It was my first trip to Omaha, ever. Given that it was the Sunday of Thanksgiving weekend and given that I was flying standby, I felt lucky to get there at all.
A taxi took me to Sam, who was flat on his back in the University of Nebraska Medical Center. A Puerto Rican nurse named Yashira was being much nicer to him than he deserved. She was refusing to even try to find his “lost” car keys unless he arranged for somebody to drive him back to Colorado.
The somebody was me.
“It felt just like the heart attack. Maybe worse.”
“That’s what I’ve heard.”
The day before, around lunchtime, Sam had started passing a gallstone he didn’t even know he possessed and had driven himself to the emergency room in Omaha thinking he was having another MI. Two hours of agony in the ER provided enough time for the stone to move on, a one-night stay in the hospital for observation convinced the docs that Sam’s heart was stable, and my presence in Nebraska motivated Yashira to search a little bit harder for his missing car keys.
While I was still trying to find my way out of Omaha, I summed up the obvious. “Kidney stones, gallstones, and heart disease. You’re a picture of health, my friend.”
“Stress might have something to do with it,” he said.
“You think?” I replied.
“That, and the fact I’m fat. Though I might have lost a few pounds. Can you tell?”
Before I found the westbound entrance to I-80, we’d talked a little about Sam’s day-after-Thanksgiving trip up to Minnesota, and I’d answered all his questions about Lauren’s health and the long-term efficacy of Emily’s paw umbrella. The Gibbs and Sterling Storey saga was a little more complicated, though; covering that ground took us almost all the way to Lincoln.
Sterling’s story didn’t surprise Sam. I’d started, of course, at the river in Georgia with Sterling’s contention that he was washed downstream maybe a quarter of a mile before he pulled himself out.
“The Ochlockonee,” Sam had said. “Tell me something. Did he really go down there to help that woman in the minivan?”
“He says he did, but who knows? I don’t think Sterling exactly found God over the past week, Sam. He’s still the same guy he was when he was flying around the country having extramarital sex with strange women.”
“Not just extramarital: recreational. Hell, not just recreational: extreme.”
“Yeah?” I was curious but decided to proceed without the details. “Anyway, an old man with a semi full of chickens gave Sterling a ride as far as Montgomery. He had enough cash with him to make his way back to Colorado to talk to Gibbs.”
“He knew she was setting him up?”
“By then, yes. She basically told him when he was in Tallahassee. He says Gibbs is smart, and he figured she’d done a great job of pinning the murders on him. He came back to Boulder to talk with her, try to straighten things out, see if he could get her to admit what she’d done before your colleagues found him. When he couldn’t find her, he came by my office to give me his side of the story, hoping I could help influence her to give herself up. Then he was going to see a lawyer on Friday, turn himself in, and try to get her picked up. That was his plan, anyway. What a mess.”
“Did he know?” Sam asked. “What she’d been doing?”
“He says he didn’t. In fact, with the exception of Louise-the woman in California-he didn’t even know that any of the women he’d… you know, had these things with… were dead. When the women recontacted him to arrange a follow-up sexual encounter, Gibbs took the message. She was always the liaison anyway. That was her role.”
“Her role?”
“She set everything up for him with the other women. And then she watched. She liked to watch.”
Sam sighed deeply, as though he were trying to get something toxic out of his lungs. “She watched? She told you this?”
“I can’t tell you what she told me. What I’m able to talk about I got from Sterling.”
“There’s something I don’t understand,” Sam said. “After all these years, why did this bust open now?”
“After their move back to Boulder a few months ago, Sterling decided he didn’t want to be married to Gibbs anymore.”
“Ah,” Sam said. “So she was going to lose him anyway. All her efforts at eliminating the competition were for naught.”
“Exactly. She was determined to make sure she didn’t lose him to another woman, though.”
“What was your part?” Sam asked me. “Why’d she bring you in?”
“I’ve been wondering about that. Clinically, I can’t comment. But criminally? I think she needed somebody to help her play the battered wife card. She figured I’d do it.” I sighed. “She figured right. And she wanted someone she could tell things to, somebody who couldn’t tell the cops. And let’s face it, indirectly she used me to get you involved.”
“She needed a channel to the police. I obliged. Gibbs fooled you about where she was the whole time, too, didn’t she?”
“She fooled me about a lot of things, Sam. I was in a better position than anybody to figure out what she was up to, and I didn’t see this coming. I thought she was the victim in that relationship. I was blind to it.”
“Me too,” he said. “She’s good at smoke screens, Gibbs is. She’s so pretty, that’s part of it.” From Sam that constituted quite a confession. I waited, but he didn’t elaborate. He repeated his earlier question. “But she fooled you about where she was?”
“Yeah, I thought she was in Vail.”
“That’s what she told me. You know something? Before cell phones? She never could have pulled it off. Flying to the Midwest while we thought she was in the Colorado mountains? Used to be a phone number meant a place. Doesn’t anymore. Doesn’t mean shit.”
Sam seemed to need a moment to lament some loss of societal innocence. After a mile or so of silence I filled him in on what had really happened with the listening device in my office.
“So it was the lawyer who did it?” was Sam’s reply to my story, as though he’d known it all along.
“Yeah. With his bug in place he’d overheard this other patient of mine-he’s a really vulnerable guy-and then he talked him into doing some of the dirty work, but it was the lawyer who planted the bug and set it all up. He wanted to get even with Lauren for something that happened in court last summer. Figured he had a foolproof scheme.”
“You turn him in?”
“I gave it all to Lucy. She’s been great. I have some fences to mend with my patients, but…”
“You won’t tell me the lawyer’s name, but I’ll see it in the paper, right?”
“Something like that.”
“Will I be surprised?”
I thought about that for a moment. “No, not really.”
