Blinded

by Stephen White

  He snorted at me and shook his head. “Work on your damn paw umbrella. Don’t insult me with your psychobabble.”

  I used a totally benign please-pass-the-salt voice to inquire, “How is it different this time?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He stood up but didn’t go anywhere. He craned his chin upward, then side to side.

  “Is your neck stiff?”

  His face said it was. He added, “I must have slept on it funny.”

  “Adrienne’s already gone for the day. She and Lauren took Jonas and Grace to the zoo in Denver. But I can probably reach her on her cell. Do you want me to give her a call?”

  “Nah. I’ll be fine. You almost done with that thing?”

  I was taping the plastic strips together, sealing the gaps between them with filament tape. I figured any slender gap was a potential escape route for Emily’s wily Houdini of a tongue. “Why don’t you sit, Sam?”

  To my surprise, he did. I noticed beads of sweat dotting his wide forehead like drizzle on a car windshield.

  “You don’t look too good. Let’s bag the bike ride. Why don’t I-I don’t know, take you somewhere? Go see a doctor. If you’re passing a stone, you’re going to need some drugs. Given how bad you felt last time, some serious drugs.”

  “I’ll be okay. If it doesn’t go away in a minute, I’ll take some Tylenol or something.”

  Yeah, that should help. And when you’re done,I thought,why don’t you go put out a forest fire by pissing on it?

  He grimaced and twisted his neck some more. “Put that thing on her. I want to see how it works.”

  Taping the device to Emily’s left front paw proved more challenging than manufacturing it had been. She didn’t fight me; the halo was so humiliating to her that a multicolored Clydesdale-hoof-shaped paw umbrella was little additional insult to her doggie fashion sensibilities. I needed two different adhesive tapes from the first-aid kit and then had to reinforce the harness with an astonishing quantity of filament tape. But the thing ultimately held together and stayed where it was supposed to stay on her lower leg.

  I told Emily to stand.

  She didn’t. She sighed.

  I took the damn plastic halo off her collar and told her to stand.

  She stood.

  The umbrella hung over her wounded paw. The plastic strips stopped half an inch above the floor. Without delay her instincts emerged, and she leaned over to lick her open wound.

  She couldn’t.

  She lay back down to lick her wound.

  She couldn’t.

  She got back up and took a few tentative steps, offering a quick disciplinary nip at our other dog, a miniature poodle named Anvil. Anvil hadn’t done anything to warrant the discipline. Emily attempted to discipline him at irregular intervals because she could and, she believed, she should.

  Anvil, as always, was unfazed. I’d realized long ago that he didn’t recognize discipline in any form.

  “You know Jonas? Adrienne’s son?” I asked.

  Sam grunted in reply.

  “He has trouble saying Anvil, so he renamed him, calls him Midgeto. I think it fits, don’t you?”

  Sam’s eyes were shut tight. Apparently so were his ears.

  Emily returned her attention to the multicolored umbrella on her paw. She walked in a circle as though she were trying to determine if the thing was really going to stay with her.

  After a careful appraisal from multiple angles she stared at me, gave a little flip of her bearded head, and uttered a familiar, guttural, all-purpose murmur of approval. To the untrained ear, the noise probably sounded like an insincere growl. But since I spoke a little Bouvier, I knew differently.

  Rarely in history have members of two different species been so enamored of the same invention. I loved the paw umbrella. Emily, our big Bouvier des Flandres, loved her paw umbrella.

  Sam’s opinion of the paw umbrella was more difficult to discern.

  When I turned back to him to share our joy, I finally realized that he was having a heart attack.

  THREE

  Not wanting to alarm Sam unnecessarily with my amateur diagnostic assessment, I excused myself, walked then ran to the bedroom phone, and called 911. When I got back to the kitchen, Sam said, “I’m a little better, I think.”

  I handed him a small handful of baby aspirin. “Chew these, and come lie down on the couch in the living room.”

  “What are they?”

  “For once don’t argue with me.”

