Line of Fire (28 page)

46

I
was too clumsy from my wound to sneak up on anyone, so I didn’t try. The only precaution I took as I followed whomever I was following was tapping the digits
9
and
1
on my phone. I kept the phone in my hand, with my index finger hovering above the
1
and my thumb hovering above
SEND
. If I managed some mildly complicated digital dexterity, I was an instant away from initiating a call to 911.

For some crazy reason, I was assuming that the arrival of the police would work in my favor. As I limped down the stairs to the second level, I didn’t try to minimize the noise I was making. After every few steps, I called out, “Diane, Diane? It’s Alan.”

I really didn’t think Diane would shoot me again. I wasn’t certain, but playing the odds, it seemed unlikely. She and I had a history of thousands of days together when she hadn’t shot me even once.

I was nearing the bottom of the staircase that led to the bedroom level when I heard a male voice say, “Down here.”

Really?
I thought.
Screw the stairs.
I took the elevator to the main floor of the flat.

Raoul was sitting on the tangerine sofa. He stood. He moved toward me, his arms extended for an embrace. We hugged as though his wife hadn’t shot my wife, as though I didn’t have through-and-through GS wounds in my calf.

Our embrace should have been mindful of all that. It wasn’t. While Raoul had his arms around me, tapping my back twice with his open palms, he said, “That was me trying to sneak away from you, up on the roof. Thought it would be better to stay invisible. If you found no one here, maybe you would leave. Turns out I’m not so good at . . . being clandestine. I should have known that about myself by now, yes? I went up there to see if the fire is moving north toward Lee Hill. If it gets to Pine Brook or Wonderland, I will have to . . .”

When he chose, Raoul could speak with no hint of his Catalonian roots. He was so choosing. I was disappointed by what he was saying. Chatting about the fire was easy. I was more interested to learn why he was in the downtown flat in the middle of the night.

But mostly I’d been hoping to hear a sincere version of “I’m so sorry.” Maybe some insight into Diane’s acute emotional decline. Her state of mind. Something.

I limped back two steps. His eyes went wide at my bloodstained scrubs. It was as though he hadn’t expected that the consequences of the day would include ill-fitting borrowed clothes and dried bodily fluids.

“She snapped, yes?” he said.

He didn’t sound surprised. I didn’t have time to have that conversation with Raoul. I said, “Is Diane here? I came to speak with her.”

“Did she call you?”

“No. I guessed she’d be here. Didn’t know where else she would go. A thousand people must be looking for her.”

“She called me from here. That’s why I came. This”—Raoul spread his arms wide—“is where she wants us to move, apparently.” He made a lyrical gesture with his hands that someone in Catalonia could probably interpret. My guess was that it meant that Raoul didn’t love the flat. “She left the door open. Her car is downstairs. But she is not here. There was a note on the door.” He retrieved it from his pocket as he grinned one of his charming grins. “It says she will be back soon. See.” He held up the paper for me to read. “Diane leaves me lots of notes. I keep telling her she should learn to text.”

I said, “She knows how to text, Raoul. She’s not the digital illiterate she wants you and me to believe she is.”

He shook his head and said, with obvious affection, “No, no. Not my Diane.”

I considered telling him about finding her in the utility room of their home with a laptop connected via USB cable to the home network’s hard drive backup. I didn’t have time or energy for the whole story, so I cut to the headline. I said, “A conjecture on my part? I think she’s monitoring your email, Raoul. Maybe through the backup hard drive you have set up on your home network. In that utility room, all the way in back behind the TV room? Or maybe she figured out your Gmail password. I’m not sure which.”

“Diane? Non.” He wasn’t so much being incredulous as he was being dismissive. He was doing it in a way I thought Diane would find condescending. He didn’t believe that his wife had any digital deception in her. The reality was that he and I had both been guilty of underestimating Diane. He said, “She can’t even manage her own passwords. Try to teach her about case sensitivity. Try.” Another Catalonian hand gesture punctuated his assertion. Again, I couldn’t interpret it.

The truth was that I had attempted to instruct Diane about password case sensitivity. I thought I had failed. But by that evening I believed that Diane had learned every lesson I taught. “Maybe I’m wrong about the details, about how,” I said. “Maybe she installed a keystroke logger on the desktop in your office at home. Maybe she got your admin password that way. Don’t know. It doesn’t matter how she did it. The bottom line? She’s reading your email, Raoul. That is what is important.”

Raoul typically carried his age with less transparency than anyone I know. At the moment he was contemplating Diane’s deception he looked old.

