The Best Revenge Page 7

  Maybe there’d be some rain. Maybe there would be an early beginning of the summer monsoons.

  Maybe Tom Clone wouldn’t call him. Or maybe Dr. Alan Gregory and Tom Clone wouldn’t hit it off.

  Right.

  And maybe her pain would be gone by morning.

  She walked over to the gun safe and punched in the combination. The fly burst out and immediately landed on the side of her highboy.

  She swatted at it with her open palm and missed. It took off toward the window and crashed into the glass.

  “Stupid fly,” she said again.

  The sky had darkened and the swamp cooler was finally beginning to catch up with the heat in the house by the time someone knocked on Kelda’s door. She glanced at her laptop monitor and noted the time at the bottom right corner of the screen: 8:47.

  Kelda lifted her legs from the bath towels and checked the condition of the peas. Definitely thawed, on the way to mushy. She yelled, “Coming,” picked up the half-dozen bags, and returned them to the freezer. She opened the front door without bothering to check the peephole first.

  She smiled. “God, I was hoping it was you.”

  The man who stood on her porch wore a faded yellow T-shirt with the sleeves cut off and a pair of Billabong board shorts that looked as old as he did. Even though his feet were adorned with flip-flops, he towered over her. He said, “Who else was it going to be? You shouldn’t be on your feet, Kelda. You know that. Come on, find a place to lie down and I’ll rub your legs.”

  She stood on her tiptoes and kissed him on the scruff on his chin. “Okay, I’ll let you. Come on in, Ira.”

  Ira switched on Kelda’s little stereo and slipped in a CD he’d burned for her. Mostly jazz, some electronic synthesized stuff he was trying to sell her on. They sat on the sofa in the living room, and she rested one of her legs on his lap. He reached across her body for the remote control and flicked on the TV across the room, which he tuned to ESPN. He muted the volume before he began his practiced ministrations on her thigh.

  “That hurts so good,” she said. “SportsCenter’s coming on?”

  “Yeah.”

  “If you want to listen, too, it’s okay with me. Maybe Mike Hampton pitched today. I think he’s cute. Did you work this late?”

  Ira was a veterinarian.

  “I was done about six, six-thirty. I had to do an emergency operation on a—”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t want to hear about surgery on animals today. What have you been doing since you left the clinic?”

  He touched the line of dew that was visible on his brow right below his hairline. “I’ve been doing what everybody in the state is doing. I’m waiting on the thunderstorms. God, we need rain, don’t we? What’s this—eleven straight days above ninety? It’s too hot, even for me.”

  “I don’t think the storms are coming early this year. Maybe by mid-July if we’re lucky. But, I agree . . . it does feel some days like it’s never going to rain here again.”

  “I’m still hopeful. One of those storms will blow out of the mountains and drench us. You have to have faith, darling.”

  Kelda lifted the T-shirt away from her sticky chest. “Please, please, please. I don’t want to talk about the heat, either.”

  “How about we talk about Tom? I saw a little bit of the news earlier. He’s really out of prison.”

  As he spoke Ira’s cheeks rose along with his eyebrows and Kelda thought, not for the first time, that he looked a little like Stan Laurel. “Yeah, he really is. I saw him in the flesh. There was a change in plans this morning. I was the one who picked him up at the penitentiary and drove him to Boulder.” She didn’t tell Ira about stopping for breakfast at the Broadmoor.

  Ira paused the ministrations to her legs. “Seriously? Do you think that was a good idea? How did that happen?”

  She slapped him lightly. “Don’t stop rubbing when you ask questions—it interrupts the flow. His lawyer called late last night and told me that the judge in Park County had just issued the order for the release. He kind of asked me to help out. The prison warden wanted to get Clone out the door before dawn so the press couldn’t make a fuss about the release. His lawyer’s in a wheelchair, he figured I might be curious about the guy, so I made some suggestions and he asked me if I would pick him up.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Then it got interesting. The detective who originally arrested Clone followed us away from the penitentiary. He spread some spikes or something on the road to give me a flat tire and then tried to intimidate Clone.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I had my gun on him before he knew who he was dealing with.”

