Blinded (9 page)

The last thing I did before I left Gibbs alone in her Escalade was set an appointment with her for the following Monday morning. Early. SevenA.M.early. It’s all I had free.

I zipped down Ninth and stopped by my office to get some material for a report I planned to write over the weekend, then decided to run a couple of errands downtown.

I regret sometimes that the Downtown Boulder Mall is no longer a place where I can buy some brass Phillips-head screws or have a prescription refilled. Before the Mall was built-transforming a few blocks of Boulder ’s “Main” Street into an alluring brick and tree-lined promenade-downtown Boulder was like a thousand other Great Plains downtowns: a two-lane thoroughfare with a coffee shop, a hardware store, a drugstore, and maybe even a five-and-dime.

My old landlady-the kind woman who had given me a lovely place to live during graduate school and had ultimately sold me the house that Lauren and I now live in-had regaled me over endless cups of jasmine tea and plates of fresh-baked cat’s tongues about the Boulder she’d fallen in love with, the Boulder that existed before the gentrification of downtown in the seventies and eighties.

Lois had been a good friend of Fred, who’d owned Fred’s Restaurant, and of Virginia, the matriarch behind the Printed Page. Lois didn’t live much in the past, but she’d occasionally allowed herself some intense longing for a piece of Fred’s apple pie, or for a copy of some unheralded book that Virginia would insist she just had to read. Neither the pie nor the literary recommendations had, apparently, ever disappointed Lois. Although she loved walking the new mall right up until the time she repatriated to Scandinavia, Lois never lost her affection for what Boulder had been for most of the century before.

Now? Fred’s is gone. So is Fred. The Printed Page has moved away, and the Downtown Boulder Mall is lined with shops, not stores. There are lots of places to buy crafts. National chain stores seem to outnumber local retailers.

I was thinking about those kinds of changes as I rushed down Pearl Street in search of a DVD that Lauren wanted me to pick up for Grace. My daughter had developed an inexplicable fascination with trucks, and apparently there was no shortage of videos on the subject that were specifically intended for the toddler set. I had a list of acceptable titles from Lauren. What I didn’t have was any confidence that the Downtown Boulder Mall contained a store that sold toddler-oriented DVDs about eighteen-wheelers and hooks and ladders.

I was approaching the pedestrian light at Broadway when I heard, “My God, would you slow down a little? Whose idea was it to put bricks down here, anyway? And whose idea was high heels? And is it ‘was high heels’ or ‘were high heels’? I want to know that.”

The fancy digital walk signal on the far side of Broadway counted down from six to zero while I waited for Diane to catch up. Traffic began to zoom by before she huffed up beside me. “You can probably find the answer to all your questions on the Internet,” I said.

“Want to know the last thing I found out on the Internet? You’ll love this. I decided that I wanted to be able to say ‘My God’ to my husband in Spanish-you know, so I could say ‘My God, Raoul, aren’t you lucky to be married to me?’ in his native tongue-so I typed ‘My God’ and ‘Spanish’ into Google. What do you think I got? I got a website that told me how to say ‘Oh my God, there’s an axe in my head!’ in one hundred and two different languages.”

“Was one of them Spanish?”

“Yeah.”

“There you go, then.”

“¡Dios mío, hay un hacha en mi cabeza!”

“That will come in handy someday, I’m sure. How are you doing, Diane?”

“Good. My practice is full, my patients think I have a healing touch, my husband’s a dream, I have money in the bank, and I don’t have a
hacha
in my
cabeza
. What more can one ask? Oh, I know: What are you doing down here on Friday, and why the hell are you in such a hurry?”

“I’m on a mission.” I explained about the DVD. I didn’t explain about my front-row seat at the execution of the search warrant at Gibbs’s house.

“Mind if I jog alongside? I have something important I’ve been meaning to ask you.”

“I’d love some company. What do you want to know?”

The walk signal changed to green. The digital scoreboard said we had twenty seconds to cross Broadway. It seemed like a long enough time, in theory, but the numbers were descending so rapidly that I wanted to hurry even more.

“Were you popular in high school?” Diane asked.

“Excuse me?” I said, though I did not miss the irony that she had asked the question as we were approaching the display windows of the teenage clothing mecca, Abercrombie amp; Fitch.

“In high school, what group did you hang with? The geeks? The nerds? The jocks?” She took a moment to laugh at the thought of me hanging with the jocks. “Come on,” she prodded. “What group? I’m testing a theory here. I won’t tell anybody.”

“I wasn’t one of the popular kids, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“Aha! I bet you were in the Freud Club or something.”

“Your school had a Freud Club?”

