John Lutz - Dancing with the Dead

Waxman was wearing a neat gray sportcoat, paisley tie, blue slacks. He looked fresh, not as if he’d been slogging around all day in the heat. “How can you get to sleep after eating that stuff so late at night?” he asked.

Morrisy finished chewing a bite of fish and swallowed, took a slug of Dixie beer. “Helps me doze off,” he said. “How’d you make out with Verlane today?”

“He gave me the same answers, wanted to know why I was asking the same questions. He’s getting plenty testy. Keeps trying to make a big deal of the fact his wife did ballroom dancing.”

“I used to dance myself,” Morrisy said. “Used to do the twist.”

“No shit? Hard to imagine.”

“Means nothing about nothing,” Morrisy said. “Just ’cause a witness said the victim was dancing at that lounge don’t mean any more’n me getting down and screwing up my knees when I was young and dumb. People dance, people play golf, tennis, then they go out and get themselves killed anyway and so what?”

“Think maybe hubby wants us to go off in some direction other’n him?” Waxman asked.

“What do you think?”

“My thought is he’s extremely tense. I told him lots of people besides his wife were dancing at the lounge that night, and they’re still alive. Thought he was gonna poke me. He’s that tightly wrapped.”

“Good. You want one of these peppers?”

“God, no.”

Morrisy smiled. He got to why he’d wanted to meet Waxman. “I talked with Schutz today.”

Waxman nodded. Schutz was a police psychiatrist. The young blond waitress who’d waited on Morrisy sashayed over and Wax-man ordered a cup of decaf.

“What he told me dovetailed with some of our conclusions,” Morrisy went on. “Autopsy report shows the perpetrator was skillful with the murder weapon, a very sharp knife, used in a way that suggests the perp knew exactly how much pressure to apply and at what angle. Way we reconstruct the crime, he almost certainly took precautions not to get any of the victim’s blood on him, as if he knew about arterial blood spurting. Schutz looked over the evidence and said the killer did the Verlane woman with a deliberateness that indicated detachment and planning. Work of a bona fide sociopath.”

“I coulda told you that,” Waxman said, sipping steaming black decaf.

“And our guy has a pathological hatred of women.”

“Coulda told you that, too.”

“But not using all that psychology jargon like Schutz,” Morrisy said. “Upshot of it is, Schutz sees psychological signs, we see physical signs, that the killer’s done his thing before. Us and Schutz together, we’re seldom wrong about something like that.”

“Computer check showed no similar killings in this or any other parish,” Waxman reminded him.

Morrisy relished the last bite of redfish. “Still, my feeling is our boy’s had practice. Experience. Another thing Schutz said: The killer himself might not know he’s committed the murders. He might be blanking out the experiences in his mind, his way of coping so he can live with his conscience. Schutz says that happens.”

“Happens a lot in court,” Waxman said, “when guilty parties are trying for insanity pleas and light sentences.”

“Hmph. Go ahead, try one of these banana peppers.”

He made it sound so much like an order that Waxman took a cautious bite from the tip of one of the tiny green peppers that had rested in hot sauce on Morrisy’s plate. Morrisy watched as Waxman scalded his tongue gulping coffee to squelch the greater fire.

“Jesus!” Waxman gasped. He was pale.

“Everybody’s agreed the guy’s killed before,” Morrisy said, “so naturally the next question is-”

“Will he do it again?” Waxman finished.

He waved the waitress over and breathlessly asked for some water. She smiled, apparently used to the request, and hurried away. Morrisy watched her, noticing she had a pretty good ass.

“Actually,” Morrisy said, “there’s not much doubt in my mind. He’ll do it again.”

“So we need to collar him before he does,” Waxman said, sort of wheezing. He was still having difficulty talking and breathing at the same time, and the waitress was nowhere in sight with the water.

Morrisy slid his half-full stein over to Waxman, said, “Wash down that pepper with some cold brew, why doncha?”

Waxman did. His breathing smoothed out, but his eyes were still watering.

Morrisy said, “Starting tomorrow, let’s find out every goddamn thing about the husband, and I mean all the way back to when the bastard was potty trained.” He stared hard at Waxman when he said this, making it plain it was something to bear down on, a career maker or breaker.

“Gotcha,” Waxman said.

The waitress arrived with a glass of water with ice in it. Waxman drank that, too.

The next morning was hot. Mary awoke eager to climb out of the perspiration-damp bed. She slapped the alarm clock button down, and in thick silence padded to the air-conditioner and switched it on, twisting the thermostat dial all the way to Coolest. The air-conditioner hummed and gurgled impotently for a few seconds, then the compressor thunked on and the blower’s tone became deeper and more powerful.

Mary stooped low so the flow of cool, chemical-smelling air flowing through the brown plastic grill washed over her face and evaporated perspiration. Then she straightened up, stretched her back, and went into the living room and switched on that window unit so the rest of the apartment would be cool when she emerged from the bathroom.

After showering, she dressed methodically, taking care to avoid snagging her pantyhose with a fingernail, choosing from her closet a lightweight gray skirt and blazer and matching medium-heeled shoes. Checked out Ms. Businesswoman in the full-length mirror and was reasonably satisfied.

When she went into the kitchen, she found it was too warm in there, almost as if there were something baking in the oven. Sunlight slanted in golden, syrupy rays that traversed the kitchen and lay in glimmering warm pools on the linoleum. The heat stifled what appetite she had, so she stuffed a filter into Mr. Coffee, spooned in some decaf, and ran water through it. Then she poured herself a glass of grapefruit juice and carried it and a cup of black coffee into the living room, where it was cooler.

She sat down on the sofa, set the glass and cup on the coffee table, and used the remote to switch on the TV and tune to the weather channel.

Eighty-five degrees at the airport, and it wasn’t even eight o’clock. No wonder the apartment hadn’t cooled down during the night. The temperature was expected to reach the high nineties today, the forecaster said, with what seemed to be barely disguised sadistic satisfaction. God, St. Louis in the summer was a city something like hell. She thumbed the remote to tune in CNN, downed the glass of sour grapefruit juice abruptly, as if it were medicine, then settled back on the sofa with her steaming coffee.

Trouble in the Middle East, said the anchorman. Tape showed a horde of raggedly dressed youths hurling rocks at some kind of armored vehicle. Doors sprang open in the side of the thing and soldiers poured out, carrying their weapons low and running in a cautious crouch. The stone-throwing youths scattered, and the tape ended. Mary sipped her coffee while another tape showed a drug bust in Washington, screaming cops battering down the front door of a shoddy house and shoving the startled occupants up against a wall and frisking them. Was it a real world out there? she wondered. Had all this actually happened? Somehow she couldn’t relate to any of it, any more than she could grasp the true meaning of the federal deficit or the trade imbalance. Did any of it really mean anything, or was it all floating around in her life in the abstract, like astrology or Einstein’s mathematical theories, so that it touched her only indirectly, if at all?