More Twisted: Collected Stories, Vol. II

who drowned; I put the flowers and cross by the stream myself before I came to pick you up at the station today. The football was merely a prop. The blood on the wall of the cell is paint. The drugs were candy (though the grappa was real — and quite rare, I may add). The photograph of me and my “wife” was created by computer.

As for what is true: My name is Antonio, I have never been married, I made a fortune in computers, and this is my vacation house.

What, you are wondering, is this all about?

I must explain:

As a child I spent much time in loneliness and boredom. I immersed myself in the books of the great writers of horror. They were terrifying, yes, but they also exhilarated me. I would see an audience watching a horror film and think: They are scared but they are alive.

Those experiences moved me to become an artist. Like any truly great musician or painter, my goal is not simply to create beauty but to open people’s eyes and rearrange their views and perceptions, the only difference being that instead of musical notes or paint, my medium is fear. When I see people like you who, as Dante writes, have lost the true path in life, I consider it my mission to help them find it. The night in Florence, the night we met, I singled you out because I saw that your eyes were dead. And I soon learned why — your unhappiness at your job, your oppressive father, your needy ex-husband. But I knew I could help you.

Oh, at this moment you hate me, of course; you are furious. Who wouldn’t be?

But, Marissa, ask yourself this question, ask it in your heart: Don’t you think that being so afraid has made you feel exquisitely alive?

Below are three phone numbers.

One is for a car service that will take you back to the train station in Florence.

The second is for the local police precinct.

The third is my mobile.

The choice of whom you call is yours. I sincerely hope you call the last of these numbers, but if you wish not to — tonight or in the future — I, of course, will understand. After all, it’s the nature of art that the artist must sometimes send his creation into the world, never to see it again.

Yours, Antonio

Furious, tearful, quivering, Marissa walked to a stone bench at the edge of the water. She sat and breathed deeply, clutching the note in one hand, the phone in the other. Her eyes rose, gazing at the stars. Suddenly she blinked, startled. A large bat, a dark shape in the darker sky, zigzagged overheard in a complex yet elegant pattern. Marissa stared at it intently until the creature vanished over the trees.

She looked back to the stream, hearing the urgent murmur of the black water’s passage. Holding the note into the beam of a light from the side of the mill, she read one of the numbers he’d given her. She punched it into her phone.

But then she paused, listening again to the water, breathing in the cool air with its scent of loam and hay and lavender. Marissa cleared the screen of her mobile. And she dialed another number.

DOUBLE JEOPARDY

“There is no one better than me.”

“Uh-huh, uh-huh. What’re my options?’

Paul Lescroix leaned back in the old oak chair and glanced down at the arm, picking at a piece of varnish the shape of Illinois. “You ever pray?” his baritone voice asked in response.

The shackles rattled as Jerry Pilsett lifted his hands and flicked his earlobe. Lescroix had known the young man all of four hours and Pilsett must’ve tapped that right earlobe a dozen times. “Nup,” said the skinny young man with the crooked teeth. “Don’t pray.”

“Well, you ought to take it up. And thank the good Lord that I’m here, Jerry. You’re at the end of the road.”

“There’s Mr. Goodwin.”

Hmm. Goodwin, a twenty-nine-year-old public defender. Unwitting co-conspirator — with the local judges — in getting his clients sentenced to terms two or three times longer than they deserved. A rube among rubes.

“Keep Goodwin, if you want.” Lescroix planted his chestnut-brown Italian shoes on the concrete floor and scooted the chair back. “I could care.”

“Wait. Just that he’s been my lawyer since I was arrested.” He added significantly, “Five months.”

“I’ve read the documents, Jerry,” Lescroix said dryly. “I know how long you two’ve been in bed together.”

Pilsett blinked. When he couldn’t process that expression, he asked, “You’re saying you’re better’n him? That it?” He stopped looking shifty-eyed and took in Lescroix’s perfect silver hair, trim waist and wise, jowly face.

“You really don’t know who I am, do you?” Lescroix, who would otherwise have been outraged by this lapse, wasn’t surprised. Here he was, after all, in Hamilton, a hick-filled county whose entire population was less than Lescroix’s home neighborhood, the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

“All’s I know is Harry, he’s the head jailor today, comes in and tells me to shut off Regis ’n’ Kathie Lee an’ get the hell down to the conference rooms. There’s this lawyer wants to see me, and now here you are telling me you want to take my case and I’m supposed to fire Mr. Goodwin. Mr. Goodwin, who’s been decent to me all along.”

“Well, see, Jerry, from what I’ve heard, Goodwin’s decent to everybody. He’s decent to the judge, he’s decent to the prosecution, he’s decent to the prosecution’s witnesses. That’s why he’s one bad lawyer and why you’re in real deep trouble.”

Pilsett was feeling pushed into a corner, which was what sitting with Lescroix for more than five minutes made you feel. So he decided to hit back. (Probably, Lescroix reflected, just what had happened on that night in June.) “Who ’xactly says you’re any good? Answer me that.”

Should I eviscerate him with my resume? Lescroix wondered. Rattle off my role in the Menendez brothers’ first trial? Last year’s acquittal of the Sacramento wife for the premeditated arson murder of her husband with a novel abuse defense (embarrassment in front of friends being abuse too)? The luscious not-guilty awarded to Fred Johnson, the pretty thief from Cabrini-Green in Chicago, who was brainwashed, yes, brainwashed, ladies and gentlemen, into helping a militant cell, no not a gang, a revolutionary cell, murder three customers in a South-side check-cashing store. The infamous Time magazine profile? The Hard Copy piece?

But Lescroix merely repeated, “There is no one better than me, Jerry.” And let the sizzling lasers of his eyes seal the argument.

“The trial’s tomorrow. Whatta you know ’bout the case? Can we get it, you know, continued?” The three syllables sounded smooth in his mouth, too smooth: he’d taken a long time to learn what the word meant and how it was pronounced.

“Don’t need to. I’ve read the entire file. Spent the last three days on it.”

“Three days.” Another blink. An earlobe tweak. This was their first meeting: Why would Lescroix have been reviewing the file for the past three days?

But Lescroix didn’t explain. He never explained anything to anyone unless he absolutely had to. Especially clients.

“But didn’t you say you was from New York or something? Can you just do a trial here?”

“Goodwin’ll let me ‘do’ the trial. No problem.”

Because he’s a decent fellow.

And a spineless wimp.

“But he don’t charge me nothing. You gonna handle the case for free?”

He really doesn’t know anything about me. Amazing. “No, Jerry. I never work for free. People don’t respect you when you work for free.”

“Mr. Goodwin—”