Peter Pan Must Die (Dave Gurney, No. 4)

by John Verdon

  He’d remind her of the unique bond that was formed in their collaboration years earlier on the Peter Piggert case, when on the same day in jurisdictions a hundred miles apart they each found half of Mrs. Piggert’s body.

  She’d shake her head and dismiss the “bond” as a grotesque coincidence in the past that was a poor reason for any present action.

  Gurney leaned back against the bench slats and looked up at the slate sky. He felt ready, if not entirely eager, for the give-and-take that he expected would begin momentarily. A few small birds, singly and in loose pairs, passed high overhead, flying rapidly, as if late for their roosting commitments.

  When Madeleine finally spoke, however, her tone and angle on the subject were not what he’d expected.

  “You realize that he’s obsessed,” she said, looking out over the pond. Half a statement, half a question.

  “Yes.”

  “Obsessed with getting revenge.”

  “Possibly.”

  “Possibly?”

  “Okay. Probably.”

  “It’s a horrible motive.”

  “I’m aware of that.”

  “And you’re also aware that it makes his version of the facts unreliable?”

  “I have no intention of accepting his version of anything. I’m not that naive.”

  Madeleine looked over at him, then back out in the direction of the pond. They were silent for a while. Gurney felt a chill in the air, a damp, earthy-smelling chill.

  “You need to talk to Malcolm Claret,” she said matter-of-factly.

  He blinked, turned, and stared at her. “What?”

  “Before you get involved in this, you need to talk to him.”

  “What the hell for?” His feelings about Claret were mixed—not because he had anything against the man himself or doubted his professional abilities, but the memories of the occasions that prompted their past meetings were still full of pain and confusion.

  “He might be able to help you … help you understand why you’re doing this.”

  “Understand why I’m doing this? What’s that supposed to mean?”

  She didn’t answer immediately. Nor did he press the question—taken aback momentarily by the sudden sharpness in his own voice.

  They’d been through this before, more than once—this question of why he did what he did, why he’d become a detective in the first place, why he was drawn to homicide in particular, and why it continued to fascinate him. He wondered at the defensiveness of his reaction, given that this was well-trod ground.

  Another pair of small birds, high in the darkening sky, were hurrying to some more familiar, perhaps safer, place—most likely the place they considered home.

  He spoke in a softer voice. “I’m not sure what you mean by ‘why you’re doing this.’ ”

  “You’ve come too close to being killed too many times.”

  He drew back a little. “When you’re dealing with murderers—”

  “Please, not now,” she interrupted, raising her hand. “Not the Dangerous Job speech. That’s not what I’m talking about.”

  “Then what—”

  “You’re the smartest man I know. The smartest. All the angles, possibilities—nobody can figure it out better or faster than you can. And yet …” Her voice trailed off, suddenly shaky.

  He waited a long ten seconds before prompting her gently. “And yet?”

  It was another ten seconds before she went on. “And yet … somehow … you’ve ended up face-to-face with an armed lunatic on three separate occasions in the past two years. An inch from death each time.”

  He said nothing.

  She stared sadly out over the pond. “There’s something wrong with that picture.”

  It took him a while to reply. “You think I want to die?”

  “Do you?”

  “Of course not.”

  She continued looking straight ahead.

  The hillside pasture and the woods beyond the pond were all growing darker. At the edge of the woods the gold patches of ragweed and lavender sprigs of grape-hyacinth had already faded to shades of gray. Madeleine gave a little shiver, zipped her windbreaker up to her chin, and folded her arms across her chest, pulling her elbows tightly against her.

  They sat in silence for a long while. It was as if their conversation had come to a strange stopping place, a slippery declivity from which there was no clear way up and out.

  As a quivering spot of silver light appeared in the center of the pond—a reflection of the moon, which had emerged at that moment through a break in the clouds—there was a sound deep in the woods behind the bench that made the hairs stand up on Gurney’s arms. A keening note, a not-quite-human cry of desolation.