“Never mind. Next question. This one’s important. Did you ever have the hots for any of the popular girls?”

Oh.
I watched the pieces begin to fall into place. “You mean the
über
-popular alpha bitches?”

“Just answer me.”

“Where is this going?”

“I’m trying to understand why you’re being so precious with Gibbs. Like I said, I have a theory.”

“And you’ve decided it has to do with some high school time warp I’m locked in to?”

“Just tell me, did you ever have a thing for any of the popular girls? You know who I’m talking about.
Them.
The ones who sat at
that
table at lunch, the ones who never said anything in a normal voice. The ones who were always whispering to each other or saying things loudly enough that the whole world knew what they were thinking.”

Several steps passed before she repeated, “
Them.
You know exactly who they were.”

“No,” I said. But I immediately had a 70mm Technicolor image of Teri Reginelli flash onto the wide screen in my brain. Wavy hair, brown eyes, and a smile that could plaster me to Teflon.

“You’re sure?”

“Yes.”

“No, you’re not. Be honest-who are you thinking about right now? Give her a name, come on.”

I sighed. “Teri Reginelli.”

“Cheerleader? Prom queen?”

“Neither. Mere goddess.”

“She was above you socially?”

“It was crowded territory.”

She punched me and said, “Still is.” Her tone softened. “Isn’t it strange how being an adolescent never really stops? Isn’t it? Show me what someone was like during their high school psychosis, and I’ll put together a damn good road map into their romantic future.”

I didn’t want to argue with her. Mostly because I knew that there was plenty of truth in her words. To deflect attention from myself I asked, “What was high school like for you?”

“I was fully occupied thinking up ways to kill the Teri Reginellis of the world. And
that
is the source of my transference to the Dancing Queen.” She admitted her introspective success triumphantly.

“A question,” I said. “Did you ever think about whacking a
hacha
into the
cabeza
of a Teri Reginelli or three at your school?”

“I was taking French-
Mon dieu, il y a une hache dans ma tête!
Otherwise, I’m sure I would have gotten there eventually. So, at what store down here do you think you’re going to find your daughter a DVD about trucks?”

“I don’t know.” I’d totally forgotten about the DVD. Teri Reginelli had that effect on me.

We crossed Thirteenth. Diane leaned close to me, tugged my head down so my ear was closer to her level, and whispered, “It’s called transference, Alan. It sneaks up on all of us. Don’t ignore it just because I’m the one who brought it up.”

Before I could reply, Diane peeled away from me like an F-18 dropping out of formation. She was making a beeline for the bank down Thirteenth, one of her favorite places downtown.

“Dios mío,”
she said over her shoulder.
“Adiós.”

Transference:
treating, responding to, and/or having feelings about someone in the present as though they were someone important from the past.

Teri Reginelli.

Gibbs Storey.

Me.

Help.

DVD procured, the drive east was uneventful. I parked my car in the garage, got out, and took a moment to linger near my dark blue not-too-old Trek road bike. The bicycle was hanging securely on its pulley system from the rafters in the garage. I glanced outside even though I knew it was already too dark to make up for the ride that I hadn’t taken that afternoon.

Lauren kissed me, Grace squealed, and the dogs seemed happy to have me home. Lauren got the DVD going for Grace while I made a couple of adjustments to Emily’s paw umbrella. The thing was protecting the wound on her paw marvelously, but it required an abnormal amount of maintenance. I was no longer certain that a trip to the patent office and instant wealth were on the horizon for me.

Once we moved to the kitchen, Lauren sat down across from me while I sorted through a seriously uninspiring pile of mail. Neither of us had any fresh news to report from either Sam or Sherry. I filled her in on the morning adventures with the cable company, the post office, and the drivers’ license office. Unmoved by my tales of institutional indolence, she moved into the business part of the kitchen to attend to the meal she’d been preparing.

Once she had her back turned to the stove, she said, “That’s interesting. So who’s Teri Reginelli?”

My breath caught in my throat.

Instinctively, I knew that my wife was facing away from me so that I couldn’t see the I’m-sitting-in-the-catbird-seat grin that she had plastered across her cute mug. I said, “Oh God. I bet Diane called you right from the bank, didn’t she? She was going straight to the bank.”

“I heard the whole story while she was standing in the teller line. She said she left you befuddled on the Mall.”

“Figures.”

“Were you?”

“Was I what?”

“Befuddled on the Mall?”

“Most of the women in my life leave me feeling befuddled. I’m beginning to feel befuddled right now, for instance. Teri Reginelli was not an exception. Believe me, she was not an exception.”

