Warning Signs

It took me only two of the remaining three floors to decide that there weren't very many ways for Lucy Ta

In fact, I could only think of one. I wasted a moment considering whether I was being unimaginative.

Outside the building on the Fourteenth Street sidewalk, Lauren asked, "Are you parked nearby?"

"Not too far, over on Walnut. Is your car ready to be picked up?" Her car was in the shop.

She shook her head. "No, they're still waiting for that thing to be delivered. Maybe tomorrow, maybe not." She checked her watch and said, "Let's walk up the Mall for a block or two and circle back to your car. We have time."

The "thing" was a transmission gasket. I took her briefcase and hung it over my shoulder. We held hands. As we turned the corner onto Pearl Street, I said, "Vaginal secretions?"

"Yeah, sorry to say. Apparently the police think they found the whole damn wet spot."

"Semen?"

"No."

"Really?"

"Think condom," she said.

"Oh," I said, feeling stupid. "Did they find that?"

"No."

Wispy clouds hung like smoke above the foothills of the Front Range. The sun was already invisible from our near vantage, though the sky above our heads was still bright. The cloud pattern promised a great finale to sunset, but I knew we wouldn't be home in time to catch it.

Lauren said, "It's too soon to know for sure. But that's the general direction that this is heading. Damned by a wet spot."

While I considered the timelessness of Macbeth, we crossed Thirteenth and moved slowly toward Broadway.

I stated the obvious. "So Lucy and Royal were having an affair?"

"Lucy won't talk about it. She continues to maintain that the details of her relationship to Royal will only serve to solidify the notion that she had a motive to kill him."

I tried to think like a prosecutor. It was not a natural act. "The police think they have means-her fingerprints are on the pottery. They think they have opportunity-a witness places her on the scene. And Lucy basically admits that she had motive. This doesn't look great for your client."

"Tell me about it."

"Lucy was having an affair with Roy and she'd decided to break up with him?" I asked. "Is that what she's saying?"

"She's not saying. But that's what I'm guessing. She's recently engaged, you know?"

"I know, she told me. But the engagement predates the wet spot by a couple of weeks. What's your theory of what happened? One last time with Royal? A good-bye fuck?"

She shook her head. "Nothing fits particularly well, I admit it. Pretty night, isn't it?"

"Lovely. Assume you're right, babe. How do things develop that night so that she ends up whacking him on the head with a lamp?"

"Like I said, nothing fits well."

"Self-defense?"

"Cozy and I would love self-defense. Lucy isn't offering, though. She maintains she had nothing to do with Royal's murder."

"What about Lucy's fiancé? If he found out about the affair, he'd have a motive, too, wouldn't he?"

"We're there already. Cozy's investigator has begun looking into that for us, though Lucy doesn't even know we have an investigator looking at him. I'm sure she'd go nuts if she knew what we were doing."

"And the bomb? What about the bomb? What's the theory as to why Lucy would want to blow up the Peterson house?"

"The bomb is our salvation. It's the only thing keeping Lucy out of jail right now. They can't tie her to it. If they found a molecule of evidence that put Lucy and that bomb in the same room, she'd be screwed."

I was amazed at how quickly my wife, a lifelong prosecutor, had adopted the vernacular of a defense attorney. People who were her colleagues days before were now "they."

At Broadway, we turned around and traced our steps back down the Mall toward the car. "How do you and Cozy know about the wet spot? There's no required discovery yet, is there? Lucy hasn't been charged."

"No formal discovery, no." She gave my hand a squeeze. "Let's just say that the politics in the DA's office right now are working to our advantage. Everyone's posturing to take Royal's place. Everyone's scrambling to keep this thing from going to a special prosecutor. Keeping us informed is part of… someone's strategy."

"Who's feeding you? Mitchell? Elliot? I bet it's not Nora."

She said, "No, of course it's not Nora. And that's all I'm telling you."

On the way home from downtown I slowed to a stop at a red light at the corner of Broadway and University by the Hill. As if to prove to me that Boulder really is a small town, Naomi Bigg pulled up in the lane next to us driving a filthy BMW sedan. She was wearing sunglasses and smoking a cigarette. I don't think she saw me and I said nothing to Lauren about her presence next to us.

Just before the light changed to green, Naomi lowered her window about six inches, took a final deep drag on her cigarette, and tossed the still-lit butt onto the road between our cars.

I didn't get it.

People like Naomi, someone who I suspected wouldn't consider tossing a candy wrapper or a pop can onto the street, thought nothing of discarding cigarette butt after cigarette butt onto public sidewalks and thoroughfares.

Was there some statute I didn't know about that exempted cigarette butts from littering concerns? I suspected that what was more likely was that this was smokers' revenge for society's continuing anticigarette bias.

I also suspected that no matter how successful psychotherapy was, Naomi would still be littering her cigarette butts when we were done.

Later Monday evening I ran into Adrie

"Hey," she said as I stood in the open doorway. She spoke to me without looking up from the box in which she was rooting around. "You should keep Anvil away from the fields for the foreseeable future. The momma fox just had some new kits, everybody in the family looks hungry, and your poodle, such as he is, looks suspiciously like lunch."

"I know about the kits. They're cute. And Anvil's tough."

She laughed. "Right, and I'm gorgeous." She mumbled a profanity that I think was intended for the box she was trying to open, not for me, before she addressed me again. "I ever tell you that I have a patient who's going through a sex change?"

I raised my eyebrows.

"No, I'm not doing the operation, if that's what you're thinking. Somebody else is actually responsible for remodeling the plumbing."

"Your patient's a guy?" I asked to buy time. The whole topic of sexual transformation made me uncomfortable. Not philosophically, surgically.

"Yeah. You interested?"

"Interested? You mean-"

"Not in trying it, doofus. In helping. You know, professionally. These guys all need psychotherapy. It's part of the protocol. It's required."

"I don't know, Adrie

"What?"

"Has he, um-"

"You want to know if the hose is still on the fire truck?"

I laughed.

She laughed, too, and returned to rooting in the boxes. She said, "Don't worry, I was just pimping you. I wouldn't send this guy to you. It would make you both crazier than you already are."