Stephen White - Blinded

“Another half hour, Boo,” I explained. She asked again, and again.

How wrong was I? The total wait at the post office to mail our package turned out to be seventy-seven minutes.

On to Boulder ’s cable TV franchisee. The remote control to our cable box had died. I was on a simple mission to trade it in for a working model. In the parking lot of the cable company, I told Grace, “This is corporate America. This will be quick. Ten minutes, tops.”

Times five, maybe. Fifty-three minutes later I had a fresh remote control unit and a splitting headache. Grace’s patience, never exemplary, had evaporated totally.

My watch said ten minutes after one. Viv-our lovely, indispensable child-care-worker-nanny-person-had been waiting for us at the house since twelve-thirty.

I drove home, handed Grace off to Viv, downed an energy bar and a big glass of water, and went to change my clothes for a bike ride.

I’d finished stripping naked and was fishing in my closet for my cycling clothes when my pager started vibrating on the shelf.

I checked the screen.

It read “ 911” beside a Boulder phone number.

Before I had a chance to return the call, the phone rang. I jogged a few steps to the bedroom and answered. To my surprise, I heard Sam’s voice.

“The shit came down,” he said.

I thought he was talking about Sherry. I guessed he’d been served with dissolution papers or something similarly awful.

“God, I’m sorry, Sam. What happened?”

“They’re executing a search warrant as we speak. Understand, you didn’t hear it from me.”

Why would they want a search warrant for Sam’s house? And who else would I hear it from?

“What for? Who’s searching your house?”

“Not here, you doofus. Don’t be a jerk. At your client’s house. That detective from California? The old murder? Getting warm yet? Need any more clues?”

“A search warrant? They haven’t even talked to anyone. I didn’t even know they were in town.”

“I’m so sorry you didn’t get copied on the memo. I promise to have someone look into that; it’s inexcusable. Anyway, Lucy says Reynoso came into town with another detective, they met with the brass, and in no time they got a warrant from Judge Heller. They sure didn’t waste any time exercising the thing. She said they have their game faces on. This one’s serious, Alan. I gotta go.”

He hung up.

My pager began to dance on the shelf again.

Same message as the previous one: “ 911” and the same local phone number that I didn’t recognize.

I dialed the number and said, “This is Dr. Gregory returning a page.”

“Can you come over?” Gibbs begged. “Please? They’re searching our house. They’re going through everything. They have our computers. They’re even taking Sterling’s shoes .”

I was tongue-tied. Partly I was wondering why it was such an affront to Gibbs that the police were taking her husband’s shoes. But mostly I was considering the curious strategy that Detective Carmen Reynoso had adopted for dealing with the accusation against Sterling Storey.

No talk, just action.

“Please?” Gibbs repeated.

“Give me your address, please, Gibbs. I don’t recall where you live.” She gave me directions to a new neighborhood I was almost totally unfamiliar with, somewhere west of Broadway and north of downtown. “Did you ever get in touch with a local lawyer?” I asked.

“Kind of.”

Whatever that means, I wondered.

“Well, I suggest you give that person a call. I’ll be over in a little while, although I’m not sure what I can do given the circumstances.”

As I pulled on some boxer shorts and gazed longingly at my Lycra, I said aloud to myself, “I don’t know why I’m coming over. But I’m coming over.”

Sam had said that they “had their game faces on.” That they were “serious.” Which to me meant one thing: Detective Carmen Reynoso believed some aspect of Gibbs’s story.

Suddenly Diane’s caution about my therapeutic behavior flowed into my head the way water emerges from a cracked pipe: loudly, and with great insistence.

“What you’re doing for Gibbs you wouldn’t do for a lot of patients.”

I stopped with one foot hovering above my trousers.

Diane was right.

Now what the hell had I gotten myself into?

Gibbs and Sterling lived in one of those big faux Victorians that had been all the rage in the build-out of the northwest and eastern expanses of Boulder in the 1980s when developers were finally beginning to believe that the city was serious about growth control. The architects had, I’m sure, been trying to pay respectful homage to the original Victorian heritage of the city’s housing base in the 1880s, but the end result turned out more like Main Street in Disneyland than like Mapleton Hill in Boulder.

The Storeys’ three-story house had to be five thousand square feet in size. As I approached the home from the corner-it was easy to tell which one it was by the convention of marked and unmarked police department vehicles clustered out front-I wondered what the Storeys did in there by themselves. A two-person game of hide-and-seek could go on for weeks without resolution.

Gibbs was sitting by herself in the driver’s seat of a monstrous gold-colored SUV, the kind of motoring behemoth that I hated driving behind, next to, in front of, or on the same road with. It wasn’t just that the latest-generation SUVs were big, it was that they tried so hard to be big. It was as though they thrust out their chests and puffed out their cheeks. Gibbs’s colossus was a Cadillac. She was swallowed up behind the steering wheel of the thing like a five-year-old pretending to drive a fire truck. She was startled when I knocked on the passenger-side window, but waved me in after a moment.

She wasn’t effervescent.

“Thanks for coming. I don’t even know why I called.”

I could have admitted that I didn’t, either, but if I had, then I probably would also have had to consider aloud why I had responded by driving across town to be with her, and I wasn’t eager to do that.

“What’s going on?”

“They just showed up, shoved some papers in my face, and started rummaging through my house. God knows what they’re doing in there. There are five of them.”

“Are they from California? The ones I called for you?” I already knew the answer to the question, but I wasn’t going to learn much about Gibbs if I didn’t keep her talking.

“Yeah, um, yes. At least one of them is. Maybe two. There’s a woman. She’s really tall. She told me she’s from Laguna. She said she was the one you spoke with on the phone.”

“Detective Reynoso.”

Gibbs shrugged.

“Any detectives from Boulder?”

“Yes.”

“Did you get a name?”

“I’ve forgotten it already.”

“ Sterling? Is he here?”

“He left yesterday for Florida. The Seminoles, the Gators, the Hurricanes-I don’t know. He’s doing some game, a Florida team against some team not from Florida. Georgia, maybe. Or Alabama. Auburn? Where’s Auburn? I’m sorry. I’ve tried and tried and tried, and I can’t tell them all apart. I know it’s important to some people, but for the life of me I can’t tell them apart.”

She actually seemed ready to break into tears over her college football dyslexia. In a more conventional psychotherapy, I would have figured that the marital repercussions of her gridiron ignorance-and her feelings about the same-were a topic we would get around to talking about in some more detail.

But now wasn’t the time. “What city is he in?”

“ Tallahassee.”

“Have you tried to reach him?” I was aware that I was asking a lot of questions, not typical for me in psychotherapy and usually not a sign that things were going well. My database of therapy sessions in the front seats of Cadillac Escalades was, however, limited.