Jake Lassiter - 02 - Night Vision

by Paul Levine

  “The truth is he simply left when he learned he’d been cuckolded.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, then realized I just expressed sorrow at learning her father was likely still alive.

  She sat in silence a moment. “Is that all you have to say?” she asked. “You really don’t know anything about me and you give no indication of wanting to know.”

  From somewhere I heard a muffled voice, answering the phone.

  “I’m sorry, Pamela. But after getting roughed up yesterday, being driven halfway across Britain today, and rolling with you between the sheets, I am not up to par in the conversation department. Next time I’ll have my devastatingly witty repartee ready.”

  “Next time! How utterly presumptuous. And keep your wit to yourself, thank you. I’m talking about communication, sharing feelings, not wisecracking.”

  Boom! Another mood shift. I propped myself up on an elbow and studied her in the darkness. I couldn’t make out her face, just the chiseled outline of that perfect profile against the flickering light. “Pam, whatever I did or didn’t do, I’m sorry. Now, why don’t we get dressed? It must be about dinnertime.”

  She laughed. “Dinner was hours ago.”

  “Oh.”

  “Don’t worry. Mum will understand.”

  “Good. Some mothers would be—”

  “That would be the pot calling the kettle black. But who am I to talk? God, I hate myself when I’m so easy.”

  I heard footsteps outside the door, then a sharp rapping.

  “Jake, wake up!”

  “C’mon in, Charlie,” I said.

  Charlie Riggs swung the door open and bustled in. At least it looked like Charlie, bushy beard and all. I just had never seen him in a crimson kimono and pink satin bedroom slippers. The sight of Pamela Maxson standing by the bed froze him.

  “Oh my,” he said. “Dr. Maxson, so sorry to intrude.” He looked down at himself. “It’s most irregular, I know. But my pants are in your mother’s bedroom. That is…she wanted to show me the workmanship on the four-poster with its painted cornice. It dates from 1785, you know. Of course you know. It’s your house, after all. But I had never seen such workmanship…and well, oh, dear me…”

  “I understand,” Pam said evenly.

  Charlie seemed to sigh. “There’s a phone call. For Jake…from Miami…Detective Rodriguez.”

  I grabbed my shorts and started for the door without asking, so Charlie just blurted it out.

  “Priscilla Fox is dead,” said the man in the crimson kimono.

  CHAPTER 24

  They

  “I get you out of bed, amigo?” Rodriguez asked.

  “Forget it. What happened?”

  “Nick had the kid for the weekend. The missus was home all alone, talking whoopee on the computer till about eleven. We got the printout. Around midnight, best we can figure, she has a visitor. Must have known the guy, no sign of a break-in. Anyway, she ends up strangled.”

  “Sexual assault?”

  “Well, the ME says she had sex within an hour of death. Seminal fluid reveals type-A blood. But the place is neat as a pin. There’s no evidence of violence other than the bruises on the neck. Nothing missing from the house. A neighbor found her today when she didn’t show for a ladies’ lunch.”

  “An organized murder scene,” I said.

  “Ey, you’re learning the jargon, counselor. Anyway, to my practiced eye, it looks like consensual sex followed by manual strangulation.”

  “Just like Mary Rosedahl.”

  “Verdad, five’ll get you ten, same guy did all three. The way I figure, he was fooling around with Marsha but couldn’t talk her out of her pants, so he just offed her. The Rosedahl girl and Priscilla were easier, that’s all.”

  So the killer wasn’t a drooling maniac or one of those social outcasts collecting bottle caps in a rented room. More like a demented Don Juan.

  I thought about Priscilla Fox. Pretty and tough. Cynical and smart. Lonely and dead.

  I remembered her in leotards and sneakers. Stretching and aerobicizing, dieting and fretting. Fighting middle age and winning. So long, Nick, hello, world. Picking up the pieces without missing a step. At least that was the side she showed. But at night, in the lonely hours, huddled over the passionless box with its microchips and electronic blips, she reached into the darkness, blindly groping for warmth and rapture. Surely there must be someone out there just as appealing, just as hungry, just as deserving of love.

  No. No, Priscilla, I wanted to shout through time and space. Bolt that door against the night. The creepy crawlies aren’t all on the late show. They drive Chevys and mow their lawns and order home-delivery pizzas. They spank on aftershave and make chitchat and smile through lying lips. They kiss and then they kill.

