Line of Fire (20 page)

31

J
onas was learning how to play the stand-up bass. My son was slight in build, like his birth father, Peter. Jonas’s bass was tall and portly. The height dwarfed him to such a
d
egree that the match of child and instrument felt wrong. Jonas was, I hoped, pre–growth spurt, which meant I could hold on to my dream that he’d eventually grow into his bass.

Jonas’s feel for the instrument seemed intuitive. He had a connection with the sound he was creating that he didn’t have with a football, or a basketball, or a soccer ball, or a Frisbee, or for
World of Warcraft
. He had a feel for the thing that he’d never displayed for his dead father’s power tools. I knew how proud Adrienne would be that the genes that had left her so musically handicapped during her life had managed to combine with Peter’s to translate into recognizable musical talent for their solitary offspring.

The music instructor worked from his basement apartment in a little house near Folsom and Mapleton. The teacher was a rabid vegan in his late twenties who had gently asked Jonas to consider wearing only certain shoes, leather free, to his lessons. Jonas was fond enough of his teacher that he had acquiesced to the shoe restriction without too much complaint.

Before that Saturday lesson, instead of taking Jonas to Snarf’s for his favorite corned beef sandwich, I had taken him to get falafel. He had not kvetched. On the first pre-lesson falafel journey, I’d explained that the culinary choice was a gesture of respect for his teacher, who would be offended by the aroma of meat, corned or otherwise, on his student’s breath.

Jonas was wise. He’d asked, “This wouldn’t be an issue in most places, would it? Whether I eat meat? What shoes I wear?”

Jonas had never lived anywhere besides Boulder. How would he know that Boulder was “other”? I was impressed.

“Exactly,” I said. “Everywhere isn’t like here.” I managed to speak that sentence with a straight face, cognizant that I was edging into world-record understatement territory.

My mobile rang two seconds after Jonas finished dragging his heavy instrument through his teacher’s door. I stayed parked at the curb while I looked at the screen. I mumbled, “Shit.”
Answer? Don’t answer?
I answered.

“Oh good. Alan? I hoped this number would find you. It’s Izza. Is this a good time? How are you?”

She asked how I was in the hyper-sincere tone people use when they wish to convey that they care about the reply. In another circumstance I might have been touched. Instead, I winced. I did not want Izza to care about me, and certainly not sincerely.

“Good. How are you?” I included no hyper-sincerity in the reflexive volley I sent back over the airwaves. I was concocting a list of all the ways that Izza calling me on my mobile phone could portend bad things.

I considered telling her I was married. I was also preparing myself for the complications that would ensue if it turned out she didn’t give a rat’s ass about my marital status.

She said, “When I Googled your number, it said that this is a Boulder cell. I didn’t have you for a Boulder guy. But the bike, right? Your funny shoes? I should have guessed. Are you on Facebook?”

“So, what’s up?” I said, trying to be polite without replying to her Facebook inquiry or sounding happy to hear from her.

“You can probably guess. I want to tempt you one more time,” she said, pausing just long enough to allow the word tempt to begin to ferment. “There’s a new renter in the picture. I know I’ll rent it soon, that’s not the thing. But—I’m being honest here—I’d rather rent to you. I can cut the rent fifty dollars if that helps. I can go all the way to eighty if you do the winter snowplowing we talked about. That’s a great deal. I know this market, and that’s a bargain. I haven’t had good luck renting to students.”

Students?
The word unsettled me. I thought,
No
. Then I thought,
Damn
.

“The new potential tenants are . . . students?”

“Stu-
dent
. Singular. He says he is, but I don’t think he’s being completely honest with me. He told me he attends Metro and, get this, he has the same major I do, but when I tried to get him to talk about his classes he didn’t seem to know what he was talking about. I mean, the most basic things just went right over his head. I don’t like liars and I think the guy might be lying.”

“Really? What makes you concerned?”

“He was hurt in an accident recently. He’s really . . . bruised and cut and battered. Said there was no alcohol involved, but . . . I’m not sure I believed his story.” She paused. “My experience is that students have parties. Horses and parties? Not a good match. Horses and drunk twentysomethings? Never a good match. And with my dad sick right now . . .” Izza sighed. “Please? Can I twist your arm? Take another look?”

I was thinking,
Comadoe
. I said, “You’ll run a credit check on the guy, right?”

“Sure. As soon as he emails me the application.”

Izza was gauging my interest in renting the cottage, of course, but she was also gauging my interest in her. I could almost smell her uncomplicated vulnerability through the phone. I could have wasted some energy being flattered, but a much healthier part of me wanted to advise her to keep looking to her contemporaries for a romantic match. I wanted for her to believe that she would eventually attract a boy who had some maturity to spare.

