Gurney wondered whether the breathless pace of Clamm’s speech was propelled by caffeine, cocaine, the pressures of the job, or just the way his personal spring happened to be wound.
“I mean, a dozen stab wounds to the throat isn’t all that common. There might be other connections we could find between the cases. Maybe we could have sent reports back and forth between here and upstate, but I thought maybe if you were on the scene and you could talk to the victim’s wife, you might see something or ask something that might not occur to you if you weren’t here. That’s what I was hoping. I mean, I hope there might be something in it. I hope it’s not a waste of your time.”
“Slow down, son. Let me tell you something. I drove here today because it seemed like a reasonable thing to do. You want to check out every possibility. So do I. The worst-case scenario here is that we eliminate one of those possibilities, and eliminating possibilities is not a waste of time, it’s part of the process. So don’t worry about my time.”
“Thank you, sir, I just meant… I mean, I know it was a long drive for you. I do appreciate that.” Clamm’s voice and manner had settled down a notch or two. He still had a revved-up, nervous look, but at least it wasn’t off the charts.
“Speaking of time,” said Gurney, “would now be a good time to take me to the scene?”
“Now would be great. Better leave your car here, come in mine. Victim’s house is in a cramped little area-some of the streets give you like two inches clearance each side of the car.”
“Sounds like Flounder Beach.”
“You know Flounder Beach?”
Gurney nodded. He’d been there once, when he was a teenager, at a girl’s birthday party-a friend of a girl he was going steady with.
“How do you know Flounder Beach?” asked Clamm as he turned out of the parking lot in the opposite direction from the main avenue.
“I grew up not far from here-out by City Island.”
“No shit. I thought you were from upstate.”
“At the moment,” said Gurney. He heard the temporariness of the phrase he’d chosen and realized he wouldn’t have put it that way in front of Madeleine.
“Well, it’s still the same nasty little bungalow colony. At high tide with a blue sky, you could almost think you were at a real beach. Then the tide goes out, the mud stinks, and you remember it’s the Bronx.”
“Right,” said Gurney.
Five minutes later they slowed to a stop on a dusty side street facing an opening in another chain-link fence like the one that enclosed the church parking lot. A painted metal sign on the fence announced that this was the FLOUNDER BEACH CLUB and parking was by permit only. A line of bullet holes had cut the sign nearly in half.
The image of the party three decades earlier came to Gurney’s mind. He wondered if that was the same entrance he’d used then. He could see the face of the girl whose birthday it was-a fat girl with pigtails and braces.
“Better to park here,” said Clamm, commenting again on the grubby enclave’s impossible streets. “Hope you don’t mind the walk.”
“Christ, how old do I look?”
Clamm responded with an awkward laugh and a tangential question as they got out of the car. “How long have you been on the job?”
Having no appetite for discussing his retirement and ad hoc reemployment, he said simply, “Twenty-five years.”
“It’s a weird case,” said Clamm, as though the observation followed naturally. “Not just all the knife wounds. It’s more than that.”
“You’re sure they’re knife wounds?”
“Why do you ask?”
“In our case it was a broken bottle-a broken whiskey bottle. Did you recover any weapon?”
“Nope. Guy from the ME’s office said ‘probable knife wounds’-double-edged, though, like a dagger. Guess a pointed piece of glass could make a cut like that. They were kinda backed up. We don’t have the autopsy report yet. But like I was saying, it’s more than that. The wife… I don’t know, there’s something weird about the wife.”
“Weird like how?”
“Lot of ways. First, she’s some kind of religious nut. In fact, that’s her alibi. She was at some kind of hallelujah prayer meeting.”
Gurney shrugged. “What else?”
“She’s on heavy-duty medication. Has to take some big pills to remember that this is her native planet.”
“I hope she keeps taking them. Anything else troubling you about her?”
“Yeah,” said Clamm, stopping in the middle of the narrow street they were walking along-more of an alley than a street. “She’s lying about something.” He looked like he had a pain in his eyes. “There’s something she isn’t telling us. Or maybe something she is telling us is bullshit. Maybe both. That’s the house.” Clamm pointed to a squat bungalow just ahead on the left, set back about ten feet from the little street. The peeling paint on the siding was a bilious green. The door was a reddish brown that reminded Gurney of dried blood. Yellow crime-scene tape, tied to portable stanchions, encircled the shabby little property. All it needed was a bow in the front, thought Gurney, to make it the gift from hell.
Clamm knocked on the door. “Oh, one other thing,” he said. “She’s big.”
“Big?”
“You’ll see.”
The warning had not fully prepared Gurney for the woman who opened the door. Well over three hundred pounds, with arms like thighs, she seemed misplaced in the little house. Even more misplaced was the face of a child on this very broad body-an off-balance, dazed sort of child. Her short black hair was parted and combed like a little boy’s.
“Can I help you?” she asked, looking as if help were the last thing on earth she was capable of providing.
“Hello, Mrs. Rudden, I’m Detective Clamm. Remember me?”
“Hello.” She said the word like she was reading it from a foreign phrase book.
“I was here yesterday.”
“I remember.”
“We need to ask you a few more questions.”
“You want to know more about Albert?”
“That’s part of it. May we come in?”
Without answering, she turned away from the door, walked across the small living room into which it opened, and sat on a sofa-which seemed to shrink under her great bulk.
“Sit down,” she said.
The two men looked around. There were no chairs. The only other objects in the room were an absurdly ornate coffee table with a cheap vase of pink plastic flowers in the center of it, an empty bookcase, and a television big enough for a ballroom. The bare plywood floor was clean except for a scattering of synthetic fibers-meaning, Gurney assumed, that the carpet on which the body was found had been taken to the lab for forensic examination.
“We don’t need to sit,” said Clamm. “We won’t be long.”
“Albert liked sports,” said Mrs. Rudden, smiling blankly at the gargantuan TV.
An archway on the left side of the little living room led to three doors. From behind one came the sound effects of a combat video game.
“That’s Jonah. Jonah is my son. That’s his bedroom.”
Gurney asked how old he was.
“Twelve. In some ways older, in some ways younger,” she said, as if this were something that had just for the first time occurred to her.
“Was he with you?” asked Gurney.
“What do you mean, was he with me?” she asked, with a weird suggestiveness that gave Gurney a chill.
“I mean,” said Gurney, trying to keep whatever it was he was feeling out of his voice, “was he with you at your religious service the night your husband was killed?”