Shut Your Eyes Tight (Dave Gurney, No. 2): A Novel (48 page)

“Right over there, sir,” said the driver, his smile revealing surprisingly bad teeth for a young man. “First one.”

The car, as Gurney had specified in his predawn call, was a Mercedes S600 sedan, the sort of six-figure vehicle you might see once a year in Walnut Crossing. In Palm Beach it was as common as five-hundred-dollar sunglasses. Gurney slipped into the
backseat—a quiet, dehumidified cocoon of soft leather, soft carpet, and softly tinted windows.

The driver closed the door for him, got in the front seat, and they glided soundlessly into the stream of taxis and shuttle buses.

“Temperature okay?”

“It’s fine.”

“You want music?”

“No, thank you.”

The driver sniffed, coughed, slowed to a crawl as the car passed through a pond-size puddle. “Been raining like a bitch.”

Gurney did not answer. He’d never been prone to conversing simply for the sake for conversing, and in the company of strangers he was more comfortable with silence. Not another word was spoken until the car came to a stop at the entrance to the very posh little shopping plaza where the Giacomo Emporium was located.

The driver looked at him through the rearview mirror. “You know how long you want to be here?”

“Not long,” said Gurney. “Fifteen minutes, max.”

“Then I stay here. Cops tell me no, then I circle.” He made an orbital gesture with his forefinger to illustrate the intended process. “I circle, keep coming around, passing this spot, until you’re here. Okay?”

“Okay.”

The shock of stepping back out into the hot, humid atmosphere was intensified by the visual impact of moving from the car’s tinted light into the full glare of the midmorning Florida sun. The plaza was landscaped with planting beds of palms and ferns and potted Asiatic lilies. The air smelled like boiled flowers.

Gurney hurried into the store, where the air smelled more like money than flowers. Customers, blond women from thirty to sixty, drifted through the meticulously crafted displays of clothes and accessories. Salespeople, anorexic boys and girls in their twenties, looked like they were trying to look like the anorexic boys and girls in Giacomo ads.

Gurney’s eagerness to flee this chic environment had him back on the street in ten minutes. Never had he spent so much on so little: an amazing $1,879.42 for one pair of jeans, one pair of moccasins,
one polo shirt, and one pair of sunglasses—selected with the assistance of a willowy male exhibiting the fashionable ennui of a recent vampire victim.

In a changing room, Gurney had removed his battered jeans, T-shirt, sneakers, and socks and put on his pricey new apparel. He removed the tags and gave them to the salesperson along with his old clothes, which he asked to be wrapped in a Giacomo box.

It was then that the salesperson offered the first small smile Gurney had seen since entering the shop. “You’re like a Transformer,” he said, presumably referring to the popular toy that is instantly convertible from one thing into another.

The Mercedes was waiting. Gurney got in, checked his printed-out tourist guide, and gave the driver the next address, less than a mile away.

Nails Delicato was a tiny place, staffed by four dramatically coiffed manicurists who appeared to be teetering on the shaky fence that separated high-fashion models from high-priced hookers. No one seemed to notice or care that Gurney was the only male customer. The manicurist to whom he was assigned looked sleepy. Apart from apologizing several times for yawning while she was working on his nails, she said nothing until she was almost at the end of the process, applying a transparent polish.

“You have nice hands,” she observed. “You should take better care of them.” Her voice was both young and weary, and it seemed to resonate with the matter-of-fact sadness in her eyes.

As he was paying on the way out, he bought a small tube of hair gel from the display of creams and cosmetics on the counter. He opened the tube, spread a bit of the gel on his palms, and rubbed it into his hair, aiming for the disarranged look so popular at the moment.

“What do you think?” he asked the blankly beautiful young woman in charge of collecting the money. The question engaged her to a degree that surprised him. She blinked several times as if being summoned from a dream, came around to the front of the counter, and studied his head from various angles.

“Can I …?” she asked.

“Absolutely.”

She ran her fingers through his hair in rapid zigzags, flicking it this way and that and pulling up on bits of it to make it spikier. After a minute or two, she stepped back, her eyes lighting up with pleasure.

