“Why you?”
The subtext wasWhy not me?
“I wish I knew the answer to that one, too. Maybe she’s aware of your, um, countertransference issues.”
I was certain Diane was going to argue that she didn’t have any negative feelings about Gibbs. But she didn’t go down that road.
“Other than murder, did you and Gibbs talk about anything else that was important during your… session?”
I explained that Gibbs wanted me to make a call to the police about the murder. Diane narrowed her eyes upon hearing that news. I continued. “And we talked about you, and what help you could be. I’d like your consultation about all this, and specifically your help setting up a meeting with Celeste what’s-her-face over at Safe House. Make sure she’s okay with this situation. Gibbs will need Safe House’s services when the shit hits the fan.”
“Clayton. Celeste Clayton. When?”
“Later today, if possible. I’m seeing Gibbs again tomorrow morning. I’d like to be confident that Safe House is comfortable having her by then so I can assure her it’s safe to go to the police with what she knows about Sterling.”
“She should be in Safe House right now, Alan. Not tomorrow.”
“I know. I suggested. She refused. I strongly encouraged her to reconsider. She refused.”
“Can I come to the meeting with Celeste? I’d really hate to miss this.”
“I was hoping you would. The release lets me tell you whatever I think is appropriate.”
“And Gibbs signed one for Safe House, too?”
“She did.”
“She didn’t argue with you?”
“No. She’s not the arguing type. You know that. Maybe that’s the source of your countertransference.”
Diane considered my words for a heartbeat before she said, “I treat lots of wimpy women. That’s not it. Do you find it odd that she dumped all this in your lap? The old murder, making the call.”
“I find this whole thing odd.”
“I know you don’t want to hear it, but this isn’t just aboutmycountertransference, you know?” Her voice was now at least a half-octave lower. The change was intended to draw my attention.
I bit. “What do you mean?”
“Are you going to call the police for her?”
“I don’t know. I guess.”
“This is your countertransference, too, Alan. What you’re doing for Gibbs you wouldn’t do for a lot of patients. Making all these arrangements, making all these calls. She’s pushing some button for you, too. Call me cynical, but I suspect it has something to do with the blond hair and the pert breasts.”
Pert breasts?“I don’t think so. The circumstances are unusual. If they were repeated with anyone else, I’d do the same thing.”
“You would call the police in another state and report an old crime for any patient who asked?”
“Yes.”
“Any old patient who wasn’t cute and blond?”
I was grateful that the pert breasts had disappeared from the equation. I said, “Yes.”
“Sure you would.” Diane returned her attention to finishing the coffee-making process. With her back to me, she said, “Alan, why is it you who always gets cases like this? You have more dead bodies in your practice than a small-town undertaker. Do you ever think about that?”
I could have confessed that I thought about it all the time, but I didn’t want to give her the satisfaction.
“I promise to think about it if you’ll think about something for me, too. Way back, Gibbs brought up something during conjoint therapy. When she mentioned whatever it was, Sterling doused it like a Boy Scout putting out a campfire. Do you remember what it was? He glared at her. Really glared at her. That’s what I remember most clearly. The glare.”
“I don’t have to think about it at all. I know what it was. I know exactly the incident that you’re talking about.”
“Yes?”
“Gibbs was saying that at some point she wanted to talk with us about their sex life.”
“Yes, yes, okay,” I agreed. “Maybe that was it. I remembered that, too, that it was something about sex.”
Sort of.
Diane said, “Don’t patronize me. That was it. And what she was about to tell us was that she and Sterling were swingers, or he was a cross-dresser, or something good and juicy like that. For a while I thought it might be bondage, but try as I might, I could never quite see the Dancing Queen in a black leather G-string and a studded bra. The whip? Maybe.”
The mental image that Diane was painting was a little distracting to me. “And you think she wanted to talk about it?” I asked.
“Exactly. Something about their weird little sex life was starting to give her the heebie-jeebies. And Sterling didn’t want her to let the cat out of the bag. He let her know he didn’t want her to talk about it. That’s what the look was about. You can take it to the bank.”
“Come on, Diane. Seriously. Bondage? Cross-dressing?”
She stared me down. The glare was only minimally less effective than Sterling ’s glower at Gibbs had been.
“I am serious. But I told you, I ruled out bondage and S amp;M early on. My vote? I think they were swingers. Probably still are swingers. Gibbs wanted to talk about it with us; Sterling didn’t. I’d guess he was pushing her to try something she didn’t want to do, and he didn’t want our votes counted.”
“Swingers swingers? Like… you know?”
“Yeah, like having sex with other couples on a regular basis. That kind of swingers. Do you know another kind?” She giggled to herself. I assumed it was at the thought that I might possess more esoteric deviant sexual knowledge than she did.
I didn’t admit that I had been actively considering the country-and-western dancing connotations of the word “swinger.”
“Gibbs and Sterling, swingers? How exactly did you come to this conclusion? She never actually said anything about that, did she? Did she say something to you in private? God, you’d think I’d remember if she’d implied they were swingers.”
“I just knew where she was going. You could tell.”
“How come I didn’t know where she was going?”
“What we do? Psychotherapy? People sometimes think we read minds. But what we do is more like seeing in the dark, you know? I knew where Gibbs was going. Sterling knew where she was going. You, sweetheart? You’re such a prude. You don’t like to go places like that. You’re a very good therapist, but where sex is concerned, you can’t see too well in the dark. Honestly, it’s one of the things I love about you.”
“You love that I’m a prude?”
She placed a mug beneath the dripping brew to catch the first, strongest cup of coffee. “I have to pick something to love, don’t I?”
SEVEN
Sam’s heart attack wasn’t awful by heart attack standards. The cardiologist didn’t think he’d suffered significant muscle damage.
During my visit to the hospital early Monday afternoon, Sam pointed out the location of the narrowing they’d discovered on a plastic model of the human heart that was about the size of a grapefruit. I’d had to hand him the model; he was flat on his back with some strange device that looked like a single-span suspension bridge straddling his groin. He’d explained that it was pressing on the incision in his artery with approximately the force that nature used to turn coal into diamonds.
All in all, not the precise degree of pressure that most men preferred in the vicinity of their groin.
“The one that got blocked up is called the diagonal artery. It’s that one there.” He pointed at a little red line on the model. “They put a stent in it to hold it open. You know what that is?”
I nodded. I rested my fingertip on the diagonal artery on the model in my hands and tried to visualize the blockage in Sam’s heart and the small wire-mesh pipe propping open his fragile blood vessel.