John Verdon - Shut Your Eyes Tight

“So?”

“You’re a natural-born onion peeler-the best that ever was.”

When Gurney finally noticed Madeleine at the den door, he wasn’t sure how long she’d been standing there, nor even how long he himself had been at the den window facing the back pasture that ran up toward the wooded ridge behind the house. To save his life, he could not have described the pasture’s current pattern of blazing goldenrod, browning grasses, and wild blue asters at which he had appeared to be gazing, but he could have come very close to reciting Hardwick’s telephone narrative word for word.

“So?” said Madeleine.

“So?” he repeated, as though he hadn’t understood the question.

She smiled impatiently.

“That was Jack Hardwick.” He was about to ask if she remembered Jack Hardwick, chief investigator on the Mellery case, when the look in her eyes told him he didn’t need to ask. It was the look she got whenever a name came up that was associated with that terrible chain of murders.

She stared at him, waiting, unblinking.

“He wants my advice.”

Still she waited.

“He wants me to speak to the mother of a girl who was killed. She was killed on her wedding day.” He was about to say how she was killed, describe the peculiar details, but realized that would be a mistake.

Madeleine nodded almost imperceptibly.

“You all right?” he asked.

“I’d been wondering how long it would take.”

“How long…?”

“For you to find another… situation that required your attention.”

“All I’m going to do is talk to her.”

“Right. And then, after a nice long talk, you’ll conclude that there’s nothing especially interesting about a woman being killed on her wedding day, and you’ll yawn and walk away. Is that the way you see it?”

His voice tightened reflexively. “I don’t know enough yet to see it in any particular way.”

She gave him her patented skeptical smile. “I have to go,” she said. Then, seeming to notice the question in his eyes, she added, “The clinic, remember? See you back here tonight.” And she was gone.

At first he just stared at the empty doorway. Then he thought he should go after her, started to do so, got as far as the middle of the kitchen, stopped, and wondered what he would say, had no idea, thought he should go after her anyway, went out the side door by the garden. But by the time he got around to the front of the house, her car was halfway down the rough little farm lane that bisected the low pasture. He wondered if she saw him in her rearview mirror, wondered if it made a difference that he’d come out after her.

In recent months he’d imagined that things were going pretty well. The raw emotion at the end of the Mellery nightmare had evolved into an imperfect peace. He and Madeleine had slipped smoothly, gradually, mostly unconsciously into affectionate or at least tolerant patterns of behavior that resembled separate elliptical orbits. While he gave his occasional lectures at the state police academy, she had accepted a part-time position in the local mental-health clinic, doing intakes and assessments. It was a function for which her LCSW credentials and experience clearly overqualified her, but it seemed to have provided a sense of balance in their marriage, a relief from the pressure of their unrealistic expectations of each other. Or was that just wishful thinking?

Wishful thinking. The universal anodyne.

He stood in the matted, drought-wilted grass and watched her car disappear behind the barn onto the narrow town road. His feet were cold. He looked down and discovered he had come outside in his socks, which were now absorbing the morning dew. As he turned to go back into the house, a movement by the barn caught his eye.

A lone coyote had emerged from the woods and was loping across the clearing between the barn and the pond. Partway across, the animal stopped, turning its head toward Gurney, and studied him for a long ten seconds. It was an intelligent look, thought Gurney. A look of pure, unemotional calculation.

“What goal is common to every undercover assignment?”

Gurney’s question was greeted by various expressions of interest and confusion on the thirty-nine faces in the academy classroom. Most guest instructors started their lectures by introducing themselves and giving their résumé highlights, then presented an outline of the subjects to be covered, content and objectives, blah, blah, blah-a general overview to which no one paid much attention. Gurney preferred a cut-to-the-chase approach, particularly for a seminar group like this, made up of experienced officers. And they’d know who he was, anyway. He had a definite reputation in law-enforcement circles. Professionally, the reputation was about as good as it gets in that world, and since his retirement from the NYPD two years earlier, it had only gotten better-if being regarded with increasing levels of respect, awe, envy, and resentment could be considered “better.” Personally, he wished he had no reputation at all, no image to live up to. Or fall short of.

“Think about it,” he said with quiet intensity, making eye contact with as many people in the room as he could. “What’s the one thing you need to achieve in every undercover situation? This is an important question. I’d like to get a response from each of you.”

A hand went up in the front row. The face, set atop a hulking offensive lineman’s body, was young and baffled. “Wouldn’t the goal be different in every case?”

“The situation would be different,” said Gurney, nodding agreeably. “The people would be different. The risks and rewards would be different. The depth and duration of your immersion in the environment would be different. The persona you project, your cover story, could be very different. The nature of the intelligence or evidence to be acquired would vary from case to case. There are definitely lots of differences. But”-he paused, again making as much eye contact as possible before continuing with rising emphasis-“there’s one goal common to every assignment. It’s your primary goal as an undercover officer. Your success in achieving every other goal of an operation hangs on your success in achieving this primary goal. Your life depends on it. Tell me what you think it is.”

For nearly half a minute, there was absolute silence, the only movement the formation of thoughtful frowns. Waiting for the replies he knew would eventually come, Gurney glanced around at his physical surroundings-the concrete-block walls with their matte beige paint; the vinyl-tile floor whose brown-and-tan pattern was indistinguishable from the scuff marks that obscured it; the rows of long, speckled-gray Formica tables, shabby with age, serving as shared desks; the stark orange plastic chairs with tubular chrome legs, too small for their large and muscular occupants, their brightness oddly depressing. A time capsule of mid-seventies architectural awfulness, the room created a bleak echo of his last city precinct.

“Gathering accurate information?” offered a questioning face in the second row.

“A reasonable guess,” said Gurney encouragingly. “Anyone have any other ideas?”

Half a dozen suggestions followed rapidly, mostly from the front of the room, mostly variations on the accurate-information theme.

“Any other ideas?” Gurney prodded.

“Goal is to get the bad guys off the street,” came a comment in a weary growl from the back row.

“Prevent crime,” said another.

“Get the truth, the whole truth, the facts, names, find out what’s going down, who’s doing what to who, what the plan is, who’s the man, who sits on top of the food chain, follow the money, shit like that. Basically, you want to know everything there is to be known-it’s that simple.” The dark, wiry man who rattled off this litany of goals with his arms folded across his chest was sitting directly in front of where Gurney was standing. His smirk announced that there was no more to be said on the subject. The name on the tent card nearest him on the long table read “Det. Falcone.”