'You're a big man, Lassiter. I like a big man.'
So why did she marry Max? 'Uh-huh,' I said.
'Max said you used to play some ball.'
'Uh-huh,' I repeated.
She smiled, licked her lips and recited:
'' There once was an athletic young jock
Who could shatter large rocks with his cock,
But a coed said, 'Dear,
Please insert the thing here.'
And he fainted away with the shock.''
Maybe she was mocking me or teasing me, but then again, my feeble male mind thought, maybe the sight of a shaggy-haired ex-linebacker carrying a briefcase turned her on.
'Are you going to faint on me, Lassiter?'
'Mrs. Blinderman, considering the fact that you're married and I'm investigating-'
'When I lock my legs around a man,' she murmured right there in front of the American flag, the Bible, and portraits of judges with fine chin whiskers, 'I don't let him go.'
'You've been reading too much of your customers' prose.'
She smiled salaciously. 'Really, counselor. Do you always carry a brief in your pants, or are you just glad to see me?'
Mocking me, I decided, and tried to think of a brilliant rejoinder.
'Jake! There you are!' Charlie Riggs was beside me, pulling me away. He wore his blue courthouse suit and seemed to have combed out his tangled beard. His dark eyes twinkled with excitement. Coming out of retirement apparently agreed with him. 'There's another one.'
'Another what?'
'Corpus delicti, of course. Same modus operandi.'
Bobbie Blinderman strode toward the courtroom door on those long, allegedly locking legs and gave a little shrug. Another time, she seemed to say. I was looking at Charlie, but I was hearing the clack-clack of Bobbie's high heels, fading like the clangor of a distant train.
The house was on a leafy street in Coral Gables. In-law quarters, the real-estate ads call them. The main house was a big stucco Spanish number from the 1920s with a barrel-tile roof, lots of arches, balconies, and black iron railings. In back sat a squat one-story box for guests or a Honduran maid without a green card.
The cops were still stringing yellow tape around the building. The glass jalousie windows were being dusted for prints. Crime-scene technicians crawled around the building, looking for footprints, weapons, any evidence the killer might have dropped. A business card would do nicely.
Blood red leaves from the Poinciana trees covered the stone path to the little house. Inside, the stench of death hung in the humid air.
'Can't anybody get that AC to work?' Detective Alejandro Rodriguez pleaded.
The place was one room. A bed against a wall, a kitchenette at the far end, and a desk in the middle. Mostly empty bookshelves lined a wall, a small TV and VCR taking up some of the space. The body was facedown near the front door. A young woman in a short cotton chemise with a floral motif. On the desk, the computer monitor still glowed, black background, white fluttery letters. Taped to the computer was a plastic card the size of a driver's license. Name, handle, and secret password: her Compu-Mate membership card.
'Rosemary Rosedahl,' Rodriguez said. His face was lathered with sweat, his blue short-sleeve shirt blotched under both arms. 'Twenty-seven. Flight attendant for Pan Am. Part-time student at FIU. Rents the place from a doctor. Looks after the main house while he's gone. He's in New England for the summer, like any sensible person.'
Charlie Riggs knelt and gently lifted the woman's head, brushing back short, frosted blond hair. He gently touched the neck where bruises were visible. He opened the mouth and peered down the throat with a pocket light. 'Apparently fractured larynx and hyoid cartilage. No signs of ligature. Pinpoint hemorrhages on the face. Death from manual strangulation.'
I tiptoed around the body to the computer monitor. 'Rodriguez,' I said. 'I think you better dust this keyboard for prints.'
The detective moved close to the screen. 'Huh? Oh, we saw that. What's the big deal? The decedent wrote it before she bought the farm.'
'A woman didn't write that,' I said.
'No, who did?'
'I don't know. Poetry isn't my strong suit.'
Charlie joined me in front of the monitor. He read silently a moment, clucking his tongue. 'Alfred Tennyson,' he said.
'I'll bring him in,' Rodriguez said.
'I am beginning to mourn,' Charlie Riggs said, 'for the death of the classical education.' Then he read it aloud:
''WEAKNESS TO BE WROTH WITH WEAKNESS! WOMAN'S PLEASURE, WOMAN'S PAIN NATURE MADE THEM BLINDER MOTIONS BOUNDED IN A SHALLOWER BRAIN: WOMAN IS THE LESSER MAN, AND ALL THY PASSIONS, MATCHED WITH MINE, ARE AS MOONLIGHT UNTO SUNLIGHT, AND AS WATER UNTO WINE''
'Quite a chauvinistic little ditty,' Charlie Riggs concluded.
'Wouldn't get a great review in Ms., if that's what you mean,' I said. 'What's it from?'
''Locksley Hall,'' said Charlie Riggs, master of the esoteric. 'A jilted lover's lament. I wonder if there's such a thing as a forensic poet. Maybe I should send this to Pamela Maxson.'
'Do it,' I said, staring at the screen, trying to picture the wacko who stole the poet's words and now taunted us.
Look for messages, Pam Maxson had said. Okay, here was one, loud and clear. A man who boasts of his unrestrained passions and belittles women. The lesser man? Shallower brain? I wished old Tennyson could bump heads with the current generation of the female of the species. They'd stomp him to death with their running shoes, then dash off to perform brain surgery or discover a new planet through mathematical magic. But no use getting angry at the poet. His words, another's actions. I turned back to the body. Charlie had examined the eyelids for hemorrhage, and now one ghastly eye remained open, staring at me in blind accusation. A fury grew within me, burned in my gut. I never knew Marsha Diamond or Mary Rosedahl, but I knew they didn't deserve to die young, die hard. I wanted the maniac who did it.
A police artist in my mind sketched him. Overweight with a bad haircut and no friends. Lives alone in a room with a hot plate and a bunch of poetry collections he underlines and misunderstands. Clothes that don't match, a diet of donuts and greasy fries from a corner diner. A guy who hears voices and talks to himself on the bus while others try not to stare. A wrathful, rejected, deranged guy who strangles a woman. Or maybe two. And lets us know why.
Now I would find out who. It wouldn't be that hard, I thought. I had the brainpower of Pam Maxson and Charlie Riggs on my side. So my mind composed a little lyric for the freak locked in his windowless room.
All thy wits, matched with mine,
Are as tinplate unto gold dust,
And as tears unto brine.
CHAPTER 9
Charlie Riggs dipped a hand into an old coffee can and came up with a half-dozen night crawlers. Juicy ones, brown and black, round and squirmy.
