JL02 - Night Vision (28 page)

She was silent, so I said, “Or do you have some fear of abandonment?”

“You treated me as a transitional object,” she said, “as a child would a teddy bear. To you, I’m something halfway between yourself and another person. Just a comforter for your infantile narcissism.”

Oh. So that’s what it was. It’s so convenient to have a doctor in the house. Still, like most men, I prefer not to have my ego bashed just after sex. “Hold on, now. If I’m not mistaken, there was an appreciable amount of cooing and sighing coming from your side of the bed. Unless you were acting, things were pretty equal in the heat department.”

“Is that it?” she demanded. “Were you measuring my galvanic skin response, the square inches of the blush on my chest? Is that all it is to you, the thermodynamics?”

“Time out! I was lying here peacefully. You’re the one who came in, slithered out of her pants, and—”

“Bastard! Rotten bastard! It’s what you wanted, the old slap and tickle.”

“Wrong. I wanted more.”

She stood and turned away. With the candlelight behind her, her profile appeared in silhouette. “And I didn’t want to be treated as a need-satisfying object as you would your mother.”

“My
mother
? I never knew my mother.”

“It shows. Your suckling my breasts was the manifestation of an obsessional need.”

“Where I come from, it’s considered appropriate, even appreciated by many females of your generation.”

“Really? Boasting now of your prowess, adding another notch to your belt.”

“No, damn it! I think we made a mistake here. We weren’t ready for this. You shouldn’t—”

“Blast and damn! It’s my fault, is it? Why didn’t you send me away?”

“Because I wanted you. I just don’t know what you expected.”

“Not a bloody thing! You’re all alike.”

“I’m glad it isn’t personal.”

“It is, you blockhead. Have you ever tried talking, comforting? Afterward, you didn’t say a word unless your silent melancholia followed by snoring is considered suitable communication among females of my generation.”

Suddenly I wasn’t lonely anymore. I
wanted
to be alone. I was tired of having my head analyzed and my lovemaking criticized. I went on the offensive. “As long as we’re talking about mothers, you were downright rude to
your
mother today.”

“Now you’re an expert on etiquette as well as orgasms, is that it?”

“My granny taught me to be kind to stray cats, to wipe my shoes before coming in the house, and to pee before I got in the shower. I figured out on my own it isn’t nice to call your mother a tramp in front of company.”

“You think you know everything, don’t you?”

“I know you’re a grown-up lady and so is your mother, and the two of you ought to just let each other live the way each one wants.”

She sighed and her shoulders sagged. When she spoke, it was softer. “It’s best if you stay out of what doesn’t concern you and what you know nothing about.”

“I’m willing to listen, to learn.”

She thought it over before speaking, then said, “My father didn’t die. That’s been her story for twenty years, but the truth…”

Somewhere down the corridor, a telephone rang.

“The truth is he simply left when he learned he’d been cuckolded.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, then realized I just expressed sorrow at learning her father was likely still alive.

She sat in silence a moment. “Is that all you have to say?” she asked. “You really don’t know anything about me and you give no indication of wanting to know.”

From somewhere I heard a muffled voice, answering the phone.

“I’m sorry, Pamela. But after getting roughed up yesterday, being driven halfway across Britain today, and rolling with you between the sheets, I am not up to par in the conversation department. Next time I’ll have my devastatingly witty repartee ready.”

“Next time! How utterly presumptuous. And keep your wit to yourself, thank you. I’m talking about communication, sharing feelings, not wisecracking.”

Boom!
Another mood shift. I propped myself up on an elbow and studied her in the darkness. I couldn’t make out her face, just the chiseled outline of that perfect profile against the flickering light. “Pam, whatever I did or didn’t do, I’m sorry. Now, why don’t we get dressed? It must be about dinnertime.”

She laughed. “Dinner was hours ago.”

“Oh.”

“Don’t worry. Mum will understand.”

“Good. Some mothers would be—”

“That would be the pot calling the kettle black. But who am I to talk? God, I hate myself when I’m so easy.”

I heard footsteps outside the door, then a sharp rapping.

“Jake, wake up!”

“C’mon in, Charlie,” I said.

