by John Verdon
Jesus bloody Christ, thought Gurney. Is that the way he shot Mark Mellery? Is that how the residue of down stuffing ended up in the neck wound and in the blood on the ground? Is that possible—that at the moment of his death Mellery was staring at a fucking goose? The picture was so grotesque he had to choke back a crazed urge to laugh. Or was it a spasm of terror? Whatever the emotion was, it was sudden and powerful. He’d faced his share of lunatics—sadists, sex murderers of every persuasion, sociopaths with ice picks, even cannibals—but never before had he been forced to devise a solution to such a complex nightmare while just a finger twitch away from a bullet in the brain.
“Lieutenant Nardo, please stand. It’s time for your entrance.” Dermott’s tone was ominous, theatrical, ironic.
In a whisper so low that Gurney wasn’t sure at first whether he was hearing it or imagining it, the old woman began muttering, “Dickie-Dickie-Dickie Duck. Dickie-Dickie-Dickie Duck. Dickie-Dickie-Dickie Duck.” It was more like a clock ticking than a human voice.
Gurney watched as Nardo unclasped his hands, stretching and clenching his fingers. He rose from his position on the floor at the foot of the bed with the resilient spring of a man in very good condition. His hard glance shifted from the odd couple on the bed to Gurney and back again. If anything in that scene surprised him, his stony face didn’t show it. The only obvious thing, from the way he eyed the goose and Dermott’s arm behind it, was that he’d figured out where the gun was.
In response, Dermott began stroking the back of the goose with his free hand. “One last question, Lieutenant, regarding your intentions before we begin. Do you plan to do as I say?”
“Sure.”
“I’ll take that answer at face value. I’m going to give you a series of directions. You must follow them precisely. Is that clear?”
“Yeah.”
“If I were a less trusting man, I might question your seriousness. I do hope you appreciate the situation. Let me put all my cards on the table to prevent any lingering misunderstanding. I’ve decided to kill you. That issue is no longer open for discussion. The only question that remains is when I will kill you. That piece of the equation is up to you. Do you follow me so far?”
“You kill me. But I decide when.” Nardo spoke with a kind of bored contempt that seemed to amuse Dermott.
“That’s right, Lieutenant. You decide when. But only up to a point, of course—because, ultimately, everything will come to an appropriate end. Until then you can remain alive by saying what I tell you to say and doing what I tell you to do. Still following me?”
“Yeah.”
“Please remember that at any point you have the option of dying instantly through the simple expedient of not following my instructions. Compliance will add precious moments to your life. Resistance will subtract them. What could be simpler?”
Nardo stared at him unblinkingly.
Gurney slid his feet a few inches back toward the legs of his chair to put himself in the best possible position to propel himself at the bed, expecting the emotional dynamic between the two men to explode within seconds.
Dermott stopped stroking the goose. “Please put your feet back where they were,” he said without taking his eyes off Nardo. Gurney did as he was told, with a new respect for Dermott’s peripheral vision. “If you move again, I’ll kill you both without saying another word. Now, Lieutenant,” Dermott continued placidly, “listen carefully to your assignment. You are an actor in a play. Your name is Jim. The play is about Jim and his wife and her son. The play is short and simple, but it has a powerful ending.”
“I have to pee,” said the woman in a pixilated voice, her fingertips again drifting back over her blond curls.
“It’s all right, dear,” he answered without looking at her. “Everything will be all right. Everything will be the way it always should have been.” Dermott adjusted the position of the goose slightly in his lap, refining, Gurney supposed, the aim of the revolver inside it at Nardo. “All set?”
If Nardo’s steady gaze were poison, Dermott would have been dead three times over. Instead there was only a flicker around his mouth, which might have been a smile or a twitch or a touch of excitement.
“I’ll take your silence for a yes this time. But a friendly word of warning. Any further ambiguity in your responses will result in the immediate termination of the play and your life. Do you understand me?”
“Yeah.”
