And, even though I was far from wealthy, I didn’t ride a cheap bike. That wasn’t an anomaly in Boulder, where having a bicycle, or two, much grander and more expensive than one’s car is not an unusual occurrence.
Raoul took one look at my old polo shirt, glanced at my even older jeans, and offered a grin at the pair of running shoes I’d bought on sale at Gart Brothers when Bill Clinton was still president, and when Monica was still an acceptable name for a female infant. Then Raoul chanced a restrained smile at his lovely wife—Diane looked gorgeous in the kind of dress rarely seen in Spanish Hills; she cleaned up good, always had—and said, “I thought you told me that Alan and Lauren would be invited to this party.”
He said it with a warm tease in his tone.
Diane shrugged the shrug of someone who expects to be right even when she clearly isn’t. She lifted an airy shawl from the upper reaches of her bare arms to the rise of her shoulders.
Raoul said, “Alain, non? You are not part of the festivities?” Raoul blended languages like a talented bartender mixes spirits in a cocktail. The result was almost always interesting.
“No, not this time,” I said. “I’m sure there will be plenty of opportunities in the future.”
Diane shrugged again. “Maybe it’s the theme,” she said.
“I thought housewarming was the theme?” Raoul said.
“Mimi’s parties always have themes. You never read invitations, Raoul. This event is called Two Cents. She wants all of her friends to give our opinions about how we think they should renovate the house.”
Raoul said, “I just assumed that Mimi would take this opportunity to meet the—”
“No, no. It’s fine,” I said, trying to short-circuit any discomfort. “I think it’s better that we skip this one. I’m actually yet to meet Mimi, Diane. I’ve only spoken to Mattin, Matt, once. He seems to be out of town a lot,” I said, offering an easy rationale for why our new neighbors excluded us. “Absolutely no hard feelings. We’re probably not the best people to participate in a group activity about remodeling Adrienne’s home, anyway.”
Raoul said, “Mattin’s his TV name. His friends call him Hake. I don’t think anyone calls him Matt.”
Raoul pronounced Hake like rake. Not Hak-e, like Rock-ay.
During our brief conversation about rogue dogs, my new neighbor did not once suggest I should call him Hake. On television, he was Mattin Snow. But, when discussing my wayward dog, I really thought he said he was Matt.
I said, “Come on, it makes perfect sense. I’m sure they’re eager for their old friends to get a chance to see the new . . . place, without the neighbors looking over their shoulders.” Lauren and I had heard from the real estate agent who had listed the house—he lived at the other end of the lane—that both of our new neighbors had referred to Peter and Adrienne’s place not as a home, not as a house, but as a “wonderful opportunity.” We knew change was coming.
Diane took her husband’s arm. Over his shoulder, Raoul said, “We’re still on for tomorrow, right? To discuss the Walnut thing?”
Diane shook her head. At the thing, or at her husband’s mixing of business with pleasure, I did not know.
“I will be there, Raoul.”
“A bientôt.”
7
I woke first on the morning after the damn housewarming. The wind had stopped blowing but had left in its wake an unwelcome gray sky and a blanket of cold, damp air. Just before six forty-five, when I took the dogs out for their morning stroll, I could see my exhaled breath. I wasn’t ready for a regular diet of visible exhalations. Within ten steps of the front door, I had already begun awaiting the next interlude of Indian summer—the Front Range usually gets a few before the determined chill of the dark season takes over.
November is way late for Indian summer, but Colorado is home, almost exclusively, to weather optimists.
Across the lane, only one car remained from the party the night before. It was that little SUV, or crossover, parked near the very end of the lane.
Japan, Korea. Honda, Toyota, Kia, Hyundai. Gray, brown. Few cars made an impression on me. It was one of the many that didn’t. Since it wasn’t a classic Camaro, or a Mercedes or BMW or Land Rover, and since the caterers were long gone, I considered that it might have belonged to a housekeeper who had stayed over to straighten up after the previous night’s festivities.
