Blinded (24 page)

Sometimes momentum rules. I’d been pointing toward Indiana’s bull’s-eye, so I kept going that way. I had some lunch in a Shoney’s by a gas station, went and saw the Speedway just for the hell of it, and then backtracked downtown so I could be near the RCA Dome. I parked the car in a motel lot a few blocks away, checked in for one night, and started strolling over toward the immense sports stadium, waiting for some inspiration from the dead woman who had worked there. What was her name? Julie Franconia. Yeah.

But I got no inspiration.

Nothing. Julie wasn’t talking.

My pager vibrated once again against my hip.

I knew it was him. I walked another hundred yards or so before I bothered to look at the screen.

It was him. Another faux 911.

First I kept my promise to Lucy, called her, and told her where I was spending the night. She didn’t have anything new for me. Then I called Alan.

The second the phone started ringing, I was already regretting phoning him back. “What?” I said.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

I was still walking. It turned out that the Dome butted right up against downtown Indianapolis. I liked that. Sports should be part of things, part of a city’s life, not some suburban reverse-doughnut thing where the arena is surrounded by acres of open space that are used to park a gazillion cars twenty times a year. There was even a nice green park with a big fountain outside the front door of the RCA Dome.

Cool.

“I’m sorry,” Alan said again.

By then I’d walked around the corner, ducked under a sky bridge that linked the stadium with a garage, and stopped in front of a nice old church with twin copper steeples. I sat on the steps.

“I’m in a church,” I said to Alan, lying. “I’m hoping it will make me be nice to you.”

“I’m sorry, Sam.”

“You said that. Next.”

“If that was being nice to me because you’re sitting in a church, I’m glad you’re not sitting in a topless bar.”

I laughed. It was a good comeback. “A titty bar would be way too much stress on my heart. Truth is, I’m actually on the stoop of the church. Not inside. God may be occupied with the folks who made it all the way inside, so be careful.”

“I shouldn’t have accused you.”

“Accused me? You shouldn’t have even considered me. I play hard, but I don’t play dirty. I might be tricky, but I don’t cheat.”

“I know. I was wrong.”

“Is that it? I got to go.”

“Where?”

It was actually another good comeback, although Alan probably didn’t realize it.

“I don’t know. I’m thinking of going up north and seeing Simon.”

“Is that a good idea?”

“Seeing my kid? It’s always a good idea. Always.”

He didn’t skip a beat. He asked, “You want to tell me what’s going on with Sherry?”

“Nope.”

My pager vibrated again. I was about to turn the damn thing off. I lifted it off my hip and held it at full arm’s length from my eyes. Even that far away I could barely read it. I said, “Gibbs is paging me. Now I do have to go.”

“What does she want? Call me back.”

“Right.”

“Detective Purdy? I’m scared.”

Her voice did something to me.

It was something unfamiliar. I stood and moved two steps higher on the church stoop. That didn’t feel quite right, so I moved back down and settled my fat ass one step lower than when I had started. I wasn’t sure precisely what I wanted God’s help doing at that moment, but I was aware that it might be something He wouldn’t be eager to assist me with.

“Yeah?”

“I think he’s alive. I do.”

I assumed we were chatting about Sterling. “You think he’d come after you?”

She said, “No, not really. But maybe, I guess. God, what a thing to say.”

As she implored the deity, I craned my neck upward toward the pointy ends of the steeples.

“Where are you, Gibbs? Are you at home?”

“No, I checked into a hotel.”

I guessed she would be at the Boulderado. I saw her standing near one of the tall windows in the new wing of the downtown hotel, her body softer than soft behind the gauzy curtains. “Which one?”

“The Boulderado,” she said.

Arguably Boulder’s finest, and the first place Sterling would look for her after he determined she wasn’t at home. The very first. Gibbs’s judgment was impaired. That wasn’t news. A lot of experience had convinced me that all battered spouses have impaired judgment.

Just like all squares have corners.

“Maybe not the best choice,” I suggested.

“Do you think he’s coming?” she asked.

“What do you think?”

“Over these years he hasn’t hurt me, he’s hurt them.”

“Them?”

“The women he was… you know.”