“Good. The curtain rises. The play begins. The time of year is late autumn. The time of day is late evening, already dark. It’s rather bleak, some snow on the ground outside, some ice. In fact, the night is very much like tonight. It’s your day off. You’ve spent the day in a local bar, drinking all day, with your drunken friends. That’s the way you spend all your days off. You arrive home as the play begins. You stagger into your wife’s bedroom. Your face is red and angry. Your eyes are dull and stupid. You have a bottle of whiskey in your hand.” Dermott pointed to the Four Roses on the hope chest. “You can use that bottle there. Pick it up now.”
Nardo stepped forward and picked it up. Dermott nodded approvingly. “You instinctively evaluate it as a potential weapon. That’s very good, very appropriate. You have a natural sympathy with the mind-set of your character. Now, with that bottle in your hand, you stand, swaying from side to side, at the foot of your wife’s bed. You glare with a stupid rage at her and her little boy and his little stuffed goose in the bed. You bare your teeth like a stupid rabid dog.” Dermott paused and studied Nardo’s face. “Let me see you bare your teeth.”
Nardo’s lips tightened and parted. Gurney could see that there was nothing artificial about the rage in that expression.
“That’s right!” enthused Dermott. “Perfect! You have a real talent for this. Now you stand there with bloodshot eyes, with spittle on your lips, and you shout at your wife in the bed, ‘What the fuck is he doing in here?’ You point at me. My mother says, ‘Calm down, Jim, he’s been showing me and Dickie Duck his little storybook.’ You say, ‘I don’t see any fucking book.’ My mother tells you, ‘Look, it’s right there on the bedside table.’ But you have a filthy mind, and it shows in your filthy face. Your filthy thoughts are oozing like the oily sweat through your stinking skin. My mother tells you that you’re drunk and you should go to sleep in the other room. But you start taking your clothes off. I scream at you to get out. But you take off all your clothes, and you stand there naked, leering at us. You make me feel like I’m going to vomit. My mother screams at you, screams at you not to be so disgusting, to get out of the room. You say, ‘Who the fuck are you calling disgusting, you slut bitch?’ Then you smash the whiskey bottle on the footboard, and you jump up on the bed like a naked ape with the broken bottle in your hand. The nauseating stink of whiskey is all over the room. Your body stinks. You call my mother a slut. You—”
“What’s her name?” interrupted Nardo.
Dermott blinked twice. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Sure it does.”
“I said it doesn’t matter.”
“Why not?”
Dermott seemed taken aback by the question, if only a little. “It doesn’t matter what her name is because you never use her name. You call her things, ugly things, but you never use her name. You never show her any respect. Maybe it’s so long since you’ve used her name you don’t even know what it is anymore.”
“But you know her name, don’t you?”
“Of course I do. She’s my mother. Of course I know my mother’s name.”
“So what is it?”
“It doesn’t matter to you. You don’t care.”
“Still, I’d like to know what it is.”
“I don’t want her name in your filthy brain.”
“If I’m going to pretend to be her husband, I have to know her name.”
“You have to know what I want you to know.”
“I can’t do this if I don’t know who that woman is. I don’t care what you say—it makes absolutely no
goddamn sense for me not to know my own wife’s name.”
It wasn’t clear to Gurney where Nardo was going with this.
Had he finally realized that he was being directed to reenact the drunken assault by Jimmy Spinks on Felicity Spinks that had occurred twenty-four years ago in this same house? Had it dawned on him that this Gregory Dermott who a year earlier had purchased this house might very well be Jimmy and Felicity’s child—the eight-year-old Spinks boy whom social services had taken into their care in the aftermath of that family disaster? Had it occurred to him that the old woman in the bed with the scar on her throat was almost certainly Felicity Spinks—reclaimed by her grown son from whatever long-term nursing facility the trauma had consigned her to?
Was Nardo hoping to change the homicidal dynamic of the little “play” in progress by revealing what it was all about? Was he trying to create a psychological distraction, in the hope of finding some way out? Or was he just fumbling around in the dark—trying to delay as long as he could, however he could, whatever Dermott had in mind?
