She found herself in a tiny cell, four feet high and six square. No windows, no other doorways.
Through her tears of panic, she saw an object on the floor in front of her. Easing forward, hands shaking, heart stuttering, she saw that it was a porcelain doll, its black eyes staring at the ceiling.
And on the wall were dark brown streaks — blood, Marissa understood — left by the prior occupant of this chamber, Lucia, who spent the last days of her life in terror, trying vainly to scratch through the stone with her bare fingers.
The match went out, and darkness surrounded her.
Marissa collapsed on the floor in panic, sobbing. What a fool I’ve been, she thought.
I’ll die here, I’ll die here, I’ll die—
But then, from outside the cell, she heard Antonio’s voice, sounding suddenly quite normal.
He called, “It’s all right, Marissa. Don’t worry. There’s a light switch behind a loose stone to the left of the door. Turn it on. Read the note hidden inside the doll.”
What was happening? Marissa wondered. She wiped the tears from her eyes and found the switch, clicked it on. Blinking against the bright light, she bent down and pulled a folded piece of paper from the hollowed-out doll. She read.
Marissa —
The wall to your left is false. It’s plastic. Pull it down and you’ll see a door and a window. The door is unlocked. When you’re ready to leave, push it open outward. But first look out the window.
She ripped the plastic away. There was indeed a window. She looked out and saw the footbridge. Unlike before, the property was now well lit with spotlights from the mill. She saw Antonio, with his suitcase, heading over the bridge. He paused, must have seen the light through the window of the cell and knew she was watching. He waved. Then he disappeared toward the parking lot. A moment later she heard his car start and the sound of him driving away.
What the hell’s going on?
She pushed the door open and stepped outside.
There was her suitcase and purse. She tore off the robe, dressed quickly with trembling hands and pulled her cell phone from her purse, gripping it the way a scared child clings to a stuffed animal. She continued with the note.
You are safe. You have always been safe.
I am on my way back to Florence now, nowhere near the mill. But believe that I’m no psychotic killer. There is no Lucia. The old woman who told you about her was paid 100 euros for her performance. There was no little boy who drowned; I put the flowers and cross by the stream myself before I came to pick you up at the station today. The football was merely a prop. The blood on the wall of the cell is paint. The drugs were candy (though the grappa was real — and quite rare, I may add). The photograph of me and my “wife” was created by computer.
As for what is true: My name is Antonio, I have never been married, I made a fortune in computers, and this is my vacation house.
What, you are wondering, is this all about?
I must explain:
As a child I spent much time in loneliness and boredom. I immersed myself in the books of the great writers of horror. They were terrifying, yes, but they also exhilarated me. I would see an audience watching a horror film and think: They are scared but they are alive.
Those experiences moved me to become an artist. Like any truly great musician or painter, my goal is not simply to create beauty but to open people’s eyes and rearrange their views and perceptions, the only difference being that instead of musical notes or paint, my medium is fear. When I see people like you who, as Dante writes, have lost the true path in life, I consider it my mission to help them find it. The night in Florence, the night we met, I singled you out because I saw that your eyes were dead. And I soon learned why — your unhappiness at your job, your oppressive father, your needy ex-husband. But I knew I could help you.
Oh, at this moment you hate me, of course; you are furious. Who wouldn’t be?
But, Marissa, ask yourself this question, ask it in your heart: Don’t you think that being so afraid has made you feel exquisitely alive?
Below are three phone numbers.
One is for a car service that will take you back to the train station in Florence.
The second is for the local police precinct.
The third is my mobile.
The choice of whom you call is yours. I sincerely hope you call the last of these numbers, but if you wish not to — tonight or in the future — I, of course, will understand. After all, it’s the nature of art that the artist must sometimes send his creation into the world, never to see it again.
Yours, Antonio
Furious, tearful, quivering, Marissa walked to a stone bench at the edge of the water. She sat and breathed deeply, clutching the note in one hand, the phone in the other. Her eyes rose, gazing at the stars. Suddenly she blinked, startled. A large bat, a dark shape in the darker sky, zigzagged overheard in a complex yet elegant pattern. Marissa stared at it intently until the creature vanished over the trees.
