Peter Pan Must Die: A Novel

by John Verdon

  “I apologize, Your Honor. I got a little carried away.”

  “I suggest you carry yourself back.”

  “Yes, Your Honor.” After seeming to gather his thoughts for a moment, he turned to the jury. “Ladies and gentlemen, it’s a sad fact that Carl Spalter can no longer move or speak or communicate with us in any way, but the horror in that fixed expression on his face tells me that he’s fully aware of what happened to him, that he knows who did this to him, and that he has no doubt that there is in this world such a thing as Pure Evil. Remember, when you find Kay Spalter guilty of attempted murder, as I know you will, this—what you see here before you—this is the real meaning of that colorless legal phrase ‘attempted murder.’ This man in this wheelchair. This life crushed beyond hope of repair. Happiness extinguished. This is the reality, dreadful beyond words.”

  “Objection!” cried the voice.

  “Mr. Piskin …” rumbled the judge.

  “I’m finished, Your Honor.”

  The judge called for a half-hour recess and summoned the prosecutor and defense attorney to his chambers.

  Gurney replayed the video. He’d never seen an opening statement quite like it. It was a lot closer in emotional tone and content to a closing argument. But he knew Piskin by reputation, and the man was no amateur. So what was his purpose? To act as though Kay Spalter’s conviction was inevitable, that the game was over before it began? Was he that sure of himself? And if that was just his opener, how was he going to top an accusation of “Pure Evil”?

  Speaking of which, he wanted to see the expression on Carl Spalter’s face that Piskin had focused the jury on but the courtroom video had failed to capture. He wondered if there might be a photograph in the voluminous material delivered by Hardwick. He picked up the sequenced guide, looking for a hint.

  Perhaps not accidentally, it was the second item on the list.

  “Number two: Check out the damage. BCI case file, third graphics tab. It’s all in those eyes. I never want to see whatever put that look on his face.”

  A minute later Gurney was holding a full-page head-and-shoulders photo printout. Even with all the preparation, the horror in Spalter’s eyes was shocking. Piskin’s final rant had not been exaggerated.

  There was indeed in those eyes the recognition of a terrible truth—a reality, as Piskin had put it, dreadful beyond words.

  Chapter 5

  Bloodthirsty Weasels

  The scraping squeak of the right-side French door being pulled from its sticking point against the sill woke Gurney from a surreal dream that slipped away as soon as he opened his eyes.

  He found himself slouched down in one of the two armchairs at the fireplace end of the long room, the Spalter documents spread out on the coffee table in front of him. His neck ached when he raised his head. The light coming through the open door had a dawn faintness about it.

  Madeleine stood there silhouetted, breathing in the cool, still air.

  “Can you hear him?” she asked.

  “Hear who?” Gurney rubbed his eyes, sitting up straighter.

  “Horace. There he goes again.”

  Gurney listened halfheartedly for the crowing of the young rooster but heard nothing.

  “Come to the door and you’ll hear him.”

  He almost replied that he had no interest in hearing him but realized that would be a poor way to start the day. He pushed himself up from the chair and went to the door.

  “There,” said Madeleine. “You heard him that time, right?”

  “I think so.”

  “He’ll be a lot easier to hear,” Madeleine said brightly, pointing to the expanse of grass between the asparagus patch and the big apple tree, “as soon as we build the coop over there.”

  “No doubt.”

  “They do it to announce their territory.”

  “Hmm.”

  “To ward off other roosters, let them know, ‘This is my yard, I was here first.’ I love it, don’t you?”

  “Love what?”

  “The sound of it, the crow.”

  “Oh. Yes. Very … rural.”

  “I’m not sure I’d want a lot of roosters. But one is really nice.”

  “Right.”

  “Horace. At first I wasn’t sure, but now it seems the perfect name for him, doesn’t it?”

  “I guess.” The truth was that the name Horace, for no reason that made sense, reminded him of the name Carl. And the name Carl, the instant it came to mind, came complete with the stricken eyes in the photograph, eyes that appeared to be staring at a demon.

