On the subject of my disability, I have a good shot at a three-quarter, tax-free pension for life. This is the NYPD equivalent of going to Atlantic City, tripping over a tear in the rug at Trump’s Castle, and hitting your head on a slot machine in full view of a liability lawyer. Jackpot!
“Did you hear me?”
“What?”
“I said, they were found at 5:45 P.M. by a neighbor—”
“Am I on retainer now?”
“Sure. They were both shot once in the head, and the neighbor found them lying on their patio deck—”
“Max, I’m going to see all this. Tell me about the neighbor.”
“Right. His name is Edgar Murphy, an old gent. He heard the Gordons’ boat come in about 5:30, and about fifteen minutes later he walks over and finds them murdered. Never heard a shot.”
“Hearing aid?”
“No. I asked him. His wife’s got okay hearing, too, according to Edgar. So maybe it was a silencer. Maybe they’re deafer than they think.”
“But they heard the boat. Edgar is sure about the time?”
“Pretty sure. He called us at 5:51 P.M., so that’s close.”
“Right.” I looked at my watch. It was now 7:10 P.M. Max must have had the bright idea to come collect me very soon after he got on the scene. I assumed the Suffolk County homicide guys were there by now. They would have come in from a little town called Yaphank where the county police are headquartered and which is about an hour drive to where the Gordons lived.
Max was going on about this and that, and I tried to get my mind into gear, but it had been about five months since I had to think about things like this. I was tempted to snap, “Just the facts, Max!” but I let him drone on. Also, “Jeremiah Was a Bullfrog” kept playing in my head, and it’s really annoying, as you know, when you can’t get a tune out of your head. Especially that one.
I looked out the open side window. We were driving along the main east-west road, which is conveniently called Main Road, toward a place called Nassau Point where the Gordons live—or lived. The North Fork is sort of like Cape Cod, a windswept jut of land surrounded on three sides by water and covered with history.
The full-time population is a little thin, about twenty thousand folks, but there are a lot of summer and weekend types, and the new wineries have attracted day-trippers. Put up a winery and you get ten thousand wine-sipping yuppie slime from the nearest urban center. Never fails.
Anyway, we turned south onto Nassau Point, which is a two-mile-long, cleaver-shaped point of land that cuts into the Great Peconic Bay. From my dock to the Gordons’ dock is about four miles.
Nassau Point has been a summer place since about the 1920s, and the homes range from simple bungalows to substantial establishments. Albert Einstein summered here, and it was from here in nineteen-thirty-whatever that he wrote his famous “Nassau Point Letter” to Roosevelt urging the president to get moving on the atomic bomb. The rest, as they say, is history.
Interestingly, Nassau Point is still home to a number of scientists; some work at Brookhaven National Laboratory, a secret nuclear something or other about thirty-five miles west of here, and some scientists work on Plum Island, a very top secret biological research site which is so scary it has to be housed on an island. Plum Island is about two miles off the tip of Orient Point, which is the last piece of land on the North Fork—next stop Europe.
Not incidental to all this, Tom and Judy Gordon were biologists who worked on Plum Island, and you can bet that both Sylvester Maxwell and John Corey were thinking about that. I asked Max, “Did you call the Feds?”
He shook his head.
“Why not?”
“Murder is not a federal offense.”
“You know what I’m talking about, Max.”
Chief Maxwell didn’t respond.
CHAPTER 2
We approached the Gordon house nestled on a small lane on the west shore of the point. The house was a 1960s ranch type that had been made over into a 1990s contemporary. The Gordons, from somewhere out in the Midwest, and uncertain about their career paths, were leasing the house with an option to buy, as they once mentioned to me. I think if I worked with the stuff they worked with, I, too, wouldn’t make any long-range plans. Hell, I wouldn’t even buy green bananas.
I turned my attention to the scene outside the windows of the Jeep. On this pleasant, shady lane, little knots of neighbors and kids on bicycles stood around in the long purple shadows, talking, and looking at the Gordon house. Three Southold police cars were parked in front of the house, as were two unmarked cars. A county forensic van blocked the driveway. It’s a good policy not to drive onto or park at a crime scene so as not to destroy evidence, and I was encouraged to see that Max’s little rural police force was up to snuff so far.
Also on the street were two TV vans, one from a local Long Island news station, the other an NBC News van.
I noticed, too, a bunch of reporter types chatting up the neighbors, whipping microphones in front of anyone who opened his mouth. It wasn’t quite a media circus yet, but it would be when the rest of the news sharks got on to the Plum Island connection.
Yellow crime scene tape was wrapped from tree to tree, cordoning off the house and grounds. Max pulled up behind the forensic van and we got out. A few cameras flashed, then a bunch of big video lights went on, and we were being taped for the eleven o’clock news. I hoped the disability board wasn’t watching, not to mention the perps who’d tried to ice moi, and who would now know where I was.
Standing in the driveway was a uniformed officer with a pad—the crime scene recorder—and Max gave him my name, title, and so forth, so I was officially logged in, now subject to subpoenas from the DA and potential defense attorneys. This was exactly what I didn’t want, but I had been home when fate called.
