Shut Your Eyes Tight

by John Verdon

  “Suppose that Ashton did in fact kill Jillian.”

  “And that Hector wasn’t involved?”

  “Right,” said Gurney. “What would follow from that starting point?”

  “That Ashton is a very good liar.”

  “So maybe he’s been telling a lot of other lies, and we haven’t noticed.”

  “Lies about Hector Flores?”

  “Right,” said Gurney again, frowning thoughtfully. “About … Hector … Flores.”

  “What is it?”

  “Just … thinking.”

  “What?”

  “Is it … possible that …?”

  “What is it?” asked Hardwick.

  “Just a minute. I just want to …” Gurney’s voice trailed off into the electricity of his racing thoughts.

  “What?”

  “Just … reducing … the equation. Reducing it to the simplest … possible …”

  “God, don’t keep stopping in the middle of sentences! Spit it out!”

  Christ it couldn’t be that simple, could it?

  But maybe it was! Maybe it was perfectly, ridiculously simple!

  Why hadn’t he seen it sooner?

  He laughed.

  “For Godsake, Gurney …”

  He hadn’t seen it sooner because he’d been searching for a missing piece. And he hadn’t been able to find it. Of course he hadn’t been able to find it. Because there was no missing piece. There never was a MISSING piece. There was an EXTRA piece. The piece that kept getting in the way of everything else. The piece that had been getting in the way of the truth from the beginning. The piece that had been designed specifically to get in the way of the truth.

  Hardwick was glaring at him in frustration.

  Gurney turned toward him with a wild smile. “Do you know why no one could find Hector Flores after the murder?”

  “Because he was dead?”

  “I don’t think so. There are three possible explanations. One, he escaped from the area like everyone thought he did. Two, he’s dead, killed by the real murderer of Jillian Perry. Or three … he was never alive to begin with.”

  “The fuck are you talking about?”

  “It’s possible that Hector Flores never existed, that there never was any such person as Hector Flores, that Hector Flores was a myth created by Scott Ashton.”

  “But all the stories …”

  “They could all have come from Ashton himself.”

  “What!?”

  “Why not? Stories get started, they spread, take on a life of their own—a point you’ve made many times. Why couldn’t the stories all have had the same starting point?”

  “But people saw Flores in Ashton’s car.”

  “They saw a Mexican day laborer in a straw cowboy hat with sunglasses. The man they saw could have been anyone Ashton might have hired on that particular day.”

  “But I don’t get how …”

  “Don’t you see? Ashton could have created all the stories himself, all the rumors. Perfect food for gossip. The special new gardener. The wonderfully industrious Mexican. The man who learned everything amazingly quickly. The man of tremendous potential. The Cinderella man. The protégé. The trusted personal assistant. The genius who began to develop little quirks. The man who stood naked on one foot in the garden pavilion. So many stories, so interesting, so colorful, so shocking, so delicious, so repeatable. The perfect food for gossip. God, don’t you see? He fed his neighbors an irresistible saga, and they ran with it, told it to one another, embellished it, told it to strangers. He created Hector Flores out of nothing and turned him into a legend, one chapter after another. A legend that Tambury couldn’t stop talking about. The man became bigger than life, realer than real.”

  “What about the bullet in the teacup?”

  “Easiest thing in the world. Ashton could have fired the bullet himself, hid the gun, reported it stolen. Perfectly believable that the crazy, ungrateful Mexican would have stolen the doctor’s expensive rifle.”

  “Hold on a second. On that videotape, at the very beginning, before the reception starts, Ashton went to the cottage to talk to Flores. When he knocked on the door, the audio picked up a very low ‘Esta abierto.’ If there was no Hector Flores in there, who said that?”

  “Obviously Ashton could have said it himself in a muffled voice. His back was to the camera.”

  “But the girls Hector spoke to at Mapleshade …”

  “The girls he supposedly spoke to are all conveniently dead or missing. So how do we know he ever spoke to anyone? There’s no one available who can actually say she saw him face-to-face. Isn’t that a pretty goddamn strange thing all by itself?”