  “What the …?”

  “I’ve heard it before,” said Madeleine. “On different nights it seems to come from different places.”

  He listened, waiting. A minute later, it sounded again, weird and plaintive.

  “Probably an owl,” he said, without having any reason to believe it.

  What he avoided saying was that it sounded to him like a lost child.

  Chapter 4

  Pure Evil

  It was past midnight, and Gurney’s efforts to fall asleep had been as unsuccessful as if he’d had half a dozen cups of coffee.

  The moon, glimpsed briefly at the pond, had disappeared behind a thick new blanket of clouds. Both windows were open at the top, letting a humid chill into the room. The darkness and the touch of the damp night air on his skin formed a kind of enclosure, giving him a creeping sense of claustrophobia. In that small, oppressive place he found it impossible to put aside his uneasy thoughts about the suspended but hardly completed death-wish discussion with Madeleine. But the thoughts went nowhere, led to no conclusions. The frustration persuaded him to abandon the bed.

  He got up and felt his way to the chair where he’d left his shirt and pants.

  “As long as you’re up, you might want to close the upstairs windows.” Madeleine’s voice from the far side of the bed sounded surprisingly wide awake.

  “Why?” he asked.

  “The storm. Haven’t you heard the thunder getting closer?”

  He hadn’t. But he trusted her ears.

  “Shall I close these by the bed too?”

  “Not yet. The air feels like satin.”

  “Wet satin, you mean?”

  He heard her sigh, give her pillow a few pats, and resettle herself. “Wet earth, wet grass, wonderful …” She yawned, made a contented little sound, and said no more. He marveled at how she could find such restorative power in the very elements of nature he instinctively fled from.

  He put on his pants and shirt, went upstairs, and closed the windows in the two spare bedrooms and in the room that Madeleine devoted to sewing, crocheting, and cello practice. He came back downstairs, went into the den, and got the plastic shopping bag full of the Spalter case materials Hardwick had left for him, and brought it out to the dining room table.

  The heaviness of the bag bothered him. It seemed to be a crude warning.

  He began spreading its contents out on the table. Then, remembering Madeleine’s unhappy reaction the last time he took over that table to examine the paperwork documenting the progress of a murder case, he picked everything up and carried it to the coffee table in front of the fireplace at the other end of the room.

  The individual items included a full printed transcript of State of New York v. Katherine R. Spalter trial proceedings; the NYSP Bureau of Criminal Investigation case file on the Spalter homicide (including the multisection original incident report with photos and drawings, crime scene inventories, forensic lab reports, interview and interrogation reports, investigatory progress reports, the autopsy report and photos, the ballistics report, and scores of miscellaneous memos and phone call reports); a list of pretrial motions (all perfunctory, all cut-and-pasted out of the capital case motions manual) and their dispositions (all denied); a folder with articles, blog printouts, broadc
ast transcripts, and a list of links to online coverage of the crime, arrest, and trial phases of the story; a manila envelope containing a set of DVDs of the trial itself, provided by the local cable station that apparently had been granted Court TV–style access to the proceedings; and, finally, a note from Jack Hardwick.

  It was a kind of road map—Hardwick’s suggested route through the daunting heap of information spread out on the coffee table.

  Gurney had good and bad feelings about this. Good, because directions and prioritization could be time-savers. Bad, because they could be manipulative. Often they were both. But they were hard to ignore—as were the opening sentences of Hardwick’s note.

  “Follow the sequence I’ve laid out here. If you depart from the path you’ll drown in a data shit-swamp.”

  The rest of the two-page note consisted of a series of numbered steps on the route.

  “Number one: Get a taste of the case against Kay Spalter. Get the DVD marked ‘A’ from the envelope and check out the prosecutor’s opening statement. It’s a classic.”

  Gurney retrieved his laptop from the den and inserted the disk.

  Like some other recordings of courtroom proceedings he’d seen, this one began with an image of the prosecutor standing in the open area in front of the judge’s bench, facing the jury box, clearing his throat. He was a small man with close-cropped dark hair, maybe in his mid-forties.

