John Verdon: Let the Devil Sleep

He stared out the den window at the high pasture without really seeing it.

What the hell’s the matter with me?

A jab of pain in his right side offered a partial answer. It also reminded him that he’d been on his way to the medicine cabinet when he’d made his appointment-canceling detour.

He returned to the bathroom. He didn’t like the look of the man who looked back at him from the mirror on the cabinet door. His forehead was lined with worry, his skin colorless, his eyes dull and tired.

Christ.

He knew he had to get back to his daily exercise regimen-the sets of push-ups, chin-ups, sit-ups that had once kept him in better shape than most men half his age. But now the man in the mirror was looking every bit of forty-eight, and he wasn’t happy about it. He wasn’t happy about the daily messages of mortality his body was sending him. He wasn’t happy about his descent from mere introversion into isolation. He wasn’t happy about… anything.

He took the ibuprofen bottle from its shelf, tapped three of the little brown pills into his hand, frowned at them, popped them into his mouth. As he was running the water, waiting for it to get cold, he heard the phone ringing in the den. Huffbarger, he thought. Or Huffbarger’s office. He made no move to answer it. To hell with them .

Then he heard Madeleine’s footsteps coming down from upstairs. A few moments later, she picked up the phone, just as the call was switching over to their ancient answering machine. He could hear her voice but couldn’t make out the words. He half-filled a small plastic cup with water and washed down the three pills that were starting to dissolve on his tongue.

He assumed that Madeleine was dealing with the Huffbarger problem. Which was fine with him. But then he heard her footsteps coming across the hall and into the bedroom. She walked through the open bathroom door, extending the phone handset toward him.

“For you,” she said, handing it to him and leaving the room.

Anticipating some unpleasantness from Huffbarger or one of his malcontent receptionists, Gurney’s tone was defensively curt. “Yes?”

There was a second of silence before the caller spoke.

“David?” The bright female voice was certainly familiar, but his memory failed to attach a name or a face to it.

“Yes,” he said, more pleasantly this time. “I’m sorry, but I can’t quite place-”

“Oh, how could you forget? Oh, I am so hurt, Detective Gurney !” the caller cried with jokey exaggeration-and suddenly the laughing timbre and inflection of the words conjured up the person: a wiry, clever, high-energy blonde with a Queens accent and a model’s cheekbones.

“Connie. Jesus. Connie Clarke. It’s been a while.”

“Six years, to be exact.”

“Six years. Jesus.” The number didn’t mean much to him, didn’t surprise him, but he didn’t know what else to say.

He remembered their connection with mixed feelings. A freelance journalist, Connie Clarke had written a laudatory article about him for New York magazine after he’d solved the infamous Jason Strunk serial-murder case-just three years after he’d been promoted to detective first grade for solving the Jorge Kunzman serial-murder case. In fact, her article was a little too laudatory for comfort, dwelling as it did on his record number of homicide arrests and referring to him as the “NYPD Supercop”-a sobriquet that lent itself to scores of amusing variations created by his more imaginative colleagues.

“So how are things up there in peaceful retirement land?”

He could hear the grin in her question and assumed she knew about his unofficial involvement in the Mellery and Perry cases. “Sometimes more peaceful than other times.”

“Wow! Yeah! I guess that’s one way of putting it. You retire from the NYPD after twenty-five years, you’re up in the sleepy Catskills for about ten minutes, and all of a sudden you’re in the middle of one murder case after another. Seems to me you’re kind of a major-crime magnet. Wow! How does Madeleine feel about that?”

“You just had her on the phone. You should have asked her.”

Connie laughed as though he’d said something wonderfully witty.

“So between murder cases what’s your typical day like?”

“There’s not much to tell. It’s pretty uneventful. Madeleine stays busier than I do.”

“I’m having such a hard time picturing you in the middle of some kind of Norman Rockwell America. Dave making maple syrup. Dave making apple cider. Dave getting eggs from the henhouse.”

“I’m afraid not. No syrup, cider, or eggs.” What came to his mind was quite a different scenario describing the past six months. Dave playing the hero. Dave getting shot. Dave recovering too goddamn slowly. Dave sitting around listening to the ringing in his own ears. Dave getting depressed, hostile, isolated. Dave viewing every proposed activity as an infuriating assault on his right to remain in a paralyzing funk. Dave wanting to have nothing to do with anything .

“So what will you be doing today?”

“To be absolutely truthful with you, Connie, damn little. At most I’ll walk around the edges of the fields, maybe pick up some of the branches that blew down during the winter, maybe rake some fertilizer into the garden beds. Stuff like that.”

“Doesn’t sound so bad to me. I know people who’d give a lot to trade places with you.”

He didn’t answer, just let the silence drag out, thinking it might force her to get to the point of the call. There had to be a point. He remembered Connie as a cordial and talky woman, but she always had a purpose. Her mind, under that windblown blond mane, was always working.

“You’re wondering why I called you,” she said. “Right?”

“The question did cross my mind.”

“I called you because I want to ask you for a favor. A huge favor.”

Gurney thought for a moment, then laughed.

“What’s the joke?” She sounded momentarily off balance.

“You once told me that it’s always better to ask for a big favor than a small one, because small ones are easier to refuse.”

“No! I can’t believe I said that. That sounds so manipulative . That’s awful . You’re making that up, aren’t you?” She was full of cheerful indignation. Connie never remained off balance for long.

“So what can I do for you?”

“You did make it up! I knew it!”

“As I said, what can I do for you?”

“Well, now I’m embarrassed to say it, but it really is a huge, huge favor.” She paused. “You remember Kim?”

“Your daughter?”

“My daughter who adores you.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Don’t tell me you didn’t know.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Oh, David, David, David, all the women love you, and you don’t even notice.”

“I think I was in the same room with your daughter once, when she was… what, maybe fifteen?” His recollection was of a pretty but very serious-looking girl at lunch with him and Connie at Connie’s house, hovering at the periphery of their conversation, hardly saying a word.

“Actually, she was seventeen. And okay, maybe ‘adore’ is too gushy a word. But she thought you were really, really smart-and to Kim that means a lot. Now she’s twenty-three, and I happen to know she still has a very high opinion of Dave Gurney, Supercop.”

“That’s very nice, but… I’m getting a little lost here.”

“Of course you are, because I’m making such a mess of asking you for the super-huge favor. Maybe you ought to sit down-this could take a few minutes.”

Gurney was still standing by the sink in the bathroom. He walked out through the bedroom and across the hall into the den. He had no desire to sit. Instead he stood by the back window. “Okay, Connie, I’m sitting,” he said. “What’s going on?”