My protective impulse meant that I was becoming distracted by Izza’s sweet nature. Although that may have been a generous inclination, I couldn’t afford to let it get in my way. Not if Comadoe had located ground zero, as I feared he had.

The danger was that Comadoe might soon trip over the first and the third living Eliases, and the second dead one, and God knows what he would discover after that.

Maybe even Sam’s ever-elusive Tyvek jumpsuit.

I said, “Okay, I’ll come by and take one more look at the place.”

“That would make me so happy,” was Izza’s reply.

• • •

The vegan bass teacher—more precisely, the bass teacher who was a devout vegan—didn’t live far from Sam’s house. I didn’t call to tell Sam I was stopping by.

That was probably a mistake.

“Hey, got a second?” I said when he threw open the door of his North Boulder bungalow. He was glaring at me through the storm door as though I were trespassing on his stoop while attempting to sell him anything other than Thin Mints.

“We’re the kind of friends who show up at each other’s front doors unannounced? When did that happen?”

I laughed. “You’ve basically moved in next door to me. And you’re offended that I knock on your door once? Be gracious. Invite me in.”

He said, “I won’t be gracious.” He allowed me to squeeze past his belly to enter his living room. He said, “It’s not always this clean. In fact, it’s never this clean.”

The caution was appropriate. Sam’s place was neat. And it was clean. Entire sections of the original oak floors that hadn’t been exposed to daylight in well over a decade were free of the piles of crap that had been accumulating since well before his wife Sherry left him. The mess was not Sam’s fault alone; neither Sherry nor Sam had ever displayed a dominant neat gene. I said, “Is your mother coming to visit?”

“No, she would find this very concerning.”

“Then what’s up?”

“Ophelia wants to see where I live. She’s never been here. And she wants to meet Simon. I agree that it’s time for her to meet Simon. I offered to bring him up to the DW. But she—”

“The DW?”

“The doublewide.”

“That’s what you call it? We call it Casa de las Dos Casas.”

Sam stared at me as though he was sorry for me. “What?”

“House of the Two Houses. Jonas made it up.”

“That’s clever,” he said. He meant if Jonas really made it up. If it were my creation, Sam’s praise was of the ironic variety.

“You were saying?” I said.

“O wants to see my home. Not my house, my
home
. I straightened up a little. Made it all a little more presentable.”

“This is false advertising. Like wearing Spanx on a first date. Are you really going to pretend to Ophelia that—”

“What are Spanx?”

I didn’t want to go there. “Google it. With an
x
.”

Sam pulled out his phone and started to do just that. I’d meant later, but I should have known better. I continued with my original thought. “Are you going to do anything to prepare Simon for Ophelia’s . . .” I was looking for a way to finish my sentence in a way that Sam wouldn’t find provocative.

Sam said, “Breasts. Am I going to prepare Simon for Ophelia’s breasts? I probably should. The best that could happen is that he’ll stare and be speechless. The worst? I don’t like to think about it. I was actually going to call you, thought you might have some guidance for me.”

“Because I’m a psychologist? That would be a first.”

“Hardly. Because you have a teenage son who has already had to adjust to Ophelia’s wardrobe.” Sam found the link he was looking for on his cell. He rotated the phone to show me a photo. “Really? Men wear these Spanx things?” he asked. “They come in big sizes?”

I could tell he was intrigued. “Men do. As for size? I would imagine XXL is Spanx’s sweet spot.”

He shrugged. He put the phone in his pocket. I was pretty sure he’d left the browser on the Spanx link for future reference. “Simon has no choice but to deal, right? I mean with Ophelia? He’ll have to see her for who she is. Get to know her as a per- son.”

I smiled. “Eventually, sure. But at his age? With his testosterone levels? I think it’s reasonable for you to expect your son to drag his eyes north when he’s addressing her. Settle for that.”

Sam had a lower bar in mind. “Even the first time?”

“He should make an effort, Sam.”

He turned his back to me before he said, “I haven’t slept with her.”

I offered up a befuddled, “Excuse me?”

“I haven’t slept with Ophelia. I’ve slept
beside
her. We’ve messed around. But no . . . sex.”

“Is it important I know that?” I was hoping it wasn’t.

“Currie?” Sam said. “We’re in this god-awful mess in Frederick because I did not use good judgment about sex. Now I’m going slow. Going fast created problems.”

It was true. Sam’s sexual judgment had proven problematic. The ladies loved him, which baffled me. He loved them right back, often indiscriminately.

