Line of Fire (19 page)

“He found my analogy amusing. By nature—by character—George is not a deliberator. VC is a gut game. At the venture capital stage of a business’s genesis, there are few numbers to analyze. Consulting about risk was
my
job. I had convinced George that his downside was limited.

“We closed the deal before he flew out of town that day. We agreed on a three-month trial—he called it his test-drive. If he liked it? Annual mutual renewals. He shook my hand and said, ‘We have a deal, Enzo.’ Enzo Ferrari. He still calls me that.”

I thought Amanda looked wistful at the memory of how it all happened.

“I didn’t see George again for almost three weeks. I actually met him for the first time—as his companion—at a hotel in Salt Lake City.” She smiled, perhaps at the irony. “My anticipation as that first night approached was electric.”

I was captivated by the story. I was aware that could be a problem.

“George had only a couple of rules—some reasonable limitations on the other . . . man. My buffer. And on any personal relationships I might have that could undermine my value. A few cities he didn’t want me to visit while he was there. Places where he has family. A meeting I couldn’t attend anymore because it was one where men took wives.”

“George is married?” I asked. I immediately questioned why I had asked it.

Amanda’s eyes, I thought, hinted
yes
. She said, “So that was how my life changed.” She shrugged. I wasn’t sure how to read it—I couldn’t tell whether the shrug was an it-was-no-big-deal kind of shrug. Or whether it was a you-never-know, life-is-a-funny-thing kind of shrug.

I said, “Later? You found your buffer?”

She looked away from me for a quick second. “Just in time, really. Within days of beginning to see George, I knew I had been right about my vulnerability. Each time I was looking forward to the next time. I came this close”—she brought her finger and thumb a millimeter apart—“to being smitten.

“It wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be to find another man.”

I couldn’t wait to hear the rest of the story.
God.
Amanda had me, I feared, precisely where she wanted me. It was not anywhere close to where she needed me.

I asked, “The man with the handgun and the orchids? George, or the Buffer?”

She shifted her weight. She didn’t answer.

29

I
spent much of my professional time listening to people tell stories. Most of the storytellers believed they were relating nonfiction. A few probably were. But the majority told me stories that they had unconsciously edited through the subjective filters of personal experience, memory, and psychology.

While few of the stories were tedious, most were more mundane than the storyteller thought. Even among those that weren’t banal the majority were as familiar to me as the furniture layout I spied in front of me each day from my consultation chair. Only a tiny fraction proved novel. A rare few were captivating enough to make me want to sit forward on my chair and not miss a word.

Amanda was reintroducing me to captivation. Each time she began a story I felt the allure. That day’s story was replete with magnetic themes—of vulnerability, and survival, and human weakness. The story featured potentially destructive forces, passion and danger, and it carried undercurrents of the tantalizing, of generous hearts and of endless money, all disguised as abundant power. And sex.

A more objective part of me—the part of me that was being paid to be objective—knew that the story Amanda was telling about herself and George and the Buffer was not the only completely captivating story I’d heard from her lips. I had not forgotten what a rapt audience I had been for the tale of the Orchid Man with the Handgun, or for the Handjob Faerie of Ronald McDonald House.

Amanda had managed, thrice in three sessions, to do something that most patients didn’t accomplish even a solitary time in a year of Thursdays at one forty-five: Amanda had made me her grateful audience.

My training, my experience, and the compass in my head—the things I relied on to tell me the difference between north and south, right and wrong, therapeutic and not—all chided me about my responsibility to resist her undertow. I had a clinical obligation to escape whatever riptide Amanda was creating and to guide her to shore.

That’s where we would do the work. Onshore.

But, in that moment, in the room, in the therapy, with Amanda, I was in danger of convincing myself that the undertow was integral to the treatment. The undertow, I was arguing, was
process
. And process was, of course, paramount.

The reality? To be an effective therapist with Amanda that day, I did not need to know additional intimate details about Amanda’s life with the men who paid her for accommodation and companionship and affection. And, yes, sex. Not right then, certainly. Maybe not at all.

To be an effective therapist for Amanda, what I needed to know more about was the storyteller. To be an effective therapist for Amanda, I needed to understand the advantage she accumulated by telling me captivating tales.

As a young, inexperienced therapist, I likely would have misperceived the process. I might have convinced myself that by learning about the sex and the money and the power I would somehow—osmosis, maybe—learn what I needed to know.