“Some irony?” I said. “I only know all this because she needed my help rebooting your modem a night you were in Cleveland. She couldn’t figure out that part. That’s the night I saw the setup. She had a laptop open that was connected with a USB cable to your backup hard drive.”

“It is not possible. My Diane is hopeless with, with . . . ,” he said. “With electronics. She couldn’t find a USB cable in a box of linguine. She can’t—”

“Diane’s smart, Raoul. She may not
like
electronics. But if she decided to figure something out, she could figure something out. Like I said, I could be wrong. I’ve been wrong about a lot lately. But I think she wanted to know what you were emailing, and to whom. You might want to consider that . . . tonight. If you speak with her.”

“Why would—” Raoul stopped himself. “My Gmail? It’s all business,” he said. “Ninety-nine percent business.”

I allowed him a moment to do the arithmetic. Raoul could design complex circuits or do elegant algorithms in his sleep. But he was having some trouble with simple percentiles.

I offered a clue. “What about the other one percent, Raoul?”

He stuffed his hands in the pockets of his trousers. He allowed his always-proud shoulders to slump forward. He stepped sideways, turning his body from mine. He was looking toward the glow from the flames of the Dome Fire, at the haze from the smoke pouring from the property of the already unlucky.

I had a lot of empathy for the already unlucky.

Despite the direction of his gaze, Raoul was thinking, I assumed, not about the unlucky but about that 1 percent. The mental review—the process of determining what content those emails encompassed—took him most of a minute.

Did one of those emails come from Amanda? Did it mention pregnancy?

Finally, he turned his back on me. With an emphasis on her name I heard as almost saccharine, he said, “Tell me, Alain. How is Lauren?”

47

I
t was past time for me to return to my wife’s bedside. And it was too late in the conversation for Raoul to ask me about her condition.

I said, “Diane is fragile, Raoul. She has been fragile for a long time.”

He faced me. “Now? Beyond fragile. This day? I didn’t see it coming. Yet I did. You know? You’ve been a good friend to her,” he said.

I wasn’t looking for Raoul to bless my friendship with his wife.

I had an abrupt need to sit. I chose one of two matched chairs opposite the tangerine sofa. I’d avoided them on my prior visit because they looked like they were constructed of ice cubes.

“Are you injured?” he said. It was as though he’d just noticed my limp.

“Bicycle accident,” I said, digesting that he didn’t realize I’d been shot. “A little road rash.”

“What do I do now?” he asked me. “When I see her? How do I help?”

I wasn’t interested in guessing what cards Raoul had in his hand. I planned to comment only on the ones he had set face-up on the table. “You need to consider calling Cozy Maitlin. Right now. For Diane. I have his mobile number. He lives near Mapleton Hill, could be here in minutes. He’ll know what to do. I need to get back to the hospital.”

“Sí
,
” Raoul said, acknowledging that my advice was prudent while also letting me know that it wasn’t the counsel he had been seeking.

I began to stand. “I have to get back to Lauren,” I said.

“There is a woman,” he said, flipping a new card for me to see.

I checked the time on my phone. I told myself five more minutes. The ice-cube chair was surprisingly comfortable. I shifted my weight to sink into its cushions. I raised my bad leg onto a matching ice-cube ottoman.

“There have been women. Diane knows that. It’s part of us. ‘A valve,’ she called it. ‘Pressure release.’”

Raoul’s facility with the English language was suffering a crash. I was thinking,
Bullshit
. I didn’t buy his rationalization, but I didn’t tell him that. I realized that I had never really witnessed Raoul’s ego defenses under major stress. This performance was a first. I was sure his defenses had been stressed when he’d been in Vegas searching for Diane when she was missing. But I hadn’t been there to observe him. In our time together, I had seen Raoul mostly as golden boy.

As what Sam had called him—a “ten-ten.”

My initial assessment was that Raoul’s defenses were a tad creaky. He was not seeing this crisis for what it was.

“Our marriage has been difficult,” he said.

Really?
I compared our experience with difficult marriages. About the best way for a husband to handle hard times. Then I tried to imagine Lauren suggesting that I hire an attractive companion to assist me in gliding over the rough patches in our relationship.

Yeah,
I thought,
that’s what Lauren would do. She would even help me pick.

“Diane knows I love her. She is not threatened. By the . . . women.”

Was Raoul talking one-night stands? Mistresses? Or ASPs? Adult service providers. Escorts.