Charlie Riggs swung the door open and bustled in. At least it looked like Charlie, bushy beard and all. I just had never seen him in a crimson kimono and pink satin bedroom slippers. The sight of Pamela Maxson standing by the bed froze him.

“Oh my,” he said. “Dr. Maxson, so sorry to intrude.” He looked down at himself. “It’s most irregular, I know. But my pants are in your mother’s bedroom. That is…she wanted to show me the workmanship on the four-poster with its painted cornice. It dates from 1785, you know. Of course you know. It’s your house, after all. But I had never seen such workmanship…and well, oh, dear me…”

“I understand,” Pam said evenly.

Charlie seemed to sigh. “There’s a phone call. For Jake…from Miami…Detective Rodriguez.”

I grabbed my shorts and started for the door without asking, so Charlie just blurted it out.

“Priscilla Fox is dead,” said the man in the crimson kimono.

“I get you out of bed, amigo?” Rodriguez asked.

“Forget it. What happened?”

“Nick had the kid for the weekend. The missus was home all alone, talking whoopee on the computer till about eleven. We got the printout. Around midnight, best we can figure, she has a visitor. Must have known the guy, no sign of a break-in. Anyway, she ends up strangled.”

“Sexual assault?”

“Well, the ME says she had sex within an hour of death. Seminal fluid reveals type-A blood. But the place is neat as a pin. There’s no evidence of violence other than the bruises on the neck. Nothing missing from the house. A neighbor found her today when she didn’t show for a ladies’ lunch.”

“An organized murder scene,” I said.

“Ey, you’re learning the jargon, counselor. Anyway, to my practiced eye, it looks like consensual sex followed by manual strangulation.”

“Just like Mary Rosedahl.”

“
Verdad,
five’ll get you ten, same guy did all three. The way I figure, he was fooling around with Marsha but couldn’t talk her out of her pants, so he just offed her. The Rosedahl girl and Priscilla were easier, that’s all.”

So the killer wasn’t a drooling maniac or one of those social outcasts collecting bottle caps in a rented room. More like a demented Don Juan.

I thought about Priscilla Fox. Pretty and tough. Cynical and smart. Lonely and dead.

I remembered her in leotards and sneakers. Stretching and aerobicizing, dieting and fretting. Fighting middle age and winning. So long, Nick, hello, world. Picking up the pieces without missing a step. At least that was the side she showed. But at night, in the lonely hours, huddled over the passionless box with its microchips and electronic blips, she reached into the darkness, blindly groping for warmth and rapture. Surely there must be someone out there just as appealing, just as hungry, just as deserving of love.

No. No, Priscilla, I wanted to shout through time and space. Bolt that door against the night. The creepy crawlies aren’t all on the late show. They drive Chevys and mow their lawns and order home-delivery pizzas. They spank on aftershave and make chitchat and smile through lying lips. They kiss and then they kill.

“How’s Nick taking it?” I asked.

“Pretty hard, though he tries not to show it. Most guys I know would just be happy, no more alimony.”

“Most guys you know are cops, coroners, and criminals. Gives you a jaundiced outlook, Rod.”

“Maybe, but Nick’s tops in my book. And so is…was Prissy.”

“Didn’t know you were acquainted,” I said.

“For years. Nick and Prissy would double-date with Maria and me before we got divorced. After Nick moved out, I’d see Prissy for dinner once in a while.”

He paused and I listened to some overseas buzzing and hissing.

If he wanted me to ask about their relationship, he had a long wait. Sometimes the best questioning technique is total silence.

“It wasn’t romantic or anything,” Rodriguez continued. “Just friends. Nick knew all about it, didn’t give a shit.”

I filed that away and asked, “You said you had a printout?”

“More poetry signed by the asshole that did the deed. You want to talk to him?”

“What? You got him! Why didn’t you say so?”

“Slow down. I’m telling you. In fact, he’ll tell you.”

“Whoa! You Mirandize him?”

“Twice, but he needs detox more than legal advice. Fifty bucks says his blood tests for bourbon at eighty proof. The rest will be type A.”

“Yeah, so’s mine and forty percent of the U.S. Congress.”

