Dry Ice Page 34

  “Cozy said they’re checking to see if it matches the blood from the woman’s body they exhumed at the cemetery. And from your shoe. He’s hoping it does.”

  Me too.

  The adrenaline rush from the fight with McClelland had worn off and the anesthetic insulation of shock had disappeared by the time we entered Colorado Springs on Highway 115. Kirsten prepared to pull onto I-25 for the shot north to Denver. I said, “Please keep going straight. I think I remember a hospital not too far up ahead. I’m pretty sure my hand is broken.”

  “What?”

  It wasn’t a difficult diagnosis. I couldn’t move either my pinky or the ring finger of my right hand without an exquisite agony that burned like a molten hammer striking my bones.

  “You don’t want to know. But I do need to see a doctor. I’m going to lie to him or her—I would be grateful if you don’t insist on witnessing that.”

  We left the emergency room at Penrose Hospital about two hours later. I found it fitting and ironic that the cast on my hand looked like a boxing glove.

  I had a dozen Vicodin in my pocket. I left them there. The throbbing seemed important.

  About an hour outside of Boulder Kirsten asked, “Would you like to talk now?”

  “Yes,” I said, “I would. But I need to tell Lauren before I tell anyone else.”

  “Is it as bad as you make it seem?”

  “I don’t know anymore,” I said. “It feels monumental, but I’m not sure.”

  “Robert’s murder felt like the end of the world, Alan. It wasn’t.” She paused. “It was close, but it wasn’t. But remember…I had some help.”

  Robert was Kirsten’s dead husband.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  FIFTY-SIX

  IT TOOK a long time to get Grace settled that night. By the time we were all back home I’d done all I could to obscure the profanity of what had happened in my daughter’s bedroom, but I could tell that Grace sensed that her space had been violated and that she had suffered some kind of intimate assault.

  I ached for her as she tried to process the muted obscenity of it all.

  I asked Lauren not to check her e-mail until we had a chance to talk. Why? I suspected that Michael’s threat about revealing my secret would take place that way. I wanted the chance to tell her myself first.

  Lauren took a long bath after Grace was asleep. I found her later wrapped in her heaviest robe on the chaise on the bedroom deck. The night was crystalline, but not warm. She was toking on her bong, the musty smoke furling out above the high prairie. Her iPod was playing in its speaker dock in the bedroom. The playlist was one I’d remembered from just before the device had been mothballed. She was listening to a set of Dusty Springfield. The set started and stopped with Lauren’s favorite Dusty song, “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me.”

  I had a Vicodin buzz. With the help of the narcotics the percussion in my broken hand was subdued and almost equivalent to the pain in the places in my left arm that had absorbed the thrust of the chair McClelland had thrown at me. Either ache in isolation would have interfered with my concentration—I appreciated the balance of the stereo agony.

  I had no regrets about sucker punching McClelland. None. I assumed his jaw hurt more than my hand did. I wondered how long he would survive at New Max. If the over/under was six weeks, I would have bet the mortgage money on the under.

  Wishful thinking.

  I settled onto the other chaise.

  Lauren and I had covered the easy ground already. We’d done that during the remaining daylight hours.

  Her health? Music no longer hurt, but her legs did. Her legal and work situation? Not good. The U.S. Attorney thought he had a case against her. The grand jury investigation that had been so important to Lauren had died along with its star witness. I didn’t know how to let her know that the witness had been a fraud. I knew I’d find a way. Other deputies in Lauren’s office were assigned to prosecute the witness’s murder.

  My legal and work situation? Not good. My practice was in tatters. Cozy and Kirsten were doing their best to clean up after me legally. Would they be successful? The jury was out. Even if the criminal problems went away, my civil liability was malignant.

  Sam’s situation? A mess. He and I had talked briefly. He was on paid leave from the police department awaiting word what his discipline would be for failing to alert the DA about his romantic relationship with Amanda Ross. The next time Simon was scheduled to stay with his mother, Sam was planning to fly to California to end things with Carmen.

