Double Take

the other sicko perverts on somebody’s couch. What he didn’t realize back then, maybe he still doesn’t, is what a conniving bitch his precious mother was.”
    “What do you mean?” Sherlock asked. “What happened?” He gave her another sweet smile. “After she’d slept with me maybe three months, she told me one afternoon when I’d slipped into her house and found her in the kitchen—her husband was off playing golf—that her son told her I buggered little boys for money, stuff like that. She said Thomas told her I’d made a pass at him. It wasn’t nice what she said to me, and she didn’t shut up. Then her husband came in through the back door into the kitchen and she looked like she’d swallowed her tongue. I remember as clear as day how I stood up and smiled at him, not a nice smile like I give you, Agent Sherlock, but a real mean smile. I told him flat out I was sleeping with his sweet-assed wife because he was old and bony, but hey, she was sexy and hot, and a pretty good lay, even if she was a gold-plated bitch.
    “The old man threw his golf clubs at me, can you imagine? Landed six feet short, of course, since he was such a bloody wuss. I laughed at him and he came at me in a rage. I remember her screaming. I picked up one of those fancy knives she was using and stuck it in his neck. All that blood.” He paused a moment, and they saw a flash of pleasure. “Blood everywhere and she wouldn’t stop screaming, so I stuck the knife in her chest. Do you know she only made this little squeaking sound, that was all? Then I stabbed her a whole bunch of times. I don’t remember how many, I just kept going, in and out, in and out.
    “They were dead, lying on that huge kitchen floor, bleeding all over the white tiles. It was a mess, I’ll tell you.
    “There was no one around. It was a Sunday, you see, and the hired staff had the day off. I stood there, looking down at them, and thought about what I was going to do. I’m not stupid, so I cleaned up really good, took the knife, and left. Since the Pallacks’ house was only two doors away from mine, I could go through the backyards and not be seen by anyone.
    “I thought I was home free there for a good long while, but I knew Thomas was eyeing me, like he knew I’d done it, but he couldn’t prove anything. I’ll have to give him credit though, Thomas came after me with all the money he had. He hired half a dozen investigators. It was only me he wanted, even though he pretended he was checking out all the neighbors. I think they wire-tapped my phones, talked to all my relatives, even got ahold of my credit card reports.
    “One day I came home early and found the police in my basement and I knew I was in deep trouble. Thomas must have helped them get a search warrant. My lawyer told me the cops found medieval torture instruments in the basement and there was dried blood on them.”
    Savich nodded.
    The old man shook his head. “But it wasn’t my stuff, it was my dad’s. He was a real history nut, loved that old stuff, anything the inquisitors used, he had to have it. Everyone knew about his torture chamber, as he liked to call it—he was an eccentric. There wasn’t any blood until Thomas got some and smeared it on some of my father’s equipment. My old man was harmless.”
    “They found the knife behind the radiator,” Sherlock said.
    “Ha! I wouldn’t be that big a fool. That was another knife. Thomas must have gotten some blood the same type as his parents’ and rubbed it on the knife—no DNA back then, so it was easy. Then he planted it for the cops to find.”
    “What did you do with the knife you used?”
    “I dropped it in the Lansky River five miles away from my house. But what could I do? Nothing, that’s what.
    “It was all over for me anyway, and I knew it. How can you fight being framed for a bunch of murders nobody committed at all?”
    Sherlock said, “When did you tell Thomas Pallack that you’d slept with his mother?”
    The old man laughed. “When I was being marched out of the courtroom between two guards right after the guilty verdict. Up dashed old Thomas, got right in my face. He looked wild with triumph, and I knew he wanted to gloat, and so I whispered it right in his face, and then I sang ‘Maggie May’ and licked my lips. He leaped on me but the guards pulled him off. I remember it so clearly, I could hear Thomas breathing hard as I laughed at him while the guards yanked me out of there.
    “But hey,