Dry Ice

by Stephen White

  He leaned back, laced his fingers behind his head, and put his gargantuan feet up on his desk. I suspected he was about to train a spotlight on my paranoia and ask exactly whose hands I was talking about him playing into. Instead he asked, “How about I sit here and you answer the right questions. We’ll both pretend that I asked them.”

  That was fine with me. “Kol—Nicole—didn’t demonstrate any depression during the few weeks I was treating her. She mentioned depression, but denied any currently. Note the time frame in that qualifier: I treated her for only a few weeks. Three sessions to be precise. I will acknowledge that it does turn out that she was depressed by history, and I will admit that I did not know the details of that history until yesterday’s meeting with her psychiatrist from the state hospital. My clinical failure wasn’t a failure of diagnosis, however—in psychotherapy diagnosis is a process, not an event. My failure—and, yes, there was one—entailed not reviewing pertinent history with her at the beginning of her treatment. I screwed that up. Mea culpa. Next?”

  “Your clinical failure would also include some failure to intervene…in a timely manner?”

  “My clinical judgment was that no dramatic clinical intervention was indicated.”

  “Then perhaps there’s some failure evidenced by your…gullibility? Is that a good word for the fact that you didn’t apply any skepticism to her narrative?”

  I stared at him.

  “It did,” he added, “prove false. Her narrative.”

  Cozy apparently wanted me to whelp additional mea culpas. I didn’t feel much like complying. Given the mood I was in, I was more likely to scream profanities than squeal apologies.

  “You bought her story,” my lawyer said, proving his determination to get me to capitulate to having committed some additional sin. “Despite the fact that it was all lies, right? Am I missing something?”

  “Facts aren’t always relevant,” I said.

  “Please try convincing a jury of that,” he muttered under his breath before I could add the qualifier in psychotherapy. He went on, “Oh, I forgot, you don’t have to worry about such mundanities. That’s my job.”

  “What do you want from me today?”

  “Some cooperation with your defense would be nice,” he said. “You made an errant assumption about her gender, and you didn’t take even a cursory mental-health history. You failed to recognize her underlying depression. Those statements are correct?”

  “Yes. Want more, Cozy? I didn’t know until I read it in the paper that Kol had a job at the cemetery. I thought he was a trust-fund baby. I still don’t know where he was living. He’d given me a false address.”

  “She,” Cozy corrected.

  I was tempted to bite back but I had no enthusiasm for a jostle. If Cozy were the lawyer who would end up defending me on the malpractice suit that was certain to follow Nicole Cruz’s death, I might have bothered to explain how my failure to take a formal history from my patient didn’t really diverge that much from generally accepted standards of practice. But that defense, even if true, was lame. I didn’t feel like rehearsing its recitation with Cozy.

  The fact that my fatal mistakes were largely the result of an act of omission—not taking a formal history—that was committed by psychotherapists every day didn’t excuse my failings or mitigate their gravity. Those lapses wouldn’t exonerate me as much as they would indict my colleagues along with me.

  The fact that Kol would likely have lied had I gone ahead and asked about mental-health history wasn’t relevant either. The fact was that I hadn’t asked the right questions. Whether or not I might have learned something crucial if I had, I would never know.

  In a civil proceeding it would all come back to the uncontestable reality that I didn’t ask.

  The current, pertinent truth was that Cozy was a criminal defense attorney and not the lawyer who would defend me against malpractice claims. My failure to ponder aloud with Nicole Cruz whether she’d ever been in a jail, on psychotropic medication, in a psychiatric hospital, or whether she had ever tried to kill herself wasn’t likely to be particularly relevant if the charges Cozy ended up defending me against were charges not that I negligently failed to anticipate my patient’s suicide, but rather that I had participated in her murder.