  I made sure he understood the continuing threat to our families from McClelland and Currie. Sam volunteered to keep an eye on my family during his leave of absence. I accepted. I liked that he had my back. I hoped it was enough.

  The whereabouts of J. Winter B.? Unknown. The apartment near Euclid and 30th Street where Sam thought she was living after separating from her husband had been vacated. The authorities would be of no help; no peace officer in any jurisdiction had tied her to a single crime associated with Michael McClelland.

  J. Winter B. remained worrisome to me, and to Sam, to say the least. Michael’s final threat hadn’t faded from my memory at all. I knew the deputy on the lane wasn’t going to be sufficient.

  My visit to Pueblo? My tête-à-tête with Michael? I wouldn’t tell Lauren any more than that I’d broken my hand while I was there. The circumstances? She was better off not knowing. She accepted that reality like a pro. She said that she was hoping I’d broken my hand on Michael’s face. I didn’t pop that balloon. If I felt compelled to admit what I did to Michael’s face, I would probably end up choosing Kirsten so that I could enjoy the legal shelter of her advocacy. She was prohibited from telling anyone. Lauren wasn’t.

  Lauren had asked me if I knew what had happened to the three rounds that were missing from her Glock. I told her I knew. She wondered aloud if she should be concerned.

  I said I didn’t think so. I pondered what else I might have forgotten to do to cover my tracks.

  Elliot had informed Lauren that Michael McClelland was on suicide watch in the infirmary at New Max and that he was acting more paranoid than ever. I knew that the heightened scrutiny would diminish over time. That was the nature of institutions. If McClelland wanted to kill himself he would find a way. If he did, I suspected he would goad someone else to do it for him.

  I expected to have frequent moments when I fantasized about being that man.

  The more difficult conversation I needed to have with Lauren had been waiting around since before that night on the beach in Cabo. Since leaving Cañon City that afternoon I’d been mulling how to start the discussion, but never came up with any magic words.

  I took a deeper breath than usual, counted to three, and said, “I’ve been keeping something big from you.”

  She looked at me. Slowly, her violet eyes narrowed in resignation. Not alarm. They were asking, “Another woman?”

  I shook my head. “It goes back to before we met.”

  “Your family?” she said.

  She knew. “Do you know?”

  She shook her head while she shrugged her shoulders. “I never really understood your…thing with your mother. You know that. The distance, especially. You’ve always given me the impression the topic was…unwelcome. Except for T., I’m not that close to my family either. Neither of us has ever questioned…the other one’s old garbage. If I left you alone, I hoped you would leave me alone. You did.” She flicked the lighter, toked from the bong, and while trying to trap the smoke in her lungs admitted, “Maybe I didn’t really want to know.”

  Too late for that, I thought as the sweet smoke began to drift my way.

  “Can I go first?” she asked.

  “What do you mean?” I said. My naïveté was almost innocent. Almost. The reality had much more to do with gullibility than with innocence.

  “I have something to tell you too,” she said. “A secret, I guess.”
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br />   The careful choreography I’d been sketching in my head didn’t include a solo for Lauren. Only my solitary lament followed by an unrehearsed pas de deux. The last duet would be a tragedy, I feared. “You do?” I said. Another man? I must have missed that.

  She said, “Here goes. I have already had…two children.” She watched my eyes for a reaction. All she got was a blink. The “two children” was reproductive calculus that my brain couldn’t do.

  Grace was…well, one child. Lauren and I had each been married previously, but both had been childless unions. There was no “two.”

  She waited a decent interval for me to reply before she went on. “I got pregnant when I was twenty. During my junior year when I was in Amsterdam. The father is Dutch. I decided not…to have an abortion.”

  Again she paused long enough for me to interject something were I so inclined. I wasn’t. Her news was major. But my radar said it wasn’t that big a deal. I began to tighten up. I felt a second blow coming.

