Jake Lassiter - 02 - Night Vision

by Paul Levine

  With that, Henry Travers hoisted himself up and looked toward the scoreboard. Valdez won, Alonso placed, and Ecenarro showed. I watched Travers’s hands as he tore a thick batch of quiniela, perfecta, and trifecta tickets down the middle. Strong hands. He showered me with the confetti, then hustled back to his post at the rail. His sciatic neuralgia must not have been acting up.

  I had a second watery beer, then headed for the exit when I heard the voice boom behind me.

  “Repent! Make peace with the children.”

  I turned, expecting one of the Jesus freaks, pamphlets in one hand, tin cup in the other. But I found Gerald Prince, tie at half-mast, gray cardigan unbuttoned. Hardwick and Prince, what a quiniela.

  “Do you remember the scene in the restaurant?” he asked.

  “What are you talking—”

  “Death of a Salesman. Willy in the restaurant with his sons in the second act, remember?”

  “Vaguely,” I said.

  “Willie tells his boys he’s been fired, and he’s looking for some good news to tell the missus.”

  “If that was my cue, I missed it. I can’t remember Biff’s lines.”

  “Don’t worry, we’ll rehearse.”

  “Are you telling me the college fired you?”

  “Of course not, I’ve got tenure. They can only discharge me for committing bestiality in the quadrangle at high noon, and then only after arbitration. It’s in our contracts.”

  He was holding a bag of nachos covered with melted cheese and salsa. He gestured with the gooey mess, offering to share the bounty, but I declined. “So what are you doing?”

  “It’s called acting,” he said.

  “I mean doing here. I didn’t know you followed jai alai.”

  “Moronic game. Never been here before in my life. I called your office. I was informed of your whereabouts by your delightful secretary.”

  “Cindy must have been replaced.”

  “Jai alai, she told me. And I always thought that was some form of Japanese poetry.”

  We walked together toward the parking lot. He was saying something, but a 747 taking off from Miami International drowned him out. When we reached my old convertible, he put a hand on my shoulder. “And that’s all there is to it. Flying Bird, yes, TV Gal, no.”

  “Are you confessing?”

  “To being a fool, Mr. Lassiter. When you suggested I spoke to both of those unfortunate young women on the nights they were killed, well, naturally, I assumed you were right. You are an authority figure.

  In a play I’d cast you as a man of character with strength, but with doubts nonetheless, a man’s man who appeals to women, but is—”

  “Could you get on with it?”

  “Of course. Well, after our meeting, I belatedly realized where I was the night of June twenty-five.”

  “Talking on the computer with TV Gal. I’ve got the printout.”

  “So you said before. But that was the night I passed out in the library, and not the only time. I never would have remembered, but I have the books stamped on that day. An anthology of British drama plus several studies of erotica, including a most provocative one with selected writings by women authors.”

  “I’m not following you.”

  “Sometime that evening, in the college library, I sat down with the books and Jack Daniel’s.”

  “Who is not, I assume, the dean.”

  Prince patted the pocket of his cardigan and produced a silver flask. “Only a pint, really. As I say, I settled down to do some reading. The chairs are really far too comfortable. I must have nodded off around ten-thirty or so. They lock the place up at eleven, and I was stuck there until six a.m. when the cleaning crew arrived.”

  “So there’d be witnesses. Whoever let you out.”

  “Goodness no. I sneaked out, headed home and showered, and made my eight o’clock class, remedial English, if you can imagine. Do you think the Philistines appreciated my efforts?”

  In an effortless motion Prince opened the flask, took a swig, and slid it back into his pocket. I unlocked the trunk of the 442, tossed aside a catcher’s mask, a tennis racket with popped strings, a snorkel and fins. Finally I uncovered my briefcase. I extracted a computer printout and handed it to the professor.

  He squinted to read under the mercury vapor lights of the parking lot. “What’s this, ‘eight feet tall, green scaly skin…’?”

  “That’s you, Prince, the night of June twenty-five.”

  “The hell you say!”

  He read aloud. “‘What about your asshole? Is it nice and tight?’ Surely, you don’t think…”

  “It’s got your handle on it.”