• • •

She sensed something had changed. Intuiting alterations in the atmosphere in a room where she was alone with a man had to be a well-honed skill for someone living Amanda’s life. She glanced at me quickly before diverting her eyes. Amanda’s glance was her way of taking my temperature. She was determined to understand the reason for the sudden thermal change.

I did not know what advantage Amanda was seeking with me that day, nor did I know why she needed it. Process in psychotherapy, if it had value, mimicked an important process that occurred in a patient’s life. I leaned forward, dropping my elbows to my knees. I kept my gaze on Amanda until she felt it. She knew something was up.

“What?” she said.

Psychotherapy rarely yields benefits when a patient is content. For the first time in almost three complete sessions Amanda was experiencing psychological discomfort. She reacted by trying to steady herself. “Watch what you wish for, right?” was what she said, while she rolled her eyes in a self-mocking way. “Juggling two men turned out to be much more difficult for me than—”

I didn’t want her escape to be so facile. By raising both my hands and turning my palms toward her—I did it slowly—I threw up an impediment. Her next word caught in her throat. I shook my head. I said, “You tell great stories, Amanda.”

She tilted her head a few degrees to the dimple side. Her expression hinted at offense. “They are not . . . stories,” she said. “What I am telling you is all true.”

“You tell great true stories, Amanda.”

The offense dissipated. It was replaced by something else, something I hadn’t seen before. She pursed her lips to speak but reconsidered. I thought I was witnessing wariness. Wariness might have been progress.

I said, “I could listen to your stories all day long.” I allowed a moment for that thought to impact her. “For us? Here? That may be a problem. I’m thinking that, in your life, it may also be a problem.” Her expression told me nothing. “I could let you tell me more stories. About wealthy and powerful men, and young beautiful women, and fancy casinos and five-star hotels.”

I allowed her to digest what I was saying. I half expected that she would have a response. Something surprising for me to consider. And because I would have to consider it, it would serve as another distraction. I hoped I would recognize the reappearance of the resistance in a new form.

Resistance is what psychotherapists call the phenomenon of warding off conscious awareness of potent issues in therapy. Amanda seemed to be busy doing just that.

When she didn’t respond, I said, “And then, after you tell me more stories? After I let you captivate me more? Our time will be up, and you will go home. You will come back next time armed with another story. I’m guessing the next story, like the one about the orchid man and his gun, and about your brother and his pain, and about George and being smitten, would have high stakes about your life and about someone else’s life. The story would be about interesting people doing interesting things.” I paused. “But I am concerned that is not a productive way for us to work.”

She smiled just enough to reveal the solo dimple. “They are not stories. They are
true,
” she said. She was concentrating so much meaning into that solitary word—
true
—it was as though she were a cook desperate for me to recognize that the sauce she was plating had been reduced to its very essence. She wanted me to judge her experience, her reduction, to be as savory as she did.

Why? I didn’t know. We weren’t there yet. “I don’t doubt,” I said, “that your stories are true.”

“These aren’t just stories. This is my . . .” The sentence rolled to a gentle stop.

I sat straight. I kept my eyes on Amanda’s. My eyes were kind because I was feeling kind. She grew uncomfortable again, either because of my attention or because of my kindness. But most likely because of whatever pressure she felt on her resistance.

Amanda wasn’t accustomed to that pressure. Not with me.

The moment that the power in the room shifts in psychotherapy is, like the moment that a rising tide begins to ebb, often subtle. It can take time for therapist and patient to recognize the alteration. But that day we both felt the fresh tilt to the room.

In psychotherapy the same steps often must be repeated time and time again before the patient can comfortably recognize the progression. Repetition wasn’t necessary that day. Amanda said, “Usually, I can distract a man. Any time I choose.”

I bet you can,
I thought. “I’ve been conspiring with you. Letting you distract me,” I said.
That has been our process.

“Until today,” she said.

“Until just now,” I said. I was wary of her insight. A doubting part of me felt as though she were tossing me a bone. I allowed the silence to settle before I stirred things up again by asking Amanda a question I should probably have pressed before.

I said, “Why are you here, Amanda? In therapy?”

Her hands were on her lap. She joined the tip of each index finger to the tip of the same hand’s thumb, completing two tiny circle shapes. The orbs intertwined. The gesture puzzled me. I fought the temptation to divert some energy making sense of it. I filed it.

