Night vision

CHAPTER 21

"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 time.

"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.'"

"What a pansy," the Fireman said.

Clarence said, "I never loved a woman and would surely not mourn over her loss."

The Fireman nodded in agreement.

"The poem was left at a murder scene, I said. "Does it mean anything to any of you?"

"A bit showy for my tastes," Clarence said. "Maybe something Ken would do. He likes the grand gesture. You dumped a body in front of Plymouth Church, didn't you, Ken?"

Ken wasn't talking, and the Fireman was licking the seams of another imaginary bomber.

"Strangled them," Clarence said. "Actually placed his hands on their filthy bodies. How unsanitary. Now, take cyanide…"

"Oh, yes, do!" shouted Stephanie.

Clarence ignored her. "The respiratory enzymes are poisoned, the body is paralyzed, and death occurs in seconds. And afterward, the body turns such a bright red. So delicious, like a big, plump cherry."

"What about it, Ken?" I asked. "Would you leave a note for your local constable?"

He glared at me. I didn't think he would say a word. Finally he turned back toward the window and softly said, "Actions speak louder than words."

From the corner of my eye, I saw Stephanie squirming in her chair. Pam Maxson acknowledged her with a wave of the hand.

"I hate to admit it, but the poem is right," Stephanie said, cocking her head to one side coquettishly. "I mean, it sounds strange for me to say it, since I'm a woman and all, but with the men I've known, the ones who've lusted after me, you have no idea, their passion. It's exhausting. And there are times when I have it, you know, the male sexuality. As you taught me, Dr. Maxson, all of us are bisexual to some degree, and I guess, me more than most. When I get it, that flow of hot male blood, it's different. So powerful and overwhelming, so intense, so lush. Lord knows, I love a man. I love to do nice things for him. But when I need a woman, it's difficult to describe, but it comes over me in waves, my passion inflamed a thousand-fold."

"What happens then?" I asked.

"I fuck her, of course. Good and proper."

I nodded and waited, and then it came.

"And hate her for it." Stephanie's voice was a whisper. "For making me the male beast. So who can blame me for killing her? I mean, really? Who can blame me?"

Pam Maxson apologized to me before leaving to join Charlie's lecture. The group had twenty minutes left, so I stuck around. We could play poker or swap tales of homicide. There didn't seem to be any poker players in the bunch.

Clarence was the most willing to talk; Stephanie stared at me and occasionally engaged in heavy breathing; the Fireman kept folding and unfolding his paper airplanes; and Ken couldn't care less.

Clarence leaned forward in his chair, elbows on his knees, and whispered conspiratorially, "Dr. Maxson is teaching you all the mumbo jumbo, eh?"

Stephanie smiled. "Sweet bitch. Are you in her pants yet?"

"He's not her type," the Fireman said. "Only he doesn't know it yet."

I just looked at them.

"We're a cottage industry, you know," Clarence said. "We need each other, the psychiatrist and the crazed killer. Without us, how would they get their government grants or appear on the tube?"

"You like playing the role?" I asked.

He shrugged. "It's expected. Your FBI behavioral-science lads came up with the childhood profile, bed wetters who slice up animals and start fires-"

"Burn, baby, burn," the Fireman interrupted.

"— and we can read as well as the next chap."

"So it's all a game," I ventured, again remembering Pam's talk about intentional schizophrenics.

"And a self-fulfilling prophecy." He smiled and leaned even closer. "We tell the psychiatrists our hallucinations. Voices ordering us to kill."

I nodded. "Right. In New York, a young man hears a dog telling him women are evil. So he used a. 44-caliber pistol to kill a few."

"Yes, and the tabloids call him the Son of Sam and he goes to a mental hospital instead of prison. Better food, a higher class of tenants."

"You think it was phony?"

"What difference does it make?" Clarence said. "Evil or crazy, the victims are just as dead." He fixed me with a cunning smile.

"You never heard voices, Clarence?"

He sat back and beamed. "Only my own."

The group was growing restless. In a few moments the attendants would take them back to their high-security ward. Ken the Doll allowed as how he needed to use the facilities and stood up and walked toward the lavatory. He came behind me and fingered my sport coat, draped on the back of my chair. It sent a chill up my spine. "Nice," he said, walking away.

Stephanie giggled and yelled after him. "Stay away from the new boy, Kenneth. He's mine!"

A moment later, the door buzzed and two white-uniformed attendants came in. Stephanie, Clarence, and the Fireman stood up without being told.

"All of you back to Ward D and no lollygagging," one attendant demanded in what I took for an Irish accent. He was tall and heavy, big-boned, but no fat. Brawny wrists stuck out of the white uniform shirt. He had roughly cut dark hair and a pale complexion with blue eyes. He might have been handsome if he smiled. He didn't smile.

"I'm a visitor," I said pleasantly. "Lassiter. Guest of Dr. Maxson."

