Peter Pan Must Die (2 page)

Gurney glanced down the slope. The GTO came to a stop by his own dusty Outback in the little makeshift parking area by the side of the house. The big Pontiac engine roared louder for a couple of seconds as it was revved prior to being shut down.

“I was expecting him in a general way,” said Gurney, “not necessarily today.”

“Do you want to see him?”

“I’d say he wants to see me, and I’d like to get it over with.”

Madeleine nodded and stood up, pushing her short brown hair back from her forehead.

As they turned to start down the trail, the mirror surface of the quarry pool shivered under a sudden breeze, dissolving the inverted image of the willows and the sky into thousands of unrecognizable splinters of green and gray.

If Gurney were the kind of man who believed in omens, he might have seen the shattered image as a sign of the destruction to come.

When he was halfway down Barrow Hill, deeper in the woods, out of sight of the house now, Gurney’s phone rang. He recognized Hardwick’s number.

“Hello, Jack.”

“Both your cars are here, but no one’s coming to the door. You hiding in the basement?”

“I’m very well, thanks. And how are you?”

“Where the hell are you?”

“Coming down through the cherry copse, quarter mile to your west.”

“Hillside with all the yellow leaf blight?”

Hardwick had a way of getting under Gurney’s skin. It wasn’t just the little jabs themselves, or the pleasure the man seemed to take in delivering them; it was the uncanny echo of a voice from Gurney’s childhood—the relentlessly sardonic voice of his father.

“Right, the one with the blight. What can I do for you, Jack?”

Hardwick cleared his throat with disgusting enthusiasm. “Question is, what can we do for each other? Tit for tat, tat for tit. By the way, I noticed your door is unlocked. Mind if I wait for you in the house? Too many fucking flies out here.”

Hardwick, a solidly built man with a ruddy complexion, a prematurely gray crew cut, and the disconcertingly blue eyes of an Alaskan sled dog, was standing in the center of the big open room that composed half of the lower floor. At one end was a country kitchen.
A round pine breakfast table was tucked in a nook next to a pair of French doors. At the far end was a sitting area, arranged around a massive fieldstone fireplace and a separate woodstove. In the middle was a plain Shaker-style dining table and half a dozen ladder-back chairs.

The first thing that struck Gurney as he entered the room was that something in Hardwick’s expression was slightly off.

Even the leer in his opening question—“And where might the delectable Madeleine be?”—seemed oddly forced.

“I’m right here,” she said, coming in from the mudroom and heading for the sink island with a half-welcoming, half-anxious smile. She was carrying a handful of asterlike wildflowers she’d picked on their way down from Barrow Hill. She laid them by the dish drainer and looked at Gurney. “I’m leaving these here. I’ll find a vase for them later. I need to go upstairs and practice for a while.”

As her footsteps receded to the upper floor, Hardwick grinned and whispered, “Practice makes perfect. So what’s she practicing?”

“Cello.”

“Ah. Of course. You know why people love the cello so much?”

“Because it has a nice sound?”

“Ah, Davey boy, now there’s the kind of direct no-nonsense insight you’re famous for.” Hardwick licked his lips. “But do you know what it is
exactly
that makes that particular sound sound nice?”

“Why don’t you just tell me, Jack?”

“And deprive you of a fascinating little puzzle to solve?” He shook his head with theatrical resoluteness. “Wouldn’t dream of it. A genius like you needs challenges. Otherwise he goes to pot.”

As Gurney stared at Hardwick, it dawned on him what was wrong, what was
off
. Underneath the prickly banter, which was the man’s customary approach to the world, there seemed to be a not-so-customary tension. Edginess was part of Hardwick’s personality, but what Gurney detected in his expression now was more nervousness than edginess. It made him wonder what was coming. The man’s unsettledness was contagious.

It didn’t help that Madeleine had chosen a rather jittery piece for her cello practice.

Hardwick began walking around the long room, touching the backs of chairs, corners of tables, potted plants, decorative bowls and
bottles and candlesticks that Madeleine had picked up in the area’s inexpensive antique shops. “Love this place! Just love it! It’s so fucking
authentic
!” He stopped and ran his hands back through his bristly crew cut. “You know what I mean?”

