Line of Fire (22 page)

35

A
manda’s eyes focused on something even farther away. Although I wasn’t completely convinced the emotion I was seeing was genuine, I was far from convinced that it was contrived.

“I couldn’t do it. I didn’t even think about doing it. It was instinct. No less an instinct than the first time I reached below the sheet to touch him. I knew—at that moment I knew—that there were limits to what I could offer him.

“I told him no—I wouldn’t do it. It felt awful. Selfish. Even cruel. It was like refusing to call the nurse when he needed morphine. Do you see?”

In the room, at that moment, I didn’t know whether she was asking the question of me or of her brother. Because of the raw power of psychotherapy, of transference, I knew the distinction was unimportant. I had no plan to reply.

“I had believed I would do anything for him. But it all changed right then. Right then, there were limits in place. Limits I hadn’t known about because I didn’t understand the unlesses. I couldn’t articulate them.”

“That particular unless?” I asked.

“What the hell would happen between us if he didn’t die?”

Saying the words seemed to deplete her of an essential force. I watched her fall into an involuntary emotional retreat. Her eyes searched the distance for a horizon she wouldn’t find. Her breathing grew shallow and disappeared into her gut.

“Where did you go just now, Amanda?”

A full minute later she said, “I didn’t go. I came back. To now.”

“Tell me about that. About now.”

She found my eyes again. “This is about me, right? Me? That’s what you said. Me? I still provide comfort to men. It still involves sex. It’s gone well beyond handjobs, of course, and I’ve discarded all of my reluctance about blowjobs. But it’s still about relieving pain. The pain isn’t physical, but call it anything you like—loneliness, isolation, inadequacy, failure, fear. Exhaustion. I provide distraction for men who want it, who think they need it. And who can afford it. Sometimes the distraction is sexual.

“I tell myself I act generously, but the question of the limits, the unlesses, is a big deal for me. That hasn’t changed since Houston.”

She finished as though she thought something had concluded between us.

I wasn’t so confident we’d reached an end. I said, “Amanda, go on.”

My words jostled her, as though she were in the fragile moment when she was first waking, and we were sharing only a fraction of the same reality.

“With George? Right from the start, from the first night in that hotel in Utah, when we had sex we were together completely. It was as though we were there for nothing else. The sex was that right, and that consuming.

“Later—this part is just as true—when we would have breakfast together, or watch a movie in the hotel room, we would eat and talk and laugh as though we were there, together, with each other, for nothing else. Our time—our nonsexual—together time was completely consuming, too.

“Our relationship isn’t easy to define. It’s time for money. But it’s not. It’s pay to play. But it’s not. George pays me to complete him. And I try to do that. I let him pay me to complete me. Yet I fight that with all my will. Where is the balance? Where am I in this?”

It seemed to take all her energy to complete her thought. I wanted to see if she could take another step.

“Does what you just described between you and George feel real?” I asked.

My question invigorated her. I suspected she had anticipated it. She said, “Is this real?”

She meant the therapy. I was instantly wary. I said, “Distraction, Amanda?”

The shorthand worked. She said, “Of course it’s not real. George never disappoints, because I have no expectations beyond a semiannual wire transfer. I never disappoint him because I’m adept at reading his expectations, and because I’m good. There are no broken promises, spoken or unspoken. We both know the . . .”

Amanda’s shoulders sank. Her eyes closed. I recognized her trajectory. I thought I should shut up. I didn’t shut up. I said, “You both know what?”

Amanda gave her reply some consideration before she said, “Before I found and recruited the man you call the Buffer, I entertained selecting other men. But they didn’t view the arrangement the same way I did.”

I felt a distraction approaching the same way I can feel a semi approaching too close when I’m on my bike on a narrow road. I didn’t have to see it to know it loomed.

“One of the men told me that for what he would be paying, he didn’t think he should have to share me with another man. He wanted all of my time. From his perspective it was a question of what he was ‘getting for his money.’

“I asked him, ‘All of my present time? Or all of my future time?’

“I knew him well. He was a trader. A present-value thinker, more of an arbitrage guy than a value-added guy. He wanted the time he wanted, and he wanted the services he expected me to provide during that time.”

“Sex?” I said. I recognized I was enabling. I was guilty of distracting Amanda with my ignorance. I was distracting her during her distraction.

“Yes, sex. But don’t underestimate the other. Sex without the other? Doesn’t work. The other without sex? Doesn’t work, either. Women know that. Pros and not.

“I explained to him that he was misunderstanding the nature of my proposal. ‘What you will get for your money,’ I told him, ‘is not a complete claim on my present but a partial claim on my future. My present is valuable, my future is invaluable.’

