The Crooked Staircase

  “Word on the street says it’s not your fingers that’s numb.”

  “What does that even mean?” he dared to ask. “Are you a crackhead bitch? You freebasing cocaine or something? You’ve maybe got a psychological problem, honey. Don’t bring me that. I’m no psychiatrist. Let’s get this done, let’s talk money.”

  Trammeled beyond any hope of escape, flat on his back, gazing up at her on the high stool, he had to be disoriented. On the ladder of fear, other men might have been on the step labeled DREAD or even TERROR. Simon didn’t appear to have gotten as high as MILD DISQUIET. Techniques for managing fear and subverting it into positive energy could be taught, but Simon’s attitude and responses did not suggest he’d been through such instruction. Instead, his apparent confidence was in fact unalloyed arrogance, and his fearlessness more likely had its roots in solipsism, the belief that in all of the world, he alone was truly real, the center of the universe and its only story, while other people were just furnishings, mere provisions of which he could make any use he wished. In her serial-killing and mass-murder cases with the Bureau, she had encountered more than a few sociopaths like him. Because of his delusional view of reality, there were strings she might use to manipulate him; however, it was necessary always to recognize his twisted genius and his cunning, for such a man could be dangerous no matter how thoroughly he had been tied down and immobilized.

  “ ‘Everybody has her story,’ ” Jane quoted him. “Except your first ex, Marlo, who has no story these days because she was beaten to death in Paris.”

  “I loved that girl. She was my world, she truly was. She was sweet, but she had no common sense. What the hell was my Marlo doing in a radical Muslim neighborhood, anyway? Looking for a rich sheik?”

  “And Alexis has no story anymore, either. She was pushed off a cliff in Yosemite. Three hundred feet is a long way to fall knowing you’ll be dead on impact.”

  “Pushed? Who ever said pushed? She and some idiot boyfriend were hiking on an insanely dangerous trail. They were casual hikers. They didn’t have the skills for it. Made me sick when I heard about it, just sick to my stomach, heartsick. I was in Hawaii at the time. Ruined Hawaii for me. Sure, our marriage didn’t work out, and that was mostly my fault. I’m not proud of sometimes thinking with my little head instead of my big one. I’m no choirboy. But I loved that girl, and it hurts me, hurts me bad, her life was cut so short.”

  Jane had the urge to get off the stool and step on his throat, put all her weight into it, and hear his esophagus collapse with a satisfying crunch. Such was the response that his kind too often elicited, because his mission in life wasn’t what he thought, wasn’t to be the unconquered hero of an epic story of power and triumph; his role was to anger others and dispirit them and, if possible, foster in them a desire to descend to his level and tempt them to act with a viciousness equal to his. She did not crush his throat, but the desire to do so remained.

  “I guess it also hurts you when you think what’s happened to your ex Dana, how she’s totally agoraphobic now, so afraid of the wider world that she can’t leave her house, lives such a prescribed existence, she’s more isolated than a nun in a cloistered order.”

  Somehow, by attitude alone, Simon almost succeeded in making it seem that he was in the higher position, looking down on her. “Don’t be such a snarky bitch. It’s tiresome. If you know Dana, you know what a tragedy that is, not just the whole agoraphobia thing, but Dana herself. I mean, she’s smart as a whip and so compassionate. She loves people, all people, not the tiniest bone of prejudice in that girl. But for all her virtues—and there’s a lot more than I’ve mentioned—in spite of her many virtues, she’s always been a little off. You hear what I’m saying? I fell hard in love with her—who wouldn’t?—so I didn’t see the problem for a while, but then it became undeniable. She was always a little off true north, like only two or three degrees off, but over time it gets worse, until she’s not going anywhere on the compass that people like you and me would recognize, she’s off into some weird territory. I feel so bad for her.”

  He paused in his odd mix of encomiums and self-justifications to cock his head and regard Jane from a slightly different angle, like an earthbound broken-wing bird turning one eye toward the sky to calculate the likelihood of single-wing flight. After a moment of silence, he said, “You’re not here about Dana or Alexis or Marlo. My Sara sent you, didn’t she?”

