"And I misinterpreted your pitiful yearning."
She seemed to be convincing herself that I wasn't half-bad, and who was I to argue?
"My goodness! I've been so frosty to you, haven't I?"
"Like Green Bay in January," I agreed.
"Then I apologize."
"Accepted."
Again, she slid the glasses back to the top of her head. She let her hand push the hair back and it tumbled over her shoulders. Then she looked at me the way a woman looks when she wants to be looked at right back. "Now, what were we saying?" she asked quietly.
"Something about the organized murderer."
She appraised me with those wide-set intelligent eyes, the flinty specks lost in the green. She didn't seem to have murder on the mind when she said, "Actually, I was thinking about you a few days ago."
"Really?"
"Yes, I was watching one of those American football shows on the telly."
"And the mindlessness of it reminded you of me."
"Well, I thought there must be more to it than meets the eye. I mean, just jumping onto each other and all. I thought you could explain it to me."
"Gladly. Where should we begin? First downs? Touchdowns? The I-formation or full-house backfield?"
"Actually, I was wondering about all the committee meetings?"
"The what?"
"Every few moments the lads stop, gather 'round a circle, pop their asses into the air, and have a meeting."
I could see we would have to start at the beginning. I remember my high-school coach the first day of practice. "Girls," he would say, "this is a football."
Pam continued: "You were quite proficient at the game, weren't you?"
"Not really."
"But Dr. Riggs said you won an award. At university, you were an Early American."
"All-American, honorable mention, my senior year. It's not that great."
We were interrupted by a shout. " Deus Misereatur! I'm so late."
Charlie was trundling across the lobby, his coattail flying, a wad of index cards in his hand. "I was going over my notes and now look at it. Tempus fugit! "
Pam Maxson assured him that his audience would wait, and we headed out of the hotel and back into the Range Rover. "I hope you two found some common ground," Charlie said, somewhat hesitantly.
"Your friend is actually quite nice," Pamela Maxson responded.
Charlie didn't have a coronary. He didn't even snicker.
"We were talking about radical psychiatry, the myth of the unconscious, that sort of thing," I told him, trying not to boast.
"Dr. Maxson must have been doing the talking," Charlie said, "because you don't know diddly-"
"Now, now, Dr. Riggs," she clucked, angelically rising to my defense, "Jake is quite knowledgeable about the law. I'm sure he knows many esoteric procedures that are quite foreign to you and me."
"Like how to spin webs of gold from piles of manure," Charlie harrumphed.
"Now, now, Dr. Riggs," I chided, pinching the back of his neck. He harrumphed again and shut up. I think the old goat was jealous in an avuncular kind of way.
Pam deftly guided the Rover out of the Mayfair section past St. James Park and across Westminster Bridge over the Thames. The rain had stopped, and the sun was peeking out of the clouds. She gunned the engine, and as we barely avoided a major pileup at a roundabout, Charlie turned to me and whispered, "What were you talking about, really?"
"Royalty," I said.
"The Queen, the Duke of Windsor?" Charlie asked.
"The Prince of Passion," I said.
CHAPTER 21
"Fantasies?" mused Clarence the Chemist. "I've had fantasies since I was eleven years old."
"About killing women?" asked Dr. Pamela Maxson in a neutral tone.
"If you could call my mother a woman."
"What do you call her?"
"Dead," Clarence said, suppressing a grin. "Braggart," chided the Fireman, from his seat across from Clarence.
"It got easier," Clarence continued. "First, the fantasies were about the victim, then about the killing, then perfecting the killing."
The Fireman scowled, then in a derisive singsong voice said, "The fantasy becomes reality, and then the fantasy develops structure. Blah, blah, blah. It's all so boring, Dr. Maxson."
"And Clarence's fantasies are so drab," complained Stephanie, fiddling with her nails. "Poisoning is so impersonal. So tacky."
Clarence the Chemist stuck out his tongue at Stephanie. It was a small pointed tongue and it flicked out and back again, snakelike, as he bobbed his head.
"Oh, you'd like to, wouldn't you?" Stephanie taunted, hiking up her pink hot pants and flashing a smooth expanse of thigh.
Clarence holstered his tongue. "If you were a woman, I'd…"
Stephanie bristled. "You'd what, you insignificant worm?"
Clarence the Chemist shrank back into the metal chair and jammed his hands into his pockets. On the far side of forty, he was short and stout, a bland face topped by wispy, blond-gray hair, a brother-in-law look you'd never remember. He wore a brown wool cardigan buttoned up. Next to him was Ken the Doll. Ken was in his twenties, handsome in a nondescript way, brown hair short and neatly parted, his pale face without lines, his thin lips without expression. He wore a blue blazer jacket worn at the elbows.
Next to Ken the Doll was Stephen aka Stephanie. All giggles and flirtatious movements, she smoothed her short, bleached-blond hair with exaggerated motions. Her halter top was tight and bright, and she kept squeezing her small breasts together with her arms. She spoke breathlessly in a poor imitation of Marilyn Monroe.
"There isn't a real man in the room," she complained, batting her eyes, "unless it's him." She dangled a handful of black lacquered fingernails in my direction.
"Bitchy, bitchy, bitchy," responded the Fireman. He was tall and lanky with prominent cheekbones, and his jaw muscles worked as he chewed a thick wad of gum. He could have been thirty or forty, and as he talked, his eyes danced to a tune all their own. "Stephanie, darling, if you hate your penis so much, why not let me dip it in kerosene and set it alight?"
That started a buzz. Clarence the Chemist smacked his lips in a boorish smooching sound and nodded his head vigorously, welcoming an ally. Ken the Doll cracked his knuckles, and the Fireman grinned maniacally at his inestimable wit. Stephanie hissed at all of them.
I just sat there and tried to act nonchalant in the presence of three men and a whoozit who collectively had killed fourteen women. The room was drafty and dark, the floor dirty linoleum. The windows were crosshatched with metal screens secured by heavy padlocks. The door was steel and opened electronically when an attendant turned a key and pushed the right button. Two floors above, Charlie Riggs was preparing to speak to an assembly of British coroners, homicide detectives, medical students, forensic psychiatrists and, I supposed, assorted other ghouls.
I surveyed The Group. Clarence the Chemist was a pharmacist who had poisoned his victims. As a child, the Fireman had dissected live cats, then torched them. More recently, he raped women and killed them, though not in that order. He always burned their bodies. Ken the Doll wasn't named Ken at all. But, as a child, he would rip the head off his sister's Barbie doll, then masturbate into the open neck. He once knifed a woman in the abdomen, then attempted sex through the wound. Stephanie was a transsexual in her late twenties, a woman trapped in a man's body. Hormone treatments had given her breasts and removed her facial hair, and in a dim bar, she would be considered attractive in a slatternly way. Judged unstable even before she killed anyone, she had been turned down for the surgery that would remove the male equipment and construct an artificial vagina.
Clad in a white lab coat, different-colored pens sticking out of a pocket, Dr. Pamela Maxson sat on the edge of the group, her legs demurely crossed, a clipboard on her lap. "Stephanie, what was your earliest fantasy?" she asked.