Shut Your Eyes Tight

by John Verdon

  “What do you want, Jack?”

  “Why the hell would I want anything? Can’t one old buddy just call another old buddy for old times’ sake?”

  “Shove the ‘old buddy’ crap, Jack, and tell me why you’re calling.”

  Again the braying laugh. “That’s so cold, Gurney, so cold.”

  “Look. I haven’t had my second cup of coffee yet. You don’t get to the point in the next five seconds, I hang up. Five … four … three … two … one …”

  “Debutante bride got whacked at her own wedding. Thought you might be interested.”

  “Why would I be interested in that?”

  “Shit, how could an ace homicide detective not be interested? Did I say she got ‘whacked’? Should’ve said ‘hacked.’ Murder weapon was a machete.”

  “The ace is retired.”

  There was a loud, prolonged bray.

  “No joke, Jack. I’m really retired.”

  “Like you were when you leaped in to solve the Mellery case?”

  “That was a temporary detour.”

  “Is that a fact?”

  “Look, Jack …” Gurney was losing patience.

  “Okay. You’re retired. I got it. Now give me two minutes to explain the opportunity here.”

  “Jack, for the love of Christ …”

  “Two lousy minutes. Two. You’re so fucking busy massaging your retirement golf balls you can’t spare your old partner two minutes?”

  The image triggered the tiny tic in Gurney’s eyelid. “We were never partners.”

  “How the hell can you say that?”

  “We worked on a couple of cases together. We weren’t partners.”

  If he were to be completely honest about it, Gurney would have to admit that he and Hardwick did have, in at least one respect, a unique relationship. Ten years earlier, working in jurisdictions a hundred miles apart on different aspects of the same murder case, they had individually discovered separate halves of the victim’s severed body. That sort of serendipity in detection can forge a strong, if bizarre, bond.

  Hardwick lowered his voice into the sincere-pathetic register. “Do I get two minutes or don’t I?”

  Gurney gave up. “Go ahead.”

  Hardwick jumped back into his characteristic carnival-barker-with-throat-cancer oratorical style. “You’re obviously a busy guy, so let me get right to it. I want to do you a giant favor.” He paused. “You still there?”

  “Talk faster.”

  “Ungrateful bastard! All right, here’s what I got for you. Sensational murder committed four months ago. Spoiled little rich girl marries hotshot celebrity psychiatrist. An hour later at the wedding reception on the psychiatrist’s fancy estate, his demented gardener decapitates her with a machete and escapes.”

  Gurney had a slight recollection of seeing a couple of tabloid headlines at that time that were probably related to the affair: BLISS TO BLOODBATH and NEW BRIDE BUTCHERED. He waited for Hardwick to go on. Instead the man coughed so disgustingly that Gurney had to hold the phone away from his ear.

  Eventually Hardwick asked again, “You still there?”

  “Yep.”

  “Quiet as a corpse. You ought to make little beeping sounds every ten seconds, let people know you’re still alive.”

  “Jack, why the hell are you calling me?”

  “I’m handing you the case of a lifetime.”

  “I’m not a cop anymore. You’re not making any sense.”