  “But does it sound like me? With my command of the language, would I grovel in such sordid feculence?”

  “I don’t know, but you don’t mind borrowing a line now and then, do you?”

  I pointed at the bottom of the page. He continued reading silently, then shook his head. “You think I stole this…this pelvic-thrusting doggerel about too much love? Really, now.”

  “Peter Shaffer or Jerry Lee Lewis, what difference does it make?”

  He arched his eyebrows so high the gesture would be visible from the balcony. “What difference! You compare the finest of contemporary theater with…with rock and roll!”

  “Which do you find more insulting, being accused of murder or of stealing lyrics?”

  “The latter, of course. With the world’s great literature at my fingertips, I never would have stooped to that monosyllabic drivel. As for the stylites poem, I suppose you know it’s by Tennyson.”

  “So I’ve been told. That’s what links Marsha Diamond’s green scaly monster to the Rosedahl murder scene.”

  Somewhere across the parking lot, a car alarm bleated. It held no interest for the security guards at the gate. Prince reached into his other pocket and pulled out a worn paperback. “A gift for you, my thespianic barrister.”

  While I riffled through a book of poetry, Prince started professoring. “Tennyson was having a bit of fun with religious fanatics, ridiculing the ancient ascetics who mortified the flesh by living atop pillars. I doubt, however, that the poor soul who communicated with Miss Diamond understands the poet’s sarcasm.”

  A muffled roar came from inside the fronton.

  “But you do.”

  He raised his fine chin and did his best to look offended. “Meaning what?”

  I tossed the book into the trunk of my car and looked him dead in the eye. “Meaning you know a lot about Tennyson, and for all I know, you collect rock ‘n’ roll classics, too.”

  “Let me see if I follow you. I have a passing acquaintance with the work of an illustrious poet. A killer quotes the same poet. Therefore, I am the killer. Gracious, lad, did you ever take a course in logic?”

  “The evidence—”

  “The evidence is what you fellows call circumstantial, is it not?”

  “I believe it was Henry David Thoreau,” I said, trying to lecture the lecturer, “who said that circumstantial evidence can be very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.”

  Maybe it was the mention of milk that made Prince blanch, or maybe he didn’t expect the literary reference from a guy in a faded football jersey, or maybe it was a look of guilt. Whichever, he recovered quickly enough. “Oh, come now! As you simply refuse to hear, I spent the entire night in the library…”

  “Where’s the proof?”

  “I have the books stamped on the twenty-fifth.”

  “You could have checked them out at noon. You have no proof.”

  He seemed to straighten and his voice rumbled from deep within. “There is my honor!”

  I didn’t laugh. I didn’t even sneer. He might have been serious. Or he might have been playing some long-forgotten role.

  He looked toward the airport, showing me his sagging profile. “Tout est perdu fors l’honneur.”

  “And when honor is lost, you’ll have nothing.”

  “Precisely.”

>   “According to the computer, Passion Prince talked to TV Gal around eleven p.m. on the night of June twenty-five. Two hours later, TV Gal was dead.”

  “The computer is wrong.”

  “You admit being Passion Prince?”

  “With all that melancholy sobriquet implies.”

  “And prior to that night, you chatted with TV Gal?”

  “But of course.”

  “And you admit talking with Flying Bird, Mary Rosedahl, on the night of July two shortly before she—”

  “Yes, yes. We’ve been over all that. You have my flagrant plagiarism from Equus.”

  “So why do you deny what the computer says is true?”

  He smiled a sad smile. “Come now, Mr. Lassiter. Does a computer know truth from illusion? How can it, when those who feed it are just as blind? What is a computer anyway but the mechanical mind of a man, a man stripped of emotion? Can a computer feel passion? Does it have a soul? Does it know the freedom of the human spirit?”

  “You lost me somewhere between illusion and passion.”

  “My dear boy, welcome to my class. You played football, didn’t you, just like Biff? Your darling secretary told me you were a professional gladiator.”

  “Not very well and not very long.”

