Shut Your Eyes Tight - Страница 2

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He became aware that Madeleine was watching him with that curious, appraising look of hers-probably guessing from the tightness in his jaw his thoughts about the squirrels. In response to her apparent clairvoyance, he wanted to say something that would justify his hostility to the fluffy-tailed rats, but the ringing of the phone intervened-in fact, the ringing of two phones intervened simultaneously, the wired phone in the den and his own cell phone on the kitchen sideboard. Madeleine headed for the den. Gurney picked up the cell.

Chapter 2

The butchered bride

Jack Hardwick was a nasty, abrasive, watery-eyed cynic who drank too much and viewed just about everything in life as a sour joke. He had few enthusiastic admirers and did not readily inspire trust. Gurney was convinced that if all of Hardwick’s questionable motives were removed, he wouldn’t have any motives left.

But Gurney also considered him one of the smartest, most insightful detectives he’d ever worked with. So when he put the phone to his ear and heard that unmistakable sandpaper voice, it generated some mixed feelings.

“Davey boy!”

Gurney winced. He was not a Davey-boyish kind of guy, never would be, which he assumed was the precise reason Hardwick had chosen that particular sobriquet.

“What can I do for you, Jack?”

The man’s braying laugh was as annoying and irrelevant as ever. “When we were working on the Mellery case, you used to brag about getting up with the chickens. Just thought I’d call and see if it was true.”

There was a certain amount of banter one always had to endure before Hardwick would deign to get to the issue at hand.

“What do you want, Jack?”

“You got any actual live chickens on that farm of yours, running around clucking and shitting, or is that ‘up with the chickens’ just some kind of folksy saying?”

“What do you want, Jack?”

“Why the hell would I want anything? Can’t one old buddy just call another old buddy for old times’ sake?”

“Shove the ‘old buddy’ crap, Jack, and tell me why you’re calling.”

Again the braying laugh. “That’s so cold, Gurney, so cold.”

“Look. I haven’t had my second cup of coffee yet. You don’t get to the point in the next five seconds, I hang up. Five… four… three… two… one…”

“Debutante bride got whacked at her own wedding. Thought you might be interested.”

“Why would I be interested in that?”

“Shit, how could an ace homicide detective not be interested? Did I say she got ‘whacked’? Should’ve said ‘hacked.’ Murder weapon was a machete.”

“The ace is retired.”

There was a loud, prolonged bray.

“No joke, Jack. I’m really retired.”

“Like you were when you leaped in to solve the Mellery case?”

“That was a temporary detour.”

“Is that a fact?”

“Look, Jack…” Gurney was losing patience.

“Okay. You’re retired. I got it. Now give me two minutes to explain the opportunity here.”

“Jack, for the love of Christ…”

“Two lousy minutes. Two. You’re so fucking busy massaging your retirement golf balls you can’t spare your old partner two minutes?”

The image triggered the tiny tic in Gurney’s eyelid. “We were never partners.”

“How the hell can you say that?”

“We worked on a couple of cases together. We weren’t partners.”

If he were to be completely honest about it, Gurney would have to admit that he and Hardwick did have, in at least one respect, a unique relationship. Ten years earlier, working in jurisdictions a hundred miles apart on different aspects of the same murder case, they had individually discovered separate halves of the victim’s severed body. That sort of serendipity in detection can forge a strong, if bizarre, bond.

Hardwick lowered his voice into the sincere-pathetic register. “Do I get two minutes or don’t I?”

Gurney gave up. “Go ahead.”

Hardwick jumped back into his characteristic carnival-barker-with-throat-cancer oratorical style. “You’re obviously a busy guy, so let me get right to it. I want to do you a giant favor.” He paused. “You still there?”

“Talk faster.”

“Ungrateful bastard! All right, here’s what I got for you. Sensational murder committed four months ago. Spoiled little rich girl marries hotshot celebrity psychiatrist. An hour later at the wedding reception on the psychiatrist’s fancy estate, his demented gardener decapitates her with a machete and escapes.”

Gurney had a slight recollection of seeing a couple of tabloid headlines at that time that were probably related to the affair: BLISS TO BLOODBATH and NEW BRIDE BUTCHERED. He waited for Hardwick to go on. Instead the man coughed so disgustingly that Gurney had to hold the phone away from his ear.

