Shut Your Eyes Tight (Dave Gurney, No. 2): A Novel (2 page)

To manure or not to manure—that was the asparagus question. Or at least it was the first question. If the answer turned out to be yes, that would raise a second question: bulk or bagged? Fertilizer, he had been informed by various websites to which he’d been directed by Madeleine, was the key to success with asparagus, but whether he needed to supplement last spring’s application with a fresh load now was not entirely clear.

He’d been trying, at least halfheartedly, for their two years in the Catskills to immerse himself in these house-and-garden issues that Madeleine had taken up with instant enthusiasm, but always nibbling at his efforts were the disturbing termites of buyer’s remorse—remorse not so much at the purchase of that specific house on its fifty scenic acres, which he continued to view as a good investment, but at the underlying life-changing decision to leave the NYPD and take his pension at the age of forty-six. The nagging question was, had he traded in his first-class detective’s shield for the horticultural duties of a would-be country squire too soon?

Certain ominous events suggested that he had. Since relocating to their pastoral paradise, he had developed a transient tic in his left eyelid. To his chagrin and Madeleine’s distress, he had started smoking again sporadically after fifteen years of abstinence. And, of course, there was the elephant in the room—his decision to involve himself the previous autumn, a year into his supposed retirement, in the horrific Mellery murder case.

He’d barely survived that experience, had even endangered Madeleine in the process, and in the moment of clarity that a close encounter with death often provides, he had for a while felt motivated to devote himself fully to the simple pleasures of their new rural life. But there’s a funny thing about a crystal-clear image of the way you ought to live. If you don’t actively hang on to it every day, the vision rapidly fades. A moment of grace is only a moment of grace. Unembraced, it soon becomes a kind of ghost, a pale retinal image receding out of reach like the memory of a dream, receding until it becomes eventually no more than a discordant note in the undertone of your life.

Understanding this process, Gurney discovered, does not provide a magic key to reversing it—with the result that a kind of halfheartedness was the best attitude toward the bucolic life that he could muster. It was an attitude that put him out of sync with his wife. It also made him wonder whether anyone could ever really change or, more to the point, whether
he
could ever change. In his darker moments, he was disheartened by the arthritic rigidity of his own way of thinking, his own way of
being
.

The bulldozer situation was a good example. He’d bought a small, old, used one six months earlier, describing it to Madeleine as a practical tool appropriate to their proprietorship of fifty acres of woods and meadows and a quarter-mile-long dirt driveway. He saw it as a means of making necessary landscaping repairs and positive improvements—a good and useful thing. She seemed to see it from the beginning, however, not as a vehicle promising his greater involvement in their new life but as a noisy, diesel-stinking symbol of his discontent—his dissatisfaction with their environment, his unhappiness with their move from the city to the mountains, his control freak’s mania for bulldozing an unacceptable new world into the shape of his own brain. She’d articulated her objection only once, and briefly at that: “Why can’t you just accept all this around us as a gift, an incredibly beautiful gift, and stop trying to
fix
it?”

As he stood at the glass doors, uncomfortably recalling her comment, hearing its gently exasperated tone in his mind’s ear, her actual voice intruded from somewhere behind him.

“Any chance you’ll get to my bike brakes before tomorrow?”

“I said I would.” He took another sip of his coffee and winced. It was unpleasantly cold. He glanced at the old regulator clock over the pine sideboard. He had nearly an hour free before he had to leave to deliver one of his occasional guest lectures at the state police academy in Albany.

“You should come with me one of these days,” she said, as though the idea had just occurred to her.

“I will,” he said—his usual reply to her periodic suggestions that he join her on one of her bike rides through the rolling farmland and forest that constituted most of the western Catskills. He turned toward her. She was standing in the doorway of the dining area in worn tights, a baggy sweatshirt, and a paint-stained baseball hat. Suddenly he couldn’t help smiling.

“What?” she said, cocking her head.

“Nothing.” Sometimes her presence was so instantly charming that it emptied his mind of every tangled, negative thought. She was that rare creature: a very beautiful woman who seemed to care
very little about how she looked. She came over and stood next to him, surveying the outdoors.

“The deer have been at the birdseed,” she said, sounding more amused than annoyed.

Across the lawn three shepherd’s-crook finch feeders had been tugged far out of plumb. Gazing at them, he realized that he shared, at least to some extent, Madeleine’s benign feelings toward the deer and whatever minor damage they caused—which seemed peculiar, since his feelings were entirely different from hers concerning the depredations of the squirrels who even now were consuming the seed the deer had been unable to extract from the bottoms of the feeders. Twitchy, quick, aggressive in their movements, they seemed motivated by an obsessive rodent hunger, an avariciously concentrated desire to consume every available speck of food.

His smile evaporating, Gurney watched them with a low-level edginess that in his more objective moments he suspected was becoming his reflexive reaction to too many things—an edginess that arose from and highlighted the fault lines in his marriage. Madeleine would describe the squirrels as fascinating, clever, resourceful, awe-inspiring in their energy and determination. She seemed to love them as she loved most things in life. He, on the other hand, wanted to shoot them.

