Think of a Number

by John Verdon

  Nardo shook his head. “You really think you can sit in here and shoot one cop after another as they come through the door without getting your head blown off? It’s not going to happen that way.”

  “Of course it isn’t. Didn’t anyone ever tell you a literal mind is a small mind? I like the crow story, Lieutenant, but there are more efficient ways to exterminate vermin than shooting them one at a time. Gassing, for example. Gassing is very efficient, if you have the right sort of delivery system. Perhaps you’ve noticed that every room in this house is equipped with sprinklers. Every one except this one.” He paused again, his livelier eye sparkling with self-congratulation. “So if I shoot you and all the crows come flying in, I open two little valves on two little pipes, and twenty seconds later …” His smile became cherubic. “Do you have any idea what concentrated chlorine gas does to a human lung? And how rapidly it does it?”

  Gurney watched Nardo struggling to assess this frighteningly contained man and his gassing threat. For an unnerving moment, he thought the cop’s pride and rage were about to propel him into a fatal leap forward, but instead Nardo took a few quiet breaths, which seemed to let some of the tension out of the spring, and spoke in a voice that sounded earnest and anxious.

  “Chlorine compounds can be tricky. I worked with them in an antiterrorism unit. One guy accidentally produced some nitrogen trichloride as a by-product of another experiment. Didn’t even realize it. Blew his thumb off. Might not be as easy as you think to run your chemicals through a sprinkler system. I’m not sure you could do that.”

  “Don’t waste your time trying to trick me, Lieutenant. You sound like you’re trying a technique from the police manual. What does it say—‘Express skepticism regarding the criminal’s plan, question his credibility, provoke him into providing additional details’? If you want to know more, there’s no need to trick me, just ask me. I have no secrets. What I do have, just so you know, are two fifty-gallon high-pressure tanks, filled with chlorine and ammonia, driven by an industrial compressor, linked directly to the main sprinkler pipe that feeds the system throughout the house. There are two valves concealed in this room that will join the combined one hundred gallons, releasing an enormous amount of gas in a highly concentrated form. As for the unlikely peripheral formation of nitrogen trichloride and the resultant explosion, I would regard that as a delightful plus, but I will be content with the simple asphyxiation of the Wycherly PD. It would be great fun to see you all blasted to pieces, but one must be content. The best must not be made the enemy of the good.”

  “Mr. Dermott, what on earth is this all about?”

  Dermott wrinkled his brow in a parody of someone who might be considering the question seriously.

  “I received a note in the mail this morning. ‘Beware the snow, beware the sun, / the night, the day, nowhere to run.’” He quoted the words from Gurney’s poem with sarcastic histrionics, shooting him an inquisitive glance as he did so. “Empty threats, but I must thank whoever sent it. It reminded me how short life can be, that I should never put off till tomorrow what I can do today.”

  “I don’t really get what you mean,” said Nardo, still in his earnest mode.

  “Just do what I say, and you’ll end up understanding perfectly.”

  “Fine, no problem. I just don’t want anyone to get hurt unnecessarily.”

  “No, of course not.” The stretchy, wormlike smile came and went. “Nobody wants that. In fact, to avoid unnecessary hurt, I really do need you to lie down on the floor right now.”

  They had come full circle. The question was, what now? Gurney was watching Nardo’s face for readable signs. How much had the man put together? Had it dawned on him yet who the woman in the chair might be, or the smiley psychopath with the whiskey bottle and the gun?

  At least he must have finally realized, if nothing else, that Dermott was the murderer of Officer Sissek. That would account for the hatred he couldn’t quite conceal in his eyes. Suddenly the tension was back in the spring. Nardo looked wild with adrenaline, with a primitive, consequences-be-damned emotion far more powerful than reason. Dermott saw it, too, but far from cowing him, it seemed to elate him, to energize him. His hand tightened just a little on the handle of the revolver, and for the first time the slithery smile revealed a lively glimmer of teeth.

  Less than a second before a .38 slug would surely have ended Nardo’s life, and less than two seconds before a second slug would have ended his own, Gurney broke the circuit with a furious, guttural shout.

