Line of Fire (7 page)

Sam was right that Michael McClelland knew that Sam had been dating Currie before her timely death in Frederick. Did McClelland ever believe the medical examiner’s conclusion that his friend’s death had been a suicide? Probably not. Did McClelland have evidence to the contrary? I could not rule that out.

If McClelland were to reveal to investigators reexamining old events in Frederick that the suicide victim had been romantically involved with a City of Boulder detective at the time of her death, that would certainly pique their attention. Throw in the new witness who had just maybe seen the wrong thing that night, and the dormant death in Frederick could come back to haunt Sam. And me.

10

A
gorgeous seventy-degree day in late September turned brisk as a fast-moving front left a hard freeze in its wake. By noon the next day the front had moved on to chill the Great Plains, leaving the skies above the Front Range the blue of possibility. The familiar respite of Indian summer seemed to promise a gentle and extended autumn.

A forty-five-degree swing of temperatures in fifteen hours? Welcome to Colorado.

I was seeing a new patient for a first visit. She had phoned the previous Friday, leaving a voicemail seeking an appointment. When I returned her call a few hours later we discussed potential times. She preferred to meet between midday Monday and midday Thursday, and not too early in the day, if that was possible. She sometimes worked late, she explained, and she traveled, sometimes on short notice.

She hoped that wouldn’t be a problem. I was grateful for the latitude in her schedule; most new patients make a play for one of my always-in-demand prime-time appointments—early, just before work, over the lunch hour, or at the end of the workday. She and I settled on a late-morning time without much negotiation.

During the brief phone conversation, I had not inquired why she was seeking time with a psychotherapist, something many of my colleagues choose to do during the initial phone contact. Nor had I asked another common question—how she had learned my name. I tend not to do much initial screening on the telephone. Some prospective patients will volunteer a capsule version of what they expect their clinical story will be. If they do, I listen. Other patients are more circumspect during the first contact. To me, as a psychotherapist, both styles are informative, but encouraging a telephone rehearsal seems to risk diminishing the impact of the face-to-face version that is certain to come.

Amanda Bobbie hadn’t inquired in advance about my fees or about whether she could use her health insurance coverage, nor had she posed any generic how-often-will-we-meet or how-long-will-this-process-take questions. I made a mental bet that she had been in psychotherapy before and that she knew how things worked.

In some ways a patient with previous therapeutic experience made my work easier. In some ways it made my work more difficult.

• • •

Amanda was sitting in one of the pair of modern chairs that Diane had installed as part of a major waiting room makeover a few years before. The renovation was an early phase of Diane’s attempt at psychological rehabilitation following the devastating trauma she’d suffered while a hostage in Nevada. I hadn’t paid sufficient heed to Diane’s coping at the time. My own life had been a mess then; I had missed the initial signs of her decline. It was a reasonable rationalization. It wasn’t a good excuse.

In the intervening time, I recognized that the barricades Diane had mounted to deal with her suffering—denial, sublimation, suppression, you name it—had proven inadequate to the task.

The woman in the waiting room wasn’t reading a magazine or flipping through content on her phone. She was sitting, contained, her back straight, her knees together, her gaze loosely focused on the cascades of water
shoosh
ing through the bamboo tubes in the too-big, too-loud water feature across the room.

Diane had been seeking Zen when she selected the big water feature from an artist out near Niwot. She hadn’t found it. The Zen. Though she did find a way to install Class IV rapids into our diminutive waiting area, which was no small accomplishment.

There was nothing at all abrupt about the way Amanda shifted her eyes to me as I stepped through the door. “Hello,” I said. “I’m Alan Gregory.”

She stood. She said, “Amanda Bobbie.”

She was somewhat younger than me—I was guessing early thirties. She’d applied almost no makeup that morning—maybe a little eyeliner and some lip gloss. I wasn’t even sure about the lip gloss. An unfussy ponytail of long, dark hair terminated slightly off-center on the right side of the back of her head. She wore a sundress of pale, angled stripes that came together high on her waist. A thin jersey jacket with short sleeves made certain that any allure of the sundress was muted.