“That’s it!” she declared. “That’s the real you!”

He burst out laughing, which seemed to confuse her. Still laughing, he took her hand and, on an impulse, kissed it for no sensible reason he could think of—which also seemed to confuse her, but more pleasantly. Then he stepped out into the Florida steam bath and back into the Mercedes and gave the driver the address of Darryl Becker’s gym.

“We need to pick up a couple of guys in West Palm,” he explained. “Then we’re going to visit a man on South Ocean Boulevard.”

A
s anyone who’d attended one of his academy lectures quickly realized, Gurney’s approach to undercover work was more complex than the average detective’s. It wasn’t just a matter of wrapping yourself in the manners, attitudes, and backstory of an assumed identity. It was more devious than that, and proportionally more difficult to manage. His “layered” approach involved creating a complex persona for the target to penetrate, a code for the target to break, a path the target could follow to arrive at the beliefs Gurney wanted him to embrace.

The current situation, however, added another dimension of difficulty. He had in past instances always known precisely what end-point belief about his identity he wanted his target to arrive at. But this time he didn’t. Because the appropriate identity would depend on the exact nature of the Karnala operation and Ballston’s connection to it—both still unknowns in the equation. It left Gurney in the position of having to feel his way forward, knowing that a misstep could be fatal.

As the car turned onto South Ocean Boulevard a couple of miles from Ballston’s address, the absurd difficulty of what Gurney was attempting began to sink in. He was walking into the home of a psychopathic sex murderer, unarmed. His only defense and only chance of success lay in the creation of a persona he would have to make up as he went along, following the currents of Ballston’s reactions as best he could, moment by moment. It was a challenge out of
Alice in Wonderland
. A sane man would probably turn back. A sane man with a wife and a son would certainly turn back.

He realized he was running too fast, that adrenaline was driving his decisions. It was a mistake that could easily lead to more mistakes. Worse, it deprived him of his main strength. It was in his analytic ability that he excelled, not in the quality of his adrenaline. He needed to
think
. He asked himself what he knew for sure, whether he had anything resembling a firm starting point for his conversation with Ballston.

He knew that the man was afraid and that his fear was related to Karnala Fashion. He knew that Karnala was reputedly controlled by the Skard family—who were, among other ugly things, high-end procurers. It also appeared that Melanie Strum had been sent to Ballston to satisfy his sexual needs. It was not too great a leap to imagine Karnala involved in that process. If evidence could be uncovered linking Karnala to both Ballston and Strum, then Ballston’s conviction would be assured. That could explain his fear. Except … Gurney had gotten the impression that the man had been frightened not only by his mention of Karnala, and therefore by Gurney’s knowledge of some link, but by Karnala itself.

And what was the significance of Ballston’s odd insistence on the phone that everything was “under control”? That wouldn’t make sense if Ballston believed that Gurney was any sort of legitimate detective. But it might make sense if he thought Gurney was a representative of Karnala or of some other dangerous organization with whom he was doing business.

This was the logic that led to the presence in the car of the two hulking, granite-faced men he’d just picked up in front of Darryl Becker’s gym. Apart from minimally identifying themselves as Dan and Frank and informing Gurney that Becker had filled them in and they “knew the routine,” they hadn’t said another word. They looked like linebackers on a prison football team, whose idea of communication was to smash into something at full speed, preferably another person.

As the car glided to a stop at the Ballston address, Gurney realized with a sinking feeling that his assumptions were, in reality, too iffy to support the course of action he was taking. Yet it was all he had. And he had to do something.

At his request, the two big men got out, and one of them opened
his door. Gurney checked his watch. It was eleven forty-five. He put on his five-hundred-dollar Giacomo sunglasses and stepped out of the car in front of an ornate iron gate at the end of a yellow-pebbled driveway. The gate was the only break in the high stone wall that enclosed the oceanfront estate on its three land-facing sides. Like its neighbors on that stretch of luxury coastline, the property had been converted from a barrier sandbar of coarse grasses, sea oats, and saw palmettos into a lushly loamed and mulched botanical garden of frangipani, hibiscus, oleander, magnolia, and gardenia blossoms.

