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

by John Verdon

  It reminded Gurney to call Kyle. That call also went into voice mail. “Hey, son. Checking in. I followed our man to the fair. All hell broke loose. Jack Hardwick got shot. I’m about to drive him to the hospital in Cooperstown. Hope everything there is okay. Give me a call and fill me in as soon as you can. Love you.”

  As soon as he ended the call, Madeleine got into the back seat, he got into the driver’s seat, and they were on their way.

  The mass of vehicles fleeing the immediate area of the fairgrounds created a kind of high-pressure traffic that felt surreal in a place where cows as a rule far outnumbered cars, and the rare moments of obstruction were caused by slow-moving hay wagons.

  By the time they reached the county route, the line of thunderstorms had passed to the east in the direction of Albany, and media helicopters were moving in, raking the valley with their searchlights—evidently hunting for the most photogenic bits of catastrophe they could find. Gurney could almost hear the breathlessly creative RAM-TV news report on “the panicky flight into the night from what some suspect may have been a terrorist attack.”

  Once free of the temporary congestion, Gurney drove as fast as he dared, and then some. With the speedometer reading between fifty and a hundred most of the way, he made it to the Cooperstown ER in about forty-five minutes. Amazingly, along the way not one word was spoken. The harrowing combination of the excessive speed, Gurney’s aggressive approach to curves, and the barely muffled roar of the big V8 seemed to freeze out any possibility of conversation en route—no matter how large and urgent the open issues and unanswered questions.

  Two hours later, the situation was quite different.

  Hardwick had been examined, probed, scanned, needled, stitched, bandaged, and transfused; put on an IV drip of antibiotics, painkillers, and electrolytes; and admitted to the general hospital for further observation. Kyle had arrived unexpectedly and had joined Gurney and Madeleine in Hardwick’s room. The three of them were sitting in chairs by Hardwick’s bed.

  Kyle filled everyone in on everything that had occurred from the arrival of the police at the house up to the removal of Klemper’s body and the abrupt suspension of the initial investigatory process when they, along with all other police and emergency personnel in a fifty-mile radius, had been called to the fairgrounds—leaving a large area outside the house taped off as a designated crime scene. At that point, having overheard enough of the police communications to have a sense of the disaster in progress, Kyle had replaced the flat on the car with the spare and headed for the fairgrounds himself. It was then that he checked his phone and found his father’s message about driving to the Cooperstown hospital.

  When he finished his narrative, Madeleine let out a nervous laugh. “I guess you figured if a madman was blowing up the fair, that’s where your father would be?”

  Kyle looked uncomfortable, glanced at Gurney, said nothing.

  Madeleine smiled and shrugged. “I’d have made the same assumption.” Then she asked a question of no one in particular in a deceptively casual tone. “First it was Lex Bincher. Then Horace. Then Mick Klemper. Who was supposed to be next?”

  Kyle looked again at his father.

  Hardwick was lying back against a pile of pillows, restful but alert.

  Gurney finally offered a reply so oblique, it was hardly a reply at all. “Well, the main thing, the important thing, the only thing that matters, is that it’s all over.”

  Now they all stared at him—Kyle curious, Hardwick skeptical, Madeleine baffled.

  Hardwick spoke slowly—as though speaking faster might hurt. “You gotta be fucking kidding.”

  “Not really. The pattern is finally clear,” said Gurney. “Your client, Kay, will win her appeal. The shooter is dead. The danger has been neutralized. The case is over.”

  “Over? You forget about the corpse on your lawn? And that we have no proof that the midget you shot is really Peter Pan? And that those promotion ads on RAM-TV promising your big Spalter case revelations are going to have every cop involved in it out for your ass?”

  Gurney smiled. “I said the case was over. The complications and conflicts will take time to resolve. The resentments will fester. The recriminations will linger. It will take time for the facts to be accepted. But too much of the truth has come out at this point for anyone to rebury it.”

  Madeleine was gazing at him intently. “Are you saying that you’re done with the Spalter murder case?”