“So who was this mystery girl I’ve never even heard about? High school, right? Should I be worried?”

Lauren’s tone was ninety-nine percent tease. “No,” I said. “But Diane should be.”

“Is this going to end up being like that Sawyer thing a few years ago? Is Teri Reginelli about to show up at our door with a suitcase and a few verses about how her life isn’t complete without you? God, I hope not. I didn’t like the Sawyer thing much at all.”

“The Sawyer thing” was the one percent in Lauren’s tone that wasn’t tease. She wasn’t kidding; she hadn’t liked the Sawyer thing at all.

“I swear that Teri Reginelli wouldn’t be able to tell you who I was if you held a gun to her head. Actually, get Diane to hold the gun to her head. Or a
hacha
to her
cabeza
. She’d relish the opportunity.”

“What? What language are you speaking?”

“It’s not important.”

“Teri Reginelli is. At least to me. Go on. I want the details. Pretend you’re talking to your therapist.”

“Teri Reginelli was a high school crush I had. I never even went out with her. Not once.”

“Then why are we talking about her?”

“Ask Diane.”

“I did. She said you had the hots for her. For Teri, that is. She said after all these years Teri’s still changing your oil. She told me to mention Teri’s name, sit back, and watch you dance like your toes were on fire.”

“That’s Diane’s phrase, isn’t it? ‘Changing your oil’? Diane said that, right? Am I right? Diane thinks I’m a prude. Do you know that? Do you think I’m a prude? A serious prude?”

“Don’t change the subject.”

“Part of it’s true, I guess. In the high school era of my life Teri was the neighbor’s wife whom I coveted.”

Lauren looked puzzled.

“Figuratively speaking. Teri Reginelli was the head of the pack in high school. You know, the leader of the popular girls. The alpha chick? Senior year she dated a guy who slummed with me and my friends sometimes.”

“Was he a hottie?”

“Yeah, Sean was a hottie.”

“And?”

“This guy Sean treated her like shit. She would talk to me about it, ask me about things he did with other girls, what he said about her. You know how girls are when they’re seventeen. She wanted to know what made him tick. I was a good listener-”

“Even then?”

“Yes, even then.”

“And you fell in love with her, and she never even knew it. Right? It was unrequited love?”

I sighed. What had felt like a monumental event in my life was suddenly sounding like a carefully carved monument to banality. “Right, something like that.”

Lauren was really getting into it. Me? I was losing interest, fast.

“She signed your yearbook ‘Alan, you’re the best!’ or ‘What a great friend!’ or something like that, I bet. Yes? The ‘XXX’ was the closest you ever came to kissing her. Am I right?”

I sighed once more.

Lauren asked, “So what does all this have to do with Diane?”

“It has absolutely nothing to do with Diane. She’s teasing me about an old conjoint case we did together.”

I watched Lauren make connections, all the wrong ones.

“No, we didn’t treat Teri Reginelli and her significant other. I don’t even know where she’s living, and I don’t have a clue what guy is stuck with her. Teri Reginelli is just a metaphor for a point Diane was trying to make. Can we talk about something else? Please.”

“Of course,” she said.

Lauren leaned over to check something in the oven. I inhaled deeply but couldn’t figure out what she was cooking in there. I was thinking chicken. I thought I captured the aroma of balsamic vinegar, too.

Her willingness to change the subject concerned me. It didn’t take long for me to discover that I had good reason to be concerned.

She said, “There was an interesting thing at work today. Mitchell got called to oversee the execution of a search warrant on the home of a guy in town who’s apparently become a fresh suspect in an old murder in southern California. A couple of detectives flew in from Laguna Beach and requested our assistance. The Boulder detective thought it would be better if somebody from our office was involved as an observer to the search.”

I don’t know whether I said “shit”-if I did, it certainly qualified as a mumbled profanity-or whether I merely thought
shit
.

Lauren said, “The whole case-a husband suspected of murder in another state, a loving wife who knows a little something-it reminded me of that question you asked me earlier in the week. Do you remember? The one about exclusions to the spousal privilege statute? Felony exceptions? Even as they might apply in some other state? Like California?”

“Yes,” I said. “I remember.”

She left the oven, walked over, and kissed me full on the mouth, tracing the outline of my lower lip with the tip of her tongue.

“Sometimes I love to watch you squirm. Mitchell saw you over at the house where they served the warrant today. So I think I know what spouse might be trying to exclude what testimony, and I think I know who the reincarnation of Teri Reginelli is, too.”

She kissed me again. No tongue the second time.

There were days I had doubts that Boulder, Colorado, was still a small town.

Well, that day I had no doubts.