Come Out Tonight

by Bonnie Rozanski

  But then Sussman stood up and insisted that his client wasn’t answering any more questions till he got some sleep. I played along. I let Jackman go back to his cell, making sure that someone kept coming in and waking him up. I had a hunch that if sleepwalking were at the bottom of this, the best way to break him was through sleep deprivation.

  Back and forth we went: from interrogation to interrupted sleep, back to interrogation, but there was no break, no confession. Then his lawyer stopped the proceedings one more time on the grounds that his client needed some shuteye. It was then I got my brilliant idea. I agreed to let him sleep one more time, but with one proviso: he had to take some Somnolux. Jerry Sussman, bless his unsuspecting heart, didn’t have a clue why. Neither did that simpleton Henry. But if Somnolux was the problem, maybe it would also prove to be the solution.

  * * *

  I never bothered to go home at all. I just lay down in an empty cell dozing until my cell phone rang at five to two in the morning. “Detective,” a voice said. “Jackman’s up and moving around. What do you want me to do?”

  “Don’t try to wake him up. Just bring him to the interrogation room. I’ll meet you there ASAP.”

  “But he’s already up.”

  According to what I’d read about Somnolux, it was sometimes hard for laymen to tell that the sleepwalkers weren’t fully awake. But, hey, I wasn’t going to bother to give this guy a lecture on parasomnias. “Just bring him over,” I said. “I’ll take it from there.”

  I got there before they did and made sure everything was prepped to tape the session before taking my position in back of the Formica interrogation table. A couple of minutes later, the door to the room opened, and Jackman – I can only say - swaggered in. He pulled the chair out for himself, lifting one leg over the seat and dropping down to face me, that same old smirk on his face that I remember from the day I met him. This didn’t look like sleepwalking. Damn. It was just Henry, fully conscious. Or was it? His body language suggested otherwise.

  “Hey, there, Babe,” he said to me.

  “Babe?” I echoed, caught off-guard.

  “You’re not so bad looking, Detective,” Henry said, his eyes staring into mine in a way that seemed to make my heart throb. “You just should take better care of yourself. Get a good haircut. Something a little more feminine. And from what I can see you’ve got some bodacious boobs. Show ‘em off a little.”

  “Henry?” I said. This was not the Henry I knew.

  “Edward,” he fired back. “You mean you can’t tell the fucking difference? Henry’s a fucking dweeb.”

  Edward, I mused. Where did I hear that name before? “Edward Jackman?”

  “Fucking right.”

  It had taken me way longer than it should have, but I had it now. Edward Jackman. Alicia’s Edward Jackman. Not Henry at all. “So you’re not just sleepwalking,” I said at last.

  Edward gave forth this low, virile chuckle, a primal pulse that seemed to set my heart beating to his own erotic rhythm. God, I was ready to scrap the interrogation and throw myself at him from across the table.

  “Is that what you thought would happen?” he said. “Henry would get up, walk in here like a zombie and fucking confess to everything?”

  Something like that. I just wasn’t sure what. Life doesn’t always hand you clear cut choices. You just have to take what it gives you and get ready to make lemonade, if necessary. I leaned over the table to get in his face. “So, who are you, Edward Jackman?”

  He was the one in charge, Edward claimed. Whether that was the truth or wishful thinking was yet to be revealed, but he certainly acted the part. For the next couple of hours under a barrage of hot lights and hard questions, I couldn’t trip Edward up on anything.

  He was obviously a lot smarter than Henry, though how that could be, I couldn’t say. How could two different personalities sharing the same brain and body be so different? I never would have thought of Henry as being attractive, though here was another version of him, still lanky and balding, yet somehow so suffused with sex, confidence and vitality, that he was transformed.... Maybe it was the bad boy in him that got to me. Maybe it was the simple element of danger and malevolence that always turned me on…. Whatever, look at me. He’s smiling at me, and like some damn automaton, I smile back….Damn, I had to stop drifting off like this….

