Solomon & Lord Drop Anchor (15 page)

Charlie nodded.

“Hey,” Rodriguez said. “You’re talking about
Jack the Ripper.”

Charlie nodded again and looked straight at
me.

“And I guess that makes me Mr. Lusk,” I
said.

They had already zipped the body into a
plastic bag when I made a final pass through the living room. The
assistant ME had packed his bag and capped his camera. The cops
were growing bored and filing out; there were other bodies in other
apartments and the night was young. Charlie Riggs was on the
staircase outside with Pamela Metcalf, reminiscing about murders
most foul. I looked around and struggled to remember everything the
old canoe maker had taught me.

Be alert to every detail
. I tried to
memorize everything in the room. The computer was an IBM clone, the
desk white oak, the telephone a new Panasonic. Michelle Diamond had
been sitting at the computer when she was killed. I looked closer
at the phone. Two lines, a bunch of buttons. One button was for
making conference calls, another put you on hold, a third activated
the speaker phone.

Then the last one. “Redial.”

I congratulated myself on how smart I was.
Half a dozen cops and nobody thought about it—maybe the last person
Michelle Diamond spoke to just a dial tone away. And maybe with
some luck, that last person was the guy who squeezed the life out
of her.
Don’t you dare come over here, Harry, we’re
through!

Then again, it could be the weather number, a
wrong number, or the public library. Only one way to find out. I
picked up the receiver and hit the button. Seven electronic notes
played do-re-mi in my ear.

A click and then the whir of a woman’s
recorded voice. “Welcome to Compu-Mate, where the person of your
dreams awaits you. Dial ROMANCE, 766-2623, on your modem, and we’ll
put you in touch. Why not let Compu-Mate find your life mate?”

“Or your death mate,” I answered the
mechanical voice, “as the case may be.”

* * *

I put the top down on my ancient Olds 442
convertible, deposited Charlie Riggs in the back and Pamela Metcalf
in the passenger bucket seat. It’s the Turbo 400, yellow body,
black canvas top, black interior, rallye wheels, four-speed stick.
An overgrown kid’s toy.

“No sign of a break-in, nothing missing from
the apartment,” Charlie yelled over the roar of three hundred
sixty-five horsepower. “No apparent motive.”

It was a cloudy June night; the air was humid
with a hint of salt. We were approaching the 
Miami
Journal
, just on the Miami side of the MacArthur Causeway. The
boxy building sat there, lights twinkling against the blackness of
the bay, taunting me.

“An organized crime scene,” Pamela Metcalf
added.

Above us, on the superstructure, yellow
lights flashed and we came to a stop at the drawbridge. When the
lights turned red, the traffic gate lowered into place, the tender
yanked on a long steel lever, and the bridge started clanking
skyward. Below us, a nighttime sailor aimed a sleek Hinckley with a
towering mast through the opening.

“Based on a cursory review,” she continued,
“I would say you’re looking for a white male in his late twenties
or early thirties, probably firstborn, height and weight within
norms, higher-than-average intelligence, though an underachiever in
school. He probably knew the victim or at least had seen her and
followed her. His socioeconomic background is at least average, and
he probably had a two-parent household, but he never formed a
stable relationship with his father.”

“I suppose the family dog got run over by a
truck when he was going through puberty,” I said, with just a hint
of sarcasm.

The psychiatrist stared at my profile. The
sight did not weaken her knees. “Actually, he probably tortured and
killed pets. Slicing open a cat’s belly and pulling out the
intestines would be typical.”

That muzzled me for a moment. The bridge
dropped back into place, the gate lifted, and we were moving again.
I swung onto the 1-95 connector and headed south, tires singing on
the concrete thirty feet above the mean streets of Overtown. Then I
said, “I’m not sure that shrinks have all the answers they think
they do.”

“Don’t sell forensic psychiatry short,”
Charlie Riggs shouted from the backseat.

“I don’t. But the data doesn’t do any good.
We can’t haul in all the firstborn sons in town.”

“No,” Pamela Metcalf said, “but we can
predict this killer’s future behavior based on studies of past
serial killers. He has fulfilled the fantasy of murder. He will
repeat it, and will add to it his other fantasies he has so far
repressed.”

