“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.