Damage

39

Jon Durbin got called out of his English class at eleven fifteen and was asked to report to the principal's office. When he got there and gave his name, the secretary instructed Jon to go to one of the counseling rooms down a short hallway off the main lobby. His stomach doing cartwheels and his head light-what else could have happened now?-he got down to the third doorway on his right and knocked once.

The door opened away from him and he stepped inside, not seeing his father until the door was nearly closed behind him. Jon looked from side to side in anger and frustration, trapped. "I don't have to stay here. Let me out."

Michael Durbin stood his ground, holding the door closed behind him. "I wanted to have a few words with you," he said, "after which you're free to go."

"I'm free to go now. I've got nothing to say to you."

"Well, that makes one of us. I've got something to say to you, short and sweet. I did not kill your mother. I don't know where you got that idea…"

"You don't? You don't think we all heard you fighting all the time?"

"It wasn't all the time. We were having some issues. That's what parents do sometimes. I did not kill her. We were trying to work things out so we could stay together. We got a little vocal from time to time."

"Ha. A little?"

"So what, Jon? Really, so what? The issues were serious. Okay?"

"I know what the issues were. Or rather, the main issue."

"You do? Maybe you could tell me, then."

"You and Liza, that's what. How's that?"

"Well, that's just completely wrong, is how that is." Michael's arms were crossed over his chest-protecting the door, protecting himself-and now he dropped them to his sides. "You think we could sit down a minute?"

The room held a table and four chairs. Jon hesitated, then finally sidestepped over to the nearest chair and lowered himself into it. His father pulled another chair from where it sat against the wall over to him. He wasn't going to leave an open shot at the door to his son. Now, though, seated in front of it, he came forward with his elbows on his knees and raised his eyes directly to Jon's. "I don't know how I'm going to convince you of this, but Liza is a friend of mine and that's all she is. That's all she has ever been."

"Yeah, right. You went over there the night after Mom's service. Are you gonna deny that, too?"

"No. I went there. I was in pain, Jon. I'm still in pain. I needed to talk to somebody and felt I'd dumped enough on Chuck and Kathy. I knew Liza would listen. Why is that so hard for you to understand? I'd think that you, of all people, would get it. You know who I am. You've always known who I am."

Michael's even tone was puncturing Jon's bubble of hostility. He sat back in his chair, hands folded in his lap, studying the floor. Finally he looked up. "Well, then, what was all the fighting about? With you and Mom?"

"I don't know which fights you're talking about exactly, but some of them were probably about money. Your mother wanted a bigger house, like Chuck and Kathy's. She wanted me to open another store if I could. I didn't want to do that. If anything, I wanted to work less and maybe get back to my painting. And that's the other thing; do you really believe I cut up my paintings?"

"I don't know. If it was the only way to get the cops off you."

"Jesus." Michael dropped his head and wagged it from side to side. "I don't know how I've failed you so badly that you could think I'd do any of this. I didn't, I swear to you. No Liza, no slashed paintings, no hurting your mother in any way."

"Then why couldn't you even say where you were that morning?"

"I was driving to work, thinking about work, about making more money, worried about your mother and me, and about Ro Curtlee being out of jail. I wasn't paying any attention to the drive, or the delays. Do you remember all the details about coming in to school today?"

"So who killed her, then?"

"Ro Curtlee killed her, Jon. I was the main reason he did all that time in prison, and he killed her and slashed my paintings to punish me. Why doesn't this make sense to you?"

"Because, Dad, he had a goddamn broken arm. How about that? It was all in the papers about the police breaking his arm when they arrested him. You don't strangle somebody if you've got a broken arm, not somebody like Mom anyway. She was strong, you know? She could still beat Peter at arm wrestling. So it just couldn't happen. And then who's that leave?" He slammed his palm flat against the surface of the table next to him, eyes filled with rage and confusion. "You don't think I haven't thought enough about this? You think I want to believe that my father… that he'd do this and so fuck up all our lives? So if it's not Ro Curtlee, who's that leave, huh? Especially when you can't remember what you did that morning…"

"I did remember! I do remember. It just didn't come to me when it should have."

"Don't you hear yourself? That is so fucking lame…"

"It's what it was, Jon. It's just what it was." Afraid that he was losing him again, and maybe for the last time, Michael came forward in his chair. "Listen," he said, "listen." Urgently, quietly. "You're not going to want to hear this, but it wasn't me having an affair."

"Are you saying it was Mom?"

"Your mother, yes."

"Bullshit."

"No. True. Just so you know somebody else is in the picture."

"Who?"

"We don't know. Inspector Glitsky doesn't know. Maybe one of her patients. But the bad news about that is that with Ro dead, Glitsky's not going to be looking very hard anymore. He thinks it was Ro."

"He can't think that. It's too damn convenient and beyond that, it doesn't make any sense."

