Blinded

by Stephen White

  Failing that dissuasion, she could have done Marilyn just as easily as Grace.

  All he’d had to do was tell her. Was that too much to ask?

  Louise was one of the last to leave the party, shutting down the new great room bar around three. Gibbs volunteered Sterling, who never drank when he was hosting a party, to drive Louise down the coast to her home in Laguna. After a tepid protest Louise agreed to give up her car keys and accept the ride.

  Sterling pulled his car out of the garage in Corona at three-fifteen.

  He didn’t return home until the sun was beginning to crest the string of coastal hills in the South Bay the next morning.

  “That was October. What about November? Can we get there soon?” Carmen Reynoso asked. I suspected that she lacked a therapist’s natural respect for backstory, but didn’t say so. It was something we could discuss at another time. Or not.

  Sterling had blown off Gibbs’s concerns about the lost hours before dawn on Crescent Bay on All Saints’ Day morning. He told his wife that he and Louise had talked for a while. That was it.

  Gibbs didn’t trust Sterling much, from a fidelity point of view. And she didn’t believe him often, at least where other women were concerned. But she’d let the issue go. She’d watch for signs. With Sterling and other women she did that a lot.

  Louise didn’t spend much time in Laguna during the first three weeks of November, and although she spoke with Gibbs a couple of times on the phone, they didn’t see each other during that period. Louise had bid for, and received, a month flying routes into De Gaulle and JFK because she adored being in both New York and Paris over Christmas. She didn’t want to be in either city for Thanksgiving, though. She had four days off, Tuesday through Friday of the holiday week, and she was planning to spend them alone in Laguna. Helena was working, and Paulie and his latest partner were doing Ibiza.

  Louise called Gibbs from her rental car on Tuesday afternoon to bitch about the traffic on the 405 and to gossip about an Australian tennis player she’d met while her actual date, an American lawyer, was in the WC at Les Deux Magots on the Left Bank in Paris. She reiterated her promise to come for Thanksgiving dinner on Thursday.

  Gibbs reminded her that dinner would be early; the turkey would be carved at five.

  And Louise reminded Gibbs that she didn’t eat turkey and that she’d recently realized that she was only two minor obstacles away from being a true vegan.

  Gibbs had asked what the obstacles were.

  Louise had replied, “Paris, and meat.”

  “That was Tuesday?” Carmen Reynoso clarified. “Two days before Thanksgiving?”

  “Yes,” I said, recognizing that the calendar pages had flipped forward to almost the exact same spot in the current year. I went on. “Gibbs said Louise was killed that night, not the next day like the newspapers reported.”

  “Please go on with your story.”

  “Please remember, it’s not my story. It’s Gibbs’s story. I’m just repeating what I was told. You can tell me one thing, though-is Gibbs correct about the time of death? Please tell me that.”

  “We’ll get there, we’ll get there,” Reynoso said. When the issue was my ignorance and not her own, she was suddenly a very patient woman.

  For some reason I thought of Sam.

  The tape recorder snapped off. Carmen Reynoso fumbled in her bag for a spare tape. After she exchanged the tapes, she said, “Go on.”

  Sterling wasn’t due home from New Orleans until Wednesday, late. Gibbs had completed the holiday shopping, supervised the house-cleaning, and done all the prep work she was planning to do in the kitchen before Thursday’s meal. She had a Mexican woman whose name she didn’t remember coming in to do most of the cooking on Thanksgiving morning.

  By Tuesday afternoon Gibbs was bored. She decided to surprise Louise. She’d pick her up and welcome her home by taking her out to dinner somewhere in Laguna.

  About a block from Crescent Bay, Gibbs spotted Sterling’s car parked on the street.

  She almost missed it. What caught her eye was the bright red hat with the network logo that he kept on the shelf behind the backseat.

  “A block away?”

  “About a block away.”

  “She didn’t tell you exactly where?”

  “I don’t know Laguna Beach, Detective. I wouldn’t recognize any landmarks. I’m sure Gibbs will tell you.”

  “Did she say what kind of car?”

  “I don’t think so. She may have. If she did, I’ve forgotten.”

  “You forgot? Anything else you forgot, Doctor?”

  Gibbs drove a few blocks away from Louise’s home and phoned Sterling’s office from her car. His secretary reminded her that he was still in New Orleans and suggested Gibbs try him on his cell phone.

  To get to Louise’s apartment, a visitor could use the public access path partway to the beach, then cut across an aging flagstone trail to the deck. Gibbs returned to Crescent Bay, parked near the top of the public path, descended a few yards, stopped, and listened.

