Dry Ice (28 page)

    "I'd be honored," she said. "If you would tell me."

    "I don't think I can, Kirsten."

    
Maybe she loved me. Maybe she still does. God.

    "Did you do something . . . terrible?" she asked.

    
Yes.
"I don't think I'm capable of making that judgment."

    "Was it so bad the last time you talked about it?"

    
Bad? Adrienne held me in her arms for about a minute after
I told her. Then she said, "Pretty good secret, meshuggah. Top
ten. Better than Peter's fire story. And definitely better than him
shagging the nanny."

    Telling Adrienne had been fine. In life she was the exception. Not the rule.

    "I think you might have to tell me," Kirsten said.

    Was that the lawyer talking? Or the woman who had loved me?

    "How old were you?" she asked.

    "Young."

    "How young?"

    "How old is Amy?" I asked.

    "Dear Jesus," she said.

ALTHOUGH I'D intended to tell Kirsten about my meeting with Tharon Thibodeaux, she and I never got around to talking about it in detail. That afternoon visit at her West Boulder cottage proved to be about other things.

All she heard about Kaladi were the headlines.

I returned home from my visit to her house just before dusk. Lauren had spent most of the day working while Grace had been off with friends. When I walked in the door Lauren asked me where I'd been. I told her I'd been meeting with my lawyers about Nicole Cruz.

    "Go well?" she asked.

    "Okay," I said.

    That ended the conversation.

As Lauren was getting ready for bed I asked, "You still thinking Bimini is a good idea?"

    "I am," she said. "I think we'll go. I couldn't live with myself if anything happened to Grace."

    Her back was turned when she spoke. I was grateful she couldn't see me attempt to process her words. I continued to feel paralyzed by her plans. That my vote on the matter had been rendered superfluous no longer surprised me.

    Lauren climbed onto the bed and flicked off the lights.

    I said, "Good night."

    In the dark she said, "Are you seeing someone? Another woman?"

    I moved toward the bed. "Lauren, what are—"

    "No," she said. "Just answer me. I don't want a speech. I don't want a thousand questions. Just tell me, dammit. You're so different lately, the last few months. So distant. So . . . just tell me. Are you having an affair?"

    "No," I said.

    "Then good night," she said.

    "Can we talk about this?" I asked.

    "I'm too tired," she said. "Please."

    I stood in the dark for a few seconds before I accepted the reality that she didn't want me there. Emily followed me out to the living room. I finished what was left of the vodka. I knew before I started drinking it that the couple of slogs in the bottle weren't going to be sufficient.

    The dog snoozed. I remembered seeing a big bank of parking lot lights near the Foothills Parkway south of Arapahoe flick off right on schedule at two-fifteen. I had been thinking about Michael McClelland conducting an orchestra that was playing my requiem march. Sometime after that, I found sleep.

    The next morning came quickly. I was up and out of the house to see an early patient before Lauren and Grace were out of bed.

"I'd like to think I can leave you alone for a weekend without the world falling apart," Cozy said to me a few minutes before noon. From Cozy, that constituted a greeting.

    He was back from San Diego.

    I had seen only two patients that morning. One other had canceled. Another was a no-show. The inevitable attrition to my caseload as a result of my public connection to a patient's suicide had begun. I expected that my patient roster would be diminished by half in another week. If the controversy didn't resolve soon, and my name continued to be plastered ignominiously on the inside pages of the local paper, the remaining half would be diminished by half within the next fortnight.

    I'd used the extra time from the last cancellation of the morning to stroll east on Pearl to get something to eat before my meeting with Cozy. I stopped at Allison for a pick-me-up shot of espresso while I weighed my options. Sal's or Snarf's? Snarf's or Sal's? Snarf's won. As I absorbed Cozy's quasi-insulting overture I still felt the warm buzz from my sandwich. I suspected it would be the most enduring pleasure of my day.