  “How about a fucking coke?” Edward asked - no, commanded around five in the morning. Never mind, I thought, I needed to get out of the room, to pull myself together. I got up, closed the door behind me and took a few deep breaths on the other side. I walked slowly down the hall to the kitchenette, grabbed a plastic cup and an open bottle of Coke and poured some coke into the cup. I had just stuck the bottle back on the refrigerator shelf, when I noticed a bowl of lemon slices. What the hell, I tossed a slice on top of the drink, made back toward the interrogation room, and plunked it down in front of Edward, who was lying back with his eyes closed, feet up on the table, no cares in the world. He opened one eye, but he didn’t say thanks.

  Hey, you can’t let it get to you. You just go on.

  “I think you get angry when you don’t get your way,” I told him. I thought back to the descriptions of Henry with a hair-trigger temper. Maybe it hadn’t been Henry after all. On a hunch I said, “I think every time a woman gets too feisty, too independent, she ticks you off. I think Sherry wasn’t happy when she found out about Jessica.”

  “She never found out about Jessica,” Edward said.

  “Well, about Alicia, then. Those panties with the red “A” we found in your drawer. I think she confronted you with them. Asked for an explanation.”

  “Which I gave,” he said.

  “Which she didn’t like. I think she was also tired of having you knock her around.”

  “That’s what you think.”

  “She liked you to abuse her?”

  “Let’s just say she liked it rough,” Edward said, looking right into my eyes, a knowing smile on his lips. “I think you do, too. I see how you look at me, Sweets. I can see it in your eyes.”

  He could have been looking into my soul, he was so right. “Do you?” I said, unable to tear my eyes from his.

  “Fucking right I do.”

  “Anyway,” I said, clearing my throat to get my voice back. “Hitting her with a wooden statue is a little over the top, even in rough sex.”

  “I wouldn’t do that.”

  “Yeah, strangling is more your style. What made you kill Jessica, Edward?”

  Now, I’ve been in this business a long time, and I’d have sworn until this very moment that criminals are not evil. Sure, they’re violent, lazy, banal, or just plain bad. They want something for nothing, or their father beat them into a lifelong resentment against the world. They’re insecure or they have no empathy. They grew up poor, abused, or just plain angry. Something set them on the road to crime, but Evil? C’mon. I wasn’t sure it even existed, until I beheld the diabolical smile on Edward’s lips as he said, “You’ve got nothin’ on me.”

  I was tired, so tired, but suddenly that smile galvanized me. Whatever I felt, I had to bring this guy to justice. “Yeah, it’s true,” I said, giving it one last shot. “We don’t have enough to convict you of murder. All we can bring is a charge of attempted murder. Willful, deliberate and premeditated attempted murder. You know that premeditated attempted murder brings a punishment of life in prison, Edward? We have enough on you without murder to put you away for a long, long time...”

  That smile was still there, but fading.

  “...The whole time without Somnolux, Edward. You know what it’s going to be like without Somnolux? You’ll be locked in Henry’s body forever, without time off for good behavior. You’ll never be able to come out. Ever. It may be life imprisonment for Henry, but it’ll be purgatory for you.” I paused for emphasis. Wait for it, wait for it. “It’ll be a fate worse than death.”

  The diabolical smile was gone, replaced by the unmistakable look of fear. “Fucking s
hit,” he said. I sat back in my chair and watched him figure it all out, minute after minute. Finally, he leaned forward, says, “Yeah. Better death than being locked in that chickenshit’s body forever.”

  I can tell you that I never actually believed he would confess. I was expecting the usual bobs and weaves, delays, justifications, all the lame defenses and false alibis you have to deal with in this business. But this was the real deal. “You’re willing to waive your right to counsel?” I asked as quickly as I could get the words out. Edward said yes.

  I turned on the CD player, as if I were going to record his confession. Never mind the fact that we had him on video tape from the moment he walked into this room. “Okay,” I said.

  And he confessed. To bludgeoning Sherry with the totem pole and leaving her for dead. To strangling Jessica however unintentionally during sexual intercourse. To shooting and killing Diego Jimenez, perhaps in self-defense, but still. It was a perfect, classic confession.

  At the end, he leaned back in his chair and said, “I’m done. Shut off the recorder.” Then he walked over to the mirror and apologized to Henry about how he had sold him out. Obviously, we’d never fooled him for one minute with the two-way mirror. I guess he just realized that I was going to confront Henry with the tape.