  She heard Sterling and Louise arguing. She couldn’t tell about what. But she heard her name.

  Gibbs.

  Sterling had yelled, “I don’t fucking care about Gibbs.”

  Gibbs headed back up the path in tears. Up near her car she heard a scream. She wasn’t sure if it was Louise or not. At the time she thought it couldn’t be. Why would it be? When she heard the news later, on Thanksgiving afternoon, she wasn’t so sure.

  Back at her car, she grabbed her phone and punched in the number of Sterling’s cell. The distinctive sound of her husband’s ringing phone traveled up the slope to where she was standing.

  She killed the call.

  “I think you know the rest,” I said.

  “I’d like to hear about his reaction when the body was discovered. Can you talk about that?”

  “Yes. Yes, I can.”

  Sterling was home, as scheduled, late in the evening on Wednesday. Gibbs never said anything to him about what she had witnessed the previous afternoon.

  On Thanksgiving Day, as was his practice, Sterling had all the TVs in the house tuned to football games. But he wasn’t watching football; he was watching coverage, production. The competition. At three-thirty a local news update reported that a partially clothed female body had been discovered facedown in a tide pool at Emerald Bay in Laguna Beach. Stay tuned, more after the game.

  Gibbs hadn’t paid much attention. Sterling didn’t stray more than a few feet from the television.

  A few minutes later Sterling asked Gibbs what time Louise was due for dinner. Gibbs said any time.

  He said he hoped Louise was okay.

  “ ‘Okay’? That’s the word he used?” Reynoso asked, frowning.

  “That’s the word Gibbs said he used.”

  The news report from Laguna Beach was repeated about a half hour later. This time there was a news crew live at the scene, and they were showing videotape of a wide shot of a body sprawled on the rocks on the north end of the horseshoe that was Crescent Bay. The tide was coming back in, and waves were lifting plumes of spray into the air as they crashed onto the rocks. The earlier report about Emerald Bay had been in error.

  The body by the tide pool was draped with a sheet striped in pastels.

  “I’m going down there,” Sterling said to his wife.

  “Why?”

  “I have a bad feeling about Louise.”

  “ ‘A bad feeling’?”

  “Yes, a bad feeling.”

  “Huh.”

  When Sterling got home, dinner was cold. As he ate a turkey and stuffing sandwich with cranberry sauce and lots of black pepper, he told Gibbs that he thought Louise had been strangled.

  “ ‘Strangled’?”

  “Yes.”

  “He said that?”

  “According to Gibbs.”

  “That would have been when-six o’clock, seven?”

  “You’ll have to ask Gibbs.”

  “A
nything else?”

  “Sterling told her that he thought that somebody must have broken into Louise’s apartment. He bet that the killer had broken a window and just gone in that rickety back door.”

  TWENTY-SIX

  Carmen Reynoso sat back and crossed her arms.

  “Why did you make the call? Why didn’t Gibbs call us herself?”

  “I’m not quite sure about the answer to that one, Detective. It has something to do with the nature of the betrayal she feels she’s engaged in. Turning her husband in is one thing. Making the actual call is something else.”

  “You think it’s psychology, then?”

  “Isn’t everything?”

  “No. Some things are just criminal.”

  The distinction was obviously clearer to her than it was to me.

  “Are we done?” I asked. I was tired, and the clock told me my girls were due home any minute. I really didn’t want Detective Reynoso here when they walked in the door.

  She stood. “Except for your earlier question. Time of death? Remember? You still interested?”

  “I didn’t think you were actually going to answer me.”

  The snow was coming down in waves. A curtain of white, thick enough to obscure the entire valley, would blow by over the course of a few minutes, and then suddenly a sparser fall would reveal the dark geometry of the fence posts and dirt tracks in the greenbelt below our house. After a brief interlude of visibility the curtain would shut, the angularity would disappear, and the world would again become white.

  A couple inches of snow were already piled on the grasses and in places on the ground that spent the late autumn in shadows.

  Carmen Reynoso stared at the winter spectacle, her lips parted. “I’ve only seen snow a few times in my life. I’m an Oakland girl. Didn’t ever get to Lake Tahoe much. It’s mesmerizing.”

  The sardonic quality of her Lake Tahoe comment was oddly alluring. I said, “There’s a moment during every storm when I’m overcome by the beauty of it all. And a moment, usually a little later on, when I’m almost-almost-overcome by the aggravation of it all.”

  She turned back toward me, puzzlement in her eyes.

