by John Verdon
She paused, seeming to read his thoughts and feelings more clearly than he could. “I’m not trying to turn you into someone you’re not. I just feel that you’d be happier if you could let some brightness, some variety, into your life. It looks to me like you keep rolling the same boulder up the same hill again and again, without any lasting relief or reward at the end. It looks like all you want is to keep pushing, keep struggling, keep putting yourself in danger—the more danger, the better.”
He was about to object to her point about danger, but decided instead to hear her out.
She looked at him, sadness filling her eyes. “It looks like you get so deeply into it, into the darkness, that it blots out the sun. It blots out everything. So I go about my life the only way I know how. I do my work at the clinic. I walk in the woods. I go to my concerts. Art shows. I read. Play my cello. Ride my bike. I take care of the garden and the house and the chickens. In the winter I snowshoe. I visit my friends. But I keep thinking—wishing—that we could be doing more of these things together. That we could be out in the sun together.”
He didn’t know how to respond. At some level he recognized the truth in what she was saying, but no words were attaching themselves to the feeling it generated in him.
“That’s it,” she concluded simply. “That’s what’s on my mind.”
The sadness in her eyes was replaced by a smile—warm, open, hopeful.
It seemed to him that she was totally present—that all of her was right there in front of him, with no obstructions, no evasions, no artifice of any kind. He put down his cup, which he’d been holding without realizing it all the while she was talking, and stepped toward her. He put his arms around her, feeling all her body warm against his.
Still without words, he picked her up in the clichéd manner of new-bride-over-the-threshold—which made her laugh—and carried her into the bedroom, where they made love with an intensely wonderful combination of urgency and tenderness.
Madeleine was up first the next morning.
After Gurney had showered, shaved, and dressed, he found her at the breakfast table with her coffee, a slice of toast with peanut butter, and an open book. Peanut butter was one of her favorite things. He went over and kissed the top of her head.
“Good morning!” she said cheerily through a mouthful of toast. She was dressed for her work at the clinic.
“Full day today?” he asked. “Or half?”
“Dunno.” She swallowed, took a sip of coffee. “Depends on who else is there. What’s on your agenda?”
“Hardwick. Due here at eight-thirty.”
“Oh?”
“We’re getting a phone call from Kay Spalter at nine, or as close to that as she can manage.”
“Problem?”
“Nothing but problems. Every fact in this case has a contradiction attached to it.”
“Isn’t that the way you like your facts?”
“Hopelessly tangled up, you mean, so I can untangle them?”
She nodded, took a final bite of her toast, took her plate and cup to the sink, and let the water run on them. Then she came back and kissed him. “Running late. Got to go.”
He made himself some bacon and toast and settled down in a chair by the French doors. Softened by a thin morning fog, the view from his chair was of the old pasture, a tumbledown stone wall along its far side, one of his neighbors’ overgrown fields, and, barely visible beyond that, Barrow Hill.
Just as he popped the last bit of bacon in his mouth, the rumble of Hardwick’s GTO became audible from the road below the barn. Two minutes later, the angular red beast was parked by the asparagus patch and Hardwick was standing at the French doors, wearing a black T-shirt and dirty gray sweatpants. The doors were open wide, but the sliding screens were latched.
Gurney leaned over and unlatched one.
Hardwick stepped inside. “You know there’s a giant fucking pig strolling up your road?”
Gurney nodded. “It’s a fairly frequent occurrence.”
“A good three hundred pounds, I’d say.”
“Tried to lift it, did you?”
Hardwick ignored the question, just looked around the room appraisingly. “I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. You’ve got a shitload of country charm here.”
“Thank you, Jack. Care to sit down?”
Hardwick picked thoughtfully at his front teeth with his fingernail, then plopped down in the chair across the table from Gurney and eyed him suspiciously. “Before we speak to the bereaved Mrs. Spalter, ace, you have anything on your mind we need to discuss?”
“Not really—apart from the fact that nothing in the case makes a damn bit of sense.”
Hardwick’s eyes narrowed. “These things that don’t make sense … do they work for us or against us?”
“ ‘Us’?”
“You know what I mean. For or against our objective of securing a reversal.”
“Probably for the objective. But I’m not positive. Too many things are screwy.”
“Screwy? Like how?”
“Like the apartment ID’d as the source of the fatal shot.”
“What about it?”
“It wasn’t. It couldn’t have been.”
“Why not?”
Gurney explained his use of Paulette to set up the informal reenactment, and his discovery of the light pole obstruction.
Hardwick looked confused but not worried. “Anything else?”
“A witness, who claims he saw the shooter.”
“Freddie? The guy who fingered Kay in the lineup?”
“No. Man by the name of Estavio Bolocco. No record of his having been interviewed, although he claims he was. He also claims he saw the shooter, but it was a man, not a woman.”
“Saw the shooter where?”
“That’s another problem. Says he saw him in the apartment—the apartment where the shot was supposed to have come from but couldn’t have.”