“Screwing?” I felt my pulse jump as though my heart had a turbocharger. Seventy to one-seventy in three seconds flat.

I thought she mumbled, “Mmm-hmmm,” or something like it.

“The women he killed… he was… having affairs with them?”

“I don’t want to…”

I found a fleece-lined version of my don’t-fuck-with-me voice and used it like an exposed blade against her throat. I said, “This isn’t the time to get coy with me, Gibbs.”

“Yes,” she blurted. “Yes.”

“Do you know of others? Other women? Besides the ones who are in the news already?”

“No one else.”

She had hesitated. Damn it. The pause was subtle, but it felt like a stomp on the foot to me. She was lying.

I didn’t want her to be lying to me.

Her next words seemed to come out of her like a tabby’s purr, all soft and comforting. She said, “I don’t want anyone to get hurt. Do you think he’s out there? Do you?”

I inhaled slowly, as though I could somehow detect the scent of Gibbs’s perfume in Indianapolis’s air. All I got was a lungful of bus exhaust. “Until someone finds his body, you can’t be sure he isn’t. I always tell people to trust their fear. It’s usually pretty good advice.”

“The FBI called and asked me about Brian Miles.”

Gibbs’s change of direction was abrupt. I felt like I’d just tripped over something. I regained my balance and asked, “Yeah? What did you tell them?”

“What I told you already. That Brian and Sterling had whored around together. And that I didn’t like Brian.”

“You didn’t tell me that. That you didn’t like Brian.”

“He wasn’t nice to women.”

“No?”

“No.”

“How wasn’t he nice to women?”

“Maybe I should go to Denver instead of staying here. Or go up into the mountains.”

Way out in front of my eyes I spied a couple of dots that needed connecting. I asked Gibbs, “What business is he in? Brian Miles?”

“Electronics.”

“Huh? Like TVs? Stereos?”

“No, microelectronics. Stuff I don’t understand. Do you like the mountains?”

I stumbled again trying to keep up with her. Gibbs was clearly accustomed to having men follow her wherever the hell she decided to go. So what did I do? I followed her, too. I asked, “Have you considered Safe House?” but I was still pondering Brian Miles and microelectronics.

“Actually, I was thinking Vail. Or maybe going back to Corona Del Mar and staying with friends.”

Gibbs was definitely Vail. Not Aspen, Vail. Not the mountain, the village. She’d be right at home in Vail Village.

Through the phone I heard a horn honk loudly.

“You have a room on the Broadway side?” I asked.

She hesitated. “Close. I’m on the alley.”

A siren blared by.

“That ambulance was really moving,” I said. “They usually don’t go that fast on Broadway.”

Gibbs said, “I wish you were here, Detective. I’d feel safer.”

It was the tabby’s purr again, vibrating gently against my fragile heart. I stood and stepped down the church steps. My feet felt like they were disappearing into sand. Lifting them-left, right-took extraordinary effort.

I made her feel safer.
I made her feel something good.

I made her feel.

“Call me Sam” was what I said. Or just call me glib. Was I tempted? Yeah. Heading back to Colorado’s high country to play bodyguard to Gibbs’s princess sounded just fine to me. The impulse to go felt wrong. It did. But the sense that it was wrong came and went fast, like the roar of a passing stock car.

A homeless guy was sitting hunched over in the recessed doorway of a building just a few yards from the church steps.
That,
I thought,
is what hope looks like as it’s dying.

I tried, but I couldn’t pry my eyes off him.

As a way to break free from the suction of his gravity, I pulled out my wallet and fished out ten bucks. I dumped the bill into the hat that sat upside down between his antique Air Jordans. He didn’t even look up to check the identity of his benefactor, but a remarkable sleight of hand allowed him to suck the bill up into the sleeve of his ratty corduroy coat so fast that my eye lost track of the money.

I realized that quick-as-a-burp he’d replaced the ten with a single and that I’d been had. I hadn’t contributed some needed charity to a homeless man, I’d made an unwitting payment to a skilled urban busker.

Gibbs broke into my reverie. “Detective?” she said. “Sam?”

She called me Sam.

“Yeah,” I replied.