  “Maybe your hearing is failing in your old age. What are you, forty-eight or eighty-eight? Listen up. Here’s the meat of the story. The daughter of one of the richest neurosurgeons in the world marries a controversial hotshot psychiatrist, a psychiatrist who’s appeared on Oprah, for Godsake. An hour later, in the midst of two hundred guests, she steps into the gardener’s cottage. She’s had a few drinks, wants the gardener to join in the wedding toast. When she doesn’t come out, her new husband sends someone to get her, but the cottage door is locked and she doesn’t answer. Then the husband, the renowned Dr. Scott Ashton, goes and bangs on the door and calls to her. No response. He gets a key, opens the door, and finds her sitting there in her wedding dress with her head chopped off—back window of the cottage open, no gardener in sight. Pretty soon every cop in the county is at the scene. In case you didn’t get the message yet, these are very important people. Case ends up in our lap at BCI, specifically in my lap. Starts out simple—find the crazy gardener. Then it starts getting complicated. This was not your average gardener. The renowned Dr. Ashton had sort of taken him under his wing. Hector Flores—that’s the gardener—was an undocumented Mexican laborer. Ashton hires him, soon realizes that the man is smart, very smart, so he starts testing him, pushing him, educating him. Over a period of two to three years, Hector becomes more like the doctor’s protégé than his leaf raker. Almost a member of the family. Seems that with his new status, he even had an affair with the wife of one of Ashton’s neighbors. Interesting character, Señor Flores. After the murder he disappears off the face of the earth, along with the neighbor’s wife. Last concrete trace of Hector is the bloody machete he left a hundred and fifty yards away in the woods.”

  “So where did all this end up?”

  “Nowhere.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “My brilliant captain had a certain view of the case—you might recall Rod Rodriguez?”

  Gurney recalled him with a shudder. Ten months earlier—six months before the murder Hardwick was describing—Gurney had been involved semiofficially in an investigation controlled by a unit of the State Police Bureau of Criminal Investigation that the rigid, ambitious Rodriguez commanded.

  “His view was that we should bring in for questioning every Mexican within twenty miles of the crime and threaten them with all kinds of crap until one of them led us to Hector Flores, and if that didn’t work, we should extend the radius to fifty miles. That’s where he wanted all the resources—one hundred percent.”

  “You didn’t agree with that?”

  “There were other avenues worth exploring. It’s possible Hector was not what he appeared to be. The whole thing had a funny feel to it.”

  “So what happened?”

  “I told Rodriguez he was full of shit.”

  “Really?” Gurney smiled for the first time.

  “Yeah, really. So I was taken off the case. And it was given to Blatt.”

  “Blatt!?” The name tasted like a mouthful of food gone bad. He remembered Investigator Arlo Blatt as the only BCI detective more irritating than Rodriguez. Blatt embodied an attitude Gurney’s favorite college professor long ago had described as “ignorance armed and ready for battle.”

  Hardwick went on. “So Blatt did exactly what Rodriguez told him to do, and he got nowhere. Four months have passed, and we know less today than when we started. But I can tell you’re wondering, what’s all this got to do with Dave Gurney?”

  “The question did cross my mind.”

  “The mother of the bride is not satisfied. She suspects that the investigation’s been botched. She has no confidence in Rodriguez, she thinks Blatt’s an idiot. But she thinks you’re a genius.”

  “She thinks what?”

  “She came to me last week—four months to the day after the murder, wondering if I could get back on the case or, if I couldn’t do that, could I work on it without anybody knowing. I told her that wouldn’t be a practical approach, my hands were tied, I was already on pretty thin ice with the bureau—however, I did happen to have personal access to the most highly decorated detective in the history of the NYPD, recently retired, still full of vim and vigor, a man who would be more than happy to provide her with an alternative to the Rodriguez-Blatt approach. To put the icing on the cake, I just happened to have a copy of that adoring little piece that New York magazine did on you after you cracked the Satanic Santa case. What was it they called you—Supercop? She was impressed.”

  Gurney grimaced. Several possible responses collided in
his head, all canceling each other out.

  Hardwick seemed encouraged by his silence. “She’d love to meet you. Oh, did I mention? She’s drop-dead gorgeous, early forties but looks about thirty-two. And she made it clear that money wasn’t an issue. You could pretty much name your price. Seriously—two hundred dollars an hour would not be a problem. Not that you’d be motivated by anything as common as money.”

  “Speaking of motives, what’s in it for you?”

  Hardwick’s effort to sound innocent instead sounded comical. “Seeing justice done? Helping out a family that’s been through hell? I mean, losing a child’s got to be the worst thing in the world, right?”

