Mental note: She said “feel,” not “felt.”
The slope Gibbs was on suddenly changed. I experienced it as a physical sensation. Her momentum slowed as the gravitational forces eased. She pulled into herself, squeezing her biceps against her upper body. The effect was to force her breasts together, accentuating her previously modest cleavage.
Was that her intent? And was it conscious or unconscious? That was my call to make. It was why I was paid the big bucks.
But I didn’t know.
“We had sex the first time a week later, on New Year’s Eve,” she said. “We were at a party, at a high-rise apartment on Wilshire Boulevard. You know, in L.A.? Some friends of his lived there. We ended up doing it on the balcony. The night wasn’t that different from the party in St. Tropez. People were having sex all over the place. I could see another couple going at it in the bedroom next door while we were doing it outside.”
She flicked a glance at me. If she could have read my mind, she would have known that I was musing that she and I had certainly spent our youths being invited to different parties.
What was she hoping? That I’d find her tale titillating? Scandalous? Mundane? I couldn’t guess. I didn’t like that I couldn’t guess.
“That was the first time he said ‘catch me.’ ”
“ ‘Catch me’?” I said.
“Yes,” she said. “ ‘Catch me.’ He said it again last night. It brought me back, reminded me.”
I adopted a studied silence, waiting, wondering where Gibbs was going to go with her story of erotic adventure. It was clear that she wanted me to know that she’d made love to her husband the night before.
Was that it? Was that all?
What did thecatch mestory mean?
She matched my quiet. I set my sensors for defiance but wasn’t sure exactly what I was detecting.
During the ensuing interim of silence I had a revelation-a slap-across-the-face kind of revelation.
My insight permitted me-hell, it compelled me-to finally ask the question I should have asked three days before, when Gibbs had first waltzed into my office and revealed that she believed her husband, Sterling, was a killer.
“Why did you come to see me, Gibbs?”
“What do you mean? We had an appointment.”
My question had ambushed her, and her reply was more concrete than an interstate highway.
“Not this morning. I’m wondering why you came back into therapy with me.”
She blinked twice in rapid succession. She parted her lips. But she didn’t respond.
Finally I felt I knew something. Suddenly the therapy wasn’t as amorphous as it had been.
What is it that I know?
I knew I had asked the right question. It wasn’t much, but at that moment it felt pretty darn good.
So why had she come to see me?
SEVENTEEN
Twenty long seconds passed.
“I don’t know what you mean. Why did I come to see you? I need your help to… get the situation with Sterling taken care of.”
“Really?” I said. Her defenses had stiffened and become awkward as she tried to parry my thrust. My compassion for her swelled. With my simple question I was trying to sound dubious. It wasn’t too difficult.
She dissembled. “What else could it be?” Gibbs asked. “I can’t live with-what he’s done. What else could it be?”
A tough question, one I was not prepared to answer.
I knew she wasn’t, either.
I asked myself another tough question:Well, Doctor, if this isn’t all about sex and murder, what is it about?
Something else.
Deep in my gut I believed that Gibbs Storey was distracting me. First with her tale of murder. Then with the suggestion of serial murder. And now with sex in St. Tropez. I had to give her credit. As distractions, those were good hooks. Major league hooks. And yet I’d taken the bait for only three days.
Not too bad. For me, anyway. Skilled sociopaths had been known to suck me in and drag me along in their off-Broadway dramatics for months at a time. Diane liked to say that when sociopaths had me for lunch, they didn’t spit out the bones until bedtime.
Diagnostically I didn’t think Gibbs was a sociopath, but her diversion ammunition was as high quality as anything I’d run across recently.
The fact that I thought Gibbs was setting up psychological screens with me didn’t mean I no longer believed her contention that Sterling was a murderer. And it didn’t mean I no longer believed her tale about the summer thing on the yacht in St. Tropez. Nor did it mean I felt her efforts to dissemble were consciously driven.
My conclusion about her psychological deke-that’s one of Sam’s hockey words-wasn’t even a hundred percent firm. From a therapy perspective, I wasn’t prepared to put it to her in the form of an interpretation, or a confrontation. But it was my new working hypothesis: Gibbs was talking about murder and sex as a way of distracting me-and yes, possibly herself-from something that felt even more psychologically dangerous to her.
So what was more dangerous than extramarital sex and a husband who was a murderer?
Her final words of the session surprised me. She said, “It’s as though you can read my mind.”
I left her thought there, hanging. The truth was, I couldn’t read minds.
On good days I could see a short ways into the dark, but that’s as far as it ever went.
EIGHTEEN
I should have predicted it, of course, but I wasn’t prepared for Sam’s vulnerability. He had always been the tough guy. But that day, despite his size, he seemed frail and more than a little frightened.
A few hours after my appointment with Gibbs, Sam and I walked from his home near Community Hospital over to North Boulder Park. He met me outside by the curb. He was carrying a pedometer that he didn’t understand how to use, and he futzed with it continually for a couple of blocks before he cursed at it and stuck it into the pocket of his sweatpants. It was apparent that he had about as much faith in the operation of the thing as he did in the diameter of the opening of his coronary arteries.
I was lugging lunch in a shopping bag that had originally been used to cart home a toaster from Peppercorn on the Mall. Lauren had packed hummus and roasted vegetable sandwiches on flatbread for Sam and me. Dessert was first-of-the-season Clementine tangerines. The beverage was caffeine-free green tea. I considered the homemade meal a special treat. Sam, I was afraid, would consider it evidence of all that was wrong with Boulder.
We did a lap around the park before we chose a place to sit and eat. Boulder was getting one of the latest extended Indian summer sojourns I could recall. The day was glorious.
Once we were seated, Sam didn’t jump to unwrap his sandwich. He had two fingers on the underside of his wrist and his eyes on his wristwatch. “I think I’m okay,” he said.
“That was convincing.”
He chuckled, just a little. What was more interesting to me was that he started downing the hummus and vegetables without complaining about the absence of animal flesh in his meal.
“That Laguna Beach detective has been in touch with the department,” he said between bites.
“What?”
“You know, that Carmen… something. The one you talked to. She reached out to us.”
“And?”
“And nothing. I asked Lucy if any of the detectives had heard anything, she told me somebody had gotten the call. Maybe Danny, she thought. But that’s all I know. I’m a little out of the loop.”
Lucy was Sam’s partner. I didn’t know any detectives named Danny.
“So you don’t know the next step for Detective Reynoso? If she’s coming out here?”
“I don’t know anything. I know less than nothing.” He took another bite of his sandwich. “You make this? It’s pretty good. There’s no cheese in it, right? I’m trying to cut back on cheese. I used to eat a lot of cheese. The French eat a lot of cheese; they’re not fat. I eat a lot of cheese, and I’m fat. I don’t get it. One of life’s mysteries, I guess. And how come so many of life’s mysteries involve the French? Why is that?”