Of course, there was another possibility. What Nardo was doing, and how Dermott was reacting to it, might not make any rational sense at all. It could be the sort of ridiculously trivial sidetrack issue over which small boys beat each other with plastic shovels in sandboxes and angry men beat each other to death in bar fights. With a sinking heart, Gurney suspected that this last guess was as good as any.
“Whether you think it makes sense is of no importance,” said Dermott, again adjusting by a quarter inch the angle of the goose, his gaze fixed on Nardo’s throat. “Nothing you think is of any importance. It’s time for you to take your clothes off.”
“First tell me her name.”
“It’s time for you to take your clothes off and smash the bottle and jump up on the bed like a naked ape. Like a stupid, drooling, hideous monster.”
“What’s her name?”
“It’s time.”
Gurney saw a slight movement in the muscle in Dermott’s forearm—meaning that his finger was tightening on the trigger.
“Just tell me her name.”
Any doubt Gurney had about what was happening was now gone. Nardo had drawn his line in the sand, and all his manhood—indeed his life—was invested in making his adversary answer his question. Dermott, likewise, was invested 100 percent in maintaining control. Gurney wondered whether Nardo had any idea how important this matter of control was to the man he was trying to face down. According to Rebecca Holdenfield—in fact, according to everyone who knew anything about serial killers—control was the goal worth any price, any risk. Absolute control—with the feeling of omniscience and omnipotence it engendered—was the ultimate euphoria. To threaten that goal head-on without a gun in your hand was suicidal.
It seemed that blindness to that fact had put Nardo once again an inch from death, and this time Gurney couldn’t save him by shouting him into submission. That tactic wouldn’t work a second time.
Murder was moving now like a racing storm cloud into Dermott’s eyes. Gurney had never felt so helpless. He couldn’t think of any way to stop that finger on the trigger.
It was then he heard the voice, clean and cool as pure silver. It was, without a doubt, Madeleine’s voice, saying something she’d said to him years ago on an occasion when he felt stymied by a seemingly hopeless case.
“There’s only one way out of a dead end.”
Of course, he thought. How absurdly obvious. Just walk in the opposite direction.
Stopping a man who has an overwhelming need to be in total control—who has an overwhelming need to kill to achieve that control—required that you do exactly the opposite of what all your instincts told you. And with Madeleine’s sentence clear as spring-water in his mind, he saw what he needed to do. It was outrageous, patently irresponsible, and legally indefensible if it didn’t work. But he knew it would.
“Now! Now, Gregory!” he hissed. “Shoot him!”
There was a shared moment of incomprehension as both men seemed to struggle to absorb what they had just heard, as they might struggle to understand a thunderclap on a cloudless day. Dermott’s deadly focus on Nardo wavered, and the direction of the gun-in-the-goose moved a little toward Gurney in the chair against the wall.
Dermott’s mouth stretched sideways in his morbid imitation of a grin. “I beg your pardon?” In the affected nonchalance, Gurney sensed a tremor of unease.
“You heard me, Gregory,” he said. “I told you to shoot him.”
“You … told … me?”
Gurney sighed with elaborate impatience. “You’re wasting my time.”
“Wasting …? What the hell do you think you’re doing?” The gun-in-the-goose moved farther in Gurney’s direction. The nonchalance was gone.
Nardo’s eyes were widening. It was hard for Gurney to gauge the mix of emotions behind the amazement. As though it were Nardo who’d demanded to know what was going on, Gurney turned toward him and said, as offhandedly as he could manage, “Gregory likes to kill people who remind him of his father.” There was a stifled sound from Dermott’s throat, like the beginning of a word or cry that got stuck there. Gurney remained determinedly focused on Nardo and went on in the same bland tone. “Problem is, he needs a little nudge from time to time. Gets bogged down in the process. And, unfortunately, he makes mistakes. He’s not as smart as he thinks. Oh, my goodness!” He paused and smiled speculatively at Dermott, whose jaw muscles were now visible. “That has possibilities, doesn’t it? Little Gregory Spinks—not as smart as he thinks. How about it, Gregory? Do you think that could be a new poem?” He almost winked at the rattled murderer but decided that might be a step too far.
