John Verdon - Think of a Number

“Big?”

“You’ll see.”

The warning had not fully prepared Gurney for the woman who opened the door. Well over three hundred pounds, with arms like thighs, she seemed misplaced in the little house. Even more misplaced was the face of a child on this very broad body-an off-balance, dazed sort of child. Her short black hair was parted and combed like a little boy’s.

“Can I help you?” she asked, looking as if help were the last thing on earth she was capable of providing.

“Hello, Mrs. Rudden, I’m Detective Clamm. Remember me?”

“Hello.” She said the word like she was reading it from a foreign phrase book.

“I was here yesterday.”

“I remember.”

“We need to ask you a few more questions.”

“You want to know more about Albert?”

“That’s part of it. May we come in?”

Without answering, she turned away from the door, walked across the small living room into which it opened, and sat on a sofa-which seemed to shrink under her great bulk.

“Sit down,” she said.

The two men looked around. There were no chairs. The only other objects in the room were an absurdly ornate coffee table with a cheap vase of pink plastic flowers in the center of it, an empty bookcase, and a television big enough for a ballroom. The bare plywood floor was clean except for a scattering of synthetic fibers-meaning, Gurney assumed, that the carpet on which the body was found had been taken to the lab for forensic examination.

“We don’t need to sit,” said Clamm. “We won’t be long.”

“Albert liked sports,” said Mrs. Rudden, smiling blankly at the gargantuan TV.

An archway on the left side of the little living room led to three doors. From behind one came the sound effects of a combat video game.

“That’s Jonah. Jonah is my son. That’s his bedroom.”

Gurney asked how old he was.

“Twelve. In some ways older, in some ways younger,” she said, as if this were something that had just for the first time occurred to her.

“Was he with you?” asked Gurney.

“What do you mean, was he with me?” she asked, with a weird suggestiveness that gave Gurney a chill.

“I mean,” said Gurney, trying to keep whatever it was he was feeling out of his voice, “was he with you at your religious service the night your husband was killed?”

“He’s accepted Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior.”

“Does that mean he was with you?”

“Yes. I told the other policeman.”

Gurney smiled sympathetically. “Sometimes it helps us to go over these things more than once.”

She nodded as if in deep agreement and repeated, “He’s accepted Jesus Christ.”

“Did your husband accept Jesus Christ?”

“I believe he did.”

“You’re not sure?”

She closed her eyes tightly as if searching the insides of her eyelids for the answer. She said, “Satan is powerful, and devious are his ways.”

“Devious indeed, Mrs. Rudden,” said Gurney. He pulled the coffee table with the pink flowers on it back a little from the couch, walked around, and sat on the edge of it, facing her. He’d learned that the best way to talk to someone who talked like that was to talk the same way, even if he had no idea where the conversation was going.

“Devious and terrible,” he said, watching her closely.

“‘The Lord is my shepherd,’” she said. “‘I shall not want.’”

“Amen.”

Clamm cleared his throat and shifted his feet.

“Tell me,” said Gurney, “in what devious way did Satan reach out to Albert?”

“It is the upright man that Satan pursueth!” she cried with sudden insistence. “For the evil man he hath already in his power.”

“And Albert was an upright man?”

“Jonah!” she cried even louder, rising from the couch and moving with surprising speed through the archway on the left to one of the doors beyond it, which she began slapping with the palm of her hand. “Open the door! Now! Open the door!”

“What the fuck…?” said Clamm.

“I said now, Jonah!”

A lock clicked, and the door opened halfway, revealing an obese boy almost as large as the mother he resembled to a disturbing degree-right up to the odd sense of detachment in the eyes, making Gurney wonder whether the cause was genetics or medication or both. His crew cut was bleached pure white.

“I told you not to lock that door when I’m home. Turn down the sound. It sounds like someone being murdered in there.” If either of them had any feeling about the awkwardness of this comment under the circumstances, neither showed it. The boy looked at Gurney and Clamm without interest. No doubt, mused Gurney, this was one of those families so accustomed to social-services interventions that official-looking strangers in the living room didn’t merit a second thought. The boy looked back at his mother.

“Can I have my Popsicle now?”

“You know you can’t have it now. Keep the sound down or you won’t have it at all.”

“I’ll have it,” he said flatly, and shut the door in her face.

She came back into the living room and sat back down on the couch. “He was devastated by Albert’s death.”

“Mrs. Rudden,” said Clamm in his let’s-move-right-along way, “Detective Gurney here needs to ask you some questions.”

“Isn’t that a funny coincidence? I have an Aunt Bernie. I was just thinking about her this morning.”

“Gurney, not Bernie,” said Clamm.

“It’s close, though, isn’t it?” Her eyes seemed to gleam with the significance of the similarity.

“Mrs. Rudden,” said Gurney, “during the past month, did your husband tell you anything he was worried about?”

“Albert never worried.”

“Did he seem in any way different to you?”

“Albert was always the same.”

Gurney suspected that these perceptions could as likely be due to the cushioning and fogging effect of her medication as to any consistency on Albert’s part.

“Did he ever receive any mail with a handwritten address or with any writing in red ink?”

“The mail is all bills and ads. I never look at it.”

“Albert took care of the mail?”

“It was all bills and ads.”

“Do you know if Albert paid any special bills lately or wrote any unusual checks?”

She shook her head emphatically, making her immature face appear shockingly childish.

“One last question. After you found your husband’s body, did you change or move anything in the room before the police arrived?”

Again she shook her head. It might have been his imagination, but he thought he caught a glimpse of something new in her expression. Had there been a ripple of alarm in that blank stare? He decided to take a chance.

“Does the Lord speak to you?” he asked.

There was something else in her expression now, not so much alarm as vindication.

“Yes, He does.”

Vindication and pride, thought Gurney.

“Did the Lord speak to you when you found Albert?”

“‘The Lord is my shepherd,’” she began-and went on to recite the entire Twenty-third Psalm. The impatient tics and blinks that peppered Clamm’s face were visible even in Gurney’s peripheral vision.

“Did the Lord give you specific instructions?”

“I don’t hear voices,” she said. Again that flicker of alarm.

“No, not voices. But the Lord did speak to you, to help you?”

“We are here on earth to do what He would have us do.”

Gurney leaned toward her from his perch on the edge of the coffee table. “And you did as the Lord directed?”

“I did as the Lord directed.”

“When you found Albert, was there something that needed to be changed, something not the way it should be, something the Lord wanted you to do?”