“He never understood what I meant.”

I said, “I am interested in what you meant.”

“I’m paying you to be interested,” she said. Though her tone made clear that the statement was at least partially banter, her words carried the echo of the earlier tease, an echo I would ignore at my clinical peril. “Is this when I should wonder if that is why you’re interested in me? Because you are being paid?”

Debating her analogy—comparing the sexual interest she showed in her clients to the clinical interest I showed in her, my patient—would take us far afield. To acknowledge the issue, yet to chart a path past it, I said, simply, “Touché.”

“Indeed,” Amanda said. “Touché.” She adjusted her posture as she accepted that I wouldn’t bite at the bait. She hadn’t been prepared for victory; she’d only been prepared for battle. The battle, one I refused to engage in, had been the point.

She said, “Had he shown any curiosity about me and my life, I would have told him that I charge what I charge because of the way I value my future. What each of my gentlemen pay for so dearly are my lost opportunities—” She stopped abruptly. “The things I might never experience because of my decision to be a paid companion.”

I wasn’t sure what she meant. I said, “Please go on.”

“While I am working there are other experiences and opportunities that will not be available. Either during the time I am with a client physically, or during the time that I am merely waiting to be with him the next time. Do you see?”

“Not yet,” I said. “All jobs require us to trade certain freedoms for the chance to earn income. We all lose opportunities.”

“What is different are the opportunities I relinquish. The lover, or husband, I may not find because our paths did not cross. The child, or children, that I may not bear because of that lover or husband that I did not find. Most jobs don’t require those kinds of trade-offs. This one does. At least for me.”

Amanda’s voice was becoming fragile. I was unfamiliar with the texture, though to my ear it sounded sincere.

I wasn’t convinced by her argument, but my conviction wasn’t the point.

A solitary tear wended from the outside corner of her right eye before it took a detour toward the lobe of her ear. “And that is what I would have told the uncurious man to explain why the price for my time is high.”

She brought her lips together and looked at me, unblinking. The trail of the tear left an uneven scar where it had traversed the blush on her cheek before it disappeared beyond her jaw. “Your future,” I said. “The one you may never know?”

“Yes.” She seemed to recompose before my eyes. Her voice rediscovered its confident timbre as she said, “My present? Or the part of it I choose to give to my men? It’s much less dear. Like all jobs, it involves time. Mine involves sex, too. I don’t find sex mystical. Once I choose a man, and I choose to give my time, I accept that I am yielding opportunity. That is my sacrifice. But the sex I consider to be almost gratis. I know it is a big part of what is expected of me, but I do that part of my job . . .” She lowered her voice in volume and allowed it to settle into a husky place before she said, “Because if I’ve picked the right man, I don’t mind it, and often I enjoy it.”

Oh God,
I thought.
I am allowing her to do it again.

She’d switched her train to a set of parallel tracks so she could tell me a story. A good story. A novel story. Maybe even a true story. Certainly, a distracting story.

I backpedaled. “Earlier in the session? You started telling me about the . . . now. It felt to me as though you were about to go someplace important.”

“But I distracted us?” she said.

“Perhaps.” The clock over Amanda’s shoulder told me our time was short.

She said, “Yes, the now.” She bit down on her lower lip in that vulnerable way that magically subtracted a decade from her face.

Cognizant that the clock was ticking, I said, “Yes?”

“Now . . .” She looked away. She looked back. She said, “Now? I am pregnant.”

My lips fell open a centimeter as I considered the possibility that Amanda was playing me again. But when I recognized that the sigh that followed her admission that she was with child seemed to empty every part of her but her womb, I knew that her announcement had not been a ruse.

Is the baby the Buffer’s? Is it George’s? Is there another man?

When she looked up at me her eyes were swollen with possibility, good and bad, her lips flattened into that no-man’s-land between frown and grin.

Then she said, “After my brother died, my daddy got a friend of his who owned a funeral home to go down to Houston in one of their retired hearses to get the coffin. We caravanned back to Austin. When I first saw my daddy again—he’d stayed behind, he was waiting in front of the funeral home—I tried to smile for him, to be strong.

“He held me at arm’s length, one of his big hands on each of my shoulders. He said, ‘Baby girl, last time I saw you, you looked different. Younger. Know what? I’m thinking that when your brother left us, what he did was that he took one of your pretty little dimples with him to heaven, to remember you by.’

“He leaned in then, and he kissed me, just a feather touch, right here.” Amanda’s fingertip tapped lightly on the cheek that had sacrificed the dimple to her brother’s memory. “He said, ‘Now you only have one dimple left.’”

