John Verdon - Let the Devil Sleep

“Any special reason for the change?” Gurney asked.

“Sort of. I set up the original schedule before I knew you’d be available. But Larry is more standoffish than Jimi, so I’d rather you were present for that. Jimi is a very opinionated leftist. So he’ll definitely participate-gives him a soapbox to attack materialism. But Larry’s not so easy. He seems disillusioned with media in general, because of the sensationalism surrounding a friend’s death years ago.”

“You understand I’m not helping you make a sales pitch, right?”

“Of course not! I just want you to listen, get a feel, tell me what you think. So I’ll be picking you up at eleven-thirty this morning instead of eight-thirty. Okay?”

“Okay,” he said, without enthusiasm. He had no specific objection to the new schedule, just a passing sense that something was off center.

As he was about to slip his cell phone into his pocket, it occurred to him that Jack Hardwick hadn’t returned his call, so he tapped in the number.

After just one ring, a raspy voice said, “Patience, Gurney, patience. I was about to call you.”

“Hello, Jack.”

“My hand is just barely healed, ace. You setting up another opportunity to get me shot?”

It was a reminder that six months earlier, at the climax of the Perry case, one of the three bullets that had struck Gurney passed through his side and lodged in Hardwick’s hand.

“Hello, Jack.”

“Hello your fucking self.”

Such was the routine of beginning any conversation with New York State Police Senior Investigator Hardwick. That combative man with pale blue malamute eyes, a razor-keen mind, and a sour wit seemed determined to make every communication with him an ordeal.

“I’m calling about Kim Corazon.”

“Little Kimmy? The kid with the school project?”

“I guess you could call it that. She has your name listed as a background source for information on the Good Shepherd case.”

“No shit. How’d you cross paths with her?”

“Long story. I thought maybe you could give me some information.”

“What did you have in mind?”

“Anything I’m not likely to find on the Internet.”

“Colorful case tidbits?”

“If you think they’re significant.”

There was a wheezing sound on the phone. “I haven’t had my coffee yet.”

Gurney said nothing, knowing what was coming.

“So here’s the deal,” growled Hardwick. “You deliver a nice big Sumatra from Abelard’s and maybe I’ll be motivated to deliver significant tidbits.”

“Are there any?”

“Who knows? If I can’t remember any, I’ll make some up. Of course, one man’s significance is another man’s horseshit. I’ll take my Sumatra black with three sugars.”

• • •

Forty minutes later, with two large coffees in the car, Gurney was driving up the twisty dirt road that led from Abelard’s General Store in Dillweed to an even twistier dirt road, hardly a road at all-more like an abandoned cattle path-at the end of which Jack Hardwick lived in a small rented farmhouse. Gurney parked next to Hardwick’s attitude car-a partially restored red 1970 Pontiac GTO.

The sparse, intermittent snowflakes had been replaced by a pin-pricky mist. As Gurney stepped up onto the creaking porch, one coffee container in each hand, the door swung open to reveal Hardwick in a T-shirt and cutoff sweatpants, his shaggy gray crew cut uncombed. They’d seen each other face-to-face only once since Gurney’s hospitalization six months earlier, at a state-police inquiry into the shooting, but Hardwick’s opening line was characteristic.

“So tell me-how the fuck do you know little Kimmy?”

Gurney extended one of the coffees. “Through her mother. You want this?”

Hardwick took it, opened the flap on the lid, tasted it. “Is the mom as hot as the kid?”

“For Christ’s sake, Jack…”

“That a yes or a no?” Hardwick stepped back to let Gurney in.

The outer doorway led directly into a large front room that Gurney would have expected to be furnished as a living room, but it was hardly furnished at all. The pair of leather armchairs with a stack of books between them on a bare pine floor looked more like things about to be moved than a planned seating arrangement.

Hardwick was watching him. “Marcy and I broke up,” he said, as if explaining the emptiness of the place.

“Sorry to hear that. Who’s Marcy?”

“Good question. Thought I knew. Apparently not.” He took a longer sip of his coffee. “I must have a big blind spot when it comes to evaluating loony women with nice tits.” Another sip, even longer. “But so what? We’ve all got our blind spots, right, Davey?”

Gurney had figured out long ago that the part of Hardwick that went through him like a needle was the part that reminded him of his father-this despite the fact that Gurney was currently forty-eight and Hardwick, although gray-haired and roughly weathered, was not quite forty.

Every so often Hardwick would hit the precise note of cynicism, the perfect echo, that would transport Gurney back into the apartment from whose high window he’d shot that inexplicable arrow, the apartment from which his first marriage had provided an escape.

The image that came to him now: He was standing in their cramped apartment’s living room, his father dispensing drunken wisdom, telling him his mother was loony, telling him all women were loony, couldn’t be trusted. Best not to tell them anything. “You and I are men, Davey, we understand each other. Your mother’s a little… a little off , you know what I mean? No need for her to know I was drinking today, right? Only cause trouble. We’re men. We can talk to each other.” Gurney was eight years old.

The forty-eight-year-old Gurney made an effort to return to Hardwick’s living room, to the moment at hand.

“She helped herself to half the shit in the house,” said Hardwick. He took another sip, sat in one of the armchairs, waved Gurney toward the other one. “What can I do for you?”

Gurney lowered himself into the chair. “Kim’s mother is a journalist I know from years ago on the job. She asked me for a favor-‘Look over Kim’s shoulder’ is the way she put it. Now I’m trying to find out what I’m involved in, thought maybe you could help. Like I said on the phone, Kim listed you as a source.”

Hardwick stared at his coffee container as if it were a perplexing artifact. “Who else is on her list?”

“FBI guy by the name of Trout. And Max Clinter, the cop who fucked up the pursuit of the shooter.”

Hardwick let out a harsh bray that turned into a fit of coughing. “Wow! The uptight prick of the century and a psycho drunk. I’m in hot-shit company.”

Gurney took a long swallow from his coffee container. “When do we get to the colorful, significant tidbits?”

Hardwick extended his scarred, muscular legs and leaned far back in his chair. “Stuff the press never got hold of?”

“Right.”

“I guess one thing would be the little animals. You didn’t know about those, did you?”

“Little animals?”

“Little plastic replicas. Part of a set. An elephant. A lion. A giraffe. A zebra. A monkey. A sixth one I can’t remember.”

“And how were these-”

“One was found at the scene of each attack.”

“Where?”

“In the general vicinity of the victim’s car.”

“General vicinity?”

“Yeah, like they’d been tossed there from the shooter’s car.”

“Lab work on these little animals lead anywhere?”

“No prints, nothing like that.”

“But?”

“But they were part of a kid’s play set. Something called Noah’s World. Like one of those diorama things. The kid builds a model of Noah’s Ark, then he puts the animals in it.”