  They looked at each other, then at the computer screen, where Ashton could be seen speaking briefly to two of the girls, pointing instructively to various parts of the chapel area. He looked as relaxed and commanding as the winning general on the day the enemy surrendered.

  Hardwick shook his head. “You really believe that Ashton came up with this incredibly elaborate scheme—that he invented this mythical person and managed to nurture the fiction for three years—just so he’d have someone to blame in case he decided someday to get married and murder his wife? Doesn’t that sound a little ridiculous?”

  “Put that way, it sounds totally ridiculous. But suppose he had another reason for inventing Hector?”

  “What reason?”

  “I don’t know. A bigger reason. A more practical reason.”

  “Seems awfully shaky. And what about the Skard business? Wasn’t that all based on the theory that one of the Skard brothers, probably Leonardo, was masquerading as Hector and talking unrepentant Mapleshade girls into leaving home for money and thrills after graduation? If there was no Hector, what happens to that whole sex-slavery scenario?”

  “I don’t know.” It was a crucial question, thought Gurney. What sense did any of their theories make if they depended on the idea that Leonardo Skard was operating in the guise of Hector Flores—if no one called Hector Flores had ever existed?

  Chapter 77

  The final episode

  “By the way,” said Gurney, “you happen to have your weapon on you?”

  “Always,” said Hardwick. “My ankle would feel naked without its little holster. In my humble opinion, bullets sometimes rank right up there with brains as problem solvers. Why do you ask? You intend to make a dramatic move?”

  “No dramatic move just yet. We need to be a lot surer about what’s going on.”

  “You sounded damn sure of yourself a minute ago.”

  Gurney made a face. “All I’m sure of is that my version of the Perry murder is possible. Or that it’s not impossible. Scott Ashton could have killed Jillian Perry. Could have. But it needs more digging, more facts. Right now there’s zero evidence and zero motive. We’ve got nothing but speculation on my part, a logical exercise.”

  “But what if—”

  Hardwick’s question was cut short by the sound of the heavy chapel door on the floor below opening and shutting, followed by a sharp metallic click. They both leaned reflexively toward the shadowy stairs beyond the doorway of the office and listened for footsteps.

  A minute later Scott Ashton emerged from the top of the stone stairwell and entered the office, moving with the same air of power and control they’d witnessed on the screen. He sank into the plushly upholstered chair behind his desk and removed his Bluetooth earpiece and dropped it in the top drawer. He brought his hands together on the massive black desktop, slowly interlocking the fingers—except for the thumbs which he held parallel to each other as if to facilitate a close comparison between them. It was a comparison that seemed to interest him. After smiling for some time at his private thoughts, he separated his hands, turning up the palms with the fingers loosely splayed in a queerly insouciant gesture.

  Then he reached into his jacket pocket and withdrew a small-caliber pistol. The action was casual—so similar to taking out a pack of cigarettes that, for a sec
ond, Gurney thought that that was what Ashton had done.

  With an almost sleepy motion, he pointed the little semiautomatic, a .25-caliber Beretta, at a point somewhere between Gurney and Hardwick, but his eyes were fixed on Hardwick.

  “Do me a favor, please. Put your hands on the arms of your chair. Right now, please. Thank you. Now, remaining seated just as you are, raise your feet slowly off the floor. Thank you. I really appreciate your cooperation. Raise them higher. Thank you. Now please extend your legs forward, toward my desk. Keep extending them until you can rest your feet on the desktop. Thank you. That’s very good, very accommodating.”

  Hardwick followed all these instructions with the relaxed seriousness of a man listening to a yoga instructor. Once his feet were propped up on the desk, Ashton leaned across from his side of it, reached under Hardwick’s right cuff, and removed a Kel-Tec P-32 from its holster. He looked it over, hefted it in his hand, then placed it in the top desk drawer.

  He sat again and smiled. “Ah, yes. Much better. Too many armed people in one room is a tragedy waiting to happen. Please, Detective, feel free to put your feet down. I think we can all relax, now that the order of things is clear.”