Dermott stared at him with hatred, confusion, and something else. What Gurney hoped it was was a swirl of questions that a control freak would be compelled to pursue before killing the only man capable of answering them. Dermott’s next word, with its strained intonation, gave him hope.
“Mistakes?”
Gurney nodded ruefully. “Quite a few, I’m afraid.”
“You’re a liar, Detective. I don’t make mistakes.”
“No? What do you call them, then, if you don’t call them mistakes? Little Dickie Duck’s fuckups?”
Even as he said it, he wondered whether he had now taken that fatal step. If so, depending on where the bullet struck him, he might never know. In any event, there was no safe retreat route left. A wave of the tiniest vibrations unsettled the corners of Dermott’s mouth. Reclining incongruously on that bed, he seemed to be gazing at Gurney from a perch in hell.
Gurney actually knew of only one mistake Dermott had made—a mistake involving the Kartch check, which had finally gotten through to him only a quarter of an hour earlier when he’d looked at the framed copy of that check on the lamp table. But suppose he were to claim that he’d recognized the mistake and its significance from the beginning. What effect would that have on the man who was so desperate to believe he was in complete control?
Again Madeleine’s maxim came to mind, but in reverse. If you can’t back up, then full speed ahead. He turned toward Nardo, as if the serial killer in the room could safely be ignored.
“One of his silliest fuckups was when he gave me the names of the men who’d sent checks to him. One of the names was Richard Kartch. The thing is, Kartch sent the check in a plain envelope with no cover note. The only identification was the name printed on the check itself. The name on the check was R. Kartch, and that’s also the way it was signed. The R could have stood for Robert, Ralph, Randolph, Rupert, or a dozen other names. But Gregory knew it stood for Richard—yet at the same time he claimed no other familiarity or contact with the sender than the name and address on the check itself—which I saw in the mail at Kartch’s house in Sotherton. So I knew right away from the discrepancy that he was lying. And the reason was obvious.”
This was too much for Nardo. “You knew? Then why the hell didn’t you tell us so we could pick him up?”
“B
ecause I knew what he was doing and why he was doing it, and I had no interest in stopping him.”
Nardo looked like he’d stepped into an alternate universe where the flies were swatting the people.
A sharp clicking noise drew Gurney’s attention back to the bed. The old woman was tapping her red glass shoes together like Dorothy leaving Oz on her way home to Kansas. The gun-in-the-goose on Dermott’s lap was now pointed directly at Gurney. Dermott was making an effort—at least Gurney hoped it required an effort—to appear unfazed by the Kartch revelation. He articulated his words with a peculiar precision.
“Whatever game you’re playing, Detective, I’m the one who’s going to end it.”
Gurney, with all the undercover acting experience he could bring to the moment, tried to speak with the confidence of a man who had a concealed Uzi zeroed in on his enemy’s chest. “Before you make a threat,” he said softly, “be sure you understand the situation.”
“Situation? I fire, you die. I fire again, he dies. The baboons come through the door, they die. That’s the situation.”
Gurney closed his eyes and leaned his head back against the wall, uttering a deep sigh. “Do you have any idea … any idea at all …?” he began, then shook his head wearily. “No. No, of course you don’t. How could you?”
“Any idea of what, Detective?” Dermott used the title with exaggerated sarcasm.
Gurney laughed. It was an unhinged sort of laugh, meant to raise new questions in Dermott’s mind, but actually energized by a rising tide of emotional chaos in himself.
“Guess how many men I’ve killed,” he whispered, glaring at Dermott with a wild intensity—praying that the man wouldn’t recognize the time-consuming purpose of his desperate ad-libbing, praying that the Wycherly cops would soon take note that Nardo was missing. Why the hell hadn’t they noticed already? Or had they? The glass shoes continued to click.
“Stupid cops kill people all the time,” said Dermott. “I couldn’t care less.”