  “Do what the man said! Get down on the fucking floor! Get down on the fucking floor NOW!”

  The effect was stunning. The antagonists were frozen in place, the insidious momentum of the confrontation shattered by Gurney’s raw outburst.

  The fact that no one was dead persuaded him that he was on the right track, but he wasn’t sure exactly what that track was. To the extent that he could read Nardo, the man looked betrayed. Beneath his more opaque exterior, Dermott seemed disconcerted but was striving, Gurney suspected, not to let the interruption undermine his control.

  “Very wise advice from your friend,” Dermott said to Nardo. “I’d follow it at once if I were you. Detective Gurney has such a good mind. Such an interesting man. A famous man. You can learn so much about a person from a simple Internet search. You’d be amazed at what sort of information pops up with a name and a zip code. So little privacy anymore.” Dermott’s sly tone sent a wave of nausea through Gurney’s chest. He tried to remind himself that Dermott’s specialty was persuading people that he knew more about them than he really did. But the idea that his own failure to think ahead regarding the postmark problem could in any way have put Madeleine in jeopardy was intrusive and nearly unbearable.

  Nardo reluctantly lowered himself to the floor, eventually lying on his stomach in the position of a man about to do a push-up. Dermott directed him to clasp his hands behind his head, “if it’s not too much to ask.” For a terrible moment, Gurney thought it might be the setup for an immediate execution. Instead, after gazing down with satisfaction at the prone lieutenant, Dermott carefully put the whiskey bottle he’d been carrying on the cedar hope chest next to the big stuffed bird—or, as Gurney now realized, the big stuffed goose. With a sickening chill, he recalled a detail from the lab reports. Goose down. Then Dermott reached down to Nardo’s right ankle, pulled a small automatic pistol out of a holster strapped there, and placed it in his own pocket. Again the humorless grin waxed and waned.

  “Knowing where all the firearms are located,” he explained with a creepy earnestness, “is the key to avoiding tragedy. So many guns. So many guns in the wrong hands. Of course, an argument is often made that guns don’t kill people, people kill people. And you have to admit that there’s some truth in that. People do kill people. But who would know that better than men in your profession?”

  Gurney added to the short list of things he knew to be true the fact that these archly delivered speeches to Dermott’s captive audience—the polite posing, the menacing gentility, the same elements that characterized his notes to his victims—had one vital purpose: to fuel his own fantasy of omnipotence.

  Proving Gurney right, Dermott turned to him and like an obsequious usher whispered, “Would you mind sitting over there against that wall?” He indicated a ladder-back chair on the left side of the bed next to the lamp table with the framed checks. Gurney went to the chair and sat without hesitation.

  Dermott looked back down at Nardo, his icy gaze at odds with his encouraging tone. “We’ll have you up and around in no time at all. We just need to get one more participant in place. I appreciate your patience.”

  On the side of Nardo’s face visible to Gurney, the jaw muscle tightened and a red flush rose from the neck into the cheek.

  Dermott moved quickly across the room to the far corner and, leaning over the side of the wing chair, whispered something to the seated woman.

  “I have to pee,” she said, raising her head.

  “Sh
e really doesn’t, you know,” said Dermott looking back toward Gurney and Nardo. “It’s an irritation created by the catheter. She’s had a catheter for years and years. A discomfort on the one hand, but a real convenience, too. The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away. Heads and tails. Can’t have one without the other. Wasn’t that a song?” He stopped as though trying to place something, hummed a familiar tune with a perky lilt, then, still holding the gun in his right hand, helped the old woman up from the chair with his left. “Come along, dear, it’s beddy-bye time.”

  As he led her in small, halting steps across the room to the bed and assisted her into a semireclining position against the upright pillows, he kept repeating in a little boy’s voice, “Beddy-bye, beddy-bye, beddy-bye, beddy-bye.”