“You’re assuming it’s a motiveless crime. Not
a jealous boyfriend or a bumbling robber.”

“Unless you discover a pecuniary motive or an
emotional one, you will find the murder quite motiveless, except in
the deranged mind of the psychopath who committed it.”

It’s hard to argue with someone so obviously
used to being right. We rode in silence as I pulled off the
interstate and onto the Rickenbacker Causeway. The moon was coming
up over Key Biscayne, spreading a creamy glow across the water. I
pulled up in front of Tugboat Willie’s. On the front porch a couple
of old salts were debating the merits of rubber jigs—the Zara Spook
versus the MirrOlure—for catching jack crevalle. Charlie got out
and came around to the driver’s side.

“Why would Nick Wolf appoint you to head the
investigation? Why not one of his cronies, someone he could
control?”

“Says he wants to do the right thing. Not
even an appearance of a conflict of interest.”

“You believe that?” Charlie asked.

I shrugged. “Why shouldn’t I?”

“
Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes.”

“That’s what I always say,” I said.

Dr. Metcalf helped me out. “Loosely
translated, ‘Beware of an enemy bearing gifts.’”

Charlie nodded, then climbed into his
mud-spattered pickup truck for the drive westward to the Glades.
Pamela Metcalf had taken a cab from her hotel, so I graciously
offered to drive her back. Her eyes shot a look toward Charlie’s
truck, as if to ask if I was trustworthy, but he was gone. Either
she decided to risk it, or she couldn’t get out of the shoulder
harness, because she wordlessly stayed in her seat.

It was a short ride to the Grand Bay Hotel in
Coconut Grove, but the doctor made it seem like a transatlantic
flight. I mentioned the beauty of the moon and she said, “Umm.” I
remarked on the nighttime feeding habits of the turkey vultures,
gliding above the sewage plant at Virginia Key, and she said,
“Umm.” When she gave me the same reply to the question of how long
she’d be in town, I asked if she was practicing her mantra. That
drew only silence, so I slipped a Beach Boys tape into the slot,
and keeping time with palm slaps on the steering wheel, provided my
own off-key praises to California girls, doubtlessly adding to the
doctor’s impression of me as a simpleton and rapscallion. To her
credit, she never once complained about my singing or the dank
evening air. When a few fat drops from a passing shower splattered
our windshield, she never once asked me to put up the top. The wind
blew her long hair straight back, and like a California girl
without the tan—or the smile—she stared ahead into the nighttime
breeze.

When I finally pulled under the canopy of the
hotel, a teenage valet crept from the darkness and appraised the
old yellow chariot.

“No shit, my old man used to talk about his
442,” the kid announced, “but I never seen one.”

I held him off and asked the doctor if she’d
like a drink before retiring.

She studied me. “Whatever for?”

That one stumped me. “To … uh … wet the
whistle. To talk.”

“Talk? What about?”

“I don’t know,” I said defensively. “I don’t
plan that far ahead.”

“I can see that. Then why invite me to share
spirits?”

I thought of Jack Nicholson telling Shirley
MacLaine that a stiff drink “might kill the bug you got up your
ass.” I thought of John Riggins, the great, wild running back of
the Redskins, telling Justice Sandra Day O’Connor at a White House
dinner to “loosen up, Sandy baby.” But what I said was, “Because we
can work together on the Diamond murder.”

She paused long enough for me to toss the
keys to the valet, and I escorted her to the glitzy bar on the
mezzanine. The usual crowd was there, Colombian cowboys,
businessmen delaying the inevitable confrontations at home, a
collection of upper-middle-class snorters and pretenders driving
leased Porsches, leaning close to young women in sequinned designer
knockoffs.

The lady asked for Pimm’s over lemonade, and
the barman didn’t bat an eye. He poured some red stuff into 7UP,
added a slice of cucumber, and Pamela Metcalf nodded with
appreciation after a dainty sip.

“Dr. Riggs is quite fond of you,” the doctor
said, as if she couldn’t imagine why.

“And I of him.”

“He said you used to play … rugby?”

“Football.”

“Yes, we have your football on the telly now.
Grown men in knickers with all that stuffing inside their clothing.
Jumping onto each other with incredible aggression.”