  “No?” Ira stopped rubbing.

  “Yeah. Don’t stop.”

  “Is he going to be trouble? The detective?”

  She shrugged. “He’s the least of my concerns. I’m much more worried about the reaction I’m going to face at work.”

  “Your boss knows that you helped the lawyer?”

  “All he knows is that somebody leaked that lab report to the lawyer. I’m on the short list of suspects. I don’t think he can prove anything, but . . .”

  Ira was using his thumbs to circle the bone on her left ankle. “So why did you take Clone to Boulder? I thought he would be going to Cripple Creek to sue everybody he could find down there or that he’d be moving back to Denver. That’s where he was, right, Denver? In medical school?”

  “Yes. For whatever reason, he’s going to stay with his grandfather in Boulder for a while until he adjusts to life outside.”

  Ira nodded. “Where in Boulder?”

  “A little house on High Street. You know it? It’s right above downtown. Terrific views of the Mall and Chautauqua.”

  Ira didn’t respond. His skilled fingers moved from Kelda’s feet up toward the territory where her quads closed in on her knee. “You still feeling okay about . . . everything you did, love?”

  She smiled with her eyes. “Yes, I am. I still feel good about it. It was the right thing to do.”

  “Justice?”

  “Yes, Ira. It is about justice. It’s all about justice.”

  “Even if it ends up causing you problems at work? You’ll still think it was worth it?”

  “If I don’t get a handle on this pain, Ira, my days in the Bureau are numbered anyway. I can’t take any more medicine than I’m taking without being sedated. I’m just hoping that Rosa Alija will continue to protect me until I decide it’s time to leave. Fortunately for me, the Bureau doesn’t want to be perceived as mistreating one of its heroes.”

  “I hope you’re right.”

  She winced and said, “That’s a bit too hard.”

  He lightened up on the pressure and said, “You and I are still okay?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Nothing’s changed?”

  “No, nothing’s changed. We’ll give things another month or so to cool off. Then we’ll go. Everything’s the same.”

  Her arms were crossed across her chest, the fingers of each hand curled over the opposite shoulder.

  He noted the posture and jumped at an interpretation. He asked, “You’re in between pain patches, aren’t you?”

  “They’re not lasting the full three days anymore. And I changed this one a little late, anyway. The new patch will kick in soon. Before morning for sure. I’ll be okay by the time I go back on duty.”

  He allowed his hand to migrate up the inside of her thigh.

  Her breath caught in her throat. After a moment of indecision, she responded to him by sliding her toes inside his shirt.

  “Why is it,” she asked, “that there are only two things that totally distract me from my pain, and one of them is hot, and the other is cold?”

  “Me and the ice?” Ira asked.

  “Yes,” she murmured.

  “The thing about me and ice is, we’re both hard,” he said. “Maybe that’s it.”

  “Maybe,” she agreed. “Maybe.”

  PART
TWO

  Necessary Lies

  CHAPTER 10

  The sign on the bricks beside the front door of our offices in the old Victorian on Walnut Street in downtown Boulder is simple. On top it reads “Alan Gregory, Ph.D.” On the bottom it reads “Diane Estevez, Ph.D.” Diane and I had toyed with the idea of putting “Clinical Psychology” on a third line below our names, but had gotten so caught up in an alpha dog argument about whose name should be on top that we neglected to resolve the question of whether we should list our profession on the sign.

  The sign maker had resolved it for us. The result was that to someone strolling by on the street, our offices could easily be mistaken for the habitat of a couple of petroleum geologists.

  A coin toss—actually, since this was Diane I was dealing with, it was best two out of three—had placed my name at the top of the sign. It was a contest she’s made sure I’ve wished I’d lost ever since.