I said, “Diane has been hurt, Raoul. All the trauma has taken a toll. You should have realized that. Now she is broken.” I spoke the words as an admonition. I felt the room needed just a pinch of acidy superego to balance out the cloying narcissism. A taste, at least.

He wasn’t ready to hear it. He said, “She knew. The women were not important to her.”

Big of you,
I thought.
A perfect bargain for two. Or three.

“My heart”—he thumped his fist against his chest—“belongs to my wife.”

I half expected Raoul to launch into an explanation of the cultural differences between us, how he didn’t think I could understand the life that he and Diane were living.

If Raoul’s argument went in the general direction of European sensibilities, I thought I might lose my cool.

“Las Vegas? The kidnapping? The rape? She was recovering. Yes?” He nodded. “And then Mimi’s arrest? What she did?” Raoul sighed. “Lauren knows how bad it was last Christmas. It has all been too much for Diane. Emotionally and physically. For us, as a couple, it’s been a challenging few years. Tough.”

The rape? What rape?
After everyone returned from Vegas, I had asked Diane if she had been raped. Diane had assured me that she had not been violated during her time as a hostage. Had she lied to me? Or had she lied to Raoul? Was the rape, real or not, a marital rationalization that Diane and Raoul kept in safekeeping to explain what was going wrong in their marriage? And what did Lauren know? I had no idea where to look to find the truth.

“The trauma was Diane’s, Raoul. You were supposed to help her. Not seek solace elsewhere.”

Raoul moved to the west-facing windows, his back to me. He asked me, “What’s his mobile number? The lawyer’s? I have only his office number.” His familiar robust tone was hollow.

I heard footsteps on the stairs. Raoul heard them, too.

To Raoul, I said, “I think it may be too late for that now.”

Diane,
I hoped, but my gut said
Sengupta
.
The guy’s timing is not good.

I knew when I left the hospital that there was a risk I would be followed, but I had hoped to take my leave from the flat before any cops showed up. I was acutely aware that I had also missed my window to call my cabbist and get back to Lauren’s side.

I lifted my phone and quickly found Sam’s name in the favorites. I hesitated before I hit the
CALL
button. Sam couldn’t do anything to help Diane. Not with Sengupta and his partner already on the stairs and backup officers covering the exits.

Anyway, I knew I should let Sam sleep. He still had to deal with Frederick.

And with Comadoe.

48

I
t was neither Diane nor Sengupta on the stairs.

It was Amanda. I had a pretty good idea how surprised I was to see her. As in, completely. A glance at Raoul’s face revealed that he was just as surprised as I was.

Amanda? She was indubitably the most surprised of the three of us.

Her arrival caused a bolus of adrenaline to course through me. The fatigue that had been slowly consuming my energy began a galloping retreat. I knew my adrenaline stores were just about shot; the rush would not endure for long.

Amanda looked at me. Then at Raoul. Then at me, again. Her eyes were warmest when she gazed at Raoul.

Oh boy.

• • •

I hadn’t summoned Amanda. Raoul hadn’t summoned Amanda. I was concerned that my god-awful day had taken its toll and I was missing something obvious that might explain her arrival. Part of me was relieved, simply, that she was safe.

The composure I was accustomed to seeing in Amanda’s face was absent. She seemed off balance as she tried to ascertain where she fit into a complex puzzle that included pieces as diverse as the garish multimillion-dollar flat off Pearl Street; Raoul, who I guessed was her employer; and me, her psychotherapist.

In bloody scrubs. Had to be awkward for her.

Raoul did not step toward Amanda. He said, “How . . . did—” Then he said, “Who told you that I was—”

Either it was fine acting, or Raoul’s self-focus was winning the moment—he was continuing to fail to adjust to the possibility that this impromptu assembly was not about him.

If Raoul had a relationship with Amanda, the allure, beyond the obvious, was beginning to make a little more sense. He was paying Amanda to be all about
him
. It wasn’t the sex he was buying—the Raouls and Georges of the world could find that anywhere.

Diane’s narcissism—the way it had blossomed post–Las Vegas—had crowded him out of their marriage in a way he couldn’t abide.

“What?” Amanda said. “
You
did. I got a—”

Amanda was interrupted by a voice from the direction of the kitchen, a voice I knew as well as I knew my wife’s.

