Critical Conditions

Five

The Rangers were in town to play the Avalanche and Sam Purdy was psyched. The plan was for him to come by my house around six and drive us to Denver to the hockey game.

He paged me at five-thirty, just as I was finishing with my last patient of the day. The number he left on the screen of my beeper was unfamiliar.

I picked up the phone and punched in the number. Sam answered gruffly after four rings. “Sam, is that you? It’s Alan. What’s up?”

“Change in plans, I’m afraid. Can you drive tonight? I’m at a crime scene without my car. I think it would save time if you just picked me up. I’m out east, not too far from your house.”

“You have the tickets with you?”

“Right next to my heart.”

“No problem, I’ll pick you up. Give me directions.”

He did.

All the rules had seemed to change in my relationship with Sam Purdy after he had exercised his cop discretion and chosen not to believe me after I confessed to him that I thought I had shot someone last October.

Before that night we had enjoyed a friendship, but it was an odd hybrid of being buddies and being adversaries. We’d tried to enhance the relationship before; we bicycled together for a while, but that faded away from mutual neglect, and our friendship continued to languish within the bloody boundary lines where his police interests and my psychological acumen overlapped. We occasionally had breakfast together, sometimes spoke on the phone for no reason other than to stay in touch, and made vague plans about getting together that we rarely followed through on. Not once had Lauren and I rendezvoused socially with Sam and his wife, Sherry.

But over the last winter things had evolved, and Sam and I started meeting away from work. The first couple of invitations were from me, generated, I think, by my persistent anxiety that he would change his mind about ignoring my confession and end up busting me for some capital offense related to that gun going off. Right from the start, though, the incident the previous October seemed dead for Sam. I tried to make sense of how something so monumental for me seemed so inconsequential to him. I finally decided that by behaving the way I did that night in October I had passed some initiation ritual that was meaningful for Sam in a way that I might never understand. Maybe by caring enough to do what I did that night, I had crossed a line, joined some unnamed fraternity, earned some invisible stripe, and to Sam, I was now good enough to be a member of the club.

What club? I don’t know.

Those first few meetings we met late, after nine at night, after Sam had tucked his son, Simon, into bed. Sherry was a morning person, and was usually in bed shortly after Simon. What Sam normally did during those late-evening hours with his family asleep, I don’t know, but he seemed grateful for the opportunity to get together with me.

For a month or so we struggled to find the right place to meet. We tried the brewpubs, Walnut and Oasis, and played some pool. We tried some coffeehouses. We met in a few of Boulder’s bars-the West End, the Boulderado, even one memorable evening at Potter’s. But nothing felt right until Sam decided that maybe I would be a suitable companion to accompany him to hockey games and invited me to Denver to watch the Colorado Avalanche.

Sam had three season tickets in the second row of the second deck in the southeast corner of the arena. One for him, one for Sherry, one for Simon. On a cop’s salary, the tickets were a big investment. On school nights, Sherry wouldn’t let Sam take Simon along, so Sam was left to fend for himself on weeknight games.

Sam had been raised in northern Minnesota and had played hockey all his life. The arrival of a National Hockey League team in Denver brought him joy that was hard for me to understand until he took it upon himself to begin to teach me about offensive defensemen and blue lines and two-line passes and clearing zones and delayed offsides and the importance of finishing checks.

During those late-winter games, I was a hockey student. He instructed me about nuance without ever taking his eyes from the ice.

And during the twenty-minute breaks between periods, Sam and I stopped being buddies and started becoming friends.

During the first game we attended together, in the break between the second and third periods, Sam started talking about a case he was doing, some guy who was using legal tricks to get some incriminating evidence dismissed against him.

“He’s a damn rapist, Alan. Just slime. We suspect him in two other assaults. We have fingerprints, we have semen, we have him cold. I don’t care what his lawyer does; this guy is not going to walk.” He tried to flag down a popcorn vendor, who ignored him. “See, justice isn’t the same as law, Alan. It isn’t about cops or prosecutors or judges or legal procedure or any of that shit. Justice is about doing the right thing, about making sure, absolutely sure, that the right thing happens. Sometimes unlawful things result in justice. Cops know that. Civilians don’t get it.”

For some reason he pointed at the Zambonis preparing the ice for the third period. “Hockey players know about justice; basketball players don’t. Basketball players want the referees to provide justice; hockey players don’t rely on the cops. See, justice is reluctant; it’s not really a natural state of affairs. The natural state of affairs is survival of the fittest. But justice isn’t about that. Justice is about the weak surviving, too. It can be unnatural. And because it’s not natural, it often needs a shove.”

“Are we talking about last fall, Sam?”

“What? That? I don’t know, I don’t know. The right thing happened, didn’t it? Could be.”

The crime scene he was working the day of the Rangers game was in an upscale residential neighborhood in east Boulder, north of where I lived. The chief trial deputy in Lauren’s office, Mitchell Crest, lived in a more modest corner of the same subdivision. Lauren and I had been to his house once for a seder.

