Raoul looked at me with infinite patience in his eyes. I envied his graciousness much more than I envied his attractiveness to women. Okay, I envied both.
He said, “Yes, all of those things you mention will be complications. But you know what they say about real estate, Alain? Location, location . . .” He spread his arms toward the depressing parking lot in front of us. “Well, this is . . . location.”
He sighed the contented sigh of an investor who was not interested in discussing risk after he had just been offered ten thousand shares of Google’s IPO. “It doesn’t get any better than this in Boulder. Not downtown. Try to assemble this amount of land within a mile of here. Not this quality of land—the quality can’t be duplicated—just this amount of land. Maybe with enough money, the Ideal Market site could be assembled—peut-être—but that fronts North Broadway, not Pearl, and it’s blocks from downtown. The Liquor Mart block? Nice, but too far from le coeur.” He placed his hand over the center of his chest. “Not the same. You can’t assemble land like this near the Mall. Remember what it took to get the St. Julien built? That was perimeter, and that land was vacant for years. It will never happen again. Jamais.
“If you ask the experienced developers on our team to identify the single best location for a high-end multiuse development in Boulder, every last one would point to this block. I know. Because we asked almost every one of them.”
Raoul didn’t need my help doing due diligence on his redevelopment dreams. I refocused my attention on my tiny corner of the Boulder redevelopment universe. “Where does Walnut fit into your grand scheme? Walnut is what, a block and a half away? I don’t see the connection.”
He turned to me and smiled his best gender-neutral, seductive, Casanova smile. A young woman walking down the alley toward Walnut noticed and assumed Raoul’s irresistible grin was intended for her. She smiled right back at him and added a definite arc to the curve of her hips as she sashayed by us.
Raoul winked at her. She dropped her chin as she tucked her long hair behind her ear. My mouth fell open in more than mild disbelief. If I had winked at her, she would have hit me. Literally, verbally. Somehow. One way or another, I would be in pain.
Raoul said, “You are wondering why are you here, Alain? Sí?”
“Other than to be humbled, yes.”
He ignored the compliment. “We may need Walnut to make the deal work.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Long story. Trust me. For later.”
I considered pressing him but realized that my effort would be in vain. “But the end of the long story is that your LLC wants, or maybe needs, to purchase Walnut Street? If Diane and I don’t sell, the redevelopment of the Camera property is in jeopardy?”
“It’s all a little more nuanced than that, but yes.”
“Diane knows about this?”
He made a dismissive noise. We had both known Diane for a long time. That meant we each knew that keeping secrets from Diane was like trying to keep news of your misbehavior from Santa Claus.
Raoul turned and began walking. I followed him around the corner so that we were heading west on Pearl, toward the mountains that stretched toward the sky ten blocks away. After a hundred feet or so, Raoul stepped inside the door of the West End Tavern, a destination I knew well. We climbed the stairs to the rooftop deck.
The West End’s outside space was packed with the late lunch crowd. Tourists and locals. On pretty days, and even days that aren’t quite pretty days, the rooftop deck of the West End was packed. Why? Because of the remarkable views.
From the deck of the West End, patrons can see the gentle rise of The Hill as it climbs from the edge of the flagstone Italianate buildings of the university campus. The backdrop of the foothills. The luxurious expanse of Chautauqua’s unspoiled acres below the vault of the Flatirons. The miles of protected green space.
“You remember this view?” Raoul said. “Before?”
Raoul meant before the recent construction of a new building to the west. “Yes. Before they built the monster wall next door.”
“Well, my Diane wants that view. For herself. In perpetuity,” he said. “The one from up here, from before.”
“Ah,” I said. “I think I’m finally getting this. You are not only developing a massive real estate project that promises to make you a ton of money you don’t need and promises to change the public face of Boulder’s West End forever. You are also buying a condominium in your new building? A home, a real home, for you and Diane.”
“The top floor. Facing south and west. With a big, big terrace”—tear-oss—“for the sunset. A lap pool for me. A fire pit. An outdoor kitchen. A fountain. Diane is hoping for a gazebo too, with curtains. Like Morocco? She dreams . . . I think the architects will say no. A gazebo on top of the building? With the chinooks? But she is hard to refuse. We will have a hundred square meters of terrace overlooking the Rockies. Maybe more.”
I considered asking him to translate that hundred square meters into hectares. “So this project is personal,” I said.
“Sí. Amor.”
10
The dogs and I went out for evening rounds.
For a while after Jonas’s puppy joined our household, we’d had three dogs. The second was a miniature poodle foster dog we were caring for as a favor to an enrollee in the witness protection program, WITSEC.
Over the previous Labor Day weekend, a federal marshal had knocked on our door and told us that he was there to collect Anvil, the foster dog. Just like that. Anvil had been ours for so long, I’d stopped believing that his aging mafioso owner would ever return to claim him.
“Carl is okay?” I said to the marshal. I knew the protected witness as Carl Luppo. I also knew it wasn’t his real name.
“Don’t know,” the marshal said. “I was told to get the dog. To tell you thanks.”