“If I decide to move somewhere else, I’ll call you from Vail or wherever I am. I hope you have something for me when we talk again.”

Me too. Me too.
“Me too,” I mumbled.

“I can pay you, you know, to protect me. I can. I’d like you… here.”

“That’s not it,” I said. “I’m working on something here that might help.”

She sighed. “ ’Bye, Sam.”

“ ’Bye.”

Where was I planning on finding whatever information it was that I planned on giving to Gibbs? That I didn’t know.

I found myself again distracted by the costumed magician who had my hard-earned money up his sleeve. An elegant, elderly woman wearing a fox stole walked by, slowed, and threw a handful of coins into his hat. For a brief moment his hand hovered above the money. But her contribution apparently didn’t equal the price of admission; this guy granted no magic show for a mere handful of change.

Then I remembered: Alan wanted me to call him back. It was just as well that I’d forgotten. If I’d remembered, I would have had to make a conscious decision not to do it. Then I would have ended up feeling guilty. And that would have been bad for my heart.

I pulled a five out of my wallet, folded it the long way into a V, and slid it into the magician’s hat. Faster than my eyes could follow, the bill was gone and replaced in the hat by a solitary buck.

The surrogate bill wasn’t folded down the middle.

I took a step back and applauded quietly and politely, as I might if I attended the symphony, which I don’t.

The homeless impersonator lifted his head an inch or two and mimed a tip of the hat for me.

All in all, it hadn’t been a bad way to spend fifteen dollars.

Despite Tayisha’s reassurance that my office was clean, I made the stroll to the waiting room to retrieve my four o’clock without feeling a whole lot of confidence in the sanctity of my workspace.

My four o’clock was the twenty-three-year-old named Craig Adamson who had called earlier in the week to confirm his appointment. Craig was one of those patients who kept me up late trying to find ways to help him. He was a terrific human being who spent every waking moment battling a whammy of mixed character pathologies-a moderate obsessive/compulsive disorder alongside a severely paranoid character. In his unfortunate circumstances the two problems coexisted about as well as quarreling neighbors. The DSM diagnostic code that I’d cobbled together to describe his condition looked like a European phone number-way too many digits-because it required that I tack on additional numerals to account not only for his depression but also for his occasional psychotic interludes.

A surprise greeted me as I opened the door to the waiting room. Craig was right where I expected to find him: in the corner chair, which was the location farthest from any other seat in the room. But sitting closest to the door was another patient of mine, one who didn’t even have an appointment that afternoon. It actually took me a moment to recognize her. She’d dyed her hair so that it was a shade of red that nature tended to reserve for flowers and fruits, and she’d cut it short enough that she wasn’t going to need a blow dryer for a while.

Sharon Lewis.

She shot to her feet, glanced at the hypervigilant man in the corner-apparently concluding that he wasn’t much of an adversary-and with enough pressure in her voice to power a hydraulic lift, she announced, “I need a minute. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, but I just do.” Then she squared and faced Craig. “May I have five minutes with him? I know it’s rude, but this is an emergency. You don’t mind, do you?”

Without waiting for either of us to reply, she squeezed past me into the hallway that led back to my office and disappeared from view.

Craig was having a difficult time comprehending what had just happened. I couldn’t blame him for that. Finally, he said, “It’s okay. Really.” But his eyes were jumping with incipient panic.

“It’s not okay,” I told him. “This time is yours.”

Despite a daily cocktail of psychotropic medications prescribed by a psychiatrist who knew what she was doing, and despite twice-weekly psychotherapy with me, Craig remained one of the most disturbed patients I’d ever tried to manage in outpatient therapy. I’d begun seeing him as a favor to my neighbor Adrienne, who worked with Craig’s parents, both local anesthesiologists. They thought I would be the ideal therapist to treat their son, one, because I wasn’t a colleague of theirs, and two, because my office was only a little more than a block from the town house they rented for Craig on West Pearl Street. Craig’s pathology severely limited the geographic territory in which he felt comfortable traveling.

Sharon Lewis could not have picked a more vulnerable person to intrude upon if she had plotted her assault on my waiting room for weeks.

