Solomon & Lord Drop Anchor (10 page)

“I know. Besides that. Anything personal with
you and the Corrigans?”

“Like what?”

Oh shit. He wasn’t going to help me out.
Sometimes the best way to get through the chop is to trim the sail
tight and just go. “Like were you screwing Melanie Corrigan?” At
the next table, a couple of spiffed-up fiftyish women with fancy
shopping bags exchanged disapproving whispers.

“At what point in time?” Roger asked.

My client, and he talks like Richard
Nixon.

“Hey Roger, this is your lawyer here, not a
grand jury.” The waiter skulked by, his thumbs buried deep in the
Caesar salad bowls. He wiped one hand on his apron, sucked some
salad dressing off a thumb and brought us the beer, an anonymous
American brand, devoid of calories, color, and taste. At least it
was cold.

Roger took a small sip, a thinking-time sip,
and said, “We were involved, sure.”

“So why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because it has nothing to do with the
case.”

My voice cranked up a few decibels. “How
about letting me decide that? If it comes out, Cefalo would claim
you had a motive for being a little careless, or worse, having
criminal intent.”

“I thought of that,” he said casually, “but
Melanie could never use that. It would hurt her case, wouldn’t it,
the unfaithful wife trying to profit from her husband’s death.”

“That’s not the way it would play. You’d be
the smooth seducer, or a madman obsessed with her, chopping up the
husband so she’d be all yours.”

Salisbury’s fork stopped in mid-air. A look
of concern crossed his face, but when he caught me studying him, he
chased it away with a laugh. “A madman maybe,” he said, smiling,
“but when it comes to seduction, she’s in a league by herself.
Besides, I knew her before Corrigan did, and well … there’s stuff
you lawyers would call extenuating circumstances.”

“I’m waiting.”

“I’m not sure it’s any of your business.”

I drained my homogenized beer and tried to
signal the brain-dead waiter to bring another. He looked right
through me.

“Right now, my business is you, everything
about you and the Corrigans,” I said, waiting for him to fill me
in.

Nothing.

The stone crabs arrived. Fresh, no black
mottled spots, the meat tearing cleanly out of the shell, the
mustard sauce tangy. I yelled for the second beer, and the waiter
brought iced tea. It tasted like the beer.

I dug into the crabs two at a time, but
Salisbury must have lost his appetite. He fidgeted in his chair and
his eyes darted from side to side. Finally, he looked me straight
on, took a breath and let it go. “Okay, here it is. I met Melanie
eight or nine years ago. I was just finishing my residency, hadn’t
spent much time with women. You know how it is, premed in college,
you bust your balls, then med school, internship, residency. Never
any money or time. She was just a kid, mixed up, kind of an exotic
dancer, but just for a while.”

“Yeah, after that she probably was Deb of the
Year.”

“She wasn’t bad or anything. Called herself
Autumn Rain. Just used her body to make a buck. So I sort of fell
for her. I started my practice, bought her a car, gave her things.
It didn’t last long. I found out other guys were doing the same.
One guy paid for her apartment, another guy her clothes, another
her trips.”

“Sold shares in herself like IBM.”

“Some guys can handle that. I couldn’t. So I
took off.” He looked away. This wasn’t a story he broadcast around
town.

“Roger, it’s nothing to be embarrassed about.
It’s an old story. You meet a pretty young thing who can suck a
golf ball through a garden hose. You overlook the fact that she’s
collected enough hoses to water Joe Robbie Stadium. You’d be
shocked how many guys fall for young hookers. Want to change them.
Old male fantasy. Some guys lose their marriages over it. Not many
doctors, though. Most are too scientific to get involved.”

“She wasn’t a hooker,” he said indignantly
and louder than necessary.

Now the two women were doing their best not
to show that our conversation was more interesting than their own.
I smiled in their direction. One recoiled as if I had exposed
myself.

Roger Salisbury poked the ice in his tea.
“Anyway, I hadn’t seen her for probably five years when Philip
Corrigan asked me over for dinner. He was seeing me for a cartilage
problem in the knee. I scoped it. Then the disc started flaring up.
We became friends. I had no idea he was married to Autumn …
Melanie.”

