by John Verdon
One of the male guests jogged his chair a few inches to the side to give Gurney more room to get to the empty one.
“Thanks, Scott.”
“Skip.”
“Skip. Right. When I see you, the name Scott always pops into my mind. I worked for years with a Scott who looked a lot like you.”
Gurney chose to think of this little lie as a gesture of social kindness. It was surely preferable to the truth, which was that he had no interest in the man and less than none in remembering his name. The problem with the excuse, to which Gurney had given no thought, was that Skip was seventy-five and emaciated, with an Einstein-like explosion of unruly white hair. In what way this cadaverous member of the Three Stooges might resemble an active homicide detective was an interesting question.
Before anyone could ask it, the heavyset woman bulldozed forward. “While Dave’s getting some food on his plate, shall we fill him in on our discussion?”
Gurney glanced around, concluding that a vote on that proposition might fail, but—Bingo! Her name came to him. Filomena, Mena for short—was clearly a leader, not a follower. She went on. “Skip made the point that the only purpose of prison is punishment, since rehabilitation … How did you put it, Skip?”
He looked pained, as if being called on by Mena to speak brought back some dreadful embarrassment from his school years. “I don’t remember at the moment.”
“Ah. Now I remember! You said that the only point of prison is punishment, since rehabilitation is nothing but a liberal fantasy. But then Margo said that properly focused punishment is indispensable to rehabilitation. But I’m not sure Madeleine agreed with that. And then Bruce said—”
A stern-looking gray-haired woman interrupted. “I didn’t say ‘punishment.’ I said ‘clear negative consequences.’ The connotations are quite different.”
“All right, then, Margo is all for clear negative consequences. But then Bruce said … Oh, my goodness, Bruce, what did you say?”
A fellow at the head of the table with a dark mustache and a tweed jacket produced a condescending smirk. “Nothing profound. I just made a minor observation that our prison system is a wretched waste of tax revenue—an absurd revolving-door institution that breeds more crime than it prevents.” He sounded like a very polite, very angry man whose preferred alternative to incarceration would be execution. It was difficult to picture him immersed in yoga meditation, breathing deeply, unified with all creation.
Gurney smiled at the thought as he spooned some of the remaining vegetarian lasagna onto his plate from a serving dish in the middle of the table. “You part of the yoga club, Bruce?”
“My wife is one of the instructors, which I suppose makes me an honorary member.” His tone was more sarcastic than amiable.
Two seats away, a pale ash blonde, whose only cosmetic seemed to be a shiny, transparent face cream, spoke in a voice barely above a whisper. “I wouldn’t say I’m an instructor, just a member of the group.” She licked her colorless lips discreetly, as if to remove invisible crumbs. “Getting back to our topic, isn’t all crime really a form of mental illness?”
Her husband rolled his eyes.
“Actually, Iona, there’s some fascinating new research on that,” said a sweet-looking woman with a soft round face, sitting across from Gurney. “Did anyone else read the journal article about the tumors? It seems there was a middle-aged man, quite normal, no unusual problems—until he began getting overpowering urges to have sex with small children, quite out of control, with no prior history. To make a long story short, medical tests revealed a fast-growing brain tumor. The tumor was removed, and the destructive sexual obsession disappeared with it. Interesting, isn’t it?”
Skip looked annoyed. “Are you saying that crime is a by-product of brain cancer?”
“I’m just saying what I read. But the article did provide references to other examples of horrendous behavior directly linked to brain abnormalities. And it does make sense, doesn’t it?”
Bruce cleared his throat. “So we should assume that Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme was hatched in a nasty little cyst in his cerebral cortex?”
“Bruce, for goodness’ sake,” interjected Mena. “Patty isn’t saying that at all.”
He shook his head grimly. “Strikes me as a slippery path, folks. Leads to zero responsibility, doesn’t it? First it was ‘Satan made me do it.’ Then it was ‘My deprived childhood made me do it.’ Now we’ve got this new one: ‘My tumor made me do it.’ Where does the excuse-making stop?”
