Stephen White - Blinded

Gibbs lifted a cell phone from her lap. “He’s not answering. He’s always busy when he’s setting up these broadcasts. Deadlines, deadlines. I left him a message.”

“And your attorney?”

“There really isn’t one.”

“And you implied that there was one because…”

I allowed the thought to settle close by her like an unfriendly dog to see if she’d respond to it. I thought I noticed her jaw clenching, but that was the only reaction she displayed.

I finished my own sentence. “… because you thought I’d be angry or disappointed if you didn’t have a lawyer.”

She nodded. She wasn’t looking at me. She was watching a very blond, very strong police officer carry an iMac out of her house. “That’s not even Sterling ’s, it’s mine. He hates Macs.”

The strong blond officer placed the computer in the back of a gray Chevy Suburban.

“You didn’t want to-what? Make me angry?”

She huffed. Just a little huff, but a huff nonetheless. “I don’t like expectations in relationships.”

Noted. “And you think that I had an expectation about you having a lawyer?”

Her nostrils flared. “From the beginning you’ve had an expectation about my doing this your way.”

I reminded myself that my relationship with Gibbs was psychotherapy, a form of human interaction that often appears to have little in common with reality.

“My way?” is all I said, and I managed to say it in a measured voice, as though I were curious and not incredulous. I knew I could have pounced. Fortunately, I was also aware at some level that I wanted to pounce.

My way would have included Gibbs staying in Safe House, not sharing a bed with the man she was accusing of murder. My way would have included Gibbs calling the Laguna Beach Police Department on her own, not having me do it in her stead. My way would not ever, ever have included my sitting in the front seat of a Cadillac Escalade while a search warrant was being carried out.

But Gibbs wasn’t talking about reality, she was talking about reality as she experienced it. Her real world. Not the real world. She was talking, especially, about the role that men assumed in her real world. My job was to help her make some sense out of that experience and perhaps ultimately help her see the extent of the divergence that existed between her real world and the place where most of us hung out, that universal theme park called “reality.”

Just then a parade of three peace officers marched out the garage door of Gibbs’s home. Each of the cops was carrying two large brown-paper bags that were folded once at the top. A tag was stapled at the fold of each bag.

Gibbs said, “I wonder what they’re stealing. I have some nice things.”

A little reality testing was in order. “I think they’re trying to solve a murder, Gibbs. Your friend Louise? You called them, right? That’s why they’re here, isn’t it?”

“I know,” she said.

But she was much more annoyed than sympathetic.

“That’s her,” Gibbs said.

Carmen Reynoso was tall. From the distance where we were sitting, I guessed six feet tall. Like many visitors to our fine state, she was also unaccustomed to the vagaries of Colorado weather. The calendar said November, and many if not most outsiders figure that means blizzards followed by subzero temperatures followed by snowplows followed by commuters getting to work on cross-country skis until the mud season starts in May.

Reynoso was dressed perfectly according to the common lore. She was decked out in good leather boots, wool pants, and a thick turtleneck sweater that would have left me begging for a place to change into something more temperate. She carried a heavy navy jacket draped over her left arm.

The tail end of a little cold front had come through overnight, clipping the Front Range and dropping us from the high seventies into the mid-sixties. The sun was sharp, though-its rays filtered only by the thinnest ribbons of high clouds-and I thought I was a bit overdressed in cords and a cotton sweater.

“Nice boots,” Gibbs said. “Though I wouldn’t wear them with that coat. Nope.”

Nice boots?

Detective Reynoso took two long strides down the serpentine herringbone brick walkway before she pirouetted to the sound of her name being called from inside the house and returned to the shadows.

“Did Detective Reynoso say anything to you about when she’d like to speak with you?” I asked.

“She asked me to stick around during the search. I assumed that meant she wanted to see me after.”

“You should have an attorney present, Gibbs. For your protection.” My wife had drilled into me that I should have an attorney present whenever anybody from law enforcement wanted to talk to me about anything. Yes, she would admit that there were exceptions, but she would insist that I first run them past my attorney.

Exasperated, Gibbs said, “I’m the one who called. I don’t need protection. Don’t you get that?”

I swallowed involuntarily. I didn’t correct her and remind her that technically it had been I who had called.

“Not from you, not from an attorney, not from Safe House, and not from her .” Gibbs pointed in the general direction of Carmen Reynoso. “Got it?”

The last thing I did before I left Gibbs alone in her Escalade was set an appointment with her for the following Monday morning. Early. SevenA.M.early. It’s all I had free.

I zipped down Ninth and stopped by my office to get some material for a report I planned to write over the weekend, then decided to run a couple of errands downtown.

I regret sometimes that the Downtown Boulder Mall is no longer a place where I can buy some brass Phillips-head screws or have a prescription refilled. Before the Mall was built-transforming a few blocks of Boulder ’s “Main” Street into an alluring brick and tree-lined promenade-downtown Boulder was like a thousand other Great Plains downtowns: a two-lane thoroughfare with a coffee shop, a hardware store, a drugstore, and maybe even a five-and-dime.

My old landlady-the kind woman who had given me a lovely place to live during graduate school and had ultimately sold me the house that Lauren and I now live in-had regaled me over endless cups of jasmine tea and plates of fresh-baked cat’s tongues about the Boulder she’d fallen in love with, the Boulder that existed before the gentrification of downtown in the seventies and eighties.

Lois had been a good friend of Fred, who’d owned Fred’s Restaurant, and of Virginia, the matriarch behind the Printed Page. Lois didn’t live much in the past, but she’d occasionally allowed herself some intense longing for a piece of Fred’s apple pie, or for a copy of some unheralded book that Virginia would insist she just had to read. Neither the pie nor the literary recommendations had, apparently, ever disappointed Lois. Although she loved walking the new mall right up until the time she repatriated to Scandinavia, Lois never lost her affection for what Boulder had been for most of the century before.

Now? Fred’s is gone. So is Fred. The Printed Page has moved away, and the Downtown Boulder Mall is lined with shops, not stores. There are lots of places to buy crafts. National chain stores seem to outnumber local retailers.

I was thinking about those kinds of changes as I rushed down Pearl Street in search of a DVD that Lauren wanted me to pick up for Grace. My daughter had developed an inexplicable fascination with trucks, and apparently there was no shortage of videos on the subject that were specifically intended for the toddler set. I had a list of acceptable titles from Lauren. What I didn’t have was any confidence that the Downtown Boulder Mall contained a store that sold toddler-oriented DVDs about eighteen-wheelers and hooks and ladders.