Think Of a Number (2010) (48 page)

Was Nardo hoping to change the homicidal dynamic of the little “play” in progress by revealing what it was all about? Was he trying to create a psychological distraction, in the hope of finding some way out? Or was he just fumbling around in the dark—trying to delay as long as he could, however he could, whatever Dermott had in mind?

Of course, there was another possibility. What Nardo was doing, and how Dermott was reacting to it, might not make any rational sense at all. It could be the sort of ridiculously trivial sidetrack issue over which small boys beat each other with plastic shovels in sandboxes and angry men beat each other to death in bar fights. With a sinking heart, Gurney suspected that this last guess was as good as any.

“Whether you think it makes sense is of no importance,” said
Dermott, again adjusting by a quarter inch the angle of the goose, his gaze fixed on Nardo’s throat. “Nothing you think is of any importance. It’s time for you to take your clothes off.”

“First tell me her name.”

“It’s time for you to take your clothes off and smash the bottle and jump up on the bed like a naked ape. Like a stupid, drooling, hideous monster.”

“What’s her name?”

“It’s time.”

Gurney saw a slight movement in the muscle in Dermott’s forearm—meaning that his finger was tightening on the trigger.

“Just tell me her name.”

Any doubt Gurney had about what was happening was now gone. Nardo had drawn his line in the sand, and all his manhood—indeed his life—was invested in making his adversary answer his question. Dermott, likewise, was invested 100 percent in maintaining control. Gurney wondered whether Nardo had any idea how important this matter of control was to the man he was trying to face down. According to Rebecca Holdenfield—in fact, according to everyone who knew anything about serial killers—control was the goal worth any price, any risk. Absolute control—with the feeling of omniscience and omnipotence it engendered—was the ultimate euphoria. To threaten that goal head-on without a gun in your hand was suicidal.

It seemed that blindness to that fact had put Nardo once again an inch from death, and this time Gurney couldn’t save him by shouting him into submission. That tactic wouldn’t work a second time.

Murder was moving now like a racing storm cloud into Dermott’s eyes. Gurney had never felt so helpless. He couldn’t think of any way to stop that finger on the trigger.

It was then he heard the voice, clean and cool as pure silver. It was, without a doubt, Madeleine’s voice, saying something she’d said to him years ago on an occasion when he felt stymied by a seemingly hopeless case.

“There’s only one way out of a dead end.”

Of course, he thought. How absurdly obvious.
Just walk in the opposite direction
.

Stopping a man who has an overwhelming need to be in total control—who has an overwhelming need to kill to achieve that control—required that you do exactly the opposite of what all your instincts told you. And with Madeleine’s sentence clear as spring-water in his mind, he saw what he needed to do. It was outrageous, patently irresponsible, and legally indefensible if it didn’t work. But he knew it would.

“Now! Now, Gregory!” he hissed. “Shoot him!”

There was a shared moment of incomprehension as both men seemed to struggle to absorb what they had just heard, as they might struggle to understand a thunderclap on a cloudless day. Dermott’s deadly focus on Nardo wavered, and the direction of the gun-in-the-goose moved a little toward Gurney in the chair against the wall.

Dermott’s mouth stretched sideways in his morbid imitation of a grin. “I beg your pardon?” In the affected nonchalance, Gurney sensed a tremor of unease.

“You heard me, Gregory,” he said. “I told you to shoot him.”

“You … 
told
 … me?”

Gurney sighed with elaborate impatience. “You’re wasting my time.”

“Wasting …? What the hell do you think you’re doing?” The gun-in-the-goose moved farther in Gurney’s direction. The nonchalance was gone.

Nardo’s eyes were widening. It was hard for Gurney to gauge the mix of emotions behind the amazement. As though it were Nardo who’d demanded to know what was going on, Gurney turned toward him and said, as offhandedly as he could manage, “Gregory likes to kill people who remind him of his father.” There was a stifled sound from Dermott’s throat, like the beginning of a word or cry that got stuck there. Gurney remained determinedly focused on Nardo and went on in the same bland tone. “Problem is, he needs a little nudge from time to time. Gets bogged down in the process. And, unfortunately,
he makes mistakes. He’s not as smart as he thinks. Oh, my goodness!” He paused and smiled speculatively at Dermott, whose jaw muscles were now visible. “That has possibilities, doesn’t it?
Little Gregory Spinks—not as smart as he thinks
. How about it, Gregory? Do you think that could be a new poem?” He almost winked at the rattled murderer but decided that might be a step too far.

