“What did you see?”
“Albert.”
Gurney waited for her to go on. When she didn’t, he prompted, “Albert was dead?”
“There was a lot of blood.”
“And the flower?”
“The flower was on the floor next to him. You see, he must have been holding it in his hand. He must have wanted to give it to me when I got home.”
“What did you do then?”
“Then? Oh. I went next door. We don’t have a phone. I think they called the police. Before the police came, I picked up the flower. It was for me,” she said with the sudden, raw insistence of a child. “It was a gift. I put it in our nicest vase.”
Chapter 35
Although it was time for lunch when they finally left the Rudden house, Gurney was in no mood for it. It wasn’t that he wasn’t hungry, and it wasn’t that Clamm hadn’t suggested a convenient place to eat. He was too frustrated, mostly with himself, to say yes to anything. As Clamm drove him back to the church parking lot where he’d left his car, they made a last halfhearted attempt to align the facts of the cases to see if there was anything at all that might connect them. The attempt led nowhere.
“Well,” said Clamm, straining to give the exercise a positive interpretation, “at least there’s no proof at this point that they’re not connected. The husband could have gotten mail the wife never saw, and it doesn’t look like the kind of marriage where there was much communication, so he might not have told her anything. And with whatever the hell she’s on, she wasn’t likely to notice any subtle emotional changes in him on her own. Might be worth having another talk with the kid. I know he’s as spacey as she is, but it’s possible he might remember something.”
“Sure,” said Gurney with zero conviction. “And you might want to see if Albert had a checking account, and if there’s a stub made out to anyone named Charybdis or Arybdis or Scylla. That’s a long shot, but at this point what the hell.”
On the drive home, the weather deteriorated further in a kind of morbid sympathy with Gurney’s frame of mind. The drizzle of the morning developed into a steady rain, reinforcing his dismal assessment of the trip. If there were any connections between the murders of Mark Mellery and Albert Rudden, beyond the large number and location of the stab wounds, they were not apparent. None of the distinctive features of the Peony crime scene were present at Flounder Beach-no tricky footprints, no lawn chair, no broken whiskey bottle, no poems-no sign of game playing at all. The victims appeared to have nothing in common. That a murderer would choose as his twin targets Mark Mellery and Albert Rudden made no sense.
These thoughts, along with the unpleasantness of driving in an increasing downpour, no doubt contributed to his strained expression as he entered the kitchen door of the old farmhouse, dripping.
“What happened to you?” asked Madeleine, looking up from the onion she was dicing.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
She shrugged and made another slice through the onion.
The edginess of his reply hung in the air. After a moment he mumbled apologetically, “I had an exhausting day, a six-hour round-trip in the rain.”
“And?”
“And? And the whole damn thing was probably a dead end.”
“And?”
“Isn’t that enough?”
She shot him a disbelieving little smile.
“To give it an extra twist, it was the Bronx,” he added morosely. “There’s no human experience that the Bronx can’t make a little uglier.”
She began chopping the onion into tiny pieces. She spoke as if she were addressing the cutting board.
“You have two messages on the phone-your friend from Ithaca and your son.”
“Detailed messages, or just asking me to call back?”
“I didn’t pay that much attention.”
“By my ‘friend from Ithaca,’ do you mean Sonya Reynolds?”
“Are there others?”
“Other what?”
“Friends you have in Ithaca, yet to be announced.”
“I have no ‘friends’ at all in Ithaca. Sonya Reynolds is a business associate-and barely that. What did she want, anyway?”
“I told you, the message is on the phone.” Madeleine’s knife, which had been hovering above the pile of onion bits, sliced down through them with particular force.
“Jesus, watch your fingers!” The words erupted from him with more anger than concern.
With the sharp edge of the knife still pressed against the cutting board, she looked at him curiously. “So what really happened today?” she asked, rewinding the conversation to the point before it ran into the ditch.
“Frustration, I guess. I don’t know.” He went to the refrigerator and took out a bottle of Heineken, opened it, and set it on the table in the breakfast nook by the French doors. Then he took off his jacket, draped it over the back of one of the chairs, and sat down.
“You want to know what happened? I’ll tell you. At the request of an NYPD detective by the ridiculous name of Randy Clamm, I made a three-hour drive to a sad little house in the Bronx where an unemployed man had been stabbed in the throat.”
“Why did he call you?”
“Ah. Good question. Seems that Detective Clamm heard about the murder up here in Peony. The similarity of the method prompted him to call the Peony police, who passed him along to the state police regional HQ, who passed him along to the captain overseeing the case, a nasty little ass-licking moron by the name of Rodriguez, whose brain is just large enough to recognize a lousy lead.”
“So he passed it along to you?”
“To the DA, who he knew would automatically pass it along to me.”
Madeleine said nothing, but the obvious question was in her eyes.
“Yeah, I knew it was an iffy lead. Stabbing in that part of the world is just another form of arguing, but for some reason I thought I might find something to tie the two cases together.”
“Nothing?”
“No. For a while it looked hopeful, though. The widow seemed to be holding something back. Finally she admits tampering with the crime scene. There was a flower on the floor that her husband apparently brought home for her. She was afraid the evidence techs would take it, and she wanted to keep it-understandably. So she picked it up and put it in a vase. End of story.”
“You were hoping she’d admit covering up some footprints in the snow or hiding a white lawn chair?”
“Something like that. But all it turned out to be was a plastic flower.”
“Plastic?”
“Plastic.” He took a long, slow swallow from the Heineken bottle. “Not a very tasteful gift, I guess.”
“Not really a gift at all,” she said with some conviction.
“What do you mean?”
“Real flowers could be gifts-they almost always are, aren’t they? Artificial flowers are something else.”
“What?”
“Items of home decor, I’d say. A man wouldn’t be any more likely to buy a woman a plastic flower than a roll of floral wallpaper.”
“What are you telling me?”
“I’m not sure. But if this woman found a plastic flower at the murder scene and assumed that her husband had bought it for her, I think she’s wrong.”
“Where do you think it came from?”
“I have no idea.”
“She seemed pretty sure he’d gotten it as a gift for her.”
“She would want to think that, wouldn’t she?”
“Maybe so. But if he didn’t bring it into the house, and assuming the son was out all evening with her as she claims, that would leave the murderer as a possible source.”
“I suppose,” said Madeleine with diminishing interest. Gurney knew that she drew a definite line between understanding what a real person would do under certain circumstances and airy hypothesizing about the source of an object in a room. He sensed he’d just crossed that line, but he pressed on, anyway.