  “How’s Nick taking it?” I asked.

  “Pretty hard, though he tries not to show it. Most guys I know would just be happy, no more alimony.”

  “Most guys you know are cops, coroners, and criminals. Gives you a jaundiced outlook, Rod.”

  “Maybe, but Nick’s tops in my book. And so is…was Prissy.”

  “Didn’t know you were acquainted,” I said.

  “For years. Nick and Prissy would double-date with Maria and me before we got divorced. After Nick moved out, I’d see Prissy for dinner once in a while.”

  He paused and I listened to some overseas buzzing and hissing.

  If he wanted me to ask about their relationship, he had a long wait. Sometimes the best questioning technique is total silence.

  “It wasn’t romantic or anything,” Rodriguez continued. “Just friends. Nick knew all about it, didn’t give a shit.”

  I filed that away and asked, “You said you had a printout?”

  “More poetry signed by the asshole that did the deed. You want to talk to him?”

  “What? You got him! Why didn’t you say so?”

  “Slow down. I’m telling you. In fact, he’ll tell you.”

  “Whoa! You Mirandize him?”

  “Twice, but he needs detox more than legal advice. Fifty bucks says his blood tests for bourbon at eighty proof. The rest will be type A.”

  “Yeah, so’s mine and forty percent of the U.S. Congress.”

  “I’d arrest those fuckers, too, if I could.”

  “Rod, if the guy’s drunk, the confession is no good.”

  “Never said he confessed. Just said we had him.”

  There was a pause, and in the background, Rodriguez said, “Cojé esto, asshole. Talk away.”

  The voice was slurred but there was no mistaking those deep tones, trained so long ago on so many stages. “My dear Biff, where have you been? Are you holding out for top billing?”

  “Prince, not you.”

  “‘Tis I.”

  “They tell me you killed Priscilla Fox.”

  “They?”

  “Look, Prince—”

  “Please, call me—”

  “Okay, Gerald.”

  “—Ishmael.”

  He was growing tiresome, but I tried again. “Prince. They want to charge you with Murder One.”

  “They? Always, they. Third-person plural, a way of distancing yourself from the bureaucratic horror, eh, Biff? They need someone don’t they? Three women dead, they need a fall guy to take the rap, that’s how they speak, isn’t it? They, dear God how I adore that word, it’s so…so Kafkaesque. Tell me, Biff, in The Trial, do you think K. represents innocent mankind forced to vindicate himself in a totally alienated world without really knowing why, or is he guilty of something? Is he a part of the faulty world, deserving of his death? I prefer the former view, one of total desperation, rather than the hope for salvation through a higher law.”

  “No more, Prince. Save it for your students or the guys in the psycho ward. If you want, call a lawyer. They get paid by the hour to listen to bullshit.”

  Then there was silence, and finally, barely above a whisper, he said, “I want to tell you something very important that’s b
een weighing heavily on my mind.”

  “You want to confess?”

  “I want to do Long Days Journey into Night. I want to play Edmund again. I thought you would understand.”

  I gave him no sympathy. “You’re too old for the part.”

  “Of course the critics would say so, but what feeling I could bring to it now. Poor sickly Edmund, racked by consumption, drinking whiskey with his miserly father over the game of cards, telling him of his travels as a seaman. Do you remember?”

  “No.”

  Suddenly his voice became youthful, thickened slightly by drink but perfect for the part. “‘It was a great mistake, my being born a man. I would have been much more successful as a seagull or a fish. As it is, I will always be a stranger who never feels at home, who does not really want and is not really wanted, who can never belong, who must always be a little in love with death!’”

  “Is that it, Prince, are you in love with death?”

  I heard his labored breathing along with the static. “That is for me to know and you to find out.”

  “But Edmund was speaking of his own death. He wasn’t a killer.”

  “Nor am I,” he said softly.

  “Did you talk on the computer with Priscilla Fox the night she was killed?”

  “I spoke with Fortyish—”

  “Forty Something.”

  “—Who, I must say, was both amusing and intelligent. Your friend Roderick tells me she’s been slain and that her name is Petula—”

  “Priscilla!”

  “Precisely.”

