Chill of Night

18

Tina Flitt and her husband, Martin Portelle, sat on the balcony of their twenty-first floor East Side apartment and watched dusk settle over New York. They felt fortunate.

Martin, a stocky, bald man with mild gray eyes and a scraggly beard grown to compensate for his lack of hair up top, had nothing about him in youth portending success. Yet here he was, a highly paid acquisition appraiser for a major holding company.

His wife, Tina, was a smallish woman in a way that suggested extreme dieting, and was pretty in an intense, dark-eyed fashion. She was a defense attorney. The two had met in court, when Martin was jury foreperson in the trial of the infamous Subway Killer, Dan Maddox. Tina had been one of the jurors. Maddox had been acquitted.

Martin used the remote to switch off the small Sony TV they used on the balcony. They’d been watching Channel One news. A special titled Six and the City. It was all about the victims whose deaths were attributed to the Justice Killer.

“Six so far,” Tina said. “New Yorkers are getting frightened.”

“Or the media wants us to see it that way.” Martin sipped the vodka martini he’d brought with him out to the balcony. The greed and paranoia of the media were subjects he could talk on for hours.

“Anybody who’s served as jury foreperson in the past ten years has reason to worry,” Tina told him.

“Only if the defendant got off in court, but was convicted in the media.”

“That list of forepersons could include a lot of people.”

Martin smiled. “It includes me, counselor.”

“I don’t find it particularly amusing,” Tina said. She didn’t like it when Martin called her counselor. It was as if he had little respect for her profession.

An emergency siren sounded far below, a police car or ambulance shrieking protest at the uncooperative traffic.

“You worry too much,” Martin said, reaching across the glass-topped table and squeezing Tina’s delicate hand. He was careful not to squeeze too hard; his wife was one of those women addicted to rings, and wore three on each hand.

“You haven’t met some of my clients.”

“You get them off,” Martin said. “Sometimes when they don’t deserve to walk.”

“They all deserve legal representation.” This was a discussion Tina and Martin had almost worn out.

Martin released Tina’s hand and leaned back in his chair. He wished she’d practice some other form of law. Four months after his acquittal, ten years ago, the acquitted Maddox had pushed a woman into the path of an oncoming subway train. It had shaken Martin’s faith in the legal system, his faith in the world. He’d felt responsible for the woman’s death, and for six months he was clinically depressed. He was in analysis for years. Even as he and his fellow jurors had voted Maddox out of legal jeopardy and back onto the streets, they’d strongly suspected he was a killer.

But “suspected” wasn’t enough. The defendant’s confession had definitely been made under duress, and was disallowed by the judge, who’d had no choice. So the jurors voted to acquit, because they had no choice.

That was what his doctors had finally gotten Martin to realize: he’d had no choice. It was the system.

Martin brushed back the long hair over his ears as a high breeze washed over the balcony. A week after the trial, he’d phoned the tiny, dark-haired juror he’d so admired in the assembly room and asked her for a date. Their relationship had developed into love, and she stayed at his side throughout his troubles. She’d somehow realized in the beginning what it had taken Martin over a year to understand.

Six years ago they were married. Tina had attended law school and become an attorney, while Martin continued to regain his mental equilibrium. It had been a step by step, painful passage, but Martin made the journey. He had moved on with his business career, with his life. Day by day, he’d built a better world for himself.

Now old wounds were being probed, but he refused to acknowledge any pain. He really did understand that the system and not the jury had freed Maddox. Martin Portelle, personally, was not responsible for Maddox after Maddox walked free from the courtroom.

Martin had to smile again as he sipped his martini. Tina had barely changed since he’d first laid eyes on her almost ten years ago, and here they were, still thinking about discussing the late Dan Maddox. Like a time machine. Hell of a world, Martin thought, but if you kept scrapping, you got your reward. At least some people did.

“I think you might be in danger,” Tina said.

“From who? Maddox? He’s long gone.”

“From somebody who loved his last victim.”

“It’s been almost ten years, Tina.”

“That might not seem long if you’ve lost someone you love. It might only seem like days, if you want vengeance.”

“The killer we’re talking about wants justice. Or his idea of it.”

Tina stroked her small, pointed chin, as she often did when she thought. “Justice? Did we play our role in trying to see that Maddox got justice?”

“Yes. We did what we could.”

“Does the Justice Killer know that?”

I’m glad you don’t cross examine me in court. “I’m not sure. I’m not inside his mind, thank God. But I’ll put my faith in percentages. You said it yourself, if I’m in trouble, so are lots of other people. Tells you something about our justice system, doesn’t it?”

Tina knew that it did, but she didn’t admit it.

Like a good attorney, she changed the subject. Outwardly, anyway.

If Martin only knew…

Number six had been fun.

The Justice Killer sat in a brown leather easy chair in his apartment, sipped Jack Daniels from the bottle, and looked at the window. It was nighttime and the window had become a mirror reflecting the room-an ordinary room, well decorated and well kept, with its traditional brown easy chair as the center of gravity.

The man in the chair was not ordinary, nor did he want to be. He had a cause. A cause had him. A just cause.

But now he also had doubts.

Not doubts, actually, but a niggling discomfort.

The unexpected had occurred. He couldn’t deny he’d enjoyed killing Beverly Baker.

There had even been in the act an unanticipated sexual component. He recalled in vivid imagery her eyes when she’d noticed him in the mirror, the very instant when she understood that hope had run out and she was about to die. That was when her will turned to ice, when mind and body were frozen and there was no resistance.

His time.

Our time.

Something, an arc of cold emotion and sacred knowledge, had passed between Beverly and her killer, something as true and old as hunter and prey. As old as the human race.

You’re drunk.

Am I?

Not that drunk.

He knew what his quest was also about, he begrudgingly admitted to himself. Not only life and death and retribution, not only justice-but power.

He took a sip of bourbon. So what? Were power and justice necessarily separate entities? Certainly they were all of a piece. Ask any helpless defendant in a courtroom. And if the Justice Killer found titillation in his revenge, what substantive difference did it make?

Why shouldn’t I enjoy it?

He sipped his booze and let his mind chew on the question.

His mind extrapolated. Why must he be bound by the conventions of the archetype serial killer? He certainly wasn’t typical.

The problem was the judicial system-the callous, damaging, arrogant, heartless system that did not work-that he was attempting to change. And there was more than one way to change it. There was no reason why he shouldn’t expand his pool of potential victims beyond those who’d chaired juries. The ordinary jurors themselves were equally guilty of setting free the guilty. Their vote was their own. In a criminal trial, the guilty verdict had to be unanimous. But if the verdict was for acquittal, the jury was usually polled. How each juror voted was a matter of public record. For the purposes of the Justice Killer, simple jurors as well as forepersons were fair game. And the effects of such victims’ deaths would be much the same-perhaps even more potent. Fear times twelve.

Many jurors, of course, were women.

The Justice Killer raised his glass in a silent toast to the seated figure reflected in the window, and the toast was acknowledged.

He was beginning to comprehend that in the world he lived in, on the far side of the law, beyond human abhorrence, he couldn’t expect to be understood. So be it. What did it matter? No one really understood anyone else, anyway. And in the world he had chosen for himself, there were advantages. There were no taboos, no walls, roadblocks, fences, rules or limits, because he decided what was moral and permissible. More and more he was realizing he had every right to enjoy the power that was his, and that anything was possible

More and more.

He leaned back in the soft chair and closed his eyes.

And saw Beverly Baker’s terrified, resigned, and understanding eyes. Heard her silent, pleading voice that he had never heard: Get it over with! Do it! Do it!

And smiled.

Why shouldn’t I enjoy it?