Jake Lassiter - 02 - Night Vision

by Paul Levine

  “‘The wind they call Ma-ri-ah,’” I singsonged, but this time, he didn’t take the bait.

  “Very well,” the judge concluded, then looked for me, hidden behind Two-Ton’s bulk.

  I elbowed my way around Tannenbaum to get into the judge’s line of vision. “This is a murder investigation,” I told her, “and the state has a compelling need for the information. We do not seek to invade anyone’s home, but rather to gain access to certain business records of Compu-Mate, Inc., a Florida corporation that enjoys none of the personal rights so eloquently defended by Mr. Tannenbaum. Those business records may show the identity of the last person to communicate with a murder victim. In short, the corporation has no right to withhold the records. As for the authors of the messages, there is no precedent to suggest that there is a constitutional right of anonymity where a person blindly transmits electronic missives into the night, oblivious to the identity of the recipient.”

  “I see,” the judge said, replacing the glasses on the bridge of her nose. Dixie Lee Boulton had worked for three Democratic governors, and when the last had been put out to pasture, she was rewarded with a judicial appointment. She hadn’t read a law book since graduating from night school in 1949, but I wasn’t worried. She had a fifty-fifty chance of being right.

  “Motion to quash denied,” she said. “Mr. Tottlebum, your client has forty-eight hours to produce the records.”

  Two-Ton exhaled a sigh like a foghorn and gave me a congenial slug on the shoulder. “I shouldn’t have sung,” he whimpered. “‘Music is the brandy of the damned.’”

  “William Pitt?” I inquired.

  “George Bernard Shaw,” he said, then waddled toward the door.

  As the courtroom emptied, Roberta Blinderman slinked out of the gallery and approached me. Her feelings about me must have changed. “Mr. Lassiter,” she breathed. “You were so very good just now. I almost wish you were on my team.”

  “Well, Arnie gets a little carried away.”

  She smiled and moved close, enough to give me a whiff of a sweet, heavy perfume. “You’re telling me. He’s one of my clients. Goes by the handle ‘Big Ham.’”

  “I’m looking forward to learning more about your customers,” I told her.

  “I can tell you about the clients,” she said, gesturing with a small briefcase. “Periodically, I sample them to find out if they’re getting what they want.”

  “Which is?”

  “Satisfaction, of course. That’s what we all want, isn’t it, Mr. Lassiter?”

  She opened the briefcase. Inside were a stack of computer printouts and two hardcover books. I thumbed through the papers. A bunch of questionnaires. On a scale of one to ten, rate the sensuous quality of your Compu-Mate calls.

  “Our peter meter,” Bobbie explained.

  “Doesn’t help me,” I said. “No names.”

  “We try both ways. Some surveys I do myself. You get unusual feedback face-to-face. But for statistics, you get more truthful answers if it’s anonymous. Have you ever made love to a woman without knowing her name and without her knowing yours?”

  “The women I know usually demand a resume, a blood test, and three bank references.”

  “Try it sometime. The less you know about someone, the more honest you can be.”

  “I see,” I said, not knowing what else to say.

  “For instance, you really don’t know me at all.”

  “What should I know about you, Mrs. Blinderman?”

  “The less the better,” she said, “and call me Bobbie.”

  We weren’t good enough friends to be standing this close. She wore a black mini with fishnet stockings and stiletto heels. Our noses nearly touched. Her dark eyes flashed with black lightning, and in the fluorescence of the courtroom, a fine line of peach fuzz showed across her upper lip.

  “Where’s Max?” I asked. “Minding the store?”

  She smiled and half turned so that her thigh pressed into my crotch. I didn’t move. Why should I? It didn’t hurt.

  “Away,” she said, drawing a long, painted fingernail across my chest, “and when Max is away…”

  “Bobbie takes surveys,” I said.

  “You’re a big man, Lassiter. I like a big man.”

  So why did she marry Max? “Uh-huh,” I said.

  “Max said you used to play some ball.”

  “Uh-huh,” I repeated.

  She smiled, licked her lips and recited:

  ”’There once was an athletic young jock

  Who could shatter large rocks with his cock,

  But a coed said, “Dear,

  Please insert the thing here.”

