The Last Lie

by Stephen White

  The cops led her back to the bedroom. One asked if she would point out the specific footprints in the shag. Just to be sure. They lined up on the narrow perimeter of hardwood near the window. “There,” she said. “See?”

  She held up her phone. “I took pictures,” she explained. She used the images on her phone to point out the outlines of each of the footprints. She then leaned over and identified the corresponding indentations on the rug.

  She’d sent the pictures she’d taken to Hella. Hella sent the pictures to my phone. I was a little skeptical. If I used my imagination, I could convince myself that the shadows on the green shag rug were footprints. I could also convince myself that I was looking through a microscope at a terrain map of some novel type of fungus.

  “What do you think?” I asked Hella.

  “She believes that they were footprints.”

  “The cops, what did they believe?”

  Hella said that Burning Man Lady didn’t think they believed her. “At some point, she grabbed her purse and dug out the detective’s card, the woman detective she’d been interviewed by on Saturday morning at the Boulder Police Department. Detective Davenport.”

  Lucy. Sam’s partner. I didn’t know Lucy well, but I knew her. Sam knew Lucy very well. He trusted her instincts. He trusted her with his life. I was curious to learn how Lucy had responded.

  Hella continued. “She then told the two patrol cops about being raped on Friday. The ongoing investigation by the Boulder sheriff. She asked them to please call Detective Davenport and tell her about the break-in. They wouldn’t. She then asked them to call the patrol officer she met the first morning. Um . . . his name is Heath Wade.

  “Right in front of her, the older cop pulled out his phone and he called Officer Wade. He walked away. A couple of minutes later he came back. He said, ‘Officer Wade and his partner are coming over. They suggested we try to reach Detective Davenport.’ ”

  Hella said, “I was on the phone with her, learning all this, when Detective Davenport arrived. She said she had to hang up to talk with the detective. I haven’t heard back since.”

  I retracted some of Fiji’s leash. She reluctantly joined me on the hard-packed lane. I recognized that I’d allowed myself to become way too much in the dark in regard to Hella’s patient’s legal situation. I needed to get up to speed. Serious events were occurring for which I didn’t have sufficient context.

  I was completely aware I had a complicated potential conflict of interest going on. I had convinced myself—perhaps with too much facility—that even if all this hadn’t happened across the lane from my home, I’d still be anxious to learn more details from my supervisee. I said, “Hella, before this gets any more complicated, I need to know the rest of the story from last Friday night. Let’s get it done. Half an hour? My office? Yours?”

  “You live out east, right? I live at the Peloton. Off Arapahoe? You want to come here? It’s much more convenient than going all the way downtown.”

  “That sounds good. Send me directions so I can find your unit.”

  Seconds later, she said, “Done.”

  “I should be there within twenty minutes or so. Maybe thirty.”

  I cupped my hands and called for Emily. I tugged the Havanese away from her determined reconnaissance for prairie dogs. Emily joined up with us as we reached the clearing between the two houses. She was winded. She’d been onto something.

  I said, “Foxes?”

  Her ears jumped up to ready. She lowered her weight onto her rear legs, prepared to launch. Emily had been protecting us from foxes. Foxes that never bothered us.

  Lauren wasn’t happy when I explained that I had a supervision crisis I had to deal with in town. In all our years together as a couple, I could count the number of times I’d actually left home on an evening or weekend to deal with a practice emergency. The number was certainly smaller than ten. Most of those ten took place when I was a young therapist. Experience had taught me that there was almost always a way to deal with crises over the phone, and that that way almost always turned out to be more therapeutic than the alternative.

  “You have to go in?” she said. “And it’s not even for a patient?”

  “It’s for a patient, but it’s not for my patient. It’s my supervisee’s. And it’s not prudent to wait any longer. I hope it won’t take long.”

  “I probably won’t stay up,” she said.

  I told her I didn’t expect her to. I said good night to the kids, got in my car, and drove out the lane.

  15

  Hella greeted me at the door.

  She lived in a compact one-bedroom unit on the top floor of a building in a sprawling complex, near 35th—a mere long fly ball from the Boulder PD. She had a great view toward Eldorado. Moonlight still brightened the night sky, the jagged profile of the Flatirons forming a stark silhouette almost due west of her home.

  She was wearing a baggy cotton sweater over a long jersey skirt. Her feet were bare. She pointed me toward a beat-up upholstered leather chair across from a sleek sofa that looked new. I sat.

  She offered me something to drink. “Water would be great,” I said. She poured two glasses from a pitcher with a built-in filter. Boulder’s tap water no longer had the cachet it once enjoyed.

  She sat across from me, folding her legs beneath her the way she always did in my office. “It’s small. I’m renting for now,” she said. “I’m trying to save for a down payment. Boulder is so expensive. Getting a practice started is so hard. Much harder than I expected. In this economy, I’m . . . I’m going slowly with things like . . . buying houses.”

  I wondered why she felt a need to defend her apartment or her decisions about real estate. Were we in my office, and were Hella my patient, I might have explored the comment for further meaning. But Hella wasn’t my patient; she was my supervisee. I filed the impressions among the random information that would become raw material for understanding what happens at other times during the supervision process, either between Hella and her patients or between Hella and me.