  There were background noises of papers rustling, chairs moving, a jumble of indistinguishable voices, someone coughing—most of which subsided after a few sharp raps of the judge’s gavel.

  The prosecutor glanced at the judge, a heavyset black man with a dour expression, who gave him a perfunctory nod. He took a deep breath and stared at the floor for several seconds before looking up at the jury.

  “Evil,” he finally announced in a strong, formal voice. He waited for absolute silence before continuing. “We all think we know what evil is. History books and news reports are full of evil deeds, evil men, evil women. But the scheme you are about to be exposed to—and the ruthless predator you will convict at the end of this trial—will bring the reality of evil home to you in a way you’ll never forget.”

  He glared at the floor, then went on. “This is the true story of a woman and a man, a wife and a husband, a predator and a victim. The story of a marriage poisoned by infidelity. The story of a homicidal plot—an attempted murder that produced a result you may well conclude was worse than murder itself. You heard me right, ladies and gentlemen. Worse than murder.”

  After a pause during which he seemed to be trying to make eye contact with as many jurors as possible, he turned and walked to the prosecution table. Directly in back of the table, in front of the area assigned to courtroom spectators, sat a man in a large wheelchair—an elaborate device that reminded Gurney of the kind of thing in which Stephen Hawking, the paralyzed physicist, made his rare public appearances. It seemed to be providing support for all parts of the occupant’s body, including his head. There were oxygen tubes in his nose and no doubt other tubes in other places, out of sight.

  Although the angle and lighting left much be desired, the image on the screen conveyed enough of Carl Spalter’s situation to make Gurney grimace. To be paralyzed like that, trapped in a numb, unresponsive body, unable even to blink or to cough, dependent on a machine to keep from drowning in your own saliva … Christ! It was like being buried alive, with your body itself the grave. To be trapped inside a half-dead mass of flesh and bones struck him as the ultimate claustrophobic horror. Shuddering at the thought, he saw that the prosecutor had resumed addressing the jury, with his hand extended toward the man in the wheelchair.

  “The tragic story whose terrible climax brought us to this courtroom today began exactly a year ago when Carl Spalter made the bold decision to run for governor—with the idealistic goal of ridding our state of organized crime once and for all. A laudable goal, but one that his wife—the defendant—opposed from the beginning, as the result of corrupt influences you’ll learn about during this trial. From the moment Carl set foot on the path of public service, she not only ridiculed him in public, doing everything she could to discourage him, but she also withdrew from all marital contact with him and began cheating on him with another man—her so-called personal trainer.” He raised an eyebrow at the term, sharing a sour smirk with the jury. “The defendant revealed herself as a woman hell-bent on getting her own way at any cost. When rumors of her infidelity reached Carl, he didn’t want to believe it. But finally he had to confront her. He told her she had to make a choice. Well, ladies and gentlemen, she made a choice, all right. You’ll hear convincing testimony concerning that choice—which was to approach an underworld figure—Giacomo Flatano, or ‘Jimmy Flats’—with an offer of fifty thousand dollars to kill her husband.” He paused, deliberately looking at each member of the jury.

  “She decided she wanted out of the marriage, but not at the expense of losing Carl’s money, so she tried to hire a hit man. But the hit man turned down the offer. So what did the defendant do next? She tried to talk her lover, the personal trainer, into doing it in return for a life of leisure with her on a tropical island, financed by the inheritance she’d receive at Carl’s death—because, ladies and gentlemen, Carl still had hopes for the marriage and still hadn’t changed his will.”

  He extended his hands forward in a kind of supplication for the jury’s empathy. “He had hopes of saving his marriage. Hopes of being with a wife he still loved. And what was that wife doing? She was conniving—first with a gangster, then with a cheap Romeo—to get him killed. What kind of person—?”