She looked back to the stream, hearing the urgent murmur of the black water’s passage. Holding the note into the beam of a light from the side of the mill, she read one of the numbers he’d given her. She punched it into her phone.
But then she paused, listening again to the water, breathing in the cool air with its scent of loam and hay and lavender. Marissa cleared the screen of her mobile. And she dialed another number.
DOUBLE JEOPARDY
“There is no one better than me.”
“Uh-huh, uh-huh. What’re my options?’
Paul Lescroix leaned back in the old oak chair and glanced down at the arm, picking at a piece of varnish the shape of Illinois. “You ever pray?” his baritone voice asked in response.
The shackles rattled as Jerry Pilsett lifted his hands and flicked his earlobe. Lescroix had known the young man all of four hours and Pilsett must’ve tapped that right earlobe a dozen times. “Nup,” said the skinny young man with the crooked teeth. “Don’t pray.”
“Well, you ought to take it up. And thank the good Lord that I’m here, Jerry. You’re at the end of the road.”
“There’s Mr. Goodwin.”
Hmm. Goodwin, a twenty-nine-year-old public defender. Unwitting co-conspirator — with the local judges — in getting his clients sentenced to terms two or three times longer than they deserved. A rube among rubes.
“Keep Goodwin, if you want.” Lescroix planted his chestnut-brown Italian shoes on the concrete floor and scooted the chair back. “I could care.”
“Wait. Just that he’s been my lawyer since I was arrested.” He added significantly, “Five months.”
“I’ve read the documents, Jerry,” Lescroix said dryly. “I know how long you two’ve been in bed together.”
Pilsett blinked. When he couldn’t process that expression, he asked, “You’re saying you’re better’n him? That it?” He stopped looking shifty-eyed and took in Lescroix’s perfect silver hair, trim waist and wise, jowly face.
“You really don’t know who I am, do you?” Lescroix, who would otherwise have been outraged by this lapse, wasn’t surprised. Here he was, after all, in Hamilton, a hick-filled county whose entire population was less than Lescroix’s home neighborhood, the Upper East Side of Manhattan.
“All’s I know is Harry, he’s the head jailor today, comes in and tells me to shut off Regis ’n’ Kathie Lee an’ get the hell down to the conference rooms. There’s this lawyer wants to see me, and now here you are telling me you want to take my case and I’m supposed to fire Mr. Goodwin. Mr. Goodwin, who’s been decent to me all along.”
“Well, see, Jerry, from what I’ve heard, Goodwin’s decent to everybody. He’s decent to the judge, he’s decent to the prosecution, he’s decent to the prosecution’s witnesses. That’s why he’s one bad lawyer and why you’re in real deep trouble.”
Pilsett was feeling pushed into a corner, which was what sitting with Lescroix for more than five minutes made you feel. So he decided to hit back. (Probably, Lescroix
reflected, just what had happened on that night in June.) “Who ’xactly says you’re any good? Answer me that.”
Should I eviscerate him with my résumé? Lescroix wondered. Rattle off my role in the Menendez brothers’ first trial? Last year’s acquittal of the Sacramento wife for the premeditated arson murder of her husband with a novel abuse defense (embarrassment in front of friends being abuse too)? The luscious not-guilty awarded to Fred Johnson, the pretty thief from Cabrini-Green in Chicago, who was brainwashed, yes, brainwashed, ladies and gentlemen, into helping a militant cell, no not a gang, a revolutionary cell, murder three customers in a South-side check-cashing store. The infamous Time magazine profile? The Hard Copy piece?
But Lescroix merely repeated, “There is no one better than me, Jerry.” And let the sizzling lasers of his eyes seal the argument.
“The trial’s tomorrow. Whatta you know ’bout the case? Can we get it, you know, continued?” The three syllables sounded smooth in his mouth, too smooth: he’d taken a long time to learn what the word meant and how it was pronounced.