"He thinks it does. But the bottom line is we may never know who killed her. And that just kills me, but it might be true." He reached a hand across and touched his son's knee. "Come back home, Jon. Please."

Jon's mouth stayed tight, his posture rigid, not committing to anything. Tears pooled in the corners of his eyes and overflowed.

"Where have you been staying, anyway?"

"Rich's."

"They said you weren't there."

"I know."

Michael's frustration with Rich's family forced a breath out of him. "Well, we're moving out of Chuck and Kathy's and into a motel on Wednesday. I think it's time we started trying getting along again as a family. Do you think you could do that?"

Angrily Jon brushed away where his tears had wet his cheeks. "I don't know, Dad. All I know is I want to kill whoever killed her."

"I do, too, Jon. I do, too. And I swear to God, that wasn't me. It wasn't me. I need you to believe me. Do you think you can do that?"

Jon slumped back and crossed his arms, his face set in a mask. After a few long beats, Michael realized that this was the best he was going to get from his son today, and he stood up, laid a hand gently on his shoulder, and walked out the door. Darrel Bracco phrased his questions to Linda Salcedo in such a way that she had no idea he was inquiring as to the alibi of Ro Curtlee on the morning of Janice Durbin's death. He let her believe he was getting general background about daily life in the Curtlee mansion, and she had been unwaveringly certain: Since he'd been released on bail the first time, and except for when he'd been in police custody and on one other morning last week, Ro Curtlee had spent every night in his bedroom, and had never gotten up before nine or nine thirty in the morning. Linda remembered specifically because she herself was up at six thirty, starting her cleaning upstairs before coming down to help with breakfast. She passed directly in front of Ro's room every morning, knocking quietly, then opening the door a crack to look in and see if he'd gotten up so that she could clean up in that room and make the bed. But no, he'd been in there every day. Definitely. And had appeared downstairs either during or after the Curtlees' having their breakfast.

This was not the news Glitsky wanted to hear.

After Bracco left his office, Glitsky sat in a blue funk for nearly a half hour. Finally he got up and went around his desk to the whiteboard where he kept his list of active cases and inspector assignments. In the clean white space that only this morning had held the name Felicia Nunez, he wrote the name Janice Durbin in large block letters, and then across from it in the empty rectangle on the right-GLITSKY. It was going to be a long, slow haul getting a special master appointed by a judge to go through the patient files in Janice Durbin's office and try to find evidence of a carnal relationship between the psychiatrist and someone who was seeing her professionally. It could take weeks, even months, and still in the end yield nothing-for the truth remained that there was a whole universe of men and even women who might have been intimately involved with Janice Durbin, and none of them her patients.

And that was if, in fact, it had not been Michael Durbin who'd been having the affair, contracted chlamydia, and killed his wife-perhaps even by accident-when she'd become infected and fought with him over it. Of course, to believe that Michael Durbin had killed his wife, Glitsky would have to believe that he'd also slashed his own works of art, but this was just the sort of almost unfathomable subterfuge he might in fact expect from a desperate killer.

In any event, he'd already let too much time go by because of his insistence upon the guilt of Ro Curtlee. This was the eleventh day after Janice's death, and to say that the trail had gone cold was a significant understatement.

At 2:40, having spent an hour on his paperwork for a search warrant and special master request, Glitsky found himself in the hallway of the block-long, low-rise stucco professional building about midway between the Stonestown Mall and San Francisco State University where Janice Durbin had had her office. It was a relatively modern building with no apparent frills. Janice had practiced in suite 204, just across from the elevator on the second floor, and Glitsky now stood outside of that suite, in the hallway, peering into it through the half-open gray venetian blinds. Unless he was missing something, and he didn't think he was, he could see the entire office.

There was no reception area, simply a couple of functional couches, one along the right wall and one under the wide, rectangular window-its blinds, too, half open-that made up most of the back wall. On the left, a low dark wood credenza looked like it probably held her files. Facing the two couches was a large red-leather lounge chair, with a telephone table and a floor lamp next to it. A large purple beanbag chair sat in the far corner. Some framed pictures hung on the walls on either side, but the glare from the outside window kept him from seeing what kind of art she'd hung there.

It wouldn't matter too much, he thought. The place was clean, uncluttered, basic.

"Can I help you?"

Glitsky straightened and turned to face an attractive, professionally dressed, heavyset black woman who looked to be somewhere in her late twenties. Introducing himself and proffering his badge, he said, "As you may know, Dr. Durbin was murdered a little over a week ago. I was hoping to talk to some of her neighbors in this building, see if somebody might be able to throw some light on the investigation."

"In what way?"

"In any way, really. We haven't gotten very far yet. Did you know Dr. Durbin?"

"Not exactly. Just, you know, in the ladies', or passing in the hallway. I couldn't believe when we heard what happened. Nobody could. You never think that kind of thing could happen to somebody you know. Or like her."

"How was she, then?"