More distraction?
I had no way to know. The clock was ticking.

“To prevent this?” Amanda said. “Double precautions. Sometimes triple. I’m on the pill. For safety, I insist on covers. Always.”

I didn’t know what that meant. I said, “I’m not familiar with that term.”

“Covers? Condoms.”

I learned something every day.

“One of my gentlemen had a recent vasectomy. That should make him triple-safe, right? How’s that for a complicated unless?”

“The father?” I asked.

“Depends what failed, doesn’t it? Did the vasectomy not work? Did the cover fail? Did my pill have an off day? Those are all unlesses, aren’t they?” she said. “I don’t know who the father is.” She pursed her lips to empty her lungs in an extended, silent blow. “And I am not sure I want to know right now.”

“When?” I asked.

Amanda shrugged.

“The last time we met?” I said. “I asked you why you were in therapy. With me.” I could tell she heard me. But didn’t make eye contact.

“Is that a question?” she said, finally.

“Sure.”

“He’s what I thought he was. But not the way it’s turned out.”

“You’re talking about your relationship with one of the men?”

“Sure. Let’s call it that. A relationship.”

“You want to call it something else?”

I could not discern the game from the resistance. Or either, from the truth.

She looked away from me, toward the window. She hesitated for a prolonged period before she said, “Maybe eventually. I admit it’s a seductive tangent, even for me—it’s that little side road that leads to a deserted beach. At sunset.” Her eyes softened. “Hard to resist, yes? But no, that’s not why I’m here.”

Another minute passed. I said, “Is this when you tell me why you
are
here?”

“If I knew,” she said. “Yes, this would be a good time.”

Her tone caused me to wonder if her answer was intended to placate me, or to lead me astray. I fell back to the question I had not asked at the very beginning of treatment: “How can I be of help, Amanda?”

Her eyes teared. She offered a bittersweet smile that was absent the dimple that had gone to heaven with her brother.

36

A
fter work I sat down across the kitchen counter from Lauren. She was grating ginger for a sauce to go with dinner. “Ponzu?” I asked.

“Ponzu,” she confirmed.

Lauren and I had eased into a culinary phase where we prepared Japanese food at least twice a week. I queried Lauren about her day while I contemplated the ingredients on the counter and tried to solve the entrée puzzle.

Lauren said, “I went to Frederick this morning. That manner- of-death case won’t go away.” She seemed to mistake the look of alarm on my face for confusion. “The suicide that might be a homicide?”

“Yeah,” I managed.

She said, “Have you ever been to Frederick?”

I almost choked on the water I was sipping. I managed to say, “I have. Sometimes I ride east when I’m not in the mood for hills. It’s a nice little town. I like to imagine it pre-I-25, before all the development.”

“You cross I-25 on your rides? I did not know that.”

“Not often, but once in a while.”

I was apprehensive at the way the conversation was unfolding. I couldn’t tell if my wife was engaging in casual chitchat about her day, or if she was setting me up to see if I’d dissemble or make some disclosure I might regret. I tried to assure myself that Lauren didn’t operate that way, at least not with me.

I then thought that the fact that she didn’t typically operate that way constituted a behavioral promise not to operate that way in the future. Unless . . .

I desperately wanted to come clean. I wanted to tell Lauren that Justine Winter Brown, the woman Sam knew as Currie, had been threatening to kill our daughter. That Sam had no choice but to do what he did.

That I had no choice but to protect Sam.

I couldn’t come clean. By telling Lauren the truth, I would increase the number of us locked in an impossible place from two to three. Other than momentarily sating my need for understanding and forgiveness, nothing would be gained from that arithmetic. But an essential thing would be lost: Lauren’s innocence.

I considered myself an honest spouse. My honesty to Lauren had always been my promise to be forthright again in similar circumstances in the future. Unless.

Sam killing Currie became the unless. Did that make me a dishonest spouse?

Or an honest spouse with an immutable unless?

I went back and forth on that.

• • •

The kids disappeared to the basement after we ate teriyaki cod. The ponzu was dribbled over grilled vegetables served with sweetened rice. I decided to risk a return to the place where I was feeling so exposed before dinner. I asked, “So, why did you have to go to Frederick? Isn’t that way out of your jurisdiction?”

Lauren sighed. “We ended up with a dead end trying to ID that cop in the cell phone photo. Even after enhancement, we couldn’t make it work. The description we got from the friend could fit fifty different Boulder cops. Beyond Boulder? An almost infinite number.