  Gurney froze. The mention of losing a child still had the power to send a tremor through his heart. It was more than fifteen years since Danny, barely four at the time, had stepped into the street when Gurney wasn’t looking, but grief, he’d discovered, was not an experience you went through once and then “moved on” (as the idiotic popular phrase would have it). The truth was that it came over you in successive waves—waves separated by periods of numbness, periods of forgetfulness, periods of ordinary living.

  “You still there?”

  Gurney grunted.

  Hardwick went on. “I want to do what I can for these people. Besides—”

  “Besides,” Gurney broke in, speaking fast, forcing his debilitating emotion aside, “if I did get involved, which I have no intention of doing, it would drive Rodriguez batshit, wouldn’t it? And if I managed to come up with something, something new, something significant, it would make him and Blatt look really bad, wouldn’t it? Might that be one of your perfectly good reasons?”

  Hardwick cleared his throat again. “That’s a fucked-up way of looking at it. Fact is, we got a tragically bereaved mother here who isn’t satisfied with the progress of the police investigation—which I can understand, since the incompetent Arlo Blatt and his crew have rousted every Mexican in the county and haven’t come up with so much as a taco fart. She’s desperate for a real detective. So I’m laying this golden egg in your lap.”

  “That’s great, Jack, but I’m not in the PI business.”

  “For the love of God, Davey, just talk to her. That’s all I’m asking you to do. Just talk to her. She’s lonely, vulnerable, beautiful, with big bucks to burn. And deep down inside, Davey boy, deep down inside there’s something wild in that woman. I guarantee it. Cross my heart and hope to die!”

  “Jack, the last thing I need right now—”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah, you’re happily married, in love with your wife, yadda, yadda, yadda. All right. Fine. And maybe you don’t care about a chance to reveal Rod Rodriguez finally and absolutely as the total asshole he really is. Okay. But this case is complex.” He gave the word a depth of meaning, made it sound like the most precious of all characteristics. “It’s got layers to it, Davey. It’s a fucking onion.”

  “So?”

  “You’re a natural-born onion peeler—the best that ever was.”

  Chapter 3

  Elliptical orbits

  When Gurney finally noticed Madeleine at the den door, he wasn’t sure how long she’d been standing there, nor even how long he himself had been at the den window facing the back pasture that ran up toward the wooded ridge behind the house. To save his life, he could not have described the pasture’s current pattern of blazing goldenrod, browning grasses, and wild blue asters at which he had appeared to be gazing, but he could have come very close to reciting Hardwick’s telephone narrative word for word.

  “So?” said Madeleine.

  “So?” he repeated, as though he hadn’t understood the question.

  She smiled impatiently.

  “That was Jack Hardwick.” He was about to ask if she remembered Jack Hardwick, chief investigator on the Mellery case, when the look in her eyes told him he didn’t need to ask. It was the look she got whenever a name came up that was associated with that terrible chain of murders.

  She stared at him, waiting, unblinking.

  “He wants my advice.”

  Still she waited.

  “He wants me to speak to the mother of a girl who was killed. She was killed on her wedding day.” He was about to say how she was killed, describe the peculiar details, but realized that would be a mistake.

  Madeleine nodded almost imperceptibly.

  “You all right?” he asked.

  “I’d been wondering how long it would take.”

  “How long …?”

  “For you to find another … situation that required your attention.”

  “All I’m going to do is talk to her.”

  “Right. And then, after a nice long talk, you’ll conclude that there’s nothing especially interesting about a woman being killed on her wedding day, and you’ll yawn and walk away. Is that the way you see it?”

  His voice tightened reflexively. “I don’t know enough yet to see it in any particular way.”

  She gave him her patented skeptical smile. “I have to go,” she said. Then, seeming to notice the question in his eyes, she added, “The clinic, remember? See you back here tonight.” And she was gone.