  One of those perspectives often becomes a mirror of the other.

  “It’s nice here,” I said. “You have privacy and a great view. You must have terrific sunsets.”

  “During the winter, yeah, if I’m home from work on time. During the summer the sun sets too far to the north. Thanks for saving me a trip back downtown. Once I’m in, I’m . . . in. This is so much better.”

  Like psychotherapy, supervision is a relationship that has vague definitions; it is reinvented by every two people who participate in it. One constant, though, is that supervision extends the clinical, and thus legal, responsibility for the patient being treated beyond the therapist, to the supervisor. I was in Hella’s apartment after hours because Burning Man Lady was—legally—my patient, too.

  I said, “I need to learn what’s going on with your patient and with the rape. And what’s going on with her now, tonight, with the burglary, or whatever it was. I’m not comfortable not knowing the whole story any longer,” I said. “Something you’re probably already becoming aware of—when lawyers get involved with cases, they’re like mice or roaches. When you see the first one, it never stops there. If your client has a lawyer, that means somebody else in her universe will have to have a lawyer, too. She’s talked to the police. The police will talk to the DA. The DA means more lawyers, on both sides. And each lawyer has an associate, and pretty soon . . .” I shrugged a worldly shrug.

  She said, “Where would you like me to pick up? I can do this with less detail, if that would help. You know, time-wise.”

  “No, given the situation, I want to hear everything you have, but before we get back to what happened on Friday night, have you heard anything more about tonight? The break-in at her house?”

  “Yes, she called me back after you and I talked. The officer came to her house. Heath Wade. And the woman detective came to her house. The one from Saturday? She came with her partner. A man.”

  Lucy Davenp
ort’s partner was Sam Purdy.

  “They looked around. The woman detective suggested that my patient should spend the night with someone away from her house—with a friend or family. She called a girlfriend, one who hadn’t been at that party on Friday. That’s where she is right now. The detective said that she would have extra patrols drive by her house during the night to keep a good eye on it.”

  “Then the detectives thought that there was a break-in?”

  “It’s hard for me to tell. My patient said the woman detective took some photos of the shag in the master bedroom. Both detectives looked around. They all sat at the kitchen table and asked her some of the same questions the other officers had asked. She said that’s about it. My patient hasn’t been able to identify anything that’s missing from the house. That complicates things, I imagine, for the police.”

  “It’s possible the intruder got interrupted,” I said.

  My long friendship with Sam Purdy had taught me that routine residential burglary investigations are not a high priority with the police department. A full forensic response wasn’t likely to happen unless a detective decided that this break-in wasn’t routine. The fact that Lucy and Sam had responded at all meant that one of them, probably Lucy, wasn’t convinced the break-in was routine.

  “How are you doing with all this?” I asked Hella. I intended that my sudden focus on her feelings be disarming.

  She looked away momentarily. I thought her gaze had narrowed a bit when she looked at me again. “This is new territory for me, Alan. Completely new. All the cops, all the lawyers. You know, I’ve never even treated a rape victim. Not right after, anyway. I’ve seen women who had been assaulted when they were younger, and the old assaults came up in therapy. But this is new for me. My patient is terrified. She sounded more terrified tonight than she did right after the assault. After the assault her affect was flat for a while. Now she’s anxious. She’s scared. The break-in, the burglary, whatever it is, has really freaked her out.”

  “What do you make of that?”

  “I guess it’s the jeopardy. The sense that the trauma isn’t over? Tonight she said, ‘This isn’t over. This isn’t over.’ I asked her what that meant and all she said was that she feared her lawyer was right.”

  “About what?” I asked.

  Hella sighed. “On Saturday, he told her that if he was reading this right, the rape was going to be only the first way people were going to try to make her a victim in this case. He said it was his job to keep that from happening. That it’s why he needed her to be so discreet.”

  “Do you know what he meant?”

  Hella shook her head. “No. I still don’t. I was hoping you would.”

  “Not yet.” I sat back. “Why don’t you finish telling me about Friday night? After she decided she liked the bed linens.”

  HELLA CLOSED BOTH EYES GENTLY. She crossed her arms across her chest, briefly resting her fingertips on her shoulders. She exhaled through her lips and folded her hands in her lap. An affectation? I was reminded of an actor or singer finding an emotional center prior to a fresh take. I filed it all.

  “Everything?” she asked.

  On more than one occasion, I’ve told patients that facts are crap. Mostly, in therapy, I believed that to be true. But at that moment with Hella, I wanted facts. I said, “Yes.”

  “She brushed her teeth with the brand-new toothbrush. She peed. She changed into the pajamas that were on the bed. She said they were a little small for her, but the fabric was so nice, she loved them. They were much nicer than anything she’d ever had. She found a tag in the top and wrote down the brand and the size—they were a six, she wears an eight—and she put the note in her purse. She was hoping she could find a pair and that they weren’t too expensive for her.

