Читать книгу White River Burning - John Verdon - Страница 14

The driveway led them to the front of the house. The imposing dark wood facade appeared to be perfectly square, perhaps fifty feet in both height and width.

“Is that what I think it is?” asked Madeleine with an amused frown.

“What do you mean?”

“Look closely. The outline of a letter.”

Gurney stared. He could just barely make out the distressed outline of a giant G—like a faded letter on a child’s alphabet block—imprinted on the house.

While they were still gazing at it, a young man with chartreuse hair, wearing a loose white shirt and skinny jeans, came running toward the car. He opened the passenger door and held it while Madeleine got out, then hurried around to the driver’s side.

“You and the lady can go right in, sir.” He handed Gurney a small card bearing the name “Dylan” and a cell number. “When you’re ready to leave, call this number and I’ll bring your car around.” Flashing a smile, he got into the dusty Outback and drove it around the side of the house.

“Nice touch,” said Madeleine as they walked across the patio.

Gurney nodded vaguely. “How do you know Trish Gelter?”

“I’ve told you three times. Vinyasa.”

“Vin . . .”

She sighed. “My yoga class. The one I go to every Sunday morning.”

As they reached the front door, it slid open like the pocket door of an enormous closet, revealing a woman with a mass of wavy blond hair.

“Mahdehlennnne!” she cried, giving the name an exaggerated French inflection that made it sound like a jokey endearment. “Welcome to Skyview!” She grinned, showing off an intriguing Lauren Hutton gap between her front teeth. “You look fabulous! Love the dress! And you brought the famous detective! Wonderful! Come in, come in!” She stood to the side and, with a hand holding a frosted blue cocktail, waved them into a cavernous space unlike any home Gurney had ever seen.

It seemed to consist of a single cube-shaped room—if anything so big could be called a room. Cubical objects of various sizes were being used as tables and chairs on which clusters of guests perched and conversed. Sets of cubes pushed together served as kitchen counters at each end of a restaurant-sized brushed-steel stove. No two cubes were the same color. As Gurney had noted from the outside, the five-story-high walls had no windows, yet the whole interior was suffused with a sunny brightness. The roof was constructed of clear glass panels. The sky above it was a cloudless blue.

Madeleine was smiling. “Trish, this place is amazing!”

“Get yourself a drink and have a good look around. It’s full of surprises. Meanwhile, I’ll introduce your shy husband to some interesting people.”

“Good luck with that,” said Madeleine, heading for a bar that consisted of two four-foot-high cubes, one fire-engine red, one acid green. Trish Gelter turned to Gurney, moistening her lips with the tip of her tongue. “I’ve been reading all about you, and now I get to meet the supercop in person.”

He grimaced.

“That’s exactly what New York magazine called you. It said you had the highest homicide arrest and conviction rate in the history of the department.”

“That article ran more than five years ago, and it’s still an embarrassment.”

His NYPD record was a distinction he didn’t mind having, since it occasionally had the practical value of opening a few doors. But he also found it embarrassing. “Magazines like to create superheroes and supervillains. I’m neither.”

“You look like a hero. You look like Daniel Craig.”

He smiled awkwardly, eager to change the subject. “That big letter out there on the front of the house—”

“A postmodern joke.” She winked at him.

“Pardon?”

“How much do you know about postmodern design?”

“Nothing.”

“How much do you want to know about it?”

“Maybe just enough to understand the big G.”

She sipped her blue cocktail and flashed her gap-toothed grin. “Irony is the essence of postmodern design.”

“The G is an ironic statement?”

“Not just the G. The whole house. A work of ironic art. A rebellion against humorless, boring modernism. The fact that this house and everything in it was designed by Kiriki Kilili says it all. Kiriki loves to stick it to the modernists with his cube jokes. The modernists want a house to be an impersonal machine. Pure efficiency.” She wrinkled her nose as if efficiency had a foul odor. “Kiriki wants it to be a place of fun, joy, pleasure.” She held Gurney’s gaze for an extra couple of seconds on that last word.

“Does the big G stand for something?”

“Giddy, goofy, Gelter—take your choice.”

“It’s a joke?”

“It’s a way of treating the house as a toy, an amusement, an absurdity.”

“Your husband is a playful fellow, is he?”

“Marv? Omigod, no. Marv’s a financial genius. Very serious. The man shits money. I’m the fun one. See the fireplace?” She pointed to one of the walls, at the base of which was a hearth at least ten feet wide. The flames across the width flickered in the full spectrum of a rainbow. “Sometimes I program it for all those colors. Or just green. I love a green fire. I’m like a witch with magic powers. A witch who always gets what she wants.”