“I’d arrest those fuckers, too, if I could.”

“Rod, if the guy’s drunk, the confession is no good.”

“Never said he confessed. Just said we had him.”

There was a pause, and in the background, Rodriguez said, “
Cojé esto,
asshole. Talk away.”

The voice was slurred but there was no mistaking those deep tones, trained so long ago on so many stages. “My dear Biff, where have you been? Are you holding out for top billing?”

“Prince, not you.”

“‘Tis I.”

“They tell me you killed Priscilla Fox.”

“They?”

“Look, Prince—”

“Please, call me—”

“Okay, Gerald.”

“—Ishmael.”

He was growing tiresome, but I tried again. “Prince. They want to charge you with Murder One.”

“
They?
Always,
they.
Third-person plural, a way of distancing yourself from the bureaucratic horror, eh, Biff?
They
need someone don’t
they?
Three women dead,
they
need a fall guy to take the rap, that’s how
they
speak, isn’t it?
They,
dear God how I adore that word, it’s so…so Kafkaesque. Tell me, Biff, in
The Trial,
do you think K. represents innocent mankind forced to vindicate himself in a totally alienated world without really knowing why, or is he guilty of something? Is he a part of the faulty world, deserving of his death? I prefer the former view, one of total desperation, rather than the hope for salvation through a higher law.”

“No more, Prince. Save it for your students or the guys in the psycho ward. If you want, call a lawyer. They get paid by the hour to listen to bullshit.”

Then there was silence, and finally, barely above a whisper, he said, “I want to tell you something very important that’s been weighing heavily on my mind.”

“You want to confess?”

“I want to do
Long Days Journey into Night.
I want to play Edmund again. I thought you would understand.”

I gave him no sympathy. “You’re too old for the part.”

“Of course the critics would say so, but what feeling I could bring to it now. Poor sickly Edmund, racked by consumption, drinking whiskey with his miserly father over the game of cards, telling him of his travels as a seaman. Do you remember?”

“No.”

Suddenly his voice became youthful, thickened slightly by drink but perfect for the part. “‘It was a great mistake, my being born a man. I would have been much more successful as a seagull or a fish. As it is, I will always be a stranger who never feels at home, who does not really want and is not really wanted, who can never belong, who must always be a little in love with death!’”

“Is that it, Prince, are you in love with death?”

I heard his labored breathing along with the static. “That is for me to know and you to find out.”

“But Edmund was speaking of his own death. He wasn’t a killer.”

“Nor am I,” he said softly.

“Did you talk on the computer with Priscilla Fox the night she was killed?”

“I spoke with Fortyish—”

“Forty Something.”

“—Who, I must say, was both amusing and intelligent. Your friend Roderick tells me she’s been slain and that her name is Petula—”

“Priscilla!”

“Precisely.”

“Priscilla Fox! She’s dead. Did you—”

“
Absolve, Domini,
” he chanted, “
aminas omnium fidelium de-functorum ab omni vinculo delictorum
.”

“Prince!”

“
Et gratia tua illis succurrente…
”

“Prince, stop it!”

“I was born a Catholic, you know.”

“Prince, you’re confusing illusion and reality. That isn’t you. It’s George chanting the Requiem Mass for his dead son in
Virginia Woolf.
”

“Is it, now?”

“Yes, but there was no son! He was imaginary, invented by George and Martha. Priscilla Fox was real.”

“Not to me.”

Then he put a tune to it, a nursery-rhyme tune, and six thousand miles away, ice water dripped into my veins. “Who’s afraid of Pris-cilla Fox, Pris-cilla Fox, Pris-cilla Fox?”

There was no reaching him. He had sailed into a foggy sea and didn’t want to make port. Filled with self-knowledge and self-loathing. He knew he’d never again play the Old Vic or romance women under the Maine pines. Maybe he had a death wish, too. But was he a killer?

“Who’s afraid of Pris-cilla Fox, early in the morning…?” The singsong voice grew weaker, and I heard the phone clank as if it had fallen from his hand. Rodriguez came on and told me Prince was asleep in his chair and that he’d be placed in a special cell and put under a suicide watch. I told him that was fine and I’d see him as soon as I could get home.