Line of Fire (12 page)

“Well, I prefer this vulnerability to that vulnerability. You did what had to be done. I supported you then. I support you now. I am all in. I will stand by you. And I will be grateful to you. Forever.”

I was proud of my speech. I’d said what I needed to say.

Sam wasn’t so impressed. He stopped walking. In a modulated voice devoid of antagonism, he said, “What you just said is lovely, poetic bullshit. Pure, righteous rationalization. You think any prosecutor or any jury is going to care
why
I did what I did that night? Or
why
you allowed yourself to become an accessory to murder
after
that night? They won’t care. No one will give a shit.

“Why? Because cops and prosecutors know what I know, what every homicide detective knows: the eloquent righteousness that is spewing from your mouth is the final excuse of the vigilante. The difference between you and me? You won’t ever hear me feel or sound as self-righteous and self-satisfied as you. Two reasons. The first is because I know nobody cares.

“The second is more important. It’s because I don’t plan to get caught. You? You talk like you’re rehearsing the soliloquy you plan to give at your sentencing hearing. Jesus. I, on the other hand, don’t plan to have a sentencing hearing.

“You’re out biking around the county like you’re invisible and invincible. If I’m a cop trying to break this thing, you are my damn wet dream.” He tightened his jaw before he continued. “Don’t screw with my plan, Alan. My plan is simpler than your plan.
My
plan is to not get caught. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

He didn’t want an answer. I didn’t have one. We were finally on the same page.

I thought he was done. I was wrong. He said, “With all your good intentions, you’re going to end up leaving us both on the wrong side of some high fences and thick walls in Cañon City or Buena Vista.”

His phone chirped. He checked the screen. “I’m the next witness. I have to go. You know, be a cop.” He pocketed the phone before he put both his hands on my shoulders. “Don’t fuck this up for me. The stakes are too high. If you do fuck this up, and the state doesn’t kill you, I will kill you.” He smiled at me, as a friend. “I’ll do it more slowly than they will. And I will enjoy it more than they will.”

Sam began to walk away. To his back, I said, “There’s a new development. Something else we need to talk about. It’s important. It may end up having some bearing on Frederick. Indirectly.” He barely slowed down. I called out, “I realize that this may not be the best possible moment, time-wise.”

He laughed loudly enough that I could hear him even with his face pointed away from me. He turned briefly. “You’re right, it’s not the best moment for me, time-wise.” He raised his phone, the contemporary equivalent of tapping the face of a wristwatch. “We’ll talk about your news some other time.”

I yelled, “What about tonight?”

“Working.”

“Tomorrow?”

“Working.”

He kept walking.

“It’s important,” I yelled. “Really important.”

Sam waved.

19

I
was ambivalent about postponing the next conversation I had to have with Sam. Although the topic was urgent—even critical—I had not yet figured out how to share with him the news that the newest addition to my clinical practice was Coma Doe.

I was bound by professional ethics. And legal responsibilities. The fact that I was seeing Coma Doe for therapy was privileged information.

Although the news about Coma Doe was something I could not hide from Sam, I was also concerned that Coma Doe could be waiting for me to get careless about his confidentiality. If he discovered me sharing clinical information cavalierly, with a single phone call he could make my life even more complicated than it already was. I had to be clever, or at the very least smart, about how I was going to bring Sam up to speed.

• • •

After Sam returned to testify at the Justice Center, I crossed Boulder Creek and followed Arapahoe up past the Foot of the Mountain Motel to Eben Fine Park. Each of those locations reminded me of a previous serious mess I’d gotten myself into. I comforted myself that I somehow escaped the mortal perils I’d felt during those episodes. I tried to feel reassured by the fact that I’d survived each one. None of it worked. I felt as vulnerable heading back toward downtown as I’d felt walking away.

I tried to clear my head, forcing myself not to perseverate on the mistakes I might have made on my visit to Frederick, or on any review of the mistakes I might have made in my initial, abbreviated meeting with Coma Doe.

I refocused, determined to think through the powerful session I’d just had with Amanda, and the provocative way she had chosen to end the hour.

She had deliberately used the word “companion” to describe her relationship with the man she had previously identified as her boss. Her specific challenge to me at the end of that morning’s session had been to decide how I felt about, as she put it, what she did. As I walked back to town on Pearl Street, that is what I was pondering.