While the kids and Lauren said a sudden good-bye to our little tough-guy poodle, I packed up his crate and toys and food, and worried about the effects of the loss on the kids, especially Jonas.
Minutes later we were again a two-dog family. Our poodle had returned to witness protection. I hoped Carl was okay.
EMILY HAD A DESTINATION IN MIND FOR THAT NIGHT’S WALK. She had taken off uphill, on the path that ran near the basement walk-out on the south side of Peter and Adrienne’s house. I thought I’d take advantage of the fact that our neighbors seemed to be gone, and I took the same route with the puppy.
I guided Fiji uphill toward the ridge at the top of the Boulder Valley. Fiji, of course, started searching for prairie dogs. I phoned Sam. The top of the hill was five-bars country.
He answered with, “Sorry about breakfast. You catch the way the Avs lost this afternoon? Pitiful. Defenseman has to slow that guy. Goalie has to stop that shot. Has to.” He sighed. “I know they’re young, but I don’t care. Defenseman has to slow that guy.”
Sam had been, was, a defenseman. He took certain failures personally.
“Happens,” I said. I was talking about the missed breakfast, not the bad hockey. I added, “No worries,” mostly because I had kids in the house and needed practice employing their always-ephemeral vernacular. No worries was one of those phrases that would finally begin rolling off my tongue about two weeks after my children had officially started considering it lame.
Gracie, though a child in all ways, would be the first to note my bad timing. She would find it hilarious that once again I’d caught on to some fleeting social idiom a smidge too late. When I’d recently stumbled into a similar swamp, she’d announced deadpan at the dinner table, “Dad just hit another three-pointer right after the buzzer.”
Although I knew Grace was repeating something she’d heard from her brother, it stung me even more that my barely six-year-old daughter had zinged me with an almost perfect use of a sports metaphor.
“So you were home last night?” Sam asked me.
Interesting, I thought. Last night would have been Friday, the night of the damn housewarm
ing. I was giving him some latitude to see what he was going to reveal about his morning visit to Spanish Hills in the company of the sheriff’s investigator.
“I was,” I said. “I think I’m getting boring.”
“ ’Fraid that ship has sailed,” Sam said.
I waited for a good fifteen seconds to see if Sam planned to continue the conversational thread. When it appeared he didn’t, I said, “Heard you came up this way after you ditched me at breakfast. Lauren saw you.”
“She’s still using the cane? Yes?”
I recognized Sam’s attempt to hijack the conversation. “Why were you here? Must have been some kind of big deal to bring both you and a sheriff’s investigator out on a Saturday morning.”
“Don’t make assumptions, Alan. The less curious you are about my visit this morning, the better.”
“I’m already curious.”
“You’re not listening. You don’t want to know why we were there. Understand?”
I let the air go dead between us. I still had questions. “I need to ask a question before I take your advice.”
“I wish I was surprised.”
“I’m a father and a husband. With responsibilities. Is there something that a couple of detectives know about my new neighbors that a father and a husband with responsibilities would want to know, too?”
Sam hesitated again. Only seconds, but still. God damn, I thought.
No more than three seconds later than he should have, he finally said, “You’re good . . . on that.”
Sam lied to me. What the hell happened during that party? “But your visit here today had to do with last night. I’m basing that assumption on your question about whether or not I was home.”
Sam didn’t reply. “Diane and Raoul were at the party, Sam. Diane will tell me every last detail. You know her. Once I ask her how the housewarming went, the only way I won’t know what happened is to put fingers in both my ears and sing la-la-la-la-la until she stops talking.”
“Diane and Raoul were there?”
Sam hadn’t known that? Huh? “They’re friends with our new neighbors.”
He said, “Doesn’t matter. I think you’ll find that Diane’s natural inclination to gossip is on hold. Let it go, my friend. You don’t have the finesse to play in this league.”
“Should I be insulted?”
“No,” he said. “It’s not a nice league.”
“I’ll consider your advice. As a friend.” Sam laughed. “You were a little out of your jurisdiction up here,” I said.
“Things get confused sometimes,” he said. “Police work isn’t always science.”
“What is it? Art?”
“Some art. Mostly just not science.”
“What about forensics?”
“That’s the part that’s science. But they don’t pay me to do the science. They pay me to do the analytical part, the art. They don’t pay me much, but . . . hey, I got work.”
“Even, it turns out, when the work is out of your jurisdiction,” I said.
I didn’t expect to get any more of an explanation from Sam about the jurisdiction issues beyond his “things get confused” headline, but it turned out that he was willing to add some detail. “Complainant came into 33rd. Thought the events in question took place in Boulder. Almost nobody in Boulder knows where Boulder begins and Boulder ends. People think Boulder’s bigger than it is. Gotta be a metaphor there.” I was tempted to chime in, but Sam was on a roll that I didn’t want to interrupt. “But since the person in question didn’t know the city limits and didn’t have a street address for the residence . . . we didn’t know to hand off to the sheriff. By the time Lucy got it sorted out—and discovered that the cul-de-sac in question is in the county—I’d already screwed my Saturday.”
“I prefer to think of our lane as a dead end. Not a cul-de-sac.”
