Let the Devil Sleep (32 page)

Whether Stone had any reaction to this declaration of authenticity was unclear. His mind seemed to wander somewhere else, refocusing only when Kim wrapped up her comments by asking, “Do you have any questions?”

“Only one,” he said, turning to Gurney. “Do you think they’ll ever get him?”

“The Good Shepherd? I’d like to think so.”

Stone rolled his eyes. “In your profession I bet you give a lot of answers like that—answers that aren’t really answers at all.” His tone was more depressed than challenging.

Gurney shrugged. “I don’t know enough yet to tell you anything more.”

Kim made some final framing adjustments in the viewfinders of her tripod cameras and put them both in HD-movie mode. She did the same with the third camera, which she kept in her hand. Then she ran her fingers back through her hair, sat up straighter in her chair, smoothed a few wrinkles out of her blazer, smiled, and began speaking.

“Eric, I want to thank you again for your willingness to participate in
The Orphans of Murder
. Our goal is an honest, unrehearsed presentation of your thoughts and feelings. Nothing is off-limits, nothing is out of bounds. We’re in your home, not on a studio set. The story is yours, the emotions are yours. Begin wherever you wish.”

He took a long, shaky breath. “I’ll begin by answering the question you asked me when you walked into the kitchen a few minutes ago. You asked me how long I’ve lived here. The answer is twenty years. Half of those years in heaven, half in hell.” He paused. “The first ten years, I lived in a world of sunlight cast by a remarkable woman, the last ten years in shadowland.”

Kim let a long silence pass before responding in a soft, sad voice. “Sometimes it’s the depth of the pain that tells us how much we’ve lost.”

Stone nodded. “Mother was a rock. A rocket. A volcano. She was a force of nature. Let me repeat that—
a force of nature
. It’s a cliché, but
a good one. Losing her was like having the law of gravity repealed.
The law of gravity—repealed!
Imagine that. A world without gravity. A world with nothing to hold it together.”

The man’s eyes were glistening with incipient tears.

Kim’s next words were a surprise. She asked Stone if she could have a cookie.

He burst out laughing—a giddy, hysterical outpouring that sent the tears down his cheeks. “Yes, yes, of course you can! My gingersnaps just came out of the oven, but there are also pecan chocolate chips, buttery-buttery shortbreads, and oatmeal raisin. All baked today.”

“I think oatmeal raisin,” she said.

“An excellent choice, madam.” He sounded like he was, through his tears, attempting to mimic a smarmy sommelier. He went to the far end of the kitchen and retrieved a plate heaped with large brown cookies from the top of the oven. Kim held up her third camera, keeping him in the frame all the while.

As he was about to lay the plate on the table, a thought seemed to stop him. He turned to Gurney. “Ten years,” he said, as if some new significance in the number had taken him by surprise. “Exactly ten years. A full decade.” The pitch of his voice rose dramatically. “Ten years, and I’m still a basket case. What do you make of that, Detective? Does my pathetic condition motivate you to find, arrest, and execute the evil fucker who murdered the most incredible woman in the world? Or am I so ridiculous you just want to laugh?”

Gurney tended to ice over at displays of emotion. Now was no exception. He answered with a matter-of-fact blandness. “I’ll do everything I can.”

Stone gave him an archly skeptical look but didn’t pursue the issue.

He offered them coffee again, and again they both declined.

After that, Kim spent some time eliciting descriptions of the man’s life before and after his mother’s murder. In Stone’s detailed narrative, life before was better in every way. Sharon Stone had been an increasingly successful player at the top end of the second-home real-estate market. And she lived her personal life at the top end in every way, sharing that luxury freely with her son. Shortly before the brutal intervention of the Good Shepherd, she’d agreed to cosign a $3 million
financing agreement to set Eric up as owner of the premier inn and restaurant in the Finger Lakes wine country.

Without her supportive signature, however, the deal collapsed. Instead of enjoying the life of an elite restaurateur and hotelier, he was at thirty-nine living in a house whose estate grounds he couldn’t begin to maintain and trying to make a living baking cookies in his late mother’s dream kitchen for local gourmet shops and B&Bs.