  He chewed the aspirin and followed me the short distance from the kitchen table to the sofa in the living room. The hand that had been poking below his rib cage was now pressing firmly at his sternum.

  “You called for an ambulance, didn’t you?”

  I considered lying. But I didn’t. I simply nodded.

  Anvil-Midgeto-jumped up on the couch and snaked under Sam’s arm to spread his lithe body across Sam’s lower abdomen. It appeared as though he was determined to be a little canine heating pad.

  Emily rested her big head on Sam’s thigh.

  Sam absently stroked the dogs’ fur and said, “You have good dogs.”

  Sam and I rarely agreed on anything. But we agreed on that.

  “Am I having a heart attack?”

  “I don’t know. I’m afraid you are.”

  “I don’t want to die, Alan.”

  We agreed on that, too. I didn’t want him to die, either.

  FOUR

  “I think he murdered a friend of ours in Laguna Beach.”

  I kept my gaze locked on Gibbs. Her words were as provocative as anything I’d heard in a therapy session in quite some time, but I was having a hard time not thinking about Sam.

  Less than twenty-four hours earlier the ambulance had taken him to Avista Hospital, which was closest to my house in the hills on the eastern side of the Boulder Valley, not Community Hospital, which was only blocks from his house in the shadow of the Rockies on Boulder’s west side. The cardiologist who worked him up in the ER and busted his clot with some cardiac Drano had scheduled an angiogram for the precise hour on Monday morning that I was seeing Gibbs Storey. At the moment when Gibbs told me she suspected her husband of murder, Sam probably already had a puncture hole in his groin and a long catheter snaking up an artery to his heart.

  What would Sam, an experienced homicide detective, do in response to Gibbs’s revelation, were he sitting here with Gibbs and me? I wasn’t sure. If I could have channeled his presence to assist in this interview, I certainly would have.

  I could have said,“Holy shit!”in response to Gibbs’s accusation of her husband, but I didn’t.

  Or I could’ve said,“That doesn’t really surprise me,”because it didn’t. Not totally, anyway. Sterling Storey was, like his wife, not only charmed but a charmer. I also suspected that he was a bully. Or more accurately, an intimidator. I’d seen his act up close and personal during one of our conjoint psychotherapy sessions.

  As I exhaled, I reminded myself that the fact that Sterling had taken a few cheap verbal shots at Gibbs a decade before didn’t mean he was capable of murder.

  But I also recalled the razor edge of his glare. The fact that I remembered it at all told me something that I was certain was relevant. I’d witnessed the glare, I think, during the second of our three sessions. Gibbs had said something about… God, I couldn’t remember what Gibbs had said something about, and Sterling had touched her knee to get her attention and had then frozen her with a look so menacing that I remembered it as though it had happened only yesterday.

  Gibbs had backed down like a good hound ordered to heel.

  And then she’d changed the subject.

  What had the subject been?

  I couldn’t recall.

  In reply to her accusation about Sterling, I could have asked Gibbs,“Why are you telling me this? Why aren’t you at the police station with this information?”But I knew there would be a reason. Maybe not a good reason, one that might sway me. But there
would be a reason, one that would teach me something important about the woman who sat across from me.

  I bought time. I crossed my left leg over the right and said, “Why don’t you tell me exactly what you’re concerned about.”

  Announcing her suspicion of her husband hadn’t robbed Gibbs of any of her composure. Her feet stayed side by side in their fashionable slides, and the smooth inner surfaces of her knees still touched as though she were intent on keeping a slip of paper clenched between them without dimpling it. Her shoulders were straight enough to please a Marine drill sergeant, and her spine erect enough to parallel a flagpole. She held her hands as though she were waiting for a photographer to finish snapping a glamour shot of her God-knows-how-many-carat engagement ring.

  “I don’t really even know how to talk about this.” She adjusted those lovely hands, moving them to a position as if in prayer, but her fingertips were pointed toward me, not the heavens. “Louise was our friend in California. In Laguna Beach. But… it’s not just Louise.”

