Shut Your Eyes Tight (Dave Gurney, No. 2): A Novel

by John Verdon

  “The what fallacy?” The question came from multiple directions.

  “The eureka fallacy. It’s a Greek word roughly translated as ‘I found it’ or, in the context in which I’m using it, ‘I’ve discovered the truth.’ The point is …” Gurney slowed down to emphasize his next statement. “The stories people tell you about themselves seem to retain the possibility of being false. But what you discover about them by yourself seems to be the truth. So what I’m saying is this: Let your target think he’s discovering something about you. Then he’ll feel that he really knows you. That’s the place at which you will have established Trust. You will have established Trust, with a capital T, the trust that makes everything else possible. We’re going to spend the rest of the day showing you how to make that happen—how to make the thing you want your target to believe about you the very thing he thinks he’s discovering on his own. But right now let’s take a break.”

  Saying this, Gurney realized that he’d grown up in an era when “a break” automatically meant a cigarette break. Now, for virtually everyone, it meant a cell-phoning or texting break. As if to illustrate the thought, most of the officers getting to their feet and heading for the door were reaching for their BlackBerrys.

  Gurney took a deep breath, extended his arms above his head, and stretched his back slowly from side to side. His introductory segment had created more muscle tension than he’d realized.

  The female Hispanic officer waited for the tide of cell phoners to pass, then approached Gurney as he was removing the videotape from the machine. Her hair was thick and framed her face in a mass of soft, kinky curls. Her full figure was packed into a pair of tight black jeans and a tight gray sweater with a swooping neckline. Her lips glistened. “I just wanted to thank you,” she said with a serious-student frown. “That was really good.”

  “The tape, you mean?”

  “No, I mean you. I mean … what I mean is”—she was incongruously blushing under her serious demeanor—“your whole presentation, your explanation of why people believe things, why they believe some things more strongly, all of that. Like that eureka fallacy thing—that really made me think. The whole presentation was really good.”

  “Your own contributions helped make it good.”

  She smiled. “I guess we’re just on the same wavelength.”

  Chapter 6

  Home

  By the time Gurney was nearing the end of his two-hour drive from the academy in Albany to his farmhouse in Walnut Crossing, dusk was settling stealthily into the winding valleys of the western Catskills.

  As he turned off the county road onto the dirt-and-gravel lane that led up to his hilltop property, the jazzed illusion of energy he’d received from two large containers of strong coffee during the afternoon seminar break was now sinking deep into its inversion phase. The fading day generated an overwrought image that he assumed was the product of caffeine withdrawal: summer sidling off the stage like an aging actor while autumn, the undertaker, waited in the wings.

  Christ, my brain is turning to mush.

  He parked the car as usual on the worn patch of weedy grass at the top of the pasture, parallel to the house, facing a deep rose-and-purple swath of sunset clouds beyond the far ridge.

  He entered the house through the side door, kicked off his shoes in the room that served as a laundry and pantry, and continued into the kitchen. Madeleine was on her knees in front of the sink, brushing shards of a broken wineglass into a dustpan. He stood watching her for several seconds before speaking. “What happened?”

  “What does it look like?”

  He let a few more seconds pass. “How are things at the clinic?”

  “Okay, I guess.” She stood, smiled gamely, walked over to the pantry, and emptied the dustpan noisily into the plastic trash barrel. He walked to the French doors and stared out at the monochrome landscape, at the large pile of logs by the woodshed waiting to be split and stacked, the grass that needed its final mowing of the season, the ferny asparagus ready to be cut down for the winter—cut and then burned to avoid the risk of asparagus beetles.

  Madeleine came back into the kitchen, switched on the recessed lights in the ceiling over the sideboard, replaced the dustpan under the sink. The increased illumination in the room had the effect of further darkening the outside world, turning the glass doors into reflectors.

  “I left some salmon on the stove,” she said, “and some rice.”

  “Thank you.” He watched her in the glass pane. She seemed to be gazing into the dishwater in the sink. He remembered her saying something about going out that night, and he decided to risk a guess. “Book-club night.”

  She smiled. He wasn’t sure whether it was because he’d gotten it right or wrong.

  “How was the academy?” she asked.

  “Not bad. A mixed bag of attendees—all the basic types. There’s always the cautious group—the ones who wait and watch, who believe in saying as little as possible. The utilitarians, the ones who want to know exactly how they can use every fact you give them. The minimizers who want to know as little as possible, get involved as little as possible, do as little as possible. The cynics who want to prove that any idea that didn’t occur first to them is bullshit. And, of course, the ‘positives’—probably the best name for them—the ones who want to learn as much as they can, see more clearly, become better cops.” He felt comfortable talking, wanted to go on, but she was studying the dishwater again. “So … yeah,” he concluded, “it was an okay day. The ‘positives’ made it … interesting.”

  “Men or women?”

  “What?”

  She lifted the spatula out of the water, frowning at it as though noticing for the first time how dull and scratched it was. “The ‘positives’—were they men or women?”

  It was curious how guilty he could feel when, really, there was nothing to feel guilty about. “Men and women,” he replied.