The dogs and I ambled down the lane to search for the mobile phone I had launched while dodging the caterer’s truck. I had Lauren’s cell with me. I hoped that dialing my own number from her phone would cause mine to ring, ending my treasure hunt. That is, if a prairie dog hadn’t filched it.
I called myself. I located the phone. The day began to look auspicious.
I heard the engine of the nondescript SUV come to life behind me as I was herding the dogs back in the front door. I turned to look at the occupant, but the car’s glass was rendered opaque by a thin covering of frost.
Inside the house, Gracie was in bed reading, while Jonas was sleeping the sleep of preadolescence. Lauren had suffered through a difficult night but was finally asleep, so I tried to be as quiet as I could be as I urged Gracie to get ready for dance class.
She had just started taking tumbling and jazz/contemporary. This would be session number three. I’d watched the first two classes—they involved little girls alternating between being precious while they pretended to dance and then being tomboys as they did cartwheels and somersaults.
Grace was loving the experience. She’d always been a tough kid, but it was becoming clearer every day that she was also being influenced by tidal estrogen flows. I watched with parental wonder as she balanced on the developmental fence between tomboy land and the princess castle. Lauren thought she would fall to one side soon. I was thinking that she might keep her balance on the fence for a while longer.
A more immediate crisis loomed. She wanted to wear her purple tights to class. I could find only her pink tights. She wanted to wake her mommy to find the purple tights. I thought that was particularly unwise.
We worked it out. Grace almost always knew when to push and when to retreat. I envied the kid’s radar.
I got toast, juice, and a banana in her and we hustled to the car. On our way out the lane, just beyond the spot on the S-curve where the caterer’s van had almost taken a tumble, I pulled over to allow a black limousine to pass. I sighed. Traffic near my home had never before been much of a concern. Limos, in particular, were as rare as comets.
“Who’s that for?” Gracie asked.
“Not us,” I said.
“The new neighbors then,” she said with a bit of a tone.
My attitude about the new neighbors, I sensed, was infectious, and not in a good way. I promised myself I would watch it, at least around the kids.
“I guess.”
“Are they on a reality show?” Gracie asked.
God help us. “I don’t think so, honey. The car is just here to pick someone up.”
“Cars like that come once you’ve been eliminated. Maybe they got voted off.”
“Off what?”
Gracie gave my question some serious thought. She shrugged. “Our mountain, I guess. They got voted off our mountain.”
I wish we could vote people off our mountain. For the time being, we had them outnumbered. “People can’t get voted off our mountain,” I said. “Cars like that come for other reasons, too.”
“Limos never came for Adrienne,” my daughter pointed out.
The limo driver tipped an imaginary cap at me as he passed. The back of the vehicle was unoccupied. I gave the driver a thumbs-up in response. Life with our new neighbors promised to bring many changes to our corner of Spanish Hills.
Lauren’s last thoughts when I climbed into bed late the night before had been, “Hear Raoul out, tomorrow. Please? We need to be open-minded.”
Maybe Lauren was right. Maybe the environment was ripe for change.
She hadn’t said it out loud yet, but every
time that Lauren encouraged me to open myself to change, I was hearing her preparing the soil for a single crop: she wanted to discuss leaving Spanish Hills.
I knew the arguments. We live too far from town. We’re always schlepping the kids somewhere. Lauren and stairs no longer get along. Peter and Adrienne are gone. Jonas needs a clean break.
It might indeed be time, is what I had started thinking.
I PLANNED TO SKIP DANCE CLASS NUMBER THREE. My cop friend Sam Purdy was going to meet me at the Village for breakfast while Grace danced and tumbled. Seconds after I pulled into the strip center parking lot on Folsom, my phone chirped with a text. I bet it was from Sam, but I had to wait to check while a guy the size of Paul Bunyan pulled his considerable mass into a Tahoe the size of an Abrams tank. The tires he’d mounted on his elevated rig were shaped like Krispy Kremes on steroids. The truck filled two spots in the tiny lot. It didn’t have to, but the guy had parked so that it did.