I said, “Sam, depending on traffic, I can be there in fifteen, twenty minutes.”

“I may need a little more time than that to finish up. But I really want to be at the game when they drop the puck. I was dying to see the warmups, but I’m afraid there’s no way now. This is the Rangers, you know. We’re talking Sandstrom and Gretzky. I’ll hustle to pull this together. When you get here, check in with one of the patrol guys.”

“Whatever.”

As I drove across town I wondered, of course, about the crime scene. Sam was a senior detective and he investigated mostly felonies, crimes against persons. Given the socioeconomics of the neighborhood, I was guessing that a domestic situation had ended way out of hand, or a burglary had gone sour after a homeowner discovered an intruder in his house.

The home where Sam directed me was on a cul-de-sac that backed up to greenbelt. Only three immense houses shared the little horseshoe-shaped street. When I arrived, though, it seemed as if the three families were sharing their quiet road with most of the law enforcement community of the City of Boulder. I was forced to park over half a block away on the closest cross street before I meandered over to try to track down Sam.

I joined a throng of neighborhood gawkers at a deep perimeter marked off at the end of the cul-de-sac by crime scene tape. Microwave trucks from the Denver TV stations were already setting up nearby for live remotes. As I approached the perimeter, I tried to be certain none of the news cameras were pointing my way.

Judging from the activity level that was apparent, the crime, whatever it was, was serious and had taken place in the middle of the three houses. The stately front door of the mansion faced the mountains; its backyard would welcome tomorrow’s sunrise.

My first goal was to find a Boulder cop walking the perimeter with a clipboard. There would be no getting inside the tape to find Sam unless I found whomever had been assigned to control access to the scene.

A uniformed patrol officer in his late twenties spotted me heading his way at the same time I recognized that he was the likely gatekeeper. He raised his chin a centimeter or two, and I thought he looked like he was preparing to repel me from the scene with gusto.

I smiled in an ingratiating manner and said, “Hello, Officer. I’m Dr. Gregory; I’m looking for Detective Purdy, Sam Purdy. I would be very grateful if you get him word that I’ve arrived. He’s expecting me.”

“Just a sec.” He glanced down at the board and found something with his index finger. “Are you Dr. Alan Gregory, by any chance?”

“Yes, I am.”

“May I see some ID please, sir?”

I dug my psychologist’s license from my wallet. I could have used my driver’s license for identification, but never in my professional life had I a reason or opportunity to show someone my psychologist’s license, so I thought I would take advantage of this one.

He examined the flimsy little paper card as though he’d never seen one before, which I was sure was the case.

Finally he checked his watch and said, “Come on inside. He’s waiting for you.”

I said, “Thanks,” and ducked under the crime-scene tape. I turned back to him and asked, “What’s going on over there? What happened?”

“I thought you knew. Some doctor ate his gun. Let’s go. I’ll escort you over.”

I had spent a brief but memorable period of time as a paid consultant to the Boulder County Coroner a few years back. My supervisor then had been a man named Scott Truscott. His was the first face I recognized as the officer walked me up a wide herringboned brick driveway.

“Scott? It’s Alan Gregory. How are you?”

He looked up, and he looked surprised. “Alan? Hi. They call you in on this?” He had been standing near one of the three garage doors. He took a few long strides my way, down the driveway. The officer left us, returning to his post on the perimeter.

I shook my head. “No. Sam Purdy and I are going to the Avs game tonight. I’m just picking him up here. You’ve been inside already?”

“Yeah. I’m done for now. The coroner is going to have his hands full for a while, though, with this post. You’re really going to see Gretzky and Sandstrom tonight? Damn, wish I had tickets for this one.”

Scott wanted to talk hockey, while I was getting more curious about the size of the response to this crime scene. I figured a quarter of the investigative resources of the police department were on this block. “So, you’ve been here a while? This is just about wrapped up?”

“This? Body was discovered right after lunch, I think. Lost some time getting a warrant. But this isn’t wrapped up. No. Not by a long shot. I have a feeling this one’ll have legs.”

“The cop at the perimeter said it was a doctor. Is it a physician? What, suicide?”

Scott picked at an uneven cuticle on the index finger of his left hand and then examined the other nine for flaws. He seemed to be making a judgment about the nature of my curiosity. He said, “Yes. Yes. No.”

I looked for a smile. There wasn’t one. “No? It’s not suicide?”

“I’m not even close to being prepared to recommend a determination of manner to the coroner, Alan. But it doesn’t look like any gunshot suicide I’ve ever seen. The scene is upside-down and backwards. My gut says it’ll take a lot of investigating and a lot of interviews and a lot of forensics to sort this out.”

I was surprised. Scott Truscott was a seasoned medical investigator and read the vagaries of death scenarios better than I read MMPI results. I said, “Really? The cop at the perimeter said he ate his gun. He made it sound, well, straightforward.”