  She held the spatula up closer to the light, wrinkled her nose in disapproval, and tossed it into the garbage receptacle under the sink.

  “Look,” he said. “About this morning. This business with Jack Hardwick. I think we need to start that discussion over again.”

  “You’re meeting with the victim’s mother. What is there to discuss?”

  “There are good reasons to meet with her,” he pressed on blindly. “And there may be some good reasons not to.”

  “A very intelligent way of looking at it.” She seemed coolly amused. Or, at least, in an ironical mood. “Can’t talk about it right now, though. Don’t want to be late. For my book club.”

  He heard a subtle emphasis on that last phrase—just enough, perhaps, to let him know she knew that he’d guessed. A remarkable woman, he thought. And despite his anxiety and exhaustion, he couldn’t help smiling.

  Chapter 7

  Val Perry

  As usual, Madeleine was first up the next morning.

  Gurney awoke to the hiss and gurgle of the coffeemaker—along with the sinking realization that he’d forgotten to fix her bicycle brakes.

  Hard upon that pang came a sense of uneasiness about his plan to meet later that morning with Val Perry. Although he’d emphasized to Jack Hardwick that his willingness to talk to her did not imply any further commitment—that the meeting was primarily a gesture of courtesy and condolence to someone who’d suffered a dreadful loss—a cloud of second thoughts was descending on him. Pushing them aside as best he could, he showered, dressed, and strode purposefully out through the kitchen to the pantry, mumbling good morning to Madeleine, who was sitting in her customary position at the breakfast table with a slice of toast in her hand and a book propped open in front of her. Slipping into his canvas barn jacket that he removed from its hook in the pantry, he went out the side door and headed for the tractor shed that housed their bicycles and kayaks. The sun had not yet appeared, and the morning was surprisingly raw for early September.

  He rolled Madeleine’s bicycle out from behind the tractor into t
he light at the front of the open shed. The aluminum frame was shockingly cold. The two small wrenches he chose from the set on the shed wall were just as cold.

  Cursing, twice banging his knuckles against the sharp edges of the front forks, the second time drawing blood, he adjusted the cables that controlled the position of the brake pads. Creating the proper clearance—allowing the wheel to move freely when the brake was disengaged, yet providing adequate pressure against the rim when the brake was applied—was a trial-and-error process that he had to repeat four times to get right. Finally, with more relief than satisfaction, he declared the job done, replaced the wrenches, and headed back to the house, one hand numb and the other aching.

  Passing the woodshed and the adjacent pile of logs made him wonder for the tenth time in as many days, should he rent a wood-splitter or buy one? There were disadvantages either way. The sun was still not up, but the squirrels were already engaged in their morning attack on the bird feeders, raising another question that seemed to have no happy answer. And, of course, there was the matter of the manure for the asparagus.

  He went into the kitchen and ran warm water over his hands.

  As the stinging subsided, he announced, “Your brakes are fixed.”

  “Thank you,” said Madeleine cheerily without looking up from her book.

  Half an hour later—resembling a paint-by-numbers sunset in her lavender fleece pants, pink Windbreaker, red gloves, and an orange wool hat pulled down over her ears—she went out to the shed, mounted her bike, rode slowly and bumpily down the pasture path, and disappeared onto the town road beyond the barn.

  Gurney spent the next hour on a mental review of the facts of the crime as they had been related to him by Hardwick. Each time he went over the scenario, he was increasingly troubled by its theatricality, its almost-operatic excess.

  At 9:00 A.M. exactly, the time appointed for his meeting with Val Perry, he went to the window to see if she might be coming up the road.

  Think of the devil and the devil arrives. In this case at the wheel of a Turbo Porsche in racing green—a model Gurney thought sold for around $160,000. The sleek vehicle crept past the barn, past the pond, slowly up the pasture hillside, to the small parking area next to the house, its hugely powerful engine purring softly. With a mixture of cautious curiosity and a bit more excitement than he’d want to admit, Gurney went out to greet his guest.

  The woman who emerged from the car was tall and curvaceously slim, wearing a satiny cream blouse and satiny black pants. Her shoulder-length black hair was cut in a straight bob across her forehead like Uma Thurman’s in Pulp Fiction. She was, as Hardwick had promised, “drop-dead gorgeous.” But there was something more—a tension in her as striking as her looks.

  She took in her surroundings with a few appraising glances that seemed to absorb everything and reveal nothing. An ingrained habit of circumspection, thought Gurney.

  She walked toward him with the hint of a grimace—or was it the customary set of her mouth?

  “Mr. Gurney, Val Perry. I appreciate your making time for me,” she said, extending her hand. “Or should I call you Detective Gurney?”

  “I left the title in the city when I retired. Call me Dave.” They shook hands. The intensity of her gaze and strength of her grip surprised him. “Would you like to come inside?”

  She hesitated, glancing around the garden and the small bluestone patio. “Can we sit out here?”

  The question surprised him. Even though the sun was now well above the eastern ridge in a cloudless sky and most of the dew was gone from the grass, the morning was still chilly.

  “Seasonal affective disorder,” she said with an explanatory smile. “Do you know what that is?”