  “Surely you recollect Willy’s speech at the end of Act One, the wistful remembrance of Biff’s last football game, the celebration of lost youth and promise.”

  “Vaguely, something about a star never fading away.”

  “Yes, yes. But what does it mean?”

  Give them tenure and two courses a semester, and they wallow in their little world, playing their little games. He looked at me, the demanding teacher, awaiting a response.

  “Okay,” I said. “Willy was lost in his illusions. His son once played a game, but there was no substance to it. Not when the rest of his life was built on lies.”

  “Precisely.”

  “Precisely what?”

  “Shall I put it in terms you can understand?”

  “If it’s not too much trouble.”

  “In Act Two, Willy’s out in the garden at night and Biff tells him he’s going to leave home and not come back.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Remember Willy’s lines?”

  It was there somewhere, buried in the attic trunk of memories. “Willie was planting carrots, putting some seeds down.”

  “Yes, very good. And what did he say about Biff’s leaving, about his son’s failure as a man?”

  I was still rooting around for it. “Something about not taking the rap for him?”

  “Right. We each bear responsibility for our own actions, but that’s all.”

  I stared blankly at him. He reached into his pocket for the silver flask and, with the same hand, unscrewed the cap, letting it dangle on a chain. He took a healthy slug, and in an instant the flask was back in the pocket, two ounces lighter. Practice, the coach always said, makes perfect.

  Professor Gerald Prince smiled and looked at me through watery eyes. “What I’m telling you, my dear Biff, is quite simple. I was framed.”

  CHAPTER 18

  Passwords

  The plaintiff leaned back, crossing his arms in front of his chest as if to ward off blows. He was a short, slender Oriental man in his fifties, and he fidgeted in a squeaky chair. He wore a short-sleeve white shirt and baggy trousers and kept shooting glances from the stenographer to me and back again.

  H. T. Patterson crammed all of us into his miniature conference room—Chong Gong Wong, his client; Rosalina Bustamente, the stenographer; Symington Foote, publisher and noted critic of the legal system; and little old me, courageous battler for the rights of Fortune-500 companies. Patterson sat next to his client, trying to calm him with occasional smiles and soothing pats on the arm. The room had no windows, one table, and six chairs, and was overflowing with the detritus of the plaintiff’s personal-injury practice—models of the spine and circulatory system, printed posters totaling damages for nearsighted jurors, blowups of various rear-end collisions at local intersections, and a tire that had suffered a blowout with ominous results.

  Either the air-conditioning was broken or my crafty adversary was employing the oldest trick in the book for shortening his client’s deposition. It didn’t matter to me. I just took off my suit coat, rolled up my sleeves, and plunged ahead.

  “In fact, Mr. Wong, shortly after the Journal’s review appeared, you changed the recipe for the duck á l’orange, did you not?”

  Wong didn’t say a word but his chair squealed.

  “Ob-jec-tion!” H. T. Patterson sang out.

  “On what ground?” I demanded.

  “Remedial measures are inadmissible,” Patterson proclaimed with a heavy dose of self-righteousness.

  I corrected him. “This is not a case where a defendant has remedied a safety problem after an accident. A city would never fix a pothole after an accident if the remedial actions were admissible. But your client is the plaintiff, and the doctrine simply does not apply.”

  “Thank you for a most cogent lecture on the rules of evidence, Mr. Lassiter, but my objection stands, and I instruct my client not to answer your insulting and harassing question. If you disagree, I suggest you take it up with the judge after the deposition.”

  I disagreed, but I didn’t have time to run to the courthouse. I also was getting nowhere with Chong Gong Wong, owner-chef of Chez Saigon, Miami’s only French-Vietnamese restaurant.

  “Can he get away with this?” Symington Foote whispered.

  I leaned close to Foote’s ear. “As long as we’re in his office and deposing his client, he’s the boss. We’ll file a motion to compel after the depo.”

  Sweat dripping from his patrician nose, Foote sneered his disapproval and made a note in his pocket calendar. Tomorrow, I suspected, the Journal would condemn lawyers who prolong litigation and cause untold expense to our last bastion of freedom, billion-dollar media conglomerates.

