Shut Your Eyes Tight

by John Verdon

  As she was speaking, she was picking unconsciously at the cuticle of her thumb with one of her fingernails, an intermittent new habit that Gurney regarded with alarm as a kind of tremor in her otherwise stable constitution.

  Minor and short-lived as these moments were, they shook him, interrupted his fantasy of her infinite resilience, left him temporarily without that secure point of reference, the night-light that warded off gloom and monsters. Absurdly, this tiny nervous gesture had the power to arouse the feeling of sickness and constriction he’d had as a child when his mother started smoking. His mother puffing anxiously on her cigarette, sucking the mouthfuls of smoke into her lungs. Get hold of yourself, Gurney. Grow up, for Godsake.

  “But I’m sure you know all that already, right?”

  He stared at her for a moment, searching for the conversational thread he’d lost.

  She shook her head in mock despair. “I’ll be in my sewing room for a while. Then I have to run up to the stores in Oneonta. If there’s anything you want, add it to the list on the sideboard.”

  Hardwick arrived with a gust of wind and a growling muffler. He parked his vintage gas guzzler—a red GTO half restored, with epoxy patches yet to be primed—next to Gurney’s green Subaru Outback. The wind channeled an eddy of fallen leaves around the cars. The first thing Hardwick did when he got out was to cough violently, hack up phlegm, and spit it on the ground.

  “Never could stand the stink of dead leaves! Always reminded me of horse manure.”

  “Nicely put, Jack,” said Gurney as they shook hands. “You have a delicate way with words.”

  They faced each other like badly matched bookends. Hardwick’s messy crew cut, florid skin, spider-veined nose, and watery blue malamute eyes gave him the appearance of a badly aging man with a perennial hangover. By contrast, Gurney’s salt-and-pepper hair was neatly combed—too neatly, Madeleine often told him—and at forty-eight he was still trim, kept his stomach firm with a regimen of sit-ups before his morning shower, and looked barely forty.

  As Gurney ushered him into the house, Hardwick grinned. “She got to you, eh?”

  “Not sure what you mean, Jack.”

  “What was it got your attention? Love of truth and justice? Chance to kick Rodriguez in the balls? Or was it her fantastic ass?”

  “Hard to say, Jack.” He found himself articulating the man’s name with a peculiar emphasis, as though it were a quick left jab. “Right now I’m just curious about the video.”

  “That so? Not bored to death yet by retirement? Not desperate to get back in the game? Not hot to help the hot lady?”

  “Just like to see the video. You bring it?”

  “The murder movie? You’ve never seen anything like it, Davey boy. High-def DVD taken at the crime scene with the crime in progress.”

  Hardwick was standing in the middle of the big room that served as kitchen, dining room, and sitting room, with an old country stove at one end and a fieldstone fireplace forty feet away at the other end. His gaze covered it all in a few seconds. “Shit, it’s a fucking feature spread in Mother Earth News.”

  “The DVD player is in the den,” said Gurney, leading the way.

  The video began arrestingly with an aerial shot of the countryside, the camera’s position slowly moving down at a steep angle until it was sweeping over green treetops, the bright green of springtime, following the course of a narrow road and a rushing stream—parallel ribbons of black asphalt and glittering water that linked a series of well-kept homes amid sprawling lawns and picturesque outbuildings.

  An estate somewhat larger and grander than any of the others came into view, and the progress of the airborne camera slowed. When it reached a position directly above a vast emerald lawn with daffodil borders, its forward movement ceased entirely, and it descended smoothly to ground level.

  “Jesus,” said Gurney. “They rented a helicopter to shoot their wedding video?”

  “Doesn’t everyone?” rasped Hardwick. “Actually, the helicopter was just for the intro. From this point on, the video was recorded by four fixed cameras that were set up on the lawn in a way that covered the whole property. So there’s a complete sound-and-image file of everything that happened outdoors.”

  The cream-colored stone house with its surrounding stone patios and free-form flower beds looked like a transplant from the Cotswolds—springtime in the bucolic English countryside.

  “Where is this place?” asked Gurney as he and Hardwick settled down on the den couch in front of the DVD monitor.

  Hardwick feigned surprise. “You don’t recognize the exclusive little hamlet of Tambury?”

  “Why should I?”