We walked up the gravel driveway and passed through a moongate into the backyard, which was mostly cedar deck, multileveled as it cascaded from the house down to the bay and ended at the long dock where the Gordons’ boat was tied. It was really a beautiful evening, and I wished Tom and Judy were alive to see it.
I observed the usual contingent of forensic lab people, plus three uniformed Southold town cops and a woman overdressed in a light tan suit jacket and matching skirt, white blouse, and sensible shoes. At first I thought she might be family, called in to ID the bodies and so forth, but then I saw she was holding a notebook and pen and looking official.
Lying on the nice silver-gray cedar deck, side by side on their backs, were Tom and Judy, their feet toward the house and their heads toward the bay, arms and legs askew as though they were making snow angels. A police photographer was taking pictures of the bodies, and the flash lit up the deck and did a weird thing to the corpses, making them look sort of ghoulish for a microsecond, à la Night of the Living Dead.
I stared at the bodies. Tom and Judy Gordon were in their mid-thirties, very good shape, and even in death a uniquely handsome couple—so much so that they were sometimes mistaken for celebrities when they dined out in the more fashionable spots.
They both wore blue jeans, running shoes, and polo shirts. Tom’s shirt was black with some marine supply logo on the front, and Judy’s was a more chic hunter green with a little yellow sailboat on the left breast.
Max, I suspected, didn’t see many murdered people in the course of a year, but he probably saw enough natural deaths, suicides, car wrecks, and such so that he wasn’t going to go green. He looked grim, concerned, pensive, and professional, but kept glancing at the bodies as if he couldn’t believe there were murdered people lying right there on the nice deck.
Yours truly, on the other hand, working as I do in a city that counts about 1,500 murders a year, am no stranger to death, as they say. I don’t see all 1,500 corpses, but I see enough so that I’m no longer surprised, sickened, shocked, or saddened. Yet, when it’s someone you knew and liked, it makes a difference.
I walked across the deck and stopped near Tom Gordon. Tom h
ad a bullet hole at the bridge of his nose. Judy had a hole in the side of her left temple.
Assuming there was only one shooter, then Tom, being a strapping guy, had probably gotten it first, a single shot to the head; then Judy, turning in disbelief toward her husband, had taken the second bullet in the side of her temple. The two bullets had probably gone through their skulls and dropped into the bay. Bad luck for ballistics.
I’ve never been to a homicide scene that didn’t have a smell—unbelievably foul, if the victims had been dead awhile. If there was blood, I could always smell it, and if a body cavity had been penetrated, there was usually a peculiar smell of innards. This is something I’d like not to smell again; the last time I smelled blood, it was my own. Anyway, the fact that this was an outdoor killing helped.
I looked around and couldn’t see any place close by where the shooter could hide. The sliding glass door of the house was open and maybe the shooter had been in there, but that was twenty feet from the bodies, and not many people can get a good head shot from that distance with a pistol. I was living proof of that. At twenty feet you go for a body shot first, then get in close and finish up with a head shot. So there were two possibilities: the shooter was using a rifle, not a pistol, or, the shooter was able to walk right up to them without causing them any alarm. Someone normal-looking, nonthreatening, maybe even someone they knew. The Gordons had gotten out of their boat, walked up the deck, they saw this person at some point and kept walking toward him or her. The person raised a pistol from no more than five feet away and drilled both of them.
I looked beyond the bodies and saw little colored pin flags stuck in the cedar planking here and there. “Red is for blood?”
Max nodded. “White is skull, gray is—”
“Got it.” Glad I wore the flip-flops.
Max informed me, “The exit wounds are big, like the whole back of their skulls are gone. And, as you can see, the entry wounds are big. I’m guessing a .45 caliber. We haven’t found the two bullets yet. They probably went into the bay.”
I didn’t reply.
Max motioned toward the sliding glass doors. He informed me, “The sliding door was forced and the house is ransacked. No big items missing—TV, computer, CD player, and all that stuff is there. But there may be jewelry and small stuff missing.”
I contemplated this a moment. The Gordons, like most egghead types on a government salary, didn’t own much jewelry, art, or anything like that. A druggie would grab the pricey electronics and such, and beat feet.
Max said, “Here’s what I think—a burglar or burglars were doing their thing, he, she, or they see the Gordons approaching through the glass door; he, she, or they step out onto the deck, fire, and flee.” He looked at me. “Right?”
“If you say so.”
“I say so.”
“Got it.” Sounded better than Home of Top Secret Germ Warfare Scientists Ransacked and Scientists Found Murdered.
Max moved closer to me and said softly, “What do you think, John?”
“Was that a hundred an hour?”
“Come on, guy, don’t jerk me around. We got maybe a world-class double murder on our hands.”
I replied, “But you just said it could be a simple homeowner-comes-on-the-scene-and-gets-iced kind of thing.”
“Yeah, but it turns out that the homeowners are … whatever they are.” He looked at me and said, “Reconstruct.”