  “Now, Mr. Wong, what is your recipe for duck á l’orange?”

  Again, Wong clammed up and the chair creaked. Patterson said, “At what point in time?”

  A lawyer will never use one word when five will do.

  “Before the newspaper published the review,” I told him.

  “Objection! Irrelevant.”

  “What about the current recipe, Mr. Wong?”

  Before Wong had a chance not to answer, Patterson sang out, “Objection! Trade secret.”

  Patterson sat there smiling at me, resplendent in a three-piece white linen suit, unfazed by the heat and humidity. I wanted to strangle him with his Italian silk tie, and he knew it.

  “Tell me, H.T., is there any question I can ask this transmitter of ptomaine, this bearer of botulism, that won’t draw an objection?”

  “What he say?” Chong Cong Wong demanded. The chair was silent.

  Patterson slapped the conference table in mock horror. “Slander! Defamation! Obloquy piled upon libel! Is it not enough that your illiterate restaurant critic referred to the acclaimed Wong entree as ‘duck a la slime’?”

  “Fair comment,” I retorted.

  “Is it not enough that he called the rice soup ‘cream of phlegm’?”

  “Hyperbole, nothing more.”

  “That he denigrated the foie gras as ‘toxic scum.’”

  “A timely reference to environmental concerns.”

  “That the rabbit cassoulet tasted like ‘road-kill muskrat.’”

  “Intended humorously, no doubt.”

  Patterson bounded from his chair, put a hand on his client’s shoulder, and thrust his chin toward the heavens. “Lies! Prevarications! I have never witnessed such calumny—”

  “Save it for the jury, H.T. Look, we’re wasting a lot of time. You’ve got a waiting room full of clients, and from the looks of them, most are lucky to be out on bond. Let’s conclude discovery, ask for an early trial date, and finish this.”

  “—A string of malicious canards impugning my cl
ient’s cuisine, damaging his reputation, assaulting his honor. The jackals of the Journal shall pay the ultimate price; their ledgers will flow with red ink in this, the Mother of all Lawsuits. And may I enlighten you as to how Shakespeare described the importance of a man’s reputation in Richard II?”

  I’d already heard it, something about the purest treasure mortal times afford. By now I figured Patterson was getting paid by the word or maybe the syllable. He would go on for a while, making the stenographer earn her keep. I checked my watch. Three-thirty. Barely time to beat rush hour on the drive to Hialeah.

  “A man loses everything in his war-ravaged country…”

  Odd, since Wong was a Viet Cong sympathizer.

  “Then in our land of opportunity, he employs dozens of unfortunate souls from the Caribbean, South America, and the Orient…”

  Not one green card in the bunch.

  “Our city leaders dine at his famous establishment…”

  Freebies for the commissioners, no kitchen inspections for Wong.

  “Until that savage reporter unleashed his venom…”

  Actually he was drunk and the copy editor asleep.

  ***

  Max Blinderman looked me up and down and didn’t like anything high or low. “She ain’t here,” he announced, leaning on the counter in the Compu-Mate office.

  I gawked over his shoulder, which isn’t hard to do when you’re nearly a foot taller. True enough, Bobbie was nowhere to be seen. Max wore a black T-shirt with a pack of cigarettes rolled up in the sleeve. I hadn’t seen anything like it in years.

  “Actually, I came to see you,” I said, and waited for my nose to grow.

  He looked at me skeptically. On his forearm, the tattooed snake seemed to hiss. Looking down, I noticed a bald spot expertly camouflaged by some vigorous back-to-front combing and a healthy dose of hairspray.

  “I wanted to apologize for that story in the Journal,” I continued, making it up as I went along. “Bobbie threatened a lawsuit because of what it would do to your business. I just wanted you to know that I had nothing—”

  “Fergit it. Hey, business never been better. Babes are calling in, wanting to join, talk to the murderer. Some kind of turn-on, can you believe it? And guys, too, one wants the handle ‘Sexy Strangler,’ I won’t give it to him.” He paused a moment to pat himself on the back. “This is a classy operation.”