by John Verdon
He checked the clock on the dashboard: 1:00 P.M. If he skipped lunch, he’d have time for one more interview before his appointment with Ashton.
The Muller property was next to the last at the high end of Badger Lane, the last being Ashton’s manicured paradise. It was a world apart from Harlen’s dump at the corner of Higgles Road.
Gurney pulled over just past a mailbox bearing the address listed for Carl Muller on his interview master sheet. The house was a very large white Colonial with classic black trim and shutters, set well back from the road. Unlike the meticulously tended houses preceding it, it had a subtle aura of neglect—a shutter a little askew, a broken-off branch lying on the front lawn, grass shaggy, fallen leaves matted on the driveway, a blown-over lawn chair upside down on a brick path by the side door.
Standing at the paneled front door, Gurney could hear music playing faintly somewhere inside. There was no doorbell, just an antique brass knocker, which he used several times with increasing impact before the door was finally opened.
The man facing him did not look well. Gurney figured that his age could be anywhere from forty-five to sixty, depending on how much of his appearance was attributable to sickness. His limp hair matched the grayish beige of his drooping cardigan.
“Hello,” he said, with no hint of greeting or curiosity.
It struck Gurney as an odd way for the man to speak to a stranger at his door. “Mr. Muller?”
The man blinked, looked like he was listening to a taped replay of the question. “I’m Carl Muller.” His voice had the pallid, toneless quality of his skin.
“My name is Dave Gurney, sir. I’m involved in the search for Hector Flores. I was wondering if I might have a minute or two of your time.”
The taped replay took longer this time. “Now?”
“If that’s possible, sir. It would be very helpful.”
Muller nodded slowly. He stepped back, making a vague gesture with his hand.
Gurney stepped into the dark center hall of a well-preserved nineteenth-century home with wide floorboards and abundant original woodwork. The music he’d dimly heard before entering he now heard more identifiably. It was, strangely out of season, “Adeste Fideles,” and it seemed to be coming from the basement. There was another sound as well, a kind of low, rhythmic buzzing, also coming from somewhere below them. To Gurney’s left, a double doorway opened into a formal dining room with a massive fireplace. In front of him, the broad hallway extended to the rear of the house, where there was a glass-paneled door to what appeared to be an endless lawn. On the side of the hallway, a wide staircase with an elaborate balustrade led to the second floor. To his right was an old-fashioned parlor furnished with overstuffed couches and armchairs and antique tables and sideboards over which hung Winslow-style seascapes. Gurney’s impression was that the inside of the house was better cared for than the outside. Muller smiled vacuously, as though waiting to be told what to do next.
“Lovely house,” said Gurney pleasantly. “Looks very comfortable. Perhaps we could sit for a moment and talk?”
Again the tape delay. “All right.”
When he didn’t move, Gurney gestured inquiringly toward the parlor.
“Of course,” said Muller, blinking as though he were just waking up. “What did you say your name was?” Without waiting for an answer, he led the way to a pair of armchairs that faced each other in front of the fireplace. “So,” he said casually when they were both seated, “what’s this all about?”
The tone of the question was, like everything else about Carl Muller, roughly twenty degrees off center. Unless the man had some organic tendency toward confusion—unlikely in the rigorous profession of marine engineering—the explanation had to be some form of medication, perhaps understandable in the aftermath of his wife’s disappearing with a murderer.
Maybe because of the position of the heating vents, Gurney noted that the strains of “Adeste Fideles” and the faint rising and falling buzz were more audible in this room than in the hall. He was tempted to ask about it but thought it better to stay focused on what he really wanted to know.
“You’re a detective,” said Muller—a statement, not a question.
Gurney smiled. “I won’t keep you long, sir. There are just a few things I need to ask you.”
“Carl.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Carl.” He was gazing into the fireplace, speaking as though the ashy remnants of the last fire had jogged his memory. “My name is Carl.”
“Okay, Carl. First question,” said Gurney. “Before the day she disappeared, did Mrs. Muller have any contact with Hector Flores that you were aware of?”
“Kiki,” he said—another revelation from the ashes.
Gurney repeated his question, changing the name.
“She would have, wouldn’t she? Under the circumstances?”
“The circumstances being …?”
Muller’s eyes closed and opened, too lethargic a process to be described as a blink. “Her therapy sessions.”
“Therapy sessions? With whom?”
Muller looked at Gurney for the first time since they’d entered the room, blinking more quickly now. “Dr. Ashton.”
“The doctor has an office in his home? Next door?”
“Yes.”
“How long had she been seeing him?”
“Six months. A year. Less? More? I don’t remember.”
“When was her last session?”
“Tuesday. They were always on Tuesday.”
For a moment Gurney was bewildered. “You mean the Tuesday before she disappeared?”
“That’s right, Tuesday.”
“And you’re assuming that Mrs. Muller—Kiki—would have had contact with Flores when she went to Ashton’s office?”
Muller didn’t answer. His gaze had returned to the fireplace.
“Did she ever talk about him?”
“Who?”
“Hector Flores?”
“He wasn’t the sort of person we’d discuss.”
“What sort of person was he?”
