Last Lie (14 page)

18

I
felt my phone vibrate again. Briefly. A text, or an e-mail. I didn't get many of either late in the evening. I knew that I couldn't ignore it. Given her health, Lauren had to be confident that she could reach me, especially when she was home alone with the children.

"Excuse me, I need to check my phone," I said to Hella. "Might be something with the kids."

The text was from Sam Purdy.
I said I'd let you know the time. It's now. Beer?

I put the phone back in my pocket.

Hella said, "Kids are okay?"

"Yeah," I said. I paused long enough to allow a change of subject to feel natural. "How are you, Hella? Right now?"

"My blood sugar? I--"

"Not the blood sugar. The case. Us? The supervision? How are you?"

As a therapist, I rarely stooped to using intentionally disarming earnestness as a blunt tool to hack away at defenses. But it could be effective. Time was tight; I knew Hella and I would not be meeting much longer that evening. If she shored up her defenses, even a little, she could outwait me. If she did, some of the poignancy of the supervisory moment would be lost. So I stooped, and I tried earnestness.

"Oh." Hella lowered her knees, sliding her feet to the side. She grabbed a pillow to embrace instead.

I felt a little cheap at what I was doing. The feeling passed.

"This is so hard, Alan. I'm so worried about this patient. About being there for her in the . . . right way." Her shoulders dropped. "I hope you don't think this is resistance, but I don't feel like I'm able to do any more tonight. Supervision. You said you needed to know some things. Was this enough? Do you . . . know what you need to know?"

It was low-hanging fruit. It would have been an act of kindness to leave it alone. I wasn't there to be kind. I said, "Do I?"

She shook her head in dismay at the opening she'd left. "I asked for that."

I nodded. "Intentionally, I suspect."

"No, not everything, probably," she said. "But enough, I think. You know the story now. About Friday night, and Saturday morning, and about tonight--the break-in, if there was one. Where things stand legally.

"And . . . yes, I admit it appears that we may need to talk just a teensy bit more about . . . me. You know, just to provide some context." Hella smiled at her own joke. "I'm sure you can tell how much I'm looking forward to that conversation. I have some free time during the day on Wednesday and Thursday. Can we pick this up again then . . . maybe at your office?"

"Of course."

I capitulated. We spent a minute finding a time that worked. I said good night and walked out to my car. Upstairs, Hella was busy making emergency repairs to her defenses.

I leaned up against the driver's door as I texted Sam.
What are you thinking?

Mountain Sun on Pearl.

That didn't feel right. Mountain Sun was too young, too hip, and too loud for Sam. I considered the possibility he was pulling my leg.
Really?

At a table in back. Watching hoops.

Lauren and the kids were asleep. I could use some decompression time with my friend. A beer sounded great.
Fifteen minutes.

So that if she woke, she wouldn't worry, I texted Lauren that I was having a beer with Sam.
No worries
I told her.

A SIMPLE GEOGRAPHICAL imperative had determined that in downtown Boulder I was a West End guy. Our offices on Walnut Street anchored me to the part of Boulder's original downtown that rests between Broadway and the mountains, more specifically to the few-blocks' radius from our door that allowed me to grab a quick bite or run an errand on foot and then get back in time to see my next patient. The other half of Boulder's nineteenth-century core, the part beyond 15th Street on the eastern end of the Downtown Boulder Mall, was territory that was not as familiar to me. That stretch of Pearl often felt like a different downtown, one I rarely visited without a destination in mind.

The differences in the adjacent neighborhoods weren't merely geographic. There were different types of stores farther east, catering to different types of folks. Different restaurants, different bars. A definitely different crowd, sometimes defiantly different, walked those sidewalks.

In the West End, Boulder's recent march to quasi-sophistication was crystal clear. The West End announced its gentrification in neon.

But ambling on the other end of Pearl it was still possible to spot abundant indications of what Boulder had been in the seventies and eighties--in the post-hippie yet still pre too-cool-for-school days.

Snarf's, for instance, was on the other side of the Mall. Snarf's sandwiches played anywhere there were people with appetites, but I didn't think the unique Snarf's ambiance would have thrived as well in the West End. Frasca and L'Atelier were the exceptions that proved the rule. The diners filling those precious east end tables nightly were a decidedly West End group. Go figure.

