Peter Pan Must Die (7 page)

“Yes.” Her lips tightened.

“And you believe that Detective Klemper manufactured and directed this elaborate web of perjury … why? Just because you reminded him of his ex-wife?”

“That’s your friend’s theory,” she said, indicating Hardwick. “Not mine. I don’t doubt that Klemper’s a woman-hating asshole, but I’m sure there’s more to it.”

“Like what?”

“Maybe my conviction was convenient for someone beyond Klemper.”

“Who, for example?”

“The mob, for example.”

“You’re saying that organized crime was responsible for—?”

“For the hit on Carl. Yes. I’m saying that it makes sense. More sense than anything else.”

“
For the hit on Carl
. Isn’t that a pretty cold—”

“A pretty cold way of discussing my husband’s death? You’re absolutely right, Mr. Supercop. I’m not going to shed sweet public tears to prove my innocence to a jury, or to you, or to anyone else.” She eyed him shrewdly. “That makes it a little harder, doesn’t it? Not so easy to prove the innocence of a coldhearted bitch.”

Hardwick drummed his fingers on the table to get her attention. Then he leaned forward and reiterated with slow intensity, “We don’t have to prove you didn’t do it.
Innocence is not the issue
. All we have to prove is that your trial was seriously, purposely fucked up by the chief investigator on the case. Which is exactly what we will do.”

Again Kay ignored Hardwick and kept her gaze fixed on Gurney. “So? Where do you stand? You have an opinion yet?”

Gurney responded only with another question. “Did you take shooting lessons?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because I thought I might have to shoot someone.”

“Who?”

“Maybe some mob guys. I had a bad feeling about Carl’s relationship with those people. I saw trouble coming and I wanted to be ready.”

Formidable
, thought Gurney, searching for a word to describe the
small, bold, unflinching creature sitting across from him. And maybe even a little
frightening
.

“Trouble from the mob because of Carl starting an anticrime political party? And making his ‘These Are the Scum of the Earth’ speeches?”

She gave a little snort of ridicule. “You don’t know a damn thing about Carl, do you?”

Kay Spalter’s eyes were closed in apparent concentration. Her full mouth was compressed into a narrow line, and her head was lowered, with her hands clasped tightly under her chin. She’d been sitting like that across the table from Gurney and Hardwick without saying a word for a good two minutes. Gurney guessed that she was wrestling with the question of how much to confide in two men she didn’t know, whose real agenda might be hidden—but who, on the other hand, might be her last chance at freedom.

The silence seemed to be getting to Hardwick. The tic reappeared at the corner of his mouth. “Look, Kay, if you have any concerns, let’s get them out on the table so we can—”

She raised her head and glared at him.
“Concerns?”

“What I meant was, if you have any questions—”

“If I have any questions, I’ll ask them.” She turned her attention to Gurney, studying his face and eyes. “How old are you?”

“Forty-nine. Why do you ask?”

“Isn’t that early to be retired?”

“Yes and no. Twenty-five years in the NYPD—”

Hardwick broke in. “The thing of it is, he never really retired. Just moved upstate. He’s still doing what he always did. He’s solved three major murder cases since he left the department. Three major murder cases in the past two years. That not what I’d call
retired
.”

Gurney was finding Hardwick’s sweaty-salesman assurances hard to take. “Look, Jack—”

This time it was Kay who interrupted Gurney. “Why are you doing this?”

“Doing what?”

“Getting involved in my case.”

Gurney had a hard time coming up with an answer he was willing to give. He finally said, “Curiosity.”

Hardwick jumped in again. “Davey is a natural-born onion peeler. Obsessive. Brilliant. Peeling away layer after layer until he gets to the truth. When he says ‘curiosity’ he means a hell of a lot more than—”

“Don’t tell me what he means. He’s here. I’m here. Let him talk. Last time, I heard what you and your lawyer friend had to say.” She shifted in her chair, pointedly focusing her attention on Gurney. “Now I want to hear what
you
have to say. How much are they paying you to work on this case?”

“Who?”

She pointed at Hardwick. “Him and his lawyer—Lex Bincher of Bincher, Fenn, and Blaskett.” She said it as if it were a vile-tasting but necessary medicine.