  “Priscilla Fox! She’s dead. Did you—”

  “Absolve, Domini,” he chanted, “aminas omnium fidelium de-functorum ab omni vinculo delictorum.”

  “Prince!”

  “Et gratia tua illis succurrente…”

  “Prince, stop it!”

  “I was born a Catholic, you know.”

  “Prince, you’re confusing illusion and reality. That isn’t you. It’s George chanting the Requiem Mass for his dead son in Virginia Woolf.”

  “Is it, now?”

  “Yes, but there was no son! He was imaginary, invented by George and Martha. Priscilla Fox was real.”

  “Not to me.”

  Then he put a tune to it, a nursery-rhyme tune, and six thousand miles away, ice water dripped into my veins. “Who’s afraid of Pris-cilla Fox, Pris-cilla Fox, Pris-cilla Fox?”

  There was no reaching him. He had sailed into a foggy sea and didn’t want to make port. Filled with self-knowledge and self-loathing. He knew he’d never again play the Old Vic or romance women under the Maine pines. Maybe he had a death wish, too. But was he a killer?

  “Who’s afraid of Pris-cilla Fox, early in the morning…?” The singsong voice grew weaker, and I heard the phone clank as if it had fallen from his hand. Rodriguez came on and told me Prince was asleep in his chair and that he’d be placed in a special cell and put under a suicide watch. I told him that was fine and I’d see him as soon as I could get home.

  “Sure thing, Jake, but Nick’s got Metro Homicide, the forensics boys, and the ME’s office all working overtime. They’ll nail this fruitcake to all three homicides faster than shit through a goose.”

  They, I thought, then realizing…I was one of Them.

  CHAPTER 25

  Woman Is His Game

  Charlie Riggs was eating Hershey’s Kisses and reading the latest report on figuring time of death by calculating the age of maggot larvae in body cavities. Forensic entomology, he called it, thumbing pages, sucking his chocolate, smacking his lips, occasionally hm-hmming and making notes in the margin.

  Alex Rodriguez was reading the Miami Journal, shaking his head. He looked up at me. “Your lousy paper got suckered on the so-called Cocaine Baby case. Everybody knows that’s an old hoax perpetrated by bored customs agents. Never been a dead baby stuffed with cocaine come through the airport. Been stuffed turkeys, been stuffed yams, even been statues of the Virgin Mary stuffed with the white lady. But never been a dead baby.”

  Nick Fox wasn’t reading anything. He paced in front of his desk, his face growing red, his right hand slicing the air as he cut off Rodriguez and made a point. “Jakie, Jakie, you got a classic case of the hind-tit syndrome. The guy who doesn’t crack the case always thinks the guy who did got the wrong man. Am I right, Rod?”

  “Verdad,” Rodriguez responded, on cue.

  “See.” Fox gloated. They were beating me up like tag-team wrestlers. Nick Fox turned to Dr. Pamela Maxson, who sat quiet and saintly in a chair by the window. “There’s probably even a fancy psychological term for it, right, Dr. Maxson?”

  “The denial defense mechanism,” Pam Maxson said.

  Rodriguez chimed in, “It’s like this, Jake. It hurts your pride to be wrong. Like getting kicked in your machismo.”

  Pamela Maxson smiled coyly. “Castration anxiety,” she said.

  I stared stupidly at her. “You’re on their side, too?”

  “With a dash of persecutory complex,” she added for good measure.

  Nick Fox stopped pacing and looked down at me, a bully asking if I’d had enough.

  I hadn’t. I get paid to argue. “Look, Prince knew you were tapping the Compu-Mate calls. I’d already shown him his Equus rantings. He’s not stupid. Why would he kill someone he’s just chatted with? He’d have to be crazy to—”

  Sometimes I say too much. Nick Fox smiled his cat-to-the-canary smile. It shut me up. “Jakie, face it. Your nutty professor is the guy. I’ll bet even Doc Riggs agrees.”

  I turned to Charlie. He was muttering to himself. “Never paid much attention to blowfly larvae. They lay their eggs in the mouth or the nostrils, you get live maggots in a few hours. How useful is that if you don’t find the body for days?”

  “Charlie!”

  He looked up, a brown smear of chocolate across his mustache. “So many misconceptions about death. Jake. Do fingernails grow after death?”

  “Yeah. I’ve heard that.”