  A new voice was heard, out of the video frame, whiny and impatient. “Objection! Your Honor, Mr. Piskin’s emotional conjecture is way beyond anything that—”

  The prosecutor calmly interrupted. “Every word I’m saying will be supported by sworn testimony.”

  The jowly judge, visible in an upper corner of the screen, muttered, “Denied. Proceed.”

  “Thank you, Your Honor. As I was saying, the defendant did everything in her power to persuade her young bedmate to kill her husband. But he refused. Well, guess what the defendant did then. What do you think a determined would-be killer would do?”

  He stared inquiringly at the jury for a good five seconds before answering his own question. “The petty gangster was afraid to shoot Carl Spalter. The personal trainer was afraid to shoot Carl Spalter. So Kay Spalter began taking shooting lessons herself!”

  The out-of-frame voice was heard again. “Objection! Your Honor, the causal link in the prosecution’s use of the word ‘So’ implies an admission of motive by the defendant. There is no such admission anywhere in—”

  The prosecutor broke in. “I’ll restate the narrative, Your Honor, in a way fully supported by testimony. The gangster declined to shoot Carl. The trainer declined to shoot Carl. And at that point the defendant began taking shooting lessons herself.”

  The judge shifted his bulk with apparent physical discomfort. “Let the record show Mr. Piskin’s restatement. Proceed.”

  The prosecutor turned to the jury. “Not only did the defendant take shooting lessons, but you’ll hear testimony from a certified firearms instructor concerning the remarkable level of skill she acquired. Which brings us to the tragic culmination of our story. Last November, Carl Spalter’s mother, Mary Spalter, passed away. She died alone, in the kind of accident that is all too common—a fall in her bathtub in the senior residential community where she had spent the final years of her life. At the funeral service that was conducted at the Willow Rest cemetery, Carl rose to deliver a eulogy at her grave. You’ll hear how he took a step or two, suddenly pitched forward, and hit the ground face-first. He didn’t move. Everyone thought he had tripped, and that the fall had knocked him unconscious. It took a few moments before anyone saw the trickle of blood on the side of his forehead—a trickle of blood coming from a tiny hole in the temple. A subsequent medical examination confirmed what the initial inves
tigating team suspected—that Carl had been struck by a high-powered small-caliber rifle bullet. You’ll hear from the police experts who reconstructed the shooting that the bullet was fired from an apartment window approximately five hundred yards from the point of impact on the victim. You’ll see maps, photographs, and drawings illustrating exactly how it was done. It will all be abundantly clear,” he said with a reassuring smile. He checked his watch before going on.

  As he spoke again, he paced back and forth in front of the jury box. “That apartment house, ladies and gentlemen, was owned by Spalter Realty. The apartment from which the bullet was fired was vacant, awaiting renovation, as were most of the apartments in that building. The defendant had easy access to the keys. But that’s not all. You’ll hear damning testimony that Kay Spalter …” He stopped and pointed toward a woman seated at the defense table with her profile to the camera. “… that Kay Spalter was not only in that building the morning of the shooting, but was in the very apartment from which the bullet was fired at the exact time Carl Spalter was shot. Furthermore, you’ll hear eyewitness testimony that she entered that empty apartment alone and that she left it alone.”

  He paused and shrugged, as if the facts of the case and the conviction those facts demanded were so obvious that there was no more to say. But then he continued. “The charge is attempted murder. But what does that legal term really mean? Consider this. The day before Carl was shot, he was full of life, full of wholesome energy and ambition. The day after he was shot … Well, just look. Take a good look at the man stuck in that wheelchair, propped up and held in place with metal braces and Velcro straps because the muscles that should be doing that job for him are now useless. Look into his eyes. What do you see? A man so battered by the hand of evil that he might be wishing he were dead? A man so devastated by the treachery of a loved one that he might be wishing he’d never been born?”

  Again the off-screen voice broke in. “Objection!”

  The judge cleared his throat. “Sustained.” His voice was a weary rumble. “Mr. Piskin, you’re over the line.”