Mounted on the wall above the hearth was a TV screen, the largest he’d ever seen. It was displaying three adjacent talking heads in the divided format of a cable news program. Several of the party guests were watching it.

“Trish?” A loud male voice from a corner of the room broke through the general hubbub.

She leaned close to Gurney. “I’m being summoned. I fear I have to be introduced to someone horribly boring. I feel it in my bones.” She managed to make her bones sound like a sex organ. “Don’t go away. You’re the first homicide detective I’ve ever met. An actual murder expert. I have so many questions.” She gave his arm a little squeeze before heading across the room, sashaying through an obstacle course of cubes.

Gurney was trying to make sense of it all.

Postmodern irony?

The big G was a symbol of absurdity?

The whole house was a multimillion-dollar joke?

A witch who gets whatever she wants?

And where the hell were the other rooms?

In particular, where was the bathroom?

As he looked around at the chatting guests, he spotted Madeleine. She was talking to a willowy woman with short black hair and catlike eyes. He made his way over.

Madeleine gave him a funny look. “Something wrong?”

“Just . . . taking it all in.”

She gestured toward the woman. “This is Filona. From Vinyasa.”

“Ah. Vinyasa. Nice to meet you. Interesting name.”

“It came to me in a dream.”

“Did it?”

“I love this space, don’t you?”

“It’s really something. Do you have any idea where the restrooms are?”

“They’re in the companion cube out back, except for the guest bathroom over there.” She pointed to an eight-foot-high pair of vertically stacked cubes a few feet from where they were standing. “The door is on the other side. It’s voice-activated. Everything in this house you either talk to or control with your phone. Like it’s all alive. Organic.”

“What do you say to the bathroom door?”

“Whatever you want.”

Gurney glanced at Madeleine, searching for guidance.

She gave him a perky little shrug. “The voice thing actually does work. Just tell it you need to use the bathroom. That’s what I heard someone do a few minutes ago.”

He stared at her. “Good to know.”

Filona added, “It’s not just the bathroom. You can tell the lamps how bright you want them. You can talk to the thermostat—higher, lower, whatever.” She paused with a half-somewhere-else sort of smile. “This is the most fun place you could ever find out here in the middle of nowhere, you know? Like the last thing you’d expect, which is what makes it so great. Like, wow, what a surprise.”

“Filona works at the LORA shelter,” said Madeleine.

He smiled. “What do you do there?”

“I’m an RC. There are three of us.”

All that came to mind was Roman Catholic. “RC?”

“Recovery companion. Sorry about that. When you’re in something, you forget that not everyone else is in it.”

He could feel Madeleine’s be nice gaze on him.

“So LORA is . . . pretty special?”

“Very special. It’s all about the spirit. People think taking care of abandoned animals is about getting rid of their worms and fleas and giving them food and shelter. But that’s just for the body. LORA heals the spirit. People buy animals like they were toys, then throw them out when they don’t act like toys. Do you know how many cats, dogs, rabbits are tossed out every day? Like garbage? Thousands. Nobody thinks about the pain to those little souls. That’s why we’re here tonight. LORA does what no one else is doing. We give animals friendship.”

The voices of the TV talking heads had gotten louder, more argumentative. Occasional words and phrases were now clearly audible. Gurney tried to stay focused on Filona. “You give them friendship?”

“We have conversations.”

“With the animals?”

“Of course.”

“Filona is also a painter,” said Madeleine. “A very accomplished one. We saw some of her work at the Kettleboro Art Show.”

“I think I remember. Purple skies?”

“My burgundy cosmologies.”

“Ah. Burgundy.”

“My burgundy paintings are done with beet juice.”

“I had no idea. If you’ll excuse me for just a minute . . .” He gestured toward the cubical structure housing the bathroom. “I’ll be back.”

On the far side of it he found a recessed door panel. Next to the panel there was a small red light above what he guessed was a pinhole microphone. He further guessed that the red light indicated that the bathroom was occupied. In no hurry to get back to the discussion of burgundy cosmologies, he stayed where he was.

The variety of people with whom Madeleine cultivated friendships never stopped surprising him. While he tended to be attuned to the dishonesty or loose screw in a new acquaintance, her focus was on a person’s capacity for goodness, liveliness, inventiveness. While he found most people in some way warranting caution, she found them in some way delightful. She managed to do that without being naïve. In fact, she was quite sensitive to real danger.

He checked the little light. It was still red.

