Night vision

CHAPTER 20

A gray rain fell against a gray sky, and a gray chill hung in the air.

The only thing gray about Pam Maxson was her silk blouse. The skirt was a rich black wool, the pumps black leather and sensibly low-heeled, but the scarf was an exclamation point of fiery scarlet. I pictured her in front of the mirror that morning, brushing back the thick auburn hair, slathering an extra daub of gloss on the lips, maybe starting for the door, then doubling back to tie that flirtatious scarf around her neck.

Great fantasy, Lassiter. Man is never so foolish as when he fools himself.

I tossed our bags into the back of Pam Maxson's silver Range Rover and let Charlie join her in the front seat. Pam expertly ran through the gears and got us out of the maze of Heathrow and onto the highway to the city.

"I like the Rover," I told her from the backseat. "Great to have four-wheel drive in case we run into quicksand in Piccadilly."

As usual, she thought I was hilarious. She showed this by ignoring me, doubtless out of fear she'd bust a gut laughing.

Charlie was packing his pipe after eight hours of quarantine on the flight. Pam Maxson said, "The staff is anxiously awaiting your lecture."

"Me too," I admitted, "and so is the customs inspector, judging from the look on his face when he opened Charlie's bag of tissue samples and internal organs."

"Some people have never seen a hand floating in a jar of formaldehyde," Charlie said, as if he couldn't understand why.

"Or a skull with an ax blade embedded in it," I agreed.

Pam Maxson turned toward the backseat. "Mr. Lassiter…"

"Jake," I reminded her.

"Jake. If you wish, I could arrange some meetings for you during Dr. Riggs's first talk. It could be useful to your investigation. Of course, you may not want to miss-"

"No problem. I've heard Charlie lecture so many times, I've stopped throwing up during the slide show."

"Very well," she said, "you might find my therapy group very stimulating."

We drove without speaking for a while, listening to the clack of the windshield wipers and the hiss of the tires. As we neared the city, Charlie nodded sleepily, and I stifled a yawn with the back of my fist.

"If the two of you are weary, perhaps a short nap would be in order," she suggested. "I could wait in the lobby, then knock you up in an hour."

I was intrigued by the possibilities but figured she was only offering a wake-up call.

"No need," Charlie said. "A cold shower, and I'll be good as new. It's best our bodies get adjusted to the time change."

I stretched my legs across the backseat and caught a glimpse of Pam Maxson in the rearview mirror. Our eyes met and hers flicked back to the road. "Perhaps the two of you would be interested in a weekend in the country," she said. "It's particularly nice this time of year in the Cotswolds."

"Not to be confused with the Catskills," I piped up, remembering our first conversation of promiscuous farm girls and uncaught murderers.

"Sounds delightful," Charlie said.

"My family's summer home is in the Cotswolds," she said to the windshield.

Family. It finally occurred to my dense brain matter that maybe the English lady was married. I pictured a dry Cambridge professor or a balding vicar, a stooped guy in a tattered tweed coat puttering around a drafty house, stirring the fire with an ancient poker.

"My mother's home, really. It's been in the family for two hundred years."

Mother, blessed mother.

"I keep a flat in London, of course. But every fortnight or so, it's ever so nice to go home. So peaceful. It's sheep country and some roads are rather primitive. The Range Rover is quite useful there."

Aha. The crack about the Range Rover had drawn a response after all. So she wasn't ignoring me. And the enchantment of that crisp voice: rather primitive…quite useful. How do they learn that unhurried enunciation?

In the city she negotiated the traffic circles they call roundabouts, smoothly shifting and accelerating, rarely yielding the right of way. The rain-polished streets were jammed with spacious black taxis and double-decker buses. On the sidewalks, tidy, well-dressed businessmen and women poured from banks and shops, walking briskly, umbrellas poised against the chilly rain.

"Not much of a day for sight-seeing," Pam Maxson said, "but that's Trafalgar Square off to the right."

I looked over my shoulder and caught sight of the National Gallery on one side and Buckingham Palace on the other and figured I had filled my culture quota for the trip.

Pam Maxson dropped us at our hotel for a quick shower before Charlie's first lecture at the Covent Hospital for the Criminally Insane. I was quicker than Charlie and in fifteen minutes found Pam sitting in a leather chair in the lobby, legs crossed, staring through large-rimmed eyeglasses at a bundle of papers in her lap.

She looked up, tossed the papers onto a side table, and slid the glasses on top of her head, brushing her hair back. "Medical students write such rubbish," she announced.

I nodded and sat down on a sofa facing her.

"So easy to condemn something they don't understand. So very avant-garde to denounce radical psychiatry."

"Haven't heard of that," I admitted.

"An unfortunate name for an innovative way of viewing psychiatric conditions. A radical psychiatrist would say that mental illness is a myth, that those we call mentally ill are just as rational as anyone else, from their own perspective."

"You mean they're not crazy because they don't know they're crazy."

"They're not crazy, as you say, because their actions are just as goal-directed and motivated as yours or mine. They are perfectly reasonable from their point of view."

"That's nuts! I'm sorry…I mean it's just semantics. They're crazy or ill or whatever you call it because they can't conform to society's standards of normal behavior."

She gave me the tolerant look an extraordinarily patient trainer might show to a particularly inept chimpanzee. "You may be surprised to learn that some schizophrenics actually choose careers as mental patients. They appraise their alternatives in the outside world, then make a rational choice as to their actions."

It didn't make sense to me, but then abstract concepts are not my strong point. "If their actions are violent or bizarre, does it matter if we call them rational or not?" I asked.

"Perhaps not, but it affects the very roots of psychiatry. Radical psychiatrists argue that the unconscious is a myth, that all wishes, emotions, and feelings are conscious thoughts, and if not conscious, they don't exist at all."

"Hold on. I thought the whole game you shrinks play is that the unconscious affects behavior."

"Historically accurate, but our science is changing."

"Are you saying it isn't the subconscious that causes someone to kill and kill again? Are you chucking out the old plea of not guilty by reason of insanity?"

"The fantasies acted out by serial murderers are clearly conscious. Your FBI has conducted lengthy interviews with imprisoned killers that demonstrate the extent of conscious fantasizing from the planning of the crime to the crime itself to disposal of the body."

"But the fantasies are the product of the unconscious, aren't they?"

"Prove it," she demanded.

Then it dawned on me. "You're a radical psychiatrist."

"Let's just say I have an open mind."

I mulled that over a moment and she continued: "Dr. Riggs rang me up about the second murder last week. The messages are quite interesting. Equus is a British work, you know."

I knew.

"The protagonist is a psychiatrist, you know."

I knew that, too.

"How do you interpret the Equus message?" she asked.

"I don't know. It was written to Mary Rosedahl by a professor who teaches drama when he isn't drunk. I was hoping you had some thoughts."

"Well, one thing is quite obvious. Judging from the differences between the messages, I would say it is unlikely that the professor wrote both the Equus excerpt to Miss Rosedahl and the 'green, scaly monster' rejoinder to Miss Diamond." I stayed quiet and she slid the glasses back down and looked directly at me. "Additionally, you have the other messages to deal with. The Jack the Ripper taunt at the Diamond murder scene and the Tennyson poem at the Rosedahl scene. They are all so different, it is difficult to know where to begin."

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, "because 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.