Dermott stared at him with hatred, confusion, and something else. What Gurney hoped it was was a swirl of questions that a control freak would be compelled to pursue before killing the only man capable of answering them. Dermott’s next word, with its strained intonation, gave him hope.

“Mistakes?”

Gurney nodded ruefully. “Quite a few, I’m afraid.”

“You’re a liar, Detective. I don’t make mistakes.”

“No? What do you call them, then, if you don’t call them mistakes? Little Dickie Duck’s fuckups?”

Even as he said it, he wondered whether he had now taken that fatal step. If so, depending on where the bullet struck him, he might never know. In any event, there was no safe retreat route left. A wave of the tiniest vibrations unsettled the corners of Dermott’s mouth. Reclining incongruously on that bed, he seemed to be gazing at Gurney from a perch in hell.

Gurney actually knew of only one mistake Dermott had made—a mistake involving the Kartch check, which had finally gotten through to him only a quarter of an hour earlier when he’d looked at the framed copy of that check on the lamp table. But suppose he were to claim that he’d recognized the mistake and its significance from the beginning. What effect would that have on the man who was so desperate to believe he was in complete control?

Again Madeleine’s maxim came to mind, but in reverse.
If you can’t back up, then full speed ahead
. He turned toward Nardo, as if the serial killer in the room could safely be ignored.

“One of his silliest fuckups was when he gave me the names of the men who’d sent checks to him. One of the names was Richard Kartch. The thing is, Kartch sent the check in a plain envelope with
no cover note. The only identification was the name printed on the check itself. The name on the check was R. Kartch, and that’s also the way it was signed. The
R
could have stood for Robert, Ralph, Randolph, Rupert, or a dozen other names. But Gregory knew it stood for Richard—yet at the same time he claimed no other familiarity or contact with the sender than the name and address on the check itself—which I saw in the mail at Kartch’s house in Sotherton. So I knew right away from the discrepancy that he was lying. And the reason was obvious.”

This was too much for Nardo. “You knew? Then why the hell didn’t you tell us so we could pick him up?”

“Because I knew what he was doing and why he was doing it, and I had no interest in stopping him.”

Nardo looked like he’d stepped into an alternate universe where the flies were swatting the people.

A sharp clicking noise drew Gurney’s attention back to the bed. The old woman was tapping her red glass shoes together like Dorothy leaving Oz on her way home to Kansas. The gun-in-the-goose on Dermott’s lap was now pointed directly at Gurney. Dermott was making an effort—at least Gurney hoped it required an effort—to appear unfazed by the Kartch revelation. He articulated his words with a peculiar precision.

“Whatever game you’re playing, Detective, I’m the one who’s going to end it.”

Gurney, with all the undercover acting experience he could bring to the moment, tried to speak with the confidence of a man who had a concealed Uzi zeroed in on his enemy’s chest. “Before you make a threat,” he said softly, “be sure you understand the situation.”

“Situation? I fire, you die. I fire again, he dies. The baboons come through the door, they die. That’s the situation.”

Gurney closed his eyes and leaned his head back against the wall, uttering a deep sigh. “Do you have any idea … any idea at all …?” he began, then shook his head wearily. “No. No, of course you don’t. How could you?”

“Any idea of what, Detective?” Dermott used the title with exaggerated sarcasm.

Gurney laughed. It was an unhinged sort of laugh, meant to raise new questions in Dermott’s mind, but actually energized by a rising tide of emotional chaos in himself.

“Guess how many men I’ve killed,” he whispered, glaring at Dermott with a wild intensity—praying that the man wouldn’t recognize the time-consuming purpose of his desperate ad-libbing, praying that the Wycherly cops would soon take note that Nardo was missing. Why the hell hadn’t they noticed already? Or had they? The glass shoes continued to click.

“Stupid cops kill people all the time,” said Dermott. “I couldn’t care less.”

“I don’t mean just any men. I mean men like Jimmy Spinks. Guess how many men like him I’ve killed.”

