Jake Lassiter - 02 - Night Vision

by Paul Levine

  Now we were getting somewhere. I knew the lady shrink would be helpful. I was concentrating on every word, something made more difficult by the fact that her black wool skirt was starting to ride up her thighs. Her legs, as any objective eyewitness with moderate powers of observation could testify, were long and slender and carved from ivory. I forced myself to look at a spot in the middle of her forehead. “I’m not sure I follow you,” I said.

  “If you’re trying to build a profile of the killer, you must be certain that the factors you build into it are derived from the killer. With these messages, some obviously are and some are not. But which? Equus is fiction, lyrical, and metaphorical. It’s not about murder.”

  “The boy blinds six horses with a spike. He is deranged, as the killer must be.”

  “But the play is not about mutilating the horses, is it?”

  As I thought it over, well-dressed London matrons carrying umbrellas began filling the lobby. The hotel apparently served an afternoon tea. Behind us, an elevator opened and some distinctively American voices—loud, complaining—filled the air. A family in warm-up suits and sneakers tromped out, festooned with video gear, the husband griping at a majestic decibel level about the price of fish and chips in SoHo.

  “No,” I said finally. “It’s about materialism and the blandness of modern life, about our losing the capacity for passion.”

  “Whereas the Jack the Ripper message is starkly literal, harshly real. A madman killing women and jeering at the authorities.”

  “And you don’t think the same person, the same killer, can be both literal and metaphorical?”

  “It’s unlikely, but the person who wrote the Equus note—”

  “Professor Prince, by name.”

  “—may well have written the Tennyson poetry at the second murder scene.”

  “Whoa! Whoever wrote the poetry killed Mary Rosedahl. He left it for us just as the Ripper note was left at the Diamond scene.”

  “Is the professor not the obvious suspect, a man who knows literature and drama?”

  “Yes, but he doesn’t seem capable—”

  “Read me the poem, just the last two lines.”

  I tried it with some feeling:

  “‘Woman is the lesser man, and all thy passions, matched with mine,

  Are as moonlight unto sunlight, and as water unto wine.’”

  She raised her eyebrows and smiled an enigmatic smile. “Now read this.” She reached into a folder and handed me the last page of the last scene of Equus. “The psychiatrist’s speech to the boy,” she said.

  I read aloud, “‘He may even come to find sex funny. Smirky funny. Bit of grunt funny. Trampled and furtive and entirely in control. Hopefully, he’ll feel nothing at his fork but approved flesh. I doubt, however, with much passion! Passion, you see, can be destroyed by a doctor. It cannot be created.’”

  She smiled again. “You read quite well. Both the poem and the play are laments to lost passion, are they not?”

  “In a way, but—”

  “The professor admits sending the Equus message the same night Miss Rosedahl is killed,” she continued. “The murder scene was organized, no blood or entrails dripping from the walls. An organized murderer is usually intelligent and able to converse with his victims. Rather than using violence to subdue, he controls with conversation. He assumes a position of authority, not unlike a teacher with a class. He can be quite winning. He frequently has problems with alcohol. Your professor fits the profile quite nicely, don’t you think?”

  In the movies, this is when the detective takes a long pull on his cigarette, exhales, and says, “A little too nicely, eh, babe?” But I don’t smoke, and it all seemed to fit, just like the lady said.

  Somewhere in my head, a memory was stirring. “After we left Marsha Diamond’s apartment, you said something about an organized crime scene.”

  “And you made a rather pathetic joke demeaning psychiatry.”

  “I just thought it was a little much, your profiling the killer as somebody who got Bs in math and wasn’t close to his father.”

  She shrugged.

  The rest of the memory filled itself in. “And that’s when we got off on the wrong foot,” I said.

  She seemed to think about it. It took a moment of self-analysis. “Before that. About two seconds after you joined Dr. Riggs and me at the restaurant. You came on as some sort of American—what do they call it?—hulk?”

  “Hunk?”

  “Yes. A big, Yank hunk. A cocky, grinning male predator.”

  “Me?”

  “You.”

  “And how long have you had these feelings of insecurity in the presence of the male animal?”

