Blinded

NINETEEN

I don’t work most Fridays. No, that doesn’t mean I do a short week. Even though I pack forty-plus hours into my four-day calendar, Puritan guilt occasionally interferes with my enjoyment of the break that I schedule every week. Still, most Fridays I treasure the extra hours I have to spend with Grace, or to do an uninterrupted bike ride on relatively uncongested roads.

That Friday wasn’t destined to be one of the days off that I treasured, however.

I packed up Grace along with all her voluminous paraphernalia-once in college I went to Europe for a month with less stuff than Grace needed to go across town-and together we headed out of the house a few minutes after nine. We were going to do some errands. Not routine errands. Grace and I were skilled professionals at the grocery store and the dry cleaner. Returning videos? Getting gas? No problem. We could have a great time strolling the aisles at McGuckin Hardware or picking out a new pair of miniature tennis shoes at a shoe store. But the errands we had to do that Friday were errands I’d been putting off for weeks because they involved-gulp-public agencies and public utilities.

If doing errands was purgatory, doing that type of errand was hell.

Our first stop was the office that issues drivers’ licenses for the state of Colorado. I was due for a renewal. Technically, because I hadn’t been apprehended any of the times that I’d bent Colorado ’s traffic laws, the statute said that all that the renewal required was my right index fingerprint, my digital photograph, a few brief written questions, and fifteen dollars and sixty cents of my money. How long could that take?

How long?

Sixty-four minutes. I counted every one of them.

Next stop: the United States Postal Service. I had to mail a small package to Italy. Once the customs forms were filled out, Grace and I got in line. Maybe twenty people were ahead of us. Three clerks at the counter. I did the math and told Grace, “Fifteen minutes tops, baby.”

Moments later, one by one, two of the clerks mysteriously closed their windows and disappeared into the back of the building. Someone asked, “What kind of business closes cashiers when they have this many customers?”

Nobody bothered to answer. The question was not only rhetorical, it was also supremely cynical. All of us in United States Postal Service suspended animation already knew we weren’t in Kansas anymore.

There were still fifteen people in front of Grace and me in line. And at least that many had piled into the building behind us. Grace asked me how much longer. She did this by squealing and pulling at my ear.

“Another half hour, Boo,” I explained. She asked again, and again.

How wrong was I? The total wait at the post office to mail our package turned out to be seventy-seven minutes.

On to Boulder ’s cable TV franchisee. The remote control to our cable box had died. I was on a simple mission to trade it in for a working model. In the parking lot of the cable company, I told Grace, “This is corporate America. This will be quick. Ten minutes, tops.”

Times five, maybe. Fifty-three minutes later I had a fresh remote control unit and a splitting headache. Grace’s patience, never exemplary, had evaporated totally.

My watch said ten minutes after one. Viv-our lovely, indispensable child-care-worker-nanny-person-had been waiting for us at the house since twelve-thirty.

I drove home, handed Grace off to Viv, downed an energy bar and a big glass of water, and went to change my clothes for a bike ride.

I’d finished stripping naked and was fishing in my closet for my cycling clothes when my pager started vibrating on the shelf.

I checked the screen.

It read “ 911” beside a Boulder phone number.

Before I had a chance to return the call, the phone rang. I jogged a few steps to the bedroom and answered. To my surprise, I heard Sam’s voice.

“The shit came down,” he said.

I thought he was talking about Sherry. I guessed he’d been served with dissolution papers or something similarly awful.

“God, I’m sorry, Sam. What happened?”

“They’re executing a search warrant as we speak. Understand, you didn’t hear it from me.”

Why would they want a search warrant for Sam’s house? And who else would I hear it from?

“What for? Who’s searching your house?”

“Not here, you doofus. Don’t be a jerk. At your client’s house. That detective from California? The old murder? Getting warm yet? Need any more clues?”

“A search warrant? They haven’t even talked to anyone. I didn’t even know they were in town.”

“I’m so sorry you didn’t get copied on the memo. I promise to have someone look into that; it’s inexcusable. Anyway, Lucy says Reynoso came into town with another detective, they met with the brass, and in no time they got a warrant from Judge Heller. They sure didn’t waste any time exercising the thing. She said they have their game faces on. This one’s serious, Alan. I gotta go.”

He hung up.

My pager began to dance on the shelf again.

Same message as the previous one: “ 911” and the same local phone number that I didn’t recognize.

I dialed the number and said, “This is Dr. Gregory returning a page.”

“Can you come over?” Gibbs begged. “Please? They’re searching our house. They’re going through everything. They have our computers. They’re even taking Sterling’sshoes.”

I was tongue-tied. Partly I was wondering why it was such an affront to Gibbs that the police were taking her husband’s shoes. But mostly I was considering the curious strategy that Detective Carmen Reynoso had adopted for dealing with the accusation against Sterling Storey.

No talk, just action.

“Please?” Gibbs repeated.

“Give me your address, please, Gibbs. I don’t recall where you live.” She gave me directions to a new neighborhood I was almost totally unfamiliar with, somewhere west of Broadway and north of downtown. “Did you ever get in touch with a local lawyer?” I asked.

“Kind of.”

Whatever that means,I wondered.

“Well, I suggest you give that person a call. I’ll be over in a little while, although I’m not sure what I can do given the circumstances.”

As I pulled on some boxer shorts and gazed longingly at my Lycra, I said aloud to myself, “I don’t know why I’m coming over. But I’m coming over.”

Sam had said that they “had their game faces on.” That they were “serious.” Which to me meant one thing: Detective Carmen Reynoso believed some aspect of Gibbs’s story.

Suddenly Diane’s caution about my therapeutic behavior flowed into my head the way water emerges from a cracked pipe: loudly, and with great insistence.

“What you’re doing for Gibbs you wouldn’t do for a lot of patients.”

I stopped with one foot hovering above my trousers.

Diane was right.

Now what the hell had I gotten myself into?