"Oh, you know. Polite, sweet, classy, down-to-earth. Just a regular person."

"Do you know if she had any particular friends here in this building? People she hung out with?"

"Not really, no. Not saying she didn't, just if she did I didn't know about it. It's not like we're all one big office here, as you probably figured out already. Everybody's got their own, mostly. I'm with Bayview Security, down at the end there at two-oh-seven. Although Dr. Mitchell downstairs, he's a dentist actually. He's got his own big triple suite. But he's about the biggest. Lots of equipment, you know. Probably the main reason the building needs a security service, although we're here for everybody."

"Well, thank you," Glitsky said. "Maybe I'll just knock on a few doors. Would that be all right with you?"

"You go ahead," she said. "Good luck to you." Starting at 201 on the opposite side of the hall, Glitsky worked his way quickly down to 215, then started up Janice Durbin's side, which faced west over the back parking lot. As he'd been warned, there wasn't much in the way of information. Six of the offices housed therapists or counselors of one kind or another, and two of those were in session on his first pass, but none of the other four, nor the people in the insurance office in 203, knew Janice any more than the first woman he'd met in the hallway.

It was the same on Janice's side until he got to 208, a Pilates studio. Glitsky almost gave it a pass, figuring that it would be a room where people just showed up as they would at a gym, willynilly. He didn't even know if a specific tenant ran the place. In the end, though, being thorough, he knocked.

Even with no discernible makeup and a light sheen from sweating, the woman who opened the door nearly tied his tongue in knots. Clad only in a red leotard, she wore her blond hair shoulder length, held back with a red headband. It showed off the broad, fair forehead over eyes of pure jade. Perhaps in her early forties, she had trace lines at the corners of those distinctive eyes, but otherwise her face might have belonged to a twenty-year-old. "Hi," she said, extending her hand. "I'm Holly."

"Hello." Glitsky shook her hand, showed his badge, kept it simple. "I'm Abe Glitsky, with San Francisco homicide. Can you answer a few questions?"

She cast a glance back over her shoulder at the obviously empty studio and shrugged. "Sure. This must be about Janice, right?" And then suddenly her incredible eyes flashed. "That fucker."

The vehemence surprised Glitsky. "You mean Dr. Durbin?"

"No, no, no." Hands waving in front of her face. "Of course I don't mean Janice. I mean that fucker who killed her."

"So you knew her?"

"Yes. I mean, not that we'd been friends a long time-I just started the studio here two months ago-but she was… I thought we were going to be friends forever, you know how that is. You meet somebody, wham, right?"

"Actually not too often," Glitsky said.

"No. I know what you mean. Not too darned often."

"So you felt you were getting to know her well?"

She nodded, now dead somber. "I thought she was starting to be my best friend. Some days she'd get an hour or two between appointments and she'd come down here, and as you can see, it gets a little slow here, too. So we'd just talk."

"What about?"

"Everything. Kids, staying in shape, getting old, running your own business, books, movies. You name it, we talked about it."

"Men?"

She cocked her head to one side. "Sure."

"Not just her husband?"

"Not always, no." Shifting her weight from one foot to the other, she added, "I guess what you want to know is was she seeing someone else. She was."

"One of her patients, did she say?"

"No. I mean, yes, she did say. No, not one of her patients."

"You're sure?"

"Unless she was lying to me, which she wasn't."

"So who was he? Did you ever meet him? Or see him?"

"No."

"Did she ever mention him by name?"

"No. She really wasn't comfortable talking about it. It was like she didn't want it to be happening, but she didn't know how she could stop. She wasn't really proud of it."

"So she wanted it to stop?"

"I don't know. I don't think so, really. She was just mostly worried that she'd get caught. She didn't want to lose her family life. And her husband. But she was infatuated with the guy, even though she was pretty sure he was a player."

"A player?"

"You know. Lots of partners. A player."

"Lots of partners? Where would he get lots of partners?"

The question clearly amused her. "Hello? A straight guy in San Francisco? Finding partners isn't your problem, trust me. You look a little frustrated."

Glitsky nodded. "I am. If this guy wasn't one of her patients, I've got basically no place to start looking for him. He could be anywhere."

"You think he's the guy who killed her?"

"I think he might have a motive, or given her husband one. Either way, I'd like to find him. Do you know where they hooked up? Some motel, maybe? An apartment?"

"Why?"

"If he used a credit card, we got him. If he paid cash, he had to show an ID and they keep it on file. I'm grasping at straws here."

After a small silence, she said, "If it's any help, Janice told me he came by here a few times after hours. Maybe somebody would have seen him then."

"I'll be sure to ask," Glitsky said. And then, berating himself for not getting to any of this much earlier, he thanked Holly and continued on his door-to-door down the hallway. In the end, he'd spoken to a living person in every one of the twenty-two businesses in the building, and except for Holly, no one had known Janice Durbin as other than a professional acquaintance.