“Call it whatever you want. But I did get a chance to see your lovely wife.” Sam paused right there. “She’s still moving . . . I don’t know, slowly.”
“She’s kind of plateaued, Sam. Mobility-wise. The recovery has been more gradual than we’d like.”
“Give her more time. Healing? It’s about time.”
Sam knew a little about the slow healing of significant others.
“I want to make sure I get it—you and Lucy are off this case? It’s the sheriff’s?”
“You got it.”
“Just tell me why I don’t want to know what happened. Why all the secrecy?”
“Ever noticed we don’t say a whole lot about active investigations? That includes to neighbors, in case you’re feeling special. Trust me on this—you’re better off not knowing any more than you know.”
“Lauren will find out, Sam. Someone in her office already knows.”
“If she finds out, she finds out. But she’s too smart to tell you.”
“Sam, I have kids,” I said. “A wife who’s home a lot. By herself. I need to know if I should be concerned. You hesitated earlier.”
“How well do you know your new neighbors?”
“Barely. Not at all. I know him like you know him. From TV.”
“Lucy told me he’s a daytime TV darling of some kind. I don’t watch a lot of daytime TV. I never, ever watch television darlings.”
“Okay.”
“Keep things the way they are. Your family will be fine. Understand?”
“No.”
“Tough shit.”
11
At supervision on the Monday morning after the housewarming, Hella Zoet began by telling me she needed to talk, once again, about Burning Man Lady.
The patient formerly known as Three-Wood Widow.
“This is an awful story,” she said. She swept her hair back with her fingers and hooked it behind her ears. “I feel so sad for her. I saw her for an emergency appointment on Saturday night, Alan. If you had asked me who in my caseload would be least likely to make an emergency call to me, she would have been near the top of my list. She called me Saturday, late afternoon, and left me a despairing-sounding voice mail asking me to call her back as soon as I could. I was out on the Mesa Trail with friends, but I got back to her within the hour, as soon as I got back to my car.
“She said—I wrote this down—‘I think I need . . . Maybe if we could meet, I think. Dr. Zoet, I’ve been . . . raped. Last night, I was raped.’ Then she paused, Alan. A good five seconds before she added, ‘I think I was raped.’ ”
I took a metaphorical deep breath. I said, “ ‘I think’? She said, ‘I think’?”
“Yes. We talked for only a couple of minutes on the phone, long enough for me to be sure she was okay physically, that she had done what she needed to do to take care of herself. She said she’d driven herself to the police and that a detective had accompanied her to Community, to the hospital. She met with a rape crisis counselor there, too.
“I canceled my plans for the evening and met her at my office a few minutes before seven o’clock. I have never done that before, Alan. Met a patient for a session on a weekend night.” After all my years of practice, I could still count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I had done something similar. “She said that one of the cops she talked to earlier that day—a woman detective, she said”—Hella consulted her notes—“Detective Davenport, told her at the hospital that no matter what happened during the rest of the day she should think about getting her own attorney as soon as she could. She even gave her a name.”
“Really? I don’t think that’s routine advice for rape victims. Do you know why the detective advised that?”
“I don’t. During that call, whenever I asked a question like that my patient kept saying, ‘This is going to be a big deal. This is going to be a big deal. Oh my God, this is going to be such a big deal.’ Like it was a mantra. I figured she was talking about the rape, but who knows? I was hoping you might be able to help me understand.”
“What kind of big?” I asked.
Hella pondered my question. “Ominou
s? That kind of big.”
I said, “Let’s go back to the beginning. Tell me what happened. Let’s see if we can puzzle this out.”
HELLA BEGAN THE STORY BY SAYING, “She’s calling what happened to her ‘acquaintance rape.’ I think that’s important. It’s one of the first things she said.” She looked at her notes again. “I think I have her exact words: ‘I know this man, the one who did this. He’s my friend. He’s not someone who—I know him.’ ”
I listened carefully as Hella continued to talk, trying to ascertain if she was using the acquaintance descriptor as a diminutive.
Hella, it turned out, wasn’t. She was telling me only that her patient knew her rapist. Thus the word acquaintance.
She said, “The fact that she knew the guy so well is important to her. I think she was expressing shock that he could do this to her—that’s why she kept repeating it. That’s the only reason that I am emphasizing it with you.”
“Betrayal?” I asked.
“Definitely. She doesn’t remember the assault. What she was feeling at first was . . . bewilderment over the betrayal.”
HELLA’S PATIENT HAD BEEN at a big party that included some friends. She drove herself to the party—it was at a home she’d never visited before in “east Boulder, out Baseline”—from her house in North Boulder. Since she has a reputation for getting lost when she goes anywhere unfamiliar, she first drove to meet a couple who live below Chautauqua, and she followed them to the location of the party.
She drank more than she intended but maintained to Hella that at no point did she consider herself drunk. Still, as the festivities were winding down she thought about accepting a ride home with the friends she’d followed to the party. She would then return the next day to retrieve her car. But Burning Man Lady ultimately decided to stay at the party to sober up. Her plan was to drive back home after a cup of coffee or two.
The Last Lie Page 8