“That it’s fucking authentic?”

“The whole deal here—it’s pure
country
. Look at that cast-iron woodstove, made in America, as American as fucking pancakes. Look at you—lean, all-American, Robert Redford kind of guy. Look at them wide floorboards, straight and honest as the trees they came from.”

“Those.”

“Beg your pardon?”

“
Those
wide floorboards. Not
them
wide floorboards.”

Hardwick stopped pacing. “The fuck are you talking about?”

“Is there a point to this visit?”

Hardwick grimaced. “Ah, Davey, Davey—all business, as usual. You dismiss my attempt at a few pleasantries, my efforts at social lubrication, a few friendly compliments on the puritan simplicity of your home decor—”

“Jack …”

“Right. Fuck the pleasantries. Where do we sit?”

Gurney motioned to the small round table by the French doors.

When they were seated across from each other, Gurney leaned back and waited.

Hardwick closed his eyes, massaging his face roughly with his hands as though trying to eradicate some deep itching under the skin. Then he folded his hands on the table and began speaking. “You ask if there’s a point to my visit. Yes, there is. An opportunity. You know that thing from
Julius Caesar
about a tide in the affairs of men?”

“What about it?”

Hardwick leaned forward, as though the words contained life’s ultimate secret. The chronic mockery had disappeared from his voice.
“There is a tide in the affairs of men / Which, taken at the flood leads on to fortune. / Omitted, all the voyage of their life / is bound in shallows and in miseries.”

“You memorized that just for me?”

“Learned it in school. Always stayed with me.”

“Never heard you mention it before.”

“The right situation never came up before.”

“But now …?”

A tic yanked at the corner of Hardwick’s mouth. “Now the right moment has arrived.”

“A tide in your affairs—?”

“In
our
affairs.”

“Yours and mine?”

“Exactly.”

Gurney said nothing for a while, just gazed at the excited, anxious face across from him. He found himself far more uncomfortable with this suddenly raw and earnest version of Jack Hardwick than he’d ever been with the perennial cynic.

For a few moments the only sound in the house was the sharp-edged melody of an early-twentieth-century cello piece that Madeleine had been struggling with for the past week.

Almost imperceptibly, Hardwick’s mouth twitched again.

Seeing this a second time, and waiting for it to happen a third time, was getting to Gurney. Because, to him, it suggested that the payment about to be demanded for the debt incurred months earlier was going to be substantial.

“You plan on telling me what you’re talking about?”

“What I’m talking about is the Spalter murder case.” Hardwick enunciated those last three words with a peculiar combination of importance and contempt. His eyes were fixed on Gurney’s, as if searching for the appropriate reaction.

Gurney frowned. “The woman who shot her rich politician husband up in Long Falls?” It had been a sensational news item earlier in the year.

“That’s the one.”

“As I recall, that was a slam-dunk conviction. The lady was buried under an avalanche of evidence and prosecution witnesses. Not to mention that special little extra—her husband, Carl, dying during the trial.”

“That’s the one.”

The details began coming back to him. “She shot him in the cemetery as he was standing at his mother’s grave, right? The bullet paralyzed him, turned him into a vegetable.”

Hardwick nodded. “A vegetable in a wheelchair. The vegetable the prosecution wheeled into court every day. God-awful sight. Constant reminder for the jury while his wife was being tried for doing it to him. Until, of course, he died halfway through the trial and they had to stop wheeling him in. They went on with the trial—just switched the charge from attempted murder to murder.”

“Spalter was a wealthy real estate guy, right? Had just announced a third-party run for governor?”

“Yep.”

“Anticrime. Anti-mob. Ballsy slogan.
‘Time to get rid of the scum of the earth.’
Or something like that.”

Hardwick leaned forward. “Those were the precise words, Davey boy. In every speech he managed to talk about ‘the scum of the earth.’ Every goddamn time. ‘The scum of the earth have risen to the top of our nation’s cesspool of political corruption.’ The scum of the earth this, the scum of the earth that. Carl liked to stay on message.”

Gurney nodded. “I seem to recall that the wife was having an affair, and that she was afraid he might divorce her, which would end up costing her millions, unless he should happen to die before he changed his will.”

