by John Verdon
“I think you were right,” said Gurney.
The frown came back, but now it was directed at him. “About what?”
“About the young woman being stoned or crazy.”
She smiled humorlessly. “What does she want?”
“Good question.”
“What does she say she wants?”
“To see me. To tell me who killed her father.”
“Carl Spalter?”
“Yes.”
“Are you going to see her?”
“Maybe.” He paused, thinking about it. “Probably.”
“Where?”
“Where she’s living. The family house on Venus Lake. Out by Long Falls.”
“Venus as in the goddess of love?”
“I guess.”
“And venereal disease?”
“I suppose.”
“Nice name for a lake.” She paused. “You said ‘the family house.’ Her father’s dead and her stepmother’s in prison. Who else is in the family?”
“As far as I know, no one. Alyssa’s the only child.”
“Quite a child. You’re going there alone?”
“Yes and no.”
She looked at him curiously.
“Maybe with some simple electronic backup.”
“You mean you’re going to be wired?”
“Not like on television, with a van full of electronics geeks and satellite equipment sitting around the corner. I’m thinking a low-tech substitute. Are you going to be home tomorrow or at the clinic?”
“I’m working in the afternoon. I should be here most of the morning. Why?”
“What I’m thinking is this. When I get to Venus Lake, before I go into the house itself, I could call our landline from my cell phone. When you pick up and confirm that it’s me, you just switch on the recorder. I’ll leave my phone on, in my shirt pocket. It may not transmit everything with ideal clarity, but it’ll provide some record of what’s said in my meeting with her, which might turn out to be useful.”
Madeleine looked doubtful. “That’s fine for later, to prove whatever you want to prove, but … it’s not exactly protection while you’re there. In the two minutes Alyssa was on the phone with me, I did get a strong impression that she might be nuts. Dangerously nuts.”
“Yeah, I know. But—”
She cut him off. “Don’t tell me how many dangerously nutty people you had to deal with in the city. That was then, this is now.” She paused, as if questioning the reality of the then/now distinction. “How much do you know about this person?”
He thought about it. Kay had said plenty about Alyssa. But how much of it was true was another question.
“How much do I know about her for sure? Almost nothing. Her stepmother claims she’s a drug addict and a liar. She may have had sex with her father. She may have had sex with Mick Klemper to influence the outcome of the investigation. She may have framed her stepmother for murder. She may have been stoned out of her mind on the phone with me just now. Or she may have been putting on a bizarre act—for God only knows what reason.”
“Do you know anything positive about her?”
“I can’t say that I do.”
“Well … it’s your decision.” She closed the silverware drawer a little more firmly than necessary. “But I think that meeting with her in her house by yourself is a terrible idea.”
“I wouldn’t do it if we couldn’t set up the phone thing for protection.”
Madeleine nodded ever so slightly, somehow managing to convey with that restrained gesture a clear message: It’s far too risky, but I know I can’t stop you.
Then she added something, aloud. “Have you made that appointment yet?”
He realized that she’d switched subjects, and that the segue itself was fraught with meaning, which he pretended not to grasp. “What appointment?”
She stood there by the sink, her hands resting on the rim of it, fixing him with a patient, disbelieving stare.
“Are you talking about Malcolm Claret?” he asked.
“Yes. Who did you think?”
He shook his head in a kind of helpless gesture. “There’s a limit to the number of things I can keep in my mind at once.”
“What time are you leaving tomorrow?”
He sensed another change of direction. “For Venus Lake? Maybe nine or so. I doubt that Miss Alyssa gets up very early. Why?”
“I want to work on the chicken house. I thought maybe if you had a few free minutes you could explain the next steps so I could make a little progress before I go to the clinic. It’s supposed to be a nice morning.”
Gurney sighed. He tried to focus on the chicken project—the basic geometry, how far they’d gotten with their measurements, the materials that needed to be purchased, what had to happen next—but he couldn’t wrap his mind around it. It was as if the Spalter issues and the chicken issues required two different brains. And then there was the Hardwick situation. Each time his mind went back to it, he regretted his decision to do as the man had asked.
He promised Madeleine he’d deal later with the chicken house issue, went into the den, and called Hardwick’s cell number.
Unsurprisingly—and frustratingly—it went directly to voice mail.
“Hardwick—leave a message.”
“Hey, Jack, what’s happening out there? Where are you? Let me know. Please.”
Finally realizing that his brain had reached a useless point of exhaustion, Gurney joined Madeleine in bed. But sleep, when it eventually came, was hardly sleep at all. His mind was stuck in one of those feverish, shallow, circular ruts—in which the ID and the directive, “Hardwick—leave a message,” kept recurring in all sorts of twisted permutations.
Chapter 30
Beautiful Poison
Gurney waited until the following morning to tell Madeleine about the power-line drama at Hardwick’s house. When he completed his much abridged rendition of the incident, she sat quietly watching him, as if waiting for the other shoe to fall.
The other shoe was the one he was afraid to drop, but felt he had to. “I think, as a precaution—” he began, but she finished his thought for him.
“I should move out of the house for a while. Is that what you were going to say?”