Hardwick made his acid-reflux face. “This is adding up to a mixed pile of good stuff and pure shit. I like the idea that your guy says the shooter was a man, not a woman. I especially like the idea that Klemper failed to keep a record of the interview. That speaks to police misconduct, possible tampering, or at least major sloppiness, all of which helps. But that crap about the apartment itself, that crap makes everything else useless. We can’t present a witness who claims the shooter used a location that we then turn around and say couldn’t have been used. I mean, where the fuck are we going with this?”
“Good question. And here’s another little oddity. Estavio Bolocco says he saw the shooter twice. Once on the day of the event itself, which was a Friday. But also five days earlier. On Sunday. He says he’s positive it was Sunday, because that was his only day off.”
“He saw the shooter where?”
“In the apartment.”
Hardwick’s indigestion appeared to be increasing. “Doing what? Casing it?”
“That would be my guess. But that raises another question. Let’s assume that the shooter had learned about Mary Spalter’s death, discovered the location of the Spalter family plot, and figured that Carl would be front and center at the burial service. Next step would be to scout out the vicinity, see if it offered a reasonably secure shooting position.”
“So what’s the question?”
“Timing. If the shooter was scouting the location on Sunday, presumably Mary Spalter’s death occurred Saturday or earlier, depending on whether the shooter was close enough to the family to have gotten the information directly, or had to wait for a published obit a day or two later. My question is, if the burial didn’t take place until, at the earliest, seven days after her death … what caused the delay?”
“Who knows? Maybe some relative couldn’t arrive for it any sooner? Why do you care?”
“It’s unusual to delay a funeral for a whole week. Unusual makes me curious, that’s all.”
“Right. Sure. Okay.” Hardwick waved his hand like he was shooing aw
ay a fly. “We can ask Kay when she calls. I just don’t think her mother-in-law’s funeral arrangements sound like Court of Appeals material.”
“Maybe not. But speaking of that conviction, did you know that Freddie—the guy who fingered Kay at the trial—has disappeared?”
Chapter 21
An Unsettling Frankness
It was closer to nine-thirty than nine when they got Kay Spalter’s call on Gurney’s landline. He put it on speakerphone in the den.
“Hey, Kay,” said Hardwick. “How are things in beautiful Bedford Hills?”
“Fabulous.” Her voice was rough, dry, impatient. “You there, Dave?”
“I’m here.”
“You said you were going to have more questions for me?”
He wondered if her abruptness was a way of feeling in control or just a symptom of prison tension. “I’ve got half a dozen of them.”
“Go ahead.”
“Last time we spoke, you mentioned a mob guy, Donny Angel, as someone we should look at for Carl’s murder. The problem is, the hit on Carl seems too complicated for that.”
“What do you mean?” She sounded curious rather than challenging.
“Angel knew him, knew a lot about him. He could have put together an easier hit than a sniper shot at a cemetery service five hundred yards away. So let’s assume for a minute that Angel wasn’t the bad guy. If you had to come up with a second choice, who would it be?”
“Jonah.” She said it without emotion and without hesitation.
“The motive being control of the family company?”
“Control would allow him to mortgage enough properties to expand the Cyberspace Cathedral into the biggest religious rip-off project in the world.”
“How much do you know about this goal of his?”
“Nothing. I’m guessing. My point is, Jonah’s a much bigger sleazeball than anyone realizes, and company control means big money for him. Big. I do know he asked Carl about mortgaging some buildings and Carl told him to go fuck himself.”
“Nice brotherly relationship. Any other candidates for killer?”
“Maybe a hundred other people whose toes Carl stomped on.”
“When I asked you the other day why you stayed with him, you gave me sort of a joke answer. At least, I think it was a joke. I need to know the real reason.”
“Truth is, I don’t know the real reason. I used to search for that mystery glue that attached me to him, but I could never identify it. So maybe I really am a cheap gold digger.”
“Are you sorry he’s dead?”
“Maybe a little.”
“What was your day-to-day relationship like?”
“Generous, patronizing, and controlling on his part.”
“And on yours?”
“Loving, admiring, and submissive. Except when he went too far.”
“And then?”
“Then all hell would break loose.”
“Did you ever threaten him?”
“Yes.”
“In front of witnesses?”
“Yes.”
“Give me an example.”
“There were quite a few.”
“Give me the worst.”
“On our tenth wedding anniversary, Carl invited a few other couples to have dinner with us. He drank too much and got on his favorite drunk theme: ‘You can take the girl out of Brooklyn, but you can’t take Brooklyn out of the girl.’ And that night it escalated into some grandiose bullshit about how he was going to run for president after he became governor of New York, and how I was going to be his link to the common man. He said he was going to be like Juan Peron in Argentina, and I would be his Evita. My job would be to make all the blue-collar workers love him. He added a few sexual suggestions as to how I might go about that. And then he said this really stupid thing. He said I could buy a thousand pairs of shoes, just like Evita.”
“And?”
“For some reason, that was too much. Why was it too much? No idea. But it was too much. Too stupid.”
“And?”
“And I screamed at him that the lady with the thousand pairs of shoes wasn’t Evita Peron, it was Imelda Marcos.”
