Come Out Tonight (41 page)

It worked!
 
Sherry told him she remembered who did it, whether it was a true memory or not.
  
And once she did, Jackman knew he had to get rid of her before she could tell anyone else.
 
“What happened?” I asked.

“Oh, he got in the back door, which we had left unlatched, as you suggested.
 
He didn’t see the stake out in the corner.
 
Sherry Pollack was out cold, of course.
 
Jackman just walked over, would you believe, singing, “’Sherry, Sherry baby, Sherry don’t you come out tonight,’ then grabbed the pillow out from under her and stuffed it over her face.”

“
Don’t
you, not
won’t
you
,
” I mused.
 
“I wonder whose benefit that play on words was for….”

There was a short pause on the line, while Koslowski puzzled over what the hell I was talking about.
 
“Well, the girl was out cold, of course,” he said.
 
“And the shades were pulled, so he couldn’t have seen us in the corner until we turned on the lights.”

“Is Sherry all right? She’s breathing?”

“Absolutely.
 
We grabbed him the moment he jammed the pillow over her face.
 
Couldn’t have been more than fifteen seconds she was under.”
 

“So tell Jackman I’ll be right down.” I chuckled.
 
“This is one session with him I’m actually looking forward to.”

“Actually, Detective, it can probably wait till morning,” Koslowski said.
 
“The strangest thing - the moment we stuck him in the holding cell, he lay down on the cot and was asleep almost before his head hit the pillow.”

“Somnolux!” I almost shouted into the phone.
 
“I knew it! Ralph, how did Jackman seem to be acting when he smothered her?”

“How did he…?
 
Normal
, I guess.
 
For a psycho.
 
Like, he was smiling as he stuffed the pillow….”

“No,” I cut him off.
 
“I mean, did he seem to be sleepwalking?”

“Sleepwalking?
 
Really?” Koslowski replied, laughing.
 
“Could he even do that?
 
I mean, the guy was singing, for Chrissakes!”

“Stranger things have happened, Bill,” I said.
 

“Well, maybe, during the act, but I don’t know.
 
Gee, I don’t think so.
 
Anyway, by the time we got him into the station, Jackman had to be awake.
 
I mean, he congratulated us on catching him in the act.”

“That was big of him,” I said.
 
 
Damn.
 
From what Koslowski had said, Jackman certainly sounded conscious. I could have sworn that Somnolux was the answer, but maybe not.
 
I wondered whether there were any examples of people singing, much less murdering someone, in their sleep.
 
I yawned.
 
Tomorrow would no doubt clear up the whole thing.
  

*
   
*
   
*

Henry Jackman was already in the interrogation room when I walked in the next morning.
 
He seemed a little scared, a little rumpled, but, as always, feisty.
 
He called me “Detective Shitken,” and when that didn’t intimidate me, he demanded his lawyer. I told Henry the guy was on his way.
 
We sat there for a few minutes, Henry looking suspiciously at the two-way mirrors.

I pointed out that he couldn’t deny we had caught him in the act.

“In the act of what?” he asked, all innocence.

“C’mon,” I said.
 
“You acknowledged that last night.”

“I did not,” he said.
 
I wondered again whether he could actually have been sleepwalking through the whole thing.
 
It seemed a stretch.

At this point Jerry Sussman entered: his clothes just a little too flashy, his accent just a little too Noo Yawk, exactly the sort of backwoods lawyer I might have imagined his parents would engage.
 
Neither he nor his client was going to be any match for me.
 
In any case, this was an open and shut case.
 
After all, we’d caught the guy in the act.

“So,” I said to Henry once his lawyer had sat down.
 
“Why were you trying to kill your girlfriend?”

Sussman objected, but Henry talked right over him.
 
“I wasn’t even there last night.”

“We caught you red-handed!” I countered.

Even his lawyer told him you can’t deny something when they catch you in the act, but Jackman went on denying that he was there.
 
It was bizarre, but I figured I’d just move on to Jessica Finklemeyer.
 
A fact, after all, is a fact.

“I wasn’t there,” he said again.
 
No, it was his doppelganger.

I informed him that the first floor neighbor had ID’d him.
 
She insisted that he was Jessica’s boyfriend and swore that he was there the night she was killed.

“Arlene,” Henry said, giving a name to the neighbor I’d not yet named. Sussman told him to shut up, but he wouldn’t. Yeah, he’d talked to Arlene, Henry said, but she’d said she wouldn’t tell anyone.
 
Meanwhile Sussman was looking disgusted because he couldn’t muzzle his client. No, he didn’t know Jessica, Henry went on, volunteering a whole slew of information in the process.
 
When I brought it back around to the night that Sherry was attacked, I got Henry to admit that he slept through the whole thing and that he didn’t call the cops until he had sprayed his apartment with Lysol.
 
It didn’t look good for him.

But then Sussman stood up and insisted that his client wasn’t answering any more questions till he got some sleep.
 
I played along.
 
I let Jackman go back to his cell, making sure that someone kept coming in and waking him up.
 
I had a hunch that if sleepwalking were at the bottom of this, the best way to break him was through sleep deprivation.
              

Back and forth we went: from interrogation to interrupted sleep, back to interrogation, but there was no break, no confession.
 