His vehemence created an awkward silence. Mena, in what Gurney guessed was her habitual role of social director and peacemaker, tried to divert everyone’s attention to a less fraught topic. “Madeleine, I heard a rumor that you were getting chickens. Is that true?”
“It’s more than a rumor. There are three lovely little hens and a charmingly arrogant young rooster living temporarily in our barn. Crowing and clucking and making all sorts of wonderful little chicken sounds. They really are amazing to watch.”
Mena cocked her head curiously. “Living temporarily in your barn?”
“They’re waiting down there for their permanent home to be built—out in back of our patio.” She pointed at the area outside the French doors.
“Make sure the coop is secure,” said Patty with worried smile. “Because all sorts of creatures prey on chickens, and the poor things are nearly defenseless.”
Bruce leaned forward in his chair. “You know about the weasel problem?”
“Yes, we know all about that,” said Madeleine quickly, as if to ward off any description of how weasels kill chickens.
He lowered his voice, seemingly for dramatic effect. “Possums are worse.”
Madeleine blinked. “Possums?”
Iona stood up abruptly, excused herself, and headed for the restroom in the hallway.
“Possums,” he repeated ominously. “They look like bumbling little creatures with a tendency to end up as roadkill. But let one into a chicken coop? You’ll see a completely different animal—crazed by the taste of blood.” He looked around the table as if he were telling a horror story to children around a midnight campfire. “That harmless little possum will tear every chicken in that coop to pieces. As though his true purpose in life was to rip every living thing around him to bloody shreds.”
There was a stunned silence, broken finally by Skip. “Of course, possums aren’t the only problem.” This, perhaps due to its timing or tone, provoked bursts of laughter. But Skip went on earnestly. “You have to watch out for coyotes, foxes, hawks, eagles, raccoons. Lots of things out there like to eat chickens.”
“Fortunately, there’s a simple solution to all those problems,” said Bruce with peculiar relish. “A nice twelve-gauge shotgun!”
Apparently sensing that her diversion of the conversation into the world of chickens was a mistake, Mena attempted a U-turn. “I’d like to get back to where we were when Dave walked into the room. I’d love to hear his perspective on crime and punishment in our society today.”
“Me too,” enthused Patty. “I’d especially like to hear what he has to say about evil.”
Gurney swallowed a bite of lasagna and stared at her cherubic face. “Evil?”
“Do you believe there is such a thing?” she asked. “Or is it a fictional concept like witches and dragons?”
He found the question irritating. “I think ‘evil’ can be a useful word.”
“So you do believe in it,” interjected Margo from the other end of the table, sounding like a debater scoring a hostile point.
“I’m aware of a common human experience for which ‘evil’ is a useful word.”
“What experience would that be?”
“Doing what you know in your heart to be wrong.”
“Ah,” said Patty with an approving light in her eyes. “There was a famous yogi who said, ‘The handle on the razor of evil cuts more deeply than its blade.’ ”
“Sounds like a fortune cookie to me,” said
Bruce. “Try telling it to the victims of the Mexican drug lords.”
Iona looked at him with no discernible emotion. “It’s like a lot of those sayings. ‘The harm I do to you, twice that much I do to me.’ There are so many ways of talking about karma.”
Bruce shook his head. “Far as I’m concerned, karma’s a crock. If a murderer has already done twice as much damage to himself as to the one he’s murdered—which seems like a pretty neat trick—does that mean that you shouldn’t bother to convict and execute him? That puts you in a ridiculous position. If you believe in karma, there’s no point in bothering to arrest and punish murderers. But if you want murderers arrested and punished, then you have to agree that karma’s a crock.”
Mena jumped in happily. “So we’re back to the issue of crime and punishment. Here’s my question for Dave. In America we seem to be losing faith in our criminal justice system. You worked in that world for over twenty years, right?”
He nodded.