Muller uttered a humorless little laugh and shook his head. “That would be obvious, wouldn’t it?”
“Obvious?”
“From his name,” said Muller with sudden, intense disdain. He was still staring into the fireplace.
“A Spanish name?”
“They’re all the same, you know. So bloody obvious. Our country is being stabbed in the back.”
“By Mexicans?”
“Mexicans are just the tip of the knife.”
“That’s the kind of person Hector was?”
“Have you ever been to those countries?”
“Latin countries?”
“Countries with hot climates.”
“Can’t say that I have, Carl.”
“Filthy places, every one of them. Mexico, Nicaragua, Colombia, Brazil, Puerto Rico—every one of them, filthy!”
“Like Hector?”
“Filthy!”
Muller glared at the ash-covered iron grate as though it were displaying infuriating images of that filth.
Gurney sat silently for a minute, waiting for the storm to subside. He watched the man’s shoulders slowly relaxing, his grip on the arms of the chair loosening, his eyes closing.
“Carl?”
“Yes?” Muller’s eyes reopened. His expression had become shockingly bland.
Gurney spoke softly. “Did you ever have evidence that anything inappropriate might be going on between your wife and Hector Flores?”
Muller looked perplexed. “What did you say your name was?”
“My name? Dave. Dave Gurney.”
“Dave? What a remarkable coincidence! Did you know that was my middle name?”
“No, Carl, I didn’t.”
“Carl David Muller.” He stared into the middle distance. “ ‘Carl David,’ my mother used to say, ‘Carl David Muller, you go straight to your room. Carl David Muller, you better behave or Santa
may lose your Christmas list. You mind what I say, Carl David.’ ”
He stood up from his chair, straightened his back, and chanted the words in the voice of a woman—“Carl David Muller”—as though the name and voice had the power to break down the wall to another world. Then he walked out of the room.
Gurney heard the front door opening.
He found Muller holding it ajar.
“It was nice of you to drop by,” said Muller blandly. “You have to leave now. Sometimes I forget. I’m not supposed to let people into the house.”
“Thank you, Carl, I appreciate your time.” Taken aback by what looked like some form of psychotic decompensation, Gurney was inclined to comply with Muller’s request in order to avoid creating any additional stress, then make some calls from his car and wait for help to arrive.
By the time he was halfway to his car, he had second thoughts. It might be better to keep an eye on the man. He returned to the front door, hoping he wouldn’t have a problem persuading Muller to admit him a second time, but the door wasn’t fully closed. He knocked on it, anyway. There was no response. He eased it open and looked inside. Muller wasn’t there, but a door in the hallway that Gurney was sure had been shut before was now ajar. Stepping into the center hall, he called out as mildly and pleasantly as he could, “Mr. Muller? Carl? It’s Dave. You there, Carl?”
No answer. But one thing was certain. The buzzing sound—more of a metallic whooshing sound, now that he could hear it more clearly—and the “Adeste Fideles” Christmas hymn were coming from someplace behind that barely open hall door. He went to it, nudged it wide open with his toe. Dimly lit stairs led down to the basement.
Cautiously, Gurney started down. After a few steps, he called out again, “Mr. Muller? Are you down there?”
A boy-soprano choir began to reprise the hymn in English: “O come, all ye faithful / Joyful and triumphant / O come ye, O come ye to Bethlehem.”
The stairs were enclosed on both sides all the way down, so only a small slice of the basement was visible to Gurney as he gradually descended the steps. The part he could see seemed to be “finished” with the traditional vinyl tiles and pine paneling of millions of other American basements. For a brief moment, the commonness of it was oddly reassuring. That feeling disappeared when he stepped out of the stairwell and turned to the source of the light.
In the far corner of the room was a very large Christmas tree, its top bent over against the nine-foot-high ceiling. Its hundreds of tiny lights were the room’s source of illumination. There were colored garlands and foil icicles and scores of glass ornaments in every traditional Christmas shape from simple orbs to handblown glass angels—all hanging from silver hooks. The room was filled with a piney fragrance.
Beside the tree, standing transfixed behind a huge platform the size of two Ping-Pong tables set end to end, was Carl Muller. His hands were on two control levers attached to a black metal box. A model train buzzed around the perimeter of the platform, made figure eights across the middle, climbed and descended gentle grades, roared through mountain tunnels, passed through tiny villages and farms, crossed rivers, traversed forests … around and around … again … again.
Muller’s eyes—glimmering spots in the sagging pallor of his face—glowed with all the colors of the tree lights. He reminded Gurney of a person afflicted with progeria, the weird accelerated-aging disease that makes a child look like an old man.
After a while Gurney went back upstairs. He decided to go on to Scott Ashton’s house and see what the doctor knew about Muller’s condition. The trains and the tree provided reasonable evidence that it was an ongoing situation, not an acute breakdown requiring intervention.
Without setting the lock, he closed the heavy front door behind him with a solid thump. As he started back along the brick path to the lane where his car was parked, an elderly woman was getting out of a vintage Land Rover that was parked directly behind his Outback.
She opened the rear door, spoke a few stern, clipped words, and out stepped a very large dog, an Airedale.
