The Girls He Adored (13 page)

Cortes was unconscious before he hit the ground, which did not deter Lee from jumping up and down on his rib cage, then stripping down his jumpsuit, turning him over, spreading his legs apart until his privates were on the floor, and grinding them under his heel as if he were putting out a cigarette butt.

The deputies in charge of the pod responded quickly, but it was too late to save anything but Cortes's life—the whole episode (from soup to nuts, in Max's humorous phrase) had taken no more than three minutes. And this time it was Lee who took the beating from the guards. Lee didn't mind pain—it only made him stronger.

In the end, the encounter with Cortes worked out satisfactorily for Maxwell. It ensured that he would be housed alone for the rest of his stay, and gave him a certain cachet among both the guards and the other inmates. But there was nothing to be gained by another such episode. For one thing, Max had learned over the years that you had to space the major thrills out, or you'd get jaded. For another, you might get away with destroying one cellmate, but do it twice and your jailers would start taking extraordinary precautions, which was the last thing he wanted.

So this time he kept Alicea rigidly suppressed.
You so much as try to come out,
Max informed her,
and I will slice up this face until it's so hideous not even Miss Miller will be able to look at us.

Then he called Mose, his memory trace personality, into co-consciousness with him, narrowed his eyes until they were nearly, but not entirely shut, lest the new gorilla try to jump him despite his restraints, and had Mose reread him the last chapter of
Ulysses,
Molly Bloom's soliloquy, while waiting to be brought from the cell to the courthouse, where he figured to have his best chance at escaping.

Ulysses
was their favorite book. Max remembered the first time they'd seen it. “Look!” the nine-year-old had cried, spying it in the bookshelf in Miss Miller's living room. “Look, a book about me!”

A few hours later Miss Miller, her breasts perfumed like Molly's, had read him—or rather, Christopher—that last chapter out loud in bed. And though he was too young to understand much of it, like Leopold Bloom's, Christopher's own heart was going like mad, and yes he said along with her, yes I will, Yes.

T
HE ART OF AFFECTIVE INTERVIEWING,
as practiced by Ed Pender, sometimes involved mirroring the interviewee's body language. In this case, with both of them cuffed and chained, sitting on a hard steel bench, that was already accomplished.

The difficult part for Pender was controlling his own excitement at being less than six feet away from Casey after all these years. Unbelievable. But he knew he'd have to proceed slowly, feel his way along. The ideal would be to wait for the other man to initiate the conversation, but the way Casey seemed to have withdrawn into himself, Pender knew he couldn't count on that.

“Hey,” he said, after a good five minutes had passed.

No response.

“Hey—I'm talking to you.”

“You talkin'a
me?”
Casey looked up slowly, his eyelids lowered sleepily and his eyebrows drawing together. And again: “You talkin'a
me?”

A perfect Travis Bickle. Pender's laugh came easily. “Not bad.”

“Not bad?” said Casey. “When did you ever see better?”

Celebrity impressionists—you never knew what was going to kindle a connection. Pender took the ball and carried it in the direction he wanted to go—place names. “I saw Rich Little do De Niro in Vegas . . . well, tell you the truth, you're about as good as him. But I saw Fred Travelena do him in Dallas—now
that
guy's a genius.”

“I do a better Nicholson,” said Casey.

“Lemme see.”

The eyebrows peaked, the lips widened to a leer.
“Heeere's Johnny!”

“The Shining,
right?”

“Right. I can also do Christopher Walken:
I hid this uncomfortable hunk of metal up my aass two years. . . .”

“Man, you
are
good.” Pender slid a little closer toward Casey. “My name's Parker.”

“Yeah, whatever,” said Casey.

Pender told himself he hadn't really expected the man to give his true name, but he was disappointed anyway—even an alias might have helped. He shook it off. Back to work. “You ever done that kinda thing professionally? You should give it a try.”

“Ah, bullshit.”

But Pender could see that Casey was pleased. A little less guarded, too—the manacled hands, balled into fists at first, had relaxed. “No, really. You should go to one of them, what do they call 'em, open mike things. They had one in that club in Dallas. Actually, I think it was Plano. You ever been to Plano?”

Casey shrugged; Pender, with a Ph.D. in shrugs, read it as a positive response: not a
Fuck, no,
but a
Yeah, what of it?

Oh-ho, thought Pender. Oh-ho was his version of Bingo! or Eureka! or Gotcha! On to topic number two. “In my opinion, it's basically a suck-ass town. Wall-to-wall stuck-up bitches. Man, I couldn't get laid in Plano to save my life.”

“You couldn't get laid in Plano? Jeez, I got more pussy in Plano than the ASPCA. 'Course, I'm better looking than you are. I can get a woman anyplace. Shit, I can get a woman in jail. There's this shrink they sent to check me out—the bitch has already got the hots for me. We fooled around a little in the interview room—we're talking about getting together soon as I get out.”

Oh-ho. Drilling randomly, Pender had struck a gusher. Casey was speaking freely now, not at all guarded. Pender modeled a receptive posture, hands as wide as the manacles permitted, shoulders relaxed, chest open but not thrust forward, as Casey slid a little closer, until they were only three feet apart.