The impression was of someone determined to appear as though she could look the way she looked five minutes after she climbed out of bed. I had no way to know whether her appearance was truly that natural or whether the effortless look had taken an hour.

At the beginning of treatment, I generated hypotheses by the bushel and typically felt no urgency to test my theses. The accumulating theories were a reminder to me of all I didn’t know about the person I was meeting. My reality? As with almost all things in psychotherapy, I believed that time would tell.

In my office, Amanda quickly assumed the same posture that she’d had in the waiting room. She had a choice between a seat on the sofa and on an upholstered chair. She chose the center of the couch, the only location that left her with no place to lean, or rest an arm. Few patients chose the center of the sofa.

The bright, palest-of-pale-blue eyes that had been focused on our mini-Niagara were now focused on me. There was, I thought, some warmth and softness in them. Amanda Bobbie wasn’t afraid of eye contact. She sought eye contact. Some patients will challenge a new therapist with an overdetermined eye-lock; they employ it as a provocation in order to stake out territory, or as a competitive attempt to control the space and time of psychotherapy. Amanda wasn’t doing that with me; if anything, her eyes invited a certain comfort.

I found it mildly disconcerting. We hadn’t yet achieved that certain comfort.

My working theory was that I was in the room with a caretaker.
We’re good.
That’s what I decided her eyes were saying to me.
We’re both good here.

She took a sudden breath that lifted her shoulders about an inch. She then released the air from her lungs in a completely silent, extended exhale.

I wasn’t sure if I had witnessed a gasp or a sigh. At the most basic level, being an effective psychotherapist is about paying attention. To be the therapist I wanted to be, my job required that I become an A student in the seminar that was being taught by, and about, Amanda Bobbie.

“Never, ever, expected to be here,” she said. “Not
here
here. But anyplace like this with anyone . . . like you.”

It wasn’t an original opening. I made a mental note that—if Amanda Bobbie was being truthful, not a given in the work I do—it appeared I had lost my internal wager about previous therapy experience.

Had I walked into a social gathering with a room full of strangers, Amanda wasn’t a woman who would have grabbed my attention. Not at first, probably not for a while. There was nothing about her manner or her features that demanded notice.

She wasn’t, for instance, an Ophelia. I suppressed a grin at the realization that I had generated no initial impression about Amanda’s breasts.
Large? Small? Attractive? Not?
Shapely?
Nothing. I had no idea. Almost everything about Amanda whispered. Except maybe her serenity.

Is the serenity a shell?
Back in that fictional room full of strangers, once I did get around to noticing Amanda, I suspected that my eyes would have been drawn back to her a second time, and maybe a third. My eyes would find her again because of her composure. I had enough self-awareness to know that her brand of confidence was a trait that captured my imagination in social gatherings. In that arena, where I can be guilty of a lack of poise, I often found myself drawn to someone who demonstrates it in spades.

I have a stock line I use during the initial moments with a new patient. I say, “How can I be of help?” I probably use the phrase with about half my intakes. The other half are either so relieved to be in the room with someone who will listen to them—or so anxious about being in the room with someone who will listen to them—that they enter my office in full verbal sprint, initiating their story before we make it down the hall.

Amanda was in a different minority. She started unprompted, but the crucial factor wasn’t what she said—her words felt banal to me, though I was prepared to alter that impression as more data accumulated—but that she’d given us something unremarkable to talk about. I wondered if she was aware that she’d done it.

Her second line that morning—I offered no response to her first—was more revealing. She said, “I’m here today because . . . I have a friend.”

11

R
eally?
Early in treatment, I tend to be quite the philanthropist where benefit-of-the-doubt grants are concerned. Amanda’s declaration caused me to reconsider my munificence.