The woman, like her imposing dog, had something about her that was both patrician and wiry. Her complexion was as outdoorsy as Muller’s was sickly. She came toward Gurney with the determined stride of a hiker, leading the dog on a short leash, carrying a walking stick more like a cudgel than a cane. Halfway up the path, she stopped with feet apart, stick planted firmly to one side and the dog on the other, blocking his way.
“I’m Marian Eliot,” she announced—as one might announce, “I am your judge and jury.”
The name was familiar to Gurney. It had appeared on the list of Ashton’s neighbors interviewed by the BCI team.
“Who are you?” she demanded.
“My name is Gurney. Why do you ask?”
She tightened her grip on her long, gnarled stick: scepter and potential weapon. This was a woman accustomed to being answered, not questioned, but it would be a mistake to be bullied by her. It would make it impossible to gain her respect.
Her eyes narrowed. “What are you doing here?”
“I’d be tempted to say it’s none of your business, if your concern for Mr. Muller weren’t so obvious.”
He wasn’t sure whether he’d hit the right note of assertiveness and sensitivity until, at the conclusion of a piercing stare, she asked, “Is he all right?”
“Depends on what you mean by all right.”
There was a flicker of something in her expression suggesting that she understood his equivocation.
“He’s in the basement,” Gurney added.
She made a scrunched-up face, nodded, seemed to be picturing something. “With the trains?” Her imperious voice had softened.
“Yes. A regular thing with him?”
She studied the top end of her big stick as though it might be a source of useful information or next steps. She exhibited no interest in answering Gurney’s question.
He decided to nudge the conversation forward from a different angle. “I’m involved in the Perry murder investigation. I remember your name from the list of people who were interviewed back in May.”
She made a contemptuous little sound. “It wasn’t really an interview. I was initially contacted by … I’ll remember the name in a moment … Senior Investigator Hardpan, Hardscrabble, Hard-something … a rough-edged man, but far from stupid. Fascinating in a way—rather like a smart rhinoceros. Unfortunately, he disappeared from the case and was replaced by someone called Blatt, or Splat, or something like that. Blatt-Splat was marginally less rude and far less intelligent. We spoke only briefly, but the brevity was a blessing, believe me. Whenever I meet a man like that, my heart goes out to the teachers who once had to endure him from September to June.”
The comment brought forth a recollection of the words next to the name Marian Eliot on the interview file’s cover sheet: Professor of Philosophy, retired (Princeton).
“In a way that’s why I’m here,” said Gurney. “I’ve been asked to follow up on some of the interviews, get some more detail into the picture, maybe develop a better understanding of what really happened.”
Her eyebrows shot up. “What really happened? You have doubts about that?”
Gurney shrugged. “Some pieces of the puzzle are still missing.”
“I thought the only things missing were the Mexican ax murderer and Carl’s wife.” She seemed both intrigued and annoyed that the situation might not be as she had assumed. The Airedale’s sharp, querying eyes seemed to be taking it all in.
Gurney suggested, “Perhaps we could speak somewhere other than right here?”
Chapter 19
Frankenstein
Marian Eliot’s suggested location for carrying on their conversation was her own home, which happened to be across the lane and a hundred yards back down the hill from Carl Muller’s. The actual location turned out to be not so much her home as her driveway, where she enlisted Gurney’s help unloading bags of peat moss and mulch from the back of her Land Rover.
She’d traded her cudgel for a hoe and stood by the edge of a rose garden about thirty feet from the vehicle. As Gurney hefted the bags into a wheelbarrow, she asked him about his precise role in the investigation and his position in the state police chain of command.
His explanation that he was an “evidence consultant” who’d been retained by the victim’s mother outside the official BCI process was greeted with a skeptical eye and tightened lips.
“What on earth is that supposed to mean?”
He decided to take a chance and reply bluntly. “I’ll tell you what it means if you can keep it to yourself. The fact is, it’s a job description that lets me carry on an investigation without waiting for the state to issue an official PI license. If you want to check on my background as an NYPD homicide detective, call the smart rhinoceros—whose name, by the way, is Jack Hardwick.”
“Hah! Good luck with the state! Do you think you might be able to push that wheelbarrow over here?”
Gurney took that as her way of accepting him and how things were. He made three more trips from the back of the Land Rover to the rose garden. After the third she invited him to sit with her on a white-enameled cast-iron bench under an overgrown apple tree.
She turned so she could look at him squarely. “What’s all this about missing pieces?”
“We’ll come to the missing pieces, but I need to ask a few questions first to help me get oriented.” He was feeling his way toward the right balance of assertiveness and accommodation, watching her body language for signs of needed course corrections. “First question: How would you describe Dr. Ashton in a sentence or two?”
“I wouldn’t try. He’s not the sort of man to be captured in a sentence or two.”
“A complex man?”
“Very.”
“Any predominant personality trait?”
“I wouldn’t know how to answer that.”
Gurney suspected that the quickest means of getting something from Marian Eliot was to stop tugging on it. He sat back and studied the shapes of the apple tree’s branches, twisty from a series of long-ago prunings.