It smelled to Gurney like a gangster’s wake.

With his two hired companions standing by the car, radiating a barely suppressed violence, he approached the intercom on the stone pillar beside the gate. In addition to the camera built into the intercom, two separate security cameras were mounted on poles on either side of the driveway—at intersecting angles, which covered the approach to the gate as well as a wide segment of the adjacent boulevard. The gate was also directly observable from at least one second-floor window of the Spanish-style mansion at the end of the yellow driveway. In such a leafy, flowery environment, it said something about the owner’s obsessiveness that not a single fallen leaf or petal had been allowed to remain on the ground.

When Gurney pressed the intercom button, the response was immediate, the tone mechanically polite.
“Good morning. Please identify yourself and the nature of your business.”

“Tell Jordan I’m here.”

There was a brief pause.
“Please identify yourself and the nature of your business.”

Gurney smiled, then let the smile fade to zero. “Just tell him.”

Another pause.
“I need to give Mr. Ballston a name.”

“Of course,” said Gurney, smiling again.

He recognized that he was at a fork in the road. He ran through the options and chose the one that offered the greatest reward, at the greatest risk.

He let the smile fade. “My name is Fuck You.”

Nothing happened for several seconds. Then there was a muted metallic click, and without another sound the gate swung slowly open.

One thing Gurney had forgotten to do in the rush to do everything else was to check the Internet for photos of Ballston. However, when the mansion door opened as he approached it, he had no doubt at all about the identity of the man standing there.

His appearance fulfilled the expectations one might have of a criminally decadent billionaire. There was a pampered look about his hair and skin and clothes; a disdainful set to his mouth, as though the world in general fell far below his standards; a self-indulgent cruelty in his eyes. There also seemed to be a sniffly twitch in his nose, suggestive of a coke addiction. It was abundantly apparent that Jordan Ballston was a man to whom nothing on earth was remotely as important as getting his own way, and getting it quickly, at whatever cost to others the process might entail.

He regarded Gurney with ill-concealed anxiety. His nose twitched. “I don’t understand what this is all about.” He looked past Gurney down the driveway at the well-guarded Mercedes, his eyes widening just a fraction.

Gurney shrugged, smiled like he was unsheathing a knife. “You want to talk outside?”

Ballston apparently heard this as a threat. He blinked, shook his head nervously. “Come in.”

“Nice pebbles,” said Gurney, ambling past Ballston into the house.

“What?”

“The yellow pebbles. In your driveway. Nice.”

“Oh.” Ballston nodded, looked confused.

Gurney stood in the middle of the grand foyer, affecting the gimlet eye of an assessor at a foreclosure. On the main wall facing him, between the curving arms of a double staircase, was a huge painting of a lawn chair—which he recognized from the art-appreciation course he’d attended with Madeleine a year and a half earlier, the course taught by Sonya Reynolds, the course that had launched him on his fateful mug-shot art “hobby.”

“I like that,” announced Gurney, pointing at it as though his benediction were a form of triage that saved it from the trash bin.

Ballston seemed vaguely relieved by the approval but no less confused.

“Guy’s a fucking faggot,” Gurney explained, “but his shit is worth a lot.”

Ballston made a hideous attempt at a grin. He cleared his throat but couldn’t seem to think of anything to say.

Gurney turned toward him, adjusting his sunglasses. “So, Jordan, you collect a lot of fag art?”

Ballston swallowed, sniffled, twitched. “Not really.”

“Not really? That’s very interesting. So where can we sit down and have a little talk?” From the trial-and-error experience of countless interrogations, Gurney had come to appreciate the unsettling effect of casual non sequiturs.

“Uh …” Ballston looked around him as though he were in someone else’s house. “In there?” He extended his arm cautiously toward a broad archway that led to an elegant, antique-furnished living room. “We could sit in there.”

“Wherever you’re comfortable, Jordan. We’ll sit down. Relax. Have a conversation.”