Jake Lassiter - 02 - Night Vision

by Paul Levine

  She thought about it. “I don’t remember that. One guy wanted to tie me up and spank me. Leather Lizard, I think. Unless it was Bondage Bill.”

  She smiled sweetly and pulled off her sweat socks and leg warmers, then wiggled her toes at me. “My feet are killing me,” she said, kneading the palm of her foot with one hand. Then she got up, walked over, and plopped onto the sofa next to me, swinging her feet into my lap. “There’s nothing like a foot rub from a man with strong hands.”

  Before I could figure which little piggy went to market, we were interrupted by a squeal. “Mommy! Mommy, you didn’t tuck me in.”

  The boy wore Fred Flintstone pajamas and had a good set of shoulders for a five-year-old. There’s no substitute for genes.

  “Nicky,” Priscilla Fox said, swinging her legs smoothly to the floor. “Say hello to Mr. Lassiter.”

  He gave me a wordless sideways look that other men on the same sofa had doubtless seen. “Hello, Nicky,” I said. “You look like a little fullback. You play football?”

  He wrinkled his nose. “Football sucks. Soccer’s rad.”

  Priscilla got to her feet and marched Nicky off to bed. I used the time to wander around. Just off the living room was a small study. A metal desk, shelves with law books. On the wall, plaques from every civic group in town. The room had been Nick’s, but a feminine hand was creeping in. A lacy blanket covered the love seat in the corner. A flower vase with plastic tulips sat on the desk next to the computer.

  She found me as I was studying an old black-and-white photo in a plastic frame. Nick was bare-chested, dog tags around his neck, the left hand holding an M-16, the right draped around another soldier’s shoulder. Both wore grins and were clean-shaven and muscular, and something in their eyes said they hadn’t yet seen combat.

  “Wasn’t he something?” Priscilla asked, the tone just this side of wistful. “Look at those pecs.”

  “Great pecs,” I agreed.

  “He and Evan were best friends. They met at OCS. Served together in Vietnam. In all Nick’s letters, Evan did this…Evan did that. Nick looked up to him.”

  “Evan?”

  “Lieutenant Evan Ferguson.”

  “They still keep in touch?” I asked, knowing the answer.

  A cloud crossed her face. “Evan never came back. He was killed in an ambush or something. They were trying to save a Vietnamese girl. Nick and Evan were leading their battalions—”

  “Platoons.”

  “Whatever. A bunch of American boys with rifles playing soldier. Something happened. Evan got killed and Nick got a medal. He doesn’t like to talk about the details.”

  There was no way to avoid wading right into it. “Would he have talked about it with Marsha?”

  She looked at me with those nut-brown eyes and seemed to consider the question.

  “Doubt it. Like most men, he doesn’t say boo about himself. About what he’s feeling, I mean. Marsha would ask me about the war, and what Nick was like when he came back. She and I got to be close. She’d come over, we’d drink white wine and have a little pajama party, gabbing all night.”

  “About Nick?”

  “Yeah, and other things.” She thought about it. “But about Nick, a lot, sure.”

  “What did he tell you about the war?”

  She looked away, mulled something over, and didn’t let me see it. “Not much. Oh, he’d talk about liberty in Japan. But what happened on patrol, the fighting, not much at all.”

  “Did Marsha ever tell you she was investigating Nick?”

  That stopped her a moment. “Investigating? No. Why would she do that?”

  “For television. Like Mike Wallace, put him under the lights and grill him.”

  “Just the opposite. She wanted to do a profile, a puff piece to make him look good.”

  “Nick didn’t tell me.”

  “He didn’t know. At least he wasn’t supposed to. She asked to see his mementos. You know, uniforms, photos, that kind of thing. There isn’t that much. But she was sort of mystical about it. She’d stare at a picture or just lay her hands on his moldy old duffel bag.”

  “Why? Did she tell you?”

  “She wanted to surprise him. Nick would come on live for an interview about some boring case in the office, and Marsha would have a profile all prepared about his childhood, the war, the crime-fighter stuff, his political life…”

  “This Is Your Life,” I said.

  Priscilla laughed. “That’s what I told Marsha, but she didn’t know the show. Too young.”