“Don’t need to. I’ve read the entire file. Spent the last three days on it.”
“Three days.” Another blink. An earlobe tweak. This was their first meeting: Why would Lescroix have been reviewing the file for the past three days?
But Lescroix didn’t explain. He never explained anything to anyone unless he absolutely had to. Especially clients.
“But didn’t you say you was from New York or something? Can you just do a trial here?”
“Goodwin’ll let me ‘do’ the trial. No problem.”
Because he’s a decent fellow.
And a spineless wimp.
“But he don’t charge me nothing. You gonna handle the case for free?”
He really doesn’t know anything about me. Amazing. “No, Jerry. I never work for free. People don’t respect you when you work for free.”
“Mr. Goodwin—”
“People don’t respect Goodwin.”
“I do.”
“Your respect doesn’t count, Jerry. Your uncle’s picking up the tab.”
“Uncle James?”
Lescroix nodded.
“He’s a good man. Hope he didn’t hock his farm.”
He’s not a good man, Jerry, Lescroix thought. He’s a fool.
Because he thinks there’s still some hope for you. And I don’t give a rat’s ass whether he mortgaged the farm or not. “So, what do you say, Jerry?”
“Well, I guess. Only there’s something you have to know.” Scooting closer, shackles rattling. The young, stubbly face leaned forward and the thin lips leveraged into a lopsided smile.
But Lescroix held up an index finger that ended in a snappy, manicured nail. “Now, you’re going to tell me a big secret, right? That you didn’t kill Patricia Cabot. That you’re completely innocent. That you’ve been framed. That this’s all a terrible mistake. That you just happened to be at the crime scene.”
“I—”
“Well, Jerry, no, it’s not a mistake.”
Pilsett looked uneasily at Lescroix, which was just the way the lawyer loved to be looked at. He was a force, he was a phenomenon. No prosecutor ever beat him, no client ever upstaged him.
“Two months ago — on June second — you were hired by Charles Arnold Cabot to mow his lawn and cart off a stack of rotten firewood near his house in Bentana, the ritziest burgh in Hamilton. He’d hired you before a few times and you didn’t really like him — Cabot’s a country club sort of guy — but of course you did the work and you took the fifty dollars he agreed to pay you. He didn’t give you a tip. You got drunk that night and the more you drank, the madder you got ’cause you remembered that he never paid you enough — even though you never bargained with him and you kept coming back when he called you.”
“Wait—”
“Shhhh. The next day, when Cabot and his wife were both out, you were still drunk and still mad. You broke into the house and while you were cutting the wires that connected their two-thousand-dollar stereo receiver to the speakers, Patricia Cabot came back home unexpectedly. She scared the hell out of you and you hit her with the hammer you’d used to break open the door from the garage to the kitchen. You knocked her out. But didn’t kill her. You tied her up. Thinking maybe you’d rape her later. Ah, ah, ah — let me finish. Thinking maybe you’d rape her later. Don’t gimme that look, Jerry. She was thirty-four, beautiful and unconscious. And look at you. You even have a girlfriend? I don’t think so.
“Then you got spooked. The woman came to and started to scream. You finished things up with the hammer and started to run out the door. The husband saw you in the doorway with the bloody hammer and the stereo and their CD collection under your arm. He called the cops and they nailed you. A fair representation of events?”
“Wasn’t all their CDs. I didn’t take the Michael Bolton.”
“Don’t ever try to be funny with me.”
Pilsett flicked his earlobe again. “Was pretty much what happened.”
“All right, Jerry. Listen. This’s a small town and people here’re plenty stupid. I consider myself the best defense lawyer in the country but this case is open and shut. You did it, everyone knows you did it, and the evidence is completely against you. They don’t have the death penalty in this state but they’re damn generous when it comes to handing out life terms with no chance for parole. So. That’s the future you’re facing.”
“Yup. And know what it tells me? Tells me you’re the one can’t lose on this here situation.” Pilsett grinned.
Maybe they weren’t as dumb in Hamilton as he thought.