  I explained. “Driving in it. Shoveling it. Walking through the slush of it. It gets old.”

  Her next words surprised me.

  She said, “You’re not a romantic, are you? I took you for a romantic. A knight-in-shining-armor-type guy.”

  “Wrong conclusion, I think. I am a romantic. I’ll be romantic about this storm all day today and all night. Then tomorrow morning, sometime around fiveA.M.,my neighbor will fire up her little green John Deere and start plowing our lane. That’s when the romance will begin to disintegrate, with the sound of my neighbor singing Christmas carols on her John Deere at five o’clock in the morning.”

  “And that’s so bad because…”

  “You’d have to know Adrienne. She makes up her own words to the carols, and she can’t sing to save her life.”

  Reynoso stepped away from the windows. “At least you get your driveway plowed.”

  “You have a little Pollyanna in you, don’t you, Detective?”

  “Very little, Doctor. Tomorrow’s Sunday. Maybe your neighbor will take the Lord’s day off.”

  “Maybe,” I agreed. “That would be nice.” I didn’t bother to clarify that if Adrienne was anything religiously, she was Jewish, and that affiliation would make her Sabbath Saturday, not Sunday.

  “The time of Louise Lake’s death has never been made public.” Reynoso’s change of direction was abrupt. Sam did the same thing to me sometimes. I was beginning to suspect that cops in general have an underappreciation of the value of segue in conversation. “The press has always reported it was Wednesday, and we’ve never contradicted them in any of our public statements. Gibbs’s contention that it was Tuesday, not Wednesday, is what hooked us-hooked me, anyway-that her story might be… real. Because the coroner says it was indeed late afternoon, early evening on Tuesday, and not late Wednesday, that Louise Lake was murdered.”

  I tried to keep my face impassive.

  “But what really hooked me was something Gibbs didn’t say, that she only implied. We’ve left the public with the impression that Louise was murdered on the beach and her body was pulled out into the water. Numerous reports from neighbors indicated that she walked the cove and the tide pools at least twice a day when she was staying in town, often at dawn or dusk. The public version of the crime is that someone followed her to the beach, or waited and accosted her there, and killed her. Maybe a crime of opportunity, maybe not.”

  “But she didn’t die on the beach?”

  “No. She died on the rocks. Her body had premorbid wounds from the rocks. And the broken window in her back door? It’s not public information, either. Therefore Sterling knew something he shouldn’t know.”

  “Why was the window broken? Is there is evidence of a struggle in the house?”

  “No comment.”

  “You haven’t talked with Sterling yet?”

  “No. He’s in Florida. Something tells me he’s going to lawyer up anyway. I’m proceeding as though we’re not going to have an opportunity to interview him.”

  “Do you have enough to arrest him?”

  “If we did, he’d be in custody.”

  I tried a segue-free transition of my own. “Why a tide pool? The killer must have known the body would be discovered soon enough.”

  “Louise Lake’s body was not placed in the tide pool. It was dumped into the Pacific, we think it got caught on something, and was in the water for almost thirty-six hours before it floated free and back into the tide pool during high tide.”

  We walked to the entryway, and I helped her with her coat.

  “You can’t repeat any of this,” she said.

  “Of course,” I said. I was already wondering why she had told me what she’d told me. I wasn’t considering the possibility that her volubility on the subject of Louise’s murder was evidence of indiscretion. Rather, I assumed that Reynoso had another motive for talking with me. What? I wasn’t smart enough to know.

  She went on. “I heard from a couple of local cops that over the years you’ve demonstrated some wisdom about forensic things-you know, from a psychological perspective-so let me ask you something. From what you know about him-I’m talking Sterling Storey, obviously-could he have done it? Could he have killed Louise Lake?”

  I considered the flattery-the spoonful of sugar-and the question-the bitter pill-that she wanted me to swallow. I said, “I’m sorry, but answering that would take me places that I’m not permitted to go, confidentialitywise. I wish I could respond, although I’m not sure of the value of what I might have to offer. Opinions are opinions, you know.”

  That little crease reappeared above her nose. She said, “I think I’ll just take that as a yes.”

  Changing the subject seemed like a good idea. “Are you okay driving in this? In snow?”

  “How would I know?”

  “If you don’t know, then you’re not okay.”

  “Any tips for a virgin?”

  “Take it slow. Don’t be afraid to use second gear. Ignore the assholes plowing by you in four-wheel-drive pickups and SUVs.”

  “And if I skid on the ice?”

  “Don’t. It’s better if you don’t skid.”

  “Thanks. I’ll try to remember that.”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  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?”