Double Shot

people around. I said, “It’s okay.”

“Mom, listen. I feel terrible.” He looked down, then scraped the toe of his tennis shoe through the dirt deposited in the street from the recent rain. I remembered Tom’s terse statement: Your son has never played golf in his life. Maybe now I was going to hear what he had been doing every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon. “Mom, there’s something—”

“Come on, folks!” Blackridge called from the bottom of the driveway.

Arch whirled away and hustled to meet the detective.

Brewster Motley cantilevered himself out of his Mercedes and approached me with a spring in his step. I’d finally decided who Brewster most reminded me of: Tigger, in the Winnie-the-Pooh stories. Sure, Brewster had a client who was a suspect in a murder case, and sure, we were here at her murdered ex-husband’s house to see who had trashed it. But hey! This is what Brewsters do best!

“Goldy! What’s happening?” He wore khaki pants and a burgundy golf shirt, and I wondered what recreational activity the house inspection had interrupted. He stopped in front of me and pulled up on his belt—a grosgrain affair covered with little burgundy frogs—and eyed the cops at the front door. “You know what they’re searching for?”

“Not a clue.”

“Okay, look.” He leaned toward me, but kept his gaze fixed on the cops. “Don’t say anything unnecessary. Don’t make any extraneous comments. If they ask you anything beyond, ‘Do you see anything missing from this room,’ say, ‘I don’t know.’ ”

“Fine. You heard about the ballistics test?”

He grinned. “You bet. But with a positive GSR on you, they may try to link you to that twenty-two.”

I felt as if I’d been punched. “They would do that?”

He raised an eyebrow and gave me a grim smile.

“Listen, Brewster, you don’t need to stay.”

He ducked his chin, shaking the blond mop in an emphatic negative. “I’m here. I’m going in with you. The cops could try to trap you with questions. This whole thing could be an ambush.”

“Even using Arch?”

“You bet.”

I trudged up the driveway with my criminal lawyer at my side. At the front door, I gave formal permission for Arch to go in with Reilly and Blackridge, and agreed to accompany them. I felt an unaccountable dread, wondering if I really would detect John Richard’s emotions before someone shot him in the heart and then the groin.

After crime-scene investigators had returned to the department, they’d given Blackridge the keys to the front door. To force their way through the windowed back door, the two vandals had shattered the glass. The kitchen floor was a mess. In addition to everything else, Blackridge added. Still, I was not prepared for what lay within.

It was as if a hurricane had blown through the house. Everything—and I do mean everything—had been pulled apart. The new leather sectional couch Arch had told me his father had bought had been disemboweled. Its stuffing lay in piles around the room. All of John Richard’s CDs were scattered on top of the wood floor and the disheveled Oriental rug, which had been pulled up and moved halfway into the hall. The sound-system speakers Arch told me John Richard had paid ten thousand dollars for had been ripped open. Woofers, wires, and amplifiers lay strewn about like the guts of a giant robot. The vandals—or whatever they were—had even smashed the giant TV to smithereens. Why would someone who was searching for something do that? I began to wonder about these robbers’ motives.

Arch stood, his mouth open, and took it all in. Under the detectives’ gentle probing, he began an oral inventory of what he thought had been in the room. As Reilly scribbled, I stepped carefully into the slate-covered hallway. There, men’s and women’s clothing—Sandee’s, presumably—had been unceremoniously chucked from the bedrooms. Athletic shoes, dress shoes, backless high heels with matching purses, John Richard’s Italian loafers and high-end running shoes—all these lay heaped between the clothes. John Richard’s beloved magazine articles about himself—beautifully matted and framed—had been wrenched from the walls and smashed. Why?

Blackridge, who had followed me, saw my puzzled look. “Probably looking for a safe of some kind. Ditto with the television. You can buy them hollow, to conceal stuff.”

“But…why the mess?” I glimpsed John Richard’s favorite Mountain West magazine article from twelve years before: “Korman Named One of Denver’s Top Twenty Doctors.” There was another: “Southwest Hospital Lauded for State-of-the-Art Obstetrics Program.” What patients never knew is that those articles, even the magazines, were commonly paid for by the doctors themselves. They were like advertising supplements, even though John Richard (and others) often clipped off the teensy-weensy printed word advertisement before having them framed and hung in their offices.

Everything he did was a lie, I thought. Everything. He never cared about other people, only himself. Without warning, I remembered John Richard’s strangely blank face when I hung up the phone and told him my grandfather had died. I’d slumped into one of our old kitchen chairs and started crying. He’d turned away and searched the refrigerator for a beer.

I gaped at the mess in the hall. Suddenly, I knew what he really was. I’d had all those courses in psychology, but I’d never seen it, not until he was dead. John Richard had been a psychopath. White collar, to be sure, but a psychopath nonetheless. Their main characteristic? They don’t feel.

I swallowed, trying to remember what I’d learned. Psychopathy resulted from a genetic predisposition, not arising, researchers were now discovering, from environment. The serial rapists and killers had usually had an abusive childhood with all kinds of narcissistic injuries. But what about psychopaths born to loving, supportive environments? Yes, John Richard’s mother had been an alcoholic, but he’d still been his parents’ golden boy. And he’d gone on to use people and toss them, in an endless attempt to feel something. To get a thrill.

The male psychopath, I remembered, also was extremely adept at keeping a group of adoring women around him. The psychopath could look into their eyes and see what those women needed—affection, maybe, or flattery. Ordinarily, they were women with enormous dependency needs who….

None of this was making me feel really great. Still, I thought I’d known him. Understood him. But I hadn’t.

I blinked. Blackridge was asking me a question, something about a weapon.

“Did Dr. Korman keep a firearm, Mrs. Schultz?”

“I don’t know,” I whispered. I didn’t need Brewster’s advice to answer truthfully. Even before the divorce, there were many things about John Richard Korman’s life that eluded me. One thing stayed constant, though. Should I tell Blackridge?

The Jerk lied. About everything. He did what he wanted, when he wanted. One of Denver’s Top Twenty Doctors. Pu-leeze.

“Nope,” Arch piped up. “No gun. Dad tried to learn how to shoot, but he wasn’t any good at, not like my mom—”

“Arch!” interrupted Brewster. He was standing by the hearth, arms crossed. He grinned widely at Arch and cocked his head. “You’re a great kid. Just answer the detectives’ questions with yes or no, okay?”

Arch’s face darkened and he stared at the floor. Here was at least one person who didn’t react well to Brewster’s charm. Still, I’d have wished that Arch’s new foray into honesty could have stopped short of mentioning my prowess on the firing range.

I asked Blackridge, “What about the garage?”

Blackridge noiselessly pointed toward a door. “I’ll take you.”

I stepped around the pile of detritus that contained John Richard’s trashed Wall of Fame articles, more women’s shoes, and a slew of papers. Blackridge opened the garage door and gave me a wry smile. Reilly was now writing down Arch’s recitation of what should have been in the guest room, also wrecked. Brewster clearly thought Arch needed more supervision than I did, so he’d followed them down the hall.

The vandals had wreaked particular havoc in the garage. The cops had hauled away the Audi in search of evidence, but this hadn’t stopped the thugs. They’d dumped out two black plastic bags of garden waste, now a mishmashed heap of lawn clippings, dusty weeds, and small branches. From the suspended wall shelves, they’d pulled and dumped cans of paint, turpentine, weed killer, and fertilizer. As I surveyed the piles, I wondered how