I said, “With me? In therapy. Why?”

Well more than a minute ticked away. The silence was hers to break. Or not. If nothing else happened to advance our work that morning, we’d already had a valuable session. If she chose continued silence, I was content to let the time expire.

I began to think that was what would happen.

As the session neared its end, she stood. With a tone as poignant and vulnerable as that of a new mom offering to allow a stranger to hold her baby, she said, “What if he hadn’t died?”

• • •

Amanda’s last words of the hour reverberated in my head for the rest of the day. But I didn’t begin to comprehend what she’d meant until I was on my way home.

I was less than a mile from my office on Ninth, waiting to turn onto Baseline at the foot of Chautauqua. To my right, the western sky was in pre-sunset splendor, with hazy pastel ribbons floating above the Flatirons. The driver of the car behind me honked twice, impatient for me to force my way into traffic.

The impudent honk echoing, I understood what Amanda had meant: she had been talking about her brother.

Her brother is the “he.”
What if he had started responding to the chemo? What if he had been the beneficiary of some medical miracle? What if his lymphomas had vanished?
What if he hadn’t died?

The horn honked again. In the rearview mirror, I could see that an elderly woman had raised an arthritic fist at me for missing an opportunity to pull onto Baseline. I waved a casual apology. Seconds later I slipped into a too-narrow break in traffic.

Straight ahead, to the east, the sky over the Great Plains was growing dark. I checked my mirror. The gray-haired lady in the oxidized Honda Accord had forced herself into the tiny slot in traffic right behind me. She was tailing me as though we were at Daytona and speed meant all.

What if her brother hadn’t died?
What if Amanda had ended up being a sexual partner for her slightly older but physically recovered teenage brother? What if he had wanted—even insisted—that their sexual relationship continue? Or what if he had insisted that their relationship mature—if that was a word that could be used—sexually?

What if he had threatened her? What if the power—in her naïve fourteen-year-old eyes, the power had belonged to Amanda—had shifted to him?

My question to Amanda at the end of the session had been:
Why are you in therapy?

Her answer had been:
What if he hadn’t died?

My new question to her—the next time we met—would be: What was it about her brother not dying that motivated her to seek my care?

And why did you call me the day you did?

And why . . . me?

The woman honked at me again. I had no idea what I was doing to displease her, other than honoring the speed limit.

That’s it. Of course,
I thought.
It’s not about me. It’s transference.

“If not me, then who?” I said aloud.

The Honda was so close to my bumper, I could not see its license plate in my mirrors. I was beginning to get annoyed.

30

L
auren and I didn’t often shop together for groceries. Marketing was a chore we split, not one we shared. When she asked me if I’d go with her to Whole Foods the next day, on Friday afternoon, I agreed. The trip, she promised, was for things we couldn’t wait to get on Saturday at Boulder’s glorious farmers’ market.

Even during times of the day when the rest of Boulder wasn’t particularly frenetic, the long block of Pearl in front of Whole Foods was sclerotic with traffic. When Whole Foods was busy—and on any random Friday afternoon it was—the store became a kind of crowded that caused me to question whether I really needed to eat that day.

It took ten minutes to find a place to park. I did a valiant job, in my appraisal, of hiding my aggravation at Lauren’s timing for the outing. Her equanimity about it all perplexed me. She was either feigning patience for some reason I couldn’t discern, or she’d been rendered copacetic by her delight at having my company. I was hoping that the latter was true. Regardless, I was determined to maintain a veneer of calm to disguise my aggravation.

She grabbed a minicart from near our car. The handle provided her with something to lean on, literally, during what I was beginning to think would be an extended sojourn in Whole Foods land. “You have the list?” she asked.

I held it up, proudly. Even when I made grocery lists, which wasn’t usually, I had a tendency to leave the list behind where I penned it. The utility of a grocery list greatly diminishes when it is left on the kitchen counter. That I had not only contributed to assembling the list but had also brought it along while shopping was a rare constellation of events. Not lunar-eclipse rare, but still. I was feeling good about myself.

Inside the store we joined a herd heading toward produce, where we became trapped behind a trio of large carts pushed by people visibly indecisive about lettuce. Each in turn fingered a big plastic clamshell of whole butter lettuce. None selected the butter lettuce. I took a deep breath. I counted to ten, then twenty, while I waited for the ambivalence to sort itself out. So that I didn’t exacerbate the congestion in the leafy greens area, I squeezed in beside my wife. She hooked her right pinkie over my left.