“You know its weak points and strong points, what works and what doesn’t. So you must have some pretty good ideas about what needs to change. I’d love to hear your thoughts.”
The question was about as appealing to him as an invitation to do a jig on the table. “I don’t think change is possible.”
“But there’s so much wrong,” said Skip, leaning forward. “So many opportunities for improvement.”
Patty, on a different wavelength, said pleasantly, “Swami Shishnapushna used to say that detectives and yogis were brothers in different garments, equal seekers after the truth.”
Gurney looked doubtful. “I’d like to think of myself as a seeker of truth, but I’m probably just an exposer of lies.”
Patty’s eyes widened, appearing to find something more profound in this than Gurney had intended.
Mena tried to get things back on point. “So, if you could take over the system tomorrow, Dave, what would you change?”
“Nothing.”
“I can’t believe that. It’s such an obvious mess.”
“Of course it’s a mess. But every piece of the mess benefits someone in power. And it’s a mess nobody wants to think about.”
Bruce waved his hand dismissively. “Eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth. Simple! Thinking’s not the solution, it’s the problem.”
“A kick in the balls for a kick in the balls!” cried Skip with an addled grin.
Mena pursued her point with Gurney. “You said you wouldn’t change anything. Why not?”
He hated conversations like this. “You know what I really think about our wretched criminal justice system? I think the terrible truth is that it’s as good as it’s going to get.”
That created the longest silence of the evening. Gurney focused on his lasagna.
The pale Iona, a frown contending with her Mona Lisa smile, was the first to speak. “I have a question. One that bothers me. It’s been on my mind a lot lately, and I haven’t been able to decide on an answer.” She was gazing down at her nearly empty plate, slowly guiding a single pea across the center of it with the tip of her knife.
“This may sound silly, but it’s serious. Because I think a totally honest answer would reveal a lot about a person. So it bothers me that I can’t decide. What does that kind of indecision say about me?”
Bruce tapped his fingertips impatiently on the table. “For Godsake, Iona, get to the point.”
“Okay. Sorry. Here it is. Suppose you had to choose. Would you rather be a murderer … or his victim?”
Bruce’s eyebrows shot up. “Are you asking me?”
“No, dear, of course not. I already know what your answer would be.”
Chapter 20
Disturbing Discrepancies
After the dinner guests departed—Bruce and Iona in their massive Range Rover, the others in their silent Priuses—Madeleine began cleaning up and straightening up, and Gurney went into the den with the Spalter case file. He extracted the autopsy report, then turned on the slick retina-display tablet that his son, Kyle, had given him for Father’s Day.
He spent the next half hour on a succession of neurological websites, trying to make sense of the disconnect between the nature of Carl Spalter’s head wound and the ten or twelve feet that Paulette claimed he staggered before collapsing.
Gurney had the unhappy advantage of having witnessed, more closely than he would have liked, two similar head shots during his years in NYPD Homicide; in both instances the victims had fallen like axed trees. Why hadn’t Carl?
Two explanations occurred to him.
One was that the ME was wrong about the extent of the brain tissue trauma, and that the motor center had not been completely destroyed by the fragmenting bullet. The second explanation was that Carl was shot not once but twice. The first bullet sent him staggering to the ground. The second bullet, to the temple, did the severe neural damage found during the autopsy. The obvious problem with that theory was that the ME found only one entry wound. Admittedly, a .220 Swift could make a very neat puncture, or a very narrow grazing line—but surely nothing subtle enough for a pathologist to miss, unless he was seriously rushed. Or distracted. Distracted by what?
As Gurney pondered this, another aspect of Paulette’s mini-reenactment was eating at him—that the ultimately fatal scenario was played out within arm’s reach of two individuals who could benefit enormously from Carl’s death. Jonah, who would achieve full control of Spalter Realty. And Alyssa, the spoiled druggy in line to inherit her father’s personal estate—assuming Kay could be gotten out of the way, as in fact she had been.
