Blinded

TWENTY

Gibbs and Sterling lived in one of those big faux Victorians that had been all the rage in the build-out of the northwest and eastern expanses of Boulder in the 1980s when developers were finally beginning to believe that the city was serious about growth control. The architects had, I’m sure, been trying to pay respectful homage to the original Victorian heritage of the city’s housing base in the 1880s, but the end result turned out more like Main Street in Disneyland than like Mapleton Hill in Boulder.

The Storeys’ three-story house had to be five thousand square feet in size. As I approached the home from the corner-it was easy to tell which one it was by the convention of marked and unmarked police department vehicles clustered out front-I wondered what the Storeys did in there by themselves. A two-person game of hide-and-seek could go on for weeks without resolution.

Gibbs was sitting by herself in the driver’s seat of a monstrous gold-colored SUV, the kind of motoring behemoth that I hated driving behind, next to, in front of, or on the same road with. It wasn’t just that the latest-generation SUVs were big, it was that they tried so hard to be big. It was as though they thrust out their chests and puffed out their cheeks. Gibbs’s colossus was a Cadillac. She was swallowed up behind the steering wheel of the thing like a five-year-old pretending to drive a fire truck. She was startled when I knocked on the passenger-side window, but waved me in after a moment.

She wasn’t effervescent.

“Thanks for coming. I don’t even know why I called.”

I could have admitted that I didn’t, either, but if I had, then I probably would also have had to consider aloud why I had responded by driving across town to be with her, and I wasn’t eager to do that.

“What’s going on?”

“They just showed up, shoved some papers in my face, and started rummaging through my house. God knows what they’re doing in there. There are five of them.”

“Are they from California? The ones I called for you?” I already knew the answer to the question, but I wasn’t going to learn much about Gibbs if I didn’t keep her talking.

“Yeah, um, yes. At least one of them is. Maybe two. There’s a woman. She’s really tall. She told me she’s from Laguna. She said she was the one you spoke with on the phone.”

“Detective Reynoso.”

Gibbs shrugged.

“Any detectives from Boulder?”

“Yes.”

“Did you get a name?”

“I’ve forgotten it already.”

“ Sterling? Is he here?”

“He left yesterday for Florida. The Seminoles, the Gators, the Hurricanes-I don’t know. He’s doing some game, a Florida team against some team not from Florida. Georgia, maybe. Or Alabama. Auburn? Where’s Auburn? I’m sorry. I’ve tried and tried and tried, and I can’t tell them all apart. I know it’s important to some people, but for the life of me I can’t tell them apart.”

She actually seemed ready to break into tears over her college football dyslexia. In a more conventional psychotherapy, I would have figured that the marital repercussions of her gridiron ignorance-and her feelings about the same-were a topic we would get around to talking about in some more detail.

But now wasn’t the time. “What city is he in?”

“ Tallahassee.”

“Have you tried to reach him?” I was aware that I was asking a lot of questions, not typical for me in psychotherapy and usually not a sign that things were going well. My database of therapy sessions in the front seats of Cadillac Escalades was, however, limited.

Gibbs lifted a cell phone from her lap. “He’s not answering. He’s always busy when he’s setting up these broadcasts. Deadlines, deadlines. I left him a message.”

“And your attorney?”

“There really isn’t one.”

“And you implied that there was one because…”

I allowed the thought to settle close by her like an unfriendly dog to see if she’d respond to it. I thought I noticed her jaw clenching, but that was the only reaction she displayed.

I finished my own sentence. “… because you thought I’d be angry or disappointed if you didn’t have a lawyer.”

She nodded. She wasn’t looking at me. She was watching a very blond, very strong police officer carry an iMac out of her house. “That’s not even Sterling ’s, it’s mine. He hates Macs.”

The strong blond officer placed the computer in the back of a gray Chevy Suburban.

“You didn’t want to-what? Make me angry?”

She huffed. Just a little huff, but a huff nonetheless. “I don’t like expectations in relationships.”

Noted. “And you think that I had an expectation about you having a lawyer?”

Her nostrils flared. “From the beginning you’ve had an expectation about my doing this your way.”

I reminded myself that my relationship with Gibbs was psychotherapy, a form of human interaction that often appears to have little in common with reality.

“My way?” is all I said, and I managed to say it in a measured voice, as though I were curious and not incredulous. I knew I could have pounced. Fortunately, I was also aware at some level that I wanted to pounce.

My way would have included Gibbs staying in Safe House, not sharing a bed with the man she was accusing of murder. My way would have included Gibbs calling the Laguna Beach Police Department on her own, not having me do it in her stead. My way would not ever, ever have included my sitting in the front seat of a Cadillac Escalade while a search warrant was being carried out.

But Gibbs wasn’t talking about reality, she was talking about reality as she experienced it. Her real world. Notthereal world. She was talking, especially, about the role that men assumed in her real world. My job was to help her make some sense out of that experience and perhaps ultimately help her see the extent of the divergence that existed between her real world and the place where most of us hung out, that universal theme park called “reality.”

Just then a parade of three peace officers marched out the garage door of Gibbs’s home. Each of the cops was carrying two large brown-paper bags that were folded once at the top. A tag was stapled at the fold of each bag.

Gibbs said, “I wonder what they’re stealing. I have some nice things.”

A little reality testing was in order. “I think they’re trying to solve a murder, Gibbs. Your friend Louise? You called them, right? That’s why they’re here, isn’t it?”

“I know,” she said.

But she was much more annoyed than sympathetic.

“That’s her,” Gibbs said.

Carmen Reynosowastall. From the distance where we were sitting, I guessed six feet tall. Like many visitors to our fine state, she was also unaccustomed to the vagaries of Colorado weather. The calendar said November, and many if not most outsiders figure that means blizzards followed by subzero temperatures followed by snowplows followed by commuters getting to work on cross-country skis until the mud season starts in May.

Reynoso was dressed perfectly according to the common lore. She was decked out in good leather boots, wool pants, and a thick turtleneck sweater that would have left me begging for a place to change into something more temperate. She carried a heavy navy jacket draped over her left arm.

The tail end of a little cold front had come through overnight, clipping the Front Range and dropping us from the high seventies into the mid-sixties. The sun was sharp, though-its rays filtered only by the thinnest ribbons of high clouds-and I thought I was a bit overdressed in cords and a cotton sweater.

“Nice boots,” Gibbs said. “Though I wouldn’t wear them with that coat. Nope.”

Nice boots?

Detective Reynoso took two long strides down the serpentine herringbone brick walkway before she pirouetted to the sound of her name being called from inside the house and returned to the shadows.

“Did Detective Reynoso say anything to you about when she’d like to speak with you?” I asked.

“She asked me to stick around during the search. I assumed that meant she wanted to see me after.”

“You should have an attorney present, Gibbs. For your protection.” My wife had drilled into me that I should have an attorney present whenever anybody from law enforcement wanted to talk to me about anything. Yes, she would admit that there were exceptions, but she would insist that I first run them past my attorney.

Exasperated, Gibbs said, “I’m the one who called. I don’tneedprotection. Don’t you get that?”

I swallowed involuntarily. I didn’t correct her and remind her that technically it had been I who had called.

“Not from you, not from an attorney, not from Safe House, and not fromher.” Gibbs pointed in the general direction of Carmen Reynoso. “Got it?”