Eventually Hardwick asked again, “You still there?”

“Yep.”

“Quiet as a corpse. You ought to make little beeping sounds every ten seconds, let people know you’re still alive.”

“Jack, why the hell are you calling me?”

“I’m handing you the case of a lifetime.”

“I’m not a cop anymore. You’re not making any sense.”

“Maybe your hearing is failing in your old age. What are you, forty-eight or eighty-eight? Listen up. Here’s the meat of the story. The daughter of one of the richest neurosurgeons in the world marries a controversial hotshot psychiatrist, a psychiatrist who’s appeared on Oprah, for Godsake. An hour later, in the midst of two hundred guests, she steps into the gardener’s cottage. She’s had a few drinks, wants the gardener to join in the wedding toast. When she doesn’t come out, her new husband sends someone to get her, but the cottage door is locked and she doesn’t answer. Then the husband, the renowned Dr. Scott Ashton, goes and bangs on the door and calls to her. No response. He gets a key, opens the door, and finds her sitting there in her wedding dress with her head chopped off-back window of the cottage open, no gardener in sight. Pretty soon every cop in the county is at the scene. In case you didn’t get the message yet, these are very important people. Case ends up in our lap at BCI, specifically in my lap. Starts out simple-find the crazy gardener. Then it starts getting complicated. This was not your average gardener. The renowned Dr. Ashton had sort of taken him under his wing. Hector Flores-that’s the gardener-was an undocumented Mexican laborer. Ashton hires him, soon realizes that the man is smart, very smart, so he starts testing him, pushing him, educating him. Over a period of two to three years, Hector becomes more like the doctor’s protégé than his leaf raker. Almost a member of the family. Seems that with his new status, he even had an affair with the wife of one of Ashton’s neighbors. Interesting character, Señor Flores. After the murder he disappears off the face of the earth, along with the neighbor’s wife. Last concrete trace of Hector is the bloody machete he left a hundred and fifty yards away in the woods.”

“So where did all this end up?”

“Nowhere.”

“What do you mean?”

“My brilliant captain had a certain view of the case-you might recall Rod Rodriguez?”

Gurney recalled him with a shudder. Ten months earlier-six months before the murder Hardwick was describing-Gurney had been involved semiofficially in an investigation controlled by a unit of the State Police Bureau of Criminal Investigation that the rigid, ambitious Rodriguez commanded.

“His view was that we should bring in for questioning every Mexican within twenty miles of the crime and threaten them with all kinds of crap until one of them led us to Hector Flores, and if that didn’t work, we should extend the radius to fifty miles. That’s where he wanted all the resources-one hundred percent.”

“You didn’t agree with that?”

“There were other avenues worth exploring. It’s possible Hector was not what he appeared to be. The whole thing had a funny feel to it.”

“So what happened?”

“I told Rodriguez he was full of shit.”

“Really?” Gurney smiled for the first time.

“Yeah, really. So I was taken off the case. And it was given to Blatt.”

“Blatt!?” The name tasted like a mouthful of food gone bad. He remembered Investigator Arlo Blatt as the only BCI detective more irritating than Rodriguez. Blatt embodied an attitude Gurney’s favorite college professor long ago had described as “ignorance armed and ready for battle.”

Hardwick went on. “So Blatt did exactly what Rodriguez told him to do, and he got nowhere. Four months have passed, and we know less today than when we started. But I can tell you’re wondering, what’s all this got to do with Dave Gurney?”

“The question did cross my mind.”

“The mother of the bride is not satisfied. She suspects that the investigation’s been botched. She has no confidence in Rodriguez, she thinks Blatt’s an idiot. But she thinks you’re a genius.”

“She thinks what?”

“She came to me last week-four months to the day after the murder, wondering if I could get back on the case or, if I couldn’t do that, could I work on it without anybody knowing. I told her that wouldn’t be a practical approach, my hands were tied, I was already on pretty thin ice with the bureau-however, I did happen to have personal access to the most highly decorated detective in the history of the NYPD, recently retired, still full of vim and vigor, a man who would be more than happy to provide her with an alternative to the Rodriguez-Blatt approach. To put the icing on the cake, I just happened to have a copy of that adoring little piece that New York magazine did on you after you cracked the Satanic Santa case. What was it they called you-Supercop? She was impressed.”