Shut Your Eyes Tight
John Verdon
Also by John Verdon
Think of a Number
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2011 by John Verdon
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
CROWN and the Crown colophon are
registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Verdon, John.
Shut your eyes tight / by John Verdon.—1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Detectives—New York (State)—New York—Fiction. I. Title. PS3622.E736S57 2011
813’.6—dc22 2010053589
eISBN: 978-0-307-71791-7
Jacket design by Superfantastic
v3.1
For Naomi
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue: The Perfect Solution
Part One: The Mexican Gardener
Chapter 1: Life in the Country
Chapter 2: The Butchered Bride
Chapter 3: Elliptical Orbits
Chapter 4: The Art of Deception
Chapter 5: The Eureka Fallacy
Chapter 6: Home
Chapter 7: Val Perry
Chapter 8: The Murder Movie
Chapter 9: The View from the Doorway
Chapter 10: The Only Way It Could Have Been Done
Chapter 11: The Evidence on the Table
Chapter 12: Peculiar Facts
Chapter 13: Weirder and Twistier
Chapter 14: The Lay of the Land
Chapter 15: Black and White
Chapter 16: A Sense of Order and Purpose
Chapter 17: In the Shadow of the Bitch
Chapter 18: Ashton’s Neighbors
Chapter 19: Frankenstein
Chapter 20: Ashton’s Manor
Chapter 21: A Word to the Wise
Chapter 22: Spider Man
Chapter 23: Leverage
Chapter 24: A Patient Spider
Chapter 25: Enter Salome, Dancing
Part Two: Salome’s Executioner
Chapter 26: The Verisimilitude of Incongruity
Chapter 27: A Lot to Think About
Chapter 28: A Different Perspective
Chapter 29: Among the Missing
Chapter 30: Alessandro’s Models
Chapter 31: Scottie Dogs
Chapter 32: An Intractable Madness
Chapter 33: A Simple Reversal
Chapter 34: Ashton Uneasy
Chapter 35: A Hell of a Lot More
Chapter 36: Into the Heart of Darkness
Chapter 37: The Deer
Chapter 38: The Eyes of Peter Piggert
Chapter 39: Real, Unreal, Crazy, Not Crazy
Chapter 40: A Faint Yipping
Chapter 41: The Big Day
Chapter 42: The Magic Mr. Jykynstyl
Part Three: Fatal Oversight
Chapter 43: Waking Up
Chapter 44: Déjà Vu
Chapter 45: A Curious Dog
Chapter 46: Nothing on Paper
Chapter 47: An Impossible Situation
Chapter 48: Perfect Memories
Chapter 49: Little Boys
Chapter 50: Loose Cannon
Chapter 51: Total Confusion
Chapter 52: The Flores Factor
Chapter 53: Game Changer
Chapter 54: Unpleasant Stories
Chapter 55: Tirana Magdalena Skard
Chapter 56: A Matter of Control
Chapter 57: The Plan
Chapter 58: Into Action
Chapter 59: Undercover
Chapter 60: Dancing with the Devil
Chapter 61: Homeward Bound
Chapter 62: Tremors
Chapter 63: Just Like Ashton’s Cottage
Chapter 64: A Very Strange Day
Chapter 65: Message from the Monster
Chapter 66: The Monstrous Truth, According to Ballston
Chapter 67: A Mother’s Love
Chapter 68: Buena Vista Trail
Chapter 69: Blind Alleys
Chapter 70: In Plain Sight
Chapter 71: For All the Reasons I Have Written
Chapter 72: One More Layer
Chapter 73: Gate of Heaven
Chapter 74: Beyond All Reason
Chapter 75: Shut Your Eyes Tight
Chapter 76: Another Layer
Chapter 77: The Final Episode
Chapter 78: All He Had Left
Chapter 79: The Last Bullet
Chapter 80: The Light of the World
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Prologue
The perfect solution
He stood in front of the mirror and smiled with deep satisfaction at his own smiling reflection. He could not at that moment have been more pleased with himself, with his life, with his intelligence—no, it was more than that, more than mere intelligence. His mental status could more accurately be described as a profound understanding of everything. That was precisely what it was—a profound understanding of everything, an understanding that went far beyond the normal range of human wisdom. He watched the smile on his face in the mirror stretching wider at the aptness of the phrase, which he had italicized in his mind as he thought it. Internally he could feel—literally feel—the power of his insight into all things human. Externally, the course of events was proof of it.
First of all, to put it in the simplest terms, he had not been caught. Almost twenty-four hours had passed, almost to the minute now, and in that nearly complete revolution of the earth he had only grown safer. But that was predictable; he had taken care to ensure that there would be no trail to follow, no logic that could lead anyone to him. And in fact no one had come. No one had found him out. Therefore it was reasonable to conclude that his elimination of the presumptuous bitch had been a success in every way.
Everything had gone according to plan, smoothly, conclusively—yes, conclusively was an excellent word for it. Everything occurred as anticipated, no stumbles, no surprises … except for that sound. Cartilage? Must have been. What else?
Such a minor thing, it made no sense that it would create such a lasting sensory impression. But perhaps the strength, the durability of the impression was simply the natural product of his preternatural sensitivity. Acuteness had its price.
Surely that snickety little crunch would one day be as faint in his memory as the image of all that blood, which was already beginning to fade. It was important to keep things in perspective, to remember that all things pass. Every ripple in the pond eventually subsides.
Part One
The Mexican Gardener
Chapter 1
Life in the country
There was a stillness in the September-morning air that was like the stillness in the heart of a gliding submarine, engines extinguished to elude the enemy’s listening devices. The whole landscape was held motionless in the invisible grip of a vast calm, the calm before a storm, a calm as deep and unpredictable as the ocean.
It had been a strangely subdued summer, the semi-drought slowly draining the life out of the grass and trees. Now the leaves were fading from green to tan and had already begun to drop silently from the branches of the maples and beeches, offering little prospect of a colorful autumn.
Dave Gurney stood ju
st inside the French doors of his farm-style kitchen, looking out over the garden and the mowed lawn that separated the big house from the overgrown pasture that sloped down to the pond and the old red barn. He was vaguely uncomfortable and unfocused, his attention drifting between the asparagus patch at the end of the garden and the small yellow bulldozer beside the barn. He sipped sourly at his morning coffee, which was losing its warmth in the dry air.
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.
Chapter 2
The butchered bride
Jack 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?”
