John Verdon - Shut Your Eyes Tight

He led her to the patio that separated the French doors from the asparagus bed. He indicated a couple of folding chairs on either side of a small café table Madeleine had purchased at an auction. “Is this all right?”

“It’s fine,” she said, pulling one of the chairs out from the table and sitting on it without bothering to brush off the seat.

No concern about ruining her obviously pricey slacks. Ditto the ecru leather handbag she tossed on the still-damp tabletop .

She studied his face with interest. “How much information has Investigator Hardwick already given you?”

Hard edge on the voice, hard look in the almond eyes .

“He gave me the basic facts surrounding the events leading up to and following the… the murder of your daughter. Mrs. Perry, if I may stop for a moment. I need to tell you before we go on how terribly sorry I am for your loss.”

At first she didn’t react at all. Then she nodded, but the movement was so slight it could have been nothing more than a tremor.

“Thank you,” she said abruptly. “I appreciate that.”

Clearly she didn’t .

“But my loss is not the issue. The issue is Hector Flores.” She articulated the name with tightened lips as though biting down defiantly on a bad tooth. “What did Hardwick tell you about him?”

“He said there was clear and convincing evidence of his guilt… that he was a strange, controversial character… that his background is still undetermined and his motivation uncertain. Current location unknown.”

“Current location unknown!” She repeated the phrase with a kind of ferocity, leaning toward him over the little table, placing her palms on the moist metal surface. Her wedding ring was a simple platinum band, but her engagement ring was crowned with the largest diamond he’d ever seen. “You summed it up perfectly,” she went on, her eyes as wildly bright as the stone. “ ‘Current location unknown.’ That’s not acceptable. Not endurable. I’m hiring you to put an end to it.”

He sighed softly. “I think we may be getting a little ahead of ourselves.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” The pressure of her hands on the tabletop had turned her knuckles white.

He answered almost sleepily, an inverted reaction he’d always had to displays of emotion. “I don’t know yet if it makes any sense for me to get involved in a situation that’s the subject of an active police investigation.”

Her lips twitched into an ugly smile. “How much do you want?”

He shook his head slowly. “Didn’t you hear what I said?”

“What do you want? Name it.”

“I have no idea what I want, Mrs. Perry. There are a lot of things I don’t know.”

She took her hands off the table and placed them in her lap, interlacing the fingers as though it were a technique to maintain self-control. “I’ll keep it simple. You find Hector Flores. You arrest him or kill him. Whichever you do, I’ll give you whatever you want. Whatever you want. ”

Gurney leaned back from the table, letting his gaze drift to the asparagus patch. At the far end of it, a red hummingbird feeder hung from a shepherd’s crook. He could hear the rising and falling pitch of the buzzing wings as two of the tiny birds swooped viciously at each other-each claiming sole right to the sugar water, or so it seemed. On the other hand, it might be some strange remnant of a spring mating dance, and what looked like a killer instinct might be another instinct altogether.

He made an effort to focus his attention on Val Perry’s eyes, trying to discern the reality behind the beauty-the actual contents of this perfect vessel. There was rage in her, no doubt of that. Desperation. A difficult past-he would bet on that. Regret. Loneliness, though she would not admit to the vulnerability that word implied. Intelligence. Impulsiveness and stubbornness-the impulsiveness to grab hold of something without thinking, the stubbornness to never let it go. And something darker. A hatred of her own life?

Enough , he said to himself. Too easy to confuse speculation with insight. Too easy to fall in love with a wild guess and follow it over a cliff.

“Tell me about your daughter,” he said.

Something in her expression shifted, as if she, too, were putting aside a certain train of thought.

“Jillian was difficult.” Her announcement had the dramatic tone of the opening sentence of a story read aloud. He suspected that whatever followed would be something she’d said many times before. “More than difficult,” she continued. “Jillian was dependent on medication to remain merely difficult and not utterly impossible. She was wild, narcissistic, promiscuous, conniving, vicious. Addicted to oxies, roxies, Ecstasy, and crack cocaine. A world-class liar. Dangerously precocious. Horribly attuned to the weaknesses of other people. Unpredictably violent. With an unhealthy passion for unhealthy men. And that’s with the benefit of the finest therapy money could buy.” Oddly excited by this litany of abuse, she sounded more like a sadist hacking at a stranger with a razor than a mother describing the emotional disorders of her child. “Did Hardwick tell you what I’m telling you about Jillian?” she asked.

“I don’t recall those specific details.”

“What did he tell you?”

“He mentioned that she came from a family with a lot of money.”

She made a loud, grating sound-a sound he was surprised to hear coming from so delicate a mouth. He was even more surprised to realize that it was a burst of laughter.

“Oh, yes!” she cried, the harshness of the laugh still in her voice. “We’re definitely a family with a lot of money. You might say we have a shitload of it.” She articulated the vulgarity with a contemptuous relish. “Does it shock you that I don’t sound the way a bereaved parent is supposed to sound?”

The chilling specter of his own loss limited his response, making speech difficult. He finally said, “I’ve seen stranger reactions to death than yours, Mrs. Perry. I’m not sure how we’re… how someone in your circumstances… is supposed to sound.”

She seemed to be considering this. “You say you’ve seen stranger reactions to death, but have you ever seen a stranger death? A stranger death than Jillian’s?”

He didn’t answer. The question sounded histrionic. The more Gurney looked into those intense eyes, the harder it became to assemble what he saw into one personality. Had she always been so fragmented, or was there something about her daughter’s murder that broke her into these incompatible pieces?

“Tell me more about Jillian,” he said.

“Like what?”

“Apart from the personal characteristics you mentioned, do you know anything about your daughter’s life that might have given this Flores a motive for killing her?”

“You’re asking me why Hector Flores did what he did? I have no idea. Neither do the police. They’ve spent the past four months bouncing back and forth between two theories, both idiotic. One is that Hector was gay, secretly in love with Scott Ashton, resentful of Jillian’s relationship with him, and driven by jealousy to kill her. And the opportunity to kill her in her wedding dress would be irresistible to his drama-queen sensibility. Makes a nice story. Their other theory contradicts the first. A marine engineer and his wife lived next door to Scott. The engineer was away a lot on ships. The wife disappeared the same time Hector did. So the police geniuses conclude that they were having an affair, which Jillian found out about and threatened to reveal to get back at Hector, with whom she was also having an affair, and one thing led to another, and-”