“Our investigators are stretched to a breaking point. Elliot came close to having me bag it. If he’s going to invest staff in a cold case, he’s going to pick one that could help him politically at home, not an already-closed case in another jurisdiction.

“His counterpart in Weld begged him to send someone out to Frederick before he pulled the plug. You know Elliot these days—he’s a politician as much as he is a prosecutor. He wants the Weld DA’s support when he decides to run for attorney general.”

“Or governor,” I said. Elliot Bellhaven, Lauren’s boss, was the current Boulder County DA. And probably, I feared, the someday-soon state attorney general, and then, a term or two later, the future governor of Colorado. Elliot and I had once been friends, but we did not have a good recent history. I did not wish him well in elected office.

“He’d have to be elected AG first,” Lauren said. “A governor from Boulder? A gay governor from Boulder? Colorado isn’t ready yet. Elliot needs a stepping stone.”

“He sent you to Frederick?” I said.

“To keep the peace with his colleague. I met the Weld prosecutor—young guy, aggressive in an off-putting way, but idealistic and probably well-intentioned. He believed he could convince me I would see something I couldn’t ignore.”

I began loading the dishwasher. I said, “Did you?”

“There’s no new evidence. All the commotion is being caused by a little boy that locals have convinced a sheriff’s investigator and this young prosecutor is some kind of . . . savant about how and when the woman died. But here’s the thing—the kid has never actually talked to anyone in law enforcement. Not a word. Not once. Not back then, when she died. And he’s not talking now.

“Everything they have is hearsay twice removed from a barely nine-year-old boy. You can’t build a homicide case that way. I met him briefly, this morning. He was home sick from school. Friendly, talkative, engaging. You know Gracie’s friend Avi? From dance? He reminded me of Avi. That kind of smart, chatty kid.

“I shook hands with the boy’s grandfather across his fence. Gruff guy. Taciturn. Kind of guy who could look mean petting a puppy. He was polite, but he made it clear to me the same thing he’s apparently made clear to everyone else—that he doesn’t want the boy involved, and he won’t let him be interviewed by law enforcement. Says it will just stir up things that are better off staying buried.”

I was confident that Lauren was talking about Elias Tres and his grandfather, Big Elias. I said, “Did the boy actually witness something that night? Are you talking about that kind of traumatic experience? Did he see . . . the gunshot?”

“I don’t think so. But then nobody really knows. The hearsay is that he saw a car. And he saw a guy walking toward the cottage where the victim died. And he maintains this all happened on a different night than the ME determined after autopsy. The boy says the timing is off by a day.”

“Is that possible? That a postmortem could be off that much?”

“Anything is possible. Everyone was thinking suicide. She had a bullet through her brainstem. How important was a day back then, either way?”

“Even if the boy is right,” I said, “couldn’t the two events be unrelated? The boy saw what he saw one night, but the death occurred another?”

“I asked the same thing. But the local lore is that everything about this kid is special. His memories about things are just not questioned by people who know him.

“And this death, the suicide or homicide, occurred only a few days after the kid’s father was killed in a firefight in Afghanistan. His dad was a marine. The body was due back in town the next day, the day after the boy says the woman died down the road. Can you imagine what that entire time was like for the family? For him?”

I said, “It is hard to imagine.” But I could picture almost every detail.

“The way I see it, the way the grandfather sees it, is that everything is all wrapped up together too tightly for this boy. His father’s death? God, in combat. Six weeks before the end of his tour. Military honors. Flag-draped casket. Somber marines every-where. The impending funeral. Getting ready for a big gathering at the house. Imagine, Alan.

“Then this . . . this death, whatever it was, happened just across the road. Down a little bit. Hundred yards away? One fifty?

“For the kid? Remembering back that far? Testifying? I think it’s way too much to ask. He’s apparently just turned nine. Back then, he was, what, barely six? Basically, the Weld County DA wants us to rely on the distant memories of a nine-year-old boy, when everything he might recollect about that awful day has been contaminated by what I hope to God turns out to be the worst events of his life.

“I don’t think there’s a prosecution there. Imagine what a defense attorney could do—would be forced to do—to that little boy if he testifies.”

“Did you talk to anyone else in Frederick? Or was it just the kid?”

Anyone named Izza?

“My counterpart introduced me to a lot of people. Almost everyone on that lane. All the farmers and ranchers. The landlord of the cottage where the woman died is a young woman. Twenties. Met her. But she lives in Greeley. She wasn’t there that night and she didn’t know the tenant well. Her father lives on the property and was there that night, apparently. But he’s been quite ill for a long time. He didn’t hear anything. Didn’t see anything. I didn’t actually meet him.”

