Last Lie (25 page)

34

I
resorted to cliche. I said, "Our time is up. We have to stop, Hella."

"Yeah," she said. "It's a good time. I'm fried."

I could feel the depth of her injury as though my fingers were actually probing the contours of the wound.

"You have a lot of decisions to make. About this video. We're not done discussing this. Would you like to talk later today?"

She looked me in the eyes. "I don't need to give this to someone? Like right away? Now?"

"There was no message attached? All you received was the video?"

"Yes."

"Then, no. Let's talk first, so you can make a clear-headed decision," I said. "Let's be deliberate about this."

"I'm relieved," she said. "I thought I'd have to . . ."

She didn't finish the sentence. "Then be relieved. We'll talk later. Come up with a plan that you can feel okay about."

She nodded. And shrugged.
Sure,
she was saying with the nod.
What good will it do?
she was asking with the shrug.

"What works for you?" I said.

Her voice lightened, just a fraction. "If I can't somehow turn back time?"

"Yeah, if you can't do that."

She hit some buttons on her phone, shaking her head. "I'm going to need to move something. I'll e-mail you later with times. Is that okay?"

"Of course. I'm sorry, Hella. You've been violated. I am so sorry."

"I know that. It's going to hit me at some point. Hard. I hope it's later. Right now I need to focus on my patient. What this means for her."

"You may not get to choose that progression. It's one of the things we can talk about later."

As she exited my office, she looked nothing like a graceful dancer.

I PROBABLY WASN'T A GOOD THERAPIST TO MY NEXT PATIENT.

It happens rarely that I allow one session to bleed into the next, but it does happen. I knew my focus was fractured. Even as I tried to zero in on the words of the man sitting across from me--he was in the chaotic despair that often accompanies the first days following the end of a marriage--I couldn't stop replaying the details of the supervision session with Hella.

When the patient after Hella left, I had a text blast waiting for me from the cyclist grapevine. Rafael was awake. Still no visitors. But he was awake.

Some good news,
I thought.

I forced myself to ponder the news that Hella had revealed
before
she'd shown me the video clip on her phone.

I reviewed what I thought I knew about the events after that Friday-night party. My vision of that night was almost entirely painted with the images provided by Hella's patient in the days immediately after the assault.

The perpetrator, in my view, had to have been my neighbor Mattin Snow. I could not see how it could be anyone else. For anyone else to be responsible, he would have to have been in the house.
Right?

Right. But the results of Mattin Snow's independent DNA analysis suggested that my vision was incorrect. Had Hella's patient confabulated the entire event? I had trouble believing that was true. But the possibility had to be considered.

Had Hella's patient intentionally misrepresented what she knew to be true? Again, I had trouble believing that, based on what I knew. But that possibility, too, had to be considered.

Or had Hella's patient pieced together the fragments of memory she possessed into a narrative that was largely true but that ended up featuring a confabulated perpetrator? Had she in fact been raped, but had someone else raped her?

Who? How?

RAOUL AND I SPOKE by phone a few minutes after my patient left the office. Raoul was across town in the middle of a long meeting with the founders of a start-up who thought they had solved one of the fundamental problems that limited the life of batteries used in personal electronics. Raoul sounded excited. He no longer got excited about too much in the venture capital world.

I'd watched him on this road before. It had started years before with Storage Tech. And later at NBI. A couple of dozen other nascent companies had followed. A good half of them had become earning engines and household names. If the battery technology eventually proved itself in the marketplace, all would soon be wealthier than they already were. The innovators would get rich. The rich investors would get richer.

Raoul said, "They are setting up a demonstration for us. I have five minutes, maybe ten, until they are ready."

"Fine," I said. "That's all the time I have anyway. What's up?"

He lowered his voice, as though he didn't wish to be overheard. His tone became Midwestern American flat. All the spice and nuance of his accents and speech idiosyncrasies were gone. He sounded like he'd been born and raised in Indianapolis.

