by Paul Levine
My kitchen window was open to the breeze. I wore canvas shorts and an old jersey, number fifty-eight. Nick Fox wore his navy-blue suit. You never know when the TV boys will show up. I poured coffee, then sat at the table, my leg supported by a chair.
"I want something from you," I said.
"Yeah, what?" Suspicion knotted his forehead. Nick's mood had changed with the morning light. Blustery again.
"Your blood. Rodriguez's too."
"Go fuck yourself," Nick Fox said.
"Sperm samples, if you want some fun."
"Up your ass, Lassiter."
"No, in a little glass bottle. If you want, you can jerk each other off."
He lit a cigarette, changed his mind, crushed it into a priceless saucer with an illustration of Larry Csonka's face. If I hadn't broken the Jim Kiick dish, I could've auctioned the set at Sotheby's for six figures.
"What's this bullshit about Rodriguez?" he asked.
I told him that Biggus Dickus was trying to diddle every woman in town with a working modem.
"I asked him to do it," Fox said.
That didn't make any sense to me, and my blank look must have said so.
"I asked Rodriguez to join the damn club, to talk with Marsha and Prissy, scope them out."
"And his dating Priscilla...?"
"Same thing, I asked him to."
"Why?"
He looked at me, took a sip of the coffee, and said, "You really don't know, do you? That's the problem with you. You see a slice of the moon and think you've got night vision. But you've got to spend time in the jungle, Jakie, before you can see in the dark."
He turned away and looked like he was deciding how much more to say. "Once you had the log, I knew you'd jump to the wrong conclusion."
I wanted to laugh but didn't. "No wrong conclusion could be worse than the truth."
"No? What about your deciding I had Rodriguez kill Marsha and Priscilla?"
Suddenly the room was stifling despite the breeze. "I figure you'll have an excuse for those, too. It was them or you, right?"
"Damn you! I knew you'd fuck it up. I've got an excuse, all right. I had nothing to do with it. I don't know who killed them, but I know where you've been and what you're trying to prove. I know you were at Compu-Mate and copied a bunch of records that Rodriguez already had. I know you played some scam in the property room, and I know your English girlfriend signed up at the horny women's club. I know you got busted up by some cowboy who drives a Jeep, and I know who sneaked out of here about an hour before I showed up. Jakie, I know when you piss and when you shit, and when you step in it."
It made me smile, the irony of it. I was investigating him, and he had me under surveillance. "Look, Nick, what am I supposed to think? Especially now. You've just admitted the motive. I don't know how much Marsha knew, but it was enough to make you nervous."
"Everything. She knew everything. Priscilla told her."
"What? You told me you never talked about it."
"She was my wife. When I got back, I was a mess. They were pinning medals on me, and I was dying inside. She took care of me. I told her. She said it would go away, she would make it better, and she did."
"Until you left her."
He picked up the mug of coffee, then put it down again. "She set me up. She pretended she didn't care, that she'd get along without me, but she wanted me back. If she couldn't have me, she'd get even. She made friends with Marsha, up-and-coming TV personality, told her everything she knew. It wasn't enough for a story, no confirming sources, but Prissy figured a journalist could do some research, put it together. Prissy could ruin me, Marsha would get a promotion. They'd both be happy."
"So you planted Rodriguez in their little garden. Like I said, you're the guy with the motive."
He looked at me straight on. "Listen, you thick-skulled, lead-footed linebacker. Would I tell you this if I had anything to do with the killings?"
"Sure, 'cause you're so much smarter than me—"
"Cut the crap. I told you the truth to get you on track. We've got to work together. You, me, Rodriguez. These cases are making too many headlines."
"Right, may cost you some votes next time around."
He ignored the crack and drained the coffee, which had turned cold. He didn't seem to notice. "Yesterday, I ordered Rodriguez to start over. Go through the files. What did we miss? Re-interview everybody. Talk to that loony Blinderman babe, Doc Riggs, your English friend, anybody who knows anything. I want you to put some heat on Max Blinderman. He's got a record."