  She smiled but didn’t say a word.

  “I think you got me wrong,” I said. “When I met you, I’d just been drop-kicked out of the courthouse. My ego was dragging. If anything, I needed feminine companionship to buoy my spirits. I was trying to impress you and it didn’t work. I regret it.”

  She thought it over. “You sought validation that your product was still good.”

  I nodded.

  “So perhaps you overcompensated.”

  I nodded again, eagerly anticipating her compassion.

  “And I misinterpreted your pitiful yearning.”

  She seemed to be convincing herself that I wasn’t half-bad, and who was I to argue?

  “My goodness! I’ve been so frosty to you, haven’t I?”

  “Like Green Bay in January,” I agreed.

  “Then I apologize.”

  “Accepted.”

  Again, she slid the glasses back to the top of her head. She let her hand push the hair back and it tumbled over her shoulders. Then she looked at me the way a woman looks when she wants to be looked at right back. “Now, what were we saying?” she asked quietly.

  “Something about the organized murderer.”

  She appraised me with those wide-set intelligent eyes, the flinty specks lost in the green. She didn’t seem to have murder on the mind when she said, “Actually, I was thinking about you a few days ago.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, I was watching one of those American football shows on the telly.”

  “And the mindlessness of it reminded you of me.”

  “Well, I thought there must be more to it than meets the eye. I mean, just jumping onto each other and all. I thought you could explain it to me.”

  “Gladly. Where should we begin? First downs? Touchdowns? The I-formation or full-house backfield?”

  “Actually, I was wondering about all the committee meetings?”

  “The what?”

  “Every few moments the lads stop, gather ‘round a circle, pop their asses into the air, and have a meeting.”

  I could see we would have to start at the beginning. I remember my high-school coach the first day of practice. “Girls,” he would say, “this is a football.”

  Pam continued: “You were quite proficient at the game, weren’t you?”

  “Not really.”

  “But Dr. Riggs said you won an award. At university, you were an Early American.”

  “All-American, honorable mention, my senior year. It’s not that great.”

  We were interrupted by a shout. “Deus Misereatur! I’m so late.”

  Charlie was trundling across the lobby, his coattail flying, a wad of index cards in his hand. “I was going over my notes and now look at it. Tempus fugit!”

  Pam Maxson assured him that his audience would wait, and we headed out of the hotel and back into the Range Rover. “I hope you two found some common ground,” Charlie said, somewhat hesitantly.

  “Your friend is actually quite nice,” Pamela Maxson responded.

  Charlie didn’t have a coronary. He didn’t even snicker.

  “We were talking about radical psychiatry, the myth of the unconscious, that sort of thing,” I told him, trying not to boast.

  “Dr. Maxson must have been doing the talking,” Charlie said, “bec
ause you don’t know diddly—”

  “Now, now, Dr. Riggs,” she clucked, angelically rising to my defense, “Jake is quite knowledgeable about the law. I’m sure he knows many esoteric procedures that are quite foreign to you and me.”

  “Like how to spin webs of gold from piles of manure,” Charlie harrumphed.

  “Now, now, Dr. Riggs,” I chided, pinching the back of his neck. He harrumphed again and shut up. I think the old goat was jealous in an avuncular kind of way.

  Pam deftly guided the Rover out of the Mayfair section past St. James Park and across Westminster Bridge over the Thames. The rain had stopped, and the sun was peeking out of the clouds. She gunned the engine, and as we barely avoided a major pileup at a roundabout, Charlie turned to me and whispered, “What were you talking about, really?”

  “Royalty,” I said.

  “The Queen, the Duke of Windsor?” Charlie asked.

  “The Prince of Passion,” I said.

  CHAPTER 21

  The Group

  “Fantasies?” mused Clarence the Chemist. “I’ve had fantasies since I was eleven years old.”

  “About killing women?” asked Dr. Pamela Maxson in a neutral tone.

  “If you could call my mother a woman.”

  “What do you call her?”

  “Dead,” Clarence said, suppressing a grin. “Braggart,” chided the Fireman, from his seat across from Clarence.