Even though I spent much more of my time in the West End, I often discovered that I was more at home with the enduring old Boulder that existed at the other end of the Mall. My Boulder memories fit those sidewalks a little better. The modern eastern edge felt more like the Boulder of Stage House Books and Fred's, of the Printed Page, of Shannon's, and of the original Pearl Street Dot's. It was the Boulder of Tom's Tavern long before Tom had cut windows into his dive, even longer before Brad Heap had imagined Salt.

I'D SEEN Mountain Sun dozens of times from my car, or passing by on the sidewalk on Pearl, but I'd never walked inside. I suspected the same was true for Sam.

"What are you drinking?" I asked as I scooted into the booth across from him. His eyes were locked on a big flat screen. The Mavs at the Lakers. His glass was almost empty.

Despite the economy the crowd was lively, and energetic, and young. Not at all Sam's kind of place. He liked to sup beer undisturbed by any backbeat. Especially if the backbeat had any acquaintance to hip-hop.

He looked at me and lifted his glass. "Found this place on Yelp. Nice, huh?"

I did not know what to make of Sam and Yelp. My suspicion was not diminishing. I said, "Great."

"This is Claymore Scotch Ale. The ale part I understand. I'm thinking the scotch part probably has more to do with the country than with the whiskey. The Claymore part? I'm on my second, and I'm nearing a conclusion that it has to do with the way these things make you feel like you've been sitting on a land mine the whole time you've been drinking."

Sam is not often loquacious about beer. I wondered what it meant that he was. "Good?"

"Yeah. It's why we're here. The hops and the hoops."

I doubted either was true. Sam could get interesting craft beer all over town. And where sports were concerned, he was all about frozen pucks, not hoops. He drank at bars where agreeable bartenders would tune in a hockey game for him. Time would tell why we were at Mountain Sun, or not. When there were serious conversational summits to be reached, Sam had a tendency to climb slowly and then retreat before he reached the peak. More often than not he ended up sliding back down as soon as he began slipping on scree.

A waitress--some people wear their Boulder-ness so visibly that it is as obvious as a brightly colored outer garment; she was one of those--stopped at the table with two grilled cheese sandwiches, each partially buried by a mound of french fries. Sam said, "I ordered for you. The sandwiches have tomatoes in them. That's for our hearts."

"Something to drink?" she asked me. She had a touch of glittery makeup on the lids above her pale eyes. Maybe some eyeliner.

I pegged her as waiting for the ski resorts to gear up so she could spend her days doing some serious boarding. For an underemployed recent grad, being a ski bum had to be more alluring than slinging Scottish ale and grilled cheese sandwiches.

"A round of what he's drinking, please," I said, pointing to Sam's glass.

If someone had asked, I might have admitted that I'd had a tough year. One of the ways I kept any self-pity in check was by comparing my tough year with my son Jonas's much tougher year, with Lauren's awful year, or with Sam's I-can't-believe-all-the-bad-shitthat's-happened-to-him year. Sam's bad year was actually getting to be multiple years in duration. He'd suffered through a divorce, the breakup of a couple of relationships after his divorce, a suspension from the police force for misconduct, some traumatic something in Florida during a vacation trip that he wouldn't discuss with me but that I thought had somehow involved an attractive fed named Deirdre something.

He'd also reunited with the second of the women who'd broken up with him after his divorce, but the economy had forced them to maintain a long-distance relationship while she struggled through a difficult pregnancy in California. The pregnancy had ended with a long stint of bed rest and a tragic stillbirth late in the eighth month.

Sam was still in Boulder. Carmen, his girlfriend, was still in Orange County. Sam was still recovering from his loss. Carmen, he'd told me once--I'd had to promise in advance not to bring it up again until he did--had retreated into a shell after the death of her baby. For her the pain from the stillbirth was, he'd said, "Twenty on a ten scale." He was still flying to California to see her a couple of times a month as his work schedule permitted.