  “Tambury is a hotbed of important people, and you’re an important guy. Anyone who’s anybody knows somebody who lives in Tambury.”

  “Guess I haven’t made the grade. You going to tell me where it is?”

  “Hour northeast of here, halfway to Albany. I’ll give you directions.”

  “I won’t be needing—” Gurney began, then stopped with a quizzical frown. “Wait a second. That wouldn’t by any chance be within Sheridan Kline’s—”

  Hardwick cut him off. “Kline’s county? You bet it would. So you’ll have a chance to work with your old friends. The DA has a soft spot in his heart for you.”

  “Jesus,” muttered Gurney.

  “Man thinks you’re a fucking genius. Course, he did take the credit for your Mellery triumph, being the suck-ass politician he is, but deep down inside he knows he owes you.”

  Gurney shook his head, looking back at the screen as he spoke. “Deep down inside Sheridan Kline there is nothing but a black hole.”

  “Davey, Davey, Davey, you have such cruel opinions of God’s children.” Then, without waiting for a response, he turned to the screen and began narrating the video.

  “Caterers,” he said as a team of spikily coiffed young men and women in black pants and crisp white tunics set up a serving bar and half a dozen hot tables.

  “The host,” he said, pointing at the screen as a smiling man in a midnight blue suit with a red flower on the lapel emerged from an arched doorway in the back of the house and walked out onto the lawn. “Fiancé, groom, husband, widower—all true on the same day, so call him whatever you want.”

  “Scott Ashton?”

  “The man himself.”

  The man made his way purposefully along the edge of a flower bed toward the right side of the screen, but just before he disappeared, the angle of the scene switched, showing him walking toward what appeared to be a small guest cottage situated at the edge of the lawn where it abutted the woods, perhaps a hundred feet from the main house.

  “How many cameras did you say this was shot with?” asked Gurney.

  “Four on tripods—plus the one in the helicopter.”

  “Who did the editing?”

  “Video department at the bureau.”

  Gurney watched Scott Ashton knocking on the cottage door—watched and heard, although the sound was not as sharp as the picture. The front of the door and Ashton’s back were about forty-five degrees to the camera. Ashton knocked again, calling out, “Hector.”

  Gurney then heard what sounded to him like a Spanish-accented voice, too faint for the words to be recognizable. He glanced questioningly at Hardwick.

  “We did an audio enhancement in the lab. ‘Está abierta.’ Translation: ‘It’s open.’ Confirms what Ashton thought he remembered Hector saying.”

  Ashton opened the door, went inside, closed it behind him.

  Hardwick picked up the remote, pressed the “fast-forward” button, explaining, “He’s in there five or six minutes. Then he opens the door, and you can hear Ashton saying, ‘If you change your mind …’ Then he comes out, closes the door behind him, walks away.” Hardwick let go of the “fast-forward” button as Ashton was emerging from the cottage, looking less happy than when he went in.

  “Is that the way they spoke to each other?” asked Gurney. “Ashton speaking En
glish, Flores speaking Spanish?”

  “I asked about that myself. Ashton told me it was a recent development, that up till a month or two earlier they’d both been speaking English. Said he believed it was a form of hostile regression, that going back to his native Spanish was Hector’s way of rejecting Ashton—by rejecting the language he’d taught him. Or some kind of psychobabble bullshit like that.”

  On the screen, as Ashton was about to exit the frame, the view switched to another camera to reveal him walking toward a Greek-columned garden pavilion—the kind of miniature Parthenon-like structure popularized by Victorian landscape designers—where four tuxedoed men were arranging their music stands and folding chairs. Ashton spoke briefly with the tuxedoed men, but none of the voices were audible.

  “String quartet instead of your basic DJ?” asked Gurney.

  “This is Tambury—nothing basic about it.” Hardwick fast-forwarded through the rest of Ashton’s conversation with the musicians, through panning shots of the baronial grounds and main house, the catering staff arranging dinner plates and silverware on white linen tablecloths, a pair of willowy female bartenders setting up bottles and glasses, close-ups of red and white petunias cascading from carved stone urns.

  “This was exactly four months ago?” asked Gurney.

  Hardwick nodded. “Second Sunday in May. Perfect time for a wedding. Glories of spring, balmy breezes, nest-building time, doves cooing.”

  The relentlessly sardonic tone was rubbing Gurney’s nerves raw.