“That’s it?”
“Not completely. I also said if he ever talked about me like that again, I’d cut off his dick and shove it up his ass.”
Hardwick, who hadn’t uttered a syllable since his question about beautiful Bedford Hills, broke out into a braying laugh, which she ignored.
Gurney switched direction. “How much do you know about silencers for guns?”
“I know that cops call them suppressors, not silencers.”
“What else?”
“They’re illegal in this state. They’re more effective with subsonic ammunition. Cheap ones are okay—expensive ones are a lot better.”
“How do you know all this?”
“I asked at the firing range where I took lessons.”
“Why?”
“Same reason I was there to begin with.”
“Because you thought you might have to shoot someone to protect Carl?”
“Yes.”
“Did you ever buy or borrow a silencer?”
“No. They got Carl before I got around to it.”
“ ‘They’ being the mob?”
“Yes. I heard what you said about the sniper route being an odd way for them to go about it. But I still think it was them. More likely them than Jonah.”
He didn’t see any advantage in debating the point. He decided to go down another path. “Apart from Angel, were there any other mob figures he was close to?”
For the first time in their exchange, she hesitated.
After a few seconds Gurney thought they’d been disconnected. “Kay?”
“There was someone he used to talk about, someone who was part of a poker group he played with.”
Gurney noted an uneasiness in her voice. “Did he mention a name?”
“No. He just mentioned what the guy did for a living.”
“Which was?”
“He arranged murders. Sort of like a broker, a go-between. If you wanted someone killed, you’d go to him and he’d get someone to do it.”
“You sound upset talking about him.”
“It bothered me that Carl wanted to play in a high-stakes game with someone who did that for a living. I said to him one day, ‘You really want to play poker against a guy who sets up mob hits? A guy who doesn’t think twice about having someone murdered? Isn’t that a little nuts?’ He told me that I didn’t understand. He said gambling was all about the risk and the rush. And the risk and the rush were a lot bigger when you were sitting across the table from Death.” She paused. “Look, I don’t have much more time. Are we done?”
“Just one more thing. How come there was such a long delay between Mary Spalter’s death and her burial?”
“What delay?”
“She was buried on a Friday. But it appears that she must have died a week before that—or at least before the previous Sunday.”
“What are you talking about? She died on a Wednesday and was buried two days later.”
“Two days? Only two? You’re sure about that?”
“Of course I’m sure. Look up the obituary. What’s this all about?”
“I’ll let you know when I find out myself.” Gurney glanced over at Hardwick. “Jack, you have anything you need to cover with Kay while we have her on the phone?”
Hardwick shook his head, then spoke with exaggerated heartiness. “Kay, we’ll be in touch with you again soon, okay? And don’t worry. We’re on the right track for the outcome we all want. Everything we’re discovering here is a plus for our side.”
He sounded a hell of a lot surer than he looked.
Chapter 22
The Second Bouquet
After the Kay Spalter call ended, Hardwick maintained an uncharacteristically long silence. He stood staring out the den window, seemingly lost in a series of what-if calculations.
Gurney
was sitting at his desk watching him. “Spit it out, Jack. It’ll make you feel better.”
“We need to talk to Lex Bincher. I mean soon. Like now. We’ve got some shit here we need to sort out. I’m thinking that’s Priority Fucking One.”
Gurney smiled. “And I’m thinking Priority One is a visit to the assisted living place where Mary Spalter died.”
Hardwick turned from the window to face Gurney directly. “See? That’s my point. We need to get together with Lex, sit down, have a meeting of the minds before we bust our humps chasing every wild goose that flies by.”
“This one may be more than a wild goose.”
“Yeah? How so?”
“Whoever was casing that apartment on a Sunday—three days before Mary Spalter died—must have known she was going to be dead very soon. Meaning her accidental death was no accident.”
“Whoa, Sherlock, slow down! All of that depends on the dumbest leap of faith I’ve heard in a long time.”
“Faith in Estavio Bolocco’s story?”
“Right. Faith that some car-wash jockey, squatting in a half-gutted building, high on God knows what, can remember the exact day of the week he saw someone walk through an apartment door nine months ago.”
“I’ll grant you there’s a witness reliability issue. But I still think—”
“You call that a ‘witness reliability issue’? I call it fucking nuts!”
Gurney spoke softly. “I hear you. I don’t disagree with you. However, if—and I know it’s a big if—if Mr. Bolocco is right about the day of the week, then the nature of the crime was completely different from the narrative proposed by the prosecutor at Kay’s trial. Jesus, Jack, think about it. Why would Carl’s mother have been killed?”
“This is a waste of time.”
“Maybe, maybe not. Let’s just say, hypothetically, that her death wasn’t an accident. I can think of two ways to approach the question of why she was murdered. One, that she and Carl were both primary targets—equally in the way of the murderer’s goal, whatever that might have been. Or, two, that she was only a stepping-stone—a way to ensure that Carl, the primary target, would be standing out in the open, in that cemetery, at a predictable time.”