Stephen White - Blinded

Gibbs had asked what the obstacles were.

Louise had replied, “Paris, and meat.”

“That was Tuesday?” Carmen Reynoso clarified. “Two days before Thanksgiving?”

“Yes,” I said, recognizing that the calendar pages had flipped forward to almost the exact same spot in the current year. I went on. “Gibbs said Louise was killed that night, not the next day like the newspapers reported.”

“Please go on with your story.”

“Please remember, it’s not my story. It’s Gibbs’s story. I’m just repeating what I was told. You can tell me one thing, though-is Gibbs correct about the time of death? Please tell me that.”

“We’ll get there, we’ll get there,” Reynoso said. When the issue was my ignorance and not her own, she was suddenly a very patient woman.

For some reason I thought of Sam.

The tape recorder snapped off. Carmen Reynoso fumbled in her bag for a spare tape. After she exchanged the tapes, she said, “Go on.”

Sterling wasn’t due home from New Orleans until Wednesday, late. Gibbs had completed the holiday shopping, supervised the house-cleaning, and done all the prep work she was planning to do in the kitchen before Thursday’s meal. She had a Mexican woman whose name she didn’t remember coming in to do most of the cooking on Thanksgiving morning.

By Tuesday afternoon Gibbs was bored. She decided to surprise Louise. She’d pick her up and welcome her home by taking her out to dinner somewhere in Laguna.

About a block from Crescent Bay, Gibbs spotted Sterling’s car parked on the street.

She almost missed it. What caught her eye was the bright red hat with the network logo that he kept on the shelf behind the backseat.

“A block away?”

“About a block away.”

“She didn’t tell you exactly where?”

“I don’t know Laguna Beach, Detective. I wouldn’t recognize any landmarks. I’m sure Gibbs will tell you.”

“Did she say what kind of car?”

“I don’t think so. She may have. If she did, I’ve forgotten.”

“You forgot? Anything else you forgot, Doctor?”

Gibbs drove a few blocks away from Louise’s home and phoned Sterling’s office from her car. His secretary reminded her that he was still in New Orleans and suggested Gibbs try him on his cell phone.

To get to Louise’s apartment, a visitor could use the public access path partway to the beach, then cut across an aging flagstone trail to the deck. Gibbs returned to Crescent Bay, parked near the top of the public path, descended a few yards, stopped, and listened.

She heard Sterling and Louise arguing. She couldn’t tell about what. But she heard her name.

Gibbs.

Sterling had yelled, “I don’t fucking care about Gibbs.”

Gibbs headed back up the path in tears. Up near her car she heard a scream. She wasn’t sure if it was Louise or not. At the time she thought it couldn’t be. Why would it be? When she heard the news later, on Thanksgiving afternoon, she wasn’t so sure.

Back at her car, she grabbed her phone and punched in the number of Sterling’s cell. The distinctive sound of her husband’s ringing phone traveled up the slope to where she was standing.

She killed the call.

“I think you know the rest,” I said.

“I’d like to hear about his reaction when the body was discovered. Can you talk about that?”

“Yes. Yes, I can.”

Sterling was home, as scheduled, late in the evening on Wednesday. Gibbs never said anything to him about what she had witnessed the previous afternoon.

On Thanksgiving Day, as was his practice, Sterling had all the TVs in the house tuned to football games. But he wasn’t watching football; he was watching coverage, production. The competition. At three-thirty a local news update reported that a partially clothed female body had been discovered facedown in a tide pool at Emerald Bay in Laguna Beach. Stay tuned, more after the game.

Gibbs hadn’t paid much attention. Sterling didn’t stray more than a few feet from the television.

A few minutes later Sterling asked Gibbs what time Louise was due for dinner. Gibbs said any time.

He said he hoped Louise was okay.

“ ‘Okay’? That’s the word he used?” Reynoso asked, frowning.

“That’s the word Gibbs said he used.”

The news report from Laguna Beach was repeated about a half hour later. This time there was a news crew live at the scene, and they were showing videotape of a wide shot of a body sprawled on the rocks on the north end of the horseshoe that was Crescent Bay. The tide was coming back in, and waves were lifting plumes of spray into the air as they crashed onto the rocks. The earlier report about Emerald Bay had been in error.

The body by the tide pool was draped with a sheet striped in pastels.

“I’m going down there,” Sterling said to his wife.

“Why?”

“I have a bad feeling about Louise.”

“ ‘A bad feeling’?”

“Yes, a bad feeling.”

“Huh.”

When Sterling got home, dinner was cold. As he ate a turkey and stuffing sandwich with cranberry sauce and lots of black pepper, he told Gibbs that he thought Louise had been strangled.

“ ‘Strangled’?”

“Yes.”

“He said that?”

“According to Gibbs.”

“That would have been when-six o’clock, seven?”

“You’ll have to ask Gibbs.”

“Anything else?”

“Sterling told her that he thought that somebody must have broken into Louise’s apartment. He bet that the killer had broken a window and just gone in that rickety back door.”

Carmen Reynoso sat back and crossed her arms.

“Why did you make the call? Why didn’t Gibbs call us herself?”

“I’m not quite sure about the answer to that one, Detective. It has something to do with the nature of the betrayal she feels she’s engaged in. Turning her husband in is one thing. Making the actual call is something else.”

“You think it’s psychology, then?”

“Isn’t everything?”

“No. Some things are just criminal.”

The distinction was obviously clearer to her than it was to me.

“Are we done?” I asked. I was tired, and the clock told me my girls were due home any minute. I really didn’t want Detective Reynoso here when they walked in the door.

She stood. “Except for your earlier question. Time of death? Remember? You still interested?”

“I didn’t think you were actually going to answer me.”

The snow was coming down in waves. A curtain of white, thick enough to obscure the entire valley, would blow by over the course of a few minutes, and then suddenly a sparser fall would reveal the dark geometry of the fence posts and dirt tracks in the greenbelt below our house. After a brief interlude of visibility the curtain would shut, the angularity would disappear, and the world would again become white.

A couple inches of snow were already piled on the grasses and in places on the ground that spent the late autumn in shadows.

Carmen Reynoso stared at the winter spectacle, her lips parted. “I’ve only seen snow a few times in my life. I’m an Oakland girl. Didn’t ever get to Lake Tahoe much. It’s mesmerizing.”

The sardonic quality of her Lake Tahoe comment was oddly alluring. I said, “There’s a moment during every storm when I’m overcome by the beauty of it all. And a moment, usually a little later on, when I’m almost-almost-overcome by the aggravation of it all.”

She turned back toward me, puzzlement in her eyes.

I explained. “Driving in it. Shoveling it. Walking through the slush of it. It gets old.”

Her next words surprised me.

She said, “You’re not a romantic, are you? I took you for a romantic. A knight-in-shining-armor-type guy.”