I allowed the conclusions to settle. “Dead end?” I said.

Lauren wasn’t quite ready to go there. She said, “The grandfather’s protective instincts may be the correct ones. The kid needs to continue to heal, to move past whatever happened during that period in his life. Not to go back and relive all of that again. Think about Jonas, babe. What he went through in that short period of his life right after Adrienne died? In my mind, it is kind of the same thing. Don’t you think?”

Our son Jonas had witnessed his birth mother’s violent death in Israel at almost the same time that Elias Tres lost his father to war. I wondered if Lauren had recognized the way the dates aligned.

She finished her glass of wine. “We’ve tried to allow Jonas to move on, right?”

I got distracted for a moment as I reflected on the magnitude of our adopted son’s losses. But Lauren was impatient for my conclusion. She said, “You know a little something about all this, Alan. Come on, what do you think?”

Lauren’s phrasing jolted me. I didn’t know if Lauren was suggesting that I knew “a little something about this” because she was somehow already aware that I did know what happened that distant night in Frederick. Or if she was referring to my—much more benign—parental or professional knowledge about the best way to approach children who have suffered multiple losses and traumas.

I feared that my guilty knowledge about Frederick was threatening to bust out of my skull like some grotesque monster from a bad horror movie.

I said, “My instinct is to agree with you, but I would probably need to hear more about the boy. For Jonas? I think we did the right thing.”

Lauren stood. She spoke with an unexpected edge. “That’s all you got? You sound like an expert witness parsing his words during a tough cross. What’s that about?”

Is she teasing?
I couldn’t tell. The thought crossed my mind that Lauren already knew what happened in Frederick.
What’s one more lie?
“Yeah, for now that’s all I have. If you can tell me more, I’ll have more.”

“I told Elliot to let it go. The evidence Weld County would
like
to have may scream homicide to them. But the evidence they
do
have says suicide to me. I think any more resources that our office invests in the investigation will be wasted.”

I tightened my grip on the countertop. Lauren’s conclusion left me feeling light enough to float. I edged over in front of the sink to begin cleaning up. I held up the serving dish from dinner. “Can this go in the dishwasher?”

Lauren gave me a how-many-times-have-you-asked-me-that face before she said, “That’s ceramic. It’s one of the ones you have to wash by hand.”

I began to wash the platter. As casually as I was able, I said, “So is that it for you and Frederick? Has Elliot covered his ass politically?”

Before Lauren could reply, Gracie called—okay, Gracie yelled—up from the basement in a voice that indicated rapidly accelerating distress. But to my well-tuned paternal ear the timbre of alarm she was using was more Off Broadway than
Friday the 13th
part whatever. I was reading my daughter’s squeal as a high-volume announcement that she wanted help because she was in the process of losing an argument to her brother, who was likely rubbing it in, the way he did sometimes.

And the way she hated every time. Lauren saw things the same way. Without giving any indication that she was buying into the urgency of Grace’s 911, she stepped toward the top of the stairs to referee. The walk from the kitchen counter to the basement stairs was short, but Lauren managed it not only without her cane, but also with some physical grace.

From a point of view of the management and progress of her MS—and of her prolonged recovery from a distant exacerbation—I was encouraged by that short stroll.

I couldn’t see my wife’s face—her head was directed down the stairs—but I could hear her clearly as she said, “Yeah, I think Elliot has seen enough.”

Gracie yelled, “Jonas! You heard her. Mom says she’s seen eee-nough! Stop it! You heard her! Now stop!”

I couldn’t see my daughter, but I knew from previous experience that she had just stomped her right foot. And that Jonas’s face had broken into the slyest, most knowing grin at his sister’s predictable affectation. He’d undoubtedly been shooting for the foot stomp. In his eyes, Jonas had claimed victory.

I began drying the little platter. Once I set it down, I pumped my right fist into the air, and I mouthed,
Yes!
I couldn’t wait to finish cleaning up so I could take the dogs out the lane. I wanted to trek to a specific spot down the lane where my phone had five bars, so I could reach out to Sam with the good news.

I was thinking we were halfway in the clear. All that was left for us to do was to deal with Comadoe.

In my heart, I knew Comadoe was up to something. In my head, I didn’t know what.

The man was dangerous. I wouldn’t underestimate Comadoe.

• • •

Outside later with the dogs, I called Sam. He didn’t answer. I left a message that I had good news about Weld County, but that I had a bad feeling about Comadoe.

An hour later he texted me that he was working on something.