by Paul Levine
When I finally pulled under the canopy of the hotel, a teenage valet crept from the darkness and appraised the old yellow chariot.
“No shit, my old man used to talk about his 442,” the kid announced, “but I never seen one.”
I held him off and asked the doctor if she’d like a drink before retiring.
She studied me. “Whatever for?”
That one stumped me. “To…uh…wet the whistle. To talk.”
“Talk? What about?”
“I don’t know,” I said defensively. “I don’t plan that far ahead.”
“I can see that. Then why invite me to share spirits?”
I thought of Jack Nicholson telling Shirley MacLaine that a stiff drink “might kill the bug you got up your ass.” I thought of John Riggins, the great, wild running back of the Redskins, telling Justice Sandra Day O’Connor at a White House dinner to “loosen up, Sandy baby.” But what I said was, “Because we can work together on the Diamond murder.”
She paused long enough for me to toss the keys to the valet, and I escorted her to the glitzy bar on the mezzanine. The usual crowd was there; Colombian cowboys, businessmen delaying the inevitable confrontations at home, a collection of upper-middle-class snorters and pretenders driving leased Porsches, leaning close to young women in sequined designer knockoffs.
The lady asked for Pimm’s over lemonade, and the barman didn’t bat an eye. He poured some red stuff into 7UP, added a slice of cucumber, and Pamela Maxson nodded with appreciation after a dainty sip.
“Dr. Riggs is quite fond of you,” the doctor said, as if she couldn’t imagine why.
“And I of him.”
“He said you used to play…rugby?”
“Football.”
“Yes, we have your football on the telly now. Grown men in knickers with all that stuffing inside their clothing. Jumping onto each other with incredible aggression.”
I smiled at her imaginative but entirely accurate definition of pro football.
“Freud conceived of aggression as a derivative of the death instinct,” she added. “Others debate whether aggression is a primary drive itself or just a reaction to frustration.”
“I just liked hitting people. It was fun.”
She opened her eyes a little wider. The green shimmered in the muted lighting. She pursed her full lips and thought a private thought. I expected her to start taking notes, maybe send me a bill later.
“Fun?” she pronounced carefully, as if trying out a new word.
“Sure. The hitting, the contact. Tackling is fun, particularly a good, clean hit that knocks the wind out of the runner. The kind that jolts him, makes the crowd go oooh.”
“The sounds of the crowd. Did it represent to you a woman’s sighs, her moans of ecstasy?”
I didn’t like where this was heading. “I think I can distinguish between the two.”
“And this tackling people, did it make you feel bigger, more…manly?”
I laughed and nearly spilled my Grolsch. “Look, if you’re going to tell me the NFL is full of closet queens…”
She ran a hand through her thick auburn hair, now tangled from the wind. “Why are you defensive about your masculinity?”
This was getting me nowhere. “Let me tell you a story,” I said. “When I was a rookie, there was a big tight end on the Jets who was so tough he made Mike Ditka look like a pussycat. He liked to talk trash at the line. So I come in at outside linebacker late in the game, and my uniform is clean and white, and he’s there all muddy and bloody, and yells out, ‘Here comes the cherry.’ Then the QB is calling signals and all I hear is the tight end saying, ‘Hey, cherry, didn’t they teach you how to put on your uniform in college? I can see your dick, and it’s all shriveled up.’ So just like somebody saying your shoes are untied, I look down, the ball is snapped, and the tight end slugs my helmet with a forearm that could ring the bell at Notre Dame.”
She considered my story and stirred her red drink. “And do you attempt to compensate for this humiliation?”
I shook my head. “No, I just don’t look at my dick unless absolutely necessary.”
She tried to see if I was joking, and when she figured I was, gave me a full smile. “Do you really want my help or are you just hoping to charm your way into my room?” she asked.
“I think I have a significantly greater chance at the former.”
“Dr. Riggs was right. You are smarter than you look.”
That was as close to a compliment as I was going to get. A winsome lass on a sailboard—perhaps overcome by sunstroke—once compared my eyes to the azure waters off Bimini. Later, she tossed me over for a scuba instructor.