  “I stayed in Holland and gave the…child up for adoption. I never saw her again.”

  Huge. But still not enough. That’s not it, I thought. There’s more.

  She sighed. Here it comes. “After Gracie was born Priscilla told me I couldn’t safely carry any more kids…because of damage that had occurred with that first delivery.”

  Priscilla was Lauren’s OB/GYN. Instinctively I argued. I said, “Priscilla never said anything to me about—”

  “I asked her not to tell you I’d had another child.”

  Oh. Another secret. “Why?”

  She knew I’d ask. She was ready. Her words sounded rehearsed. “When we first met I was expecting you to leave me, so I didn’t tell you. I didn’t want to be judged. After Grace was born I thought she’d be enough for us, and I wouldn’t have to tell you.

  “Mostly? I don’t like to think about…her. My baby. My teenage daughter. It hurts too much. You would want to talk it to death, Alan. It’s who you are. I can’t…do that.”

  “Grace has a…”

  “Half-sister.”

  I nodded. It was mock understanding, at best. “And you can’t have any more…children?”

  Lauren said, “My ovaries are okay, but I can’t carry any more, no.” She began a soliloquy on the gynecological details.

  I stopped her. I said, “I believe you.” In my heart I knew this wasn’t a new lie—it was the end of an old one. My pulse had slowed to a crawl and I felt as though my blood pressure was insufficient to sustain circulation. The conflicting emotions—sorrow and anger mostly—were canceling each other out and my autonomic nervous system was shutting down. I didn’t know what else to say. Silence seemed wise.

  Lauren didn’t want to be a woman who could give away her child. I can accept that, I thought. I can. Dissembling with me? Harder to accept. Did it say more about her, or about her vision of me? I didn’t know.

  That’s the thing about secrets. They are never really dormant. They are termites; unseen, they eat away at foundations.

  She said, “You had something to tell me.”

  Lauren wanted to change the subject. I didn’t blame her.

  I blinked the blink of someone coming out of a trance. One, two, three. “I shot my father when I was thirteen. I killed him.”

  My wife gasped and shrunk back against the chaise. Her fingertips flew up to cover her lips.

  Dusty Springfield sang, “You don’t have to say you love me/ Just be close at hand.”

  FIFTY-SEVEN

  I THINK they loved each other. My parents. They just never figured out how to be together.

  By the time I was old enough to make sense of what was going on, I saw a father who was jealous and unsatisfied with his fate. A mother who felt neglected and had never learned to fulfill herself. After keeping her fulfilled had stopped being her father’s job, my mother was certain that it had become my father’s job. When he accepted that assignment they loved each other like they were a couple in the movies. When he resisted that assignment they fought each other like they were a couple in the movies. There wasn’t much in between.

  Each was capable of being an enchanting parent. Although circumstances seemed to insist that my memories be more strychnine than honey, the truth is that I had good times with each of them—where nonfamily matters were concerned my father could be a sage, and my mother could be as funny as anyone on Johnny Carson. Occasionally the three of us were as sweet as dessert.

  By the time I approached adolescence they were coping inelegantly. My father drank and stayed away. My mother had what she called “friends who happen to be men.” I was a kid; I didn’t understand why they couldn’t get along. During periods when they weren’t fighting they seemed almost like other kids’ parents. I prayed for those interludes.

  They separated when I was twelve. Reconciled when I was thirteen. Separated again four months later. The second separation was short—only a couple of weeks. My father promised to stop drinking. My mother promised to “clean up her act.” We were living in a small house on a nothing block in a bland subdivision on the outer fringe of Thousand Oaks, California, a bedroom far north of L.A. My father was a loud drunk. They were both loud lovers and they were both loud fighters. I was privy to all his recriminations and all her assignations.

  When my parents’ friends asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up I would tell them I wanted to be a referee. Neither my mother nor my father ever spotted the irony.

