Shut Your Eyes Tight (Dave Gurney, No. 2): A Novel (7 page)

Interesting, thought Gurney. Interesting, too, was the glitter in Val Perry’s eyes. Maybe Jillian wasn’t the only one in love with life on the edge.

“And Dr. Ashton?” he asked mildly.

“Scott doesn’t care what anyone thinks about anything.” It was a trait she clearly admired.

“So when Jillian was eighteen, maybe nineteen, he proposed marriage?”

“Nineteen. She did the proposing, he accepted.”

As he considered this, he watched the strange excitement in her subsiding.

“So he accepted her proposal. How did you feel about that?”

At first he thought she hadn’t heard him. Then, in a small hoarse voice, looking away, she said, “Relieved.” She stared at Gurney’s asparagus ferns as though somewhere among them she might locate an appropriate explanation for her rapidly shifting feelings. A mild breeze had materialized while they’d been speaking, and the tops of the ferns were waving gently.

He waited, saying nothing.

She blinked, her jaw muscles clenching and relaxing. When she spoke, it was with apparent effort, forcing the individual words out as though each were as heavy as something in a dream. “I was relieved to have the responsibility taken off my hands.” She opened her mouth as though she were about to say more, then closed it with only a slight shake of her head. A gesture of disapproval, thought Gurney. Disapproval of herself. Was that the root of her desire to see Hector Flores dead? To pay her guilty debt to her daughter?

Whoa. Slow down. Stay in touch with the facts
.

“I didn’t intend …” She let her voice trail off, leaving it unclear what was unintended.

“What do you think of Scott Ashton?” Gurney asked in a brisk tone, as far from her dark and complex mood as he could get.

She responded instantly, as though the question were a lifesaving escape hatch. “Scott Ashton is brilliant, ambitious, decisive …” She paused.

“And?”

“And cool to the touch.”

“Why do you think he would want to marry a—”

“A woman as crazy as Jillian?” She shrugged unconvincingly. “Possibly because she was breathtakingly beautiful?”

He nodded, unconvinced.

“I know this sounds incredibly trite, but Jillian was special, really
special.
” She gave the word an almost lurid depth and color. “Did you know her IQ was 168?”

“That’s remarkable.”

“Yes. It was the highest score the testing service had ever measured. They tested her three times, just to make sure.”

“So in addition to everything else, Jillian was a genius?”

“Oh, yes, a genius,” she agreed, a brittle animation returning to her voice. “And, of course, a nymphomaniac. Did I forget to mention that?”

She searched his face for a reaction.

He looked off into the distance, out over the treetops beyond the barn. “And all you want me to do is look for Hector Flores.”

“Not look for him.
Find
him.”

Gurney had a fondness for puzzles, but this one was starting to feel more like a nightmare. Besides, Madeleine would never …

Jesus, think of her name and …

Amazingly, there she was, in her explosion of red and orange attire, making her way gradually up through the pasture, pushing her bicycle along the rutted incline of the path.

Val Perry turned anxiously in her chair to follow his gaze. “Are you expecting someone?”

“My wife.”

They said nothing more until Madeleine arrived at the edge of the patio on her way to the shed. The women exchanged blandly polite gazes. Gurney introduced them, saying only—to maintain the appearance of confidentiality—that Val was “a friend of a friend” who had dropped by for some professional advice.

“It’s so
restful
here,” said Val Perry, her emphasis making it sound like a foreign word whose pronunciation she was practicing. “You must
love
it.”

“I do,” said Madeleine. She gave the woman a brief smile and rolled her bicycle on toward the shed.

“Well,” said Val Perry uneasily, after Madeleine had passed out of sight behind the rhododendrons at the back of the garden, “is there anything else I can tell you?”

“Were you bothered at all by the nineteen versus thirty-eight difference in ages?”

“No,” she snapped, confirming his suspicion that she was.

“How does your husband feel about your intention to engage a private detective?”

“He’s supportive,” she said.

“Meaning what, exactly?”

“He supports what I want to do.”

Gurney waited.

“Are you asking me how much he’s willing to pay?” Anger twisted some of the beauty out of her face.