  It’s not just Louise?

  “Louise is the one who was murdered?”

  “Yes, in 1997. While we were living in Corona Del Mar. She was killed at her apartment on Crescent Bay on Thanksgiving Day. Or nearby, anyway. We’d just finished redoing our cottage. Right from the start the police suspected that her assailant wasn’t close to her. They thought the guy who killed her might have known her, you know, casually, but wasn’t close to her. She wasn’t from there; she was British. But no one has ever been arrested.”

  We’d just finished redoing our cottage?

  “And you think Sterling was involved?”

  “Involved? That’s a funny word. Well, I think Sterling did it. Who am I kidding? Although I don’t want to believe it, I guess I know he did. He had a thing… going with her.”

  “A sexual thing? An affair?”

  “Of course.”

  The string of her earlier words that had initially caught my attention was still bouncing around my head like a Miller moth trapped behind a miniblind. I repeated the words aloud. “Gibbs, what did you mean when you said before, ‘It’s not just Louise’?”

  “This is weird,” she said.

  Tell me about it,I thought.

  “What did that mean, Gibbs? ‘It’s not just Louise.’ What did you mean by that?”

  “I don’t even know why I said it.”

  My mind raced ahead of her, but I tried to keep my focus. I decided not to say what was on my mind. Why? What was on my mind was that I didn’t believe her most recent denial. Inconsequential to the therapy perhaps, but an important point considering the circumstances.

  Things that are unimportant to the progression of therapy may be crucial to the prosecution of a murder.

  She clenched her teeth and tried to smile. Maybe she was fighting tears, but as incongruous as it was, I thought she was actually trying to smile.

  She raised her hands to her face to cover her mouth, then took them down again before she said, “You know Sterling, Dr. Gregory. I mean, yes, yes, yes, he has a temper. But could I really be married to a murderer? Or am I nuts?”

  Two different questions,I thought.

  Two different questions.

  Before I conjured up a response, I remembered what it was that Gibbs had said a decade before that had earned her the memorable glare from Sterling.

  Sex.

  Gibbs had said something about sex.

  FIVE

  Louise had walked down the path to Crescent Bay from her flat on the cliff above the beach a hundred times. A thousand. She could have dodged the fat ropes of seaweed on the sand in her sleep. From where the shoreline started at the foot of the trail to the beginning of the rough rocks on the north end of the horseshoe cove wasn’t more than a few dozen steps. Carrying her old trainers in her hands, she crossed the area in seconds, careful to stay above the high-tide line. The beach had already yielded the day’s heat, and the sand that crept up between her toes was cool and dry.

  She wondered what he had planned.

  Something imaginative, she hoped. God, she needed a man to show some imagination.

  That lad in Paris? The Australian? He hadn’t been bad. But it was all about the shot for him, not about the setup.

  She needed someone to care about the setup, too. The match wasn’t just about the goal.

  She’d checked her watch before she left her flat. He’d said seven-thirty. She hadn’t walked out her door until a quarter to eight. She knew she was worth waiting for. Whatever he had planned, she was worth waiting for.

  And she was game.

  She checked the Walkman in her hand and adjusted the headphones on her ears, waiting for his next words. His first words had been “Leave it running, now. The silence is part of the mystery. Follow my commands. And trust me. Do what I say.”

  At the foot of the rocks she brushed the sand off her feet and pulled on her shoes, then scampered up the rocks toward the tide pools. Her favorite pool, the big one that was shaped like Maui, would be covered by the encroaching tide already. She hoped that in the recession between waves-she thought of it as the ocean’s inhale-she could maybe steal a quick glance at the cluster of urchins in the southeast corner of the pool.

  She loved those urchins, though she couldn’t have said why.

  “Up toward the pools. Do it without a flashlight, now. No peeking. Let yourself be surprised.” The voice in her ears, electronically distorted, made her smile. It was a nice touch.

