconds the hum became an insistent rumble. Adrienne wasn’t singing, but she had indeed fired up the Deere and was preparing to plow the lane. Sunday or not, she loved the damn tractor too much to allow a decent snowfall to melt of its own volition.

Solar energy was her sworn enemy.

The roar of the Deere awakened Grace, and within a minute I was called to my daughter’s room by her surprisingly mature lungs.

Diaper change for Grace. Take the dogs out, feed them. Waffles. Sunday almost always meant waffles-from-scratch waffles-and lots of chatter. Debussy ended, and the next disk in the changer fired up. Tony Bennett and k.d. lang doing Louis Armstrong. Perfect.

The weekend morning routine was soothing but surreal. After breakfast Grace played in her high chair. I tried to focus on the paper. But below the surface calm lurked, I knew, the monster that lived in the depths: the closed bedroom door and the precarious state of my wife’s health. I waited for the sound of the toilet flushing, or water pinging against the tile in the shower, anything to indicate that Lauren’s day had started in a fashion that resembled normal. But eight o’clock came and went without a hint of her condition.

The phone rang at 8:05.

I pounced on it.

“It’s me,” Sam said.

“Another field trip?” I asked. “I think I’m busy.”

“I’m calling from the pay phone outside Moe’s. The place is crowded even after a blizzard.”

Moe’s Bagels was in a little shopping center on North Broadway not far from Sam’s house. I made an assumption that he was out for his prescribed morning rehab walk and was seeking moral support from me much the way that an alcoholic might call his sponsor from outside a saloon. I said, “It’s okay, Sam. But get something with whole grain. And nonfat cream cheese. Not the good stuff. But lox is okay. Omega-three oils.”

“I’m not asking for help with the menu. I’m calling from a pay phone outside of Moe’s so that if somebody ever subpoenas your phone records, they won’t show that I talked to you at eight o’clock on this Sunday morning.” His tone was gruff.

I sat down. “Yeah? Why?”

“Because Sterling Storey is dead. And I’d rather people not know that I’m the one who told you. Just in case that becomes important.”

“What?” My exclamation had to do with surprise at the news of Sterling’s death. But I was also wondering how it could become important from whom I’d heard the news. Paranoia wasn’t part of my friend’s character, so I assumed that Sam was a step or two ahead of me. Although all the chess pieces appeared blurred on the board to me, Sam was plotting moves farther down the line.

“Lucy came by to see me last night, kind of late. You know, to check on me. She told me about it.”

“Why is Lucy worried about you?”

“That’s not why I called, either, Alan. Focus.”

I considered pressing it; after all, he’d offered the opening. But I didn’t. “Okay, then what happened to Sterling?”

“I don’t know what happened to Sterling Storey. All I know is what I’m hearing.”

Another one of those critical distinctions that Sam liked to make. I asked, “And the Storey story is what?”

His voice changed. It became a little louder, a little less patient. “Hold on. I’m waiting for a woman to stop staring at me thinking I’ll get off the damn phone any second if she’s rude enough. I hate that. Don’t you hate that? Now she’s like five feet away. She’s staring right at me. I’m staring right back at her.

“Hey, lady, I’m going to be a while, do you mind? Get over it.”

“Did she go away?”

“She’s like sixty or something-she looks exactly like my aunt Esther-and she just flipped me off behind her back as she was walking away. What is that? I don’t think I want to live in a society where old people are pricks.”

“She’s an exception, Sam. Tell me about Sterling.”

“You know he was in Florida, producing coverage for some football game? Yeah, of course you know that. After his damn football game was over yesterday, he was driving from Tallahassee to visit an old college friend in Albany, Georgia. You know where that is? Me, neither. Personally, I think he was avoiding coming back here to face the music, but it’s a free country, right? Until the cuffs are on, hey-he can do what he pleases. Lots of people want to talk to him, but nobody was ready to arrest him.

“Anyway, there was some freak rainstorm all across southern Georgia yesterday. Flash floods, the whole thing. A biblical-type storm. Witnesses say a car went off the highway and was about to slide into the Ochlockonee River. If I said that name right, I deserve a prize. I thought Minnesota had goofy names for places, but the South? It’s like they had a goofy name contest and there were a thousand winners. No, ten thousand winners.

“Anyway, Sterling, being the sweet guy we all know he is, stopped his rental car and went to help this woman whose car was about to go in the river. He slipped on the bank, fell in, and went underwater almost immediately. His body hasn’t been found.”

“Wow.”

“That’s it? ‘Wow’?”

“Sam, the man’s about to be picked up for questioning for a homicide and instead he dies a damn hero trying to rescue a stranger from a car wreck? That’s world-class irony.”

“Warms your heart, doesn’t it? Three witnesses to the whole thing, too. One of them is a damn preacher. The others are twin sisters. A social worker and a pediatrician.”

“I take it you don’t believe what you’re hearing?” Sam often didn’t believe what he was hearing. It wasn’t evidence of a character defect so much as it was the foundation that made him a good detective.

“What do the lawyers say? Render up the body? Do I got that right? Well, when they render up the body, then I’ll believe it. It’s all too convenient as far as I’m concerned.”

“How do you fake a rainstorm and a biblical flood, Sam? Sterling Storey isn’t Moses.”

“Moses? What Bible do you read? Moses doesn’t fake any floods in the Bible I read. Forget my question-I don’t want to know what Bible you read. No. All I’m saying about Sterling Storey is that maybe… maybe the guy thinks on his feet, that’s all.”

“I assume that the Georgia cops are looking for his remains.”

“They are. The river he went into-I’m not going to try to say the name again-is pretty wild, apparently. Lots of things underwater-trees and shit-where a body could get caught up.”

“Sam, why do you care about this case so much? You have plenty more important things to worry about.”

He was silent for ten seconds before he replied, “I’m not sure. I think I’m going to go back home.”

“Wait, Sam. Hold on. Do you know anything about Jara Heller’s husband? Judge Heller?”

“I saw the paper. Nothing more than that.”

“Will you do something for me? Will you check and see how they became suspicious of him? How they knew he was involved?”

“Why?”

“It’s important.”

“Somebody fingered him. You can count on it. Maybe he walked into a sting, but odds are somebody gave him up. You hang around with people who do drugs, especially people who buy and sell drugs, you come to realize that it’s not the most honorable segment of our society.”

“Just check for me, please. If somebody turned him in, I’d love to know that. I promise I won’t ask who did it.”

“You promise?”

“Yes, Sam.”

“That means you already know who turned him in. You just want me to confirm it for you. Am I right?”

I stammered.

He said, “You should be seeing a higher quality of clientele. You hang out with a lot of scum.” Then he hung up.

Across the room Grace-bless her-continued to entertain herself. She was absolutely captivated by the wrong end of a spoon.

I called my office phone and checked for a call from Gibbs. I wondered if she even knew what had happened to her husband the previous night, whether anyone had called her.

The only messages on my voicemail were from other patients. One was a cancellation; another was from a patient requesting an additional session. And one was a confirmation from a paranoid-obsessive guy I was treating named Craig Adamson. Craig always required confirmation that I hadn’t forgotten his next appointment. Always. It was sad.

All in all, the messages on my voicemail were a zero-sum game and included no frantic calls from Gibbs Storey.

I was trying to decipher what that meant when, behind me, Lauren said, “Who was that who called?”

A big smile exploded across Grace’s face, and she said, “Mom Mom.”

I pivoted.