I said, “You have a friend?” I tried to make the four simple words sound Swiss. Neutral. I probably didn’t succeed. I find skepticism to be one of those infiltrates that is most difficult for me to couch.

Amanda’s response was to flatten her lips into a thin line that barely curled up at each end, in the most subdued of acknowledging smiles. She raised her eyebrows, which served to widen her expressive eyes. “I know, right? I get no points for originality. I do not for a second imagine that I’m the first client to use that line here.”

“No,” I said, in lieu of the more pejorative
hardly
. Parsimony seemed like a reasonable alternative to incredulity, or to my instinctive inclination toward sarcasm.

Parsimony was more Swiss.

Amanda continued. “Were I sitting in your chair, my tendency might be . . . I don’t know . . . to be skeptical, or even disbelieving, if I heard those words about a friend from someone sitting where I am sitting.”

What make therapy an art are the choice points. A simple reflection—
You’re concerned that I might be disbelieving?
—was one option. A slightly confrontational backhand volley—
How would you choose for me to respond?
—was another. The therapeutic default option, silence, was always available.

In the earliest moments of a psychotherapeutic encounter, the most delicate things in the room are rarely content related. The fragility exists in the nascent relationship—the one, real or imagined, that is beginning to develop between psychotherapist and patient. The supposed facts are typically much less loaded with meaning than are the soft edges and gray borders around them that are about who stated the facts, how they were stated, who heard them, how they were heard, and with what expectations the speaker spoke the words, or the listener listened to them.

In shrink terms those fragile things, those poignant things—the carpet of eggshells on which the first steps of the therapeutic dance take place—are the stuff of process.

At the beginning the air in the consultation room—the process air—is either infused with the scent of trust or it is tainted with the tincture of its bitter cousin, mistrust. Amanda may or may not have recognized trust as one of the components of our shared miasma, but she and I had already begun exploring trust—she of me, me of her.

My trust of her? I assumed some dissembling, intentional or not. Amanda had no reason to trust me. Blind trust was as illustrative of process as was a refusal to consider trust.

“Tell me,” I said, “about your concerns for your friend.” I was taking her at her word that her concern for her friend was real, and worthy of our time. She would either accept that as sincere, or she would not.

Amanda folded her hands, one over the other, on her lap. Only her pinkies, each adorned with a ring, intertwined. One ring appeared to be gold, the other a silver-toned metal. A ring on a ring finger, or the shadow of one recently removed, might have portended a story about a romantic relationship, a tale of satisfaction or failure, of safety, or loss.

The null set, the absence of that ring, told me little.

“I am worried about him,” she said. “My friend.” She shifted her shoulders back and forth. “He is someone I work . . . with. A successful man. A proud man. Although he is skillful and imaginative in his work, he is unaccustomed to certain personal challenges. Challenges that for most of us might be considered parochial. Those challenges upset his equilibrium. There are times I am not even sure he is aware he is off balance.”

I was painting by the numbers on Amanda’s portrait, assigning values and finding just the right hues to provide an accurate representation of her poise, and her presentation, and her manner, and her vocabulary, and her affect, and her mood. I made judgments about her intelligence—she had used the words parochial and equilibrium while describing her friend—and her relatedness, which seemed comfortable.

I was holding in abeyance other judgments. About her honesty. If we were indeed speaking about her friend, the proud man, I wondered whether we were discussing him so that she could seek help for him in his stead, or whether the focus on him was the most palatable way she’d found to begin the process of seeking indirect help for herself.

I wondered, too, if Amanda knew the answer to that question.

It was another early choice point for me. With a pointed comment or a question, I could have focused her on her friend, or on herself. She had revealed a working relationship without hinting at what either of them did for a living.

At the beginning of treatment, my question list was always much longer than my answer list. I knew the discrepancy would narrow if I avoided the temptation to throw myself in Amanda’s path. I made the smallest of leaps from the parsed information she had revealed thus far. I said, “Something is challenging your friend’s equilibrium?”

