Shut Your Eyes Tight

by John Verdon

  “Hello, Jordan. How are you this evening?”

  “Fine.”

  Gurney said nothing.

  “What … what’s this about?”

  “What do you think?”

  “What? Who am I speaking to?”

  “I’m a police officer, Jordan.”

  “I have nothing to say to the police. That’s been made clear by—”

  Gurney broke in. “Not even about Karnala?”

  There was a pause. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Gurney sighed, made a bored little sucking noise with his teeth.

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Ballston reiterated.

  If he really didn’t, thought Gurney, he’d have hung up by now. Or he never would have taken the call. “Well, Jordan, the thing is, if you had any information you were willing to share, perhaps something could be worked out to your advantage.”

  Ballston hesitated. “Look … uh, why don’t you give me your name, Officer?”

  “That’s not a good idea.”

  “Sorry? I don’t …”

  “See, Jordan, this is a preliminary exploration here. You understand what I’m saying?”

  “I’m not sure I do.”

  Gurney sighed again, as though speech itself were a burden. “No formal offer can be made without some indication that it would be seriously considered. A willingness to provide useful information about Karnala Fashion could result in a very different prosecutorial attitude toward your case, but we would need to feel a sense of cooperation from you before we discuss the possibilities. I’m sure you understand.”

  “No, I really don’t.” Ballston’s voice was brittle.

  “No?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I never heard of Caramel Fashion, or whatever the name of it is. So it’s impossible to tell you anything about it.”

  Gurney laughed softly. “Very good, Jordan. That’s very good.”

  “I’m serious. I know nothing about that company, that name, whatever it is.”

  “That’s good to know.” Gurney let a glimpse of the reptile creep into his voice. “That’s good for you. Good for everybody.”

  The glimpse seemed to have a stunning effect. Ballston was absolutely quiet.

  “You still with us, Jordan?”

  “Yes.”

  “So we got that piece of it out of the way, right?”

  “Piece of it?”

  “That piece of the situation. But we got more to talk about.”

  There was a pause. “You’re not really a cop, are you?”

  “Of course I’m a cop. Why would I say I was a cop if I wasn’t a cop?”

  “Who are you really, and what do you want?”

  “I want to come see you.”

  “See me?”

  “I don’t like the phone so much.”

  “I don’t understand what you want.”

  “Just a little talk.”

  “About what?”

  “Enough bullshit. You’re a smart guy. Don’t talk like I’m stupid.”

  Again Ballston seemed stunned into silence. Gurney thought he could hear a tremor in the man’s breathing. When Ballston spoke again, his voice had dropped to a frightened whisper.

  “Look, I’m not sure who you are, but … everything is under control.”

  “Good. Everyone will be glad to hear that.”

  “Really. I mean it. Everything … is … under … control.”

  “Good.”

  “Then, what more …”

  “A little talk. Face-to-face. We just want to be sure.”

  “Sure? But why? I mean …”

  “Like I said, Jordan … I don’t like the fucking phone!”

  Another silence. This time Ballston hardly seemed to be breathing at all.

  Gurney brought his tone back down to a velvety calm. “Okay, nothing to worry about. So here’s what we do. I come up to your place. We talk a little bit. That’s all. See? No problem. Easy.”

  “When do you want to do this?”

  “How about half an hour from now?”

  “Tonight?” Ballston’s voice was close to breaking.

  “Yeah, Jordan, tonight. When the fuck else would half an hour from now be?”

  In Ballston’s silence, Gurney imagined he could sense pure fear. The ideal moment to end the call. He broke the connection and laid the phone down on the end of the dinner table.

  In the dim light beyond the far end of the table, Madeleine was standing in the kitchen doorway in her pajamas. The top didn’t match the bottom. “What’s going on?” she asked, blinking sleepily.

  “I think we have a fish on the line.”

  “We?”

  With a twinge of annoyance, he rephrased his comment. “The fish in Palm Beach seems to be hooked, at least for the moment.”