"Anything else?"
"Be creative. Do what you do best."
"You want me to hit somebody?" I asked.
***
I could never be a prosecutor.
A really good prosecutor must have no doubts. The prosecutor is the vengeful instrument of the state, a man or woman who sees the effect of depravity and must not care about the cause. The defendant is filth. No matter that as a child he may have been abused, impoverished, and ignored. He is a blight on society, and the prosecutor is the street cleaner of our times.
I always have doubts. I see the glimmer of humanity underneath masks of evil. I see reasons and causes and justifications. And mitigating circumstances. I feel pity. Nick Fox would say I misdirect my sorrow. He would say I am soft. But now my anguish was for him.
I had listened to his tale of horror and fear, to his admission of cowardice and betrayal. And I mourned for him, undeserving recipient of my grief. Evan Ferguson was dead. A few seconds of pain, nothing more. Nick Fox was dead, a lifetime of nightmarish torment.
He was right. He never should have appointed me. I didn't belong here anymore. Keep Lassiter away from the cops and the crooks. Let him try his fancy-pants divorces. Let him argue which conglomerate breached which contract to sell a million widgets to which multinational corporation. Let him defend the rights of reporters to fib and to fumble. But he doesn't have the stomach for the place with steel doors and the men with hard eyes. He doesn't see in black and white. All he sees are shades of gray.
***
"How do you feel?" Pam Maxson asked.
"Compared to what?" I answered.
I was sprawled on my sofa, left leg hoisted onto my sailboard cocktail table. Three donuts were spread on the fin.
"I went out," she said, sitting down on a wooden rocker Granny Lassiter had given me.
"I know."
"I couldn't sleep."
"That makes two of us."
"You were dead to the world when I left. You look better now."
I didn't ask better than what.
She walked over and sat down but didn't take a donut. "Did you have any breakfast?"
"Coffee and cyanide with Nick Fox. He stopped by after you...left."
We were dancing around it. I consider myself a modern man. Maybe I never took a vote on it, but I like to think I am enlightened where relationships are concerned. I try to be sensitive to a woman's needs, her independence, her space. Still, I don't think it impertinent to ask where my bedmate has gone at three a.m. while I lie there, battered and drugged.
So why didn't I ask?
Because she would think me a Neanderthal, a clinging, possessive, antiquated jerk. Instead, I told her of my talk with Nick, and she listened quietly, asking only if I believed he was innocent in spite of the obvious motive.
I didn't know.
Then I mentioned the northeasterly breeze and how today might be a bit cooler, and she nodded in silent appreciation of my meteorological insights. Finally I grabbed a donut from the daggerlike fin, took a healthy bite, and blurted out, "So where the hell were you—?"
She looked away and said, "Is it going to be that way?"
"Sorry, but I'm not used to falling asleep with company and waking up solo."
"And I'm sorry if I deflated your engorged male ego."
"Look, it's not as if I don't trust you, it's—"
She bolted from the rocker, which pitched forward and back even witho
ut her. "Trust me! What right do you have to even think about me in those terms? I don't seek your trust. I don't want your trust. If you have some romantic notions about us, let me disabuse you right now, Jake. You and I have gone bump in the night. You have great vigor in your performance, so you may paste a gold star on your report card. You try hard to please, and if you are a bit rough around the edges—you rub my breasts as if you're waxing your car—you are by no means unique in that regard. You are not an unpleasant fellow most of the time, although your penchant for unprovoked violence prompts me to suggest intensive therapy. As for our relationship, you are involved in a most interesting investigation that furthers my research. When it is completed, I seriously doubt that either of us will desire the other's company. So please, Jake, for your sake, face reality."