I smiled at her imaginative but entirely
accurate definition of pro football.

“Freud conceived of aggression as a
derivative of the death instinct,” she added. “Others debate
whether aggression is a primary drive itself or just a reaction to
frustration.”

“I just liked hitting people. It was
fun.”

She opened her eyes a little wider. The green
shimmered in the muted lighting. She pursed her full lips and
thought a private thought. I expected her to start taking notes,
maybe send me a bill later.

“Fun?” she pronounced carefully, as if trying
out a new word.

“Sure. The hitting, the contact. Tackling is
fun, particularly a good, clean hit that knocks the wind out of the
runner. The kind that jolts him, makes the crowd
go 
oooh
.

“The sounds of the crowd. Did it represent to
you a woman’s sighs, her moans of ecstasy?”

I didn’t like where this was heading. “I
think I can distinguish between the two.”

“And this tackling people, did it make you
feel bigger, more … manly?”

I laughed and nearly spilled my Grolsch.
“Look, if you’re going to tell me the NFL is full of closet queens
…”

She ran a hand through her thick auburn hair,
now tangled from the wind. “Why are you defensive about your
masculinity?”

This was getting me nowhere. “Let me tell you
a story,” I said. “When I was a rookie, there was a big tight end
on the Jets who was so tough he made Mike Ditka look like a
pussycat. He liked to talk trash at the line. So I come in at
outside linebacker late in the game, and my uniform is clean and
white, and he’s there all muddy and bloody, and yells out, ‘Here
comes the cherry.’ Then the QB is calling signals and all I hear is
the tight end saying, ‘Hey, cherry, didn’t they teach you how to
put on your uniform in college? I can see your dick, and it’s all
shriveled up.’ So just like somebody saying your shoes are untied,
I look down, the ball is snapped, and the tight end slugs my helmet
with a forearm that could ring the bell at Notre Dame.”

She considered my story and stirred her red
drink. “And do you attempt to compensate for this humiliation?”

I shook my head. “No, I just don’t look at my
dick unless absolutely necessary.”

She tried to see if I was joking, and when
she figured I was, gave me a full smile. “Do you really want my
help or are you just hoping to charm your way into my room?” she
asked.

“I think I have a significantly greater
chance at the former.”

“Dr. Riggs was right. You are smarter than
you look.”

That was as close to a compliment as I was
going to get. A winsome lass on a sailboard—perhaps overcome by
sunstroke—once compared my eyes to the azure waters off Bimini.
Later, she tossed me over for a scuba instructor.

Pamela Metcalf declined a second drink and we
looked at each other a moment, her thoughts imperceptible. She told
me she was leaving for New York in the morning, a couple of network
appearances, a book signing in the Doubleday store on Fifth Avenue,
then back to England. I should call her if I learned anything or if
there was another killing.

“Look for messages,” she said.

“Besides ones in lipstick?”

“Frankly, I’m puzzled by the reference to
Jack the Ripper. Jack was a disorganized murderer, a slasher who
was extremely violent and quite messy. He stalked women he did not
know and used force, not persuasion, to subdue them.”

“So the killer’s tossing a curveball?”

“A curve …”

“A red herring, a bum steer.”

“Perhaps. But even if the killer is tossing a
… bum steer, the message is still meaningful. Whoever wrote it is
well read, perhaps an amateur historian, or someone who knows a
great deal about classic criminal cases, stories of law
enforcement, that sort of thing.”

“Like the honorable state attorney,” I mused,
mostly to myself.

“If that were the case, the crime would not
be motiveless, would it? If the Diamond girl was his chippy and he
killed her, there would have to be a motive. But if it’s a random
killing, the work of a serial murderer, you’ll know soon
enough.”

“How?”

“Because there’ll be another one presently,
won’t there?”

I hadn’t thought about that before, but now I
did. Looking for a little excitement with the gun-and-badge set was
one thing, hunting a serial killer was something else again. Serial
killers are lifetime obsessions of guys with little offices and big
file drawers. It takes forever to nab one. Isn’t that what makes
them serial killers, unsolved murders over several years? What had
I gotten into?