What does a “companion” do?

I was assuming that Amanda was telling me that she was acting as a paid companion to the man whose professional life was falling apart. The one who was, possibly, contemplating suicide. I was also considering the likelihood that her companionship with him took multiple forms, and that some of those forms were intimate. Or—if not intimate in the psychologically meaningful way I usually defined the word in my office—at least sexual.

I was having a hard time arriving at any other conclusion than that Amanda was telling me that she was, for want of a better word—and that morning I lacked that better word—the man’s mistress. But Amanda had obviously considered there to be a better word, the one she had used with me. That word was “companion.”

Was the difference in vocabulary one that made a difference? She hadn’t said she was the man’s lover. She hadn’t even led me to believe that he was married, or involved with another woman. Amanda had not chosen to identify herself as his “mistress”—a word I would have construed to mean something specific—nor had she chosen to define herself as his “courtesan” or his “concubine.” Had she used either of those last two nouns I would have simply gone online and researched contemporary connotations. The ancient definitions in my head—part geisha, part something else—probably didn’t have any application to whatever relationship she was having with the troubled venture capital guy.

Amanda had identified what she was doing as companionship. She had clearly described the man as her employer. The variable that differentiated mistress from employed companion? I was assuming that money was changing hands. Hell, she had identified her service to the man as one of her gigs.

I revisited her challenge.
How do I feel about it?
I was having trouble generating much moral outrage about her employment.

When I let my mind freely wander the psychotherapeutic terrain, I noted how easily my focus skipped between the current arrangement she had with her employer and the earlier one she’d had with her older brother when she was just shy of fifteen years old. The creation of just that gestalt—the current figure, companion, superimposed over the earlier ground, handjob fairy—could have been Amanda’s intent.

I was acutely aware that Amanda had chosen, consciously or unconsciously, to present those two chapters in her life to me in a particular order. The order of the narratives made it difficult to view her recent adult—“adult” in all its connotations—choice absent the context of her earlier, immature, adolescent decisions.

How do I feel about her work?
As part of the companionship arrangement, she was earning money. As part of the arrangement, she was likely making herself available for sex. If
a
was true, and
b
was true, then
c
was also, likely, true.

C
was that Amanda was functioning, in a broad context, as a sex worker. An escort. A prostitute. Her challenge at the end of the session left me wondering whether she anticipated that I would feel some negative judgment about that profession.

I had scant context to help me understand the work Amanda was describing.

Not many months before, I had been seeing a Denver banker for therapy for what he self-described as an addiction to “hobbying.” The term was new to me at the time, but the hobby he was seeking help arresting was a lifestyle that included frequent visits with prostitutes. The therapy had been short-lived, and I considered it less than successful. Despite the fact that his hobby was costing him up to a thousand dollars a month that he said he couldn’t afford, I had always considered his desire for change to be tepid at best. I told him once, just before he abruptly stopped therapy, that his anxiety appeared to be almost entirely about being discovered or caught.

“Of course,” was how he replied.

I wasn’t confident I had been helpful to him, but during the brief treatment, I had managed to learn a lot from him about a microworld about which I had previously known almost nothing.

The women he visited, and paid for sex, were never “hookers” to him, or “whores.” My patient didn’t troll for streetwalkers. He had always referred to the women he made “dates” with as “escorts,” “providers,” or “ASPs.” Adult service providers. He had always spoken of the women with respect. Occasionally, I thought, with reverence.

Was,
I wondered,
Amanda one of those women? An ASP?

I wasn’t sure. My ex-patient had paid various providers for short increments of their time. An hour or two. An evening. When he traveled, he would occasionally splurge for an overnight date. Although a couple of women became what he called ATFs—his all-time favorites—he mostly preferred variety.

Amanda was not describing much variety. I was suspecting that Amanda’s commitment of time to her employer was much longer in duration than an evening or a night. Did that change things? Did the extended time commitment Amanda made cause her to be something other than a “provider”? I did not know.

I cut back toward my office when I got to Sixth.

My next session with Amanda would likely provide new pieces for the puzzle and new data to remedy my ignorance.

I literally stopped in my tracks when I recognized that Amanda’s revelation in the last moment of our time together that she was a paid companion had almost completely overshadowed what had been one of the most poignant sessions I had experienced in my office, ever.

Talk about process. Lord.

