Double Take

CHAPTER 55

ATTICA, NEW YORK

Thursday

Big Sonny Moldavo of the New York Field Office met Savich and Sherlock at their gate when they deplaned at JFK and escorted them to the black Bell FBI helicopter waiting to take them to Attica. “Bobby’s your pilot, hell of a wild man. He was a helicopter pilot in Desert Storm, buzzed the Republican Guard whenever he got bored, but, hey, don’t worry, he’ll get you there.” When Big Sonny left them in the wild man’s hands, Bobby spit a good six feet, stretched, and gave them a lazy grin. “You guys must be real important to get such fancy treatment. Okay, Attica’s between Rochester and Buffalo—it won’t take too long. Climb aboard and buckle up.” In the next minute they’d lifted off and were soon looking down at a beautiful clear day over lower Manhattan.

Sherlock took a drink of water, and handed the bottle to Savich. He drank deeply, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

She looked down. They’d already passed over Manhattan and the suburbs. They were flying over flatlands now, broken with pine and oak forests. Occasional small towns dotted the countryside. She pointed down to a red barn, glittering in the morning sunlight.

Savich nodded. “This whole business—even though we know it’s Pallack, there’s no way we could talk a judge into granting us a warrant to search his penthouse or his office.”

She drummed her fingertips on her leg. “I know, but you’ve got to remember we only arrived in San Francisco two nights ago—amazing, given all that’s happened. Why are we going to see Courtney James now, Dillon?”

“I had MAX look him up the other morning. He was a neighbor of the Pallacks so he knew all of them, Thomas Pallack, and his parents. For years. And I realized he must know Thomas Pallack better than anyone else living. If anyone can fill in the blanks, I figure it’s James.

“Then we hit all the excitement with Makepeace and I had to put him on my mental back burner.

“But the thing is, even though it’s only been two days we’ve been on this, I’m worried about Dix. He’s so frustrated he looks ready to burst out of his skin. I have this hope, Sherlock,” and he raised her hand to kiss her fingers, “that since we’re stopped dead in our tracks in San Francisco that maybe, just maybe, Courtney James will have something to say that will break up the roadblock.”

“What could he tell us? All his knowledge, his memories of the Pallacks, is thirty years old.”

Savich sighed. “I know, I know.”

“But you’re hopeful.”

He kissed her, said against her mouth, “Yep, I’m hopeful. We’ll see.”

Sherlock hoped so too, although she couldn’t imagine what Courtney James would tell them that would be of any use. She yawned. Even though both of them were good sleepers on planes, the last few days had wiped them both out. It had to come to an end soon, she thought, it simply had to. She leaned her head back, closed her eyes, the sound of the helicopter blade rumbling through her head, and imagined the three of them playing on the beach in Aruba.

An hour later Bobby set them down on the rippled asphalt helipad at Tomlinson Field, the small airport outside Attica, and waved them to a nondescript beige Ford Escort parked at the edge of the tarmac. He gave them both a sharp salute and a lazy smile, said he was glad neither of them had been big yakkers, and in the next breath added, “Hey, maybe we can have some more fun on our return trip.”

“Can’t wait,” Savich said. “I was just thinking the ride over was smooth as my treadmill.”

Sherlock said, “Yeah, I especially liked how my stomach heaved up to my ears when you banked halfway over to set us down.”

Bobby smiled. “I’ll have to do something about that, won’t I? I wouldn’t want you two big shots to be bored on the way back to the big bad city.”

The sun had disappeared behind darkening clouds thirty minutes before, and was still a no-show in western New York. The wind kicked up occasional gusts that dusted up the dirt beside the road. The trees, they saw, were greening up nicely with the spring rains. The land was flat, cows thick in pastures, and Alexander Road was light on traffic. Savich drove past the Attican Motel thinking he’d like to turn in, pull the shades down in a room, and sleep with Sherlock until Monday. Coming east on the red-eye wiped you out.

Two guards and an administrator escorted them to the hospital, a basic three-story red brick building, like most of the other buildings in the vast correctional facility. There they met Warden Daniel Rafferty, who adjusted his thick glasses to closely check their I.D.s even though they’d already been checked twice, and shook their hands. “Courtney was having problems breathing during the night so we brought him here to check him out. He’s had some heart problems for years now, but never anything life-threatening. Still, we like to be careful. He’s on the third floor. This way.”

