John Verdon - Think of a Number

After a brief detour to the bathroom off the pantry, he went directly into the den and checked the phone messages. There was just one. The voice was Sonya’s-satiny, cello-like. “Hello, David. I have a customer who is enthralled by your work. I told him you’re completing another piece, and I’d like to tell him when it will be available . Enthralled is not too strong a term, and money does not seem to be an issue. Give me a call as soon as you can. We need to get our heads together on this one. Thanks, David.”

He was starting to replay the message when he heard the back door opening and shutting. He pressed the “stop” button on the machine to abort the Sonya replay and called out, “Is that you?”

There was no answer, which annoyed him.

“Madeleine,” he called, more loudly than he needed to.

He heard her voice answer, but it was too low to make out what she said. It was a voice level that, in his hostile moments, he labeled “passive-aggressively low.” His first inclination was to stay in the den, but that seemed infantile, so he went out to the kitchen.

Madeleine turned to him from the coat pegs on the far side of the room where she’d hung her orange parka. It still had sprinkles of snow on the shoulders, which meant she’d been walking through the pines.

“It’s so-o-o beautiful out,” she said, running her fingers through her thick brown hair, fluffing it up where the parka hood had pressed it down. She walked into the pantry, came out a minute later, and glanced around at the countertops.

“Where did you put the pecans?”

“What?”

“Didn’t I ask you to get pecans?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Maybe I didn’t. Or maybe you didn’t hear me?”

“I have no idea,” he said. He was having a hard time fitting the subject into the current shape of his mind. “I’ll get some tomorrow.”

“Where?”

“Abelard’s.”

“On Sunday?”

“Sun-Oh, right, they’re closed. What is it you need them for?”

“I’m the one making dessert.”

“What dessert?”

“Elizabeth is making the salad and baking the bread, Jan is making the chili, and I’m making the dessert.” Her eyes darkened. “You forgot?”

“They’re coming here tomorrow?”

“That’s right.”

“What time?”

“Is that an issue?”

“I have to deliver a written statement to the BCI team at noon.”

“On Sunday?”

“It’s a murder investigation,” he said dully, he hoped not sarcastically.

She nodded. “So you’ll be gone all day.”

“Part of the day.”

“How big a part?”

“Christ, you know the nature of these things.”

The sadness and anger that contended with each other in her eyes disturbed Gurney more than a slap would have. “So I guess you’ll get home tomorrow whatever time you get home, and maybe you’ll join us for dinner and maybe not,” she said.

“I have to deliver a signed statement as a witness-before-the-fact in a murder case. That is not something I want to do.” His voice rose abruptly, shockingly, spitting the words at her. “There are some things in life we are required to do. This is a legal obligation-not a matter of preference. I didn’t write the goddamn law!”

She stared at him with a weariness as sudden as his fury. “You still don’t see it, do you?”

“See what?”

“That your brain is so tied up with murder and mayhem and blood and monsters and liars and psychopaths, there’s simply nothing left for anything else.”

He spent two hours that night writing and editing his statement. It recounted simply-without adjectives, emotions, opinions-the facts of his acquaintance with Mark Mellery, including their casual association in college and their recent contacts, beginning with Mellery’s e-mail requesting a meeting and ending with his adamant refusal to take the matter to the police.

He drank two mugs of strong coffee while composing the statement and, as a result, slept poorly. Cold, sweaty, itchy, thirsty, with a transient ache that drifted inexplicably from one leg to the other-the night’s succession of discomforts provided a malignant nursery for troubled thoughts, especially concerning the pain he’d glimpsed in Madeleine’s eyes.

He knew that it came from her sense of his priorities. She was complaining that when the roles in his life collided, Dave the Detective always superseded Dave the Husband. His retirement from the job had made no difference. It was clear she’d hoped it would, maybe believed it would. But how could he stop being what he was? However much he cared for her, however much he wanted to be with her, however much he wanted her to be happy, how could he become someone he wasn’t? His mind worked exceptionally well in a certain way, and the greatest satisfactions in his life had come from applying that intellectual gift. He had a supremely logical brain and a finely tuned antenna for discrepancy. These qualities made him an outstanding detective. They also created the cushion of abstraction that allowed him to maintain a tolerable distance from the horrors of his profession. Other cops had other cushions-alcohol, frat-boy solidarity, heart-deadening cynicism. Gurney’s shield was his ability to grasp situations as intellectual challenges, and crimes as equations to be solved. That was who he was. It was not something he could cease to be, simply by retiring. At least that’s the way he was thinking about it when he finally fell asleep an hour before dawn.

Sixty miles east of Walnut Crossing, ten miles beyond Peony, on a bluff within sight of the Hudson, State Police Regional Headquarters had the look and feel of a newly erected fortress. Its massive gray stone exterior and narrow windows seemed designed to withstand the apocalypse. Gurney wondered if the architecture was influenced by the 9/11 hysteria, which had bred projects even sillier than impregnable trooper stations.

Inside, fluorescent lighting maximized the harsh look of the metal detectors, remote cameras, bulletproof guard booth, and polished concrete floor. There was a microphone for communicating with the guard in the booth-which was really more like a control room, containing a bank of monitors for the security cameras. The lights, which cast a cold glare on all the hard surfaces, gave the guard an exhausted pallor. Even his colorless hair was rendered sickly by the unnatural illumination. He looked like he was about to throw up.

Gurney spoke into the microphone, resisting an urge to ask the guard if he was all right. “David Gurney. I’m here for a meeting with Jack Hardwick.”

The guard pushed a temporary facility pass and a visitor’s sign-in sheet through a narrow slot at the base of the formidable glass wall running from the ceiling down to the counter that separated them. He picked up the phone, consulted a list that was Scotch-taped to his side of the counter, dialed a four-digit extension, said something Gurney couldn’t hear, then replaced the phone on its cradle.

A minute later a gray steel door in the wall next to the booth opened to reveal the same plainclothes trooper who’d escorted him the previous day at the institute. He motioned to Gurney without any indication of recognizing him and led him down a featureless gray corridor to another steel door, which he opened.

They stepped into a large, windowless conference room-windowless no doubt to keep conferees safe from the flying glass of a terrorist attack. Gurney was a bit claustrophobic, hated windowless spaces, hated the architects who thought they were a good idea.

His laconic guide made straight for the coffee urn in the far corner. Most of the seats at the oblong conference table had already been claimed by people not yet in the room. Jackets were hanging over the backs of four of the ten chairs, and three other chairs had been reserved by tilting them forward against the table. Gurney removed the light parka he was wearing and placed it over the back of one of the free chairs.