Kim was watching Gurney’s face as he slipped his phone back into his pocket. “What did he say?”
“He said maybe the day after tomorrow.”
At Gurney’s insistence they took separate cars on their trip to Barkham Dell. In the event something unexpected arose, he wanted the flexibility to separate himself from Kim’s series of interviews.
She drove faster than he did, and they were out of sight of each other before they reached the interstate. It was a beautiful day—the only one so far that captured the concept of the season. The sky was a piercing blue. The widely scattered little clouds were radiant puffy things. Patches of tiny snowdrop flowers were blossoming in shaded areas along the highway. When the time-to-destination on his GPS told him he was halfway there, Gurney stopped for gas. After he filled his tank, he went into the station’s convenience store for a container of coffee. Minutes later, sitting in the car with the windows open, sipping his French roast, he decided to call Jack Hardwick and ask for two more favors. He was concerned that the quid pro quo, whenever it might come, would be substantial. But he wanted information, and this was the most efficient way to get it. He placed the call, half hoping for voice mail. Instead he got the sarcastic sandpaper voice of the man himself.
“Davey boy! Bloodhound on the trail of evil incarnate! What the fuck do you want from me now?”
“Actually, quite a lot.”
“You don’t say! What a goddamn shock!”
“I’ll be seriously indebted to you.”
“You already are, ace.”
“True.”
“Just so long as you know it. Speak.”
“First, I’d like to know everything there is to know about a Syracuse University student by the name of Robert Meese, aka Robert Montague. Second, I’d like to know everything there is to know about Emilio Corazon, father of Kim Corazon, former husband of New York City journalist Connie Clarke. Emilio dropped out of sight and out of communication ten years ago this week. Family efforts to locate him have failed.”
“When you say ‘everything there is to know,’ what exactly—”
“What I mean is, everything that can be dug up within the next two or three days.”
“That’s it?”
“You’ll do it?”
“Just don’t forget all that indebtedness.”
“I won’t. Jack, I really appreciate—” Gurney began. Then he noticed that the connection had already been broken.
After he resumed his journey, he followed the instructions of his GPS off the interstate and onto a series of increasingly rural byways until he came to the turn for Foxledge Lane. There, parked at the side of the road, he saw the red Miata. Kim waved, pulled out onto the pavement in front of him, and drove slowly up the lane.
They didn’t have far to go. The first driveway, flanked by impressive drystone walls, belonged to something called the Whittingham Hunt Club. The second driveway, a few hundred yards farther on, bore no identification or visible address, but Kim turned in and Gurney followed her.
Eric Stone’s home was at the end of a quarter-mile driveway. It was a very large New England Colonial. Everywhere bits of paint were beginning to peel. The gutters needed tightening and straightening. There were frost-heave cracks in the driveway. Debris from the recent winter littered the lawn areas and flower beds.
There was an uneven brick walk connecting the driveway with the three steps leading up to the front door. The walk and the steps were covered with rotting leaves and twigs. When Gurney and Kim were halfway along this path, the door opened and a man emerged onto the broad top step. It occurred to Gurney that the man was shaped like an egg. His narrow-shouldered, large-bellied physique was wrapped from neck to knees in a spotless white apron.
“Do be careful. Please. It’s a veritable jungle out there.” His theatrical delivery was accompanied by a toothy smile and anxious eyes that fastened on Gurney. His short hair, prematurely gray, was neatly parted. His small pink face was freshly shaved.
“Gingersnaps!” he announced cheerily as he moved aside to let them into the big house.
As Gurney stepped past him, the scent of talcum powder gave way to the distinctive, spicy-sweet aroma of the only kind of cookie he thoroughly disliked.
“Just follow the hall all the way to the back. The kitchen is the coziest spot in the house.”
In addition to the staircase to the second floor, the wide traditional center hall included several doors, but the patina of dust on the knobs suggested that they were rarely opened.