I wondered if he could be voted out of the parking lot.
The driver spotted me waiting for him to depart, which is never a good thing. I waited while he checked his phone. Straightened his sunglasses. Played with his radio. Pulled on his seat belt. Looked in the mirror while he practiced chin thrusts? What? Who does that? Finally, he backed up slowly, as though he were practicing docking the space shuttle to the International Space Station and he didn’t trust his instruments. I was not at all surprised to learn that the truck’s exhaust was tuned to approximate the sound of repetitive sonic booms.
I pulled into one of the two spots the truck vacated. A Smart car immediately took the other. The line was out the door at the Village.
Sam’s text read: Luce needs me. Sorry. Off to 33rd.
“Luce” was Lucy Davenport, Sam’s detective partner in the Boulder Police Department, and “33rd” was 33rd Street, home of the Public Safety Building.
Hope it’s nothing is what I texted back. But I knew that if it were nothing, Lucy wouldn’t have called Sam in on a Saturday morning. A senior detective pair catching a routine call on a day off? Not a chance. Either something big had happened, or Sam and Lucy were being punished for something.
Although I couldn’t rule out the latter hypothesis—neither cop was renowned for rule-following inclinations; Sam’s recent history of transgressions was much worse than Lucy’s—I was wondering if Boulder had suffered a rare homicide.
Ha was Sam’s texted retort to my good wishes.
Breakfast at the Village had been Sam’s idea, not mine. I gave up my parking spot and headed up Canyon to 14th Street in the direction of Lucile’s.
I knew that the line would be out the door at Lucile’s, too. But my kid was doing interpretive dance and cartwheels, so I had time to waste. I lucked into an angled parking spot near my lawyer Cozy Maitlin’s office across from the Colorado Building on the other side of the Mall. I hoofed it from there. What breeze was left from the night before was still from the north, so I could smell chicory and beignets wafting in my direction the moment I opened the car door.
I grabbed a seat at the communal table and ordered eggs and grits and toast and coffee. And a beignet. While I ate, I read an article in the Daily Camera’s sports section about how the Buffs were about to rescue their disappointing season by surprising some ranked football foe. I was thinking I’d read an annual version of the same story every fall for at least a decade.
I STAYED IN TOWN ALL MORNING. Soccer practice followed dance class for Gracie. I had her back home, as I promised Lauren I would, in time to get her ready for a one thirty birthday party. Gracie had a full social calendar.
Jonas, on the other hand, was still looking for his social niche. Through no fault of his own, his path in life was a difficult one. He’d lost his father to a homicide when he was still too young to realize what had happened. Then, only the previous year, he had lost his mom to a bomb in a cowardly battle in a decades-old foreign war. Jonas had taken shrapnel in his leg from the same explosion that took his mother. His emotional wounds were more visible to me than were his permanent physical scars.
From the moment I flew to Israel to retrieve him after the terrorist bombing, I was determined to be a good card in his bad hand. I didn’t know how I was going to do it, but I was determined to succeed as his parent.
He and I had plans to go to a movie later that afternoon. Jonas and I went to a lot of movies, often late on weekend afternoons. He tended to choose adolescent fare that I considered too lurid or too lusty for him, or childish flicks that seemed to provide some regressed comfort. I assumed he was working out something with his attraction to the violence. I usually went along with his choice. With the blood and guts, my consent was usually reluctant. On the lusty side? I didn’t care if he saw an exposed breast or two.
I wasn’t sure about many things as a parent, but I was completely certain that no child had ever been harmed by gazing at a boob.
On rare occasions, Jonas would ask me to pick the movie. Those times, I’d take him to a film at the university or to a theater playing classics I’d really liked—movies I wanted to share with him. He had loved The Sting. And the first Indiana Jones. The Great Escape. The Godfather. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. He’d thought Bridge on the River Kwai was “weak.” I defended it, but I couldn’t bring him around to my way of thinking.