“So you started slipping out of the hospital
a little early. Sneaking in nooners while old man Corrigan was
littering the Keys with ugly condos on stilts.”

He laughed a short, bitter laugh.
“Hardly.”

Then he clammed up again. I gave him a c’mon
Roger look.

Finally he spoke in a whisper. “This is where
it gets a little sticky.”

“I’ll bet.”

They didn’t have to sneak around, he told me
over the watery tea.

Why not? I asked.

Philip wanted to watch, Roger said. Sometimes
to take part, sometimes to videotape. On their boat, a custom
Hatteras furnished like a Bal Harbour penthouse, in their mansion
on a giant waterbed, in their swimming pool.

So Philip Corrigan was a peeper and an old
letch. Probably got to an age where the money bored him, and his
engine wouldn’t start without some kinky provocation.

“Then, after doing a few lines of coke, we’d
mix it up,
ménage à trois
,” Roger said. He paused and gave
me a sheepish look.

If the two women at the next table craned
their necks any farther our way, they’d need a chiropractor.

Are you disappointed in me? he asked.

I don’t make moral judgments about clients, I
told him, because it interferes with my ability to give good
advice.

Just the same I tallied a moral scorecard on
the yellow pad of my mind. We all do that. We try to live and let
live, but underneath it, we’re left with a smug sense of
superiority about ourselves and vague disgust for others who don’t
measure up. Roger Salisbury didn’t measure up. He was doing drugs
and a group grope like some kind of sleaze. But he was my sleaze,
my client, and his bedroom—or swimming pool—activities didn’t make
him an incompetent doctor, much less a murderer.

After his
mea culpa
, I thought his
morale could use a boost.

“Here’s how I see it,” I told him. “You got
stuck in a little game with a tramp who slithered her way to Gables
Estates and a guy who couldn’t get his rocks off in the missionary
position. That doesn’t put you in a class with Charles Manson, but
if it ever came out in court or the newspapers, that’s all anybody
would know about you. You might be donating half your time to
charity cases and feeding homeless cats, but the world would know
you only as a sex-crazed doctor who aced his girlfriend’s husband.
Makes good reading. Now do you see why I have to know about this?
If I make an uninformed decision at some point, it could hurt you.
Badly. Understand?”

“Understood.”

“Is that all there is to it?”

“I guess so. Except that I’m still sort of
under her spell.”

Oh brother.

“In all these years,” he said, “nobody’s been
able to turn me on like her. She knows things, does things. She’s
totally uninhibited and free with herself. She’s a pleasure giver.
Do you know how hard it is for me to give that up?”

Dr. Ruth, I’m not, but I took a stab at it
anyway. “Roger, it sounds to me like Melanie Corrigan is a taker,
not a giver, and you better stay the hell out of her hot tub.”

“There is a certain side to her, a kind of
danger,” he said. “Maybe that’s part of the appeal, I don’t know.”
He just let it hang there, his mind working something over, not
letting me in on it.

“Okay then, I’ve got it all, right? You
played hide the weenie with the missus while the old man watched,
videotaped, and once in a while jumped on the pile.”

“That’s it.” He paused, looked side to side
and added, “There is one more thing.”

“There always is.”

“She asked me to kill her husband,” he
said.

This and other e-books by
Paul Levine may be found at
http://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/JAKELASSITER

NIGHT VISION

Look at those legs
.

Look at those goddamn floor-to-ceiling
million-dollar legs, Michelle thought, then unconsciously sneaked a
peek at her own. Short. Stubby little shapeless legs. God, how she
hated them.

Shit, now they’re on a two-shot
. Look
at the monitor. Next to her I look like a double amputee.

Then there was her hair. Thick, auburn hair
brushed straight back. And her skin, that patrician paleness so out
of place in Miami. Just a subdued line of gloss on full lips
… 
She probably gets dressed and made up in ten
minutes
.

If Michelle didn’t spend half an hour
covering her freckles with pancake, Max Factor Number Two, they’d
ship her back to Scranton to handle neighborhood weather from
Nanticoke. The legs, nothing you could do about those. But thank
God for plastic surgeons and periodontists. A rhinoplasty—the Sandy
Duncan model, pert but not prominent—and capped teeth called
“Hollywoods.” Thanks to lawyers, too. Two hundred bucks to change
Mabel Dombrowsky to Michelle Diamond.