“Ophelia?” I asked. “She’s okay with your . . . pace?”

“She’s a patient lady. She has some things in her past, too. I don’t know about them yet, but there’s big baggage of some kind. That twenty-three on her shirts?” he added. “I think that’s history. It has something to do with something.”

I was suspicious that I was witnessing a Clinton/Lewinsky splitting of hairs. It wasn’t adding up for me. I said, “Sam, we’re, like, neighbors. I hear things.”

“Oh crap.” Sam’s ears turned red. He walked into the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, closed it, and returned to the living room. “What you’re hearing?” He held up a hand. “That wasn’t a question. Don’t tell me. See, Ophelia and I may not be having, like, cocktails, but that doesn’t mean we don’t enjoy . . . other adult beverages.”

Despite the obvious peril to my well-being, I smiled. “Did you just come up with that? This minute?”

“Alan, don’t.”

“Say no more. We’re already well into way-too-much-information territory.” I added, “Going forward? If you feel any compulsion to let me know when the sexual drought ends, that’d be a good time to rethink your instinct. I can live a long time without knowing.”

32

S
am came perilously close to a cleansing breath. He said, “Why are you here, Alan?”

I sat. “I’m pretty sure Comadoe is trying to rent the cottage in Frederick. That means he’s connected a lot of those dots.”

Sam stood. He stuffed his hands into the back pockets of his jeans. His pale face began turning red. Sam’s complexion was never far from red. It almost always bore a preparatory glow, so the transition from standard-issue pale pink to almost-alarming red didn’t take light-years to develop.

“You know this how?” he asked. “You see him again?”

I told him about the call from Izza but left out the part about Jonas’s vegan bass teacher. Social controversies could sidetrack Sam. He had recently dragged me into a meditation about whether the
B
and
T
parts of LGBT really deserved equal billing with the
L
and the
G
. During the harangue, he never once said the word
bisexual
or
transgender
.
B
and
T
was as far as Sam could go.

Sam’s reply to my news about Izza and Comadoe was, “This isn’t good.”

“Comadoe has a record, right? Does that mean he’s on probation? Or parole?”

Sam said, “Probation.” He nodded again. The second nod was more definitive, which meant his head was developing a metronome-ish sway. Given the raw heft of his cranium, and the whole objects-in-motion physics thing, the momentum concerned me. “Yeah, probation, probably. And with new charges pending? Interesting. Good, Alan. I like where you’re going. His probation officer likely has him on the shortest of short leashes. If he doesn’t, he should. If he doesn’t, I can ask him to.”

I said, “By going to Frederick to look at a house, could he be in some kind of violation? I was thinking that he might not even be allowed to live outside the county without permission. Is that possible? Does it work that way?”

“If he hasn’t told his PO what he’s up to? That he’s moving? Sure, that’s possible. But it doesn’t matter if he’s in violation. What’s important is if I can convince his PO that he’s in violation. They’re not the most trusting souls on the public payroll. How hard can it be to convince a PO that a drug-dealing asshole is a deceptive drug-dealing asshole?”

I considered it a rhetorical question.

He said, “I’ll think on this. Since you’re here, I want to show you something.” He walked into the kitchen. I followed. He stopped in front of the control panel for the luxury intercom system he’d described to me that night in the ICU, the system that all the neighbors would have envied in the fifties. He held a screwdriver in his right hand.

“Sam, I told you I don’t want to be any part of your end-of-life scheme. I don’t care what’s inside that—”

He ignored my protests. Sam had a number of moods of which I wasn’t fond. That one jumped up near the top of the list.

“Four screws, like I said.” He popped out the quartet of brass screws. “Then you have to pull off these knobs. I may have forgotten to tell you about the knobs. Then the faceplate comes off—it’ll just dangle down from the wires. See?”

Sam was one of the few people who knew that I had accidentally shot my father when I was a child.
Could you really have suppressed that?

I tried once again to convince Sam that I was not a good choice to be his death buddy. “Sam,” I said gently, “no.”

I had an additional explanation for my reticence, one with more recent echoes. But confidentiality forbade me from revealing that I’d had a patient who had hired someone to kill him if he ever got sick or disabled, or that the entire episode that had ensued had saddened and terrified me and left me with great apprehension about that phase of anyone’s life. Especially that phase of the lives of people I loved.