  She nodded thoughtfully. “Now what?”

  “Reel him in. What else?”

  “So who are you meeting with?”

  “Meeting with?”

  “In half an hour.”

  “You heard me say that? Actually, I’m not meeting with anyone in half an hour. I wanted to give Mr. Ballston the idea that I was in the neighborhood. Ratchet up the uneasiness. I also said that I’d come up to his place, create the impression that I might be driving up from Lake Worth or South Palm.”

  “What happens when you don’t show up?”

  “He worries. Has some trouble sleeping.”

  Madeleine looked skeptical. “Then what?”

  “I haven’t worked that out yet.”

  Despite the fact that this was partly true, Madeleine’s antenna seemed to detect the dishonesty in it. “So do you have a plan or don’t you?”

  “I have sort of a plan.”

  She waited, staring at him expectantly.

  He couldn’t picture any way out of the spot he was in other than straight ahead. “I need to get in closer to him. It’s obvious he has some connection with Karnala Fashion, that the connection is dangerous, and that it frightens him. But I need to find out a lot more about it—exactly what the connection is, what Karnala is all about, how Karnala and Jordan Ballston are connected to the other pieces of the case. There’s no way I can do all that over the phone. I need to see his eyes, read his expressions, watch his body language. I also need to take advantage of the moment, while the son of a bitch is wriggling on the hook. Right now I have his fear working for me. But that won’t last.”

  “So you’re on your way to Florida?”

  “Not tonight. Maybe tomorrow.”

  “Maybe tomorrow?”

  “Most likely tomorrow.”

  “Tuesday.”

  “Right.” He wondered if he’d forgotten something. “Do we have some other commitment?”

  “What difference would it make?”

  “Well, do we?”

  “As I said, what difference would it make?”

  Such a simple question, yet how strangely difficult to answer. Perhaps because Gurney heard it as a proxy for the larger questions that these days never seemed far from Madeleine’s mind: Will anything we plan to do together ever make a difference? Will any piece of our life together ever be more important than the next step in some investigation? Will our being together ever outweigh your being a detective? Or will chasing whatever you’re chasing always be at the heart of your life?

  Then again, maybe he was reading too damn much into a cranky comment, a passing mood in the middle of the night. “Look, tell me if I’m supposed to be doing something tomorrow that I somehow forgot about,” he said earnestly, “and I’ll tell you if it makes a difference.”

  “You’re such an accommodating man,” she said, mocking his earnestness. “I’m going back to bed.”

  For some time after she left, his priorities were jumbled. He went to the unlit end of the room, the sitting area between the fieldstone fireplace and the iron woodstove. The air smelled cold and ashy. He sank into his dark leather armchair.
He felt uneasy, unmoored. A man without a harbor.

  He fell asleep.

  He awoke at 2:00 A.M. He pushed himself up out of the chair, stretching his arms and back to work out the kinks.

  The customary currents of his mind had reasserted themselves and seemingly resolved whatever doubts he might have had about his plans for the coming day. He got his credit card out of his wallet, went to the computer in the den, and typed on the search line, “Flights from Albany NY to Palm Beach FL.”

  As his round-trip electronic tickets were printing out, along with a Palm Beach Tourist Guide, he was heading into the shower. And forty-five minutes later, having scribbled a note to Madeleine promising he’d be home that evening around seven, he was on his way to the airport, carrying nothing but his wallet, cell phone, and printouts.

  During the sixty-mile drive east on I-88, he made four phone calls. The first was to a high-end limousine service, open twenty-four hours a day, to arrange for the right kind of car to meet him in Palm Beach. The next was to Val Perry, because he was going to be spending her money on some expensive but necessary purchases, and he wanted it on the record, if only by voice mail in the wee hours of the morning.

  His third call, at 4:20 A.M., was to Darryl Becker. Amazingly, Becker not only picked up but sounded wide awake—or as wide awake as a man with a drawl could sound to northern ears.

  “I’m just on my way out to the gym,” Becker said. “What’s up?”