  “What about the other three? Huffy, Puffy, and Fluffy—do you think those names are too silly?”

  It took Gurney a few seconds to refocus his attention. “Too silly for chickens?”

  She laughed and shrugged. “As soon as we build their little house, with a nice open-air pen at one end, they can all move up from the stuffy barn.”

  “Right.” His lack of enthusiasm was palpable.

  “And you’ll make the pen predator-proof?”

  “Yes.”

  “The director of the clinic lost one of his Rhode Island reds last week. The little thing was there one minute, gone the next.”

  “That’s the risk of letting them out.”

  “Not if we build the right kind of pen. Then they can be out, running around, pecking in the grass, which they love, and still be safe. And it’ll be fun watching them—right over there.” She pointed again with an emphatic little jab of her forefinger at the area she’d chosen.

  “So what does he think happened to his missing chicken?”

  “Something grabbed it and carried it off. Most likely a coyote or an eagle. He’s pretty sure an eagle, because when we have the kind of drought we’ve had this summer they start looking for things other than fish.”

  “Hmm.”

  “He said if we’re going to build a pen we should be sure the wire mesh goes over the top and down at least six inches into the ground. Otherwise things can burrow underneath it.”

  “Things?”

  “He mentioned weasels. Apparently they’re really awful.”

  “Awful?”

  Madeleine made a face. “He said if a weasel gets in with the chickens, he’ll … bite their heads off—all of them.”

  “Not eat them? Just kill them?”

  She nodded, her lips pressed tightly together. More than a wince, it was an expression of empathic misery. “He explained that some kind of frenzy comes over a weasel … once he tastes blood. Once he does, he won’t stop biting until all the chickens are dead.”

  Chapter 6

  Ants

  A little after sunrise, feeling that he’d made a sufficient gesture in the direction of solving the chicken problem—by drawing a construction diagram for a coop and fenced run—Gurney put away his pad and settled down at the breakfast table with a second cup of coffee.

  When Madeleine joined him, he decided to show her the photograph of Carl Spalter.

  From her triage and counseling work at the local mental health crisis center, she was accustomed to being in the presence of the extremes of negative feelings—panic, rage, anguish, despair. Even so, her eyes widened at the vividness of Spalter’s expression.

  She laid the photo on the table, then pushed it a few inches farther away.

  “He knows something,” she said. “Something he didn’t know before his wife shot him.”

  “Maybe she didn’t. According to Hardwick, the case against her was fabricated.”

  “Do you believe that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “So maybe she did it, and maybe she didn’t. But Hardwick doesn’t really care which, does he?”

  Gurney was tempted to argue the point, because he didn’t like the position it put him in. Instead, he just shrugged. “What he cares about is getting her conviction thrown out.”

  “What he really cares about is getting even—and watching his former employers twist in the wind.”

 
“I know.”

  She cocked her head and stared at him as if to ask why he’d let himself be drawn into such a fraught and nasty undertaking.

  “I haven’t promised anything. But I have to admit,” he said, pointing to the photograph on the table, “I am curious about that.”

  She pursed her lips, turned to the open door, and gazed out at the thin, scattered fog illuminated by the sideways rays of the early sun. Then something caught her attention at the edge of the stone patio just beyond the doorsill.

  “They’re back,” she said.

  “Who? What?”

  “The carpenter ants.”

  “Where?”

  “Everywhere.”

  “Everywhere?”

  She answered in a tone as mild as his was impatient. “Out there. In here. On the windowsills. By the cupboards. Around the sink.”

  “Why the hell didn’t you mention it?”

  “I just did.”

  He was about to ride the argument over a self-righteous cliff, but sanity prevailed and all he said was “I hate those damn things.” And hate them he did. Carpenter ants were the termites of the Catskills and other cold places—gnawing away the inner fiber of beams and joists, in silence and darkness converting the support structures of solid homes to sawdust. An exterminating service sprayed the outside of the foundation every other month, and sometimes they seemed to be winning the battle. But then the scout ants would return, and then … battalions.