“It’s just to be on the safe side. Just for a few days. My feeling is that this guy made his point and isn’t likely to repeat the performance, but still … I want you to be away from any possible danger until the issue is resolved.”
Anticipating the same angry reaction she’d had to a similar suggestion he’d made a year earlier during the unnerving Jillian Perry case, he was caught off-balance by her evident lack of objection. Her first question was surprisingly practical: “How many days are we talking about?”
“I’d only be guessing. But … maybe three, four? Depends on how soon we can eliminate the problem.”
“Three or four days starting when?”
“Hopefully by tomorrow night? I was thinking maybe you could invite yourself to your sister’s place down in—”
“I’ll be at the Winklers’.”
“You’ll be where?”
“I knew you wouldn’t remember. The Winklers. At their farm. In Buck Ridge.”
It rang a distant bell in his memory.
“The people with the odd animals?”
“Alpacas. And you also remember that I offered to go there to help them take care of things during the fair?”
A second distant bell. “Ah. Yes. Right.”
“And that the fair starts this weekend?”
A third distant bell. “Right.”
“So that’s where I’ll be. At the fair with them and at their farm. I was going to go the day after tomorrow, but I’m sure they won’t mind me coming a day early. In fact, they had invited me to stay the whole week. I was going to take a few days off from the clinic. You know, we did discuss this when they first brought it up.”
“I have a vague recollection. I guess it just seemed so fa
r away at the time. But that’s fine—a lot more convenient than going down to your sister’s or something like that.”
Her easy manner stiffened. “But what about you? If it makes sense for me not to be here …”
“I’ll be fine. Like I said, the shooter was delivering a message. He seems to know that Hardwick is responsible for stirring up the Spalter case, so it makes sense that he addressed his nasty little message to him. Besides, in the highly unlikely event that he wants to make his presence known a second time, I may be able to take advantage of that.”
Her face was full of anxious confusion, as if she were wrestling with a major contradiction.
He noted her expression and regretted having added an unnecessary twist, which he now tried to dance away from. “My point is that the likelihood of any real problem here is minuscule, but even if it’s less than one percent, I’d like you to be as far away from it as possible.”
“But again, what about you? Even if it is less than one percent, which I don’t really believe …”
“Me? No need to worry. According to New York magazine, I’m the most successful homicide dick in the history of the Big Apple.”
His tongue-in-cheek boast was supposed to relax her.
If anything, it appeared to do the opposite.
Gurney’s GPS took him into the enclave of Venus Lake via a series of agrarian river valleys, bypassing the blight of Long Falls.
Lakeshore Drive formed a two-mile loop around a body of water that he estimated to be about a mile long and a quarter-mile wide. The loop began and ended in a postcard village at the foot of the lake. The Spalter home—an inflated imitation of a colonial farmhouse—stood on a formally landscaped multiacre property at the head of the lake.
He made a complete circuit of the road before stopping in front of Killington’s Mercantile Emporium, which—with the meticulous rusticity of its facade and window display of fly-fishing equipment, English teas, and country tweeds—appeared to Gurney to be about as authentic a representation of rural life as a scented-candle catalog.
He took out his phone and called Hardwick for the third time that morning, and for the third time was shunted into voice mail. Then he called Esti’s cell, also for the third time, but this time she picked up. “Dave?”
“Any news from Jack?”
“Yes and no. He called me at eleven forty-five last night. Didn’t sound very happy. Apparently the shooter either had a trail bike or an ATV. Jack said he could hear him in the woods near the road at one point, but that was the closest he got. So, no progress there. I think he was going to spend time today trying to track down the guys who testified against Kay.”
“What about the photos?”
“The Gurikos autopsy photos?”
“Well, those, too—but I meant the trail-cam photos. Remember the flashes we saw up in the woods after the shots hit the house?”
“According to Jack, the cameras were shattered. Apparently the shooter put a couple of bullets in each one. As for the Gurikos and the Mary Spalter autopsy stuff, I’ve got phone queries out. May have replies soon, fingers crossed.”
The next call he made was to his own home landline number.
At first there was no answer, and the call went into voice mail. He was starting to leave a panicky Where the hell are you? message when Madeleine picked up. “Hi. I was outside, trying to figure out the electric thing.”
“What electric thing?”
“Didn’t we agree there’d have to be an electric line running out to the chicken house?”
He suppressed a sigh of exasperation. “Yeah, I guess. I mean, it’s not … not something we need to deal with right now.”
“Okay … but shouldn’t we know where it’s going to be, so we don’t have a problem later?”
“Look, I can’t focus on this now. I’m at Venus Lake, about to interview the victim’s daughter. I need you to set up our phone to make a recording.”
“I know. You told me. I just leave the line open and turn on the recorder.”
“Right, that’s pretty much it. Except, I thought of a better way to handle it.”
She said nothing.
“You still there?”
“I’m still here.”
“Okay. Here’s what I need you to do. Call me exactly ten minutes from now. I’ll say something to you—ignore whatever it is that I say—then I’ll disconnect you. Call me back immediately. I’ll say something else and disconnect you again. Call me a third time and, no matter what I say, leave the line open at that point and turn on the recorder. Okay?”
