Stephen White - Blinded

“The release is that specific?”

“Yes, Ms. Storey has been quite specific about what she would like me to tell you and what she would prefer to remain privileged.”

Carmen Reynoso sat back on the sofa, crossed her long legs, and smiled such a big engaging smile that I reflexively smiled in return.

“Twenty questions with you just isn’t any fun,” she said. “How about this? Why don’t you tell me what you can tell me?”

So I did.

I knew only what Gibbs wanted me to know.

Louise Lake was a British flight attendant who had shared two homes with two other flight attendants. One of the homes was an almost-derelict, two-bedroom, to-die-for maid’s quarters attached to a ramshackle, early-twentieth-century shingled palace high on the rocky cliff above Crescent Bay in Laguna Beach in the southern L.A. metro area. The woman who owned the property and rented out the apartment was an elderly Australian who spent most of the year in Sydney.

The other home shared by the trio of flight attendants was a tiny one-bedroom flat in the fashionably tony Hyde Park section of London. Louise and another woman, named Helena, owned the London flat together. Their third roommate, Paulie, paid them a healthy rent for the privilege of crashing occasionally at one place or the other and, when circumstances dictated, didn’t complain about sleeping on the sofa in the front room of the London flat.

All three close friends typically flew the busy Heathrow-LAX run for British Airways.

Sterling had met Louise in business class while he was on the long trip back from doing the coverage on the British Open in the summer of 1997. She told him that she was looking forward at the time to an almost full fortnight of holiday at her Laguna Beach hideaway. Sterling revealed to her that they were practically neighbors-that he and his wife were only weeks away from completing renovations on a cottage in Corona Del Mar, just a few miles up PCH from Crescent Bay.

Louise was seeing a guy in L.A. at the time. His name was Scott and he was the personal assistant to a young director who was a favorite of Steven Spielberg and David Geffen. Louise was a little embarrassed by the way Scott flashed his cell phone and beeper and BlackBerry like a Boy Scout displaying his merit badges. She admitted to Sterling that she thought Scott was fun and pretty but was really just a “glorified freeway butler.”

At the conclusion of the flight Sterling invited Louise and Scott to dinner. She accepted.

The meal was at a little French place that the Storeys loved on Balboa Island, and it went well. Scott turned out to be precisely as full of himself as Louise had suggested he was, and with precisely as little cause. Over the next few months as Gibbs, Louise, and Sterling became good friends, Scott was soon out of the picture. He disappeared to Europe with his boss, who was spending the late summer wooing a French actress in Brussels and scouting locations for “a period thing” he was about to start shooting in Budapest and Prague.

“The nature of the friendship, please. That’s important,” Carmen Reynoso prodded. “If you can, of course.”

Louise was a working woman whose primary home was in Britain. When not in London she was usually traversing the North Atlantic doing her job, which left her mostly unavailable to accompany Gibbs on her frequent forays to her favorite haunts of Fashion Island or South Coast Plaza. Louise’s unavailability didn’t seem to matter; Gibbs adored Louise and almost immediately counted her among her closest friends. Gibbs especially loved Louise’s cosmopolitan manners and her London accent. Although she didn’t say so exactly, it was apparent that Gibbs thought Louise was a better accessory in the South Bay social scene than either Kate Spade or Manolo Blahnik.

“ Louise Lake was a beautiful woman. Where did that fit in?” With the question, I noted that the cleft had reappeared between Reynoso’s eyebrows. She wanted to know about Sterling and Louise, the couple. The thought apparently caused her to frown.

Gibbs didn’t suspect that anything was going on between Sterling and Louise until a Halloween costume party that Gibbs had long planned to celebrate the completion of the renovation of the Corona Del Mar cottage. Louise wasn’t even planning to attend the party; she had sent her regrets weeks before because she was scheduled to work the overnight from LAX to Heathrow on the thirty-first. Some combination of factors-Gibbs thought it was a mechanical problem and a crew overtime issue, but who ever knew with the airlines?-conspired to keep Louise in L.A. for another night.

She arrived at the Storeys’ party in Corona after midnight, still dressed in her BA uniform. The party was already in its death throes, and the few guests still remaining on the patio were so inebriated that a couple of them even complimented Louise on the originality of her costume.

Gibbs was decked out as Grace Kelly. By self-report, she’d looked the part. Sterling came as Joe DiMaggio, and Gibbs remained troubled about his late change of heart about costumes. She had been counting on Prince Rainier or James Bond, her early suggestions. If she’d known he was going to be wearing pinstripe flannels as Joltin’ Joe, she would have tried to talk him out of it.

Failing that dissuasion, she could have done Marilyn just as easily as Grace.

All he’d had to do was tell her. Was that too much to ask?

Louise was one of the last to leave the party, shutting down the new great room bar around three. Gibbs volunteered Sterling, who never drank when he was hosting a party, to drive Louise down the coast to her home in Laguna. After a tepid protest Louise agreed to give up her car keys and accept the ride.

Sterling pulled his car out of the garage in Corona at three-fifteen.

He didn’t return home until the sun was beginning to crest the string of coastal hills in the South Bay the next morning.

“That was October. What about November? Can we get there soon?” Carmen Reynoso asked. I suspected that she lacked a therapist’s natural respect for backstory, but didn’t say so. It was something we could discuss at another time. Or not.

Sterling had blown off Gibbs’s concerns about the lost hours before dawn on Crescent Bay on All Saints’ Day morning. He told his wife that he and Louise had talked for a while. That was it.

Gibbs didn’t trust Sterling much, from a fidelity point of view. And she didn’t believe him often, at least where other women were concerned. But she’d let the issue go. She’d watch for signs. With Sterling and other women she did that a lot.

Louise didn’t spend much time in Laguna during the first three weeks of November, and although she spoke with Gibbs a couple of times on the phone, they didn’t see each other during that period. Louise had bid for, and received, a month flying routes into De Gaulle and JFK because she adored being in both New York and Paris over Christmas. She didn’t want to be in either city for Thanksgiving, though. She had four days off, Tuesday through Friday of the holiday week, and she was planning to spend them alone in Laguna. Helena was working, and Paulie and his latest partner were doing Ibiza.

Louise called Gibbs from her rental car on Tuesday afternoon to bitch about the traffic on the 405 and to gossip about an Australian tennis player she’d met while her actual date, an American lawyer, was in the WC at Les Deux Magots on the Left Bank in Paris. She reiterated her promise to come for Thanksgiving dinner on Thursday.

Gibbs reminded her that dinner would be early; the turkey would be carved at five.

And Louise reminded Gibbs that she didn’t eat turkey and that she’d recently realized that she was only two minor obstacles away from being a true vegan.