She said, “He has suffered losses recently. For him, they are difficult.”

Loss is familiar clinical territory. A spouse, divorce or death. A parent, a friend. A child.
God.
A home. Lately, a job. Grief is one of humanity’s great equalizers. I made another small, intentional leap as I reflected, “He has suffered a loss of someone close to him? That kind of loss?”

I watched some tautness appear in her mandibles. I suspected that I had leapt too far, or in the wrong direction, or perhaps just too soon.

“No,” she said. But her head got caught in the gray area between a nod and a shake. “Money. His business. His money is his business, which is his life.”

At this stage of therapy, I wasn’t required to be right. But I couldn’t afford to be consistently wrong. Amanda’s sense of the value of the relationship between therapist and patient would be correlated with her perception of my competence.

Amanda said, “I may minimize his talents, they are considerable, but at the end of the day my friend is an investor, but also a gambler. His bets are on talent, on visionaries. On long shots.” She closed her eyes momentarily as she lowered her chin to one side. “He’s had a bad couple of years. The industry has retrenched. The economy? Right? My friend chose to invest his way out of trouble. Some of his moves were risky, even for him. They don’t look good now. Many may prove to be complete losses. If that is true, he will take clients, partners, down with him.”

In a town like Boulder, psychotherapists develop referral patterns. Subgroups of patients exist in odd employment or lifestyle clusters. One of my idiosyncratic clusters was composed of school administrators; in my caseload I was seeing three different assistant principals. Another cluster consisted of aerospace engineers. All but one worked across town at Ball Aerospace.

Another one of my clinical microworlds involved inhabitants of the esoteric world of VC. Venture capital. The VC cluster in my practice formed in a typical fashion. By chance, I treated an initial venture capitalist, a woman, who eventually referred another, a man. He referred two more colleagues, who each eventually referred a friend. A few members of the cohort stayed in therapy with me for a while. Others lasted only a session or two.

Before long, though, I had a view through small windows into a subculture of a subset of Boulder’s moneyed class; they were men, and a few women, who provided seed financing for entrepreneurial endeavors using some combination of their own money and that of clients, friends, or family. Some functioned as scouts. Some as nurturers and mentors. Some were described by others as vultures.

The knowledge I acquired about the Boulder VC community from my clinical work complemented the knowledge I already possessed because Diane’s husband, Raoul, was the unofficial dean of Boulder’s tech VC group. During a dinner out with Lauren and me, Diane had referred to him as “Boulder’s VC godfather.” That night her indiscretion had earned Diane a pronounced frown from her husband.

I eased Amanda back to her narrative. “You are worried about your friend because of his financial losses?”

“He is unaccustomed to . . . failure. People recognized signs of reaching even before the latest misplays. I suspect few know how badly he is bleeding.

“He is flying out of town frequently. He wants others to think he has his eye on something they’re unaware of, that he is doing due diligence on something they missed. Some of his colleagues may buy the charade—VC is as much about insecurity as it is about vision. But he is not scouting. He is praying for a score from a handful of still-viable bets that remain on the table. To stay afloat, he’s been selling tranches of good positions he shouldn’t sell. I am concerned that he has convinced himself that one big play he is contemplating will be the one that will save him.”

I waited.

“It won’t,” Amanda said. “It’s battery technology. Innovative, but vulnerable to competitors. Other start-ups are doing similar things with more secure financing and less restless talent. The patent barriers aren’t insurmountable.”

I allowed some of my incredulity to surface. I asked, “You came to see me because you’re concerned about your friend losing money?”

She crossed her left leg over her right and tugged her dress to the top of her knees. “No,” she said. “I came to see you because I am concerned he is going to kill himself.”

In the early stages of psychotherapy new patients tend to discuss the issue of suicide, if at all, in euphemisms. Amanda earned points for frankness.

I had concrete questions to ask about her suspicions so that I could make a judgment about the risk of her friend attempting to take his own life, but they could wait. It was more important for me to see what step Amanda would take next. I said, “Go on.”

