Dying for Chocolate

Philip Miller. He had not felt any pain in his eyes for thirty minutes because he had had anesthetic in his eyes from the glaucoma test. He could see. He just couldn’t feel the damage that was being done to his eyes until it was too late.

I reached for the phone.

Tom Schulz was not at his desk. I left a message and finished preparing the dinner. The quiches puffed up to golden-brown perfection. Arch had two slices, Julian four. When we finished, General Farquhar surprised us with a new jar of macadamia-nut sauce for our pound cake.

Later, I tucked Arch in over his protestations that he was getting too old to be tucked in. I asked him if he remembered when he was six, telling me that losing your mind was when you forgot something.

He said, “Why? Did you forget to call the people for the magic party?” I had promised to do it as soon as I got home.

I apologized. I promised to get the list from tue Poe book and make the calls first thing in the morning. Kids could do things on the spur of the moment, couldn’t they?

He said, “I guess,” and gave me a brief hug.

I went into my room and waited for the house to get quiet. I was going to sneak out. I didn’t want anyone in the household to know my intentions.

Ten o’clock: Adele tap-stepped her way up to the master bedroom, ran water for twenty minutes, and then settled in after a therapeutic soak.

Eleven: The general’s muffled telephone voice stopped and the door to his study gently opened and closed. Then there was the sound of more water, then quiet.

Midnight: The faint boom-boom and twang of Julian’s rock music stopped wafting up from the ground floor.

Finally there were no sounds except the breeze sighing in the pines. I had left my van on the street. Now all I had to do was get out of the house without making a catastrophic amount of noise.

General Farquhar had closed the windows and reset the security system. If I set it off and no one interrupted the automatic dial, an armed representative of Aspen Meadow Security would arrive in a pickup truck at the bottom of the driveway. He would then wait for someone to come out and give the secret password, signaling the all-clear. If no one came, the security man would call the police. Julian had provided the password: CHOCOLATE.

But I should have problems with none of that, I reflected as I tiptoed down the staircase, pressed buttons, and slid through the front door. An ocean of summer stars glittered overhead. As on most moonless nights in the high country, the Milky Way shone like a wide ribbon across the inky sky. At the end of the driveway, the security gate yielded to the code my fingers punched in, and I was off.

I had broken into an office once before. It had been the ob-gyn office of my ex-father-in-law, Fritz Korman. Alarms had gone off instantaneously. But that time, I had known what I was looking for. This time I was not so sure. I ground the gears into third and started up toward Philip’s office at Aspen Meadow North. This is crazy, I thought. It’s not as if I’m being paid to figure out what happened to Philip Miller. It had been an accident. Involving peroxide. An accident with the man whom I thought had loved me. He had not loved me; he had been studying me. I felt betrayed. I wondered if he had betrayed anyone else.

If someone had decided to kill Philip Miller, how would that someone have gone about it? What would you need?

In addition to having a motive, and I was still unclear on what that was, you would have to know his schedule. Know when he was going to the eye doctor. You would have to plan. And, I thought regretfully, you would have to have some way of killing a psychologist so that it looked like an accident.

You would have to be smart.

The parking lot at Aspen Meadow North was empty. Neon security lights glowed like fluorescent plants in the asphalt. Not wanting to look conspicuous, I pulled into a far corner of the lot under the shade of an ancient pine. The wide branches swaying in the breeze made a pocket of darkness. The office building’s angles and corners, so innocuous during the day, cast long geometric shadows. I got out and was startled by a buzzing sound. But it was only a neon bulb. I tried not to think of it as warning me off.

One thing I had learned from the general about security: Most burglars will try to make it look as if they had not broken in. That delayed any action being taken against them. I climbed up the wooden stairs to Philip Miller’s office wondering how I would do that. A step creaked loudly. Immediately there was a brushing sound in the trees. I froze and stared at the place where the noise had come from. Without a moon, it was hard to make anything out. My eyes adjusted slowly. After a few minutes a bull elk stepped gingerly from behind the trees and then trotted toward the brush behind the building. Welcome to the mountains.

I made my way quickly down to Philip’s office door and wondered if I could slide a charge card into the area between the lock and the door frame, the way they did on television. My charge cards were of limited use in charging things, anyway.

No luck. Finally I just kicked hard. Two, three, four times. The door opened. No alarms. You should have been more careful, Philip.

Schulz had told me that the Sheriff’s Department had taken the files to look through them regarding the clients. Had Elizabeth told Schulz that Philip thought one of them was homicidal? I did not know. The schedule, I told myself. Who saw him that last week?

I looked for a calendar on the secretary’s desk and on Philip’s. Nothing. Then I opened a closet in his office and turned on the light. Voila: a large paper month-to-month calendar was tacked on the back of the closet door.

The last week he was alive, Philip Miller had appointments with General Bo Farquhar, Adele Farquhar, and Julian Teller. On the day before he died, he had lunch with Weezie Harrington.

22.

I couldn’t sleep. As I had so many times before, I ran a mental film of Philip’s BMW’s terrifying swerves and then sickening smash. I added to the film the new knowledge that he had been blinded. It explained everything.

Well, almost everything. Blinded by what? By unrinsed contact lenses embedded with peroxide. You couldn’t drive that road if you couldn’t see that road. Could the lack of rinse have been an accident? Reason said no. So did the existence of a murderous patient. Or perhaps it was not a patient at all, but Elizabeth had just thought it was.

Blinded by whom? Julian had problems that erupted in hostility. In meeting with Philip Miller, General Bo and Adele were probably trying to help the troubled teen. Weezie had her own agenda: to protect her land and win back her errant spouse. And of course there was Brian himself—ace developer and, perhaps, jealous husband.

I did not know if there was a way to figure this out. Psychologists keep notes on their patients and Schulz had Philip’s. Their content remained a mystery. Arch had gone to a counselor after he became addicted to escaping from reality in fantasy role-playing games. That fellow had referred to notes during our three-way monthly discussions. But what kind of notes did they teach you to take in Shrink School?

Moreover, as academics love to say, there were other ramifications. Sure, I had kicked in Philip’s door. I had looked for and found a schedule for his appointments and activities. I presumed the police had seen his schedule, too. But Schulz would never let me see the files. I was his friend and confidante, but there were limits.

Images of Philip with Adele, Philip with Elizabeth, Philip with Julian, Philip with Weezie floated up as I tossed fitfully in the guest-room bed. Philip with Weezie. Mapping out a game plan for dealing with county commissioners? Or playing some other kind of game? I didn’t want to think about it.

Against all transcendental teaching, I started to repeat my mantra just to get to sleep. That plus the early sunrise had their usual soporific effect. I fell into a deep cloud of slumber that was only dispersed when my radio alarm blasted me at seven o’clock with the Beatles’ version of “Twist and Shout.”

I pressed all the wrong buttons and finally got it off. Arch was still asleep so I turned off the motion detector, stumbled to the phone in the kitchen, and wondered if you could free-base caffeine.

I punched the buttons and got Schulz, the early bird. I said, “Finally!”

There was a pause. “Well,” he said, “I didn’t want to wake you up returning your call.”