Sherlock whispered behind her hand when the warden was a goodly distance ahead of them, “We’re met by the warden himself, who refers to our mass murderer as Courtney? It sounds like they’ve given him such fine care he might fund a new building if he’s ever paroled.”

Warden Rafferty laughed, turned, and grinned at her. “The acoustics in the hospital are truly phenomenal. You’re right, of course. Courtney James is in a class by himself. Do you think he’s really a mass murderer?” The warden shrugged. “He’s here for life, so what does it matter? Fact is, I like the old guy. I’ve never been able to see him committing any random murders because some odd voice told him to do it. Come this way.”

Savich and Sherlock followed the warden through two sets of secure doors, both manned by guards who dropped their looks of hard-eyed intimidation when Sherlock nodded and smiled at them.

Warden Rafferty ran into a doctor coming out of Courtney James’s room, which was private, he remarked, because none of the other prisoners wanted to crowd in on the old man’s space. “The doc here will tell you that even the meanest thugs, the most vicious psychopaths, make way for Courtney. They defer to him in the food line, walk with him nice and slow during exercise so he won’t be alone. He has the money to get them most anything they want, legally or otherwise—you know, cigarettes, candy, CDs, and the like—but he also treats them with respect. He even gives me a rather tasty fruitcake for Christmas every year made by monks somewhere in Oregon, and he has a crate of Krispy Kremes flown in for the inmates and guards.”

Dr. Burgess, stoop-shouldered and rumpled, looked at the agents with old, tired eyes, then he turned to Warden Rafferty. “He has a fruitcake sent to me every Christmas too. Courtney’s doing fine. I took him off the oxygen. I think he overdid it with the big poker game last night and he’s just tuckered out.” Sherlock raised an eyebrow.

Warden Rafferty laughed. “They all have a deck of cards. They’ve developed a sophisticated code to tap against the walls of their cells to communicate—a call, raise, a fold. Evidently, Black Tooth Moses was winning big, especially from Courtney, and didn’t want to stop. Since Courtney wouldn’t ever want to disappoint him, he kept going until he collapsed. Scared the crap out of all the inmates, Black Moses the most. And the guards, needless to say.” His mouth kicked up a bit. “Yep, they like the old guy and those Krispy Kremes, glazed, still warm to the touch and nearly as fresh.”

They walked into the small white-walled room with its three hospital beds, two of them empty. There was one utilitarian chair in the corner and a single window that looked out onto one of the yards. They followed Warden Rafferty to the bedside.

They’d seen photos of Courtney James from the time of his arrest in 1977 to when he was pronounced guilty by the jury in 1979. But nearly thirty years had passed. None of the photos resembled the old man they saw now.

“Courtney?”

Vivid blue eyes stared first at the warden, then took in Sherlock and Savich. He grinned. “What’s this? You bring me a pretty girl? My, would you look at those beautiful blue eyes, sort of like mine. Hmm, could I be her granddaddy, you think?”

“I don’t think so, Courtney.”

“Then I’m on my way out, Warden?”

“Nah, you’re a fixture. She’s not just a pretty girl, she’s an FBI agent. Her name’s Sherlock. This is Agent Savich. They’re here to speak to you. You feeling up to it?”

“Of course I’ll speak to this pretty girl. I haven’t seen a pretty girl in thirty years, and I haven’t seen such beautiful hair in all my life. My mama dyed her hair red, but you could tell, you know? But your hair, Agent Sherlock—you married, sweet girl?”

Sherlock leaned down to his thin, sharp cheekboned face with its pale, amazingly unlined skin. A sick old man, she thought. Interesting how it blurred the reality of what he’d done. “You’ve got to be careful, Mr. James. Agent Savich is my husband.”

Courtney James said, “Nah, he can’t be jealous of me, I’m just an old man on his way out. Maybe I should try to look pitiful— put those oxygen clips back in my nose. Big fellow, isn’t he? Looks like he eats nails for breakfast.”

“Not me,” Savich said, “I eat Cheerios along with my little boy.”