“You’re being good,” she said. “Keep it up, and I’ll get you a treat when we check out.”

I liked that she had recognized that I was being good. I pulled my trapped pinkie free and used that hand to lightly cup the right cheek of her fine butt. I whispered that I could wait for my treat until we were home.

She laughed and whispered that she was thinking more along the lines of a granola bar.

Whatever she might have intended to act as segue to what came next, I missed. I was knocked more than a little off balance when she said, “That case in Frederick? Weld County kicked a piece our way. They think that the woman who killed herself had been romantically involved with a cop, maybe even a Boulder cop, before she moved to Frederick.”

I tried to keep my cool. I said, “How do they know that?”

“An acquaintance, a neighbor, said she’d been seeing a cop. That’s it.”

“Yeah?” I said. I didn’t think I could manage much more of a sentence than that. Since Lauren was busy looking for a route out of leafy greens, she didn’t seem to recognize my apoplexy. I tried a diversion. I said, “The dead woman may have been acquainted with Michael McClelland while they were at the state hospital. Right?”

“Yes.
May
have been acquainted. There’s never been any proof. Could be nothing more than temporal coincidence—they were there at the same time. We have no evidence they even met.”

A tiny gap opened as a man with shoulder-length white hair, a tattered AC/DC concert T-shirt, below-the-knee cutoff jeans, and a beat-up pair of forest-green cowboy boots chose baby spinach over arugula and aimed his cart in the general direction of the berries. Lauren jumped into the opening.

“Has anyone spoken to him?” I asked as we were forced to a stop just shy of our goal of lemons. “McClelland? Whether he knew her?”

“We won’t tip our hand with him. He’s too slippery to use for a fishing expedition. It would blow up on us, and he’d end up with an additional advantage.”

“Is it possible that McClelland has a hand in this? The suicide? Everything?”

I knew Michael hadn’t been a player in that part of the extended drama, but I threw out the possibility to Lauren hoping that even the potential of McClelland’s participation might add a complication that could be a valuable distraction to the Boulder investigators. One that would lead away from Sam Purdy.

“Given our personal history with McClelland, Alan, I never rule him out. No indication of his involvement surfaced during his Pitkin trial. And there have been no new red flags from prison since his conviction. He could have found a way around the correspondence monitoring—hell, he probably has—but . . .”

She let the thought drop. I said, “How is the relationship the woman might have had with the Boulder cop significant? The relevance escapes me.”

“We don’t know. How do I read it? The Weld County sheriff seems to suspect that the suicide was really a homicide. Throw a cop into that mix? Especially one from another jurisdiction? And if they can develop something that makes that Boulder cop a plausible suspect, then this suicide-turned-homicide becomes a very big deal for them.”

“Yeah,” I said. My stomach was beginning to hurt.

Lauren said, “I want some of those fried potatoes. The ones that you bake first? Will you make some?”

“The ones that look like latkes?”

“Those.”

I kissed her lightly on the lips. “Your wish is . . .” I stepped away from the safety of the cart determined to grab potatoes and make a quick return.

Lauren’s revelation meant that two different posses were riding after Sam.

Comadoe was trying to find someone in Frederick who could place Sam in town the night of Currie’s death so he could serve Sam up as a sacrificial lamb to keep himself out of prison. And now the Boulder DA’s investigators were trying to find out which Boulder cop had been romantically involved with Currie before she moved from Boulder to Frederick. If either posse proved successful the entire ruse about how Currie died—the carefully constructed suicide house of cards that had insulated Sam and me since he had assisted Currie in her death—was in serious jeopardy of crumbling. If Sam were caught in the law enforcement net, or in Comadoe’s amateur snare, I would be trapped, too. The consequences would be life-altering for everyone in Sam’s orbit and everyone in mine.

A kid pushing a cart for his mom crashed into the back of my legs as I bagged some purple potatoes. He hit me hard. His mother apologized to me.

The kid told her that it was my fault for not moving.

I had some thoughts that I managed to keep to myself.

Lauren said, “We still need lemons. I’m heading over to citrus. Stay close.”

• • •

I thought I would brine and sear some scallops to go with the fried potatoes, which meant dealing with the throngs lined up at the fish counter. Lines and Lauren’s MS didn’t get along, so I joined the fish queue while Lauren parked our cart out of traffic in a sedate cul-de-sac near an apparently undesirable end of the dairy cooler.

