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.
She said, “Your brother’s flying in from D.C. on an FBI jet he commandeered for his work at the Department of Justice. He’ll land at Orange County airport, the private-plane terminal, at about ten-thirty tomorrow morning. One of your company’s limos will pick him up. Don’t deny it. Researching you, I hacked your company. I saw the booking for him. So what I want is…you pull your scheduled chauffeur off the job, and I’ll supply the driver.”
He said, “No.”
“No? You really think no is an option?”
“Time comes, I’m gonna put a hand up your snatch and rip your guts out through it.”
“So you skipped high-school biology, huh?”
He sheathed his dagger eyes.
“Anyway,” she said, “your hands are still in your pants. Find any little thing yet? Maybe if you think about punching your mother in the face, that’ll work better than Viagra.”
He hated her too much to keep his eyes closed. The sight of her filled him with homicidal fantasies, one of his favorite forms of entertainment.
From the breast pocket of her sport coat, Jane removed a microcassette recorder smaller than a pack of cigarettes. “Everything we said is on this.”
“Why do I give a shit? I’m telling you, I’m wired into so much protection, the cops will shine my shoes if I ask.”
“Maybe I know cops who don’t shine shoes. Cops or no cops, I’ll hand a copy of this to your mom, in another recorder, ready to play. She lives under her maiden name—Anabel Claridge—half the year on an estate in La Jolla, half on a waterfront estate in Lake Tahoe, Nevada. When I give it to her, I’ll suggest if she gets a gift box on Mother’s Day, she should call the bomb squad to open it.”