Jonah and Alyssa. He had a growing interest in meeting them both. And Mick Klemper, as well. He needed to get face-to-face with that man soon. And maybe Piskin, the prosecutor, as well—to get a sense of where he stood in this fog of contradictions, shaky evidence, and possible perjury.
There was a crash in the kitchen. He grimaced.
Funny thing about crashes in the kitchen. He once considered them an indicator of Madeleine’s state of mind, until he realized that his interpretation of them was really an indicator of his own state of mind. When he believed he’d given her a reason to be less than delighted with him, he heard the crash of dishes as a symptom of her annoyance. But if he felt that he’d been behaving thoughtfully, the same dropped dishes would seem a harmless accident.
That night he wasn’t comfortable with his having been nearly an hour late for dinner, or with his inability to remember the names of her friends, or with his leaving her in the kitchen and scurrying off to the den as soon as the last set of taillights receded down the hill.
He realized this last offense was still correctable. After making a few final notes from the most extensive of the neurological websites he’d come upon, he shut down the tablet, put the autopsy report away with the case file, and went out to the kitchen.
Madeleine was just closing the dishwasher door. He went to the coffeemaker on the sink island, set it up, and pushed the BREW button. Madeleine picked up a sponge and a towel and began wiping the countertops.
“Odd bunch of people,” he said lightly.
“ ‘Interesting’ people might be a nicer way to put it.”
He cleared his throat. “I hope they weren’t taken aback by what I said about the criminal justice system.”
The coffeemaker emitted the whooshing-spitting sound that ended its cycle.
“It’s not so much what you said. Your tone has a way of conveying a lot more than your words.”
“More? Like what?”
She didn’t answer right away. She was leaning over the counter, scrubbing a recalcitrant stain. He waited. She straightened up and brushed a few dangling hairs away from her face with the back of her hand. “Sometimes you sound annoyed at having to spend time with people, listen to them, talk to them.”
“It’s not exactly that I’m annoyed. It’s …” He sighed, his voice trailing off. He took his cup from under the dispensing spout of the coffeemaker, added sugar, and stirred the coffee a
lot longer than it needed to be stirred before completing his explanation. “When I get involved in something intense, I find it difficult to switch back to ordinary life.”
“It is difficult,” she replied. “I know. I think sometimes you forget what kind of work I do at the clinic, what kind of problems I deal with.”
He was about to point out that those problems didn’t usually involve murder, but he caught himself in time. She had the look in her eyes that meant an unfinished thought, so he just stood silently, holding his coffee cup, waiting for her to go on—expecting her to describe some of the more appalling realities of a rural crisis center.
But she took a different tack. “Maybe I can disengage more easily than you can because I’m not as good at what I do.”
He blinked. “What do you mean?”
“When someone has a great talent for something, there’s a temptation to focus on it to the exclusion of virtually everything else. Don’t you find that to be true?”
“I suppose,” he replied, wondering where this was going.
“Well, I think you have a great talent for figuring things out, for unraveling deceptions, solving complicated crimes. And maybe you’re so good at it, so comfortable in that particular way of thinking, that the rest of life seems like an uncomfortable interruption.” She searched his face for a reaction.
He knew there was truth in what she was saying, but all he could manage was a noncommittal shrug.
She went on in a soft voice. “I don’t see myself as having a huge talent for my work. I’ve been told I’m good at it, but it’s not the sum and substance of my life. It’s not the only thing that matters. I try to treat everything in my life as though it matters. Because it does. You, most of all.” She looked into his eyes and smiled in that odd way of hers that seemed to have less to do with her mouth than with some internal source of radiance.
“Sometimes when we talk about your absorption in a case, it turns into an argument—maybe because you feel that I’m trying to transform you from a detective into a hiking, biking kayaker. That might have been a hope or fantasy of mine when we first moved up here to the mountains, but it’s not anymore. I understand who you are, and I’m content with that. More than content. I know sometimes it doesn’t seem that way. It seems like I’m pushing, pulling, trying to change you. But that’s not what it is.”