  “Sara Holdsteck, wife number four? I know that part of your history, but I’ve never even spoken to her,” Jane lied.

  Briefly—but only briefly—puzzled, he said, “This isn’t about any ex-wife. So is it Petra? No, it can’t be. Don’t tell me Petra’s brought in some radical-feminist muscle to break some money out of me. I wouldn’t have figured Petra capable of that kind of thing.”

  “Why wouldn’t you think her capable of it?”

  He shrugged as best he could in his restraints. “She’s a fun kid, and she’s smart enough, but she doesn’t have it in her to look out for herself.”

  “Yeah? Well, a little earlier tonight, she came at me with a broken vodka bottle, tried to slash my face.”

  “No shit? She really did?” He appeared delighted by the image that those words had painted in his mind. “Of course, after a girls’ night out, she would’ve been drunk. And she can always hold her own when it’s just girl on girl. You gotta tell me, sugar, what’d you do to piss her off?”

  “I liked bitch better.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t call me sugar.”

  “Yeah, you’re one of those types. I get it. But what did you do to piss off Petra?”

  “I needed her to tell me some things about you, and she didn’t feel in a mood to cooperate.”

  “Where is she now?”

  “Dead,” Jane lied. “She came at me hard, and I shot her.”

  “You’re shittin’ me.”

  “Her body’s in the kitchen.”

  “Damn, that’s some of the sorriest news I’ve heard in a while. She was really hot. The word hot doesn’t do her justice. She was a fine, fine piece of girl.” He sighed and shook his head. “You’re not here because of the wives, and not here because of Petra. You’re here for you. So then why all this talk, talk, talk, talk? Let’s do business.”

  “What did you mean, Petra can ‘hold her own when it’s just girl on girl’?”

  “What’s it matter now?”

  “Humor me. I’m the curious type.”

  “I never been tied up for a gossip session before. Okay, all right. With a guy, any guy, she was like putty, just rolled over no matter what. Did what she was told, drunk or sober or in between. Did what she was told, took what she was told to take, and liked it. Never complained no matter what.”

  Jane leaned forward on her stool and peered down as if to read him more closely. “No matter what? So did you hit her?”

  “ ‘Hit her’? Hell, no. I can get all the girls I want without ever hitting them. What’s wrong with you talking trash like that? We’re making progress, correcting the record, slowly coming to terms, and now you dis me like this. ‘Did you hit her?’ I don’t take offense easy, but that one’s over the line. Did you come here just to insult me, or you want something worth the risks you’ve taken?”

  Jane got off the stool. She walked away from him and then back toward him, rolling her shoulders, stretching her neck. “Two things I want. First, tell me where the cash is. And don’t play any games with this, because I’m not Petra. I don’t roll over.”

  “Maybe I look stupid right now, but I’m not. I give you one wrong number, you’ll come back here and start cutting me or using a pair of pliers on my balls. I got no leverage. All I want is we do our business and get you gone.”

  After he told her where to find the safe and divulged the combination, she said, “You just want me gone, but what about Petra? Will you ha
ng that murder on me?”

  “There won’t be a body by tomorrow morning,” he said. “It’ll be ground-up sludge poured in a pond at a sewage-treatment plant. She’s the kind no one’ll miss. Even those dumb-ass bitches she goes club-hopping with—in a month they won’t remember her name. So she went off to Puerto Vallarta or Vegas or Mars with some other stud, just slutting her way to an early grave. So what? Who cares? Nobody. She’s nothing.”

  She had parked Petra in the back of the theater because she wanted her to hear the truth of Simon from his lips, in the hope that the girl might ask herself what had gone wrong with her that she’d involve herself with such a man. But in Petra’s fragile condition, Simon’s acid contempt might do her more harm than good, and it was regrettable that she’d had to hear it.

  Jane asked, “You sure you can get the sewage-treatment-plant thing done?”

