Текст книги "Death Wish"

Автор книги: Brian Garfield

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In the end it had led to another argument about retribution vs. reality and Paul had got to his feet to make some angry point, his voice trembling, and Carol suddenly had covered her ears with her palms and screwed her eyes shut and uttered an earsplitting shriek.

“You’d better go on home,” Jack had said.

“I’d rather wait till the doctor gets here.”

“No, I think it would only upset her more. You can understand that.”

Jack had given her a pill and put her to bed while Paul was calling Dr. Rosen; now Jack picked up Paul’s jacket and handed it to him. “I don’t mean to seem cruel.”

“Damn it, I’m her father.”

“Right now you’re a reminder of her mother, I think.”

A sharp remark rose to his tongue—something acid about Jack’s license to practice parlor psychiatry—but he had let it die there; Jack was too vulnerable, there was too much heat already.

So he had left, bile in his throat. A taxi from Horatio Street to the upper West Side. He’d got out of the taxi at the corner of Seventieth and West End, crossed the avenue with the light and walked up the half-block to the apartment house, staring with belligerent suspicion at every face on the street.

The night man on the door gave him a nod and a polite smile of recognition as if nothing had ever happened. Was it possible he didn’t know? Paul stopped automatically to unlock the mailbox. It was crowded with small stiff envelopes—sympathy cards. He shoved them in his pocket, locked the mailbox and went along the corridor from the lobby to the back elevator. He rode up part-way with a middle-aged couple he’d seen often enough to say hello to; he didn’t know their names. If they had seen the papers they hadn’t made the connection; they nodded and said goodnight when they got out at the seventh floor, leading their Pekingese on a leash snuffling and tugging. Paul rode on up to the twelfth floor, put the key in the lock and pushed into the apartment with his stomach muscles tensed, not sure what he was going to find or how he was going to react to it.

Someone had slid a note under the door. It lay askew on the carpet. He bent down to pick it up, ready for anger, half expecting it to be a threatening letter from the killers. It was a sympathy card from the Bernsteins next door. He put it together with the stack from his pocket and left the pile on the end-table under the mirror in the foyer.

They had moved into this apartment after Carol had started college and it had become regretfully evident that she was no longer going to live at home with them for any extended periods of time. There was only the living-room, middle-sized, and the large corner bedroom and bath, and the kitchen off the entrance foyer. The building was forty or fifty years old, it had the high ceilings and multitudinous closets of its vintage, the curious moldings that ran around the walls a foot below the ceiling, the Edwardian ceiling-light fixtures. It wasn’t quite old enough to have a bathtub on claw feet, but the bathroom had that flavor to it. It was a small apartment but comfortable, it had more than its share of windows and most of them looked down upon the attractive row of converted brownstones on the opposite side of Seventy-first Street.

He kicked the door shut behind him and glanced into the kitchen and walked into the living room. The place had been tidied; everything was neat. Had the police gone to the trouble? It wasn’t the cleaning lady, she came on Mondays. He scowled; he had expected to find wreckage, he had occupied himself thinking about cleaning the place up.

The flavor of Esther was in the place but it didn’t seem to affect him. He walked through the rooms trying to feel something. It was as if his subconscious was afraid to let him feel anything.

Something unfamiliar caught his eye and it took him a moment to figure out what it was. He had to run his eyes around the living room and study each object. The chairs, the coffee table, the bookcase, the television, the air-conditioner in the window.…

He went back. The television. The killers had stolen the television.

It was a console; it stood in the corner where the old portable had squatted on its table. It looked like a color set—the kind with built-in stereo and AM-FM radio. He crossed the room in four long strides.

There was a note:

Paul—

In hopes this may make it just a

bit more bearable—

Our very deepest condolences

,

—The Guys at the Office

P.S.—We stocked the refrig

.

It broke him down: he wept.

*  *  *

They had never had a color set and he hadn’t seen many color programs—only the occasional badly tuned football game above a bar, and once or twice the Academy Awards on some friends’ enormous set. He spent twenty minutes fiddling with the thing, tuning in all the channels, trying to find amusement. He was too restless. He switched it off and thought about making a drink, but decided against it.

The phone rang. It was Jack. “Dr. Rosen just left. He’s prescribed some stronger sedatives. He’s arranging an appointment for her with a shrink Monday morning.”