“Ain’t that a kick now?” His smart old eyes went from one to the other and back again. “You want to talk to me? About what? You reopening the case? You want to get me out of here?”

“That would be nice,” Savich said, “but I don’t think it’s going to happen.”

“Well, Agent, the thing is, I can’t tell you where any of those bodies are buried since I never killed those folk they thought I did. I killed the Pallacks, true enough, and the good Lord knows I’m sorry I got caught. Fact is, they deserved it. They were a pair of shits, especially her. She was worse than both her husband and her son.” He sighed deeply. “Can I touch your hair, Agent Sherlock? That’s quite a name you’ve got there.”

“Thank you, Mr. James.” Sherlock didn’t pull away from the old man when he raised his thin veined hand to smooth her thick hair.

Warden Rafferty was moving from one foot to the other, doubtless wondering why they were playing around like this, but he kept quiet, something Savich appreciated.

Savich said, “Okay, Mr. James, you’ve flirted enough with my wife. You back off now or I’ll have to hurt you.”

The old man grinned wide again, showing white teeth that looked like his own. “You’re a lucky boy,” he said. “Okay, you’re here to ask me questions. Obviously something’s happened. What’s up?”

Savich said, “I want you to tell us all you remember about the Pallacks. The parents and their son Thomas. You said Mrs. Pal-lack was the worst, worse than her son and her husband. Tell us what you mean.”

Courtney James looked over at the blank white wall. “It was a long time ago, but you know, some things are like photographs, they stay in your brain forever. I can still see the look on her face when I stabbed her the first time. Okay, let me get back on track here. Margaret Pallack was the prettiest woman I’d ever seen, and she knew it. She was almost sixty, Pallack sixty-five when I killed them, but you know what? She was still a beauty, tall and slim— she stayed fit, had her own gym in her house and exercised every day—and she had beautiful dark hair that curved around her jaw. A stranger would have thought she wasn’t a day over forty. And did she ever know it, and use it.”

“Why would you kill a woman you so obviously admired?”

“Well, now, pretty girl, since you ask, the thing is, she slept with me. I never admitted that to the cops, prurient little bastards, never told them anything, really, since they’d already made up their minds that I was this demon psychopath, that I’d butchered everything that moved. But I don’t care now that you know. The truth is, I had loads of provocation, a whole bulging truckload.

“I think that whole serial killer nonsense was Thomas’s doing. Thomas Pallack was a chip off the old block, his mama’s old block, always tied to his mama’s leash, was Thomas. I remember that the prosecutor kept trying to sneak in references to ‘other crimes’ and ‘other people,’ that sort of thing, but they didn’t have any proof of that.

“Yeah, I’ll bet it was Thomas. The snooty little creep always hated me. I’d see him staring at his mother, then over at me, and he looked vicious, like he knew. You know something else? He looked jealous. I used to wonder if he’d have tried to frame me for killing his parents even if I hadn’t done it. But the thing is, his folks, they really asked for it like I said, they really did.” He stopped talking for some time, just stared blankly at the white wall in front of him.

Finally, Savich said, “Mr. James, you’re speaking very freely to us, and we appreciate that.”

“And why shouldn’t I, Agent Savich? I’m nearly eighty years old. How much longer can I last in the warden’s lovely country home? Like I already told you, I spent years with everyone believing I was a serial killer, that I heard voices from the devil, nonsense like that. I remember having to deny it even to the shrinks in here, but no one wanted to hear it.

“Now, here are two federal agents who are finally ready to hear what really happened. You are, aren’t you?”

“Yes, Mr. James, we came a long way to find out what really happened.”

“Ah, you’re such a pretty little girl. I hate for you to hear all this, even though all the blood is dry now, but it isn’t pleasant—”

“I’m pretty tough, Mr. James. It’s my job to be.”

He looked at her with his bright blue eyes, intelligent eyes, assessing her. Then he gave her a sweet smile, and Sherlock had to remind herself that he was a murderer.

He said, “I’ll tell you anything you want to know.”

“Good,” Savich said. “Please include me in that too, Mr. James. May we record this?”

The old man slowly nodded. He said, “Her name was Margaret. I called her Maggie May. I remember I used to sing ‘Maggie May’ when we were in bed. That was before I killed her.”