    The tone of Cozy's comments wasn't only an awkward jab at humor, it was also that of a father expressing his disappointment to a teenager who had demolished the trust his parents had placed in him while they were out of town. Most days I would have parried with some move in the same key. Or I would have allowed Cozy his interpersonal imperialism, knowing that in the near future he would be using the honed skill not at my expense, but in my defense.

    Not that day. I wasn't even looking at him when I said, "Stop, Cozy. Save it for somebody else. I'm not in the mood." I looked at my watch. "I'm going to work all day to make enough money to pay for half of this little chat. I have thirty-five minutes until my next appointment. Let's get something done before I have to leave."

Cozy liked to sit behind his big desk so clients were forced to take him in as part of the grandeur of the scenery. The wall of windows behind him on the top floor of the Colorado Building in downtown Boulder had a billion-dollar bird's-eye view of historic Boulder, the foothills, the Flatirons, and a wide-angle slice of the Rocky Mountains, including a hundred-mile chunk of the Continental Divide.

    As gorgeous as the view was—and it was world-class—that's how ugly a stain the building where Cozy worked left on the Boulder downtown landscape. If architects could be shot for malpractice, the one who designed the monstrosity would have long before taken a bullet into his or her soul. The Colorado Building had been erected as though someone with unrefined modernist sensibilities had determined that a late-nineteenthcentury Colorado Victorian frontier town needed nothing more than it needed a horrendously out-of-scale, eighty-foot-tall, red brick and reflective glass cereal box to cleave the very soul of downtown into two roughly equal halves. When I got worked up about it, something I did just about every time I was confronted by the thing, I tried to remind myself that the architect shared the responsibility for the travesty with myriad owners, developers, and city planners. Most days the reminder failed to modulate my criticism, or diminish the fact that I wanted the architect's throat.

    "Don't you feel . . . unclean working in this building, Cozy? It's the architectural equivalent of driving a Hummer."

    He manufactured a smile. He glanced out the window. He said, "No."

    From our present perch it was hard to argue with him. Despite its lack of aesthetic virtue—with its most recent fenestration the building looked like a gingham glass gate hung between two brick walls—the views to the west from its upper floors were so stunning that it was easy to forget that I was standing inside a monument to architectural pornography.

    "You wanted to move on. Anything else you would like to criticize first?" he asked. I shook my head. "Okay, Alan. The dead . . . person . . . hanging in your neighbor's barn was your patient? I have that right?"

    I thought I was ready to follow him, but I wasn't. "Ever go to Snarf's, Cozy? Best thing to happen to that end of Pearl since Don's."

    "What," he asked, "is Snarf's?"

    Snarf's wasn't Cozy's kind of place. "It's a dive of a sand

wich shop at 21st and Pearl. The old A&W? You really should try it, but promise me you'll be nice to the girls at the counter." I was about to add a caution that the girls at the counter might not always be nice to him until I noted that he was staring at me as though he had just realized I was mentally challenged. I pressed on, unfazed. "What about Salvaggio's, Cozy? You go there, right? Hell, there's one at the damn corner. The capicolla? Come on. Tell me you do."

    "Your dead patient, Alan? If I may divert your attention from . . . cold cuts."

    I was ready to follow him. "You can call her Nicole. You can call her a woman. You can call me a fuckup. None of it's germane to what happened on Saturday."

    He sighed. He'd been hoping for a little less attitude. No longer expecting it, but still, hoping. After muttering, "But Snarf's is?" under his breath, he said, "You didn't know she was suicidal?"

    "She wasn't."

    "O-kay. We'll just set aside the"—he spread the fingers of both hands, and palms up, seemed to be trying to capture something as it floated past him—"fact . . . that the evidence seems to indicate that she hung herself a few yards from the front door of your home. Some might consider that prima facie evidence that she was suicidal, at least . . . momentarily. But why quibble? My next question: You didn't know she was depressed?"

    I clenched my jaw tightly enough that I could feel the enamel surface of my teeth grinding and could hear the squeal from the friction. "You're not asking the right questions, Cozy. If you don't ask me the right questions, you're playing into their hands."