“The other guy, the vulnerable one-how’s he?”
I’d visited Craig in the hospital the day before. I said, “He’s not doing too well.”
“I’m sorry.”
He sounded sorry. It made me think about the waitress in Gold Hill, the one whose hand Sam had been holding since her sexual assault in the back of the van on the way to the frat house on the Hill. Maybe Sam was thinking about her, too.
We made it all the way across Nebraska-it’s a wide state-and were paralleling the Platte River on the stretch of Interstate 76 between Ogallala, Nebraska, and Julesburg, Colorado, before we got around to talking about Sherry. The conversation was a little cryptic at first.
“You want to talk about Sherry?” I asked.
“No,” Sam said. “Not really.”
That was the first installment in its entirety.
A hundred and twenty-five miles or so later I cut off I-76 at Hudson for the final westward push into Boulder. I could’ve spent the whole drive beating my head against the wall of Sam’s stubbornness, but all I would have learned is how good it felt when I stopped.
Sam said, “In case you’re wondering, I don’t believe that talking helps.”
I hadn’t been wondering. But I was eager to hear his thoughts on the matter. “Yeah?”
“Sherry thinks talking about things makes them better. Round and round we go. Me? I don’t think so. Words don’t heal. Time? Maybe. Words? No.”
I thought he was making a veiled editorial comment on my chosen profession, but rather than taking the bait, I waited to see where he’d go next.
I had to wait a while-about twenty miles-until we crossed I-25 at Dacono. We were getting close to home.
Sam said, “Sherry and I are done. I’m moving out.”
“You are?” I didn’t have any trouble keeping the surprise out of my voice.
“Yeah. She’s been seeing somebody.”
“She has?” This time my voice was nothing but surprise.
“I’ve known about it. The affair. A guy came in to buy flowers for his wife, that’s how she met him. He’s a psych professor at the university. I followed him to work one day, that’s how I know.”
He’d emphasized the guy’s profession, as though he wanted to spoil the air with the innuendo that the field of psychology had something to do with his problems. I wondered if I knew the man responsible for making Sam a cuckold. I hoped not.
“Did she know you knew?” I asked.
“No. I thought it was a thing. That it would pass. I still think it will pass. The affair’s not the reason the marriage is over.”
“What is?”
“Ask her? I’m a difficult guy. Ask me? I put up with a lot. Too much. She’d probably say the same, of course. That she put up with a lot from me. But I put up with a ton from her over the last few years. I did.”
I recalled the tense visits I’d witnessed in the hospital. “What are you talking about? Criticism? What?”
His answer took a moment to compose. “There’s a point where criticism stops and something else starts. Something more serious. More demeaning, damaging, you know? Somewhere near there was… us.”
“Are you talking about… abuse, Sam? Sherry… did what?”
“Next topic, Alan. I said what I’m going to say.”
Sometimes friendship means inquisitiveness, sometimes it means silent respect. I had a thousand questions. I asked none of them.
But Sam answered one that wasn’t even on my list. “I almost had an affair, too. Over Thanksgiving.”
I quickly catalogued the likely suspects. “Detective Reynoso?”
“Turns out we get along.”
I glanced over at him. I was checking to see if he was joking. He wasn’t. “Why didn’t you?”
“Hadn’t talked to Sherry yet. But… I’ve talked to her now, so who knows? California’s not that far away. I like the beach.”
I didn’t know Sam had ever seen a beach.
“And you like Carmen?”
“Yeah, I do. Don’t know how much that means. I loved Sherry. What good did it do?”
I hit the brakes to avoid running up on an old primer-covered Dodge truck that was pulling a long trailer piled high with hay.
“I’m sorry, Sam. About Sherry.”
“Ever feel like you’re playing the same music you were playing as a kid? When girls first became real? Where women are concerned, I don’t know that I’ve progressed much in thirty years.”
Sam’s words transported me back to Teri Reginelli and¡Dios mío, hay un hacha en mi cabeza!I knew that the Gibbs Storeys of the world were still capable of capturing my feet in the quicksand of my adolescence, but I desperately wanted to believe that I had developed the maturity to pull myself back out. Before I had a chance to get lost any further in that old swamp, Sam yanked me back to the present.
“You know what? Sherry and me? We had a good thing. And then one day we didn’t. It’s been bad now almost as long as it was good.”
“Simon?”
“We’ll do okay with him. We will. We’re not idiots.”
“You want to run anything by me about his reaction to all this, I’m happy to listen.”
“Yeah, thanks. If the phone doesn’t ring, that’s me.”
I laughed.
“Marriage is a weird thing. Gibbs and Sterling-what was that? All the screwing around they did. And Holly Malone? The good Catholic girl from South Bend? Her and her husband? What were they up to with their shenanigans? You and Lauren seem like you’re rock solid, but I know you’re not. God only knows what sexual perversity the two of you are into.”
I opened my mouth.
He held up his hand. “God knows, Alan-I don’t want to.”
The car lurched and hopped as we crossed two sets of railroad tracks. “You’re allowed to hit the brakes, you know, before you hit the bumps,” Sam said.
Metaphor? With Sam, I could never be quite sure. “I’ll remember that,” I said.
“I know you’re not,” he repeated. “Rock solid, I mean.”
“It’s a challenge, Sam. For us, for everybody.”
“I’m glad we agree on that. Because I don’t really want to talk about it after this.”
I said I was sorry again about him and Sherry. He pretended to ignore it.
He said, “You see the papers? They found that woman who shut down DIA. She’s from Boulder. Figures. I wouldn’t want to be her.”
Thanks to a brilliant moon the mountains were looming large against the night sky. The delta shapes of the Flatirons remained indistinct. It didn’t matter. I could feel Boulder long before I could see it.