  Ashton looked at one of them and then at the other in an idle, amused way. “I must say it’s turning into an absolutely fascinating day. So many … developments. And you, Detective Gurney, you’ve really had that little mind of yours in overdrive.” Ashton’s voice was purring with honeyed sarcasm. “Quite a lurid plot you’ve described. Sounds like a movie pitch. Scott Ashton, famous psychiatrist, murdered his wife in the presence of two hundred wedding guests. And all he had to tell her was, ‘Shut your eyes tight.’ There never was a Hector Flores. The bloody machete was a clever ruse. There was a cleaver in his pocket. A pseudo-accidental dive into the roses. A clever switch of suits in the bathroom. And so forth and so on. An ingenious conspiracy uncovered. A sensational murder case solved. Merchants of perversion exposed. The dead get their day of justice. The living live happily ever after. Is that about the size and shape of it?”

  If he expected a reaction of shock or fear at his ability to summarize Gurney’s conversation with Hardwick, he was disappointed. One of Gurney’s strengths when blindsided was to react mildly but in a tone that was slightly off, a tone that might be appropriate to more secure circumstances. That’s what he did now.

  “That pretty much sums it up,” he said simply. He showed no surprise that while Ashton was downstairs, he’d been listening in on their conversation—probably via a transmission to his earpiece from a hidden microphone. No—it was definitely a transmission to the earpiece. Gurney secretly kicked himself for not having noted the anomaly of Ashton’s speaking on a handheld cell phone earlier on the chapel floor—indicating that his earpiece at that moment was being used for something else. It was painful that something so obvious had escaped his notice, but that kind of pain he would never show.

  Gurney found the effect of his blasé response hard to measure. He hoped it had the jarring effect intended. Any speck of doubt he could toss into Ashton’s grasp of the situation would be a plus.

  Ashton shifted his gaze to Hardwick, whose eyes were on the pistol. Ashton shook his head as though admonishing a naughty child. “As they say in the movies, Detective, don’t even think about it. I’d have three bullets in your chest before you got out of your chair.”

  Then he addressed Gurney in the same tone. “And you, Detective, you’re like a fly that’s found its way into the house. You buzz around, you walk on the ceiling. Bzzzz. You see what you can see. Bzzzz. But you have no grasp of what you see. Bzzzz. Then SWAT! All that buzzing around—for nothing. All that searching and looking—all of it for nothing. Because you can’t possibly understand what you see. How could you? You’re nothing but a fly.” He began to laugh, soundlessly.

  Gurney knew that the strategic imperative was to create delay, to slow things down. If Ashton was the killer he appeared to be, the mind game would be what it usually was in such cases: a contest for the high ground of emotional control. So the practical agenda for Gurney now was to prolong it—to engage his opponent in the game and make it go on until a game-ending opportunity presented itself. He sat back in his chair and smiled. “But in this case, Ashton, the fly got it right, didn’t he? You wouldn’t have that gun in your hand if I hadn’t gotten it right.”

  Ashton stopped laughing. “Gotten it right? The deductive mastermind is taking credit for having gotten it right? After I fed you all those little facts? The fact that some of our graduates were missing, the fact of the car arguments, the fact that the young ladies in question had all appeared in Karnala ads? If I hadn’t been tempted to tease you—to make the contest interesting—you wouldn’t have gotten any further than your moronic colleagues.”

  Now Gurney laughed. “Making the contest interesting had nothing to do with it. You knew that our next step would be to talk to former students, and all those facts would come to light immediately. So you weren’t giving us a damn thing we wouldn’t have gotten in another day or two ourselves. It was a pathetic effort to buy our trust with information you couldn’t keep hidden.” Gurney’s reading of Ashton’s expression—a frozen attempt at the appearance of equanimity—convinced him that he’d hit the target dead center. But sometimes in the management of a confrontation like this, there was such a thing as being too right, of scoring too direct a hit.

  Ashton’s next words gave him the awful feeling that this was one of those cases.

  “There’s no point in wasting any more time. I want you to see something. I want you to see how the story ends.” He stood up and with his free hand dragged his heavy chair to a point near the open office door that formed a triangle with the large flat-screen monitor on the table behind his desk and the pair of chairs opposite the desk that were occupied by Gurney and Hardwick—a position with his back to the door from which he could observe the screen and them at the same time.