  “Yes.” He returned her smile. “I think I have a mild case of it myself.”

  “I have more than a mild case. From this time of year on, I need as much light, preferably sun, as possible. Or I really do want to kill myself. So if you don’t mind, Dave, perhaps we could sit out here?” It wasn’t really a question.

  The detective part of his brain, dominant and hardwired, unaffected by the technicality of retirement, wondered about her seasonal-disorder story, wondered if there was another reason. An eccentric control need, a desire to make others conform to her whims? A desire, for whatever reason, to keep him off balance? Neurotic claustrophobia? An effort to minimize the risk of being recorded? And if being recorded was a worry, did it have a practical or paranoid basis?

  He led her to the patio that separated the French doors from the asparagus bed. He indicated a couple of folding chairs on either side of a small café table Madeleine had purchased at an auction. “Is this all right?”

  “It’s fine,” she said, pulling one of the chairs out from the table and sitting on it without bothering to brush off the seat.

  No concern about ruining her obviously pricey slacks. Ditto the ecru leather handbag she tossed on the still-damp tabletop.

  She studied his face with interest. “How much information has Investigator Hardwick already given you?”

  Hard edge on the voice, hard look in the almond eyes.

  “He gave me the basic facts surrounding the events leading up to and following the … the murder of your daughter. Mrs. Perry, if I may stop for a moment. I need to tell you before we go on how terribly sorry I am for your loss.”

  At first she didn’t react at all. Then she nodded, but the movement was so slight it could have been nothing more than a tremor.

  “Thank you,” she said abruptly. “I appreciate that.”

  Clearly she didn’t.

  “But my loss is not the issue. The issue is Hector Flores.” She articulated the name with tightened lips as though biting down defiantly on a bad tooth. “What did Hardwick tell you about him?”

  “He said there was clear and convincing evidence of his guilt … that he was a strange, controversial character … that his background is still undetermined and his motivation uncertain. Current location unknown.”

  “Current location unknown!” She repeated the phrase with a kind of ferocity, leaning toward him over the little table, placing her palms on the moist metal surface. Her wedding ring was a simple platinum band, but her engagement ring was crowned with the largest diamond he’d ever seen. “You summed it up perfectly,” she went on, her eyes as wildly bright as the stone. “ ‘Current location unknown.’ That’s not acceptable. Not endurable. I’m hiring you to put an end to it.”

  He sighed softly. “I think we may be getting a little ahead of ourselves.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” The pressure of her hands on the tabletop had turned her knuckles white.

  He answered almost sleepily, an inverted reaction he’d always had to displays of emotion. “I don’t know yet if it makes any sense for me to get involved in a situation that’s the subject of an active police investigation.”

  Her lips twitched into an ugly smile. “How much do you want?”

  He shook his head slowly. “Didn’t you hear what I said?”

  “What do you want? Name it.”

  “I have no idea what I want, Mrs. Perry. There are a lot of things I don’t know.”

  She took her hands off the table and placed them in her lap, interlacing the fingers as though it were a technique to maintain self-control. “I’ll keep it simple. You find Hector Flores. You arrest him or kill him. Whichever you do, I’ll give you whatever you want. Whatever you want.”

  Gurney leaned back from the table, letting his gaze drift to the asparagus patch. At the far end of it, a red hummingbird feeder hung from a shepherd’s crook. He could hear the rising and falling pitch of the buzzing wings as two of the tiny birds swooped viciously at each other—each claiming sole right to the sugar water, or so it seemed. On the other hand, it might be some strange remnant of a spring mating dance, and what looked like a killer instinct might be another instinct altogether.

  He made an effort to focus his attention on Val Perry’s eyes, trying to di
scern the reality behind the beauty—the actual contents of this perfect vessel. There was rage in her, no doubt of that. Desperation. A difficult past—he would bet on that. Regret. Loneliness, though she would not admit to the vulnerability that word implied. Intelligence. Impulsiveness and stubbornness—the impulsiveness to grab hold of something without thinking, the stubbornness to never let it go. And something darker. A hatred of her own life?

  Enough, he said to himself. Too easy to confuse speculation with insight. Too easy to fall in love with a wild guess and follow it over a cliff.

  “Tell me about your daughter,” he said.

  Something in her expression shifted, as if she, too, were putting aside a certain train of thought.

  “Jillian was difficult.” Her announcement had the dramatic tone of the opening sentence of a story read aloud. He suspected that whatever followed would be something she’d said many times before. “More than difficult,” she continued. “Jillian was dependent on medication to remain merely difficult and not utterly impossible. She was wild, narcissistic, promiscuous, conniving, vicious. Addicted to oxies, roxies, Ecstasy, and crack cocaine. A world-class liar. Dangerously precocious. Horribly attuned to the weaknesses of other people. Unpredictably violent. With an unhealthy passion for unhealthy men. And that’s with the benefit of the finest therapy money could buy.” Oddly excited by this litany of abuse, she sounded more like a sadist hacking at a stranger with a razor than a mother describing the emotional disorders of her child. “Did Hardwick tell you what I’m telling you about Jillian?” she asked.