Despite my offers, he'd declined to talk more about the stillbirth or the status of things with Carmen. When Sam had texted me that evening, I was hoping that he'd decided he was ready to let me know more of what had come down and how he was doing with it all.

Frankly, his timing wasn't great. My brain was stuffed. But if Sam was ready to talk, I was ready to listen.

The grilled cheese was tangy, crisp, and just the right amount of greasy. I couldn't argue with Sam's description of the ale.

"You solve your puzzle yet?" he asked. "About your neighbor and everybody being . . . you know, safe?"

I didn't expect Sam to go in that direction, not without some kicking and screaming by me. Based on our one short phone call, and on the brief caution he'd given Lauren on Saturday morning, I expected him to continue to be part of the great stone wall of law enforcement regarding what had come down at the damn housewarming.

The fact that he was initiating a conversation about the Friday-night incident suggested that whatever he was getting ready to tell me about his personal life had to feel even more distasteful to him. I decided to allow him to set the pace, fully cognizant of the fact that with Sam, I didn't really have a choice.

"No," I said. "And I'm not happy about it, either." I ate another fry.

"You shouldn't be," Sam said. "I wouldn't be."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. It's bullshit that you don't know. Right next door? You should know what you're dealing with."

"You expect me to disagree?" I said.

Sam smirked. "Want to know what the problem is? What came down isn't about cops and DAs and crimes and suspects. Not really. The problem is that this is already about lawyers. Almost always--I'm talking the old days--crimes were about good guys and bad guys, mostly cops arresting bad guys and turning them over to prosecutors and judges. Now? Sometimes, somehow, it's only about the lawyers. On both sides. The suspects have lawyers. Even the vics have lawyers." Sam made a what's-that-about face. "The rest of us--the cops, the judges--we're just taxpayer labor for all the private lawyers."

I shrugged. I wasn't able to disclose to Sam that I knew that Cozy Maitlin was working with the alleged victim because I'd learned that information in supervision, and I had no right to reveal the existence of the supervision relationship to Sam. I cautioned myself to be careful with my friend. He was a good detective. His allegiances were usually exactly where they belonged. Which meant they were not always with me.

He lowered his voice. He said, "I'm not telling you this."

That got my attention. He waited for me to acknowledge what he'd said. I nodded.

"One lawyer is none other than Casey Sparrow. Though I don't know anything for sure, I would bet that this impenetrable wall of silence is partly her doing. I spy the hand of an attorney wizard. My experience over the years has convinced me that Ms. Sparrow is one of those defense attorney wizards."

"Casey is representing . . . whom? My neighbor?"

Sam said, "You know I can't confirm anything based on personal knowledge. It's not my case, and if it were, I couldn't talk about it. For the sake of damn argument, not that we're going to argue, let's just say I've heard rumors outside official channels that she is representing the accused."

I restated the obvious. "Casey is a defense attorney."

"That'd be true," he said. "An excellent one. I did say
accused,
I think."

"So there's a crime?"

"Alleged." Sam pronounced the word by chopping up the syllables.
A-ledge-ed.

I decided to push the door open a little wider. "Is the allegation of a misdemeanor or a felony?"

"If it is indeed a true crime," he said, "that true crime would fall into the felonious category."

"Then . . . a felony happened--okay, may have happened--thirty yards from my front door. That's what you're saying?"

"That's not what I'm saying. Like I said, I can't
say
anything. That would be wrong. But you know the lawyer I'm talking about. Her reputation? That tells you something, right? I'm just reading tea leaves. Making inferences. It's what we detectives do. Did you know that?"

I laughed. "So what's your inference, Mr. Detective?"

"Do wealthy clients hire Casey Sparrow to make misdemeanors go away?"

I weighed my reply; I didn't want Sam to know what I knew. I said, "Point. So, it's a felony. Damn it."

Sam said, "Wouldn't know anything at all happened from reading the paper, would you? That there's been an alleged felony out your way. No word in the press. Nothing online I've been able to find. Those particular tea leaves I'm talking about? Way I read them, and I repeat I'm far from perfect at tea-leaf reading, is that the lawyer wizard Sparrow somehow got an airtight lid on all this before anyone outside even knew there was something to put an airtight lid on."