I sank into the sofa and brooded. Reality. The medication had worn off and my head throbbed. But not as much as my ego. So far I had been wrong about everyone and everything. I ran through the roster. Alex Rodriguez wooed computer ladies because Nick Fox wanted him to. Nick killed his best friend but not the wife who set him up or the girlfriend who would have destroyed him. Tom Carruthers was a charming guy who dated my secretary and hadn't strangled her yet. Mary Rosedahl didn't fit in anywhere. Gerald Prince was merely a drunk who wanted a comeback on the stage. And Pamela Maxson? She was using me to further her research, and the first night I wasn't up to bedtime games under the paddle fan, she hotfooted it elsewhere.
Or did she? She hadn't said. It shouldn't make any difference, but it did. Okay, so I'm not that enlightened.
"Are you saying you weren't with someone else or that I have no right to ask whether you have been?"
"Jake, must you?"
"Yes."
"Very well. I have found a lover."
And what am I, chopped liver?
"I see," I said softly. A look of martyrdom.
"Really, Jake, you're acting very immature. It is not as if we pledged ourselves to each other."
"So I shouldn't have a sense of loss."
"You can't lose what you don't have."
It made sense to my brain, but the rest of me wasn't listening. My eyes were watery.
"Who is he?" I asked. "Do I know him?"
"Oh, Jake. Don't go looking to be hurt."
She was right. No need to look. The pain would find me soon enough.
CHAPTER 33
Metamorphoses
Professor Gerald Prince thrust his chin forward, and in his best upper-crust Rex Harrison voice intoned: "The great secret, Eliza, is not having bad manners or good manners or any other particular sort of manners, but having the same manner for all human souls, in short, behaving as if you were in Heaven, where there are no third-class carriages, and one soul is as good as another." I hobbled to my customary spot in the back row and wondered if I'd get in trouble for not doing the homework. On the stage a young woman read Eliza Doolittle's lines as they worked their way through the final act.
When Prince told the community-college Eliza that he'd grown accustomed to her face, I believed him. He was a damn fine actor.
They wrapped up the final scene and the class applauded politely. "What is Shaw telling us in the play?" Prince asked.
"It's about abolishing the difference between the classes," said an earnest young man up front.
"Perhaps that is the result, but the mechanics of the change?"
"Language, clarity of thought and speech," said the woman next to me.
The class mumbled its agreement. They had learned something since my last visit.
"Quite so," Prince said. "The play is unapologetically didactic. Shaw sincerely cared about the language. He—"
"I don't get something," interrupted a student near me. "In the movie the professor gets the girl. Here..."
"Here, she leaves to marry Freddy Eynsford Hill," Prince said. "And why? Because Higgins is a confirmed bachelor more attached to his work than to a pretty face, even one to which he has become accustomed."
"And his mother thing," the young woman said. "Higgins was a momma's boy."
"A mother thing, indeed," Prince said. "In his notes Shaw discusses the mother as rival. As intelligent and articulate as he was, Higgins was not fully developed emotionally."
Prince looked toward the clock on the wall, nodded his head, and the students obediently closed their notebooks. I gingerly worked my way to the front. Prince was stuffing some papers into an old briefcase.
He saw me and bowed formally. "Did you fancy my reading of Higgins?"
"First rate. Much lighter fare than Edmund Tyrone. Not all that in-love-with-death stuff."
He beamed. Like trial lawyers, actors never hear too many compliments. The professor wore a checked shirt under a blue blazer with a rakish yellow ascot. His eyes were clear. "You were worried about me, weren't you? I am moved by that, Biff. Have no fear. I am sane, stable, and as happy as can be expected. As for Edmund's speech, in drama, if one looks hard enough, there is the antidote to every expressed emotion:
"'No life that breathes with human breath
Has ever truly longed for death.'"
"Good to see you so chipper. And I like the line. Shakespeare?"
"No, Alfred Tennyson."
Him again.
Prince smiled slyly. "Your policeman friend was here yesterday. He apologized for unfairly accusing me. Then he showed me printouts of someone calling himself Passion Prince chatting with Miss Rosedahl and Mrs. Fox. Some very good poetry, if you like that sort of thing, taken badly out of context. I thought I'd get a rise out of you with the reference to Tennyson."
"You did."
