Critical Conditions

Thirty-six

While Merritt called Cozy, I paged her uncle. I’d been thinking about what to say and I thought I’d found an ethical crease that I could squeeze through to let Sam know about all the visitors Ed Robilio had been greeting just prior to becoming Dead Ed.

Sam was in his car, going where, I had to guess. “Sam, it’s me.”

“Figured. Any news yet?”

“No, everyone here is chewing their fingernails off. I’ll page you when the word is out. Listen, I’ve been thinking-looking for french fries, so to speak.”

“Hold your thought for a second. I’m still losing sleep trying to figure out why the harassment stopped against Brenda before the public knew Chaney was sick. Am I being obsessive here?”

“I don’t know, Sam. Maybe the guy just gave up on his own. That happens, right? Every candle burns out eventually.”

“Maybe, I don’t know. I don’t like loose ends where my family’s concerned. What did you want?”

“Like I said, I’ve been thinking, too.”

“Yeah?”

“Sunny Hasan, remember her, at the cabin? She told us about her uncle and aunt, Andrew and Abby. Last name Porter. You know, how they’re getting a divorce, how there were a lot of bad feelings between them and Robilio?”

“Mmm-hmm. Yeah?”

“I’m just wondering whether any of his latents, you know, Andrew Porter’s, were found at the Robilio house, maybe even in the home office?”

Pause. “You have a reason to think they might have been?”

I stayed quiet and hoped he knew why.

He didn’t miss a beat. “But you think, maybe, it’d be worth checking? Asking Andrew about recent visits? Tension in the family? Like around this divorce thing?”

I wished he could see my face. “I would think more the custody thing than the divorce thing. But that’s sort of it, yes.”

Sam was silent for a couple of measures. “My own brother-in-law, Trent, does some of that, doesn’t he? Custody evaluation work?”

“Yeah, I think he does.”

Sam’s voice lightened as he said, “You’re out on a limb right now, aren’t you?”

“Sam, I’ve been out here so much lately I’m actually beginning to like the view.”

At one forty-five that afternoon, a twin-jet air ambulance lifted off from Centennial Airport for a two-and-a-half-hour flight to Sea-Tac airport in Washington. Chaney Trent was on board along with a nurse, a physician, her mother, her father, and her Aunt Sherry.

The Channel 7 news team had been on the story with three crews and a full graphics package-“Chaney’s Hope,” they were calling it-from the moment Brenda informed her boss she was going to need some extended family leave time. The other local stations were less than an hour behind with their own blanket coverage.

I had finished a long psychotherapy session with Merritt to begin to explore her feelings about her sister’s illness and prognosis, and to give her a chance to look at what she had done with Madison and Dr. Robilio. Merritt’s discharge planning meeting with the unit staff ate up an additional thirty minutes and I was in the unit dayroom as I watched the air ambulance take off-LIVE!-from the runway at Centennial Airport, courtesy of cameras mounted inside the same news helicopter that had floated Lucy Davenport and me over the Continental Divide.

As the plane banked west toward the Rockies, an off-camera reporter, remarkably breathless, read a statement from MedExcel that said that the corporate change of heart about providing approval for Chaney’s procedure was due to a routine re-review of the facts of the case. On air, the reporter didn’t question either the velocity or the direction of the corporate spin.

What was more important news, apparently, were the preparations being made for a local crew to follow the air ambulance to Seattle. We saw almost a minute of tape of those preparations.

As the piece on Chaney’s departure segued into a commercial for Xantac 75, I found myself musing that Dr. Terence Gusman was probably one of the only people in Denver whose heart wasn’t warmed by Chaney’s story.

Merritt had missed the news reports of her sister’s departure for Washington. After our session concluded, she moved into a different consultation room to engage in a much-delayed tête-à-tête with Cozier Maitlin. I was pretty sure she was busy making him crazy with her rules about what parts of her story he could use to help her and what parts he couldn’t. Cozy, I figured, would soon come to the same conclusion I had reached overnight: If Merritt had simply admitted going to Robilio’s house early on, she would have had a living witness to corroborate her story about discovering his body. But now Madison was dead, and Cozy had to find a way, without the benefit of witnesses, to convince the authorities of his client’s innocence. And without enjoying the freedom to tell anyone that his client had been busy blackmailing the victim with a videotape of their scripted sexual encounter.