  At first he just stared at the empty doorway. Then he thought he should go after her, started to do so, got as far as the middle of the kitchen, stopped, and wondered what he would say, had no idea, thought he should go after her anyway, went out the side door by the garden. But by the time he got around to the front of the house, her car was halfway down the rough little farm lane that bisected the low pasture. He wondered if she saw him in her rearview mirror, wondered if it made a difference that he’d come out after her.

  In recent months he’d imagined that things were going pretty well. The raw emotion at the end of the Mellery nightmare had evolved into an imperfect peace. He and Madeleine had slipped smoothly, gradually, mostly unconsciously into affectionate or at least tolerant patterns of behavior that resembled separate elliptical orbits. While he gave his occasional lectures at the state police academy, she had accepted a part-time position in the local mental-health clinic, doing intakes and assessments. It was a function for which her LCSW credentials and experience clearly overqualified her, but it seemed to have provided a sense of balance in their marriage, a relief from the pressure of their unrealistic expectations of each other. Or was that just wishful thinking?

  Wishful thinking. The universal anodyne.

  He stood in the matted, drought-wilted grass and watched her car disappear behind the barn onto the narrow town road. His feet were cold. He looked down and discovered he had come outside in his socks, which were now absorbing the morning dew. As he turned to go back into the house, a movement by the barn caught his eye.

  A lone coyote had emerged from the woods and was loping across the clearing between the barn and the pond. Partway across, the animal stopped, turning its head toward Gurney, and studied him for a long ten seconds. It was an intelligent look, thought Gurney. A look of pure, unemotional calculation.

  Chapter 4

  The art of deception

  “What goal is common to every undercover assignment?”

  Gurney’s question was greeted by various expressions of interest and confusion on the thirty-nine faces in the academy classroom. Most guest instructors started their lectures by introducing themselves and giving their résumé highlights, then presented an outline of the subjects to be covered, content and objectives, blah, blah, blah—a general overview to which no one paid much attention. Gurney preferred a cut-to-the-chase approach, particularly for a seminar group like this, made up of experienced officers. And they’d know who he was, anyway. He had a definite reputation in law-enforcement circles. Professionally, the reputation was about as good as it gets in that world, and since his retirement from the NYPD two years earlier, it had only gotten better—if being regarded with increasing levels of respect, awe, envy, and resentment could be considered “better.” Personally, he wished he had no reputation at all, no image to live up to. Or fall short of
.

  “Think about it,” he said with quiet intensity, making eye contact with as many people in the room as he could. “What’s the one thing you need to achieve in every undercover situation? This is an important question. I’d like to get a response from each of you.”

  A hand went up in the front row. The face, set atop a hulking offensive lineman’s body, was young and baffled. “Wouldn’t the goal be different in every case?”

  “The situation would be different,” said Gurney, nodding agreeably. “The people would be different. The risks and rewards would be different. The depth and duration of your immersion in the environment would be different. The persona you project, your cover story, could be very different. The nature of the intelligence or evidence to be acquired would vary from case to case. There are definitely lots of differences. But”—he paused, again making as much eye contact as possible before continuing with rising emphasis—“there’s one goal common to every assignment. It’s your primary goal as an undercover officer. Your success in achieving every other goal of an operation hangs on your success in achieving this primary goal. Your life depends on it. Tell me what you think it is.”

  For nearly half a minute, there was absolute silence, the only movement the formation of thoughtful frowns. Waiting for the replies he knew would eventually come, Gurney glanced around at his physical surroundings—the concrete-block walls with their matte beige paint; the vinyl-tile floor whose brown-and-tan pattern was indistinguishable from the scuff marks that obscured it; the rows of long, speckled-gray Formica tables, shabby with age, serving as shared desks; the stark orange plastic chairs with tubular chrome legs, too small for their large and muscular occupants, their brightness oddly depressing. A time capsule of mid-seventies architectural awfulness, the room created a bleak echo of his last city precinct.

  “Gathering accurate information?” offered a questioning face in the second row.

  “A reasonable guess,” said Gurney encouragingly. “Anyone have any other ideas?”