Peter Pan Must Die (3 page)

Gurney wondered if he was hearing right. “You expect
me
to sell her that idea?”

“No. Absolutely not. No selling required. I’d just like you to be part of the equation.”

“What part?”

“Hotshot homicide detective from the big city. Successful murder investigations and decorations up the kazoo. Man who turned the Good Shepherd case inside out and embarrassed the shit out of all the fuckheads.”

“You’re saying you want me to play the role of a bright, shiny front man for you and this ‘vicious, unprincipled fucker’ of yours?”

“He’s not really unprincipled. Just … aggressive. Knows how to use his elbows. And no, you wouldn’t just be a ‘front man’ for anyone. You’d be a player. Part of the team. Part of the reason Kay Spalter should hire us to reinvestigate the case, engineer her appeal, and get her bullshit conviction reversed.”

Gurney shook his head. “I’m not following this at all. If there wasn’t any money for a hotshot attorney to begin with, how come there is now?”

“To begin with, looking at the surface strength of the prosecution’s case, there wasn’t much hope that Kay would prevail. And if she couldn’t prevail, there’d be no way for her to pay a significant legal bill.”

“But now—?”

“But now the situation is different. You, me, and Lex Bincher are going to make sure of that. Believe me, she will prevail, and the bad guys will bite the dust. And once she prevails, she will be entitled to inherit a huge chunk of cash as Carl’s primary beneficiary.”

“Meaning this Bincher guy is working on a contingency fee in a criminal case? Isn’t that semi-illegal, or at least unethical?”

“Don’t sweat it. There’s no actual contingency clause in the agreement she’ll sign. I guess you could say that Lex getting paid will sort of depend on the success of the appeal, but there’s nothing in writing that makes that connection. If the appeal fails, technically Kay will just owe him a lot of money. But forget about all that. That’s Lex’s problem. Besides, the appeal will succeed!”

Gurney sat back, stared out through the door at the asparagus patch at the far side of the old bluestone patio. The asparagus ferns had grown much taller than in either of the previous two summers. He reckoned a tall man could stand in their midst and not be seen. Normally a soft bluish green, now, under an unsettled gray sky, they appeared colorless.

He blinked, rubbed his face roughly with both hands, and tried to refocus his mind on reducing the tacky mess being placed before him to its essentials.

The way he saw it, he was being asked to launch Hardwick in his
new PI business—by helping to ensure his first major client commitment. And this was to be the repayment for the regulation-skirting favors Hardwick had done for him in the past, at the cost of Hardwick’s career with the state police. That much was clear, as far as it went. But there was a lot more to consider.

One of Hardwick’s distinctive traits had been a bold independence, the kind of let-the-chips-fall-where-they-may independence that comes from not being too attached to anything or anybody or any predetermined goal. But the man sure as hell was attached to this new project and its intended outcome, and the change didn’t strike Gurney as all that positive. He wondered what it would be like working with Hardwick in this altered state—with all his abrasiveness intact, but now in the service of a resentful obsession.

He turned his attention from the asparagus ferns to Hardwick’s face. “So, what does that mean, Jack—‘part of the team’? What, specifically, would you want me to do, other than look smart and rattle my medals?”

“Whatever the hell you feel like doing. Look, I’m telling you—the prosecution’s case was rotten start to finish. If the chief investigating officer doesn’t end up in Attica at the end of this, I’ll … I’ll become a fucking vegan. I absolutely guarantee you that the underlying facts and narratives will be full of disconnects. Even the trial transcript is full of them. And, Davey boy, whether you admit it or not, you know damn well that no cop ever had a sharper eye and ear for disconnects than you do. So that’s the story. I want you on the team. Will you do this for me?”

Will you do this for me?
The plea echoed in Gurney’s head. He didn’t feel capable of saying no. Not right at that moment, anyway. He took a deep breath. “You have the trial transcript?”

“I do.”

“With you?”

“In my car.”

“I’ll … take look at it. We’ll have to see where we go from there.”