  Pointing the gun at a rough midpoint between Nardo on the floor and Gurney in the chair, he looked unhurriedly around the room, but not at anything in particular. It was hard to tell whether he was seeing what was there or overlaying on it another scene from another time or place. Then he looked at the woman on the bed in the same way and said with a kind of fey Peter Pan conviction, “Everything’s going to be perfect. Everything’s going to be the way it always should have been.” He began humming very softly a few disconnected notes. As he went on, Gurney recognized the tune of a nursery rhyme, “Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush.” Perhaps it was the uncomfortable reaction he’d always had to the antilogic of nursery rhymes; perhaps it was this one’s dizzying imagery; perhaps it was the colossal inappropriateness of the music to the moment; but whatever it was, hearing that melody in that room made him want to puke.

  Then Dermott added words, but not the right words. He sang like a child, “Here we get into the bed again, the bed again, the bed again. Here we get into the bed again, so early in the morning.”

  “I have to pee,” the woman said.

  Dermott continued singing his weird ditty as though it were a lullaby. Gurney wondered how distracted the man actually was—sufficiently to permit a leaping tackle across the bed? He thought not. Would a more vulnerable moment come later? If Dermott’s chlorine-gas story was an action plan, not just a scary fantasy, how much time did they have left? He guessed not much.

  The house above was deadly still. There was no indication that any of the other Wycherly cops had yet discovered their lieutenant’s absence or, if they had, realized its significance. There were no raised voices, no scuttling feet, no hint of any outside activity at all—which meant that saving Nardo’s life and his own would probably depend on what Gurney himself could come up with in the next five or ten minutes to derail the psychopath who was fluffing up the pillows on the bed.

  Dermott stopped singing. Then he stepped sideways along the edge of the bed to a point at which he could aim his revolver with equal ease at either Nardo or Gurney. He began moving it back and forth like a baton, rhythmically, aiming it at one and then the other and back again. Gurney got the idea, perhaps from the movement of the man’s lips, that he was waving the gun in time to eeny meeny miney mo, catch a tiger by the toe. The possibility that this silent recitation might in a few seconds be punctuated with a bullet in one of their heads seemed overwhelmingly real—real enough to jar Gurney right then into taking a wild verbal swing.

  In the softest, most casual voice he could muster he asked, “Does she ever wear the ruby slippers?”

  Dermott’s lips stopped moving, and his facial expression reverted to a deep, dangerous emptiness. His gun lost its rhythm. The direction of its muzzle settled slowly on Gurney like a roulette wheel winding down to a losing number.

  It wasn’t the first time he’d been at the wrong end of a gun barrel, but never in all the forty-seven years of his life had he felt closer to death. There was a draining sensation in his skin, as though the blood were retreating to some safer place. Then, bizarrely, he felt calm. It made him think of the accounts he’d read of men overboard in an icy sea, of the hallucinatory tranquillity they felt before losing consciousness. He gazed across the bed at Dermott, into those emotionally asymmetric eyes—one corpselike from a long-ago battlefield, the other alive with hatred. In that second, more purposeful eye, he sensed a rapid calculation under way. Perhaps Gurney’s reference to the pilfered slippers from The Laurels had served its purpose—raising questions that needed resolution. Perhaps Dermott was wondering how much he knew and how such knowledge might affect the consummation of his endgame.

  If so, Dermott resolved these matters to his satisfaction with disheartening speed. He grinned, showing for the second time a glimpse of small, pearly teeth.

  “Did you get my messages?” he asked playfully.

  The peace that had enveloped Gurney was fading. He knew that answering the question the wrong way would create a major problem. So would not answering it. He hoped that Dermott was referring to the only two things resembling “messages” that had been found at The Laurels.

  “You mean your little quote from The Shining?”

  “That’s one,” said Dermott.

  “Obviously, signing in as Mr. and Mrs. Scylla.” Gurney sounded bored.

  “That’s two. But the third was the best, don’t you think?”

  “I thought the third was stupid,” said Gurney, desperately stalling, racing back through his recollections of the eccentric little inn and its half owner, Bruce Wellstone.

  His comment produced a quick flash of anger in Dermott, followed by a kind of caginess. “I wonder if you really know what I’m talking about, Detective.”