  And he fainted away with the shock.’”

  Maybe she was mocking me or teasing me, but then again, my feeble male mind thought, maybe the sight of a shaggy-haired ex-linebacker carrying a briefcase turned her on.

  “Are you going to faint on me, Lassiter?”

  “Mrs. Blinderman, considering the fact that you’re married and I’m investigating—”

  “When I lock my legs around a man,” she murmured right there in front of the American flag, the Bible, and portraits of judges with fine chin whiskers, “I don’t let him go.”

  “You’ve been reading too much of your customers’ prose.”

  She smiled salaciously. “Really, counselor. Do you always carry a brief in your pants, or are you just glad to see me?”

  Mocking me, I decided, and tried to think of a brilliant rejoinder.

  “Jake! There you are!” Charlie Riggs was beside me, pulling me away. He wore his blue courthouse suit and seemed to have combed out his tangled beard. His dark eyes twinkled with excitement. Coming out of retirement apparently agreed with him. “There’s another one.”

  “Another what?”

  “Corpus delicti, of course. Same modus operandi.”

  Bobbie Blinderman strode toward the courtroom door on those long, allegedly locking legs and gave a little shrug. Another time, she seemed to say. I was looking at Charlie, but I was hearing the clack-clack of Bobbie’s high heels, fading like the clangor of a distant train.

  ***

  The house was on a leafy street in Coral Gables. In-law quarters, the real-estate ads call them. The main house was a big stucco Spanish number from the 1920s with a barrel-tile roof, lots of arches, balconies, and black iron railings. In back sat a squat one-story box for guests or a Honduran maid without a green card.

  The cops were still stringing yellow tape around the building. The glass jalousie windows were being dusted for prints. Crime-scene technicians crawled around the building, looking for footprints, weapons, any evidence the killer might have dropped. A business card would do nicely.

  Blood red leaves from the Poinciana trees covered the stone path to the little house. Inside, the stench of death hung in the humid air.

  “Can’t anybody get that AC to work?” Detective Alejandro Rodriguez pleaded.

  The place was one room. A bed against a wall, a kitchenette at the far end, and a desk in the middle. Mostly empty bookshelves lined a wall, a small TV and VCR taking up some of the space. The body was facedown near the front door. A young woman in a short cotton chemise with a floral motif. On the desk, the computer monitor still glowed, black background, white fluttery letters. Taped to the computer was a plastic card the size of a driver’s license. Name, handle, and secret password: her Compu-Mate membership card.

  “Rosemary Rosedahl,” Rodriguez said. His face was lathered with sweat, his blue short-sleeve shirt blotched under both arms. “Twenty-seven. Flight attendant for Pan Am. Part-time student at FIU. Rents the place from a doctor. Looks after the main house while he’s gone. He’s in New England for the summer, like any sensible person.”

  Charlie Riggs knelt and gently lifted the woman’s head, brushing back short, frosted blond hair. He gently touched the neck where bruises were visible. He opened the mouth and peered down the throat with a pocket light. “Apparently fractured larynx and hyoid cartila
ge. No signs of ligature. Pinpoint hemorrhages on the face. Death from manual strangulation.”

  I tiptoed around the body to the computer monitor. “Rodriguez,” I said. “I think you better dust this keyboard for prints.”

  The detective moved close to the screen. “Huh? Oh, we saw that. What’s the big deal? The decedent wrote it before she bought the farm.”

  “A woman didn’t write that,” I said.

  “No, who did?”

  “I don’t know. Poetry isn’t my strong suit.”

  Charlie joined me in front of the monitor. He read silently a moment, clucking his tongue. “Alfred Tennyson,” he said.

  “I’ll bring him in,” Rodriguez said.