“That wasn’t him. That was me,” Diane said. She directed her next words to Raoul. “I used your iPad to text her an invitation to join you here. I made the text sound all urgent. But . . . this is unexpected. I didn’t expect her to actually show up. Right? I mean . . . I thought . . . Well, I had to be sure, didn’t I?” Diane smiled in a perplexed way that, for me, underscored the tragedy. “God! I wish I looked like that without my makeup. Your complexion, honey! You and Mary-Louise, I swear. I got the brains, but that girl got the skin. How can skin not have pores? Amazing.”

During sane moments, Diane liked to pretend that she was Mary-Louise Parker’s older fraternal twin. On good, and even mediocre, mental health days, Diane was in on the jokes about the actress, which she told at her own expense. That night I was dubious.

Diane was standing in the doorway that led to the kitchen. Behind her, the door to the walk-in pantry was open. “Forgot,” she said before she raised the pistol I had first seen in her hand that morning. “Forgive me? Turns out this thing helps people focus. Even me.” She lifted it to firing height but didn’t seem to be targeting anyone in particular.

She had changed her clothes since the last time I’d seen her. The morning shooting outfit—the chinos and the cami layered below the open shirt—had been replaced by cocktail attire. Her strappy dress was purple organza. On her feet were a pair of textured, metallic Jimmy Choos with too-tall heels that she’d modeled one distant afternoon in our office hallway after a FedEx delivery.

Her hair needed some attention, and her eye shadow was questionable. But all in all Diane’s appearance was hovering on the outskirts of “fine.” Completely inappropriate, but fine. She leaned against the kitchen doorjamb, examining each of our faces. She said, “Everyone knows everyone.” Her demeanor had become that of a gracious hostess preparing to offer her guests a choice of beverages. “Amanda, dear? You look . . . lovely. I mean, considering.”

Amanda closed her mouth. She shifted her eyes from Raoul to Diane.

Diane addressed her again. “Except us two, right? We haven’t been introduced. I am Raoul’s wife, Diane Estevez.” She curtsied. “He may have mentioned me. I’m the one who . . . Whatever. He thinks I bitch a little. True, that. Maybe you’ve heard?”

Raoul begged, “Diane, please.”

Diane continued as though he hadn’t spoken. “So, do tell,” Diane said to Amanda. “How on earth did you come to know my dear Alan?”

Raoul had a different idea about how the conversation should proceed. “Diane, give me that gun. Right now.”

He said it expecting to be obeyed, which I considered to be illuminative. I had known Diane for a long time; giving her orders had never worked out too well for me.

“Don’t,” Diane hissed at her husband. “This is a Kahr, with a
K
and an
h
. I like my little Kahr.” She moved the gun barrel from the generally threatening position where she’d been holding it to a direct aim at her spouse. She used her trigger finger to caress some engraved lettering near the barrel. “It’s a point-three-eight-zero. Though I don’t know what that means.” I found it eerie that her voice so easily resumed its hostess timbre as she added, “I’d love to discover how Amanda came to know Alan. Has Alan been . . .
straying
?” Diane poked her tongue into the side of her cheek. “Is that how you two, well, came together?” Diane brought the hand that held the pistol quickly toward her open mouth, mocking some horror at the thought of Amanda and me hooking up.

The gesture, and the fact that she had failed to recognize her double entendre, made me much more nervous than did the accusation.

In my pocket I began to finger my phone. Hoping that Sam’s number remained on my screen, I hit the button I thought was
CALL
. I slid the phone from my pocket, trying to keep it hidden at my side. I placed my thumb over the indentation that I thought was the device’s speaker.

Amanda saw an opening that might allow her to diffuse some tension. She said, “When I decided I needed help, I got Dr. Gregory’s name from a . . . colleague. A girlfriend, at Prackfer and Lander. She said he was good.”

“Oh, Alan is good,” Diane said. “Fine choice. I find him a little prudish at times, though. Don’t you think?” Diane nodded, agreeing with herself. “But he’s easy to love, right? The man is a positive transference magnet, you have to give him that. Everybody falls for Dr. Alan. Raoul?
Mel?
Did you know about Amanda and Alan? That she was seeing my best friend right next door to my fucking office?”

Diane’s use of
mel
threw me for a moment until I recalled that it was a Catalonian endearment.

I assumed that Diane’s insertion of Raoul between the proverbial rock and the proverbial hard place was intentional. To reply, Raoul had to choose either to tell Diane—who was pointing a gun at him—the truth, or to fabricate a lie internally consistent with whatever reality Diane might have gleaned from reading his emails.

It was a tough act to perform on the fly, especially with a pistol aimed at one’s sternum.

Raoul said, “Not at first. Diane, could you please lower that gun? Please?”

That time, it was more of a plea than an order. Diane wanted none of it.

