'You remember how to get here?'
'I remember.'
* * *
On the way there I felt like a kid on a date. I rang her bell according to the code and stood at the curb.
She tossed me the key. I went inside and rode up in the big elevator.
She was wearing a skirt and sweater and had doeskin slippers on her feet. We stood looking at each other for a moment and then I handed her the paper bag I was carrying. She took out the two bottles, one of Teacher's Scotch, the other of the brand of Russian vodka she favored.
'The perfect hostess gift,' she said. 'I thought you were a bourbon drinker.'
'Well, it's a funny thing. I had a clear head the other morning, and it occurred to me that Scotch might be less likely to give me a hangover.'
She put the bottles down. 'I wasn't going to drink tonight,' she said.
'Well, it'll keep. Vodka doesn't go bad.'
'Not if you don't drink it. Let me fix you something. Straight, right?'
'Right.'
It was stilted at first. We'd been close to one another, we'd spent a night in bed together, but we were nevertheless stiff and awkward with each other. I started talking about the case, partly because I wanted to talk to someone about it, partly because it was what we had in common.
I told her how my client had tried to take me off the case and how I was staying with it anyway. She didn't seem to find this unusual.
Then I talked about Pinell.
'He definitely didn't kill Barbara Ettinger,' I said, 'and he definitely did commit the icepick murder in Sheepshead Bay. I didn't really have much doubt about either of those points but I wanted to have my own impressions to work with. And I just plain wanted to see him. I wanted some sense of the man.'
'What was he like?'
'Ordinary. They're always ordinary, aren't they? Except I don't know that that's the right word for it.
The thing about Pinell is that he looked insignificant.'
'I think I saw a picture of him in the paper.'
'You don't get the full effect from a photograph. Pinell's the kind of person you don't notice. You see guys like him delivering lunches, taking tickets in a movie theater. Slight build, furtive manner, and a face that just won't stay in your memory.'
' 'The Banality of Evil.' '
'What's that?'
She repeated the phrase. 'It's the title of an essay about Adolf Eichmann.'
'I don't know that Pinell's evil. He's crazy. Maybe evil's a form of insanity. Anyway, you don't need a psychiatrist's report to know he's crazy. It's right there in his eyes. Speaking of eyes, that's another thing I wanted to ask him.'
'What?'
'If he stabbed them all in both eyes. He said he did. He did that right away, before he went to work turning their bodies into pincushions.'
She shuddered. 'Why?'
'That was the other thing I wanted to ask him. Why the eyes? It turned out he had a perfectly logical reason. He did it to avoid detection.'
'I don't follow you.'
'He thought a dead person's eyes would retain the last image they perceived before death. If that were the case you could obtain a picture of the murderer by scanning the victim's retina. He was just guarding against this possibility by destroying their eyes.'
'Jesus.'
'The funny thing is that he's not the first person to have that theory. During the last century some criminologists believed the same thing Pinell hit on. They just figured it was a matter of time before the necessary technology existed for recovering the image from the retina.
And who knows that it won't be possible someday? A doctor could give you all sorts of reasons why it'll never be physiologically possible, but look at all the things that would have seemed at least as farfetched a hundred years ago. Or even twenty years ago.'
'So Pinell's just a little ahead of his time, is that it?' She got up, carried my empty glass to the bar. She filled it and poured a glass of vodka for herself. 'I do believe that calls for a drink. 'Here's looking at you, kid.' That's as close as I can come to an imitation of Humphrey Bogart. I do better with clay.'
She sat down and said, 'I wasn't going to drink anything today.
Well, what the hell.'
'I want to go fairly light myself.'