I phoned her after about five minutes. We could see each other. I still had the list in my hand. She waved at me when she spotted my name in caller ID. I asked, “Are couscous and quinoa in the same location in the store?” I knew one, quinoa, was a grain and one, couscous, was a pasta, but I also knew that they were both little tiny hard food balls that became edible only after spending time in hot water. My question was really whether their tiny hard roundness was a sufficiently compelling shared trait to place them in close proximity in a grocery store. I didn’t get to hear Lauren’s answer; it was my turn with the fishmonger. I said, “Got to go,” and pocketed my phone.

I ended up with some fine-looking scallops. I carried the package over to the eddy where Lauren waited and tossed it into the cart. I said, “Even with the addition of a Boulder cop to the puzzle, it doesn’t really explain your department’s interest in an old suicide in Frederick. I’m thinking that you’re not convinced that Michael McClelland is really on the sidelines.”

She looked over at me, a rueful smile on her face. “When has that particular assumption ever served me well?” she asked. “Us well?”

I touched her arm. “Hunch? Or fear? Or do you have some evidence he’s pulling strings from prison?”

She said, “Fear, so far.” She grazed my fingers with hers. She gestured down the long aisle that ran the length of the back of the store. “Are you ready to deal with the cheese people? And with the olive guy?”

“I thought you liked the olive guy.”

She began to push the cart toward the far side of the store. “You know, there are days that I just want to buy olives. I don’t want to discuss them. I don’t want to know their lineage or what kind of weather they endured. He likes to discuss his olives. For me, this is one of those I-just-want-to-buy-them days.”

I offered to deal with the olive guy after I tracked down the quinoa. She could do the cheese. She thought about it for a few seconds before she told me she was a big girl and she would deal with the olive guy.

Lauren ran into a couple of her friends before we made it ten more feet. Once I recognized that the three of them wanted to talk, and not just say hello, I excused myself. They were still together after I located the quinoa. I retreated to buy a smoothie at the front of the store. I lucked into an empty table by the window. I called Sam.

“Yeah?” he said. “I’m working. Not everybody takes Friday off.”

I said, “The sheriff knows that a cop, maybe a Boulder cop, was in a relationship with . . . that woman before she left town and moved to Weld County. How careful do you think they were? The possible cop and the woman who moved away?”

He laughed at me. In a mock-conspiratorial whisper, he said, “You really think our phones are bugged? If our phones are tapped we’re already screwed.”

I moved on. “Okay, how careful were you with Currie?”

“You asking about condoms?”

“I’m trying to gauge how down-low you guys were.”

“We were discreet, but not as down-low as I would have been had I known things were going to end up with her . . . killing herself. Early in our relationship I didn’t foresee the killing-herself scenario. If I had, I think I might have passed on the romance.”

“Best guess? Will the investigators be able to identify you?”

“It’s possible. We met at her place sometimes. I didn’t wear disguises. She had neighbors. We met at my place sometimes. I have neighbors who might remember her face or her car. Do you know who’s going to be doing the looking? Did Lauren say?”

“Boulder DA is investigating at the request of the Weld County DA. I would guess it’d be one of the in-house investigators. Abrams? Or maybe Otero. If it’s important to you, I can press her on it.”

“Let it go. I don’t want to draw any attention. What’s that noise? Where are you?”

“Whole Foods, God help me. On Pearl. McClelland’s the other wild card, Sam. Lauren says that it appears he’s on the sidelines so far. He must know about you and Currie. If he decides he can bring any of us down by disclosing what he knows, then—”

“Yeah. We have to assume he knows, but there’s nothing we can do about it. He’ll play the card when it suits him.”

“Is there a way to reach out, to express our . . . concerns?”

“Concerns about what?” Lauren said. She slid onto the chair across from me.

“Sam says hi,” I said. I did not want to answer Lauren’s question.

She grabbed my smoothie and took a long drink from the straw. In a stage whisper, she said, “You think we can finish up? I’m pretty sure I’m getting tired. But I got the cheese
and
the olives.”

“Bye, Sam.” I killed the call.

“There was a little too much rain in Greece,” Lauren added. “For the olives.”

I told Lauren to sit and finish the smoothie. I would check us out.

She told me not to bother to pick out a granola bar.