“Of course, a guy with your looks, what
you
might want to do if you ever get back that way and you're horny, there's a motel called the Sleep-Tite in Dallas. Vietnamese hookers. Ask for Anh Tranh. Tightest little piece I ever had. All you gotta do is call the desk, tell the guy you want number one girl, make boom-boom.”

Pender decided to narrow the focus a little. “They got any white girls there?”

“Just 'Mese.”

And a little narrower. “Naah, I like white girls. Blonds or redheads—nothing like a pale-haired pussy.”

“You're crazy—pussy's pussy,” Casey said quickly. Then he shut down, thud, like an asbestos fire curtain coming down in the middle of a scene.

Pussy's pussy.
Max knew immediately that he'd gone too far. That locker-room bullshit about Irene Cogan. And why on earth had he felt compelled to tell Parker about the Sleep-Tite? He knew what Ish would say: that it had something to do with a need for approval from older men—apparently any older man would do. Or not so much approval as acceptance—he wanted to be accepted as a man, by men. He also suspected that this compulsion toward sexual boasting had as much to do with Mr. Kronk as it did with Ulysses Maxwell Sr. It would be nice to ask Dr. Cogan about it when he got her back to Scorned Ridge and they started therapy again for real.

The abduction of Dr. Irene Cogan: now
that
would be a challenge worthy of Max. He'd known he'd have to attempt it when he awoke from his hypnotic trance that afternoon—he'd been so damn smug, so sure she could never put him under. But she'd not only put him under, she'd made contact with little Lyssy.

Lyssy the Sissy, his—their—original personality, was the only identity with whom Max did not share memory, so there was no way for him to know whether or not the little tattletale had let slip some clue as to their identity, or the location of Scorned Ridge. In any event, it was not a chance he cared to take.

But self-preservation was only one of two reasons Max had determined to bring Irene along with him. The other had to do with his admittedly unique psychological makeup. Although he understood that to the rest of the world, DID was a disorder, personally Max liked to think of it as a new and superior order. Still and all, it was a great strain on Max, the de facto host alter after Useless had been supplanted, the personality who dealt with the world most of the time, whose job it was to hold together the complex and contradictory bundle of personalities known collectively as Ulysses Maxwell.

It was for that reason that Max had turned to the study of psychiatry seven years earlier. With all the resources of the system, of course, there'd been no need for formal education. He'd simply bought a small library of psychology books down in Medford, plus every textbook on MPD or DID he could get his hands on, and
subscribed to every journal and magazine that came to his attention. Max read them, Mose memorized them, and Ish, who'd come into being during this period, integrated the insights into the system.

But lately Max was beginning to think they'd taken their therapy about as far as they could on their own. And since Dr. Cogan was a specialist—an attractive specialist—in dissociative disorders, and since he needed to remove her from the general population for his own protection ASAP, why not bring her back to Scorned Ridge with him to continue his therapy?

Max recognized that this was an insane idea on the surface of it. But since Paula Ann Wisniewski was dead, and Irene was—or could again be—a strawberry blond, he'd be killing two birds with one stone.

Strawberry blonds! Suddenly it struck him. Parker's crap about liking blonds and redheads—what the fuck was that? And mentioning Plano to boot. Max thought back—were there any comedy clubs in Plano? Any clubs at all? Mose couldn't tell him—Mose only recorded what other alters read, observed, or heard. But Plano, though the Chamber of Commerce would deny the appellation, was really more of a wealthy bedroom community, a glorified suburb of Dallas. Dallas was where the nightspots were.

So was it a trap? Was Parker a cop? There was definitely something familiar about the man, beneath that Bluto act. Max couldn't quite put his finger on it, so he instructed Mose to go through the archives, and report back when he had a hit.

Seconds later Max sensed the MTP's excitement. Quickly he brought Mose up to co-consciousness, and was rewarded with a vivid recollection of sitting in a hotel room in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, in 1994, watching Special Agent E. L. Pender holding a press conference in nearby Reeford, asking the public for assistance in locating one Gloria Whitworth, a coed at Reeford College, and in particular asking any strawberry blonds in the area to report suspicious contacts with strangers.

Dear Gloria. Aptly named—though she was otherwise nothing to write home about, Miss Whitworth's waist-length strawberry blond hair was glorious indeed. It had been her pride and joy— how she'd wept the first time it was harvested.

And now Pender had finally connected him, not only to Gloria but also to Donna Hughes in Plano. God double fucking damn the man. Time to book on out of here. And never mind waiting until
he was taken to the courthouse to make his escape—Max, with Lee's help, had business to take care of right here in this cell.

Pender knew he'd blown it. He could sense Casey shutting down on him. Following Plano with the blonds—too much, too soon. He did what he could to repair the damage. “Yeah, you're right. Pussy's pussy.”

But Casey ignored him. He'd turned his back on Pender, picked his teeth, and fiddled with his manacles, but he hadn't moved any farther away. Pender was just thinking how that was a good sign when he heard the unmistakable click of handcuffs being unlocked.

Then, before Pender could call out, Casey turned, one of the handcuff bracelets clenched in his left fist, and Pender learned with a sick sad sense of surprise exactly what Deputy Jervis had meant when she said that if you hadn't seen the fucker, you couldn't imagine how fast the fucker could move.