  For a moment he forgot what he and Madeleine had been talking about before the ant tangent. When he remembered, it was with the sinking feeling that he’d been straining to justify a questionable decision.

  He decided to try for as much openness as he could. “Look, I understand the danger, the less-than-virtuous motive driving this thing. But I believe I owe Jack something. Maybe not a lot, but certainly something. And an innocent woman may have been convicted on evidence manufactured by a dirty cop. I don’t like dirty cops.”

  Madeleine broke in. “Hardwick doesn’t care whether she’s innocent. To him, that’s irrelevant.”

  “I know. But I’m not Hardwick.”

  Chapter 7

  Mick the Dick

  “So everyone thought he tripped, until they found a bullet in his brain?” asked Gurney.

  He was sitting in the passenger seat of Hardwick’s roaring GTO—not a traveling option he’d normally choose, but the trip from Walnut Crossing to the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility would take close to three hours, according to Google, and it seemed a good opportunity to ask questions.

  “The little round entry wound was kind of a hint,” said Hardwick. “But the CAT scan left no doubt. Eventually a surgeon retrieved most of the bullet fragments.”

  “It was a .220 Swift?” Gurney had managed to review half the trial transcript and a third of the BCI case file before Hardwick arrived to pick him up, and he wanted to be sure of his facts.

  “Yep. Fastest bullet made. Flattest trajectory in the business. Put it in the right rifle with the right scope, you can blow the head off a chipmunk a quarter mile away. Definitely a precision item. Nothing quite like it. Add a silencer to that package, and you’ve got—”

  “A silencer?”

  “A silencer. Which is why no one heard the shot. That, and the firecrackers.”

  “Firecrackers?”

  Hardwick shrugged. “Witnesses heard anywhere from five to ten packs of firecrackers go off that morning. Over in the direction of the building where the shot came from. The last pack around the time Spalter was hit.”

  “How’d they know which building it was?”

  “On-site reconstruction. Witness descriptions of the victim’s position when he was hit. Followed by a door-to-door search of the possible sources.”

  “But nobody caught on right away that he was hit, right?”

  “They just saw him falling. As he was walking toward a podium at the head of the grave, he was hit in the left temple and fell forward. At the moment he was hit, his left side was exposed to an empty stretch of the cemetery, the river, a busy county highway, and beyond that a row of partially gutted apartment buildings owned by the Spalter family.”

  “How’d they identify which apartment the shooter used?”

  “Easy enough. She … I mean, the shooter, whoever … left the gun behind, mounted on a nice tripod.”

  “With a scope?”

  “Top-of-the-line.”

  “And the silencer?”

  “No. The shooter removed that.”

  “Then how do you know—”

  “The end of the barrel was custom-threaded for one. And the firecrackers alone couldn’t have covered the report of an unsuppressed .220 Swift. It’s a seriously powerful cartridge.”

  “And the silencer alone would only deal with the muzzle blast, which would have left an audible supersonic report, which would explain the need for the firecracker distraction. So—cautious approach, thorough planning. Is that the way it’s being understood?”

  “That’s the way it should be understood, but who the fuck knows what they understand? It never came up in the trial. Lot of shit never came up in the trial. Lot of shit that should have come up.”

  “But why leave the gun and remove the silencer?”

  “No fucking idea. Unless it was one of those super-sophisticated five-thousand-dollar jobs—too good to leave behind?”

  Gurney found that hard to digest. “Of all the ways a vindictive wife might kill her husband, the prosecution narrative is that Kay Spalter chose to take the most complicated, expensive, high-tech—”

  “Davey boy, you don’t have to convince me that the narrative sucks. I know it sucks. More holes in it than an old junky’s arm. That’s why I picked it for my kickoff case. It’s got major reversal potential.”

  “Okay. So there was a silencer, but the silencer was taken. Presumably by the shooter.”

  “Correct.”

  “No prints left on anything?”

  “No prints, no nothing. Latex glove job.”

  “This rotten-apple detective—he didn’t plant anything in the apartment to incriminate Spalter’s wife?”