His eyes never moved from mine. The other one, a thick-necked youth with a shock of unruly red hair, circled to my left. These guys had some training. If I went for one of them, the other would nail me.

"Identification?" the tall one asked, the tone formal without being nasty.

I reached for my sport coat. Pam Maxson had pinned the badge on the lapel.

Damn! Now where was it?

"It must have fallen off," I said, sounding guilty even to myself.

Now the redhead was directly behind me.

"Sure it did," the tall one said. "There are supposed to be four lunatics in this group, and unless my Gaelic eyes deceive me, there's four of you here. So how about falling in with your friends?"

I smiled and tried to look sane but felt myself a grinning madman. "The fourth…uh…lunatic went to the head. I'm sure if you-"

"My patience is wearing thin, laddie."

"Careful," Stephanie warned. "Francis likes to hit more than he likes to fuck."

"Ken went to the head," I said. "He must have taken my visitor's badge. Maybe he's escaped. Perhaps you should sound an alarm. I'm Lassiter."

He looked at me skeptically.

"I'm a lawyer," I went on, "a barrister."

"Hear that, Clive, he's a bloomin' pettifogger," Francis told his buddy.

"I'm a specially appointed prosecutor from America. I'm looking for a murderer and I came here asking these…these murderers for help."

Even I didn't believe me.

"Classic schizophrenia," Clarence the Chemist said, "with guilt-induced denial."

"Clarence!" I pleaded. "Tell them. Tell them I'm not crazy."

Francis looked toward Clarence, who shrugged and said, "He's no crazier than the rest of us."

Stephanie gave me an adoring look. "Now, Kenneth. Don't you want to come back to the ward and continue where we left off?"

Clive put a meaty hand on my left shoulder. I swatted it away, and both men took a step backward and began circling me, keeping out of range, just like they were taught.

"I don't like being touched," I said.

"'E donna like bein' touched," Francis mocked me, laughing.

They continued circling. It was supposed to make me dizzy. But I was focused on a stationary spot on the wall. I was getting ready. The fog of the transatlantic flight was lifting. My nerves were coming alive, little lights blinking away, alarm bells sounding red alert. Some spigot deep inside opened wide and the adrenaline flowed. The heat started in the pit of my stomach and spread to my chest, through my shoulders, and into my arms and hands. Unused muscle fibers began twitching, and the heart picked up the pace. My fingers tingled. I flexed my knees and let my arms hang loosely at my sides. Somewhere far away, the crowd was getting to its feet, a rumble growing. Thirty seconds to kickoff. I wanted to hit somebody.

I didn't know how they would signal each other, so it would have been smarter to take the first shot. But I was the victim, after all. While I was thinking about it Clive winked at Francis, who was behind, me. I never saw Francis move toward me, but I felt him there, poised to grab me. He never saw my elbow shoot down, but he felt it. In karate, they call it the ushiro hiji-ate, the back elbow strike.

I heard Francis's ooomph, my elbow sinking into his gut. In a second, Clive snatched my right forearm with two strong hands and was twisting my arm behind my back. He was quicker than he looked. But he must have been thinking that my left arm was in his pal's grasp the way they planned it, and it wasn't, so I reached around, grabbed him by the hair, pulled him off me, and spun him around.

I was starting to enjoy this. Isn't that what I told Pam Maxson that first night: hitting people was fun? Before I had a chance to submit myself for analysis, Francis had recovered and landed a short punch in my kidneys from behind. Would this guy ever face me head-on? I must have left my flak jacket in the locker room, because the punch hurt. So did the second one, and some of the starch oozed out of me. But the adrenaline was still flowing, and I whirled, and while he was trying to tag me with a hook to the body I brought a forearm up under his chin. A solid chin but a pretty solid forearm, too, and it sent Francis to the hard floor. I didn't know whether to expect the fans' cheers or fifteen yards for unsportsmanlike conduct. I got neither. Clive tackled me from behind, a good hit for a guy who probably never went one-on-one with a blocking sled. He got me around the waist with those big arms and drove me to the floor. He hammered a shoulder into the small of my back and used his weight to keep me down. My face was crushed against the cold tile floor, my ear squashed beneath my head.

From above me I heard Stephanie's voice. "Don't hurt him, you brutes."

Francis got up cursing and holding his jaw. He must have missed soccer practice because he decided to take a few penalty kicks. He bounced a hard-toed shoe off my temple and three into my ribs before getting tired. Then he slipped something out of his back pocket. Clive was still holding me down, my arms pinned over my head, when they put the plastic handcuffs on me.

"Get the needle, Clive," Francis said.

I hate a needle almost as much as I hate a knife.

My head was a spinning satellite, and through the glare of a thousand suns I saw Clive unlock a drawer and withdraw a syringe and small vial.

"A day without Thorazine is like a day without a funeral," Clarence intoned from across the room.

"Oooh. When he's out, I'll give him a good licking," Stephanie cooed.