“Well, I suppose that’s the best thing right now.”

“I hope it’ll help snap her out of it. I imagine it will. Rosen says he’s got a very good man.”

“I imagine he would.”

“It was damned nice of him to come. Where can you find a doctor willing to make house calls on Friday night any more?”

“He’s been our family doctor for almost twenty years.”

“Well, I’ll let you know if anything changes. Right now she’s asleep—doped up. The poor kid. Christ, this is a rotten thing.… How about you? Are you all right up there? You can still come back down and spend the night if you’d feel better. I know it must be miserable up there all alone.”

“I’ll have to get used to it sometime. This is as good a time to start as any.”

“There’s no need to make it too hard on yourself, Pop.”

“I’ll be all right,” he growled. “I’ll probably drop by tomorrow to look in on Carol.”

“Fine.”

After he hung up the apartment seemed emptier. He reversed his earlier decision and made a drink. Carried it into the bedroom and sat down, jerked at his tie, bent down and began to unlace his shoes.

He kicked them off and reached for his drink and heard himself cry out.

He couldn’t believe it. He had always managed to bottle things up; anything else was weakness. He sat like a stone, writhing inside, experiencing terror from the crazy random impulse to do violence: he wanted to smash out at anything within reach.

Finally he began swinging his fist rhythmically against the side of the mattress. He got down on one knee and swung from the floor. It didn’t hurt his fist and it didn’t do the mattress any damage and after a little while he knew there wasn’t going to be any satisfaction in it. He remembered a kid in high school who’d put his fist through the panel of a door in one of the study halls—all the way through it. He couldn’t remember whether the kid had done it on a dare or just out of sheer rage; the kid had been one of the athletes, a bully everyone feared. Paul thought about slugging a door but he was afraid of pain, he didn’t want to break his hand.

A hammer, he thought. That would feel good—taking a hammer to something, swinging it as hard as you could.

And do what? Smash up the furniture? The walls?

His brain kept frustrating him.

In the middle of the night he got up and took a shower. Lying on the bed drying off, he wished Esther were there. He would have shouted at her and it would have made him feel better.

Just last week he had noticed how overweight she was getting—the way the flesh of her sapless breasts and her armpits were bunched around the edges of her bra; how thick her hips had become, her waist and thighs, the soft heavy padding of flesh under her chin. Well she was forty-six years old, a year younger than Paul, almost to the day: they were both Aquarians.

Aquarian acquaintances, he thought. All the intense promises when you were youthful; but after marriage they had settled into their lives without any sparks. They had slowly got fat and out of shape. They had both been strangely old before they should have been—as if they had never been young.

In the beginning she had been an attractive girl who moved gracefully and had a soft voice, mercifully lacking in the brass that coated the tongues of most of the city girls he met. He supposed they had liked each other from the outset. They had gone on liking each other. There had been surprisingly few fights; he knew they both had been repressed people who had to build up a head of steam before being able to give vent to their rages, and by the time things became that intense there was usually some outside outlet—the office, the community volunteer groups where Esther worked almost full-time and Paul had contributed as much time as he could spare.

Now with hindsight he was unhappy with the feeling that they had both played life too carefully. Was he sad now because he had loved her, or because he was guilty that he hadn’t loved her? Nothing left now but a fistful of lost dreams—but then they were dreams that had been lost long ago; her death perhaps was nothing more than a punctuation mark. It had been, most of the time, a good quiet friendship—not what they had dreamed of in the early days, but perhaps the highest possibility either of them was capable of attaining. They did not blame each other for things; yet when he saw friends and acquaintances who adored their husbands or wives, he remembered his envy.

Now what would he do with himself on the weekends?

It hadn’t been a Technicolor marriage but she had become a condition of his life. It was important to have someone. He began to understand what his father, who had lived alone a good part of his life, had endured.

It came again: a shortness of breath, a debilitating rage that flooded all the tissues of his body.