Dermott blinked. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about killing drunks. Ridding the world of alcoholic animals, exterminating the scum of the earth.”

Once again there was an almost imperceptible vibration around Dermott’s mouth. He had the man’s attention, no doubt about that. Now what? What else but ride the wave. There was no other transportation in sight. He composed his words as he spoke them.

“Late one night in the Port Authority bus terminal, when I was a rookie cop, I was told to roust some derelicts from the rear entryway. One wouldn’t leave. I could smell the stink of the whiskey from ten feet off. I told him again to get out of the building, but instead of going out the door, he started coming toward me. He pulled a kitchen knife out of his pocket—a little knife with a serrated blade like you’d use to slice an orange. He brandished the knife in a threatening manner and ignored my order to drop it. Two witnesses who saw the confrontation from the escalator swore that I shot him in self-defense.” He paused and smiled. “But that’s not true. If I’d wanted to, I could have subdued him without even breathing hard. Instead I shot him in the face and blew his brains out the back of his head. You know why I did that, Gregory?”

“Dickie-Dickie-Dickie Duck,” said the old woman in a rhythm quicker than the clicking of her shoes. Dermott’s mouth opened a fraction of an inch, but he said nothing.

“I did it because he looked like my father,” said Gurney with an angrily rising voice, “looked like my father looked the night he smashed a teapot on my mother’s head—a fucking stupid teapot with a fucking stupid clown face on it.”

“Your father wasn’t much of a father,” said Dermott coldly. “But then again, Detective, neither were you.”

The leering accusation removed any doubt in Gurney’s mind about the extent of Dermott’s knowledge. At that moment he seriously considered the option of absorbing a bullet to get his hands on Dermott’s throat.

The leer intensified. Perhaps Dermott sensed Gurney’s discomfort. “A good father should protect his four-year-old son, not let him get run over, not let the driver get away.”

“You piece of shit,” muttered Gurney.

Dermott giggled, seemingly crazed with delight. “Vulgar, vulgar, vulgar—and I thought you were a fellow poet. I hoped we could keep trading verses. I had a little ditty all ready for our next exchange. Tell me what you think of it. ‘A hit-and-run without a trace, / the star detective fell on his face. / What did the little boy’s mother say / when you came home alone that day?’”

An eerie animal sound rose from Gurney’s chest, a strangled eruption of rage. Dermott was transfixed.

Nardo had apparently been waiting for the moment of maximum distraction. His muscular right arm accelerated up and around in a mighty circular overhand motion, hurling the unopened Four Roses bottle with tremendous force at Dermott’s head. As Dermott sensed the movement and began to swivel the gun-in-the-goose toward Nardo, Gurney launched himself in a headlong diving leap at the bed, landing chest-first on the goose, just as the thick glass base of the full whiskey bottle smashed squarely into Dermott’s temple. The revolver discharged beneath Gurney, filling the air around him with an atomized explosion of down stuffing. The bullet
passed under Gurney in the direction of the wall where he’d been sitting, shattering the table lamp that had provided the room’s sole illumination. In the darkness he could hear Nardo breathing hard through clenched teeth. The old woman started to make a faint wailing sound, a sound with a quavering pitch, a sound like a half-remembered lullaby. Then there was the sound of a terrific impact, and the heavy metal door of the room flew open, swung around, and hit the wall—followed immediately by the huge hurtling figure of a man and a smaller figure behind him.

“Freeze!” shouted the giant.

T
he cavalry had finally arrived—a little late, but that was a good thing. Considering Dermott’s history of precise marksmanship and his eagerness to pile up the crows, it was possible that not only the cavalry but Nardo and Gurney would have ended up with bullets in their throats. And then, when the gunshots brought the whole department swarming into the house and Dermott opened the valve, sending the pressurized chlorine and ammonia through the sprinkler system …

As it was, the only major casualty other than the lamp and the doorframe was Dermott himself. The bottle, propelled by all of Nardo’s combative rage, had struck him with sufficient force to produce what looked like a possible coma. In a related minor injury, a curved shard of glass had splintered from the bottle on impact, embedding itself in Gurney’s head at the hairline.

“We heard a shot. What the fuck’s going on here?” snarled the hulking man, peering around the mostly dark room.