  “I have some good news, and I need a big favor.”

  “How good and how big?”

  “I took a wild swing at Ballston on the phone, and I hit a soft spot. I’m on my way to see him, to see what happens if I keep punching.”

  “He doesn’t talk to cops. What the hell did you say to get through to him?”

  “Long story, but the son of a bitch is going down.” Gurney was sounding a lot more confident than he really was.

  “I’m impressed. So what’s the favor?”

  “I need a couple of big guys, nastiest-looking big guys you know, to stand next to my car while I’m in Ballston’s house.”

  Becker sounded incredulous. “You afraid someone’s going to steal it?”

  “I need to create a certain impression.”

  “When does this impression need to get created?”

  “Around noontime today. By the way, the pay is pretty good. They get five hundred bucks apiece for an hour’s work.”

  “For standing next to your car?”

  “For standing next to my car and looking like mob muscle.”

  “For five hundred an hour, that can be arranged. You can pick them up at my gym in West Palm. I’ll give you the address.”

  Chapter 59

  Undercover

  Gurney’s plane departed from Albany on schedule at 5:05 A.M. He switched planes in D.C., barely making a tight connection, and arrived in Palm Beach International Airport at 9:55 A.M.

  In the designated limo-pickup area, among the dozen or so uniformed drivers awaiting incoming passengers, there was one driver with a sign bearing Gurney’s name.

  He was a young Latino with high Indian cheekbones, hair as black as squid ink, and a diamond stud in one ear. He seemed at first a bit thrown off, even annoyed, by the absence of luggage—until Gurney handed him the address of their first stop: the Giacomo Emporium on Worth Avenue. Then he brightened, perhaps reasoning that a man who traveled light for convenience, later picking up what he needed at Giacomo, might be a lavish tipper.

  “Car is right outside, sir,” he said, with an accent Gurney guessed to be Central American. “Very nice one.”

  A power-assisted revolving door propelled them from the controlled, seasonless, indoor climate common to airports everywhere into a tropical steam bath—reminding Gurney there is nothing autumnal about southern Florida in September.

  “Right over there, sir,” said the driver, his smile revealing surprisingly bad teeth for a young man. “First one.”

  The car, as Gurney had specified in his predawn call, was a Mercedes S600 sedan, the sort of six-figure vehicle you might see once a year in Walnut Crossing. In Palm Beach it was as common as five-hundred-dollar sunglasses. Gurney slipped into the backseat—a quiet, dehumidified cocoon of soft leather, soft carpet, and softly tinted windows.

  The driver closed the door for him, got in the front seat, and they glided soundlessly into the stream of taxis and shuttle buses.

  “Temperature okay?”

  “It’s fine.”

  “You want music?”

  “No, thank you.”

  The driver sniffed, coughed, slowed to a crawl as the car passed through a pond-size puddle. “Been raining like a bitch.”

  Gurney did not answer. He’d never been prone to conversing simply for the sake for conversing, and in the company of strangers he was more comfortable with silence. Not another word was spoken until the car came to a stop at the entrance to the very posh little shopping plaza where the Giacomo Emporium was located.

  The driver looked at him through the rearview mirror. “You know how long you want to be here?”

  “Not long,” said Gurney. “Fifteen minutes, max.”

  “Then I stay here. Cops tell me no, then I circle.” He made an orbital gesture with his forefinger to illustrate the intended process. “I circle, keep coming around, passing this spot, until you’re here. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  The shock of stepping back out into the hot, humid atmosphere was intensified by the visual impact of moving from the car’s tinted light into the full glare of the midmorning Florida sun. The plaza was landscaped with planting beds of palms and ferns and potted Asiatic lilies. The air smelled like boiled flowers.

  Gurney hurried into the store, where the air smelled more like money than flowers. Customers, blond women from thirty to sixty, drifted through the meticulously crafted displays of clothes and accessories. Salespeople, anorexic boys and girls in their twenties, looked like they were trying to look like the anorexic boys and girls in Giacomo ads.