The kitchen at the back of the house was cozy only in the sense of being warm and full of oven aromas. It was huge and high-ceilinged and contained all the professional-commercial appliances that a decade or two earlier had become de rigueur in the homes of the well-to-do. The stove’s ten-foot-tall exhaust hood brought to Gurney’s mind a sacrificial altar in an Indiana Jones movie.
“My mother was a devotee of quality,” said the egg-shaped man. Then he added, with a startling echo of Gurney’s passing thought, “She was an acolyte at the altar of perfection.”
“How long have you lived here?” asked Kim.
Instead of answering the question, he turned to Gurney. “I definitely know who you are, and I suspect you know who I am, but I still think it would be appropriate to be introduced.”
“Oh, stupid me!” said Kim. “I’m so sorry. Dave Gurney, Eric Stone.”
“Delighted,” said Stone, extending his hand with an ingratiating smile. His large, even teeth were nearly as white as his apron. “Your very impressive reputation precedes you.”
“Nice to meet you,” said Gurney. Stone’s hand was warm, soft, and unpleasantly moist.
“I told Eric about the article my mother wrote about you,” said Kim.
After an awkward silence, Stone pointed to a fashionably distressed pine table at the end of the kitchen farthest from the grand stove. “Shall we?”
When Gurney and Kim had taken their seats, Stone asked if either one wanted anything to drink. “I have various coffees in various strengths, as well as teas in countless herbal varieties. I also have some peculiar pomegranate soda. Any takers?”
They both declined, and Stone, making an exaggerated show of disappointment, sat down in the third chair at the table. Kim took three small cameras and two mini-tripods out of her shoulder bag. She set up two of the cameras on the tripods, one facing Stone, one facing herself.
She then explained the production philosophy at length—how “the folks at RAM” were intent on ensuring that the look and feeling of the interview was as simple and low-tech as possible, keeping it within the same visual and audio framework that was familiar to all those viewers who were accustomed to recording family moments on their iPhones. The goal was to keep it real. Keep it simple. An unpredictable conversation, not a scripted scene. With room lighting, not stage lighting. Nonprofessional. Human beings being human. Et cetera.
Whether Stone had any reaction to this declaration of authenticity was unclear. His mind seemed to wander somewhere else, refocusing only when Kim wrapped up her comments by asking, “Do you have any questions?”
“Only one,” he said, turning to Gurney. “Do you think they’ll ever get him?”
“The Good Shepherd? I’d like to think so.”
Stone rolled his eyes. “In your profession I bet you give a lot of answers like that—answers that aren’t really answers at all.” His tone was more depressed than challenging.
Gurney shrugged. “I don’t know enough yet to tell you anything more.”
Kim made some final framing adjustments in the viewfinders of her tripod cameras and put them both in HD-movie mode. She did the same with the third camera, which she kept in her hand. Then she ran her fingers back through her hair, sat up straighter in her chair, smoothed a few wrinkles out of her blazer, smiled, and began speaking.
“Eric, I want to thank you again for your willingness to participate in The Orphans of Murder. Our goal is an honest, unrehearsed presen
tation of your thoughts and feelings. Nothing is off-limits, nothing is out of bounds. We’re in your home, not on a studio set. The story is yours, the emotions are yours. Begin wherever you wish.”
He took a long, shaky breath. “I’ll begin by answering the question you asked me when you walked into the kitchen a few minutes ago. You asked me how long I’ve lived here. The answer is twenty years. Half of those years in heaven, half in hell.” He paused. “The first ten years, I lived in a world of sunlight cast by a remarkable woman, the last ten years in shadowland.”
Kim let a long silence pass before responding in a soft, sad voice. “Sometimes it’s the depth of the pain that tells us how much we’ve lost.”
Stone nodded. “Mother was a rock. A rocket. A volcano. She was a force of nature. Let me repeat that—a force of nature. It’s a cliché, but a good one. Losing her was like having the law of gravity repealed. The law of gravity—repealed! Imagine that. A world without gravity. A world with nothing to hold it together.”