  Their second reconciliation fractured on a Monday night. I was on summer vacation from school. My father came home an hour late, alcohol seeping from his pores like cheap cologne. They fought.

  The next night was looking like the second half of a double feature. My father didn’t come home from work on time. My mother left his supper on the table. It was pot roast and gravy, boiled potatoes and carrots, and an iceberg-lettuce salad slathered with poor man’s Thousand Island—ketchup and mayonnaise pebbled with pickle relish. A short stack of Wonder Bread completed the tableau. After chain-smoking and pacing for three hours with her arms folded across her breasts, she left the house.

  “I’m going out,” she said to me. “Don’t you dare touch that food.” She knew that I would have. For her the rotting food was a battle flag being hoisted. I considered it my duty to lower those flags whenever I spotted them.

  A few flies had already claimed the meal like squatters moving into a tenement.

  He came home first. I was up late listening to Vin Scully call the bottom of the eleventh inning of a Dodgers game. They were playing the Giants at Candlestick. He was drunk. My father, not Vin Scully.

  “Is your mother out?” he asked.

  I shrugged. I’d learned when it was prudent to be invisible—a good referee needs to know when to swallow the whistle. He left my room. I heard a sequence of noises that let me know he’d grabbed a six-pack and retreated to the patio. If cell phones had existed he would have been harassing my mother on hers. But cells didn’t exist so he drank cheap beer until he could simmer in the broth.

  I was asleep when she came home.

  His bellowed call of “You slut” woke me up. The clock by my bed read two thirty-five. I’d heard the yelling before and knew it would last a while. I reached for my pillow to cover my ears.

  “Drunk,” she screamed back. They were in the kitchen.

  I knew his next line.

  “Whore,” he yelled, proving me correct. As lovers they showed some occasional flair, but they weren’t imaginative fighters.

  “Your boyfriend give you that?” my father asked in his most condescending tone. He was a better-than-average bowler, and he could fix things around the house. He could be a sensitive father. People said he was good at work. But his most marked skill? He could do derision as though he held the patent for it. Snidely he said, “You’re going to shoot me now?”

  Shoot? We didn’t own a gun.

  I climbed out of bed at that improvisation.


  “Put that knife down,” she warned him. The knife, too, was a new prop.

  She’d later tell me he had the knife in his hand when she walked into the kitchen and that she was lucky she had borrowed the gun from a “friend” “just in case.” I didn’t believe her. They had abused each other plenty. But until that night they had never used weapons any sharper than their tongues. She’d thrown a few things on occasion, but her aim inevitably sucked.

  “Drop it!” she screamed, up two octaves at least.

  “You drop it!” he yelled, matching her volume.

  I began to walk down the short hallway wearing nothing but my white briefs. I hadn’t had time to put on my striped shirt or grab my whistle.

  I heard more yelling and commotion from the kitchen and then I watched a blue-black revolver with a dark wooden grip—I’d later learn it was a .38—come skittering through the doorway until it stopped inches from my bare feet.

  I picked it up.

  My mother ran toward me and started screaming, “Give me that! Give me that!”

  Giving it to her didn’t seem wise. I was as tall as she, and stronger. With one arm I stopped her advance. With the other arm I held the pistol by my side. The damn thing was heavy.

  My father stood beside the dinette set six feet away. He did indeed have one of the kitchen knives in his hand. He held it as though he were preparing to chop some onions.

  “Don’t give the slut the gun,” he slurred. “That a boy. Give it here.” He took a step toward us. My mother reached across me and forcibly raised my arm until the revolver was pointed in the direction of my father. “Stay there!” she shrieked.

  He lunged for the gun. The motion surprised me. His quickness surprised me. She screamed, “Shoot! Shoot!”

  The knife was at his side. His outstretched hand was empty. I still see that moment in my mind as though it had been photographed by a professional and put on the cover of Life magazine.

  “Shoot!” she screamed again.

  I closed my eyes. I pulled the trigger.

  Gut shot.

  He died as the ambulance arrived.