He disentangled himself clumsily from the twisted sheets and went into the bathroom, switched on the light and stared at himself in the mirror. His ginger hair was getting very thin on top. The freckles that covered his cheeks and hands seemed to have multiplied and intensified to the texture of knockwurst. His eyes were in red pouches; he saw the flabby lines in his face and throat, the beginnings of a sagging pot in his belly that pulled creases into his sides along the ribs. A washed-up, used-up carcass. He walked into the kitchen, moving nothing but his legs; poured a new martini ten-to-one, not bothering with ice, and padded back into the living room. When he sat down he realized it was the first time he had moved naked through the apartment in years. They had both failed to overturn their pristine and modest backgrounds; they always changed clothes in the bedroom, they never walked naked through the living room and kitchen.

Chills swept him furiously. He took the top magazine off the unread pile beside the couch; opened it at random and read a long paragraph and went back to start it again, realizing he had not paid attention to the meaning of the words. After the second try he gave it up and closed the magazine.

This wouldn’t do. He had to do something; he had to start making some sort of plans.

He decided he would call the police in the morning. Maybe they had to be needled.

He swallowed half the martini and looked around the room with a different glance: trying to picture how it had happened. Where had they done it? On the carpet? Right here on this couch? He tried to visualize it.

It was hard to form a picture. He had never seen real violence except on television or in the movies. Until this had happened, he had been secretly convinced that a good part of it was fictitious—part of the spurious hearty masculine myths that city men constructed to reassure themselves of their machismo and the toughness of the world they inhabited. Intellectually he knew better but in his private emotions and fantasies he did not really believe, in a personal way, that hoodlums and killers existed. He had lived his entire life in the Sin Capital of the world, except for the two years they had lived within commuting distance of it, yet never with his own eyes had he seen any vice or corruption, or any violence beyond the occasional arbitrary explosion of a motorist or pedestrian so overcome by inarticulate rage that he began to shout at taxi drivers and beat their fenders with fists. He had never seen a bookie, never known a gangster. He knew drugs were pushed in the neighborhood: one block east was Needle Park, and he had seen the faces full of listless ennui which he understood belonged to addicts, but he had never seen drugs change hands, never seen a hypodermic needle outside a doctor’s office. Sometimes he had been frightened by the harsh laughing packs of teenagers who roamed through subway trains and stood in knots on street corners, but he had never actually seen them commit acts of violence. Sometimes it was hard to escape the feeling that the pages of the Daily News and the Mirror were filled not with fact-news but with the lurid fantasies of pulp-fiction writers.

He knew plenty of people whose apartments had been burglarized. Once, three or four years ago, Carol’s purse had been snatched by a quick nimble arm darting through a closing subway door. Those things happened but they happened anonymously; there was no real feeling of personal human violence to them.

Now he had to get used to an entire new universe of reality.

6

There was a crime story in the Sunday Times Magazine and Esther’s name was in it. Sam Kreutzer called at ten that morning to tell him about it. “How are you getting along?”

“I’m all right.”

“It’s a rotten time. Is there anything at all we can do, Paul?”

“No. Nothing.”

“Maybe you’d like to come over and have dinner with us one night this week.”

“Can I let you know later on in the week, Sam? Right now I don’t much want to see anybody.” He wanted to evade the kindnesses of friends. It hadn’t happened to them; it was secondhand to them. You only bled from your own wounds. There was a saccharine quality to people’s sympathy, they couldn’t help it, and pity was a cruel emotion at best.

He called Jack. Carol was still asleep. Paul said he’d telephone again later; he probably wouldn’t come there to eat unless she was feeling much better—otherwise a raincheck?

He went out to buy the Times. Walked up the avenue to Seventy-second and over to the newsstand by the subway station on Broadway. It was quite warm. He narrowly watched the flow of people on the streets, wondering for the first time in his life which of them were killers, which were addicts, which were the innocent. Never before had he felt acutely physically afraid of walking on the streets; he had always been prudent, used taxis late at night, never walked dark streets or ventured alone into uninhabited neighborhoods; but that had been a kind of automatic habit. Now he found himself searching every face for signs of violence.

He carried the Times back along Seventy-second Street, walking slowly, consciously looking at things he had spent years taking for granted: the filth, the gray hurrying faces, the brittle skinny girls who stood under the awning in midblock. There wasn’t much traffic—on these last warm Sundays after Labor Day everyone fled the city, seeking to prolong the summer as much as they could by soaking up sunshine in the country or at the crowded beaches.