Hardwick stood up from the table, his nervousness now looking more like excitement. “I’ll leave you a copy of the official case file, too. Lots of interesting shit. Could be helpful.”

“How’d you get the file?”

“I still have a few friends.”

Gurney smiled uncomfortably. “I’m not promising anything, Jack.”

“Fine. No problem. I’ll get the stuff from the car. You take your time with it. See what you think.” On the way out, he stopped and turned back. “You won’t be sorry, Davey. The Spalter case has everything—horror, gangsters, politics, big money, big lies, and maybe even a little bit of incest. You’re gonna fuckin’ love it!”

Madeleine cooked a simple dinner and they ate with little conversation. Gurney kept expecting her to engage him in an exhaustive discussion of his meeting with Hardwick, but she asked only one question.

“What does he want from you?”

Gurney described the nature of the Kay Spalter case, Hardwick’s new PI status, his evidently huge emotional investment in getting Kay’s conviction overturned, his request for assistance.

Madeleine’s only reaction consisted of a small nod and a barely audible “Hmm.” She stood up, cleared the dishes and silverware from the table, and took them to the sink island, where she proceeded to wash them, rinse them, and stack them in the drainer. Then she got a pitcher from the cupboard and watered the plants that stood on the sideboard below the kitchen windows. Each minute that she failed to pursue the subject exerted a stronger tug on Gurney to add a few additional words of explanation, reassurance, justification. Just as he was about to do so, she suggested they take a stroll down to the pond.

“It’s too nice an evening to stay inside,” she said.

Nice
was not a word he would have used to describe the uncertain sky with its scuttling clouds, but he resisted the urge to debate the point. He followed her to the mudroom off the kitchen, where she put on one of her tropically bright nylon jackets. He slipped into an olive-drab cardigan he’d had for nearly twenty years.

She squinted at it doubtfully. “Are you trying to look like someone’s grandfather?”

“You mean stable, trustworthy, and lovable?”

She raised an ironic eyebrow.

Nothing else was said until they’d made their way down through the low pasture and were seated on the weathered wooden bench beside the pond. She appeared, as she often did, in a static position, not quite relaxed. It was as if her slim, naturally athletic body craved movement in the way that some bodies crave sugar.

Except for a grassy opening between the bench and the water, the pond was ringed by tall bulrushes, where redwing blackbirds built nests and fended off intruders with aggressive swoops and screeches through late spring and into the summer.

“We have to start pulling out some of those giant reeds,” said Madeleine, “or they’ll take over completely.”

Each year the encircling band of bulrushes had grown thicker, inching farther out into the water. Pulling them out, Gurney had discovered the one time he’d tried it, was a muddy, tiresome, frustrating job. “Right,” he said vaguely.

The crows, settling in the tops of the trees up along the edge of the pasture, were in full voice now—a sharp, continuous chattering that each evening reached a peak at sunset, then diminished into silence as dusk fell.

“And we really have to do something with that thing.” She pointed at the warped and tilting trellis a former owner had erected at the beginning of the path around the pond. “But it’ll have to wait until after we build the coop with a nice big fenced run. The chickens should be able to run around outside, not just sit in that dark little barn all the time.”

Gurney said nothing. The barn had windows—it wasn’t all that dark inside—but that was a line of argument guaranteed to go nowhere. It
was
smaller than the original building, which had been destroyed in a mysterious fire several months earlier, in the middle of the Good Shepherd case, but surely it was big enough for a rooster and three hens. To Madeleine, however, enclosed places were at best temporary resting areas and the open air was heaven. It was clear that she empathized with what she imagined to be the imprisonment of the chickens, and it would be as easy to convince her that the barn was a reasonable home for them as it would be to persuade her to live in it herself.

Besides, they hadn’t come down to the pond to debate the future of bulrushes or trellises or chickens. Gurney felt certain that she’d return to the matter of Jack Hardwick, and he began to prepare a line of argument defending his potential involvement in the case.

She’d ask if he was planning to take on yet another full-scale murder investigation in his so-called retirement, and if so, why had he bothered to retire?