As I walked up the driveway toward the back door to my office, Sam texted me.

Some asshole busted into my car. Where the f were the f-ing cops??? Do you know a good glass place?

Before I felt any compassion for Sam’s situation, I felt some selfish relief that he’d discovered the burglary after our earlier conversation, and not before.

20

I
continued to leave Sam messages trying to find a time to talk about Coma Doe. No luck.

• • •

The next afternoon, Diane invited me to join her to look at a downtown flat after I was done with work. She actually used the word “flat” in her invitation, which made me wary—it was not exactly a common term in the local real estate vernacular.

The invitation came in the form of a handwritten note she attached by tape to the door to our shared bathroom. She was confident I would see it there; after practicing together as long as we had, Diane and I knew each other’s intimate patterns as well as would a longtime married couple.

One night the previous spring when the four of us—Lauren and I, Raoul and Diane—had been out to dinner, Raoul had waited until the ladies excused themselves to the restroom before he told me that Diane often referred to me as her “work spouse.”

I replied that I wasn’t sure whether to feel honored or offended.

At first, he said he hadn’t known whether to be threatened by my status. But he ultimately decided that it was cool.

That Raoul might feel even a twinge of threat from me was the stuff of revelation, though I was unconvinced about his sincerity. “Work spouse? Really?” I’d said.

He allowed that sometimes it was “work husband” and occasionally even “city spouse.” He said that one—“
ciutat cònjuge
”
—
was his favorite, and probably the most accurate. The translation, I assumed, was into Raoul’s native Catalonian tongue.

Unsure of the accuracy of the translation, I asked, “That’s not some kind of Mediterranean homie insult?”

In response, Raoul smiled a smile I envied. The envy was pure. I envied Raoul’s smile the same way that I envied Derrick Rose’s dribble drive or Brian Greene’s grasp of cosmology.

“Hardly. I am grateful to you. You are a great friend to my wife. Through some very difficult times. Her wounds are not always easy.”

“I adore her, Raoul. She is my dear friend.”

• • •

Diane’s real estate invitation included a short, desperate postscript. It read, “Please don’t say no please please please.” I suspected that Diane’s flat-shopping summons was part of my city spouse responsibilities. I understood that I would decline at my peril.

I texted Lauren that I would be home a little late. As explanation, I used the solitary word Diane. She texted me back that my penance would be picking up dinner.

Diane was waiting in her office at the end of the day. She knew I’d say yes.

“We walking or driving?” I asked.

“Four blocks,” she replied.

Diane was either implying that four blocks was a dreadful hike or that four blocks was a mere jaunt. I didn’t care whether we walked or drove, so I made a guess about her preference. “Let’s just walk,” I said.

“I think I’d rather drive,” she said. “I’m in heels, and the place has terrific parking. How great is that?”

Years of friendship had left us with few secrets. Although Diane would often appear to be interested in appearing accommodating with me, she had a controlling side I knew well. I’d been aware of her self-centered streak from the beginning of our friendship, but as we aged together as partners and friends her controlling, self-focused alter was becoming a more dominating presence.

For my part, I was yielding to her wishes more than I did when we were younger. In that sense, we were coconspirators. I liked to rationalize that I wasn’t enabling her, but rather that I was exhibiting compassion. For Las Vegas, initially. But more recently, for the pain Diane had suffered watching the family of her longtime best friend disintegrate the previous year.

Diane had not recovered from the traumas of Las Vegas. She had not been able to digest the crimes her friend had committed to protect her family. My longtime friend was becoming a poster child for the consequences of repeated trauma.

• • •

I asked, “Are we meeting Kevin?” Kevin was Diane’s real-estate-agent-slash-friend. Once she demonstrated the first inclination to move to town, Diane had proven to be an ambivalent house shopper; her insistence on seeing everything—not an exaggeration—and her refusal to commit to anything caused her to burn through Realtors at a rapid clip. Diane had earned her reputation.

Kevin was a recent acquisition. He’d already hung around longer than most.

Diane whispered, “Kevin gave me the lockbox code,” before she returned her voice to its normal pitch. “The owners are in Slovakia. No, Slovenia? Far away. Raoul would know which was correct just by looking at the couple from across the room. If he heard them speak, even just a sentence, he would know what village they’re from. Drives me nuts. Anyway, Kevin says the listing agent knows about us stopping by. We can inspect at our leisure.”

