“How do you like it so far?”
Slade laughed as if Gurney had made a clever joke. “Honesty is astonishing. A key to another world.”
“A world Emma Martin introduced you to?”
“At the precise moment I was ready for it. Do you know I was stabbed and near death?”
“Emma told me.”
“Something happened while I was in the intensive care unit. I had a sudden vision of my life as a selfish, cruel, useless progression. A life of lies. I felt a desperate desire for my life to be the opposite of everything it was. That’s when I was brought to Emma. A magical connection.”
Gurney was skeptical of dramatic conversions, and particularly of their staying power. “So, that was the end of the old life? No thoughts of going back?”
The perfect smile reappeared. “Why would I go back to being the old me? That man was an idiot. I was drowning in money and buying one useless piece of junk after another. I had a fifty-thousand-dollar gold watch. Why? Because my East Hampton neighbor had a thirty-thousand-dollar gold watch. I was also fucking his very expensive wife. In fact, I fucked her in my laundry room the night of my own wife’s birthday party. I fucked her twice on her husband’s yacht. And I fucked their daughter for three days straight in a hotel room on a ten-grand crack buy. This was not unusual. This is what I did.”
“There are people who might envy that old life of yours.”
“People who don’t know what it really is. People who’ve never seen themselves as the scum of the earth, desperate to stay high because the crashes are devastating, and the crashes only get worse, and you get crazier and more terrified and more desperate. The dark is full of devils, and the light is unbearable. You want to die, but you’re terrified of dying—the claustrophobia, the paralysis, the suffocation—and the only way to escape the grave is to grab for another woman, another hit, another delusion of power. Then the next crash drives you back to the grave, and you can’t breathe and your mind is going to explode.”
Gurney had listened to a lot of addicts over the years, and Slade’s description of the low-bottom life rang true. Of course, where he came from was never in dispute. The more interesting questions centered around his post-conversion life—if that’s what it really was—and how that life related to the murder of Lenny Lerman.
“Are you still married to the woman who stabbed you?”
“No. She was too addicted to the insanity. When I got out of the hospital and backed away from the old life, she convinced herself I was either a total phony or a religious bore. She was done with me.”
“Why did she stab you?”
“We were arguing, she picked up an ice pick, and . . . it happened.”
“And since then you’ve been leading a straight life?”
“Yes.”
“A life that means a great deal to you?”
“It means everything to me.” His steady gaze met Gurney’s. “So, if someone threatened my new life with proof of an old crime, I would have a powerful motive for killing him. Is that what you’re thinking?”
“I think that’s what Cam Stryker wanted the jury to think.”
“It sounds reasonable. But it actually makes no sense.”
“Why not?”
“If I killed Mr. Lerman, I would have been trying to preserve the appearance of my new life at the cost of destroying the reality of it. That would be insane, wouldn’t it?”
14
THAT WOULD BE INSANE, WOULDN’T IT?
Even though his meeting with Slade continued for another twenty-five minutes, that was the comment most vivid in Gurney’s mind during his drive home. Viewed one way, it could be seen as the straightforward observation of an innocent man. Viewed another way, it might be the smirking humor of a psychopath.
He felt a similar uncertainty about Slade’s post-stabbing life of virtue. Perhaps it was all true, a legitimate road-to-Damascus awakening. Or it could be a long-term con job, aimed at some yet-to-be-revealed payoff.
Gurney went back over the final questions he had asked Slade.
Did he receive the threatening phone calls from Lerman that Stryker had referred to?
No, he hadn’t.
How did he explain the three calls made from Lerman’s number to his, and Lerman’s description of them in his diary?
He couldn’t explain them because they never happened.
If he was in the lodge the evening of the murder as he claimed, how could Lerman have been knocked unconscious a few feet from the front porch, dragged to a grave in the woods, beheaded, and buried without his noticing anything at all?
He’d been making preparations for the following day’s Thanksgiving dinner. The kitchen was in a rear corner of the building, and he had a Mahler symphony on the stereo, parts of which could have drowned out a machine gun.
How did his DNA get on the camos Lerman was found wearing?
It must have been stolen from a closet in the lodge. He never bothered to lock the upstairs windows. Getting in would have been a cinch when he wasn’t there, which was most days.
Slade’s answers sounded reasonable, but if true, it would mean that Cam Stryker’s persuasive courtroom narrative was a total fiction.
That thought produced a small frisson—and a new realization, not so much about Slade as about himself. He recalled his inclination after the Harrow Hill horrors to avoid active involvement in future criminal investigations—an easy enough boundary to maintain in the absence of temptation—but now he could feel the familiar pull of a closed case that just possibly should not have ended the way it did.
Under the influence of that magnetic pull, he might talk himself into something best avoided. He decided to share his thoughts with Jack Hardwick, the former New York State Police detective with whom he had an often contentious but ultimately productive working relationship.
Hardwick was vulgar and combative, but he was also smart and fearless. He and Gurney shared a special connection, formed as the result of a macabre coincidence. When Gurney was still with the NYPD and Hardwick with the NYSP, they were both involved in the investigation of the infamous Peter Piggert murder case. On the same day, in jurisdictions a hundred miles apart, they each found half of Mrs. Piggert’s body.
Gurney pulled into a roadside gas station and convenience store. He parked next to a battered pickup truck and placed the call. After four rings, it was answered by a female voice with a Puerto Rican accent.
“Dave?”
“Esti?” Esti Moreno was Hardwick’s live-in girlfriend. She was also a New York State Trooper in what was still very much a man’s world, which said a lot about her toughness and determination.
“Who else?” she said in a tone of teasing reprimand. “I saw your name on Jack’s phone screen, so I picked it up. He’s outside. We have groundhogs. Jack hates groundhogs. You want to talk to him?”
“I wanted to ask him if he knows anything about a murder case involving Ziko Slade.”
“The tennis player?”
“Years ago, yes.”
“I had such a crush on him!”
“On Ziko Slade?”
“I was such a tennis fanatic back then, and he was incredible. So graceful. He made it look so easy. Like he was born for it. Such a beautiful boy. The girls, the women, the gay men at the court where I played—we were all in love with him.”
“He’s not a boy anymore.”