  “That’s exactly what I’m saying.”

  “You’re walking away from it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Just like that?”

  “Just like that.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “What don’t you understand?”

  “You’ve never walked away from a puzzle with a major piece still missing.”

  “That’s right.”

  “But you’re doing it now?”

  “No, I’m not. Quite the opposite.”

  “You mean it’s over because you’ve solved it? You know who hired Peter Pan to kill Carl Spalter?”

  “The fact is, nobody hired him to kill Carl.”

  “What on earth do you mean?”

  “Carl wasn’t supposed to be killed. This whole case has been a comedy—or tragedy—of errors from the very beginning. It’s going to end up being a great teaching tool. The chapter in the criminal investigation textbook will be titled ‘The Fatal Consequences of Accepting Reasonable Assumptions.’ ”

  Kyle was leaning forward in his chair. “Carl wasn’t supposed to be killed? How’d you figure that out?”

  “By banging my head against all the other pieces of the case that made no sense with Carl as the bull’s-eye. The prosecution’s wife-shoots-husband scenario fell apart almost as soon as I looked closely at it. It seemed far more likely that Kay, or maybe someone else, had hired a pro to hit Carl. But even that scenario had awkward aspects—like where the shot actually came from and the general complexity of the hit and the peculiarity of bringing in an expensive but uncontrollable pro like Peter Pan for what should have been a fairly straightforward job. It just never felt right. And then there were some old cases that kept coming to mind—a shooting in an alley, an exploding car.”

  Kyle’s eyes were widening. “Those cases were connected to Carl’s murder?”

  “Not directly. But they both involved faulty assumptions about timing and sequence. Maybe I sensed those same assumptions might be lurking in the Spalter case.”

  “What assumptions?”

  “In the alley shooting, two big ones. That the shot the officer fired actually struck the suspect and killed him. And that the officer was lying about which way the suspect was facing when he shot him. Both assumptions were quite reasonable. But they were wrong. The bullet wound that ended up killing the suspect had been incurred before the officer arrived on the scene. And the officer was telling the truth. With the car, the assumption was that it exploded because the driver lost control of it and drove it into a ravine. In fact, the driver lost control and drove it into a ravine because it exploded.”

  Kyle nodded thoughtfully.

  Hardwick made one of his distressed faces. “So what’s this got to do with Carl?”

  “Everything—sequence, timing, assumptions.”

  “How about spelling that out in the simple language of a peasant like me?”

  “Everyone assumed that Carl stumbled and fell because he was shot. But suppose he was shot because he stumbled and fell.”

  Hardwick blinked, his eyes revealing a rapid rethinking of the possibilities. “You mean stumbled and fell in front of the intended victim?”

  Madeleine looked unconvinced. “Isn’t that a bit of a stretch? That he was accidentally shot because he stumbled in front of the person the hit man was actually aiming at?”

  “But that’s exactly what everyone saw happen, but then they all changed their minds—because their minds immediately reconnected the dots in a more conventional way.”

/>   Kyle looked perplexed. “What do you mean, ‘That’s exactly what everyone saw happen’?”

  “Everyone at the funeral who was interviewed claimed they thought at first that Carl had stumbled—maybe tripped over something or turned his ankle and lost his balance. A little while later, when the bullet wound was discovered, they all automatically revised their original perceptions. Essentially, their brains unconsciously were evaluating the relative likelihood of two possible sequences and favoring the one that normally would have had the greater chance of occurring.”

  “Isn’t that what our brains are supposed to do?”

  “Up to a point. The problem is, once we accept a certain sequence—in this case, ‘was shot, stumbled, and fell’ rather than ‘stumbled, was shot, and fell’—we tend to dismiss and forget the other. Our new version becomes the only version. The mind is built to resolve ambiguities and move on. In practice this often means leaping from reasonable assumption to assumed truth, and not looking back. Of course, if the reasonable assumption happens to be inaccurate, everything built on it later is nonsense and eventually collapses.”

