It crossed my mind that maybe that’s why Gibbs Storey was seeing Alan. She was a neat freak, a pathological neat freak of some kind. He was trying to get her to loosen up, not dust for a day.
But who was I to say what was deviant, right?
While I was encouraging Gibbs Storey to stop crying-I do a surprising amount of that in my job day to day, and I’m pretty good at it-I was thinking that if somebody came and chopped off the rest of this house and just left this room standing, Sherry and I still couldn’t afford to live here.
Why did we fight so hard to stay in Boulder? Why? We worked our asses off, together we made a decent amount of money, or what should have been a decent amount of money, and what did we get for it? A barely insulated frame box with a crappy furnace, a twenty-year-old roof, and wall-to-wall carpeting that smelled like a colony of prairie dogs used it for a few years before donating it to the Goodwill. If you’re a cop, or a teacher, or a lady selling flowers in a little shop just off the Downtown Mall, that’s what working your ass off gets you, if you want the privilege of living a dozen blocks away from Gibbs and Sterling Storey in beautiful, beautiful Boulder.
It gets you shit.
Maybe Sherry was right. Maybe it was time for a change. Back to Minnesota? I didn’t know.
Gibbs was curled up in the corner of a big sofa. I was across from her on a chair made out of twigs and branches. Her sniffles seemed to be slowing. Finally, she whimpered, “I’m a private person. Soon everybody is going to know everything, right?”
Well, that gave me pause. I’m thinking I have a grieving widow on my hands, and that I’m going to be ladling out the comfort and tugging the tissues if I want to get anything out of her, but instead I’m wondering whether she’s upset just because her family secrets aren’t likely to remain secrets for too long.
That was a whole different state of affairs.
“ ‘Everything’ being what exactly, ma’am?” I said. It was as innocuous as I could make the question sound. I hoped it was innocuous enough, because if Gibbs heard any semblance of the echo of what she’d just said to me-assuming she was one tenth as smart as she was pretty-I figured that my forward progress was going to be severely hampered.
She swallowed, opened her eyes a tad wider, and inhaled slowly. Yep, she’d caught wind of the echo.
“What is it that you want, Detective?”
“Please call me Sam. Sam Purdy.”
She dabbed at her eyes with one of the tissues I’d handed her. It wasn’t wadded; it was folded neatly. She used one of the sharp corners to do the dabbing. “But you are that detective friend of Dr. Gregory’s, right? The one who works with the Boulder Police Department?”
Tricky question. “That is how I make my living, ma’am.”
“Why are you here? Why did you come to see me this morning?”
“Something’s been troubling me, I mean wake-up-in-the-middle-of-the-night troubling me about… your situation, and I’m hoping you can help me make some of my confusion go away.”
She narrowed her eyes. “What?”
“You’ve lived with your husband a long time since you knew he had killed your old friend, right?”
“Yes.”
It was a reluctant yes. Not reluctant because the facts didn’t ring true to her, reluctant because she could spot the danger looming ahead if she accepted my premise.
“Well, I’d like to know how you could stay with him. It’s important. To me, really important. I don’t understand how you could go through the routines, you know, the daily… stuff that makes up marriage, knowing what you knew.”
“He’s my husband, Detective.”
Yeah, yeah.But I heard the present tense. And knew she’d wanted me to hear the present tense.
“But wives leave husbands all the time, ma’am. All the time. They leave husbands over goofy things, over things that are much less consequential than murder. Money, booze, other women. Snoring, halitosis, sex-too much, not enough-you name it. But you didn’t, and I’m trying to understand that.”
What I didn’t say was“My God, woman, your options are limitless. I know twenty men who would bow down and lick clean the ground you walk on.”
“I love Sterling.”
I wanted to touch my chest right then, press on my sternum with at least three fingers to see if the tightness I was feeling had to do with my heart or with myheart,but I was afraid it might freak her out to see me caressing myself, so I didn’t. Instead, I reached into my coat pocket and fingered the bottle of nitro the way I used to stroke the velvety rabbit’s foot I carried around in my pants pocket as a kid.
I said, “And that’s enough?”
“It was for me,” she said.
Past tense now.
I took a moment to look away from her and give myself a pep talk. I told myself that I could look her in the eye and not be weakened by her beauty. That my resolve wouldn’t dissolve in her loveliness.
When I looked back up at her, I was pretty sure that I’d been wrong.
“Can I admit what I’ve been wondering about you?” I said.
In an endearing way that ambushed me, she said, “Please.”
“I’ve been wondering whether you’ve been threatened, you know? Or maybe you’ve feared what your life would be like if you turned him in, what would happen to you. Is that what kept you from calling us?”
My mother collects Lladro angels. The smile Gibbs offered reminded me of the face of one of the angels, only prettier. “That wasn’t it, Detective. I’ve gone over all this with that woman detective. With Miss Reynoso.”
I waved off her objection. “Different departments. California, Colorado. It’s a left hand, right hand thing. I don’t mean to be repetitive-to force you to be repetitive-but in my business it truly helps sometimes to hear things yourself.” I glanced away from her, then right back. Gibbs Storey was still gorgeous; that hadn’t changed. “I’d understand those reasons. You know, if you were scared. If that’s the reason it took you so long to-”
“But you don’t understand that I love him. And that love made every choice difficult. Every option… complicated.”
Is that what love did? Would Sherry say the same thing? I didn’t know. I’d like to have asked her.
Maybe I would. Probably I wouldn’t.
I said, “I’m having a little trouble with that, I’ll admit.”
Gibbs stood up and crossed the space between us. She leaned over, placing her hands on her knees so that the flawless skin of her face was only about a foot from my eyes. She said, “Would you like something to drink, Detective? Some coffee, maybe? It’ll just take a minute.”
She made me some decaf in a little glass coffeepot with a spring thing in the middle. It looked like something from a high school chemistry lab. The results were pretty good. I bet Alan had a pot just like it. Probably most of Boulder had a pot just like it. Sherry and I would be last. More likely, everybody would move on to another kind of coffee-making appliance before we got around to getting the one with the little spring thing in the middle.
We’d get ours on the sale table at Target.
She served the coffee in a cup with a saucer and a little platter of cookies. Often when I go into people’s houses to talk, they offer me coffee, or a Coke, or even a beer, but I know it’s fake polite, not real polite. They’re seeking to grab some of my advantage; they don’t really want me there. I didn’t get that feeling from Gibbs. She seemed sincere with her coffee and cookies.
“About your husband’s disappearance, ma’am? If you can bring yourself to discuss it-I’m sure it’s painful-I’d very much like to hear your thoughts about what happened.”
Her eyes filled with tears again. Was that grief? If it wasn’t, it was a close approximation.