Pamela Maxson declined a second drink and we looked at each other a moment, her thoughts imperceptible. She told me she was leaving for New York in the morning, a couple of network appearances, a book signing in the Doubleday store on Fifth Avenue, then back to England. I should call her if I learned anything or if there was another killing.
“Look for messages,” she said.
“Besides ones in lipstick?”
“Frankly, I’m puzzled by the reference to Jack the Ripper. Jack was a disorganized murderer, a slasher who was extremely violent and quite messy. He stalked women he did not know and used force, not persuasion, to subdue them.”
“So the killer’s tossing a curveball?”
“A curve…”
“A red herring, a bum steer.”
“Perhaps. But even if the killer is tossing a…bum steer, the message is still meaningful. Whoever wrote it is well read, perhaps an amateur historian, or someone who knows a great deal about classic criminal cases, stories of law enforcement, that sort of thing.”
“Like the honorable state attorney,” I mused, mostly to myself.
“If that were the case, the crime would not be motiveless, would it? If the Diamond girl was his chippy and he killed her, there would have to be a motive. But if it’s a random killing, the work of a serial murderer, you’ll know soon enough.”
“How?”
“Because there’ll be another one presently, won’t there?”
I hadn’t thought about that before, but now I did. Looking for a little excitement with the gun-and-badge set was one thing, hunting a serial killer was something else again. Serial killers are lifetime obsessions of guys with little offices and big file drawers. It takes forever to nab one. Isn’t that what makes them serial killers, unsolved murders over several years? What had I gotten into?
“I don’t know how to catch those guys,” I admitted.
Dr. Maxson smiled faintly. “Don’t feel sorry for yourself, Mr. Lassiter. The police are always complaining that serial killers are so difficult to apprehend because there is no connection between victims and no apparent motives. But they do leave clues, and usually they are quite careless. Often they contact the police or stand in the crowd that gathers at the scene.”
“So they want to be caught?”
“No, a common misconception. Part of the thrill is outwitting the police and reliving the crime. There was an ambulance driver who would abduct young women, kill them, call the police, then race back to the hospital so he would get the call to pick up the body.”
While I thought that over she smoothed her skirt in a gesture even my non-psychoanalytic mind could understand.
Thank you for the ride and the drink, Mr. Lassiter,” she said with British formality, and stood up to leave.
“All my friends call me Jake…Pamela,” I said.
She rewarded me with a second smile and then extended a finely tapered white hand. “Good evening, Jake. And good luck.”
The hand was cool, the shake firm. She didn’t ask me to share the view from her room, so I headed out the front where my 442 was parked in a space of honor next to a Rolls. The hood was still hot, and the gas tank was a nudge lower than an hour earlier.
I looked hard at the valet.
“Your shocks are a little soft on the turns,” he said sheepis
hly.
I gave him five bucks. “You’re telling me.”
CHAPTER 5
Joining the Club
It was one of those muggy June days with fifteen hours of daylight but hardly any sunshine. A tropical depression hung over the Gulf of Mexico and raised the blood pressure of Miami’s frothy weather guys. Come six and eleven, they show us their color radar and satellite photos, their computerized maps and digital barometers. They blather about wind speeds and waterspouts and reveal what we already know: baby, it’s hot outside.
It wasn’t even eight a.m., but already my little coral-rock pillbox was stifling. The storm in the Gulf had sucked all the wind from the Florida Straits. Ten days of rain and a month of inattention had left my overgrown yard a jungle that could get me fined if the zoning inspectors weren’t busy collecting cash from condo builders who pour rotten slabs.
My house sits in the shade of chinaberry and live-oak trees just off Kumquat in the old part of Coconut Grove. It was built before air-conditioning and has plenty of cross ventilation. But when the wind stops blowing, and the heavy gray sky sags over the bay and the Glades, the old ceiling fans don’t do the trick. One of these days I’m going to break down and put in central air. Sure, and maybe get a rooftop dish, a combination fax and photocopy machine, maybe an outdoor whirlpool and an indoor sauna.
