Three’s a Crowd
I was late for dinner with Doc Riggs. But I hadn’t expected to make it at all. With a jury out, you never know.
I spotted Charlie’s unkempt hair and bushy beard, now streaked with gray. He wore a khaki bush jacket and sat at his usual table on the front porch of Tugboat Willie’s, a weather-beaten joint located behind the Marine Stadium on the causeway, halfway between the mainland and Key Biscayne. Charlie had been coming to the old restaurant since his early days as county medical examiner. It was one of the few places where neither the management nor patrons seemed to mind the whiff of formaldehyde. Sometimes Charlie caught his own fish and asked the cook to make it any old way as long as it was fried. Sometimes he ordered from the menu. Willie’s is a great place as long as the wind isn’t out of the northeast. The restaurant sits just southwest of the city sewage plant at Virginia Key. On a tropical island filled with cypress hammocks and white herons-one of the few bayfront spots not auctioned off to rapacious developers-Miami chose to dump its bodily wastes.
The evening was warm and muggy; not a breath of air stirred the queen palms in front of the ramshackle restaurant. Toward the mainland, low feathery clouds reflected an orange glow, not from the setting sun, but from the anticrime mercury-vapor lights of Liberty City.
Charlie was already digging into his fried snapper when I climbed the steps to the porch. Next to him was a woman with long auburn hair and fine porcelain skin. She wore a tailored blue suit that meant business and, best I could tell, no makeup. She didn’t need any. In the gauzy light of dusk she glowed with a look that Hollywood cinematographers crave for the starlet of the year. Her cheekbones were finely carved and high, the eyes green, wide set, and confident.
I slid into an empty chair next to the woman and tried to use my wit. “Charlie, I can’t leave you alone for one evening without your smooth-talking some sweet young woman…”
Then I gave her my best crinkly-eyed, pearly-toothed smile out of a face tanned from many indolent afternoons riding the small waves on a sailboard not far from where we sat. I am broad of shoulder, sandy of hair, and crooked of grin, but the lady’s eyes darted to me and back to Charlie without tarrying.
“I don’t mean to argue with you, Dr. Riggs,” she said in a clipped British accent that sounded like royalty, “but most of these so-called killer profiles are so much rubbish. Just the modern version of detecting criminals by the shape of their noses or the size of their ears.”
Charlie’s fork froze in mid-bite. “But even you have identified characteristics. In your book-”
“Yes, yes. But they’re of little import. What is consequential is that these men are incapable of forming normal relationships. They do not see themselves as separate human beings or recognize the separate humanity of any other being, and we don’t know why. To a Hillside Strangler or a Yorkshire Ripper, a human being is no more animate than a block of wood. We’ll never make any progress until we understand what made them that way.”
I nodded my agreement, hoping Charlie would bring me up to date, or at least introduce me. But the old billy goat was having too good a time to notice.
“This is the classic distinction between our disciplines,” Charlie said, sipping a glass of Saint-Veran white burgundy, while I sat, parched, irked, and apparently invisible. “The medical examiner searches for the clues of who did the crime and how. The forensic psychiatrist yearns for the why.”
“And the lawyer says the devil or his mother or irresistible impulse made the rascal do it,” I offered.
Charlie noticed me then. “Oh, my manners! Dr. Metcalf, this is Jacob Lassiter, a dear friend of mine. When I was the county ME, Jake was a young public defender, and how he made my life miserable. Now he’s a successful civil lawyer, eh, Jake?”
“Some days. How do you do, Dr. Metcalf.”
She nodded and seemed to appraise me with green eyes spiked with flint. The eyes lingered, decided I was an interesting specimen but hardly worth an afternoon tea, and returned to Charlie. I gave Doc my pleading, hang- dog look, which he recognized as acute deprivation of female companionship.
“Jake was quite creative when he was a PD,” Charlie said. His eyes twinkled behind thick glasses held together with a bent fishhook where they had lost a screw. “He’d be defending a Murder One and ask me on cross in very serious tones, ‘Isn’t the fact that the decedent fell from a tenth-floor balcony consistent with suicide?’”
I laughed and said, “And Charlie would look at the jury, scratch his beard, and say, ‘Only if we omit the fact that a second before falling, the decedent was shot in the back by a gun covered with your client’s fingerprints.’”
The English lady nearly smiled, and it didn’t seem to hurt.
“Pamela’s on a book tour,” Charlie told me, “and my old friend Warwick at Broadmoor asked her to look me up.”
“Warwick at Broadmoor?” I asked, with a blank face.
“Dr. Warwick heads the forensic unit at Broadmoor. Hospital for the criminally insane,” Charlie added, as if any dolt should know. “In London. Dr. Metcalf was instrumental in apprehending and then treating the Firebug Murderer.”
I was silent, not willing to admit my ignorance quite so often.
The lady psychiatrist rescued me. “Just a lad, really. The fellow would find lovers parked in their cars, snogging away-”
“Snogging, were they?” I asked, eyebrows raised in mock disapproval.
“Yes, what you would call… oh, Dr. Riggs, help me.”
Charlie coughed and said, “Necking and what have you.”
I nodded, knowingly.
“In any event,” Dr. Metcalf continued, “this poor wretch would seek out lovers, pour petrol over them, and set them alight.”
“Indeed?” I said, in an unintended imitation of her accent.
“Quite,” she replied, giving me a look that said she did not suffer fools, particularly of the American wise-guy variety.
I signaled the waiter for a beer by elegantly pointing a finger down my throat. Then I turned to the lady psychiatrist with practiced sincerity. “Tell me about your work, Dr. Metcalf. How do you treat these firebugs and murderers?”
“I study the psychopath,” she said. “I want to know why he acts the way he does.”
“Or she does,” I added, believing in equality of the sexes in all departments.
“The subject is so complex,” Pamela Metcalf said, ignoring me. “We study the childhood antecedents to murder-”
“Environment,” Charlie Riggs said.
“But we also know that there are neurological, genetic, and biophysiological components, too.”
“The extra Y chromosome in men.” Charlie nodded.
“Yes, we know the XYY abnormality is four times more prevalent among murderers.”
“So are killers made or born?” I asked.
“That’s what I’ve been trying to determine ever since I became fascinated with the Cotswolds Killer.”
I showed her my vague look. It comes naturally.
“You know the section called the Cotswolds?” she asked.
“The Catskills, I know…”
“In Oxfordshire, wonderful hilly sheep country. I grew up there near Chipping Camden. I was still a student when someone began killing farm girls. One near Bourton-on-the-Water, one just outside Upper Slaughter.”
“Upper Slaughter,” Charlie muttered.
“Each of the girls had been strangled. Like so many of them nowadays, each had been sexually active at age fifteen or so, highly active, and their several boyfriends were initially suspected.”
“Any of the boyfriends know both the girls?” Charlie asked, still trying to earn his detective’s shield.
“No. And no strangers were implicated, either. The crimes were never solved, and… well, it just got me started.”
I thought about pretty Miss Metcalf scouring the sylvan English countryside for clues of murder. The thought didn’t last. The waiter brought my beer, and I ordered yellowtail snapper broiled, some fried sweet plantains, and black beans with rice. The pathologist and the psychiatrist were still carrying on, regaling each other with tales of death and derangement.
