Stephen White - Blinded

She leaned directly over the pillow and made a great show of ripping the paper into shreds.

“So you’ve decided not to call him?” I asked. That line was in the script.

“I’ve been staring at that number for two days. I have it memorized.” That’s when she recited the phone number in a lovely, melodic little singsong. She couldn’t have delivered the line any better if she’d rehearsed it for days.

I mimed some silent applause for her benefit.

A beeper chirped. It wasn’t mine, which was set to vibrate.

Adrienne responded to the interruption by diving at the little backpack/purse she carried and said, “Shit, that’s my pager. I have to go, sorry. You’ve been… I don’t know… ‘helpful’ isn’t exactly the right word, is it?”

I sat openmouthed.

She grabbed her things and skipped toward the door. The skipping part wasn’t in the script, either.

“Back or front?”

I was standing with Carmen beside the gate in the chain-link fence in Holly Malone’s backyard. Carmen had stopped my forward progress by placing her palm against my chest. To be more specific, her hand had come to rest on top of my left man-boob. A couple of inches below her hand my upper abdomen still ached from the angina or whatever it was. But the ache was dull, not sharp. I could live with it, I thought.

Figuratively, if not literally.

“The adults are all in the kitchen,” I said. “We should probably just knock on the back door. We’ll spook ’em a little bit, which is a good thing. And that way we don’t have to fight through the whole bushel of kids at the front of the house.” While I was speaking, I was also involuntarily sucking in my gut and tightening my chest muscles.

Carmen removed her hand from my chest. “You want the honors?”

“No, no. You go right ahead.”

She pulled back the screen door and knocked. Artie opened the door with a carving knife in his right hand and a stern expression plastered on his face, as though he suspected that he’d just discovered that one of his dressed-for-church kids had snuck outside for something sinister, like fun, and he was planning to Jack-the-Ripper the child into submission as a lesson for the surviving siblings.

Through the open door I spotted Holly’s two sisters lined up behind Artie. The other brother-in-law? Elsewhere.

Carmen said, “I’m Detective Reynoso. This is Detective Purdy. We’d like to speak with Holly Malone, please.”

“I don’t see any badges.” For a moment I thought Artie might be a lawyer but quickly decided that he had merely watched a lot of TV. I was having more than a little trouble getting past the dancing-teapots apron he was wearing and the fact that he had his hands on his hips in some semblance of indignation. With the knife at the ready, he looked a lot like an angry, aging transvestite on a day that he forgot to put on his wig.

Carmen and I both flashed our badge wallets for Artie’s benefit. All we offered was a bored, quick little flip/close. Nobody ever reads the damn things. I had forgotten mine one day in Boulder and just flipped open my regular wallet instead at someone’s house. It turned out that my driver’s license and a school picture of Simon worked just fine to get me in that door.

“Holly Malone, please.” Carmen’s voice was suddenly clipped into a no-bullshit tone that caused Artie to take a step back from her. “It’s important. We spoke with her earlier; we know she’s home.”

The older of the two sisters appeared appropriately sobered by our presence at the door. She said, “A few minutes ago she went to take a quick bath and get dressed. I’ll go find her.”

With a what-did-she-do-now tone the younger sister, Artie’s wife, asked, “Is she in trouble?”

Poor thing, she was actually asking Artie.

Before he could make a total fool of himself by pretending he knew how to answer her question, I intervened. “For something she did? No, ma’am. We just want to ask her a few questions.”

Carmen leaned back toward me and whispered, “She’s taking a bath, Sammy. I’m feeling kind of stupid.”

“Yeah, well,” I said.

I’d noticed that she’d called me Sammy.

But I wasn’t feeling stupid. Not yet. There would be plenty of time for that later. The bath? What was I thinking about that? I was thinking, What else was Holly going to tell her sisters? To please excuse her so that she could go down to the basement for a quick poke with a stranger who’s probably a serial killer? Tugging along immediately behind the locomotive of that thought came the unedited laundry room image of Holly on the dryer, followed by a cabooselike graphic still of what happened up in the organ loft after Holly and then Sterling climbed the stairs from the Chapel of the Reliquaries in the Basilica of the Sacred Heart.

Fortunately, all it took to make the prurient images vanish again was a quick glance at Artie in the dancing-teapots apron.

“Sir?” I said to him. “Feel free to go finish carving your turkey. This shouldn’t take long, shouldn’t interfere with your meal.” I smiled. “We came to the back door so we wouldn’t alarm the children.”

My suggestion about returning his attention to the turkey served as a reminder to Artie that he was holding a long thin knife in a provocative manner while speaking with a pair of police officers. He glanced at the blade, then at us. His face at that moment was priceless-he was the guy going through security at the airport who’d just remembered he’d forgotten to take his Mac-10 out of his carry-on.

Oops.

Artie slowly moved the knife behind his back, as though Carmen and I wouldn’t notice he was still holding the thing.

Good move, Artie.

Sometimes I really love my job. Put them under enough stress, and most people are endlessly entertaining.

Big sister returned ten seconds later, breathless. For the first few moments after she reentered the kitchen, she couldn’t make her mouth work. I had already started looking around for the basement stairs when she finally cried out, “I couldn’t find her. And the bathtub was dry.”

Carmen was halfway through the door. She demanded, “The basement stairs? Where are they?”

My cell phone rang. I should’ve been following after Carmen and grabbing my handgun in order to mount a search-and-rescue mission to the basement, but I grabbed the phone instead.

The caller ID? I held it at full arm’s length from my aging eyes. What did it read?

To Carmen, I said, “It’s Gibbs.”

Carmen instantly recognized the possible implications. She stopped in her tracks and stared at me. Her big gun dropped from the ready position until it was pointing vaguely at my feet.

Artie’s wife asked, “Who is Gibbs?”

“Yeah,” I said into the phone.

“He’s here, Sam! Sterling is here. Oh my God. Oh my God. Help me!” Gibbs was frantic.

I pulled the phone away from my ear, covered the microphone, and said to Carmen. “Sterling’s in Vail.”

Artie’s wife asked, “Who is Sterling?”

Carmen said, “So where’s Holly?”

The big sister said, “She didn’t take a bath. The tub’s dry.”

I lifted the phone back beside my ear just in time to hear Gibbs’s frenetic whisper, “Help me!”

The house was calm when I got home from the two-act farce I’d produced at my office.

The meeting with Jim Zebid had been brief and relatively cordial. He seemed surprised by my revelation that some of the same lapses in confidentiality that had been plaguing my practice were also plaguing my partner’s practice next door. I went into a long explanation about the design of the soundproofing of the interior walls of the offices and why we had ruled out the possibility of eavesdroppers. I then revealed that my partner and I were planning to interview the couple who cleaned the offices for us the next day, and that we suspected that one or both of them may have found a way to get into our locked filing cabinets.