Warning Signs

by Stephen White

  I shook my head.

  "He said, 'I wondered which one of us would come to our senses first. I'm glad it was you.' At the time, I didn't know what he meant."

  "And now?"

  "Right now? I think he knew what Susan and I were doing. How we were hurting each other."

  I added, "But he was willing to participate anyway."

  "That's sick, too, isn't it?" she asked.

  I didn't have to answer.

  She stood up and took a step away from me.

  I opened my mouth to ask another question, then closed it. She said, "Go ahead, ask me."

  "No, I was going to change the subject."

  "Ask."

  "Your fingerprints were on the pottery, Lucy. The piece that was used to bash Royal in the head."

  She nodded. "The pottery was a new acquisition of Royal's. He was proud of it; it was by some artist he really liked from New York City. He'd found it on eBay and was thrilled that he had won the auction. He showed it to me when I first got there that night."

  "That's it?" I asked. "You touched it when he showed it to you?"

  She shrugged. "What was it Freud said about cigars?" she asked.

  I managed a weak grin for her benefit, but was thinking that Lucy was in no position to make a decision whether or not this cigar was really just a cigar. I also knew that she hadn't shared all her secrets.

  CHAPTER 64

  "W as Ramp there that night, Lucy? Did Royal discover him placing the bomb? Is that what happened?"

  She shook her head. "I asked Ramp about it. He said that he and Marin placed the bomb in the Peterson home at least a week before Royal was murdered. He said they were real careful to make sure no one was home. They were in and out of the house in ten minutes and didn't see anyone."

  "You believed him?"

  "Of course. And I still do. What possible reason would he have had to lie?"

  She seemed surprisingly sanguine.

  Not really sure why I was asking, I said, "You know who killed Royal, don't you?"

  "Any cop will tell you that knowing who did it is sometimes the easy part. Proving who did it, that's the hard part. This town learned that lesson the hardest possible way."

  I figured she was alluding to JonBenét Ramsey's murder. The old homicide was a stray dog that followed Boulder cops everywhere they went. No way was I going to comment on that mutt.

  She hadn't answered my question. I said, "But you know, don't you?"

  "Sure I do. So do you."

  She actually smiled.

  "What do you mean?" I asked.

  She shook her head.

  "Sorry," she said. "The hostility has to end somewhere."

  CHAPTER 65

  S usan Peterson killed herself the next morning.

  Sam and I were sitting downstairs at her kitchen table while she did it. I still think that I was more surprised than Sam was, which gives you some idea about how much to rely on a psychologist's ability to predict suicide.

  S ince Sam wasn't an active part of the investigation of Royal Peterson's murder and had no official reason to visit Susan again, he'd asked if he could accompany me on my next visit to see her.

  After my conversation the day before with Lucy about Susan, I wasn't at all certain I would ever choose to see Susan again. When I told Sam that I had absolutely no plans to make another visit to the Peterson home, he looked at me with mocking condescension and asked me if I was getting thicker with age.

  I replied by wondering aloud if there was any alternative. He said no, that it was important.

  I made the necessary calls and we drove to Jay Street together around eight-thirty the next morning. Susan's health aide, Crystal, answered the door and ambushed me by greeting Sam as though they were old friends, even giving him a little peck on the cheek. She stepped out onto the porch wearing a cable-knit sweater. She was carrying a macramé bag over her shoulder that I guessed functioned as her purse.

  To Sam, she said, "An hour, you think?"

  He replied, "That should be plenty of time. It's enough for you?"

  "If there's not too bad a line over there, it should be great for me. You're an angel, Detective, an angel." She glanced back over her shoulder. "I imagine she'll be waking up soon enough. Her food's in the fridge all ready to go."

  As Crystal meandered down the walk toward the street, Sam explained, "She needs to get her driver's license renewed. I told her we'd keep an eye on things here for an hour or so."

  "You two are tight?"

  "We had a beer last night. She likes hockey, actually knows what she's talking about. I told her if this works out I might be able to get her some Avs tickets. She's from Wisconsin, but Crystal's okay."