  “It got easier,” Clarence continued. “First, the fantasies were about the victim, then about the killing, then perfecting the killing.”

  The Fireman scowled, then in a derisive singsong voice said, “The fantasy becomes reality, and then the fantasy develops structure. Blah, blah, blah. It’s all so boring, Dr. Maxson.”

  “And Clarence’s fantasies are so drab,” complained Stephanie, fiddling with her nails. “Poisoning is so impersonal. So tacky.”

  Clarence the Chemist stuck out his tongue at Stephanie. It was a small pointed tongue and it flicked out and back again, snakelike, as he bobbed his head.

  “Oh, you’d like to, wouldn’t you?” Stephanie taunted, hiking up her pink hot pants and flashing a smooth expanse of thigh.

  Clarence holstered his tongue. “If you were a woman, I’d…”

  Stephanie bristled. “You’d what, you insignificant worm?”

  Clarence the Chemist shrank back into the metal chair and jammed his hands into his pockets. On the far side of forty, he was short and stout, a bland face topped by wispy, blond-gray hair, a brother-in-law look you’d never remember. He wore a brown wool cardigan buttoned up. Next to him was Ken the Doll. Ken was in his twenties, handsome in a nondescript way, brown hair short and neatly parted, his pale face without lines, his thin lips without expression. He wore a blue blazer jacket worn at the elbows.

  Next to Ken the Doll was Stephen aka Stephanie. All giggles and flirtatious movements, she smoothed her short, bleached-blond hair with exaggerated motions. Her halter top was tight and bright, and she kept squeezing her small breasts together with her arms. She spoke breathlessly in a poor imitation of Marilyn Monroe.

  “There isn’t a real man in the room,” she complained, batting her eyes, “unless it’s him.” She dangled a handful of black lacquered fingernails in my direction.

  “Bitchy, bitchy, bitchy,” responded the Fireman. He was tall and lanky with prominent cheekbones, and his jaw muscles worked as he chewed a thick wad of gum. He could have been thirty or forty, and as he talked, his eyes danced to a tune all their own. “Stephanie, darling, if you hate your penis so much, why not let me dip it in kerosene and set it alight?”

  That started a buzz. Clarence the Chemist smacked his lips in a boorish smooching sound and nodded his head vigorously, welcoming an ally. Ken the Doll cracked his knuckles, and the Fireman grinned maniacally at his inestimable wit. Stephanie hissed at all of them.

  I just sat there and tried to act nonchalant in the presence of three men and a whoozit who collectively had killed fourteen women. The room was drafty and dark, the floor dirty linoleum. The windows were crosshatched with metal screens secured by heavy padlocks. The door was steel and opened electronically when an attendant turned a key and pushed the right button. Two floors above, Charlie Riggs was preparing to speak to an assembly of British coroners, homicide detectives, medical students, forensic psychiatrists and, I supposed, assorted other ghouls.

  I surveyed The Group. Clarence the Chemist was a pharmacist who had poisoned his victims. As a child, the Fireman had dissected live cats, then torched them. More recently, he raped women and killed them, though not in that order. He always burned their bodies. Ken the Doll wasn’t named Ken at all. But, as a child, he would rip the head off his sister’s Barbie doll, then masturbate into the open neck. He once knifed a woman in the abdomen, then attempted sex through the wound. Stephanie was a transsexual in her late twenties, a woman trapped in a man’s body. Hormone treatments had given her breasts and removed her facial hair, and in a dim bar, she would be considered attractive in a slatternly way. Judged unstable even before she killed anyone, she had been turned down for the surgery that would remove the male equipment and construct an artificial vagina.

  Clad in a white lab coat, different-colored pens sticking out of a pocket, Dr. Pamela Maxson sat on the edge of the group, her legs demurely crossed, a clipboard on her lap. “Stephanie, what was your earliest fantasy?” she asked.

  “Being just like Mother.”

  “Mother, mother, mother,” Clarence the Chemist chanted.

  “Fucker, fucker, fucker,” the Fireman chimed in.

  “Did you fantasize about wearing women’s clothes?” Pam asked.