  When Hardwick stopped fast-forwarding and returned the DVD to “play” mode, the camera was focused on an elaborate ivied trellis that served as an entryway to the main expanse of the lawn. A loose line of wedding guests was strolling through it. There was music in the background, something cheerily baroque.

  As each couple passed under the arched bower, Hardwick identified them, referring to a wrinkled list he’d pulled from his pants pocket. “Tambury chief of police Burt Luntz and his wife … President of Dartwell College and her husband … Ashton’s literary agent and her husband … President of the Tambury British Heritage Society and his wife … Congresswoman Liz Laughton and her husband … Philanthropist Angus Boyd and his young male whatever-he-is, calls him his ‘assistant’ … Editor of the International Journal of Clinical Psychology and his wife … Lieutenant governor and his wife … Dean of the medical—”

  Gurney interrupted. “Are they all like that?”

  “Do they all reek of money, power, connections? Yes. CEOs, major politicians, newspaper publishers, even a goddamn bishop.”

  For the next ten minutes, the stream of privileged overachievers flowed into Scott Ashton’s backyard botanical garden. None appeared out of place in the rarefied environment. But none appeared particularly thrilled to be there.

  “We’re getting to the end of the line,” said Hardwick. “Next we have the bride’s parents: Dr. Withrow Perry, world-famous neurosurgeon, and Val Perry, his trophy wife.”

  The doctor looked to be in his early sixties. He had a fleshy, contemptuous mouth, the double chin of a gourmand, and sharp eyes. He moved with a surprising quickness and grace—like a former fencing instructor, thought Gurney, remembering the lessons he and Madeleine had taken together in the second or third year of their marriage, when they were still actively searching for things they might enjoy doing together.

  The Val Perry standing beside the doctor on the screen like a film fantasy of Cleopatra radiated a satisfaction missing from the Val Perry who’d visited Gurney that morning.

  “And now,” said Hardwick, “the groom and his soon-to-be-headless bride.”

  “Jesus,” murmured Gurney. There were times when Hardwick’s lack of feeling seemed to go far enough beyond routine cop cynicism to qualify him as a marginal sociopath. But this was neither the time nor the place to … to what? To tell the man he was a sick prick?

  Gurney took a deep breath and refocused his attention on the video—on Dr. Scott Ashton and Jillian Perry Ashton walking together toward the camera, smiling—a smattering of applause, a few shouts of “Bravo!” and a joyful baroque crescendo in the background.

  Gurney was staring in amazement at the bride.

  “The hell is wrong?” asked Hardwick.

  “She’s not quite what I imagined.”

  “The hell did you expect?”

  “From what her mother told me, I wasn’t expecting her to look like a cover shot on Brides magazine.”

  Hardwick studied the image of the beaming young beauty in a floor-length white satin gown, the modest neckline dotted with tiny sequins, her white-gloved hands holding a bouquet of pink tea roses, her golden hair swept up in a tight swirl topped by a glittering tiara, her almond eyes accented with a touch of eyeliner, her perfect mouth enlivened with a lipstick that matched the pink of the tea roses.

  Hardwick shrugged. “Don’t they all want to look like that?”

  Gurney frowned, troubled by the conventionality of Jillian’s appearance.

  “It’s in their goddamn genes,” Hardwick insisted.

  “Yeah, maybe,” said Gurney, unconvinced.

  Hardwick fast-forwarded through scenes of bride and groom moving through the crowd, the string quartet attacking their instruments with great gusto, the catering staff gliding among the sipping and munching throng. “We’re going to cut to the chase,” he said, “straight to the segment where everything happens.”

  “You mean the actual murder?”

  “Plus some interesting stuff just before and just after.”

  After a few seconds of digital artifacts, the screen was filled with a medium shot of three people conversing in a triangle. Some words were more audible than others, partly buried in the buzz of other conversations, partly overwhelmed by the exuberance of Vivaldi.

  Hardwick pulled another folded sheet of paper from his pocket, opened it, and handed it to Gurney, who recognized the familiar format: the typed transcript of a recorded conversation.