  I'd never understood the nature of the relationship between the residents of Wisconsin and Minnesota, but decided not to pursue an explanation at that moment. "If what works out? What did she tell you?"

  I thought he almost grinned as he said, "You'll see."

  I followed Sam inside the Peterson home and watched as he squatted down and opened the housing on the underside of the electric lift that Susan used to get up and down the stairs. I was instantly suspicious-if Susan was upstairs sleeping, as Crystal had just implied, the chair should have been at the top of the stairs, not the bottom. Sam flicked a red switch before he shut the cover back tight onto the housing.

  A large oval piece of pottery sat smack in the middle of the third step on the staircase. Sam touched it to make sure it wasn't balanced too precariously. He whispered, "Recognize it? This is from Royal's collection downstairs. With that hole in it, though, I don't know what you'd actually use it for, but it's kind of nice to look at."

  I assumed he wasn't planning on telling me what he was up to, so, sotto voce, I asked, "You turned the lift off?"

  He nodded. "Crystal promised to leave some coffee and things for us. Come on."

  We walked into the kitchen. Sam poured us each a mug of coffee and dragged a plate of muffins across the table so that it was smack in front of him. I smelled apples and spice. Morning light drenched the kitchen and from our perch on the sloping foothills of the Front Range the budding leaves on the trees in the Boulder Valley gave the beautiful view a lime-green aura.

  I could have pressed him to divulge his strategy, but it would have been futile. Sam was directing this play and act two would come after act one. That was the natural order of things. Sam liked natural order.

  After ten minutes or so talking about our kids and hockey, Sam said, without segue, "Lucy says that Royal told her that he was going to leave Susan. Was thinking about putting her in a nursing home. Did you know that? He had some insurance or something that would help pay."

  "Lucy told me the same thing, Sam. Just yesterday." I didn't tell Sam what else Lucy had told me the day before.

  He nodded as though he knew exactly what Lucy had revealed to me. But I knew he didn't know. Lucy would never tell Sam what she'd told me on Flagstaff Mountain.

  Never.

  With the fat edge of his hand, Sam scraped muffin crumbs into a little pile in front of him and then pressed them into a tiny orb that he tossed into his mouth. He said, "Even though I really shouldn't be here, I can't sit and wait around for this investigation to go on any longer. I don't ever want to know what the lab says about the stain on the sheet, you know? Not today, not tomorrow." He began to break apart another muffin. "Remember a cop named Manes? Brian Manes?"

  I shook my head.

  "Couple of years back, he was accused of coercing women to have sex with him on traffic stops?"

  "I remember now."

  "He went to my church. Has a kid Simon's age. He coached the kids' soccer team. His wife is a sweetheart. And, until the first woman filed a complaint against him, he had a perfect record as a cop."

  I sensed where he was going. "Sometimes you just can't see what's going on below the surface with people, can you?"

  "I could never figure out why, what was going on in his head, how he could risk
so much for so little."

  Were we talking about Brian Manes or were we talking about Lucy? I decided Sam didn't really want me to know for sure. "Sometimes people don't even recognize what they're doing, let alone why they're doing it."

  "That's what keeps you in business? The fact that people fuck up their lives and don't have a clue what the hell they were doing or why the hell they were doing it?"

  "What do they say, Sam? Denial's not a river in Egypt."

  Sam adjusted his ample weight on the chair. He didn't move any of the crumbled muffin pieces toward his mouth. "Anyway, I don't want to know how the stain on the sheet got there. Not a bit. And I don't really want anybody else to know, either." He forced his chin forward. "I suspect there's a good possibility that it wouldn't be good news for Lucy. All in all, I'd rather not confront that possibility."

  Sam was wrapping himself in his denial as though he were bundling up in a parka to go out in a blizzard. I wondered if the gesture was intended to be an ironic charade on his part. I said, "I can understand that, Sam. But remember, Brian Manes abused his office. If Lucy screwed anything up, it was only her personal life."