Adiós, forty-dollar electricity bills.
Hola, the Grove trendy set.
I wore canvas shorts and nothing else and stood on my rear porch surveying the expanse of my estate—an eighth of an acre, give or take an inch or two. The neighborhood was quiet. The one-story stucco number hidden behind the Poinciana trees belonged to Geoffrey Thompson, who wouldn’t be up until noon. He roamed the city streets each night as a free-lance cameraman, shooting videos of drug busts, race riots, and fatal car crashes. A budding entrepreneur, Geoffrey created his own industry when he learned that none of the local TV stations employed photo teams between midnight and eight a.m. When he was drunk enough, Geoffrey would show the outtakes considered too gruesome even for Miami’s bloodthirsty viewers.
Next door there was no sign of life at Phoebe’s place, which was exactly what it was called in an ad in Florida Swingers magazine. Phoebe had bright red hair and occasionally counted on her fingers, as she did the time she appeared at my door and asked if she could borrow three—no, make it four—condoms. Robert and Robert, who lived together and owned Robert’s—what else—Art Gallery, were up and around, hauling out wine bottles and trimming their hibiscus hedge. A regular slice of Americana, that’s my Mia-muh.
I dropped into the crabgrass and did my morning push-ups, fifty regular, then twenty one-armed, first right, then left. I rolled onto my back, brought my knees toward my face, and worked through a hundred stomach crunches. C’mon, Lassiter, Coach Sandusky yelled from some faraway field. Get in shape. The grass tickled my bare back and the sweat rolled down my chest. Overhead, an unseen laughing gull mocked me with its raucous call.
The ringing telephone was an excuse to declare victory in my battle to resurrect semi-glories of the past. It was Granny Lassiter calling to tell me a thirty-pound snook was swimming figure-eights under an Islamorada bridge, calling my name. I told her I had a murder to solve but I’d help her eat Mr. Snook if she could catch him.
She wasn’t impressed by my work and allowed as how she would catch the fish without me, but wanted to be sporting and land that sucker on eight-pound test line, using live finger mullet for bait.
Granny wasn’t my grandmother, but there was some relationship on my father’s side, great-aunt maybe. She raised me in the very house of Dade County pine and coral rock where I now lived. When Coconut Grove became too chic, she gave me the house and headed for the Keys, where she fishes and fusses and makes a decent home brew, if you’re partial to drinking liquid methane. She’s the only family I have. My father was a shrimper who was killed in a barroom brawl in Marathon when I was five years old. He had handled three bikers with his bare hands before a fourth jammed a push dagger into his jugular. Today, when I think of him, I remember his thick wrists and red, rawboned hands. My earliest memory: dangling from those poleax wrists as he would lift me off the floor.
My mother I don’t remember at all. All Granny told me was that she had bleached her hair almost white and, while waiting tables in Key West, ran off with a curly-haired stranger headed for the Texas oil fields. So I never called anyone Mom, but for as long as I can remember there’s always been a Granny. She taught me how to fish and how to live without doing too much damage along the way.
When I was fifteen—towheaded and suntanned and already two hundred pounds—the hormones were pounding in my ears, and I would shake the little house by jolting the pine-slab walls I considered a make-believe blocking sled. Granny didn’t complain; she just hauled me off to the high-school football field, where a couple of Gainesville-bound seniors whupped me up and down. The next year, I was whupping ‘most everybody else, and the recruiters came calling from just about every college in the southeast. I visited a few campuses where the fraternity boys laughed at my cutoff jeans, dilapidated deck shoes, and rawhide necklace with the genuine shark’s tooth. I didn’t have much in common with the players either. They were generally engaged in drunken wrestling matches followed by pissing contests—distance, duration, and accuracy.