The man’s eyes were glistening with incipient tears.
Kim’s next words were a surprise. She asked Stone if she could have a cookie.
He burst out laughing—a giddy, hysterical outpouring that sent the tears down his cheeks. “Yes, yes, of course you can! My gingersnaps just came out of the oven, but there are also pecan chocolate chips, buttery-buttery shortbreads, and oatmeal raisin. All baked today.”
“I think oatmeal raisin,” she said.
“An excellent choice, madam.” He sounded like he was, through his tears, attempting to mimic a smarmy sommelier. He went to the far end of the kitchen and retrieved a plate heaped with large brown cookies from the top of the oven. Kim held up her third camera, keeping him in the frame all the while.
As he was about to lay the plate on the table, a thought seemed to stop him. He turned to Gurney. “Ten years,” he said, as if some new significance in the number had taken him by surprise. “Exactly ten years. A full decade.” The pitch of his voice rose dramatically. “Ten years, and I’m still a basket case. What do you make of that, Detective? Does my pathetic condition motivate you to find, arrest, and execute the evil fucker who murdered the most incredible woman in the world? Or am I so ridiculous you just want to laugh?”
Gurney tended to ice over at displays of emotion. Now was no exception. He answered with a matter-of-fact blandness. “I’ll do everything I can.”
Stone gave him an archly skeptical look but didn’t pursue the issue.
He offered them coffee again, and again they both declined.
After that, Kim spent some time eliciting descriptions of the man’s life before and after his mother’s murder. In Stone’s detailed narrative, life before was better in every way. Sharon Stone had been an increasingly successful player at the top end of the second-home real-estate market. And she lived her personal life at the top end in every way, sharing that luxury freely with her son. Shortly before the brutal intervention of the Good Shepherd, she’d agreed to cosign a $3 million financing agreement to set Eric up as owner of the premier inn and restaurant in the Finger Lakes wine country.
Without her supportive signature, however, the deal collapsed. Instead of enjoying the life of an elite restaurateur and hotelier, he was at thirty-nine living in a house whose estate grounds he couldn’t begin to maintain and trying to make a living baking cookies in his late mother’s dream kitchen for local gourmet shops and B&Bs.
After an hour or so, Kim finally closed the small notebook she’d been consulting and surprised Gurney by asking if he had any questions of his own.
“Maybe a couple, if Mr. Stone doesn’t mind.”
“Mr. Stone? Please, call me Eric.”
“All right, Eric. Do you know if your mother ever had any prior business or personal contact with any of the other victims?”
He winced. “Not that I know of.”
“Any enemies you knew of?”
“Mother did not suffer fools gladly.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning she ruffled feathers, stepped on toes. Real estate, particularly at the level at which Mother operated, is a very competitive business, and she didn’t like to have her time wasted by idiots.”
“Do you remember why she bought a Mercedes?”
“Of course.” Stone grinned. “Classy. Stylish. Powerful. Agile. A major cut above the others. Just like Mother.”
“Over the past ten years, have you had any contact with anyone connected with the other victims?”
He winced again. “That word. I don’t like it.”
“What word?”
“ ‘Victim.’ I don’t think of her that way. It sounds so horribly passive, helpless, all the things that Mother wasn’t.”
“I’ll put it another way. Regarding any contact with the families—”
Stone interrupted. “The answer is yes, there was some contact at first—a kind of support group that came together after the shootings.”
“Were all the families involved?”
“Not really. The surgeon who lived in Williamstown had a son who joined us once or twice, then announced he had no interest in a grief group because he had no grief. He said he was glad his father was dead. He was quite awful. Totally hostile. Very hurtful.”
Gurney glanced at Kim.
“Jimi Brewster,” she said.
“Is that all?” asked Stone.