“I am fond of him. I don’t want him to . . . hurt himself.”

Fair enough.
At moments in therapy when truth finds focus, especially when it’s associated with some meaningful application of insight, I usually feel a slight change in my clinical muscles. It starts with an initial lift—akin to the buoyancy I would feel as a young surfer the instant I knew I was in a wave, or as a young skier when I was able to balance my weight above my bindings and start to float in knee-deep powder.

I wasn’t feeling that lift with Amanda. I wasn’t convinced that her friend’s vulnerability was the reason she was in my office. But my curiosity was piqued
. If a friend at risk of suicide isn’t your motivation, what is?

I said, “How do you hope I can be of help with that?”

She seemed taken aback by my question. Her chin actually snapped to one side as though she were pulling her face out of the way of a slap. “That’s your job,” she said. Her tone edged perilously near condescension, as though I were her plumber and she was reprimanding me for wondering aloud what I was supposed to do about her clogged drain.

Or, more to the point, her neighbor’s clogged drain.

In a voice leveled to a micro-millimeter of flat, I said, “It’s not my job.”

I paused while her incredulity adjusted to room temperature. Once her disbelief had tempered, I asked, “Is it your job?”

“You are a psychologist. Trust me. He is at serious risk.” Amanda’s reply ignored my question—direct, and poignant with confrontation as it was—with ease. In case I had further misconceptions about my responsibilities, she clarified her perception of my duties. She said, “Your job is to help him.”

“I don’t think so,” I said. I followed the words with a pause to allow yet another burst of her incredulity—sincere or not—time to ripen. “My job is to help you.”

Her expression—I was far from confident in my ability to read it—progressed from incredulity to something akin to perplexity. She said, “Then help me help him.”

“My earlier question—does it feel to you that it is your responsibility to keep your friend from attempting to take his life?”

Her eyes said,
Of course it does.
Her words? “I need your expertise. I can’t—I need—I don’t know how to get him to recognize that he needs . . .”

I allowed time for her to finish her thought before I said, “You believe it is your responsibility?” She nodded. “My experience is that psychotherapy by proxy can be a frustrating endeavor. Not only for the identified patient. But also for the intermediary. It usually proves much less salutary than the intermediary hopes.”

“That’s me? I am the intermediary?”

“I don’t mean to be callous—I can feel your compassion—but keeping him alive is not something you can do.” Light caught a tear on the surface of her left eye.

“But,” she said meekly, “who else?”

The first progress in her therapy may have been reflected in the meekness of Amanda’s defiance.

I said, “Please tell me about your concerns about your friend attempting suicide.”

She said, “You will help him?”

I allowed time to pass before I said, “I remain interested in how I can help you.”

“You will help me . . . help him?”

“I am here to help
you
.”

Amanda looked down at her lap. “I am so confused,” she said.

“That’s not a bad thing,” I said. I watched that tear escape. She caught it on the tip of her finger before it had traveled south even an inch. She touched the fingertip to her tongue. I asked, “Has your friend spoken of hurting himself?”

She looked away before she shook her head. “No.” She raised a shoulder. “I keep orchids for him—long story—but he cares for them himself. We both know he uses the orchids as an excuse to visit. I find it sweet. But neglecting them? And he is neglecting them. I can’t comprehend it.”

Amanda might have picked up on a most poignant tell. Or not.

“Has he made any threats? Overt, or vague?” I asked.

“The day I called you? He left his briefcase open. There was a gun in it. I didn’t know he had a gun.”

Oh.
The gun revealed many possible things. Amanda’s friend might indeed have reached a determination about how he preferred to take his own life. The weapon could reveal that suicidal planning was well under way, or even complete. It certainly revealed, in a faint whiff of good news, that some small part of Amanda’s friend might have been willing to leave clues that might raise alarm. Many people intent on killing themselves fail to give friends or loved ones any opportunity to intervene.