“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, menage a 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.
NIGHT VISION
PROLOGUE
Live at Five
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…”