  If I somehow managed to avoid the charge of homicide that Kirsten feared the authorities were contemplating, the recitation of my defense on malpractice, however futile, would occur with some lawyer other than Cozy, an attorney who handled civil, not criminal, defense. It was to that lawyer that I’d have to admit that I’d made a clinical judgment by choosing to spend those early weeks of treatment ruling out Kol’s self-diagnosis of residual autism and ADHD, and not asking for her hospitalization history or assessing her suicidal risk.

  Before I’d decided which of Cozy’s unasked questions I would address next, the intercom on his desk came alive. His receptionist was a black man from Kenya named Nigel. Nigel’s English was accented, formal, and impeccable. In contrast to most of Boulder, he always dressed like he was expecting GQ to show up for a photo shoot at any minute. Cozy had told me that Nigel had originally visited Boulder while running with the elite field in the Bolder Boulder, had fallen in love with our town, and moved. He was supporting his family so that his wife could continue her studies at the university. When she was done, he would get his turn at graduate school.

  From my limited observation, Nigel seemed to take no shit from Cozy, which endeared him to me. Nigel wanted to be an architect. He despised the aesthetics and placement of the building in which he worked as much as I did. That endeared him to me. His architectural dream was to design and build inexpensive modular green housing that could be mass produced in his native Kenya. That endeared him to me, too.

  Nigel’s voice on the intercom: “Ms. Lord instructed me to interrupt you.”

  Cozy raised his not insignificant eyebrows, punched a button, and picked up the phone. “Hello, Kirsten,” he said.

  I didn’t know how much Kirsten had told her boss about my visit to her home the previous afternoon, but I felt it was prudent to assume that she’d already told him everything that I’d told her, but probably not everything she had told me. The point of this particular call to her boss? I’d have to try to discern it from Cozy’s end of the conversation. But Cozy’s end turned out to be mostly silence. Kirsten was doing most of the talking.

  I stood and soaked in the view until Cozy got off the phone. He walked over next to me, put an arm around my shoulders, and said, “I’ll continue to prod you until you recognize the extent of your jeopardy. We have a lot of work to do, Alan. What’s going on is serious. This isn’t going to go away because you believe you didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “I understand that.”

  “You’re not acting like you do. Fighting me is a waste of energy. The civil-liability issues might end your career. The criminal-liability issues could have much more serious consequences. We have to get focused. Not next week. Now. I’ll be in touch.”

  I turned toward the door.

  He said, “Just for the record? I’m a regular at Sal’s. Pastrami.”

  He was smiling.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  THE MEETING with Cozy didn’t improve my mood. I doubted that it improved my legal prospects. It certainly hadn’t improved my financial condition.

  I suspected that Kirsten’s call had been bad news. When I’d asked Cozy about it before I left his office, he denied the call had been about my case. I don’t think he really expected me to believe him.

  I didn’t.

  I was looking forward to the walk back up the Mall toward my office. The odd intersection of lives that collided on Boulder’s most egalitarian public thoroughfare was almost always distracting to me, usually in a positive way. On most days the stroll west toward the looming panorama of the foothills with the midday sun over my left shoulder would soften any ill mood. The riot of color in the brick planters should have bee
n an added bonus—the regiments of tulips that the Mall’s groomer, Paul, nursed every year were in prime springtime explosion.

  That day nothing seemed to help.

  My phone vibrated in my pocket. The screen read PAY PHONE. I thought Sam. I was right. “You tell anyone we talked yesterday while I was…away from Boulder?” he asked in lieu of a greeting.

  I could tell he didn’t want it to be true—he didn’t want me to have talked to anyone. I didn’t hesitate to inform him that I hadn’t. “No.”

  “You didn’t tell anyone where I said I was?”

  “I don’t think you said where you were. Something about some dogs.”

  “You were at a pay phone when you called?”

  “I was. Down in Denver, by DU.”

  He was silent for a moment. I wondered if he was trying to decide if he believed me. Or if he was trying to figure out why I’d made the long drive to south Denver.

  “You’re sure?”