Gurney shook his head. “It’s not that.”

She seemed not to hear him. “I
told
you money was not an issue. I told you we have a shitload of money—a
shitload
, Mr. Gurney, a
SHITLOAD
—and I’ll spend whatever it takes to get done what I want to get done!”

Cherry splotches were appearing on her vanilla skin, the words rushing out contemptuously. “My husband is the fucking highest-paid fucking neurosurgeon in the fucking world! He makes over forty fucking million dollars a year! We live in a fucking twelve-million-dollar house! You see this fucking thing on my finger?” She glared furiously at her ring, as though it were a tumor on her hand. “This shiny lump of shit is worth two million fucking dollars! For fucking Christ’s sake, don’t ask me about money!”

Gurney was sitting back, his fingers steepled under his chin. Madeleine had returned and was standing quietly at the edge of the patio. She came over to the table.

“You all right?” she asked, as though the meltdown she’d just witnessed had no more significance than a bad fit of sneezing.

“Sorry,” said Val Perry vaguely.

“You want some water?”

“No, I’m fine, I’m perfectly … I’m … No, actually, yes, water would be good. Thank you.”

Madeleine smiled, nodded pleasantly, and went into the house through the French doors.

“My point,” said Val Perry, nervously straightening her blouse, “my point, which I … overstated … My point is simply that money
is not an issue. The goal is the important thing. Whatever resources are needed to reach the goal … the resources are available. That’s all I was trying to say.” She pressed her lips together as if to ensure no further outburst.

Madeleine returned with a glass of water and laid it on the table. The woman picked it up, drank half, and put it down carefully. “Thank you.”

“Well,” said Madeleine, with a malicious twinkle in her eye as she went back into the house, “if you need anything else, just holler.”

Val Perry sat erect and motionless. She seemed to be reassembling her composure through an act of will. After a minute she took a deep breath.

“I’m not sure what to say next. Maybe there’s nothing to say, other than to ask for your help.” She swallowed. “Will you help me?”

Interesting. She could have said, “Will you take the case?” Did she consider that way of saying it and realize that this was a better way, a way that would be harder to reject?

However she asked, he knew he’d be crazy to say yes.

He said, “I’m sorry. I don’t think I can.”

She didn’t react, just sat there, holding on to the edge of the table, looking into his eyes. He wondered if she’d heard him.

“Why not?” she asked in a tiny voice.

He considered what to say.

For one thing, Mrs. Perry, you seem a bit too much like your descriptions of your daughter. My inevitable collision with the official investigating agency could turn into a major train wreck. And Madeleine’s potential reaction to my immersion in another murder case could redefine marital trouble
.

What he actually said was, “My involvement could disrupt the ongoing police efforts, and that would be bad for everyone involved.”

“I see.”

He saw in her expression no real understanding or acceptance of his decision. He watched her, waiting for her next move.

“I understand your reluctance,” she said. “I’d feel the same way in your place. All I ask is that you keep an open mind until you see the video.”

“The video?”

“Didn’t Jack Hardwick mention it?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“Well, it’s all there, the whole … event.”

“You don’t mean a video of the reception where the murder took place?”

“That’s exactly what I mean. The whole thing was recorded. Every minute of it. It’s all on a neat little DVD.”

I
n the Gurneys’ spacious farmhouse kitchen, there were two tables for meals—the cherrywood Shaker trestle table used mainly for guest dinners, when it would be dusted off and bedecked by Madeleine with candles and bright flowers from their garden, and the so-called breakfast table, with a round pine top on a cream-painted pedestal base, where, singly or together, they ate most of their meals. This smaller table stood just inside the south-facing French doors. On a clear day, it was touched by sunlight from early morning till sunset, making it one of their favorite places to read.

At two-thirty that afternoon, they were sitting in their usual chairs when Madeleine looked up from her book, a biography of John Adams. Adams was her favorite president—largely, it seemed, because his solution to most emotional and physical problems was to take long, curative walks in the woods. She frowned attentively. “I hear a car.”