He’d explain again that Hardwick had been forced out of the NYSP partly as a result of the assistance he’d provided at Gurney’s request on the Good Shepherd case, and providing assistance in return was a simple matter of justice. A debt incurred, a debt paid.

She’d point out that Hardwick had undermined himself—that it wasn’t the passing along of a few restricted files that got him fired; it was his long history of insubordination and disrespect, his adolescent relish in puncturing the egos of authority figures. That kind of behavior carried obvious risks, and the ax had finally fallen.

He’d counter with an argument about the fuzzier demands of friendship.

She’d claim that he and Hardwick had never really been friends, just uneasy colleagues with occasional common interests.

He’d remind her of the unique bond that was formed in their collaboration years earlier on the Peter Piggert case, when on the same day in jurisdictions a hundred miles apart they each found half of Mrs. Piggert’s body.

She’d shake her head and dismiss the “bond” as a grotesque coincidence in the past that was a poor reason for any present action.

Gurney leaned back against the bench slats and looked up at the slate sky. He felt ready, if not entirely eager, for the give-and-take that he expected would begin momentarily. A few small birds, singly and in loose pairs, passed high overhead, flying rapidly, as if late for their roosting commitments.

When Madeleine finally spoke, however, her tone and angle on the subject were not what he’d expected.

“You realize that he’s obsessed,” she said, looking out over the pond. Half a statement, half a question.

“Yes.”

“Obsessed with getting revenge.”

“Possibly.”

“Possibly?”

“Okay. Probably.”

“It’s a horrible motive.”

“I’m aware of that.”

“And you’re also aware that it makes his version of the facts unreliable?”

“I have no intention of accepting his version of anything. I’m not that naive.”

Madeleine looked over at him, then back out in the direction of the pond. They were silent for a while. Gurney felt a chill in the air, a damp, earthy-smelling chill.

“You need to talk to Malcolm Claret,” she said matter-of-factly.

He blinked, turned, and stared at her. “What?”

“Before you get involved in this, you need to talk to him.”

“What the hell for?” His feelings about Claret were mixed—not because he had anything against the man himself or doubted his professional abilities, but the memories of the occasions that prompted their past meetings were still full of pain and confusion.

“He might be able to help you … help you understand why you’re doing this.”

“Understand why I’m doing this? What’s that supposed to mean?”

She didn’t answer immediately. Nor did he press the question—taken aback momentarily by the sudden sharpness in his own voice.

They’d been through this before, more than once—this question of why he did what he did, why he’d become a detective in the first place, why he was drawn to homicide in particular, and why it continued to fascinate him. He wondered at the defensiveness of his reaction, given that this was well-trod ground.

Another pair of small birds, high in the darkening sky, were hurrying to some more familiar, perhaps safer, place—most likely the place they considered home.

He spoke in a softer voice. “I’m not sure what you mean by ‘why you’re doing this.’ ”

“You’ve come too close to being killed too many times.”

He drew back a little. “When you’re dealing with murderers—”

“Please, not now,” she interrupted, raising her hand. “Not the Dangerous Job speech. That’s not what I’m talking about.”

“Then what—”

“You’re the smartest man I know. The smartest. All the angles, possibilities—nobody can figure it out better or faster than you can. And yet …” Her voice trailed off, suddenly shaky.

He waited a long ten seconds before prompting her gently. “And yet?”

It was another ten seconds before she went on. “And yet … somehow … you’ve ended up face-to-face with an armed lunatic on three separate occasions in the past two years. An inch from death each time.”

He said nothing.

She stared sadly out over the pond. “There’s something wrong with that picture.”

It took him a while to reply. “You think I want to die?”

“
Do
you?”

“Of course not.”

She continued looking straight ahead.

The hillside pasture and the woods beyond the pond were all growing darker. At the edge of the woods the gold patches of ragweed and lavender sprigs of grape-hyacinth had already faded to shades of gray. Madeleine gave a little shiver, zipped her windbreaker up to her chin, and folded her arms across her chest, pulling her elbows tightly against her.