“Where did you get the gun?” Raoul asked, determined to assert something.

She grinned. “I do wish you paid more attention, mel. I told you this place comes furnished.
Completely
furnished. There’s a built-in gun safe in the master closet.”

And,
I thought,
the idiot owners use the same combination for the gun safe that they do for everything else in their lives.
Diane had not mentioned the gun safe to me during my initial tour of the flat. Oversight? I didn’t think so.

Raoul took a half step toward his wife.

“Don’t!” she barked. “There is recent evidence to suggest I will, in fact, fire this thing.” She smiled. “Next question. Do you know the reason Amanda was seeking Alan’s professional care?”

Raoul didn’t reply. I assumed he had no facile lie handy. The truth? Problematic.

I thought a different path for the conversation might prove salutary. I said, “Diane? Is this the best time and is this weird condo you want to buy the best place to discuss this? It’s late, we’re all tired, and—”

I paused when Diane closed her eyes. She left them closed for two or three seconds. When she reopened them, she gestured toward the ice-cube ottoman. She said, “Is that your blood? Did I do that? To your leg?”

I glanced down at my bloody scrubs. I nodded.

“Is it serious?”

I shook my head. I almost said,
Flesh wound
. Instead I chose, “Through and through.”

“I am so sorry.
Mmm mm mmm
.” She briefly brought the palms of her hands together in front of her chest. For that fleeting instant she looked like a schoolgirl in prayer. Albeit an armed schoolgirl wearing purple organza and metallic Jimmy Choos. Then she said, “Now, shut up, please. We’re here. We’re doing this . . .
thang
.”

Amanda took another stab at deflecting the crazy lady with the gun. She said, “I have issues with my brother’s death. That’s why I am seeing Dr. Gregory.”

“Issues?” Diane said.

I recognized Diane’s tone. So did Raoul. Amanda was at a disadvantage; she couldn’t know that Diane had turned to high-octane sarcasm.

“Sexual issues mostly. They started . . . with my brother.”

Amanda was doing what she did. She was trying to captivate, and distract, with one of her true and prurient stories.

“Really,” Diane said. “Incest then? Raoul, did you know your friend has incest issues? Now, there’s a loaded gun.”

Raoul’s face made it clear to all that Amanda’s brother-sister sexual issues were news to him. The expression in his dark eyes was a Catalonian variant on
What the fuck?

Diane had again missed her own joke. Her failure to flash even a self-referencing grin indicated that far too little of her awareness was in our moment.

“Well, amen to issues,” Diane said. “Me? God knows I have a shitload. My house
for one. And,
ughh,
I have this weird uncle named Oliver who lived around the corner from my grandparents when I was seven. I could kill that asshole. Like with my bare hands. I could literally sharpen my thumbnail and use it to slit his throat. I would do it right now if he was here. Let’s see, what else? These damn fires. Right? So tired of the damn fires. Evacuate this, evacuate that. And this flat?
Who would expect to find a place like this half a block from Pearl Street in Boulder?” She sighed. “Issues? Oh my—a trip I took to Vegas. My marriage. Didn’t used to be an issue, but . . . And social networking? There’s an issue. So much money to be made on the VC side. And so much damn money to be lost. And so fast.” Diane’s chin began to quiver. She wrinkled her nose and pinched her eyes almost closed. She faced Raoul. “I also have baby issues. A husband who . . .” She shook her head with vehemence. “And a womb that . . . And then . . .”

Diane leveled the gun and waved it from side to side until we all felt equally arbitrarily threatened. “See, I’m getting older. Tick-tock, tick-tock. My window to have babies is small. Now, or never. It’s one, and then the next second it’s the other.” She used the index finger of one hand and the tip of the barrel of the pistol to mark a space about the size of a molar. “Little window. Dollhouse window. Amanda? Girl-talk time.
Tu i jo.
Just like me and Mary-Louise.” Diane lowered her tone to a stage whisper. “Sorry. Tu i jo means ‘you and me’ in pretty boy’s native tongue. So, just between tu i jo
,
in addition to the incest thing—and I don’t mean to minimize that, not at all; it’s a big, big deal—do you have baby issues, too? By chance? Is this your time, too?”

Diane arrested the swinging arc of the gun barrel and let it settle in the vicinity of Amanda’s midsection.

Oh God.

Diane hit her forehead with the heel of the hand without the handgun. She said, “Damn, I forgot about the STIs. Talk about issues. Back up! Everyone with an STI raise your hand.”