Think of a Number

by John Verdon

  the blood that spurts out on the floor

  until there isn’t any more,

  their eyes for an eye, their teeth for a tooth,

  the end of it all, their moment of truth,

  the good that I’ve done with that drunkard’s gun—

  all nothing compared to the cleansing to come.”

  He sighed and stared at the screen, wrinkling his nose. “The meter isn’t right.”

  The old woman nodded with serene incomprehension and asked in a coy little-girl voice, “What will my little Dickie do?”

  He was tempted to describe “the cleansing to come” in all the detail in which he imagined it. The death of all the monsters. It was so colorful, so exciting, so … satisfying! But he also prided himself on his realism, his grasp of his mother’s limitations. He knew that her questions required no specific answers, that she forgot most of them as soon as she uttered them, that his words were mainly sounds, sounds she liked, found soothing. He could say anything—count to ten, recite a nursery rhyme. It really made no difference what he said, so long as he said it with feeling and rhythm. He always strove for a certain richness of inflection. He enjoyed pleasing her.

  Chapter 33

  A hell of a night

  Every so often Gurney would have a dream that was achingly sad, a dream that seemed to be the heart of sadness itself. In these dreams he saw with a clarity beyond words that the wellspring of sadness was loss, and the greatest loss was the loss of love.

  In the most recent version of the dream, little more than a vignette, his father was dressed as he’d been dressed for work forty years ago and in all respects looked exactly as he had then. The nondescript beige jacket and gray pants, the fading freckles on the backs of his large hands and on his rounded receding forehead, the mocking look in the eyes that seemed focused on a scene occurring somewhere else, the subtle suggestion of a restlessness to be on his way, to be anywhere but where he was, the odd fact that he said so little yet managed to convey with his silence so much dissatisfaction—all these buried images were resurrected in a scene that lasted no more than a minute. And then Gurney was part of the scene as a child, looking at that distant figure pleadingly, pleading with him not to leave, warm tears streaming down his face in the intensity of the dream—as he was sure they’d never done in the actual presence of his father, for he could not remember a single expression of strong emotion ever passing between them—and then awakening suddenly, his face still bathed in tears, his heart hurting.

  He was tempted to wake Madeleine, tell her about the dream, let her see his tears. But it had nothing to do with her. She’d barely known his father. And dreams, after all, were only dreams. Ultimately they meant nothing. Instead he asked himself what day it was. It was Thursday. With this thought came that quick, practical transformation of his mental landscape that he’d come to rely on to sweep away the residue of a disturbing night and replace it with the reality of things to be done in the daylight. Thursday. Thursday would be occupied mainly with his trip to the Bronx—to a neighborhood not far from the neighborhood where he’d grown up.

  Chapter 34

  A dark day

  The three-hour drive was a journey into ugliness, a perception amplified by the cold drizzle that required continual adjustment of the intermittent wiper speed. Gurney was depressed and edgy—partly because of the weather and partly, he suspected, because his dream had left him with a raw, oversensitive perspective.

  He hated the Bronx. He hated everything about the Bronx—from the buckled pavements to the burned-out carcasses of stolen cars. He hated the garish billboards touting four-day, three-night escapes to Las Vegas. He hated the smell—a shifting miasma of diesel fumes, mold, tar, and dead fish, with an insinuating undertone of something metallic. Even more than what he saw, he hated the memory from his childhood that invaded his mind whenever he was in the Bronx—hideous, prehistorically armored horseshoe crabs with spearlike tails, lurking in the mudflats of Eastchester Bay.

  Having spent half an hour creeping across the clogged “expressway” to the last exit, he was relieved to negotiate the few city blocks to the agreed-upon meeting place—the parking lot of Holy Saints Church. The lot was enclosed by a chain-link fence with a sign warning that parking was reserved for those engaged in church business. The lot was empty except for a nondescript Chevy sedan, beside which a young man with a fashionably gelled crew cut was speaking into a cell phone. As Gurney parked his car on the other side of the Chevy, the man concluded his call and clipped the phone to his belt.