A woman stood staring vacantly into a display window of one of the cheap variety shops. There was a red sign in the window: ¿Cómo sabe Vd. que no tiene enfermedad venérea? How do you know you haven’t got V.D.? She was a primitive woman, her dark face mottled with scars, her mouth loose: an ancient slut, an evil hag with a greasy shopping bag pendant from her doughy hand. How many killers had sprung from her loins? How many muggers had lain between her ancient yielding thighs?

He rushed back to the apartment, alarmed.

Monday he was still deep in what he decided was post-trauma tristesse. He had taken sleeping pills last night; they made him irritable in the morning. Last night he had decided it would be best to go in to the office today—even if he didn’t get any work done it would be better to have familiar people around him—but now he knew he couldn’t face any of them.

He went to the bank because he was low on cash. It was a short walk, across the street from the newsstand on the corner of Broadway and Seventy-second. The same route he had followed yesterday to buy the Times; the same route he had followed thousands of times, to and from the subway to go to work. Yet now it was different. He slipped into the bank as if it were a hiding place.

He had thought of buying a heavy cane and carrying it as a weapon. But it would be unwieldy at best; someone with a knife could get in under it, and it might anger them if they saw you carrying an obvious club.

At the counter he stood behind a fat man in a grease-spotted apron who was buying change, probably for a lunch counter’s cash register. The man went away with a sack heavy with coins wrapped in paper rolls.

Paul bought a ten-dollar roll of quarters. Back in the apartment he slipped it into a sock, knotted it, and crashed it experimentally into his cupped palm. Then he put it in his pocket. He would carry it all the time henceforth.

He wasn’t gentle; he was a flabby coward. It was dawning on him that the most terrifying thing about his existence was his ineffectualness.

He felt like a fool. He took the roll of coins out of his pocket, untied the sock, and went to put the roll of quarters away in the drawer of an end table. The drawer opened an inch and then stuck. He jerked at it; it came out, fell from his hand, tumbled onto the rug. The oddments from it—safety pins, decks of cards—flew across the floor.

He blurted a string of oaths at the top of his lungs.

After he had put the drawer back and gathered up its droppings he re-wrapped the roll of quarters in the sock and returned it to his pocket.

He called a locksmith and the man agreed to come round Wednesday and change the locks, replace them with heavy models that couldn’t be slipped with cellulose or broken by pressure.

For several hours he sat constructing fantasies of methods of boobytrapping the apartment against intruders. Shotguns with wires attached to the triggers. Grenades.

After that he began to call himself names: stupid idiot, paranoid fool.

Jack phoned a little after five. “I’ve been trying to get you since noon.”

“I had the phone off the hook. Too many sympathy calls.”

“I know what you mean.”

“Did Carol see the psychiatrist?”

“Yes, we went around there this morning. He seemed like a nice guy, pretty level-headed. He prescribed some tranquilizers and said she’d probably take a little while to get over it. I think he spent more time talking to me than he spent with Carol. A lot of speechifying on how I have to be calm and patient and understanding with her until she’s over it. You’d think she was pregnant.”

“It sounds as if he’s probably right, though. Aren’t you relieved?”

“I was at the time. But she’s incredibly depressed, Pop. She hardly reacts at all when I talk to her. It’s like talking to a wall.”

“Maybe that’s partly the effect of the tranquilizers.”

“Maybe,” Jack said without conviction.

“Do you think it would do her any good if I came around to see her?”

“No. I mentioned it to the doctor. He said it might be better for her not to see you for a little while. I told him you might be hard to convince, but he seems to feel it’s important to try and protect her from certain associations with the crime. Evidently she identifies you with it because it was your apartment. Now please don’t misunderstand, Pop—it’s not that she blames you for anything. But it might be better if you didn’t see her for a few days.”

“That’s what he said, is it?”

“Yes. I’m sorry—I know things are hard enough for you without–”

“Never mind, I understand.” He wasn’t sure he did, altogether; but he didn’t want to start an argument. It would be fruitless. “Well, I’ll call you tomorrow.” He rang off, feeling dismal.

He had called the police Sunday morning; he phoned again Monday evening and was put through to a Lieutenant Malcolm Briggs. “Yes, that’s right, Mr. Benjamin, I’m in charge of the case.”

