Keep thinking, Lassiter.
No thank you, miss, not another of the little brown bottles, rich cool liquid twirling down the throat. On the other hand, it's my duty to lighten the load you have to push down the aisle.
Who knew both women? Biggus Dickus and Passion Prince. The first one had alibis, Alex Rodriguez said. The second one had his own frustrations, but a killer? I would ask Pamela Maxson about that, too.
Ah, Dr. Maxson. Sexy and sagacious. Tall, brainy, beautiful Dr. Maxson who stiff-armed me like Larry Csonka jolting a linebacker. I pushed the rewind button in my mind and played it back. I saw her in my old convertible, hair flying, as we crossed the drawbridge on the night we met, lights of the city shimmering in the bay. But the scene was out of kilter. She had been unsmiling and unresponsive, unimpressed by an ex-jock mouthpiece with a crooked grin and an ancient chariot. I hadn't made a dent in her armor.
Okay, admit it, Lassiter, it's not the first time. There've been others, wise to your aw-shucks counterfeit charm, to the sports-pub patter, the barbed sarcasm that passes for humor. Maybe the English lady sees through the veneer to the guy inside, the guy who despises renting himself out by the hour to the client with the largest checkbook. Which is almost always the client with the blackest hat.
No, Your Honor, Asbestos-R-Us shouldn't have to remove its exemplary product from the Sunnyvale Elementary School. No problem if microscopic spores pierce the lungs of little Jack and Jill. Toughen 'em up.
So after a while the guy inside didn't care anymore, and maybe it started to show on the guy outside. But now, with two women dead, something to care about. I didn't ask for it, but someone pinned a badge on me. Maybe someone who wanted me to boot it, someone who saw me lose and liked what he saw. Damn it, Lassiter! So full of doubts under all that swagger. Just buckle on the chin strap and dive into the pile. Make something happen. Hit somebody!
I chased away the gremlins, closed my eyes, and thought of Pam Maxson for a while, maybe a long while, as the 747's giant engines droned on, and the warmth of Tennessee sour mash spread through me. When I opened my eyes, the plane's tires were screeching against the tarmac and I was still thinking of the psychiatrist lady, and I was happy and sad at the same time and didn't even know why.
CHAPTER 20
A gray rain fell against a gray sky, and a gray chill hung in the air.
The only thing gray about Pam Maxson was her silk blouse. The skirt was a rich black wool, the pumps black leather and sensibly low-heeled, but the scarf was an exclamation point of fiery scarlet. I pictured her in front of the mirror that morning, brushing back the thick auburn hair, slathering an extra daub of gloss on the lips, maybe starting for the door, then doubling back to tie that flirtatious scarf around her neck.
Great fantasy, Lassiter. Man is never so foolish as when he fools himself.
I tossed our bags into the back of Pam Maxson's silver Range Rover and let Charlie join her in the front seat. Pam expertly ran through the gears and got us out of the maze of Heathrow and onto the highway to the city.
"I like the Rover," I told her from the backseat. "Great to have four-wheel drive in case we run into quicksand in Piccadilly."
As usual, she thought I was hilarious. She showed this by ignoring me, doubtless out of fear she'd bust a gut laughing.
Charlie was packing his pipe after eight hours of quarantine on the flight. Pam Maxson said, "The staff is anxiously awaiting your lecture."
"Me too," I admitted, "and so is the customs inspector, judging from the look on his face when he opened Charlie's bag of tissue samples and internal organs."
"Some people have never seen a hand floating in a jar of formaldehyde," Charlie said, as if he couldn't understand why.
"Or a skull with an ax blade embedded in it," I agreed.
Pam Maxson turned toward the backseat. "Mr. Lassiter…"
"Jake," I reminded her.
"Jake. If you wish, I could arrange some meetings for you during Dr. Riggs's first talk. It could be useful to your investigation. Of course, you may not want to miss-"
"No problem. I've heard Charlie lecture so many times, I've stopped throwing up during the slide show."
"Very well," she said, "you might find my therapy group very stimulating."
We drove without speaking for a while, listening to the clack of the windshield wipers and the hiss of the tires. As we neared the city, Charlie nodded sleepily, and I stifled a yawn with the back of my fist.
"If the two of you are weary, perhaps a short nap would be in order," she suggested. "I could wait in the lobby, then knock you up in an hour."
I was intrigued by the possibilities but figured she was only offering a wake-up call.
"No need," Charlie said. "A cold shower, and I'll be good as new. It's best our bodies get adjusted to the time change."
I stretched my legs across the backseat and caught a glimpse of Pam Maxson in the rearview mirror. Our eyes met and hers flicked back to the road. "Perhaps the two of you would be interested in a weekend in the country," she said. "It's particularly nice this time of year in the Cotswolds."
"Not to be confused with the Catskills," I piped up, remembering our first conversation of promiscuous farm girls and uncaught murderers.
"Sounds delightful," Charlie said.
"My family's summer home is in the Cotswolds," she said to the windshield.
Family. It finally occurred to my dense brain matter that maybe the English lady was married. I pictured a dry Cambridge professor or a balding vicar, a stooped guy in a tattered tweed coat puttering around a drafty house, stirring the fire with an ancient poker.
"My mother's home, really. It's been in the family for two hundred years."
Mother, blessed mother.
"I keep a flat in London, of course. But every fortnight or so, it's ever so nice to go home. So peaceful. It's sheep country and some roads are rather primitive. The Range Rover is quite useful there."
Aha. The crack about the Range Rover had drawn a response after all. So she wasn't ignoring me. And the enchantment of that crisp voice: rather primitive…quite useful. How do they learn that unhurried enunciation?
In the city she negotiated the traffic circles they call roundabouts, smoothly shifting and accelerating, rarely yielding the right of way. The rain-polished streets were jammed with spacious black taxis and double-decker buses. On the sidewalks, tidy, well-dressed businessmen and women poured from banks and shops, walking briskly, umbrellas poised against the chilly rain.
"Not much of a day for sight-seeing," Pam Maxson said, "but that's Trafalgar Square off to the right."
I looked over my shoulder and caught sight of the National Gallery on one side and Buckingham Palace on the other and figured I had filled my culture quota for the trip.
Pam Maxson dropped us at our hotel for a quick shower before Charlie's first lecture at the Covent Hospital for the Criminally Insane. I was quicker than Charlie and in fifteen minutes found Pam sitting in a leather chair in the lobby, legs crossed, staring through large-rimmed eyeglasses at a bundle of papers in her lap.
She looked up, tossed the papers onto a side table, and slid the glasses on top of her head, brushing her hair back. "Medical students write such rubbish," she announced.
I nodded and sat down on a sofa facing her.
"So easy to condemn something they don't understand. So very avant-garde to denounce radical psychiatry."
"Haven't heard of that," I admitted.
"An unfortunate name for an innovative way of viewing psychiatric conditions. A radical psychiatrist would say that mental illness is a myth, that those we call mentally ill are just as rational as anyone else, from their own perspective."