Gurney shook his head. “I’m not following this at all. If there wasn’t any money for a hotshot attorney to begin with, how come there is now?”
“To begin with, looking at the surface strength of the prosecution’s case, there wasn’t much hope that Kay would prevail. And if she couldn’t prevail, there’d be no way for her to pay a significant legal bill.”
“But now—?”
“But now the situation is different. You, me, and Lex Bincher are going to make sure of that. Believe me, she will prevail, and the bad guys will bite the dust. And once she prevails, she will be entitled to inherit a huge chunk of cash as Carl’s primary beneficiary.”
“Meaning this Bincher guy is working on a contingency fee in a criminal case? Isn’t that semi-illegal, or at least unethical?”
“Don’t sweat it. There’s no actual contingency clause in the agreement she’ll sign. I guess you could say that Lex getting paid will sort of depend on the success of the appeal, but there’s nothing in writing that makes that connection. If the appeal fails, technically Kay will just owe him a lot of money. But forget about all that. That’s Lex’s problem. Besides, the appeal will succeed!”
Gurney sat back, stared out through the door at the asparagus patch at the far side of the old bluestone patio. The asparagus ferns had grown much taller than in either of the previous two summers. He reckoned a tall man could stand in their midst and not be seen. Normally a soft bluish green, now, under an unsettled gray sky, they appeared colorless.
He blinked, rubbed his face roughly with both hands, and tried to refocus his mind on reducing the tacky mess being placed before him to its essentials.
The way he saw it, he was being asked to launch Hardwick in his new PI business—by helping to ensure his first major client commitment. And this was to be the repayment for the regulation-skirting favors Hardwick had done for him in the past, at the cost of Hardwick’s career with the state police. That much was clear, as far as it went. But there was a lot more to consider.
One of Hardwick’s distinctive traits had been a bold independence, the kind of let-the-chips-fall-where-they-may independence that comes from not being too attached to anything or anybody or any predetermined goal. But the man sure as hell was attached to this new project and its intended outcome, and the change didn’t strike Gurney as all that positive. He wondered what it would be like working with Hardwick in this altered state—with all his abrasiveness intact, but now in the service of a resentful obsession.
He turned his attention from the asparagus ferns to Hardwick’s face. “So, what does that mean, Jack—‘part of the team’? What, specifically, would you want me to do, other than look smart and rattle my medals?”
“Whatever the hell you feel like doing. Look, I’m telling you—the prosecution’s case was rotten start to finish. If the chief investigating officer doesn’t end up in Attica at the end of this, I’ll … I’ll become a fucking vegan. I absolutely guarantee you that the underlying facts and narratives will be full of disconnects. Even the trial transcript is full of them. And, Davey boy, whether you admit it or not, you know damn well that no cop ever had a sharper eye and ear for disconnects than you do. So that’s the story. I want you on the team. Will you do this for me?”
Will you do this for me? The plea echoed in Gurney’s head. He didn’t feel capable of saying no. Not right at that moment, anyway. He took a deep breath. “You have the trial transcript?”
“I do.”
“With you?”
“In my car.”
“I’ll … take look at it. We’ll have to see where we go from there.”
Hardwick stood up from the table, his nervousness now looking more like excitement. “I’ll leave you a copy of the official case file, too. Lots of interesting shit. Could be helpful.”
“How’d you get the file?”
“I still have a few friends.”
Gurney smiled uncomfortably. “I’m not promising anything, Jack.”
“Fine. No problem. I’ll get the stuff from the car. You take your time with it. See what you think.” On the way out, he stopped and turned back. “You won’t be sorry, Davey. The Spalter case has everything—horror, gangsters, politics, big money, big lies, and maybe even a little bit of incest. You’re gonna fuckin’ love it!”
Chapter 3. Something in the Woods
Madeleine cooked a simple dinner and they ate with little conversation. Gurney kept expecting her to engage him in an exhaustive discussion of his meeting with Hardwick, but she asked only one question.
“What does he want from you?”
Gurney described the nature of the Kay Spalter case, Hardwick’s new PI status, his evidently huge emotional investment in getting Kay’s conviction overturned, his request for assistance.
Madeleine’s only reaction consisted of a small nod and a barely audible “Hmm.” She stood up, cleared the dishes and silverware from the table, and took them to the sink island, where she proceeded to wash them, rinse them, and stack them in the drainer. Then she got a pitcher from the cupboard and watered the plants that stood on the sideboard below the kitchen windows. Each minute that she failed to pursue the subject exerted a stronger tug on Gurney to add a few additional words of explanation, reassurance, justification. Just as he was about to do so, she suggested they take a stroll down to the pond.
“It’s too nice an evening to stay inside,” she said.
Nice was not a word he would have used to describe the uncertain sky with its scuttling clouds, but he resisted the urge to debate the point. He followed her to the mudroom off the kitchen, where she put on one of her tropically bright nylon jackets. He slipped into an olive-drab cardigan he’d had for nearly twenty years.
She squinted at it doubtfully. “Are you trying to look like someone’s grandfather?”
“You mean stable, trustworthy, and lovable?”
She raised an ironic eyebrow.
Nothing else was said until they’d made their way down through the low pasture and were seated on the weathered wooden bench beside the pond. She appeared, as she often did, in a static position, not quite relaxed. It was as if her slim, naturally athletic body craved movement in the way that some bodies crave sugar.
Except for a grassy opening between the bench and the water, the pond was ringed by tall bulrushes, where redwing blackbirds built nests and fended off intruders with aggressive swoops and screeches through late spring and into the summer.
“We have to start pulling out some of those giant reeds,” said Madeleine, “or they’ll take over completely.”
Each year the encircling band of bulrushes had grown thicker, inching farther out into the water. Pulling them out, Gurney had discovered the one time he’d tried it, was a muddy, tiresome, frustrating job. “Right,” he said vaguely.
The crows, settling in the tops of the trees up along the edge of the pasture, were in full voice now—a sharp, continuous chattering that each evening reached a peak at sunset, then diminished into silence as dusk fell.
“And we really have to do something with that thing.” She pointed at the warped and tilting trellis a former owner had erected at the beginning of the path around the pond. “But it’ll have to wait until after we build the coop with a nice big fenced run. The chickens should be able to run around outside, not just sit in that dark little barn all the time.”
Gurney said nothing. The barn had windows—it wasn’t all that dark inside—but that was a line of argument guaranteed to go nowhere. It was smaller than the original building, which had been destroyed in a mysterious fire several months earlier, in the middle of the Good Shepherd case, but surely it was big enough for a rooster and three hens. To Madeleine, however, enclosed places were at best temporary resting areas and the open air was heaven. It was clear that she empathized with what she imagined to be the imprisonment of the chickens, and it would be as easy to convince her that the barn was a reasonable home for them as it would be to persuade her to live in it herself.