I had no good options to use to deter Sam; I didn’t want to revisit my role in my father’s death and I didn’t want to dance around what I couldn’t reveal about my dead patient. “Sam, I’m sensitive about this. I’m not at liberty to tell you why, but you should pick someone else to help you with your plan. Lucy or Sherry. Someone more comfortable with the issues—”

“Here’s the S-hook, up here on the left. Give me your hand.” He took my hand and forcibly extended my fingers so that I had no choice but to feel the contours of the exposed curve of the S-hook. “You can push up on the hinged top of the housing”—he used my knuckles to do the pushing—“and then you can pull up on the hook. Grab it. Go ahead, grab it. Got it? Do it. It’s important that you can do this when the time comes. By definition, I’m not going to be around to hold your hand.”

“Sam, I’m not pretending I don’t want to be involved. I don’t want to—”

“I’m not asking you to shoot me. Not today, anyway. I want you to know where shit is. Life is complicated. People change. Circumstances . . . evolve. This is a precaution. It’s like me telling you where to find my will. Now pull.”

“Where’s your will? Let’s start there.”

“Pull.”

I pulled. As Sam had promised that night in the ICU, I felt a significant amount of weight on the other end of the nylon line that was attached to the S-hook.

“Keep pulling,” Sam said. “You almost have it.”

The hook slipped from my fingers. As the hook rattled toward the housing, Sam gasped. He transitioned from gasping to cursing me with such alacrity that gravity had not even succeeded in yanking the heavy weight at the end of the fishing line down to the floor plate inside the wall before he finished the initial profanity.

“Did you do that on purpose?” he said.

“Hardly,” I said, but I chose not to initiate a discussion of my unconscious motivation. I did reach in to see if there was anything left to grab. Unfortunately, there was. The hook had caught on the lip of the housing. I was tempted to flick it right back off and let Sam’s hidden pistol clank all the rest of the way down inside the wall. Instead I grabbed the hook for the second time and began to methodically fish the line back out of the wall. “No harm, no foul,” I said.

Sam called me an asshole before he cautioned me that getting the bag out of the opening wasn’t as easy as it looked.

The nylon mesh bag contained the promised handgun wrapped in oilcloth along with a small cardboard box of ammunition. “Okay,” I said. “Can I put everything back?”

Sam said, “Lauren’s gun is a Glock. A nine-millimeter. You know how that works. Or at least you should. This is a revolver, a thirty-two. Different animal. A good blend of size and power. I want to show you how it works, how to load it, how to fire it.”

Sam knew I was not a gun guy, though he had apparently repressed why I wasn’t a gun guy. He certainly wasn’t allowing my bias to dissuade him from continuing with his Jack Kevorkian tutorial.

He tugged open the top of the mesh bag and removed the oilcloth. He set the package on the kitchen counter reverentially, as though it were a religious relic or an archaeological treasure. Or, who knows, a loaded gun.

He unfolded the oilcloth. Inside was a hunk of Colorado red slate. On the slate, someone had traced the outline of, I was guessing, Sam’s .32.

Sam glared at me. I shook my head.

He checked the box of ammunition. The box contained nothing but stones.

I followed him as he hustled out the back door and dropped to his knees beside the downspout extension on the northwest corner of the bungalow. He lowered his head all the way to the soil so he could peer under the bottom edge of the galvanized spout extension. He said, “The magnet that holds the key case in place under the downspout has been turned almost a hundred and eighty degrees.”

I wasn’t about to pursue an argument about how he could possibly know that. I said, “Which means . . . what?”

“Someone turned it. It can’t rotate on its own. It’s a strong magnet.”

In life I go for the obvious. Outside of my office, anyway. Hoofprints mean horses, not zebras. A cough means a cold, not lung cancer. Common things happen commonly. Rare things happen rarely. I said, “Simon probably locked himself out of the house. When he replaced the key, he put the magnet back differently.”

Sam thought about it for, say, five seconds. “Simon has used the spare key once. That one time, he left all the pieces on the kitchen counter for me to put back in place. He’s a teenager. He leaves stuff where he uses it. Milk on the counter. Doesn’t close cereal boxes. He’s never capped the toothpaste in his life.”

“That night in Comadoe’s room? We definitely talked about me killing you”—I smiled for his benefit—“when the time comes. With your unregistered, illegal handgun. And we talked about exactly where I could find said gun in your kitchen.”

By the time I had reached the last sentence I was talking to Sam’s back. He was on his way inside the house.

Sam lifted his butt up onto the kitchen counter right beside the Colorado slate. He said, “The asshole knows my name. He knows where I live. He has my house key. We have ample proof he heard what we said that night. And now he’s carrying an unregistered weapon that has my prints on it.”

“I’m sorry, Sam.”

“What is he up to, Alan? Until I’m sure of that, I can’t risk putting his PO on him. This may change everything. How much worse can this get?”

Oh,
I thought,
let me count the ways.