  “Don’t look at me,” said Ashton, pointing at the computer. “Look at the screen. Reality TV. Mapleshade: The Final Episode. It’s not the finale I’d intended to write, but in reality television one has to be flexible. Okay. We’re all in our seats. The camera is running, the action is in progress, but I think we could use a little more light down there.” He took the small lights-and-locks electronic remote from his pocket and pressed a button.

  The chapel nave grew brighter, as rows of wall-sconce lamps were illuminated. There was a brief hiatus in the conversational hum as the girls in the discussion groups looked around at the lamps.

  “That’s better,” said Ashton, smiling with satisfaction at the screen. “Considering your contribution, Detective, I want to be sure you can see everything clearly.”

  What contribution? Gurney wanted to ask. Instead he put his hand over his mouth and stifled a yawn. Then he glanced at his watch.

  Ashton gave him a long, cool stare. “You won’t be bored much longer.” A swarm of minuscule tics migrated across his face. “You’re an educated man, Detective. Tell me something: The medieval term condign reparation—do you know what it means?”

  Strangely, he did. From a college philosophy class. Condign reparation: Punishment in perfect balance with the offense. Punishment of an ideally appropriate nature.

  “Yes, I do,” he answered, triggering a hint of surprise in Ashton’s eyes.

  And then, at the edge of his field of vision, he detected something else—a quickly moving shadow. Or was it the edge of a dark piece of clothing, a sleeve perhaps? Whatever it was, it had disappeared in the recess of the landing, where there would be barely enough room for a man to stand, just outside the office doorway.

  “Then you may be able to appreciate the damage your ignorance has done.”

  “Tell me about it,” said Gurney, with a look of increasing interest that he hoped would hide—better than his feigned yawn—the fear he was feeling.

  “You have exceptional mental wiring, Detective. Quite an efficient brain. A remarkable
calculator of vectors and probabilities.”

  This characterization was precisely the opposite of Gurney’s current estimate of his capabilities. He wondered, with a nauseating chill, if Ashton’s perception of his state of mind could be so keen that the observation was intended as a joke.

  Gurney’s own sense was that the brain that was responsible for his great professional victories was sliding sideways in the mud, losing traction and direction, as it strained to fit together so many things at once: The unreal Hector. The unreal Jykynstyl. The decapitated Jillian Perry. The decapitated Kiki Muller. The decapitated Melanie Strum. The decapitated Savannah Liston. The decapitated doll in Madeleine’s sewing room.

  Where was the center of gravity in all this—the place at which the lines of force converged? Was it here at Mapleshade? Or at the brownstone, tended by Steck’s “daughters”? Or in some obscure Sardinian café where Giotto Skard might at that very moment be sipping bitter espresso—lurking like a wizened spider at the center of his web, where all the threads of his enterprises converged?

  Unanswered questions were piling up fast.

  And now a very personal one: Why had he, Gurney, failed to consider the possibility that the room might be bugged?

  He’d always felt that the “death wish” concept was a grossly facile and overused paradigm, but now he wondered if it might not be the best explanation of his own behavior.

  Or was his mental hard drive just too damn full of undigested details?

  Undigested details, wobbly theories, and murders.

  When all else fails, return to the present.

  Madeleine’s persistent advice: Be here, in the here and now. Pay attention.

  Awareness of the moment: the holy grail of consciousness.

  Ashton was in the middle of a sentence. “… tragicomic clumsiness of the criminal-justice system—which is neither just nor systematic, but surely criminal. When it comes to dealing with sex offenders, the system is inanely political and ludicrously inept. Of the offenders it catches, it helps none and makes the majority worse. It frees all those clever enough to fool the so-called professionals who evaluate them. It publishes public lists of sex offenders that are incomplete and useless. Under cover of this PR scam, it turns snakes loose to devour children!” He glared at Gurney, at Hardwick, at Gurney again. “This is the wretched system all your fine mental wiring, all your logic, all your investigative skill, all your intelligence ultimately serves.”