“Kevin gave you the code?” I wasn’t accustomed to real estate agents sending buyers on solo property-hunting missions armed with lockbox codes to private residences. “The place has no alarm?”

“Kevin doesn’t think it’s set. It wasn’t when he showed it to me.”

“I don’t think I wanted to know that.”

“Don’t be such a good boy, Alan. It’s a tough market. People have to be flexible if they want to sell. Kevin has a charity thing tonight. He knows how interested I am in this place. And anyway, who, I ask, is more trustworthy than me?”

I was way too experienced with Diane to disagree with her self-assessment. I said, “This is a good idea? Yes?”

She asked, “What is three percent of two point seven million?”

Lauren often reminded me that she found me annoyingly good—the amalgam of compliment and criticism completely intentional on her part—at doing arithmetic in my head. The posed problem—Kevin’s half share of a likely 6 percent real estate sales commission—wasn’t much of a challenge. “Eighty-one thousand dollars,” I said. “Is that exactly how trustworthy you are?”

Diane grabbed her things. Over her shoulder, she said, “At a minimum.”

I said, “I thought you and Raoul were going to rent while the
Daily Camera
project gets sorted out. Buying means a big change in plans.”

“I’m impatient.” Diane had not always been so impatient. She knew that. I knew that. I wrote the change off, too, to Las Vegas and PTSD. She said, “I’ve looked and I’ve looked. There’s nothing to rent downtown that’s right for us. Now I’m thinking we’ll buy, then we’ll sell again once the redevelopment is done and the market has recovered. Maybe even make a little money on the flip. Then”—she widened her eyes—“we can move into my new sky palace at Eleventh and Pearl.”

Considering his wealth, Raoul was a simple man. He showed no inclination toward accumulating stuff, or collecting things, and had an aversion to purchases that might complicate his life. Despite his money—I didn’t know the extent of his fortune, but I assumed that it had grown large enough that at any given time he didn’t know the extent of his fortune, either—Raoul possessed few of the accoutrements of the wealthy. He and Diane owned no second home, not even a condo in ski country. No time-share jet. No yacht on call in St. John or St. Tropez. Diane didn’t flaunt big jewels. Their home in the foothills was of modest proportions, especially considering the extent of their financial resources.

Buying a multimillion-dollar temporary downtown home—excuse me, flat—sounded like the exact kind of thing Raoul would consider an unnecessary complication.

I said, “Raoul’s on board with this? It doesn’t sound like his kind of move.”

Diane exhaled audibly through her nose. I translated the sound as exasperation. “Raoul’s in Chicago. Again. He told me I could find someplace for us to live in town. If I decide this is the place, I’ll convince him there isn’t an alternative. That’s the way it works for us. As a couple.”

I put my arm around her. “You mean once he understands that he has a wife who has reached the absolute end of her tolerance for living in the mountains?” Diane looked up at me. I could see all the years of our friendship reflected in her eyes. I said, “I was talking about the Fourmile Fire. I know how frightened you were.”

She nodded, then she said, “I don’t even like to think about that.” She looked away for a second, then back. “The truth? It’s more like Raoul has a wife who’s in danger of becoming a complete bitch. I swear, if the
Daily Camera
thing falls through, if . . .”

I hugged her with both arms. She curled into my body like my daughter, Gracie, did after she’d endured one of her rare bad days.

“How’re things with you?” Diane asked.

I was taken aback. Since Las Vegas, Diane’s self-focus almost never swayed. In her unique variant of PTSD, she had become post-traumatically narcissistic. “The kids are good, Lauren’s health has been stable. No complaints.”
That I can tell you about.

“Work? Your practice? Therapist friends tell me things are slow. You getting new referrals?”

“I’ve picked up a couple of new patients recently. I’m doing all right, given the economy.”

“Interesting patients? Will they stick around?”

I was wary. The last two questions were not things I recalled Diane wondering about before. I shrugged. “Interesting? Sure. Long-term? Who knows? Too soon to tell.”

“I’ll send some more your way.”

More?
I didn’t recall recent referrals from Diane. “I know you will, Diane. You know I’m grateful. You want me to drive?” I asked as I was locking the door to our building.

“Nope,” she said. She climbed into her Saab convertible and lowered the top.