His position by the bathroom door gave him an angled view of the wide screen above the hearth. Several more party guests, drinks in hand, were gathering in front of it. The talking heads were gone. With a fanfare of synthesized sound effects, a swirling jumble of colorful letters was coalescing into words:

PEOPLE—PASSIONS—IDEAS—VALUES

THE AMERICAN DREAM IN CRISIS

The list then contracted into a single line to make room for three statements covering the width of the screen, accompanied by a martial-sounding drum roll:

EXPLOSIVE CRISIS—HAPPENING NOW

SEE IT ON BATTLEGROUND TONIGHT

NOTHING’S AS REAL AS RAM-TV

A moment later these statements burst into flying shards, replaced by a video of a nighttime street scene—an angry crowd chanting, “Justice for Laxton . . . Justice for Laxton . . . Justice for Laxton . . .” Demonstrators with signs bearing the same message were thrusting them up and down to the rhythm of the chant. The crowd was being contained by waist-high movable fencing, backed up by a line of cops in riot gear. When the video source was switched to a second camera angle, Gurney could see that the demonstration was taking place in front of a granite-faced building. The words WHITE RIVER POLICE DEPARTMENT were visible on the stone lintel above the front door.

At the bottom of the video screen, the words BATTLEGROUND TONIGHT—ONLY ON RAM-TV were flashing in a bright-red stripe.

The video shifted to what appeared to be another demonstration. The camera was positioned behind the demonstrators, facing the speaker addressing them. He spoke in a voice that rose and fell, paused and stretched in the cadences of an old-time preacher. “We have asked for justice. Begged for justice. Pleaded for justice. Cried for justice. Cried so much. Cried so long. Cried bitter tears for justice. But those days are over. The days of asking and begging and pleading—those days are behind us. Today, on this day that the Lord hath made, on this day of days, on this day of reckoning, we DEMAND justice. Here and now, we DEMAND it. I say it again, lest there be deaf ears in high places—we DEMAND justice. For Laxton Jones, murdered on this very street, we DEMAND justice. Standing on this very street, standing in the place anointed by his innocent blood, we DEMAND justice.” He raised both fists high above his head, his voice swelling up into a hoarse roar. “It is his sacred RIGHT in the sight of God. His RIGHT as a child of God. This RIGHT will not be denied. Justice MUST be done. Justice WILL be done.”

As he spoke, his dramatic pauses were filled with loud amens and other cries and murmurs of approval, growing more insistent as the speech progressed. An identifying line was superimposed on the video like a foreign-film subtitle: “Marcel Jordan, Black Defense Alliance.”

The group standing in front of the Gelters’ TV, holding colorful cocktails and little hors d’oeuvre plates, had grown larger and more attentive, reminding Gurney that nothing attracts a crowd like aggressive emotion. In fact, that one nasty truth seemed to be propelling the race to the bottom in the country’s political discourse and news programming.

As the demonstrators began to sing the old civil rights anthem “We Shall Overcome,” the video scene changed again. It showed a crowd outdoors at night, but very little was happening. The people were loosely assembled with their backs to the camera on a grassy area just beyond a treelined sidewalk. The illumination, evidently coming from overhead streetlights, was partly blocked by the trees. From somewhere out of sight came bits and pieces of an amplified speech, its rhythms indistinctly captured by the camera’s microphone. Two patrol officers in modified riot gear were moving back and forth on the sidewalk, as if to continually vary their lines of sight around the trees and through the crowd.

The fact that nothing of significance was happening in a video selected for broadcast could mean only one thing—that something was about to happen. Just as it occurred to Gurney what it might be, the video frame froze and a statement was superimposed on it:

WARNING!!!

A VIOLENT EVENT IS ABOUT TO BE SHOWN

IF YOU WOULD PREFER NOT TO WITNESS IT

CLOSE YOUR EYES FOR THE NEXT SIXTY SECONDS

The video continued, with the two officers again moving slowly along the sidewalk, their attention on the crowd. Gurney grimaced, his jaw clenched in anticipation of what he was now sure was coming.

Suddenly the head of one of the officers jerked forward, and he fell facedown onto the concrete, hard, as though an invisible hand had slammed him down.

There were cries of shock and dismay from the guests around the TV. Most continued watching the video—the panicky movements of the second officer as he realized what had happened, his frantic attempts at first aid, his shouting into his cell phone, the spreading awareness of trouble, the confused milling and retreat of many of the nearest onlookers.

Two key facts were clear. The shot had come not from the crowd but from somewhere behind the victim. And either the shooter was far enough away or the weapon was sufficiently silenced for the shot not to be picked up by the camera’s audio system.

Gurney was aware of the bathroom door sliding open behind him, but he remained focused on the video. Three more officers arrived on the run, two with weapons drawn; one of the other officers took off his own protective vest and placed it under the man’s head; more cell phone calls were made; the crowd was breaking apart; a distant siren was growing louder.

“Goddamn animals.”

The voice behind Gurney had a rough scraping quality that sharpened the contempt conveyed by the words.