Gurney cupped his hand to his ear, but even then it was a good ten seconds before he heard it, too. “It’s Jack Hardwick. Apparently there’s a complete video record of the party where the Perry girl was killed. He said he’d bring it over. I said I’d take a look.”

She closed her book, letting her gaze drift into the middle distance beyond the glass doors. “Has it occurred to you that your prospective client is … not exactly sane?”

“All I’m doing is looking at the video. No promises to anyone. You’re welcome to watch it with me.”

Madeleine’s quick flash of a smile seemed to brush aside the invitation. She went on. “I’d be willing to go a little further and say
that she’s a poisonous psycho who probably fits at least half a dozen diagnostic codes from the DSM-IV. And whatever she’s told you? I’ll bet it’s not the whole truth, not even close.”

As she was speaking, she was picking unconsciously at the cuticle of her thumb with one of her fingernails, an intermittent new habit that Gurney regarded with alarm as a kind of tremor in her otherwise stable constitution.

Minor and short-lived as these moments were, they shook him, interrupted his fantasy of her infinite resilience, left him temporarily without that secure point of reference, the night-light that warded off gloom and monsters. Absurdly, this tiny nervous gesture had the power to arouse the feeling of sickness and constriction he’d had as a child when his mother started smoking. His mother puffing anxiously on her cigarette, sucking the mouthfuls of smoke into her lungs.
Get hold of yourself, Gurney. Grow up, for Godsake
.

“But I’m sure you know all that already, right?”

He stared at her for a moment, searching for the conversational thread he’d lost.

She shook her head in mock despair. “I’ll be in my sewing room for a while. Then I have to run up to the stores in Oneonta. If there’s anything you want, add it to the list on the sideboard.”

H
ardwick arrived with a gust of wind and a growling muffler. He parked his vintage gas guzzler—a red GTO half restored, with epoxy patches yet to be primed—next to Gurney’s green Subaru Outback. The wind channeled an eddy of fallen leaves around the cars. The first thing Hardwick did when he got out was to cough violently, hack up phlegm, and spit it on the ground.

“Never could stand the stink of dead leaves! Always reminded me of horse manure.”

“Nicely put, Jack,” said Gurney as they shook hands. “You have a delicate way with words.”

They faced each other like badly matched bookends. Hardwick’s messy crew cut, florid skin, spider-veined nose, and watery blue malamute eyes gave him the appearance of a badly aging man with a perennial hangover. By contrast, Gurney’s salt-and-pepper hair
was neatly combed—too neatly, Madeleine often told him—and at forty-eight he was still trim, kept his stomach firm with a regimen of sit-ups before his morning shower, and looked barely forty.

As Gurney ushered him into the house, Hardwick grinned. “She got to you, eh?”

“Not sure what you mean, Jack.”

“What was it got your attention? Love of truth and justice? Chance to kick Rodriguez in the balls? Or was it her fantastic ass?”

“Hard to say, Jack.” He found himself articulating the man’s name with a peculiar emphasis, as though it were a quick left jab. “Right now I’m just curious about the video.”

“That so? Not bored to death yet by retirement? Not desperate to get back in the game? Not hot to help the hot lady?”

“Just like to see the video. You bring it?”

“The murder movie? You’ve never seen anything like it, Davey boy. High-def DVD taken at the crime scene with the crime in progress.”

Hardwick was standing in the middle of the big room that served as kitchen, dining room, and sitting room, with an old country stove at one end and a fieldstone fireplace forty feet away at the other end. His gaze covered it all in a few seconds. “Shit, it’s a fucking feature spread in
Mother Earth News.
”

“The DVD player is in the den,” said Gurney, leading the way.

The video began arrestingly with an aerial shot of the countryside, the camera’s position slowly moving down at a steep angle until it was sweeping over green treetops, the bright green of springtime, following the course of a narrow road and a rushing stream—parallel ribbons of black asphalt and glittering water that linked a series of well-kept homes amid sprawling lawns and picturesque outbuildings.

An estate somewhat larger and grander than any of the others came into view, and the progress of the airborne camera slowed. When it reached a position directly above a vast emerald lawn with daffodil borders, its forward movement ceased entirely, and it descended smoothly to ground level.