  “Sí,” Rodriguez said. “I found a stiff dead two weeks, you could tell the nails had grown an inch.”

  “Deceptio visus,” Charlie said. “The tips of the fingers and toes shrink, so the nails appear longer. Nothing more.”

  “You mean appearances are deceiving, don’t you, Charlie?” I asked hopefully. With Doc Riggs, you have to read between the lines.

  He smiled back at me.

  I kept going. “You’re saying Prince didn’t do it.”

  Charlie shrugged. “What do we have so far? Circumstantial evidence. Prince appears to have chatted with three women shortly before each was killed. He admits speaking to two of them, denies the first, which is curious but not conclusive of anything. We have no matching latent prints at any of the scenes. The autopsy of Miss Diamond reveals rather modest bruising over the thyroid and a partially fractured hyoid bone, which is consistent with strangulation by moderate force.”

  “A limp-wristed English professor,” Fox said, making his point with a dainty wave of the arm, “a wacko drunk pervert. What more you want, Jake?”

  “On the other hand,” Charlie said, “Ms. Rosedahl and Mrs. Fox suffered somewhat greater damage. Larynx snapped in two. Fractured hyoid, thyroid, and cricoid, the whole shebang.”

  Fox shrugged. “He got better at it, maybe sobered up. Doc, don’t forget the blood typing.”

  “Prince tests for blood type A, as do the semen specimens from Miss Rosedahl and Mrs. Fox. Have you done the DNA testing?”

  “It’s at the lab,” Rodriguez said. He put down the newspaper, glommed a chocolate Kiss from Charlie, unwrapped the foil, and popped it into his mouth.

  “Well,” Charlie said. “No use speculating now. When they line up the alleles for each polymorphic locus, there’ll be no mistaking it. Either it’s Prince’s semen or not.”

  “So what if it matches,” I jumped in. “That doesn’t exclude the possibility that he had sex with each woman, then after he left, the killer arrived.”


  Fox laughed. “Oh, gimme a break, Jake! What is this guy to you, some Mr. Chips character?”

  I didn’t answer, but Charlie did. “If there’s a DNA match, it means Prince is lying. He says he never met any of the women, much less…”

  “And if he’s lying,” Nick said, scooping up the ball and heading for the end zone, “he’s the killer. Admit it, Jake.”

  “It’d be enough to sustain an indictment,” I conceded glumly.

  “Enough to pull the switch at Raiford,” Nick Fox concluded.

  I looked at Pam Maxson. She placidly watched them take shots at me. Maybe she liked it. I’d been surprised when she told me to book three seats to Miami. Wanted to fulfill some speaking engagements, she said, help with my investigation, too. Surprised me again when she accepted my invitation for room, board, and affection at the little coral-rock house between Kumquat and Poinciana, rather than a fancy, oceanfront, phone-in-the-bathroom, twenty-four-hour-room-service hotel. We had shared my bed under the paddle fan on the second floor, the pungent aroma of neighborhood mango trees wafting through the open windows on the sticky nighttime breeze. We had listened to distant police sirens and each other’s heartbeats. We had curled around each other, and I said sweet things into her neck, all of which I meant at the time.

  I always think there’s a band, kid. Professor Gerald Prince, master plagiarist, said that. So did Professor Harold Hill, knavish music man. And Jacob Lassiter, bloomin’ pettifogger. Fakers all.

  Rodriguez had given me the manila folder with the printout from Priscilla Fox’s computer. I looked at it for the third time.

  DO YOU LIKE TO PAMPER A WOMAN, PASSION KING?

  PRINCE. JUST A PRINCE, LIKE YOUNG HAMLET.

  PAMPERING? IS THAT WHAT YOU NEED?

  DON’T KNOW. NEVER HAD IT. MIGHT BE NICE FOR A CHANGE.

  IF YOU CAN’T STAND THE COLDNESS OF MY SORT OF LIFE, GO BACK TO THE GUTTER.

  THE GUTTER!

  LISTEN HERE, PASSION PRICK. I’VE BEEN A WIFE AND A MOTHER AND HAD DINNER WITH THE GOVERNOR AND DROVE CAR POOL, AND I’M A LADY ALL DAY, AND AT NIGHT, I DO WHAT THE HELL I WANT.