  Madeleine was exhibiting the impatient frown with which she greeted most of Gurney’s psychological theorizing. “So who was Panikos aiming at when Carl got in the way?”

  “The answer is easy enough to get to. It would be the person whose role as a victim makes all the other oddities of the case make sense.”

  Kyle’s eyes were fastened on his father. “You already know who it is, don’t you?”

  “I have a pretty good idea.”

  Madeleine spoke up excitedly. “The thing I keep hearing you talk about, the ‘oddity’ that bothers you the most, is the involvement of Peter Pan—who supposedly only accepted really difficult contracts. So there are just two questions. First, ‘Who at the Mary Spalter funeral would be the most difficult to kill?’ And second, ‘Did Carl pass in front of that person as he was heading for the podium?’ ”

  Hardwick’s interjected response sounded certain, despite his speech being somewhat blurred. “Answer to the first is Jonah. Answer to the second is yes.”

  Gurney had come to the same conclusion nearly four hours earlier on the concourse by the Ferris wheel, but it was reassuring to see another mind arrive at the same place. With Jonah as the intended victim, all the twisted pieces of the case straightened out. Jonah was somewhere between difficult and impossible to locate physically, which made him the perfect challenge for Panikos. In fact, his mother’s funeral may well have been the only event that was capable of guaranteeing his presence in a predictable place at a predictable time, which is why Panikos killed her. Jonah’s seated position at graveside solved the line-of-sight problem from the Axton Avenue apartment. Carl couldn’t have been hit as he stepped past Alyssa, but he could easily have been hit by a bullet intended for Jonah as he stumbled to the ground in front of him. That scenario also explained the inconsistency that had troubled Gurney from the outset: How did Carl manage to travel ten or twelve feet after a bullet had destroyed the motor center of his brain? The simple answer was that he didn’t. And finally, the absurd outcome—in which “the Magician” shot the wrong man, making a potential laughingstock of himself in the very circles where his reputation mattered—explained his subsequent deadly efforts to keep that ruinous fact a secret.

  The next question followed naturally.

  Kyle asked it, uneasily. “If Jonah was the real target, who hired Panikos to kill him?”

  From a simple cui bono perspective, it seemed to Gurney that the answer was obvious. Only one person would have benefited significantly from Jonah’s death, and he would have benefited very significantly indeed.

  The expressions on their faces showed that the answer was equally obvious to everyone in the room.

  “Slimy piece of shit,” muttered Hardwick.

  “Oh, God.” Madeleine looked as if her view of human nature had absorbed a body blow.

  They all stared at one another, as if wondering if there could be an alternative explanation.

  But it seemed that there was no escaping the loathsome truth.

  The man who’d bought the hit that killed Carl Spalter must have been none other than Carl Spalter himself. In his effort to do away with his brother, he’d brought about his own terrible demise—slow death in full knowledge of his full responsibility.

  It was both horrifying and ludicrous.

  But it had about it a terrible, undeniably satisfying symmetry.

  It was karma with a vengeance.

  And it finally provided an adequate explanation of that look of dread and despair on the face of the dying man in the courtroom—a man already in hell.

  For the next quarter of an hour, the conversation veered between bleak observations on fratricide and efforts to come to terms with the harrowing practicalities of the situation in which they were entangled.

  As Hardwick put it slowly but determinedly, “Tragic Cain-and-Abel shit aside, we need to figure out where we stand. A giant law enforcement clusterfuck is about to begin, with every participant doing his best to be a fucker, not a fuckee.”

  Gurney nodded his agreement. “Where do you want to start?”

  Before Hardwick could answer, Esti appeared at the door—out of breath and looking fearful, relieved, and curious in rapid succession.

  “Hey! Peaches!” Hardwick’s rough whisper was accompanied by a soft smile. “How’d you manage to get away down there with all hell breaking loose?”

  She ignored the question, just hurried over to the side of his bed and squeezed his hand. “How are you doing?”