Well, not
shoot
them, exactly, not actually kill or maim them, but maybe thwack them with an air pistol hard enough to knock them off the finch feeders and send them fleeing into the woods where they belonged. Killing was not a solution that ever appealed to him. In all his years in the NYPD, in all his years as a homicide detective, in twenty-five years of dealing with violent men in a violent city, he had never drawn his gun, had hardly touched it outside a firing range, and he had no desire to start now. Whatever it was that had drawn him to police work, that had wed him to the job for so many years, it surely wasn’t the appeal of a gun or the deceptively simple solution it offers.

He became aware that Madeleine was watching him with that curious, appraising look of hers—probably guessing from the tightness in his jaw his thoughts about the squirrels. In response to her apparent clairvoyance, he wanted to say something that would
justify his hostility to the fluffy-tailed rats, but the ringing of the phone intervened—in fact, the ringing of two phones intervened simultaneously, the wired phone in the den and his own cell phone on the kitchen sideboard. Madeleine headed for the den. Gurney picked up the cell.

J
ack Hardwick was a nasty, abrasive, watery-eyed cynic who drank too much and viewed just about everything in life as a sour joke. He had few enthusiastic admirers and did not readily inspire trust. Gurney was convinced that if all of Hardwick’s questionable motives were removed, he wouldn’t have any motives left.

But Gurney also considered him one of the smartest, most insightful detectives he’d ever worked with. So when he put the phone to his ear and heard that unmistakable sandpaper voice, it generated some mixed feelings.

“Davey boy!”

Gurney winced. He was not a Davey-boyish kind of guy, never would be, which he assumed was the precise reason Hardwick had chosen that particular sobriquet.

“What can I do for you, Jack?”

The man’s braying laugh was as annoying and irrelevant as ever. “When we were working on the Mellery case, you used to brag about getting up with the chickens. Just thought I’d call and see if it was true.”

There was a certain amount of banter one always had to endure before Hardwick would deign to get to the issue at hand.

“What do you want, Jack?”

“You got any actual live chickens on that farm of yours, running around clucking and shitting, or is that ‘up with the chickens’ just some kind of folksy saying?”

“What do you want, Jack?”

“Why the hell would I want anything? Can’t one old buddy just call another old buddy for old times’ sake?”

“Shove the ‘old buddy’ crap, Jack, and tell me why you’re calling.”

Again the braying laugh. “That’s so cold, Gurney, so cold.”

“Look. I haven’t had my second cup of coffee yet. You don’t get to the point in the next five seconds, I hang up. Five … four … three … two … one …”

“Debutante bride got whacked at her own wedding. Thought you might be interested.”

“Why would I be interested in that?”

“Shit, how could an ace homicide detective not be interested? Did I say she got ‘whacked’? Should’ve said ‘hacked.’ Murder weapon was a machete.”

“The ace is retired.”

There was a loud, prolonged bray.

“No joke, Jack. I’m really retired.”

“Like you were when you leaped in to solve the Mellery case?”

“That was a temporary detour.”

“Is that a fact?”

“Look, Jack …” Gurney was losing patience.

“Okay. You’re retired. I got it. Now give me two minutes to explain the opportunity here.”

“Jack, for the love of Christ …”

“Two lousy minutes. Two. You’re so fucking busy massaging your retirement golf balls you can’t spare your old partner two minutes?”

The image triggered the tiny tic in Gurney’s eyelid. “We were never partners.”

“How the hell can you say that?”

“We worked on a couple of cases together. We weren’t
partners.
”

If he were to be completely honest about it, Gurney would have to admit that he and Hardwick did have, in at least one respect, a unique relationship. Ten years earlier, working in jurisdictions a hundred miles apart on different aspects of the same murder case, they had individually discovered separate halves of the victim’s severed body. That sort of serendipity in detection can forge a strong, if bizarre, bond.

Hardwick lowered his voice into the sincere-pathetic register. “Do I get two minutes or don’t I?”

Gurney gave up. “Go ahead.”

Hardwick jumped back into his characteristic carnival-barker-with-throat-cancer oratorical style. “You’re obviously a busy guy, so let me get right to it. I want to do you a giant favor.” He paused. “You still there?”

“Talk faster.”

“Ungrateful bastard! All right, here’s what I got for you. Sensational murder committed four months ago. Spoiled little rich girl marries hotshot celebrity psychiatrist. An hour later at the wedding reception on the psychiatrist’s fancy estate, his demented gardener decapitates her with a machete and escapes.”

Gurney had a slight recollection of seeing a couple of tabloid headlines at that time that were probably related to the affair:
BLISS TO BLOODBATH
and
NEW BRIDE BUTCHERED
. He waited for Hardwick to go on. Instead the man coughed so disgustingly that Gurney had to hold the phone away from his ear.

Eventually Hardwick asked again, “You still there?”

“Yep.”

“Quiet as a corpse. You ought to make little beeping sounds every ten seconds, let people know you’re still alive.”

“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.