"We need the Walnut office to make the
Camera
project fly. I can't find a way around it. To keep Roscoe in the syndicate--if we lose Roscoe, we lose two others; all three are crucial development people. If we lose them, we're done as an entity. To keep Roscoe on board we must acquire the Walnut land so that he can build the duplex for his wife and for his sister-in-law and her kids. He knows Diane is a partial owner; he insists on that specific piece of land.

"The city planning department has also made clear that as part of our proposal we will need to provide them with assurances that we have access to nearby land for material staging and for worker parking during the extended construction on Pearl. The Walnut lot is barely adequate for that, in terms of size. We must acquire it. I can see no alternative, Alain. I'm sorry."

It's what I feared he would tell me. "Time frame?" I said.

"Start of business, Monday, for your decision. The syndicate is meeting at nine thirty. I know you have much to consider. And I'm not giving you much time."

"We haven't discussed price or terms, Raoul."

"If you agree to entertain an offer, I will have something formal prepared for you by this time tomorrow. The numbers will not be an insult. I know what you and Diane have been offered by developers in the past. I will make certain it is . . . enticing to you."

I said, "Okay. You heard about the murder in Devil's Thumb yesterday. Yes?"

"Yes. Tragic."

"That's become Lauren's case. She may not have much attention or energy to give to this proposal. I am making no promises we'll be able to meet your deadline."

Raoul's tone became softer in timbre and even lower in volume. He said, "Understood. I appreciate any consideration. We'll leave it there?"

"Fine."

"You know," Raoul said, the lovely lingual affectation instantly seeping back into his words, "we apparently ate his last meal. The last one he cooked . . . as a chef, for others. Preston Georges. It is so sad, what happened to him in his own home."

"I agree. I heard you had houseguests last night."

"Singular. Just Mimi. It's a difficult time for them. For the family. The accident on top of . . . There is much tension. It's hard for us to be in the middle. I keep telling Diane we have to try to be Switzerland."

"How's that going for her?"

"
Comme ci, comme ca
. In temperament, my Diane is not so Swiss."

That was the truth. I said, "Well, I need to go. Lauren and I will consider your offer, Raoul. We'll do it for you and for Diane."

"Gracias
.
"

I e-mailed Lauren at work that Raoul and his LLC would be submitting an offer on the Walnut property for our consideration and that we would need to reach a decision by the end of the weekend. She texted me back that the "vic at Devil's Thumb" was the "chef from Friday" and that the homicide investigation was getting screwier by the minute.

Her decision to use a text message meant that my wife was apparently not eager for her editorial musings about the homicide to become part of a subpoena-able or discoverable permanent record. Over the years, she had taught me that e-mails were almost always archived. Text messages were often not so reliably discoverable.

In what way?
I texted back.

My phone vibrated again within seconds. But the next text wasn't from Lauren.

It was from Jonas.
Whats soil analysis
he wanted to know.

What?
It wasn't like Jonas to ask me school questions during the day. I replied,
We can talk tonight.

Lauren at work

I supplied the missing question mark.
Yep. You cool?

Yep fgw

For government work.
The red light on the wall across my office flashed on, indicating that my next patient had arrived in the waiting room. I didn't even note that Lauren had failed to get back to me about what was so screwy about the murder investigation in Devil's Thumb.

AFTER MY LAST PATIENT of the day walked out the door, I called Nicole. I said, "Hello, this is Alan Gregory. Remember me?"

She said she did.

I started lying. I wondered if she was still interested in house-sitting for us.

"Yes, when? Oh my God, yes. Yes."

I'd prepared a fictional itinerary for her. "We're going to Mexico for ten days, over Thanksgiving. Manzanillo. Right on the beach, if you can believe it. Will you be in town? Please say yes."

I suspected it was unlikely that Nicole would be in town. Most students at CU headed home, or elsewhere, over the Thanksgiving break. The reality was that it didn't matter to me where Nicole would be. We weren't going to Mexico over Thanksgiving. And there was no way I was ever giving her the key to my house. I just needed an excuse to ask her some questions about Preston Georges.