  When that was done, though, he looked at me, laughed the same old diabolical laugh and said, “Got what you wanted, Bitch?”

  Man, did that tick me off. This thing between Edward and me was over. It was over. I was ready to say something just as nasty in return until I realized that after all the sexist hoops I’d had to run through for the past seventeen years and the near impossibility of smashing the goddamn glass ceiling in the NYPD, THIS WAS GOING TO FUCKING GET ME DETECTIVE FIRST GRADE! And, meanwhile, THAT BASTARD WAS GOING TO JAIL FOR THE REST OF HIS LIFE! Nothing I could possibly say would be as sweet a payback as that.

  HENRY

  A couple of weeks later, Sirken comes in while I’m lying on my cot, staring at the ceiling. There’s no telling how long it’s going to be till your trial gets going, she says. Maybe one to three years, because of the New York court calendar backlog.

  “Thanks,” I say, turning toward the wall. That’s a hint, but she doesn’t take it. I can tell from the shadow on the wall that she’s still standing there.

  “I think I owe you an explanation,” she says at last.

  I turn over and sit up. “Really?”

  She’s already pulling the lone chair over to the bed. “Today the CEO of Vandenberg Institute was indicted on charges of fraud, conspiracy, money laundering, misrepresenting its non-profit status, and intent to harm the public.”

  “No shit,” I say.

  “For the past couple of years, we’ve had a sting operation at Vandenberg Institute. They’re supposed to be a research-for-research’s-sake organization, but we suspected they’re really a big money-making scheme. They essentially steal their staff’s research discoveries and spin off companies which are supposed to be arms-length but aren’t. Lots of money all around. Way too much money. We suspected that they were paying off some of their employees to keep them quiet. We suspected Ryan to be one of those employees.”

  “You could have asked me. I saw a bag of cash in his apartment.”

  “Couldn’t. That was the whole point. You kept bugging me to put pressure on him, but I couldn’t be too hard on him without jeopardizing the larger operation.”

  “He’s guilty of something.”

  “Of being a sleaze, yeah. Of accepting bribe money, sure. But he wouldn’t have knocked anyone off; Ryan’s way too much of a wimp...” She almost smiles. “Actually, he was one of the relatively good guys at Vandenberg.”

  “What?” I laugh.

  Sirken gives me a long look. “Sherry was a lot worse than he was.”

  “Sherry?” I say, caught off guard. “No way.”

  “Henry, have you ever asked yourself why everyone in that corporation seemed so corrupt while Sherry was pure as the driven snow?”

  “I never said she was pure. But she had integrity! When Sherry heard about Somnolux’s side-effects, she tried to tell the public. It was Ryan and the rest of Vandenberg who tried to shut her up.”

  “Only after she let them develop it.”

  “Well, yeah, but she didn’t know there would be all those reactions.”

  “Henry,” Sirken says, dragging her chair closer. “Sherry was the first to know. She had developed the damned thing. You think they did no testing at all? Sure, she knew it could cause parasomnias. She was an expert on the sleep/wake system. She knew how complex it is, how to cause actions without awareness. She experimented with methodically shutting off some parts, turning on others, seeing what behaviors emerged.”

  “How do you know this shit?”

  “Her written notes, Henry. Computer files. Original data. Ryan had them all. He tried to cut a deal with us last night...Said it was all Sherry’s idea. Her theory. He had nothing to do with it...”

  I can’t help but laugh. What a scumbag.

  “That’s what her research was all about: the conscious self. How it arises from the brain. Sherry knew about DID early on...”

  “DID?” I ask.

  Sirken stares at me. “Dissociative Identity Disorder. Also goes by the name of Multiple Personality Disorder. You didn’t know that?”

  “Dissociative disorders. So that’s what it was,” I say, shaking my head.

  “She was looking for a way to find the self in the brain. When she found Somnolux could, in rare instances, produce it, she went all out to mass produce the drug so she’d have enough incidences of DID to study.”

  I sit there staring at her. “No way! Sherry tried to get Vandenberg to publicize the side-effects...she wanted me to stop taking it!”

