Night vision

CHAPTER 28

Richie Bergman kept twitching his nose, and the sergeant kept staring. "And just who is he?" the sergeant asked.

"My paralegal," I said.

The sergeant turned the volume down on his black-and-white five-inch set. "And what's his problem?"

"Sinuses," Richie Bergman said.

The only thing wrong with Richie Bergman's sinuses was what he stuffed into them. He sniffled and looked away. Richie was in his late twenties, skinny as a one-iron, jug-eared, and hawk-beaked. He wore thick, rimless glasses and had a scraggly mustache that looked like a squashed caterpillar.

If Richie hadn't acquired an unquenchable appetite for the White Lady and a missionary's desire to share his good fortune, he'd be a doctor by now, and a damn fine one. In his last year of med school, Richie had a Saturday-night ritual. He would squirt chicken's blood up his nose and rush into the ER yelling nosebleed. His buddy, a resident in the trauma program, would give him a ten-percent cocaine solution used to contract the capillaries, and Richie would retreat to the lab to evaporate the liquid, leaving pure crystallized coke.

Richie was too generous for his own good. He told his roommate of the scam and the next weekend half the med school showed up with nosebleeds. Even that might not have tipped the dean, had the lab floor not been covered with chicken feathers.

Would you believe a pillow fight? Richie asked the dean.

The dean would not.

Now Richie lived alone and worked as a computer consultant, which is a fancy name for hacker, though he preferred calling himself a cyberpunk. He could change your grades at any of four state universities or add your worst enemy's name to the county health department's list of venereal-disease carriers. For a monthly fee of twenty bucks, he could get you free, unlimited long-distance calls, and for an extra ten, you could charge them to the person of your choice. All of Richie's personal calls were billed to the Reverend Jimmy Swaggart, including a live porno hotline headquartered in Vegas.

Richie owed me a favor because I got him probation after he broke into an airline computer system and arranged a million frequent-flier miles for himself and every member of the county commission. The commissioners hadn't asked him to, but everybody who knew them thought they had, and a couple decided it was a pretty good idea in any event.

So Richie Bergman stood at my side while a potbellied, retirement-age sergeant sat on his stool at the property-room window and looked us over. "Got your name here, Lassiter, but not this young fellow. Say, son, you just do some time?"

Richie shook his head and stifled a sneeze.

"'Cause you're so pale, you look like you just did eighteen months at Dade Correctional."

"I spend a lot of time in my room," Richie said honestly.

"And what the hell you doing with that?" the sergeant demanded, gesturing toward Richie's right hand.

"TV. Like to watch it while we work," Richie said, holding a computer monitor for the old sergeant to see.

After letting us know what a favor he was doing, and how if the lieutenant would find out, his ass was grass, and don't forget him at Christmas, the sergeant let us in, and we laid the contents of the locker, M. Diamond Case No. 91-1376-A, on a scarred walnut table in the back of the room. The sergeant returned to the window, and I heard the volume crank up on his TV. Local news. Rick Gomez had the latest on the computer sex murders, as Channel 8 had dubbed them. The latest was that the state's case against a local English professor had collapsed due to the incompetence of one Jacob Lassiter, Esquire. "No new leads," Gomez told his audience, his voice filled with concern, "and no comment from the special prosecutor." Then I heard Nick Fox's voice, tinny and distant, following me like a vengeful ghost. But he wasn't talking about the murders. No, it was his monthly crime-prevention tip, filler for the station and free publicity for an ambitious politician.

"Plant some fear in burglars," Nick Fox was saying. "Under your windows, plant thorny bushes that bite. Try cactus or crown of thorns. Use the Spanish bayonet, the limeberry, or the carissa, all burglar biters. In law enforcement we think of them as antipersonnel plants."

Horticulture, Miami style.

Richie moved quickly, plugging in the cables, finding an outlet for Marsha's computer, hooking up the monitor he had brought along. He punched some keys, scanned the directories, found what he wanted, and went to work. I opened my briefcase, pulled out a folder containing the photos taken at the scene by Dr. Whitson, the young assistant medical examiner. There was the body, head jammed into the monitor, eight-by-tens from every angle. There were close-ups of the neck, the bruises and fingernail marks clearly visible. If Whitson couldn't hack it as a canoe maker, he could always make a living shooting pictures at weddings and bar mitzvahs.