“You got it.” Hardwick smiled.

“I got it?” Gurney looked incredulous. “This is the high-tide opportunity you were talking about? The Spalter case? In the event you hadn’t noticed, the Spalter case is done, closed, over. If memory serves, Kay Spalter is doing twenty-five to life in max security at Bedford Hills.”

“All true,” said Hardwick.

“So what the hell are we talking about?”

Hardwick indulged in a long, slow, humorless smile—the kind of dramatic pause he was fond of and Gurney hated. “We’re talking about the fact that … the lady was framed. The case against her was total bullshit, start to finish. Pure … unadulterated … bullshit.” Again, at the corner of the smile, the tic. “Bottom line, we’re talking about getting the lady’s conviction overturned.”

“How do you know the case was bullshit?”

“She got screwed by a dirty cop.”

“How do you know that?”

“I just know things. Also, people tell me things. The dirty cop has enemies—with good reason. He’s not dirty, he’s filthy. The ultimate piece of shit.” Now there was a new fierceness in Hardwick’s eyes.

“Okay. Let’s say she was framed by a dirty cop. Let’s even go so far as to say she was innocent. What’s that got to do with you? Or me?”

“Besides the minor issue of justice?”

“That look in your eyes has nothing to do with justice.”

“Sure it does. It has everything to do with justice. The organization fucked me. So I’m going to fuck the organization. Honestly, legally, and totally on the side of justice. They forced me out because they always wanted to. I got a little sloppy about a few files on the Good Shepherd case that I passed along to you, bureaucratic bullshit, and that gave the scumbags their excuse.”

Gurney nodded. He’d been wondering if the debt would be mentioned—the benefit delivered to Gurney, the career-ending expense paid by Hardwick. Now he didn’t have to wonder anymore.

Hardwick went on. “So now I’m entering the PI business. Unemployed detective for hire. And my first client is going to be Kay Spalter, through the lawyer who’ll be handling her appeal. So my first victory’s gonna be a very big one.”

Gurney paused, thought about what he’d just heard. “And me?”

“What?”

“You said this was an opportunity for both of us.”

“And that’s exactly what it is. For you, it could be the case of a fucking lifetime. Get into it, and tear it to pieces, put it back together the right way. The Spalter case was the crime of the decade, followed by the frame of the century. You get to figure it out, set it straight, and kick some nasty bastards in the balls along the way.”

“You didn’t drive all the way over here today just to give me an opportunity to kick bad guys in the balls. Why do you want me involved in this?”

Hardwick shrugged, took a deep breath. “Plenty of reasons.”

“And the biggest would be …?”

For the first time it looked like he was having trouble getting the words out. “To help turn the key another quarter inch and lock up the deal.”

“There’s no deal yet? I thought you said Kay Spalter was your client.”

“I said she’s
going to be
my client. Some legal details need to be signed off on first.”

“Details?”

“Believe me, everything’s lined up. Just a matter of pushing the right buttons.”

Gurney saw the tic again and felt his own jaw muscles tightening.

Hardwick went on quickly. “Kay Spalter was represented by a court-appointed asshole who’s still technically her attorney, which weakens an otherwise powerful set of arguments for having the conviction reversed. One potential bullet in the appeal gun would be incompetent representation, but the current guy can’t really make that argument. You can’t say to the judge, ‘You have to free my client because I’m an asshole.’ Someone else has to call you an asshole. Law of the land. So, bottom line—”

Gurney broke in. “Wait a second. There’s got to be a ton of money in that family. How did she end up with a court-appointed—?”

“There
is
a ton of money. Problem is, it was all in Carl’s name. He controlled everything. Tells you something about the kind of guy he was. Kay lived like a very rich lady—without actually having a cent to her name. Technically, she’s indigent. And she got assigned the kind of attorney indigents usually get. Not to mention a tight budget for defense out-of-pockets. So, as I was saying: Bottom line, she needs new representation. And I have the perfect man all lined up, sharpening his fangs. Smart, vicious, unprincipled fucker—always hungry. She just needs to sign a couple of things to make the switch official.”