John Verdon: Shut Your Eyes Tight

“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.”

Gurney grimaced. Several possible responses collided in his head, all canceling each other out.

Hardwick seemed encouraged by his silence. “She’d love to meet you. Oh, did I mention? She’s drop-dead gorgeous, early forties but looks about thirty-two. And she made it clear that money wasn’t an issue. You could pretty much name your price. Seriously-two hundred dollars an hour would not be a problem. Not that you’d be motivated by anything as common as money.”

“Speaking of motives, what’s in it for you?”

Hardwick’s effort to sound innocent instead sounded comical. “Seeing justice done? Helping out a family that’s been through hell? I mean, losing a child’s got to be the worst thing in the world, right?”

Gurney froze. The mention of losing a child still had the power to send a tremor through his heart. It was more than fifteen years since Danny, barely four at the time, had stepped into the street when Gurney wasn’t looking, but grief, he’d discovered, was not an experience you went through once and then “moved on” (as the idiotic popular phrase would have it). The truth was that it came over you in successive waves-waves separated by periods of numbness, periods of forgetfulness, periods of ordinary living.

“You still there?”

Gurney grunted.

Hardwick went on. “I want to do what I can for these people. Besides-”

“Besides,” Gurney broke in, speaking fast, forcing his debilitating emotion aside, “if I did get involved, which I have no intention of doing, it would drive Rodriguez batshit, wouldn’t it? And if I managed to come up with something, something new, something significant, it would make him and Blatt look really bad, wouldn’t it? Might that be one of your perfectly good reasons?”

Hardwick cleared his throat again. “That’s a fucked-up way of looking at it. Fact is, we got a tragically bereaved mother here who isn’t satisfied with the progress of the police investigation-which I can understand, since the incompetent Arlo Blatt and his crew have rousted every Mexican in the county and haven’t come up with so much as a taco fart. She’s desperate for a real detective. So I’m laying this golden egg in your lap.”

“That’s great, Jack, but I’m not in the PI business.”

“For the love of God, Davey, just talk to her. That’s all I’m asking you to do. Just talk to her. She’s lonely, vulnerable, beautiful, with big bucks to burn. And deep down inside, Davey boy, deep down inside there’s something wild in that woman. I guarantee it. Cross my heart and hope to die!”

“Jack, the last thing I need right now-”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, you’re happily married, in love with your wife, yadda, yadda, yadda. All right. Fine. And maybe you don’t care about a chance to reveal Rod Rodriguez finally and absolutely as the total asshole he really is. Okay. But this case is complex. ” He gave the word a depth of meaning, made it sound like the most precious of all characteristics. “It’s got layers to it, Davey. It’s a fucking onion.”