  The drizzle that had shrouded most of his drive that morning had diminished to a mist too fine to see, but as Gurney stepped from his car, he could feel its cold pinpricks on his forehead. Perhaps the young man was feeling it, too; perhaps that accounted for his expression of anxious discomfort.

  “Detective Gurney?”

  “Dave,” said Gurney, extending his hand.

  “Randy Clamm. Thanks for making the trip. Hope it’s not a waste of your time. Just trying to cover all the bases, and we’ve got this crazy MO that sounded like what you guys are working on. Could be unrelated—I mean, it doesn’t make much sense that the same guy would want to kill some hotshot guru upstate and an unemployed night watchman in the Bronx—but all those stab wounds in the throat, I couldn’t just let it go. You get a feeling about these things—you think, ‘Christ, if I let it go, it’ll turn out to be the same guy,’ you know what I mean?”

  Gurney wondered whether the breathless pace of Clamm’s speech was propelled by caffeine, cocaine, the pressures of the job, or just the way his personal spring happened to be wound.

  “I mean, a dozen stab wounds to the throat isn’t all that common. There might be other connections we could find between the cases. Maybe we could have sent reports back and forth between here and upstate, but I thought maybe if you were on the scene and you could talk to the victim’s wife, you might see something or ask something that might not occur to you if you weren’t here. That’s what I was hoping. I mean, I hope there might be something in it. I hope it’s not a waste of your time.”

  “Slow down, son. Let me tell you something. I drove here today because it seemed like a reasonable thing to do. You want to check out every possibility. So do I. The worst-case scenario here is that we eliminate one of those possibilities, and eliminating possibilities is not a waste of time, it’s part of the process. So don’t worry about my time.”

  “Thank you, sir, I just meant … I mean, I know it was a long drive for you. I do appreciate that.” Clamm’s voice and manner had settled down a notch or two. He still had a revved-up, nervous look, but at least it wasn’t off the charts.

  “Speaking of time,” said Gurney, “would now be a good time to take me to the scene?”

  “Now would be great. Better leave your car here, come in mine. Victim’s house is in a cramped little area—some of the streets give you like two inches clearance each side of the car.”

  “Sounds like Flounder Beach.”

  “You know Flounder Beach?”

  Gurney nodded. He’d been there once, when he was a teenager, at a girl’s birthday party—a friend of a girl he was going steady with.

  “How do you know Flounder Beach?” asked Clamm as he turned out of the parking lot in the opposite direction from the main avenue.

  “I grew up not far from here—out by City Island.”

  “No shit. I thought you were from upstate.”

  “At the moment,” said Gurney. He heard the temporariness of the phrase he’d chosen and realized he wouldn’t have put it that way in front of Madeleine.

  “Well, it’s still the same nasty little bungalow colony. At high tide with a blue sky, you could almost think you were at a real beach. Then the tide goes out, the mud stinks, and you remember it’s the Bronx.”

  “Right,” said Gurney.

  Five minutes later they slowed to a stop on a dusty side street facing an opening in another chain-link fence like the one that encl
osed the church parking lot. A painted metal sign on the fence announced that this was the FLOUNDER BEACH CLUB and parking was by permit only. A line of bullet holes had cut the sign nearly in half.

  The image of the party three decades earlier came to Gurney’s mind. He wondered if that was the same entrance he’d used then. He could see the face of the girl whose birthday it was—a fat girl with pigtails and braces.

  “Better to park here,” said Clamm, commenting again on the grubby enclave’s impossible streets. “Hope you don’t mind the walk.”

  “Christ, how old do I look?”

  Clamm responded with an awkward laugh and a tangential question as they got out of the car. “How long have you been on the job?”

  Having no appetite for discussing his retirement and ad hoc reemployment, he said simply, “Twenty-five years.”

