I looked at it and handed it to Meyer. Five-by-seven black-and-white glossy of a slender girl standing by a boat pulled up on a rocky beach. You could see the trees on the hazy far shore. She had turned to look back over her left shoulder, to smile at the camera. Her face looked small and sweet under the heavy weight of dark hair. Her smile was provocative. Her hips were rich and vital in taut white slacks below the narrowness of her waist. It was a starlet pose, hip-shot, canted. I wondered if Meyer was as surprised as I was to see how young she looked.
“So let’s say Coralita started making it with the kid when he was seventeen. It wouldn’t be any big problem to get him started. Kids that age don’t think of very much else. So she would have him whenever she could when he was eighteen and nineteen and twenty. He must have felt real guilty about not being able to stop. A good strong boy that age could give Coralita a pretty good run. Maybe she tried to end it too. Who knows? But the old man would be away, and they would be alone in the house, eat supper, watch the TU, maybe try not to look at each other. Go to bed. Each one thinking of the other one in the other bedroom, both of them getting hornier and hornier. Both of them with the perfect excuse. What harm can one more time do? Who’s to know? Then one or the other coming cat-foot down the dark hall, sliding warm into the bed, all arms and mouths and groans and shudders.”
He shook his head.
“Human sexuality. A hell of an engine. Let it get out of control, and it can kill. You ever hear about the doctor that got asked to speak to the PTA about human sexuality? No? He went home and told his wife he was going to talk to the PTA and she said what about, and he didn’t want to get into some kind of discussion with her about what he should or shouldn’t say, so he told her he was going to talk to them about sailing. She was out of town the day he gave the speech, and when she got back a friend came running up to her and said, ‘Mary, your husband gave the most wonderful talk to the PTA yesterday! You should be very proud of that man.’ The wife stared at her and said, ‘I don’t understand. George just doesn’t know anything about it. He only tried it twice in his life, and once he got motion sick and the second time his hat blew off.’”
After our dutiful and politic laughter, Meyer said, “What you are telling us about Cody and Coralita, Sergeant, is that you don’t see them as evil people.”
“What’s evil? They got thrown together. She had the hots and he was just a kid. They were weak and they were stupid, and they happened to get caught. Maybe the best answer would have been if Bryce Pittler had killed them both and then himself. Not because of the punishment or anything like that, but just to keep from turning Cody loose on the world. You talk about psychology, I don’t know shit from Shinola. All I know as a law officer is that there would be no way in God’s world Cody T. W. Pittler could ever feel okay about himself. And the worst crimes I get are the ones done by people who are trying to punish themselves. I think they want to be dead, and they can’t go at it direct, so they keep circling it, giving it a chance to happen.”
All of a sudden there was a coughing roar that steadied into a loud hum, and cold air began coming out of the vents in the side wall. Paul Sigiera jumped up and closed the small window. He went and stood in front of the vents and bared his chest and said, “Ahhhhh. Finally.”
“We’ve taken up a lot of your time,” Meyer said.
He turned and shrugged. “This is Thursday morning, friend. The quiet time. Last weekend’s wars have been ironed out. The troops are regrouping. Tomorrow night there’ll be some skirmishes, and by Saturday the fire fights will start and I’ll be busy as a little dog in a big yard. This has been kinda interesting.”
“For us too,” I said. “One question. Did you develop a set of prints?”
“Sure did. Nice and clear. Beer bottle, bathroom glass, countertop, lots of good surfaces. They must have gotten a lot of sets of his and then picked the best and classified them and sent them in to FBI Central records. The theory is he gets picked up for something and the prints go in and they are cross-indexed in some damn way, and they identify him-sooner or later. It used to work better than it does now. But it didn’t work too well, I hear, way back when.”
“What happened to the car?”
“From the file they had hopes they could trace the kid that way. It was an almost new DeSoto, off white. It turned up finally near Alpine. It was at the bottom of a steep cliff out of sight of the highway. A backpacker reported it.” He flipped the folder open again. “Says here they estimate it had been down there six weeks. I don’t know how they worked that out. There was no body near it or in it. It was a place where there was a kind of scenic lookout, where he could have got out and pushed it and let it roll over the edge.”
I looked questioningly at Meyer. He knew what I meant. He gave a shrug of acquiescence. “What if, using the name Larry Joe Harris, he killed a young girl over in Cotulla eighteen years ago? What if, five years ago, using the name Jerry Tobin, he ran off with a girl from Dallas and killed her in a fake automobile accident down in the hill country? What if, as Evan Lawrence, he married Professor Meyer’s niece and blew her and two other people to bits. He made over two thousand dollars off the killing in Cotulla, two hundred thousand off the Dallas girl, three hundred thousand off his bride from Houston. What would you say to that?”
“Identification okay?”
“Through the picture we showed you. Total certainty.”
“Like I said, I don’t want to get artsy-fartsy fancy, like the psychiatrists in the courtroom. But isn’t what he’s doing, maybe, is killing Coralita over and over, killing his stepmother?”
“Punishing himself by killing her,” Meyer said. “I could agree.”
“So then there’s more,” Sigiera said. “It adds up to four years between Coralita and the girl in Cotulla, then a gap of twelve years? He counted with his fingers, tapping them on the edge of his desk. ”No, thirteen. Then five years until this one, this month. There’d be more in there. God only knows what his cycle is. If it’s every two years, that makes three you know about and eight you don’t.“
“Women seem to be strongly attracted to him,” Meyer said.
“Okay, he’s a compulsive. You take a rapist. They go on and on until you catch them. But that’s a crime of violence, not sex. They want to hurt and kill. This is different. He wants to love and be loved. He wants romance. He wants to heat somebody up until they’re as hungry for it as Coralita was. Then he’s got the excuse to punish himself and her for that kind of sex by killing her, depriving himself.”
“Meyer and I had dinner with them aboard my houseboat.”
“That’s the first time you didn’t throw in the word Professor, so now I’ll buy the idea you’re friends. Go ahead.”
“I remarked afterward to Meyer there was a kind of almost tangible erotic tension between them, almost visible, like smoke in the air.”
Sigiera shook his head slowly, making a bitter mouth under the droop of the mustache. “All the years,” he said. “All the years on the run. Roaming among the women, all smiles. Taking little jobs and then moving on. Roaming and killing, and in pain all the time. By now he must be damn well expert at picking up new identities. It’s never hard if you start with cash and with the smarts. But it can go wrong. Some little thing. He’d have to be ready at any time to fold the tent and run. I don’t think a man can stand that much tension for too long.”