“No, no,” he said. “It’s okay. I’ll wait. She needs… it… you… more than I do. I’ll wait-wait here.” He didn’t look at me as he spoke. Not even a glance.

“I’ll take care of this as quickly as I can.”

“Fine. Fine.” Exhale. “Fine, fine, fine.”

“I’ll be right back out,” I said. A blind person could have read his body language. Craig was anything but fine.

He stuck his face closer to his magazine. I noticed that he was reading
Popular Mechanics
. It wasn’t a title that Diane and I supplied to the waiting room, which meant that he had brought it along with him. It could have been, of course, that he wasn’t fond of any of the magazines we provided for the waiting room. But I suspected the reality was that Craig wasn’t comfortable picking up a magazine not knowing who might have touched it before him.

Would he admit that to me? Not yet. But we’d been making progress on the trust issue lately. Progress that I was afraid this event might annihilate.

Sharon Lewis was waiting on my sofa. She appeared as though she’d been hooked up to a Starbucks IV for most of the day. Her acute agitation made me think of Lauren’s recent Solumedrol jolt.

“I should just go back to Ontario and hide.”

“Ontario? California?” I felt an imperative to adjust my therapeutic gyroscope. Asking an inane question or two would buy me a few seconds of calibration time.

“I’m from Canada,” she explained.

“I didn’t know.” I didn’t.

“Well, they know,” she said. “God damn it. They know. They know everything.”

I took a slow, deep breath trying to find words that would challenge her without being accusatory. “What you just did out there in the waiting room, Sharon, is the same thing that got you into such a mess at the airport a couple of weeks ago. It’s what we’ve been talking about. You impulsively decided that your needs were more important than anyone else’s, in this case the other person in the waiting room. You once again allowed a sense of urgency”-I could have added, but didn’t, “and a sense of grandiosity”-“to cause you to decide that the rules”-I omitted “of decency and compassion”-“don’t apply to you.”

“I said I knew it was rude. And I apologized to him.”

“The problem is that knowing that the behavior is rude doesn’t serve to deter you at all. And your apology sounded about as sincere as-as a campaign commercial.”

Her jaws were clenched. Despite my bluntness my words hadn’t dented her Kevlar facade. I hadn’t expected they would.

“They know who I am. Today on the noon news, Colorado’s fucking News Channel reported that the mystery woman who inconvenienced a million airline passengers-you know,
the most selfish woman in America
-they’re reporting that her name is Sharon, that she lives in Boulder, and-get this-they said she’s getting mental health treatment for her ‘condition.’ My ‘condition’! Jesus.”

The blood drained from my face. I guessed what was coming next. And I wasn’t disappointed.

Or I was.

“Did you tell someone?” She almost spat the words at me. “Did you tell someone about me?”

“You would like to blame me for the situation you’re in?” I thought I managed to ask the question evenly, with just the slightest hint of confrontation.

“Who else?” The subtext of her retort was
You imbecile! Nobody else knows but you!

Yogi Berra once said that he couldn’t think and hit a baseball simultaneously. His point? Some things happen so fast that they must be done by instinct.

My reply to Sharon should have been one of those instinctive things. But it wasn’t. Why? Because I was absolutely frozen in place by the fact that one of my options was admitting to Sharon that I’d just had a listening device removed from the office in which we were sitting, and that it was likely that the little microphone and transmitter had carried her secrets out my windows or through my walls out into the world.

The fact that one of the local television news channels knew only her first name convinced me that the leak had been from one of our sessions. Rarely did I ever use a last name during treatment. But if I made the admission to Sharon about the listening device, I was certain that she would, rightly, accuse me of destroying her hope of confidentiality. Were she to accuse me in public, the notoriety of the case would bring me almost as much misery as she was about to suffer.

I sputtered to find words. Although I knew I’d eventually have to tell Sharon and all my other patients what I’d found in my cushion, I wasn’t ready to start right at that moment.

In ten quick seconds of therapeutic silence I saw my precious career vaporizing before my eyes.

What did I end up saying? I said, “I don’t know, Sharon.”

She actually started to cry. “I was going to turn myself in. I was. Now? It will look like I did it because they found out it was me. Hell, I’m screwed. Screwed! I’m leaving-I have to talk to a lawyer.”