“Why the extra complication?” There was a rising note of anxiety in her voice.
“Alyssa may assume that I’m recording the interview on my phone or that I’m transmitting it to another recorder. I want to kill that idea in her head by creating a situation that will convince her I’ve turned it off completely.”
“Okay. I’ll call you in ten minutes. Ten minutes from right now?”
“Yes.”
He slipped the phone into his shirt pocket and took a small digital recorder out of the car’s console box and clipped it to a very visible position on his belt. Then he drove from Killington’s Mercantile Emporium to the opposite end of Venus Lake—to the open wrought-iron gate and driveway that led up to the Spalter house. He passed slowly through the gate and parked where the driveway broadened in front of wide granite steps.
The front door appeared to be an antique salvaged from an older but equally prosperous home. On the wall beside it there was an intercom. He pressed the button.
A disembodied female voice said, “Come in, the door’s unlocked.”
He checked his watch. Just six minutes to Madeleine’s call. He opened the door and stepped into a large entry hall illuminated by a series of antique sconces on each wall. An arched doorway on the left opened into a formal dining room; a similar one on the right opened into a well-furnished living room with a weathered-brick fireplace a man could stand in. At the rear of the hall a polished-mahogany staircase with elaborate banisters rose to a second-floor landing.
A half-naked young woman came out onto the landing, paused, smiled, and began to descend the stairs. She was wearing only two skimpy bits of clothing—clearly designed to emphasize what they nominally concealed—a pink cutoff T-shirt that barely covered her breasts, and white shorts that covered almost nothing. An unexplained acronym, FMAD, was printed in bold black letters across the stretched fabric of her shirt.
Her face looked fresher than Gurney had expected the face of a drug addict to look. Her shoulder-length ash-blond hair was disarrayed and damp-looking, as though she’d recently come from the shower. She was barefoot. As she descended farther, he noticed that her toenails were painted a pale pink, matching the hint of pink on her lips, which were small and delicately shaped, like a doll’s.
When she reached the foot of the stairs, she paused, giving him the same sort of visual inspection he’d been giving her.
“Hi, Dave.” Her voice, like her appearance, was both vain and absurdly seductive. Her eyes, he noted with interest, were not the dull, self-pitying eyes of the average junkie. They were sky blue, clear, bright. But the chilly substance sparkling in those eyes wasn’t the innocence of youth. Far from it.
There is an interesting thing about eyes, thought Gurney. They contain and reflect, even in the effort of concealment, the emotional sum of everything they’ve seen.
He cleared his throat and asked a perfunctory but necessary question. “Are you Alyssa Spalter?”
Her pink lips parted slightly, showing a row of perfect teeth. “That’s the question cops on TV ask before they arrest somebody. Do you want to arrest me?” Her tone was playful, but her eyes weren’t.
“That’s not my plan.”
“What is your plan?”
“No plan. I’m here because you called me.”
“And because you’re curious?”
“I’m curious about who killed your father. You told me you knew who
it was. Do you?”
“Don’t be in such a hurry. Come in and sit down.” She turned at the foot of the stairs and walked through the archway into the living room, moving on her bare feet with a kind of silkiness, like a dancer. She didn’t look back.
He followed her—thinking that he’d never before encountered such a remarkable combination of over-the-top sexuality and pure cyanide.
The room itself—with its enormous fireplace, leather-upholstered chairs, and English landscape paintings—provided a bizarre contrast to the Lolita-like figure who might soon inherit it. Or maybe not such a contrast after all, considering that the house was probably no older than Alyssa, and its outward appearance no more than a clever contrivance.
“Kinda like a museum,” she said, “but the sofa is nice and soft. I love the way it feels on my legs. Try it.”
Before he could choose a place to sit—anywhere but the sofa—his phone rang. He checked the ID. It was Madeleine, right on time. He stared at the screen with an expression of consternation, as though the caller were the last person he wanted to hear from, before pressing TALK.
“Yes?” He paused. “No.” He paused again before repeating, angrily now, “I said no!” He pressed END CALL, put the phone back in his shirt pocket, looked at Alyssa and erased his frown. “Sorry for the interruption. Where were we?”
“We were about to get comfortable.” She sat at one end of the sofa and gestured invitingly toward the cushion nearest her.
Instead he sat in a wing chair, separated from her by a coffee table.
She let a pouty little look come and go. “You want something to drink?”
He shook his head.
“Beer?”
“No.”
“Champagne?”
“No, I’m fine.”
“Martini? Negroni? Tequini? Margarita?”
“Nothing.”
The pouty look again. “You don’t drink?”
“Sometimes. Not now.”
“You sound so tense. You need to—”
His phone rang again. He checked the ID, confirmed that it was Madeleine. He let it ring three more times, as though intending to let it go to his voice mail; then, in an apparent burst of impatience, he pressed TALK. “What is it?” He paused. “This is not the time … For Christ’s sake …” He paused, looking increasingly annoyed. “Look. Please. I’m in the middle of something. Yes … No … NOT NOW!” He pressed END CALL and replaced the phone in his pocket.