  “It’s a weird case,” said Clamm, as though the observation followed naturally. “Not just all the knife wounds. It’s more than that.”

  “You’re sure they’re knife wounds?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “In our case it was a broken bottle—a broken whiskey bottle. Did you recover any weapon?”

  “Nope. Guy from the ME’s office said ‘probable knife wounds’—double-edged, though, like a dagger. Guess a pointed piece of glass could make a cut like that. They were kinda backed up. We don’t have the autopsy report yet. But like I was saying, it’s more than that. The wife … I don’t know, there’s something weird about the wife.”

  “Weird like how?”

  “Lot of ways. First, she’s some kind of religious nut. In fact, that’s her alibi. She was at some kind of hallelujah prayer meeting.”

  Gurney shrugged. “What else?”

  “She’s on heavy-duty medication. Has to take some big pills to remember that this is her native planet.”

  “I hope she keeps taking them. Anything else troubling you about her?”

  “Yeah,” said Clamm, stopping in the middle of the narrow street they were walking along—more of an alley than a street. “She’s lying about something.” He looked like he had a pain in his eyes. “There’s something she isn’t telling us. Or maybe something she is telling us is bullshit. Maybe both. That’s the house.” Clamm pointed to a squat bungalow just ahead on the left, set back about ten feet from the little street. The peeling paint on the siding was a bilious green. The door was a reddish brown that reminded Gurney of dried blood. Yellow crime-scene tape, tied to portable stanchions, encircled the shabby little property. All it needed was a bow in the front, thought Gurney, to make it the gift from hell.

  Clamm knocked on the door. “Oh, one other thing,” he said. “She’s big.”

  “Big?”

  “You’ll see.”

  The warning had not fully prepared Gurney for the woman who opened the door. Well over three hundred pounds, with arms like thighs, she seemed misplaced in the little house. Even more misplaced was the face of a child on this very broad body—an off-balance, dazed sort of child. Her short black hair was parted and combed like a little boy’s.

  “Can I help you?” she asked, looking as if help were the last thing on earth she was capable of providing.

  “Hello, Mrs. Rudden, I’m Detective Clamm. Remember me?”

  “Hello.” She said the word like she was reading it from a foreign phrase book.

  “I was here yesterday.”

  “I remember.”

  “We need to ask you a few more questions.”

  “You want to know more about Albert?”

  “That’s part of it. May we come in?”

  Without answering, she turned away from the door, walked across the small living room into which it opened, and sat on a sofa—which seemed to shrink under her great bulk.

  “Sit down,” she said.

  The two men looked around. There were no chairs. The only other objects in the room were an absurdly ornate coffee table with a cheap vase of pink plastic flowers in the center of it, an empty bookcase, and a television big enough for a ballroom. The bare plywood floor was clean except for a scattering of synthetic fibers—meaning, Gurney assumed, that the carpet on which the body was found had been taken to the lab for forensic examination.

  “We don’t need to sit,” said Clamm. “We won’t be long.”

  “Albert liked sports,” said Mrs. Rudden, smiling blankly at the gargantuan TV.

  An archway on the left side of the little living room led to three doors. From behind one came the sound effects of a combat video game.

  “That’s Jonah. Jonah is my son. That’s his bedroom.”

  Gurney asked how old he was.

  “Twelve. In some ways older, in some ways younger,” she said, as if this were something that had just for the first time occurred to her.

  “Was he with you?” asked Gurney.

  “What do you mean, was he with me?” she asked, with a weird suggestiveness that gave Gurney a chill.

  “I mean,” said Gurney, trying to keep whatever it was he was feeling out of his voice, “was he with you at your religious service the night your husband was killed?”

  “He’s accepted Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior.”

  “Does that mean he was with you?”

  “Yes. I told the other policeman.”

  Gurney smiled sympathetically. “Sometimes it helps us to go over these things more than once.”

  She nodded as if in deep agreement and repeated, “He’s accepted Jesus Christ.”