  She wasn’t carrying a torch; she didn’t need one here any more than she’d need one to find the loo in her flat in the dark. The night wasn’t totally black, but even if it were, she knew these rock paths like she knew the cabin of a 747. She could wander these cliffs at any tidal level without a map. She knew the path all the way from Crescent Bay to Emerald Bay. She could do it in a storm if she had to.

  “Keep going, my lady. Don’t be impatient. You’ll find your reward. Soon, soon, soon.” The voice prodded her. “Look up. Look down. Look, look, look.”

  Finally, she spotted a basket. An old-fashioned picnic basket. High up on a rock shelf, almost above her reach.

  She pulled it down, flipped open the lid, and her heart soared just a little.

  Meursault. God, she loved Meursault. Fresh gherkins. Pâté.Well,she thought,I’m not a vegan tonight.

  She was late.But where is he?

  She removed the cork from the bottle, poured herself a glass of wine, and nibbled on a gherkin as she watched the fluorescence of the nighttime waves crash higher and higher on the rocks above the pools, closer and closer to her perch.

  “Lovely,” she said aloud. “Lovely.”

  “The night will surprise you. Prepare,” the recorded voice murmured into her ears.

  “It’s a good start,” she admitted out loud.

  Sitting on the sharp edges of the jagged rocks was less than comfortable. She moved to a squatting position and began to wonder how on earth the goal was going to be scored without scarring one of them forever on the rock faces.

  She smiled.It will be fun to find out.

  “Open your blouse. Now!”

  Ooooh. Urgency.

  Okay, okay.Button by button, she did.

  “Don’t turn around.”

  Her chest pounded. She was having trouble catching her breath.

  Less than a second later her feet were out from beneath her and something sharp and hard was surrounding her neck and her attempts at breathing were thwarted. Totally thwarted.

  She struggled at the ligature. It didn’t help.

  Moments later she didn’t even feel the cold chill of the Pacific as she spilled forward into the darkness.

  SIX

  Patients returning to see me after an extended absence from treatment, like Gibbs Storey, tend to labor under the suspicion that a decade does nothing to alter my recall of the facts of their lives. The truth is that that is not the truth. Since Gibbs and Sterling last left my office on their way to Capistrano or C
orona or Laguna or Newport Beach or wherever they ended up, a few hundred new patients had crossed my threshold and told me their tales. That’s too many stories for my brain to juggle. Way too many. Scores too many. Sometimes I got the details confused. I would assign faulty facts to a patient or misremember who had died in what year, who had what illness, and who had slept with whom.

  So why didn’t I just go back to my patient files and refresh my memory?

  Because as a general rule I put few facts in my case notes. The more potentially private the fact, the less likely I was to put it on paper. Why? Because doctor-patient confidentiality is not a brick wall that forever separates my knowledge of my patient from the gaze of the judicial system. Confidentiality is actually a brick wall with a few conveniently spaced locked gates. And the courts, not I, hold the keys to those gates. Whatever I wrote down might therefore someday become public. In all my years in clinical practice I hadn’t discovered a single reason to volunteer to be a conduit to making the private public.

  Consequently, I didn’t write much down.

  I caught Diane Estevez in our little kitchen about an hour after Gibbs left my office. Diane would remember everything that I’d forgotten about our ancient conjoint treatment of the Storeys. I suspected sometimes when I queried her about such things that Diane made up whatever she didn’t actually remember, but in any event, her recall would appear seamless and complete.

  “Hey, Alan, how’s Sam?”

  Although I hadn’t had a chance to tell her about Sam’s heart attack, I wasn’t surprised that she already knew. Diane had sources everywhere. If gossip was an art form, she was the Picasso of our generation.

  “He had an angiogram this morning. I’ll know more later today when I go visit him.”

  “Angioplasty, too? Stent?”

  “I’m still waiting to hear.”

  “But it was an MI?”

  “Enzymes say yes. They used clot busters.”

  “Keep me informed.”