  “I haven’t told anyone we talked, Sam. I still don’t know where you were when we did. Hell, I don’t know where you are now. What’s going on?” I asked.

  “Somebody is saying they saw me someplace I wasn’t supposed to be.”

  “Were you where they thought they saw you?”

  “I was. But there’s no way anybody saw me.”

  I picked some mental dominos out of the pile and lined them up in formation like Paul’s tulip army on the Mall: The missing grand jury witness. Sam had been ordered off the case. He’d ignored the order. And someone had spied him ignoring the order.

  Sam was wary that the first domino was about to tumble.

  “Who saw you?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. I got an e-mail from some bogus Yahoo account. Says someone saw me yesterday where I was. I’m thinking if they tell my bosses I should just deny everything.” He was thinking out loud with me, something he rarely did. “What are they going to do? Believe some civilian or believe me?”

  “Who do you think it was?” I asked again.

  “This thing breaks wrong and I may have just lost my job,” he said. “Listen, here’s a freebie for you: The prints under the workbench, and on the side of the fridge?”

  My amble west on the Mall was interrupted by the light at Broadway. I somehow ended up standing between two baby strollers. One of the strollers was a double that was about the size of my first car. The women who were pushing the large-wheeled behemoths continued the conversation they’d been having as though I wasn’t there. It was something about sun and hair mixed in with something about flying to Frankfurt on Lufthansa. I assumed I’d missed an important transition in their discussion.

  “We’re talking about Peter’s shop now?” I said to Sam.

  “Yeah, we are. The latents weren’t McClelland’s. No hit in AFIS.”

  The light changed. I stayed put. The mothers took off behind their strollers.

  I had been certain that Michael had been camping out in the barn prior to Kol’s suicide. It was the only way to begin to make sense of what I knew.

  Now what?

  “Were the prints Kol’s? I mean, Nicole’s?”

  “No. We don’t know whose they are. The lab needs a complete set of exemplars from Adrienne and Jonas to rule them out. And anybody who’s worked for them in the past, you know, while.”

  “Could they be Peter’s?”

  “Unlikely, but it’s possible.” He paused. “Could they be yours?”

  Shit. “The way my luck’s been running? Could be.”

  “Wouldn’t be good.”

  “Adrienne and Jonas are still in Israel,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Sam said. “Complicates things.”

  “I appreciate the information.”

  He hesitated before he said, “This may feel like a series of ambushes to you. Or more benignly, like the pieces of a puzzle. It isn’t. It’s one big web. From where I stand, it’s being constructed to snare you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The purse? The blood on your shoe? The note on your door? The body? The forensics that we’re getting? If you’re not guilty of something, then somebody’s going to great lengths to make it look like you are.”

  I watched the electronic scoreboard that let pedestrians know how long they had to get across Broadway count down from sixteen to fifteen to fourteen to thirteen.

  “Sam, I know things you don’t know. You know things that I don’t know. Together we might know enough. Help me. I’ll help you.”

  Eleven, ten, nine. “I can’t help you, Alan. You know that.”

  “I shouldn’t help you, Sam. You know that. But I will.”

  He hung up.

  I rushed across Broadway as the light changed. The strollers rolled ahead of me, hub to hub.

  I finished the day’s work with the efficiency of a robot. And probably with about the same amount of clinical skill.

  I picked up Grace at school and we came home to an empty house.

  Since Kol’s death in the barn Emily and I had developed a new end-of-the-day routine. As soon as I got home and got Grace settled, the big dog and I searched our house, inside and out, checking for bad guys, unlocked windows, forced doors. After we did the house we did the garage and then we did the perimeter of the barn and the perimeter of Adrienne’s house.

  Emily had the DNA of a herding dog but she had a reasonable nose for trouble and could be as intimidating to strangers as a grizzly mom protecting her cubs. I always felt better when she gave me the all clear.

