Paul Levine - Night vision

Now, try not to disturb anything and look around. What do you see? A fairly neat desk. Some bills, a day-old newspaper, some advertising fliers, and a police-department fingerprint kit. Something else that looked familiar, the logo of interlocking male and female symbols. I picked it up. It asked for name, address, handle, and password. It asked how often you used the service and if you had any suggestions. It asked, on a scale of one to ten, how you would rate the overall quality of the fantasy and the flesh produced by your pals at Compu-Mate.

Alex Rodriguez never answered the questions. Before he had a chance to fill in the blanks and stick on his stamp…wait. There was no return envelope. The questionnaire didn't come in the mail. It would have been brought by Bobbie Blinderman, who personally surveyed her customers.

Satisfaction guaranteed.

Somewhere in the back of my mind a buzzer was going off. The Compu-Mate connection. Of course.

Nick Fox and Alex Rodriguez didn't kill anyone. The murders weren't to silence anyone. And they weren't the work of a motiveless serial killer. They were planned and carried out for the oldest and best of reasons. Jealousy and revenge.

Nobody fucks with Bobbie.

Bisexual and promiscuous, Bobbie Blinderman waltzed door-to-door with her cockamamie surveys. You never know who'll invite you in for a drink and a tickle. Maybe a TV Gal, a Flying Bird, a Forty Something. And you never know who'll be right behind. An enraged husband who borrows a dead guy's poetry and a drunk guy's handle. He finds the bedroom, too, gets his revenge. Uses a gun to force his way, then ends the rivalry with his powerful jockey's hands. Until the next one comes along.

Larynx snapped in two. Fractured hyoid, thyroid, and cricoid cartilage, the whole shebang.

I remembered his hands, clawing reflexively at my own throat. With the women, it was easy enough. But that's not how you kill a man. If you target a man, a cop, you bring a gun and use it.

I gingerly picked up the phone, trying not to leave prints. I called the state attorney's office and told Nick Fox where I was and who lay on the floor.

"Oh Jesus," he said.

I told him about Bobbie and Max Blinderman, and he said it sounded crazy.

"Nick, the guy's flipped out. He assaulted me this morning because he thinks I'm diddling his wife."

"Are you?"

"No! What's that got to do with it?"

"You musta beat the shit out of the little punk."

He waited. "No, I took it easy on him."

"Okay, I'll send homicide out there. You stay put. Let's hope we get lucky, and somebody saw him going in or coming out of the house, or we come up with a gun."

"Lucky! We've got the printouts, and Max had the motive and the ability to sign on as Passion Prince. He raped the women and strangled them, and now he's shot Rodriguez. What more-"

"Jakie, simmer down. And start returning your calls, or don't they teach that downtown? Your pal Doc Katzen stopped by about twenty minutes ago. Blinderman's blood doesn't match up."

"What?"

"You heard me, Jakie. No match on the DNA. You got nice theories, tying everything up and all. And maybe you're right for once. But Max Blinderman didn't do the screwing, so you tell me how you're gonna prove he did the strangling…"

I didn't know.

"And one other thing, Jakie."

"Yeah?"

"You're fired. I'm taking you off the investigation. Back to your divorces and whiplashes. I'll handle it from here. Turn in your badge and your gun. And give me some blood."

"Blood?"

"Yeah, Jakie. Bleed a little. You like to take it. Time to give. It's for a worthy cause. Just stop at the lab and see Dr. Katzen. And bring the gun into ballistics."

"The gun. Why?"

"Standard procedure. A man says he found a gunshot victim and the man doing the finding has a gun. Routine request, nothing more."

The gun.

The last time I saw the gun it was on a black enamel table in Cindy's apartment taking a breather after Pam fired it.

Oh brother. It's one thing to lose your new fountain pen, another to lose a county-owned gun. But what was I worried about? I hadn't done anything wrong. My blood would be red with just the right amount of calcium, phosphorus, and potassium, and a tad too much cholesterol. The gun would be right there where I left it, oiled and shiny. Wouldn't it?

Max Blinderman. Ex-jockey, penny-ante con artist, a life told in a series of yellowed newspaper clips and scraps of microfilm.

Roberta Blinderman. Goes by Bobbie. Ex…Ex-what?

Just who the hell was Roberta Blinderman? No criminal record, at least not under that name. I had been watching her swiveling walk but not paying attention to anything else.

My thoughts were interrupted by someone pounding on my front door. They do that after pushing the button half a dozen times. The doorbell hasn't worked in years. I yelled that it was unlocked. I heard some feeble pushing, but the door didn't budge. In the humidity it swells up like a patrolman's feet.

"Hit it with your shoulder," I yelled.

A thud, a curse, and a moment later Bobbie Blinderman high-heeled it into my combination library, living room, conversation pit, and entertainment area. It's a library because the sports pages are usually spread across the floor. I spend most of my time here, hence the living room, and I entertain myself with one-sided conversations. At the moment I was lying on a sagging sofa, nursing a sixteen-ounce Grolsch, my gimpy leg propped up.

"I was just thinking about you," I said, telling the truth.

She wore a black scooped-back dress, molded to her body, with a sweeping skirt. It was the first time I couldn't see a mile or so of thigh.

"You look very nice," I said. "Almost ladylike."

"We need to talk."

"About Max."

"No. About Pam."

"Pam?"

The name sounded familiar, but I hadn't thought about her since she had hustled me into an elevator at the hotel. The emotional wounds must be healing, or were they only superficial? I hoisted myself to a sitting position, offered Bobbie a seat, and she gracefully bent at the knees and lowered herself into the cushion at the far end of the sofa. She had spent some time tending to herself. The blush emphasized the sanguine complexion, the black hair was in a cultivated shag that suggested wildness under control. Her dark, wide-set eyes were accented with liner, shadow, and mascara.

She took a breath and said, "I thought Pam and I might really have something special. And we do, or did. I gave her all my love, and believe me, Lassiter, it's a lot. You have no idea how hot I burn, the depth of my passion."

She looked at me with eyes both smoldering and vulnerable. It was a new look, as if she had been playing a role, tough and loose, and now something else had opened up, sensitive and giving. As for the depths of her passion, if I didn't know now, the look said I might soon learn.

"Now Pam wants to know all about you and me," she said.

"A short conversation."

"That's what I told her, the truth, that you arouse me and I flirted with you, but you never responded."

"I responded, but you're married, and even if you weren't, it would be a conflict of interest with the investigation going on."

I patted myself on the back, gave myself the discretion-is-the-better-part-of-ardor award. Then I realized I wasn't investigating anything anymore. I had been fired. I was supposed to give blood but said to hell with it. I was supposed to turn in my gun, but Cindy couldn't find it. Now, revising the equation, the only hang-up was that Bobbie Blinderman was married.

And promiscuous.

And bisexual.

And her husband may be a maniac who kills anyone who dallies with her.

Other than that, we were made for each other.