“Okay. You understand that the perp did not fire from that sliding glass door. He was standing right in front of them. The door you found open was closed then so that the Gordons saw nothing unusual as they approached the house. The gunman was possibly sitting here in one of these chairs, and he may have arrived by boat since he wasn’t going to park his car out front where the world could see it. Or maybe he was dropped off. In either case, the Gordons either knew him or were not unduly troubled by his presence on their back deck, and maybe it’s a woman, nice and sweet-looking, and the Gordons walk toward her and she toward them. They may have exchanged a word or two, but very soon after, the murderer produced a pistol and blew them away.”
Chief Maxwell nodded.
“If the perp was looking for anything inside, it wasn’t jewelry or cash, it was papers. You know—bug stuff. He didn’t kill the Gordons because they stumbled onto him; he killed them because he wanted them dead. He was waitingfor them. You know all this.”
He nodded.
I said, “Then again, Max, I’ve seen a lot of bungled and screwed-up burglaries where the homeowner got killed, and the burglar got nothing. When it’s a druggie thing, nothing makes sense.”
Chief Maxwell rubbed his chin as he contemplated a hop-head with a gun on one hand, a cool assassin on the other, and whatever might fall in between.
While he did that, I knelt beside the bodies, closest to Judy. Her eyes were open, really wide open, and she looked surprised. Tom’s eyes were open, too, but he looked more peaceful than his wife. The flies had found the blood around the wounds, and I was tempted to shoo them away, but it didn’t matter.
I examined the bodies more closely without touching anything that would get the forensic types all bent up. I looked at hair, nails, skin, clothing, shoes, and so on. When I was done, I patted Judy’s cheek and stood.
Maxwell asked me, “How long did you know them?”
“Since about June.”
“Have you been to this house before?”
“Yes. You get to ask me one more question.”
“Well … I have to ask…. Where were you about 5:30 P.M.?”
“With your girlfriend.”
He smiled, but he was not amused.
I asked Max, “How well did you know them?”
He hesitated a moment, then replied, “Just socially. My girlfriend drags me to wine tastings and crap like that.”
“Does she? And how did you know I knew them?”
“They mentioned they met a New York cop who was convalescing. I said I knew you.”
“Small world,” I said.
He didn’t reply.
I looked around the backyard. To the east was the house, and to the south was a thick line of tall hedges, and beyond the hedges was the home of Edgar Murphy, the neighbor who found the bodies. To the north was an open marsh area that stretched a few hundred yards to the next house, which was barely visible. To the west, the deck dropped in three levels toward the bay where the dock ran out about a hundred feet to the deeper water. At the end of the dock was the Gordons’ boat, a sleek white fiberglass speedboat—a Formula three-something, about thirty feet long. It was named the Spirochete, which as we know from Bio 101 is the nasty bug that causes syphilis. The Gordons had a sense of humor.
Max said, “Edgar Murphy stated that the Gordons sometimes used their own boat to commute to Plum Island. They took the government ferry when the weather was bad and in the winter.”
I nodded. I knew that.
He continued, “I’m going to call Plum Island and see if I can find out what time they left. The sea is calm, the tide is coming in, and the wind is from the east, so they could make maximum time between Plum and here.”
“I’m not a sailor.”
“Well, I am. It could have taken them as little as one hour to get here from Plum, but usually it’s an hour and a half, two at the outside. The Murphys heard the Gordon boat come in about 5:30, so now we see if we can find out the time they left Plum, then we know with a little more certainty that it was the Gordon boat that the Murphys heard at 5:30.”
“Right.” I looked around the deck. There was the usual patio and deck furniture—table, chairs, outdoor bar, sun umbrellas, and such. Small bushes and plants grew through cutouts in the deck, but basically there was no place a person could conceal him- or herself and ambush two people out in the open.
“What are you thinking about?” Max asked.
“Well, I’m thinking about the great American deck. Big, maintenance-free wood, multileveled, landscaped, and all that. Not like my ol
d-fashioned narrow porch that always needs painting. If I bought my uncle’s house, I could build a deck down to the bay like this one. But then I wouldn’t have as much lawn.”
Max let a few seconds pass, then asked, “That’s what you’re thinking about?”
“Yeah. What are you thinking about?”
“I’m thinking about a double murder.”
“Good. Tell me what else you’ve learned here.”
“Okay. I felt the engines—” He jerked his thumb toward the boat. “They were still warm when I arrived, like the bodies.”
I nodded. The sun was starting to dip into the bay, and it was getting noticeably darker and cooler, and I was getting chilly in my T-shirt and shorts, sans underwear.
September is a truly golden month up and down the Atlantic coast, from the Outer Banks to Newfoundland. The days are mild, the nights pleasant for sleeping; it is summer without the heat and humidity, autumn without the cold rains. The summer birds haven’t left yet, and the first migratory birds from up north are taking a break on their way south. I suppose if I left Manhattan and wound up here, I’d get into this nature thing, boating, fishing, and all that.
Max was saying, “And something else—the line is clove-hitched around the piling.”
“Well, there’s a major break in the case. What the hell’s a line?”
“The rope. The boat’s rope isn’t tied to the cleats on the dock. The rope is just temporarily hitched to the pilings— the big poles that come out of the water. I deduce that they intended to go out in the boat again, soon.”
“Good observation.”
“Right. So, any ideas?”