  “She was about to climb into bed. She heard a knock on the door. There was a short robe on a hanger on the back of the bedroom door. She pulled that on over her pajamas before she opened the door. She made a point of telling me she was dressed modestly.

  “It was her host. He had changed from the clothes he had worn during dinner. He was wearing cotton pants, thin, like exercise pants, she thought. And a T-shirt. A tight T-shirt with long sleeves. He was barefoot, even though the house was kind of chilly.

  “She mentioned that she thought it was odd that his shirt was so tight. She couldn’t imagine sleeping in something that tight.

  “He was carrying two small glasses. Little wineglasses? She didn’t recognize what they were, what kind of glass. She said that kind of thing happens all the time with these friends. They have food, and drinks, and utensils, and gadgets, and things that she doesn’t recognize. They serve her things she doesn’t know how to eat. She said she always does what she can to disguise her ignorance. That’s important to her.

  “So, she was thinking that he was offering her something new to drink. After the other guests had left, the wine they had was the same wine that had been served during the party. It was served in regular, big wineglasses.

  “The man, her friend, told her that he and his wife weren’t ready to go to bed. He wondered if, since she didn’t have to drive anywhere, she would like to come back out by the fire and have a nightcap with them.

  “She said she thanked him but told him she was tired and thought she’d go to bed, because she was eager to head back home early the next morning. He said something about how disappointed his wife would be—that she so much loved to have company stay late after parties. How it was one of her favorite things.

  “She told me that puzzled her, that she hadn’t known that about her friend. After all the time they had spent together, she always thought the hostess was the one person in the group who was most ready for parties to end. Reluctantly, she agreed to join them in the family room. The fire in the fireplace was almost out.” Hella sipped some water. “And the man’s wife wasn’t there.

  “I’ve talked about this with you before, Alan. At least I think I have. There’s a smaller social group she is part of—a group of friends who were all at the housewarming. She considers them . . . above her. I don’t say that to be condescending to her—my patient is a sincere, down-to-earth, unpretentious woman—but it’s how she perceives the situation. Her friends are all wealthy—she makes them sound very wealthy, but I don’t really know how to judge that. And they are all accomplished people. Successful in their careers, their lives. They’re sophisticated. They’ve traveled to a million places, eaten at every restaurant around. They know other important people. They go to cool events. They have season tickets everywhere. Sports. Theater. They go on trips together and stay at each other’s vacation homes.

  “My patient is a young widow. She works a full day in an office. Struggles to pay her bills. Dinner out, if it happens, is Chili’s or Applebee’s. When she was initially drawn into this group with her husband—they were invited after her husband had started giving a couple of the wives golf lessons—she tried to fit in by being as accommodating as she could. She bakes well. She would always bring cakes, or scones, or cookies, or something for her friends. When any of her new friends asked her for a favor that she felt she could do, she went out of her way to try to do it. Always. As a group, and as individuals, they were all so generous to her and her husband with invitations and dinners out. The men included her husband in their golf games. They all went fishing. You get the picture. She always felt an obligation to try to reciprocate. She liked being able to reciprocate. She liked that she could do something her friends appreciated.

  “I almost forgot—after her husband died, two of the men even helped her decide how to invest his life insurance money. She feels very indebted to them for that—she has no expertise with that kind of thing.

  “That night? She didn’t feel she could say no to something as simple as an invitation to stay up a little past her bedtime and have one final drink with her host and hostess by the fire. She felt as though she couldn’t turn it down.”

  “Okay,” I said. Hella’s ass
essment of the relationship dynamics felt spot-on to me.

  “She went back and sat down on the same chair as before. After she and the host talked for a while—they talked about maybe running the Bolder Boulder in the spring, among other things—she remembers asking him when his wife would be downstairs to join them. She doesn’t actually remember if he answered. She thought he changed the subject, that he said something about the port. That’s what they were drinking. Port. He told her it was made in California by a wine-making friend he’d met through Francis, um, crap—oh, God, the Godfather director guy, what’s his name? I’m terrible with celebrity names.”

  “Francis Ford Coppola,” I said.

  “Him. Some friend of Francis Ford Coppola made the port from . . . Zinfandel grapes that the host had grown on his land in Napa. Do you know wine? Do I have that right? Or does that sound completely stupid?”

  I had friends who knew wine. Peter, who died while living in the house across the lane, the house where Hella’s patient had sipped the port in question, could have answered any questions about Napa and Zinfandel and port. I had no doubt that Raoul, who’d been at the same housewarming, could have told a charming story or two about the process and the people. Me? Not so much. “I know what I like, Hella. I’m not an expert.”

  “At some point he asked her if she liked it. The port. This is where things start to get really fuzzy for her. She doesn’t remember replying to his question. She doesn’t even remember whether she liked the port or not.

  “She thinks he poured a second glass. So one of them must have finished the first one, right? She doesn’t remember whether the second glass was for him or for her.

  “The next thing she remembers is an image. When she first went back out, she sat down on the same big leather chair she’d been on before. Earlier, the host and hostess had kind of cuddled together on the other one.