  My four o’clock patient that summer afternoon was a woman whom I’d been treating for much too long who thought that there was actually a correct way to load a dishwasher. Not a preferred way to load a dishwasher, but a correct way. My private name for her was “the Kitchen Aid Lady.” The details of her argument, I admit, had numbed me right from the moment she’d first revealed them many, many sessions before, but one of her more passionate protests had to do with an arcane concept she called silverware nesting.

  We revisited the concept at regular intervals. I can’t tell you how much I looked forward to it each time.

  My patient adamantly believed that anyone who didn’t load the dishwasher the correct way was ill informed or, more likely, an idiot. The idiot in question during our session that day was, of course, the Kitchen Aid Lady’s husband. But she did not consider her spouse to be mentally challenged; in fact she considered his intellectual acumen one of his more attractive features. His failure to load the dishwasher correctly was therefore—no surprise here—an unmistakable sign that he didn’t really love her.

  His position, I gleaned from her newly refined comments that afternoon, was that there were many ways to load a dishwasher and that reasonable people could disagree on which method was best. He also seemed intent on not compromising on the issue, refusing to allow the measure of his love to be determined by what he considered to be a spurious dishwasher-loading assay.

  My patient wrapped up her soliloquy that hot summer afternoon by asking me to cast my lot on the dishwasher-loading question. She didn’t exactly ask; what she did was insist that I validate her position. Was I a proponent of her method—the correct one that took into account such issues as silverware nesting? Or was I a proponent of some radical or haphazard alternative method—like her idiot spouse?

  Dodging the question adroitly—I admit that I hadn’t paid enough attention during any of her previous recitations of the specifics of dishwasher-loading etiquette to make a rational choice between the various methodologies—I suggested that it appeared that she was, right then and there, doing the same thing with me that she was doing with her husband.

  “What?” she asked. “What on earth are you talking about?” She was stupefied. She couldn’t see the point I was making.

  I repeated my gentle confrontation. That worked sometimes.

  Not this time. She still didn’t get it.

  I spelled it out for her. “It seems to me that you’ve decided to equate your husband’s love for you with his willingness to load the dishwasher according to your desires. Now, apparently, you’ve decided to equate my capacity to be a helpful psychotherapist with my position on the same question.”

  When I finished my interpretation I sat back and awaited the reward of herAha, you are so brilliant .

  It didn’t come. Instead, she made a short guttural sound deep in her throat and appraised me as though I had just peed on the carpet. Finally, she asked, “Are you saying that if you load the dishwasher right, I’ll think you love me?”

  Despite my commitment to helping my patient with her problems, at that moment I couldn’t help but empathize with her idiot husband.

  I made a few notes, returned a couple of phone calls—including one to schedule an initial appointment the next day for a new patient, and packed up to leave. My quasi partner in my clinical psychology practice, Diane Estevez, walked out to her car a few moments after I walked out to mine. Diane and I had been friends and colleagues for enough years that I no longer remembered precisely how many years it had been. That was a very nice feeling.

  Although our clinical practices were separate entities, she and I co-owned the little Victorian house on Walnut Street in downtown Boulder that housed both of our offices and that of our tenant, a gnomic man of Pakistani ancestry who for the past fifteen months or so had used the upstairs attic/alcove for a business that had something to do with security on the Internet. For the first fortnight or so of his tenancy, Diane and I had both tried to understand his business strategy, but his broken English and our intact technological ignorance combined to make it clear we weren’t ever going to get it.

  The early summer heat was stifling. A big tacky thermometer with an oxymoronic enticement for cigarettes—“Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco”—was nailed up on the ramshackle garage at the rear of the property, a structure that by all rights should have already been blown over by any number of recent winter Chinook windstorms. I walked halfway over to the garage—it was as close as I liked to get to the thing—and eyed the temperature. The gauge maintained that the air that was currently enveloping me was ninety-six degrees. And that was in the shade.

  Diane opened the door to her Saab and stood outside to allow the thermal waves to escape from her leather seats. I did the same with my car, although my seats were cloth. “Hey,” she said. “Haven’t seen you much lately.”