  “Haven’t you been telling me how I’m great at making women go away? And does it seem like I worry about cops? Let me tell you, honey, I’m so connected I could get a police escort to that sewage plant.”

  Jane knelt on the floor beside him. She could see that he preferred her at a distance. “I’m curious about something.”

  “You’re a damn cat with all your curiosity.”

  “Why did you name the house computer Anabel?”

  “What’s that got to do with the price of beans? Go get the money you came for, honey.”

  “Money honey. Rhymin’ Simon. Of all the names in the world, why name the house computer Anabel? It’s a simple question. Isn’t that a simple question?”

  “Nothing about you is simple, is it? I didn’t mean honey, it’s just how I talk. I’ll go back to bitch, make us both happy. Okay, all right. The system doesn’t come with a set name. You have to give it one. I could’ve called it anything.”

  “But you called it Anabel. Your mother’s name is Anabel. Does it make you feel special to be able to tell your mother what to do, and she always obeys?”

  For the first time, he was nervous. In spite of his solipsism, perhaps he began to be troubled by the thought that even if he was the only real person in existence, even if the universe had been created solely as a vehicle for him to tell his story, his fate could take an unexpected turn for the worse.

  47

  Still kneeling beside Simon Yegg, Jane pressed one finger to the dimple in his chin. “Just like that actor back in the day, Kirk Douglas. When you were little, did your mommy put her finger in your chin dimple and call you adorable?”

  As he had said, he wasn’t stupid. He knew where this must be going, and it was forbidden territory.

  His expression did not betray the anger that he wanted to conceal from her, but his eyes belied the impression of unconcern and self-control that he worked hard to project. Thus far they had been as opaque as the eyes of a ventriloquist’s dummy, but now they revealed an inhuman fury. If he had not been tied down, he would have killed Jane to prevent her from pursuing her current line of inquiry.

  She wiped her chin-probing finger on his rugby shirt. “Tell me now, how much do you hate your mother?”

  “You’re off true north yourself. You’re totally off the map. My mother’s a great lady.”

  “How much do you hate and fear your mother?” she persisted.

  “Just shove it, shut your mouth. You don’t know her.”

  “But I know about her. Four husbands. Each an effete wuss, a trust-fund baby from the day he was born. Each of them had just scads and scads of inherited wealth.”

  “You don’t go there. You don’t go to family, ever.”

  “Four divorces, she gets everything she wants. More than she wants. They give her whatever it takes. They’re in terror of her.”

  “They all loved her,” Simon insisted. “Not a one of them ever said a word against her, not one word, not ever.”

  Flat on his back, he suddenly couldn’t swallow his saliva as fast as it formed. He choked and coughed. Strings of spittle sputtered between his lips, spattered his chin.

  Jane watched this brief episode with interest, because it had meaning for her.

  The three pairs of salivary glands in the mouth secrete three pints of saliva every day. The purposes of saliva are to moisten food for swallowing, help keep teeth clean, convert complex starches into sugars, and minimize acidity in the mouth. The production of this fluid can be accelerated by the sight or smell of delicious food, also by nausea, among other things. Although it’s frequently written that someone’s mouth went dry with fear, it is more likely that extreme fear, which contributes to acidity in the mouth, will trigger a sudden flood of saliva, which is a balancing alkaline.

  Jane said, “In the years following those divorces, one of her husbands committed suicide. The note he left behind claimed he had come to hate himself for his cowardice and weakness, so he believed he needed to suffer. He made his death especially hard for himself by using a barbed-wire noose. Another took a vacation to Jamaica—where his body was found hacked apart with a machete, pieces of it arranged in various elaborately drawn voodoo veves in an old Quonset hut used for occult ceremonies. Another, your father, died during an evening at a friend’s house, when a home-invasion robbery went bad. His friend was shot to death, and he himself was burned to death when the intruders, who were never caught, set the place ablaze to cover their crimes. You’d be amazed, Rhymin’ Simon, at how much security her remaining ex has, even though your dear mom is now seventy-five and he’s eighty-six. Why, the president of the United States doesn’t have that much security.”