  Stephanie bristled. “If you mean, did I have a fetish about cross-dressing, don’t be ridiculous. I was never a transvestite, those wretched faggots jerking off into their wives’ underwear. I was born a woman. I will die a woman.”

  “Any day now,” muttered the Fireman.

  “Oh, Stephanie,” cooed Clarence the Chemist. “Is it still two pounds sterling for you to suck off the guards in the WC, or has the price gone up?”

  “It has,” the Fireman said, furiously working his chewing gum. “Now Stephanie will pay five pounds.”

  Even Ken the Doll laughed at that one.

  “Ignore them,” Pamela told Stephanie.

  But boys will be boys, even homicidal-maniac boys, and they were getting pretty worked up.

  “Stephanie,” the Fireman said, “do you know how to make a hormone?”

  Stephanie looked straight ahead and said nothing.

  “Don’t pay her!” Clarence answered triumphantly.

  These two were going to make everybody forget Abbott and Costello. When the clapping and foot-stomping stopped, Pamela looked Clarence in the eye. “Perhaps I should call Clive and order up a double dose of Thorazine. We could end group now, and everyone could return to the ward for a nice long nap.”

  That got their attention. The noise stopped, and Pamela continued. “Stephanie, your mother dressed you in girls’ clothes, didn’t she?”

  “Ever since I could remember. Bows and frills. Just like Mother.” Stephanie’s voice had taken on an eerie little-girl quality.

  “And Father, what did he say?”

  “He was too potted to say anything, and after a while he wasn’t there at all.”

  “And why did you kill the shop assistant?”

  The question was jarring, as it was meant to be. Stephanie didn’t bat a false eyelash. “The tart was throwing herself at a man.”

  “A man?”

  “My man…the man I wanted.”

  “So you killed her?”

  Stephanie shrugged. It was rational, I thought, remembering my earlier conversation with Pam. She killed the woman out of jealousy. The woman was after the man Stephanie wanted. And probably more important, the woman possessed the body parts Stephanie coveted, was lucky enough to be born with them.

  “Kill, kill, kill,” chanted Clarence the Chemist, quieter this tim
e.

  “Burn, burn, burn,” answered the Fireman.

  “Let’s talk about the new boy,” Stephanie said.

  Suddenly they were looking at me.

  “He’s big,” said the fireman.

  “Handsome in a loutish way,” said Stephanie.

  “Do you kill them first or fuck them first?” Clarence asked.

  Talk about leading questions. “Usually I make a joke and they just go away,” I said.

  Pam Maxson began passing out photocopies like a teacher to her class.

  “Ooh, show-and-tell,” Stephanie breathed.

  Clarence drew a pair of spectacles from his shirt pocket and studied the papers. The Fireman industriously folded his copies, making three paper airplanes, licking the seams along the wings. Ken the Doll simply stared toward the screened windows.

  “Clarence, you liked to leave little missives, didn’t you?” Pam Maxson asked.

  “Poetry. I wrote poetry. ‘Ode to White Arsenic.’ ‘On Turning Blue.’ ‘Sighing with Cyanide.’ You’ve read them all, Dr. Maxson.” He examined the papers. “But this…this ranting about horses’ eyes. This is sick.”

  “What about the others?”

  Clarence read aloud. “‘Catch me if you can, Mr. Lusk.’ Not much to it unless old Lusky is a pedophile.”

  Clarence flipped to the next page. The Fireman sailed a paper airplane across the room, where it did a nosedive into a steel-screened window.

  Stephanie said, “If he’s cute, Mr. Lusk can catch me if he wants.”

  Again, Clarence read aloud. “‘Weakness to be wroth with weakness, woman’s pleasure, woman’s pain…’ A little dated, wouldn’t you say, doctor?”

  Pam Maxson turned to me and shrugged. I looked at Clarence. “Keep reading,” I told him, wondering if Tennyson had ever been heard in these surroundings.

  He continued silently, then said, “I can’t relate to this, if that’s your question.” He screwed his face into a look of disapproval and read aloud again. “‘Woman is the lesser man, and all thy passions matched with mine, are as moonlight unto sunlight, and as water unto wine.’”