  “I am beginning to mourn,” Charlie Riggs said, “for the death of the classical education.” Then he read it aloud:

  “‘WEAKNESS TO BE WROTH WITH WEAKNESS! WOMAN’S PLEASURE, WOMAN’S PAIN—

  NATURE MADE THEM BLINDER MOTIONS BOUNDED IN A SHALLOWER BRAIN:

  WOMAN IS THE LESSER MAN, AND ALL THY PASSIONS, MATCHED WITH MINE,

  ARE AS MOONLIGHT UNTO SUNLIGHT, AND AS WATER UNTO WINE’”

  “Quite a chauvinistic little ditty,” Charlie Riggs concluded.

  “Wouldn’t get a great review in Ms., if that’s what you mean,” I said. “What’s it from?”

  “‘Locksley Hall,’” said Charlie Riggs, master of the esoteric. “A jilted lover’s lament. I wonder if there’s such a thing as a forensic poet. Maybe I should send this to Pamela Maxson.”

  “Do it,” I said, staring at the screen, trying to picture the wacko who stole the poet’s words and now taunted us.

  Look for messages, Pam Maxson had said. Okay, here was one, loud and clear. A man who boasts of his unrestrained passions and belittles women. The lesser man? Shallower brain? I wished old Tennyson could bump heads with the current generation of the female of the species. They’d stomp him to death with their running shoes, then dash off to perform brain surgery or discover a new planet through mathematical magic. But no use getting angry at the poet. His words, another’s actions. I turned back to the body. Charlie had examined the eyelids for hemorrhage, and now one ghastly eye remained open, staring at me in blind accusation. A fury grew within me, burned in my gut. I never knew Marsha Diamond or Mary Rosedahl, but I knew they didn’t deserve to die young, die hard. I wanted the maniac who did it.

  A police artist in my mind sketched him. Overweight with a bad haircut and no friends. Lives alone in a room with a hot plate and a bunch of poetry collections he underlines and misunderstands. Clothes that don’t match, a diet of donuts and greasy fries from a corner diner. A guy who hears voices and talks to himself on the bus while others try not to stare. A wrathful, rejected, deranged guy who strangles a woman. Or maybe two. And lets us know why.

  Now I would find out who. It wouldn’t be that hard, I thought. I had the brainpower of Pam Maxson and Charlie Riggs on my side. So my mind composed a little lyric for the freak locked in his windowless room.

  All thy wits, matched with mine,

  Are as tinplate unto gold dust,

  And as tears unto brine.

  CHAPTER 9

  Gone Fishing

  Charlie Riggs dipped a hand into an old coffee can and came up with a half-dozen night crawlers. Juicy ones, brown and black, round and squirmy.

  “If you were a bass, would you chomp one of these?” he asked.

  “If I were a bass, I’d want to be a tarpon,” I said.

  Charlie grumbled something unintelligible and speared a fat worm with his hook. He swung his cane pole—no graphite rods and championship tackle for him—into the canal and waited. On the marshy bank, a great white heron peg-legged along, a full five feet tall on those matchstick legs.

  Charlie’s line drifted with the almost imperceptible current, the moon tugging the endless waters from the ocean to the straits to the bay to the great slough of the Everglades. “Can’t eat the bass anymore,” Charlie said. “Mercury poisoning.”

  I had seen the Journal headline: chemical threatens glades. Two inches of type, tops. A Florida panther dead, its liver laced with mercury. Nearby, a mess of bass floating belly up. I imagined an innocuous headline dated December 1, 1941: Japanese flotilla steams southeast.

  In the whirl and buzz of today’s world, the men and women stuck in traffic jams cannot see the fouled streams, the poisoned pastures, the sea creatures strangled in plastic nets. Between punching in and punching out, getting ahead and stashing away their IRA, they have no time to consider the invisible menace. Meanwhile, in well-lighted conference rooms, finely groomed men in charcoal suits coolly discuss their budgets for R&D, SG&A, and the profit ratio of malignant poisons that coat the vegetables and artificial hormones that lace the beef.

  Their computer models tell them how many tankers will cruise the Gulf before one strikes a reef and the appropriate tonnage that will ooze into the precious estuaries. Mathematically, they can figure when the waters of the Everglades will become as deadly as a toxic dump, when the song of a million birds will be stilled. No problem. The boys in insurance gotcha covered. Five million primary for the basic risk, fifty million excess reinsured with Lloyd’s to protect the company’s net worth and their own pensions. The public-relations folks—experts at damage control—are ready to fax prepackaged news releases that explain the company’s profound concern at this unanticipated and unfortunate incident.