After an hour or so, Kim finally closed the small notebook she’d been consulting and surprised Gurney by asking if he had any questions of his own.

“Maybe a couple, if Mr. Stone doesn’t mind.”

“
Mr. Stone?
Please, call me Eric.”

“All right, Eric. Do you know if your mother ever had any prior business or personal contact with any of the other victims?”

He winced. “Not that I know of.”

“Any enemies you knew of?”

“Mother did not suffer fools gladly.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning she ruffled feathers, stepped on toes. Real estate, particularly at the level at which Mother operated, is a
very
competitive business, and she didn’t like to have her time wasted by idiots.”

“Do you remember why she bought a Mercedes?”

“Of course.” Stone grinned. “Classy. Stylish. Powerful. Agile. A major cut above the others. Just like Mother.”

“Over the past ten years, have you had any contact with anyone connected with the other victims?”

He winced again. “That word. I don’t like it.”

“What word?”

“ ‘Victim.’ I don’t think of her that way. It sounds so horribly passive, helpless, all the things that Mother
wasn’t
.”

“I’ll put it another way. Regarding any contact with the families—”

Stone interrupted. “The answer is yes, there was some contact at first—a kind of support group that came together after the shootings.”

“Were all the families involved?”

“Not really. The surgeon who lived in Williamstown had a son who joined us once or twice, then announced he had no interest in a
grief group because he had no grief. He said he was glad his father was dead. He was quite awful. Totally hostile. Very hurtful.”

Gurney glanced at Kim.

“Jimi Brewster,” she said.

“Is that all?” asked Stone.

“Just two more quick ones. Did your mother ever mention anyone she was afraid of?”

“Never. She was the most fearless human being who ever walked the earth.”

“Was ‘Sharon Stone’ her real name?”

“Yes and no. Mostly yes. Her name was officially Mary Sharon Stone. After the huge success of
Basic Instinct
, she had a makeover—changed her hair from brown to blond, dropped the ‘Mary,’ and promoted the remarkable new persona. Mother was a promotional genius. She even got the idea of running photos of herself on billboards, sitting with her legs crossed in a short skirt, à la the famous scene in the film.”

Gurney indicated to Kim that he had no more questions.

Stone added with an unsettling smile, “Mother had legs to die for.”

A
n hour later Gurney pulled in next to Kim’s Miata in front of the bleak strip-mall office of an accounting firm: Bickers, Mellani, and Flemm. It was situated between a yoga studio and a travel agency on the outskirts of Middletown.

Kim was on her cell phone. Gurney sat back and mused on what he would do if his name were Flemm. Would he change it, or would he wear it as a badge of defiance? Was the refusal to change one’s name, when the name was as patently absurd as a donkey tattoo on one’s forehead, laudably honest or stupidly stubborn? At what point did pride become dysfunctional?

Christ, why am I occupying my brain with this nonsense?

A sharp little rap and Kim’s purposeful face at his side window brought him back to the moment. He got out of his car and followed her into the office.

The front door opened into an unimpressive waiting area with a few unmatched chairs against one wall. Worn copies of
SmartMoney
were fanned out on a small Danish Modern coffee table. A waist-high
barrier separated this area from a smaller area that contained two bare desks in front of a wall with a single door, which was closed. Atop the barrier was an old-fashioned bell—a little silver dome that had a raised plunger on the top.

Kim tapped firmly on the plunger, producing a surprisingly loud
ding
. She repeated this half a minute later, with no response. As she was reaching for her phone, the door in the rear wall opened. The man in the doorway was thin, pale, tired-looking. He gazed at them without curiosity.

“Mr. Mellani?” said Kim.

“Yes.” His voice was dry and colorless.

“I’m Kim Corazon.”

“Yes.”

“We spoke on the phone? About my coming here to prepare for our interview?”

“Yes, I remember.”

“Well …” She looked around in mild confusion. “Where would you like to …?”

“Oh. Yes. You can come into my office.” He stepped back inside.