One day my senior year in high school, Granny grilled a mess of mangrove snapper with Vidalia onions for a coach with a Brooklyn accent who kept talking about books and classes. I wanted to hear about bowl games and cheerleaders, but he was yammering away in this funny voice about SAT scores and graduation rates. Granny smiled and served him an extra slab of her key lime pie, and I went off to Penn State, where I survived frostbite, aced American Theater 461, and stayed out of jail.
I was a decent enough college player, but the stopwatch doesn’t lie, and the NFL scouts could take a nap while I ran the forty. Since then, I’ve come to figure I must have been the three hundred thirty-seventh best player in the nation my senior year. This bit of mathematical logic stems from the fact that the pros drafted three hundred thirty-six players, none of them named Lassiter. I packed my spikes and gray practice shorts in what was then a not-yet-antique convertible and drove south. I caught on with the hometown Dolphins as a free agent, barely surviving each cut, playing second string, earning my keep by wreaking havoc on kickoffs, and occasionally starting when the star weakside linebacker was in drug rehab. When I realized I wasn’t bound for the Hall of Fame (or even a league pension), I started taking night law classes. I had seen Gregory Peck playing Atticus Finch and figured I knew what lawyering was all about. After finally passing the bar exam the third try—the first time coming two days after knee surgery and hefty doses of Darvon, the second after generous rations of Grolsch—I concluded there are no more Atticus Finches. Today’s lawyers are slaves to computerized time sheets and, rather than fighting for justice, spend their days punching voluminous pleadings out of word processors and sleeping through endless pretrial depositions. But they seldom stand in front of juries and plead for justice, which, if it is kin to the law, is a distant cousin, at best.
I joined the public defender’s office, where I soon discovered that my clients were not necessarily saintly just because they were impoverished. Most of them went to prison, got early release because of overcrowding, and became repeat customers in the Jake Lassiter legal merry-go-round. Then I joined the downtown firm of Harman and Fox, where I became another paper-pushing civil trial lawyer, until Nick Fox called me back to the criminal-law jungle, this time representing the state.
***
I showered and put on a seersucker suit, but the sweat continued to flow. I poured some orange juice and grabbed a fresh mango, green and red on the outside, sweeter than a peach inside. The neighborhood is overflowing with mangoes and lichee nuts. Peel the nuts, slice the mango, chop a tart carambola into star-shaped pieces, and you’ve got a fine breakfast. No preservatives, no caffeine.
Inside the ancient Oldsmobile, the cracked leather felt slick and the carpeting smelled of mildew. I put the top down and pretended that the soggy air cooled me. I headed up Miami Avenue under an umbrella of red Poinciana trees. I passed the house that once belonged to a client, a doctor who killed, and I was there when he crumbled under the weight of the guilt and the shame.
Charlie Riggs had helped me then, had taught me how to speak for the dead. He had been the county medical examiner for so long, people swore he began his career digging musket balls out of bodies at Bull Run. He still reads the first forensic medicine textbook, Questiones medico legales, in its original Latin. He can determine the time of death by algor mortis, livor mortis, and rigor mortis—the temperature, color, and stiffness of death. When an inexperienced assistant ME found sunflower seeds in the stomach of a dead banker who died with a smile on his face, Charlie knew that death was by horribly painful strychnine poisoning. The smile was risus sardonicus, a sardonic grin produced by contortions of facial muscles. The sunflower seeds were the remnants of rat poison, and a sharp-eyed hardware-store clerk soon identified the grieving widow with the million-dollar insurance policy as the town’s leading pesticide purchaser.
Charlie Riggs knows so much about so many things. I could never figure how a guy who spent his life hollowing out lifeless shells could understand the living so well. There must be lots of canoe makers who know everything about in-shoot wounds and lividity and blood typing. They help the cops figure the when and how of death, and sometimes, piecing together all their clues, they even find the murderer, the who. But if you don’t have bullet fragments and a matching gun, or latent prints and a matching hand, you’d better know the why to figure the who. That’s why I need you, Charlie Riggs. You bearded old wizard, I need you again.
***
“Jeez, get a load of that suit,” Cindy said, fishing a pen out of her rust-colored, hyper-curled hair. “Why’s it all crinkly?”