  He gave her a twisted little smile. “No problem. Slippery bullet. Went right through me without hitting anything that matters.”

  “Good!” She sounded alarmed and happy at the same time.

  “So tell me, how’d you get away?”

  “I didn’t really get away—not officially—just took a detour on my way to a traffic assignment. Would you believe it—we have more idiots coming into the area now than trying to get out of it. Disaster lovers, gawkers, jerks!”

  “So they’re putting investigators on traffic assignments?”

  “They’re putting everybody on everything. You can’t believe what a mess it is down there. And lots of rumors flying around.” She looked significantly over at Gurney, who was sitting at the foot of the bed. “There’s talk about a crazy hit man blowing everything up. There’s talk about an NYPD detective shooting a kid. Or maybe shooting the crazy hit man? Or some unidentified midget?” She looked back at Hardwick. “One of the deputies told me that the midget was Panikos, and that he’s the one who shot you—and somehow he did this after he was already dead. You see what I mean? Everybody’s talking, nobody’s making sense. And on top of all that, there’s a jurisdictional pissing match between the county-level sheriff’s people, the local people, the state people, maybe soon the feds. Why not? More the merrier, right? And this is all happening while crazy people in the parking lot are ramming one another, every asshole trying to get out first. And even crazier assholes trying to get in, maybe take pictures, put them on Facebook. So that’s the way it is down there.” She looked back and forth between Hardwick and Gurney. “You guys were there. What’s with the kid? You shot him? He shot you? What on earth were you doing there to begin with?”

  Hardwick looked at Gurney. “Be my guest. Talking’s getting rough for me right now.”

  “Okay. I’ll make it fast, but I need to start at the beginning.”

  Esti listened in anxious amazement to Gurney’s rapid recounting of the key events of the evening—from the lumber pile explosion and death of Klemper by the asparagus patch right up to the motorcycle chase and the death of Peter Pan in the midst of the rampant destruction at the fair.

  After a stunned silence, her first question was a big one. “Can you prove that the person you shot is actually Panikos?”

  “Yes and no. We can definitely prove that the person I shot is the same person who set off the s
eries of explosions—and whose concealed gun discharged and shot Jack. The sheriff’s people have custody of his body, his gun, and his cell phone—which he was using as a remote detonator. The nearest cell tower records will show that he called a series of numbers in that same location. And I have no doubt that the times of those calls will relate precisely to the times of the explosions—which can be verified through fairgrounds security recordings. If we have any luck, the bomb fragments at the fair will include bits of cell phone detonation systems, and the systems will match those that were used at Bincher’s house. And we’ll almost certainly get a match between the incendiary chemical formulas used at the fair and at Bincher’s. If the concealed weapon on Panikos’s body was used elsewhere, that could open another door. Linking the body and its DNA back to the Panikos identity in Europe will be a job for Interpol and their interested partners. In the meantime, pre-autopsy photos of his face, which was intact at last sight, can be compared to the features captured on the security videos from Axton Avenue and Emmerling Oaks.”

  As Esti was nodding slowly in an evident effort to absorb and remember all of this, Gurney concluded, “I’m one hundred percent convinced that the body belongs to Panikos. But from a purely practical cover-my-ass legal perspective, it doesn’t matter. We can prove that the body belongs to an individual who was willfully responsible for the deaths of God only knows how many people in just the past couple of hours.”

  “Actually, it’s not only God who knows. The latest count is between fifty and a hundred.”

  “What?”

  “That’s the latest as I was leaving for my traffic assignment. The number is expected to rise. Severe burns, two collapsed buildings, a fatal dispute in the parking lot, kids who got trampled. And the big one was the collapsing Ferris wheel.”

  “Fifty to a hundred?” whispered Madeleine, horrified.

  “Christ.” Gurney leaned back in his chair, closing his eyes. He could see the Ferris wheel tipping, slowly falling, disappearing behind the tent. He could hear the shocking crash, the screams piercing the awful din.