Although Chaney was on her way to Seattle and Merritt was on her way out of the hospital, there remained some jokers loose in the deck. The videotape, the real one-not the substitute one that Brad had bashed into Madison’s head-had yet to surface. Sometime soon, I feared, Merritt would have to suffer the humiliation and legal jeopardy of the tape being played somewhere to somebody. And at some point, even if it took a grand jury, John Trent and the authorities were going to have a pointed conversation about Trent’s repeated visits to Dead Ed’s house.

I returned to the nursing station and grabbed Merritt’s chart from the rack. After jotting down the specifics of the discharge plan I had just negotiated with the unit staff, I added, with profound understatement, that her legal situation still required clarification. With any luck from the DA or Cozy Maitlin, though, I harbored some hope she would be on her way to join her family in Seattle in a day or two.

I headed back to Boulder with some of my own fantasies-that my wife would be home soon, my practice would be mundane soon, and my life would again be my own soon.

Ha.

Adrienne had plastered a big victory for the masses banner across the front door of my house. In my life, I have never even had time to figure out how to get my computer and printer to print envelopes, so I couldn’t imagine how she had been able to master the art of banner-making. Two explanations came to mind. Adrienne didn’t sleep, which gave her more time to putz than me, and she was, conservatively, double-digit IQ points smarter than me, which usually was fine, although sometimes it really pissed me off.

Emily was as happy to see me as I was to see her. I played a long-distance game of kill-the-tennis-ball with her for a while and promised her a long walk at the end of the day. Unfortunately, the future tense doesn’t exist in any known dog lexicon and she was visibly perplexed at being returned to her dog run without the appearance of her leash.

Cozy had left me a long voice-mail message about an unpleasant meeting he had just concluded with Mitchell Crest, the thrust of which was that if I discharged Merritt, the DA’s office wasn’t going to be happy, but they weren’t going to arrest her before we whisked her to DIA.

Cozy added that I had better not be wrong about his client no longer being suicidal. He said, “You have one shot before the buzzer. Make it count.” Cozy’s use of a sports metaphor threw me off balance; I figured it was for my benefit.

I had rescheduled two patients at the end of the day. Their issues were blessedly routine. As the first session became the second, I felt the comforting return of my therapeutic rhythm. It reminded me of the moment when I find a robotic spin on a long bike ride. Once you’re there, instinct is golden. You trust, you fly.

As I had been listening to my second patient describe the nearly daily argument he was having with his wife about what he was absolutely determined was the correct way to load the dishwasher, I had a revelation about Merritt and Madison and Dead Ed.

Ah-ha moments, flashes of insight, although not commonplace, aren’t unexpected in the lives of psychotherapists. Most of the time, though, I apply the brakes of caution and keep the initial glint of percipience to myself. I do this because often I’m plain wrong, and also because there is usually no harm in sitting on the revelations. True insights aren’t perishable; there is no danger in storing them for long periods of time. Sometimes insights even age and improve like good wine. But false insight always injects clutter and misdirection-the construction of an artificial fork in an otherwise meandering but purposeful road.

The truth is that when doing psychotherapy, being right is usually much less important than not being wrong.

I reminded myself of none of these things as I called Miggy Monroe, invited myself over, and asked for directions to her apartment.

I don’t know why I expected a chaotic apartment with ten cats, undusted tchotchkes, and piles of magazines from the Johnson administration, but I did. It’s not what I found.

Miggy Monroe lived in one of the brick midrise buildings on the west end of Arapahoe near Ninth Street. The apartment had a wonderful view of the Flatirons, and Miggy favored contemporary pieces in the colors of the various incarnations of oatmeal: plain, with honey, with milk, with milk and cinnamon.

The only colors in the apartment were the red lines in Miggy’s eyes and the dust-jacketed spines of hundreds of books.

She was surprised I was so young. I was surprised she was so young. I offered my compassion over Madison’s death and she invited me to the funeral to be held two days later. The coroner in Routt County had just released her daughter’s body. Madison’s father was flying in from Humboldt State in California. She thought I would like him. It seemed apparent to me that Miggy still did.

I told her I couldn’t tell her why I needed to know, but I asked if she had yet gone through her daughter’s things.

“Sure, I was hoping for some answers.”

“Find any?”

I thought she hesitated before she shook her head.

I was tempted to dance around my objectives but wasn’t creative enough to find a way to do it. I said, “Did you find any videotapes with her stuff?”

She looked puzzled, said, “No.”

“Is there a collection of tapes the family keeps?”

“There is no family. It was just me and Maddy.”