    He leaned back, laced his fingers behind his head, and put his gargantuan feet up on his desk. I suspected he was about to train a spotlight on my paranoia and ask exactly whose hands I was talking about him playing into. Instead he asked, "How about I sit here and you answer the right questions. We'll both pretend that I asked them."

    That was fine with me. "Kol—Nicole—didn't demonstrate any depression during the few weeks I was treating her. She mentioned depression, but denied any currently. Note the time frame in that qualifier: I treated her for only a few weeks. Three sessions to be precise. I will acknowledge that it does turn out that she was depressed by history, and I will admit that I did not know the details of that history until yesterday's meeting with her psychiatrist from the state hospital. My clinical failure wasn't a failure of diagnosis, however—in psychotherapy diagnosis is a process, not an event. My failure—and, yes, there was one—entailed not reviewing pertinent history with her at the beginning of her treatment. I screwed that up. Mea culpa. Next?"

    "Your clinical failure would also include some failure to intervene . . . in a timely manner?"

    "My clinical judgment was that no dramatic clinical intervention was indicated."

    "Then perhaps there's some failure evidenced by your . . . gullibility? Is that a good word for the fact that you didn't apply any skepticism to her narrative?"

    I stared at him.

    "It did," he added, "prove false. Her narrative."

    Cozy apparently wanted me to whelp additional mea culpas. I didn't feel much like complying. Given the mood I was in, I was more likely to scream profanities than squeal apologies.

    "You bought her story," my lawyer said, proving his determination to get me to capitulate to having committed some additional sin. "Despite the fact that it was all lies, right? Am I missing something?"

    "Facts aren't always relevant," I said.

    "Please try convincing a jury of that," he muttered under his breath before I could add the qualifier
in psychotherapy
. He went on, "Oh, I forgot, you don't have to worry about such mundanities. That's my job."

    "What do you want from me today?"

    "Some cooperation with your defense would be nice," he said. "You made an errant assumption about her gender, and you didn't take even a cursory mental-health history. You failed to recognize her underlying depression. Those statements are correct?"

    "Yes. Want more, Cozy? I didn't know until I read it in the paper that Kol had a job at the cemetery. I thought he was a trust-fund baby. I still don't know where he was living. He'd given me a false address."

    "She," Cozy corrected.

    I was tempted to bite back but I had no enthusiasm for a jostle. If Cozy were the lawyer who would end up defending me on the malpractice suit that was certain to follow Nicole Cruz's death, I might have bothered to explain how my failure to take a formal history from my patient didn't really diverge that much from generally accepted standards of practice. But that defense, even if true, was lame. I didn't feel like rehearsing its recitation with Cozy.

    The fact that my fatal mistakes were largely the result of an act of omission—not taking a formal history—that was committed by psychotherapists every day didn't excuse my failings or mitigate their gravity. Those lapses wouldn't exonerate me as much as they would indict my colleagues along with me.

    The fact that Kol would likely have lied had I gone ahead and asked about mental-health history wasn't relevant either. The fact was that I hadn't asked the right questions. Whether or not I might have learned something crucial if I had, I would never know.

    In a civil proceeding it would all come back to the uncontestable reality that I didn't ask.

    The current, pertinent truth was that Cozy was a criminal defense attorney and not the lawyer who would defend me against malpractice claims. My failure to ponder aloud with Nicole Cruz whether she'd ever been in a jail, on psychotropic medication, in a psychiatric hospital, or whether she had ever tried to kill herself wasn't likely to be particularly relevant if the charges Cozy ended up defending me against were charges not that I negligently failed to anticipate my patient's suicide, but rather that I had participated in her murder.

    If I somehow managed to avoid the charge of homicide that Kirsten feared the authorities were contemplating, the recitation of my defense on malpractice, however futile, would occur with some lawyer other than Cozy, an attorney who handled civil, not criminal, defense. It was to that lawyer that I'd have to admit that I'd made a clinical judgment by choosing to spend those early weeks of treatment ruling out Kol's self-diagnosis of residual autism and ADHD, and not asking for her hospitalization history or assessing her suicidal risk.