“They’re not paying me anything.”

“You’re not getting paid?”

“No.”

“But you expect to get paid sometime in the future, if your effort produces the desired result?”

“No, I don’t.”

“You don’t? So, apart from that crap about onion peeling, why are you doing this?”

“I owe Jack a favor.”

“For what?”

“He helped me with the Good Shepherd case. I’m helping him with this one.”

“Curiosity. Payback. What else?”

What else? Gurney wondered if she knew that there was a third reason. He sat back in his chair, thinking for a moment about what he was going to say. Then he spoke softly. “I saw a photograph of your late husband in his wheelchair, apparently taken a few days before he died. The photograph was mainly of his face.”

Kay finally showed some sign of an emotional reaction. Her green eyes widened, and her skin seemed a shade paler. “What about it?”

“The look in his eyes. I want to know what that was about.”

She bit down on her lower lip. “Maybe it was just … the way a person looks when he knows he’s about to die.”

“I don’t think so. I’ve seen a lot of people die. Shot by drug dealers. By strangers. By relatives. By cops. But never before have I seen that expression on anyone’s face.”

She took a deep breath, let it out shakily.

“You all right?” asked Gurney. He’d observed hundreds, maybe thousands, of examples of faked emotion in his career. But this looked real.

She closed her eyes for a few seconds then opened them. “The prosecutor told the jury that Carl’s face reflected the despair of a man who’d been betrayed by someone he loved. Is that what you’re thinking? That it might be the look of a man whose wife wanted him dead?”

“I think that’s a possibility. But not the only possibility.”

She reacted with a small nod. “One last question. Your buddy here keeps telling me the success of my appeal has nothing to do with whether or not I shot Carl. It just depends on showing ‘a substantive defect in due process.’ So tell me something. Does it matter to
you personally
whether I’m guilty or innocent?”

“To me, that’s the
only
thing that matters.”

She held Gurney’s gaze for what seemed like a long time before clearing her throat, turning to Hardwick, and speaking in a changed voice: crisper, lighter. “Okay. We have a deal. Ask Bincher to send me the letter of agreement.”

“Will do,” said Hardwick with a quick, serious nod that barely concealed his elation.

She looked at Gurney suspiciously. “Why are you staring at me like that?”

“I’m impressed with the way you make decisions.”

“I make them as soon as my gut and brain agree. What’s the next item on our list?”

“You said earlier that I didn’t know a damn thing about Carl. Educate me.”

“Where shall I start?”

“With whatever seems important. For example, was Carl involved in anything that might have led to his murder?”

She flashed a quick, bitter smile. “It’s no surprise he was murdered.
The only surprise was that it didn’t happen sooner. The cause of his death was his life. Carl was ambitious. Crazy with ambition. Sick with ambition. He inherited that gene from his father, a disgusting reptile who’d have swallowed the world whole if he could have.”

“When you say Carl was ‘sick,’ what do you mean?”

“His ambition was destroying him. More, bigger, better. More, more, more. And the
how
didn’t matter. To get what he wanted, he was dealing with people you wouldn’t want to be in the same room with. You play with rattlesnakes …” She paused, her eyes bright with anger. “It’s so damn absurd that I’m locked up in this zoo.
I’m
the one who warned him to back away from the predators.
I’m
the one who told him he was in over his head, that he was going to get himself murdered. Well, he paid no attention to me, and he got himself murdered. And
I’m
the one convicted for it.” She gave Gurney a look that seemed to say,
Is life a fucked-up joke or what?

“You have any idea who shot him?”

“Well, that’s another little irony. The guy without whose approval nothing happens in upstate New York—in other words, the snake who either ordered the hit on Carl or at least okayed it—that snake was in our house on three occasions. I could’ve popped him on any one of those occasions. In fact, I came very close to it the third time. You know what? If I’d done it then, when I had the urge, Carl wouldn’t be dead now, and I wouldn’t be sitting here. You get the picture? I was convicted for a murder I didn’t commit—because of a murder I should have committed but didn’t.”

“What’s his name?”

“Who?”