  “Watch the video and listen to the sound track,” said Hardwick. “I’ll tell you when you can start following it on the transcript, in case you can’t make out the audio. The three speakers are Chief Luntz and his wife, Carol, both facing you, and Ashton, with his back to you.” The Luntzes were holding tall drinks topped with lime wedges. The chief was balancing a couple of canapés on the palm of his free hand. Whatever Ashton was drinking he was holding in front of him, out of the fixed camera’s line of sight. The audible snippets of dialogue seemed thoroughly trite and came entirely from Mrs. Luntz.

  “Yes, yes … day for it … fortunate that the forecast, which was very … flowers … the time of year that makes living in the Catskills worthwhile … music, very different, perfect for the occasion … mosquito, not a single … altitude makes it impossible, thank God, because mosquitoes down on Long Island … ticks, no ticks at all, thank God … had Lyme disease, absolutely horrible … wrong diagnosis … nauseous, aching, absolutely in despair, wanted to kill herself, the pain …”

  As Gurney glanced sideways at Hardwick on the couch, a raised eyebrow questioning the point of all this, he heard the chief’s louder voice for the first time. “Carol, it’s no time to be talking about ticks. It’s a happy day—right, Doctor?”

  Hardwick pointed a forefinger at the top line of the typed page on Gurney’s lap.

  Gurney looked down at it, finding it a useful supplement to the hubbub on the sound track.

  SCOTT ASHTON: Very happy, indeed, Chief.

  CAROL LUNTZ: I was just trying to say how perfect everything is today—no bugs, no rain, no problems at all. And what a lovely affair, the music, handsome men everywhere …

  CHIEF LUNTZ: How you doing with your Mexican genius?

  SCOTT ASHTON: I wish I knew, Chief. Sometimes …

  CAROL LUNTZ: I heard there were some … strange … I don’t know, I don’t like repeating …

  SCOTT ASHTON: Hector is going through some sort of emotional difficulty. His behavior has been different l
ately. I guess it’s been noticed. I’d be very interested in anything you’ve witnessed, anything that caught your attention.

  CAROL LUNTZ: Well, not witnessed by me, not directly, I only … rumors, but I try not to listen to rumors.

  SCOTT ASHTON: Oh. Oh, just one second. Excuse me just one minute. Jillian seems to be waving at me.

  Hardwick pushed the “pause” button. “See?” he said. “On the far left side of the picture?” Frozen in the pause frame was Jillian, looking in Ashton’s direction, holding up the gold watch on her left wrist and pointing to it. Hardwick pushed “play” again, and the action resumed. As Ashton made his way across the lawn through a scattering of guests to Jillian, the Luntzes continued their conversation without him, most of which was clear enough to Gurney with only an occasional glance at the transcript.

  CHIEF LUNTZ: You planning to tell him about that business with Kiki Muller?

  CAROL LUNTZ: Don’t you think he has a right to know?

  CHIEF LUNTZ: You don’t even know how that rumor started.

  CAROL LUNTZ: I think it’s more than a rumor.

  CHIEF LUNTZ: Yeah, yeah, you think. You don’t know. You think.

  CAROL LUNTZ: If you had someone living in your house, eating your food, who was secretly screwing your neighbor’s wife, wouldn’t you want to know?

  CHIEF LUNTZ: What I’m saying is, you don’t know.

  CAROL LUNTZ: What do I need, pictures?

  CHIEF LUNTZ: Pictures would help.

  CAROL LUNTZ: Burt, you can be ridiculous all you want, but if some weirdo Mexican was living in our house and screwing Charley Maxon’s wife, what would you do then, wait for pictures?

  CHIEF LUNTZ: Jesus fucking Christ, Carol …

  CAROL LUNTZ: Burt, that’s blasphemy. I told you, Burt, don’t talk that way.

  CHIEF LUNTZ: Got it. No blasphemy. Listen—here’s the point. You heard something from somebody who heard something from somebody who heard something from somebody—

  CAROL LUNTZ: All right, Burt, we can do without the sarcasm!

  They fell silent. After a minute or so, the chief tried to get one of the canapés resting on his left hand into his mouth, finally succeeding by employing the base of his glass like a tiny shovel. His wife made a face, looked away, drained her drink, began tapping her foot to the rhythms emanating from the mini-Parthenon. Her expression became festive, bordering on manic, and her gaze darted around the crowd as though searching for a promised celebrity. When one of the servers approached with a tray of drinks, she traded in her empty glass for a full one. The chief was now observing her with lips compressed into a hard line.