  Gurney’s eagerness to flee this chic environment had him back on the street in ten minutes. Never had he spent so much on so little: an amazing $1,879.42 for one pair of jeans, one pair of moccasins, one polo shirt, and one pair of sunglasses—selected with the assistance of a willowy male exhibiting the fashionable ennui of a recent vampire victim.

  In a changing room, Gurney had removed his battered jeans, T-shirt, sneakers, and socks and put on his pricey new apparel. He removed the tags and gave them to the salesperson along with his old clothes, which he asked to be wrapped in a Giacomo box.

  It was then that the salesperson offered the first small smile Gurney had seen since entering the shop. “You’re like a Transformer,” he said, presumably referring to the popular toy that is instantly convertible from one thing into another.

  The Mercedes was waiting. Gurney got in, checked his printed-out tourist guide, and gave the driver the next address, less than a mile away.

  Nails Delicato was a tiny place, staffed by four dramatically coiffed manicurists who appeared to be teetering on the shaky fence that separated high-fashion models from high-priced hookers. No one seemed to notice or care that Gurney was the only male customer. The manicurist to whom he was assigned looked sleepy. Apart from apologizing several times for yawning while she was working on his nails, she said nothing until she was almost at the end of the process, applying a transparent polish.

  “You have nice hands,” she observed. “You should take better care of them.” Her voice was both young and weary, and it seemed to resonate with the matter-of-fact sadness in her eyes.

  As he was paying on the way out, he bought a small tube of hair gel from the display of creams and cosmetics on the counter. He opened the tube, spread a bit of the gel on his palms, and rubbed it into his hair, aiming for the disarranged look so popular at the moment.

  “What do you think?” he asked the blankly beautiful young woman in charge of collecting the money. The questio
n engaged her to a degree that surprised him. She blinked several times as if being summoned from a dream, came around to the front of the counter, and studied his head from various angles.

  “Can I …?” she asked.

  “Absolutely.”

  She ran her fingers through his hair in rapid zigzags, flicking it this way and that and pulling up on bits of it to make it spikier. After a minute or two, she stepped back, her eyes lighting up with pleasure.

  “That’s it!” she declared. “That’s the real you!”

  He burst out laughing, which seemed to confuse her. Still laughing, he took her hand and, on an impulse, kissed it for no sensible reason he could think of—which also seemed to confuse her, but more pleasantly. Then he stepped out into the Florida steam bath and back into the Mercedes and gave the driver the address of Darryl Becker’s gym.

  “We need to pick up a couple of guys in West Palm,” he explained. “Then we’re going to visit a man on South Ocean Boulevard.”

  Chapter 60

  Dancing with the devil

  As anyone who’d attended one of his academy lectures quickly realized, Gurney’s approach to undercover work was more complex than the average detective’s. It wasn’t just a matter of wrapping yourself in the manners, attitudes, and backstory of an assumed identity. It was more devious than that, and proportionally more difficult to manage. His “layered” approach involved creating a complex persona for the target to penetrate, a code for the target to break, a path the target could follow to arrive at the beliefs Gurney wanted him to embrace.

  The current situation, however, added another dimension of difficulty. He had in past instances always known precisely what end-point belief about his identity he wanted his target to arrive at. But this time he didn’t. Because the appropriate identity would depend on the exact nature of the Karnala operation and Ballston’s connection to it—both still unknowns in the equation. It left Gurney in the position of having to feel his way forward, knowing that a misstep could be fatal.

  As the car turned onto South Ocean Boulevard a couple of miles from Ballston’s address, the absurd difficulty of what Gurney was attempting began to sink in. He was walking into the home of a psychopathic sex murderer, unarmed. His only defense and only chance of success lay in the creation of a persona he would have to make up as he went along, following the currents of Ballston’s reactions as best he could, moment by moment. It was a challenge out of Alice in Wonderland. A sane man would probably turn back. A sane man with a wife and a son would certainly turn back.