The young man continued, “You come all the way here from New York. You do the trial and you leave. If you get me off, you’re a celebrity and you get paid and on Geraldo or Oprah or some such for winning a hopeless case. And if you lose, you get paid and nobody gives a damn because I got put away like I oughta.”
Lescroix had to grin. “Jerry, Jerry, Jerry. That’s one thing I just love about this line of work. No charades between us.”
“What’s charades?”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“Gotta question.” He frowned.
Take your time…
“Say you was to get me off. Could they come after me again?”
“Nope. That’d be double jeopardy. That’s what’s so great about this country. Once a jury’s said you’re innocent, you’re free, and the prosecutor can’t do diddly…. Come on, you gonna hire me and boot that Goodwin back to the law library, where he belongs?”
He flicked his earlobe again. The chains clinked. “Guess I will.”
“Then let’s get to work.”
* * *
Paul Lescroix’s résumé had been amply massaged over the years. He’d gone to a city law school at night. Which wouldn’t of course play in the many new stories he fantasized would feature him, so after he graduated he signed up fast for continuing ed courses in Cambridge, which were open to any lawyer willing to pay five hundred bucks. Accordingly the claim that he was “Harvard educated” was true.
He got a job at minimum wage transcribing and filing judicial opinions for traffic court magistrates. So he could say that he’d served his apprenticeship clerking and writing opinions for criminal court judges.
He opened a solo practice above Great Eastern Cantonese carry-out in a sooty building off Maiden Lane in downtown Manhattan. Hence, he became “a partner in a Wall Street firm, specializing in white-collar crime.”
But these little hiccups in the history of Paul Lescroix (all right, originally Paul Vito Lacosta), these little glitches didn’t detract from his one gift — the uncanny ability to decimate his opponents in court. Which is one talent no lawyer can fake. He’d unearth every fact he could about the case, the parties, the judge, the prosecutor, then he’d squeeze them hard, pinch them, mold them like Play-Doh. They were facts still, but facts mutated; in his hands they became weapons, shields, viruses, disguises.
The night
before the Pilsett trial, he spent one hour emptying poor Al Goodwin of whatever insights he might have about the case, two hours meeting with reporters and ten hours reviewing two things; the police report, and a lengthy document prepared by his own private investigator, hired three days ago when James Pilsett, Jerry’s uncle, came to him with the retainer fee.
Lescroix immediately noticed that while the circumstantial evidence against Pilsett was substantial, the biggest threat came from Charles Cabot himself. They were lucky of course that he was the only witness but unfortunate that he happened to be the husband of the woman who was killed. It’s a dangerous risk to attack the credibility of a witness who’s also suffered because of the crime.
But Paul Victor Lescroix, Esq., was paid four hundred dollars an hour against five-figure retainers for the very reason that he was willing — no, eager — to take risks like that.
Smiling to himself, he called room service for a large pot of coffee and, while murderer Jerry Pilsett and decent Al Goodwin and all the simple folk of Hamilton County dreamt their simple dreams, Lescroix planned for battle.
He arrived at the courtroom early, as he always did, and sat primly at the defense table as the witnesses and spectators and (yes, thank you, Lord, the press) showed up. He mugged subtly for the cameras and scoped out the prosecutor (state U grad, Lescroix had learned, top 40 percent, fifteen years under his belt and numb from being mired in a dead-end career he should have left thirteen years ago).
Lescroix then turned his eyes to a man sitting in the back of the courtroom. Charles Cabot. He sat beside a woman in her sixties — mother or mother-in-law, Lescroix reckoned, gauging by the tears. The lawyer was slightly troubled. He’d expected Cabot to be a stiff, upper-middle-class suburbanite, someone who’d elicit little sympathy from the jury. But the man — though he was about forty — seemed boyish. He had mussed hair, dark blond, and wore a rumpled sports coat and slacks, striped tie. A friendly insurance salesman. He comforted the woman and dropped a few tears himself. He was the sort of widower a jury could easily fall in love with.
More Twisted: Collected Stories, Vol. II Page 15