Her laugh warmed my heart. “He’s doing the best he can. He’s so off-balance. The heart attack. His family gone. I don’t think he can really believe that Sherry took Simon away at a time like this.”
Grace seized the moment to toss her spoon across the table. I caught it before it hit the floor. She thought the whole thing was hilarious. If I gave it back to her, I was sure the game would get repeated. Piaget would have given it back. I kept it.
Lauren said, “I can’t either.” Panic crossed her violet eyes in a flash, like the reflection of a lightning bolt in a pane of glass at midnight.
“Nor can I,” I said. I didn’t know if my wife wanted me to say that I wouldn’t leave her, to reassure her that the latest permutation of her illness hadn’t changed a single facet on the surface of my heart, but I feared that the very mention of her vulnerability might make the circumstances too real for her. So all I added was “I can’t believe what’s happened with them.”
I slid the newspaper across the table to her, pointing at the article about Penn Heller’s arrest for possession of cocaine.
She read the headline, gazed up at me, and said, “Really?”
I could have lied and said,“I don’t know anything more than I just read in the paper.”But I didn’t. I said, “Apparently.”
She scanned the article quickly. “It sounds like they have him for intent to distribute. That’s not good.”
“What’s this going to do to Jara’s position on the bench? How damaging is it?”
She shrugged.
“Do you know her husband?”
“A little,” Lauren said. “Just a little.”
It was apparent that Lauren wasn’t eager to talk about Jara and Penn Heller.
A few minutes later Lauren hobbled back toward the bedroom with her non-walking stick hand full of the supplies necessary to inject a milliliter of interferon into her thigh. I glanced at the clock. I added two hours. That was when she’d start getting sick from the medicine. I added twenty-four hours more to that. That was when she would stop being sick from the medicine.
A day, every week, deducted from her life in a valiant effort to repel rogue elephants.
I waited until Lauren closed the door behind her before I turned to Grace and said, “It’s too late this time, I’m afraid, Gracie. The elephants are already here.”
Grace tried to say “elephants.” Anyway, I think what she tried to say was “elephants.”
She pointed at the dogs.
Close enough.
I realized that Emily’s paw umbrella needed my attention.
THIRTY-ONE
The list of people who were going to be pissed at me was longer than usual.
Alan? Absolutely. Top of the list. My captain? He’d kill me if he got half a chance-save my insurance company a lot of money and my doctor a lot of work. My cardiologist? I think he was coming around to the reality that I wasn’t his normal post-MI patient. Still, he wasn’t going to be happy about my extracurricular activities. I was pretty sure about that. And Carmen Reynoso? Eh, so? It’d just give her another reason to look down her nose at us mountain cops.
Who else?
I wondered what Sherry would think, but I finally decided that I couldn’t really guess. I hadn’t thought she was the type of person who could walk out the door with my kid less than a week after I had a heart attack.
Who am I kidding? Sherry wouldn’t be surprised. When she heard what I was up to, she’d make that noise that I hated that came from someplace far back in her sinuses, but she wouldn’t be surprised.
The noise was her marital shorthand for “See what an asshole he is.”
Or maybe it was “What can I do with him?”
I didn’t know anymore.
But at that moment I was coming to the conclusion that being on medical leave from the department wasn’t all bad. My check was still coming in. The mortgage was going to get paid. I even liked not carrying my badge. And not having a gun on my hip or strapped below my armpit? It was fine, good even, at least for a while.
Two phone calls, and I had her address. If I was smarter, I could have figured it out in one, but I used one of the calls to get an answer to Alan’s question about how the cops were tipped about Jara Heller’s husband’s cocaine problems. I admit I frittered away a minute or two trying to figure out why Alan wanted to know, too.
Gibbs Storey’s house wasn’t that far from mine, geographically speaking. Ten blocks? Twelve? I could have walked over there easily, but I didn’t. Too much slush on the sidewalks, too little motivation to fight the muck on my part. I took the Cherokee and parked half a block down from her place. Why not in front?
I was on the lookout for media, especially media with cameras.
The whole connection between current Boulder residents Sterling and Gibbs Storey and the old murder in Laguna Beach hadn’t yet hit the papers, but I knew it would. Any minute, probably.
And Sterling’s disappearance in Georgia?
That was prime tabloid bait. The frosting on the cake. When that news hit the wires, we were talking nonstop cable TV chatter and lots of reporters making their first trips ever to southern Georgia so they could do their pompous stand-ups on some obscure bridge over the Ochlockonee River. There’d probably be good footage of gorgeous old bloodhounds on long leashes snuffling along the riverbank and maybe even some shots of gruff rescue guys in wet suits searching eddies. And of course, there’d be plenty of on-camera interviews with fat cops like me saying they’re doing the best they can, ferreting out every lead, examining every possibility.
So I checked the street in front of the house as carefully as I knew how. I didn’t want to get ambushed by some reporter.
Not yet.
Gibbs Storey was home. To my surprise, she answered her door. To my greater surprise, she invited me inside as soon as I told her I was a friend of her psychologist. That’s what got me inside her door: Alan. Whatever. I was grateful to be off the porch; I’d felt like I had a spotlight on me when I was standing outside like some Jehovah’s Witness or some almost-homeless guy walking across lawns going house to house spreading doorspam.
The entryway of the Storeys’ home was all rose-hued marble tile. Nothing was out of place in the part of the house that I could see from where I was standing. No dust, no dirt. No kids’ shoes. No crappy tennis balls the dog dragged in. If my crazy grandmother had had a ton of money and a totally different sense of what was tasteful-actually the dear old woman didn’t have any sense at all of what was tasteful-this is what her house would have looked like.
“You’re Dr. Gregory’s detective friend? The one he wanted to talk to about… my situation?”
That part couldn’t have gone better if I had written her lines myself. I’d never said I was a cop-technically since I was on leave, I wasn’t a functioning cop-but she’d generously gone ahead and granted me detective status. Alan had once told me that status was a simple thing, psychologically speaking. One person assigned it, and as soon as someone else agreed, the status became real. That’s all it took. Well, Gibbs had assigned me detective status. And me?
I didn’t contradict her. Thus, my status was real.
“Yeah. I’m Dr. Gregory’s friend. The one he talked to” was all I said.
“How did you find me? He said he wouldn’t tell you my name.”
“He didn’t. He kept his word; he’s big on that. But there’s a lot of other stuff going on-you must know that. Things that I’m in a position to hear about without any assistance from him. The search warrant here the other day? The cops visiting from the West Coast? It wasn’t hard to put numbers on the players’ backs, if you know what I mean. I sort of put two and two together on my own.”