Gurney opened a swinging panel in the low barrier and held it for Kim. It was dusty, like the two unoccupied desks behind it. He followed her into the back office—a windowless room with a large mahogany table, four straight-backed chairs, and bookcases on three of the four walls. The bookcases were filled with fat volumes on accounting rules and tax laws. The pervasive dust had settled on the books as well. The air smelled stale.

The only illumination came from a desk lamp at the far end of the table. There was a fluorescent fixture on the ceiling, but it was turned off. As Kim surveyed the room for places to set up her cameras, she asked if it could be turned on.

Mellani shrugged and flipped the switch. After a series of hesitant flashes, the light stabilized, producing a low buzz. The fluorescent glow emphasized the paleness of his skin and the shadows below his eyes. There was something distinctly cadaverous about him.

As she had done in Stone’s kitchen, she went through the process of arranging the cameras. When she was finished, she and Gurney sat on one side of the mahogany table, Mellani on the other. At that point she
gave, almost word for word, the same speech she’d given Stone about the production goals of informality, simplicity, naturalness—keeping the interview as close as possible to the kind of conversation two friends might have in their home, loose and candid.

Mellani didn’t reply.

She told him that he should feel free to say anything he wished.

He said nothing, just sat and stared at her.

She looked around the claustrophobic space, whose inhospitable drabness the ceiling light had only managed to enhance. “So,” she said awkwardly, seeming to realize that she would have to be the motivator of whatever conversation they were going to have, “this is your main office?”

Mellani seemed to consider this. “Only office.”

“And your partners? They … they’re here?”

“No. No partners.”

“I thought … the names … Bickers … and …?”

“That was the name of the firm. Formed as a partnership. I was the senior partner. Then we … we parted ways. The name of the firm was a legal thing … legally independent of who actually worked here. I never had the energy to change it.” He spoke slowly, as though struggling with the unwieldiness of his own words. “Like some divorced women keep their married names. I don’t know why I don’t change it. I should, right?” He didn’t sound as if he wanted an answer.

Kim’s smile became more strained. She shifted in her seat. “Quick question before we go any further. Shall I call you Paul, or would you prefer that I call you Mr. Mellani?”

After several seconds of dead silence, he answered almost inaudibly, “Paul’s okay.”

“Okay, Paul, we’ll get started. As we discussed on the phone, we’re just going to have a simple conversation about your life after the death of your father. Is that all right with you?”

Another pause, and then he said, “Sure.”

“Great. So. How long have you been an accountant?”

“Forever.”

“I mean, specifically, in years?”

“Years? Since college. I’m … forty-five now. Twenty-two when I
graduated. So forty-five minus twenty-two equals twenty-three years as an accountant.” He closed his eyes.

“Paul?”

“Yes?”

“Are you all right?”

He opened one eye, then the other. “I agreed to do this, so I’ll do it, but I’d like to get it over with. I’ve been through all this in therapy. I can give you the answers. I just … don’t like listening to the questions.” He sighed. “I read your letter … We talked on the phone … I know what you want. You want before and after, right? Okay. I’ll give you before and after. I’ll give you the gist of the then and the now.” He uttered another small sigh.

Gurney had the momentary impression that they were miners trapped in an underground cave-in, their oxygen supply fading—a scrap of memory from a movie he saw as a child.

Kim frowned. “I’m not sure I understand.”

Mellani repeated, the words heavier the second time around, “I’ve been through all this in therapy.”

“Okay … and … therefore … you …?”

“Therefore I can give you the answers without your having to ask the questions. Better for everyone. Right?”

“Sounds great, Paul. Please, go right ahead.”

He pointed at one of her cameras. “Is that running?”

“Yes.”

Mellani shut his eyes again. By the time he began his narrative, whatever Kim was feeling about the situation was breaking out in tics at the corners of her mouth.

“It’s not like I was a happy person before the … event. I was never a happy person. But there was a time when I had hope. I think I had hope. Something like hope. A sense that the future could be brighter. But after the … event … that feeling was gone forever. The color in the picture got switched off, everything was gray. You understand that? No color. I once had the energy to build a professional practice, to
grow
something.” He articulated the word as though it were a strange concept. “Clients … partners … momentum. More, better, bigger. Until it happened.” He fell silent.