  “When she finally saw the monster she had created, she got cold feet, tried to backtrack...”

  “Monster! No! She loved me! She wanted to protect me!”

  “Henry,” Sirken says, putting her hand on top of mine. “She didn’t love you. You were her guinea pig.”

  I pull my hand away, looking at her in horror.

  “It’s true, Henry... but in the end, she fell in love with Edward, and probably wouldn’t have revealed the secret to anyone even if you hadn’t incapacitated her.”

  “Edward...not me,” I mumble. “I never hurt her.”

  “I believe that,” the detective says, putting her hand on my shoulder.

  I shrug it off. “Get out of here.”

  “Hey, I thought you’d want the truth.”

  “Get out.”

  “Suit yourself.” She gets up and lets herself out. The door clicks behind her.

  The rest of the day and half the night, I obsess about it all. I can’t get out of jail. If I could, Sherry wouldn’t remember a goddamn thing about it. She’d deny it all, because she didn’t remember doing it. Does she remember not loving me? And if not, did that mean she loves me? What’s there in me, anyway, that’s so worthless, so unlovable? And what was she looking for that she thought she found in me? Did she pick me out of a crowd in Central Park, saying, this is the one. This one is the piece of worthless chickenshit I can pull apart like a piece of monkey-bread?

  Edward was right: all the inconsequential parts are me: all the chickenshit parts, all the unloved parts. All the action parts are him: the sexy parts, the parts that Sherry loves. All the best parts, the parts I want, the sexy Edward parts, are off-limits. I don’t want to be this person! All I’ve ever done is let life come to me. All those things I dreamed of doing: climbing mountains, bedding beautiful women, driving James Bond cars, making tons of money. All those undone plans. All those unused parts. But the two of us are tied into a single piece. So why can’t I choose what parts I want? Why do I only get the crummy, leftover ones?

  I hunker down on the hard, lumpy mattress and obsess about the injustice of it all and all the yadayadayada that goes along with that. It wasn’t me who did it. This other guy hijacked my body
. It’s not fair, Your Honor! How would that sound in court?

  Shit. Do people really believe in multiple personalities or do they think they only turn up on bad TV melodramas? Will they believe me when I tell them I don’t remember what went on? Sounds pretty lame, even to me. Do I believe me?

  The sleepwalking defense never has succeeded in the U.S. Sirken said that. She thought one case went down in Canada, but, hey, Canadians believe in universal health care. No way will it fly here. If a sleepwalking defense can’t work...then how can this?

  Okay, so put Edward on the stand... Give me Somnolux, and...Haha! Give me Somnolux or give me death! No...Seriously. Let them see the transition. How about that? Yeah, sure. Fuckin’ jury, he’d call them. Or get up and fondle the judge’s boobs. Seal my doom.

  ...And, anyway! How in HELL is he aware of me when I don’t have the foggiest of him? Maybe Henry’s the figment and Edward’s the real one? So who am I in all this? Henry. Sure! Of course! Every memory of Henry. Mark and Lisa locking me in the upstairs closet...Yelling! Mom making chicken soup. Don’t want that stupid knaidle. I want noodles! Dad’s 1988 Chevy... new car smell...ahhhh. BUT NOT A SINGLE MEMORY OF EDWARD except that freaking video. Must be Henry...Must....Ouch. Stuff like that just makes my head hurt. I’m not going there. No, I’m not. Hummmmm Da da doo da. Shut up. I’m not thinking about that.

  Anyway...doesn’t matter, because Edward’s never gonna see the light of day!

  Somehow, though....I... miss him. Yeah, did some pretty sick stuff. Hit Sherry in the head, left her to die, destroyed her life...Yeah, but...didn’t mean to kill her! Said that. Edward knows right from wrong! Yes, but. He MURDERED Jessica. No! Didn’t mean that either. Two consenting adults...she liked that sort of stuff...must have been going for the big “O” and it just got out of hand....Yeah, yeah. But he KILLED her. He DID. She’s DEAD. Could I have? Wouldn’t...couldn’t... No don’t think about that. Hummmm. Da da doo da. Shut up.