My hands were cuffed together, but in front of me, not behind my back. These guys had clearly never seen Miami Vice. Francis was hauling me up by the elbow while Clive approached gingerly with the needle. Clive was still a half-dozen steps away, and I was hunched over, breathing through my mouth, moaning. Playing possum.

Francis relaxed his grip on my elbow. I brought both arms down hard to shake him off, and then, fists together, I swung my arms up and smashed him on the point of his nose with both fists. There was a pop of breaking cartilage, and I was showered with blood, sticky and warm on my face. The punch stood Francis up, wobbled his knees, and he fell over backward.

Clive was impressed. He circled me, brandishing the needle like a switchblade. He feinted and I ducked. He stabbed and I slipped to the side. He aimed high and I dropped to the floor, throwing my shoulder at his knees in a chop block. I rolled into him, my body pinning his left foot to the floor while my shoulder turned his leg sideways. I heard the crack and knew his anterior cruciate ligament was blown into shreds of spaghetti. He hollered and clutched the knee, rolling from side to side. I heard Stephanie screaming.

I struggled to my feet and saw a shadow over my shoulder. I swung at it and it disappeared. I swung again and missed again. Twisting my neck, I saw it once more. It seemed to be attached to me. I turned the other way, and the shadow became the plunger of a syringe. The business end was stuck into my shoulder just behind the blade. Clive must have taken a shot at me as I went for his knees. I hadn't felt it. My hands were still cuffed in front, and I couldn't reach it.

Francis was still on the floor. If he was conscious, he wasn't solving ten-digit logarithms. I tested him with a foot. He groaned but didn't move. I knelt down, fumbled with his belt, and removed a key ring. After seven keys, I still hadn't found the right one, so I said to hell with it. I managed to push a couple of buttons on the wall, and I the door opened with a buzz and a clang.

I bolted into the corridor, possessed of no particularly brilliant ideas. I was handcuffed, panting, covered with blood, and had a needle sticking out of my shoulder. Two men in white coats were walking thirty yards down the corridor. I waved to them with my cuffed hands. One waved back, did a double take, then they started for me. I used the good shoulder to push through some swinging doors and headed up a set of steep metal stairs. I was dizzy and nauseous. I thought I heard shouts behind me as I took the stairs two at a time, my footsteps resounding like distant echoes.

Three flights up, I heard the roar of amplified words that seemed to envelop me. I stopped, my heart pounding in my ears, my vision hazy.

A dignified voice proclaimed: "There are four manners of death…" For a moment, in my wooziness, I envisioned the PA announcer at the Pearly Gates. Have your admission tickets ready. Lassiter, Jacob Lassiter? We have no record of your reservation. I took a deep breath and let an invisible force lead me up the stairs to a peaceful hereafter. I was vaguely aware of a secret pleasure that I hadn't headed toward the basement.

The electronic voice recited: "Accident, suicide, homicide, and natural. Distinguishing them is the first task of the medical examiner."

Wait. I had heard the voice before. The words too. Authoritative, though hardly heavenly.

"If the body has a black eye, is it from a punch, or from a fall after a heart attack?"

I was so sleepy. So ready for rest.

"An autopsy can only tell you so much. You must take as much care at the scene of the crime as in the morgue. Take precise photographs. Measure and diagram the scene. Preserve the evidence, including hair and fibers at the scene. We all remember the Wayne Williams murder trial in Atlanta. Fiber evidence from Williams' car was crucial to the conviction. And, of course, bullets. You have no idea how many times I've seen bullets crushed by a physician's instruments. We even had one assistant ME who would etch his initials onto bullets he removed. That's one way to lose friends in ballistics."

Good old Charlie Riggs, his voice booming over a loudspeaker. He would take care of me. Put me to sleep. Whoops, all his patients were sleeping the big sleep. On stainless steel tables with wooden pillows in a room that could give you-but not them-a cold.

I stumbled through a door, up three more steps onto the skirt of a wooden stage. Heavy purple drapes separated me from my old friend. I peeked through an opening and saw him, a blaze of lights at his feet, an unseen audience beyond.

"A medical examiner must never be surprised. Neither by physical evidence nor human behavior. The medical examiner remains objective, cool, dispassionate, unfazed in the face of horror and…"

I burst through the curtain with my last reserve of strength and collapsed at Charlie's feet. I heard a gasp from beyond the footlights. For some reason, I pictured Gerald Prince playing Julius Caesar.

I looked up at my old friend. "Et tu, Charles?" I asked.

Charlie Riggs looked down at the bloody, sweaty, needle-stuck body at his feet. " Mea culpa, " he whispered. "I never should have left you alone here."

I brought myself to my knees, looked up at him, and smiled a peaceful smile. Then I promptly vomited on his genuine L.L. Bean hiking boots.

"Perhaps," I heard him say into the microphone as I rolled free of the mess and rested my face on the cool floorboards, "we should take a five-minute break before the slide show."