"Thanksgiving? No, my family lives in Seven Hills--that's outside Las Vegas. I'm going home for Thanksgiving. We always do this big feast. But I am so bummed. I would love to do it some other time."

She sounded truly disappointed. I was trying to decide whether she wanted access to my house for a blowout kegger or for a romantic weekend with some guy. I was thinking kegger. "I was afraid of that," I said, trying to sound disappointed. "Our neighbors told us that the chef you guys worked with up here--I'm sure you remember him--had given them a couple of names of good house-sitters. I guess I'll try one of them. I don't like to hire strangers, but--"

"Did you hear," Nicole said, "what happened to him? That he was . . . murdered? In his house?"

Garage, actually. I mouthed
thank you,
grateful that I didn't have to be the one to tell her about the murder. Nicole hadn't struck me as the type of person who stayed current with local news. "I did," I said. "Is that awful, or what?"

"Eric told me. He said they used one of his own knives. You know, to . . ." I hadn't heard that. I would ask Lauren. "He carried them . . . like, everywhere. His knives. He has--had--this leather . . . case thing for them."

"I didn't know that," I said. "I never met him. Who saw him last? At the party you did, I mean. You said he left before you guys?"

"Right before us. It was probably me, or Eric. Chef had gone in to chat with the last few guests. He came back into the kitchen just as we were finishing loading the van. No, no . . . it was Eric, it wasn't me. Eric's the one who saw him last. Definitely, Eric."

"How can you be sure?"

"Because he hit on Eric as he was heading out the door. He called Eric off to the side, away from me. Asked him if he had plans later on. Whether he wanted to meet up somewhere in town. Right after the chef drove away, Eric was acting all offended. I told him to get over it."

"Is Eric gay?"

Nicole made a dismissive sound. "Hardly," she said. A second passed. She added, "I don't think so, anyway."

So Eric's not openly gay,
I thought. I wondered how Eric felt about Preston Georges's advance. If his defensiveness that evening about the offer was as overt as Nicole was suggesting, I had another motivation to add to the list of possible explanations for Eric's recklessness at the end of the evening. He may have been having a difficult time dealing with the chef's flirtation. I also began to wonder if Preston Georges and Eric had actually hooked up later.

"So how long after the chef left did you guys drive away in the van?"

"Two minutes, maybe three," Nicole said. "We were basically ready to go when he left. Couple more things to carry out. Remember, we were hustling. The hostess wanted us gone. Eric wanted to go."

"Well, it looks like you're right, then. Eric was probably the last one to see Preston Georges alive . . . at work. One of my friends who was there heard that meal was his last professional gig. That it was like his last . . . meal."

"I'll have to tell Eric. It might turn out that he was the last guy Chef ever hit on." She laughed at that thought.

I told Nicole we had another trip out of town coming up in late January. I promised to call her to house-sit. She said that would be perfect for her.

All the lying felt as natural to me as breathing.

I HAD THE INFORMATION I'D WANTED. If Nicole and Eric had come close to hitting that pedestrian beyond the second curve on the lane as they were leaving that night, then it was almost certain that Preston Georges, leaving only two or three minutes before, had seen the same man on his route down the lane toward the paved familiarity of South Boulder Road. When the chef drove out, the pedestrian would have been on a relatively straight stretch of the lane that ran for about five-eighths of a mile between the mailboxes and the first half of the S-curve.

Just beyond the NO OUTLET and DEAD END warning signs. And just past Peter's carved ALAN'S AHAH sign on the mailbox post.

That night the weather had been inclement. Cold air had been moving in. High winds were gusting from the north. It had not been a night for a leisurely jaunt in the neighborhood. That solitary pedestrian, stocking-capped and hooded, had to have recognized that he was heading down a road that led, almost, to nowhere. At somewhere around eleven thirty at night.

I was nearly certain that he had not been on his way to visit Lauren or me, or the kids. That meant that his destination had to have been the home of Mattin and Mimi Snow. Why? I had no idea.