  As she talked she straightened up a bookshelf, then dusted the desk with the palm of her hand. Even the modern woman can’t fight a millennium of tradition.

  “Maybe you could show me Nick’s war memorabilia.”

  She hesitated and looked at me sideways. “Not without asking him first.”

  “Don’t bother. I’ll mention it to him myself. By the way, he told me you introduced him to Marsha.”

  There was a touch of sadness in her smile. “I knew she would never get serious with him. She wanted to use Nick, meet all the judges and lawyers and cops you need to know in her business. She wanted to get out of the mold they created for her at the station. Get onto hard news, then move to a bigger television market, like L.A. or New York. To her Nick was just a power fuck. And to Nick, she was just…”

  “A sport fuck.”

  “You got that right.”

  “So there was a better chance of Nick coming back than if he found some divorcee looking for commitment.”

  She seemed to sigh. Her look spoke of lonely nights, of the anguish Nick caused her, of the love she still had for him. The brave front was crumbling. “It was almost as if I still had him. I liked Marsha. She’d tell me what they did, what he said about me. Usually he complained. I was always pushing him, he’d say, which was right. I pushed him to go to law school, to run for office. I pushed him to become the man he is.”

  “And then he left.”

  She nodded and turned her head away.

  “Life never goes the way you plan it,” I said.

  I got that right, too.

  CHAPTER 12

  Alibis

  I hit every red light for fifty blocks heading east toward Coconut Grove. They’re timed that way by our traffic planners, who are either sadists or extortionists who get kickbacks from the oil and tire companies.

  My little coral-rock house was dark, quiet, and hot. I turned on the lights, pulled the cord on every ceiling fan, and opened the windows. The soggy air inside was soon joined by soggy air outside. I turned on the eleven o’clock news just to have some background noise.

  It had been a slow news day by local standards. No gangland executions, no cockfight raids, no riots in the streets. No DC-3s dropping bales of marijuana through the roofs of convents. Just the usual assortment of mondo bizarro Miami news.

  Lead story, a woman nine months pregnant and just off the plane from Barranquilla, sitting in a wheelchair at the airport. She told the customs agent her stomach hurt. Any other city, they would have thought the woman was going into labor. Here, they asked what she had swallowed before leaving Colombia.

  Condoms filled with cocaina, she reluctantly admitted.

  How many, the agent asked.

  Ciento diez, she said, beginning to cry.

  The agent didn’t believe her, but sure enough, after a handful of laxatives, agents recovered a hundred and ten condoms filled with nearly two pounds of cocaine. “The woman’s a real swallower,” the anchorman solemnly concluded.

  Then there was the Green Thumb Gang, ripping up expensive plants from residential yards. Nick Fox’s face appeared on the screen. “I’m declaring war on the black market for flowers and plants,” he announced. “We’ll have men working undercover at the flea markets, and we advise all citizens not to buy lilies or liriopes from anyone you do not know.”

  And rounding out the news, two highway attacks, only one a homicide. A woman tailgating in her Honda was shocked when
the driver in front stopped his Nissan, walked back to her car, and wordlessly poured his coffee through the window and into her lap. Then a man in a Hyundai apparently turned left too slowly to suit the man in the Corvette behind him. After being hung up at a traffic light, the Corvette driver took chase and peppered the slowpoke with a burst of nine-millimeter shells from an Uzi.

  “Stay cool on our hot highways,” a police major was saying. “Don’t blow your horn except for safety reasons. Never get out of your car unless absolutely necessary.”

  Welcome to Belfast. Or maybe Beirut.

  I was glad there were no new stories about the Marsha Diamond case. Mary Rosedahl hadn’t even made television and was awarded only four paragraphs in the Journal under the headline flight attendant slain. As long as we didn’t release the Compu-Mate connection, the news media probably wouldn’t link the two killings. Not that they weren’t still pestering me. That very afternoon, a reporter, a photographer, and a grip from Channel 8 ambushed me outside the courthouse with camera rolling.

  “Any new developments in the anchor-lady murder?” Rick Gomez yelled over the traffic.

  I picked up my pace and cut toward the street, hoping to tangle Gomez’s mike cord on a parking meter. “Your fly’s open, Rick.”

