I made the necessary calls and we drove to Jay Street together around eight-thirty the next morning. Susan's health aide, Crystal, answered the door and ambushed me by greeting Sam as though they were old friends, even giving him a little peck on the cheek. She stepped out onto the porch wearing a cable-knit sweater. She was carrying a macramé bag over her shoulder that I guessed functioned as her purse.
To Sam, she said, "An hour, you think?"
He replied, "That should be plenty of time. It's enough for you?"
"If there's not too bad a line over there, it should be great for me. You're an angel, Detective, an angel." She glanced back over her shoulder. "I imagine she'll be waking up soon enough. Her food's in the fridge all ready to go."
As Crystal meandered down the walk toward the street, Sam explained, "She needs to get her driver's license renewed. I told her we'd keep an eye on things here for an hour or so."
"You two are tight?"
"We had a beer last night. She likes hockey, actually knows what she's talking about. I told her if this works out I might be able to get her some Avs tickets. She's from Wisconsin, but Crystal's okay."
I'd never understood the nature of the relationship between the residents of Wisconsin and Minnesota, but decided not to pursue an explanation at that moment. "If what works out? What did she tell you?"
I thought he almost grinned as he said, "You'll see."
I followed Sam inside the Peterson home and watched as he squatted down and opened the housing on the underside of the electric lift that Susan used to get up and down the stairs. I was instantly suspicious-if Susan was upstairs sleeping, as Crystal had just implied, the chair should have been at the top of the stairs, not the bottom. Sam flicked a red switch before he shut the cover back tight onto the housing.
A large oval piece of pottery sat smack in the middle of the third step on the staircase. Sam touched it to make sure it wasn't balanced too precariously. He whispered, "Recognize it? This is from Royal's collection downstairs. With that hole in it, though, I don't know what you'd actually use it for, but it's kind of nice to look at."
I assumed he wasn't planning on telling me what he was up to, so, sotto voce, I asked, "You turned the lift off?"
He nodded. "Crystal promised to leave some coffee and things for us. Come on."
We walked into the kitchen. Sam poured us each a mug of coffee and dragged a plate of muffins across the table so that it was smack in front of him. I smelled apples and spice. Morning light drenched the kitchen and from our perch on the sloping foothills of the Front Range the budding leaves on the trees in the Boulder Valley gave the beautiful view a lime-green aura.
I could have pressed him to divulge his strategy, but it would have been futile. Sam was directing this play and act two would come after act one. That was the natural order of things. Sam liked natural order.
After ten minutes or so talking about our kids and hockey, Sam said, without segue, "Lucy says that Royal told her that he was going to leave Susan. Was thinking about putting her in a nursing home. Did you know that? He had some insurance or something that would help pay."
"Lucy told me the same thing, Sam. Just yesterday." I didn't tell Sam what else Lucy had told me the day before.
He nodded as though he knew exactly what Lucy had revealed to me. But I knew he didn't know. Lucy would never tell Sam what she'd told me on Flagstaff Mountain.
Never.
With the fat edge of his hand, Sam scraped muffin crumbs into a little pile in front of him and then pressed them into a tiny orb that he tossed into his mouth. He said, "Even though I really shouldn't be here, I can't sit and wait around for this investigation to go on any longer. I don't ever want to know what the lab says about the stain on the sheet, you know? Not today, not tomorrow." He began to break apart another muffin. "Remember a cop named Manes? Brian Manes?"
I shook my head.
"Couple of years back, he was accused of coercing women to have sex with him on traffic stops?"
"I remember now."
"He went to my church. Has a kid Simon's age. He coached the kids' soccer team. His wife is a sweetheart. And, until the first woman filed a complaint against him, he had a perfect record as a cop."
I sensed where he was going. "Sometimes you just can't see what's going on below the surface with people, can you?"
"I could never figure out why, what was going on in his head, how he could risk so much for so little."
Were we talking about Brian Manes or were we talking about Lucy? I decided Sam didn't really want me to know for sure. "Sometimes people don't even recognize what they're doing, let alone why they're doing it."
"That's what keeps you in business? The fact that people fuck up their lives and don't have a clue what the hell they were doing or why the hell they were doing it?"
"What do they say, Sam? Denial's not a river in Egypt."
Sam adjusted his ample weight on the chair. He didn't move any of the crumbled muffin pieces toward his mouth. "Anyway, I don't want to know how the stain on the sheet got there. Not a bit. And I don't really want anybody else to know, either." He forced his chin forward. "I suspect there's a good possibility that it wouldn't be good news for Lucy. All in all, I'd rather not confront that possibility."
Sam was wrapping himself in his denial as though he were bundling up in a parka to go out in a blizzard. I wondered if the gesture was intended to be an ironic charade on his part. I said, "I can understand that, Sam. But remember, Brian Manes abused his office. If Lucy screwed anything up, it was only her personal life."
"That's what I tell myself, too, that everybody has dirty laundry." He smiled at the inadvertent allusion. "But there's something else," he said. "Something that doesn't really have to do with my deep level of disappointment in my fellow man. I've had trouble with the whole laundry thing right from the beginning. Not the sheet with the stain on it so much. That wakes me up in the middle of the night, sure, but that's not what I mean. I mean the laundry that was already in the dryer. You may remember that the first officer in the house heard the dryer running when she went in. I asked Lucy about it. She says that Royal was as likely to do a load of laundry as he was to change the oil on the space shuttle. So I wondered who it was who put that load in the dryer."
"It wasn't Lucy?"
"She says not."
The intercom erupted across the room, Susan's voice emerging from the speaker. I found the sound irritating, like the grainy feeling in my sinuses when I'm warding off a sneeze.
She said, "Crystal, I'm awake. I'm ready anytime."
To me, Sam whispered, "Crystal says that despite how it appears, Susan's strong enough to do laundry. So I'm doing a little experiment. You know me, I like to be empirical."
I wondered how Sam was planning on tricking Susan into doing a load of whites. But I didn't say anything. Sam had asked for an hour or two. I had time.
A minute later, after the plumbing announced the flush of a toilet, Susan repeated her entreaty to Crystal, her voice a decibel or two higher.
Sam asked me if I wanted more coffee.
I didn't.
Susan's patience was diminishing. When she called for Crystal again, she sounded closer. She seemed to be screaming down from the top of the stairs, apparently suspicious that the problem she was experiencing might be with the intercom and not with her health aide.
She finished her little tirade with, "I can smell the coffee down there, Crystal, damn it."
Sam raised his index finger to his lips to keep me silent. Seconds later we could hear Susan fumbling with the switch that, had Sam not disabled it, would have called the seat of the lift from the bottom of the stairs to the top. Susan cursed at the machinery when it didn't budge.