Shut Your Eyes Tight

Part Two

Salome’s Executioner

Chapter 26

The verisimilitude of incongruity

“After I ice the stupid fuck, I see he’s only wearing one shoe. I think, what the fuck? Closer look, I see there’s no sock on the foot that’s got the shoe on it. On the bottom of the shoe, I see this little slanted M, the Marconi logo, so this is like a two-thousand-dollar shoe. The other foot that’s got no shoe-that one’s got a sock on it. Cashmere. I think, who the fuck does that? Who the fuck puts on one cashmere sock and one two-thousand-dollar shoe-on different feet? I’ll tell you who does that-a fucking juicehead with bucks, a rich fucking drunk.”

That was the way Gurney opened his presentation that morning. Ultimate cut-to-the-chase approach. And it worked. He had the attention of every set of eyes in the bleak, concrete-walled police-academy lecture hall.

“The other day we talked about the eureka fallacy-the tendency of people to put a lot more faith in things they’ve discovered about someone than in things that person has told them. We’re wired to believe that the hidden truth is the real truth. Undercover, you can take advantage of that tendency by letting your target ‘discover’ the things about you that you most want him to believe. It’s not an easy technique, but it’s very powerful. Today we’ll look at another factor that creates credibility, another way of making your undercover line of bullshit sound true: layers of unusual, striking, incongruous detail.”

All the people in the room appeared to be in the same seats they were in two days earlier, with the exception of the attractive Hispanic cop with the lip gloss who had moved into the front row, displacing the dyspeptic Detective Falcone, who was now in the second row-a pleasant switch from Gurney’s point of view.

“The story I just started telling you about whacking the guy with the Marconi logo on the sole of his shoe, that’s a story I actually told in an undercover situation. The odd little facts are all there for specific reasons. Can anyone tell me what they might be?”

A hand went up in the middle of the room. “Make you sound cold and hard.”

Other opinions were offered without raised hands:

“Make you sound like you got a little problem with drunks.”

“Like maybe you’re a little crazy.”

“Like Joe Pesci in Goodfellas.”

“Distraction,” said a thin, colorless female in the back row.

“Tell me about that,” said Gurney.

“You get somebody focused on a lot of weird shit, trying to figure out why the guy you shot is only wearing one shoe, they don’t focus so much on the main question, which is whether or not you shot anybody to begin with.”

“Bury ’em in bullshit!” another female voice chimed in.

“That’s the idea,” said Gurney. “Now, there’s one more thing-”

The pretty cop with the glistening lips broke in, “The little M on the sole of his shoe?”

Gurney couldn’t help grinning. “Right. The little M. What’s that all about?”

“It makes the hit more credible?”

Falcone, behind her, rolled his eyes. Gurney felt like tossing him out of the class but doubted he had the authority to make it stick and didn’t want to get tangled up in an academy pissing contest. He concentrated on his Hispanic star pupil, a much easier task.

“How does it do that?”

“By the way you picture it in your mind. The victim is down, shot, on the floor. That’s how the sole of his shoe would be visible. So when I’m picturing that, wondering about that little logo, I’m already believing the guy has been shot. You know what I mean? Once I’m seeing his feet in that position, I’m already past the question of whether you shot him. It’s kind of like the other little detail you tossed in-that the sock on the other foot was cashmere. The only way to know something is cashmere is to feel it. So I’m picturing this killer, curious about the sock, feeling the dead guy’s foot. Very icy. Scary guy. Believable.”

The restaurant where Gurney had agreed to meet Sonya Reynolds was in a hamlet outside Bainbridge, halfway between the police academy in Albany and her gallery in Ithaca. He’d finished his lecture at eleven and got to the Galloping Duck-her choice-at a quarter to one.

There was a curious disconnect between the country-cutesy name of the place with its cockeyed cutout of a giant duck on the front lawn and the plain, almost Shaker-like decor inside-like the crossed wires of a bad marriage.

He arrived first and was shown to a table for two next to a window overlooking a pond, the possible home of the eponymous fowl if ever it had existed. A chubby, cheerful teenage waitress with pink spiked hair and an indescribable melange of neon clothes brought two menus and two glasses of ice water.

Gurney counted a total of nine tables in the small dining room, only two of which were occupied, both silently- one by a youngish couple staring intently at their BlackBerry screens, the other by a middle-aged man and woman from the pre-electronic era staring stolidly into their own thoughts.

Gurney’s gaze drifted out to the pond. He sipped his water and thought about Sonya. Looking back on their relationship-not a “relationship” in the romantic sense, just a business association with a fair amount of suppressed lust on his part-it struck him as one of the stranger interludes in his life. Inspired by an art-appreciation course Sonya was teaching, which he and Madeleine attended shortly after moving upstate, he’d begun creating art prints from the mug shots of murderers-illuminating their violent personalities through the subtle manipulation of the stark official photographs taken at the time of their arrests. Sonya’s great enthusiasm for the project and her sale of eight of the prints (at two thousand dollars apiece through her Ithaca gallery) kept Gurney involved for several months, despite Madeleine’s discomfort with the morbid subject matter and with his eagerness to please Sonya. The tension in that conflict came back to him now, along with an uneasy recollection of the near disaster that ended it.

In addition to almost getting him killed, the Mellery murder case had brought him face-to-face with his acute failures as a husband and father. In the humbling clarity of the experience, it had occurred to him that love is the only thing on earth that matters. Seeing the mug-shot art endeavor and his contact with Sonya as disrupters of his relationship with the only person he really loved, he turned away from them toward Madeleine.

Now, however, a scant year later, the white light of his realization had dimmed. He still knew there was truth in it-that love, in a sense, was the most important thing-but he no longer saw it as the only true light in the universe. The gradual fading of its priority happened quietly and did not announce itself as a loss. It felt more like the growth of a more realistic perspective, surely not a bad thing. After all, one could not function long in the state of emotional intensity created by the Mellery affair, lest one forget to mow the lawn and buy food-or make the money one needed to buy food and lawn mowers. Wasn’t it in the very nature of intense experiences to settle down, permitting the ordinary rhythms of life to resume? So Gurney wasn’t especially concerned that now, from time to time, the “love is all that matters” idea seemed to have the ring of a sentimental shibboleth, a country-music title.

Which is not to say that his guard was completely down. There was an electricity in Sonya Reynolds that only a very foolish man would consider harmless. And when the pink-haired girl ushered the shapely, elegant Sonya into the dining room, that electricity was radiating like the hum of a power plant.

“David, my love, you look… exactly the same!” she cried, gliding toward him as if to music, offering him her cheek to kiss. “But of course you do! How else would you look? You’re such a rock! Such stability!” This last word she pronounced with an exotic delight, as though it were the perfect Italian term for something the English language was inadequate to express.

She was wearing very tight designer jeans and a silky T-shirt under a linen jacket so casually unconstructed it