I had no idea what that afternoon’s choice would bring.
But first I had that meeting with Raoul. He had an investment opportunity he wanted Lauren and me to consider. Something about Walnut.
8
Lauren called me into our bedroom while the kids were eating lunch. “Close the door,” she said. There had been phases in our marriage when a magical moment might have ensued. We weren’t enjoying one of those phases.
She sat on the edge of the bed up near her pillow. She sighed.
I said, “Gracie still loves dance. She may stick with it this time. She even likes the girly parts. Something is changing for her, you know.”
“I can tell,” Lauren said. “She talks about it all the time.” She smiled. Then she stopped smiling. “Sam was here this morning along with a sheriff’s investigator.”
That was news. I sat down on the upholstered chair across from the bed. I figured the cops had stopped by for something to do with Lauren’s work. It was not an unheard-of occurrence. My wife was a deputy DA for Boulder County. I surmised that she was going to have to go to the office, which meant that I was going to have to get Grace to the birthday party.
God, I hope we have a present already. And that it’s wrapped. I asked, “Do you have something that’s breaking at work?” Sam was the Boulder PD detective who had stood me up at breakfast. His jurisdiction was the City of Boulder. Boulder County, which included the rural enclave where we lived, was the law enforcement purview of the Boulder sheriff. That representatives of both departments had been out our way together was an anomaly; the agencies rarely rolled together.
Lauren said, “They weren’t here to see me. They were across the lane for something. Neither of them would tell me why.
“The sheriff’s investigator was Courtney Rea. She recognized me from court. She asked me if I knew where our neighbors were, or when they’d be back. I said I didn’t.”
“That’s it?”
“Pretty much. Do you know Courtney?”
I shook my head. I’d met many of Sam’s police colleagues over the years but wasn’t well acquainted with the sheriff’s department staff. Through the DA’s office, Lauren got to know all the investigative players for both departments.
“She asked me how well I knew our neighbors. I told her they had just moved in—I don’t think she’d known that; she wrote it down—that I’d met them once, casually. She asked if I was aware of a gathering at their house last night. I said I saw a lot of cars over there before I went to bed and that some catering people had arrived earlier in the day. Sam stepped over and whispered something to Courtney. Courtney said that was it. She didn’t have any more questio
ns.”
I said, “Gracie and I saw a limo coming in the lane this morning when we were on our way to dance class. Mattin and Mimi must have had a car taking them someplace.”
“I missed all that. I didn’t get out of bed until late.”
That was her way of letting me know it had been another difficult night for her. She looked like she could use a smile. I told her about Gracie’s reaction to the limo and her theory about someone being voted off our mountain.
The story earned the smile. Lauren added, “I find it odd that Sam never offered a hint to me why he was out here. He played it cool, professional. I don’t think Courtney could have guessed that Sam knew me in any way other than through work. After she got in her car and took off, Sam backed up, leaned out the window, and said, ‘Leave this alone. The less you know, the better.’
“I saw nothing to indicate that anything special was going on. Their house has been quiet all day. No emergency response on the lane. No fire, no rescue. Just Sam and Courtney.”
“Why a cop and a deputy?” I asked. “That part makes no sense.”
Lauren didn’t know that either.
I hadn’t had a chance to tell Lauren about my run-in with the catering truck the night before. I filled her in.
“Idiots,” she said. “But it didn’t actually crash, right? You didn’t call it in?”
“I didn’t.”
She shook her head. “None of it makes sense.”
I asked, “Who was catching this morning at your office? They would know what’s going on.” A deputy district attorney was always on call to respond to the police department or the sheriff’s office regarding developing law enforcement situations. Occasionally, a crime scene or a fresh development in an ongoing investigation might require immediate consultation from the DA’s office.
The Last Lie Page 6