"The policeman said you always believed in my innocence. That means a lot to me, Biff. If there's anything I can do for you..."
Of course, there was.
***
I ordered an iced tea and Prince said make it two. I gave him a look.
"There's a repertory company auditioning in Lauderdale," he explained. "Inherit the Wind. The collision of blind faith with the inquisitive search for truth. It wouldn't hurt me to show up sober."
"Henry Drummond?"
"But of course. Would you care to hear his cross-examination of the self-appointed prophet, Matthew Brady?"
"Maybe later."
He looked great. The silvery hair was swept back and combed. The blazer was either new or freshly pressed, not a gravy stain in sight. Best of all, he was cold sober. He had acknowledged his problem. So few do. A doctor asks a patient how much he drinks and how often he has sex. To get the truth, multiply the former by two and divide the latter by three.
The waiter brought our broiled snapper and fried plantains. We were in a bayfront restaurant two weeks old that tried hard to achieve the dilapidated sea-shanty look. Unpainted, knotholed boards were bolted to walls of sturdy concrete block. Lobster traps and colorful buoys hung from the ceiling, and an old dinghy sat wedged on the roof, as if a hurricane deposited it there. None of that bothered me. I could even tolerate the plastic pelican on a Styrofoam piling. But the snapper had that too-late-frozen, too-early-thawed, four-day-old fishy taste.
A sad truth: it is hard to find good, fresh local fish in a city that sits on the sea. I used to visit the docks in Bayfront Park when the fishing boats came in. The fishermen would fillet yellowtail, grouper, or dolphin that had been caught an hour earlier, and an hour later, you could be home marinating the catch in pineapple juice and soy sauce while the charcoal turned white. Then the city fathers evicted the fishing boats and built a trendy plaza of shops and restaurants, where we now sat, eating last week's fish.
"What did Rodriguez want?" I asked.
"The poetry. What it might mean. I told him what it meant to Tennyson was quite different than what some warped soul might read into it."
"What did the poet mean when he wrote, 'Woman is the lesser man'?"
He smiled at me and finished the stanza:
"'And all thy passions, matched with mine,
Are as moonlight unto
sunlight, and as water unto wine.'"
***
What do you think it means, Biff?"
"I don't know. It contradicts most people's beliefs. Most would say that women's passions run deeper than men's, though my recent experiences would belie that."
Prince didn't seem interested in my personal life. Instead, he began the lecture. "The poem was written shortly after Tennyson's unhappy love affair with Rosa Baring. Her marriage to another man may have prompted the bittersweet imagery."
"So jealousy is the emotion."
"The poem is more complex," he continued, "and frankly, a bit whiny for my tastes. If you're looking for a theme, Tennyson's important later poetry was naturalistic and Utopian. He saw mankind's struggle as an ascent to a nobler life. His poetry hinted of evolution even before Darwin's Origin of the Species."
"Henry Drummond would approve."
"Yes, and he also wrote of evolving to a new happiness. Man was still unfinished, still evolving. Tennyson was optimistic to the end. In his last poem, 'The Dreamer,' an old man speaks to a despairing Earth, which is wailing of its destiny, 'darkened with doubts of a faith that saves, and crimson with battles, and hollow with graves.' But the poet tells the Earth that 'less will be lost than won. Whirl, and follow the sun.'"
I wanted to know more. I showed Prince the printouts from Pam's conversation of the night before.
Prince frowned. "Someone's still using my handle. Perhaps I should sue. Know any honest lawyers, or is that an oxymoron?"
I ignored the insult. "What about the poetry?"
He read part of it aloud:
"'Till back I fell and from mine arms she rose,
Glowing all over noble shame; and all
Her falser self slipt from her like a robe.'"
He considered it a moment, then said, "It's from The Princess. It was written about ten years after the lesser-man diatribe of Locksley Hall. It's Tennyson's view of feminism, women's aspirations juxtaposed against the requirements of marriage. The poem raises numerous questions about sexual identity but the answers are left somewhat open."
