John Verdon: Let the Devil Sleep

“What makes you so sure?”

“If you heard his voice-the calls he made to me after I threw him out? Or saw the looks on his face when we’d pass each other on campus? Then you’d know. It was the same weirdness . I don’t know how to explain it, but the stuff that’s been happening? It’s creepy, the same way Robby is creepy.”

In the ensuing silence, Kim wrapped her hands tightly around her coffee cup. It reminded Gurney of the way she was standing at the door earlier, her palms pressed against the glass. Emotion and control.

He thought about her program idea, her slant on the pain created by murder. There was truth in what she said. In some cases the wound inflicted by a killer tore a hole through a family-left spouse, children, parents desolate-filled their lives with sadness and rage.

In other cases, though, there was little grief, little emotion of any kind. Gurney had seen too many of those cases. Men who lived ugly lives and died ugly deaths. Drug dealers, pimps, career criminals, teenage gangbangers playing video games with real guns. The human devastation was breathtaking. Sometimes he had a dream, always the same, with an image from the concentration camps. A bulldozer pushing half-skeletonized bodies into a broad trench. Pushing them in like mannequins. Like rubble.

He sat gazing at the intense, dark-eyed young woman who was still grasping her lukewarm mug, leaning toward it, her shining hair hiding most of her face.

Then he glanced over at Madeleine with a question in his eyes.

She gave a tiny shrug, a hint of a smile. It felt like a nudge in the direction of action.

He looked back at Kim. “Okay. Let’s return to the basic issue. How can I help you?”

What she wanted was for Gurney to follow her back to her apartment in Syracuse, where she kept everything related to her project. That way he could see it all firsthand-her correspondence with potential interviewees, the two initial interviews she’d conducted and submitted as part of her proposal, her plans for the interviews yet to come, her contract with Rudy Getz at RAM-TV, the general positioning and promotional copy she was preparing for the series. He could see everything, get a feel for it, tell her what rang true, what didn’t.

He had as little appetite for driving to Syracuse as he’d had for any activity in recent months, which was close to none. But it struck him as the quickest way to discharge whatever obligation he felt toward Connie Clarke. He’d go, he’d look, he’d comment. Duty discharged. “Huge favor” granted. Then back into his cave.

The Google directions to Kim’s address that he’d printed out in the event they got separated estimated a journey of one hour and forty-nine minutes from Walnut Crossing, but there was almost no traffic on the two interstates that constituted most of the trip, and the little Miata ahead of him rarely descended to anywhere near the speed limit.

In a better mood, Gurney might have enjoyed the trip, passing through a rolling landscape of woods and meadows, wide rushing streams, farm fields with black earth newly plowed for spring planting, iconic silos and red barns. But in his state of mind, these bucolic views were reduced to a damp, muddy expanse-a wasteland of agricultural decline and bad weather.

His first sight of the environs of Syracuse reinforced his bleak thoughts. He recalled reading somewhere that the city sat at the foot of Onondaga Lake, whose fame arose from having been one of the most polluted lakes in America. It triggered a memory from his Bronx childhood-a memory of Eastchester Bay, whose murky navigation channel was constantly churned by barges and tugboats. The bay was an oily extension of Long Island Sound, in which nothing seemed to live except filthy seaweed and hideous brown crabs-armored, inedible, primeval, scuttling things-the thought of which could still raise gooseflesh on his arms.

He followed Kim’s Miata off the interstate into a neighborhood that had a worn look and no obvious zoning restrictions. He drove past a haphazard sequence of small single-family houses, spacious older homes now fractured into multiple apartments, shabby convenience stores, dreary commercial buildings, and desolate open areas surrounded by chain-link fences.

At a corner take-out place-Onondaga Princes of Pizza-the Miata turned onto a smaller side street and came to a stop in front of an Archie Bunker house. It was separated by a narrow driveway from an identical house on each side. A patch of rough earth in front-not much larger than a double grave-was in desperate need of flowers or grass. Gurney parked behind Kim and watched as she emerged from the little car, locked and double-checked both doors. She looked up at the house and along the driveway-warily, it seemed to him. As he walked over to her, she gave him a nervous smile.

“Anything wrong?” he asked.

“No, everything… seems fine.” She climbed the three steps to the front door, which was unlocked. That door, however, provided entry only to a tiny vestibule with two more doors. The one on the right had two serious-looking locks, which she opened with separate keys. Before turning the knob, she looked at it suspiciously and gave it a couple of sharp yanks.

That door opened into a hallway. She led him into the first room on the right-a small IKEA-furnished living room with the bare essentials: a futon couch, a coffee table, two low wooden armchairs with loose cushions, two minimalist floor lamps, a bookcase, a two-drawer metal file cabinet, and a table being used as a desk with a straight-backed chair behind it. The floor was covered by a worn-looking earth-tone rug.

He smiled curiously. “What was that yanking on the doorknob all about?”

“There were a couple of times it came off in my hand.”

“You mean it was purposely loosened?”

“Oh, it was purposely loosened all right. Twice. The first time, the police took one look and dismissed it as a practical joke someone played on me. The second time, they didn’t even bother to send someone out. Cop on the phone seemed to think it was funny.”

“Doesn’t sound funny to me.”

“Thank you.”

“I know I already asked you this, but…”

“The answer is yes, I’m sure it’s Robby. And no, I don’t have any proof. But who else could it be?”

As she finished speaking, the doorbell rang-a complex musical chime.

“Oh, God. My mother’s idea. She gave me that when I moved in here. There used to be a buzzer, which she hated. Just a second.” She headed out of the room for the front door.

She returned a minute later with a large pizza box and two cans of Diet Coke.

“Pretty good timing. I ordered this stuff on my cell on the way up here. I figured we’d need some lunch. Pizza okay with you?”

“Pizza’s fine.”

She laid the box on the coffee table, opened it, and dragged one of the light armchairs over to the table. Gurney sat on the couch.

After they’d each eaten a slice and washed it down with some soda, she said, “Okay. Where do you want to start?”

“You had this idea about talking to the families of murder victims. So I assume the first thing you had to do was figure out which murders to pick?”

“Right.” She was watching him intently.

“There’s no shortage of homicide cases. Even if you limited yourself to New York State, even to a single year, you’d have hundreds to choose from.”

“Right.”

He leaned forward. “So tell me how you made your choices. What were the criteria?”

“The criteria changed along the way. At first I wanted to include all kinds of victims, all kinds of homicides, all kinds of families, different racial and ethnic backgrounds, different lengths of time between the crime and now. Total variety! But Dr. Wilson kept telling me, ‘Simplify, simplify.’ Minimize the variables, he said. Look for a hook, make it easy for the viewer to understand. ‘The narrower the focus, the sharper the point.’ Like maybe the dozenth time he said that, I got it. Everything started connecting, falling into place. And after that I was like, ‘ Yes! This is it! I know exactly what I’m going to do!’ ”