  “Yeah, I’ve missed you,” I replied. “My hours have been weird. Lauren and I have been juggling our schedules to try to spend more time with the baby. You and Raoul doing okay?”

  “Yeah, yeah. He’s traveling a lot for his new business. But we’re fine. Grace is good?”

  “Terrific. She’s getting big. She’s walking, talking—”

  “Peeing, pooping.” Diane’s vision of parenthood had never been quite the same as mine. The bottom line was that she focused more on diapers than I did.

  “That, too,” I said. I threw my canvas briefcase into the car. “Diane, does the work get to you sometimes?”

  “Therapy? That work?”

  “Yes.”

  She flicked a glance at her watch, then spent a moment examining my face. She ordered, “Take off your sunglasses.” I raised them obediently to my forehead and held them there. She said, “Just what I thought. You have time for a drink?”

  I looked at my watch and considered her offer for a second or two while I wondered what she had seen in my eyes. “Yeah, that would be great. Let me call Viv and tell her I’ll be a while.”

  “She’s your nanny, right? I don’t want to be interfering with a tryst with some mistress.”

  “Lauren and I consider Viv our goddess. But to outsiders, ‘nanny’ seems to be less controversial.”

  “You want to get something to eat? I’ve been fantasizing all day about eating my entire next meal at Emiliana and you can save me from myself. What do you say we walk over to Triana? Although it’s not going to be as satisfying as the six-course dessert indulgence at Emiliana, I think I could go for some tapas and sherry as a consolation prize.” She fanned herself. “Anyway, it’s too hot for a full meal.”

  The full name of Emiliana was Emiliana Dessert House and Restaurant. My wife, Lauren, liked to say that they put last things first, right where they belong. To Diane, I said, “You like sherry?”

  “No. I like beer. But it sounds better to say tapas and sherry. Don’t you think it sounds better?”

  “Is that what Raoul says?” Diane’s husband’s family was from somewhere close to Barcelona.

  “No, he says snacks and beer. But I know he does it just
to annoy me.”

  Triana was a couple of doors west of the Downtown Boulder Mall. Only a few years old, the restaurant consumed the century-old space of what for years had been Boulder’s iconic used-book store, Stage House Books.

  The bar was almost full when Diane and I arrived. She found a couple of seats at a tiny table that was in the precise location where in the building’s Stage House days I’d once discovered a treasure trove of nineteenth-century political cartoons. Diane waved across the room at a waitress who couldn’t have been old enough to serve us. She couldn’t have been. To me, Diane said, “I think it’s too hot for sherry, so I’m going to get a beer.”

  She said it with a straight face. I was impressed. “Make it two.”

  She’d grabbed the little bar menu from the table. “Do you mind if I order the tapas?”

  “Would it make any difference if I minded? Go ahead and order enough for both of us. And remember I don’t like olives.”

  “I forgot. With you it’s olive oil,si, olives,no . I don’t get it. What do you have against olives?”

  “Do you really want to go there?”

  “Probably not. So, what, are you burned out, Alan? Or are you just a precocious marcher in the midlife crisis parade?”

  I’d had enough practice conversing with Diane over the years that I could usually follow the uneven terrain of the progression of her thinking without tripping over my feet. “Maybe. I don’t know. I hadn’t been thinking about it that way, but, shoot, it’s a possibility.” I’d never considered myself one of those people who were vulnerable to professional burnout, but I spent a few minutes recounting the story of my four o’clock appointment and the dishwasher-loading dilemma as a way of trying to elucidate for Diane whatever it was that I was vulnerable to.

  “Raoul would agree with your patient. Sometimes I catch him rearranging the dirty dishes after I load the dishwasher.”

  “No, no, no,” I protested. “The difference is that Raoul doesn’t consider you flawed because of it and he doesn’t consider your failure to learn different dishwasher-loading techniques to be a measure of your love for him.”