“The snake you should have killed.”

“Donny Angel. Also known as the Greek. Also known as Adonis Angelidis. Three times I had a chance to take him out. Three times I let it go by.”

This narrative direction, Gurney noted, had illuminated another piece of Kay Spalter. Inside the smart, striking, fine-boned creature, there was something very icy.

“Back up for a minute,” said Gurney, wanting a clearer sense of the world the Spalters lived in. “Tell me more about Carl’s business.”

“I can only tell you what I know. Tip of the iceberg.”

Over the next half hour Kay covered not only Carl’s business and its strange corporate structure, but his strange family as well.

His father, Joe Spalter, had inherited a real estate holding company from
his
father. Spalter Realty ended up owning a huge chunk of upstate New York’s inventory of rental properties, including half the apartment houses in Long Falls—all of this by the time that Joe, close to death, transferred the company to his two sons, Carl and Jonah.

Carl took after Joe, had his ambition and money-hunger, squared. Jonah took after his mother, Mary, an aggressive pursuer of many hopeless causes. Jonah was a utopian dreamer, a charismatic New Age spiritualist. As Kay put it, “Carl wanted to own the world, and Jonah wanted to save it.”

The way their father saw it, Carl had what it took to “go all the way”—to be the richest man in America, or maybe the world. The problem was, Carl was as uncontrolled as he was ruthless. There was nothing he wouldn’t do to get what he wanted. As a child he’d once set fire to a neighbor’s dog as a distraction so he could steal a video game. And that wasn’t a one-time instance of craziness. Things like that happened regularly.

Joe, as ruthless as he was himself, saw this trait as a potential problem—not that he cared about setting fire to dogs or about stealing. It was the lack of
prudence
, the lack of an appropriate risk-reward calculus, that bothered him. His ultimate solution was to bind Carl and Jonah together in the family business. Jonah was supposed to be a moderating influence, a source of the caution that Carl lacked.

The vehicle for this supposedly beneficial combining of their personalities was an unbreakable legal agreement that they both signed when Joe handed the corporation over to them. All of its provisions were designed to ensure that no business could be done, no decisions taken, and no changes made to the corporation without Carl and Jonah’s
joint
approval.

But Joe’s fantasy of merging the opposite inclinations of his sons into a single force for success was never realized. All that came of it was conflict, the stagnation of Spalter Realty, and an ever-growing animosity between the brothers. It pushed Carl in the direction of politics as an alternate route to power and money, with backdoor help from
organized crime, while it pushed Jonah in the direction of religion and the establishment of his grand venture, the Cyberspace Cathedral, with backdoor help from his mother, whom Joe had left exceedingly well-off. The mother at whose funeral Carl was fatally wounded.

When Kay finally concluded her recounting of the Spalter family saga, Gurney was the first to speak. “So Carl’s Anticrime Party and his ‘Scum of the Earth’ speeches about smashing organized crime in New York were nothing but—”

She finished his thought. “A lie, a disguise. For a politician secretly in bed with the mob, what better cover could you have than an image as the state’s most aggressive crime fighter?”

Gurney nodded, trying to let the twisty soap opera narrative sink in. “So your theory is that Carl eventually had some kind of falling-out with this Angel character? And that’s the reason he was killed?”

“Angel was always the most dangerous player in the room. Carl wouldn’t have been the first or even the tenth of Angel’s business associates to end up dead. There’s a saying in certain circles that the Greek only puts two offers on the negotiating table: ‘Do it my way. Or I blow your fucking head off.’ I’d bet anything that there was something Carl refused to do Donny’s way. And he did end up getting his head blown off, didn’t he?”

Gurney didn’t answer. He was trying to figure out who the hell this brutally unsentimental woman really was.

“By the way,” she added, “you ought to look at some pictures of Carl taken before this thing happened.”

“Why?”

“So you understand what he had going for him. Carl was made for politics. Sold his soul to the devil—with a smile made in heaven.”

“How come you didn’t leave him when things got ugly?”

“Because I’m a shallow little gold digger, addicted to power and money.”

“Is that true?”

Her answer was a brilliant, enigmatic smile. “You have any more questions?”