“I was just wondering if anything had developed. Any—leads.”

“Well, I’d like to be encouraging, but right now we haven’t got anything strong enough to call a lead. We’ve pinned down one or two people who saw a group of kids hanging around the front of the supermarket at about the right time of day that afternoon. One of our witnesses says he thinks he’d recognize them if he saw them again, so if we do pick them up he’ll be able to do a show-up for us. But so far no one’s been able to pick them out of our mug books. Your daughter looked through the mug pictures yesterday, of course, but she wasn’t positive enough about any of the faces to identify them.”

“I didn’t know she’d been to police headquarters.”

“She wasn’t. I talked to Mr. Tobey, he told me her condition, so I managed to talk the deputy inspector down there into letting us have a couple of patrolmen relay the mug books over to her at her apartment, one at a time. She went through all our photo files of people who’ve had records of anything close to this kind of modus operandi. As I say, she didn’t pick any of them out. She did give us something of a description, though.”

“Oh?”

“She seemed to be pretty sure that two of them were Puerto Ricans and the third was black. Of course he may have been a black Puerto Rican—there are quite a few of them.”

“Well, isn’t there a method you people use of reconstructing faces with drawings of various features?”

“The Identikit, yes, sir. She didn’t seem to feel up to that.”

“Well, she should be feeling better within a few days.”

“She can have a crack at it whenever she’s ready, sir.”

After the connection broke, Paul thought of half a dozen more questions he should have asked. He brooded at the telephone, then dialed the Horatio Street number.

“Jack?”

“Oh hello, Pop. Anything wrong?”

“Why didn’t you tell me Carol had been through the police mug books?”

“I guess it must have slipped my mind. I mean she didn’t recognize any of them.”

“It must have been damned upsetting for her.”

“She insisted on it, Pop. It was her idea.”

“Judging by what’s happened I don’t think it was such a good idea.”

“Well, at the time I thought it was an encouraging sign that she had the gumption to want to do it. Afterward it only seemed to make it worse, though.” Jack’s voice cracked slightly: “Hell, Pop, what are we going to do?”

He wished he had an answer.

When he hung up he realized why Jack hadn’t told him about it. Jack had anticipated an explosion; he knew how protective Paul could be.

It made him wonder why he hadn’t exploded more forcefully than he had. Things were still bottled up inside him, under high pressure. Something was bound to burst.

7

On Thursday Carol was hospitalized at Columbia-Presbyterian for observation; at least that was what the psychiatrist called it.

By Thursday morning Paul had begun to realize how dangerous it was to coop himself up alone. The longer he spent in the apartment the more terrifying the outside world became. He had to bestir himself. It was too easy to seal himself off, stare at imbecilic television programs and blank walls. Drinking more than he ate. Getting no exercise at all. He kept thinking he was having heart attacks.

Except for the hours when he tried to sleep he avoided the bedroom. It was too full of Esther. He knew he should pack her things and get rid of them but he didn’t want to go near them yet so he confined himself to the living room, the kitchen, the foyer; sometimes striding back and forth from one to the other but usually sitting blankly in front of the television console whether it was turned on or not.

He had only been out of the apartment three times on brief excursions in the past one hundred hours. That was no good. The body rotted, the mind deteriorated; only the demons of subconscious fantasies thrived.

He decided to call Sam Kreutzer at the office and take Sam up on the invitation to dinner if it was still open; he prepared himself for the possibility that Sam and his wife would have some other engagement for tonight, and reached for the phone.

It rang before he touched it. Jack, to tell him about Carol’s hospitalization.

Paul didn’t remember the conversation clearly afterward. He knew he had shouted at Jack—damn fool questions to which Jack couldn’t possibly have the answers; cruel inane accusations that only succeeded in eliciting chilly replies from Jack. Finally Jack hung up on him.

He hadn’t even got the psychiatrist’s name. He would have to call back and get it. But not right away; he had to give Jack time to cool off first—and give himself time for the same thing.

He showered—scrubbed himself viciously until the flesh stung with a red rash. Shaved with meticulous care. Got into a completely clean set of clothes from the skin out for the first time in five days. His best office suit—the gray gabardine Esther had insisted he buy in the Oxford Street shop the last time they had been to London, three years ago. He knotted his tie precisely and fixed it to his shirt with the silver tiepin. Wiped off his shoes with a rag. Checked himself in the mirror, re-combed his hair, and braced himself to walk out the door.