  Just that morning Charlie and I heard thunder roll in the distance to the west. Not from the sky, but from underground explosions set by an oil company searching for a fortune beneath the river of grass. At dawn we watched their trucks, obscenely white, roll along the old levee, seismic sensors protruding like the antennae of steel-jacketed insects. Exploratory only, the company says, for it has no drilling permit. Just wait. After lobbyists pay their nighttime visits, it will only be a matter of time. The drilling will start, and some dark lonely night, through human error or computer breakdown or metal fatigue, the black gunk will belch into the marshy hammocks and over the sawgrass and through the canals. The crude will pour into the aquifer that supplies our fresh water. A bad enough spill and Palm Beach, Fort Lauderdale, and Miami will go bone dry. The roaches will inherit the concrete shells of forsaken condos, which in the end might be what was intended all along.

  ***

  “Itemize it for me,” Charlie Riggs ordered, as if I were a fuzzy-cheeked intern.

  We were sitting on the wooden dock behind his cabin on an Everglades canal. Charlie wore hiking boots and khaki shorts that were stained with fish guts or worse. I wore gray practice shorts and an old tear-away jersey, number fifty-eight, which the Dolphins somehow managed not to retire. In the glare of the late-afternoon sun, I tried to talk and pull the porcelain stopper on a sixteen-ounce Grolsch at the same time.

  “Two young women who live alone are strangled a week apart. They have no known enemies, no common friends. Neither was robbed. The first may have had sex shortly before death, though it could have been a solo flight. The second victim clearly had sex in close proximity to death. Seminal fluid revealed an assailant or lover with blood type A, according to young Dr. Whitson.”

  “Assailant or lover?”

  “No sign of a struggle,” I said. “Other than the injury to the neck, no contusions. Also no skin under the fingernails and no torn clothing. It appears consensual.”

  “Unless it was postmortem.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that.”

  “Well do, and please continue.”

  Charlie gets ornery if you overlook anything.

  I said, “A message at the first scene echoed Jack the Ripper and taunted us. A message at the second scene reflected animosity toward women. Other than that, there is no apparent connection between the two murders, except…”

  Charlie yanked on the cane pole and came up with a palm frond.

  “Except,” I continued, “both victims belonged to a sex-talk club. Both were frequent fliers on the computer wooing cir
cuit, including the night each was killed.”

  “Anything else?” he asked, keeping his eyes on the rippling canal.

  “Victim one was having a fling with the politically ambitious state attorney. Didn’t seem too serious on either side. What the kids call a sport fuck.”

  Charlie scowled and flipped his sunglasses down from the bill of his cap like a shortstop under a pop-up. “Our language,” he moaned, “In partibus infidelium. ‘In the hands of infidels.’”

  “She may have been poking into Fox’s war record.”

  “I assume you haven’t queried Fox whether she asked him about Vietnam.”

  I took a hit on the cold Grolsch. “Right. Too early. I try not to cross-examine a witness until I know at least as much as he does.”

  Charlie smiled. He had burned me from the witness stand more than once when my eagerness exceeded my experience.

  “No one knows what Marsha was up to,” I said. “The news director says she was working some investigation on her own, doesn’t know what. She wouldn’t tell him anything about it except she had a confidential source. He didn’t take it too seriously. Didn’t take Marsha too seriously, for that matter.”

  “Uh-huh,” Charlie said. I thought the old wizard had come up with some revelation, but he was just pulling in a small blue-striped fish.

  “Looks like a bream,” I said.

  “No. A damn tilapia. Belongs in somebody’s den in an aquarium. Folks started dumping their exotic fish out here, now they’ve taken over the bedding areas. No wonder you can’t find bluegill.”

  Charlie tossed the fish back, chose another night crawler, and baited his hook. “Maybe Nick Fox didn’t take her seriously either. Maybe she was just a sport—I can’t say it—to him until he found out she was onto something.”