  Grace retreated to her room while I fed the dogs and started dinner. Getting ready to cook that night’s meal was mostly prep. I partially boiled some wide noodles, cleaned some spinach and arugula, took some sliced ham out of the refrigerator, and rested a few eggs and a stick of sweet butter on the counter to bring everything to room temperature. The final steps would take only minutes; I wouldn’t throw the ingredients together on a plate until everyone was at the table.

  The only tricky part of the meal I had planned was the brown butter. Making brown butter isn’t culinary jujitsu, but experience had taught me that brown butter is one of those things that should be made by an attentive cook.

  When six-thirty came and went and Lauren didn’t get home, I started to worry. Fifteen minutes later, I was using most of my mental energy to try to keep from panicking.

  I tried Lauren’s cell. No answer. I tried her office. No answer.

  I checked on Grace. She was fine.

  Seven o’clock came. Two minutes later the phone rang. Caller ID read PRIVATE CALLER. I answered with an anxious “Where are you? Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine. Alan? What’s going on?”

  It wasn’t Lauren on the line. It was Kirsten.

  I looked out the window. Lauren was driving down the lane, her security escort right behind her car. She was okay. Grace was okay.

  “Can I call you back?” I asked.

  “Soon? Tonight? It’s important.”

  “What kind of important?”

  “We know what the grand jury is investigating.”

  “Soon,” I said. I hung up before Lauren made it in the door.

  The meal was a simple toss of inch-wide noodles, wilted greens, and sliced ham. The heat from the brown butter and cooked noodles warmed the ham and softened the greens. I arranged the savory mix on a plate and topped it all with an egg that I fried sunny-side up in more brown butter. For Lauren, the concoction screamed comfort food. The meal was an undisguised entreaty from me—intended as a kindness and invitation. Nothing romantic. Just my acknowledgment that we desperately needed to talk.

  She had another agenda. Lauren chose that supper to tell Grace that they were going to someplace called Bimini for a vacation. Daddy had to work; he was going to stay home and take care of the dogs. Gracie ran from the table and got her globe. It was clear that she loved the way the word Bimini felt rolling off her innocent lips. “Can we look for a book abo
ut Bimini?” she asked.

  “Of course,” Lauren said, smiling. “We can go online and try to find one.”

  “Can I Google it?”

  “If one of us is with you.”

  “What about school?” Gracie asked after her mother had helped her find the Bahamas on the globe.

  “I’ll work that out,” Lauren told her. “Don’t worry. But one thing?”

  “What?” my daughter asked.

  “This has to be our secret? Okay? You and me.” A second later Lauren added, “And Daddy.”

  Lauren was at the sink cleaning the brown butter from the egg pan.

  Grace was back in her room singing a song she was making up about Bimini and the Bahamas. The rhymes were proving a challenge. I finished clearing the table and asked Lauren if we could talk.

  “Maybe when we get back, Alan. Not now. Let it rest for a while, okay? There’s too much going on.”

  “I don’t like that you’re leaving feeling…the way you’re feeling,” I said.

  “What way am I feeling?” she said. “You think you know? Grace and I won’t be gone long. They’ll find Michael soon enough. When it’s safe, we’ll be back. When we’re back, we can talk.”

  I was hurt and angry. I would counsel someone else that it was time to let the passion I felt for her fuel me enough to fight. I tried to swallow both my hurt and my anger. The passion? At that moment it barely felt combustible. I said, “That’s it?”

  “For now,” she said. “Yes, that’s it.”

  “When will you leave?”

  “I need to go to the office tomorrow to tie up a few things. As soon as I can finish making travel arrangements, we’ll go. If I can get it together we could fly to Miami as early as tomorrow night, or maybe the next day. We have to spend one night in Miami to get a connection to Bimini.”

  I started to leave the kitchen, my tail between my legs.

  She said, “For what it’s worth, I always thought that if it ever happened to us that you would be the one leaving me.”

  Without turning around, I said, “Is that what this is? You leaving me?”