In front of the building splinters of shattered glass lay like frost on the sidewalk—a broken bottle. He stepped around it and looked both ways for traffic and jaywalked across to the east side of the avenue. When he walked up Seventieth toward Broadway the children were leaving P.S. 199, making a racket, traveling in packs and knots. His stomach muscles knotted. At first he didn’t look any of them in the face—as if by pretending they didn’t exist he could prevent them from seeing him. He let them flow around him. There was a lot of rough-edged laughter in high voices. Did it have a savage brutal ring to it or was he only hearing it that way?

As he forged into the midst of the yelling mass he suddenly began looking them straight in the faces. In his pocket his fist closed around the knotted sock, weighted with its roll of coins.

One tall youth caught Paul’s glance. The youth’s eyes flickered when they touched Paul’s: flickered and slid away. Paul almost stopped. His head swiveled to follow the youth, who said something to the kid beside him; they both laughed but they didn’t look back in Paul’s direction.

He had the light at the corner; he trotted across Amsterdam and was stopped by the light at Broadway so he turned right on the curb and began to walk toward Columbus Circle. He was out of the packs of kids now; his gut relaxed. But his thoughts raced: what had he expected? To be attacked in the midst of a street crowded with schoolchildren? To get into a stare-down match with that tall youth, and come to blows?

You have got to get hold of yourself.

He approached the clean attractive buildings of the Lincoln Center complex. A sudden impulse sent him across Broadway on Sixty-fifth and he went into Central Park, heading across town.

Just inside the park a bum staggered near with palm outstretched; and Paul, who had always felt obliged to pay off the infirm ones, hurried past with his face averted.

The park was covered with the leavings of callous humanity: discarded newspapers, crumpled lunch bags, rusty bottlecaps, rustless empty cans, broken bottles. Several years ago he had worked an entire summer, every spare hour of it, for the volunteer anti-litter campaign. All right, they’ve been told, they’ve had their chance.

He didn’t follow the implications of the thought through: he was afraid to.

Near the zoo a drunk sat swaying on a bench. His eyes tracked Paul. He looked as if he had no past and was entitled to no future. He kept watching Paul, his head turning to follow Paul’s passage. It set Paul’s teeth on edge. He hurried through the zoo and out onto Fifth Avenue.

He had started with no particular destination, only an urge to get out, get moving, put an end to his unhealthy isolation. By now he knew where he was heading. He quickened his pace even though his feet were beginning to get hot and sore.

The door sucked shut behind him. Marilyn the receptionist, who was a matronly twenty-six-year-old brunette with the suggestion of a double chin, did a double-take that contrived to combine in one expression amazement, pleasure and sympathy. “Why Mr. Benjamin!” she chirped. “How nice!” Then she remembered; her face changed with comic abruptness. “Oh we were all so frightfully sorry to hear … Poor Mrs. Benjamin … It must have been just terrible for you–”

He nodded and muttered something and hurried through the corridor door before she could take a notion to suffocate him protectively against her big soft bosom.

He went along to Sam Kreutzer’s office and got a similar reception from Sam’s secretary; when he went into the office Dundee was with Sam. They were both effusive; it was a while before he could get a word in. “I was getting cabin fever. Thought I’d come back to work. I’m probably not much good for anything yet but it might help just to sit there and push papers around.”

“I think you’re dead right,” Dundee said. “At least you’ll have some friendly faces for company.”

He steadied himself against the banal predictability of their throat-clearing and face-rearranging. Sam said, “Hell, Paul.”

Dundee gripped his arm with one hand and patted his shoulder with the other. “It always takes a while, fella, but we’re all a hundred percent with you. Anything you need, anything at all.…”

“It’s okay, Bill.” He endeavored to lighten things: “Actually, Sam, if that invitation’s still open, the one thing I think I really need more than anything else is a square meal. I’ve been living on frozen food—TV dinners that taste like reruns.”

He wasn’t sure if he imagined it: the briefest discomfiture on Sam’s face? But a smile chased it away. “You bet, Paul. I’ll call herself and tell her to set a place.”