  "That's what I tell myself, too, that everybody has dirty laundry." He smiled at the inadvertent allusion. "But there's something else," he said. "Something that doesn't really have to do with my deep level of disappointment in my fellow man. I've had trouble with the whole laundry thing right from the beginning. Not the sheet with the stain on it so much. That wakes me up in the middle of the night, sure, but that's not what I mean. I mean the laundry that was already in the dryer. You may remember that the first officer in the house heard the dryer running when she went in. I asked Lucy about it. She says that Royal was as likely to do a load of laundry as he was to change the oil on the space shuttle. So I wondered who it was who put that load in the dryer."

  "It wasn't Lucy?"

  "She says not."

  The intercom erupted across the room, Susan's voice emerging from the speaker. I found the sound irritating, like the grainy feeling in my sinuses when I'm warding off a sneeze.

  She said, "Crystal, I'm awake. I'm ready anytime."

  To me, Sam whispered, "Crystal says that despite how it appears, Susan's strong enough to do laundry. So I'm doing a little experiment. You know me, I like to be empirical."

  I wondered how Sam was planning on tricking Susan into doing a load of whites. But I didn't say anything. Sam had asked for an hour or two. I had time.

  A minute later, after the plumbing announced the flush of a toilet, Susan repeated her entreaty to Crystal, her voice a decibel or two higher.

  Sam asked me if I wanted more coffee.

  I didn't.

  Susan's patience was diminishing. When she called for Crystal again, she sounded closer. She seemed to be screaming down from the top of the stairs, apparently suspicious that the problem she was experiencing might be with the intercom and not with her health aide.

  She finished her little tirade with, "I can smell the coffee down there, Crystal, damn it."

  Sam raised his index finger to his lips to keep me silent. Seconds later we could hear Susan fumbling with the switch that, had Sam not disabled it, would have called the seat of the lift from the bottom of the stairs to the top. Susan cursed at the machinery when it didn't budge.

  Sam raised his eyebrows in mock surprise and mouthed, "Such language."

  We listened to two or three minutes of shuffling and huffing and puffing and cursing and mumbling before Susan muttered, "Who left this thing on the stairs?" More profanity, then a final, "Crystal, did you turn this off? Crystal! Where are you, woman?"

  A few seconds later, Susan Peterson walked into the kitchen looking like she'd spent the last eight hours sleeping with the devil. Her pajamas were creased. Her hair was a mess, her face was devoid of makeup, and her eyes had the glaze of someone with a narcotic hangover. She supported herself with one hand on a cane that was carved to resemble a stack of tiny turtles.

  In the other hand she held the large oval ceramic that had been on the stairs. She held it up easily, naturally, as though she were about to waggle it at Crystal and demand to know what it had been doing on the stairs.

  Her mouth hung open when she saw us sitting at the kitchen table.

  The silence in the room was stunning.

  Susan's eyes darted from Sam to me and then back to Sam before they came to rest on the heavy piece of pottery that she was holding in her hand. Finally, she said, "Oh."

  Sam said, "Crystal will be back in a bit. She had an errand to run. I see you made it down the stairs all right. I wondered how you'd manage with the lift not working. It seems I needn't have worried; you managed just fine."

  Susan shook her head, as though she were disagreeing with something Sam had said. Or perhaps she was trying to clear her thoughts. The gesture caused me to have an uncomfortable association to Lucy.

  Sam went on. "Crystal said your arms are stronger than your legs. The way you're holding that heavy piece of pottery, it looks like she was right. But apparently your legs are strong enough to get down the stairs."

  "And… what's your point?" Susan asked defiantly, but I could tell that her heart wasn't really in her protest.

  Sam placed his hands palm-down on the smooth surface of the table. He said, "Why don't you go get dressed, Susan? I'd like you to come with me over to Thirty-third Street."

  Her voice cracked as she asked, "Why?"

  He paused, inhaling a thin stream of air through pursed lips, tasting his words the way my friend Peter used to taste wine before he pronounced it palatable. "I think you killed your husband. The detectives who are investigating his murder will have some questions for you." He somehow managed to make the declaration sound mundane.