A minute later I was on my way back out to the waiting room to retrieve Craig. I opened the door to discover that he was gone. I wasn’t surprised, and I began considering the words I’d use that evening when I called Craig’s home trying to repair some of the damage. I actually felt some hope that if he and I could deal with what had happened in the waiting room that day, it might ultimately be helpful in his psychotherapy. Nevertheless, I didn’t take much comfort in being the unwitting foil in the provocation he had suffered.

I spent the dead time before my final appointment of the day making a list of all my patients and all their recent secrets, big and small. I couldn’t keep myself from making tortuous detours as I imagined the admissions that I would have to make to each one about the possibility that their revelations to me were soon going to be in the public domain.

A few minutes before five Diane tapped on my open door. She was mugging a pouty face. “None of them wanted me. I got voir-dired to death on an arson case, but nobody wanted me. I’m crushed.”

“Hi,” I said. “It turns out you were right.”

“Of course I was. About what?”

“The bug in my office.”

“That? Right. Anyway, there was this one guy in the jury pool-”

“I’m not kidding.”

She snapped her mouth shut, and I explained about Tayisha and the listening device and about the continued revelations about my patients’ lives that were finding their way into public view.

She couldn’t tell whether to believe me. Finally, she asked, “How many is that total?”

In my head, I counted. Jim Zebid and his story about Judge Heller’s husband’s cocaine. That was one. Gibbs Storey and her accusations about Sterling. That was two. Sharon Lewis and her ignominious behavior at Denver International Airport. That was three.

“Three that I know of,” I said.

“That doesn’t make sense.”

Why it didn’t make sense escaped me. “What, Diane? You don’t like odd numbers?”

“Why would somebody plant a bug to discover something about one of your patients and proceed to broadcast information about three of them? It doesn’t make any sense.”

“I don’t follow.”

“One person walks into a park and paints a statue pink, you think there’s something wrong with the painter, right? A wacko?”

“Yeah.” Although I replied in the affirmative, my tone conveyed more doubt than assurance.

“But if three different people walk into the park at different times, and they each paint part of the statue pink, you have to begin to think that there’s either a conspiracy going on-”

“Yeah.” Less doubt that time.

“Or… there’s something weird about that statue. Does anything-anything at all-tie those three patients of yours together?”

The possibility of a conspiracy was novel to me. “I can’t see anything. As far as I know they don’t know each other. They’re all in different professions. Different social circles. They’ve never mentioned each other to me, that’s for sure.”

“Well, then take a look at the statue.”

“Me? I’m the pink statue?”

“Exactly.”

“What are you saying?”

“Somebody’s out to get you.”

“Me? What are they planning to do, Diane? Humiliate me publicly by revealing what I say to patients in therapy? I may not always be pithy, but I don’t think what I say is
that
bad.”

“Pithy? Did you say pithy? God, you’re something. Whoever planted that bug didn’t expect you to find it, Alan. Right? So why was it there? Not to embarrass you. A simple tape recording of your clinical wisdom would have embarrassed you. And I don’t think it was to learn some deep dark secret that one of your patients might be telling you. Don’t you see? Not with three different stories leaked already. Why would somebody do that?”

I’m sure I looked confused.

She went on. “If it was just one patient whose story was revealed, you could say that patient’s secrets were the target, but if there are three-with maybe more to come-you have to assume that you, and not your patients, are the target.”

“Then what? I don’t get it.” I was hoping we weren’t on our way back to the pink statue.

“What was it you once told me in one of your rare fits of perspicacity? You said that if I want to understand someone’s motivation for an act, then I should take a look at the consequences. Well, what are the consequences of all these leaks going public?”

“It’s going to ruin me.”

She walked close enough to me that she could rest a hand on my shoulder. “Exactly. Somebody’s been trying to set you up as a therapist who can’t keep secrets. You have an enemy, dear.”

I tried to inhale. I failed. “Diane, if somebody did that, it-”

“It sure would. Once people in town think you can’t keep secrets, you’re dead meat.”

“Hell.”

“Just a guess on my part,” she said. “But I would think that we’ve discerned the motivation. All you need to do is figure out who might want to destroy you.”