'Yum yum,' Susan said. She moved the champagne glass away from her mouth and tipped her head up at me and I kissed her on the mouth.
'No French-kissing,' I said. 'It muddles the palate.'
Susan sipped another gram of champagne and looked at me without comment.
I went back to the kitchen and began to pound a couple of boneless chicken thighs with a heavy knife.
'Takes a tough man to make a tender chicken,' I said.
'Is Quirk making up a kind of special squad of his own?' Susan said.
'Belson called it a posse. Quirk's own posse,' I said.
'Because the killer may be someone in his department?'
'And because his department is going to get eaten up by the circus,' I said. 'Quirk wants an alternative. He wants someone not on the payroll. He wants somebody the mayor can't boss, and the city council can't threaten. Somebody who's not bucking for captain. He wants someplace to go where it's quiet and he can think.'
'Will it be that bad?' Susan said.
'Yes, very soon,' I said.
'Have you been involved in something like this before?'
'I was around the Strangler case,' I said. 'We had psychics and movie producers and dancing chickens in every corner.'
I sprinkled some rosemary on the flattened chicken thighs and put them in olive oil and lemon juice to marinate.
'Everyone uses it,' Susan said.
'Yes,' I said. I poured a little of the champagne into my glass. 'To get promoted, to get famous, to get rich, to get excited.' I drank my champagne and poured some more, and went around the corner to have some caviar.
'How do you afford caviar?' Susan said.
'Low overhead,' I said. 'I weave my own blackjacks.'
'He seems as if he wants to be caught,' Susan said.
'The letter. Yeah, probably. But he didn't write it until after the second killing.'
'So if he drops clues it may be very slowly,' Susan said.
'And a lot of women may die before he drops enough for us to catch him.'
I said.
Susan took maybe two sturgeon eggs on the tip of the spoon and ate them slowly.
'While we eat caviar,' she said.
'And drink champagne,' I said. I poured some for her and added a touch of the Midori.
'Shamelessly,' Susan said.
'If we drank Moxie and ate Devil Dogs, they'd still die,' I said.
'I know.'
We each sipped champagne. The leather pants were smooth over Susan's thighs.
'What we know basically is that it's a white guy killing black women.
Certainly sounds like a racial crime,' I said.
'And the semen traces?' Susan said.
'Certainly sounds like a sexual crime,' I said.
'A dysfunctional one,' Susan said.
'Because there's no penetration,' I said.
'Except with a gun,' Susan said. 'Think how frightened of women he must be, to tie them up and gag them and render them helpless, and still he cannot actually connect. He can only find sexual expression the way he does.'
'Expression?'
'In the original sense,' Susan said.
I nodded. 'Why black women?' I said.
Susan shook her head. 'No way to know,' she said. 'Psychopaths, and we must assume that we've got one here, have their own logic, a logic rooted in their own symbolism.'
'In other words, just because he's white and they're black is not enough reason to assume he's killing them for racial reasons,' I said.
'That's right. What the women represent to him, why he needs to treat them as he does, may be a function of their blackness, or their status on the social scale. Or it may be that there is some idiosyncratic association for him that no one else can imagine.'