There were several shots of the room, a couple catching Nick Fox in the background. I studied them. His forehead was wrinkled in thought. Grief? I wondered. Or concern for his own hide? Then there was a photo of Pam Maxson happily digging her nails into my arm and a close-up of the marks themselves, Charlie's lesson that nail marks often appear reversed on human skin.

Finally Richie motioned me over and I looked at the screen.

HELLO, TV GAL. LIGHTS, CAMERA, ACTION-PASSION PRINCE.

I scanned the page. "Already have that. She talked with other men the same night. Earlier."

He punched some more buttons and tickled the machine's memory banks.

I CAN HEAL YOU!! I CAN HEAL YOUR WOUNDS AND SAVE YOU, LITTLE LADY. OH BOB, LIGHTEN UP. NOT BOB! NEVER BOB! ORAL ROBERT. I CAN LICK YOU INTO HEAVEN. BUT YOU GOTTA BELIEVE. I CAN LIFT A BRICK WITH MY TONGUE. GO SHIT A BRICK, BOB.

She had cut him off, checked who else was in the mating room, skillfully avoided a misspelled pornographic entreaty from Bush Whacker, then fielded another call.

IS YOUR ELECTRICITY ON, TV GAL? HELLO, BIGGUS, BEEN A WHILE. ARE YOU CABLE READY, TV GAL? 'CAUSE YOU WANNA PLUG ME IN, RIGHT? CMON, BIGGUS, NOT YOU TOO. OK. WHATS NEW? SAME OLD THING. BOSS DOESN'T TRUST ME TO DO BIG-TIME REPORTING. I COULD BLOW THIS TOWN OPEN IF THEY GAVE ME HALF A CHANCE. REALLY, TELL ME ABOUT IT. ANOTHER TIME. WHATS NEW WITH YOU? STILL CHASING BAD GUYS. OH, THATS WHAT YOU DO. YOU'RE A COP? YEP. HEY, I MEET A LOT OF COPS IN MY WORK. FUNNY, WE MIGHT EVEN KNOW EACH OTHER. WE COULD GET TO. A DRINK SOMETIME? YOU COULD COOK ME DINNER. I DON'T EVEN COOK ME DINNER, BIGGUS. SO HOW ABOUT I COME OVER NOW, BRING A BOTTLE OF SCOTCH? NOT NOW, B.D. IT'S INCONVENIENT. OH, GOT SOMEBODY OVER? SORRY. SO WHY ARE YOU WASTING MY TIME? 'NIGHT, BIGGUS.

"That what you're after?" Richie asked. He was in a hurry to get home and perfect a system for trading citrus-futures contracts in somebody else's account.

"That's it."

But it wasn't what I expected. Sure, Rodriguez was putting the make on her. But he sounded halfway reasonable. Even cloaked with anonymity, he was just a guy looking for a date, a little miffed not to get one. Not a drooling psychopath. But there was something new here, a man in her apartment when Rodriguez called. Not Nick, his alibi was ironclad. He was attending a prosecutors' conference in Orlando, returned the next morning. Who was it, some computer chatterbug who beat Biggus to the punch? And Nick thought she was only seeing him. I smiled at that, a pinprick in his ego when I would tell him.

"Hey, Richie, you know much about women?"

"Less than most, I suspect."

"Say it's around midnight, a woman's got one guy in the bedroom, why would she be calling around, trying to meet somebody else, somebody new?"

"Dunno, maybe the guy in the bedroom couldn't cut the mustard."

Maybe, but we still didn't have a suspect, and the question was nagging at me. Who was Marsha's lover that night, and why was she still on the make?

Richie pulled all the cables, and we replaced everything in the right locker. I repacked my file and declined Richie's kind suggestion that he break into the county traffic computer and fix all the lights green for our drive down Dixie Highway. Then we walked past the old sergeant, nodding our thanks, Richie sniffling and blowing his nose.

"Got a cold?" the sarge asked.

"Virus," Richie told him.