Then his lawyer stopped the proceedings one more time on the grounds that his client needed some shuteye.
 
It was then I got my brilliant idea. I agreed to let him sleep one more time, but with one proviso: he had to take some Somnolux.
 
Jerry Sussman, bless his unsuspecting heart, didn’t have a clue why.
 
Neither did that simpleton Henry.
  
But if Somnolux was the problem, maybe it would also prove to be the solution.
 

*
    
*
    
*

I never bothered to go home at all.
 
I just lay down in an empty cell dozing until my cell phone rang at five to two in the morning.
 
“Detective,” a voice said. “Jackman’s up and moving around.
 
What do you want me to do?”
 

“Don’t try to wake him up.
 
Just bring him to the interrogation room.
 
I’ll meet you there ASAP.”

“But he’s already up.”
 

According to what I’d read about Somnolux, it was sometimes hard for laymen to tell that the sleepwalkers weren’t fully awake.
 
But, hey, I wasn’t going to bother to give this guy a lecture on parasomnias.
 
“Just bring him over,” I said. “I’ll take it from there.”

I got there before they did and made sure everything was prepped to tape the session before taking my position in back of the Formica interrogation table.
 
A couple of minutes later, the door to the room opened, and Jackman – I can only say -
swaggered
in. He pulled the chair out for himself, lifting one leg over the seat and dropping down to face me, that same old smirk on his face that I remember from the day I met him.
 
This didn’t look like sleepwalking.
 
Damn.
 
It was just Henry, fully conscious.
 
Or was it?
 
His body language suggested otherwise.

“Hey, there, Babe,” he said to me.
 

“Babe?” I echoed, caught off-guard.
 

“You’re not so bad looking, Detective,” Henry said, his eyes staring into mine in a way that seemed to make my heart throb.
 
“You just should take better care of yourself.
 
Get a good haircut.
 
Something a little more feminine.
 
And from what I can see you’ve got some bodacious boobs.
 
Show ‘em off a little.”
 

“Henry?” I said.
 
This was not the Henry I knew.

“Edward,” he fired back. “You mean you can’t tell the fucking difference? Henry’s a fucking dweeb.”

Edward, I mused.
 
Where did I hear that name before?
  
“Edward Jackman?”

“Fucking right.”

It had taken me way longer than it should have, but I had it now.
 
Edward Jackman.
 
Alicia’s Edward Jackman.
 
Not Henry at all.
 
“So you’re not just sleepwalking,” I said at last.

Edward gave forth this low, virile chuckle, a primal pulse that seemed to set my heart beating to his own erotic rhythm. God, I was ready to scrap the interrogation and throw myself at him from across the table.
  

“Is that what you thought would happen?” he said.
 
“Henry would get up, walk in here like a zombie and fucking confess to everything?”

Something like that. I just wasn’t sure what.
 
L
ife
doesn’t always hand you clear cut choices.
 
You just have to take what it gives you and get ready to make lemonade, if necessary.
 
I leaned over the table to get in his face.
 
“So, who are you, Edward Jackman?”

He
was the one in charge, Edward claimed.
 
Whether that was the truth or wishful thinking was yet to be revealed, but he certainly acted the part.
 
For the next couple of hours under a barrage of hot lights and hard questions, I couldn’t trip Edward up on anything.
 

He was obviously a lot smarter than Henry, though how that could be, I couldn’t say.
 
How could two different personalities sharing the same brain and body be so different?
 
I never would have thought of Henry as being attractive, though here was another version of him, still lanky and balding, yet somehow so suffused with sex, confidence and vitality, that he was transformed.... Maybe it was the bad boy in him that got to me.
 
Maybe it was the simple element of danger and malevolence that always turned me on…. Whatever, look at me.
 
He’s smiling at me, and like some damn automaton, I smile back….Damn, I had to stop drifting off like this….

“How about a fucking coke?” Edward asked - no, commanded around five in the morning.
 
Never mind, I thought, I needed to get out of the room, to pull myself together.
 
I got up, closed the door behind me and took a few deep breaths on the other side. I walked slowly down the hall to the kitchenette, grabbed a plastic cup and an open bottle of Coke and poured some coke into the cup.
 
I had just stuck the bottle back on the refrigerator shelf, when I noticed a bowl of lemon slices.
 
What the hell, I tossed a slice on top of the drink, made back toward the interrogation room, and plunked it down in front of Edward, who was lying back with his eyes closed, feet up on the table, no cares in the world.
 
He opened one eye, but he didn’t say thanks.
 

Hey, you can’t let it get to you.
 
You just go on.
 

“I think you get angry when you don’t get your way,” I told him.
 
I thought back to the descriptions of Henry with a hair-trigger temper.
 
Maybe it hadn’t been Henry after all. On a hunch I said, “I think every time a woman gets too feisty, too independent, she ticks you off.
 
I think Sherry wasn’t happy when she found out about Jessica.”

“She never found out about Jessica,” Edward said.

“Well, about Alicia, then.
 
Those panties with the red “A” we found in your drawer.
 
I think she confronted you with them.
 
Asked for an explanation.”

“Which I gave,” he said.

“Which she didn’t like.
 
I think she was also tired of having you knock her around.”