“So, Dr. Metcalf, your book suggests that
serial murderers share certain characteristics,” Michelle said.

“Well, we can place them into distinct
categories,” Pamela Metcalf replied. “There are the organized
murderers, who are above average in intelligence and are socially
and sexually competent. They are usually the eldest sons in the
family. Ordinarily they know their victims and plan the crime. The
crime scene is neat and orderly—”

“Well, neatness counts,” Michelle Diamond
chirped. Inside the control booth, the director groaned.

“The disorganized murderer is quite the
opposite,” Dr. Metcalf explained, ignoring the interviewer and
smiling politely at the camera. “Below average in intelligence,
socially inadequate, sexually incompetent. Usually the last or next
to last born. His crimes are more spontaneous. The victims are
usually strangers, and rather than using conversation, he subdues
with sudden outbursts of violence. Often he will perform sexual
acts after the death of the victim …”

Oh shit, how do you follow that one up?

“In either case,” Dr. Metcalf said, “the
killers have highly active fantasy lives. The fantasies often are
of rape, torture, and murder. When they can no longer differentiate
fantasy from reality, the two become one.”

And that upper-crust voice. Like
Masterpiece Theatre
.

Michelle cleared her throat, and the sound
man cursed, his earpiece clacking like an enraged rattlesnake. “We
seem to have more mass murderers in our country—”

“Serial murderers,” Pamela Metcalf corrected
her. “Mass murderers kill many persons at the same time. Serial
murderers kill many over time, usually at random.”

Michelle felt her face heat up. “Yes, of
course. Is there something uniquely American about
these 
serial
 killers? Something about our violent
society?”

“Goodness no. In Britain we had Jack the
Ripper, Germany its Peter Kurten. During the time of Joan of Arc
France had the infamous Gilles de Rais, who killed hundreds. There
have been serial killers throughout history.”

Damn
. Like being lectured by Jane
Seymour with a medical degree. Michelle racked her brain for news
stories. “Yes, but here we’ve had Ted Bundy, the Hillside
Strangler, the Night Stalker"— Michelle strained to keep up the
patter— “the Son of Stan …”

“Son of Sam,” Dr. Metcalf helped out. “No
doubt America has had its share. My primary interest is in
understanding the reasons for these motiveless murders. We know
that serial killers frequently cannot separate sex from aggression.
We don’t know whether this psychological deficit is caused by
genetic, chemical, or hormonal reasons.”

Thank God the director cut to a close-up
of the British bitch
.

Michelle caught a cue from the floor manager.
“We’ll be back with Dr. Pamela Metcalf, author of 
The
Murderer Within Us
, right after this …”

* * *

The news director’s door was open, so
Michelle walked in. Jerry Abrams was devouring a bacon
cheeseburger. Late thirties, bushy mustache, disheveled,
overweight. He chewed noisily, occasionally burping as he kept his
eyes on one of three TV screens in his glass-enclosed cubicle.

“Hey, Michelle, get a load—”

“
Me-chelle.”

“Okay, Meeee-chelle, get a load of this
turkey.”

On the screen a crew-cut blond man with a
string tie was reciting baseball scores. The sound was turned low.
Jerry Abrams always reviewed audition tapes this way. Watch the way
they look, nobody listens anyway, he explained.

“Wanna play?” Jerry Abrams asked.

“I dunno, Jerry.”

“C’mon, guess.

“El Paso?”

He shook his head.

“Albuquerque?”

Jerry fished a french fry out of a paper
sack. The office smelled of grease and charred meat. “The Wyatt
Earp tie’s throwing you off. Smaller market, farther north.”

“North Platte, Nebraska,” she said.

“Good guess. Quad Cities, Iowa. Hayseed wants
to come to Gomorrah-by-the-Sea.”

He punched a button on the remote control and
grabbed another cassette. More than a hundred were stacked around
his desk.

“Jerry, I’d like you to relieve me on the
five o’clock. Just for a couple weeks.”

“What? During sweeps? Jesus, no!”

“But I’m working on an investigative piece
…”