  He looked down, cursed at his own gullibility, and tried again. “Is it fair to say the investigation is stalled?”

  “We’ll have an indictment about the time your paternity case comes to trial.”

  “C’mon, Jake! Gimme something I can use.”

  “Have you tried condoms?”

  “Jake, please.”

  “See if they come in petite.”

  The grip was getting a charge out of this, even if Rick Gomez wasn’t. If nothing else, they could show it on the blooper reel at the station’s Christmas party.

  I jaywalked across Miami Avenue, cut close to a city cop on horseback, using him as a pick like in a basketball game. Gomez, a veteran street reporter, stayed on my heels. “Critics have questioned your qualifications to head the investigation.”

  “So has my granny.”

  “How many homicides have you prosecuted?”

  “Same number of Emmys you’ve won.”

  I was within sight of my office building, but Gomez wouldn’t give up. “There’s a rumor that the state attorney couldn’t handle the Diamond case because of his personal involvement with the victim. Care to comment?”

  “I heard a rumor that you got run out of the Atlanta market after an incident with a fifteen-year-old cheerleader.”

  “Jake!”

  I hit the revolving door and left Gomez and his crew in the heat of Flagler Street. I was halfway to the elevator when I heard his plaintive cry: “She was seventeen, you second-string son of a bitch!”

  ***

  With the TV still jabbering in the background, I prepared dinner in a kitchen so small the roaches walk in single file. I opened a can of tomato soup and a can of tuna. The Grolsch comes in a bottle, so I didn’t open any more cans.

  I heard the weather guy explain how it would be ninety-two with an eighty percent chance of afternoon thunderstorms. He could have mailed it in.

  The anchorman was inviting me to stay up late and watch a comedian tell semi-dirty jokes when the glare of headlights swung through the front window, a set of brakes squealed, and rear tires kicked up gravel where my lawn is supposed to be. Cops like to make entrances.

  Alejandro Rodriguez walked in, helped himself to a beer, and nearly said thank you. He ran a hand through his short black hair and removed his made-for-Hollywood reflecting sunglasses, which was a good idea, since it was close to midnight. He tossed his wrinkled sport coat over a chair and removed his rubber-soled oxfords. Then he turned off his portable two-way radio, crackling with police jargon, threw down a crumpled old briefcase, and dropped into the sofa to watch TV. At the first commercial he said, “What’s black and brown and looks good on a lawyer?”

  “Dunno.”

  “A Doberman.”

  He had another beer, and at the second commercial he asked, “What’s the difference between a rooster and a lawyer?”

  “Dunno.”

  “The rooster clucks defiance.”

  I was running out of beer, so I was happy when he stood up, turned off the tube, and simply said, “Passion Prince is an English professor with a potbelly.”

  Then he opened the briefcase, removed a file, and slid it across my sailboard, which, when propped between cinder blocks, makes a fine coffee table. I lifted the porcelain top on my last sixteen-ounce Grolsch, sat down, and started reading. Rodriguez had handled the old-fashioned gumshoe work himself, checking out the nighttime callers. Four to Marsha Diamond, nine to Mary Rosedahl the night each was killed. Two men chatted with both. Biggus Dickus never left his house either night, Rodriguez said. His wife corroborated the alibi. Wife?

  They played the game together. Biggus bedded down the women, conversationally at least. They talked it right down to panting, penetration, and popping. The missus did the men. Made them both so hot, they’d get off together. For real.

  Oh.

  Of the other ten men, seven had alibis that also checked out. That left Passion Prince, Harry Hardwick, and Tom Cat. Passion Prince was Gerald Prince, fifty-one, an English professor at Miami-Dade Community College. Other than Biggus Dickus, the only man to talk to both women the night they died. Divorced, lives alone. No criminal record. Expressed shock at the deaths, Rodriguez said, but seemed to enjoy the attention. Was home alone at time of both killings. Or, in the words of Rodriguez’s report, “Subject allegedly asleep between 2300 hours and 0600 on dates of homicides, no corroborating witnesses.”

  “Does Prince teach poetry, by any chance?” I asked.

  “Nope. I checked. Specializes in theater.”