  His words reeled me back to a recollection of my recent afternoon visit up Flagstaff Mountain with Lucy. I thought of her almost intractable denial about her strange ménage à trois, and about the way she was able to wall off her hostility toward her mother. And then I realized that perhaps she wasn't alone-that my own denial of the events that had taken place in this house had been as impenetrable as blackout curtains.

  I wasn't in denial that Susan might have killed Royal-at some suburb of my awareness I'd been entertaining that possibility for a while. No, my denial had been about Susan Peterson's ultimate expression of hostility. As I sat watching Sam's production I was finally beginning to accept the obvious: From the moment she descended the stairs to kill her husband, Susan had been setting up her own daughter to take the fall.

  Evil, I realized, had many faces. It was becoming increasingly obvious that Susan Peterson wore most of them.

  Susan made a noise. It seemed to come from deep in her throat, but it wasn't exactly a groan. I thought that she appeared to be weighing Sam's directive that they head across town to the police department. As though she'd reached a conclusion, her eyelids closed slowly, like a curtain descending at the end of an evening at the theater.

  There was no applause.

  I watched as she shifted the bulk of her weight onto the arm supported by the cane. She mumbled, "I'm not well."

  I didn't think the words were intended for Sam or me. I think she spoke them because she found them palliative.

  Sam said, "Mrs. Peterson? Susan?" When she didn't respond, he repeated her name twice more until she reopened her eyes. The moment she did, he recited Miranda to her, the familiar words somehow as lyrical as Whitman.

  I was still thinking about the faces of evil as I heard the hum of the lift carrying her up the stairs.

  T he roar of the gunshot came about three or four minutes later. I jumped up at the sharp clap, knocking my coffee mug off the edge of the table.

  Sam winced and shook his head. He said, "I wondered if she'd do that. Actually thought she might take some pills. Didn't really think about Royal having a gun in the house, but I have to admit that I wondered whether she'd do something." He stood up and sighed. "I guess I have to go upstairs and see how go
od a shot she is. Or was."

  I intertwined my fingers to quiet the tremor that had erupted in my hands.

  "Want to come with?" Sam asked.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  In my career as a clinical psychologist, a decade of work was barely enough time for a therapist to be considered seasoned. But in the world of commercial publishing a decade is a long time indeed. Achieving longevity isn't possible without the assistance of many people and my gratitude for all the support I've received seems to grow greater every year.

  In order to create Warning Signs I relied on guidance and instruction from some dedicated public servants who patiently led me through the specifics of their fields of expertise. My thanks to Jerry Burkhalter, a veteran of the Denver Police Department Bomb Squad, Detective Melissa Kampf of the Boulder Police Department, and Assistant District Attorney Chuck Lepley of Denver County. The responsibility for any damage done to the facts is mine, not theirs.

  My wife Rose and my son Xan make all of this possible and worthwhile, and my mother Sara will always be my biggest fan. The Limericks, Patti and Jeff, believed in me at the beginning, and Al Silverman has believed in me ever since. My gratitude to them endures. Adrienne, as always, owes her medical acumen and some of her keenest insights to Dr. Stan Galansky. Elyse Morgan and Judy Pomerantz trained their critical eyes on an early version of the manuscript, and Nancy M. Hall's help was invaluable in assisting me during the difficult task of proofreading. They, too, have my thanks.

  Bruce Collamore-the real one, not the fictional one in the first couple of chapters-graciously permitted me to use his name and some of his life story in support of charity. His wisdom might be questioned, but not his goodwill or his generosity. Jane Davis is an unsung hero-with great spirit and unparalleled competence she keeps my Web page humming and insulates me from more daily distractions than I will ever know. Thank you.

  Fortunately for all of us, my books don't go directly from my word processor to the bookstore. First, the pages go through the hands of exemplary professionals who tune them, shine them, and prepare them for the light of day. My enduring thanks go to all of those at Bantam Dell and Doubleday whose efforts have been so beneficial to this book-especially Kate Burke Miciak, Nita Taublib, Irwyn Applebaum, Deborah Dwyer, Stephen Rubin, Gail Brussel, and Peter Gethers-and to all the wonderful people who support me year round at Janklow amp; Nesbit, specifically Lynn Nesbit and Amy Howell.