  “He didn’t know her then. He didn’t decide to put her in the frame until he met her and decided he hated her and she had to be the shooter.”

  “This guy is the CIO named in the case file? Senior Investigator Michael Klemper?”

  “Mick the Dick—that’s our boy. Shaved head, small eyes, big chest. Temperament of a rottweiler. Martial arts fanatic. Likes breaking bricks with his fists, especially in public. A very angry man. Which brings us back to the timing issue. Mick the Dick was divorced by his wife a few years back. Super-ugly divorce. Mick … Well, now we get into some … some unsubstantiated hearsay. Libel, slander, lawsuit territory, you get what I mean?”

  Gurney sighed. “Go on, Jack.”

  “According to rumor, Mick’s wife was doing the deed with a certain influential organized crime figure she happened to meet because Mick happened to be—so the rumor goes—on the take from the aforesaid crime figure.” Hardwick paused. “You see the problem?”

  “I see several.”

  “Mick found out she was fucking the major wiseguy, but that left him with a dilemma. I mean, that’s not a can of worms you want opened in divorce court, or anywhere else. So he couldn’t take the normal legal steps. However, he used to talk privately about wanting to strangle the bitch, twist her head off, feed it to his dog. Apparently, he would also say this to her from time to time. One of those times, she made a video of him telling her in colorful detail, after a few drinks, how he was going to feed her sensitive body parts to his pit bull. Guess what happened then?”

  “Tell me.”

  “The next day she threatened to put the video on YouTube and flush his career and pension down the toilet if he didn’t give her a quiet divorce on her terms with a very generous settlement.”

  Hardwick’s thin grin conveyed a kind of perverse admiration. “That was when the ho
micidal hate started oozing out of old Mick the Dick like pus. He would have gladly killed her at that point, wiseguy connection or no wiseguy connection, if she hadn’t ensured that the tape would go viral if anything happened to her. So he was forced to give her the divorce. And the money. And ever since then he’s been taking it out on every woman who even remotely reminds him of his wife. Mick was always a little touchy. But after he got that divorce deal rammed up his ass, he turned into two hundred and fifty pounds of pure vengeance, searching for targets.”

  “You’re telling me he framed Kay Spalter just because she was fucking around like his wife?”

  “Worse than that. Crazier than that. I think his blind hatred for anyone like his wife made him believe that Kay Spalter actually did murder her husband, and that it was his duty to see that she paid for it. She was guilty in his fucked-up mind, and he was determined to put her away at any cost. He wasn’t going to let another unfaithful bitch get off scot-free. If that meant suborning a little perjury here and there in the interest of justice, so what?”

  “You’re telling me he’s a psycho.”

  “Mild way of putting it.”

  “And you know all this how, exactly?”

  “I told you. He has enemies.”

  “Could you be more specific?”

  “Someone close enough to the man to hear things gave me the details of his bile and bullshit on the job, snippets of phone calls, comments here and there, what he said about women in general, about his ex-wife and Kay Spalter in particular. The Dick got carried away sometimes, wasn’t as careful as he should have been.”

  “This ‘someone’ have a name?”

  “Can’t reveal that.”

  “Yes you can.”

  “No way.”

  “Listen up, Jack. You keep secrets, and there’s no deal. I get to know everything you know. Every question answered. That’s the deal. Period.”

  “Christ, Davey, you’re not making this easy.”

  “Neither are you.”

  Gurney glanced over at the speedometer and saw that it was creeping toward eighty. Hardwick’s jaw muscle was tight. So were his hands on the wheel. A good minute passed before he said simply, “Esti Moreno.” Another minute passed before he went on. “She worked under Mick the Dick from the time of his divorce right up through the end of the Spalter trial. Finally managed to get reassigned—same barracks, but a different reporting line. Had to accept an office job, all paperwork, which she hates. But she hates the paperwork less than she hates the Dick. Esti’s a good cop. Good brain. Good eyes and ears. And principles. Esti’s got principles. You know what she said about the Dick?”