She wanted me to focus with her on grief. I wanted to find the videotape. I felt like all my compassionate muscles were cramping from overuse. I said, “I’m sorry. Do you have a video camera?”

A hesitant, “Yes. What’s so important about our videos?”

“So you have some tapes, then? Things you’ve recorded over the years-home videos? Maybe some movies you recorded? Prerecorded tapes?”

“Sure. Of course. We used to take lots of videos when she was little. Madison. Not so much lately. Things were difficult lately. She recorded stuff off cable, too. We get HBO.”

“May I see the collection?”

“Of course, I guess. Is this about Merritt? Are you looking for one with Maddy and Merritt on it? I don’t think there are any.” She opened a white lacquer cabinet to reveal a TV and VCR. An interior drawer held about two dozen tapes.

“Yes, it’s about Merritt, but I can’t say any more than that.” I thought about what to do next. I didn’t really want to sit in Miggy’s apartment watching her TV and her VCR while I searched for the videotape of whatever Madison had recorded happening between Merritt and Dead Ed in the rear end of Haldeman.

“May I take these with me, Miggy? Overnight? I need to go through them-I’m looking for something specific-and I don’t want to intrude on you while I do. I’ll return them to you tomorrow, I promise.”

“Even the one you’re looking for?”

“If Madison’s on that one-at all-yes. I’ll return that one, too.”

She was obviously puzzled but too fractured by her grief to press me. She shrugged and said, “Why not? Let me get a shopping bag for you.”

The bag was white, with handles.

Leaving Miggy Monroe’s apartment, I backtracked across Boulder Creek to downtown and picked up a ready-to-bake pizza at Nick-N-Willy’s before I went home. While the oven heated, I salved my guilt and played with Emily without even changing my clothes. I played with her some more while the pizza baked. I knew I was procrastinating. I didn’t want to find the Holiday Rambler tape. I didn’t want to not find the Holiday Rambler tape.

Mostly, I didn’t want to see it.

My theory went like this: Madison’s return trip home to Boulder after she had run away with Brad had been because she had told him about taping Merritt and he was bullying her to retrieve the videotape of Merritt and Robilio, so he could begin his not-too-well-thought-out little extortion scenario with Robilio’s company, MedExcel. Madison, I figured, was having second thoughts about having told him about the blackmail scheme she and Merritt had cooked up and didn’t really want Brad to have the tape, so she had taken a copy of Pretty Woman to him instead, after making him promise not to watch it. But she told Brad it was the one.

Brad, of course, had watched the tape, and found nobody screwing on it but Richard Gere and Julia Roberts. He had beaten Madison viciously for her lie, using the copy of Pretty Woman as a bludgeon.

I shuddered at what might have followed between them, what slight by Madison had caused Brad to turn from batterer to murderer. I suspected that the proximity of Dead Ed’s arsenal made it too convenient for Brad to vent his rage with his finger on a trigger.

To support her subterfuge with Brad, I figured that Madison would have picked a bogus tape of the same category as the real tape: that is, a movie taped off HBO or one of the networks. By my count, the shopping bag that Miggy Monroe had given me contained nine likely suspects.

With a Sunshine Wheat Beer and two slices of Nick-N-Willy’s by my side, I fast-forwarded through snippets of Emma, Sense and Sensibility, and Waiting to Exhale before finding myself so amused and charmed by Alicia Silver-stone in Clueless that I watched almost half of it.

On the sixth tape, three minutes into Little Women, I found myself looking at Edward Robilio’s ass.

Never in my life have I been so grateful for a pause button.

I’m not offended by dirty movies. Although I can’t always trace the line accurately, I have no problem believing that a demarcation exists somewhere between erotica and obscenity.

At that moment, with Dead Ed’s butt filling the expanse of Lauren’s new big-screen TV in front of me, I was looking at the most pornographic image I had ever laid eyes on. If Edward Robilio managed to play Lazarus and rose from the dead right there in my living room, I would have pulled the videotape from the machine and beaten him back to eternity with it. It would have been the shortest reincarnation on record. He would have been begging me to merely shoot him a couple of times.

I paced the room. I changed clothes. I opened my mail. I put the rest of the pizza in the refrigerator. I checked my voice mail. I finished the beer and considered vodka.

I watched the damn tape.

The interlude in the RV lasted three and one-half minutes. A little over halfway through, Merritt raised her head and looked at the camera with a face so dead it belonged in a wax museum.