Stephen White - Blinded

A taxi took me to Sam, who was flat on his back in the University of Nebraska Medical Center. A Puerto Rican nurse named Yashira was being much nicer to him than he deserved. She was refusing to even try to find his “lost” car keys unless he arranged for somebody to drive him back to Colorado.

The somebody was me.

“It felt just like the heart attack. Maybe worse.”

“That’s what I’ve heard.”

The day before, around lunchtime, Sam had started passing a gallstone he didn’t even know he possessed and had driven himself to the emergency room in Omaha thinking he was having another MI. Two hours of agony in the ER provided enough time for the stone to move on, a one-night stay in the hospital for observation convinced the docs that Sam’s heart was stable, and my presence in Nebraska motivated Yashira to search a little bit harder for his missing car keys.

While I was still trying to find my way out of Omaha, I summed up the obvious. “Kidney stones, gallstones, and heart disease. You’re a picture of health, my friend.”

“Stress might have something to do with it,” he said.

“You think?” I replied.

“That, and the fact I’m fat. Though I might have lost a few pounds. Can you tell?”

Before I found the westbound entrance to I-80, we’d talked a little about Sam’s day-after-Thanksgiving trip up to Minnesota, and I’d answered all his questions about Lauren’s health and the long-term efficacy of Emily’s paw umbrella. The Gibbs and Sterling Storey saga was a little more complicated, though; covering that ground took us almost all the way to Lincoln.

Sterling’s story didn’t surprise Sam. I’d started, of course, at the river in Georgia with Sterling’s contention that he was washed downstream maybe a quarter of a mile before he pulled himself out.

“The Ochlockonee,” Sam had said. “Tell me something. Did he really go down there to help that woman in the minivan?”

“He says he did, but who knows? I don’t think Sterling exactly found God over the past week, Sam. He’s still the same guy he was when he was flying around the country having extramarital sex with strange women.”

“Not just extramarital: recreational. Hell, not just recreational: extreme.”

“Yeah?” I was curious but decided to proceed without the details. “Anyway, an old man with a semi full of chickens gave Sterling a ride as far as Montgomery. He had enough cash with him to make his way back to Colorado to talk to Gibbs.”

“He knew she was setting him up?”

“By then, yes. She basically told him when he was in Tallahassee. He says Gibbs is smart, and he figured she’d done a great job of pinning the murders on him. He came back to Boulder to talk with her, try to straighten things out, see if he could get her to admit what she’d done before your colleagues found him. When he couldn’t find her, he came by my office to give me his side of the story, hoping I could help influence her to give herself up. Then he was going to see a lawyer on Friday, turn himself in, and try to get her picked up. That was his plan, anyway. What a mess.”

“Did he know?” Sam asked. “What she’d been doing?”

“He says he didn’t. In fact, with the exception of Louise-the woman in California-he didn’t even know that any of the women he’d… you know, had these things with… were dead. When the women recontacted him to arrange a follow-up sexual encounter, Gibbs took the message. She was always the liaison anyway. That was her role.”

“Her role?”

“She set everything up for him with the other women. And then she watched. She liked to watch.”

Sam sighed deeply, as though he were trying to get something toxic out of his lungs. “She watched? She told you this?”

“I can’t tell you what she told me. What I’m able to talk about I got from Sterling.”

“There’s something I don’t understand,” Sam said. “After all these years, why did this bust open now?”

“After their move back to Boulder a few months ago, Sterling decided he didn’t want to be married to Gibbs anymore.”

“Ah,” Sam said. “So she was going to lose him anyway. All her efforts at eliminating the competition were for naught.”

“Exactly. She was determined to make sure she didn’t lose him to another woman, though.”

“What was your part?” Sam asked me. “Why’d she bring you in?”

“I’ve been wondering about that. Clinically, I can’t comment. But criminally? I think she needed somebody to help her play the battered wife card. She figured I’d do it.” I sighed. “She figured right. And she wanted someone she could tell things to, somebody who couldn’t tell the cops. And let’s face it, indirectly she used me to get you involved.”

“She needed a channel to the police. I obliged. Gibbs fooled you about where she was the whole time, too, didn’t she?”

“She fooled me about a lot of things, Sam. I was in a better position than anybody to figure out what she was up to, and I didn’t see this coming. I thought she was the victim in that relationship. I was blind to it.”

“Me too,” he said. “She’s good at smoke screens, Gibbs is. She’s so pretty, that’s part of it.” From Sam that constituted quite a confession. I waited, but he didn’t elaborate. He repeated his earlier question. “But she fooled you about where she was?”

“Yeah, I thought she was in Vail.”

“That’s what she told me. You know something? Before cell phones? She never could have pulled it off. Flying to the Midwest while we thought she was in the Colorado mountains? Used to be a phone number meant a place. Doesn’t anymore. Doesn’t mean shit.”

Sam seemed to need a moment to lament some loss of societal innocence. After a mile or so of silence I filled him in on what had really happened with the listening device in my office.

“So it was the lawyer who did it?” was Sam’s reply to my story, as though he’d known it all along.

“Yeah. With his bug in place he’d overheard this other patient of mine-he’s a really vulnerable guy-and then he talked him into doing some of the dirty work, but it was the lawyer who planted the bug and set it all up. He wanted to get even with Lauren for something that happened in court last summer. Figured he had a foolproof scheme.”

“You turn him in?”

“I gave it all to Lucy. She’s been great. I have some fences to mend with my patients, but…”

“You won’t tell me the lawyer’s name, but I’ll see it in the paper, right?”

“Something like that.”

“Will I be surprised?”

I thought about that for a moment. “No, not really.”

“The other guy, the vulnerable one-how’s he?”

I’d visited Craig in the hospital the day before. I said, “He’s not doing too well.”

“I’m sorry.”

He sounded sorry. It made me think about the waitress in Gold Hill, the one whose hand Sam had been holding since her sexual assault in the back of the van on the way to the frat house on the Hill. Maybe Sam was thinking about her, too.

We made it all the way across Nebraska-it’s a wide state-and were paralleling the Platte River on the stretch of Interstate 76 between Ogallala, Nebraska, and Julesburg, Colorado, before we got around to talking about Sherry. The conversation was a little cryptic at first.

“You want to talk about Sherry?” I asked.

“No,” Sam said. “Not really.”

That was the first installment in its entirety.

A hundred and twenty-five miles or so later I cut off I-76 at Hudson for the final westward push into Boulder. I could’ve spent the whole drive beating my head against the wall of Sam’s stubbornness, but all I would have learned is how good it felt when I stopped.