Shut Your Eyes Tight

inviolable, his whims absolute. That was what Gurney had endeavored to highlight in his manipulation of the original mug-shot photo. The rigid tyrant behind the bland features. Satan in the skin of Everyman.

Was that what Jay Jykynstyl was fascinated by? The veiled evil? Was that what he prized, what he was offering to pay a small fortune for?

Of course, there was a crucial difference between the reality of the killer and the portrait of the killer. The object on the screen derived its appeal in part from its evocation of the monster and in part, ironically, from its own essential harmlessness. The serpent defanged. The devil paralyzed and laminated.

Gurney leaned back from his desk, away from the computer screen, folded his arms across his chest, and gazed out the west window. His focus initially was inward. When he began to notice the crimson sunset, it seemed at first a smear of blood across the aqua sky. Then he realized he was remembering a bedroom wall in the South Bronx, a turquoise wall against which a shooting victim had leaned, sliding slowly to the floor. Twenty-four years ago, his first murder case.

Flies. It was August, and the body had been there for a week.

Chapter 39

Real, unreal, crazy, not crazy

For twenty-four years he’d been up to his armpits in murder and mayhem. Half his life. Even now, in retirement… What was it Madeleine had said to him during the Mellery carnage? That death seemed to call to him more strongly than life?

He’d denied it. And argued the point semantically: It wasn’t death that drew his attention and energy; it was the challenge of unraveling the mystery of murder. It was about justice.

And of course she had given him her wry look. Madeleine was unimpressed by principled motives, or at least by the invocation of principles to win arguments.

Once he had disengaged from the debate, the truth would sneak up on him. The truth was that he was drawn, almost physically, to criminal mysteries and the process of exposing the people behind them. It was a far more primal and powerful force than whatever it was that pushed him toward weeding the asparagus patch. Murder investigations captured the fullness of his attention as nothing else in his life ever had.

That was the good news. It was also the bad news. Good because it was real, and some men went through life with nothing to excite them but their fantasies. Bad because it was a tidal force that drew him away from everything else in his life that mattered, including Madeleine.

He tried to remember where she was at that very moment and found that it had slipped his mind-displaced by God-knows-what. By Jay Jykynstyl and his hundred-thousand-dollar carrot? By the toxic rancor at BCI and its warping effect on the investigation? By the teasing significance of Edward Vallory’s lost play? By the eagerness of Peggy, the spider man’s wife, to join the hunt? By the echo of Savannah Liston’s fearful voice, reporting the disappearance of her former classmates? The truth is, any of a score of items could easily have edged Madeleine’s whereabouts off his radar screen.

Then he heard a car driving up the pasture lane, and it came back to him: her Friday-evening meeting with her knitting friends. But if that was her car, she was coming home a lot earlier than usual. As he headed for the kitchen window to check, the phone rang on the den desk behind him, and he went back to answer it.

“Dave, so glad I caught you live on the phone, not your machine. I’ve got a couple of curveballs for you, but not to worry!” It was Sonya Reynolds, a dash of anxiety coloring her characteristic excitement.

“I was going to call you-” Gurney began. He’d planned to ask more questions in order to get a more grounded feeling about the following evening’s dinner with Jykynstyl.

Sonya cut him off. “Dinner is now lunch. Jay has to catch a plane for Rome. Hope that’s not a problem for you. If it is, you’ll have to make it not be. And curveball number two is that I won’t be there.” That was the part that obviously bothered her. “Did you hear what I said?” she asked after Gurney failed to react.

“Lunch is not a problem for me. You can’t be there?”

“I certainly could be there, would certainly like to be there, but… well, instead of trying to explain, why don’t I just tell you what he said. Let me preface this by reminding you how incredibly impressed he is with your work. He referred to it as potentially seminal. He’s very excited. But here’s what he said: ‘I want to see for myself who this David Gurney is, this incredible artist who happens to be a detective. I want to understand who I’m investing in. I want to be exposed to the mind and imagination of this man without the obstruction of a third party.’ I told him that was the first time in my life I’d ever been referred to as an obstruction. I told him I don’t think I like that very much, being told not to come. But for him I make an exception. I stay home. You’re very quiet, David. What are you thinking?”

“I’m wondering if this man is a lunatic.”

“This man is Jay Jykynstyl. Lunatic is not the word I would use. I would say that he is quite unusual.”

Gurney heard the side door opening and shutting, followed by sounds from the mudroom off the kitchen.

“David-why so quiet? More thinking?”

“No, I just… I don’t know, what does he mean by ‘investing’ in me?”

“Ah, that’s the really good news. That’s the biggest part of the reason I would have wanted to be there at dinner, or lunch, or whatever. Listen to this. This is life-changing information. He wants to own all of your work. Not one or two things. All of it. And he expects it to increase in value.”

“Why would it?”

“Everything Jykynstyl buys increases in value.”

Gurney caught a movement out of the corner of his eye, turned, and saw Madeleine at the den door. She was frowning at him-a worried frown.

“You still there, David?” Sonya’s voice was both bubbly and incredulous. “Are you always so quiet when someone offers you a million dollars to start with and sky’s the limit after that?”

“I find it bizarre.”

A little twist of annoyance was added to Madeleine’s worried frown, and she went back out to the kitchen.

“Of course it’s bizarre!” cried Sonya. “Success in the art world is always bizarre. Bizarre is normal. You know what Mark Rothko’s colored squares sell for? Why should bizarre be a problem?”

“Let me absorb this, okay? Can I call you later?”

“You better call me later, David, my million-dollar baby. Tomorrow’s a big day. I need to get you ready for it. I can feel that you are thinking again. My God, David, what are you thinking now?”

“I’m just having a hard time believing that any of this is real.”

“David, David, David, you know what they tell you when you’re learning to swim? Stop fighting the water. Relax and float. Relax and breathe and let the water hold you up. Same thing here. Stop struggling with real, unreal, crazy, not crazy-all these words. Accept the magic. The magic Mr. Jykynstyl. And his magic millions. Ciao!”

Magic? There was no concept on earth quite so alien to Gurney as magic. No concept quite so meaningless, so aggravatingly empty-headed.

He stood by his desk gazing out through the west window. The sky above the ridge, so recently a bloody red, had faded to a murky pall of mauve and granite, and the grass of the high field behind the house had only the memory of green in it.

There was a crash and a clatter in the kitchen, the sound of pot covers sliding from the overloaded dish drainer into the sink, then the sound of Madeleine restacking them.

Gurney emerged from the darkened den into the lighted kitchen. Madeleine was wiping her hands on one of the dish towels.

“What happened to the car?” she asked.

“What? Oh. A deer collision.” The recollection was clear, sickening.

She looked at him with alarm, pain.

He went on. “Ran out of the woods. Right in front of me. No way to… to get out of the way.”