Scott was not known for talking out of school, and he was apparently done sharing his secrets with me about this death. He shrugged. “It may have looked that way when the first officers arrived, but it doesn’t look that way now.” He shook his head and glanced at his watch. “Remember JonBenet? Things aren’t always as they seem. Listen, I have to run. I’m sure Sam Purdy will tell you more than I will.”

Scott took two steps toward his coroner’s van before he stopped and turned. “You wouldn’t know of anyone who has any other tickets available, would you? I mean, for the Rangers game tonight?”

“We’re using Sam’s tickets, Scott, not mine. I don’t know. I’ll ask him if he has any extras. Can he reach you on your pager?”

“Yes. Absolutely.”

I figured Sam had the unused ticket for the third seat with him in his pocket. I didn’t know whether he wanted Scott Truscott to sit in that seat. Sam seemed to like to use it as a coat rack and as a place to hold his food.

As I made my way from the driveway to the front porch I ran into Mitchell Crest, the chief trial deputy of the DA’s office, Lauren’s colleague. “Hi, Mitchell. Stop here on your way home?”

He wasn’t as surprised to see me as Scott Truscott, but I didn’t feel he was pleased, either. “Hello, Alan. I wish. What are you doing here? How did you get inside the tape?”

“Everyone keeps asking me that. I’m just running a taxi service, looking for Sam Purdy. He and I have plans in Denver tonight.”

Mitchell nodded as if he didn’t really believe me. Lauren did the same thing sometimes. I suspected there were advance seminars on the technique in law school.

“I just saw him in there. I don’t think he’s quite done inside.”

“I’ll wait, I guess. Who’s the dead doctor?” I was afraid it was someone I knew.

He furrowed his brow, snapped his finger. “Edward Robilio. Dr. Edward Robilio.”

I shrugged. I had never heard the name. “I don’t know him. Does he practice here in town?”

“I only knew him as Ed from the homeowners’ association. He’s the past president, ran the meetings like a parliamentarian from the Weimar Republic. He had this obsessive thing about wanting to revoke the covenant that prohibits parking an RV on your own property in the neighborhood. He owns this cream-and-peach-colored Holiday Rambler that’s the size of a Greyhound bus. But yes, he’s a physician, although I don’t think he practices anymore. He’s a businessman of some kind. Something to do with health insurance.”

“I’m sorry if I was flippant, Mitchell. I didn’t know you knew him.”

“It’s all right. We were acquaintances, not friends. I actively supported keeping the RV parking ban. Ed took that personally, figured it made me a jerk.”

“What exactly is a Holiday Rambler? That’s an RV, like a Winnebago?”

Mitchell smiled. “Not exactly. Hearing you say that would probably make Ed turn over in his grave, if he was in one yet. Apparently, Ford is to Mercedes-Benz as Winnebago is to Holiday Rambler.”

“I don’t see one around anywhere. I take it your position on the parking ban prevailed?”

“Yes, we won. Dr. Robilio was forced to move his pride and joy up to his ranch in the mountains.”

I tilted my head toward the house. “So, was this a suicide?”

“Suicide? You thinking maybe he was that distraught about the parking ban? Hardly. It looks like he’s dead by gunshot. But there’s no weapon on the scene. You can try real hard, but it’s difficult to make that look like suicide. Maybe not impossible, but certainly difficult.”

“What are you guessing? That the killer screwed around with the scene?”

“Let’s just say the scene is complicated.”

“But the shot was in the man’s mouth?”

He eyed me. “Yes, it was. Close, anyway. How did you know about that?”

I didn’t want to point a finger at the patrolman with the clipboard. “Somebody at the perimeter said that the deceased ate his gun.”

Mitchell seemed to be thinking of how to respond. Finally he said, “It may be true, about him eating his gun. If it is, though, it looks like it was a case of force-feeding. Who knows, maybe he literally ate it and we’ll get it back on autopsy. That would be a first.” He stuffed his hands in his pockets. “That’s not funny. Sorry. Keep all this to yourself. If any of those reporters stop you, and they will, just ‘no comment’ them, okay?”

“I know the drill, Mitchell.”

Right then the wind shifted, or someone opened a window somewhere in the house, creating a crosswind or something. But I was almost bowled over by a blast of air so fetid and distinctive that I had no trouble recognizing its source.

Mitchell smelled it, too. He smiled at my reaction. “Dr. Robilio’s been dead awhile. Smell wasn’t bad until they started moving him around. Lauren’s lucky she’s out of town. When rich doctors die by gunshot, prosecutors on the felony team don’t tend to get too much sleep. Say hi to her for me. Her mother’s doing…?”

“Her mom’s stable. Thanks for asking.”

“And Lauren’s feeling okay, I hope?”

“Yes, Mitchell. She’s well-fine.” Lauren would despise the fact that everyone asked about her health as though she were an invalid. She would hate it. I wouldn’t tell her.