  I turned to the next file. Harry Hardwick was Henry Travers, forty-six, retired postal worker on full disability. Ordinarily found at the horses, dogs, or jai alai, depending on the season. Never married, no criminal record. Willing interview subject. Admits computer connection with Mary Rosedahl early on evening she was killed. Claims to have been at jai alai, maybe on way home at time of homicide.

  Tom Cat was Tom Carruthers, thirty-five, wilderness guide. Never married, one arrest for assault in a tavern brawl, case dismissed. Refused to be interviewed, or as Rodriguez wrote, “Subject provided minimal assistance and informed undersigned officer to ‘fuck off, asshole.’”

  “What do you think?” I asked Rodriguez.

  He sighed and stretched out on the sofa, one tired cop. “I don’t know. Travers and Carruthers spoke only to Rosedahl, so you gotta start with the professor because of the double match. The retired guy walks with a limp and would have a hell of a time attacking anybody. The outdoorsman is a hardass, one of those survivalist freaks with about thirty guns, but…”

  “Nobody got shot here.”

  “Right.” Rodriguez grazed his chin with the back of his hand, scratching his five o’clock shadow plus seven hours. “And another thing. You deal with enough homicides, you get a feeling. Like you can talk to a guy and you just know he’s a killer. I don’t get that feeling here, not with any of them.”

  “I’m told that psychopaths can be very charming.”

  “None of them’s exactly a charmer either.” He paused, then said, “One’s a weirdo, though.”

  “Which one?”

  “Don’t know, but look at this.”

  Rodriguez shoved a sheet of computer paper in front of me. “The crime-scene guys got this to print out of Mary Rosedahl’s computer. According to the directory, it was her last Compu-Mate conversation. She saved it into hard memory about two hours before she was aced.”

  HELLO, FLYING BIRD, CARE TO CHAT?

  SURE. HAVEN’T SEEN YOU AROUND THE CLUB BEFORE, HAVE I?

  NO. WHAT DO YOU DO FOR FUN, OH SWEET BIRD OF YOUTH?

  JOG, WORK OUT, RIDE.

  RIDE?

  YOU KNOW, HORSES.

  AH, FLY
ING BIRD. EQUUS THE KIND…THE MERCIFUL!

  WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?

  EYES LIKE FLAMES. GOD SEEST!

  ARE YOU ONE OF THOSE BORN-AGAIN GUYS? ‘CAUSE I GOTTA TELL YOU THAT SHIT DOESN’T

  EQUUS…NOBLE EQUUS. GOD-SLAVE…THOU GOD SEEST NOTHING!!!!

  OH FORGET IT. NICE CHATTING. SIGNING OFF NOW…FLYING BIRD

  “A real sicko, huh,” Rodriguez said. “Wish she had mentioned his handle. Which one you think—” “Rod, that English prof, what’s his name?”

  “Prince, just like his handle.”

  “You say he teaches theater?”

  Rodriguez flipped open his file and read aloud. “‘American and British Drama, 1930 to 1980.’”

  “Thought so.”

  “That shit’s from a play?”

  I nodded. “He’s playing the disturbed boy. Trying to get Mary Rosedahl to be the psychiatrist, but she doesn’t know the lines, has no idea what he’s talking about.”

  “I got no idea what you’re talking about,” Rodriguez said. “Galloping horses. Passion. Seeing in the dark.”

  “Huh?”

  “Welts cut into a boy’s mind by flying manes.”

  “Sounds like you’re the one needs the psychiatrist,” he said.

  “In due time,” I said. “In due time.”

  CHAPTER 13

  Truth and Illusion

  I slid into an empty seat in the back row of the classroom and got my first look at the Prince of Passion. Gerald Prince had a fine thatch of silver hair swept over his ears, a florid complexion, and a face that had clearly been handsome in his youth. His shoulders were rounded and the brown sweater was threadbare at one elbow. A paunch hung over his belt, and the pants were baggy in the seat.

  He was pacing in front of the class on an elevated stage, wagging a finger at a skinny young man near the front. About thirty students were scattered throughout the classroom in various stages of semi-somnolence. “And what does the playwright tell us about truth versus illusion?” The voice surprised me. Strong, resonant, a hint of a British accent. An aging actor, a tired Jason Robards maybe.