  Gurney suppressed his urge to protest. He’d discovered that often the best bluff was silence. And it was easier to think when you weren’t talking.

  The only peculiar thing he could remember Wellstone saying was something about birds, or bird-watching, and that something about it didn’t make sense at that time of year. What the hell kind of birds were they? And what was it about the number? Something about the number of birds …

  Dermott was getting restless. It was time for another wild swing.

  “The birds,” said Gurney slyly. At least he hoped he sounded sly and not inane. Something in Dermott’s eyes told him the wild swing may have connected. But how? And what now? What was it about the birds that mattered? What was the message? The wrong time of year for what? Rose-breasted grosbeaks! That’s what they were! But so what? What did rose-breasted grosbeaks have to do with anything?

  He decided to push the bluff and see where it led. “Rose-breasted grosbeaks,” he said with an enigmatic wink.

  Dermott tried to hide a flicker of surprise under a patronizing smile. Gurney wished to God he knew what it was all about, wished he knew what he was pretending to know. What the hell was the number Wellstone had mentioned? He had no idea what to say next, how to parry a direct question should it come. None came.

  “I was right about you,” said Dermott smugly. “From our first phone call, I knew you were smarter than most members of your tribe of baboons.”

  He paused, nodding to himself with apparent pleasure.

  “That’s good,” he said. “An intelligent ape. You’ll be able to appreciate what you’re about to see. As a matter of fact, I think I’ll follow your advice. After all, this is a very special night—a perfect night for magic slippers.” As he was speaking, he was backing up toward a chest of drawers against the wall on the far side of the room. Without taking his eyes off Gurney, he opened the top drawer of the chest and removed, with conspicuous care, a pair of shoes. The style reminded Gurney of the open-toe, medium-heel dress shoes his mother used to wear to church—except that these shoes were made of ruby-colored glass, glass that glistened like translucent blood in the subdued light.

  Dermott nudged the drawer shut with his elbow and returned to the bed with the shoes in one hand and the gun in the other, still leveled at Gurney.

  “I appreciate your input, Detective. If you hadn’t mentioned the slippers, I wouldn’t have thought of them. Most men in your position wouldn’t be so helpful.” The unsubtle ridicule in the comment
was meant to convey, Gurney assumed, the message that Dermott was so completely in control that he could easily turn to his own advantage anything anyone else might say or do. He leaned over the bed and removed the old woman’s worn corduroy bedroom slippers and replaced them with the glowing red ones. Her feet were small, and the shoes slipped on smoothly.

  “Is Dickie Duck coming to bed?” the old woman asked, like a child reciting her favorite part of a fairy tale.

  “He’ll kill the snake and cut off its head. / Then Dickie Duck will come to bed,” he replied in a singsong voice.

  “Where’s my little Dickie been?”

  “Killing the cock to save the hen.”

  “Why does Dickie do what Dickie does?”

  “For blood that’s as red / as a painted rose. / So every man knows / he reaps what he sows.”

  Dermott looked at the old woman expectantly, as though the ritual exchange was not finished. He leaned toward her, prompting her in a loud whisper, “What will Dickie do tonight?”

  “What will Dickie do tonight?” she asked in the same whisper.

  “He’ll call the crows till the crows are all dead. / Then Dickie Duck will come to bed.”

  She moved her fingertips dreamily over her Goldilocks wig, as though she imagined she were arranging it in some ethereal style. The smile on her face reminded Gurney of a junkie’s rush.

  Dermott was watching her, too. His gaze was revoltingly unfilial, the tip of his tongue moving back and forth between his lips like a small, slithering parasite. Then he blinked and looked around the room.

  “I think we’re ready to begin,” he said brightly. He got up on the bed and crawled over the old woman’s legs to the opposite side—taking the goose from the hope chest as he did so. He settled himself against the pillows beside her and placed the goose in his lap. “Almost ready now.” The cheeriness of this assurance would have been appropriate for someone placing a candle on a birthday cake. What he was doing, however, was inserting his revolver, finger still on the trigger, into a deep pocket cut into the back of the goose.