He turned and came face-to-face with a man of his own height, build, and age. His features were individually normal, even ideal; but they didn’t seem to go together.

“Gurney, right?”

“Right.”

“NYPD detective?”

“Retired.”

A shrewd look entered the eyes that seemed a bit too close together. “Technically, right?”

“A bit more than technically.”

“My point is, being a cop gets in the blood. It never goes away, right?” He smiled, but the effect was chillier than if he hadn’t.

Gurney returned the smile. “How do you know who I am?”

“My wife always lets me know who she’s bringing into the house.”

Gurney thought of a cat announcing with a distinctive meow that she was bringing in a captured mouse. “So you’re Marv Gelter. Nice to meet you.”

They shook hands, Gelter eyeing him as one might examine an interesting object for its potential utility.

Gurney nodded toward the TV. “That’s quite a thing you have over there.”

Gelter peered for a moment at the big screen, his eyes narrowing. “Animals.”

Gurney said nothing.

“You had to deal with that kind of shit in the city?”

“Cops being shot?”

“The whole thing. The circus of bullshit. The entitlement.” He articulated the last word with vicious precision. His eyes narrowed as he stared at Gurney, apparently waiting for a response, an endorsement.

Again Gurney said nothing. On the screen, two talking heads were arguing. One was contending that the current problems were part of the endless price being paid for the moral disaster of slavery, that the destruction of families had wrought irreparable damage, carried from generation to generation.

His opponent was shaking his head. “The problem was never the enslavement of Africans. That’s a myth. A politically correct fairy tale. The problem is simpler, uglier. The problem is . . . Africans! Look at the facts. Millions of Africans were never enslaved. But Africa is still a total disaster! Every country, a disaster! Ignorance. Illiteracy. Lunacy. Diseases too disgusting to describe. Mass rapes. Genocides. This isn’t the result of slavery. This is the nature of Africa. And Africans!”

The talking heads froze in place. Jagged triangles of color came swirling in from the edges of the screen, forming the letters of the words that earlier had blown apart:

EXPLOSIVE NEWS—HAPPENING NOW

SEE IT ALL ON BATTLEGROUND TONIGHT

THERE’S NOTHING AS REAL AS RAM-TV

Gelter nodded appreciatively before speaking, his eyes still on the screen. “Killer point about all the slavery bullshit. And he nailed the truth about the African cesspool. Refreshing to hear a man with the balls to tell it like it is.”

Gurney shrugged. “Balls . . . or a mental disorder.”

Gelter said nothing, registering the remark only with a sharp sideways glance.

The three-line statement on the screen blew apart again, and a single line coalesced from tumbling shards of color—THE CONTROVERSY CONTINUES—then it, too, broke into pieces that cartwheeled out of the frame.

A new talking head appeared—a young man in his early twenties, with fine features, a fierce gaze, and thick reddish-blond hair pulled back in a ponytail. His name and affiliation crept across the bottom of the screen: “Cory Payne, White Men for Black Justice.”

Payne began in a strident voice, “The police claim to be defenders of the rule of law.”

Gelter grimaced. “You want to hear a mental disorder, listen to this asshole!”

“They claim to be defenders of the rule of law,” repeated Payne. “But their claim is a lie. It’s not the rule of law they defend, but the laws of the rulers. The laws of the manipulators, the ambition-crazed politicians, the dictators who want to control us. The police are their tools of control and repression, enforcers of a system that benefits only the rulers and the enforcers. The police claim to be our protectors. Nothing could be further from the truth.”

Gurney suspected, from the practiced flow of Payne’s accusations, that he’d made them many times before. But there didn’t seem to be anything rehearsed about the anger driving them. Or the intense emotion in the young man’s eyes.

“Those of you who seek justice, beware! Those of you who trust in the myth of due process, beware! Those of you who believe the law will protect you, beware! People of color, beware! Those who speak out, beware! Beware the enforcers who use moments of unrest for their own ends. This is such a moment. A police officer has been shot. The powers that be are gathering to retaliate. Revenge and repression are in the air.”

“You see what I mean? Unmitigated garbage!” Gelter was seething. “You see what civilization is up against? The rabble-rousing crap that spews out of the mouth of that self-indulgent little shit—”

He broke off as Trish came up to him looking hurried and anxious. “You have a call on the house phone.”

“Take a message.”

She hesitated. “It’s Dell Beckert.”

There was a shift in Gelter’s expression.

“Ah. Well. I suppose I should take it.”

After he’d disappeared through one of the doors in the back wall, Trish put on a bright smile. “I hope you like vegan Asian cuisine. I found the cutest young Cambodian chef. My little wok wizard.”