“Just two more quick ones. Did your mother ever mention anyone she was afraid of?”
“Never. She was the most fearless human being who ever walked the earth.”
“Was ‘Sharon Stone’ her real name?”
“Yes and no. Mostly yes. Her name was officially Mary Sharon Stone. After the huge success of Basic Instinct, she had a makeover—changed her hair from brown to blond, dropped the ‘Mary,’ and promoted the remarkable new persona. Mother was a promotional genius. She even got the idea of running photos of herself on billboards, sitting with her legs crossed in a short skirt, à la the famous scene in the film.”
Gurney indicated to Kim that he had no more questions.
Stone added with an unsettling smile, “Mother had legs to die for.”
An hour later Gurney pulled in next to Kim’s Miata in front of the bleak strip-mall office of an accounting firm: Bickers, Mellani, and Flemm. It was situated between a yoga studio and a travel agency on the outskirts of Middletown.
Kim was on her cell phone. Gurney sat back and mused on what he would do if his name were Flemm. Would he change it, or would he wear it as a badge of defiance? Was the refusal to change one’s name, when the name was as patently absurd as a donkey tattoo on one’s forehead, laudably honest or stupidly stubborn? At what point did pride become dysfunctional?
Christ, why am I occupying my brain with this nonsense?
A sharp little rap and Kim’s purposeful face at his side window brought him back to the moment. He got out of his car and followed her into the office.
The front door opened into an unimpressive waiting area with a few unmatched chairs against one wall. Worn copies of SmartMoney were fanned out on a small Danish Modern coffee table. A waist-high barrier separated this area from a smaller area that contained two bare desks in front of a wall with a single door, which was closed. Atop the barrier was an old-fashioned bell—a little silver dome that had a raised plunger on the top.
Kim tapped firmly on the plunger, producing a surprisingly loud ding. She repeated this half a minute later, with no response. As she was reaching for her phone, the door in the rear wall opened. The man in the doorway was thin, pale, tired-looking. He gazed at them without curiosity.
“Mr. Mellani?” said Kim.
“Yes.” His voice was dry and colorless.
“I’m Kim Corazon.”
“Yes.”
“We spoke on the phone? About my coming here to prepare for our interview?”
“Yes, I remember.”
“Well …” She looked around in mild confusion. “Where would you like to …?
”
“Oh. Yes. You can come into my office.” He stepped back inside.
Gurney opened a swinging panel in the low barrier and held it for Kim. It was dusty, like the two unoccupied desks behind it. He followed her into the back office—a windowless room with a large mahogany table, four straight-backed chairs, and bookcases on three of the four walls. The bookcases were filled with fat volumes on accounting rules and tax laws. The pervasive dust had settled on the books as well. The air smelled stale.
The only illumination came from a desk lamp at the far end of the table. There was a fluorescent fixture on the ceiling, but it was turned off. As Kim surveyed the room for places to set up her cameras, she asked if it could be turned on.
Mellani shrugged and flipped the switch. After a series of hesitant flashes, the light stabilized, producing a low buzz. The fluorescent glow emphasized the paleness of his skin and the shadows below his eyes. There was something distinctly cadaverous about him.
As she had done in Stone’s kitchen, she went through the process of arranging the cameras. When she was finished, she and Gurney sat on one side of the mahogany table, Mellani on the other. At that point she gave, almost word for word, the same speech she’d given Stone about the production goals of informality, simplicity, naturalness—keeping the interview as close as possible to the kind of conversation two friends might have in their home, loose and candid.
Mellani didn’t reply.
She told him that he should feel free to say anything he wished.
He said nothing, just sat and stared at her.
She looked around the claustrophobic space, whose inhospitable drabness the ceiling light had only managed to enhance. “So,” she said awkwardly, seeming to realize that she would have to be the motivator of whatever conversation they were going to have, “this is your main office?”
Mellani seemed to consider this. “Only office.”
“And your partners? They … they’re here?”