  “Did your husband accept Jesus Christ?”

  “I believe he did.”

  “You’re not sure?”

  She closed her eyes tightly as if searching the insides of her eyelids for the answer. She said, “Satan is powerful, and devious are his ways.”

  “Devious indeed, Mrs. Rudden,” said Gurney. He pulled the coffee table with the pink flowers on it back a little from the couch, walked around, and sat on the edge of it, facing her. He’d learned that the best way to talk to someone who talked like that was to talk the same way, even if he had no idea where the conversation was going.

  “Devious and terrible,” he said, watching her closely.

  “‘The Lord is my shepherd,’” she said. “‘I shall not want.’”

  “Amen.”

  Clamm cleared his throat and shifted his feet.

  “Tell me,” said Gurney, “in what devious way did Satan reach out to Albert?”

  “It is the upright man that Satan pursueth!” she cried with sudden insistence. “For the evil man he hath already in his power.”

  “And Albert was an upright man?”

  “Jonah!” she cried even louder, rising from the couch and moving with surprising speed through the archway on the left to one of the doors beyond it, which she began slapping with the palm of her hand. “Open the door! Now! Open the door!”

  “What the fuck …?” said Clamm.

  “I said now, Jonah!”

  A lock clicked, and the door opened halfway, revealing an obese boy almost as large as the mother he resembled to a disturbing degree—right up to the odd sense of detachment in the eyes, making Gurney wonder whether the cause was genetics or medication or both. His crew cut was bleached pure white.

  “I told you not to lock that door when I’m home. Turn down the sound. It sounds like someone being murdered in there.” If either of them had any feeling about the awkwardness of this comment under the circumstances, neither showed it. The boy looked at Gurney and Clamm without interest. No doubt, mused Gurney, this was one of those families so accustomed to social-services interventions that official-looking strangers in the living room didn’t merit a second thought. The boy looked back at his mother.

  “Can I have my Popsicle now?”

  “You know you can’t have it now. Keep the sound down or you won’t have it at all.”

  “I’ll have it,” he said flatly, and shut the door in her face.

  She came back into the living room and sat back down on the couc
h. “He was devastated by Albert’s death.”

  “Mrs. Rudden,” said Clamm in his let’s-move-right-along way, “Detective Gurney here needs to ask you some questions.”

  “Isn’t that a funny coincidence? I have an Aunt Bernie. I was just thinking about her this morning.”

  “Gurney, not Bernie,” said Clamm.

  “It’s close, though, isn’t it?” Her eyes seemed to gleam with the significance of the similarity.

  “Mrs. Rudden,” said Gurney, “during the past month, did your husband tell you anything he was worried about?”

  “Albert never worried.”

  “Did he seem in any way different to you?”

  “Albert was always the same.”

  Gurney suspected that these perceptions could as likely be due to the cushioning and fogging effect of her medication as to any consistency on Albert’s part.

  “Did he ever receive any mail with a handwritten address or with any writing in red ink?”

  “The mail is all bills and ads. I never look at it.”

  “Albert took care of the mail?”

  “It was all bills and ads.”

  “Do you know if Albert paid any special bills lately or wrote any unusual checks?”

  She shook her head emphatically, making her immature face appear shockingly childish.

  “One last question. After you found your husband’s body, did you change or move anything in the room before the police arrived?”

  Again she shook her head. It might have been his imagination, but he thought he caught a glimpse of something new in her expression. Had there been a ripple of alarm in that blank stare? He decided to take a chance.

  “Does the Lord speak to you?” he asked.

  There was something else in her expression now, not so much alarm as vindication.

  “Yes, He does.”

  Vindication and pride, thought Gurney.

  “Did the Lord speak to you when you found Albert?”

  “‘The Lord is my shepherd,’” she began—and went on to recite the entire Twenty-third Psalm. The impatient tics and blinks that peppered Clamm’s face were visible even in Gurney’s peripheral vision.