  Simon swallowed hard, licked his wet lips. “You’re taking facts and making them into something they’re not. It’s all distortion.”

  “If you don’t hate and fear your mother, why did you tell your wives she was long dead? I know you told Dana, because I talked to her, so I figure you told the other three the same.”

  He sounded tubercular, words rising like bubbles through the saliva that slurried down his throat. “You get away from me, stay away from me.” He turned his face from her. “I won’t listen anymore.”

  “Every one of your four wives was the image of your mother. Uncannily like her.”

  “You’re talking shit now, crazy shit now.”

  “All of them the same height and weight, all with raven-black hair, all with blue eyes—just like your mother in her youth.”

  There on the floor before the stage, the lightfall favored his supine performance as he turned his head toward her again, his face a mask of astonishment and abhorrence. Words eluded him as he worked his mouth in search of them.

  Sociopaths were good actors. Lacking all feelings other than self-love, they were nevertheless able to fake a panoply of emotions that in other people were real. This man wasn’t half as accomplished a thespian as others Jane had known. However, his stifled speech and his nuanced expression of shock far exceeded the highest level of performance of which he’d previously shown himself capable. Although he surely knew that he was doing to wealthy women what Anabel had done to wealthy men, Jane could believe that he might not have been consciously aware of choosing only mother figures to abuse and break and loot.

  Sociopaths were as efficient in the human ocean as sharks in their water world. They were humming engines of need, untroubled by any doubt about their rightness and imbued with such a strong sense of superiority that they could not conceive that failure might be a possibility. They were empty vessels. Their minds were hollow spheres of certitude. Yet each of them believed he had more facets than a treasure of well-cut diamonds and was certain he knew those countless aspects of himself in full detail, though all he—or she—knew was what he wanted and how to get it with ruthless action.

  Therefore, this first crack in Simon’s armor, this rare moment of psychological insight that badly rattled his self-image, was an opportunity Jane must seize before he repaired it with the mortar of
delusion.

  She pressed him: “Petra’s the same weight, height, body type as your mother. Blue eyes like your mother. She’s a blonde, but there are times—aren’t there?—when she wears a wig for you?”

  The wig was a guess; Petra had not mentioned it. Simon’s eyes widened with further shock, his face twisted with hatred and alarm, his slack mouth spilled forth a thin drool, proving the truth of what she’d said.

  “You can’t be a man with it unless you hit them or break them or steal from them. All you can do with it is pee. Your hands are in your pants, and your fingers aren’t numb, so why don’t you feel for it, see what condition it’s in, if you can even find it.”

  He choked on excess saliva and coughed, coughed, and found the words that had eluded him, all of them obscene, vicious, a torrent of invective.

  Jane rose from beside him and sat on the stool once more. She gazed down at him not with an expression of disgust, but with an indifference that would nettle him more, as if she had considered stepping on him, yes, but had decided that crushing him wasn’t worth soiling her shoe.

  His curses dried up, and he lay in wordless passion of the darkest character. Theater light pooled in his baleful eyes, fading their color. Yet his gaze seemed to sharpen the longer he regarded her, as though in his helplessness he sought to tap the godlike power that every sociopath believed would one day manifest in himself, and behead her with his stare.

  “Two things,” Jane reminded him. “The money is the least of them. The second thing I want is your brother, your half brother, Booth Hendrickson.”

  If Simon was surprised, he didn’t show it, and he remained silent. Perhaps he understood that his fearlessness had been revealed as pretense, that he had been diminished in her eyes and would be further reduced in her estimation if, when speaking, he again became intemperate.

  Even though he was lying in bonds, he needed her to be afraid of him, not because he was formulating a plan to exploit her fear and turn the tables on her, but because he needed to believe that when he wanted to disquiet other people, he could alarm them enough to elicit their respect. Being an evoker of apprehension was a core part of a sociopath’s self-image.